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“Seat one, standby for comm check.” Tanisha’s hands are shaking; strapped in, there’s not much to do now except listen.

“Seat one, hear you loud and clear,” she says. The voice goes down the line until Tyler in seat five calls that he’s getting signal just fine. “Standby for ground comm check,” the voice over the speaker says, and cuts out.

No one is talking. Tanisha watched Challenger explode live on TV when she was five; she’s thinking about O-rings and has a split-second mental image of what it must have felt like to fall from atmosphere and know it was the end.

Tanisha closes her eyes and hums you are my sunshine. After a few hours the speaker crackles and a voice says the launch is 45 minutes out.

“Alright Davis,” says Gerald in seat three over the radio, “what’s the next thing that’s gonna kill us?”

Tanisha cracks a smile. “There’s no problem so bad that we can’t make it worse,” she says. Their visors are down and no one broadcasts their reaction, but Tanisha knows they’re all laughing.

At five minutes to launch, Tanisha throws the three switches that energize the shuttle’s hydraulics system. At three and a half minutes, she tests the rudder and the elevons and the propelling nozzles. Below her feet, high-pressure fluid runs through the veins of the spacecraft and gives the illusion that the aluminum frame is pulsing beneath her. It unearths a memory of clinging to her father while sitting on his shoulders, and Tanisha lets out a shaky breath.

The last of the checks finish as a voice over the speaker crackles, “Forty-five seconds.” Tanisha’s brain flits to Challenger, and her husband, and then she pulls her thoughts back to focus.

The thirty second announcement is a cue that the shuttle is completely ready, even without Houston. At fifteen, Tanisha can picture the sparklers deploying under the main engine to react with excess hydrogen released by its startup sequence. Please don’t die, she thinks. Or at least let it be fast.

Ten, nine…

“Here we go,” Tanisha says to no one from inside her visor. At six seconds, the three main engines come up to full power and the shuttle sways forward. As the twang corrects, they hit zero. The boosters are lit, and below them pyrotechnic chargers ignite and cut the attachments holding the shuttle to the ground.

They break the speed of sound in forty-five seconds. The boosters shake the shuttle, and the acceleration pushes them back into their chairs. Tanisha’s head is shaking so violently she can’t focus on the instruments, and she reaches forward to grab a bar and pull her head forward, leaving her neck to take the brunt of the vibration. She’s trained for this, the gyroscope check and staging and roll program operation drilled into her so deeply that she barely has to think more than What’s next? What’s next? What’s next? They pass seventy-three seconds; Tanisha is too focused to notice.

In two minutes they’ve escaped the friction of air and are going seven times the speed of sound. The rocket boosters fall off and the shaking stops, but breathing is taking effort against the force of acceleration, and their clothes feel like weights against their lungs. Tanisha watches the screens as the computer brings the throttles back to idle, preventing them from accelerating so much that they tear themselves apart.

Six-and-a-half minutes later, with almost all their fuel spent, the engines begin to tail off and shut down. Tanisha floats, held in place only by her harness, and knows that down below an entire room is cheering their success.