Later she went out to the Michoud plant in New Orleans, where the big External Tanks were being constructed. She spent longer here; she was being encouraged to make the tanks a specialty during the mission.
The warehouses were immense caverns, big enough to hold the tanks in great cylindrical chunks. She watched the manufacture of a bulkhead, a huge dome which would cap the big liquid hydrogen tank. The dome came in pie-shaped aluminum slices called gores, which needed manufacturing precision far beyond the capability of any hydraulic press. So a forming die, with a flat sheet of aluminum on top, was sunk to the bottom of a sixty-thousand-gallon water tank, and a pattern of explosives was laid over the top. The gore was blasted into shape by surging shock waves.
York was awed by the scale of the enterprise. As she pursued her studies she became fascinated by the tanks, even though they were perhaps the most mundane item in the whole mission.
Each tank contained two massive, domed canisters, of propellant and oxidizer, connected by a cylindrical ring. The tanks were coated with four inches of polyurethane foam and reflective shielding, to reduce boiloff of the cryogenic propellants. Inside the tanks there were zero-G screens and cagelike baffles designed to stop the liquids sloshing during engine fire; the liquids were so heavy — more than two million pounds per tank — that the whole booster cluster could be thrown out of control by a severe enough slosh. And there were antivortex baffles, like huge propeller blades, to prevent the buildup of whirlpools — like those above the plug hole of a draining bath — that could suck bubbles of vapor into the feed pipes…
Because of the need for extreme reliability, and the extraordinary range of conditions a spacecraft faced, every component of Ares contained a hell of a lot more engineering than she’d expected from outside the program. Even these simple babies, the tanks. And because of the limited opportunities to test, traceability was essential: the ability to trace the life history of the humblest component right back to the ore from which it was smelted, to aid analysis in case of a failure.
It was the kind of attention to detail which passed by people — including Capitol Hill decision makers — who balked at the price of components NASA ordered. You want to spend how much, just on a goddamn gas can?
When she was at sites like Michoud — in the thick of the program — the discouragement of Romero’s resignation, and the skepticism, even downright hostility, of some sections of the press to the mission, all fell away from her. How could I turn down a Saturn? It would flawlessly hurl her to Mars, to perform experiments of huge importance. A billion dollars were being invested in her, a billion eyes would be on her to do a good job.
At places like Michoud, she would become convinced that the price she was paying — all the Astronaut Office bullshit, the disruption of her career, the compromises of the science, the laying waste of her personal life — all of it was justified.
…We see that a manned space mission may be viewed as a complex biotechnical and sociotechnical system consisting of manufactured and human parts. A thorough understanding of the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the Mars mission is crucial for reducing the probability of malfunction of the human part of the system, independently of the structural, mechanical, and electronic elements, thereby forcing the readjustment of the system as a whole. Psychological and interpersonal stresses may be reduced through environmental engineering, manipulating crew composition, and the structuring of situations and tasks…
To York, the psych experts’ pseudoscientific lectures — and the role-playing group exercises, and the individual and group psych analyses the crew had to endure — were the worst part of the premission training. They were invariably excruciatingly dull, or profoundly embarrassing, or both.
York had little experience of the soft sciences; and she was dismayed by how limited the underlying thinking was — even here, in the money-no-object space program. Some of the theories that were being applied to her and her crewmates seemed speculative at best. And it was clear that the study of group psychology — as opposed to an individual’s psychology — was still primitive.
Also, more fundamentally, experience of long-duration spaceflight was still so small that there was hardly any evidence to back up the guidelines and techniques being taught to them.
A deep-space mission like Ares was basically unprecedented. So, to figure out what might befall the mental state of a Mars crew, the research psychologists were having to work from case studies of analogous situations — undersea habitats, nuclear submarines, polar research stations, isolated Canadian villages — and they used data from sensory deprivation experiments, sleeplessness studies, and work on social isolation. And sometimes, it seemed to York, they pushed those analogies a little far.
She’d gotten used to the idea that the Ares flight would take aerospace technology to its limit. It was disturbing to her that the softer disciplines, like psychology, would be pushing at the edge of their envelope, too.
It was disturbing that in this fundamental aspect of the mission, nobody actually knew if the crew could survive the flight.
Later, from Vladimir Viktorenko, York started to learn something of how the Soviets handled such matters.
Small things: the Soviet mission planners would plan the selection of food to suit the taste of the crew. Color schemes for the spacecraft’s walls and equipment would be adjusted carefully. There would be music, on personal players, to suit individual preference. There would be recordings of simple sounds from home: birdsongs, waves on a seashore, falling rain. Cosmonauts were even encouraged to take living things into orbit, perhaps as part of biology experiments: plants, grasses, tadpoles — little droplets of life, said Viktorenko, bits of Earth’s great river of existence, with its source in the great primeval sea which united humans with all living things.
The astronauts tended to dismiss the Soviets as backward, technically, compared to the U.S. But York decided she liked some aspects of the Soviet way. They’d come up with simple, practical, homely ways of dealing with the pink bodies inside the rockets.
She started bringing Viktorenko’s ideas into the psych sessions with Stone and Gershon.
“…The sheer magnitude of the publicity program, I might say, is unmatched by anything we’ve seen since Apollo 11. The Voice of America is heavily involved, of course. We estimate that the VOA can reach twenty-seven percent of the world’s population outside the U.S. This is the biggest operation in their history. Prelaunch we’ll be sending out ten thousand forty-five minute English-language tapes and scripts, to U.S. Information Agency posts around the world. During the key phases of the mission the VOA will be broadcasting live commentary in seven major languages, and summaries in a further thirty-six.
“We’re also sending out special prelaunch press materials, in addition to the regular NASA manned mission press kits we pouch out around the world. These include ninety news wire stories and features sent in the weeks before liftoff; the Life feature on you and your families; a forty-eight page ‘Man on Mars’ color-illustrated pamphlet, four hundred twenty-two thousand copies of that; and one million, nine hundred thousand postcards of the astronauts, of you three. Also we anticipate having in place at the USIA outposts overseas one million Ares lapel buttons, nine full-size Mars-walk space suits, a hundred twenty-five Ares kiosks, with lights, music, transparencies, and posters. We’ve got ten thousand maps of Mars, eight hundred and forty plastic Saturn rockets, two hundred and fifty sixteen-inch Mars globes…”