“No, it’s not that. In a lot of cases it’s just sloppy practice. For instance, the first time I went up to the S-NB test installation at Michoud I found some of the technicians going for a few beers with their lunch. That’s just outrageous, when you’re working on man-rated hardware. And I saw some guy pumping lox out of a tank on the ground up into an umbilical tower. I asked him where the lox was going. ‘Beats the hell out of me,’ he said. Once it got out of the other end of his hose, that little guy didn’t have a clue what happened to the lox. After that, I told them that I wanted every engineer to learn everything there is to know about every system he was running — where the stuff came from, where it was going, and all the things that might go wrong in between. Every one of those guys has got to know his system from womb to tomb.

“I made a list — I copied you on it — of thirty-odd things that got up my ass, in my first hour up there. Lousy materials handling, mixed-up demarcation of workspaces, wasted time…

“Sure, the schedule pressures are working against us, too. With the sloppy practices the manufacturers have, there’s no way they can keep to their development timetables. And then they cut corners on testing, to try to make the end date, which means you end up with a candle that’s late and lousy quality.”

Michaels was nodding, rubbing the thick jowls under his chin. “Yeah. I understand. You’re doing a good job, Joe. You’re doing just the job I hired you for.”

“Fred, we’ve gone wrong, somewhere. We scraped this kind of crap out of Apollo; back then we had an operation, right across the country, that was as slick as snot. But now we’ve slipped back.”

Michaels grunted and sipped his drink. “Maybe. But we had lots of things working for us, back then. A goal you couldn’t have defined more sharply, a lot of goodwill — even though Congress squeezed the budgets — and, hell, I don’t know, a kind of romance about it all. We were still moving outward, Joe; it was still a great adventure, a time of firsts, every year. And we had one hell of a schedule pressure; we still thought the Russians might beat us to it.

“Now,” he ruminated, “it’s different. All the forces working on us have changed. Even though we’ve got the prospect of Mars, somewhere out there in the future, we’ve been mooching about in Earth orbit for a decade, and what the hell do we have to show for it but a couple of tin-can fuel-tank ’Labs, Apollo hardware still in orbit a decade after the Moon landings, a Saturn upgrade booster that hasn’t flown once, and a lethal bucket of bolts called NERVA?”