The Mission Control Center here at JSC hummed around her, rows of sleek black touch-screen workstations like Star Trek props, littered with coffee cups and yellow stickies and laptops and binders of mission rules. Beside her desk there was a huge recycling bin for soda cans. At the back of the room was a row of pot plants, their tubs littered with more soda cans. At the front of the room, the big screens carried computer-graphic images of the Station’s position and orientation in orbit, a view of the Earth from an external camera, and a shot of a science lab where a European astronaut was freezing saliva scrapings taken from the crew.

It was a familiar working place for Geena, so homely that coming in here was like taking an adrenaline antidote.

Bored to tears, she tried to focus on seat liners.

She’d spent the morning attending a press conference on the plans the boys from JPL were putting up for a fast probe to Venus. It had been exciting, energetic; in fact NASA as a whole had been energized by the Venus event, Geena thought. Whatever the ominous implications, the amount of attention space issues had received since then had been gratifying, and NASA’s speed and flexibility of response invigorating.

But even so, when you got to the coal face of manned spaceflight, it was still a crushing bureaucracy to work in.

The seat liner controversy went on and on.

The hardest thing about managing the Station project was not the technology or the work on orbit. Geena knew from experience that once on orbit, isolated in that collection of tin cans, people tended to drop their personal differences and work together. Integrating two forty-year-old management hierarchies on the ground had proven much more difficult.

Even the basic philosophy of operation of the two control centres differed. For instance, previous Russian space stations — Mir and the Salyuts — had been out of contact with their controllers for most of each day, because of a lack of ground stations around the globe. So the Russians had developed a shift system based on that fact, which differed from the American system. And they’d had to allow their cosmonauts more latitude in day-to-day operations and decision-making than American astronauts, checklisted to death, were generally permitted. American and Russian mission controllers had worked together for some years now, on the Station assembly project and before that on the Shuttle-Mir docking missions, and had thrashed out a set of common procedures. NASA had given all its astronauts and controllers accelerated Russian language training, and had provided joint training and simulations, and so on.

But it was never going to be easy.

Day to day, they ticked along. But every time a real problem blew up, like this one, it seemed to go to the top of both hierarchies before resolution.