In 2001, the astronauts are basically updated versions of the hapless B-52 crewmen in Dr. Strangelove. They are sent on secret missions at the orders of bland bureaucrats meeting in underground rooms. And of all the bland bureaucrats in that imaginary future space program, Heywood Floyd was clearly the alpha male. Floyd ignores the proper procedure at Voiceprint Identification, and the computer still lets him though like it was Logan Airport instead of the Orbital Hilton. Russian functionaries in ugly Communist clothes pump Floyd for secrets -- but he sells them a ridiculous cover story with a few "unguarded" facial expressions. Floyd gets a private flight to the Moon. Floyd threatens everyone with dire punishment if they leak any secrets -- just by changing the tone of his voice. Heywood Floyd is THE MAN!

Somehow, at the age of 13 I realized that this wasn't just a movie -- it was how the real space program actually operated behind all the hype. And I wanted to have Heywood Floyd's power and privileges when I grew up. I spent the rest of the 20th century trying to become Heywood Floyd. And by the real year 2001 I was as close to being Heywood Floyd as anybody could get in the real world. On most days it was as much fun as I had expected it would be back in 1968.

But 06 November 2003 didn't look like it was going to be one of those fun days. The National Council on Astronautics (NCA) had never looked this grim before. The row of visiting experts sitting against the wall looked even worse.

A skinny kid from NOAA spoke first. His Corel Presentation was mostly a movie of sun images showing vast clouds of gas shooting out from the corona. He used words like "unprecedented" and "not predictable by current models" and "extraordinary at this declining phase of the solar cycle." Clearly he was trying to divert the blame for the coming catastrophe away from his obscure "space weather bureau". Suddenly the picture was fuzzy with white pixels. The space weatherman froze the movie on a frame that looked like a snowstorm.

"These white spots and trails are the problem. They are the result of energetic ions from the flares blasting through the detector array on SOHO. Summing up all the data on all the flares of last week, we estimate that an unprotected astronaut outside the Earth's magnetosphere would have gotten a dose of about 90,000 rems."

I turned to the doctor from JSC Medical Operations. "If I remember my Boy Scout nuclear warfare handbook correctly, that is about 150 times the lethal dose for humans. Did you expect anything this colossal when you designed the solar flare shelter for Columbia?"

"No, we used historical data on the biggest observed solar flares in modern times. All the protective measures against solar radiation in Project Ares are scaled to the big flare in 1972, which we think was about 14,000 rems. In hindsight it is clear that we should have looked at a longer time base. We recently learned of a flare way back in 1859 which appears to have been even more powerful than the biggest one we have seen in the last week."

When I was first appointed as head of the NCA, they let me read all the classified files on spaceflight. That 1972 flare had occurred right between Apollo's 16 and 17. It had scared NASA into canceling the rest of the Apollo missions and all those wonderful plans for manned roving lunar science labs. Like they always do after a major screw-up, they blamed budget cuts. Years later somebody leaked the truth to the novelist James Mitchener, who wrote a lurid account of a fictional Apollo 18 crew getting fried in one of those mega-flares. Suddenly I felt an intense desire to be over in Heywood Floyd's universe. At least you could fight back against insane computers. Or was the sun going crazy in his time-line too?

The NOAA man had slunk to the back of the room and left the floor to Med Ops. "Also, we did not expect several major flares to overlap in time. The drinking water supply in Columbia's flare shelter was exhausted during the first day, and they had to take turns making short trips to the galley. Of course, that is at the other end of the hab module and totally unshielded. During Phase C we warned Marshall--"

"So cut to the chase, doctor -- will they live or not?"

"For a while."

"What do you mean, for a while? How long is a while?"

"That depends on what you decide here today. The crew is very ill, in extreme pain, and we think confined to their bunks. They have essentially zero chance of surviving until the landing next month."

"Then what is there for the NCA to decide? This looks like a job for President Gore's speechwriters. We supplied them with a rough outline for a comforting and inspiring national address over two years ago. That was specifically to cover a fatal crash on Mars, but this situation is similar."

Med Ops had one of those special doctor's expressions on his face. This particular one reminded me of that time when they thought I needed a liver transplant. "The last intelligible message from Columbia requested that the hab module's CO2 scrubbers be turned off by ground command. Of course this would quickly kill the crew in a relatively painless manner. The highest relevant authority can only make such a decision, which is the NCA. Also, none of you are medical doctors, so no conflict with the Hippocratic Oath arises. We need the decision immediately, if not sooner. "

I put on my best Senior Executive Service face. "Then perhaps everyone but the Council should step out into the hall while we discuss this..."

"Some other issues needed to be considered now, also." That was the head of Astrobiology at Ames -- who else still wore suspenders in 2003? "What about the microbes that Columbia collected on Mars? Since the samples were already stowed in the landing capsule in preparation for the impending Earth reentry, they had some minor level of shielding. And of course any organisms that could survive for billions of years on Mars must be extremely tough. They have probably evolved a strong resistance to particle radiation. They probably survived the flare storm, and will still be viable when Columbia arrives at the Earth. Can anyone tell me what will happen to the ship with no live crew on board? Will those bugs reach the ground alive?"

