“Not only that, you’d have had both of those ships with liquid oxygen/hydrogen loads in the payload bay. And we never truly figured how we were going to handle that. We didn’t know how to keep the load topped up on the pad. Would you run cryogenic lines through the skin of the orbiter? And we couldn’t figure out a way to dump it fast enough in case of an abort. For instance you might be flying an RTLS abort, which is a powered fly-around back to the Cape, a hell of an aerobatic manoeuvre which we’ve never, in fact, tried. And in the middle of this you’d have to dump your forty thousand pounds of LOX and hydrogen, separately.

“Or what if you do a transatlantic abort and finish up at some airfield in Africa? How are you going to process the stuff there? It takes three days to get the C-130s out there, and in that time you could get an explosive build-up of gases in your payload bay. Well, hell, after Challenger we just never looked at that again…”

Geena was content to listen for a while, absorbing their personalities, the bar’s atmosphere.

The Outpost was a beat-up old bar off NASA Road One, not far from the Johnson Space Center. The NASA folk held launch parties and post-mission parties here. It was just a low-roofed wooden shack, its walls plastered with ageing Shuttle crew signed photos, crew patches and other memorabilia. One of the photos had been airbrushed Soviet-style to remove an unpopular female astronaut from her one and only spaceflight. There was a scuffed shuffleboard deck and a pool table.

But not everybody was a NASA nut. There were plenty of good old boys who looked like they had their heads on upside down, sitting in a wall around the bar and glowering at strangers, cradling Buds and watching basketball on the noisy TV.

Geena didn’t particularly like it here. The Outpost was a close, dark wooden box. It was photogenic, and a lot of times you couldn’t move in here for the TV crews. But what depressed her was the sense of antiquity, the walls encrusted with layers of yellowed photos lying over older pictures, like Henry’s geological strata. The Space Age reduced to a nostalgia object.

But it was inevitable, she supposed; after decades the space program had developed its own history and peculiar human traditions, like everything else people ever did, from baseball to religion to politics.

Or maybe she was just sour because she didn’t want to be here, that somehow her life was still tangled up with Henry’s.”