Voyage

Thursday, February 13, 1969

MEMORANDUM for

— The Vice President

— The Secretary of Defense

— The Acting Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

— The Science Advisor

It is necessary for me to have in the near future a definitive recommendation on the direction which the US space program should take in the post-Apollo period. I, therefore, ask the Secretary of Defense, the Acting Administrator of NASA, and the Science Advisor each to develop proposed plans and to meet together as a Space Task Group, with the Vice President in the chair, to prepare for me a coordinated program and budget proposal. In developing your proposed plans, you may wish to seek advice from the scientific, engineering, and industrial communities, from Congress and the public.

I would like to receive the coordinated proposal by September 1, 1969.

Richard M. Nixon

Handwritten addendum: Spiro, do we have to go to Mars? What options have we got? — RMN

Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1969 (Washington, DC Government Printing Office, 1969) Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Minus 000/00:00:08

In their orange pressure suits, York, Gershon, and Stone were jammed together so close they were rubbing elbows. They were shielded from daylight; small fluorescent floods lit up the Command Module’s cramped cabin.

There was a powerful thump. York, startled, glanced at her crewmates.

“Fuel pumps,” Stone said.

York heard a dull rumbling — like faraway thunder — a shudder that transmitted itself through the padded couch to her body.

Hundreds of feet below York, liquid oxygen and hydrogen were rushing together, mingling in the big first-stage engines’ combustion chambers.

She could feel her heartbeat rising, clattering within her chest. Take it easy, damn it.

A small metal model of a cosmonaut, squat and Asiatic, dangled from a chain fixed above her head. This was Boris, the gift from Vlad Viktorenko. The toy swung back and forth, its grotesque features leering at her out of a sketch of a helmet. Good luck, Bah-reess.

The noise began, cacophonous, a steady roar. It was like being inside the mouth of some huge, bellowing giant.

Phil Stone shouted, “All five at nominal. Stand by for the stretch.”

The five liquid rocket engines of the Saturn VB booster’s first stage, the MS-IC, had ignited a full eight seconds ahead of the enhanced Saturn’s four Solid Rocket Boosters. And next came the “stretch,” as the stack reached up under the pressure of that immense thrust. She could feel the ship pushing upward, hear the groan of strained metal as the joints of the segmented solid boosters flexed.

It was all supposed to happen this way. But still… Jesus. What a design.

Stone said, “Three, two. SRB ignition.”

They were committed. The solid boosters were big firecrackers; once the SRBs were ignited, nothing could stop them until they burned out.

“Clock is running—”

Zero.

There was a jolt: mild, easy. The explosive pins holding down the boosters had snapped.

Nothing as heavy as a Saturn VB was going to leap into the air.

The cabin started to shake, the couch restraints and fittings rattling.

“Climbout,” Stone said evenly. “Here we go.”

Ralph Gershon whooped. “Rager! Going full bore!”

Liftoff. Good God. I’m off the ground.

She felt excitement surge in her; the grainy reality of the motion pressed in on her. “Poyekhali!” she shouted. Let’s go! — the spontaneous cry of an excited Yuri Gagarin.

The lurching continued.

York was thrown against her harness, to the right, and then to the left, so that she jammed up against Gershon.

The Saturn VB was inching its way upward past the launch tower, almost skittishly, its automated controls swiveling its five first-stage engines to correct for wind shear. Right, left, forward, back, in a series of spasmodic jerks hard enough to bruise her.

No simulation had even hinted at the violence. It was like riding out of an explosion.

“Access arm,” Stone called. “Clear of the tower.”

John Young, Houston capcom for the launch, came on line.

“Ares, Houston. Copy. You are clear of the tower.”

York felt a lurch forward. The whole stack had pitched over; she was sitting up in her couch, the huge rattling thrust of the first stage pushing at her back.

“Houston, we have a good roll program,” Stone said.

“Roger the roll.”

The Saturn was arcing over the Florida coast, toward the Atlantic.

Down there on the beaches, she knew, children had written huge good luck messages into the Florida sand. GODSPEED ARES. York looked up and to her right, toward the tiny square window there. But there was nothing to see. They were cocooned; the boost protective cover, a solid cone, lay over the Command Module, blocking out the daylight.

The Command Module’s interior was the size of a small car. It was small, dingy, mechanical, metallic. Very 1960s, York thought. The walls, painted gray and yellow, were studded with gauges, dials, control switches, and circuit breakers. There were scraps of notes, from the crew to themselves, and emergency checklists, and hundreds of tiny round-cornered squares of blue Velcro stuck to the walls.

The three crew couches were just metal frames with canvas supports. York lay on her back, in the Command Module’s right-hand seat. Stone, as commander, was in the left-hand seat; Ralph Gershon was in the center couch. The main hatch was behind Gershon’s head, with big chunky levers on its inside, like a submarine’s hatch.

“Ares, Houston. You’re right smack-dab on the trajectory.”

“Roger, John,” Stone said. “This baby is really going.”

“Roger that.”

“Go, you mother,” Gershon shouted. “Shit hot!” York could hear his voice shaking with the oscillation.

“Ten thousand and point five Mach,” Young said.

Point five Mach. Less than thirty seconds into the mission, and I’m already hitting half the speed of sound.

John Young didn’t sound scared, or nervous. Just another day at the office for him.

John had ridden around the Moon in Apollo 10, back in 1969; and if the later Apollos hadn’t been canned, he probably would have commanded a mission to the lunar surface.

In fact, if he hadn’t been so critical of NASA following Apollo-N, Young might have been sitting in the cabin himself.

The vibration worsened. Her head rattled in her helmet, like a seed in a gourd. The whole cabin was shaking, and she couldn’t focus on the oscillating banks of instruments in front of her.

“Point nine Mach,” Stone said. “Forty seconds. Mach one. Going through nineteen thousand.”

“Ares, you are go at forty.”

Abruptly the ride smoothed out; it was like passing onto a smoother road surface. Even the engine noise was gone; they were moving so fast they were leaving their own sound behind.

“Ares, you’re looking good.”

“Rog,” Stone said. “Okay, we’re throttling down.”

The engines cut back to ease the stack through max-Q, the point when air density and the booster’s velocity combined to exert maximum stress on the airframe.

“You are go at throttle up.”

“Roger. Go at throttle up.”

The pressure on York’s chest seemed to be growing; it was becoming more difficult to breathe, as her lungs labored against the thrust of the stack.

Stone said, “Thirty-five thousand feet. Going through Mach one point nine. SRB combustion chamber pressure down to fifty pounds per square inch.”

“Copy,” John Young said from the ground. “You are go for SRB separation.”

“Rog.”

She heard a faint, muffled bang; the cabin shuddered, rattling her against her restraints. Separation squibs had fired, pushing the exhausted solid boosters away from the main stack. She felt a dip in the thrust; but then the acceleration of the MS-IC’s central liquid boosters picked up again, and she was pressed back into her seat.

“Roger on the sep,” Young said.

“Smooth as glass, John.”

The solid boosters would be falling away like matchsticks, dribbling smoke and flames. The strap-on solid boosters were the most visible enhancement of the VB over the core Saturn V design; with their help the VB was capable of carrying twice the payload of the V to Earth orbit.

“Five thousand one hundred feet per second,” Stone said. “Thirty-three miles downrange.”

She glanced at the G-meter. Three times the force of gravity. It wasn’t comfortable, but she had endured a lot worse in the centrifuge.

Cool air played inside her helmet, bringing with it the smell of metal and plastic.

With the SRBs gone, the ride was a lot easier. Liquid motors were fundamentally smoother burners than solids. She could hear the mounting, steady roar of the MS-IC’s engines, the continuing purr of the Command Module’s equipment.

Everything was smooth, ticking, regular. Inside the cosy little cabin, it was like being inside a huge sewing machine. Whir, purr. Save for the press of the acceleration it was unreal: as if this was, after all, just another sim.

“Three minutes,” Stone said. “Altitude forty-three miles, downrange seventy miles.”

“Coming up on staging,” Gershon said. “Stand by for the train wreck.”

Right on schedule the first-stage engines shut down.

The acceleration vanished.

It was as if they were sitting in a catapult. She was thrown forward, toward the instrument panel, and slammed up against her restraints. The canvas straps hauled her back into her seat, and then she was shoved forward again.

The first-stage engines had compressed the whole stack like an accordion; when the engines cut, the accordion just stretched out and rebounded. It was incredibly violent.

Just like a train wreck, in fact. Another thing they didn’t tell me about in the sims.

She heard the clatter of explosive bolts, blowing away the dying MS-IC. And there were more bangs, thumps in her back transmitted through her couch: small ullage rockets, firing to settle the liquid oxygen and hydrogen in the huge second-stage tanks.

Vibration returned as the second-stage engines ignited, and she was shoved back into her seat.

There was a loud bang over her head, startling her, as if someone was hammering on the skin of the Command Module. Flame and smoke flared beyond her window.

“Tower,” Stone reported.

“Roger, tower.”

The emergency escape rocket had blown itself away, taking the conical cap over the Command Module with it. Daylight, startlingly brilliant, streamed into the cabin, lapping over their orange pressure suits, dimming the instruments.

York peered out of her window. There was a darkening blue sky above, a vivid bright segment of clouds and wrinkled ocean below.

Stone said drily, “Ah, Houston, we advise the visual is go today.”

There was a lot of debris coming past York’s exposed window, from the jettisoned escape tower and the MS-IC. It looked like confetti, floating away from the vehicle, turning and sparkling in the sun.

Young said: “Press for engine cutoff.”

“Rog,” Stone said. “Press to ECO.”

Whatever else happened, Ares was to continue on, up to cutoff of the MS-II’s main engines. On to orbit.

“Ares, you are go at five plus thirty, with ECO at eight plus thirty-four.”

Ares had reached Mach 15, at an altitude of eighty miles. And still the engines burned; still they climbed upward. Earth’s gravity well was deep.

“Eight minutes. Ares, Houston, you are go at eight.”

“Looking good,” Stone said.

The residual engine noise and vibration died, suddenly. The recoil was powerful. York was thrown forward again, and bounced back in her canvas restraints.

“ECO!” Stone called.

Engine cutoff; the MS-II stage was spent.

…And this time, the weight didn’t come back. It was like taking a fast car over a bump in the road, and never coming back down again.

“Standing by for MS-II sep.”

There was another muffled bang, a soft jolt.

John Young said, “Roger, we confirm the sep, Ares.”

“Uh, we are one zero one point four by one zero three point six.”

“Roger, we copy, one zero one point four by one zero three point six…”

The parameters of an almost perfect circular orbit about the Earth, a hundred miles high.

Phil Stone’s voice was as level as Young’s. Just another day at the office. But the stack he commanded was moving at five miles per second.

York gazed out of the window, at the glistening curvature of Earth, the crumpled skin of ocean, the clouds layered on like whipped cream.

I’m in orbit. My God. She felt a huge relief that she was still alive, that she had survived that immense expenditure of energy.

Above her head, the little cosmonaut was floating, his chain slack and coiling up.

Sunday, July 20, 1969

Joe Muldoon peered through the Lunar Module’s triangular window. Muldoon was fascinated by the play of light and color on the lunar surface. If he looked straight ahead, to the west, away from the rising sun, the flat landscape reflected back the light in a shimmering golden brown sheen. But to either side there was a softer tan. And if he leaned forward to look off to the side, away from the line of the sun, the surface looked a dull ash gray, as if he was looking through a polarizing filter.

Even the light here wasn’t Earthlike.

Outside, Armstrong was moving about with what looked like ease, bouncing across the beachlike lunar surface like a balloon. His white suit gleamed in the sunlight, the brightest object on the surface of the Moon, but his lower legs and light blue overshoes were already stained dark gray by dust.

Muldoon couldn’t see Armstrong’s face, behind his reflective golden sun visor.

He checked the time. It was fourteen minutes after the commander’s egress.

“Neil, are you ready for me to come out?”

Armstrong called back. “Yes. Just stand by a second. First let me move the LEC over the edge for you.”

Armstrong floated about the LM, pushing aside the LEC, the crude rope-and-pulley lunar equipment conveyor which Muldoon had been using to pass equipment down to his commander on the surface.

Muldoon turned around in the evacuated cabin and got to his knees. He crawled backwards, out through the LM’s small hatch, and over the porch, the platform which bridged to the egress ladder fixed to the LM’s front leg. The pressurized suit seemed to resist every movement, as if he were enclosed in a form-fitting balloon; he even had trouble closing his gloved fingers around the porch’s handles.

Armstrong guided him out. “Okay, you saw what difficulties I was having. I’ll try to watch your PLSS from underneath here. Your PLSS looks like it’s clearing okay. The shoes are about to come over the sill… Okay, now drop your PLSS down. There you go, you’re clear and spidery, you’re good. About an inch of clearance on top of your PLSS.”

When he got to the ladder’s top rung, Muldoon took hold of the handrails and pulled himself upright. He could see the small TV camera, which Armstrong had deployed to film his own egress, sitting on its stowage tray hinged out from the LM. The camera watched him silently. He said, “Now I want to back up and partially close the hatch. Making sure I haven’t left the key in the ignition, and the handbrake is on…”

“A particularly good thought.”

“We’d walk far to find a rental car around here.”

He was ten feet or so above the lunar surface, with the gaunt planes of the LM’s ascent stage before him, the spiderlike descent stage below. “Okay, I’m on the top step, and I can look down over the pads. It’s a simple matter to hop down from one step to the next.”

“Yeah,” Armstrong said. “I found it to be very comfortable, and walking is also very comfortable. Joe, you’ve got three more rungs and then a long one.”

“I’m going to leave one foot up there and move both hands down to the fourth rung up…”

It was routine, like a sim in the Peter Pan rig back at MSC. He didn’t find it hard to report his progress down the ladder to Houston.

But once he was standing on Eagle’s footpad, he found words fleeing from him. Morning on the Moon:

Holding on to the ladder, Muldoon turned slowly. His suit was a warm, comforting bubble around him; he heard the hum of pumps and fans in the PLSS — his backpack, the Portable Life Support System — and he felt the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.

The LM was standing on a broad, level plain. There were craters everywhere, ranging from several yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows. There were even tiny micrometeorite craters, zap pits, punched in the sides of the rocks littering the surface.

There were rocks and boulders scattered about, and ridges that might have been twenty feet high — but it was hard to judge distance because there were no plants, no buildings, no people to give him any sense of scale: it was more barren than the high desert of the Mojave, with not even the haze of an atmosphere, so that rocks at the horizon were just as sharp as those near his feet.

Muldoon was overwhelmed. The sims — even his previous spaceflight in Earth orbit on Gemini — hadn’t prepared him for the strangeness of this place, the jewel-like clarity about the airless view, with its sharp contrast between the darkness of the sky and the lunar plain beneath, jumbled with rocks and craters.

Holding the ladder with both hands, Muldoon swung his feet off the pad and onto the Moon.

It was like walking on snow.

There was a firm footing beneath a soft, resilient layer a few inches thick. Every time he took a step a little spray of dust particles sailed off along perfect parabolae, like tiny golf balls. He understood how this had implications for the geology: no atmospheric winnowing on the Moon, no gravitational sorting.

In some of the smaller zap craters he saw small, shining fragments, with a metallic sheen. Like bits of mercury on a bench. And here and there he saw transparent crystals lying on the surface, like fragments of glass. He wished he had a sample collector. He would have to remember to come back for these glass beads, during the documented sampling later.

His footprints were miraculously sharp, as if he’d placed his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He took a photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it would persist there for millions of years, he realized, like the fossilized footprint of a dinosaur, to be eroded away only by the slow rain of micrometeorites, that echo of the titanic bombardments of the deep past.

Muldoon’s job was to check his balance and stability. He did turns and leaps like a dancer. The pull of this little world was so gentle that he couldn’t tell when he stood upright, and the inertia of the PLSS at his back was a disconcerting drag at his changes of motion.

“…Very powdery surface,” he reported back to Houston. “My boot tends to slide over it easily… You have to be careful about where your center of mass is. It takes two or three paces to bring you to a smooth stop. And to change direction you have to step out to the side and cut back a little bit. Like a football player. Moving your arms around doesn’t lift your feet off the surface. We’re not quite that light-footed…”

There was a pressure in his kidneys. He stood still and let go, into the urine collection condom; it was like wetting his pants. Well, Neil might have been the first man to walk on the Moon. But I’m the first to take a leak here.

He looked up. A star was climbing out of the eastern sky, unblinking, hauling its way toward the zenith, directly over his head. It was Apollo, waiting in orbit to take him home.

Armstrong peeled away silver plastic and read out the inscription on the plaque on the LM’s front leg. “First, there’s the two hemispheres of the Earth. Underneath it says, ‘Here Man from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.’ It has the crew members’ signatures and the signature of the President of the United States.”

They unfurled the Stars and Stripes. The flag had been stiffened with wire so it would fly there, without any wind.

The two of them tried to plant the pole in the dust. But as hard as they pushed, the flagpole would only go six or eight inches into the ground, and Muldoon worried that the flag would fall over in front of the huge TV audience.

At last they got the pole steady and backed away.

Muldoon set off on some more locomotion experiments.

He tried a slow-motion jog. His steps took him so high that time seemed to slow during each step. On Earth he would descend sixteen feet in the first second of a fall; on the Moon, he would fall only two. So he was suspended in each mid-stride, waiting to come down.

He started to evolve a better way of moving. He bent, and rocked from side to side as he ran. It was more of a lope than a run: push with one foot, shift your weight, land on the other.

He was breathing hard; he heard the hiss of water through the suit’s cooling system, the pipes that curled around his limbs and chest.

He felt buoyant, young. A line from an old novel floated into his mind: We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now…

The capcom’s voice startled him.

“Tranquillity Base, this is Houston. Could we get both of you on the camera for a minute, please?”

Muldoon stumbled to a halt.

Armstrong had been erecting a panel of aluminum foil that he unrolled from a tube; the experiment was designed to trap particles emanating from the sun. “Say again, Houston.”

“Rog. We’d like to get both of you in the field of view of the camera for a minute. Neil and Joe, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.”

The President? Goddamn it, I bet Neil knew about this.

He heard Armstrong say formally: “That would be an honor.”

“Go ahead, Mr. President. This is Houston. Over.”

Muldoon floated over to Armstrong and faced the TV camera.

Hello, Neil and Joe. I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Office at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made. I just can’t tell you how proud we all are of what you have achieved. For every American, this has to be the proudest moment of our lives, and for all people all over the world, I am sure they, too, join with Americans in recognizing what a feat this is. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world…

What Muldoon mostly felt as Nixon rambled on, in his oddly unstructured way, was impatience. He and Armstrong had little enough time there as it was — no more than two and a half hours for their single moonwalk — and every second had been choreographed, in the endless sims back in Houston, and detailed in the little spiral-bound checklists fixed to their cuffs. Nixon’s speech hadn’t been rehearsed in the simulations, though, and Muldoon felt a mounting anxiety as he thought ahead over the tasks they still had to complete. They would have to skip something. He could see them returning to Earth with fewer samples than had been anticipated, and maybe they would have to skip documenting them, and just grab what they could… The scientists wouldn’t be pleased.

He would like to have gotten a sample of one of those glittering fragments in the crater bottoms, or one of the crystals. There just wouldn’t be time.

Muldoon didn’t really care about the science, if truth be told. But he felt a gnawing anxiety about completing the checklist. Getting through your checklist was the way to get on another flight.

With these thoughts, some of the lightness he’d enjoyed earlier began to dissipate.

…For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are one. One in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.

Armstrong responded: “Thank you, sir. It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations — and with interest and curiosity, and men with a vision for the future.”

And thank you very much. Now I want to pass you on briefly to a special guest I have here with me in the Oval Office today.

Muldoon thought, A guest? My God. Has he any idea of how much this call is costing?

And then familiar tones — that oddly clipped Bostonian accent — sounded in his headset, and Muldoon felt a response rising within him, a thrill deep and atavistic.

Hello, gentlemen. How are you today? I won’t take up your precious time on the Moon. I just want to quote to you what I said to Congress, on May 25, 1961 — just eight short years ago…

’Now is the time to take longer strides — time for a great new American enterprise — time for this nation to take on a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.

’I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish…’

My God, Muldoon thought. Nixon hates Kennedy; everyone knows that. Muldoon wondered what calculations — PR, political, even geopolitical — lay behind Nixon letting old JFK back into the limelight, today of all days.

It was hard to concentrate on Kennedy’s words.

Fifty feet from him the LM looked like a gaunt spider, twenty feet tall, resting there in the glaring sunlight. The Eagle was complex and delicate, a filmy construct of gold leaf and aluminum, the symmetry of the ascent stage spoiled by the bulbous fuel tank to the right. The craft bristled with antennae, docking targets, and reaction control thruster assemblies. He saw how dust had splashed up over the skirt of the descent stage’s engine, and the gold leaf which coated it. In the sunlight the LM looked fragile. And so it was, he knew, just a taut bubble of aluminum, shaved to the minimum weight by Grumman engineers. But here, on this small, static, delicate world, the LM didn’t seem at all out of place.

I want to tell you now how nervous I was that day, gentlemen. I wasn’t sure if I was right to ask that august body for such huge sums of money, indeed for a transformation of our national economy. But now that goal is accomplished, thanks to the courage of you, Neil and Joe, and so many of your colleagues, and the dedication of many skilled people all across our great country, in NASA and its contractor allies…

Muldoon glanced uneasily at the mute TV camera on its tripod. He said “the goal is accomplished.” He knew that on a hot July evening in Houston it was around ten-forty. He wondered how many moonwalk parties would already be breaking up.

Maybe it really was just about footprints and flags after all.

But, back in Clear Lake, Jill would still be watching — wouldn’t she?

…Apollo has energized the American spirit, after a difficult decade at home and abroad. Now that we have reached the Moon, I believe we must not let our collective will dissipate. I believe we must look farther. Here, at this moment of Apollo’s triumph, I would like to set my country a new challenge: to go farther and farther than most of us have dreamed — to continue the building of our great ships, and to fly them onward to Mars.

Mars?

The clipped voice was an insect whisper in his headset, remote and meaningless.

Maybe it was true what they whispered: that the bullets Kennedy had survived in Texas, six years ago, had damaged more than his body…

Standing silently, he saw that the land curved, gently but noticeably, all the way to the horizon, and in every direction from him. It was a little like standing at the summit of a huge, gentle hill. He could actually see that he and Armstrong were two people standing on a ball floating in space. It was vertiginous, a kind of science-fiction feeling, something he’d never experienced on Earth.

…This will certainly be the most arduous journey since the great explorers set sail to map our own planet over three centuries ago: it is a journey which will take a new generation of heroes to a place so far away that the Earth itself will be diminished to a point of light, indistinguishable from the stars themselves… We will go to Mars because it is the most likely abode of life beyond our Earth. And we will make that world into a second Earth, and so secure the survival of humankind as a species for the indefinite future…

The Earth, floating above him, was huge, a ball, blue and complex; it was much more obviously a three-dimensional world than the Moon ever looked from home. He was aware of the sun, fat and low, its light slanting across that desolate place. Suddenly he got a sense of perspective of the distance he’d traveled, to go there: so far that the trinity of lights that had always dominated human awareness — Earth, Moon, and sun — had moved around him in a complex dance, to these new relative positions in his sensorium.

And yet his sense of detachment was all but gone. He was as locked to Earth as if the experience was all just another sim at JSC. I guess you don’t throw off four billion years of evolution in a week.

He found himself wondering about his own future.

All his life, someone — some outside agency — had directed him toward goals. It had started with his father, and later — what a place to remember such a thing! — summer camp, where winning teams got turkey, and losers got beans. Then there had been the academy, and the Air Force, and NASA…

He’d always been driven by a strong sense of purpose, a purpose that had brought him far — all the way to the Moon itself.

But his greatest goal was achieved.

He remembered how his mood had taken a dip, after returning from his Gemini flight. How tough was this new return going to be for him?

Kennedy had finished speaking. There was a silence that stretched awkwardly; Muldoon wondered if he should say something.

Armstrong said, “We’re honored to talk to you, sir.”

Thank you very much. I’m grateful to President Nixon for his hospitality toward me today, and I’ll ask him to pass on my very best regards when he sees you on the Hornet on Thursday.

Muldoon steeled himself to speak. “I look forward to that very much, sir.”

Then, following Armstrong’s lead, he raised his gloved hand in salute and turned away from the camera.

He felt perplexed, troubled. It was as if Earth, above, was working on him already, its huge gravity pushing down on him.

He would have to find a new goal, that was all.

What, he mused, if Kennedy’s fantastic Mars vision came to reality? Now, that would be one terrific project to work on.

Maybe he could join that new program. Maybe he could be the first man to walk on three worlds. That would be one hell of a goal to work toward: fifteen, twenty more years of direction, of shape to his life…

But to do that, he knew, he’d have to get out from under all the PR hoopla that was going to follow the splashdown.

For him, he suspected, returning to Earth was going to be harder than journeying to the Moon ever was.

He loped away from the TV camera, back toward the glittering, toylike LM.

Saturday, October 4, 1969

A smell of burning came on the breeze off the desert and mixed with the test rig’s faint stench of oil and paint. The scents were unearthly, as if York had been transported away from Nevada.

I remember reading that moondust smells like this, she thought. Of burning, of ash, an autumn scent.

In 1969, Natalie York was twenty-one years old.

In Ben Priest’s Corvette they’d made the ninety-mile journey from Vegas to Jackass Flats in under an hour.

At the Flats, Mike Conlig was there to meet them and wave them through security. That late in the evening, the site was deserted save for a handful of security guys. When the three of them — York, Priest, and Petey, Priest’s son — climbed out of Ben’s Corvette, York noticed how the car was coated with dust and popped as it cooled.

Nevada was huge, empty, its topography complex and folded, cupped by misshapen hills. The sun was hanging over the western horizon, fat and red, and the day’s heat was leaching quickly out of the air. The ground was all but barren. York recognized salt-resistant shadscale and creosote bushes clinging here and there, and the occasional pocket of sagebrush. Good place to test out a nuclear rocket, York thought. But — my God — what soul-crushing desolation.

In bursts of quick jargon, Mike and Ben started discussing some aspect of the test results they’d been reviewing that day. If York had learned one skill in too many hours in college bars and common rooms — she was finishing up her own BS in geology at UCLA — it was how to tune out someone else’s specialty. So she let Mike and Ben talk themselves out and walked a little way away from them.

