Underground, Suelette Dreyfus [ebook reader online .txt] 📗

Jeremy Rivkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends, another protest group, also drove a wedge between `the people’ and `NASA’s people’. He told UPI, `The astronauts volunteered for this mission. Those around the world who may be the victims of radiation contamination have not volunteered.‘4

But the protesters weren’t the only people working the media. NASA knew how to handle the press. They simply rolled out their superstars—the astronauts themselves. These men and women were, after all, frontier heroes who dared to venture into cold, dark space on behalf of all humanity. Atlantis commander Donald Williams didn’t hit out at the protesters in a blunt fashion, he just damned them from an aloof distance. `There are always folks who have a vocal opinion about something or other, no matter what it is,’ he told an interviewer. `On the other hand, it’s easy to carry a sign. It’s not so easy to go forth and do something worthwhile.‘5

NASA had another trump card in the families of the heroes. Atlantis co-pilot Michael McCulley said the use of RTGs, Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators—the chunks of plutonium in the lead boxes—was a `non-issue’. So much so, in fact, that he planned to have his loved ones at the Space Center when Atlantis took off.

Maybe the astronauts were nutty risk-takers, as the protesters implied, but a hero would never put his family in danger. Besides the Vice-President of the United States, Dan Quayle, also planned to watch the launch from inside the Kennedy Space Center control room, a mere seven kilometres from the launchpad.

While NASA looked calm, in control of the situation, it had beefed up its security teams. It had about 200 security guards watching the launch site. NASA just wasn’t taking any chances. The agency’s scientists had waited too long for this moment. Galileo’s parade would not be rained on by a bunch of peaceniks.

The launch was already running late as it was—almost seven years late. Congress gave the Galileo project its stamp of approval way back in 1977 and the probe, which had been budgeted to cost about $400 million, was scheduled to be launched in 1982. However, things began going wrong almost from the start.

In 1979, NASA pushed the flight out to 1984 because of shuttle development problems. Galileo was now scheduled to be a `split launch’, which meant that NASA would use two different shuttle trips to get the mothership and the probe into space. By 1981, with costs spiralling upwards, NASA made major changes to the project. It stopped work on Galileo’s planned three-stage booster system in favour of a different system and pushed out the launch deadline yet again, this time to 1985. After a federal Budget cut fight in 1981 to save Galileo’s booster development program, NASA moved the launch yet again, to May 1986. The 1986 Challenger disaster, however, saw NASA change Galileo’s booster system for safety reasons, resulting in yet more delays.

The best option seemed to be a two-stage, solid-fuel IUS system. There was only one problem. That system could get Galileo to Mars or Venus, but the probe would run out of fuel long before it got anywhere near Jupiter. Then Roger Diehl of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a good idea. Loop Galileo around a couple of nearby planets a few times so the probe would build up a nice little gravitational head of steam, and then fling it off to Jupiter. Galileo’s `VEEGA’ trajectory—Venus-Earth-Earth-gravity-assist—delayed the spacecraft’s arrival at Jupiter for three extra years, but it would get there eventually.

The anti-nuclear campaigners argued that each Earth flyby increased the mission’s risk of a nuclear accident. But in NASA’s view, such was the price of a successful slingshot.

Galileo experienced other delays getting off the ground. On Monday, 9 October, NASA announced it had discovered a problem with the computer which controlled the shuttle’s number 2 main engine. True, the problem was with Atlantis, not Galileo. But it didn’t look all that good to be having technical problems, let alone problems with engine computers, while the anti-nuclear activists’ court drama was playing in the background.

NASA’s engineers debated the computer problem in a cross-country teleconference. Rectifying it would delay blast-off by more than a few hours. It would likely take days. And Galileo didn’t have many of those. Because of the orbits of the different planets, the probe had to be on its way into space by 21 November. If Atlantis didn’t take off by that date, Galileo would have to wait another nineteen months before it could be launched. The project was already $1 billion over its original $400 million budget. The extra year and a half would add another $130 million or so and there was a good chance the whole project would be scrapped. It was pretty much now or never for Galileo.

Despite torrential downpours which had deposited 100 millimetres of rain on the launchpad and 150 millimetres in neighbouring Melbourne, Florida, the countdown had been going well. Until now. NASA took its decision. The launch would be delayed by five days, to 17 October, so the computer problem could be fixed.

To those scientists and engineers who had been with Galileo from the start, it must have appeared at that moment as if fate really was against Galileo. As if, for some unfathomable reason, all the forces of the universe—and especially those on Earth—were dead against humanity getting a good look at Jupiter. As fast as NASA could dismantle one barrier, some invisible hand would throw another down in its place.

Monday, 16 October, 1989 NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

Across the vast NASA empire, reaching from Maryland to California, from Europe to Japan, NASA workers greeted each other, checked their in-trays for mail, got their cups of coffee, settled into their chairs and tried to login to their computers for a day of solving complex physics problems. But many of the computer systems were behaving very strangely.

From the moment staff logged in, it was clear that someone—or something—had taken over. Instead of the usual system’s official identification banner, they were startled to find the following message staring them in the face:

“Worms Aginst Nuclear Killers!

Your System Has Been Officically Wanked. You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.”

Wanked? Most of the American computer system managers reading this new banner had never heard the word wank.

Who would want to invade NASA’s computer systems? And who exactly were the Worms Against Nuclear Killers? Were they some loony fringe group? Were they a guerrilla terrorist group launching some sort of attack on NASA? And why `worms’? A worm was a strange choice of animal mascot for a revolutionary group. Worms were the bottom of the rung. As in `as lowly as a worm’. Who would chose a worm as a symbol of power?

As for the nuclear killers, well, that was even stranger. The banner’s motto—`You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war’—just didn’t seem to apply to NASA. The agency didn’t make nuclear missiles, it sent people to the moon. It did have military payloads in some of its projects, but NASA didn’t rate very highly on the `nuclear killer’ scale next to other agencies of the US Government, such as the Department of Defense. So the question remained: why NASA?

And that word, `WANKED’. It did not make sense. What did it mean when a system was `wanked’?

It meant NASA had lost control over its computer systems.

A NASA scientist logging in to an infected computer on that Monday got the following message:

deleted file

deleted file

deleted file , etc

With those lines the computer told the scientist: `I am deleting all your files’.

The line looked exactly as if the scientist typed in the command:

delete/log .

—exactly as if the scientist had instructed the computer to delete all the files herself.

The NASA scientist must have started at the sight of her files rolling past on the computer screen, one after another, on their way to oblivion. Something was definitely wrong. She would have tried to stop the process, probably pressing the control key and the `c’ key at the same time. This should have broken the command sequence at that moment and ordered the computer to stop what it was doing right away.

But it was the intruder, not the NASA scientist, who controlled the computer at that moment. And the intruder told the computer: `That command means nothing. Ignore it’.

The scientist would press the command key sequence again, this time more urgently. And again, over and over. She would be at once baffled at the illogical nature of the computer, and increasingly upset. Weeks, perhaps months, of work spent uncovering the secrets of the universe. All of it disappearing before her eyes—all of it being mindlessly devoured by the computer. The whole thing beyond her control. Going. Going. Gone.

People tend not to react well when they lose control over their computers. Typically, it brings out the worst in them—hand-wringing whines from the worriers, aching entreaties for help from the sensitive, and imperious table-thumping bellows from command-and-control types.

Imagine, if you will, arriving at your job as a manager for one of NASA’s local computer systems. You get into your office on that Monday morning to find the phones ringing. Every caller is a distraught, confused NASA worker. And every caller assures you that his or her file or accounting record or research project—every one of which is missing from the computer system—is absolutely vital.

In this case, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that NASA’s field centres often competed with each other for projects. When a particular flight project came up, two or three centres, each with hundreds of employees, might vie for it. Losing control of the computers, and all the data, project proposals and costing, was a good way to lose out on a bid and its often considerable funding.

This was not going to be a good day for the guys down at the NASA SPAN computer network office.

This was not going to be a good day for John McMahon.

As the assistant DECNET protocol manager for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, John McMahon normally spent the day managing the chunk of the SPAN computer network which ran between Goddard’s fifteen to twenty buildings.

McMahon worked for Code 630.4, otherwise known as Goddard’s Advanced Data Flow Technology Office, in Building 28. Goddard scientists would call him up for help with their computers. Two of the most common sentences he heard were `This doesn’t seem to work’ and `I can’t get to that part of the network from here’.

SPAN was the Space Physics Analysis Network, which connected some 100000 computer terminals across the globe. Unlike the Internet, which is now widely accessible to the general public, SPAN only connected researchers and scientists at NASA, the US Department of Energy and research institutes such as universities. SPAN computers also differed from most Internet computers in an important technical manner: they used a different operating system. Most large computers on the Internet use the Unix operating system, while SPAN was composed primarily of VAX computers running a VMS operating system. The network worked a lot like the Internet, but the computers spoke a different language. The Internet `talked’ TCP/IP, while SPAN `spoke’ DECNET.

Indeed, the SPAN network was known as a DECNET internet. Most of the computers on it were manufactured by the Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts—hence the name DECNET. DEC built powerful computers. Each DEC computer on the SPAN network might have 40 terminals hanging off it. Some SPAN computers had many more. It was not unusual for one DEC computer to service 400 people. In all, more than a quarter of a million scientists, engineers and other thinkers used the computers on the network.

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