Lebedeva’s analogue was Devraj Chand. Naomi hadn’t worked with him directly, but he’d been at drinks after work a few times. She remembered him being very tall, polite, and quiet except for the occasional cutting remark that would make everyone blink and sit up and pay attention. Very fond of a pun.

The flight surgeon backup was Ryan Webb. He was blandly good-looking, brown hair and eyes, firm handshake. He’d looked after her health in her time at NASA. His specialism was internal medicine, like Hart, but without the same level of psychological expertise, which was another potential flaw in both the original proposed crew and the five men before her. Few had the same balance of skill as Valerie’s choices. It was why she’d picked them.

The military test pilot and mechanical engineer was Josh Hines. He was one of those men that harkened back to the early days of astronauts, those Mercury boys with their swagger and machismo, who would drag race down freeways in the desert after half a bottle of Jack just to prove they could. A man’s man, a little too familiar. He’d kept trying to flirt with Naomi and been very confused when she proved immune to his charms.

Dennis Lee was Naomi’s own double. Another botanist, one of the team that had developed the strain of algae they’d be using in the greenhouse both for food and life support. It was Lee who had figured out the best place to store water would be in the hull of the ship to provide additional cosmic radiation shielding.

Dennis was the one she knew second-best. They’d worked together for two years at NASA, side by side, developing those in-jokes borne out of close proximity and long days in a lab that smelled of pond scum and bleach. He’d done consulting work for Valerie on her company Haven, as well. She drifted closer, peering at the blur where his head must be. He had a face Naomi could only describe as mobile—always on the verge of a laugh, a smirk, a frown. She had never seen him still.

And then the last one, the backup leader of the mission. He was such a celebrity, that First Man of Mars, that Naomi was surprised they hadn’t put Cole Palmer on the main team to spearhead the mission like he had for Ares over a decade previously. His face had been familiar to her before she’d ever met him in person, his wide smile beaming at her from news segments, advertisements, the cover of his memoir in a bookstore. Even features, auburn hair, startling dark eyes. Those broad shoulders and tapered waist, his astronaut’s helmet usually propped jauntily in one arm or against a hip. If someone were to build a man to be the face of space exploration, he’d be it.