Ben Priest’s son Petey, at ten, was a lanky framework of muscle and energy; he ran ahead of the others, his blond hair a shining flag in the last of the daylight.

The test site was laid out as a rectangle confined by roads to the south and rail tracks to the north. They were walking west — away from the control buildings, where the car was parked — toward the static test site, Engine Test Facility One.

The test station was cupped in an immense dip in the land delimited by two great fault blocks: the Colorado Plateau and Wasatch Range to the east, the Sierra Nevada range to the west. The station — with its isolated test stands and bits of rail track and handful of shabby tar-paper shacks — looked overwhelmed by the echoing geology of the desert, reduced to something shabby, trivial.

They reached the test facility. The assembly was maybe thirty feet high, its geometry crude, complex, and mysterious. York made out a sleek, upright cylindrical form enclosed by a gantry, a boxy thing of girders. The stack was scuffed, patchy, unpainted. The whole thing was mounted on a flatwagon on the rail track, hooked up to a rudimentary locomotive. Big pipes ran out of the rig and off to other parts of the test station; in the distance she saw the gleam of spherical cryogenic tanks: liquid hydrogen, she guessed.

Petey Priest had his face pressed to the fence around the test facility, so that the wire mesh made patterned indentations on his face; he stared at the rig, evidently captivated.

York watched Conlig and Priest together.

Mike Conlig was a native Texan. At twenty-seven he was a little shorter than York; his build was stocky, his engineer’s hands callused and scarred, and his jet black hair, which he wore tied back in a ponytail, showed his Irish extraction. A slight paunch was pushing out his T-shirt.

York had met Mike half a year ago, at a party at Ricketts House at Caltech, which was a half-hour drive from UCLA. York had gone out there on a kind of dare; women weren’t admitted to Caltech. She enjoyed his fast, lively mind, his genuine readiness to respect her for her intellect… and the compact muscles of his body.

She’d finished up in bed with Mike within a couple of hours.

Mike was quite a contrast to Ben Priest, she thought, looking at them together.

At thirty-one, Ben Priest was tall, wiry, and with an ear-to-ear, kindly grin. He was a Navy aviator with a dozen years’ experience, including two at the Navy’s prime flight test center at Patuxent River, Maryland — and, since 1965, he’d been a NASA astronaut, although he hadn’t yet flown in space.

York knew Mike and Ben had developed a close relationship since Ben’s assignment as astronaut representative on the project. She’d no doubt Mike was throwing himself into the camaraderie of the station — guys together in their prefabricated shacks, at the frontier of technology, playing with NERVA all day, and knocking back a few each evening.

It was having a visible physical effect on Mike, she thought, if not on Ben…

Security lights were coming on all over the nuclear test rig; they made it into a sculpture of shadows and glimmering reflections, an angular, deformed representation of a true spacecraft. As if the ambitions driving the men and women who worked there had actually shaped the geometry of the place, making it into something not quite of the Earth.

While he was talking to Priest about the day’s events, Mike Conlig tried to keep a hawkeye on Natalie. She was gazing around the plant. Natalie was a little too tall, slim, intense, her hair jet black and tied back; those big Romanian-peasant eyebrows she hated so much were creased in concentration.

The visit was important to Conlig.

Strictly speaking, he and Priest were breaking NASA and AEC regs by taking her there, to see their work close up; and certainly a kid like Petey shouldn’t be allowed. But regulations got replaced by realism in a place as remote as Jackass Flats. We’re all good old boys together out here, he thought.

Anyhow, he was keen to show Natalie the place: where he worked, what he did with his life. It was worth breaking a few rules to achieve that. He wanted Natalie to see Jackass Flats through his eyes.

Natalie’s head was habitually full of suspicion and disapproval, of big government science like that. But the world looked different to Conlig. To him, that shabby test site was the gateway to the future: to other worlds, colonies on the Moon.

Even Mars itself.

Ben Priest was trying to explain the test rig to Natalie. He made her look more closely at the object inside the gantry, trying to get her to make sense of it. A nozzle, gracefully shaped, flared from the top toward the sky…

“Oh,” she said. “I’ve got it. It’s a rocket. There’s the nozzle, at the top of the stack. It’s a rocket, on its launch gantry. Gee. Just like Cape Kennedy.”

Ben Priest laughed. “Except it’s upside-down.”

“One day we’ll see this at Kennedy,” Conlig said, aware he sounded a little defensive. “One day soon. Its descendants, anyhow; this poor bird is never going to fly.”

“This is actually a late-generation engine,” Ben said. “Our newest pride and joy. The XE-Prime: quite close to a flight configuration. The first rigs here, ten years ago, were called Kiwis.”

“Oh,” York said. “Flightless birds.”

“Now,” said Ben, “there are a string of projects working under the generic title NERVA. For ‘Nuclear Engine—’ ”

“ ‘—for Rocket Vehicle Application.’ I know.”

“But we’re still restricted to building flightless birds,” Priest mused. “We’re proud of this baby, Natalie. We’ve managed to get close to fifty thousand pounds of thrust with her. And we managed twenty-eight restarts. You see, reliability is going to be a key factor in long-haul space travel…”

Conlig watched Natalie, trying to gauge her reaction.

All of six years older than Natalie, Conlig had finished his Ph.D. — on exotic, heat-tolerant refractory materials for lightweight fission reactors — in a near-record time.

Conlig was certain — so was Natalie, come to that — that he was heading for the top of his chosen profession. And since, if Spiro Agnew could be believed, nuclear rockets were going to be the next big thing in space, that top could be a very high summit indeed.

Meanwhile, York’s geology was likely to take her away for months at a time. Their relationship was going to be odd, to say the least.

It was strange to think that his whole life might be shaped by the success, or failure, of a nuclear rocket. I really am living in the future, he thought.

To Conlig, nuclear rockets were the simplest, most beautiful machines in the world. You didn’t burn anything, as in a Saturn. You just heated up high-pressure liquid hydrogen in a reactor core, and let hot gas squirt out of the rear of your ship.

A nuclear upper stage would outperform a Saturn V by a factor of two; Moon payloads could be increased by more than half.

But there were major technical challenges.

The working fluid was liquid hydrogen at twenty-five degrees above absolute zero. Once it was pumped to the reactor the hydrogen had to be flashed to above two thousand degrees.

Cooling systems were Mike Conlig’s specialty.

There were other difficulties. Like, if you were looking at space applications, there was the need to shield the crew from radiation. And the fact that you couldn’t cluster too many of these babies in a given stack, because their neutron emissions would interfere with each other, and, and…

Still, the project was making progress. In the short term they were aiming for a RIFT, a Reactor-in-Flight Test. But there was a hell of a lot of work to do before then. You couldn’t cut corners with nuclear technology: nobody wanted a live nuclear pile to be smeared over Florida thanks to some fuck-up at Kennedy.

But, Conlig thought, they’d fly one day. They had problems to solve. But they’d solve them. Just as soon as Nixon gave his go-ahead to the Space Task Group’s proposals.

The Space Task Group was a committee, headed by Vice President Agnew, which Nixon had set up to formulate post-Apollo goals for the space program. The STG were due to report in September. The rumors were they would endorse a manned Mars landing program. And when that happened, Conlig’s project would get some serious money to spend.

Ben Priest was still talking Natalie through the details of the XE-Prime. They looked good together, Conlig thought suddenly. Relaxed. He felt a remote stab of unease.

But Natalie was giving Priest a hard time. She was talking about politics, as usual.

Natalie York laughed, uncomfortable; a shiver of awe — or maybe disgust — swept over her, as she studied the slim XE-Prime.

“You said there have been nuclear rocket developments here for ten years?”

“Yes,” Priest said.

“Why? We’ve not been considering Mars missions that long, have we?”

Priest scratched his ear. “Well, the original objectives of the site didn’t have much to do with spaceflight, Natalie. Back in the late 1950s, big chemical rockets were still a thing of the future. And the nuclear weapons were bulky, heavy—”

“Oh. They were building ICBMs here. Nuclear ICBMs.”

“Just engineering experiments,” Priest said evenly. “In case of need. And remember, the USSR was well ahead of us then, with their big, heavy-lift chemical ICBMs. But our chemical rockets got bigger, and the bombs got lighter, and the need went away. Later NASA thought they might need the nukes for Apollo Moon missions. But then the Saturn rockets came along…”

“And now, we still need to build nuke rockets because we’re going to Mars.”

“Hey, Ben,” Mike said. “Maybe you’ll be the first man on Mars. In the nuclear rocket ship Spiro Agnew.”

Ben snorted. He cupped his hand over his mouth, and intoned, Cronkite-style, “And now we take you live to the aptly named Jackass Flats, where the good ship Agnew is ready to lift Man In Space to his new destiny… over to you, Dan.”

“Thanks, Walter, and here, as I stand under the painted sky of Nevada, I cannot but help recall…”

On they clowned, like two kids, laughing and bumping against each other. Petey came away from the fence, drawn by their laughter, and pulled at his father, punching his back playfully.

York, indulgently, let them walk ahead of her.

She looked around more carefully, trying to figure the layout of the place. When the laughter had faded, she said to Priest, “Tell me how they operate here.”

“Well, the rail track is the key to everything.” He pointed. “The track runs out of that building, the Radioactive Material Storage Facility. The test articles aren’t too radioactive, you know, until they’ve been fired. They are delivered on their flatwagon trucks to the test cells, and go through their firing. Afterward they are taken to a dump over there, at the eastern end of the track.”

“Because they are too radioactive to recover?”

“Yeah.” Priest shrugged. “Mike talks about restart capabilities, but it looks more likely now that an interplanetary ship is going to have a whole host of big NERVA rockets clustered together. After you’ve fired one, you’d dump it, to save the crew from the radioactivity. And you’d use them all up at Earth departure; you’d stick to chemical rockets for mid-course corrections.”

“Good grief. And this strikes you as a rational way to fly?”

He grinned at her, his teeth pale in the gathering darkness. “If it’s what it takes to get me to Mars, hell, yes.”

“Have they had any accidents here?”

“Sure. It’s a development site. What do you expect?”

“What kind of accidents?”

“Ruptured cores. Ozone production in trapped air bubbles. Loss of moderator—”

“And injuries?”

“Ruptured ear drums. A few burns.” Priest looked uncomfortable. “Natalie, what do you want me to tell you? The NRDS was born in a different age. You have to see things through the eyes of the times.”

“Oh, sure.” A different age. But we’re still using this hideous place now. And Mike works here, for God’s sake. She shivered, as if she could feel old Cold-War radioactive particles sleeting through her flesh.

She looked around. “How do they do their containment? When the test rockets fire. All that radioactive hydrogen, pluming into the air—”

Ben said, “What containment?”

They all piled into Ben’s Corvette and roared off down the interstate toward Vegas, where they were going to spend the night and Sunday. Petey quickly drifted off to sleep, his head lolling against the seat cushion.

Ben turned on his radio. A news program was broadcasting; York, sitting up in front with Ben, listened desultorily to dreary statistics from Vietnam.

Outside, light leaked from the sky, and hard starlight poked through the desert blue.

Ben leaned forward and turned up the volume. “Hey, Mike, listen to this. It’s Agnew.”

“…the three options identified by our Space Task Group represent a balanced program… a wide range of manned flights, unmanned planetary expeditions, and applications satellites — serving people on Earth and increasing international cooperation in space…”

Wernher von Braun’s cultured voice came on, testifying to the Senate. “I say let’s do it quickly and establish a foothold on a new planet while we still have one left to take off from…”

“So they’re still talking about going to Mars,” York said.

“Sure they are,” Ben said. “Agnew’s three options are all about going to Mars; the only difference between them is, the more you spend per year, the faster you get there. Although—”

“What?”

“Although he did put in a fourth option, where we give up manned spaceflight altogether.” Priest stared at the road ahead. “We’re just going to have to see, I guess.”

“Agnew is an asshole,” York said mildly.

“Maybe, but he’s an asshole who likes spaceships and astronauts,” Mike said, leaning forward from the back. “And that makes him my kind of asshole.”

“Going to Mars is a beautiful idea,” York said. “But it’s science fiction. Isn’t it?”

Mike squeezed her shoulder. “You’ve seen the XE-Prime. We can build this bird. All we need is the money.”

“How much money?”

“It’s not outrageous,” Ben said. “Probably not as much as Apollo, in real terms. The whole program is going to be modular. A few basic components, used in different combinations for different missions. You’d have a Space Shuttle to get to orbit cheaply, a nuclear rocket for long-haul missions to the Moon and beyond, and cans — space station modules — you could assemble in different configurations. You’d put together your Mars ships using space station cans as habitation modules, and nuclear boosters—”

York felt shaken by what she’d seen of the nuclear test station, and she felt like arguing, trying to get it out of her system. “But what’s it all for? More footprints and flags, like Apollo?”

“No,” Mike snapped.

There had been an edge of impatience in his voice since they’d left the Flats. She sensed that her response there hadn’t been what he’d hoped for.

He said, “Haven’t you been listening, Natalie? Agnew’s presented a great vision. We could be on Mars by 1982. And by 1990 we’ll have a hundred men in Earth orbit, forty-eight on the Moon, and forty-eight in a base on Mars—”

“Oh, sure,” she said, bristling. “Yes, actually, I have been listening. And I hear that Agnew gets booed when he talks in public about going to Mars. People don’t want this, Mike; the war is fucking up the economy too comprehensively.”

Ben, gratifyingly, looked startled to hear her swear.

“Well, I doubt Nixon’s going to buy it all anyhow,” Ben said. “The word is he’s leaning a little toward the Space Shuttle, as the one element in the STG proposals to preserve over all the rest. Because it promises low-cost access to space. On the other hand, Nixon likes heroes…”

“But he’s backed into a corner, by what Kennedy said to Armstrong and Muldoon in July,” Mike said. “And by the pro-Mars statements he’s been issuing ever since.”

York grunted. “Nixon hates Kennedy. Besides, Kennedy’s just another opportunist. Do you really think he would have continued pumping funds into Apollo the way Johnson did, if he hadn’t been invalided out of the White House back in ’63? If he’d actually had to pay for any of the things he was able to call for, from his wheelchair?”

“Johnson was a genuine space enthusiast,” Mike said. “You’re too cynical, Natalie.”

“Johnson was interested in his own advantage. Why else do you have so many NASA centers in the South?”

“Does make you think, though,” Ben said. “What if Kennedy hadn’t taken those bullets in Dallas? Or — what if they’d killed him, instead of his wife? If he’d not been around as a cheerleader on the sidelines, maybe the whole program would have gotten itself canceled.”

“Anyway,” York said, “I just hope that whatever happens this time around they make room for a few scientists among all you av-i-at-ors.”

“Don’t listen to her, Ben,” Conlig said. “She’s playing it cool. Guess what she keeps on the wall of her bedroom in her mom’s house.”

“Shut up, Mike—”

“Tell me.”

“Pictures of Mars.”

Priest looked at her, evidently intrigued. “Really?”

“Hell, I was just sixteen. For a while I got caught up in all that showbiz about Mariner 4…”

Mariner 4 was a NASA space probe which reached Mars in July 1964. Mariner hadn’t carried the fuel to put itself into orbit around Mars; it made one sweep past the planet, firing off pictures as it went. Mariner sent back twenty-one pictures in all. They covered maybe 1 percent of Mars’s surface.

Natalie York had never even thought about Mars, other worlds, before Mariner. She wasn’t even interested in astronomy, or space travel, or other worlds, or any of that. Astronomy was a subject for the handful of old men who controlled access to the big telescopes and used them to pursue their obscure, decade-spanning projects. Even back in 1964, geology — the study of the Earth — was what captured her imagination. Stuff you could walk around in, and pick up, and examine with your eyes and hands.

Mariner made everything different. For a while, anyhow.

She remembered a teacher at school trying to put over the basics of astronomy.

In July 1964, when Mariner reached Mars, the planet had been in opposition. Like all planets, Mars circled the sun; but its orbit was outside the Earth’s, and its year was twice as long. That meant its distance from Earth was constantly changing, as Earth scooted by on the inside track. But Mars would come closest to Earth when sun, Earth, and Mars where lined up, in that order. Opposition. That’s what it means. So at opposition, Mars is almost opposite the sun, seen from Earth. At its closest point.

She remembered, as she’d learned of that, a sudden sense of herself as a passenger on the Earth — as if it were a giant spinning spaceship, steaming past that great red liner called Mars.

To do their jobs, astronomers have to be able to figure out where they are, in relation to the rest of the universe. They have to be able to imagine, really and truly, that they aren’t living on a flat Earth.

She’d gotten copies of the pictures radioed back by Mariner 4 and had indeed taped them to her bedroom wall.

The first photo showed the limb of the planet, seen from close to; the horizon curved, and surface markings were vaguely, frustratingly visible. Still, the image was a hell of a contrast to the misty, unreal disk you could see through a telescope.

Mariner’s photos showed how Mars would look to an orbiting astronaut.

The next few pictures showed views of the surface, as if looking down from directly overhead. The monochrome images looked like aerial pictures of a desert, Arizona maybe…

Ben Priest said, “You know, Mariner was a big shock to us all. Before Mariner, we thought we understood Mars pretty well. You could walk around on the surface with nothing more than a face mask. We thought we saw seasonal changes in dark patches on the surface that were maybe due to some kind of spreading vegetation.

“But now, everything looks different. We had it wrong — all of it. Earthlike, Mars certainly isn’t.”

It was Mariner’s seventh picture that was the real surprise.

The seventh picture showed craters. Nobody was expecting to find those.

Not Arizona, then. Mars looked more like the Moon.

Priest said, “We know now the atmosphere is impossibly thin. It’s mostly carbon dioxide, and there’s no oxygen, and hardly any water vapor. Not even nitrogen… Mariner didn’t find any canals, incidentally. Even though it flew over an area where a lot of the most prominent canals were expected.

“All our ideas were turned upside down by this. With such a thin atmosphere, any life must be very hardy. Nothing like terrestrial life at all. But, of course, the question of life won’t be settled until humans land there. It was one hell of a disappointment, the NASA guys tell me. Suddenly, Mars became a place it wasn’t worth traveling to. If we don’t make it to Mars, if the funding and resources aren’t assembled, then for me, that shock of Mariner 4 will have been the turning point.”

York shrugged. “But NASA oversold Mars for years. It was a kind of holiday resort in the sky, teeming with life, justifying all the billions they wanted to pour into rockets and spaceships…”

Priest laughed. “A holiday resort. I like that.”

After Mariner she’d become briefly interested in Mars, and its history in the human imagination. She got books from the library. Mars as the Abode of Life by Percival Lowell, New York, 1909; Mars and Its Canals by Lowell, New York, 1906… She remembered fantastic, gaudy pictures of huge irrigation canals dug across the face of a dying, drying Mars, long descriptions of the waves of vegetation and the herds of animals which must sweep across the red Martian plains. The Mars Project: Wernher von Braun, University of Illinois, 1953. It had a big rocket ship on the cover, like a kid’s book. Von Braun wanted to build ten spaceships in Earth orbit, each weighing three and a half thousand tons, and carrying seven men. It would take nine hundred flights to orbit to assemble the Meet. There would be two-hundred-ton landing boats, to take fifty people down to the surface for a year-long stay… These visions, she’d thought, were a boy’s dreams of power, dressed up as serious engineering plans.

York had put that stuff aside. Even at the age of sixteen, York was hot on science, on the strictness and logic of it; she found herself getting unreasonably impatient at illogic, and wishful thinking, and the emotional coloration of rational processes of all sorts.

(Actually she was much too severe for most of the boys her mother tried to match her with. You’d think that someone who’d suffered as messy a divorce as Maisie York would learn not to meddle in other people’s relationships…)

The fact was that to her the real Mars was a hell of a lot more interesting than Lowell’s anthropocentric dreams.

Because of Mariner, Mars had turned into a place you could do some geology.

How would the geology of Mars differ from Earth’s? What would that tell you about Earth that you couldn’t have learned from staying at home? A hell of a lot, probably.

Mariner’s thirteenth frame had electrified her.

The thirteenth picture showed craters with frost inside them.

My God. Not the Moon, not Arizona. Mars is something else. Something unique.

Ben eyed York, interested, speculative. “So you’re a closet Mars nut. I ought to take you out to JPL sometime. That’s where they run the planetary probes from… Hey, Natalie. Maybe you ought to apply.”

“What for?”

“The astronaut corps.”

“Me? Are you joking?”

“Why not? You’re qualified. And we need people like you. Even Spiro says so; he thinks people were turned off by Apollo because it was too engineering-oriented.”

“Well, so it was.”

Priest eyed her. “I’m serious, actually, Natalie. It’s a genuine opportunity for you. You could go work for Jorge Romero’s geology boys in Flagstaff, and train the moonwalkers. That’s how Jack Schmitt got into the program, and they say he’ll make it to the Moon.”

“You worry me, Ben. How can a crazy man like you be allowed to drive a car at night?”

“Here.” Driving with one hand, he reached up, turned back his lapel, and unclipped a silver pin, in the shape of a shooting star trailing a comet’s tail.

“What is it?”

“My rookie’s pin. Someday soon I’m going to get a flight. So you need this more than I do. Take it. And when you’re the first human on Mars, when the Spiro Agnew lands in 1982, drop it into the deepest damn crater you see, and think of me.”

“You’re crazy,” she said again. “You should give it to Petey.”

They fell silent.

Her thoughts turned back to Jackass Flats.

They don’t even contain the vented hydrogen. And Mike never thought to tell me about any of this. Why? Because he thought I couldn’t stand to hear it? Or because he can’t even see what’s wrong here?

What does that say about us? And — do we really have to do this shit to get to Mars?

She closed her fingers around the little pin Ben had given her.

Ahead of them, the interstate was a band shining in the starlight and stretching toward the glow of Vegas.

Monday, October 27, 1969

Major Philip Stone joined the USAF in 1953, at the age of twenty. He arrived in Korea in time to make a series of hazardous sorties. Well, Korea had been a turkey shoot. But Stone hadn’t enjoyed combat. His buddies called him too serious — a straight arrow. But for Stone, the important thing was what he could learn in each flight, either about his machines or about himself.

After the war, his disciplined curiosity found a new focus.

In the early 1960s the most promising route to space, if you were inside the USAF, had looked like the experimental high-altitude rocket aircraft program. The X-15s could even give their pilots astronaut wings, by flying through the officially recognized lower limit of “space,” at fifty miles high. The X-15s were to lead to the advanced X-20 — the Dyna-Soar — in which a guy would have been boosted into orbit, and then he would have flown back down, landing like an airplane.

But with men routinely being hurled into space in ballistic capsules like Mercury and Gemini, the X-20 looked too advanced for its time, and it soon ran up a bill as large as that for the entire Mercury program without delivering a single flight article. And it was canned.

Now, the only way for a pilot to reach space was to transfer to NASA. Neil Armstrong was another X-15 pilot who had gone that way before. And so that was what Stone had determined to do.

But first he had some unfinished business.

In 1969, Stone was thirty-seven years old.

“Drop minus one minute.”

“One minute,” Stone said. “Rog. Data on. Emergency battery on. I’m ready when you are, buddy. Master arm is on, system arm light is on…”

The B-52 reached its launch station over Delamar Dry Lake in Nevada. The rocket plane was suspended from the bomber’s wing pylon like a slim, black, stub-winged missile, crammed full of liquid oxygen and anhydrous ammonia, ready for its midair launch.

Stone was sealed up inside the X-15. The B-52’s engine was just feet away from his head, but Stone, cocooned inside the pressurized cockpit, could barely hear its noise. From the corner of his eye he could see the chase planes clustered close to the B-52. At last, this damn flight is going to be over and done with.

After fifteen years, the X-15 program was winding up. There was only one serviceable ship left: X-15-1, the first to fly back in 1960, a veteran of seventy-nine previous missions. The Edwards people wanted to finish up the program with one last flight, the two hundredth overall; and they had asked Phil Stone to stay around long enough for that. But then there was a series of delays and technical hitches, and the winter weather had closed in, until the flight was all but a year later than it had originally been planned for.

For Stone that was a year out of his life wasted. But he’d spent the time preparing for his move to NASA, trying to be sure he started off his new career as well placed as he could be.

“Fifteen-second mark to separation. Chase planes on target. Ten seconds.”

He felt his heart, somewhere under the silver surface of his pressure suit, pumping a little harder. As it was supposed to at such moments.

“Three. Two. One. Sep.”

With a solid crack the B-52’s shackle released the X-15, and the plane dropped away from its mother, and Stone was jolted up out of his seat.

Stone emerged from the shadow of the bomber’s wing, at forty-five thousand feet, into a shock of brilliant sunshine. He was already so high that the morning light was electric blue, more like dusk. The chase planes were little points of silver light around him, with their contrails looping through the air.

The land curved below the plane’s nose, as if the Mojave was some huge, smooth dome. He could see the worn hump of Soledad, the Lonely Mountain, brooding over Rogers Dry Lake, half a mile above sea level. Everywhere the dried-up salt lakes glistened like glass, speckled with gray-green sagebrush and the twisted forms of Joshua trees. It was a flat, desolate, forbidding place. But every summer the desert sun baked the damp lake beds to a flat and smooth surface. The whole place was like one huge runway, and you could land anywhere in reasonable safety.

It was a little after ten-thirty in the morning.

Stone pushed the button to ignite the X-15’s rocket engine.

He was kicked in the back, hard. The plane’s nose was tipped up into the sky as ammonia and oxygen burned behind him, and he rode higher into the deepening blue. He could hear his own breathing inside his helmet; otherwise, there was barely a sound — he was outpacing the noise and exhaust plumes behind him.

Far ahead he saw a speck of light, like a low star. It was a high chase plane. It grew out of nowhere in a flash, and plummeted backwards past Stone, as if it were standing still.

At forty thousand feet he reached .9 Mach, and he could feel a bumping, like a light airplane flying in turbulence. He was moving so quickly that the air molecules couldn’t get out of the way of his craft in time.

The turbulence smoothed out as he went supersonic.

Eighty thousand feet.

He moved the rocket’s throttle to maximum thrust, and he was pushed back into his seat by four and a half Gs. X-15-1 climbed almost vertically. The sky turned from pearl blue to a rich navy. He was already so high he could see stars ahead of him, in the middle of the day; so high there were only a few wisps of atmosphere, barely sufficient for his plane’s aerodynamic control surfaces to grip.

The sensations of power, of speed, of control were exhilarating.

Ninety thousand feet; thirty-two hundred feet per second.

The Mojave, spread out beneath him, over two thousand feet above sea level, was like the dried-out roof of the world.

