CHAPTER FOUR
DISASTER
The warm summer of 1979 saw me with a good teaching degree specialising in drama and art, but with an element of environmental science within it, a subject at which I excelled. There were, at this time, some 13,000 teachers on the dole, most of whom were experienced whilst I was still damp behind the ears. It seemed to me that I had at least as good a chance of getting into space as obtaining a post teaching drama.
It was time to assess what attributes I had to offer to astronautics. My degree showed that I was capable of learning and my army service had furnished me with the ability to work in a team. I could walk vast distances on powerful legs and read a map better than a book. But, though I was capable and had much potential it became painfully obvious that at the age of forty I had not proved myself; I had done nothing that would set me apart. This was something that all astronauts and cosmonauts seemed to have in common; that they stood tall upon their accomplishments. I had therefore, if I was to take this business seriously, to achieve.
I was also aware that I was no spring chicken, Forty was one helluva time in life to decide to be an astronaut. If I was to accomplish that which would set me apart there was no time to lose, no time at all. I derived some comfort from the fact that two years previously a cosmonaut of 46 years, Georgi Grechko, had set a new record of over 96 days in space.
It was at this time that I read a book about a desert expedition in the Sahara in which mention of an area north of Timbuktu was made. This area, between the villages of Araouane in Mali and Oualata in Mauritania, a distance of 350 miles, had never been crossed. Now, I thought, if a man were to cross that last bastion of the desert, and were to do it alone without guides, then he would have accomplished something worthy of note. I read all I could on the area and on deserts, thought again about it, and decided to go ahead.
It was, in many ways, an act of desperation, a do-or-die attempt to make sense of the previous forty years. The expedition would have to be conducted with as much professionalism as I could muster or I would, I knew, not survive it. I put ideas of space to the back of my cluttered mind and brought the Sahara to the front.
I estimated that the journey would take about 16 days and on each of those days I would require a gallon of water. There was no water en-route, which is why it hadn't been crossed. A gallon of water weighs 10 lb. Obviously I couldn't carry 160 lb. on my back, plus food and equipment. I didn't want to use a motor vehicle as it would not be the accomplishment that I was seeking. Camels were the other alternative, but I knew next to nothing about them other than that they were not cheap. However, a light seemed to appear.
Barnes Wallace, when he was not inventing bouncing bombs to bust dams, invented a method of obtaining water from the desert which he called the solar still. This device was included in every desert survival manual I had come across so I assumed that it must work. One dug a hole in the sand, placed a cup in the centre, covered the hole with a plastic sheet which one weighted down at the edges and placed a handful of sand in the middle of the sheet as a weight. The Sun would, in theory, warm up the trapped air beneath the sheet, evaporating any moisture in the sand. This would then hit the sheet, condense out and run down unto the cup. By this method up to half a pint per day could, I was told, be collected. If therefore I took the wherewithal to produce sufficient water for my needs then I should be able to walk over the desert uncluttered by the vast weight of water I would require.
Maybe it would work, and maybe it wouldn't. There was only one way to find out. I would go to Timbuktu, enter the desert and try out my stills. If they worked then I would give it a go. If not, then I would come home with my life intact ready to fight another day.
It seemed a good time to make contacts amongst the British space community, such as it was. I put together an information pack on my proposed expedition, copies of which I sent to the United Kingdom Industrial Space Committee and the Department of Industry (Space Division), offering the expedition as a test bed for food and insulation materials as astronauts and desert explorers have similar problems in these areas. The former department didn't want to know but the latter, though they declined my offer, supplied me with some useful information.
I managed to acquire a temporary teaching post which financed the trip and early 1980 saw me north of Timbuktu. I dug my holes, much to the amusement of the local populace, waited out the day and settled down for a night under the stars.
And what stars they were. The splendour of that night sky in the dustless and unpolluted air of the Sahara will stay with me always. Luna held splendid court, a ball of silver delicately etched with craters and plains with her dark-side crescent visible in the star and reflected Earth-light. She sailed in a sea of jewels so numerous that there was hardly enough blackness to allow their rich ruby reds, deep oranges, brilliant yellows and flashing blue-white diamonds to shine. Old friends were still there. The Big Dipper scooped them greedily up as it pointed through the yellow super-giant of Polaris to Cassiopeia with its variable blue colossus at the centre of the 'W'. Betelgeuse bled redly upon Orion's shoulder whilst the twins, blue-white Castor and the orange Pollux, stayed aloof. No matter what form ones cosmology may take, it is impossible to be an atheist on the desert.
