And on, and on, in a wild feedback process, as the S-NB’s instrument unit strove to bring the ship back to an unreachable flight path.

Where the hell was Conlig?

“Booster, Flight. Booster.”

Christ, Fred Michaels thought, watching from the Viewing Room at the back of the MOCR. I do not want this bird aborted.

It would be a very bad time to foul up.

The new Reagan administration was shaping itself up after its landslide, and Michaels was already gloomy about the future. He figured it was Ted Kennedy’s defection from Carter during the primaries that had done for the peanut farmer, although Michaels suspected Carter’s time might have been up anyhow. And here came Reagan, rattling his saber at the Russians over Poland and Afghanistan, and promising to get the hostages out of Iran… Maybe Reagan would be gung ho about space; nobody knew.

Meanwhile Michaels had lost a close political buddy in the White House, and his Kennedy card was looking a little worn.

Anyhow, the Apollo-N flight had so far gotten NASA some extensive coverage — some of it even favorable, as it showed the elaborate precautions the Agency was taking over its nuclear materials. It had even crowded out the “Who Shot JR?” hoopla that was fascinating everybody. Michaels did not want to turn those front pages into damning coverage of another Apollo disaster; not now, not ever…

Bert Seger, a few rows back from Michaels in the Viewing Room, knew this was NASA’s most controversial flight since the military crews of Skylab A. There had been a march and protest rally by campaigners at Kennedy today, people with kids, and banners saying REMEMBER THREE MILE ISLAND. The Cape security people had kept them well away from the launch site, and from the main public viewing areas. But Seger, hotfooting it back from Tyuratam for this launch, had had to work his way past it all.

Seger had been cocooned in the project for years. He’d found the anger he’d witnessed in those massed faces, on the news programs and on NASA’s closed-circuit loops, startling, deeply troubling.

Of even more concern to him was the grumbling he’d heard from inside the Agency. Some of the astronauts, that loudmouth Joe Muldoon, for instance, had been getting a little too vocal about the flight-readiness, or lack of it, of NERVA. Fortunately, however, Muldoon was safely out of the way, on the other side of the Moon.

But Muldoon and the others had planted seeds of doubt in Seger. Had he been pushing too hard? If anything went badly wrong today, then after bulling through the protests, NASA might, after all, smear nuclear fuel all over the eastern seaboard.