Less than a minute into the flight, the problems started.

He got a message from the ground. It sounded like they were losing telemetry from the bird. The trouble was, the voice link had suddenly gotten so bad that he couldn’t tell for sure what they were saying.

A warning light showed up on his panel. Another glitch. For some reason his automatic reaction control rockets had deactivated. It wasn’t too serious yet; he was still deep enough in the atmosphere that he was able to maintain control with the aerodynamics.

The X-15 flew like an airplane in the lower atmosphere. It had conventional aerodynamic surfaces — a rudder and tail planes — which Stone could work electronically, or with his pitch control stick and rudder pedals. But above the atmosphere, the X-15 was a spacecraft. The automatic RCS reaction control system — little rocket nozzles, like a spaceship’s — was controlled by an electronic system called the MH96. And there was a separate manual RCS system Stone could control with a left-hand stick.

Quickly he was able to trace through the fault. The automatic RCS had shut itself off because the gains of his MH96, his control system, had fallen to less than 50 percent. The gains were supposed to drop when the plane was in dense air; then the MH96 was designed to shut itself off, to conserve hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel. But the gains had dropped because the hydraulics which controlled his aerodynamic surfaces were stuttering. So the automatic control system couldn’t rely on the data it was getting, and it had shut down the automatic RCS.

It looked as if the electrical disturbance that had started with the radio was spreading. Looks as if we might be snake-bit, old buddy.

Well, he was close to the exhaustion of his rocket fuel anyhow. He pressed a switch, and the engine shut down with a bang.

He was thrust forward against his straps, and then floated back.

He had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone; X-15-1 would coast to the roof of its trajectory, unpowered. He lost all sensation of speed, of motion. He was weightless inside the cabin, and he felt as if his gut were climbing up out of his neck.

He tried to put the problems aside. He was still flying, still in shape. And, no matter what was happening to the MH96, he had a program to work through, a whole series of experiments for NASA and the USAF.

One minute forty-one.

He activated the solar spectrum measurement gadget and the micrometeorite collector in his left wing pod.

Suddenly, the MH96 control system’s gains shot up to 90 percent, for no apparent reason, and the automatic RCS cut back in.

He checked his instruments. Like most experimental aircraft, the X-15’s cockpit had a primitive, hand-made feel, with rivets and wires showing. Well, it seemed he had full control ability for the first time since entering his ballistic flight path. He welcomed the return, but he was unnerved, all over again. What next?

He had very little confidence left in the battered old bird. Maybe she knows it’s her last flight; maybe she’d prefer a blaze of glory to a few decades rusting in some museum.

He would soon be going over the top, the peak of his trajectory, at 260,000 feet.

It was time to begin the precision attitude tracking work required for the solar spectrum measurement. He needed a nose-down pitch, and a yaw to the left. He was already flying at almost a zero-degree angle of attack, but was yawing a little to the right, and rolling off to the right as well. So he fired his wing-mounted roll control thruster for two seconds to bring his wings level, and his yaw control thruster to bring the X-15’s nose around to the left. The X-15 was like a gimbaled platform, hanging in the air, twisting this way and that in response to his commands. To stop the left roll he fired another rocket -

He was still rolling, too far to the left. Christ. What now?

The MH96 had failed again, and had cut out the automatic RCS, just as he was completing his maneuver.

He continued to rotate. To compensate he held his right roll control for eight more seconds. But the air was so thin that his aerodynamic controls were degraded, and the response was sluggish. He fired his manual RCS yaw rockets.

He could feel sweat pooling under his eyes; one problem after another was hitting him, blam blam blam.

Suddenly the MH96 cut back in with its automatic RCS. That stopped his yaw, short of the correct heading. Stone fired his manual yaw again; this time as he approached the reference heading the yaw was countered by the automatics, apparently correctly — but the damn thing cut out again, and he yawed past the reference.

And, on top of that, his roll attitude indicator ball was rotating. He had started rolling to the left again. He tried to wrestle that back with three short pulses on the manual roll RCS, but he overshot, and started a roll to the right…

Fifty miles high. The sky outside his tiny cabin was a deep blue-black, and the control lights gleamed brightly, like something off a Christmas tree. At the horizon’s rim he saw the thick layer of air out of which he’d climbed. He could see the western seaboard of the USA, all the way from San Francisco to Mexico; the air was clear, and it was all laid out under him like a relief map.

Three minutes twenty-three seconds. His yaw deviation was increasing, five or six degrees a second. And his heading had deviated from the B-52’s, maybe as much as fifty degrees. His angle was becoming extreme, and the air started to pluck at his aircraft, rolling it over to the right. He was in danger of rolling off completely. He might even reenter at the wrong attitude.

And if that happened, he’d finish up spread over the welcoming desert in a smoking ellipse one mile wide and ten miles long.

To stop the roll he applied left roll RCS, full left rudder and full left aileron. Everything he had. But the roll seemed to be accelerating. And the nose was starting to pitch down, too.

The starry sky, and the glowing desert below, started to wheel, slowly, around his cockpit, while he continued to work his controls.

At 240,000 feet above the ground — still supersonic — the X-15 went into a spin, tumbling around two axes at once.

He reported his spin to the ground.

They sounded incredulous. “Say again, Phil.”

“I said, I’m in a goddamn spin.” He wasn’t surprised at their disbelief; there was no way of monitoring the X-15’s heading from the ground, and they would only see pronounced and slow pitching and rolling motions.

And besides, nothing was known about supersonic spin. Nothing. There had been some wind tunnel tests on X-15 spin modes which had proved inconclusive.

There was no spin recovery technique in the pilot’s handbook.

Stone tried everything he knew, using his manual RCS and his aerodynamic controls. Full rudder; full ailerons. What else is there?

The plane began to shudder around him; he was slammed from side to side; it was hard to breathe, to think. It had all fallen apart so quickly. I lost my tail. I’ve had it.

Suddenly the MH96 armed the automatic RCS again, and the little rockets started firing in a series of long bursts, opposing the spin. Stone worked with it, reinforcing the RCS with his aerodynamics.

The X-15 broke out of the spin and leveled oft. The buffeting faded away.

Stone felt a brief burst of elation. He was at 120,000 feet, and Mach 5. Now all I’ve got to do is reenter the goddamn atmosphere.

He pulled up the nose; he muttered a short, obscene prayer as the controls responded to him. He reached the correct twenty-degree nose-up angle of attack, and opened the air brakes, flaps on the plane’s rear vertical stabilizer. A sensation of speed returned as deceleration started to bite, and shoved him forward against his restraint. The leading edges of his wings were glowing a dark, threatening red.

The sky brightened quickly. He could see Edwards, a grid laid out over the desert below, 260 miles from his takeoff point.

At 18,000 feet he pulled in his air brakes and hauled on the aerodynamic controls to initiate a corkscrew dive. The idea was to shed more speed and energy as fast as possible.

At a thousand feet above the dry lake bed he pulled out of his dive and, with the slipstream roaring past his canopy, jettisoned his ventral fin. He extended the landing flaps and pulled up the scorched nose, blistered from the reentry. Chase aircraft settled in alongside him.

The X-15 hit the dirt. The skids at the rear sent a cloud of dust up into the still desert air; Stone was jolted as the crude skids scraped across the lake bed. The nose wheel stayed up for a few seconds, before thumping down to add to the dust clouds.

A mile from touchdown the X-15 came to a halt. The chase planes roared overhead.

As the dust settled over his canopy, Stone switched off his instruments, closed his eyes, and slumped back in his seat.

The ring of his pressure suit dug into the back of his neck.

Stone had proved himself as a pilot today. But a flight like today’s wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good with NASA. I got out of a supersonic spin! I got my hide back down, and if I can figure out how I did it, I’ll be in the manual. But I screwed up. I didn’t finish the science; I didn’t make it through the checklist. And for NASA, that was what it was all about.

A fist banged on his canopy. The ground crews had reached him; through the dusty glass he could see a wide, grinning face. He raised a gloved hand and joined thumb and forefinger in a “perfect” symbol.

All in a day’s work, in the space program.

Monday, April 13, 1970

In 1970, Ralph Gershon was twenty-five years old.

He had grown up on a farm in Iowa, surrounded by near poverty and toil, dreaming of flight. As a kid he’d gone to Mars with Weinbaum and Clarke and Burroughs and Bradbury; later, he’d followed the emerging space program with fascination. He’d gotten himself some flight experience, had crammed his head at school, and — in the face of a lot of prejudice — had finally made it into the academy, and the Air Force.

He’d been following a dream.

But it hadn’t worked out so wonderfully.

As soon as he had climbed away from the base, Gershon was over jungle. It was just a sea of darkness under him, blacker than the sky, rolling to the horizon.

His wingman had pushed in his power and was invisible; he would already be somewhere over the four-thousand-foot mark.

As the Spad climbed, the noise of its turbine rose in pitch, and the prop dragged at smoky air. Gershon could see flashes of light, pinpricks of crimson embedded in the masked ground. The pinpricks were muzzle flashes from the bigger guns down there.

The air was dingy with the smoke: it was about twice as bad as the average Los Angeles smog. The smoke struck Gershon’s imagination. Down there hundreds, thousands of little farmers were patiently tending smoky fires in their own soggy fields, each doing his bit to thwart him, Gershon, and his fellows. If you thought too hard about it, it was awesome; it gave you a sense of the size of this land, of how it was capable of absorbing a hell of a lot of punishment.

So Gershon resolutely tried not to think about it.

Then he leveled off. “Back to cruise power,” he told his wingman.

The Combat Skyspot radar controller came on the line.

He’d been expecting this. He snapped on his flashlight and prepared to mark his map.

Gershon had been briefed for a target inside South Vietnam. But then, in terse sentences, the Skyspot gave him a new target.

Gershon changed his heading; more miles of anonymous, complex jungle rolled beneath his prow.

After the raid was over, ground controllers would destroy all evidence of the diversion, shredding documents and reporting that the attack had taken place, as planned, inside South Vietnam.

And not inside neutral Cambodia.

And, as on previous flights, Gershon was going to have to file a false report.

He glanced into the sky. Somewhere up there, Apollo 13 was heading for the Moon.

Gershon found it hard to reconcile the terrific adventure going on in the sky, three guys hanging their hides out over the edge, with the mindless, lying bullshit of this war.

After an hour the Spad started trembling — pogoing, vibrating longitudinally, so that he was juddered back and forth in his seat. Night flying seemed to magnify everything, every little problem, until you could damn near scare yourself out of the sky. It was hard to know if vibrations like those were a real problem or something that he’d just dismiss during daylight.

He tried to ride it out, and after a while the juddering let up. Production of the Spads — single-seater Douglas A-1 Skyraiders — had been stopped in 1957. Thirteen years ago. They shouldn’t be flying anymore. Operational ships had to be nursed along with components cannibalized from wrecks.

In the dark Gershon had to fly time-and-distance: a kind of dead reckoning, based on nothing but his heading, his airspeed, and the time he flew. It wasn’t exactly accurate. Still, soon Gershon figured he was over the FAG’s reported location. The FAG was his Forward Air Guide, the friendly Cambodian spotter who had been assigned to guide his bombs home.

He twisted the knobs of his VHF radio. “Hello, Topdog, this is Pilgrim. How you hear? Topdog. Pilgrim. How you hear?”

He heard the barking of a thirty-seven-mil airburst, miles away.

Gershon tried to keep his patience. After all, the poor guy was down there in the night, surrounded by mortar-firing hostiles.

There was a crackling of radio static, a distant voice. “Pilgrim. Topdog. You come help Topdog?”

“Yes, Topdog. Pilgrim come help you. You have bad guys?”

“Rager, rager, Pilgrim.” Rager for roger. The FAG was talking the abbreviated lingo the pilots had worked out with the locals they had to deal with. “Have many, many bad guys. They all around. They shoot big gun at me.”

Big gun? Gershon peered down at the dark. Maybe it was so. He couldn’t see any muzzle flashes, so maybe the fight was just a small-arms affair.

Small-arms fire was okay with Gershon. It was even kind of interesting. It sounded like rain on tin, and put little holes in the airplane.

But “big gun” could mean a mortar.

It was hard to be sure. Things would be looking kind of different to Topdog, helpless in his blacked-out hellhole on the inky ground.

“Okay, Topdog, you give us coordinates where you are. We come help you.” Gershon flicked on his flashlight and wrote out the numbers, then checked them against the map.

The coordinates didn’t tie up with where the FAG was supposed to be.

Gershon called his wingman. “Hey. You copy that?”

“Copy.”

“Either he doesn’t know where he is, or he’s a hundred miles from here.”

“Your call, Pilgrim.”

Gershon hesitated, trying to figure what to do. Sometimes this kind of hide-and-seek was normal with an FAG.

Then again, sometimes voices would come floating up out of the dark to the bombers, confidently calling out positions to hit. On checking, the flyers would find the locations to be the designated areas of friendly troops.

“Topdog, this is Pilgrim. You hear my airplane?”

“Pilgrim, Topdog. I hear your airplane. You come north maybe two mile.”

Gershon pushed north.

Gershon looked down. The mountains there were high, and his cruising altitude of 10,500 feet didn’t put him all that far above them.

“Hey, Topdog. You hear my airplane now?”

“Rager, rager, Pilgrim. You over my position now.”

There was a valley below him, a black wound in the landscape, coated with the fur of jungle.

“Topdog. Pilgrim see big valley. Where are you?”

“Rager, Pilgrim. Bad guy in valley. You put bomb in middle of valley.”

It was a pinpoint target. “Look, Topdog, I want to know where you are.” Gershon didn’t want to bomb out the FAG himself.

“Pilgrim, Topdog on top of mountain. You bomb bad guy.”

“All right, Topdog, Pilgrim drop bomb in valley.”

Gershon set his wing selector to the left stub, where a five-hundred-pound napalm bomb nestled. He peered down, into oceanic invisibility. He put on a single fuselage light, so the wingman would be able to see where he was going.

He rolled over, relying on his instruments in the darkness, and stabilized into a forty-degree dive.

He descended below the tops of the mountains and closed rapidly. Through his gunsight he could see glimmers outlining the valley below.

The altimeter unwound, and Gershon’s breath was ragged and hot. He wasn’t worried about antiaircraft fire; just then he was more concerned about not hitting the ground.

He hit the release button.

Five hundred pounds dropped away from the ship with a jolt. He pulled up, and grunted as three Gs settled on his chest.

The nape splashed over the landscape. It was like an immense flashbulb, exploding from the valley floor, and it lit up the smoky sky, turning it into a milky dome above him. It was eerie, alien, almost beautiful.

“Pilgrim! You have number one bomb. Very good. You do same again.”

“Okay, Topdog, we’ll put it right there.”

Gershon swapped altitudes with his wingman, and let the wingman dive in. The valley wasn’t dark any longer; it was a mass of fires and splotches of twenty-mil hits, which sparkled like little fire jewels. Gershon caught glimpses of his wingman’s Spad, rolling down and leveling off, silhouetted against the blaze below.

“Very good bomb, Pilgrim.”

“Okay, Topdog.”

“Hey, Pilgrim. You got radio?”

Gershon couldn’t figure what the FAG was talking about; the raid was over. “Say again, Topdog. Say again.”

“Topdog listen to radio. Voice of America. You brave boys in trouble.”

“What?”

“Apollo. Brave boys. Spaceship in terrible danger, say Voice of America. You understand?”

Jesus. He felt electrified. I wonder what the hell has happened, if they can get home…

But what a way to find out, from some poor little guy, lost in a shit-hole in the mountains of Cambodia.

“Rager, Topdog. I copy. Thank you.”

“And to you, Pilgrim, a good night.”

Yeah. A good night faking my records.

Somewhere in the sky above him — for all the peril those guys were in — Americans were undertaking vast, wonderful adventures. And there he was, flying this bucket of bolts, splashing liquid fire over peasants. Doing something so shitty that even his own government wouldn’t admit it was happening.

I’ve got to get out of this. Of course, despite a lot of pressure from the White House, NASA had yet to fly a black man into space. It would be a long haul for Ralph Gershon…

But it can’t be worse than this.

Gershon and his wingman climbed back to altitude, and Gershon turned his nose for home. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 000/00:12:22

Earth was a wall of blue light, as bright as a slice of tropical sky; it dazzled her, dilating her eyes, making the sky pitch-black when she looked away. The Command Module’s windows were tiny, already scuffed, but even so they let in shafts of startling blue, and the cabin was bright, cheerful, light-filled.

“Houston, we have a hot cabin.” Stone tapped a gloved forefinger against a temperature gauge. “Running at seventy-seven.”

“Copy, Ares” Young said. “We recommend you put coolant fluid through the secondary coolant loop.”

“Roger,” said Gershon. “Ah, okay, Houston, now I’m seeing a fluctuation of my water quantity gauge. It’s oscillating between, I’d say, 60 and 80 percent.”

“Copy, Ralph, working on that one…”

And Stone said he suspected there was a helium bubble in an attitude thruster propellant tank. Young recommended that he perform a couple of purge burns of the attitude thrusters to burn out the bubble. So Stone began to work that out. Meanwhile, Young came back with an answer to the water gauge problem; it looked as if it was traced to a faulty transducer…

And on, and on, a hail of small checks and detailed, trivial problems.

York had her own checklist to follow. She worked her way through the pale pages quickly, opening and closing circuit breakers, throwing switches, calling out instructions for Stone and Gershon. She was immersed in the hiss of the air in her closed helmet, the humming of the Command Module’s instruments and pumps, the rustle of paper, the crackle of Young’s voice calling up from the ground, the soft voices of Gershon and Stone as they worked through their post-orbit checklists.

It was a mundane procedure they’d followed together dozens of times in the sims.

But, she realized, it was a profound shock to go through this routine — not in some stuffy ground-based trainer — but here.

If she looked ahead of the craft, she could see the planet’s curve. It was a blue-and-white arc with black space above it. But when she looked straight down, the skin of the Earth filled her window, scrolling steadily past as if she were viewing some colorful map on a computer screen.

She was amazed by the transparency of the air. There was a sense of depth to the atmosphere, a three-dimensional appearance that surprised her. There were shadows under the clouds as they slid across the face of the seas. The clouds thickened toward the equator, and when she looked ahead, tangential to the Earth’s surface, she could see them climbing up into the atmosphere, as if Ares was heading for a wall of vapor. On the land she could easily make out cities — a gray, angular patchwork — and the lines of major roads. The orange-brown of deserts was vivid, but the jungles and temperate zones were harder to spot; their color did not penetrate the atmosphere so well, and they showed up as a gray-blue, with the barest hint of green.

She found the lack of green disappointing.

She saw the wake of a ship, feathering out like a brushstroke on the sea’s calm surface.

Gershon, in his center seat, leaned toward her. “Quite a view, huh.”

She turned her head — and quickly regretted it; her head felt like a tank of fluid, sloshing when she moved. She held her head steady for a few seconds and let the sloshing settle down again. Resolutely, she tried not to think about her stomach.

Space adaptation syndrome. She understood what was happening to her. Without gravity, little particles of calcium on sensitive hairs in the inner ear took up random positions, and the body couldn’t work out which way was up. It generally went away after a few days.

But just now it was a huge embarrassment to York.

More carefully, she turned back to the window. They were passing over storm clouds, thunderheads which piled up on top of each other as if solid, cliffs and ravines of cloud miles deep. She could see lightning, sparking in the clouds like living things, propagating across storm systems thousands of miles across. The clouds, illuminated from within, glowed purple-pink, like neon sculptures. “Look at that. It looks as if the thunderheads are reaching up toward us.”

“Only about a tenth of the way,” Gershon said mildly.

“Pressure’s okay,” Stone said. He began to take off his gloves and helmet.

York unlatched her gloves and pulled them off, then shoved them into a pocket on her couch. She grasped the sides of her helmet, which came loose with a click; she pushed it up over her head.

She moved too quickly. Suddenly her head was full of sloshing fluid again, and saliva flooded her mouth.

Her helmet, rolling loose, clattered against a bank of switches. Gershon grabbed it easily, laughing. “Interception!” In his pressure suit he looked small, compact, comfortable. He threw the helmet up in the air again with a twist; the helmet revolved, oscillating about two spin axes.

York felt embarrassed, clumsy. And, watching the helmet, suddenly she was retching.

“Oh, man,” Stone said in disgust. He handed her a plastic bag, and York fumbled it open, and pushed her face into it.

As she heaved, a greenish sphere, about the size of a tennis ball, came floating up out of the bag. It was shimmering, and complex pulsations crossed its surface.

York watched in awe. Maybe I ought to film this. It was a demonstration of fluid mechanics, in the absence of gravity; she wondered if the wave patterns, dominated by surface tension, could be predicted by computer.

The glob of vomit split in two. One half headed toward the wall, and the other made straight for Gershon.

“Ah, shit,” Gershon said, and he tried to squirm out of the way.

The glob hit him in the chest, with a soft impact; it immediately collapsed and spread out over his suit, as flat as a fried egg. Surface tension again, York thought absently.

“Oh, Jesus,” Gershon said. “Oh, shit.”

Stone reached for wet wipes, and passed some to Gershon. “Come on, man. It might have been any of us. We’ve got to get this place cleaned up.”

So they began chasing around the cabin, hunting down bits of vomit with paper towels and plastic bags.

Once her stomach awareness had receded a little, York found, oddly, that it wasn’t actually so unpleasant. It was a little like chasing butterflies.

“NC One phasing burn,” Stone said. He held down the thrust control, watching his instruments.

The burn felt tight and rattly to York. She was shoved into her couch again; the acceleration was low, but crisp.

Through her window she could see vapor venting from attitude control thruster nozzles; the vents looked like fountains of ice crystals, the particles receding from the walls of the craft in precise straight lines.

The burn was taking place over the nightside of Earth. The planet pulled away; it was as if she were rising above a floor of dark, frosted glass. The continents were outlined by chains of brilliant dots, like streetlights seen from the air. But those dots weren’t streetlights; they were towns.

She twisted in her seat and looked ahead, toward the limb of the planet.

She could see the airglow layer, the bright layer of ionized oxygen at the top of the atmosphere, a fine line that was like a false sunrise. And then, as she watched, a sliver of sky turned blue and spread along the horizon. More colors came up, coalescing around a bright patch that was the rising sun, a spectrum that washed around the curve of Earth. The light of the dawn reached her through the layer of atmosphere; for a brief moment she saw the shadows of the clouds streaming across the orange surface of the sea.

Then the sun rose high enough to illuminate the tops of the clouds. The sea turned to crimson, and a wash of pale blue and white spread from the horizon toward her.

On a whim, she dug into a pocket of her pressure garment and pulled out the handful of grass which Vladimir Viktorenko had given her. She held it in her palm and rubbed it gently; it gave off a sweet aroma, like a herb. It was polin, a kind of wormwood, common all over the Kazakhstan steppe.

Stone finished the burn. His push-button control, released, popped back out of the panel on its spring. “Two hundred seven feet per second,” he said.

“Right on the wire,” Gershon murmured. “One hundred ninety-five times two hundred zero one.”

Young called up, “Copy your burn, Ares. You are two hundred fifty miles from the stack, and closing.”

“Copy, John. Preparing for NC Two…”

The crew had arrived in orbit with half the Ares cluster: their Apollo Command and Service Modules, the Mars Excursion Module — the MEM — and the Mission Module, their habitat for the journey. The rest of the cluster — the main injection booster and its huge fuel tanks — had already been placed in orbit and assembled, ready for them to dock with it.

The Mission Module was a squat cylinder, with the Apollo a slim, silvery cylinder-cone attached to its front, and the MEM — a fatter, truncated cone — stuck on the back. Fixed to the base of the MEM’s shroud was an Orbital Maneuvering Module, a fat doughnut fitted with a modified Apollo Service Module propulsion system. The OMM would be discarded before they docked with the booster cluster. But first Stone had to use the OMM in a series of four burns, to chase the booster cluster around the sky.

Stone announced: “Ready for NCC.”

“Copy,” Young said. “Ninety miles and closing.”

The corrective burn was crisp and short, a brief hiss.

Stone murmured, “Natalie, you ought to be able to see the booster by now. Right out front.”

York pressed her face to the window. The brief burns were placing Ares on segments of successively wider orbits; following the new orbits, Ares would eventually overtake the booster stack.

The craft was noticeably higher than when they had first been injected into orbit; the curvature of the Earth was much more pronounced, and she was able to see complete landmasses, speckled with cloud.

Suddenly it was there: a pencil, gleaming silver, hanging over the dipping horizon.

“I have it.”

“That’s a relief,” said Stone drily. “Okay, Houston, I’m going for the twenty-eight feet per second coelliptic combination burn.”

“Copy, Phil.”

Another sharp rattle.

Young said, “Slight underburn that time, Ares. One point six feet per second.”

“Copy that,” said Gershon, and he clucked at Stone in mock disapproval.

Young said, “Your orbit is now ten miles under the booster’s. Range sixty-three miles and closing.”

“Rog,” Stone said. “Going for terminal phase initiation.” York could hear solenoids clatter as Stone worked the push-button controls of the reaction control clusters. “How about that. Right down Route One.”

“Good burn, Ares,” Young said. “You’re closing at one hundred thirty-one feet per second.”

Stone went through two more corrections, and five sharp braking maneuvers. Then, maybe half a mile from the booster, he took the Apollo on a short, angular inspection sweep. The reaction control systems bit sharply, rattling York against her restraint.

York watched the cluster roll with silent grace past her window.

The booster cluster was squat, pregnant with fuel. Its heart was a fat MS-II booster, a Saturn second stage, modified to serve as an orbital injector. Fixed to the front of the MS-II was an MS-IVB, a modified Saturn third stage, a narrower cylinder. To either side of the MS-II were fixed the two External Tanks, fat, silvery cylinders as long and as wide as the MS-II stage itself. The supplementary tanks carried more than two million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, propellant Ares would need to break clear of Earth orbit.

The MS-II and its tanks looked like three fat sausages, side by side, with the slimmer pencil shape of the MS-IVB protruding from the center. The rest of the Ares stack — the Mission Module, MEM, and Apollo — would be docked onto the front of the MS-IVB to complete the assembly of the first Mars ship, a needle well over three hundred feet long.

