Or how about my taking my new Chase Plane into space where neither of us has been, both of us prototypes? No matter what the statistics might say, it’s impossible to foresee every possibility for disappointment, damage and death. Chances are good what I’m about to do may not turn out well.
“How are you feeling?” Dick asks as we walk across the ramp, headed to the airstrip’s flight office and lounge, the afternoon warm, the sky bright with only a few clouds. “You didn’t sleep a wink on the plane.”
“I was too busy worrying.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he holds the door.
Soldiers inside instantly salute, and I wonder if it ever gets old.
“It’s just that Neva was at the White House,” I explain. “She wasn’t inside the Situation Room, and shouldn’t know anything that went on in there.”
“But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t,” Dick says as we emerge from the small building.
Another black Suburban is awaiting, this one flanked by two Air Force security officers armed to the teeth in full ballistic gear. Our detail for the trip, and we climb in the back of the armored SUV as they take the front. Dick and I buckle up this time, and I send him a text old-fashioned-style, typing it myself, not asking ART’s help.
Is it ok to talk in front of these guys? I touch send.
Affirmative, Dick writes back, and we’re communicating remotely while in the same place.
“You know as well as I do,” I resume out loud, “that Neva must have a legion of snitches. And when you think of all the people in the room this morning, she’s probably friendly with every one of them.”
“That’s the problem,” Dick agrees. “After we left, she had lunch in the mess hall with the secretary of state. This was after both of them sat in on the meeting with the president of Uganda.”
“Who’s concerned about investing in a space program when it’s unclear if his satellites would be safe,” I add as we drive through the barracks and hangars. “And they sure as heck wouldn’t be, and we both know that Neva’s probably the reason.”
The causeway connecting the Air Force Station to Kennedy Space Center is off limits to members of the public unless they’re on a NASA tour bus. And I’m not seeing any of those at the moment as we cross the lagoon called Banana River.
“Why not deny Neva access to absolutely everything she wants and needs?” I suggest to Dick what I have before as the serious-minded officers up front stare straight ahead, hearing every word. “Why help her hurt us? Why do we make it easier for someone like that? Are we the only ones who see her for what she is?”
“The problem is as old as time,” Dick says. “A lot of the people she deals with aren’t necessarily any more altruistically motivated than she is, and what she’s managed to do over the years is to join them in order to beat them. She has dirt on people, and they owe her. She’s masterful at creating entanglements and conflicts. In other words, human nature wins.”
“Maybe not always. And not everything about human nature is as rotten to the core as she is.”
“It’s always complicated when someone manages to place any number of powerful individuals or groups in compromised positions,” he says, and Kennedy’s main launch viewing area is out my window, a strip of grass with bleachers and a few palm trees along the fence-lined shore.
Across the lagoon I can see the rocket on its pad pointing up like a bright-white finger against deep blue, 76.2 meters (250 feet) tall. Its twin BE-4 liquefied natural gas–fueled engines are capable of 4,800 kilonewtons (1.08 million pounds) of thrust, almost triple that when you add the 6 solid rocket boosters. All to say that when I’m strapped into my seat, for all practical purposes I’ll be sitting on top of a missile.
My attention stays out the window, across the alligator-infested water, and I sense Dick looking at me. I wonder if he’s proud of what he’s wrought, grooming someone from the beginning to do exactly as instructed. How must it feel to rewire, and reprogram that person, to play God?
“You doing okay?” he asks quietly, his sunglasses fixed on me.
“Sure,” I lie.
Our tires sing over the metal drawbridge that’s raised when NASA’s covered barge called Pegasus arrives with rocket stages and other huge components after a 900-mile ferry from Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Once on shore at Kennedy, the priceless cargo is hauled by a special carrier to the 50-story Vehicle Assembly Building dominating the flat horizon.
“Mostly I’m starved,” I add, and that much is true as we enter the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.
I remember from my days here at the NASA Protective Services training academy that you never know what might be crossing the road. But I wouldn’t count on a chicken, more likely an alligator, snake, turtle, maybe a black bear, could be all sorts of critters trying to get to the other side.
For the next several minutes we encounter endless acres of marshland, giant pines, and old mangroves with thickets of roots exposed in shallow brackish water. Then Kennedy Space Center is in front of us, more industrial than a showplace, miles of white concrete and metal facilities.
In the distance are the launch pads, water towers and tall lightning-protection masts as far removed from civilization as one can get without tumbling into the Atlantic Ocean. Now that the furlough has ended and the government is back to work, employee parking lots are full, plenty of personnel out and about.
We take a left on East Avenue at the Space Station Processing Facility. As the name implies, it takes care of everything that goes into building, maintaining and resupplying our orbiting laboratory 408 kilometers (254 miles) above Earth. The next sprawling complex is the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building, actually twin long buildings side by side.
A narrow lane runs between them, and we follow it to a parking area designated for astronauts confined here prior to launch. The entrance reminds me of a sally port to a jail, except over the steel double doors are crew mission patches and a NASA meatball logo.
“My home away from home, I’m in and out of here so often,” Dick says as we grab our bags. “But by design it’s not exactly a room with a view, I’ll warn you in advance.”
His security detail is standing at the ready, and he tells them that will be it for now.