He was struck — shocked, even — by the poverty he saw around him in the neighborhood of the church, just blocks away from NASA Headquarters, here in the capital city of the richest nation on the planet.

He began to see that he’d been locked away inside NASA for too long, pursuing the organization’s single goal, the Mars landing, with blinkered obsessiveness. Perhaps they all had.

He remembered how shocked he’d been by the intrusion of those antinuke protesters at the Cape.

The world out here, beyond JSC, had continued to evolve, and Seger felt as if he was emerging into a new, harsh light, his NASA cocoon crumbling around him.

He went to the libraries and started going through back issues of newspapers — papers he’d barely scanned when they were printed, save for sports results and NASA coverage. Then, as he stared into grainy microfiche screens, he felt as if he was learning about some phase of ancient history. But this was the world in which he had lived, the story of the country which supported him.

The United States was falling apart, it seemed to Seger.

The country was deep in recession. Under Reagan, there was a kind of cheerful, simplistic optimism around. But the divisions in society seemed to Seger to be growing wider than ever. Two Americas were emerging: there was a grotesque, materialistic money-chase among the already affluent, and among the poor — particularly the nonwhites, in the inner cities — there was a tailspin of drugs, crime, decaying housing projects, and a failing educational system.

And meanwhile, Seger learned, in the middle of the recession, Reagan was vastly increasing the Pentagon’s budget. Nuclear weapons were a key part of that buildup. Next year, cruise missiles would be deployed in Western Europe, in the face of much protest from those countries. There’d been more protest at home, too, he read.

People were growing scared again. A DoD official had talked about how backyard shelters would save them all, when the bomb dropped. If there are enough shovels going around, everybody’s going to make it.

Seger read back as far as Three Mile Island. The similarities — administrative and technical — between that disaster and the Apollo-N incident chilled him.

The general press coverage of NASA, once he looked on that with his new perspective, startled him, too. He saw skepticism, anger, contempt, resentment, on the part of the people outside looking in. He remembered how Eisenhower had cautioned against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex — against an expanded space program, in fact — because technocracy was foreign to the individualistic American spirit, and grafting it onto the nation was going to do a lot of harm. Well, Kennedy had accepted that risk. And it seemed to Seger that the country was paying the price.