Lee, for once in his life, couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

“Can I tell my people?”

Muldoon checked his watch, an astronaut’s heavy Rolex. “We can’t make a public announcement until the stock markets on the West Coast close… Well, what the hell.”

He allowed Lee to make two phone calls.

Lee used the phone in Muldoon’s office. He thought of calling Jennine.

He called Art Cane.

And then he called Gene Tyson, at Hughes, and he took a lot of pleasure in commiserating with him.

Muldoon took Lee out that night, for a meal and a good few cold ones. Lee got thoroughly oiled and had a hell of a time.

But by 5 A.M. he was up, watching the early-morning news on the TV, and packing his overnight bag.

He caught a glance of himself in the mirror on the wall of his motel room. “By God,” he said aloud. “I’m going to build a spacecraft to take three Americans to Mars.”

Then the TV news item broke into his awareness.

A Saturn VB had blown up. There was an image of a white cloud, tinged with orange, with Solid Rocket Boosters veering crazily out of it, trailing smoke.

The commentators said the accident would set the Ares program back years.

My God. Lee knotted his tie, his fingers frantic, fumbling, and hurried from the room. New York Times, Tuesday, December 15, 1981

…Today the last remains of the tragic Apollo-N space mission have been buried, in an underground storage facility at NASA’s Cape Kennedy launch site in Florida.

I spoke to Aaron Raab at the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center about the problems involved. Raab was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1946. He joined NASA in July 1967, just a few months after another tragedy, the Apollo 1 pad fire which claimed the lives of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee.

In the immediate aftermath of the Apollo-N disaster, Raab shouldered the heavy burden of “Debris Manager.”

After being off-loaded from its recovery vessel at Port Canaveral, the Apollo-N Command Module — the 11,000-pound capsule which returned NASA astronauts Dana, Jones, and Priest to Earth — was painstakingly disassembled and laid out for investigation purposes in temporary storage areas by a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) team. Under Raab’s supervision, and under the watchful eye of the investigating commission appointed by President Reagan, the components of the Command Module were arranged in their original configuration relative to one another, to assist the investigators. The components remained in this “footprint” for almost a full year, because once the investigations were over and the reports written, NASA got down to its own internal engineering evaluation and data retrieval.

Surprisingly little equipment was used to move the components about, including a light crane, a forklift, and two flatbed trucks.