And amongst those mega-ancient orbs sped another, younger, star. Bright as Venus I saw it rise in the west and rapidly describe a great arc traversing the heavens. Within a few minutes it was almost overhead, then it dipped silently towards the east and was gone. Salyut 6 with Popov and Ryumin aboard for what would be a record 185-day flight, continued on its orbit.
Morning saw me staring at a fine collection of slightly-damp plastic over a series of bone-dry cups in holes. Placing my tail firmly between my legs I came home, penniless, emaciated and in rags.
In '77 NASA put Voyagers 1 and 2 on course for Jupiter, to arrive in '79. Meanwhile it worked to put its shuttle into space. An orbiter, Enterprise, flew several times in the atmosphere as a glider, taken aloft piggy-back on a Boeing 747. It flew like a bird and landed perfectly on the long runway of Edwards Air Force Base. Astronauts were selected. The eighth group of NASA astronauts, the biggest yet, included for the first time members of ethnic minorities and women. Proposals that these groups should be represented in space had been flying around Congress and other governing bodies for over twenty years, but NASA had stuck to its guns that only those who made the grade and fitted the requirements of the programme to the letter would be selected.
However the programme, thanks to the imminent advent of the shuttle, was now changing drastically. No longer were test pilots specifically required. On take-off in a shuttle the astronauts would experience only 3G and many of the astronauts would not be pilots. Indeed, the pilot would no longer be the commander of the mission. Of the 35 selected only 13 would train as pilots. The rest were in a brand new category, mission specialists. It was their job to conduct the experiments and run the other equipment during their time in orbit. Social pressure had been brought to bear upon NASA. If they wanted politicians friendly to space to be voted into power then all the American people, including women, black Americans, Chinese, Native and Hispanic Americans, would have to feel that they had a part to play.
In the USSR a new generation of Soyuz craft was being developed with computerized controls and microcircuits. The whole thing still looked the same to the casual observer, but it wasn't. Named the Soyuz T it had three seats for the first time since the Soyuz 11 disaster back in '71. Soyuz T1 was an unmanned test. It flew in December 1979 and successfully docked with Salyut 6. An old-style, but still serviceable, Soyuz took up Arnaldo Mendez, an ex shoe-shine boy from Cuba and the first black person in space. The first three-man crew in the new, less bulky, space-suits, docked in November 1980 aboard Soyuz T3.
In April '79 the USSR and France had signed an agreement that put the French on the Intercosmos list. Two Frenchmen, Jean-Loup Chretien and Patrick Baudry, arrived in Baikonur to start their training on 7th September 1980, just after Chretien's 42nd birthday. I was happy to see that spaceflight was becoming an occupation for those in their middle years.
I had picked up the desert gauntlet and was loath to put it down. During my previous trip I had made many mistakes, but I had learned from them. The Saharan Empty Quarter, as I had come to know it, beckoned me constantly and would not leave me alone. Enquiries had led me to the conclusion that all the writers of desert survival manuals had read each others books and none had actually tried out the solar still. This made me suspect much of the rest that they contained.
I had come to the conclusion that my 16 gallons of water would have to be carried by two camels, one as a back-up in case the other was to give up the ghost. I needed, therefore, experience with camels. Thus it was that at the end of January 1981 I arrived in Tunisia and headed south for a month in the northern Sahara, there to gain this experience.
In Douz, on the Sahara's northern edge, I hired a camel and a guide. The guide's brains I picked mercilessly, determined to get my money's worth. It wasn't easy since he, at first, insisted upon being my slave. I wanted him for a teacher. Once this point was established then an excellent teacher he became and I was satisfied with my progress into the world of the desert nomad.
Another problem was going to be survival if both my camels were to die on me, or simply wander off leaving me alone in the desert. I needed to be aware of my capabilities as a desert walker. Using a map that was little better than a road map I walked across the open and trackless wilderness to a hill forty miles south of Douz carrying my own water, then walked back. The whole journey, in temperatures of over 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 C.), took two and a half days. At the end I was very tired but still capable of walking onward had circumstances demanded it. So there I was, ready for anything that the desert could throw at me and raring to go.
At Kennedy the shuttle, too, was raring to go. It stood on its tail, the orbiter 120 feet (36 metres) long, which coincidentally was the length of Orville Wright's first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. On the screen of TVs the world over was the shuttle Columbia, steam rising lazily from her as the countdown neared zero.
