There was only silence.

An amused voice said over their comm units, "Sorry, guys. You didn't make it that time."

Emma yanked off her headset. "That wasn't fair, Hazel!" Jill Hewitt chimed in with a protesting, "Hey, you meant to kill us. There was no way to save it." Emma was the first crew member to scramble out of the shuttle flight simulator. With the others right behind her, she marched into the windowless control room, where their three instructors at the row of consoles.

Team Leader Hazel Barra, wearing a mischievous smile, swiveled around to face Commander Kittredge's irate crew of four.

Though Hazel looked like a buxom earth mother with her gloriously frizzy brown hair, she was, in truth, a ruthless gameplayer who ran her flight crews through the most difficult of simulations and seemed to count it as a victory whenever the crew failed to survive. Hazel was well aware of the fact that every launch could end in disaster, and she wanted her astronauts equipped with the to survive. Losing one of her teams was a nightmare she hoped never to face.

"That really was below the belt, Hazel," complained Kittredge.

"Hey, you guys keep surviving. We have to knock down your cockiness a notch."

"Come on," said Andy. "Two engines down on liftoff? A broken data bus? An APU out? And then you throw in a failed number five computer? How many malfs and nits is that? It's not realistic."

Patrick, one of the other instructors, swiveled around with a grin. "You guys didn't even notice the other stuff we did."

"What else was there?"

"I threw in a nit on your oxygen tank sensor. None of you saw the change in the pressure gauge, did you?"

Kittredge gave a laugh. "When did we have time? We were juggling a dozen other malfunctions."

Hazel raised a stout arm in a call for a truce. "Okay, guys. Maybe we did overdo it. Frankly, we were surprised you got as far as you did with the RTLS abort. We wanted to throw in another wrench, to make it more interesting."