Muldoon knew enough about the workings of NASA to know what kind of man it needed as its Administrator. It shouldn’t be a scientist, or an engineer. It had to be someone who understood the great issues of national and public policy. It had to be a manager, someone able to keep the multiple warring centers in effective and efficient operation. It had to be a man who knew his way around Congress, and the Pentagon, and the Bureau of the Budget.

Such a man was Fred Michaels.

Michaels, as had James Webb before him, had shown himself to have the ability to build up a political lobby behind a space program — and then, crucially, to sustain it across the years. Michaels’s continuity, and his endless energy and commitment, had probably meant as much as Kennedy’s advocacy in keeping the NASA show on the road, over all these long and seemingly fruitless years.

With lesser men in the Administrator’s office, Muldoon realized, NASA might have fallen on bad times years before.

And now, at this lowest moment, he wants to give up, to slink back to fucking Dallas.

Muldoon sat there in the gloom of the office, listening to Michaels, watching the flickering of the TV screen.

He was reminded of the day, long ago, when his own father had admitted to him that he was terminally ill; he felt the same loss of foundations, of surety.

I guess I’m going to have to become one of the grown-ups now, he thought.

But what the hell am I supposed to do?

March-April 1981

LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

From Joe Muldoon’s point of view, the arguments and decision making about the future shape of the space program accelerated dramatically over the next few weeks.

Reagan asked his White House counsel to review options. A small meeting was pulled together in a room of the White House, overlooking the South Lawn. Tim Josephson briefed Muldoon on how the session had gone. Just a handful of men had been in there, talking and arguing for hours: the counsel, the budget director, Fred Michaels, Josephson and a couple of assistants, and Michaels’s old adversary, Leon Agronski.

“It was important to us, Joe. It could have been maybe the single most important meeting since the decision to go to the Moon. But we spent most of the time bitching about the lousy decisions that have landed us in this mess in the first place. And you had Agronski weighing in yet again about how manned spaceflight is a waste of time… I still feel Reagan is looking for something positive, and feasible, and real, that he can unite us all around; but so far we haven’t come up with anything. We’re in danger of being picked apart; Reagan will find his prestigious morale-boosters somewhere else, and we’ll end up flying nothing but goddamn low-orbit spy missions.”