Destination Titan Page #4

---

so I have to say there was

about a year in the project

that was very, very difficult.

I find it difficult even

to think back to those times.

It was difficult to keep

everything going, frankly,

and I was very lucky I had a really good team

who, when things got very difficult for me,

they were more than able

to keep the show on the road.

There were some very, very long working hours

involved, particularly when you get to the flight model

and you're trying to get

everything to meet the deadline.

If you miss the delivery,

you're not going to Titan.

You ever have one of those

weeks where nothing works?

Our fax machine is broken,

the photocopier didn't work,

the coffee machine is broken down,

even the BBC's bloody light has stopped,

so we have to improvise with this desk lamp.

I'm sitting in this dark old laboratory with an

experiment that's not working and you sort of think,

is this really what I want to do?

Have I made the right decision?

But then you remember

the bigger picture.

The project developed, it was hard and painful at

times, but finally we got to the very last test.

This was the vibration test.

And can you believe what happened?

The damned thing broke.

The structure which held our

instrument together cracked.

I was personally

devastated to hear the news.

I realised the impact of it

straightaway,

that even just rebuilding the

top hat was going to be a problem,

but the fact we had to

rebuild the sensors too

meant that every aspect of the project had

its hands full with a huge, huge workload.

It was really the possibility that the European

Space Agency might say, "I'm sorry, guys,

"you're not going to make

the delivery date,

"you're not going to be on the

probe, you're not going to Titan."

And, at that point, it was at least four

years of my life dedicated to that instrument.

We had to find a solution,

we had to get out of this hole.

It had taken maybe six months

to build this flight model,

and we were two weeks away from delivery

and had to rebuild the whole thing.

For John, it was an even

longer time on this project

and, again, he knew instantly

that there was a chance

we were getting thrown off

this mission.

We came up with a strategy, whereby we would

deliver the engineering model to the spacecraft,

that would enable ESA to

continue with their programme,

they couldn't hold it up.

This meant we had to dismantle the

whole thing, remove all the harness,

fix the structure but also

build flight spare instruments,

calibrate them,

put the whole thing back together.

In the end, it took about three or four months to go

through the whole thing again but it was touch and go.

We worked around it,

we came up with an alternative design,

and we delivered that to the spacecraft.

Late, but it was working.

MUSIC:
"Safe From Harm"

by Massive Attack

NEWS REPORTER:

Titan, the hazy moon around Saturn.

Today a huge rocket is being prepared

to explore that distant world.

Europe and America have joined forces

in a 3.5 billion mission called Cassini.

This was it. We flew out

to Florida for the launch.

To our surprise, we were actually

greeted there by protesters.

'With legions of protesters climbing

the gates at the air station,

'opponents have maintained that

'NASA's plutonium powered satellite could

kill the innocent should something go wrong.'

They blow up all the

time here, you know and,

for some reason

of insanity I can't imagine,

they're going to stick 72lbs

of plutonium atop this thing.

What I want to see is a safe world.

I don't want nuclear in space.

If you go out to the distance

of Saturn from the sun,

sunlight is very weak,

so you can't use the traditional way

of generating electricity

on a spacecraft,

which is to use solar cells.

So, you have to do

something else and this is true

of all outer solar system missions.

And what is done is to use

radioactive material.

This case plutonium.

And you use the

radiation that it emits

essentially to generate electricity.

That's the only way you can do it.

There seemed to be a sort

of knee-jerk reaction that

radioactivity is this terrible thing

but, for me, it was just

a necessary part of the spacecraft.

But how would the

protests affect the launch?

Would they get in the way, would

we be getting tomatoes thrown at us?

It took me back to my

time as a student in the 1960s

when I was doing the protesting,

when I was carrying the banners.

Now there I was, I was having

to cross the picket line.

The launch was in the middle of

the night at about three o'clock

in the morning and I think,

because of security and so on,

they had special buses

arranged for us.

Are you nervous?

Yes, I am.

Yeah, I'm a little nervous,

yes, just a bit.

Seven years' work and

this is the make or break night.

There's a lot of work down the

line from here but this is really

one place where it could fall down.

'It was always in the back of our

minds that any rocket is only'

so there's a good chance

that if the mission fails

it was going to fail now.

'Launch command systems now enabled.

'T minus 1 minute 30 seconds.'

Sat there biting fingernails

and trying not to get too nervous,

waiting for the

OK that they are going to launch.

'T minus 10,

'9, 8, 7...

'6, 5, 4,

'3, 2, 1.'

I saw flames at the base of the

rocket and the first thing

that went through my mind was

that the rocket's caught fire

and it's about to blow up

or something because the

ignition happens but it's several

miles away, and so the sound of the

ignition hasn't reached you yet,

you just see the flames and then

you see the rocket start to ascend.

Then the direct sound hits you

and there's this wall of deep

rumbling bass and you get a sense,

wow, now we're really on our way.

Cassini goes up and it was almost

by design, there was a cloud about,

I think, 1,000 feet or so right

above the launcher and then after a

few seconds it went into this cloud.

There was almost an explosion of light,

it looked like the thing had blown up.

This cloud was just a huge

ball of fire, it looked like.

For a fraction of a second it was

horror, it's gone, we've lost it,

but then we saw Cassini appearing

above the cloud.

It was coming through

and then it went up into this clear

black sky, absolutely serene,

a truly wonderful sight.

Once it was off and through that

cloud, you knew it was going,

you knew it was going

to be a good launch.

I guess I kept an eye

on the rocket all the way up

till it was a tiny dot.

During the journey to Titan,

we actually moved our team to the

Open University in Milton Keynes.

A lot of things do happen in some

respects, I mean one is rather sad

because the team that we'd built up

to design, build, and launch the SSP,

much of that team dissolves.

We don't have the funding to keep

that team going all the way through.

But we kept a core team together

because roughly every six months

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes