Orbiter’s Florida Trip Is Delicate 1st Step Toward Mars

It took two years, $151 million and dozens of workers at Denver’s Lockheed Martin facility to bring NASA’s newest Mars spacecraft to life. And that was just the beginning.

Now Tim Welton has to get the 8,000-pound orbiter to Florida for launch. In one piece--without a dent, ding, torn thermal blanket or fried circuit board that could derail the 350-million-mile mission.

Scheduled for launch on April 7 and arrival at Mars on Oct. 20, the orbiter will search the planet for evidence of water ice just beneath the surface and will scan for radiation hazards, a first step in seeing if Mars is safe for human exploration.

Such a journey begins long before the spacecraft reaches the launch pads of Cape Canaveral. For this orbiter, the trip started as it left the warehouse-size clean room in Denver where it was created and began the perilous trip to Florida’s “Space Coast.”

On this trip, which started Thursday, no precaution was too small. Technicians in white clean suits and filmy beard covers danced delicately around the spacecraft, grounding themselves so that stray sparks wouldn’t disable any electronics. The men and women moved slowly and deliberately, gripping tools tightly in latex-gloved hands and babying the machine.

“One wrong move and you’ve made a million-dollar mistake--and you don’t know if it’s a project stopper,” said Dick Bryan, a 54-year-old geologist turned spacecraft technician on the seven-person team that built the orbiter for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

The mission is especially important to this Lockheed Martin crew. Many of them worked on the two Mars probes that vanished in 1999 because of a math error and a still-undiagnosed propulsion problem. This time, they need a success.

“A lot of this mission, for the engineers at least, is about redemption,” said Guy Beutelschies, a 36-year-old JPL engineer who cut his teeth on the Galileo spacecraft now circling Jupiter. He has spent the last three years working on this Mars orbiter.

A reminder, as if it were needed, of the failures sits silently in a Lockheed Martin Corp. facility shrouded under plastic: the 2001 Mars Lander that should have been launched this spring, but the project was canceled by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration after the string of losses. Now it will never go to Mars; instead, it will be slowly cannibalized for parts.

“There’s a lot of sadness,” said Lockheed Martin’s chief scientist, Ben Clark.

Though NASA officials canceled the lander’s launch, they allowed the orbiter, a carbon copy of the one that was lost, to proceed--as long as every single piece of it was reviewed for errors by special teams composed of high-level experts.

“This one should have been a cookie cutter, a no-brainer,” said John Henk, who manages spacecraft assembly, testing and launch operations for Lockheed Martin. “Now, there is probably nothing on there that is the same.”

“The spacecraft is aptly named,” said George Pace, the project’s JPL manager. “Odyssey: a long journey with many stops along the way.”

Space travel is very much about taking risks. But it is also about limiting them--especially during high-stakes periods like “moving day.”

Welton, an intense 40-year-old bodybuilder and engineer in charge of the logistics of the move, leaves nothing to chance. He started planning this trip almost a year ago--before the spacecraft was even assembled.

He lined up the C-17 cargo plane that would carry the load. That’s not usually a problem; planetary missions pull rank because of their limited opportunities for launch. Miss this one and the team will have to wait two years. “Our priority is right below the president,” Welton said. “We do not get bumped.”

The trickiest part of the trip is when Welton and his crew winch the spacecraft into the belly of the plane, cross the country and then offload it. To prepare, Welton studies diagrams and watches films--over and over--of previous loadings.

“This is game day for me,” he said. “This is definitely a career highlight.” The metaphor is a comfortable one for Welton; he was a place-kicker at Colorado State University in the late 1970s.

The team starts by placing a protective crate around the spacecraft: a thick, padded metal box that allows temperature and humidity inside to be controlled. A simple red sign outside the white box reads: “2001 Mars Odyssey.”

The spacecraft has been covered with a sparkling metallic blanket of plastic impregnated with nickel that will not cause sparks. The team uses special Kapton tape by the crate, at $275 for 100 yards. Cheaper tape might give off gases that could cloud spacecraft optics.

During key moments of the move, every member of the team is quiet, even somber. Crew briefings, with the team standing in a circle, look like a cross between football huddles and prayer meetings.

All movement is slow and deliberate. After the container is closed, the crew turns 50 bolts to seal it shut. When a 20-ton crane lifts the spacecraft onto the trailer bed that will transport it to the airfield, all eyes are on the container.

“Any time you see your spacecraft lifted up and suspended over the ground, you hold your breath,” said spacecraft designer Beutelschies.

Atop the trailer, the spacecraft is secured with so much heavy gauge chain that driver Dave Smith is certain he’ll be severely teased over his CB radio by fellow truckers.

