But just then Lee, sitting back in his chair, seemed bright, alert, and his eyes had that slightly glazed, almost high look in them that Morgan had come to associate with Lee’s major bursts of activity.

“Hell, no,” Lee said vehemently. “Don’t you get it? This damn note means we’re still in the running. They wouldn’t be asking us these questions otherwise.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get the answers, of course.” Lee stabbed at his intercom. “Bella. I want you to start putting out calls. Get the MEM team leaders in here as soon as you can. And book a flight for us all, out to Houston, for — let me think — two days’ time.”

“But that’s a Sunday, JK.”

“Here you go again with your but but but,” Lee said. “I’ve told you about that before.”

“Yes, sir, JK.”

Morgan was aghast. “You’re not serious. It’s unheard of for a bidder to make a personal visit during an evaluation process.”

“What is that, a rule?”

“An unwritten one, I guess.”

Lee arched his eyebrows. “Imagine my concern.”

After the visit of the Columbia people to JSC, the scoring was revised again, and the senior people on the evaluation board took the proposal to Tim Josephson in Washington.

Muldoon’s people recommended Rockwell on the basis of the scoring system, with Columbia finally showing up at third.

The Administrator listened carefully.

Then Josephson thanked the board, and he asked Joe Muldoon, Ralph Gershon, and a couple of others to stay behind.

“Tell me the truth.” His tone sounded to Gershon typically dry and bureaucratic. “Are there any factors, other than those presented by the evaluation board, which I ought to take into account in this decision?”

Joe Muldoon spoke up. “Hell, yes. You have to look again at the Columbia bid, Tim.”

“Why so?”

“Because in my opinion it’s the most technically plausible. It’s shallow in some areas, but overall it was the most coherent of the bids. With the support of good subcontractors, the small organizational weight of Columbia won’t be a handicap…”

Gershon tried not to grin. As he’d watched Muldoon and Josephson and the rest work in the last few days, he’d come to believe that running an organization had a lot in common with flying a plane. You had to use your instruments, sure, but raw data, however well interpreted and analyzed, was only one input; in the end — when you had to make the decisions that could save you or kill you — there was no substitute for the mysterious internal processing that amalgamated data and experience and the feel of a ship in your hands.

It was just what Tim Josephson and Joe Muldoon were doing, he thought. The Columbia bid felt right, and that might swing it for JK Lee, even yet.

Still, it was going to be difficult for Josephson to set aside the conclusions of his formal evaluation. Two decades earlier Jim Webb had done that, when he’d plumped for Rockwell to build Apollo. And there had been muttering about corruption and backhand deals ever since.

When Gershon left to take a plane to the Cape, the decision still hung in the balance.

Lee was getting steadily more depressed. Even though his unorthodox visit to Houston had gone well, the rumors coming out of Washington were strong and consistent: that Rockwell had the MEM contract wrapped up. Hell, he thought, they always did. Who was I ever trying to kid?

At 10 A.M. on the day after getting back from Houston he found himself staring out of his office window. He was thinking of going home. He could spend some time with Jennine. And his son, Bert, was playing baseball that evening for his high-school team. Maybe it would be good for Lee to show up, for once.

Then Joe Muldoon called.

“Can you come back over to Houston today?”

Lee was nonplussed. “I don’t know. The flights—”

“Tonight would be fine. I’d like to see you. Come to my office at JSC.”

Maybe Muldoon thought it would be kinder to tell Lee in person, even if it meant dragging him all the way out to Houston.

Lee thought of Bert and his ball game. That seemed a more attractive option.

He called Bella to ask her to fix up a flight to Houston.

He got to JSC in the late afternoon. He’d spent the flight, and the ride from the airport, bracing himself for the axe.

Muldoon took him into his office and closed the door. He stuck out his hand and grinned. “Congratulations. I wanted to tell you in person. You’ve won the MEM.”

Lee, for once in his life, couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

“Can I tell my people?”

Muldoon checked his watch, an astronaut’s heavy Rolex. “We can’t make a public announcement until the stock markets on the West Coast close… Well, what the hell.”

He allowed Lee to make two phone calls.

Lee used the phone in Muldoon’s office. He thought of calling Jennine.

He called Art Cane.

And then he called Gene Tyson, at Hughes, and he took a lot of pleasure in commiserating with him.

Muldoon took Lee out that night, for a meal and a good few cold ones. Lee got thoroughly oiled and had a hell of a time.

But by 5 A.M. he was up, watching the early-morning news on the TV, and packing his overnight bag.

He caught a glance of himself in the mirror on the wall of his motel room. “By God,” he said aloud. “I’m going to build a spacecraft to take three Americans to Mars.”

Then the TV news item broke into his awareness.

A Saturn VB had blown up. There was an image of a white cloud, tinged with orange, with Solid Rocket Boosters veering crazily out of it, trailing smoke.

The commentators said the accident would set the Ares program back years.

My God. Lee knotted his tie, his fingers frantic, fumbling, and hurried from the room. New York Times, Tuesday, December 15, 1981

…Today the last remains of the tragic Apollo-N space mission have been buried, in an underground storage facility at NASA’s Cape Kennedy launch site in Florida.

I spoke to Aaron Raab at the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center about the problems involved. Raab was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1946. He joined NASA in July 1967, just a few months after another tragedy, the Apollo 1 pad fire which claimed the lives of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee.

In the immediate aftermath of the Apollo-N disaster, Raab shouldered the heavy burden of “Debris Manager.”

After being off-loaded from its recovery vessel at Port Canaveral, the Apollo-N Command Module — the 11,000-pound capsule which returned NASA astronauts Dana, Jones, and Priest to Earth — was painstakingly disassembled and laid out for investigation purposes in temporary storage areas by a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) team. Under Raab’s supervision, and under the watchful eye of the investigating commission appointed by President Reagan, the components of the Command Module were arranged in their original configuration relative to one another, to assist the investigators. The components remained in this “footprint” for almost a full year, because once the investigations were over and the reports written, NASA got down to its own internal engineering evaluation and data retrieval.

Surprisingly little equipment was used to move the components about, including a light crane, a forklift, and two flatbed trucks.

Because the Command Module had been recovered from the saltwater ocean, some of it required corrosion-proofing to preserve it. In addition, special measures were taken to protect Apollo-N’s voice recorders. Soon after recovery the recorders had been sent to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for restoration by IBM and analysis by a team led by woman astronaut Natalie York.

The Command Module’s final resting place is perhaps bizarre, but practical. The spacecraft now lies deep underground in a disused Minuteman missile silo complex in a quiet corner of Cape Canaveral. The chosen site consists of one silo (Complex 31) and four vaultlike underground equipment rooms.