York wasn’t a pilot, though. She’d spent long enough agonizing over her own role in NASA, in the wake of Ben’s death. As if there wasn’t already enough doubt, enough ambiguity in her mind.

She’d resolved it by determining, in the privacy of her own mind, that everything she did from then on was for Ben. It was as simple as that.

A strident woman stood up. “Natalie, as a scientist, how do you respond to those people who claim that the whole of the Mars expedition is a stunt, a fake? — that instead of traveling to Mars you’ll just be closeted away in some studio in Houston for a year, bounding around a mock-up of the MEM?”

That did it. York was incensed. She leaned forward so her voice boomed from the speakers. “Look, I’ve really no time for crap like this. We’re training for a deep-space mission, for Christ’s sake. Why should we give up our time, put more pressure on ourselves, just to respond to dumb-ass remarks like—”

Phil Stone put his hand over her microphone.

“I understand how Natalie feels,” he said smoothly. “Believe me. The suggestion’s just implausible. I think the best proof I can offer you that our mission is genuine is this: it’s probably easier to fly to Mars for real than to fake it up.”

That got a laugh, and the moment passed.

York tried to steady her breathing. She knew she was in for a lecture from Rick Llewellyn later.

“What about sex?”

Stone asked, “What do you mean?”

A male reporter in a seedy Lieutenant Columbo raincoat got up, a grin on his face. “What about sex? You’re all normal, healthy adults — America’s first mixed space crew — and you’ll be cooped up in that dinky Mission Module for eighteen months. And Ralph and Natalie aren’t married… Come on. Two guys and one gal? What a situation.”

York felt her cheeks burn. I could just walk out of this. Yeah. And out of the mission.

Gershon was grinning, enjoying it all hugely.

Stone pursed his lips. “I take it you know the official NASA line. It’s in our induction handbooks. Close coupling of crew members is to be avoided.” He smiled, self-deprecating, completely in control. “Some help.” Another laugh. “But I’d say that advice is basically right. Hell, we’re all adults. But a sexual relationship between crew members — or, more importantly, a special emotional relationship — would be harmful to the stability of the crew as a whole, and might compromise our ability to support the whole crew through the entire duration of the mission. And if you fully understand the potential for negative impact — you’ve got jealousy, special treatment, circumvention of the chain of command, recrimination and regret when you fall out, and so on — I bet this avoidance will be adopted as a group norm on future mixed flights.”

Gershon cocked his head. “Adopted as a what?”

“Pay more attention to your psych training, Gershon.”

Another laugh. Another defused moment.

York hoped the color was fading from her cheeks. It was remarkable the way Stone could turn out the party line, though. The same bland crap, the half-lie which NASA had fed to the world since the days of Mercury.

And I’m just part of the machine now, she thought. An accomplice in the traditional lie. I’m an astronaut, now; my human needs don’t exist anymore, officially.

The reporter’s question, if facetious, was actually perceptive. NASA was terrific at the technology, she thought, but stunningly bad at dealing with the needs of the soft, pink bodies they loaded inside their gleaming von Braun dream machines — unable even to recognize that those needs existed.

The questions continued to come, sliding from topic to topic. And all of them, York thought, looking for ways into the central, banal question anyone wanted to ask of an astronaut:

What does it feel like, in space? On the Moon? On Mars?

At first it seemed just dumb to her: naive, too open, without a possible answer. And the way it cropped up, in one form or another, at every conference irritated her.

Today, Joe Muldoon tried to answer it.

“I’m just an ordinary guy. But I guess you could say I’ve done something extraordinary.

“Let me tell you what it was like. When you look down on the Earth from orbit, you forget about your hassles: the bills you have to pay, the trouble you’re having with your car. Instead, all you think about is the people: the people you know and care about, down there in that blue bowl of air. And you realize, somewhat, how much indeed you do care about them…”

Save for Muldoon’s voice, the room was silent.

She watched the questioners, tough, cynical pressmen all, as they fixed on the face of the astronaut. Even the woman who’d asked about the fake-up was listening, intent, trying to understand.

Muldoon was saying, “To see the Earth fall away behind your receding capsule… To stand on the Moon, and see that little world curve away under your feet: to be cognizant that you are one of just two humans on this whole goddamn planet, and to be able to hold your hand up and cover the Earth…”

Here you had a handful of men who had done something extraordinary: flown beyond the air, even walked on the airless surface of the Moon — unimaginable things, things which nothing in their human evolutionary heritage had prepared them for. And York began to see that something in the press people — masked by all the banter and joshing and bluster — was responding to that. Something primeval.

You’ve been up there. I could never go. Don’t say you’re just an ordinary guy. What is it like? Tell me.

As the astronauts spoke to the public — even though, for God knew what reason, even a skilled operator like Muldoon always seemed to fall into a stilted jargon littered with “somewhat” and “cognizant” — a very basic and primal communication was struggling to happen, a layer under the spoken. The words of Muldoon and the rest weren’t enough; they could never be. York often had the feeling that people wanted to close in and touch the astronauts. As if they were gods. Or as if information, sensations, memories could be transmitted through the skin.

But she could not contribute to that process. How could she? She’d never flown higher than in a T-38.

She felt like a fake, sitting there bathed in TV lights, alongside a man who had bent down and run his fingers through lunar dirt. October 1984

…How frequently we perceive our national debates about the future of SPACE TRAVEL veering between hysterical extremes! And all of it is played out against the background of the most cynically AMORAL times in living memory.

While the “yuppies” parade their Rolex watches and their BMW sports cars, and while our illusory economic “upturn” is fueled only by the President’s massive rise in MILITARY EXPENDITURE — which is itself inherently inflationary, and to which the Mars mission has become explicitly linked, by NASA’s supporters in politics — all of which is leading to an immense DEFICIT which we will bequeath to our children — the income gap between richest and poorest is at its widest in two decades.

And that very DEFICIT is itself a cynical manipulation of the economy by an administration which is determined that there shall be no opportunity, because of the DEFICIT burden, for an expansion in welfare spending or other programs in the years beyond President Reagan’s retirement in 1988.

At its grandest, the dehumanizing experience of SPACE can lead us, paradoxically, to a fuller understanding of the HUMANITY the astronauts must cast aside. Indeed it can teach us a truer perspective:

— CONTEMPT for our works.

— VALUE of ourselves.

It is a new perspective which can lead us closer to GOD.

But all too often the experience of SPACE, certainly as portrayed to the general public by the government information organizations and public bodies supporting and opposing the space initiative, veers between twin mirror-image idols, both of them false: