Small things: the Soviet mission planners would plan the selection of food to suit the taste of the crew. Color schemes for the spacecraft’s walls and equipment would be adjusted carefully. There would be music, on personal players, to suit individual preference. There would be recordings of simple sounds from home: birdsongs, waves on a seashore, falling rain. Cosmonauts were even encouraged to take living things into orbit, perhaps as part of biology experiments: plants, grasses, tadpoles — little droplets of life, said Viktorenko, bits of Earth’s great river of existence, with its source in the great primeval sea which united humans with all living things.

The astronauts tended to dismiss the Soviets as backward, technically, compared to the U.S. But York decided she liked some aspects of the Soviet way. They’d come up with simple, practical, homely ways of dealing with the pink bodies inside the rockets.

She started bringing Viktorenko’s ideas into the psych sessions with Stone and Gershon.

“…The sheer magnitude of the publicity program, I might say, is unmatched by anything we’ve seen since Apollo 11. The Voice of America is heavily involved, of course. We estimate that the VOA can reach twenty-seven percent of the world’s population outside the U.S. This is the biggest operation in their history. Prelaunch we’ll be sending out ten thousand forty-five minute English-language tapes and scripts, to U.S. Information Agency posts around the world. During the key phases of the mission the VOA will be broadcasting live commentary in seven major languages, and summaries in a further thirty-six.

“We’re also sending out special prelaunch press materials, in addition to the regular NASA manned mission press kits we pouch out around the world. These include ninety news wire stories and features sent in the weeks before liftoff; the Life feature on you and your families; a forty-eight page ‘Man on Mars’ color-illustrated pamphlet, four hundred twenty-two thousand copies of that; and one million, nine hundred thousand postcards of the astronauts, of you three. Also we anticipate having in place at the USIA outposts overseas one million Ares lapel buttons, nine full-size Mars-walk space suits, a hundred twenty-five Ares kiosks, with lights, music, transparencies, and posters. We’ve got ten thousand maps of Mars, eight hundred and forty plastic Saturn rockets, two hundred and fifty sixteen-inch Mars globes…”

The statistics went on and on, baffling, the slides bewildering.

For someone responsible for NASA’s PR, York thought, Rick Llewellyn’s speaking style was oddly drab, uninspiring. It was hard to fix your attention on him for much longer than a couple of sentences at a time. It was like one of her early ground-training classroom sessions: all those block diagrams, the endless, droning afternoons.

But the content of Llewellyn’s slide show was terrifying, if you thought about it too hard.