Countdown

At six o'clock on Tuesday morning, Ana Fuentes stood in front of the whiteboard and wrote a single number: 48. In forty-eight hours, a rocket would lift off from the coast of Florida, and somewhere inside it, folded up like a paper bird, would be the small satellite her team had spent three years building.

Ana had grown up in Valparaiso, Chile, watching ships come and go from the harbor and wondering what was beyond the horizon. Now she was the lead engineer at Skyline Orbital, a company so small that everyone knew how everyone else took their coffee. "By this time on Thursday," she told the team, "we'll be watching it climb. Let's make sure we've got nothing left to worry about."

The plan was simple on paper. By noon, the software team would have finished the final tests. By the evening, the satellite would have been delivered to the launch site, and by Wednesday afternoon it would have been attached to the rocket. Ana underlined each deadline twice, as if that would make them behave.

The first problem appeared before lunch. Marcus, who was in charge of the software, walked into her office looking pale. "One of the sensors is sending strange data," he said. "Until we know why, I can't sign it off." Ana looked at the clock. "How long will you need?" "If we're lucky, three hours. If we're not, I'll still be sitting here when the rocket takes off."

Ana didn't panic. She had learned long ago that panic was a luxury engineers couldn't afford. She called the launch site and asked if they could push the delivery back to midnight. The man on the phone sighed. "As long as it's here before two in the morning, we can manage. After that, you'll be missing your slot, and the next one isn't until March."

At four in the afternoon, a second problem arrived. A storm was forming over the Gulf of Mexico, and the forecast suggested heavy rain along the highway they would be using to transport the satellite. "We'll be driving through the worst of it," said Diane, the logistics manager. "Unless we leave earlier, of course." "We can't leave until Marcus has finished," Ana replied. Everyone in the room understood what that meant: the truck would be racing the storm.

Marcus found the fault at seven. A cable had been bent during the last vibration test, and it was producing tiny electrical spikes. Replacing it would take an hour, and testing it again would take another. "By nine," he promised, "I'll have fixed it and checked it twice." At nine fifteen, he walked out of the clean room and gave a tired thumbs-up. The whole office cheered as if a goal had been scored.

The truck left at half past nine. Ana followed it in her own car, her hands tight on the wheel as the rain hit the windshield in waves. Every few minutes she checked the time and did the calculation again. If nothing else went wrong, they would have arrived by one. If the highway flooded, she would be explaining to the investors why their satellite was spending the spring in a warehouse.

They reached the gate at twelve forty. A security guard with a flashlight looked at their papers for what felt like an hour and then waved them through. When the satellite was finally lifted into the clean room at the launch site, Ana sat down on a plastic chair and realized she hadn't eaten anything since breakfast.

On Thursday morning, the whole team gathered on a beach a few miles from the launch pad. The sky was clear, as if the storm had never existed. "In ten minutes," Marcus said, checking his phone, "we'll have done something nobody thought a company our size could do." Ana smiled but said nothing. She knew better than to celebrate before the countdown reached zero.

At exactly nine o'clock, the rocket rose into the blue sky on a column of fire. Ana watched until it was a tiny point of light and then nothing at all. Forty minutes later, her phone buzzed with a message from mission control: the satellite had separated and was sending its first signals. She went back to the office, wiped the whiteboard clean and wrote a new number: 0.