- Mahoney, Bob.
Damned to Heaven.
Austin, TX: 1st World Publishing, 2003.
ISBN 978-0-9718562-8-8.
-
This may be the geekiest space thriller ever written. The
author has worked as a spaceflight instructor at NASA's
Johnson Space Center in Houston for more than a decade,
training astronauts and flight controllers in the details
of orbital operations. He was Lead Instructor for the first
Shuttle-Mir mission. He knows his stuff,
and this book, which bristles with as many acronyms and NASA
jargon as a Shuttle flight plan, gets the details right and only
takes liberty with the facts where necessary to advance the
plot. Indeed, it seems the author is on an “expanded
mission” of his NASA career as an instructor to ensure
that not only those he's paid to teach, but all readers of
the novel know their stuff as well—he even
distinguishes acronyms pronounced letter-by-letter (such as
E.V.A.) and those spoken as words (like OMS), and provides
pronunciation guides for the latter.
For a first time novelist, the author writes quite well, and
there are only a few typographical and factual errors. Since the
dialogue is largely air to ground transmissions or proceedings of
NASA mission management meetings, it comes across as stilted, but
is entirely authentic—that's how they talk. Character
description is rudimentary, and character development as the story
progresses almost nonexistent, but then most of the characters
are career civil servants who have made it to the higher echelons
of an intensely politically correct and meritocratic bureaucracy
where mavericks or those even remotely interesting are ground down
or else cut off and jettisoned. Again, not the usual
dramatis personæ of a thriller,
but pretty accurate.
So what about the story? A space shuttle bound for the International
Space Station suffers damage to its thermal protection system which
makes it impossible to reenter safely, and the crew takes refuge
on the still incomplete Station, stretching its life support resources
to the limit. A series of mishaps, which may seem implausible all
taken together, but every one of which has actually occurred in
U.S. and Soviet space operations over the last two decades, eliminates
all of the rescue alternatives but one last, desperate Hail Mary
option, which a flight director embraces, not out of boldness, but
because there is no other way to save the crew. Trying to thwart the
rescue is a malevolent force high in the NASA management hierarchy,
bent on destroying the existing human spaceflight program in order that
a better replacement may be born. (The latter might have seemed preposterous
when the novel was published in 2003, but looking just at the results of
NASA senior management decisions in the ensuing years, it's hard to
distinguish the outcomes from those of having deliberate wreckers at the
helm.)
The author had just about finished the novel when the Columbia
accident occurred in February 2003. Had Columbia been on a
mission to the Space Station, and had the damage to its thermal
protection system been detected (which is probable, as it would have
been visible as the shuttle approached the station), then the
scenario here, or at least the first part, would have likely occurred.
The author made a few changes to the novel post-Columbia;
they are detailed in notes at the end.
As a thriller, this worked for me—I read the whole thing in
three days and enjoyed the author's painting his characters into
corner after corner and then letting them struggle to avert disaster
due to the laws of nature, ambitious bureaucratic adversaries, and
cluelessness and incompetence, in ascending order of peril to mission
success and crew survival. I suspect many readers will consider
this a bit much; recall that I used the word “geekiest”
in the first sentence of these remarks. But unlike
another thriller by a NASA engineer, I was never
once tempted to hurl this one into the flame trench immediately before
ignition.
If the events in this book had actually happened, and an official
NASA historian had written an account of them some years later,
it would probably read much like this book. That is quite an
achievement, and the author has accomplished that rare feat
of crafting a page-turner (at least for readers who consider
“geeky” a compliment) which also gets the details
right and crafts scenarios which are both surprising and plausible.
My quibbles with the plot are not with the technical details but
rather scepticism that the NASA of today could act as quickly as
in the novel, even when faced with an existential threat to its
human spaceflight program.
October 2010 