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affectionately known as the meatball, a star-spangled blue circle embellished with an orbital ellipse and a forked slash red. NASA administrator Leroy Cornell and JSC director Ken Blankenship stepped up to the lectern to field questions. Their mission, quite bluntly, was to beg for money, and they faced a gathering of congressmen and senators, members of the various subcommittees that determined NASA’s budget. For the second straight year, NASA had suffered devastating cutbacks, and lately an air of abject gloom wafted through the halls of Johnson Space Center.
    Gazing at the audience of well-dressed men and women, Gordon felt as though he were staring at an alien culture. What was wrong with these politicians? How could they be so shortsighted?
    It bewildered him that they did not share his most passionate belief. What sets the human race apart from the beasts is man’s hunger for knowledge. Every child asks the universal question, Why? They are programmed from birth to be curious, to be explorers, to seek scientific truths.
    Yet these elected officials had lost the curiosity that makes man unique. They’d come to Houston not to ask why, but why should we?
    It was Cornell’s idea to woo them with what he cynically called “the Tom Hanks tour,” a reference to the movie Apollo 13, which still ranked as the best PR NASA had ever known. Cornell had already presented the latest achievements aboard the orbiting International Space Station.
    He’d let them shake the hands of some real live astronauts. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted? To touch golden boy, a hero? Next there’d be a tour of Johnson Space Center, starting with Building 30 and the Flight Control Room. All that gleaming technology would surely dazzle them and make them true believers.
    But it isn’t working, thought Gordon in dismay. These politicians aren’t buying it.
    NASA faced powerful opponents, starting with Senator Phil Parish, sitting in the front row. Seventy-six years old, an uncompromising hawk from South Carolina, Parish’s first priority preserving the defense budget, NASA be damned. Now he hauled his three-hundred-pound frame out of his seat and stood up to address Cornell in a gentleman’s drawl.
    “Your agency is billions of dollars overbudget on that space station,” he said. “Now, I don’t think the American people expected to sacrifice their defense capabilities just so you can tinker around there with your nifty lab experiments. This is supposed to be an international effort, isn’t it? Well, far as I can see, we’re picking up most of the tab. How am I supposed to justify this elephant to the good folks of South Carolina?”
    NASA administrator Cornell responded with a camera-ready smile. He was a political animal, the glad-hander whose personal charm and charisma made him a star with the press and in Washington, where he spent most of his time cajoling Congress and White House for more money, ever more money, to fund the space agency’s perennially insufficient budget. His was the public face NASA, while Ken Blankenship, the man in charge of day-to-day operations at JSC, was the private face known only to agency insiders. They were the yin and yang of NASA leadership, so different in temperament it was hard to imagine how they functioned as a team. The inside joke at NASA was that Leroy Cornell was all style and no substance, and Blankenship was all substance and no style.
    Cornell smoothly responded to Senator Parish’s question. “You asked why other countries aren’t contributing. Senator, the reason is, they already have. This truly is an international space station. Yes, the Russians are badly strapped for cash. Yes, we had to up the difference. But they’re committed to this station. They’ve got a cosmonaut up there now, and they have every reason to help us keep ISS running. As for why we need the station, just look at the research that’s being conducted in biology and medicine. Materials science. Geophysics.