It was April 12th 1981, six years after the Apollo/Soyuz mission when the last American flew in space, and the 20th anniversary of Gagarin's first orbit, that the first shuttle rocked the ground of Kennedy Space Centre. The flight was highly successful and America smiled when she glided down to Earth at over 200mph.
Meanwhile NASA had learned its lesson about publicity, about keeping the rats inside the wall and dragging its light out from under its obscuring bushel. They organized a vast publicity machine reaching out to the young, the future voters, through schools, museums, clubs, television and even a Space Camp where the youngsters could learn the realities of space and its exploration. America was in a hurry to regain international prestige.
From Baikonur a Soviet/Romanian crew flew aboard the last of the old Soyuz spacecraft to successfully dock with Salyut 6 whilst Salyut 7 was prepared for a launch early in 1982.
The British manned space effort, which consisted entirely of me, was continuing apace. I had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the honour being the greater, since my acceptance had been endorsed by none other than Wilfred Thesiger, the doyen of British desert exploration. From the RGS I obtained lists of institutions offering expedition grants. I wrote to many, spending around £40, which I could little afford on the project, and not mentioning my intentions in space. It was £40, and a great deal of time and effort, wasted.
Teaching jobs were thin on the ground but I managed to scrape together enough for a shoe-string expedition, selling anything of value that I owned, which wasn't much. The cheapest way to Timbuktu seemed to be through Spain and Morocco, thus avoiding the expensive Marseille/Algiers ferry. However the best laid plans of mice, men and potential astronauts gang aft a-gley.
Within an hour of landing in Morocco I had been successfully mugged and parted from a substantial proportion of my meagre expedition funds. The best that could be said about the encounter is that all three of them knew they'd been in a scrap.
So it was back to Manchester again, bloodied but unbowed, to work for next winter, reflecting ruefully that Neil Armstrong never had this trouble.
Columbia flew three more proving missions and the USA went wild when a smiling Reagan declared the space shuttle operational. There were mumbles and mutterings from the space community. Only four flights had been made by shuttles. The X15 rocket planes had flown over 200 missions and had never been called anything but experimental. Shuttle was many times more complex than the X15.
In November of 1982 Columbia deployed two communication satellites into orbit. This was to become the main money-spinner for NASA throughout the shuttle programme.
The Soviet Union launched their new space station, Salyut 7, in April 82 and in that May two cosmonauts began a 211 day mission aboard her. The Western press was now convinced that the Soviets were working towards a three-year manned Mars mission and said so at great length. It was indeed a new era of space occupation for the Soviets. Salyut 7 was intended as a permanent research station in space with crews changing on a shift basis. Space would no longer be a place merely to visit, but a place to inhabit.
In June, Jean-Loup Chretien, in his 44th year, flew to Salyut 7 for France. It was his wish to take up garlic, perhaps to establish forever evidence of the French occupation of space. This was disallowed on the pretext that the air purifiers couldn't handle it. The French would call him neither cosmonaut nor astronaut, but invented their own term, spationaute. I determined that if I flew then I would be called a spaceman. If it was good enough for Dan Dare, it was good enough for me.
Jean-Loup put the wind up his crew by wearing a Hunchback of Notre Dame mask. Upon his return he was honoured by the Soviets and invested by his countrymen with a string of titles long enough to decorate the Eiffel Tower from top to bottom. He was also appointed Spaceflight Chief of CNES, the French space agency.
Later Chretien was appointed leader of the team of test pilots for the prospective French space shuttle, Hermes. This spacecraft was still on the drawing board and not expected to enter space before 1995 at the earliest. Chretien would then be 57 years old. In fact Hermes was to remain on the drawing board but Jean-Loup was to fly in an American shuttle when he was 59.
The aged Salyut 6, veteran of 27 dockings, 676 manned days and over 1,300 experiments; aboard which there had been several emergencies, all of which had been solved and added to the cosmonauts' experience of space, came to its death and cremation when in July '82 its orbit decayed and its 35 tonnes burned brightly on re-entry, a proud sight indeed.
Back in Britain I had amassed enough cash for another go at the desert, providing I went down to Paris by the cheap Magic Bus. By now I had become a source of amusement to friends and colleagues, a sort of semi-suicidal clown. Had I been rich I would have been declared eccentric. As it was I was deemed bonkers but harmless.
