A lengthy check-out followed. The suit techs pressurized his garments and checked every joint of the forty-year-old gear for leakage and mobility. Deeke stood there in the van, enduring the prodding and fingering of the techs.

These guys were all pretty young; even the senior officer here in the van looked no more than thirty-five. They avoided his gaze. Their expressions were blank, busy, competent. They seemed to typify, to him, the newer generation of military people: calm, assured, expecting to be cocooned and protected and fed information by the high technology systems in which they were immersed. Different from the old days: different from Deeke’s generation, and those who’d gone before, those who’d fought in Vietnam and Korea and the Pacific, who built birds with their bare hands, who’d been prepared to fly to Moscow loaded with nukes.

He wondered what those old guys would think of him and his mission, when they heard.

Now there was a call for pilot entry. Equipment specialists formed up to either side of him, carrying a portable liquid oxygen breathing and cooling unit, hooked up to his suit.

Deeke stepped out of the van. Outside, light was starting to leak into the sky.

Deeke walked across the tarmac to the X-15. Inside the pressure suit it took some effort just to move his legs forward, and by the time he got to the bird he could feel his lungs dragging at the oxygen fed to him by the suit.

He climbed the ladder to the access platform over the open cockpit. The roomy cockpit was dominated by the big ejection seat. He could see the seat’s folded-up fins and booms, designed to bloom out after ejection, and the big beefy handles pivoted around the arm rests that would lock his arms and upper body in place in case he had to eject. He’d always found the massive seat terrifying; he’d never had to trust himself to its crushing, over-complicated embrace, and hoped he wouldn’t have to today.

He slid on in. Suit techs began to strap Deeke in, pulling harnesses around him and hooking him up to his bailout kit, the aircraft’s breathing oxygen supply, and the suit pressurization and cooling gas.

The seat wasn’t adjustable. He had to have pads for the seat, back and armrests.

As he looked around the little cabin, he felt his heart thump. The cockpit equipment had the bolted-together look of every test airplane Deeke had ever flown. Its hard-wired analogue instruments struck him as startlingly old-fashioned, though, in this age of glass cockpits. And the whole thing was generally scuffed and worn, despite its refurbishment. This X-15 model had been the first to fly in the test program, and the last. And it showed.

But now, sitting in this familiar cocoon, it was as if thirty years had fallen away from him; he felt young again.

He was surrounded by control panels. The front panel, dominated by a big eight-ball attitude indicator, was encrusted with barometric instruments to help with control and guidance. But for most of the flight the X-15 would be outside the sensible atmosphere, and such instruments were useless; he would have to rely on inertial data, computations performed by the onboard processor.

For atmospheric flight there were control rudder pedals and a control stick to his right-hand side, which moved the aerodynamic control surfaces. There was also a center stick, but in the course of the flight program it had become a macho thing never to touch that center stick but to rely on the side stick and pedals. And then on the left-hand instrument panel was mounted another hand controller, to operate the manual reaction controls: the little rockets which controlled attitude outside the atmosphere.

X-15 was built to fly like an aircraft when it had to, and as a spacecraft when it had to.

The crew closed the canopy.

The canopy was a solid box, save for a mailbox window to the front and the sides. Deeke was sealed in, inside this little bubble of nitrogen, unable even to lift his faceplate to scratch his nose. All he could smell was the cool oxygen in his helmet; all he could hear were the intermittent crackles of radio voices. Deeke was in a world over which he had complete control. He could make it hotter or cooler, brighter or dimmer; if he wanted he could even shut out the radio voices with his volume control. He was secure in here, safe. He felt himself receding deeper into the recesses of his own mind, his memories, and it was a nice place to be, excluding the complexities and doubts of the murky future outside.

Now the bomber’s engines started, and Deeke could feel the deep thrumming transmitted to him through the connecting bomb shackles.

The B-52 began its taxi to the duty runway. He could hear little of the noise of the plane’s big engines, the nearest just feet away from his head. Ground vehicles drove alongside, eight or ten of them, their headlights making great elliptical splashes of light over the dark tarmac. It was a rough ride for Deeke, with a lot of hard, jarring vibration to his spine. Probably the wheels of the B-52 had got out of the round during the long wait.

The control crew called out a brisk takeoff clearance.

The B-52 began its takeoff roll. It soon outstripped the ground vehicles, and the runway lights whipped away to either side of Deeke.

Then the lights fell away beneath him, and the ride smoothed out.

In the Flight Control Room in JSC’s Building 30, Barbara Fahy stood up behind her console, and surveyed her controllers. As they waited for the point, eight seconds into the ascent, where they would take over the management of the flight, the controllers cycled through their displays and spoke calmly on the loops to each other, to their back room teams, and to her. There was an atmosphere of competence, of calm.

Each of the controllers had a little plastic Stars-and-Stripes on his or her console, a memento of the mission, America’s last manned spaceflight, in this year of Our Lord, 2008. The STS-147 mission patch was high on the wall of the room, a big disc bearing a stylized planet Saturn with a Shuttle orbiter looping through the rings. It was only the second mission patch not to bear the names of the crew: the first was Apollo 11.

The launch events unfolded, eroding away to the moment of ignition.

There were no malfunctions, no holds. She tried to put aside her gnawing anxiety.

Jackie Benacerraf was almost late for the launch.

She’d flown into Orlando and stayed overnight, and then driven out to the Cape straight along Interstate 50. But that was the wrong way; she was turned back by a guard on the road, and she had to go over a bridge to the south and drive north along Merritt Island. Then, for the first time, she got caught in traffic.

The commentators had predicted a big turnout to watch this last Shuttle launch. It would be Apollo 17 all over again, the old-timers predicted. The nostalgia factor. Well, there was some heavy traffic here, but nothing like the density she’d expected.

But there were some roadside parties, young people glittering with image-tattoos, writhing to arrhythmic rock, draped in softscreen flags. They looked like beings from the future, she thought, brought back in time to this site of monumental 1960s engineering.

Maybe it really is over. Maybe people really don’t care any more, she thought.

At last she got into the Space Center, by Security Gate 2 off U.S. 3. There was an orderly demonstration here, mounted by a creationist group from Texas called the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. Here was Xavier Maclachlan himself on a soapbox, all jug ears and ten gallon hat, steadily denouncing the manned space program for the sake of the cameras.

At an office at the gate, after queuing, she picked up her orange STS-147 media badge.