Space shuttle Endeavour - 15 May 1992

After all the miseries of the past week or two and the bad memories of Los Angeles still reverberating, it was a tonic feeling to sit and watch, on Wednesday evening, three ghostly figures hovering and tinkering with aching patience, and listen to the short staccato sentences from them – and over that, the quiet voice of an announcer in Houston, just mentioning, while your hairs started to rise, that the slow-dropping satellite was something like a 17-foot, 5-ton elephant.

Is there any risk, somebody asked, that if the angle's wrong and they mistime the grab it could come close enough to hurt them? Hurt them, the man said, it could crush them, that's one of the many hazards. More space shorthand from the three men, more anxious silence down in the Johnson Space Center, broken by a roar of applause after the navy's Captain Brandenstein radioed, Houston, I think we've got a satellite.

The plan of having all three men go into space together and try and catch and then tether the satellite and to do with this with their hands in the first place, was the crew's idea. They'd failed both, both on Sunday and Monday, to rescue this satellite from its two years of useless wandering, then they'd used metal bars to try and grab it. On Wednesday evening, Eastern Daylight Time, about 1am Thursday in Britain, was their last chance. Fuel was running low on the space shuttle and to have failed again would have tossed $150 million worth of great equipment into a perpetually purposeless life. Within an hour of more of those six gloved hands reaching out to grab it, the satellite was secured on top of a solid fuel booster engine. It was to be released from the shuttle's payload bay to fire its engines and put it in its proper orbit 23 thousand miles above the earth. Imagine they had intercepted its wayward flight, only 230 miles above us and this time, this successful time, used only gloves, five-layered gloves however.

By a weird coincidence, on Wednesday morning, I'd had in the mail a page proof version of Arthur C Clarke's forthcoming book and had been delighted to see reprinted, in an appendix, the first thing most of us I imagine had ever read about satellites. Try to throw your mind back to the time it was written, and read by such as me and you'll appreciate, I believe, why we hadn't the faintest notion what he was going on about. The main obstacle to the understanding of the layman was the vocabulary which was odd and unfamiliar as the ideas it expressed. But listen to this and bear in mind that it was written by a 27-year-old and published in something called Wireless World in October 1945.

He's writing first about the vast expense and the technological mere impossibility of providing a television service covering much more than a hundred miles, while "even with a relay chain several thousand miles long, trans-oceanic service would still be impossible". Then he offers a modest proposal. Many, he begins, may consider the solution proposed in this discussion too far-fetched to be taken seriously, and so indeed I'm sure did the great majority of his readers.

For what this young electrician proposing? Rockets, that's what, and he begins with the startling sentence. He lost me right here, "A rocket which achieved a sufficiently great speed in flight outside the earth's atmosphere would never return. Orbital velocity is five miles per second and a rocket which attained it would become an artificial satellite, circling the world for ever with no expenditure of power, a second Moon, in fact. It will be possible, in a few more years to build radio-controlled rockets which can be steered into such orbits beyond the limits of the atmosphere and left to broadcast scientific information back to the Earth and a little later, manned rockets will be able to make similar flights with sufficient excess power to break the orbit and return to earth."

I think a reasonably good high school student reading that today is likely to think he's being given a glimpse of the obvious, but 47 years ago, even greybeard astrophysicists were very sceptical and the general educated public knew that the ideas were far-fetched and that this young Clarke fella was probably talking what then we should have called poppycock.

Now what was the mission all about, why rescue what? Was it done for the United States space programme? Yet another giant step for mankind? No, it was a blessed step on behalf of a business corporation, a consortium of 122 nations who have invested in the International Telecommunications Satellite Organisation. It was their satellite, known as Intelsat-VI and its job, which it will be getting back to, once it's up there, is to relay for the next 10 years, to relay 120,000 telephone and television signals simultaneously. It will, by the way, earn $240,000 a day for its owners. So it was a commercial object, so to speak, that the brave crew of the Endeavour rescued.

This government and the American taxpayer are going to share quite a lot of the cost of the mission. Consider the consortium, Intelsat, paid the United States, I mean NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, paid them $93 million to subsidise the rescue mission, but that's just 270 million short of what the mission cost by NASA's estimate. But, it says here, private experts, unnamed, say that's way below a practical estimate. They figure another 7,800 millions. Say the whole job could come to $1 billion. It'll be interesting to see, when the proper and well-deserved applause for the bravery of the three men has died down – it will be interesting to see if questions will begin to be asked in Washington, or come to that, by John Q Citizen, Mr Average Taxpayer.

But then again, such questions, protests about paying taxes to rescue and repair a corporation's baby, they may simply die down. You never can tell these days whether a brewing scandal will come to the boil or just simmer and cool off. I was pretty sure in the last week in April, that the Bush administration was coming in for a very embarrassing bit of exposure about its relations with Saddam Hussein up to, practically up to the day he went into Kuwait. I was, in fact, ready to talk about this when the nights of the 29 and 30 of April buried many another good and urgent story in the roaring furnace of South Central Los Angeles. However, here's the gist of the case brought against the administration in a matter that, until now, the administration has been only too happy to have us recall, namely Saddam Hussein, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, the power and the glory of General Schwarzkopf and his Allied troops.

By way of brief recall, you may remember that for a month or two after the victory in the desert, popular approval of Mr Bush stood at an unheard of 85% and rising. Then you'll recall the presidential campaign got underway and the Democrats and their original seven presidential candidates started saying, oh yes, he's been fine and dandy when it came to helping the Saudis or the Kuwaiti princes or the desperate Russians but what's he done for us, for his own country lately?

The first line the Democrats took was an expression of deep concern for the middle class, not usually the main object of concern in a presidential election. But Mr Bush had to say, of course he'd never forgotten his own people and so he made a great show of being equally protective of the welfare of the middle class. And, from time to time, he'd remind us of his expertise, his prudence and good judgement anyway, in foreign policy, by recognising one of the Soviet breakaway republics and by asking the Congress for money for Boris Yeltsin. The campaign presidential had settled down into this seesaw debate about the prosperity of the middle class, when the new York Times fired the first shocking salvo about pre-war, pre-desert war, American policy towards Saddam. Then came the explosion of Los Angeles and now all the politicians forgot the middle class and are desperate to heal and help the poor of the inner cities.

But this Saddam story may well, I believe, be revived and set jumping all over Washington during the year of the presidential campaign. Briefly then. In early 1989, just about two years before Desert Storm, officials in the government Energy Department found out that Iraq was secretly buying all – from all over the West and the United States – all the parts, equipment, triggers necessary to make a nuclear bomb. These officials made an urgent effort to tell members of the president's National Security Council.

The evidence of Iraq's diligent and widespread purchase of every sort of technical component is exhaustive and exhausting. Long and damning memoranda were written by physicists and others inside the Energy Department. They were first turned down, they rewrote the memoranda, they piled up alarming proof, begged their bosses to get the information to Secretary of State Baker. They were turned down by their superiors, who made three points. One, the warnings were alarmist, two, American policy for many years had been to support Saddam and Iraq against the more inflammatory, the America-hating Iran and three, American intelligence had conclusively proved that Saddam was at least 10 years away from making the bomb.

Well, as we all now know, he was more like three or four months away when the first bombs dropped on Baghdad. In view of this impeccably documented story, I doubt Mr Bush will spend much time in the finest hours of the campaign recalling his glory days in the desert.

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