In December, as I was teaching in Moss Side, I received a 'phone call from Alistair Macdonald of BBC TV North West News. Could I come for an interview on the box, he wished to know. I was somewhat apprehensive about this as it would be easy to turn the whole thing into a circus farce, but decided to go for it and keep it as sane as possible. After all, publicity was part of my plan and it would be good for the book I wished to write should the expedition be successful. If I managed to begin the trek and it was unsuccessful, then at least it would serve as an epitaph.
I needn't have worried. Alistair conducted the interview with dignity. A few days later he rang me again, asking me if I would mind being filmed as I set off.
"What? Getting on a number 66?" I asked.
No, he explained, he meant to film me setting out from Timbuktu and during the 150 mile approach to my starting point, the village of Araouane. Then he wished me to film the actual crossing whilst he and his crew went around the longer, easier way to film my approach to Oualata at my journey's end. The whole thing was to be made into a half-hour documentary for the BBC.
"I wouldn't mind," I told Alistair.
Christmas was hectic. The expedition had to be delayed whilst I gave Alistair an understanding of deserts and he gave me a lightning course on the Bolex 16mm movie camera. Meanwhile Magic Bus went bust so the BBC bought me an air ticket to Algiers.
On the 11th of January 1983 I boarded the 'plane. I crossed the Sahara by truck and car from the north to the south, took a boat up the Niger and met Alistair and his crew in Timbuktu a couple of weeks later. There I bought two camels. One, who in human terms would have been a skittish teenager, I solemnly named Pegasus because I found her near the airfield. The other, a matron, was designated The Traditionalist because of her dread of motor vehicles. These names were quickly shortened to Peggy and Trad.
Then we set out north, me leading my livestock and Alistair captaining a truck and Land Rover. He would go ahead a few miles and film me as I breasted a dune or traversed a ridge before a watery sunset. A week later we arrived, exhausted, in Araouane for a couple of days final preparation and rest.
It was my intention to aim at completing the crossing in 15 days. I intimated to Alistair that if I hadn't arrived by day 19 then I would be in trouble and would be very grateful for an attempted rescue. Then I handed him last letters, and my will, and he vanished over a dune to the south. I watched for some time, then went to mend a saddle.
The story of that journey has been told and retold many times. Suffice it to say here that it was fraught from the start with problems. The camels vanished almost nightly, putting up my daily mileage by as much as 14 miles as I tracked them through the dunes. Half way across, as I deemed it fitting to ride Peggy, she threw me off, resulting in my breaking three ribs. There were two accidents with my barely adequate water supply, which resulted in a week of drastically reduced rations and three waterless days at the end. Iron ore in the ground sent my compass haywire and I had to navigate by the stars, the magnificently beautiful and infinitely friendly stars.
If I lay on my back beneath that celestial canopy, as I did nightly, the heavens covered all of my field of vision, even the peripheral. It was possible to ignore the weight of the unseen planet at my back and hang in space, to fly amongst the nearby planets and distant galaxies; to be ONE, transcending time and space with the visible and invisible universe.
The crossing of the Empty Quarter, which almost became my funeral procession, took 19 days and cost me four stones in weight. A ghostly site, I was carried into Oualata by a barely alive Peggy with Trad staggering in the rear, Alistair being away on a mission of rescue. He returned at sundown and with Champagne and Gin we celebrated into the silent and bejewelled night.
Every expert in desert survival that I had spoken with had deemed the expedition to be both fatal and impossible. The impossible journey had been done! I had done it! I had achieved! I now had the status that I sought. My next direction, after four years of hardship, poverty, mockery and dreams, was UP..........
On my journey I had made tape recordings of every event, partly as a sound track to the film and partly as a source for the intended book. Owing to my dilapidated condition at the end of the expedition I had little recollection of details, all my energies going towards moving forward.
Alistair took these tapes for professional cleaning, as they would be impregnated with a substantial part of the Sahara and to play them in that condition would have been to destroy them. A few days after our return he rang me.
"I've just played the tapes," he said with all the enthusiasm of a successful lottery punter. "They're GREAT! You're DYING!"
When I heard them there was a passage on day 16 which brought shivers to every sinew and made the hairs bristle as memory flooded back. I was obviously on my last legs and repeatedly affirmed to my recorder, "My name...is Ted Edwards......I WILL NOT DIE!"
I switched off the machine, went down to the pub and got very drunk.