The cluster was oriented so that it was pointing toward the sun; that way, boiloff of the cryogenic propellants inside the tanks was reduced. Shadows of struts and attitude thrusters lay long against the sunlit white-and-silver bellies of the fuel tanks. The booster’s underside was illuminated only by the soft blue and green of Earthlight. She could see the great flaps of the cluster’s solar panels, folded up against the sides of the MS-IVB stage like wings; the panels would be unfurled when Ares was safely launched on its trajectory to Mars. There was the bold red UNITED STATES stenciled against the side of the MS-II, and the finer lettering along the long thin protective flaps masking the solar panels, and the NASA logo; and she could make out the support struts and attachment pins which held the External Tanks in place against the flanks of the MS-II, and the gold-gleaming mouths of the MS-II’s four J-2S engines, upgrades of the engines which had pushed Apollo to the Moon.

To assemble this much mass in Earth orbit had taken all of nine Saturn VB flights over the last five years — half of them manned. The booster stages and their tanks had been flown up and assembled more or less empty, and then pumped full of gas from tanker modules. The cluster was an exercise in enhanced Apollo-Saturn technology, of course, and the essence of its design went all the way back to the 1960s. But NASA had had to develop a raft of new techniques to achieve it: the assembly in orbit of heavy components, the long-term storage of supercold fuels, in-orbit fueling.

Sailing over the Earth, brilliantly lit by the unimpeded sunlight, the booster stack was complex, massive, new-looking, perfect, like a huge, jeweled model. Once they’d docked, she wouldn’t see the cluster from outside again like this for a year. Not until, she realized with a jolt, she receded from it in the MEM, in orbit around Mars.

Stone stretched, raising his arms above his head and reverse-arching his back, so that he floated up out of his frame couch. His long limbs unfolded with evident relief; he really did look too tall to be an astronaut, York thought.

He said, “It’s been a long day already. What say we have ourselves some lunch before we proceed with the docking? If you can take it, Natalie.”

Food? Now? “Sure,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Rager,” said Gershon. He climbed out of his couch. He moved in microgravity as if he’d been born to it; he just floated up out of his couch, pushed at the instrument panel in front of him, and went swimming around like an eel.

He rooted in the equipment bay beneath the couches. He got to the food locker and lifted the lid; it was full to bursting with little cellophane packets of food, all Velcroed in place.

Once they got into the Mission Module, the standard of cuisine would improve, York knew. But while they were stuck inside the Apollo they had to make do with squirting water into color-coded plastic bags of dehydrated food. Still, she wasn’t about to complain. The Command Module was like a cute little mobile home, with its warm water for food and coffee, and toothpaste, even a system for the guys to shave.

Gershon came floating up with a handful of gold-painted bags. “Hey. I found these at the front. None of us is coded gold, are we?”

Stone smiled. “Nope. I had those put there for you to find.”

York studied the bags. “Beef and potatoes. Butterscotch pudding. Brownies. Grape punch.” She looked at Stone. “What’s this? None of this was in my personal preference. In fact, I hate butterscotch pudding.”

“I thought it was kind of appropriate. This was the first meal the Apollo 11 crew ate in space. Straight after translunar injection, after they left Earth orbit for the Moon.”

“All right,” Ralph Gershon said, and he pulled a hose out of the potable water tank and squirted the spigot into his bags with enthusiasm.

York looked at the bags again. Butterscotch pudding, in memoriam. Bizarre.

But maybe, after all, it was appropriate.

Monday, April 13, 1970

Chuck Jones snapped his visor closed and tugged at the umbilicals on his pressure suit, testing their fittings.

He stepped to the edge of the tank. It was a big blue rectangle, like a swimming pool. T-shirted divers were already moving through the water, playing around the sim like dolphins; cables trailed through the water, around the blocky white shape of the sim itself.

It’s like a fucking kid’s game, Jones thought. Sims. How I hate sims.

He turned to see his partner, Adam Bleeker. Because his suit was so stiff, Tones had to hop around like a rabbit. “You okay, kid?”

Bleeker seemed to start. “Sure. Yeah, sure, Chuck.”

Jones snickered to himself. He knew he could put a bug up the ass of a raw kid like Bleeker, just by smiling at him. “Good boy. Welcome to the Weightless Environment Training Facility, here in sunny Texas. Beautiful sight, isn’t it?”

Bleeker turned to the water. “I think I’ve got a kind of Monday-morning feeling about this, Chuck.”

“So do I, Adam; so do I. I hate this fucking fish tank. But we gotta go through with crap like this, or they won’t let us fly their beautiful birds. You all set?”

“Let’s do it.”

His breath loud in his ears, Jones stepped onto the white platform before him. He was suspended over the pool. With a whine of hydraulics, the platform lowered his clumsy, umbilicaled bulk into the water.

The divers loaded him up with weights that would neutralize his buoyancy, and so simulate weightlessness. Then they got hold of Jones’s suited arms, and began to drag him through the water toward the sim. The water was hot, for the benefit of the divers.

The WET-F, pronounced “wet-eff,” was one of the largest simulator facilities there at MSC. The pool was set at the center of Building 29, a big circular building that had once served as a centrifuge. A sleek ambulance stood beside the pool, and there was a decompression chamber nearby. Big clunky white pieces of kit, simulators for other exercises, stood beside the water; cranes running along the roof would lower them in when required.

Jones hated the WET-F. He could never forget the presence of the water around him: the resistance to every movement, the clammy light, the glopping of bubbles, the shadowy forms of the divers.

Conditions more different from the ice-cold stillness of space it was hard to dream up.

Looming ahead in the water he could see the sixty-foot-long hulk of a mocked-up S-IVB, a Saturn third stage, with the mouth of its single engine bell gaping at him. The Multiple Docking Adapter was a squat cylinder fixed to the front of the S-IVB, and a crude, open-ended mock-up of a docked Apollo Command Module was fixed to the front of that.

The idea was that the empty S-IVB would be used as a space station shell, a Skylab, once it had reached orbit. The S-IVB and the Apollo carrying its crew would be launched separately, by Saturn IB boosters, the smaller, cheaper cousins of Saturn Vs. The astronauts would dock with the booster by nuzzling the nose of their Apollo against the docking adapter, and then enter through specially fitted airlocks. The crew would clean out the shell and settle down to live inside the big liquid hydrogen tank.

The sim wasn’t painted, or finished in any way. It all looked ungainly, ugly, evidently lashed up in haste.

The simulation supervisor’s voice sounded in his headset. “Good morning, Chuck, Adam.”

Good morning to you, asshole.

Bleeker turned and waved at one of the ubiquitous TV cameras.

The SimSup said, “I just want to review the basic parameters of the sim with you, before you start. Now, you know this isn’t an integrated sim.” Meaning they weren’t hooked up to Mission Control. “This is just a preliminary trial of the checklist we’re going to have to use when we fit out the workshop in orbit. Okay, let’s proceed.”

The divers nodded to Jones, and they guided him closer to the Apollo mockup. It was just an open cone, fitted to the docking adapter. The simulation was supposed to start at the moment at which the crew was moving into the workshop to configure it for habitation.

Their first job was to dismantle the docking assembly in Apollo’s nose and open up the tunnel to the workshop. That part, at least, should go smoothly, because that sort of docking was standard operating procedure on the Moon missions.

Jones heard Bleeker’s breath scratching as he hauled at the heavy docking-probe assembly. “Take it easy, kid. We’re being paid by the hour.”

Bleeker laughed, and his posture relaxed a little.

When they had the probe assembly loose, Bleeker passed it to a diver.

Bleeker moved ahead of Jones into the Multiple Docking Adapter. The adapter was a tight tunnel, lined with lockers. All the equipment for living quarters, clothes, food, experiments, and the rest was stored in the lockers during the launch; after they’d fitted out the hydrogen tank for habitation, Jones and Bleeker would have to return here, unpack the lockers, and move the equipment into the tank.

Bleeker passed on, into the hydrogen tank itself.

The metal walls of the tank opened out around him. It was pitch-dark, and Jones had the feeling that he was following Bleeker into a huge, forbidding metal cave. “Hold up, Adam; let’s throw a little light on the situation here.” Jones unclipped a portable light from his belt and fixed it to the fireman’s pole that passed along the axis of the tank.

The lamp sent glimmering light through the water along the length of the tank, to a wall at the far end that bulged inward toward him. That was the bulkhead between the hydrogen tank and the booster’s lox tank beyond. Helium pressurization spheres clung to the walls like big silver warts. Handrails and poles looped across the metal cave, and folded-up partitions and other bits of kit were stowed neatly against the walls of the tank. Too neatly. I wonder what those poor schmuckos will find when they meet this bird in real life, in orbit.

The Skylabs were just lash-ups, really, improvisation. But they would give NASA experience it needed of orbital operations and long-duration flights, before the real space station cans started flying later.

“Okay, guys,” the SimSup said. “As you know, in orbit the first job would be to check that the propellant lines are properly blocked. Today, we want you to skip over that and proceed straight to the assembly of the floor.”

“We’ve read the checklist,” Jones growled. “Come on, pal.” He shinned along the fireman’s pole, deeper into the tank.

Bleeker and Jones manhandled packs of floor panels away from their stowage against the tank walls. Their job was to fit a floor of aluminum grid across the width of the tank, maybe two-thirds of the way along its length. Putting the panels together would be like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, working toward the tank’s axis.

The two men worked their way around the perimeter of the tank. It was simple work, but slow, clumsy, and tiring; Jones found it hard to grip tools with his suited hands, and the water resisted every motion.

Divers had followed them into the tank. One of them had brought in an underwater TV camera, and was filming them.

The SimSup tried to cheer them up. “We appreciate your help here, guys. We’re well aware that you two are slated for other missions, and probably won’t even be the ones to carry this out for real anyway…”

I sure as hell hope not, Jones thought.

Chuck Jones was supposed to be going to the Moon. He was backup commander on Apollo 15, which, according to the basic framework of crew rotation, would give him his own mission three shots later, on Apollo 18.

But Congress had cut NASA’s budget for fiscal 1971, making it the leanest budget for nine years. And Nixon still hadn’t responded to the Space Task Group’s proposals for the future shape of the space program, although the word was he was leaning toward a Mars program of some kind, under Kennedy’s relentless public pressure.

Anyhow, NASA was going to need Saturn Vs to launch its Skylabs and space station modules and NERVA test flights. So, NASA was going to have to conserve Saturn V launches. The remaining lunar expeditions, Apollos 14 to 20, were going to be stretched out to six-month intervals…

There were rumors in the Office that the later flights might be cut altogether.

Jones had flown in space. Once.

He’d finished three orbits of Earth on the second orbital Mercury flight, following John Glenn. It had been a picnic. He’d enjoyed the feeling of microgravity, being able to yaw the little capsule about so that the glowing Earth sailed every which way past his tiny window.

But he used up too much of his hydrogen peroxide maneuvering fuel, playing around in orbit.

By the time he got to the retrosequence, nobody was sure if he had enough fuel to set the capsule at the right angle to reenter. He might have burned up, having wasted all his fuel playing around in orbit. Well, he hadn’t; he’d overshot his splashdown point by 250 miles, but he was picked up within a couple of hours by choppers from the carrier.

Jones had been content with his adventure. But the NASA hierarchy were less than pleased with him. He might have augered in: killed himself by playing around.

Officially Jones stayed on the roster, for assignment to a later flight. But a certain distance had developed between Jones and the rest of the Astronaut Office. Deke Slayton, the chief astronaut, had dropped heavy hints that he might want to drop out of the program altogether.

But Jones, mad as hell, had flatly refused. He’d wanted to prove the astronauts really were aviators. He knew he’d done well; he knew he’d done better than Glenn, even, as far as he was concerned.

So he was going to stay on as an astronaut, and he was going to go to the goddamn Moon. In the meantime, to keep in the program, he accepted a job with Slayton and Alan Shepard — another of the original astronauts, also grounded, in his case for an ear condition — in the Astronaut Office.

Jones had served in there for eight whole years: scheduling and training, working on sims and mission profiles. Eight years.

Enough bigwigs had finally moved out of NASA, it seemed, for his indiscretion to be forgotten, and he was back on flight status.

But if the Moon flights got cut, so did he. He’d probably be too damn old for Mars.

Jones didn’t want to go to the Moon for the thrill of exploration. For him it wasn’t the destination that counted but the journey: a mission that offered the most challenging flying test anyone could devise.

The Skylabs just weren’t going to offer that. He had no wish for his career to climax in a low-Earth-orbiting trash can, where the job would be to endure, just logging days, boring a hole in the sky.

He really would hate to miss out on the Moon.

Jones hauled at floor bolts with a vigor that alarmed the surgeons who were monitoring his vital signs.

When the floor was completed, the SimSup congratulated them. “Okay, boys; we’ll take a break and refurbish before the next session. Come out through the docking adapter.”

Preceded by the divers, Bleeker made his way through the cramped adapter and toward the brightly lit water beyond.

“Now you, Chuck,” the SimSup said.

Jones made his way into the shadowy adapter; the lockers clustered about, restricting his movement. He was illuminated by the tank lights behind him, and the free blue water of the facility ahead of him.

When he was well inside the adapter, the exit to the Apollo mock-up slammed shut.

Jones pulled up short. He wrapped his gloved palms around the hatch lever. It wouldn’t give.

“What’s going on?”

“Jones.” The SimSup voice was terse. “You’ve suffered a multiple failure. Your Command Module is disabled; you can’t return to it; you can’t get it loose of the docking port. The power in the workshop cluster is about to fail. What do you do? Go.”

Then the lights failed. He was left floating in pitch-darkness. Even the tank lights had gone out.

“What kind of asshole game is this?…”

He took a breath and calmed himself down. SimSups were famous for throwing crap like that at you. He had to find an answer to it, and fast; he could yell at them later.

He knew the theory. If Skylab astronauts couldn’t get home, a new Apollo would be sent up from the Cape. But if the disabled Apollo was jammed to the docking port, what use would that be?

In the pitch-darkness, he was starting to forget which way up he was.

These fucking sims.

He tried to concentrate; he pictured the adapter as he’d seen it just before the “failure”: the useless docking port before him; the access tunnel back to the workshop behind him.

He suffered a surge of panic. He reached out at random; his gloved hands clattered against lockers and handholds. The space was too big, he realized suddenly; that was what was disorienting him. If he were safely tucked up in Mercury -

Take it easy. You’re not in any danger. You can always back out into the tank. The divers are still there.

Yeah, he thought sourly. But if I do that, I’ll have fucked up. The Grand Old Man of the Astronaut Office. Put him in a swimming bath for two minutes, and he screws the pooch.

In fact, he thought, I’m already screwing up by taking so long. How many seconds? Half a minute? There must be something obvious I’m meant to do; something I’m missing. Think, damn it. If the docking port is blocked, then how -

Then it came to him. The docking adapter had two docking ports. Bleeker had gotten out through the axial port; but there was also a radial port, stuck to the side of the adapter for just the sort of problem he had.

He reached down and found the port on his first try; it was jammed, but it gave after a couple of tugs.

Bleeker clapped Jones on the shoulder; the impact was deadened by layers of suit fabric. “What were you doing in there, pops, having a shave? Next time, make sure you’ve studied the manual.”

“Asshole,” Jones growled. “You were in on that, weren’t you?”

“Just another Monday, Chuck. Don’t take it personal.”

Fucking engineers. Fucking smart-ass rookies.

With the help of the divers, they swam clumsily to the side of the facility.

Tuesday, April 14, 1970

According to Fred Michaels’s antique vest-pocket watch, it was a little after a quarter to two. He’d been watching the time compulsively, he realized.

Tim Josephson oiled up to him. “Mr. Agronski is here to see you, sir. He’s waiting in your office.”

“That’s Doctor Agronski, damn it.”

“Sorry. Shall I tell him you’ll meet him over there?”

Michaels, resenting the intrusion, turned away rather than answer. He looked through the glass, at the three rows of flight controllers.

Seen from the Viewing Room at the back of the MOCR — Mission Operations Control Room, pronounced to rhyme with “poker,” and known as “Mission Control” to the world — there was no obvious drama. But the controllers looked pretty crumpled, with ties loosened or discarded, shirts creased, and the operations desks were strewn with coffee cups, manuals, and scribbled notes.

He could see Joe Muldoon wandering about at the back of the MOCR. Nine months after his own lunar flight, Muldoon had just finished a six-hour stint as capcom to Jim Lovell and his Apollo 13 crew, but he showed no desire to leave; in fact, he knew that Muldoon was intending to head on over to Building 5, where other off-duty astronauts were running continual simulations of the improvised procedures the Apollo 13 crew would have to adopt to get home.

Already seventeen hours had passed since 13 had started to fall apart; Michaels wondered how many of the controllers had gotten a minute’s sleep since.

Josephson coughed. The aide was a slim, prematurely balding young man, with a Ph.D. in some discipline or other. You needed a Ph.D. to make the coffee, here at MSC. “Sir, Dr. Agronski—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Leon Agronski worked on President Nixon’s Science Advisory Committee, with special responsibility for the space program, and all its expensive evils. Michaels knew why Agronski was there: to thrash out “options” for NASA’s budget for FY1971 and beyond, before any formal submission by the White House.

More cuts.

Michaels was an associate administrator with responsibility for manned spaceflight, reporting directly to Thomas Paine, NASA Administrator. It had broken Michaels’s heart when Paine had gone public back in February to announce the cuts to Skylab, even some terminations at NASA.

“You know,” he mused, “maybe, if we can pull this off, this Apollo 13 thing, it will bring us back together, just a little. If we can remember how it feels to have worked like this, today, then maybe we’ll be able to achieve great things again…”

Josephson had been avoiding his eyes; then he confronted Michaels a little more boldly. “Fred, I know you’re upset. But the wheels don’t stop turning. And Dr. Agronski has flown out from Washington to catch you.”

Michaels grunted. Josephson was right, of course. The wheels never stopped turning.

And maybe, just maybe, he could use the mess to his advantage. He felt his mood lighten a little.

“All right, let’s go see him,” he said. “But not in some goddamn bureaucratic office block. Call him over here — ask him to come to the lunar surface back room.” Another thought struck him. “Oh — and, Tim—”

“Sir?”

“Ask Joe Muldoon to join us, would you?”

The back room would have been used as the center of operations for the moonwalks. Its walls were covered with crew checklists, and with Orbiter and Apollo photographs of the landing area — called Fra Mauro, a place in the lunar uplands: the first ambitious, scientifically interesting site they’d planned to land. Just now, however, it was deserted.

When Michaels arrived, Muldoon and Agronski were sitting at a large walnut desk in the center of the room. Agronski, thin to the point of sharpness, was leafing through some notes from his briefcase; Muldoon was hollow-eyed with fatigue, and he had folded his big, powerful hands on the desk top. He glared impatiently at Michaels. Josephson fussed around, pouring coffees.

Michaels pulled out a chair and accepted a coffee. Then Josephson withdrew, leaving the three of them alone.

Michaels introduced Muldoon to Agronski. “Leon, Joe here is on the backup crew for Apollo 14, and then should command his own mission, on 17. Joe, you’re here at my invitation. To help remind us what this damn thing is all about.”

Here is the second American on the Moon, Agronski, you thin-lipped asshole, Michaels thought. Here he is! Large as life, and twice as brave! A living symbol! Show a little respect!

In the dazzle of the room’s strip lights, Michaels couldn’t see Agronski’s eyes behind his narrow-rimmed glasses.

Joe Muldoon was glaring back at Michaels. Muldoon’s look, those blue eyes hard under that balding prow of a skull, said it all; he was thinking that Michaels was a paper-pushing prick who shouldn’t be wasting Muldoon’s time on a day like this. Not when he — Muldoon — could be in Building 5 or the MOCR with the other guys; not when he might be able to come up with something to save the crew out there -

Christ, Michaels thought suddenly. Maybe I’ve miscalculated. If Muldoon blows his stack here, this could turn into a hundred-kilowatt disaster. He shot an imploring look at Muldoon.

Agronski handed Michaels a document from his case. “I’m sorry, Colonel Muldoon; I wasn’t expecting you to be here. I brought only two copies.”

Muldoon turned that bald-eagle glare on the science advisor, who seemed oblivious.

The document was a photostat, stapled together, covered in pencil notes, and with the presidential seal on the first page.

“This is the statement President Nixon was drafting, to make in March,” Agronski said. “A formal response to the Space Task Group report. But he withdrew it. I want you to see this draft, Fred, to understand the way the thoughts of the administration are heading.”

Michaels scanned the statement.

…Over the last decade, the principal goal of our nation’s, space program has been the Moon… I believe these accomplishments should help us gain a new perspective on our space program… We must define new goals which make sense for the seventies. We must build on the successes of the past, always reaching out for new achievements. But we must also recognize that many critical problems here on this planet make high-priority demands on our attention and our resources. By no means should we allow our space program to stagnate. But — with the entire future and the entire universe before us — we should not try to do everything at once. Our approach to space must continue to be bold, but it must also be balanced…

Christ, Michaels thought. We’re in trouble.

He read on. Economies everywhere. One rationalization after another. No money for more lunar flights beyond Apollo 20. The space station projects cut back to little more than Skylab. All decisions on later stuff, beyond Apollo and Skylab, deferred: that is, canned.

The feasibility studies on the Space Shuttle seemed spared, but even that was only because Nixon perceived the Shuttle as saving the bottom line: We should work to reduce substantially the cost of space operations… As we build for the longer-range future, we must devise less costly and less complicated ways of transporting payloads into space…

Michaels put the paper down. So Nixon thinks we can cost-cut our way to Mars.

It wouldn’t have been like this with LBJ.

But Johnson was gone. There was a new breed of shifty Republicans in the White House. And suddenly Michaels, at sixty-one, found that the political levers he was used to pulling weren’t connected to anything anymore. Even his links with the Kennedys didn’t seem as useful as they once had.

Sitting here, he felt old, tired, used up.

Maybe I should retire back to Dallas, he thought. Go work on my golf swing.

He noticed Agronski glancing around at the walls, at the moonwalk maps. “Poignant, isn’t it?” Michaels said sharply.

Agronski didn’t react.

“Leon, why did the President withdraw this draft?”

“Because, frankly, nobody in the White House is sure about the impact Kennedy’s remarks about the Mars option are having on public opinion. And now” — Agronski waved a hand at the curling photographs of Fra Mauro — “now you people have served us up with all this. The public mood is a fragile thing, Fred; after Apollo 13 America may want to go to Mars as fast as it can — or it may want to close down the space program altogether.”

Muldoon’s nostrils went white. “You’re talking about the lives of three men, damn it.”

Agronski studied him, analytically. “You know, you people at NASA have been the same whenever I’ve dealt with you. So emotive, so unrealistic. Even you, Fred. Every time we ask for proposals, back you come wanting everything: look at this Space Task Group report with its ‘balanced programs,’ its ‘wide range of technologies.’ You ask for Mars, but that brings everything else in its wake, it seems: nuclear boosters, a Space Shuttle, huge space stations. The same old vision von Braun has peddled since the 1950s — even though you didn’t need a space station to get to the Moon. Your hidden agendas are not, frankly, very well hidden. Why can’t you learn to prioritize?”

Muldoon said angrily, “The task group is asking for a mandate to begin the colonization of the Solar System. And to secure the future of the human race, just as Kennedy is saying. What could be higher priority than that?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Agronski snapped. “We’re a country at war, Colonel Muldoon. And the war is a hemorrhage of money, resources, national morale.”

“Sure,” Muldoon said. “And Apollo is going to end up having cost as much as it takes to keep the war going for another twelve months. What a price to pay.”

Agronski ignored that. “The budget just isn’t big enough to do everything you want. You don’t have to be a White House insider to see that. And the public mood is against you, too. I don’t suppose you flyboys have heard of a thing called Earth Day, planned by the environmentalists in a couple of weeks’ time—”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it, damn it.”

“Cleanups. Marches. Teach-ins. That’s where the public is going to focus in the coming decade, Colonel Muldoon: on our problems here on Earth, not more of your stunts in space.”

“Maybe so. But Agnew chaired the Space Task Group, not NASA,” Michaels growled.

Agronski plowed on. “It’s time you people dropped the idea that you’re some kind of heroic superagency. During Apollo you thought you were the Manhattan Project. Well, now you’re a service agency with a limited budget. And that’s what you have to learn to live with…”

Michaels knew Agronski had a point.

In Michaels’s humble opinion, the current NASA Administrator, Thomas O. Paine, was an idiot: a naive dreamer who was pumping Agnew full of grandiose visions, without a thought about how acceptable they would be to the decision makers inside the White House. Paine was a real contrast to his predecessor, Jim Webb, whom Michaels had greatly admired. Webb was a real political operator — he had known where the bodies were buried, up on the Hill — and he had actively avoided long-term planning. NASA was bad at it anyhow — long-range plans always got bogged down in infighting between the centers — and Webb believed that long-term plans were just hostages to fortune, a distraction for budget authorizers and NASA managers.

Paine couldn’t seem to see that the real problem lay in holding NASA together in the tough times to come, not starting up new programs.

It just wasn’t the way Michaels would run things.

Agronski said, “Fred, forget your huge space stations, your fifty men on the Moon in 1980. The President wants what he’s calling, in private, a ‘Kennedy option.’ ” He tapped the document again. “In this statement he was going to pick out one element from the task group’s report, the Space Shuttle, on which to focus. But what if he were to choose something else — a more visible, major goal — to achieve as quickly and as cheaply as possible?”

Muldoon was staring at Agronski, evidently baffled.

But Michaels understood. He’s speaking obliquely. In code. He has to. But Kennedy is evidently making his point. Nixon wants to save money. But he doesn’t want to be the President who killed the space program, not with Kennedy bleating in the background.

“You’re thinking about Mars,” he said to Agronski. “After all that bullshit about the Manhattan Project and Earth Day, you’re here to talk about going to Mars. Aren’t you?”

Muldoon looked startled.

“What does Paine say about this?”

Agronski looked at him carefully. “Let’s think about Dr. Paine later,” he said.

I knew it. They’re forcing Paine out. He’d heard the rumors from within the White House. Not only was Paine not cooperating, he was being seen as undermining the President. We need a new Administrator who will work with us and not against us, and will reflect credit on the President, not embarrass him… Paine was a dead duck. And now — from the way Agronski was studying him — Michaels understood that he, Fred Michaels, was being offered the chance to succeed, in preference to George Low, Jim Fletcher.

Mars, and the post of Administrator, all in one day. Games within games. But I’ll have to give Agronski something to take home with him, the bones of a cheap Mars option. And there is sure as hell going to be a price to pay, and I need to find out what it is.

The talk was affecting the astronaut differently. There was a look of hope on Muldoon’s face, Michaels recognized; a delicate, fragile hope, as if Muldoon thought the magical possibility — we might go to Mars — might melt away if he longed for it too warmly.

