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managed
twenty-eight
restarts. Reliability is going to be a key factor in long-haul space travel …’
    Conlig watched Natalie, trying to gauge her reaction.
    All of six years older than Natalie, Conlig had finished his PhD – on exotic, heat-tolerant refractory materials for lightweight fission reactors – in a near-record time.
    Conlig was certain – so was Natalie, come to that – that he was heading for the top of his chosen profession. And since, if Spiro Agnew could be believed, nuclear rockets were going to be the Next Big Thing in space, that top could be a very high summit indeed. Meanwhile, York’s geology was likely to take her away for months at a time. Their relationship was going to be odd, to say the least.
    It was odd to know that his whole life might be shaped by thesuccess, or failure, of a nuclear rocket.
I really am living in the future
, he thought.
    To Conlig, nuclear rockets were the simplest, most beautiful machines in the world. You didn’t burn anything, like in a Saturn. You just heated up high-pressure liquid hydrogen in a reactor core, and let hot gas squirt out of the rear of your ship.
    A nuclear upper stage would uprate a Saturn V by a factor of two: Moon payloads could be increased by more than half.
    But there were major technical challenges.
    The working fluid was liquid hydrogen at twenty-five degrees above absolute zero. Once it was pumped to the reactor the hydrogen had to be flashed to above two thousand degrees.
    Cooling systems were Mike Conlig’s specialty.
    There were other difficulties. Like, if you were looking at space applications, there was the need to shield the crew from radiation. And the fact that you couldn’t cluster too many of these babies in a given stack, because their neutron emissions interfere with each other, and, and …
    Still, the project was making progress. In the short term they were aiming for a RIFT, a Reactor-in-Flight Test. But there was a hell of a lot of work to do before then. You couldn’t cut corners with nuclear technology: nobody wanted a live nuclear pile to be smeared over Florida thanks to some fuck-up at Kennedy.
    But, Conlig thought, they’d fly one day. They had problems to solve. But they’d solve them. Just as soon as Nixon gave his go-ahead to the Space Task Group’s proposals.
    The Space Task Group was a committee, headed by Vice President Agnew, which Nixon had set up to formulate post-Apollo goals for the space program. The STG had been due to report in September. The rumors were they’d endorsed a manned Mars landing program. When a manned Mars landing program happened, this project would get some serious money to spend.
    Ben Priest was still talking Natalie through the details of the XE-Prime. They looked good together, Conlig thought suddenly. Relaxed. He felt a remote stab of unease.
    But Natalie was giving Priest a hard time. She was talking about politics, as usual.
    Natalie York laughed, uncomfortable; a shiver of awe – or maybe disgust – swept over her, as she studied the slim XE-Prime.
    ‘You said there have been nuclear rocket developments here for ten years?’
    ‘Yes,’ Priest said.
    ‘Why? We’ve not been considering Mars missions that long, have we?’
    Priest scratched his ear. ‘Well, the original objectives of the site didn’t have much to do with spaceflight, Natalie. Back in the late 1950s, big chemical rockets were still a thing of the future. And the nuclear weapons were bulky, heavy –’
    ‘Oh. They were building ICBMs here.
Nuclear
ICBMs.’
    ‘Just engineering experiments,’ Priest said evenly. ‘In case of need. And remember, the USSR was well ahead of us then, with their big, heavy-lift chemical ICBMs. But our chemical rockets got bigger, and the bombs got lighter, and the need went away. Later NASA thought they might need the nukes for Apollo Moon missions. But then the Saturn rockets came along …’
    ‘And now, we still need to build nuke rockets because we’re going to