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Light gushed out of the test stand in a ball, flaring; steam billowed furiously. He thought he could feel the heat of the bang on his face, even across a mile of desert, even through the toughened glass. It was like a nova, White thought, a star exploding on the Earth.

The explosion lasted no more than a second. Then the test stand shut itself down, cutting off the flow of kerosene and oxidant to the failed engine.

The light faded, leaving the test stand exposed, huge clouds of steam still billowing up out of the flame deflector.

Baylor lifted his glasses and rubbed his face; White could see that his eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy, glossy with water. The eyes of an old man.

“Fuck,” said Baylor. “See what I’m saying about the instability.”

All around them, in the viewing bunker, the technicians and managers were moving out, with much gloomy talk and shaking of heads.

Now’s the time for a bit of inspiration, Marcus. This is why you’re here. Sprinkle a little of the old Moondust on them, and get them all fired up to go out there and take that motor to pieces, and go over it again and again until they get it right.

Like they used to in the old days.

But right now, damn his soul to hell, he couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Outside, around the ruined test stand, the steam clouds continued to billow out of the flame deflector. Mojave sand was scattered around the test stand in rays: dead straight and maybe thirty feet long, reminding him of the raying on the lunar surface, around his LM descent stage, after the landing.

* * *

This wasn’t like preparing for any other flight, Siobhan Libet found. This wasn’t just routine, just another element in the assembly-line of Shuttle missions.

It wasn’t just that it was the last. With this flight, she was entering realms of mythology. People looked at her differently.

And everywhere she went she faced the classic, unanswerable question. What’s it like to fly in space?

She went up to Boeing’s Shuttle orbiter assembly facility, at Palmdale, California.

Libet tried to remain inconspicuous as Billy Ray Jardine of Boeing conducted his tour. That wasn’t too difficult at first; the little ten-strong group, of astronauts, NASA Shuttle and Titan program managers — including Libet and Barbara Fahy — were anonymously clad in bunny suits, long, crisp-white coats and hygiene-conscious caps. They looked, Libet thought wryly, like a group of food hygiene inspectors descending on a McDonald’s.

The Palmdale assembly facility was huge, cavernous, a place of light and rectangles. The floor was a layer of some blue-grey resin, utterly flat, threaded with yellow demarcation lines and scarred with rubber skid marks from the little electric carts that rolled everywhere. The walls were painted with corporate red, white and blue stripes and huge Stars-and-Stripes. Around the edge of the floor were big, cuboid offices, like independent buildings spawned inside the gut of this monster, and the floor was littered with massive, anonymous machinery.

Billy Ray Jardine was the President of Boeing’s space transportation division. Jardine looked every bit the corporate senior executive, with his grey suit jacket stretching over his ample, comfortable belly. He would have fit in just about any era since the Second World War, Libet thought; his type had been running the country for much longer than she had been alive. Only the full-color images cycling across the surface of his softscreen tie — of old successes in space, Rockwell’s Saturn V second stage, Apollo, Shuttle itself, not to mention Boeing’s own Saturn V first stage — gave any concession to modernity.

The facility was clean, bright, every metal surface shining and unscuffed. The assembly and manufacturing equipment around her looked state of the art. Here — by Rockwell, before the Boeing buyout — all five of the billion-dollar spacecraft of the Shuttle fleet had been assembled, from Columbia to the Challenger replacement Endeavour, which had first flown in 1992. And Boeing had evidently maintained this facility to the highest standard. Any time NASA had asked for a revival of the Shuttle construction program, Boeing would have been able to respond, ready to accept all those fat billion-buck NASA contracts once more.

But Libet felt depressed by all this sparkling readiness. Because this facility was never going to be used to build an orbiter again.

In fact, Boeing had adapted its facility to tear spacecraft apart.

The party was taken to a metal balcony which overlooked a sectioned-off part of the assembly area floor. Here, the Shuttle orbiter Atlantis had been brought for its hasty modification. The orbiter’s boattail — the aft fuselage assembly — was facing Libet, with the nozzles of the three big main engines thrusting out of the scaffolding. The rest of the orbiter, foreshortened by perspective, was encased in scaffolding and protective sheeting. A little swarm of white-coated workers was busy all over the spacecraft; the air filled with the whine of drills and the ozone stink of oxy-acetylene burners. Atlantis looked, Libet thought, as if it was being deliberately crippled.

At first glance, the orbiter itself still looked much as it had done before. But, slowly, Libet made out differences.

For instance, the crew cabin — the nose of the orbiter — had been dismantled. Now, a simple aerodynamic cone fairing was being fixed to the orbiter’s frame. And Atlantis’s payload bay had been lengthened, into the space vacated by the crew compartment, to more than eighty feet: a third more than the baseline design of the Shuttle system. The boattail, with the main engine assembly, was being left almost unmodified. But the smaller engines of the orbiter’s orbital maneuvering system had been removed. Those engines brought the ship out of orbit at the end of its mission. And there was no need for a system to bring Atlantis home again.

And Atlantis had no wings.

Atlantis no longer needed wings, or a tailplane, or retro engines. Atlantis was no longer an orbiter. She had been reduced to a Shuttle-C Cargo Element, a so-called SCE, consisting of little more than a payload carrier bay and an aft fuselage, with engines. And SCEs were expendable. Atlantis would never again carry a crew. No effort would be made to return Atlantis to Earth after her final flight; its cargo delivered to orbit, Atlantis would be slowed by its reaction control thrusters, and allowed to burn up over the Pacific.

Libet could see the big delta-shaped wings, their leading edges battered by their multiple reentries, taken away from the orbiter hulk and stacked against a wall of the facility. Looking at the severed joint of each wing she could see their internal structure; the wings were just a skin of stiffened aluminum alloy over a framework of internal ribs and stringers. Detached from the orbiter, the wings looked crude, primitive. Something Howard Hughes might have recognized. The wings had been manufactured by Grumman, at their Bethpage plant in New York. Grumman had been the people who had manufactured the Lunar Module for Apollo. She wondered what the old-timers there thought of this day’s work.

“…Of course,” Billy Ray Jardine was saying, “what you have here is an extension of the original Shuttle-C concept, which would have relied on the manufacture of wholly new SCEs — Shuttle-C Cargo Elements — rather than their adaptation from existing orbiters. Not that the manufacture of new SCEs would have presented in any way a challenge. But you have to understand that we have to pretty much take apart each orbiter to adapt it to serve as a Shuttle-C SCE. Naturally the modification of the old test articles is generally somewhat simpler than the flight articles.