He wondered how much, if at all, Muldoon was aware of what was really going on, under the surface. Looking at Muldoon’s angry, open face, Michaels felt vaguely ashamed of his calculation. In fact, Muldoon’s presence seemed to be working on him the way he’d hoped it would work on Agronski.

Joe Muldoon felt scared to say anything, to disturb the difficult, mysterious process of negotiation. In case he made it all somehow go away.

Mars. They’re still talking about Mars. If Fred Michaels says and does the right things now, the road to Mars might actually be opening up, for us.

For me.

And Joe Muldoon would have something to do with his life again.

The months since his return from the Moon had been as bad as Muldoon had expected.

His most recent PR jaunt had been to some place called Morang, in Nepal. He’d given his standard-issue schoolkids’ talk. When I was on the Moon…

“When I was on the Moon, I couldn’t see Earth so well. Tranquillity Base was close to the Moon’s equator, and right at the center of the face of the Moon as you look at it. So Earth was directly above my head, and it was difficult to tip back in my space suit to see it.

“The sunlight was very bright, and, under a black sky, the ground was a kind of gentle brown. It looked like a beach, actually. I remember looking at Neil bounding around up there, and I thought he looked like a beach ball, human-shaped, bouncing across the sand. But the colors of the Moon aren’t strong, and the most colorful thing there was the Eagle, which looked like a small, fragile house, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange, and yellow…”

His attention had kept drifting from his words, to the hiss of warm rain on the school’s wooden roof, the coinlike faces of the children sitting cross-legged on the floor before him, the teacher’s odd, suspicious frown.

Once, his brief couple of hours’ walking on the Moon had been the most vivid thing in his mind, colorful as an Eagle on the flat, tan expanse of his memory. But in the endless goodwill tours which had followed the splashdown, he’d given all his little speeches so often, already, that he felt the phrases, the underlying memories, had gotten polished smooth, like pebbles. Eventually the tale would be rendered trivial by the retelling.

Hell, but I’m a long way from the Moon now. And with all these damn cuts I’m never going back. All I can do is talk about it. Damn, damn.

When he’d done, the Nepalese schoolkids had started to ask questions. The questions seemed strange to Muldoon.

“Who did you see?”

“Where?”

“On the Moon. Who did you see?”

“Nobody. There’s no one there.”

“But what did you see?”

Muldoon started to understand, he thought. Maybe his American-flavored images of beach balls and sand were too foreign for those kids, their level of education not what he’d been prepared for. He needed to be more basic. “There’s nothing there. No people, no plants or trees, no animals. Not even air, no wind. Nothing.”

The children looked at each other, apparently confused.

The rest of the talk, the questions, rambled into nothing.

At the prompting of the teacher — a slim girl — there was some polite applause for him, and he gave out little American flags and copies of the mission patch.

As he left the little schoolhouse, he heard the teacher say, “Now, you mustn’t listen to him. He’s wrong…”

Back in his hotel room, he’d started working his way through the mini bar.

It turned out that the Nepalese believed that when you died, you went to the Moon. Those kids had thought the spirits of their ancestors, their grandparents, lived up on the Moon, and Muldoon should have seen them when he was there. He’d been telling them there was no heaven. No wonder they had been confused.

He’d walked on the Moon. And then, in that corner of his own Earth, he’d been confronted by rows of kids in a wooden shack who were still being taught — despite his actual presence, despite his eyewitness account from the Moon itself — superstitious fairy tales.

It made the whole damn enterprise seem futile.

Just before coming over to JSC to do his capcom shift today, he’d gotten a package in the post. It was a script for a credit card commercial. Do you know me? Last year I walked on the Moon. That doesn’t help me though when I want to reserve an airline seat… Goddamn garbage.

It was for more money than he’d make in five years. He could only do it if he retired from the Agency.

Jill would surely welcome it. Jill wasn’t like some of the other wives. She didn’t have a military background; Jill had never gotten used to the flights, the dangers, the diluted bullshit that NASA doled out during a mission…

And the fact was, NASA was never going to let him go back to the Moon.

What if he did retire?

Maybe the moonwalker tag wouldn’t endure; maybe he wouldn’t be seen as a hero for much longer. The mood seemed to have turned even more against the program. There had even been criticism, in the press, about his and Armstrong’s conduct on the Moon. They’d spent too long on the ceremonials. They’d collected fewer rocks than hoped for. Most of the samples weren’t properly documented. They’d used the wrong camera to photograph their footprints, so they’d lost time and come home with less interesting photographs. They’d had to cut short the 3-D photography. Even the shots they’d taken in orbit were criticized, as being tourist shots of Earthrise, while the unexplored Moon whipped by beneath them.

Hell, it was hardly our fault. Nixon called us, not the other way around. And what can you do with all that science stuff? It was hardly idiotproof: too damn easy to make mistakes, when you only have a couple of hours, out of your entire life, to walk on the Moon…

He was already drinking too much, fighting off the depression, the deflation, with alcohol. He’d been just the same after his Gemini flight. A few years of this and he’d turn into some sad, paunchy slob telling war stories to anyone who’d listen, to increasingly blank faces.

He remembered, that day in Nepal, that he’d taken a nap. When he woke up, he needed the bathroom. He tried to float out of bed, and his torso went crashing to the floor, his legs wrapped up in a sheet. And then, when he’d shaved, he tried to leave the after-shave bottle floating in the air. It fell into the sink, smashing into big sharp chunks.

That evening in Nepal, he was to be guest of honor at a dinner at a swank, Western-standard restaurant a mile off. He had elected to walk, to clear his head of beer fumes. The road was rocky, badly made, and steep; he was, after all, in the foothills of the Himalayas there. He soon tired.

All along the side of the road as he walked, there were children, kneeling down. They all held candles and looked up at him, their round faces shining in the dusk light like images of the Moon.

It was an act of veneration.

They think I’m a god. A god, come to visit them.

They shouldn’t do this to people, damn it. They’d made him into a stranded moonwalker. He just wanted to walk on another glowing beach.

He tried to focus on what Michaels and Agronski were saying.

Michaels hauled his bulk out of his chair, and let his impressive, waistcoated gut hang over the polished table for a minute. “Gentlemen, let’s see if we can’t cut to the chase.”

He pulled a flip chart away from the wall. The first few sheets were covered with barely comprehensible notes relating to the Apollo 13 astronauts’ abandoned moonwalk checklists: “DOCUMENTED SAMPLE: select sample / place gnomon upsun of sample / sample gnomon [8,5,2] x sun / retrieve sample…” There was a peculiar poetry in the way technical people communicated with each other, he reflected.

On a clean page, he began to scribble. “Let’s see what we have here. How would we do this? What’s the minimum we have to do to get to Mars? I can see three strands of work for the short term. First, we’ll need flight tests of the nuclear rocketry. Second, we’ll have to man-rate the modules of the Mars ship itself, such as a lander. Finally, we’re going to have to get some experience of long-duration missions in space.” He listed the items quickly. “But, whether we go for the Space Shuttle, or for an uprated Saturn program, or both, you’re looking at maybe five years before a new launch system comes on stream. So for the time being we’re going to need to use the Saturn V to get by.” He eyed Agronski. “You know we’ve already announced the suspension of the Saturn V production line.”

“Of course.”

“Now, in addition to the moonshots, we have our Skylab program, which might have needed a couple of Vs. But a couple of months back we redirected the program; we’re going to revert to the wet workshop concept, which can be launched by a Saturn IB. So as of now our remaining Saturn Vs — seven of them built or in production, SA-509 through SA-515 — are dedicated to Apollo Moon missions.”

“How many launches will you need for a Mars program?” Agronski asked.

Michaels blew out his cheeks. “Let’s say, in the next half decade, six Saturn V flights, and perhaps ten Saturn IBs. That should get Skylab well under way, and perhaps take us as far as the first Earth-orbit manned flights of the NERVA, before we get the new launcher. Joe, does that sound reasonable?”

Muldoon grunted. “Yeah. I guess. If you want to cut it to the bone; if you want to run the risk of another Apollo 1 fire.”

“Now, Joe…”

“Six Saturn Vs,” Agronski said. “And there are seven Moon flights left, Apollos 14 through 20.” His lips pulled tight into a thin grin.

So that’s it. Now I know the price, for Mars, for Paine’s job. It was as if Agronski was taking a much-delayed revenge. Agronski had always despised the manned Moon program, opposed it whenever he could. Agronski knows that this is the end of Apollo. Right here and now; right in this room.

Agronski said smugly, “Well. Of course I’m aware that there’s a lot of opposition to further Moon flights, even within NASA. The whole system’s too complex. ‘One of these days Apollo will kill somebody, if it hasn’t already killed Lovell and his crew’ — that’s what is being said, isn’t it? I imagine a curtailment wouldn’t be impossibly difficult to sell, even within NASA, now that the first landings have been achieved. And—”

Muldoon kicked back his chair and stood up. “So we’re cutting the Moon flights,” he said. He was tall, intimidating, his disgust majestic. “Just when we’ve gotten there. Jesus Christ, Fred. The later flights would have been the crown of the program. J-class missions, with advanced LMs, three-day stays on the surface, long-duration backpacks that would extend each moonwalk to up to seven hours, and electric cars. We’d have gone to sites of terrific wonder, and beauty, and scientific interest. We’ve even got a tentative plan to go to the far side of the Moon.”

Michaels stared at Muldoon. He prided himself on being a great off-the-ballot politician, but he found words deserting him, at that moment of all moments.

“I know, Joe. I know.”

Michaels could imagine the attacks he’d suffer from the scientists. It was even possible he wouldn’t be able to sell a deal like this to Paine, and to others in the Agency, such as George Mueller, the great space station proponent. And, looking farther ahead, he supposed there was a danger that a Mars program would keep NASA a single-issue Agency, everything subordinated to one goal, just as in the days of Apollo.

He tried to focus on Muldoon, to handle the situation in front of him.

“It may not be a case of canceling the flights, Joe. Maybe we could stretch out the schedule. Defer some of the flights until later—”

Muldoon faced Michaels; the knotty muscles bunched around his shoulders, under his shirt. “Don’t do this, Fred. Don’t kill the missions.”

From the corner of his eye Michaels could see Agronski’s face, his revulsion at that outburst of monomania.

He knows he’s won. He knows I’m going to have to do more than just defer; that I’m going to agree to make these sacrifices, to sell them within the Agency, then manage them through as Administrator, in order to give us all a future. And there is more pain, much more, to come.

Michaels felt as if all of history, past and present, were flowing through him, in this room, just now; and that whatever he decided might shape the destiny of worlds.

Sunday, June 21, 1970

When Jim Dana passed Richmond he turned the Corvette off Route 1 and onto the narrower State Highway 60, heading southeast. The towns were fewer, and smaller. And, at last, after Williamsburg, there seemed to be nothing but forests and marshland, and the occasional farmhouse.

It was a fresh June day, and soon Dana could taste salt and ozone from the coast; the sunlight was sharp on the bare arm he propped in the window frame. The landscape around him seemed to expand, to assume the huge, hollow dimensions of his childhood, echoing with seagull cries.

A little after noon he reached Hampton: his hometown, right at the tip of the peninsula. It was a fishing town, a backwater. He drove down streets so familiar it seemed his memories had reached out to reconstruct an external world. There were the same shabby boatyards, the crab boats lolling in the brackish tidal flow, the gulls: all the symbols of his childhood, still in place. It was as if twelve years had rolled off him, taking away all his achievements — Mary and the kids, the academy, his USAF service — leaving him a scraped-raw ten-year-old again.

Men had walked on the Moon. And the thinkers of the Langley research center, just a few miles to the north, had played a key role in putting them there, Dana’s father Gregory included. But it all seemed to have made damn little difference to Hampton.

Both his parents came out onto the porch to greet him. The house’s windows gleamed, the porch was swept until it shone, and the wind chimes glittered in the fresh blue daylight. But the little wooden-framed house had an air of shabbiness about it, and the downtown neighborhood seemed to have gotten rougher than ever. Dana felt a certain claustrophobia settling over him, like an old, ill-fitting coat.

His mother, Sylvia, was rounder, older, her face more tired and slack than he remembered, but she was lit up by a smile of such intensity that Dana felt obscurely guilty. And there came his father, Gregory Dana, in an old cardigan and with tie loosely knotted, wiping his hands on an oily rag. It was hard to see Gregory’s eyes through his dusty wire-rimmed spectacles — John Lennon glasses, Dana realized suddenly, and he suppressed a grin.

Gregory shook Dana’s hand. “So how’s the great astronaut coming along?”

Gregory had asked that question as long as Dana could remember. The difference now was it looked as if the question might soon have some bearing on the truth.

Lunch was a stiff affair. His parents had always been a little awkward with him, undemonstrative in their affections. So he talked about Mary, the children, how much they’d appreciated the presents they’d been sent for their recent birthdays: the Revell Saturn V rocket kit, which had been much too advanced for two-year-old Jake, the hand-knitted sweater for Maria.

When lunch was done, Gregory Dana tucked his tobacco pouch into the pocket of his shabby gray cardigan. “Well, Jimmy. How’s about a little brain-busting, back in the shop?”

Dana’s mother gave him a glistening nod. It was okay, she’d be fine.

“Sure, Dad.”

The workshop, so-called, was actually a small unused bedroom at the back of the house, filled with tools and books and bits of unfinished models, a blackboard coated with obscure, unreadable equations.

Dana cleared some loose sketches from a stool. His slacks were already coated with a patina of fine dust. Every surface was covered with scraps of paper, chewed-off pencils, shreds of tobacco, bits of discarded models. Gregory had always banned Sylvia from doing any cleaning in there. As Dana had grown little older he’d done a certain amount to keep down the level of detritus and mire; but since he’d left home it looked as if the shop hadn’t been cleaned out once.

His father began to bustle about the workshop, pulling together obscure bits and pieces from the clutter, sorting haphazardly. Gregory puffed at his pipe as he worked, quite content, and the rich, seductive scent of burning tobacco filled the room, evoking sharp memories in Dana.

On Sunday afternoons, Gregory had often taken Dana out to the meadows alongside Langley’s airfield, and there they would join other Langley engineers in flying their model airplanes and rockets — made not from kits, but in ramshackle home workshops just like Gregory’s. It had been terrific for Dana to be out there on a windblown afternoon, with those gangling, noisy eccentrics — the Brain Busters, they called themselves, isolated from the Hampton locals, who scorned them.

To Dana as a boy of eight or nine, to be able to work at Langley on airplanes and spaceships had seemed the best possible future in the world.

“So,” Gregory said without looking at him, “where’s the next assignment?”

“I’m not sure. It’s most likely going to be Edwards.” Down in the Mojave Desert, the USAF’s top flight test station.

“Will you fly there?”

“Maybe. Well, probably. But not the most advanced planes.”

“And,” Gregory said levelly, “is that likely to be your long-term posting?”

“Nothing is long-term, Dad. You know that.” It was a question he was asked every time he came home.

Gregory’s face was soft, round, a little jowly; his thin hair was plastered over a dome of skull. “It’s your mother. She gets concerned. I—”

“Dad,” Dana said, “I’m not a combat pilot. You shouldn’t worry about such things. I’m not going to Nam. I’m aiming for the space program, not Nam. I don’t know how many times I have to—”

“Can you get to be an astronaut, out of Edwards?”

Dana took a breath. “Sure. In fact, Edwards’s day might be coming,” he said. “The studies are coming in for the Space Shuttle. That will lean heavily on the old lifting-body research that was performed at Edwards. And there is talk or having the Shuttle land at Edwards. Gliding down from space, to land right on the old salt flats.”

Gregory grunted. “If the Shuttle goes ahead. The studies are also going ahead for Mars landing missions. And there we are looking at more big dumb rockets. More V-2s.”

Dana grinned. “Those Germans, Dad?”

“It’s the crudity of their approach that galls me. Von Braun’s designs have always looked the same. For thirty years! Immense, overpowered machines! Leaping to the stars, by the most direct route possible!”

“The Germans got a man on the Moon,” Dana said gently.

“Of course. But it’s not elegant.”

Not elegant. And that’s not the Langley Way.

Gregory was saying, “Even the basic thinking about interplanetary travel has hardly advanced since Jules Verne.”

Dana guffawed. “Oh, come on, Dad; that’s hardly fair.” The lunar voyagers of Jules Verne’s nineteenth-century science fiction had been fired at the Moon out of a huge cannon, situated in Florida. “Even Verne could have worked out that the gun’s acceleration would have creamed his travelers against the walls of their projectile.”

Gregory waved his pipe. “Oh, of course. But that’s just a detail. Look — Verne launched his travelers with an impulse: a shock, a blow, imparted by his cannon. After that brief moment, the spacecraft followed an elongated orbit about the Earth, without any means of directing itself.

“And just so with Apollo. Our great rockets, the Saturns of von Braun, work for only minutes, in a flight lasting days. Effectively they apply an impulse to the craft. Even the Mars studies follow the same principles. Here — look here.”

Gregory walked to the blackboard and wiped it clean with the sleeve of his sweater. He rummaged in his cardigan pocket until he dug out a fluff-covered piece of chalk, and he drew two concentric circles on the board. “Here are the orbits of Earth and Mars. Every object in the Solar System follows an orbit around the sun: ellipses, flattened circles, of one eccentricity or another.

“How are we to travel from Earth, on this inner track, to Mars, on the outer? We do not have the technology to fire our rockets for extended periods. We can only apply impulses, hopping from one elliptical path to another, as if jumping between moving streetcars. And so we must patch together our trajectory, to Mars and back, from fragments of ellipse. We kick and we coast; kick and coast. Like so…”

Dana watched as his father sketched, and thought about Langley.

The Samuel P. Langley Memorial Laboratory was the oldest aeronautical research center in the U.S., and it was father to all the rest. It had been founded during the First World War, conceived out of a fear that the land of the Wright brothers might start to fall behind the European belligerents in aviation. It had been a different world, a world in which the individualistic traditions of old America were still strong, and there was a great suspicion of falling into the emerging technocratic ways of the totalitarian powers of Europe.

Langley stayed poor, humble, and obscure, but it succeeded in keeping abreast of the latest technology. And back then — Gregory had told Jim — Hampton was a place where people still referred to the Civil War as “the late war.”

Gregory had often taken Jim around Langley. The research center was a cluster of dignified old buildings, with precise brickwork and extensive porches, that looked almost like a college campus. But, set among the neatly trimmed lawns and tree-shaded streets, there were exotic shapes: huge spheres, buildings from which protruded pipes twenty or thirty feet wide. They were Langley’s famous wind tunnels.

Jim Dana had come to identify the layout of Langley — the odd mixture of the neatly mundane and the exotic — with the geography of his father’s complex, secretive mind.

Hampton was so isolated that a lot of bright young aeronautical engineers didn’t want to come within a hundred miles of the place. Those who did come to Langley tended to be highly motivated, and not a little odd — like Gregory himself, Jim had come to realize ruefully. And the local Virginians hadn’t thought much of the “Nacka Nuts” — as they still called them — arriving in their midst. So the Langley engineers had kept themselves to themselves most of the time, on and off the job, and Langley had evolved into its own peculiar little world.

As Dana had grown and moved away, he’d become aware of the bigger world beyond Virginia.

“I don’t know why you stay here,” he’d once told his father. “All the real action in NASA is at other sites. Why don’t you ever think about moving away?” He couldn’t figure his father’s lack of ambition.

“Because things don’t get any better for people like me than they are here,” Gregory had replied. “The press don’t care much about Langley. Even the rest of NASA doesn’t care much. To the outsider, the place is just a set of gray buildings with gray people working slide rules and writing out long equations on blackboards. But if you’re in love with aeronautical research, it’s a kind of heaven — a unique and wonderful place.”

Jim knew that Langley had made immense contributions to the U.S.’s prowess in aeronautics and astronautics. It had gotten involved with the development of military aircraft during the Second World War and then in the programs which led to the first supersonic airplane, the Bell X-1. Langley staff had formed the task force which had been responsible for the Mercury program, and later it became involved with studies for the optimal shapes for the Gemini and Apollo ships…

Gregory never talked about his past. Dana knew he’d suffered during the war. Maybe, he thought, Langley was kind of a refuge, after all that. It buffered him from the pressures of the competitive aircraft industry, and on the other hand from NASA politics. It was as if the men of Langley — and they were men, almost exclusively — had made a kind of unconscious decision that their site and budgets and scope should remain small, even as the space program Langley had spawned had grown like Topsy.

Gregory was still only forty-one. But Dana could see, having grown a little more, that Gregory had found a place that suited him; and there he was going to stay, getting older and slower, charming everyone with the lingering traces of his French accent, working at his own pace inside that peaceful, isolated cocoon. Staying at Langley meant, though, that Gregory and Sylvia were more or less stuck, here in downtown Hampton, on Gregory’s plateaued-out salary; and here they’d probably have to stay, despite the inexorable decay of the neighborhood…

Gregory had drawn a half ellipse, which touched Earth’s orbit at one extreme, and reached out to kiss Mars’s orbit at the other. “Here we have a minimum-energy transfer orbit. It is called a Hohmann ellipse. Any other trajectory requires a greater expenditure of energy than this… To return to Earth, we must follow a similar half ellipse.” He moved Mars around perhaps two-thirds of its orbital path, and drew another kissing ellipse, this one out of Mars and inward toward the Earth. “The flight home takes just as long as the flight out, around 260 days. And in addition, we must wait all this time at Mars, until Earth and Mars have moved into the right configuration for us to return: for no fewer than 480 days. And so our mission time is a remarkable 977 days: more than two and a half years. Our longest spaceflight to date has been around two weeks; we surely can’t contemplate a mission of such magnitude.”

“And yet, Rockwell is studying just such a mission profile, for NASA,” Dana said. “Chemical technology only. And at Marshall they are looking at nuclear options.” Nuclear rockets, more powerful, could put ships into shallower, more direct ellipses. “The Marshall study is showing journey times of no more than 450 days, total…”

“More big rockets! Huh!”

Dana grinned. “Still not elegant enough for you, Dad? But where’s the room for elegance in all this? It seems we’re kind of constrained by the laws of celestial mechanics. It’s either Hohmann, or brute force.”

“Exactly. So the elegant thing to do is wait: wait until we’ve developed a smart engine, like an ion drive, which can really cut down the transit times. But that won’t come in my lifetime, and maybe not yours.”

“Hmm.” Dana took the chalk from his father and drew more concentric circles. “Of course, you didn’t show the full picture here. There are other planets in the system: Venus inside Earth, Jupiter beyond Mars. And the others.”

Gregory scowled. “What difference does that make?”

“I don’t know.” Dana dropped the fragment of chalk back into his father’s pocket. “You’re the specialist.”

“No, no, this is not my field.”

“Maybe there is some way to use the other planets, to get to Mars. There are NASA studies going on of a Grand Tour: using the gravity field of Jupiter and the other giant planets to accelerate a probe out to Neptune…”

“So what are you suggesting? That we fly to Mars via Jupiter? That’s ridiculous. Jupiter is three times as far from the sun as Mars is.”

This tone — hectoring, impatient — was all too familiar to Dana. He held his hands up, irritated. “I’m not suggesting anything, Dad. I’m just chewing the fat. The hell with it.”

But Gregory continued to stare at the board, his eyes invisible behind the layer of chalk dust on his glasses. Some remark of Dana’s had sent him off, like a Jules Verne impulse, on some new speculative trajectory of his own; Jim Dana might as well not have been there.

The hell with it, he thought. I have my own life now, my own concerns. I don’t have time for this anymore.

Maybe I never did.

Dana withdrew from the workshop, brushing the dust off his jacket, leaving his father to his thoughts.

He spent the rest of the afternoon with his mother. They sat on the swing seat back of the house, drinking homemade lemonade and talking in the warmth of the sun. In the distance, seagulls cried.

Gregory Dana carefully sketched interplanetary trajectories.

…At age fifteen, in the year 1944, Gregory Dana was no rocket engineer. In fact he was no more than garbage, just one of the thirty thousand French, Russians, Czechs, and Poles who toiled inside a carved-out mountain in Thuringia.

Everything was slow — even dressing was slow — and Dana was already hungry by the start of his work at 5 A.M. And yet he would receive nothing until his soup, at two in the afternoon.

And then would come the rush into the smoking mouth of the tunnel into the mountain, with the SS guards lashing out with their sticks and fists at the heads and shoulders of the worker herd which passed them. The tunnel was like hell itself, with prisoners made white with dust and laden with rubble, cement bags, girders, and boxes, and the corpses of the night being dragged by their feet from the sleep galleries.

Gregory Dana was prized by the supervisors for the capacity of his small hands for skilled work. So he was assigned to lighter, more complex tasks. Gradually he picked up something of the nature of the great machines on which he toiled and learned of the visions of the Reich’s military planners.

It was well-known among the workers within the Mittelwerk that Hitler had ordered the production of no less than twelve thousand of von Braun’s A-2 rockets — or rather, what the Germans called their V-2: V for Vergeltungswaffe, revenge weapon.

There was a plan to construct an immense dome at the Pas de Calais — sixty thousand tons of concrete — from which rockets would be fired off at England in batches of fourteen at once. And then there were the further schemes: of hurling rockets from submarine craft, of greater rockets which might bombard targets thousands of miles distant, and — the greatest dream of all! — of a huge station orbiting five thousand miles above the Earth and bearing a huge mirror capable of reflecting sunlight, so that cities would flash to smoke and oceans might boil.

Such visions!

…But the V-2 was the daily, extraordinary reality. That great, finned bullet-shape — no less than forty-seven feet long — was capable of carrying a warhead of more than two thousand pounds across two hundred miles! Its four tons of metal contained no less than twenty-two thousand components!

Dana came to love the V-2. It was magnificent, a machine from another world, from a bright future — and the true dream inherent in its lines, the dream of its designers, was obvious to Dana.

Even as it slowly killed him.

One morning, so early that the stars still shone and frost coated the ground, he saw the engineers from the research facility at Peenemьnde — Wernher von Braun, Hans Udet, Walter Riedel, and the rest, smartly uniformed young men, some not much older than Dana — looking up at the stars, and pointing, and talking softly.

Dana had glanced up, to see where they were looking. There was a star, bright, glowing steadily, with the faintest glimmer of red, like a ruby.

The “star” was, of course, the planet Mars, burning brightly.

Of course: that was the dream which motivated and sustained those young, clever Germans: that one day the disk of Mars would be lit up with cities built by men — men carried there by some unimaginable descendant of the V-2.

