But Donnelly wasn’t concerned; not now. He had a lot of faith in his people. The controllers in this room were actually leaders of the teams, three or five strong, who worked in the back rooms clustered around the MOCR; to get as far as this room, the controllers had had to work in the back rooms on a good number of missions. That was the way Donnelly had come up himself. The controllers would often get poached away by the higher salaries offered by the aerospace companies: a spell in Mission Control looked good on your resume. But that was all right; it kept down the average age in here.

Anyway, Donnelly had no such ambitions. The MOCR was much closer to the center of gravity of decision making, on any flight they’d launched to date, even than being in the cabin of the actual spacecraft. This was where things were run; in this room, Donnelly was in control. As far as he was concerned, it was better than flying.

One minute into the flight.

The vibrations of the launch smoothed out. We are outpacing sound itself, Jim Dana thought.

“You know,” Jones shouted, “there’s something…”

Ben Priest yelled back. “What?”

“This goddamn bird doesn’t ring right…”

Dana, staring at the panel before him, couldn’t see Jones’s face inside his helmet.

There wasn’t time to think about it. Gs were piling on Dana, as the five heavy engines of the S-IC stage continued to blast. Two, three, four Gs… he could feel his chest flattening.

But that was about as bad as it would get. In fact, the Gs were oddly reassuring. They were coming right on schedule. Maybe Jones was wrong. So far this was just like the sims. Almost.

Suddenly he was thrown forward against his seat restraints. What the…? The smooth buildup was gone. Could an engine have failed? But then he was hurled back, deeper into his couch; and then forward again, so hard he could feel his straps bruise his stomach and chest through the suit’s layers. Then back again -

“Pogoing!” Jones shouted. “Hang on to your hats, guys.”

The vibrations, forward and back, were coming at the rate of five or six a second, and their violence was astonishing. How many Gs? And oscillating all the time -

Dana could no longer see; the craft was a blur around him, and he felt as if he was being pummeled about the chest, head, and legs. We’ll have to abort. We can’t survive this. It’ll shake us to pieces. He tried to turn his head, to see if Jones was reaching for his abort handle.

The pogoing didn’t show up in the MOCR.

To the controllers there, the first-stage burn looked nominal. It was only apparent in the Marshall engineers’ equivalent of Mission Control, called the Huntsville Operations Support Center.