From the security building, Henry was escorted to the Astronaut Office. He walked across the campus, the blocky buildings of oyster shell and glass, a solidification of a 1960s future that had never quite come to pass. Concrete paths criss-crossed between the buildings, lacing across bristly, bottle-green grass; the paths, Henry had observed in the past, never seemed to take you where you wanted to go, and he had developed a habit of jaywalking over the lawns, something that had not improved his popularity around here.

Today, following the girl from security, he stuck to the path.

There seemed to be a lot of people around, groups of them running between the buildings, carrying laptops and vu-graphs and folders of mission rules and procedures. There was a sense of urgency, in fact, that hadn’t been apparent in the time he’d spent here before. JSC, the centre of the nation’s space effort, had with time become just another place where big government work was done, with the nine-to-five schedules and leisurely pace that entailed.

Not now, though. Now, there were things to be done, missions to be mounted, a sense of urgency the place hadn’t known since the Apollo days.

All because of me, he thought. Jesus.

But then, it was as if NASA had been waiting for this call to arms since the curtailing of Apollo.

It seemed to Henry that once he had gotten through Monica Beus’s OSTP review, the official initiation of the scrambled Moon program had been extraordinarily fast.

He had to make another presentation, more formal, to the National Space Council: another presidential advisory group, this one chaired by the Vice President himself. And away from his own involvement, support built up. He read of Congressmen being hauled into the White House to be pressured into supporting the emergency bill authorizing the release of federal funds to NASA to implement the program. Opponents in the Senate, who appeared to think this was just another NASA job-creating publicity stunt, tried to filibuster the bill. But the White House orchestrated public opinion and concern, focusing on fence-sitting senators, who soon started to feel the heat from their home districts.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise, Henry thought. This President had emerged from Congress herself; she was said to be the most skilled Chief Executive at dealing with Congressmen since Johnson. And that was just as well given the sexual harassment charges still being laid against her.

And when she went public — as, of course, she must have anticipated — she found herself, as the first President since Kennedy to approve a start-up Moon program, riding on a wave of popular approval. The language of the commentators was helpfully blunt. This is America. We aren’t going to sit here and let some nano-bug screw us over like in Scotland. Let’s go to the Moon and kick butt…