“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your colleagues?”

With Geena was a mission designer she introduced as Frank Turtle, a skinny, owlish, bearded guy in bell-bottom jeans who was probably older than he looked. And there were a couple of astronauts: both men, both aged around forty, both with hard-muscled arms folded across their sports shirts. They regarded Henry with evident distaste, and said as little as they had to.

Turtle, it turned out, had been at the heart of devising this improvised lunar mission from the start, and so had found himself catapulted upwards in terms of responsibility — if not, Henry suspected, in such tangibles as his salary, the size of his office, and the colour of his carpet. He looked as if the responsibility was crushing him.

Frank Turtle coughed. “Dr Meacher, we’ve tried to devise a training program to get you through as much as possible in the time we’ve got. There are three main phases. Suitability, where the medicos assess if you could survive a space mission at all. Generic training, in emergency procedures, weightlessness, so on. Finally crew training, where you’ll be taken through the launch and docking procedures.” He scratched his receding hairline. “It’s going to be a scramble; I don’t know what resources we can offer you. I don’t think NASA personnel have ever been so stretched. For instance we’re going to have to force through Shuttle launches to take up the spacecraft components. We’re all working double shifts… equivalent to a pace of sixteen Shuttle launches in a year, if we had to keep it up that long…”

Geena said to Henry heavily, “Guys like Frank in operations and Mission Control, and the engineers at the Cape, and the flight crews, are the true heroes of this, Henry. The greatest pace we achieved in the history of the Shuttle program was nine launches, in the year before Challenger. I have guys working their asses off, doing double or triple shifts. Just don’t forget it. This mission isn’t about you. It’s about them.”

The astronauts eyed him coldly.

He wondered what to say. “I’m grateful.”

None of them was comfortable. He sensed anger. Frustration. Henry could see conflict in Geena’s face, and Frank Turtle’s.

It wasn’t hard to understand why.

NASA tended to think of itself as a heroic agency, capable of taking on whatever challenges were thrown at it. But the truth was, all the way back to Mercury, they had never launched a manned mission without every aspect of it being timelined, checklisted, simulated and rehearsed, over and over, until every possible glitch had been identified and contingency-planned, until the crew knew the mission so well they were actually desensitized to its dangers.