“Orion is supposed to launch in 2023,” says Lowell Zoller, one of the last remaining engineers who worked on the Apollo program, with a wry smile. “Well, if it does, it’ll be at 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 2023. It’s just not ready.”
These days Zoller gives tours of his and America’s fading space past at the Space & Rocket Center. A stupendous test version of the Saturn V moon rocket he worked on, which Von Braun intended to take us all the way to Mars but which NASA no longer has the components to build even if it wanted to, hangs forlornly over everything.
Zoller, 82, is the picture of both grandparental affability and barely-disguised frustration. Asked about Space Force, Donald Trump’s unfunded fantasy proposal for a fourth branch of the military, Zoller’s mouth curls and his eyes roll skyward. “Does that answer your question?”
I can’t help but consider that here at Space Camp — at a three-day course to promote the second season of National Geographic’s future fantasy series, Mars — we’re playing at Space Force, too. For a challenge in which we split into teams to design a heat shield that will protect an egg from a fiery torch (and more importantly from a NASA perspective, to do so as much under budget as possible), my team ironically adopts the name Space Force. A camp counselor enthuses that they should ironically do the same for a future program.
Be the first to comment