“It was extremely tense,” recalls Richard Mingus, who spent several days fielding calls at the emergency command center. By 1978, NEST—Nuclear Emergency Search Team—was finally trained to handle nuclear disasters. The man in charge was Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, also the manager of the Nevada Test Site. According to Gates, “the nucleus for NEST-related activity was established within EG&G, which had responsibility for overall logistics” to the nuclear lab workers and those assigned to NEST by the federal government. The team waited on standby at McCarran Airport, “ready to go the minute the thing crash-landed,” Mingus says. “Our job at the emergency command center was to keep people across America from panicking.” All that Brzezinski had said publicly was that America was experiencing a “space age difficulty.” Mingus believes this was the right move. “The satellite was still pretty high up, there was no radioactive danger until it actually hit the ground. But imagine the panic if people, or say a mayor of a city, started calling for cities to evacuate based on where they thought the satellite was going to crash down on the next ninety-minute rotation?” Mingus says the feeling at the command center was that if that were to happen, it would be panic like in The War of the Worlds.
When Cosmos 954 finally crashed, it hit the earth across a large swath of ice in the middle of the frozen Canadian tundra, one thousand miles north of Montana on Great Slave Lake. At McCarran Airport a fleet of unmarked NEST vans—meant to look like bakery vans but really loaded with banks of gamma-and neutron-detection equipment inside—drove into the belly of a giant C-130 transport plane and prepared to head north. NEST personnel included the usual players in the nuclear military-industrial complex: scientists and engineers from Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, and EG&G. Troy Wade was the lead federal official dispatched to the crash site. Looking back, he explains, “It was the radioactive fuel we were most concerned about. If a piece comes down that weighs a ton, you can’t predict how far and wide the debris, including all that fuel, will go.”
For this reason, the first order of business was detecting radiation levels from the air. Wade and the EG&G remote-sensing team loaded small aircraft and helicopters into the belly of the C-130, alongside the unmarked bread vans, and headed for the Canadian tundra. As part of Operation Morning Light, NEST members scoured a fifty-by-eight-hundred-mile corridor searching for radioactive debris. “This was long before the advent of GPS. There were no mountains to navigate by,” Wade says. “The pilots had no reference points. Just a lot of snow and ice out there. Temperatures of nearly fifty degrees below zero.” Helping out from high above was an Air Force U-2 spy plane.
After several long months, 90 percent of the debris from Cosmos 954 had been recovered. In the postaccident analysis, officials at NORAD determined that if the satellite had made one last orbit before crashing, its trajectory would have put it down somewhere on America’s East Coast.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of Area 51
Two hundred and fifty thousand miles from the Nevada Test Site, on July 20, 1969, with less than ninety-four seconds of fuel remaining, Neil Armstrong and copilot Buzz Aldrin were facing almost certain death as they approached the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon. The autotargeting on their lunar landing module, famously called the Eagle, was taking them down onto a football-field-size crater laden with jagged boulders. To have crash-landed there would have meant death. The autotargeting was burning precious fuel with each passing second; the quick-thinking Neil Armstrong turned it off, took manual control of the Eagle, and, as he would tell NASA officials at Mission Control in Houston, Texas, only moments later, began “flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area” to land. When Armstrong finally set the Eagle down safely on the moon, there was a mere twenty seconds’ worth of fuel left in the descent tanks.
Practice makes perfect, and no doubt Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying experimental aircraft like the X-15 rocket ship—in dangerous and often death-defying scenarios—helped prepare him for piloting a safe landing on the moon. As with most seminal U.S. government accomplishments, particularly those involving science, it took thousands of men working hundreds of thousands of hours inside scores of research centers and test facilities—not to mention a number of chemical rockets designed by Wernher Von Braun—to get the Apollo 11 astronauts and five additional crews (Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) to the moon and back home. A little-known fact is that to prepare for what it would actually be like to walk around on the geology of the moon, the astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site. There, they hiked inside several atomic craters, learning what kind of geology they might have to deal with on the lunar surface’s inhospitable terrain. The Atomic Energy Commission’s Ernie Williams was their guide.