LITMIR.BIZ

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and watched the pilots, following her own copy of the checklist, boredom competing with apprehension. It was, she thought, like going over the lip of the world’s biggest roller-coaster.

      

      On the morning of Columbia’s landing at Edwards, Jake Hadamard flew into LAX.

      An Agency limousine was waiting for him, and he was driven out through the rectangular-grid suburbs of LA, across the San Gabriel Mountains, and into the Mojave. His driver – a college kid from UCLA earning her way through an aeronautics degree – seemed excited to have NASA’s Administrator in the back of her car, and she wanted to talk, find out how he felt about the landing today, the latest Station delays, the future of humans in space.

      Hadamard was able to shut her down within a few minutes, and get on with the paperwork in his briefcase.

      He was fifty-two. And he knew that with his brushed-back silver-blond hair, his high forehead and his cold blue eyes – augmented by the steel-rimmed spectacles he favoured – he could look chilling, a whiplash-thin power from the inner circles of government. Which was how he thought of himself.

      The paperwork – contained in a softscreen which he unfolded over his knees – was all about next year’s budget submission for the Agency. What else? Hadamard had been Administrator for three years now, and every one of those years, almost all his energy had been devoted to preparing the budget submission: trying to coax some kind of reasonable data and projections out of the temperamental assholes who ran NASA’s centers, then forcing it through the White House, and through its submission to Congress, and all the complex negotiations that followed, before the final cuts were agreed.

      And that was always the nature of it, of course: cuts.

      Hadamard understood that.

      Jake Hadamard, NASA Administrator, wasn’t any kind of engineer, or aerospace nut. He’d risen to the board of a multinational supplier of commodity staples – basic foodstuffs, bathroom paper, soap and shampoo. High volume, low differentiation; you made your profit by driving down costs, and keeping your prices the lowest in the marketplace. Hadamard had achieved just that by a process of ruthless vertical integration and horizontal acquisition. He hadn’t made himself popular with the unions and the welfare groups. But he sure was popular with the shareholders.

      After that he’d taken on Microsoft, after that company had fallen on hard times, and Bill Gates was finally deposed and sent off to dream his Disneyland dreams. By cost-cutting, rationalization and excising a lot of Gates’s dumber, more expensive fantasies – and by ruthlessly using Microsoft’s widespread presence to exclude the competition, so smartly and subtly that the anti-trust suits never had a chance to keep up – Hadamard had taken Microsoft back to massive profit within a couple of years.

      With a profile like that, Hadamard was a natural for NASA Administrator, in these opening years of the third millennium.

      And even in his first month he’d won a lot of praise from the White House for the way he’d beat up on the United Space Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed consortium that ran Shuttle launches, and then on Loral, the company which had bought out IBM’s space software support division.

      Hadamard planned to do this job for a couple more years, then move up to something more senior, probably within the White House. The long-term plan for NASA, of course, was to subsume it within the Department of Agriculture, but Hadamard didn’t intend to be around that long. Let somebody else take whatever political fall-out there was from that final dismantling, when all the wrinkly old Moonwalker guys like Tom Lamb and Marcus White got on the TV again, with their premature osteoporosis and their heart problems, and started bleating about the heroic days.

      Hadamard was under no illusion about his own position. He wasn’t here to deliver some kind of terrific new Apollo program. He was here to administer a declining budget, as gracefully as he could, not to bring home Moonrocks.

      There had been no big new spacecraft project since the Cassini thing to Saturn that was launched in 1997, and even half of that was paid for by the Europeans. There sure as hell wasn’t going to be any new generation of Space Shuttle – not in his time, not as long as a couple of decades’ more mileage could be wrung out of the four beat-up old birds they had flying up there. The aerospace companies – Boeing North American, Lockheed Martin – did a lot of crying about the lack of seedcorn money from NASA, the stretching-out of the X-33 Shuttle replacement program. But if the companies were so dumb, so politically naive, as not to be able to see that NASA wasn’t actually supposed to make access to space easy and routine, then the hell with them.

      The car turned onto Rosamond Boulevard, passed a checkpoint, and then arrived at the main gate of Edwards Air Force Base. The driver showed her pass, and the limo was waved through.

      He folded up his softscreen and put it in his breast pocket.

      They arrived at the center of the base, the Dryden Flight Research Center. The parking lot was maybe half full, and there was a mass of network trucks and relay equipment outside the cafeteria.

      He shivered when he got out of the car; the November sun still hadn’t driven off the chill of the desert night. The dry lake beds stretched off into the distance, and he could see sage brush and Joshua trees peppered over the dirt, diminishing to the eroded mountains at the horizon. Hadamard looked for his reception.

      

      Barbara Fahy settled into her position in the FCR – pronounced ‘Ficker’, for Flight Control Room. She was the lead Flight Director with overall responsibility for STS-143, and the Flight Director of the team of controllers for the upcoming entry phase.

      Right now, Columbia was still half a planet away from the Edwards Air Force Base landing site at California; the primary landing site, at Kennedy, had waved off because of a storm there. Now Fahy checked weather conditions at Edwards. The data came in from a meteorology group here at JSC. Cloud cover under ten thou was less than five per cent. Visibility was eight miles. Crosswinds were under ten knots. There were no thunderstorms or rain showers for forty miles. It was all well within the mission rules for landing.

      Everything, right now, looked nominal.

      She glanced around the FCR. There was an air of quiet expectancy as her crew took over their stations and settled in, preparing for this mission’s final, crucial – and dangerous – phase.

      This FCR was the newest of the three control rooms here in JSC’s Building 30; the oldest, on the third floor, dated back to the days of Gemini and Apollo, and had been flash-frozen as a monument to those brave old days. Fahy still preferred the older rooms, with their blocky rows of benches, the workstations with bolted-in terminals and crude CRTs and keyboards, all hard-wired, so limited the controllers would bring in fold-up softscreens to do the heavy number-crunching. Damn it, she’d liked the old Gemini mission patches on the walls, and the framed retirement plaques, and the big old US flag at front right, beside the plot screens; she even liked the ceiling tiles and the dingy yellow gloom, and the comforting litter of yellow stickies and styrofoam coffee cups and the ring binders full of mission rules …

      But this room was more modern. The controllers’ DEC Alpha workstations were huge, black and sleek, with UNIX-controlled touch screens. The display/control system, the big projection screens at the front of the FCR, showed a mix of plots, timing data and images of an empty runway at Edwards. The decor was already dated – very nineties, done out in blue and grey, with a row of absurd pot-plants at the back of the room, which everyone ritually tried to poison with coffee dregs and soda. It was soulless. Nothing heroic had happened here. Of course, Fahy hoped nothing would, today.

      Fahy began to monitor the flow of operations, through her console and the quiet voices of her controllers on their loops: Helium isolation switches closed, all four. Tank isolation switches open, all eight. Crossfeed switches closed. Checking aft RCS. Helium press switches open …

      Fahy went around the horn, checking readiness for the deorbit burn.

      ‘Got the comms locked in there, Inco?’

      ‘Nice strong signal, Flight.’

      ‘How

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