Cape Canaveral, Kennedy Space Center.
"Billy, I now seriously suspect that the purpose of spinning around was for this very day."
Spanish astronaut Pedro Dick and Shen Bili walked one after another through the launch tower corridor, at the other end of which was the poised Falcon 9 rocket and its payload the "Gravity Dragon" spacecraft.
Pedro had returned to Earth last year after a short three-month mission at the International Space Station, for a simple reason: NACA was aggressively expanding the number of new astronauts, and the quickest way to do that was to have them live in space for a while.
With the addition of the Dreamer Space Shuttle and the Dragon Spaceship, NACA had executed a total of six manned launch missions last year, a historical high in recent years.