At fifteen, Gregory Dana had been able to understand how those young men from Peenemьnde were blinded by the dazzling beauty of their V-2 and what it represented. It was not simple callousness: yes, he could understand the duality of it, and he would comfort himself with plans for after the war. Perhaps, he would dream, he himself would pursue a career in building still greater rocket machines, and even father a son who would be the first to travel beyond the air to Mars or Venus.

How he envied the young engineers from Peenemьnde, who walked about the Mittelwerk in their smart uniforms; they seemed to find it an easy thing to brush past the stacks of corpses piled up for daily collection, the people gaunt as skeletons toiling around the great metal spaceships! The duality of it crushed Dana. Was such squalor and agony the inevitable price to be paid for the dream of spaceflight?

He tried to imagine how it would have been had he been born to become one of those smart young Germans in their SS uniforms.

When he immersed himself in such dreams, something of his own daily pain would fall from him.

But then the morning would come again.

In his workshop, in the sunny June of 1970, Gregory Dana labored at his blackboard, immersed in memories, and the resolving dream of spaceflight.

As Dana’s car was pulling away, his father came running from the house. He rested his hands on the Corvette’s window frame. There was chalk smeared across his forehead.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to get away, Dad,” Dana said apologetically. “I have to be at—”

“I think it works,” Gregory said breathlessly. “Of course it’s too early to be sure yet, but—”

“What works?”

“Venus. Not Jupiter — Venus. Kiss good-bye to Verne — we don’t need those immense nuclear rockets after all!”

“Dad, I—”

Sylvia linked Gregory’s arm. “Good-bye, dear. Drive safely.”

“I’ll call when I’m home, Mom.”

Dana looked back once, at the end of the block. Sylvia was waving, but his father had already gone back to his shop.

Thursday, July 9, 1970

It was nearly noon; from a burned blue sky the sunlight bore down on York’s bare head and shoulders.

Jorge Romero had led them all into a little valley that afforded a good view of the hills. He went bounding up to a twisted old ironwood tree. “This tree is your LM. You’ve just landed on the Moon. Now I want each of you to come stand over here and describe what you see.”

The three astronauts — Jones, Priest, Bleeker — stared back, all but anonymous in their baseball caps, T-shirts, and chromed sunglasses.

Romero’s question wasn’t hard, York knew. It was an interesting area: nonlunar, but with easily visible geologic relations among colorful rock units. But the stances and expressions of the astronauts betrayed a mixture of bafflement, embarrassment, and resentment.

Christ, York thought. This trip is going to be a disaster.

But Romero was windmilling his arms at them. “Come on! The one thing you’re always short of on the Moon is time. You — Charles. Come over here and start us off.”

With a kind of lazy grin at Bleeker, Chuck Jones went strolling over to Romero. He leaned against the tree, beside Romero, and began to summarize what he could see.

Romero was maybe fifty, York supposed, but he was vigorous and supple, apparently still full of energy; his sunburned nose stuck out from under his sunglasses, and a few strands of graying hair licked out from under his floppy hat. York had taken in a graduate lecture of Romero’s some years back. Working out of Flagstaff, Romero was a great field geologist as well as a geochemical analyst. He had immediately struck her as someone who could not fail to inspire the most reluctant of students — such as your average beer-swilling, wise-cracking pilot-astronaut hero, for instance.

So when Ben Priest had told her that Romero had agreed to give the Apollo 14 crews, prime and backup, some geologic training, and Ben had invited her along to help out, she’d been pleased.

“…No, no, no! What about the layers in that mountainside over there?”

“Look, Professor—”

“And you have missed the most important feature of the landscape altogether!”

Jones looked baffled; he was squat, solid, dark, and the thick primate hair on his hands and arms seemed to bristle with anger. “What ‘important feature,’ for Christ’s sake?”

“Look here.” Romero knelt and picked up a handful of fragments, of a white rock, from the floor of the valley. “Can you see? Such rocks are everywhere — are they not? — now that you observe.”

Jones had had enough. “This is a goddamn boot camp.” He kicked at one of Romero’s white rocks. “Ben, this is a fucking waste of time. Our program is compressed enough without this crap.”

“Come on, Chuck,” Adam Bleeker said easily. “You haven’t given it much of a chance.”

“Fuck it, and fuck you,” Jones said. “Listen up: we’re only the backup crew for Apollo 14. That’s the first thing; we probably won’t even make it to the Moon. Two. The target is the lunar Apennines, not goddamn California. So why am I here tripping myself up on a pile of Californian rocks? Three. I’m an aviator. I don’t see why I need to know a fucking thing about the geology of the goddamn Moon to do my job.”

“Look, Chuck—” York stepped forward.

The look he gave her then — of sheer, undiluted contempt — made her hesitate, just long enough for Romero to raise his hand.

“Now, now. Of course Mr. Jones here is absolutely right.”

Jones looked startled.

“It doesn’t matter how much you know about the San Gabriel Mountains. Of course not. It doesn’t really matter what you know about the Moon. What does matter to me, though, is that for you to make your mission into a full-up success, you’re going to have to learn how to observe.”

A full-up success. Ben Priest was suppressing a grin; York wondered if he had coached Romero to throw dumb-fighter-jock slang at Jones.

It caught Jones off-balance, anyhow. He bent and picked up a piece of the white rock. “Just tell me what the hell the relevance of this is.”

“It is called anorthosite,” Romero said evenly. “And it is our best guess that this was the primary component of the Moon’s primordial crust.”

“Really?” Adam Bleeker stepped forward and took the piece of rock from Jones — as if it was the only sample of anorthosite in the valley, York reflected wryly. “How so?”

Jones still glowered, but he was sidelined from the conversation, and Romero was back in control.

“When it first formed, the Moon was probably entirely molten. Then the outer hundred miles or so cooled to form a crust of anorthositic rocks — bright rocks, just like these. The main components of anorthosites, you see, like plagioclase, are light; heavier minerals, including those rich in iron and magnesium, sank into the body of the Moon. Now, the anorthosite — we think — dominates the brighter, older areas we see on the Moon’s face, while the dark maria are cooled seas of lava.”

Bleeker was grinning at the idea. “So the maria really were seas, once.”

York nodded. “It must have been a hell of a sight, back then: oceans the size of the Mediterranean brimming with red-hot, molten lava…”

She tailed off. Jones, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses, was watching her as she spoke, and cracking some joke to Ben Priest. Something crass, about the way she moved her eyebrows up and down when she was talking.

Ben looked uncomfortable, caught between a grin with his crew commander and embarrassment for his friend.

And York was silenced, just like that. She felt as if she was sixteen again, gawky, clumsy, infuriated.

With a fling of the arms, a grand actor’s gesture, Jorge Romero walked a few yards away. “Listen to me. I want you to leave this place as better observers, after today. But I also want you to leave with something else: a sense of the great drama of geology.” He glanced around. “When you look at a valley like this, you see a few dusty old rocks, perhaps. But I see immense processes which churn the surfaces of worlds, frozen in time as if by a flashbulb. I am sure Natalie has the same perception. It is only our mayfly life spans which restrict us all from seeing this.

“And now you may be going to the Moon! You must grasp this opportunity, and go there with open hearts and minds. Believe me when I say that I would give anything to exchange places with you.”

Chuck Jones stepped forward and spit a piece of gum onto the dusty ground. “Yeah, well, we won’t be going either unless Dave Scott and Jim Irwin drive their Lunar Roving Vehicle over a goddamn cliff on one of these dumb jaunts. They’ll be taking the last Apollo to the Moon, and not us. So I think you should cut the speeches, Prof, and let’s get on with the checklist, and get this over.”

He kicked a piece of ancient anorthosite out of his way and stalked out of the valley.

There should have been four astronauts on the field trip. But the good old guys seemed to have lost heart in what they saw as pointless training exercises, after the program cancellations Fred Michaels had announced earlier in the month. At least these three had turned up, but Jones’s attitude was turning the whole thing into a walk through Purgatory.

York was pretty uniformly appalled by the astronauts she’d met so far. Ben was clearly atypical. And she couldn’t believe guys like Jones; they were like relics from some grisly Flintstones version of the 1950s. To her, the whole bunch of them seemed utterly self-obsessed.

Well, screw them.

She and her friends at Berkeley had done little, over the last couple of months, but follow the fallout from the events at Kent State in May. Some of them were preparing their own demonstrations in support and sympathy. She was prepared to bet Chuck Jones — probably Bleeker, too, even Ben — hadn’t even heard of the Kent State trouble, the way it was tearing the country apart. They were so cocooned inside their precious programs.

She felt blind, unreasoning anger, almost a hatred of astronauts and the system that had produced them.

As he stumped over the landscape, Chuck Jones could barely see the rocks around him. He just kept on going over and over the events of the last few days.

Fred Michaels, associate administrator, had come to the Astronaut Office in Building 4 personally to wield the axe. He’d stood there in his waistcoat, plump as a seal, in front of a room full of sport shirts and crew cuts.

Michaels’s personal presence wasn’t much consolation for Chuck Jones.

Michaels was there to announce, tersely, that the bean counters were cutting all the remaining Moon flights — save only for one more, Apollo 14, which was due to fly early in 1971.

Jones couldn’t believe it; in a few words, Michaels was shredding his, Jones’s, one-and-only chance of a Moon flight.

There was some argument from the floor, but Michaels slapped down their questions. “It’s for the good of the program, damn it, the longer-term good of the Agency. We’ve done what we’ve had to do. And Tom Paine” — the NASA Administrator — “doesn’t like this any more than I do. Less, even. But we’ve had to accept this, to give us all a future. I’m sure most of you men understand that.”

Sure, Jones thought, you might understand it in your head. But, when you’ve just had the flight you’ve trained for over years taken away, you can’t take it in your fucking gut.

And the anguish in the Office had gotten all the greater when Deke Slayton stood up, his face like granite, to announce that it had been decided that this last mission, 14, should be upgraded to a J-class, a sophisticated scientific expedition. So 14 would get the advanced LM with the Lunar Rover, and the Service Module with orbital instrument pallet, which had been assigned to Apollo 15. And with 15’s equipment had come its landing site: a place called Hadley, in the foothills of the lunar Apennines.

But 15’s original crew — Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden — was already in intensive training for the Hadley site.

So, Deke said, he was standing down Alan Shepard and his crew, who had been the prime assignment for Apollo 14. Scott and his crew had been promoted to 14 instead, and they’d take their backup crew of Jones, Bleeker, and Priest with them. The date of the flight would be put back a few months, to give Boeing a chance to get the Rover ready, and let Grumman finish their LM upgrades. Deke said he’d expect Shepard’s crew to pitch in and support Scott’s training from thereon.

Jones saw Al Shepard walk out of that meeting, his face like a tombstone. You didn’t want to cross Al at the best of times, and it was obvious that despite his seniority he hadn’t been taken into Slayton’s confidence about the rearranged schedules before the meeting. Slayton was a good old buddy of Al’s, too, all the way back to the Mercury days. A hell of a way to handle things, Deke. Well, Jones expected Slayton would be getting a few choice words of advice from Shepard afterward.

Jones had his own points to make, though.

He left it a couple of hours, then he went storming into Slayton’s office.

“Damn it, Deke, I shouldn’t be backup. You ought to be making me commander of the prime crew for 14, in place of Scott.” After all he — Jones — had been one of the original batch of Mercury astronauts, and the fourth American in space. And he’d already started his training for his own later J-class mission besides.

He’d waited a hell of a long time for this, the crown of his career, and he wasn’t giving up his mission — to be busted down to hole-in-the-sky trash-can Skylab flights — without a fight.

But Deke had just waved him away. “You don’t have a case, Chuck. Listen: Al Shepard is also one of the original batch, in case you forgot that, and he’s been waiting for a lot of years for a second flight after that damn ear illness. And he was the first American in space; Al outranks you, Chuck. But I’m still standing him down in favor of Dave Scott. You’ve got to face it, Chuck. I don’t like this any more than you do, but Scott’s is the best prepared crew I have, for the one mission we’ve got left.”

“Yeah.” Of course Jones understood that. The mission was the thing; nobody within NASA wanted to do anything that carried the slightest risk of a foul-up.

Nobody, that is, save the astronauts who weren’t aboard the last Apollo out.

Understanding it didn’t stop him trying, though; and he had stayed in Slayton’s office for a long time, arguing hard…

There was another piece of the old rock, anorthosite or whatever shit it was, in his way. Jones kicked it aside and stalked on.

The afternoon was to be a simulated three-hour moonwalk. York had to make up the numbers, in the absence of enough astronauts. Jones teamed with Priest, and Bleeker paired off with York. Jorge Romero would stay behind in the truck and act as a capcom. The astronauts wore backpacks, radios, and cameras, and they followed traverses laid out on coarse maps designed to match the quality of low-resolution orbital photographs.

York and Bleeker stopped at the first sample point. There was a large, fractured boulder, shot through with anorthosite. Bleeker set up a gnomon and took a photograph of the rock face. The gnomon was a device for calibration, a little tripod with a color scale for the photography, and a free-hanging central rod to give local vertical. Bleeker hit the rock with his hammer, and broke off a piece the size of his fist. He placed the sample in a small Teflon bag and dropped it into the pack on York’s back. He’d donned lunar gloves to do the work; York could see how stiff and clumsy the gloves were.

“How was that?”

She grinned back at him. “Standard operating procedures, Adam; Jorge will be proud of you.”

They walked on.

Bleeker raised his face to the sun, a vague half smile on his face. Bleeker was pale, freckled — a northern boy — and he wore plenty of sunblock on his exposed skin, there in the California heat. York hadn’t spent any time alone with him before today. He seemed bland, unimaginative, rather empty. Ideal profile for a moonwalker, she thought wryly.

“I guess this training is very different from what you’ve been used to,” she said.

“Oh, you bet. Especially compared to my assignment before joining the Astronaut Office.”

“What was that?”

“Five-ten Squadron. That’s a fighter-bomber squadron, based in Virginia. Beautiful part of the country. Do you know it?”

“No…. What kind of bombs?”

He glanced at her, professional reserve coming down behind his eyes. “Special weapons.”

Oh. Nuclear.

“We were trained to deploy out of West Germany. We’d have flown low, a hundred feet, under the enemy’s radar.” He mimed the maneuver with a dusty hand. He pulled his hand so it soared straight upward. “The idea was to let go of the payload at just the right moment. The package would follow a two-mile arc to the target.” He grinned again, almost shyly. “While it was falling I’d be hightailing it out of there, as fast as I could go, before the detonation.”

“I’ll bet. It sounds risky.”

“All flying is risky,” he said levelly. “But the F100s we flew were beautiful ships…”

He waxed lyrical about the F100 for a while: the “Super Saber,” the world’s first fighter capable of sustained supersonic speed.

York tuned out.

The F100 had been produced by Rockwell: the company which had built Apollo, and was bidding to go to Mars. Given where the bulk of the money went, it was as if the space work of companies like Rockwell was a thin, glamorous patina on the surface of their real mother lode, military development.

“The part I didn’t enjoy so much was ejecting.”

“Ejecting?”

“It was a one-shot mission. The planes didn’t carry enough fuel to make it to their targets and back. We had to eject hundreds of miles short of home, let the planes crash, and then survive as best we could.”

“Christ,” York said. “Walking home, through a nuclear battlefield?”

“I was trained for it,” he said. “I was part of a global strategy. The weapons are new, so you need new strategies to use them. It’s all about mutual deterrence. ‘Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation…’ ”

She was startled by the quote. “That’s well expressed.”

“Winston Churchill.” His eyes were like blue windows.

He wasn’t unintelligent, she realized. Just — different, from her and the people she mixed with. A Cold Warrior. She shivered.

He glanced at his checklist. “Hey, look; we’ve missed our last stop.”

They turned and retraced their footsteps, reaching for fresh sample bags.

At the end of the afternoon, they met up back at the truck. Romero was still grinning, even joking with Jones, but York thought she could see a strain around Romero’s eyes, under the dust and sunblock.

On the truck radio, a commentator was quoting a speech by Walter Mondale in Congress, where NASA’s budget submission was being debated…. I believe it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such staggering cost as this Mars proposal when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our rivers and lakes are polluted, and when our cities and rural areas are dying. What are our values? What do we think is more important?…

York and Ben Priest got cups of coffee from a communal flask and walked off a little way. The sun was low and blasted directly into their eyes; it had lost little of its heat.

“I guess Romero is soaking up a lot of Chuck’s frustration at losing his flight,” York said.

“Naw. Chuck is always like this, when it comes to the ‘science,’ ” Priest said. He took a pull of his coffee. “It’s damaging.”

“Damaging is right. Can’t you exert some influence on him?”

He grinned at her. “I’m afraid you don’t know astronaut psychology, Natalie. Where these guys are concerned, the commander’s word is everything. He sets the tone for the crew, the whole mission. If the commander is somber and quiet, like Armstrong, then that’s the way the crew must be; if he wants to wear a beanie hat with a Teflon propeller on it and sing all the way to the Moon, like Pete Conrad, then we all have to wear our beanie hats and like it. That’s the way it is. Thank God Dave Scott is taking the science seriously. I think if Chuck was the prime commander, 14 might be the nadir of Apollo’s science program, not the zenith.”

Now she heard raised voices again. Romero was telling Jones how important it was to take samples from large boulders, if they could, because large rocks wouldn’t have moved far from where they were formed. And the context of a sample was just as important, to the good geologist, as the content of the rock -

Jones was telling Romero where he could stick his geological hammer.

This isn’t good enough, York fumed. We can’t keep sending these clowns to the Moon. Beanie hats, and kids’ jokes -

We can’t go on like this. If we’re really going to Mars, we need a new class of astronaut. A better breed.

Ben had continued to encourage her to apply, to join the program. Maybe I should. I know I could do a better job than a moron like Chuck Jones.

She went back to the truck and got more coffee. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 001/13:45:57

“You are go for TOI,” Capcom Bob Crippen said. “One minute thirty.”

“Thank you,” Gershon replied.

York pulled on her helmet and locked it to the neck of her pressure suit. She fumbled slightly, her fingers clumsy inside her stiff gloves. She buckled her canvas restraints around her.

Once more she felt cool, stale air wash over her face.

Ares, assembled, was a slim, fragile pencil of metal. It was a big, bright object, and it would be easily visible from Earth, as a naked-eye star passing over Cape Canaveral.

Stone said, “Go for ET hydrogen pressurization.”

“Confirm.”

York began closing switches that would raise the temperature inside the booster’s two great External Tanks. Liquid hydrogen would boil and evaporate, and the resulting gas would force liquid propellant through the feed pipes and into the combustion chambers of the MS-II.

York was a geologist, and that was why she was going to Mars. But a crew was only three people. So, if you expected to fly in space, you had to expect to study up on a lot of mundane crap that was necessary just to keep the spacecraft and booster working.

And Natalie York’s specialty was the External Tanks.

She knew enough to give expert papers on External Tanks to the industry. In fact, she had given a paper on them, God help her.

“One minute,” Gershon said.

York glanced at the window to her right. She was over the west Atlantic, and it was early morning down there; she could see boats on the Gulf, ribbons of land laid out like a cartoon map.

TOI was Transfer Orbit Injection: it meant departure from Earth orbit, the start of the long transit to Mars. That was a key moment in the mission — in her life, in fact.

But a day and a half here, orbiting Earth, wasn’t enough.

She had tried to fix some of the more memorable scenes of Earth in her head. Night over Africa: the fires of nomad encampments, spread across the desert. Thunderstorms over New Zealand: lightning like flashbulbs, exploding under cottony layers of cloud, discharges sparking each other in great chain reactions covering the country.

November 6, 1986. That was the day when Ares was due to return to Earth orbit. Mission day 539. Then I’ll be back; I’ll be seeing you again. A bright Sunday morning, with my sample crates full of bits of Mars.

“Ares, you are go for the burn,” Crippen said.

Stone set the “master arm” switch to ON, and York could see him checking over the rest of the instrument panel. Guidance control was set to primary; thrust control was on automatic; the craft was in the correct attitude; the engine gimbals were enabled, so that the nozzles could swivel like eyeballs in their sockets to direct the craft.

Eight seconds before ignition, York felt a push at her back. Ullage: small rockets firing around the base of the stack, settling the propellants before the main burn.

The commit code, “99:40,” started flashing up on the small computer screen before Stone. Are you sure you want to do this?

There was a small button marked PROCEED under the screen. Stone reached out a gloved finger, and pressed the button.

Gershon counted down: “Five. Four…”

York braced herself.

There was a distant rumble, carried through the stack, as the MS-II’s four huge engines ignited, three hundred feet away from her. The acceleration was low, almost gentle, pushing her into her couch with a soft pressure across her chest and limbs.

After thirty-seven hours of microgravity, she felt enormously heavy. But at least it was smooth: this time, the ride really did feel like the simulator. Later in the mission — when Ares had burned off its fuel, reducing its mass — the acceleration of the MS-II would be a lot tougher.

Gershon read out velocity increments. York could hear how his voice was masked, slightly, by the gum he chewed. Juicy Fruit. How can you chew gum in a space suit? Gershon wasn’t above sticking a wad to the inside of his faceplate, with his tongue, for retrieval later. The guy was gross.

“Ares, Houston, you’re looking good here,” Crippen said. “Right down the old center line.”

“Thank you,” Stone said. “Things look fine up here, too. Rates looking good.”

She looked out of her window. The Earth was falling away, visibly; it was a remarkable sight, as if the Earth was a special-effects prop, being hauled away from her window.

The sense of motion, of speed, was remarkable.

“How’s it going, York?” Stone asked drily.

She started. He’d caught her rubbernecking again. “Fine. Fine, Phil.”

She turned back to her station. She had her job to do, and she should get to it. It won’t fail because of me. The mantra of everyone involved with the Ares program.

She stole a glance at Stone. He was watching his own readouts, eyes fixed on the goal, apparently oblivious to her again. Stone was in utter control of himself. He always was.

She began to watch the status of the External Tanks in earnest, their brief biographies spelled out by the displays in front of her.

Floods of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, sixty-four thousand gallons a minute, pumped out of the tanks to be consumed in the engines of the MS-II. Already the pressure in the tanks was dropping away, she read; to keep the pressure up, there was a complicated backfeed system which took vaporized gases back from the engines into the tanks. The fuel system was surprisingly complicated, elaborate, a system of huge pipes, fountains of supercold liquid propellants cascading into combustion chambers as hot as the sun…

In the middle of the burn, Crippen said, “Okay, Ares, Houston, we’d like to try for the TV request.”

Stone and Gershon both stifled groans. York glanced up self-consciously at the little Westinghouse TV camera fixed to its bracket above her head.

Crippen said, “We would like five minutes’ worth of TV, and we would like an exterior shot, with a narrative if you can give us one.”

“Copy,” Stone said.

NASA was following a policy of televising the most dramatic moments of the mission. It was all to drum up interest and enthusiasm for Ares, to allow the great American public to see what they were paying for. A feed from the Command Module to the TV companies had been provided during the launch itself, for example. But York wasn’t so sure that had been a good idea. The launch probably looked too damn comfortable to a generation that had been brought up on the glamorous pyrotechnics of Star Wars.

Stone nodded to York, and she pushed a button on her console to start the camera.

“Okay,” said Stone. “Welcome to Ares. You’re looking at us in our Command Module here. We’re in the middle of our TOI maneuver. We see out of our windows the sun going by, and, of course, the Earth. We can give you the time of day in our system of mission elapsed time: thirty-seven hours, and fifty-one minutes, and umpteen seconds. Now maybe Ralph can show you what we see out of our windows.”

Stone nodded to York. She reached up to pull the TV camera off its mount. Because of the thrust she couldn’t just float it; she had to pass the camera to Gershon. It felt massy, awkward, in the gentle acceleration of the MS-II.

“Okay, Houston, here you go,” Gershon said. “Here you see the Earth, falling away beneath us.”

“Copy, Ares. Fine images.”

“It really is a fantastic sight,” Gershon said. “We’re somewhere over the Atlantic right now, and I can see the eastern seaboard, from Florida all the way up to Newfoundland, as clear as crystal. I don’t know if that’s visible in your images.”

“We see it.”

“And as I look to my right, I can see, just toward the limb of the planet, what must be Western Europe and Africa. I can see Spain, and the British Isles, all kind of foreshortened. The British Isles are definitely a greener color than the brownish green that we have in Spain. There’s a little haze over Spain, and what looks like cumulus clouds piled up over the south of England.”

“Copy. That matches the weather reports we have today.”

“Good to know I’m looking at the right planet, Houston…”

Stone said, “I have a comment about the point on the Earth where the sun’s rays reflect back toward us. In general the color of the ocean is uniform, a rich blue, except for that region — a circle, maybe an eighth of the Earth’s radius. In this circular area, the blue of the water turns to a grayish color and I’m sure that’s where the sun’s rays are being reflected back on up toward us.”

“Roger, Phil,” Crippen said. “That’s been observed before. It’s similar to a light shining on a bowling ball. You get this bright spot and the blue of the water then turns into a grayish color.”

“A bowling ball, yeah. Or maybe the top of Phil’s head.” Gershon laughed at his own joke.

It was true, York saw, twisting her head; there was a huge highlight on the blue surface of the ocean. Damn. The thing really is a sphere. Like a ball of steel.

“Thank you, Ares. How about an internal position now, please? Maybe you’d like to talk us through what the TOI is all about, today.”

Gershon passed the camera back along the cabin, and York fitted it to its pedestal, so it had a panoramic view of the three of them. She caught Stone’s face; he rolled his eyes, and pointed to her and the camera.

York was on.

She turned back to her displays and tried not to look up too often at the camera. Her throat felt tight, her face flushed inside her helmet; suddenly she could feel every hot crumple of her pressure suit. She keyed the press-to-talk switch on her headset cable. “Okay, Houston. This is our TOI maneuver: TOI, for Transfer Orbit Injection. Right now, the big engines on our main booster stage, the MS-II, are firing to push us out of Earth orbit. The MS-II is just a version of the second stage of the old Saturn V, modified to serve as an orbital injection vehicle. The S-IIs which took Apollo to the Moon had five J-2 engines. Well, we’ve got just four engines, upgrades called J-2S; the central one was removed to accommodate a lox tanker docking port. The MS-II has more insulation, to stop boiloff, and its own small maneuvering engines, and more docking ports at the front.

