“Helicopter experience. That’s a nice bird, and it’s easy enough to fly. But it goes against everything, every instinct you build up flying a plane.” He obviously hadn’t listened to her. Or maybe he had taken in what she’d said, as much as he felt he needed to know, and had moved on to his next thought, the next step of his inexorable approach to Mars. “If that’s the way the MEM is going to handle, anybody with a lot of chopper proficiency is going to have an edge. That’s obvious.”

“And you have, I suppose?”

“No. But I will soon.”

His helmet under his arm, he stalked off across the tarmac, short, purposeful, bristling with determination, back toward the MLTV.

Curval scratched the back of his crew-cut head. “What a day. What an asshole.”

Maybe, York thought. But he looks to me like an asshole who is going to Mars.

November 1983

NEWPORT BEACH

As he walked into the low fieldstone building that served as office space for Columbia’s executives, Gershon could all but smell the tension in the air.

The CARR was to be held in a big bleak conference room here. The CARR, the Contractor’s Acceptance Readiness Review, was a major event in the life of a spacecraft, the moment when it was judged to have met the specifications of the contract and became the property of the United States government. And since Spacecraft 009 was the first MEM designated for a manned mission — the man-rating D-prime flight — the pressure on Columbia Aviation to get this CARR right was intense.

There were a dozen senior NASA managers and a lot of the top people from Columbia involved in the project: Chaushui Xu, Bob Rowen, Julie Lye, and others. People Gershon had gotten to know well.

But the CARR was starting late.

JK Lee, the chairman for the day, hadn’t turned up for work yet. In fact, the word was, he hadn’t shown up at all since Friday afternoon. It was Monday morning, and everyone knew that Lee normally worked right through the weekend. Gershon felt vaguely disturbed. This sure as hell wasn’t like Lee.

Gershon got himself a coffee and a bag of peanuts from one of the ubiquitous vending machines.

Without a single article having yet left the ground for a flight test, the MEM program was suffering very visible delays and failures and cost overruns. Columbia was coming in for a huge amount of criticism: from NASA, from Congress, from other subcontractors. Even NASA’s redesign around JK’s three-man strategy was being picked over. In the Astronaut Office, the fury at the reduction of Muldoon’s four-man crews to three still hadn’t subsided…