It was painstaking, agonizing, intense work, made all the more difficult by the fact that only two or three workers could get into the Command Module at any one time. But Seger insisted on adhering to the procedure, and Muldoon supported him. It was the way they had done it on Apollo 1, after the fire, and it was the way they were going to do it on Apollo-N. It was just the kind of detailed, meticulous job Seger enjoyed getting his teeth into.

Sometimes he thought back over the incidents surrounding the flight. He recalled the hostile faces of the protesters on launch day. That still returned to haunt him. And he was worried by the way the internal communication of his organization had fallen apart, even within Mission Control, on the day. Seger as Program Office head had been keeping up the pressure, of budgets and time frames, on his people for years, and they’d seemed to be responding well; but he wondered if there were greater problems under the surface than he’d been perceiving. Hell, maybe he hadn’t wanted to perceive them.

Well, if there were such issues, he would address them. You had to be rational, to overcome doubt, in order to go forward, to achieve things. The crew had known the risks when they climbed aboard the NERVA ship in the first place. They’d paid the ultimate price. Seger owed it to their sacrifice to ensure that their lives hadn’t been wasted, that NASA learned from this and moved forward.

Away from the hangar, Seger spent a lot of time on the phone lines arguing with Fred Michaels and Tim Josephson and others about the future shape of the program.

It couldn’t be denied that the incident was going to set the program back. But Seger wanted to make up time by putting the all-up testing approach to work. The next flight, Seger argued, should be another manned Saturn/NERVA launch. Maybe they should even be more ambitious, such as by taking an S-NB out of Earth orbit and sending it around the Moon.

But he found Michaels opposing him. Michaels said if they weren’t forced to discontinue the nuclear program altogether, they should run a few more unmanned tests and then repeat the Apollo-N mission profile. If Apollo-N had been a useful mission (and if it wasn’t, why had they lost three men to it?) they owed it to the program and to the memory of the crew to do the mission.

Seger thought that was just an emotional argument.