“In space, one needs the courage and resourcefulness to continue to work on a problem long after an average person, with hope of rescue, might have given in. And this is what I begin to instill in you now.”

York was tired, in pain, hugely irritated. The trouble was, there was a strand of thinking inside NASA that approved of the Soviets’ tough approach: mostly the old military flyboys, who seemed to think NASA astronauts were getting pampered. Joe Muldoon, for instance, Viktorenko’s great Moon-orbiting buddy. Yeah, pampered. Especially all these goddamn newfangled hyphenated-astronauts who want to go to Mars…

She said, “All this macho training didn’t help Ben Priest and the others, did it?”

Viktorenko studied her. More gently he said, “No. It did not help Ben Priest.” He plucked at the cuffs of his thick sweater. “Listen, Natalie. There is an old Russian folktale. A young woman named Marushka was famous for being able to embroider fantastical designs. Her fame reached the attention of Kaschei the Immortal, an evil sorcerer, who fell in love with her and wished her to go away with him. She turned him down, despite his magic powers, for she was modest, and wished only to stay in the village where she was born.

“Enraged, Kaschei turned her into a firebird with brilliant plumage, and himself into a huge black bird of prey.

“The bird of prey seized the firebird in its talons and flew away with it.

“Marushka, realizing she was dying, willed that she should shed her plumage. Her feathers fell to the ground on the land she loved.

“Marushka died, but her feathers were magical; for they remained alive, but only to those who appreciated beauty and chose to share it with others…

“So it is with death, among us. No kosmonaut dies in vain, Natalie York.”

The Command Module rocked harder, swinging back and forth through thirty, forty degrees. Water lapped, gurgling, against the hull. York had a nightmare vision of the capsule sinking, dragging them, padded trousers and all, down to the bottom of the lousy little salt lake.

It’s so hot in here. Her head seemed full of blood; she could feel her pulse at her neck, and there was a yellow haze at the edge of her vision.

Christ. I’m going to faint.

But then the cabin tipped again, over to the right, and her stomach knotted up. Saliva pooled at the back of her throat. No. No, that’s not fainting.

She turned away from the others, toward the wall; when it came, the vomit splashed against the port and wall and slid down under her seat.

There was a hand on her shoulder. “York. You okay?”

It was Gershon; she waved him away. She tried to talk, but her throat was still closed up.

And then the stink hit Gershon. “Oh, Jesus.” He lunged, sticking his head over the back of his couch, and began to throw up, too, in huge, noisy spasms.

Viktorenko laughed. “So, Bah-reess, only you and I are able-bodied seamen, eh?”

“Fuck,” Ralph Gershon groaned.

The water lapped against the hull of the Soyuz, and Boris the cosmonaut dangled from his silver chain above York’s head.

She wondered what had happened to Gershon’s gum. Washington Post, Monday, February 23, 1981

…We have no hesitation in devoting this editorial exclusively to the report of the Presidential Commission into the Apollo-N space disaster, which has at last, after weeks of leaks, rumors and counterrumors, been formally published. The report is 3,300 pages long and weighs in at 19 pounds, and it does not mince words. The report makes it clear that the accident was not the result of a chance malfunction, in a statistical sense, but rather resulted from an unusual combination of mistakes, coupled with a deficient design.

The Apollo-N disaster has sparked a fresh national debate, led by a skeptical Congress, over whether the country should be spending tens of billions of dollars on a “footprints-and-flags” program to send men to space, when it faces so many problems at home. Public opinion polls find many citizens asking if the program is costing too much and feeling that any trip to Mars would be as much a political stunt as was the Apollo race to the Moon.

Meanwhile, many prominent scientists, such as Professor Leon Agronski, a former science advisor to President Nixon, are arguing in public fora that less expensive unmanned probes could teach us more about the composition of Mars and the other planets than astronauts.

On the other hand, supporters of the space program point out that the average American spends much more per year on cigarettes and alcohol than on sending fellow countrymen to other planets, and that untold scientific and technological benefits will flow from the continuing program.

This paper remains skeptical.

The most damaging part of the Commission report is a frank indictment of NASA and its senior contractors. The Commission’s investigation revealed many deficiencies in design and engineering, in manufacturing and quality control. Numerous examples have been unturned, in addition to the simple and avoidable defect that led to the tragedy itself.

This newspaper is appalled at the incredible complacency of NASA engineers. Even a high-school physics student would have known not to allow a nuclear core with instability built into its very design onto an operational space mission.

It seems likely that this nation will continue on to Mars, and beyond; successes in space travel have become essential to the image of the United States as the world’s leading power in science and technology: an image projected to the Soviet Union, our allies around the world, the uncommitted nations of the Third World, and — perhaps most importantly — to our own citizenry. And we should not forget the cold, cynical political calculation that a cancellation of the space program would immediately cause a drastic oversupply in the aerospace industry, and inevitable job losses and shutdowns in that area.

But as we put Apollo-N behind us and strive to move forward, we should never forget how the dry technical prose of the Presidential Commission report convicts those in charge of NASA of gross incompetence and negligence…

Joe Muldoon called on Fred Michaels in his office in Washington. He arrived a little after seven, having flown out from Houston.

Without getting up, Michaels waved Muldoon to a chair. “Sit down, Joe. It’s good to see you. You want a drink?”

“Sure.” Muldoon sat uncertainly, studying Michaels.

There were glasses and a decanter in a corner of Michaels’s desk; Michaels poured Muldoon a careless couple of fingers and passed it over. It was good Kentucky bourbon. The place was darkened, somber, with the lights dimmed; the brightest source of light was the small TV set in one corner of the room, which was showing a news program, with the sound off.

Michaels rocked back in his chair, with his boots on the corner of his wide desk; his gold-braided vest hung open, and the dim light emphasized the deep grooves in his face as — in typical Michaels style — he waited for Muldoon to say what he wanted to say.

Muldoon began to tell the Administrator about the progress he was making in his new role as head of the Program Office. “The NERVA contractors were running a fucking country club, Fred. And those bastards at Marshall have been letting them get away with it.”

Michaels, with one eye on the TV, shrugged. “That’s maybe a little harsh, Joe. We’ve been putting them all under a hell of a lot of schedule pressure. Maybe too much.”

“No, it’s not that. In a lot of cases it’s just sloppy practice. For instance, the first time I went up to the S-NB test installation at Michoud I found some of the technicians going for a few beers with their lunch. That’s just outrageous, when you’re working on man-rated hardware. And I saw some guy pumping lox out of a tank on the ground up into an umbilical tower. I asked him where the lox was going. ‘Beats the hell out of me,’ he said. Once it got out of the other end of his hose, that little guy didn’t have a clue what happened to the lox. After that, I told them that I wanted every engineer to learn everything there is to know about every system he was running — where the stuff came from, where it was going, and all the things that might go wrong in between. Every one of those guys has got to know his system from womb to tomb.