That line went around the country. It became a sort of catch-phrase. The press and media loved it and had a field day with the thin Wiganer. Explorers should have upper-class plummy voices but this one had a Lancashire accent you could hang a black-pudding from. It could have gone to farce, but it didn't. Always that proclamation, "My name is Ted Edwards.... I WILL NOT DIE!" brought it back to Earth.
The film was completed quickly to utilize the press and media interest and with the title 'BEYOND THE LAST OASIS' was shown first on BBC North West TV and then networked on BBC2. The Lancashire Evening Post said 'This was the Everest of desert travel and (the film) could do with being twice as long.' The Daily Mail gushed, 'An achievement to go alongside Shackleton at the South Pole or Hillary on Everest'.
So, I had achieved! The national press said so. Radio 4 put out a documentary entitled 'I WILL NOT DIE', which was an edited version of my tapes. It got rave reviews. Alistair declared that the journey was, '...absolutely staggering. Ted's expedition has set new standards in exploration. He has done something not just as well as the Arabs, but better!'
When Russell Harty and Salina Scott acquired me for their respective programmes I was convinced that I'd made it. How could the powers that be, my ego enthused, refuse to take such a brave and interesting personality into space?
My ego, that propounder of false hopes and obscurer of realities, was, as usual, wrong! I was a nine-day wonder. My name was rapidly forgotten and my dying-swan speech relegated to that part of the nation's collective unconscious reserved for winners of 'STARS IN THEIR EYES' and naked-breasted women on sports fields. I kept my space ambitions to myself. Now was not the time to go public.
That April, from Kennedy, the second shuttle in space, Challenger, made its debut. Success followed success as launch after nonchalant launch sent the world's most advanced vehicle into space. Shuttle went commercial, deploying satellite after satellite for whoever had the money, and taking up their technicians as well. The days of the hard and tough test-pilot-astronaut were receding. The orbiter had a shirt-sleeve environment. Anyone who was reasonably healthy and had a good reason, be it scientific, political or monetary, could be considered for a flight.
32 year old physicist Sally Ride, who at the age of 12 had seen television pictures of Valentina Tereshkova becoming the first woman in space, became the first American spacewoman twenty years and two days later. The publicity was staggering. She was not only intelligent but good looking, a factor which I would take a great deal of convincing had no bearing on her selection. Every TV chat-show wanted Sally Ride. She was America's number one cover girl. The publicity machine worked overtime.
They worked too on Guion Bluford Jr., America's first black person in space, thus espousing the egalitarianism of the good old U.S. of A. and probably attracting a few million votes for the ruling party.
November '83 saw the launch, in the cargo bay of a shuttle, of the European Space Agency's Spacelab. Aboard was the first foreign national to fly with NASA, Ulf Merbold, a scientist of West Germany and ESA. NASA had gone international. The Spacelab project was destined to fly on 22 missions giving untold information about life in space and was to end in April '98.
1983 was not a good year for the Soviets. In April, Soyuz T8 with three cosmonauts aboard bound for a long stay in Salyut 7, lost its radar, essential for a rendezvous and docking. A manual docking was attempted but failed and they came home.
Baikonur trained three crews for each mission, a prime crew, a back-up crew and a stand-by crew. If one member of the prime crew, for whatever reason, could not fly, then that crew would stand down and the other two crews would move up a notch.
For some reason the prime crew couldn't fly. The back-up crew was Lyakhov and Alexandrov, the third crew-member being dropped to accommodate more fuel. Two months later they flew in Soyuz T9 and docked without incident. They settled in and began their experiments. All was fine until the second week in September when a Progress robot freighter began to transfer fuel to the space station. There was a leak from the fuel line and, fearing an explosion, the cosmonauts evacuated the station and sealed themselves into their Soyuz, preparing for an emergency return to Earth. However ground control, some hours later, decided that there was no danger of an explosion and they returned to Salyut 7.
Almost immediately one of the three solar panels went on the blink and ceased to operate. The resulting dearth of electricity in the air conditioning system caused the temperature to drop to 10 degrees C (50F) and the humidity to shoot up to almost 100%. The main problem was not the lack of comfort but that the wet circuits were likely to short out.
There were spare panels on board but the crew was not trained in the space-walk techniques necessary. A visiting mission, Soyuz T10, was already scheduled for the 27th of September but the prime crew had not the necessary training to fix the panels either. Cosmonauts Titov and Strekhalov of the abortive T8 mission had undergone the required course and were trained for the mission in a fortnight.
It was to be a night launch and at two minutes to takeoff, T-2 minutes, all seemed to be well. The routine of checks and verifications continued calmly. At T-25 seconds, less than half a minute to departure, a small fire appeared at the base of the rocket. A fuel line had fractured. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing exploded.
On top of the crew capsule, on both Soviet and American non-recoverable rockets, is a small tower atop which are miniature rockets which, in emergency, will fire automatically and take the already automatically detached capsule a thousand yards above the problem, landing by parachute hopefully out of harm's way. At T-20 seconds, as the flames roared brighter, it should already have fired but it sat, solid as a monolith, atop the imminent Hell. Mission Control realised that the fire must have damaged the automatic mechanisms. To operate the system manually required that two controllers in separate parts of the building would have to countdown simultaneously for ten seconds and together press the buttons that would operate the escape tower by radio-control.
They started the countdown at T-10 seconds, with little expectation of success for the base of the rocket was engulfed in flames and the volatile fuel already heated beyond reasonable tolerance. But they had to try. It was all that they could do.
Ten...nine...eight...seven...six...five...four...still the mighty multi-coloured inferno raged...three...two...one...zero...Cataclysm! The Earth itself shook as the great fireball of reds, yellows, oranges and blacks shot flaming debris over the site causing the controllers in their bunkers to relinquish all hope for the cosmonauts.
Then someone spotted a point of light rising silently above the conflagration's roar. It continued upwards into the clouds and was gone. The manual system had worked. With their pants on fire the two cosmonauts had survived the first explosion of a manned rocket on the pad. Bruised and battered they were picked up and fed vodka to calm their shattered nerves.
All this left Lyakhov and Alexandrov, up in Salyut 7, no better off. They still froze in the damp atmosphere and to add to their problems their Soyuz craft, which they would have to return in, was beyond its safety limit, its use-by date, of 100 days. Seemingly they were marooned in space, a fact that the western press jumped upon with glee.
They weren't of course. The Soviet philosophy of space travel was always to err on the side of safety so the use-by date was more a point of wariness than one of danger. The cosmonauts were told of the abortive launch, and that it would take a couple of months to ready another Soyuz to bring them down. They were asked if they would agree to do a space 'walk', always a dangerous prospect, and attempt to attach new solar panels themselves, following detailed instructions from Earth, then return in the out-of-date craft. They agreed readily. Both tasks were accomplished without problems and they landed on the 23rd of November after 150 days in orbit.
1984 saw three more visits to Salyut 7, a long stay mission lasting a record 237 days, a Soviet/Indian mission and the second flight of Svetlana Savitskaya, Russia's second woman in space. She made the first 'space-walk' by a woman and completed a welding exercise with the first electron welder in space. The construction of huge complexes in orbit was now possible.
Now was the time to make positive moves towards space. It is my philosophy that when dealing with any organization from which one requires something out of the ordinary one never begins at the bottom where the bureaucrats reside. If one is going to be a pain in the bum then one should choose an important bum. Accordingly I wrote to Sir Keith Joseph, the then Secretary of State for Education and Science. I asked Sir Keith about the state of play concerning putting a Brit into space with NASA and volunteered my services for any such venture, citing my desert expedition as evidence of my competence. A month later the letter arrived on the desk of Andrew Kurzfeld, Private Secretary of the Science and Engineering Research Council who replied thus:
Dear Edwards,
I reply to your letter of 8 April 1984 to Sir Keith Joseph. The SERC is not presently considering a manned space flight programme, and I doubt that, within the limited resources available to it at the present time, it could entertain such a proposal.
That was the first time I'd been called 'Edwards' since my army days and, though Kurzfeld said that he was sincerely mine, I know a brick wall when I see one. Since the only other nation going into space on a regular basis was the USSR I wrote to Chairman Gury Marchuk of the State Committee for Science and Technology at the Kremlin with a copy to His Excellency Viktor Popov, their ambassador in London. Their replies were conspicuous by their absence.
I worked on the book of the trip, plagiarising by consent Alistair's title of 'BEYOND THE LAST OASIS'. John Murray (Publishers) liked it and we signed a contract for publication in 1985. In the meantime I needed more publicity. I had caught the exploration bug and my feet were getting itchy. Since I'd had four years of deserts I decided to try something different. I needed another impossible trip.
From the 10th of August to the 2nd of September 1984 I did the first walk, solo, from the east to the west coast of Iceland. It was no picnic. I set out with 72 lb. of equipment on my back to walk the 510 miles across moor and mountain, glacier and volcanic desert. On several occasions I almost made fatal mistakes. For 19 of those 24 days a gale with the strength of a solid wall threw rain directly into my teeth.
