“…What about guidance and navigation? Don’t you realize that you’re now talking about devising a mission profile with possibly four planetary encounters? — Mars, Venus maybe twice, and Earth on return? And at each encounter the accuracy of positioning will have to be of the order of a few hundred miles, after traveling tens of millions. How can we navigate so accurately? Why, we haven’t yet proved we can manage a single swing-by on such a scale.”

“But we will,” Dana insisted. “Remember, NASA committed to the lunar-orbit rendezvous mode for Apollo — which required a rendezvous a quarter of a million miles from home — before a single space rendezvous had been demonstrated.”

There was some muttering at that. Hardly a valid comparison.

“What about the design constraints? Near Venus the sunlight is four times hotter than at Mars, so you’ll be sacrificing payload space for a cooling system that will be deadweight at Mars. And there’ll be problems with the increased level of radiation coming from the sun…”

Dana tried to answer — I’ve incorporated spacecraft design modifications into my weights analysis, and… But he was all but drowned out by the noise of an audience which had little interest in him.

Then Hans Udet stood up, and a hush gathered. Udet said precisely, “On what basis have you arrived at your figures? I am aware of the preliminary analyses of the complicated mission classes you describe. I am aware of no detailed analyses which show the savings you claim.”

Dana began to stammer out a reply. But our understanding of spacecraft systems has advanced since those early studies, and with the figures I have compiled, we can now show that -

“These results are false.” Udet glanced around at the audience — tall, aristocratic, in control, still charming. “This is obvious. The figures we are shown are based on unstated suppositions. The speaker doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It may be incompetence, or malice, whatever. We should not expend further energy on this red herring.” He sat down, his back ramrod-straight.

There was an uncomfortable stirring in the audience, some nervous laughter.

Bert Seger got to his feet, quickly thanked Dana, and turned away from him.

Udet’s words were incredible to Dana. Such accusations should not be made, in such fora as these, or beyond. It is — uncivilized. Somehow, though, now that it had happened, there seemed a certain inevitability about it all. Of course, I have been rejected. But this isn’t about logic, or engineering, or science. It was because he’d gone outside the hierarchy, the formal channels. This really is about power. Infighting. It’s possible Udet is even sincere. Maybe he really does think I’ve cooked up these numbers, that I’m just infighting for Langley.

Dana gathered together his foils, clumsily, and got off the stage.