Back to the Moon by Homer Hickam Page B

the constant, unceasing Atlantic wind whistling through the launch complex. Beneath them huge steel pipes grumbled and groaned as an immense wash of super-cold liquid propellants flooded through them into the shuttle’s external tank. At launch
Columbia
with her stack weighed 2,250 tons. Eight hundred and fifty tons of that was liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Immersed in the cacophony of wind and propellant Jack felt excitement crawl up his spine. He was ready, tired of waiting, and willed the clock forward. He was supremely confident but he also believed that the day’s work would be difficult, and all that followed filled with pitfalls. He didn’t care. The clock was counting. It was time to go into the history books or hell. Maybe both. “Let’s go do it,” he said to his pilot, and together they turned away from the wind.
    THE JSC DIRECTOR
    Building 1, Sixth Floor, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas
    Frank Bonner, director of Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, surveyed each of his managers at the conclusion of the meeting he held every morning in his office. Sullen faces looked back. As was his habit, he’d chewed each of them out by turn. “That’s it,” he said. “Any questions?”
    There were none. His managers had learned over their tenure that to ask a question was to invite a biting retort. Bonner didn’t like questions. He wanted action. They also knew today he was in an especially foul mood. One of his shuttles was being retired. That didn’t sit well with the director of Johnson Space Center. He needed every shuttle he could get to keep flying his astronauts into space.
    Lily Acton, his secretary, came bustling into his office while the managers filed out. She straightened his tie, brushed lint off the sleeves of his suit jacket. “Law, Frank, you can’t go down to the press room dressed like a tramp.”
    Bonner frowned. “I don’t need you to look after me, Lily.”
    â€œSomebody needs to,” she admonished.
    When Lily finished checking him, she left, going back outside the heavy oaken doors to maintain her vigil, to keep away anyone other than approved personnel. Bonner still had fifteen minutes before he would go down the six floors and walk across the JSC campus to Shuttle Mission Control. He went to his floor-to-ceiling office window and drew back the curtains. His view was of a grassy park where a giant
Saturn V
moon rocket lay splayed on its side like a beached whale. It never failed to remind him of Huntsville, the city where the von Braun team had built the giant booster. When he’d first come to work for the agency, he’d spent a year as an engineering intern in the Rocket City. He’d enjoyed the work with the researchers and engineers of Marshall Space Flight Center. Most of the Germans who’d built the big boosters for
Apollo
had retired by then but he’d met the daughter of one of them, a vivacious, gregarious young woman named Katrina Suttner. She was a fellow engineering intern in the Propulsion Lab and he’d fallen hard for her, as hard as he ever had imagined that he could. He had doggedly pursued her, wore her down with long phone calls filled with his longing. He went after her as if he were on a campaign, every waking moment dedicated to the question of how to win her. For six glorious months he used logic on her, debated with her the relative merits of being single versus marrying someone such as himself. He was going somewhere in NASA, he’d told her. So was she. Together, they could change the agency and the world. When he’d asked her to marry him, to his astonishment and utter joy she’d said yes. Then she shared with him her greatest secret, what the late Wernher von Braun had arranged for her when she was a child. It was the happiest time in his life and he’d dedicated himself anew to NASA, to make everything she’d wanted come true for both of them. Sometimes,