Jennine watched this through a glass picture window. It was a startlingly medieval scene, this slow and painstaking handcrafting. And she wondered how it must feel to work on something — to touch and shape it with your fingertips — knowing that it might, one day, enter the air of Mars.

Avco’s testing process would start with handheld blowtorches, and finish up with rocket-propelled power dives into the Earth’s atmosphere…

But such occasions, when JK took the trouble to share his work with her, were the exception, not the rule. Mostly she had to endure his absences, silently hostess his business meetings.

Jennine had married JK back in 1955.

At the time he had been working for a master’s in aeronautical engineering at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, out in Pasadena.

They got married in a Catholic church close to Jennine’s parents’ home in New Orleans. She had been starting to make her way as a secretary in a large law practice in the city. But she gave it all up to go with JK, to support him and his career a thousand miles away. That was what you did in 1955.

Jennine’s parents gave them money to rent a car for a couple of weeks, and so they drove back east, through Vermont, to watch the fall coloring the leaves. Whenever the fall came she thought of that honeymoon.

After the honeymoon they flew west, and JK drove her out to Pasadena, to the little house he’d rented.

When they arrived, there was a group of JK’s pals waiting there. She thought it must be some kind of welcome home party. But no; it turned out there was a problem in the Caltech wind tunnel.

So JK had kissed her and gone off to the lab, leaving her standing in the driveway with all her luggage. JK didn’t get home until dawn.

As it turned out, that honeymoon in Vermont, twenty-seven years ago, had been the last holiday Jennine and JK had taken together.

And this damn Mars program was the toughest project JK had ever worked on. JK was at heart a technician, and a hands-on manager, at his best — so Jennine thought — when working with comparatively small teams, at one site. But now he was running a national effort, one of the most complex engineering projects ever undertaken.

Even beyond the complexity of what was going on at Columbia itself there were all the subcontractors Columbia had to deal with: Honeywell working on stabilization and control (not Hughes, JK would point out with relish), Garrett Corporation on the cabin environment, Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Rockwell, providing the main propulsion systems, Pratt and Whitney developing the fuel cells, and so on.