Alexandra continued to network and I continued to advise her. She got a seat on the Appropriations Committee as a junior member and also on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. I also started writing military articles for think tanks. My own combat experience helped me get my foot in the door, but what really helped was my knowledge of current events and military history. The weapons change, but the same tactics and strategies show up over and over, and the same goes for the flaws that lead to defeat and the virtues that lead to victory. I didn't expect my articles to change much, I just enjoyed the attention and the money I got for them. It's hard to stop or change an idea when a lot of people have a stake in not changing it. Fight the ocean and you will drown. It's hard to make an impression on the world; the best the greatest souls have ever done is leave a dent, which often becomes obscured through nearby dents. It's like a wall covered in graffiti; it's hard to tell who wrote first or best, only that many have written and a lot of it is not worth reading.
Cathy had begun to walk and talk. It's interesting how quickly someone's personality becomes visible. She always seemed to find a way to climb to some precarious position. I once watched from where she couldn't see me as she escaped from a playpen, moved as quickly and quietly as possible into the kitchen, then stacked some books to create a crude ladder to reach the counter where I put some fresh chocolate chip cookies. In fairness, I left the tools she needed to reach the prize, which I had also placed intentionally. On the floor nearby, I placed cushions as a safety measure. Before she could ascend her book-ladder, I stopped her and we each ate a cookie. I decided the experiment had been a success and there was no reason to let it continue.
Alexandra became pregnant again, but continued to work with a gradually reduced pace. Her energy seemed boundless. When Jimmy Carter took office, it seemed her star would rise or fall with his. I advised her to hedge her bets by making some connections with the opposition. A lot of deals are made in the cloak room. So much so in fact that when Thomas Edison proposed a device that would allow all members of Congress to vote remotely from home via telegraph, it was bitterly opposed. The reason why was voting by telegraph, while allowing senators and such to spend more time with their constituents, completely removed the face-to-face interactions that so many politicians depended on. It was reminiscent of a Roman emperor, Vespasian, if my memory serves, who opposed a certain type of crane as it required less labor and would put many people out of work. In fact, the word sabotage comes from the act of throwing a wooden shoe, or sabot, into a factory machine to get it to stop turning. Many workers during the Industrial Revolution opposed various kinds of new labor-saving devices.
The next few years were a series of psychological setbacks for me in spite of the birth of my next child, a son. Alexandra let me pick the name, so I decided on Quint, after the shark hunter from the film Jaws. I loved that movie. The first setback was the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. All though the accident itself was minor, it more or less killed the reputation of nuclear power, something which I always thought would be the future. Then came the Iran hostage crisis, which for me was like watching the Fall of Saigon all over again. There was a failed rescue operation, the news of which depressed me further. I decided that focusing on my children and marriage would ease my troubled mind. I took Cathy to the various Smithsonian museums, though she was still a bit young to appreciate the exhibits. It was great for me to see so much natural history on display. I was taken back to my childhood and the many hours I spent reading the encyclopedia and other books about such things.
Alexandra's political career seemed rock-solid. She won re-election easily and was clearly enjoying her work. I tried not to spoil her fun with too much realism. The Mars landing idea she had led to other more practical deals, though she never gave up on it. There was a joint US-USSR space mission called Apollo-Soyuz in which an American spacecraft docked with a Soviet one in 1975. It was literally a friendly handshake in orbit. Alexandra was not involved in funding that, but she did continue to advocate for more joint missions, but that wouldn't happen again until many years later with the Shuttle-Mir program, which paved the way for the International Space Station. She did succeed in getting funding for the Viking program, which landed two unmanned probes on Mars. It was a successor to the Mariner program of the 1960s in which probes flew by and orbited Venus and Mars.
It's interesting to note that the guy who literally helped NASA get off the ground was an ex-Nazi rocket scientist named Wernher von Braun. The rocket which took the Apollo astronauts to the moon was basically a supersized version of the German V2 ballistic missile. It became the first object to reach space in 1944, 25 years before the moon landing. The V2 had a single stage, whereas the Saturn V moon rocket had several stages that fired one after another so it could travel farther and faster. Von Braun wrote a book in 1948 called The Mars Project in which he explained the design of a spacecraft that could carry human explorers there.
In my own home state of West Virginia, there was a man named Homer Hickam who built model rockets with his friends as a teen. He was inspired by the launch of Sputnik in 1957. He learned to scuba dive in the Army as a hobby and later ended up working for NASA designing underwater training to simulate the weightlessness of being in space. I heard him give a speech much later where he said that astronauts are easy to teach because they already know everything. But I digress. Often.
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