“I guess you can say we’re all pretty much relieved that the MS-II is working as well as it is; we’re going to rely on the MS-II not just to leave Earth but to slow us when we get to Mars, and to bring us out of Mars orbit when we’re ready to come home…”

She dried up. She was speaking too fast, waffling.

“Stand by,” Capcom Crippen said. “Okay, we’ve cut the live feed. Ares, you’ve got a pretty big audience: it was live in the U.S., it went live to Japan, Western Europe, and much of South America. Everybody reports good color, they appreciate the great show”

Gershon said, “Keep those cards and letters coming, folks.”

“Missing you already,” said Crippen.

Christ, what rubbish. No wonder they cut the feed.

She hadn’t meant to say any of that; she’d wanted to say something personal.

To say how it felt, to see the Earth fall away.

She’d always criticized earlier generations of astronauts for their lack of eloquence. Maybe it wasn’t so easy after all.

“ETs depleted,” York reported. “Ready for sep.”

“Roger,” Stone said.

More than two million pounds of fuel, a treasure that had taken five years to haul up to Earth orbit, had burned off in sixteen minutes.

“Three, two, one. Fire.”

Outside, pyrotechnics would be severing the securing bolts and frames at the top and bottom of each tank, and guillotines should be slicing across the wide feed pipes which had carried fuel from the tanks into the MS-II’s belly. York half expected to hear a rattle of bolts, muffled clangs, like the staging during the Saturn VB launch, but she heard and felt nothing.

“ET sep is good,” she said.

“Confirm ET sep,” said Crippen.

“Hey, how about that.” Gershon was looking out of his window. “I can see a tank.”

York twisted in her couch and turned to look. Silhouetted against the gray-blue of Earth, the discarded ET was a fat, cone-tipped cigar case, colored muddy brown and silver. On its flank she could see bits of lettering, and small patches of orange insulation amid the silver. Propellant dribbled from one of the severed feed pipes, a stream of crystals which glittered against the skin of Earth. The dribble made it look as if the ET had been wounded, like a great harpooned whale.

The tank rapidly receded from Ares, falling away and tumbling slowly.

Both tanks were moving quickly enough to have escaped Earth’s gravity well with Ares. The tanks would become independent satellites of the sun, lasting maybe for billions of years before falling into a planet’s gravity well.

She waved the tank good-bye, with a little flourish of her gloved fingers. Good luck, baby.

The engines finally died. She felt it as an easing away of acceleration — a gentle reduction of the subliminal noise and vibration from the remote engines.

“That’s it,” Stone said. “Shutdown. Everything looks nominal.”

Crippen called up: “You have a whole room of people down here who say you are looking good, Ares.”

Gershon whooped in reply. “It was one hell of a ride, Bob.”

Stone said drily, “From up here the burn was copacetic, Houston. Thank you.” He began to uncouple his helmet and gloves.

York watched the receding Earth fold over on itself, becoming a tight, compact ball in space, with the Atlantic Ocean thrust outward toward her, wrinkled, glistening.

The Ares cluster was only a couple of hundred miles farther from the Earth than in its low orbit. But it was traveling so fast that Earth’s gravity could no longer hold it. Four hundred miles a minute, York thought: so fast that she would cross the orbit of the Moon in just twelve hours.

Crippen said, “Is that music I hear in the background?”

“No,” Stone said. “Ralph is singing.”

Saturday, August 7, 1971

Bert Seger had some paperwork to finish up before he got to go home today. But when the news of the splashdown came in he walked out of his office, into the Control Center’s high corridor. He pulled a cigar out of the breast pocket of his jacket, his hand brushing the pink carnation that his wife had placed there for him, as always.

After a twelve-day flight, Apollo 14 had splashed down in the Pacific, four miles from the carrier Okinawa. NASA was going to be on a high for a while, Seger realized. Scott and Irwin had spent nineteen hours outside the LM, compared to under three hours for Armstrong and Muldoon, and they had traversed seventeen miles around the terrain at the foot of a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain. The flight controllers and astronauts had become pretty good at coordinating with the scientists in the back rooms where and how they should proceed. Almost every one of the J-class mission’s innovations — the upgraded LM, the Rover, the orbiting Service Module’s instrument pallet — had worked without a hitch.

Apollo 14 had been the biggest success since the first landing: even skeptics among the scientists were applauding the mission.

But it was done.

Seger’s footsteps echoed in the quiet. It was just two years since Apollo 11, he thought, and yet the first age of lunar exploration was already over. Damn it, Seger thought. We’ve just gotten good at this stuff, and now we have to stop.

He stopped at the door of the MOCR, Mission Control, and stepped in. The MOCR was deserted; everybody had already left for the splashdown party, some almighty gumbo affair the Mission Evaluation guys were holding over in Building 45.

He climbed the steps to the Flight Director’s console: the heart of a mission, even more so than the couch of the spacecraft commander himself. The big twenty-by-ten-foot screen at the front of the room was black, cold. The controllers’ consoles were littered with books, logs, checklists, headsets, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and half-smoked cigars. Some of the controllers had left behind the little Stars and Stripes they’d waved when the spacecraft splashed down.

Maybe, he thought, someday these consoles would be full of data streaming in from a manned spacecraft in orbit around Mars.

Standing here, thinking of it in those terms, it didn’t seem possible; but then, the lunar landing must have seemed just as impossible back in 1959, when NASA didn’t yet exist, and technicians had taken Mercury boilerplate capsules to the Cape on the backs of flatbed trucks, cushioned by mattresses.

It was Bert Seger’s job to make Mars happen.

Seger had been appointed, just a month ago, as a deputy director of the Office of Manned Spaceflight, one of NASA’s four big divisions. His job was running the embryonic Mars Program Office, here in Houston.

Fred Michaels had become the new Administrator, after Tom Paine’s resignation, and he seemed determined to pull the Agency out of the mess his predecessor had left behind. And he had appointed Bert Seger himself.

“Bert, the damn Mars thing is already coming apart at the seams, and we haven’t even gotten back the final Phase A definition reports yet. Look — I need someone to do for Mars what Joe Shea did for the Moon program, back in the early days. To pull the thing together. Or we’re never going to get it past Nixon.”

Seger understood. “You need a foreman,” he’d said. “And an enforcer.”

“Damn right I do. Will you do it?”

“Damn right I will.”

“Then here’s your first job,” Michaels had said. “Sort out the goddamn mission mode…”

The competing industry contractors, preparing their Phase A preliminary studies, were all working on different ways of getting to Mars, but the routes they were planning were all direct: Earth to Mars, and back to Earth. And there was some guy in Langley who was kicking up a fuss about another mode. Something to do with flying by Venus on the way.

“Some little jerk called Dana,” Michaels said. “Gregory Dana. He wrote direct to me. Can you believe it?” Dana had bypassed all the bureaucratic channels, and had gotten right up a lot of asses.

“Is he right? About Venus?”

“How in hell do I know? Could I care less, at this point? This Dana has them all — the Marshall guys, the rest of Langley, the contractors, the budget office, the damn Science Advisory Committee — buzzing like wasps in a jar. The Requests For Proposal for Phase B detailed definition studies are about to go out. This Dana is putting all of that under threat. Bert, I want you to sort it out for me…”

Seger didn’t doubt his own ability to resolve the mode issue. Nor did he doubt that he’d be able to fulfill his greater commission: to pull together the Mars program. If that was what the country decided it wanted to do.

Seger always prayed, intensely, for a few minutes at the start of the working day, or before tackling a major task. He felt that showed that his character had deep roots, strength, conviction. Standing there in the MOCR, he offered up a brief prayer.

He thought of that fragile little world 240,000 miles away, where three LM descent stages still sat, surrounded by footprints and scuffed-up lunar soil. But the footprints, and the flags, even the science — none of that was really the point, as far as Seger was concerned. Not even getting there ahead of the Russians. To his mind, what Apollo had proved was that men could indeed travel to places beyond the Earth, and live and work there.

The Moon hadn’t been as exotic as some had suspected. Some had predicted that the astronauts would sink into miles of dust. Or that the mountains of the Moon might be fragile, like huge gray meringues maybe, and would collapse in puffs of dust when the astronauts tried to walk there. Or maybe the moondust would catch fire, or explode, when the astronauts brought it into the LM. Or the astronauts would be afflicted by terrible diseases…

In the end, those hardheaded engineers who had stubbornly insisted that the Moon would be just like Arizona — and had designed the LM’s landing gear that way — had turned out to be right. That’s what I’ve gotta bear in mind, he thought. Mars will be just like Arizona, too.

To Seger, that was a magical thought, as if Earth and Moon and Mars were somehow unified, physically bridged, as they were bridged by the exploits of Americans.

He walked carefully down the steps, away from the Flight Director’s console, and latched the door behind him.

Monday, August 16, 1971

Gregory Dana arrived late, his Vu-graph foils and reports bundled under his arm; by the time he reached the conference room — right next to the office of von Braun himself — it was already full, and he had to creep to the back to find a space.

The room was on the tenth floor of Marshall’s headquarters building, colloquially known as the von Braun Hilton. Just about everybody who counted seemed to be here: senior staff from Marshall and Houston, a few managers from NASA Headquarters in Washington, and a lot of people from the contractors whose studies were being presented today.

At the front of the room, so remote from Dana that it was difficult to see his face, Bert Seger, head of the nascent Mars Program Office, was making his opening remarks.

They were all here to listen to the Mars mission mode Phase A studies final presentations. Their purpose today, Seger said, was to settle on a recommended mode for the development program. The group had to regard itself as in competition for resources and endorsement with the parallel studies going on into the reusable Space Shuttle; a similar heavyweight meeting had recently been held in Williamsburg to thrash out some of the conceptual issues involved in that program.

In his rapid Bronx delivery Seger gave them a little pep talk: about the need for open discussion, for receptivity, and for a willingness for all there to walk out of the room with a consensus behind whatever mode was favored. Dana could see a little crucifix glinting on Seger’s lapel, under a wilting pink carnation.

Dana doubted that anyone missed the subtext of what Seger was saying. Congress was approving the requested funding for NASA’s FY1972, but the big expenditure for whatever program was settled on was going to start in FY1973. And President Nixon still hadn’t made up his mind about the future of the space program. It was said he might even can manned spaceflight altogether, and look for some superscience stunt on Earth that might prove a better fit with the mood of the times.

Meanwhile there was open warfare going on between two of NASA’s centers, Houston and Marshall, over their preferred Mars modes.

It was just what NASA didn’t need, and all the old hands at NASA had been there before, too many times. Dana knew that Seger had already been trying to get around the conflict by encouraging informal contacts and discussions, and by having the Houston people help with the devising of Marshall’s presentation, and so forth. And it was obvious that Seger’s intention today was to lance that boil before sending the recommendations farther up the chain of command.

Seger flashed up a draft agenda. The meeting was going to run for the whole day. The two major modes — chemical and nuclear — would be presented first, followed by the other studies…

Dana found with dismay that his would be the last of the five major presentations. I’m coming at the nutty end, he realized. Even after the guys from General Dynamics with their ludicrous atomic-bomb motor. I’m being wheeled on as light relief. In the midst of the organizational infighting, he was going to be squeezed out; he had probably upset too many people by circumventing the hierarchy. He felt his stomach knot up with frustration and anxiety. Damn it, I know I’m right, that I have the way we should be going to Mars, right here in this folder. He pushed his spectacles up onto his nose, agitated.

First up was the nuclear rocket option.

Dana thought the timing was significant; that option, heavily pushed by Marshall, was, he had heard, the preferred option among the NASA brass.

The presentation was opened by a hairy young man called Mike Conlig. Conlig reported into Marshall, but he had worked for several years at the nuclear rocket development station in Nevada. “We’ve achieved twenty-eight starts of our XE-Prime liquid hydrogen prototype, running up in excess of fifty-five thousand pounds of thrust.” Conlig showed a photograph of an ungainly test rig, framed by dismal mountains. “Next we will proceed to the development of NERVA 1, which will develop seventy-five thousand pounds of thrust. Then the full NERVA 2 module will be developed, to support the Mars mission itself. NERVA 2 will be flight-tested in the mid 1970s, in fact launched into orbit as a new Saturn V third stage…”

Conlig spoke well and enthusiastically; Dana let the data rattle through his head.

Next a slim, cold-looking man, his blond hair speckled with gray, walked to the stage. “To achieve the necessary performance for interplanetary travel, we have evolved a ‘building block’ technology, in which separate NERVA propulsion modules will be launched into Earth orbit, and clustered to achieve different requirements…” The voice was shallow, a little clipped — overlaid by a disconcerting Alabama drawl, after all the years at Huntsville — but still underpinned by sharp Teutonic consonants.

This was Hans Udet: Udet, who had worked at Peenemьnde with von Braun and was one of von Braun’s senior people at Marshall.

Dana showed no reaction.

Dana had dealt with the Huntsville Germans many times, during his years at NASA. And he recognized, in the halls and offices of NASA, many faces from those ancient days in the Harz Mountains.

But he had never been recognized, in his turn — why should he be? — and he had never volunteered his identity. He had mentioned this antique link to no one. The Mittelwerk was buried deep in the past, and they had all moved on to new concerns.

He’d never even discussed that part of his past with Jim.

But he had never lost his sense of inferiority before the confident, clever Germans.

Udet put up foils showing two identical ships, to be assembled in Earth orbit. There would be four or six crew in each ship. The ships would be boosted out of orbit by disposable NERVA modules, and then docked nose to nose for the flight to Mars. Udet flashed up summaries of mission weights, flight durations, development costs, and other key parameters. “Our baseline study,” Udet said, “will allow us to launch to Mars in November 1981…”

It was a huge, grandiose scenario. Typical von Braun, Dana thought: unimaginative, brute force, overengineered.

Bert Seger opened the presentation up for questions. The hostile Houston contingent put in a lot of detailed probing about the untried nuclear technology: the difficulties of clustering the nuclear modules, progress on the advanced cooling techniques needed. There were also questions about the significance of the treaties banning atmospheric testing of nuclear technology; it seemed to Dana that those issues were still unresolved.

Seger let the questions run on for some time — well over the option’s allotted slot — and then orchestrated a round of applause. All of it reinforced Dana’s view that this was the mode preferred within NASA, unofficially, and Seger had a brief to make sure that it was fully understood and accepted.

The second major presentation was of an all-chemical-engine mode. It was prepared by Rockwell, and championed by Houston staff. Rockwell was, incidentally, the favorite to be selected as lead contractor for the Space Shuttle.

The mission profile, Dana soon saw, was close to the classic minimum-energy Hohmann transfer profile he’d sketched out to Jim, that day in the shop at the back of his house in Hampton.

The chemical mode had some advantages. The development program would be comparatively cheap, since the hardware would be based on incremental upgrades of Saturn technology, for example the use of an enhanced Saturn second stage to serve as an orbital injection booster.

But the nuclear camp from Marshall, led by Udet and Conlig, didn’t find it hard to pick holes in the case. Compared to the NERVA profile, twice as much mass would have to be hurled into Earth orbit, for a mission twice the length. Chemical technology couldn’t manage much better than that. Not without imagination, anyway, Dana thought; not if you stick to direct transfer…

Dana knew that most of the points raised in the discussion were a repeat of the sterile arguments which had plagued NASA for some months.

At the end of the question session Seger didn’t call for any applause.

Lunch turned out to be steak and chicken served buffet style. The debate continued during the meal, with delegates making points by jabbing bits of steak or fried potato at each other.

Dana spotted the sleek, handsome figure of Wernher von Braun himself. He was talking to an astronaut: Joe Muldoon, a moonwalker, tall, erect, his thinning, gray-blond hair clipped to military neatness.

Few people spoke to the obscure little man from Langley with his peculiar presentation. Venus swing-by modes? What the hell is that about? That suited Dana. He left the lunch early and returned to his seat in the hall; he didn’t much like steak anyway.

The conference looked at two more options, before Dana’s pitch. Both of those were more ambitious, technically, than either the main chemical or nuclear options reviewed earlier; Dana suspected they had been explored just to make sure nothing obvious was missed before the primary mode was selected.

A representative of McDonnell presented a so-called nuclear electric option, together with representatives of NASA and ARPA, the government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Plasma — a charged gas — would be accelerated electrodynamically out of a rocket nozzle. A plasma rocket’s thrust was tiny, but would last for months; plasma rockets would move spaceflight techniques away, at last, from the antique Jules Verne kick-and-coast model. The technology was unproven, but there had been some trials; an electric rocket had been operated at high altitude as long ago as 1964.

The McDonnell man flashed up a conceptual design for a manned nuclear-electric ship. It was a staggering arrangement, like a three-armed windmill. Two of the arms — each fifty yards long — contained reactors, and the third the habitable section. The rockets were mounted at the hub of the rotor, and the whole thing was designed to spin about the hub to provide artificial gravity. It would be, Dana thought, like a great metal snowflake, spinning toward Mars. It was a terrific concept, and utterly impractical.

Next up was a project manager from General Dynamics. He got to his feet with a broad grin gleaming from out of a California tan. “I’ve got to tell you,” he told the audience deadpan, “that I can beat you NERVA folks hands-down. With two million pounds in Earth orbit I can get to Mars and back in just 250 days — not much more than half your time — and taking no less than twenty guys. Gentlemen, I give you Project Putt-Putt.”

The idea was to throw one-kiloton nuclear bombs out of the back of the spacecraft — thirty devices every second — and set them off, a thousand feet behind the ship. The shocks would be absorbed through water-cooled springs, and the ship would be driven forward. “Like setting off firecrackers behind a tin can. Am I right?”

The concept seemed ridiculous, but General Dynamics had done some preliminary studies, called “Project Orion,” in the early 1960s, and the presenter was able to show photographs of a small flight-test model which had used high explosives to hurl itself a few hundred feet into the air.

The technical problems were all around the high temperature flux on the rocket’s back end structure, which would have to radiate away excess heat between explosions. And of course the system had one major drawback, the General Dynamics man said, and that was the radioactive exhaust. But that hadn’t seemed such an obstacle back in 1960, when the first Orion studies had been initiated. Then, it was thought that the unscrupulous Soviets might use this quick-and-dirty method to short-cut to space, so we had to look at it, too.

The General Dynamics man joshed and wisecracked his way through his talk. When he sat down he got the biggest hand of the day.

Dana felt himself shrink into his seat. How the hell do I follow that?

When he got to the podium Dana shuffled with his notes and foils, trying to avoid looking out over the sea of sleek suits before him. There was a spotlight on him; it seemed to impale him. It was already four-thirty, and after the General Dynamics pitch the delegates had lost concentration; they were still laughing, talking.

Dana began to read from his notes. “Manned Mars stopover missions of duration twelve to twenty-four months are characterized by Earth return velocities of up to seventy thousand feet per second, over the cycle of mission opportunities. A promising mode for reducing Earth entry velocities to forty to fifty thousand feet per second, without increasing spacecraft gross weight, is the swing-by through the gravitational field of Venus. Studies indicate that this technique can be applied to all Mars mission opportunities, and in one-third of them, the propulsion requirements actually can be reduced below minimum direct-mode requirements…”

There was a ripple of reaction in the audience, a restless shifting. Dana plowed on. He felt sweat start over his brow, around his collar.

He hurried through the idea of gravity assist. He tried to emphasize the history and intellectual weight of the idea, showing that his own computations had built on the work of others. “The concept within NASA of using a Venus swing-by to reach Mars dates back to Hollister and Sohn, working independently, who published in 1963 and 1964. This was further elaborated by Sohn, and by Deerwester, who presented exhaustive results graphically in a format compatible with the direct flight curves in the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook…”

It was a little like a game of interplanetary pool, he said. A spacecraft would dive in so close to a planet that its path would be altered by that world’s gravitational field. In the swing-by — the bounce off the planet — the spacecraft would extract energy from the planet’s revolution around the sun, and so speed up; in exchange, the planet’s year would be minutely changed.

In practical terms, bouncing off a planet’s gravity well was like enjoying the benefit of an additional rocket stage at no extra cost, if your navigation was good enough.

“We have already studied the Mariner Mercury mission, which would have swung by Venus en route to Mercury. A direct journey would have been possible, using, for example, a Titan IIIC booster; but the gravity assist would have allowed the use of the cheaper Atlas-Centaur launch system…”

“Yeah,” a voice called from the audience, “but Mariner Mercury got canned. And there were no men on it anyhow!”

Laughter.

Dana pressed on, brushing the sweat from his eyes. There were two ways Venus could be used to get to Mars, he said. The spacecraft could swing by Venus outbound, and use Venus’s gravity to accelerate it toward Mars. Or Venus could be used to decelerate the craft, on its way back to Earth.

“First estimates show a mass in Earth orbit of two million pounds would be required for a mission duration of 640 days.” Same weight as nuclear; two-thirds the trip time of chemical. “Thus a mission profile close to optimal is delivered, without the need for ambitious new technologies, and hence significantly reduced development costs compared to other candidate modes…”

And it’s elegant. Don’t you see that? No brute force here: no huge nuclear V-2s. Just proven technology, and elegance, and style. A little thought, gentlemen.

“In conclusion, it has been shown that the Venus swing-by mode is generally applicable to all of the Mars flyby and stopover round-trip launch opportunities, with very favorable benefits.”

Dana stepped back from the podium, retreating from the glare of the light. He was numbed, a little giddy, unable to feel his hands or face.

Seger thanked him, then opened up for questions; with a glance at his watch he signaled that they should be brief.

“…What about guidance and navigation? Don’t you realize that you’re now talking about devising a mission profile with possibly four planetary encounters? — Mars, Venus maybe twice, and Earth on return? And at each encounter the accuracy of positioning will have to be of the order of a few hundred miles, after traveling tens of millions. How can we navigate so accurately? Why, we haven’t yet proved we can manage a single swing-by on such a scale.”

“But we will,” Dana insisted. “Remember, NASA committed to the lunar-orbit rendezvous mode for Apollo — which required a rendezvous a quarter of a million miles from home — before a single space rendezvous had been demonstrated.”

There was some muttering at that. Hardly a valid comparison.

“What about the design constraints? Near Venus the sunlight is four times hotter than at Mars, so you’ll be sacrificing payload space for a cooling system that will be deadweight at Mars. And there’ll be problems with the increased level of radiation coming from the sun…”

Dana tried to answer — I’ve incorporated spacecraft design modifications into my weights analysis, and… But he was all but drowned out by the noise of an audience which had little interest in him.

Then Hans Udet stood up, and a hush gathered. Udet said precisely, “On what basis have you arrived at your figures? I am aware of the preliminary analyses of the complicated mission classes you describe. I am aware of no detailed analyses which show the savings you claim.”

Dana began to stammer out a reply. But our understanding of spacecraft systems has advanced since those early studies, and with the figures I have compiled, we can now show that -

“These results are false.” Udet glanced around at the audience — tall, aristocratic, in control, still charming. “This is obvious. The figures we are shown are based on unstated suppositions. The speaker doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It may be incompetence, or malice, whatever. We should not expend further energy on this red herring.” He sat down, his back ramrod-straight.

There was an uncomfortable stirring in the audience, some nervous laughter.

Bert Seger got to his feet, quickly thanked Dana, and turned away from him.

Udet’s words were incredible to Dana. Such accusations should not be made, in such fora as these, or beyond. It is — uncivilized. Somehow, though, now that it had happened, there seemed a certain inevitability about it all. Of course, I have been rejected. But this isn’t about logic, or engineering, or science. It was because he’d gone outside the hierarchy, the formal channels. This really is about power. Infighting. It’s possible Udet is even sincere. Maybe he really does think I’ve cooked up these numbers, that I’m just infighting for Langley.

Dana gathered together his foils, clumsily, and got off the stage.

The lights went up, and the conference room was quiet. Bert Seger got to his feet and began stalking along the stage, eyeballing the delegates as if challenging them, his hands on his hips.

“I’ve heard a lot of good things today about the nuclear mode,” he said. “And I’ve heard nothing else today, frankly, that makes a hell of a lot of sense to me in comparison.” He glared at the audience. “Now, I have to say that I think we can do this. I think we do indeed have a ‘Kennedy option’ to present to the President. And I’d like to hear now what son of a bitch thinks nuclear isn’t the right thing to do.”

There was a little more to and fro. Wernher von Braun got to his feet to make a brief statement commending the nuclear option. Then one of the chemical option presenters from Houston got up, and graciously conceded defeat to the guys from Marshall.

Seger closed the meeting. “Gentlemen, I want to thank you here for all the work you’ve done. I think we’ve found a way we can work together and do this thing. I think we’ve worked out how we’re going to Mars.”

He started to clap, then; and the hall joined in, applauding themselves for their achievement.

All but Dana. At least he could resist that much.

The Germans had won again.

Seger might be right. Perhaps we’ve made a historic decision that will, indeed, take men to Mars within my lifetime. But it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.

Anyhow, he thought, it’s still possible this huge mission will never be funded. Perhaps Nixon will choose to build the Shuttle. Or nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

The applause went on, until the delegates started to cheer themselves.

Future of NASA

Present tentative plans call for major reductions or changes in NASA by sharply reducing the balance of the manned space program and many remaining NASA programs.

I believe this would be a mistake.

1) The real reason for reductions in the NASA budget is that NASA is entirely in the 28 percent of the budget that is controllable. In short, we cut because it is cuttable, not because it is doing a bad job or an unnecessary one.

2) We are being driven, by the uncontrollable items, to spend more and more on programs that offer no real hope for the future: welfare, interest on national debt, Medicare, etc. Essentially they are programs not of our choice, designed to repair mistakes of the past.

3) There is real merit to the future of NASA and to its proposed programs. Skylab and NERVA particularly offer the opportunity, among other things, to secure substantial scientific fallout for the civilian economy at the same time that large numbers of valuable (and hard to employ elsewhere) scientists and technicians are kept at work on projects that increase our knowledge of space. It is very difficult to reassemble the NASA teams should it be decided later, after major stoppages, to restart some of the long-range programs.

4) In response to our pressure NASA has reduced its requested development budget for the next several fiscals by half.

5) Apollo 14 was very successful from all points of view. Most important is the fact that it gave the American people a much-needed lift in spirit (and the people of the world an equally needed look at American superiority). Announcement now that we were canceling or severely diminishing the US manned space program would have a very bad effect. It would be confirming in some respects a belief that I fear is gaining credence at home and abroad, that our best years are behind us, that we are turning inward, reducing our defense commitments, and voluntarily starting to give up our superpower status, and our desire to maintain world superiority.

America should be able to afford something besides increased welfare…

Handwritten addendum: I agree with Cap. RMN.