When I was three days from the end America sent Judy Resnik, their second woman in space, up in a shuttle. With her aboard Discovery, on her maiden voyage, was the first 'fare-paying passenger', Charles Walker, who conducted experiments in the pharmaceutical separation of enzymes and hormones from other materials, an operation found to be much easier in the absence of gravity. Both the experimental material and Walker's fare were produced by McDonell Douglas who were on the brink of producing the product commercially. Here was another possible route into space.
Upon my arrival from Reykjavik I found a letter awaiting me from an acknowledged expert on Iceland telling me that the trip couldn't be done. I wonder if he watched my film of the journey, part of which was shown on BBC1. The next six months I spent writing a book about the trip entitled 'FIGHT THE WILD ISLAND' (ISBN 0-7195-4331-2). It was another lever to use when the time came.
Despite the lack of interest in new innovations shown by most governments, who tend to see themselves as custodians of the status-quo, there are always those of vision who would rock the steadiest of boats. In Britain there were, at this time, two such visionaries, dedicated to Britain as a space-faring nation and with the technical know-how to bend dreams to realities. A major problem of the deployment of satellites into low Earth orbit was cost. Every tonne put up by a shuttle cost almost £3½ million. Alan Bond and Bob Parkinson thought that this could be reduced to little more than £½ million. Their concept was for a robot space plane which would take-off from a conventional runway, deploy the payload in orbit and land as a normal aircraft. The whole thing would be reusable and would require far fewer personnel to operate than any kind of conventional rocket taking off vertically.
The secret was in Alan Bond's baby, the engine, being developed under the auspices of Rolls Royce. Designated RB 545 it had both gas turbine and rocket engine capability. During initial take-off it used the oxygen in the atmosphere. When, about ten minutes later, it reached five times the speed of sound at a height of 15 miles (24 kms), it would switch to on-board liquid oxygen and enter orbit as a rocket.
Roughly the same size as Concorde, the air/space frame would be designed by Bob Parkinson of British Aerospace and his team. The whole thing would be called HOTOL. It was Britain's second bite at the space cherry. Years ahead of the USA, the USSR, Japan and West Germany, who had space-plane ambitions merely in mind, it would put Britain in a position to launch the bulk of the world's satellites.
Unfortunately it would cost lots of pound notes to develop, and that development, though potentially lucrative, would take many years. Business, which required a fairly swift return on investment, could not fund it alone. It required substantial financial commitment from government. Accordingly they made representations to the UK government and to ESA in 1984, then sat back to gnaw their fingernails whilst soulless accountants and bureaucrats spent month after frustrating month sifting through their figures. Finally, in 1985, a joint two year proof-of-concept study funded by the British government, Rolls Royce and British Aerospace was begun. It was a gift from the gods: our last chance for a future in a technological world.
An American ex-employee of NASA bought some scrap rocket engines from NASA and planned to launch a home-made rocket, complete with astronaut, into space. I had long held the view that the era of 'bangers in space', of private enterprise and the spirit of 'Professor Screwtop', would eventually dawn.
In '85 Capt. Robert Truax (USN-ret) was planning a sub-orbital flight. I tried to contact him with a view to acting as a back-up, but the post failed me. It was just as well for in 1986 I heard that the rocket had exploded on take-off. I never found out what happened to the brave Capt. Truax. It is a fact, however, that such men are deemed fools only before they succeed or after they fail.
Maybe his countryman Theodore Roosevelt said it best in 1899:
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though chequered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy or suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory or defeat."
Meanwhile, back at NASA, they conceived the 'Space Flight Participation Program' which would send selected civilians into space. It was a master-stroke meant to destroy the rats in the wall forever. Applications were invited from the two premier communicating professions, teachers and journalists. The successful teacher was due to fly in 1985 with the successful journalist and all the journalistic finalists flying soon after that. NASA had learned its lesson well. There were 11,146 applications from teachers. Everyone knew, or knew of, a teacher who had applied. For the first time each and every United States citizen had a recognisable personal stake in space.
I obtained this excerpt from the Federal Register.
"To be considered for selection as space flight participants, applicants must:
(1) Be free of medical conditions which would either impair the applicants' ability to participate in, or be aggravated by, space flight, as determined by NASA physicians.
