All Lee’s brief feelings of panic were gone; he felt strong, fit, eager, pumping with adrenaline again. He grabbed Morgan’s arm. “So all we have to do is figure out some way of getting three guys to maintain a twenty-four hour EVA shift pattern. Listen, Jack. This is what I want you to do.”

It was hardly a simulator: just a room within a room, fenced off from one of the Columbia site’s larger lab areas. They fitted it out with a rudimentary life-support system — food and water — but the room was left open to the outside air.

Morgan paid three students from a paramedic class he taught at Caltech to come and live in there for a month.

Every day the students went through a mocked-up EVA: they put on dummy space suits and backpacks loaded with lead weights, and they moved about simulating Mars surface experiments. And then the students would climb up a little ladder to simulate returning to the MEM, and vacuum each other clean of talcum-powder Mars dust.

The students experimented with work and sleep patterns, trying to find ways to optimize their surface shifts.

The whole setup was crude, but effective; at the end of the month the students were a little bored, and definitely exhausted; but they were alert, functional, and actually fitter than when they had gone into the mock-up. Exhaustion was fine, anyhow; the real crew was going to have the whole return leg of the trip, seven months of it, to sleep it off.

Morgan wrote this up for Lee, and Lee was delighted with the results. Not only was his three-man idea going to hit that evaluation board between the eyes, he was going to be able to throw at them detailed proposals about managing the Mars surface time: suggestions for shift rotas, the need to establish work and sleep patterns before arrival at Mars, how to schedule suitable rest periods, and all the rest.

Problems and opportunities. He had a mood of gathering momentum, of approaching triumph.

As the clock wound down to the deadline day, Lee started sitting in on the rehearsals as each group put together its own piece of the pitch.

He began to figure out how the final thing would come together. There would be him — and Xu, Rowen, Lye, Morgan, and a few others — on a stage in some kind of hotel or convention center, in front of a mass of NASA engineers, and they would have sixty minutes to make their case.

But the more he listened to the draft pieces of the pitch, the more he understood that it wasn’t going to make sense to have five or six or seven presenters in that time. One man was going to have to do the whole show, from beginning to end, on every aspect of the proposal, every damned subsystem, with the others sitting there in support to help field questions.