He went around the horn, polling his controllers; they all reported a ship that was, in spite of everything, reasonably close to nominal. We got through it. How, I’ll never know.

Bert Seger knew they had been lucky. He determined to poke a hot stick up the asses of those guys from Marshall over this. The S-IC had pogoed. The Saturn first stage should not be letting them down, not after more than a decade of experience, not after so many flights.

Seger walked into the MOCR and leaned over Donnelly’s station. “I want you to make damn sure you’re confident about that NERVA engine of Marshall’s. Otherwise, bring those guys straight back down.”

Friday, November 28, 1980

APOLLO-N; LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

They shoved their pressure suits into net bags and crammed them under their couches; Jim Dana was wearing only a pair of Beta-cloth coveralls over his long johns.

He was a hundred miles up, a thousand miles downrange from the Cape, and covering five miles every second. There in his center couch, his feet pointed up at the stars, he was peering at his home planet through the Command Module’s window.

He couldn’t get over how beautiful the sunlit Earth was. It was a wall of color and light, gently curving, which divided the universe in two; cloud lay across land and ocean in brilliant white plumes, like feathers.

Ben Priest, to Dana’s right, was grinning at him. “How do you feel?”

“Like I was born to be up here.”

Chuck Jones unbuckled his seat belt and pushed himself out of the left-hand couch. He floated up toward the instrument panel. “Hot dawg,” he said. “We is in orbit, gentlemen. Welcome to the astronaut corps. Now all we’ve got to do is figure out if we can stay here.”

Priest and Jones set to work on checking out the craft’s flight path and velocity estimates with the ground stations and instrumentation aircraft. Dana could hear Jones humming as he worked. Meanwhile, Dana’s job was to make sure the guidance platform was aligned.

He floated up into the air and folded back his couch, the center of the three. In microgravity, the cramped cabin seemed roomy. Dana pushed a fingertip against an instrument panel; it was enough to launch him slowly down past the others into the equipment bay under the couches.

He drifted among coolant pipes and storage compartments. There was room to stretch out, for the first time since the launch, with his feet by the hatch and his head pointing at the floor. As he stretched he felt twinges at his stomach, chest, and knees: the aftermath of the pogoing. It was actually less painful than he’d expected; his pressure suit had evidently protected him.