The woman from Project Ares management looked like her bone marrow had absorbed a few thousand rems too. "We just finished a model on that. Without the final midcourse correction, the whole spaceship, including the entry capsule, will enter the Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean at a non-survivable angle. We expect the lighter sections like the hab module to burn up over California and Nevada. The flare shelter is quite thick" -- not thick enough! --"and should break up somewhere over New Mexico."

"And the entry capsule?" Astrobiology asked.

"It's hard to model, the CG will be very different with no crew.... Our last model has it breaking up near Dallas, with the pieces landing all over East Texas."

Astrobiology leaned back in his chair and grabbed his suspenders with both hands. "This is clearly unacceptable from a back-contamination standpoint, not to mention a public relations standpoint. Can't you make that course correction by ground control? Or divert Columbia away from Earth entirely?"

The Ares manager compulsively smoothed her skirt for the 455th time. "The astronauts insisted on full on-board control for every phase of the mission. They threatened to resign and become anti-NASA commentators on Fox News if we ran the mission remotely. Houston has no control over Columbia's course, only the life-support systems. ."

A guy from the Albert Gore Sr. Nuclear Space Propulsion Center raised his hand. (President Bush had gotten the Human Exploration Initiative through Congress back in 1989 by promising then-Senator Albert Gore Jr. A new NASA center for Tennessee.) "We have modeled the reentry of Columbia's reactor core. Since the U-235 fuel elements are extremely dense, they will travel much further east. We expect them to land intact but badly damaged along a line just north of New Orleans. Most of them will plunge down deep into that soft gumbo soil, beyond the reach of our detectors. We will probably not find them all until they begin to leak high-level nuclear waste into the Mississippi."

"This is crazy!!" Shouted the bald guy from the White House. "Losing seven astronauts and a spaceship would be bad enough by itself, but you techheads have saddled the gummint with a political disaster of Biblical proportions! Our whole plan to comply with the Kyoto Treaty is based on the "Green Fission" initiative, which is gonna be impossible to sell to the rubes when fishermen start pulling deformed catfish out of the bayous. If you don't give me something better than this, I'll jest hafta have the President declare y'all to be enemy combatants and send you someplace where you can't even see the sun!"

I decided that the panic level in the room was now adequate for my purposes. As usual, nothing at the meeting had been a surprise. The whole horrible disaster had been obvious to me, as soon as those first SOHO images appeared on the Web. The smart bureaucrat -- the bureaucrat looking for a Cabinet post after the next election -- has all his ducks in a row before the meeting even starts. I spoke to the security guard at the door: "Ask General Hawkes to step in."

Hawkes was an Air Force two-star from Omaha. He was one of those eccentric die-hards who still used PowerPoint. His slides all had a sky-blue background speckled with little white missiles. "Assuming continuous Doppler tracking by DSN plus optical data from GEODSS and the asteroid search community, we can reprogram a single-warhead Minuteman III to intercept Columbia well before reentry. The fireball will render those Mars germs combat-ineffective, and melt or disintegrate the reactor core. If we choose a burst point here, the debris will mostly miss the Earth. The rest will burn up on entry and any nuclear materials will be so dispersed as to be hardly detectable, at least by foreigners. Of course, only the President can authorize the release of a nuclear warhead for this purpose." Hawkes glanced significantly at the White House rep.

But before the bald guy could say anything, the skinny kid from NOAA jumped up again. "I assumed some plan like this would be considered. We studied the electromagnetic effects of a megaton burst roughly in the general's proposed target zone. Data from the 1962 STARFISH space nuclear bomb tests establishes beyond any doubt that the charged particle density in the Van Allen Belts will be considerably increased for some time after the burst. I predict that almost all civilian comm and nav satellites in high orbit will be permanently disabled. Remember the effects of the Galaxy failure of some years ago. Today the communication infrastructure in space is even more vital. For instance, merchant ships rely entirely on satcom and don't even carry radio operators anymore. International trade will come to a standstill. We might have to fall back on military satellites, which are hardened against such events."

Hawkes frowned. "We did have rad-hardened satellites back during the Cold War. But since 1989, this "sprint-to-Mars" program has sucked up so much money and launch capacity that there basically isn't a military comsat network anymore. We rent transponders on civilian satellites now. If we carry out my plan and your model is correct, the Pentagon will be communicating with our boys in Zimbabwe by carrier pigeon."

Everybody in the room looked at me. Suddenly I wished we had seen Fiddler on the Roof on that night in Toledo back in 1968.

Jeffrey F. Bell is Adjunct Professor of Planetology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Any alleged resemblance between characters in this alternate-history fantasy and real persons in our own time-line is irresponsible speculation by the reader.

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