Smith, who normally drives late night trailers ferrying Lockheed Martin’s Titan and Atlas rockets, eased the trailer onto Colorado Highway 470, heading east. The truck is escorted by deputies in four Douglas County sheriff’s patrol cars.

The route has been surveyed a half-dozen times by Smith’s boss, Brian Brown, to make sure the height of every bridge and utility line is known--and won’t scrape the truck. “If a street sign changes, it can be catastrophic for us,” Brown said.

Amid stares and confusion from fellow drivers, the Mars spacecraft slowly made it way past the snow-dusted grasslands and new condominiums rising like spring crops on Denver’s southwest side. The convoy ends at Buckley Air Force Base, an airfield on Denver’s northwest side.

The C-17 personnel, an Air Force Reserve crew out of Charleston, S.C., are somewhat nonplused by the cargo. Their 174-foot-long plane can carry 170,000 pounds: four Huey helicopters, six light armored vehicles, eight Humvees, 10 howitzers or 150 troops.

“Whether it’s a $300-million Mars orbiter or a Humvee, we don’t damage the cargo or the aircraft,” said Master Sgt. Darryl Brown, the plane’s loadmaster. “But this is lots more exciting,” he admitted. The plane was the same one that carted Keiko the whale from Oregon back to its homeland in Iceland.

Slowly, carefully, the spacecraft is hauled aboard. In what’s seen as a good omen for the American space program, a bald eagle hovers overhead.

In minutes, the spacecraft is safely aboard--tethered to nitrogen tanks that keep it dry and ringed with accelerometers to measure any heavy gravitational forces. Meanwhile, Lockheed’s other precious cargo--the dozen technicians who will prepare the craft for launch--strap themselves into their seats.

“Welcome aboard Mars Observer One,” quipped loadmaster Brown. Welton, unable to relax, looked intently at the spacecraft. “Halftime,” he muttered.

While the trip may seem a logistical nightmare, it’s much easier than it was a decade ago. That’s when Bob Berry, a 33-year Lockheed Martin veteran who manages the Mars Odyssey project, helped drive the Venus-bound Magellan spacecraft to Cape Canaveral in a convoy of flatbeds and motor homes.

The journey, on back roads through towns like Turkey, Texas, took five agonizing days. “You were exposed to the elements, accidents, idiots with guns,” said Berry. “This is less stressful. Still, this is not something you want to do every day.”

Critical spacecraft components are never simply shipped. When they travel on commercial aircraft, seats are occasionally purchased so the parts aren’t placed in the cargo hold. Spacecraft gyroscopes have to travel near the center of rotation of planes, which just happens to be in the first class cabin. “Everyone volunteers for that,” said Pace, a 39-year JPL veteran of the Mariner and Viking missions.

The C-17, considered the “Cadillac” of cargo planes, is comfortable and heated, but the roar of the engines makes discussion nearly impossible. Some team members nap during the three-hour flight, others read, others take turns sitting in the cockpit for the view.

The only person who has to work is Lockheed Martin safety engineer Jack Dekker. Every 30 minutes, he takes an oxygen reading to make sure the nitrogen gas surrounding the spacecraft doesn’t leak out and render the passengers and crew unconscious.

The plane has special clearance to land on the space shuttle landing strip. The 15,000-foot strip, one of America’s longest, was eye-boggling to Capt. John Robinson, who has previously seen this runway only on CNN and flies a plane that can stop in 900 feet.

About two dozen people from JPL and Lockheed Martin are standing on the runway about 10 p.m. in a citrus-freezing 23 degrees. Many of them, like Pace, will spend the next four hours in the cold unloading the spacecraft and helping make sure that it is kept warm and safely put to bed.

The orbiter is secured in NASA’s voluminous spacecraft assembly building; it is another clean room where this craft’s predecessors to Mars, the Viking orbiters, were also assembled. The crew has only a few hours to rest before starting to prepare the craft for launch.

Because some of the scientific instruments needed last-minute fixes and calibrations, the team is somewhat behind schedule. They’ll be working six-day weeks or more until the April launch and living in Florida, far from their families. It’s a sacrifice, said Linda Townsend, a 46-year-old electronics expert who is the team’s only female member.

But all the sacrifice, she predicted, will be forgotten at launch time, when a Delta II rocket hurls the spacecraft out of Earth’s atmosphere.

“The launch is such an adrenaline builder. You’re ready to sign up and commit to the next one after that,” said Townsend, who harbored hopes of being an astronaut before she was talked out of it by a teacher who told her that women couldn’t go into space.

With moving day over, team members now have all eyes on launch day, when they hope to safely shepherd their charge into outer space.

“It’s like your baby heading off,” said Jim Young, a sometimes gruff, bearded technician who has spent 20 of his 39 years working at Lockheed, following in the footsteps of his father, a propulsion engineer on the Viking mission. “You get all teary-eyed.”