The Trouble with Telstar Read online

will behave. Come on," hesaid, getting up to put on his coat again. "We have to see a man."

  "One thing," I said, as I got up, "while we're being so just."

  "Yes?"

  "I had thought of asking your Sylvia for a date. But she was so snippythe other night I decided to forget it. Now, she got me into this, andshe'll have to pay and pay! How do I get to her? It'll be quite awhile before I'm an astronaut."

  He took his pipe from between his teeth. "This calls for the wisdom ofa Solomon," he decided. "But you might try oysters."

  * * * * *

  It was pretty good advice. I hung behind him long enough to tellSylvia about the Chincoteague oysters they put in the stew at GrandCentral Terminal, and got a dinner date. That was all, just the date,because Cleary was itching to take me to see a man.

  Politics must be an awfully large part of business. The man we went tosee was the government side of COMCORP, and I guess he had had to doas much explaining about Telstar failures to a Senate Committee asPaul Cleary had had to do to the Western. He wanted an out just as badas Paul did.

  There were a good many conferences before a sufficient number ofpeople decided the cheapest way out was to send a man to fix theTelstars that had broken down. The question was whether it waspossible.

  We went at it from two directions. They got a team assigned tofiguring out if the Dyna-Soar rocket could be modified to make thethree contacts around the orbit, carry two men and enough air and fuelfor the job, and at COMCORP we appointed a crew to figure out what itmeant to make the repair in orbit.

  Cleary put me in charge of our crew. They gave me a full-size Telstarsatellite for my lab, and I went to work.

  Fancy electronic equipment consists of millions of parts, and Telstaris no exception. One of the bonuses America got from its poor rocketbooster performance, as compared with the Russians, was a forced-draftcourse in miniaturization. Our engineers have learned how to makealmost anything about one-tenth the size you'd think it ought to be,and still work. To get all these tiny parts into a total system, theyare assembled in racks. In the Telstar each of these long skinnysticks of perforated magnesium alloy is hinged to the main frameworkso that it can be swung out for testing or for replacement of parts,which is why the engineers call each component a "gate."

  I spent several weeks learning how to take each suspected componentout of the gate. Most of the time I needed a screwdriver. Sometimes Ihad to drill out a soft aluminium rivet. The hard part was that someof the components were so deep inside, even with a couple gates swungout the way, that I needed all kinds of extension tools.

  Of course, I had to visualize what it would be like doing all this outin space. I'd be in a spacesuit, wearing thick gloves, and when Iremoved a screw that would have looked good in a Swiss watch, there'dbe no work bench on which to place it while I took out the next one.Worse yet, I would have to put it back in.

  The longer I worked with the parts, the harder it looked. Therewouldn't be a prayer of just turning the parts loose in space. Intheory they'd follow along in orbit. In practice you can't bring yourhand to a halt and release a tiny part without imparting a smallproper motion to it. And even worse, you couldn't handle the littlewretches when you tried to put them back in. With a solid floor to lieon, with gravity to give things a position orientation, I kept losingtiny screws. Magnets didn't help, because the screws were nonmagneticfor what seemed pretty good reasons. Some were made of dural forlightness. Some were silicon bronze. None of them was steel.

  That put us back in the lab to find out what would happen if we usedsteel screws. The answer was, surprisingly, nothing important. Sothere was one solid achievement. I had a few thousand of each of thethirty-four different sizes of fasteners machined from steel, andmagnetized a fly-tier's tweezers. The result was that I could getscrews back into their holes without dropping them, especially when Iput little pads of Alnico on the point of each tweezer to give me areally potent magnet. Then we had to cook up an offset screwdriverwith a ratchet that would let me reach in about a yard and still runa number 0-80 machine screw up tight. That called for a kind oftorque-limit clutch and other snivies.

