In addition to their rising workload as launch day approached, the crew were still expected to attend PR functions. The astronauts called it “time in the barrel.” Usually a head of a chamber of commerce would need a showpiece astronaut to attend a reception and shake hands and pose for pictures and spread goodwill.

York was lousy at it, and she tended to be kept behind the scenes, mostly doing goodwill tours to various NASA and contractor facilities. Gershon spent a lot of his time at Newport, where even so close to launch, the Columbia engineers were struggling to comb out the MEM problems highlighted by the D-prime mission and other tests, and complete their flight article, the MEM that would land on Mars.

York was sent up to Marshall.

They put her up overnight at the Sheraton Wooden Nickel in Huntsville, a town which the tourist information called “Rocket City.” The next day she was taken on a tour of Marshall by a couple of eager young engineers. Marshall had been hived off into NASA from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, but its military origins were obvious; in fact it occupied a couple of thousand acres within the Redstone Arsenal. She was shown a spectacular rocket garden at the Space Orientation Center, and shown around a huge test stand used in the development of Saturn F-1 engines. Saturn stages were assembled here, and then, bizarrely, transported by water routes to the Cape; they were shipped on barges down the Tennessee River, then moved via the Ohio and Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, and then around the coast to Florida, where they were brought into the Kennedy waterways.

She spent most of the day in von Braun’s old conference room, with around twenty engineers. Most of them were young Americans, thus confounding her prejudice about Marshall’s domination by Germans. Each of the engineers got up for a half hour, to talk about his or her specialty, while the rest of them remained in the room, half looking at the speaker, and half at her. It seemed odd. Didn’t those guys have anything better to do than look at her looking at Vu-graphs of rockets?

She was taken to a party at the Marshall people’s country club, called the Mars Club.

There, she started to understand them a little better.

This was an isolated group, stuck there in Alabama, and they ate and drank spaceflight. To them, an astronaut was worthy of much greater homage than you were liable to receive in, say, Houston: and the Ares crew especially, as embodiments of von Braun’s thirty-year-old dream of flying to Mars. Having an astronaut come to Alabama made it all real — and reassuring, in the midst of the usual crisis over the overall NASA budget and the future of the centers.