A few days before the launch was due, they moved out of the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn and into the crew dormitory, on the second floor of the MSOB at the Kennedy Space Center.

The Manned Spacecraft Operations Building was pretty comfortable, all things considered. There was a gym and a mess hall. And the crew quarters, tucked away inside what looked like a regular office building, were fairly luxurious compared to a lot of NASA facilities: from a mundane, sterile office, she walked through a locked door into a carpeted apartment with subdued lights, and separate bedrooms for the three of them.

It was the same apartment in which the moonwalking Apollo astronauts had bunked before their launches.

Her bedroom was individually decorated; it even had a TV. The three rooms had paintings hanging in them: nudes in two of them, a landscape in the third.

York got the one with the landscape. She stuck over it her grainy Mariner 4 blowups.

The astronauts were cut off in the apartment. To protect the crew from infection — and to keep at bay the pressure of the media attention — only “authorized personnel” were allowed into the MSOB. That didn’t include family or friends.

There was nobody York particularly wanted to see, anyhow. Her mother had called, once, and talked about her own concerns. She wasn’t planning to come to the launch; she was going to be filmed watching it by some local TV company.

But she could see that Stone and Gershon, while relieved to get out of the glare of camera spots, were soon going a little stir-crazy.

It was dumb policy. Why not let families in? Sure, there would have to be some kind of quarantine. But she could see how a little contact with children and spouses could go a long way to calming the soul.

Anyhow, whatever the merits and problems of the quarantine, to York it was a great relief. When she first shut the big heavy door of her MSOB room behind her, she threw her personal bag on the floor, flopped out on the bed, and slept for nine hours. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 371/02:03:23

Ralph Gershon’s mouth was dry. That was the pure oxygen pumping through his pressure suit.

Stone stood to his right, and York, silent, was behind them both.

Gershon ran over the readouts on his station. He’d already pressurized the descent-engine fuel tanks, and he’d called up the right computer programs, and he’d taken sightings through the alignment telescope to check Challenger’s trajectory.

Houston was silent, listening, so far away they could do nothing to help.

Challenger had turned over onto its back as it fell through the air, so that its landing radar pointed at the ground. The radar hadn’t gotten a lock yet. All Gershon had through his window was a triangle of lurid violet-pink sky.