Dana picked up his briefcase then and, with a curt nod, walked away.

All Udet’s exhilaration, his mood of triumph, drained away from him; he felt as if he had been toying, ignorantly, with a loaded pistol.

The Mittelwerk He was there; one of those invisible thousands. My God.

There may be no limit to the power which this absurd little man can wield over me.

After Michaels’s meeting, events began to move with a speed that stunned Muldoon.

There was predictable opposition to the new proposal from Leon Agronski of MIT. Agronski attacked NASA for continuing to give too much attention to manned spaceflight. And he raised economic objections. He had studies to show that whereas aerospace R D attracted 35 percent of the national effort into R D, it accounted for only 4 percent of the total value added by U.S. manufacturers to their raw materials.

But Michaels was ready with other evidence which argued that two-thirds of all economic growth from the Crash of 1929 to Sputnik was traceable to new technology; and that the return on investment on NASA was, by 1980, around 43 percent.

Agronski, as Michaels expected, also attacked the new program as bad science. Michaels responded by saying that NASA was planning to deliver several astronaut-months on Mars, for a fraction of the cost of Apollo, which had delivered just a few man-weeks on the Moon…

Meanwhile, on another front, Michaels started negotiations with the secretary of defense, who suspected — rightly — that Michaels was trying to siphon off some of the billions Reagan had promised on military spending. So Michaels had to get the endorsement of the DoD for this new civilian space effort.

But it wasn’t immediately obvious why such support should be forthcoming. Having seen the Soviets send up a whole series of low-orbit military Salyut flights, the DoD, and the USAF in particular, were fighting hard for a new program based on a restriction to low Earth orbit, for reconnaissance and other purposes, and maybe some accelerated experimentation with space-based weapons systems — such as anti-ICBM particle and projectile guns — that would fit in with Reagan’s broader strategic thinking.

Michaels offered consolations to the military people. He showed how the Mars mission’s technology — orbital refueling techniques, for instance — could be adapted to military uses. And military personnel and experiments could fly on the Mars program test flights.