After her rescue, she had been reassigned stateside by her C.O. in keeping with standard Air Force policy to shunt pilots who had been downed in combat away from the theater of operations, regardless of their eagerness or apparent fitness to get back in the air--the understandable concern being that they might have suffered some hidden trauma that would cause them to blink for a split second when they needed to act, or conversely, overreact to a perceived threat, not a good idea either way when you were roaring over enemy territory at speeds upwards of five hundred miles per hour. Whatever inclination she'd had to argue the matter had been offset by her concern for her parents, whose fears for her safety had been borne out by events. For nearly a week before NATO searchers picked up the signal from her emergency locator beacon, it had been thought likely she had perished in the crash of her plane, and she hadn't wanted to put them through that kind of gut-wrenching ordeal again.

She had been elated after getting contacted for an initial NASA interview within weeks of her transfer, but then had come the long, tortuous screening process of reference checks, re-interviews, and physical examinations prior to her qualifying for finalist status, to be followed by another series of prelims, and then the nail-biting wait for a conclusive yea or nay.

When Annie was notified that her candidacy had been accepted, her excitement had been so intense she had felt as if she might soar beyond the bonds of gravity without benefit of a spacecraft, knowing full well that there was still no guarantee she would ultimately be sent into space. Before that would come two rigorous years of basic astronaut training during which her skills would be developed and subject to constant evaluation. But she had attained the high ground and was, as Tom Wolfe had put it in The Right Stuff, within sight of Olympus. Nothing would stop her from going the rest of the distance.

Driven by her lifelong ambition, and aided by an innate self-discipline and passion to excel that her parents had always reinforced, she'd applied herself to the challenges of training with a kind of fierce, single-minded dedication, come through at the top of her class--right up there with Jim Rowland--and been selected for formal mission training immediately upon graduation.

Annie and Jim had flown their first shuttle mission together in 1997, he as commander, she as pilot.