Out back of the apartment building, she spotted a car that had gotten mildewed from the moisture in the air.

Friday, December 8, 1978

WASATCH, UTAH

As he flew into Salt Lake City Gregory Dana got a spectacular view of the lake. Feeder streams glistened like snail tracks, and human settlements were misty gray patches spread along ribbons of road. The morning was bright and clear, the sky huge and transparent and appearing to reach all the way down to the desert surface far below the plane.

Dana allowed himself briefly to imagine that he was landing on some foreign planet, a world of parched desert and high, isolated inland seas.

To most people, he reflected, the complex world of human society was the entire universe, somehow disengaged from the physical underpinning of things. Most people never formed any sense of perspective: the understanding that the whole of their lives was contained in a thin slice of air coating a small, spinning ball of rock, that their awareness was confined to a thin flashbulb slice of geological time, that they inhabited a universe which had emerged from, and was inexorably descending into, conditions unimaginably different from those with which they were familiar.

Even the view of the air traveler gave a perspective that hadn’t been available to any of the generations who went before. If spaceflight gives us nothing else than an awareness of our true nature, he thought, then that alone will justify its cost.

He glanced back into the cabin. Most of his fellow passengers — even those attached to NASA and the space program, as he was — had their faces buried in documents, or books, or newspapers.

Morton Thiokol sent a car to meet him at the airport. The driver — young, breezy, anonymous behind mirrored sunglasses — introduced himself as Jack, and loaded Dana’s bags into the trunk, although Dana kept his briefcase with him.

Jack drove onto the freeway heading north, toward Brigham City. The driver told him that he was to be taken straight to the first test firing of the SRB, the new Saturn VB-class Solid Rocket Booster.

Dana grumbled, but saw no option but to submit.

Dana had been asked by Bert Seger to participate in the Critical Design Review of the new SRB, the formal checkpoint that marked the end of that phase of the rocket’s development. The use of solid rockets in a man-rated booster stack was one of the most controversial elements of the whole Saturn upgrade program, and it was one on which NASA was determined to be seen to be absolutely clean.

But Dana had been uncertain about working with Udet, about his own ability to get the Marshall people to listen to him. And anyway, such an assignment was well outside his own area of competence.

Seger had insisted: “You can inspect what you like, and recommend what you like, and I’ll make sure you get a hearing. We have to get this right, Dr. Dana…”