It is a new perspective which can lead us closer to GOD.

But all too often the experience of SPACE, certainly as portrayed to the general public by the government information organizations and public bodies supporting and opposing the space initiative, veers between twin mirror-image idols, both of them false:

— MELLONOLATRY, that is the baseless worship of technology for its own sake.

— MISONEISM, an equally baseless fear and hatred of technology.

What better argument for casting aside our rocket vessels now, with their deadly NUCLEAR hearts!…

Monday, December 3, 1984

LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

Ralph Gershon was standing in the hatchway of the MEM mock-up, his face visible behind his clear visor. “Okay, Natalie. You want to come in now?”

“Rog, Ralph.”

York, on the faked-up Martian surface, took a deliberate step toward the MEM.

As she moved, the harness around her chest hauled at her brutally, and she was dragged upward through a couple of feet. She tripped. The suit, pressurized at three and a half pounds per square inch, was like a balloon around her, and it kept her body stiff, like a manikin, and she couldn’t save herself.

She toppled like a felled tree.

She fell on her knees, with her gloved hands in the dirt. The soil in front of her face was dried-out Houston gumbo, sprinkled with pink gravel: she was on what the astronauts called, inaccurately, a rock pile, a simulated Martian surface. The surface was more or less flat, because flat areas were where the more conservative mission planners wanted to put the MEM down.

“Goddamn this harness.”

“You tell it, Natalie. You want any help?”

“No. No, I’ll manage, damn it.”

York was lashed up to a tethered Mars gravity simulator. The harness around her chest was attached by cables to a pole above her; the cables led to pulleys which offset two-thirds of her weight. Just like on Mars. Except on Mars, there wouldn’t be some ludicrous, clumsy rope hauling unpredictably at her back every time she took a step.

To get upright, for example, she had to push at the ground, and let the harness haul her upright, and scrabble with her ankles at the soil, hoping not to tip over backwards again.

She stood there teetering on her feet, her hands outstretched for balance. Through her helmet she could hear ironic applause from the technicians.

“Ignore the assholes,” Gershon advised.

“Rog.” She took a breath. “Here I come again, Ralph.”

“Just take it steadily, Natalie. That’s my girl…”

She took a slow and measured step. It was actually a lot easier to take her feet off the surface than to put them back down again. She seemed to drift in a shallow parabola through the air before each step was completed, and she grounded with a crunch in the dried gumbo. It was like swimming through some viscous liquid, all her motions rendered slow, dreamlike, unstable.