“Wait a minute.”

Two of the SpaceX vehicle inspection team members groaned, looking at the third with undisguised annoyance. “Dammit, Mickey,” one said, “ what is it now?”

Michael Hong hated his nickname. As a kid his ears had stuck out perpendicular to the sides of his head, and for this reason his classmates had begun calling him Mickey. When he’d gone to college, he’d made the mistake of staying in-state. By the end of his first semester his high school classmates had spread “Mickey” around his new friends. Ever since then the name seemed unshakable, since even his best references, his favorite professors and bosses, everyone would say, “Michael Hong? Oh, you mean Mickey!” And the name would stick.

This wasn’t the main reason he’d fallen into a job which would keep him both solitary and unloved at his workplace, but in the two years he’d worked as an inspection camera operator at SpaceX he’d learned that he liked being called “that nitpicky bastard Hong” much better than “Mickey.”

Nobody had yet called him his new nickname, “Nitpicky Mouse,” to his face.

And if he leaned a little towards the cautious side sometimes, well, it meant safer flights, and whose business was it if his inner six-year-old jumped up and down cheering revenge against the kids who kept offering him cheese or asking for Donald Duck’s autograph?

“Look at oxygen tank #2,” Hong said, working the camera controls to bring the spot in view. The camera probe had been snaked far, far up into the insides of the Red Falcon first stage slated for the Sleipnir 3 resupply mission to Mars. Now its little light and its little camera focused on the manifold coupling which connected the central oxygen tank to several rocket motors below.

“I looked,” his coworker replied. “It’s fine. No sign of failure.”

“But you see that discoloration just above the coupling?” Hong insisted.

The third inspector groaned again. “Hong,” he said, “Mark Watney and his alien buddies are farming their own shit and eating nothing but potatoes and hay to survive. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, but-“

“They need this supply mission to survive until Ares 3B shows up to rescue them,” the third inspector continued. “Ideally, they should be there yesterday, and we should be sending twice as much.”

“And every day we hold this mission back,” the second inspector added, “is a day Watney and friends wait for their take-out, get me, Mickey?”

“Better that than it not get there at all,” Hong snapped.

“Hong, we have ten days, counting today, to hand this booster and its second stage off to NASA for inspections and final assembly,” the third inspector continued. “We’ve found four issues already which will take six days to correct.”

SpaceX had enjoyed many surprising triumphs over expectations over the years, but their ambitions of routine 24-hour turnover of their reusable first stage rockets had shattered against the unyielding concrete wall of facts. There was only so much good engineering and good materials could do against the extreme forces of rocket exhaust heat, atmospheric compression and friction, acceleration forces, vibration forces, etc. etc. etc. And Red Falcon, the literal BFR, SpaceX’s most complex creation except for the Hermes habitat section, just had that much more that could go wrong.

“But… well, this shouldn’t be like this,” Hong insisted. “Have you ever seen anything like this in inspections before?”

“Nope,” the second inspector said. “Not even in training. It’s not a leak, it's not a thin patch in the pipes or tanks, so it’s not a problem.”

“It’s on the oxygen tank,” Hong insisted. “The main feed line, anyway. This isn’t like the fuel tank. If RP-1 leaks, you might have a fire or you might not. But a compressed LOX leak will ruin your day five times over. We do not mess around with the oxygen tanks, guys!”

“How long,” the third inspector said, “will it take to disassemble the rocket, replace the feed stem and the manifold coupling-“

“Probably the manifold, too, to be thorough,” the second inspector added.

“-and put it all back together again?”

Hong shrugged. “Nine days,” he said. “But the other repairs could be done at the same time, so that would save three days again.”

“It still puts us two days behind,” the second inspector grumbled. “And that’s only if we find nothing else wrong. Really wrong,” he added emphatically.

“And all of NASA, from Teddy Sanders on down, is breathing down our necks,” the third inspector added. “They all think Watney’s farm is going to explode or something and that he’ll run out of food if we don’t get it to him right now. Maybe they’re right, Hong.”

“Look, Mickey,” the second inspector said, trying to adopt the role of voice of reason, “if you can tell us what that particular discoloration is, and how it might lead to a failure in flight, we’ll flag it for remediation. Otherwise, it’s a non-issue and we move on. How about it?”

The other two inspectors stopped and waited for Hong to think it over. They had a point-NASA wanted this booster in on time, after the delays with the booster for Sleipnir 2. And- Hong reminded himself- there wasn’t any definitive sign of a leak or imminent failure. It could be tarnishing from some pre-assembly contact, or it could be thread lubricant used to get the connections tight. He’d passed the booster for the Ares IV MAV, and it had launched without a hitch with three questionable spots more questionable than this.

But again… this was the central oxygen tank.

Hong didn’t want to fail it, but he just didn’t feel right about passing it, either.

But… but the other two were right. He couldn’t pinpoint a known flaw. He could just say, “That metal’s the wrong color.” And it wasn’t a wrong color that matched any known warning signs of oxidization or other issues.

Hong shrugged. “I just have a bad feeling,” he said.

“Bad feeling isn’t good enough,” the third inspector said. “It looks just fine to us.”

Hong sighed. “Okay, if you say so,” he said. “Let’s move on.”

And the other two members of the inspection crew breathed a sigh of relief, congratulated themselves on getting one past Nitpicky Mouse, and moved on. Seriously, each of them thought, with the huge stick up his butt he had, you’d think he worked for NASA.

Author's Notes:

Tonight, Oregon.

Tomorrow, Orewent.