“VStars are noisier, I’ll give you that,” she said. We were sitting side by side on the tailgate of Dak’s truck.

“Ain’t you got no poetry in your soul, woman?”

I used the tip of the screen’s stylus to touch 7, then 5, then enter on the tiny flatscreen keypad. Camera 75 showed a view looking up from the massive concrete abutments that supported the VStar. Center screen were the long, pinched shapes of the six linear aerospike rocket engines that stretched across the ship’s wide tail. Wisps of ice-cold hydrogen and oxygen escaped from the pressure valves and swirled in the warm Florida night air. Down in the corner were the words “VStar III Delaware,” a mission number, and a countdown clock. In less than a minute camera 75 would be toast.

In a corner of the screen the countdown clock went from twenty-five to twenty. I pressed 5, then 5, then enter. A head-on angle of the cockpit crew, slightly fish-eye from a wide-angle lens. There were no more checks to perform, no more toggles to switch. They were almost motionless, waiting for the automatic launch sequence.

I pressed 4, then 4 again: Looking down the center aisle of the passenger compartment. It was built to carry as many as eighteen, but only seven chairs were filled, all of them toward the front of the module.

I knew those seven faces as well as an earlier generation of space nuts had known the faces of Al Shepard, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter… the original Mercury astronauts. None of this seven looked particularly nervous or excited. The white-knuckle days of space travel were over, or so everyone said. Mom says they’ll never be over for her generation, who saw Challenger explode.