She parked in the big lot at the foot of the stupendous Vehicle Assembly Building. When she got out of the car, with her camera around her neck and her softscreen rolled up under her arm, she heard the voice of the public affairs officer drifting across the lot, from the big speakers close to the press stand… T minus four minutes and counting. As preparation for main engine ignition the main fuel valve heaters have been turned on. T minus three minutes fifty-seven seconds and counting; the final fuel purge on the Shuttle main engines has been started in preparation for engine start…

Four minutes. Jesus, she’d cut it close.

She spent a moment looking up at the VAB: that gigantic block, taller than a twenty-storey tower, was as impressive, still, as when it had been built back in the 1960s. But it was showing its age, like the rest of the space effort. Its exterior was stained by the weather, and the big Stars-and-Stripes, painted on the building’s flank during the Bicentennial, was faded and had run.

She locked her car and hurried past the network TV buildings, with their glittering glass carapaces, to the press stand. The faded wooden bleacher was no more than a third full, last mission or not. There were a couple of guys in the front row doing radio feeds. A hundred yards away there was a portakabin press office, but it turned out that the mission timelines and info packs hadn’t arrived yet.

Her mother had fixed her an invite to the grander family viewing area, on the roof of the administration building. She’d decided she’d rather be here, in this battered old press stand, with working people, rather than drink with faded celebrities.

She sat near the front of the stand. She was looking east. The sky was overlaid by lumpy, broken grey cloud. Before her was a big old-fashioned TV monitor showing a grainy image of the interior of the orbiter flight deck — an image of her mother the astronaut, for God’s sake — intercut with shots of the Firing Room here at the Cape containing the controllers who would run the first few seconds of the launch, and Mission Control at Houston, who would take over later.

She looked around. The VAB was a big, visually dominating block over to her left. On a patch of grass before the press stand there were the press portakabins, a big rectangular digital clock, steadily counting down, and a flagpole. Beyond that was a stretch of water, the barge canal from the Banana River leading to the VAB. Behind the canal was a treeline, and beyond that, straight ahead of her, she could make out the two great launch complexes: 39-A to the right, forever empty now, and 39-B to the left, with Endeavour.

The launch complex looked grey, colorless, like a piece of some industrial plant. Beside the gantry there were big hemispherical fuel tanks, and a water tower. And she could see Endeavour, the gleaming white of the orbiter against the orange of its External Tank and the battleship grey of the gantry. She could make out the orbiter’s tail, wings, windows.

It looked, she thought, surprisingly beautiful, like 1950s vision of a spaceplane, somehow futuristic. The curve of the wing was especially striking at its joint with the body, the only curve in the mountain of engineering, graceful against the blocky industrial gantry.

To Jackie’s right there were more pads, stretching off to the south, towards what they called ICBM Row, a whole line of launch complexes facing the ocean. Among them were the pads which had launched the early Mercury and Gemini manned shots. Most were disused, dismantled. Already museum pieces.

She could have brought the kids today, but neither of them had been interested. Both of them had preferred to stay behind for some out-of-school trip to a Disney-Coke net Island.

That was fine by Jackie. She didn’t want to confront them with the reality of this. Her kids had been forced to say goodbye to their grandmother; what the hell could Paula expect from them?

Gareth Deeke was suspended beneath the wing of a B-52, high in the brightening sky over the Atlantic seaboard.

His head was enclosed snugly by the cockpit canopy. There was only just room for his helmet, and every time he moved, he brushed or banged his skull on a pad or the canopy structure. As the mailbox windows were right next to his head he had good vision ahead and sideways, but the widening fuselage beyond the windows restricted his downwards vision. Because of the placement of the windows and the fuselage, he could see nothing of most of his airplane, the wings and nose, or indeed the ground.

On most planes, the airframe could be used as a reference platform. Not in the X-15. It was disconcerting, as if he was suspended in the air in this glass bubble, as if his controls were connected to nothing at all.

At twelve minutes to launch he started to activate the X-15.

Inside the B-52 an engineer was working a panel. “Okay, Linebacker, you want to reset your altitude? I’ve got just a hair shy of a thousand feet per second velocity and maybe three hundred feet up. Eleven minutes to launch.”

“Rog,” Deeke replied. “Attitudes look good.”

“Do you want to try your controls again, Linebacker?”

Deeke worked his stick. “Here’s roll, pitch, and rudder.”

“Try your flaps.”

“Okay, flaps coming down.”

“Confirm that.”

“And back up.”

“We see flaps up.”

“My aux cabin pressure switch is on. The inertial platform is going internal.”

“That’s nominal, Linebacker,” the ground called.

He went into a stability augmentation system check. Then a generator reset. A hydraulic press check. And an electrical press check…

His launch light came on.

Everything was looking good. By God, it looked as if not even a malfunction was going to curtail this incredible flight.

“Five minutes.”

The ground instructed the B-52 to turn further eastward. Thus far the ground path had been a broad circle inland. Now, Deeke knew, the B-52 was going to line itself up with the ground path of the Shuttle, which, after launch, would be driving eastward towards its orbital path.

The B-52 crew called, “Two minutes.”

“Okay,” Deeke said, “data is on. Tape to fifteen. Push to test ball nose. Looks good. Alpha is still about one degree, beta is about a half degree right.”

“Calibrate, Linebacker?”

“Confirm, I got a calibrate.”

“One minute to go,” the B-52 said. “Picking up heading.”

One minute. Now he had to activate the engine.

“Emergency battery on. Fast slave gyro on. Ventral jet armed…”

Even now, Deeke half-expected to be called back.

The call didn’t come.

“Prime switch to prime. Igniter-ready light is on. Precool switch to precool.” Now the priming sequence had commenced, and the precool switch increased the flow of lox to the turbopump.

“Coming up on ten seconds. Pump idle.”

When Deeke pressed his pump-idle button, the rocket engine’s turbopump came up to speed and forced propellants into a small chamber called the first-stage igniter, where they were burned by a spark plug. The igniter acted like a blow torch, firing the propellant and oxidizer into the main combustion chamber.

Deeke heard a deep, bass rumbling.

The X-15’s flight path today was based on the old high-altitude profile used at Edwards. The only powered portion of the flight was the short rocket burst at the beginning, just after launch from the B-52, driving the bird into a steep climb out of the atmosphere. Then would follow a ballistic, unpowered trajectory up to a peak altitude, and a steep fall back into the atmosphere.

Thus, Deeke would leave the atmosphere and would be weightless for several minutes. This flight was basically a short-duration spaceflight, comparable to the first suborbital Mercury lobs by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, but fully under Deeke’s control.