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that—perhaps especially at a time like that—there was room for a joke. Pettit, dying inside, tried to squeeze into the space under his seat until they arrived at the pad.
    Once herded off the bus, they took the elevator 195 feet up the shuttle’s hull, watching all the while condensation running down the sides of the external tank, falling into the trench that would catch their fire beneath them. Finally they found themselves in the WhiteRoom, a closed-off sanctuary in which they finished the last of their waiting. (Three miles distant, their families would find them by the bright light.) One by one, helped by six technicians in white suits and ball caps, they crawled through the hatch on their hands and knees.
    Ten minutes later, they were on their way back to the ground.
    Earlier in the day, a valve had been opened, allowing the oxygen that would be pumped into the crew’s helmets and cabin to flow through the ship. Now routine preflight tests had found a small amount of that oxygen in the shuttle’s cargo bay. There was no good reason for it to be there. Somewhere in the bundles of flexible hoses under the floor, there was a leak.
    “Tonight’s not our night,” Steve Altemus, NASA’s launch manager, had crackled over the radio. “I know you guys are going to be disappointed, but I think we want to give you a healthy vehicle before we cut you loose from the Cape.”
    “Absolutely,” Wetherbee said.
    And that, for the moment, was the only absolute. As with the faulty bolt explosives, no one was sure exactly what the problem was. No one yet knew how to fix it. Here was this giant, groaning stack of metal and ceramic tiles and rocket fuel, and some virtually invisible thing in it had gone wrong. It was probably something painfully small, no bigger than a pinhole. But in space—in a vacuum without gravity—small things grow into big things, and a pinhole is plenty big enough to leave seven men trapped in a box without air.
    ·   ·   ·
    Thousands of hands guide the shuttle on its journey to liftoff. Like the fibers of a wire, more than one hundred private aerospace contractors and subcontractors across the country conspire to muster the necessary current. The Boeing Company of Chicago and the Lockheed Martin Corporation of Bethesda are the principal circuits; through their jointly owned subsidiary, United Space Alliance of Houston, they’ve been responsible for the day-to-day operations of the shuttle since 1996. Among their suppliers are ATK Thiokol Propulsion of Brigham City, Utah, which builds the solid rocketboosters; Spacehab, Inc., of Webster, Texas, which designs and manufactures the modules that house experiments; and United Technologies of Hartford, which, through its Pratt & Whitney engine divisions in Florida and California, forges the turbopumps. The external tank is welded in Michoud, Louisiana. The life support system comes out of Windsor Locks, Connecticut. The main engines were first brought to life in Canoga Park, California.
    At each of those sites, dozens of processes combine to produce a single part of the shuttle or sometimes only a part of a part. For instance: the shuttle’s nose cap can withstand temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but it doesn’t provide much insulation for the crew looking out over it, and in its hollow core, a bundle of thirty-two heat-resistant blankets must be packed into place. Every one of them is made from scratch at NASA’s Thermal Protection System Facility. Ceramic fabric is first measured and cut and coated with sizing to prevent the fibers from coming apart; the fabric is layered between insulating batting and stitched; it’s trimmed and sewn closed around its edges; the completed blanket is finally baked twice in superhot ovens and waterproofed. The process takes a team of workers two months to complete—all to produce a single critical thing in a machine born from thousands.
    By barge and plane, truck and train, the pieces are