  It was the fanciest and most expensive screwdriver you ever saw. Thehandle was a good two feet long. The problem then became that ofseeing what you were doing, and one of the boys faked up a kind ofbinocular jeweler's loupe with long focus, so that I could lie back ayard from the screw and focus on it with about ten diametersmagnification. The trouble was that the long focal length gave a fieldof vision about six times the diameter of the screw-head, which meantthat every time my heart beat my head moved enough to throw the fieldof vision off the work.

  * * * * *

  By that time I was working in a simulated spacesuit--the actual numberwas still being made to fit an accurate plaster cast of my body. Sothe boys figured out a clamp that would hold my helmet firmly to thegate, and a chin rack inside the helmet against which I could pressand hold my head steady enough to keep my binoculars focused wherethey had to be focused. At a certain point I went back to Paul Clearyand said I thought I could make the necessary tests, dismount what Ihad to dismount, and replace any affected part.

  "All worked out, eh?" he said, reaching for his pipe.

  "Not by a county mile, Mr. Cleary. But I know what the problems are,and the shop can figure out sensible answers. Some of the hardestparts turned out to be the easiest."

  "Name any three," he suggested.

  "Well, the screws. As I take them out, I'll discard them into space. Ihave to use magnetic screws on reassembly, so there is no point savingwhat I take out. Doug Folley has doped out something like a motorman'schange-dispenser that will dispense one screw at a time into mytweezers, and I'll carry a supply of all thirty-four kinds at mywaist."

  "That's one," he counted on a hairy forefinger.

  "We can use something like a double-faced pressure-sensitive tape tohold other parts," I said. "We'll draw a diagram on it, stick it tosome unopened part of the satellite near where I'm working, and as Ipull pieces out, I'll just press them against the other sticky face,in the correct place in the diagram, and they'll be there to pullloose when I want them."

  "At absolute zero?" he scoffed. "That sticky face will be hard asglass."

  "We'll face the bird around to the sun," I said. "And warm it up. Ifwe have to, we'll put wiring in the tape, connect it to Telstar'sbattery supply, and keep it warm."

  "Might work," he grumped. "That's two. How about the spacesuit part?"

  That had been tougher. Some forty or fifty men had made the ride intospace and back from Cape Canaveral by this time, and there had beenrendezvous in space in preparation for flights to the moon. But so farno one had done any free maneuvering in space in a suit.

  They had put me in a swimming pool in a concentrated salt solutionthat gave me just zero buoyancy, and I had practiced a kind ofskin-diving in a spacesuit. The problem was one of mobility, and theone thing we could not reproduce, of course, was frictionless motion.No matter how I moved, the viscosity of the solution quickly slowed medown. Out in space I'd have to learn on the first try how to getaround where every force imparted a motion that would continueindefinitely until an equal and opposite force had been applied.

  The force part had been worked out in theory long before. To myspacesuit they had fixed two tiny rockets. One aimed out from thesmall of my back, the other straight out from my belly. Twopressurized containers contained hydrazine and nitric acid, whichcould be released in tiny streams into peanut rocket chambers by asingle valve-release. They were self-igniting, and spurted out aneedle-fine jet of fire that imparted a few dynes of force as long asthe valve was held open. It only had two positions--full open, orclosed, so that navigation would consist of triggering the valvebriefly open until a little push had been imparted, and drifting untilyou triggered the opposite rocket for braking.

  The airtanks on my back were right off a scuba outfit.

  Really, they spen
t more time on the gloves than anything else. Atfirst we thought of the problem as a heat problem, but it was tougherthan that. Heat loss was not much, out there in a vacuum, and theymade arrangements to warm the handles of my tools so that I wouldn'tbleed heat through my gloves to them and thus freeze my fingers. No,the problem was to get a glove that stood up to a pressure differenceof three or four pounds per square inch and could still be flexed withany accuracy by my fingers. We could make a glove that was prettythin, but it stiffened out under pressure and made delicate workreally tough. It was a lot like trying to do brain surgery in mittens.

  They eventually gave me a porous glove that leaked air when you flexedyour fingers. Air, they said, could always be gotten from theDyna-Soar rocket that