When she floated up into the science platform, it was like entering an octagonal cave. Bulky equipment racks and storage bays were fixed all around the curved hull. One side of the octagon served as a ceiling, broken by a couple of high-quality viewing ports — disks of darkness — and by small science-experiment airlocks, sturdy wheeled hatches like the doors of little safes. Everything was still in its place, stowed neatly away, still in the wrapper.

She pulled herself to the right-hand wall and locked her feet into a couple of stirrups. It was the display and control console: a long rack of switches, cathode-ray displays, and numeric and qwerty keypads. She closed switches and began booting up the science platform’s computers, then started to power up and check out the rest of the equipment.

As it started to come to life, the cramped little science station reminded her of some bespectacled kid’s bedroom laboratory; it was compact, miniature, kind of sweet.

Some of the experiments carried by Ares were part of long-term microgravity research programs. There were experiments in protein crystal growth, and the diffusion of bacteria in microgravity conditions, and a chunky arrangement called the heat pipe performance experiment, a dry engineering test of the diffusion of heat from hot spots on pipes and ducts in microgravity.

But Ares offered some special opportunities. There was a scheme to observe major solar events like spots and flares from the two widely separate vantage points of Ares and Earth, and so there was a whole bunch of instruments which would be directed at the sun: a coronagraph, a spectroheliograph, a spectrographic telescope. Since in flight the Ares cluster would keep itself aligned to point at the sun, to save boiloff, all the equipment was mounted in a pallet, which would be unfolded and held out from the body of the Mission Module, like a rearview mirror.

The setting up took longer than she expected. The computers, Hewlett-Packard minis, were slow. The models Ares was carrying were out-of-date: the design of the platform, already nearly a decade old, had become frozen around those customized, low-weight, low-power machines years before. Hewlett-Packard and the other computer suppliers had made a commitment to keep supporting NASA’s in-flight equipment as long as was necessary. But it was ironic that York was — in deep space, en route to Mars — having to make do and mend with technology which no self-respecting middle-sized savings and loan in Gary, Indiana, would put up with anymore.