And the truth was, the three of them didn’t really get along. York never said much to anyone, Stone was too much the USAF goddamn straight-arrow commander to get involved, and Gershon himself said far too much, all the time.

But it didn’t bother Gershon. Or his crewmates, he suspected. All the psychiatric team-building stuff was so much horseshit, to Gershon. They weren’t on this mission to make friends with each other; they were there to fly to Mars. And to achieve that they would overcome a little interpersonal friction.

As long as a man got a little time to himself, it was no big deal.

He worked steadily through the gauges and dials and computer screens in front of him, and compared them with the expected readings printed out on his teletyped checklist. His headset was voice-activated; he’d fixed it so that the Mozart stopped playing when he spoke.

Gershon liked working with Apollo hardware.

The basic design was antiquated, but it was fifteen years since its last major failure, on Apollo 13. Anyway, there wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with “antiquated.” To a pilot, it was the difference between a development vehicle and an operational bird; for “antiquated” read “proven.” In Gershon’s view it would have been a crying shame to have abandoned the Apollo line back in the early 1970s and try to build a newfangled spaceplane. Nice as the shuttle would have been to fly.

The enhancements Rockwell had applied over the years had turned the basic configuration into a flexible, robust space truck. Outwardly the ship stuck nose first to the front of the Mission Module Docking Adapter looked much the same as every other Apollo which had ever flown: it was made up of the classic configuration, the cylindrical Service Module, with its big propulsion system engine bell stuck on the back, and the squat cone of the Command Module on top. But this Apollo — called a “Block V” design by the Rockwell engineers who had built her — was put together very differently from the early models, the old Block IIs, which had flown to the Moon in the 1960s, and even from the later Block III and IV Earth-orbital ferries.

The first lunar missions had been only two weeks in length. But the Ares Apollo was going to have to survive eighteen months of soak in deep space. And the temperature extremes Apollo would endure, as Ares flew across the Solar System, were much greater than on any lunar flight. So most of Apollo’s main systems had been redesigned from the floor up.