On the brown-painted walls there were mission patches, dating all the way back to Gemini 4; and there were plaques, framed in the team colors of retired flight directors. There was a big Stars and Stripes at the front of the room. The light was low, the colors gloomy; but the CRTs glowed brightly.

The booster passed the launch tower. And, smoothly, Indigo Team took control of the mission from the Kennedy Firing Room.

Donnelly could feel adrenaline surge in his system.

“Roll and pitch program,” Chuck Jones called down on the air-to-ground loop. His voice was shaking, barely audible to Donnelly. “Everything’s looking good. The sky is getting lighter.”

The Saturn VN pitched itself over, arcing east over the Atlantic. The booster was flying itself, gimbaling its engines so that it neatly followed its preprogrammed trajectory; the members of the crew, Jones, Priest, and Dana, were passengers, their nuclear rocket just payload.

Natalie York, capcom for the shift, called up to the spacecraft. “Apollo, Houston… You’re right smack-dab on the trajectory.”

“Roger, Houston. This baby is really going.”

“Roger, that.”

Numbers scrolled across CRT screens, and Donnelly’s team talked quietly to each other on their comms loops.

It was York’s first assignment as capcom. She sounded calm, controlled; Donnelly was pleased.

The flight was going well. Rolf Donnelly could feel it. He didn’t have to do a thing.

There were a lot of unique features about this mission. It was the first time the U.S. had tried to maintain two ambitious flights at once, with no less than six astronauts above the atmosphere: Jones, Dana, and Priest climbing to orbit for their NERVA test flight on top of the Saturn VN, and Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone already out in lunar orbit in Moonlab, waiting for their rendezvous with the Russians. It was also the first time NASA had operated both its MOCRs at once.

And this was, of course, the first manned flight of the S-NB, the new Saturn booster third stage with its NERVA 2 nuclear engine.

Management Row, behind Donnelly in the MOCR, was full today. For instance, there was Bert Seger, just over Donnelly’s shoulder, his trademark carnation a glare of white. And in the Viewing Room behind the glass wall at the back of the MOCR, Donnelly had spotted Fred Michaels himself, puffing on one of his cigars, watching the numbers unroll with baffled anxiety. This was a very important, and very public, flight.