For the first, he had Bella print up a kind of calendar, which he pinned up around the plant and had checked off every day. FORTY-SIX DAYS TO SUBMISSION DAY! AND ROCKWELL IS STILL AHEAD OF US! Lee was proud of this. “It’s kind of like the calendar they had in When Worlds Collide. Do you remember that, Bella? When they were building a rocket ship to get off the Earth?…”

“Yes, sir, JK.”

The weight problem was more difficult to crack.

Every design definition Lee had ever worked on was the same; each subsystem inevitably grew in scope and complexity as the engineers got into the detail. So Lee started to keep a list of best-guess weights for all the various components and subsystems.

Every morning Lee would call his senior people into his own office, into a progress meeting he called a hot griddle. It was something he knew they used at the Strategic Air Command. Seven-forty-five smart and then the doors were locked; the chairs were pushed against the wall, and there was no coffee, so you couldn’t sit down and take it easy. Then, everybody would talk through their top problem for the day and how they would resolve it.

At the griddle sessions Lee handed out weight summaries, showing how far the current aggregate design was over the limit. He was reluctant to start setting weight limits for subsystems — he wanted to find the best trade-off across the whole spacecraft — but he pushed his people every day to figure out what they could do to bring down their net weight, to give the rest a little slack.

Still, the daily totals weren’t coming down fast enough, and the weight issue soon emerged as his major worry.

It wouldn’t matter if, at submission time, they were a little heavy, a little above the target. If they won, there would be plenty of detailed design work to follow. But just then it seemed as if the Columbia MEM wouldn’t even be in the right ballpark.

The weight limits had been set by NASA to fit into their new all-chemical, gravity-assist system configuration. And the limits were thereby much tighter than they had been in previous nuclear-option baselines.

Lee started to worry, privately, that they might be too tight to be feasible.

The issue was brought to a head, at last, by Lee’s closest ally.

Jack Morgan took Lee into a corner of the office, away from the hubbub. Morgan’s face was long, uncharacteristically serious. “JK, I think we’re in trouble.”

Morgan took Lee through the figures he had been establishing for the MEM environment and life-support systems. He had guideline figures, based on Apollo, for what it would take to support one human being for one day on Mars: food, clothing, air supply, waste disposal, living space, EVA consumables.