Joan could feel the tension in the room as they listened to the men’s increasingly desperate voices. Joan could hear their movements as they scrambled to get out. She could see it, could feel it. What it must have felt like to be trapped there, knowing they were going to die.

Joan could not get Frances out of her mind. How would Barbara explain it to her if something like that happened to Joan? How might Frances be forever changed by a tragedy like that?

Joan was not afraid to die. She had always felt that she was prepared for the nothingness that awaited her. She was happy, in some ways, to know that her body would decompose. That she would give back to the Earth all she had taken from it.

But Frances.

She might be fine with dying, but she was not fine with leaving Frances.

The transmission ended after only seventeen seconds. Everyone in the room knew what that meant. Joan’s entire body felt heavy, her legs concrete, her head a magnet pulled to her chest. She could not look at Griff. But when she managed to raise her head, briefly, she saw that he could not look at anyone, either.

“Most of our days here at NASA are good ones. We achieve things once believed to be impossible. But there have been some days that we never see coming. Days that stick with us forever. That may cost some of us our lives. If you cannot accept that this risk lies ahead in all we do here,” Jack said, “now is your chance to make a different choice. To choose a different life for yourself. A safer one.”

The theater was quiet. There was no shuffling of feet. No one fiddled with papers. For a moment, Joan felt a strong sense that this entire undertaking was a mistake. Perhaps humans should not do this. The shuttle was nothing more than a pair of wax wings.

When Joan finally exhaled and looked up, Griff was pinching the bridge of his nose, and Hank was staring straight forward. Donna’s chest visibly rose and fell. Vanessa was so lost in thought, Joan could not even catch her eye.

Then Joan turned to look at Lydia. The color was gone from her face. The two of them looked each other in the eye. Could they do this? Could they really stay here in this room knowing what it might one day mean?

Not a single person left.

Days later, every member of Group 9 stood on the tarmac at Ellington Field in front of a fleet of Northrop T-38 Talons—white jet trainers with glass cockpits barely big enough for two people. The T-38s were supersonic, meaning they could fly faster than the speed of sound. And they could go ten thousand feet higher than a commercial airplane.