(2) Be willing to undergo appropriate background investigation.
(3) Be willing to undergo necessary training.
(4) Meet additional requirements that may be stated in Announcements of Opportunity soliciting applications for particular spaceflights."
It was planned, they said, to fly two or three private citizens per year. Christa McAuliffe, a 37 year old high school social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was the chosen. She was attractive, vivacious and an excellent communicator. It was Sally Ride all over again; the chat-shows, the magazine covers, the smiling Christa was everywhere charming the pants off even the rats. As she began her arduous training America fell madly and irrevocably in love.
'BEYOND THE LAST OASIS' (ISBN 0-7195-4205-7) was published in April 1985 and designated Book of the Month by the publishers, Murray. Consequently I was invited to meet an Irishman called Wogan. This took place before an estimated audience of over nine million, all of whom were informed that my name was Ted Edwards and that I would not die. It was all good publicity, which was exactly what I needed.
August saw me in Tanzania on a solo expedition to retrace the route of Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to find Livingstone, from Zanzibar to Ujiji a thousand miles west on Lake Tanganyika. There, near Morogoro, I discovered the site of the lost city of Simba-mwenni. Wogan was interested again.
An agreement was signed between Britain and the USA to put two Skynet 4 British military satellites into orbit using two shuttles. These would be accompanied by two British astronauts, yet to be chosen and announced. That brought me down to Earth with a bang.
If they were military satellites then the odds were that the astronauts would be military also. I had to gazumped them. By a circuitous route I contacted the Rt. Hon. Michael Heseltine and offered my services as the first writer in space. The ability to write and a proven capacity for not panicking in extremis were the best assets I could offer to British astronautics. After all it took many years to train a writer whilst an astronaut could be trained in less than one. It made sense, therefore, to train a writer in the art of astronautics rather than vice-versa.
Back came the reply on the 24th of June, also circuitously routed, confirming that the Ministry of Defence would supply astronauts for the first two Skynet 4 military communications satellites and if I should write to NASA then I should receive, '.....information about the shuttle programme and the opportunities to make space flights.
Four days later America's darling, Christa McAuliffe was due to fly in the delayed shuttle Challenger. The crew selected for the first Space Flight Participation Mission were:
Dick Scobee Commander Aged 46
Michael J. Smith Pilot Aged 40
Ellison S. Onizuka Aerospace Engineer Aged 39
Ronald E. McNair Physicist Aged 35
Gregory B. Jarvis Electrical Engineer Aged 41
Judith A. Resnik Electrical Engineer Aged 36
Christa McAuliffe Teacher Aged 38
NASA set up a video link with Christa's class and schools throughout the country so that she could teach school from orbit. For the first time an ordinary person would be speaking to the nation from space. This was NASA's best publicity shot. The crew came from all over the USA. McNair was black. Onizuka was a Japanese American. America's second woman in space, Judy Resnik, was a classical pianist.
On the morning of January 28th 1986 the clear blue sky made Florida cold. It was just above freezing when the crew climbed aboard the shuttle Challenger for its tenth flight. One of the ground crew gave the teacher a shiny red apple. Three miles away, on the viewing platform, Christa's husband Steve and their children Scott, 9, and Caroline, 6, stood with some of Scott's classmates to see the launch. From that distance of safety the spacecraft looked like a little bundle of blackboard chalks, three white and the biggest, the external tank, red. The children waved American flags and ate ice-cream. It was a great day for a holiday.
At 11.38am brilliant yellow flames shone silently beneath the little bundle as clouds of white steam billowed about. The chalk bundle lifted cleanly into the sky as the sound reached the watchers on the platform, like a continuous distant explosion, causing white egrets to flap away. A brilliant white line of smoke, neat and narrow, curved to the right over the sea and continued up into the blue, written by the bundle of chalks. The watchers strained their necks as the dot went higher and was lost by distance, but still the neat white line was written slowly across the blue heavens. The roar had gone as the invisible bundle was seven miles high and almost eight miles distant. The watchers noticed that the top of the thin line now ended in a dot, like a full stop.
The egrets landed again. Slowly confirmation of the worst fears permeated to the platform, to the classrooms, to the nation and to the world. Christa was dead. The whole crew of brave men and women had perished when one of the solid-fuel boosters had exploded in a fire-ball brought about by penny-pinching and corner-cutting. The rats in the wall had had their final victory and did not even recognize their part in it.
It took me two weeks to gather the courage to weep.
I am weeping now...!