Three of Phil Stone’s crew — Adam Bleeker and a senior astronaut called Ted Curval — would take up the B mission, she saw, the first, risky, shakedown of the enhanced booster, the Saturn VB. An all-USAF crew. York could see the logic behind sending up test pilots for what was basically a flight test, but it set a tone for the whole program, right from the start: the wrong tone, a military, test-pilot tone. More dumb-fighter-jock bullshit, just as it’s always been.

But then the D mission, the long space soak flight, would have a full crew of four, including two mission specialists: Ralph Gershon, she read. And -

Natalie York.

She tried to read on. Phil Stone’s B-mission four-man crew made up the backup crew…

Natalie York.

She read her name over and over, unable to be sure if she was seeing it correctly, as if her eyeballs were still compressed by some invisible centrifuge, Jesus. That really is me, up there, in a prime crew. I’m going into orbit.

I’ll be the first American woman in space.

She was one of just three female astronauts in the corps, and the only one who’d been named on Muldoon’s chart.

All around the room there was an explosion of tension; there were whoops, a lot of handshakes, good-old-boy back pats. York was even the recipient of a few of those herself.

There were a lot of forced grins around her. She knew what lay behind the grins; she’d be thinking the same. I’ve got to smile, make like I’m really pleased for you. But it should have been me, you bastard, not you. Maybe it will be, if, pray God, you break your leg or otherwise fuck up somewhere down the line.

Muldoon held up his hands for silence. “I told you that beyond the first E mission I don’t think it’s appropriate yet to allocate crews. But I expect the selection to be made by the normal rotation system. Thanks for your attention; if you’ve no questions right now, you can come see me in my office…”

He’d said, The normal rotation system.

That hit York like an electric shock, burning away her brief euphoria.

She knew what that meant, and so did everybody else. She stared at the chart again, doing fast calculations. It means I will make it to Earth orbit. But that’s as far as I’ll get. Phil Stone is going to Mars. I’m not.

Nobody was going to get any more work out of the Astronaut Office that day; York guessed Joe Muldoon had planned the announcement around that.