Source: Caspar W. Weinberger, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Memorandum to the President, 27 August 1971. White House, Richard M. Nixon, President, 1968-1971 File, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

Wednesday, December 1, 1971

Ben Priest swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista, heading past the Rose Bowl. His hired car was an antique Dodge, and its heating was malfunctioning; outside it was a cold December day, and York alternately baked and shivered.

“This seems a long way out of Pasadena,” she remarked.

He grinned. “Yeah. Well, they used to test rocket engines here. Everyone thought the place would be dangerous, so they built it way the hell out there, in the arroyo. And then they built a sprawling, expensive suburb all around it.”

York saw that office buildings filled the arroyo; some of them were drab boxes, but there was also an imposing tower of steel and glass.

There were cars parked for a quarter of a mile along the road leading to JPL, and the street outside the press center was nearly blocked by TV vans.

There was a guard at the JPL entrance; he waved them into a parking lot. It seemed to York that pretty much every space was taken.

They got inside quickly; the cold seemed to be deepening.

Priest guided her through corridors littered with computer cards and printouts. Close-up photographs of the Moon’s surface were casually framed and stuck on the walls. JPL seemed a strange hybrid; this might have been any office complex anywhere, York supposed, except that people were younger than the average — and not one of them wore a suit, or a tie — and there was a lot of hair about, bristling above yellow Smile buttons. Some of the women even wore hot pants. But at the same time the place didn’t have the ragged, laid-back feel of a college; there was too much urgency for that. There was a sense that things happened there.

She remarked on how full the parking lot had been.

Priest said, “You should have been here a week ago, when the first pictures began coming through from Mars. You couldn’t move for press guys, and VIPs, and politicos, and science-fiction writers — anybody and everybody who could scrounge a pass.” He laughed. “You should have seen their faces, when all we got back was a picture of the dust.”

It was odd to be with Priest again. A blast from the past. She hadn’t seen him for more than a year, and she’d been surprised when he’d come through on his old promise to take her there to see the results from Mars come in. He hadn’t changed, as far as she could see: slim, dedicated to his job, easygoing, intelligent.

Fun to be with. Comfortable. Married.

She felt vaguely restless.

She was basically drifting, doing some postdoc work here and there. She was looking for a focus, a topic, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

And she was still in her mess of a relationship with Mike Conlig, who was so immersed in his NERVA work he barely seemed aware she was there, when she got any time out of him at all. NERVA was the center of Mike’s life; a kind of monomaniacal obsessive seemed to be emerging from inside the gentler, more intellectual outer shell that had first attracted her.

She got the impression that the space program was full of people like that.

The question for York was, did she really want to be a bit-part player in the story of someone else’s goals?

They reached the communications center. The walls were coated with TV screens, all filled with grainy, obscure black-and-white images. Hard copies littered tables, and ribbons of computer printouts trailed across the tables and floor and walls. The workers there — mostly men, mostly shirtsleeved, uniformly hairy — pored over the images and printouts, their security badges dangling from their top pockets. There were cups of stale coffee all over the tables, some perched close to precious printouts, and in one corner she spotted a half-eaten doughnut, the jelly still oozing from its center.

There was a smell, faint but distinctive, of body odor.

Priest shrugged, looking a little sheepish. “It’s always pretty much like this, Natalie. Kind of slow chaos. This is the heart of the SFOF, what they call the Space Flight Operations Facility. The results from Mariner are coming in all the time; the guys work in shifts here. And it’s adaptive; the results from one orbit may be used to influence what they do on the next. There isn’t a lot of time for housekeeping.”

“You don’t need to apologize. You ought to see the average geology field site after a couple of days.”

There was a model of the Mariner 9 spacecraft itself, a couple of feet across, hanging in one corner of the room. She slowed, looking up at it. Four silvery solar panels unfolded like sails from a central octagonal box. A rocket engine with propellant tanks was mounted on top of the box, and underneath sprouted a cluster of instruments. York could recognize the tiny lenses of TV cameras, glinting in the fluorescent light. The craft was comparatively crude, compared to the heavy Viking landers which were already under development for the 1975 launch opportunity. But still, Mariner 9 was quite beautiful, like a fine watch.

York retained lingering suspicions about the value of spaceflight in terms of its science. As a kid she’d been intrigued, even startled, by the Mariner 4 pictures. But that had worn off, and she hadn’t followed the progress of later probes closely. But still, this beautiful, delicate thing had been assembled by humans — made by hands like hers — and then thrown across interplanetary distances, to orbit Mars itself: it had become the first man-made object to orbit another planet.

It was quite a thought.

Priest was talking about the dust storm. “It covered the whole damn planet, Natalie. When we arrived we couldn’t see a thing. They did some measurements at the limb of the planet, and found the dust reaching an altitude of fifty miles. It seems impossible, but it’s true. Anyhow, the storm did us one favor.”

“How’s that?”

“All of a sudden, funnily enough, everybody got very excited about looking at the moons. Listen, you want me to get you a coffee? A doughnut, maybe?”

“No thanks, Ben.”

He led her through more corridors, to a smaller laboratory. More shirtsleeves, working at terminals and screens.

“Image Processing,” Priest said. He took her to an unoccupied monitor, and they sat on rickety fold-up chairs. He began tapping at the keypad. “They got the first reasonably clear image of Phobos on revolution thirty-one — just last night. I stayed up until the small hours watching them process the data…” An image began to build up on the video monitor, line by line, working from top to bottom. “Mariner records its pictures on magnetic tape, and sends them back to Earth in pretty much the way a newsprint wire photo is transmitted. This is exactly how the first image emerged, for the team last night.”

She smiled. “What’s this, Ben? Why not just show me the finished picture? More NASA showmanship?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You’re too cynical. Or would be, if I thought you meant it.”

Impulsively she touched his hand. “I’m sorry, Ben.” His skin was warm and leathery.

He grinned at her easily.

Today she was finding Ben, with his intelligence and enthusiasm for the wonderful Mars project, unreasonably attractive. Damn it. I’m not supposed to feel like this.

She concentrated on the pictures.

The upper few lines of the image had been black — just empty space. But then she saw some detail, a curve of gray and white, building up line by line. At first she thought she was seeing the limb of a sphere, but the shape soon looked much too irregular for that.

Phobos turned out to be a rough ellipse, half in shadow, with a battered, irregular edge. It looked much more like York’s preconception of an asteroid than any moon. There were craters everywhere, huge and ancient, some so deep that the impacts that caused them must have come close to splitting the battered little moon in half.

“Natalie, this is more or less the face of Phobos, about half the size of our full Moon, that you would see if you were standing on Mars right now.”

Phobos looked like a diseased potato. Priest was staring at the picture, and its gray and black reflected in his eyes. “This is history, Natalie. Think about it: mine were among the first human eyes ever to see Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. I wanted to show you this, kind of share it with you, the way I saw it.”

She was moved to touch him again, but she resisted the impulse. “Show me Mars, Ben.”

“Sure.”

After a few more minutes Priest had retrieved images of the surface of the planet itself. But the dust storm was still continuing. There was only one place away from the poles where any detail was visible: an area called Tharsis, close to the Martian equator. Here the pictures showed four dark, irregular spots, roughly circular, three in a line running at an angle to the equator, and the fourth a little way away to the west.

She asked, “What the hell can these be?”

“Who knows? I guess we’ll figure it out when the storm clears. The lab staffers are calling them ‘Carl’s Marks.’ After Sagan, see—”

The shapes in the images intrigued her; they were familiar, somehow. If only she could see just a little more… “You say this region’s called Tharsis. Do we know anything else about it?”

“Actually, yes. You’re the geologist, Natalie. You ought to know.”

“Just tell me, asshole.”

“There have been radar studies of Mars since the mid-sixties. This Tharsis region — which is just a bright splotch seen from Earth — looks as if it’s the highest plateau on the planet.”

“Really? How high?”

He shrugged. “Ten or twenty miles above the mean datum. We can’t say for sure. Mean datum — you understand there’s no ocean on Mars, so no convenient sea level to—”

“You must have some better-resolution images than these. It’s the only visible spot on the planet, for Christ’s sake. Somebody must have pointed the cameras again.”

Priest began to work the keyboard. He found a couple of images which showed her some more detail. She stared at the screen, pressing close to the glass.

“You’re telling me these features are stable? That they aren’t, uh, whirlwinds in the dust storm or somesuch?”

“No way. They’ve lasted since Mariner got to Mars, a couple of weeks ago. We’re undoubtedly looking at some kind of surface feature, here.”

She could see circular markings within each spot. And there was some kind of scalloping. They almost look like volcanic caldera. The mouths of volcanoes.

But why should these features, of all of Mars, be showing up at all? Because they’re in Tharsis. And Tharsis is the highest region on Mars. And why these particular features? Because they are the highest points in Tharsis — therefore the highest points on the planet…

“My God,” she whispered.

“Natalie? What is it?”

Those spots had to be volcanoes, sitting on top of some kind of vast shield system. Big enough to dwarf anything on Earth. Everest was only five miles high; those babies must be fifteen miles at least. So high they were poking above the dust storms; so high they were above the bulk of the atmosphere itself.

“Natalie? Are you okay?”

York couldn’t believe her eyes. She had Priest call up image after image.

At least, she reflected later, the mystery of the Martian geology had taken her mind off Priest.

Saturday, December 11, 1971

After Fred Michaels hung up, Tim Josephson sat in his office, a glass of whiskey in his hand.

The decision was made.

He supposed he ought to be feeling triumph. Exultation. We’ve got what we wanted, by God. Another huge boondoggle, a program that ought to keep thousands of NASA employees gainfully employed for a decade or more.

But the truth was, he felt too beat-up to care.

He was having a little trouble focusing his eyes. He’d been chained to his desk and phone all day, working in support of Fred Michaels’s machinations. And there were still a hundred and one things to be finished up. But, he told himself, there was nothing that wouldn’t keep until the next day.

So he took his shoes off and got his feet up on his desk, and he started dictating into a pocket tape recorder.

The last few months had given Josephson, working as a close aide of Fred Michaels, a startling insight into the way major national decisions were made: at the highest level in the land, with at stake national prestige, tens of billions of dollars spread across many years, and hundreds of high-profile careers in politics, industry, the military. Someday he was going to write a book about all of it. Management in the Space Age, maybe.

The decision about America’s future in space had turned out to be extraordinarily painful.

It had been clear to Josephson from the beginning that Nixon wanted to spend as little as possible on space.

The fact was, Nixon — belying his image — had brought a pretty liberal domestic agenda to the White House; in the midst of a debilitating war, he wanted to free up money to pay for expanded social entitlement programs, and wage and price controls.

Space was one place that money could come from. But space was a tough lobby to fight.

So, soon after coming into office, Nixon had allowed Congress to reorganize the standing space committees out of existence, so that space was the purview of the Senate Commerce and House Science and Technology subcommittees. Losing its special interface to Congress, NASA was in danger of being emasculated, losing its heroic status, becoming just another spending department fighting for funds. To most people involved in the space program, even within NASA, such changes were all but invisible; but to an insider like Josephson — or Michaels — they were dramatic, a potent signifier of Nixon’s real determination to down-grade the profile of space.

But then the White House had come up against the aerospace industry.

Aerospace was ailing, as ever. In fact technological progress was making life even tougher. New systems were either not deployed at all or had short production runs: if it works, it’s obsolete Aerospace firms had to bet the farm every time they accepted a contract.

But obviously the government needed a healthy aerospace industry. So ways had to be found to feed the industry in slack times: to spread wealth, and to subsidize research. The civilian space program was perfect for that purpose. It always had been.

So, from the start of 1971, Fred Michaels had started to put it about that the aerospace industry might not be able to survive another year of diminished space work; he spoke particularly to congressmen from states like California, Texas, and Florida, where aerospace depression was an acute electoral issue. And he quietly encouraged the contractors contributing to the various program studies to talk up their estimates of the employment the various options would stimulate. It was all designed to keep the pressure on the White House. Nineteen seventy-two is an election year. We need a space program to keep the aerospace guys in work… But what’s that program going to he?

Josephson was mildly shocked at how quickly the scientific and exploratory aspects of spaceflight were discarded as factors in shaping the new program. Nobody with any clout cared about going to Mars, or anywhere else, for the science. And nobody argued — he was more surprised to observe — on the basis of the benefits of space spin-offs. After all, if you wanted the spin-offs, why go into space at all? Why not turn the R D money and NASA’s fabled management skills directly to other, more worthy, programs?

Those were hard questions to answer. So Michaels, bluntly, avoided them.

In public, Michaels played up space as an adventure — something a nation like the U.S. ought to be able to afford, damn it. Astronauts from the heroic days, including Joe Muldoon, were wheeled out to serve as living reminders of good moments gone by. After Michaels’s skillful PR hoopla, Mars came to seem a little more acceptable. There was a snowball effect, and some support for the option started to appear on the Hill.

And, slowly, the opinion polls showed public opposition to a Mars option dropping.

But NASA’s budget was still far too high. In July, members of Congress had moved twice to delete manned spaceflight altogether from the FY1972 budget.

It was a dangerous moment in history, and the hard bargaining continued.

What can we drop?

At one point Josephson had believed Nixon was coming close to approving the Space Shuttle system — just that one item, out of all the options his own task group had presented. At least the goal of the Shuttle was to do with reducing costs, and the Shuttle would actually have been the favored option of the aerospace lobby because of all the new development it would have entailed.

But the Shuttle program had quickly become a mess. It was obvious, Josephson thought, that the final, low-cost Shuttle design was a bastardized compromise, put together by committee to satisfy conflicting interests. And Michaels wasn’t above drafting his predecessor, Paine — a great lover of the Mars option whom Michaels had replaced in September — to point out the Shuttle’s strong military flavor. It was no accident that the low, hundred-mile orbits which were all the Space Shuttle was capable of, and its wide-ranging flyback capabilities, were ideally suited to Air Force missions.

The Space Shuttle would be cute technology, with nowhere to go except low-Earth-orbit reconnaissance missions. In an era in which detente was becoming the fashion, the military taint of the Shuttle was unpalatable. And besides, Kennedy and others never ceased to remind the public, there was nothing heroic about it.

So Josephson had watched, not unhappily, as the Shuttle quietly faded from Nixon’s thinking. The next generation of launch vehicles for manned flight, instead, would probably be a series of upgraded Saturns.

It looked as if there would be no elaborate space station modules, either, as the Space Task Group had proposed; just an extended series of Skylabs, improvised from Saturn fuel tanks. The engineers inside NASA screamed like hell, especially Mueller and his space station lobby. But it all brought the cost profile closer to something the White House might be able to endorse.

Of course, contained in the final program there would be trade-offs. Rockwell had been a hot favorite as lead contractor for the canned Shuttle. And it looked as if its big rival, Boeing, was going to get the largest piece of the new space booster pie, because Boeing, manufacturer of the huge Saturn S-IC first stage, was going to be lead contractor in the new enhanced Saturn project. Boeing had all sorts of ideas for reducing the costs of the Saturn V system, for instance by adding strap-on reusable rockets to it, and even making the S-IC itself recoverable, including wings, parachutes, hydrogen-filled balloons, drag brakes, paragliders, and rotary systems of spinning parachutes.

So Rockwell — manufacturer of Apollo — looked, to everyone’s surprise, like being left with very little. It was offered a consolation: it would be allowed to proceed with a program to turn the S-II, its hydrogen-fueled Saturn second stage, into a heavyweight interplanetary injection engine. But that, of course, was the job that NERVA would perform, so strictly speaking the S-II program was redundant before it started, and questions were already being asked about its requirement and viability.

Still, Josephson thought wryly, Rockwell was bound to pick up other compensations along the way. Already it was the hot favorite for the one big new start-up spacecraft program to emerge from today’s decision, even before it had been announced…

Meanwhile the military had been bought off, to Josephson’s way of thinking, with a promise of a presence on the new long-duration Skylabs, a restoration of their old Manned Orbital Laboratory mission objectives.

The new space program, then, was going to be a balance of forces, a compromise among the warring factions lobbying the White House and Capitol Hill. Thus, Josephson thought, as it always was.

But it wouldn’t have come together without Michaels’s string-pulling and favor-calling, exploiting the web of political alliances he’d built up over the years. A less astute Administrator — Thomas Paine, for instance — wouldn’t have had a prayer of delivering it. And yet Josephson knew that Michaels’s work was only just beginning. Michaels had worked to obtain the initial commitment to a new program; the challenge would be to keep that commitment in the long, wearying years ahead.

Fred Michaels had known Nixon all the way back to the Sputnik days, when he’d been Eisenhower’s veep. Michaels believed that Nixon was a man who grasped the symbolism of the space age, right from the beginning. “Politics is frankly more important than science,” Michaels had told Josephson, and Josephson repeated it into his tape recorder. “The real motive for space is prestige. Nixon understands that. He’s the right clay to be shaped. I tell you, Tim; I’m not so surprised at the way all this has turned out. All he needed was the right argument…”

Maybe, Josephson thought. But Nixon was also pragmatic, highly intelligent, a man who saw space as fairly low on his priority list.

He might have chosen to shut down the manned program altogether.

And yet, and yet…

And yet there was dear old Jack Kennedy, speaking like a ghost from his study in New England, quietly telling Americans that they were better than their pessimistic visions of themselves: that they had, after all, succeeded in landing men on the Moon, and in the full view of the world; that they should not pause, but should go on, endlessly reinventing themselves in the light of the fiery dream that was space travel, a dream of which Kennedy had become the living embodiment…

It had come to a head, at last, today. Michaels had been asked to a meeting with Agronski, other Presidential aides, and representatives of the Office of Management and Budget.

Agronski, Michaels told Josephson, had opened the meeting briskly. “You’re going to get your Mars boondoggle, Fred. Against my better judgment.”

“The President’s approving the program.”

“Yes.” Agronski shuffled papers. “There are still some decisions to be made about size and cost…”

Michaels grunted. “What decided him?”

“A number of factors. The point that we can’t afford to forgo manned spaceflight altogether, for our prestige at home and abroad.” He sounded rueful. “We’re stuck with you, Fred. That the Mars mission is the only option we have that is meaningful and could be accomplished on a modest budget. That we were only thinking of cutting NASA anyway because we could. That not starting the program would be damaging to the aerospace industry…”

Michaels had understood, and Josephson wasn’t surprised. Kennedy’s lobbying, and his own machinations, had swung public opinion just enough. And 1972 was going to be an election year; unemployment lines in states heavily dependent on aerospace — California, Texas, Florida — wouldn’t look good for Nixon. But we were damn lucky to find an ally in Cap Weinberger. Without Cap’s lobbying inside the administration, Josephson knew, the manned program could have been lost.

The meeting had started haggling over details, the wording of a Presidential announcement. But the decision was made.

Mars.

Josephson, through his weariness, felt a deep satisfaction growing inside him. It was like the feeling of having enjoyed a fine meal, brandy and cigars.

It was actually unfortunate for Nixon, Josephson thought. Nixon’s thinking had been sensible, really; he’d wanted an affordable program with more than just one goal, a program which would lay a more solid foundation for the future. But it looked as if he was going to end up with another footprints-and-flags extravaganza. And Jack Kennedy — or maybe Ted, drawing on the credit of one assassinated and one crippled brother, making his own way to the White House — was going to get the credit.

Anyhow, thus, in a crucible of social, political, economic, and technical forces, wielded by men like Michaels and Nixon and Kennedy, the decision had emerged. And, incremental and contingent though it might be, it was — against all the odds — a decision to send Americans to Mars.

A cleaning woman knocked and entered, towing a heavy vacuum cleaner. Josephson turned off his tape recorder. Millie Jacks grinned at Josephson; she was used to seeing him work as late as this.

“I hear we’re going to Mars, Dr. Josephson?”

“Looks like it, Millie.”

“Hoo!” Millie chortled her disbelief. But then, she’d been shaking her head over everything NASA had done since 1966; Josephson sometimes wondered if she actually believed that men had been to the Moon, that it wasn’t all some kind of stunt.

Of course, what would be unbelievable — what would really make Millie shake her head — would be if we got a few blackfaces, even female ones, among the Mars crews.

Maybe it will change. Maybe it will be a different world, when we fly to Mars in 1982. Wednesday, January 5, 1972

…I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of systems and technologies designed to take American astronauts on landing missions to Mars. This system will center on a new generation of rockets, exploiting nuclear power, which will revolutionize and routinize long-haul interplanetary flights.

The year 1971 was a year of conclusion for America’s current series of manned flights to the Moon. Much was achieved in the three successful landing missions — in fact, the scientific results of the third mission have been shown to greatly outweigh the return from all earlier manned spaceflights, to Earth orbit or the Moon. But it also brought us to an important decision point — a point of assessing what our space horizons are as Apollo ends, and of determining where we go from here.

In the scientific arena, the past decade of experience has taught us that spacecraft are an irreplaceable tool for learning about our near-space environment, the Moon, and the planets, besides being an important aid to our studies of the sun and stars. In utilizing space to successfully meet needs on Earth, we have seen the tremendous potential of satellites for international communications and worldwide forecasting, and global resource monitoring.

However, all these possibilities, and countless others with direct and dramatic bearing on human betterment, will not be achieved without a continuation of the dream which has carried us so far and so fast: I mean the dream of exploration, of American and human expansion into space, the greatest frontier of all. In my decision today, I have taken account of the need to fully encourage and sustain that dream.

NASA and many aerospace companies have carried out extensive design studies for the Mars mission. Congress has reviewed and approved this effort. Preparation is now sufficient for us to confidently commence a new development program. In order to completely minimize technical and economic risks, the space agency will continue to cautiously take an evolutionary approach in the development of this new system. Even so, by moving ahead at this time, we can have the first components of the Mars spacecraft in manned flight test by the end of the decade, and operational a short time later. But we will not set arbitrary deadlines, as some have called for; we will make decisions as to the pace of our program in the fullness of time and with the wisdom of experience.

It is for the reason of technological robustness that I have decided against the development of the reusable Space Shuttle at this time; despite the manifest economic benefits of such a launch system if available, I am not convinced that our technology is so mature that we are ready yet to confidently tackle the huge problems posed by the project without cost overruns and delays, and many of its economic benefits should in any case be realizable from enhancements to our existing “throwaway” platforms.

It is also significant that this major new national enterprise will engage the best efforts of thousands of highly skilled workers and hundreds of contractor firms over the next several years. The continued preeminence of America and American industry in the aerospace field will be an important part of the Mars mission’s payload.

We will go to Mars because it is the one place other than our Earth where we expect human life to be sustainable, and where our colonies could flourish. We will go to Mars because an examination of its geology and history will reflect back a greatly deepened understanding of our own precious Earth.

Above all, we will go to Mars because it will inspire us to clearly look beyond the difficulties and divisions of today, to a better future tomorrow.

“We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.” So with man’s epic voyage into space — a voyage the United States of America has led and still shall lead. Apollo has returned to harbor. Now it is time to swiftly build new ships, and to purposefully sail farther than our ancestors could ever have dreamed possible…

Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1972 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972) Wednesday, January 5, 1972

…As indicated in the President’s statement, the studies by NASA and the aerospace industry of the Mars mission have now reached the point where the decision can be made to proceed into actual development of mission components. The decision to proceed, which the President has now approved, is consistent with the plans presented to and approved by Congress in NASA’s FY1972 budget.

The Mars mission will consist of a pair of ships assembled in Earth orbit. The ships will be clusters of several nuclear-rocket propulsion modules, launched by chemical vehicles based on our proven Saturn V technology. The spacecraft will be designed in this modular form to enable different configurations to be assembled speedily: for example, to complete missions to other planets or to the asteroids. The crew will inhabit modules developed from the first “dry fuel tank” Skylab space stations we intend to fly from next year. The crew will ride a new landing craft to the Martian surface.

As the President indicated, we are not going to work to a set timetable.

However, we hope to fly our first mission to take advantage of Mars’s opposition with Earth in 1982. This first mission will be preceded by an intensive development program including flight phases in Earth orbit. The program will include the full development of the new nuclear technology, of life support for long-duration missions, of interplanetary communications and navigation techniques, of the increased reusability and reliability of systems, and of Mars entry and landing systems. Calls for recruitment of astronauts for the new program will shortly be issued.

To survey landing sites for the eventual manned mission, a new series of Mariner unmanned photographic orbiters will be sent to Mars. These flights will replace the previously proposed Viking science platforms, which are now canceled, and so will take place within the envelope of current funding levels.

The decision by the President is a historic step in the nation’s space program. It will transform man’s reach in space. In another decade the nation will have the means to transfer men and equipment across interplanetary space; shortly thereafter we expect such missions to be mounted as routinely as we now have sent men to the Moon and returned them safely to Earth. Not just Mars, but our sister planet Venus, the resources of the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter and the outer planets will come within our compass. This will be done within the framework of a useful total space program of science, exploration, and applications at approximately the present overall level of the space budget.

Thank you…

Source: Frederick W. Michaels Chronological File, 1972, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

Wednesday, January 5, 1972

Gregory Dana had spent the day at a meeting on rendezvous techniques for the upcoming Skylab missions. He came across a number of Houston people gathered in the hallway, before a notice board. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t you know? We’re going to Mars. Nixon has confirmed it at last. Look at this.” They made way for him at the board.

At first Dana could see nothing of interest to him on the board: an offer of tickets for the Cowboys vs Dolphins Super Bowl, classes in TM and acupuncture (posted in NASA HQ!), and a bright orange sticker saying simply JESUS HEALS. But there, crowded out by the trivia, was a closely printed piece of headed paper. It was a statement from Nixon, and a subsidiary statement from Michaels, the new NASA Administrator. Some supporting press briefing material was pinned up, too: a “Mars mission digest,” with simple question-and-answer chunks of information about the mission, and a few spectacular artist’s impressions of the mission’s various phases. There were even a few outlines of the mission modes which had been evaluated and discarded.

There was no mention of Dana’s Venus swing-by mode.

Since that apocalyptic Phase A meeting in Huntsville back in July, Dana had heard almost nothing of the development of the Mars options. And this was the first he’d learned of the final decision — along with the Headquarters cleaning staff, and the rest of the nation. It was clear that he’d been excluded from the decision-making process since July.

What could he do about it? Write another letter to Fred Michaels?

He felt the injustice, the stupidity of it, burn a hole in his stomach.

Well, it was nothing to do with him anymore. Maybe, at least, Jim would be able to realize some of his own dreams, in the slow unwinding of this decision.

Dana tucked his briefcase under his arm and walked away.