He was stunned by the scale of it all, his first gut understanding, perhaps, of the huge energies and efforts that would be assembled under him to hurl his own fragile body into space.

The staff who worked here, preparing spacecraft for launch, were a type of human being he hadn’t encountered before, either in the circles of scientists with whom he’d spent his working life, or among the closeted NASA engineers at the other centers, or even among the astronauts. These were people used to heavy work: dealing with millions of gallons of high-explosive fuel, with the slow controlled explosions of Shuttle launches, and doing it every few weeks, year in and year out. They must have a lot in common with oil-workers, he thought, or deep miners: hard-working, confident, muscled people.

All the crew went through an abbreviated program of training on Apollo systems, at JSC and Kennedy. A basic curriculum was rapidly developed for them, based on 1960s material dug out of the archives. The simulations they were offered, working through key mission phases with teams of flight controllers in the FCR, were thorough, but they were fixed-based. The cost of adapting the motion-based simulators — which, with their six degrees of movement, afforded some of the sensations of spacecraft motion — was, it was said, too high. Rosenberg heard, however, that the real reason was that the motion-based sims were tagged to be a key attraction at the JSC visitors’ center, bringing in revenue long after the Titan mission was history.

They were given briefings on the science aspects of the mission: the studies of the Sun, Venus and Jupiter they were expected to perform en route, what was being learned from Cassini and Huygens about the Saturn system, Titan itself.

Carl Sagan came out of retirement to give them a pep talk about the studies he’d made, as far back as the 1980s, on synthesizing the organic haze on Titan. And he talked to them about cosmology: how the Solar System had formed, the planets coalescing from concentric rings of rock and ice, how the sun would blossom into a red giant at the end of its life, shedding warmth — briefly — over the chill worlds of the outer System. Sagan was in his seventies, and he was a little bent, that famous voice even more gravel-filled, and his hair white as snow; but he was still as handsome as all hell. The science was baby stuff, of course, for Rosenberg. But Sagan’s talk, brief as it was, turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole training program for him.

Then there was all the surgeon stuff.

A key objective for this mission, as far as the ground-based experts were concerned, was to find out once and for all how the human body adapted to long-duration spaceflight. Or not.

Of course the experienced astronauts might already have suffered much of the harm to which they were susceptible; some studies of past astronauts suggested that the major damage to many of the body’s major systems happened in the first few hours of a spaceflight…

Anyhow, to achieve a sound study the surgeons had to have some kind of baseline, an understanding of what condition their various bodies had been in before being subjected to the rigors of the flight. So the crew were put through a comprehensive medical study. They had to submit, every two or three days, to electrocardiograms, seismocardiograms and measurements of their breathing rates and volume; and once a week they had to spend a whole day on a much more thorough check-out, which included sampling of body fluids, measurements of the phases of cardiac contraction, heartbeat volume, venous pressure, vascular tone in different parts of the body, blood circulation in the head, lung ventilation.

After a few weeks of this Rosenberg figured that by the time he was launched there would be more of his body mass in test tubes in the labs around the country than aboard that Shuttle on the pad. And all the checkups meant a whole day lost out of every week, time which Rosenberg had no choice but to give up, but which he had to drag out of his continuing research, and other commitments…

In all, eighty percent of his training time was taken up with Shuttle emergency procedures: mostly to do with problems during launch, or a forced landing.

Apparently as part of NASA’s post-Challenger adjustment, the crew families were encouraged to come in and observe the emergency stuff, so they could understand what was happening, if and when it all unravelled. So here were Nicola’s ageing parents from England, the mother with her prion-ruined face, and Paula’s grandchildren, two boys who watched with baffled incomprehension as their grandmother clambered out of windows and hatchways and shimmied down ropes and slid down wires to the little green car that would whisk her away in case the Shuttle blew up on the pad.

There was nobody to come see Rosenberg, and he was more than glad of that.

Some of the preparation was chilling, then. But some was mundane, almost comical, and yet delivered with the usual NASA cheerful high-tech gloss. The crew was taken to the Food Systems Engineering Facility, for instance, where they were given samples of Shuttle food packs to try out, so they could select their own preferences. No salmon, Angel insisted. The stink of fish, in the enclosed places of a Shuttle, was just unacceptable. And then there was the john: the Waste Management Compartment trainer, where Rosenberg was trained, in all earnestness, how to go to the bathroom. It was an affair of rubber gloves he had to use to clean himself, and little plastic scraper tools, and fans that whirred noisily. There was even a little camera situated in the bowl, peering up at his ass, so he could tell if he was positioning his orifice correctly…

But in the midst of all that, the stuff that was so easily mocked, he came across signs and symbols that showed him where he was: here, at the heart of NASA, the Agency that had put men on the Moon. Bits of 1960s technology, capsules and rockets, that looked so primitive they might have come from the 1930s. Pictures he hadn’t seen before, of Americans bounding across the surface of the Moon, working and joshing as if it was a field hike in Arizona.

And the astronauts: the hard core of them, the big-boned, blue-eyed WASPs of the earliest recruitment rounds, many of them greying now, few of them still active, but still fit and tanned and with faces like craggy lunar rock. Before these men — who had, after all, been the first — Rosenberg felt intimidated, weak and insignificant. But every time one of them walked past there was a powerful stink of male deodorant which wafted after him down the narrow corridors, all human scents suppressed, his surface somehow shining and impenetrable, as if he was already half-way to orbit just standing there, as if his purpose, the purpose of his race, had been to guide humanity to the stars.

Of his own crew, it was clearly Angel who aspired to membership of this elite group — which was, of course, impossible, for the role of hero astronaut had vanished long before Angel had joined NASA. But, anyhow, Angel walked through the space centers, mean-looking and tall, his muscles honed and hard, his language full of the dread-reducing jargon of contingencies and aborts. He even looked like them, with his blond-WASP hair and blue eyes, and he was almost schizoid, it seemed to Rosenberg, in his lack of reaction to the peril of his Columbia flight — and yet, despite that, there was a certain desperation in his empty eyes.

On it went, and Rosenberg became steadily more enmeshed in the procedures and practices and jargon of this huge organization. And yet, he thought, if you looked at it sideways, the whole Titan program was a remarkable event: here was a bureaucracy, dry and sane, devoting itself to the surreal: a gigantic adventure which everyone was committed to, but whose purpose and logic and meaning nobody could agree upon.