York felt panic build up inside her. Jesus. We can’t take much more of this.

This is the first chance Mars has to kill us, she thought. I wonder if it will take it.

From the ground, Challenger would look like a huge meteor, she supposed, glowing and burning and sputtering, leaving a complex, multiple trail across the dark Martian sky.

The thrusters squirted again, tipping up the nose of Challenger.

“Here we go,” Gershon said. “Coming into pull-up.”

The MEM had some maneuvering capability. The center of gravity was offset, and so by rotating and pitching up, Challenger could be made to skip like a flat stone off the thicker layers of air, closer to the surface.

“Three, two, one,” Gershon said.

Now York felt a deep lurch, a shove which quickly bottomed out; it was like reaching the base of a loop on some huge roller coaster.

“How about that,” Gershon said. “What a ride. Into the zoom maneuver.”

Challenger was ascending briefly, shedding its heat, before dipping once more into the lower air.

Stone tapped a glass panel. “Hey. I’ve got me a working altimeter. Sixty thousand feet.”

York felt a prickle at the base of her scalp. Sixty thousand feet. Suddenly the altitude reading had turned from miles — a spacecraft’s measure — to feet, read from an air-pressure altimeter. Just like an aircraft. We’re nearly there.

There was another bang of attitude jets. The capsule tipped up again.

The glow beyond the small window faded, to gray, then to a pale pink, the color of flesh.

“Lift vector up glide,” Gershon called.

The MEM was falling again, dipping into the thickening air at the better part of five hundred feet per second. But the ride was smooth, comparatively gentle, the worst of the heat and the Gs over. It really was like the sims.

Gershon unclipped his harness and threw it back over his shoulder. “All change,” he said. He pushed himself up and climbed out of his couch. To York’s left, Stone began to do the same. The crew had to stand for the last powered-descent phase of the landing.

Apprehensive, she unclipped her own harness. She stood, cautiously, on her couch, holding on to straps on the walls.

She could barely feel her legs. After her year in space York seemed to have forgotten how to stand up. Her inner ears were rotating like crazy, and the aluminum walls of the cabin tipped up around her. She felt enormously heavy.

She felt a hand on her arm. Stone’s.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It passes.”

That was true. But after most long-duration space missions there were ground crews to lift you out of your cabin and carry you to a wheelchair, en route to the hospital…

Stone slapped his gloved hands together. “Let’s hustle,” he said. He turned to his station, and Gershon did the same, and they began to rattle through a fresh checklist.

York’s job now was to support the pilots. She hauled at levers to fold up the acceleration couches, leaving the cabin floor exposed; then she fixed restraints, elasticized cables, to the waists of the pilots as they worked.

Then she took her own position, standing in a corner of the little cabin, and hooked herself up to restraint cables. Standing room only, all the way down to the surface of Mars.

There was a sharp crack. Sunlight streamed into the cabin, strong and flat.

The conical upper heat shield, its function fulfilled, broke into segments and fell away, revealing a complex structure of propellant tanks and antennae. A plug popped out of the bottom of the craft, exposing the bell of the retro-propulsion descent engine. All around the base of the MEM, six squat landing legs rattled out of their bays.

Challenger had configured itself to land.

York could see out of the corners of the pilots’ down-slanting triangular windows. She saw sunlight, a violet sky, and a tan, curving landscape. New York Times, Monday, March 4, 1985

German-Born Nazi Expert Quits U.S. to Avoid War-Crimes Suit

Hans Udet, a German-born NASA rocket expert, has renounced his U.S. citizenship and returned to Germany, after facing the prospect of charges of war crimes, it was revealed yesterday.

Udet was one of Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket development team during World War II. After the war, he came to America with von Braun to work on U.S. space projects.

After the retirement of von Braun, Udet became one of NASA’s most senior managers, and he recently directed the development of the Saturn VB enhanced rocket booster. The VB will be used to launch the Ares manned mission to Mars, and has already been launched successfully several times to deliver components of the Mars ship to Earth orbit.

Now, the Justice Department has told Udet that he must surrender his U.S. citizenship and leave the country or face charges that he had been involved in a forced labor camp at Nordhausen in Germany where the V-2 was manufactured. The department is apparently acting on information that has been in the hands of the government for forty years.

Udet has apparently not been accused of committing atrocities, but of being aware of them, and failing to acknowledge that fact in his application for U.S. citizenship.

Udet maintains his innocence, but says that because of his age and financial situation, he will not undertake the prolonged legal battle that the government suit would entail.

Under an agreement with the Department of Justice Udet left the U.S. in January.

Senior colleagues within NASA have spoken out in Udet’s defense, calling the Justice Department action “cynical” and “shabby.” The feeling is that the Justice Department stayed its hand on this matter until after Udet had served out a lifetime of useful service for the government.

Among those who campaigned on behalf of Udet within NASA was Dr. Gregory Dana, father of dead Apollo-N astronaut James Dana, and a scientist who, this newspaper can reveal, was himself a conscript laborer at Nordhausen during the war… New York Times, Friday, March 8, 1985

Frederick W. Michaels, 76, NASA Administrator

Fred Michaels, who was NASA’s Administrator during its turbulent post-Apollo decade, died Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Texas. He was 76.

Born in Dallas in 1909, Michaels received a BA in education from the University of Chicago in 1933. He studied law and was admitted to the District of Columbia bar in 1939. He worked in private business from 1939 to 1963, save for a 4-year spell in the Bureau of the Budget. In this period he rose to become President of the Umex Oil Company, assistant to the President of Morgan Industries, and a member of the board of Southpaw Airlines. He joined NASA in 1963.

He served as Administrator of NASA from 1971 to 1981, when he resigned subsequent to the loss of the Apollo-N test mission and the death of its astronaut crew.

Michaels’s reign at NASA was characterized by political astuteness. His stewardship was much more worldly than that of his predecessor, the visionary but ineffectual Thomas O. Paine. Michaels effectively managed both the internal conflicts between centers, which have plagued NASA from its inception, and external pressures from political, budget, and aerospace interests and such lobbies as the universities.

Michaels was criticized for a lack of vision. NASA under his stewardship was a throwback to the Apollo-era organization under James Webb (1906 — ), in which all activities, however worthy, were valued solely in terms of their contribution to a single goal — in Michaels’s case, the eventual Mars landing. NASA appeared to suffer from a lack of direction during much of the 1970s, and when a clear mission did emerge, in the aftermath of the Apollo-NERVA disaster, NASA was left with no vision of its future beyond the Ares project, and with its facilities and systems dangerously weighted to serve Ares alone. Michaels’s successors will face a formidable challenge in keeping the large organization and workforce in place once the primary goal has been achieved.