Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [22]
Several months later, I intently followed the Challenger's radar mission.
Friday, October 5, 1984 ... At 7:03 A.M., a blaze of light pierces the dark Florida sky. A huge cloud of smoke billows out across Cape Kennedy's swampland. In a rare night launch, the space shuttle Challenger thunders skyward, punches a hole in a cloud, and accelerates into orbit. It is a perfect launch, the sixth for the Challenger. A commentator notes that it is "now a fully mature spaceplane."
Saturday... The shuttle mission isn't going so well. One problem is an out-of-control, wildly swinging KU-band antenna, designed to relay data from the SIR-B radar to a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS), which is supposed to beam the information back to earth. In Houston the press is told that SIR-B may be able to cover only 20 percent of its targets. There would have to be drastic prioritizations. Goodbye, Ubar. The flight director, John Cox, says that "Murphy has a way of getting to you," Murphy, of course, being the author of the law "Whatever can go wrong, will."
Sunday ... Hopes rise when Mission Specialist Kathryn Sullivan becomes the first American woman to walk in space. Working with Specialist David Leetsma, she stops the KU antenna from reeling about like a drunk at a party. They lock it in a fixed position. Priority SIR-B data can now be downloaded by using maneuvering jets to point the Challenger at the TDRS satellite, a space-age version of the tail wagging the dog. As Charles Elachi explains, "It's like rotating your house to re-aim the TV antenna and get better reception."2
Though a controller announces, "We're back in business," the SIR-B array malfunctions again. As part of "the revolt of the antennas," the radar's main thirty-five-foot antenna won't budge from the cargo bay. Finding this unacceptable, Sally Ride pokes it with a mechanical arm, and it springs to life. Next a short circuit plagues and intermittently degrades SIR-B's images. There's no way to fix it.
Tuesday... It is touch and go with the SIR-B array.
Wednesday... Still touch and go.
Thursday... On its 96th orbit, the Challenger streaks over the Ubar search area, presumably without acquiring any data.
Friday... The spacecraft's 112th orbit again takes it over our search area, on a path fifty kilometers west of the pass the day before. Six hours later, dodging Hurricane Josephine, Captain Robert Crippen safely guides the Challenger back to earth.
In a NASA news conference, it is estimated that the SIR-B radar achieved only 40 percent of its goals. Charles Elachi allows he is "a little bit disheartened," but is confident SIR will fly again another day. The next week's issue of Time reports: "The loss of viewing time, coupled with the antenna problems, meant that a few scientific projects had to be sacrificed, among them a hoped-for image of the Arabian Peninsula near Oman, thought to be the site of an ancient lost city. Shrugged Charles Elachi, 'The lost city will have to be lost for another year or so.'"3
Ron Blom, Kay, and I were as disappointed as Charles was. About the best we could hope for, he said, was a radar reflight in three or four years' time (actually, it would be a full ten years before SIR-C went aloft).
Ron went on with his work interpreting the geology of America's western deserts from space, Kay continued to combat crime as a federal probation officer, and I made documentaries for television. Still, whenever I could spare a few hours, I wistfully returned to either UCLA's University Research Library or the Huntington. I pursued the possibility that the city was a link in Arabia's incense trade, perhaps even its point of origin. But I had relatively little idea who might have lived there or what had become of them.
Now I had a new lead. As I chased after Ubar, I had frequently bumped into references to another lost city in Arabia, spelled either "Irem" or "Iram." The Koran asks, "Have you not heard how Allah dealt with 'Ad? The people of the many-columned city of Iram, whose like has not been built