"Exactly."
Johnson Space Center did not feel like Nexora.
That surprised him.
The buildings were more functional than ceremonial. People moved quickly without seeming hurried. Badges mattered, but expensive clothes did not. A woman in sneakers argued orbital mechanics beside a vending machine while a man in a tie carried three binders and a half-eaten banana.
Isaac found the environment almost comforting.
At the operations facility, he received a temporary badge with an escort requirement and a workspace near the command team.
He barely used it.
The next forty-eight hours became a sequence of reviews, simulations, parameter checks, and formal challenge sessions.
The third framework evolved into a fourth.
Then a fifth.
Each revision narrowed risk.
Grace found a response lag Isaac's earlier model had underestimated. Priya refined the temperature-dependent stiffness range. Adrian caught an indexing error in a simulation input before it propagated into a validation report.
Isaac crossed the room and shook his hand.
Adrian looked startled.
"What?"
"You found it."
"It was an input error."
"That's what kills things."
Later, Adrian told Grace that the handshake meant more than any performance review he had received in four years.
The final remediation package reached mission authorization with less than thirty hours of modeled stable margin remaining before the next risk threshold.
The operations room held thirty-seven people.
No one called it a rescue.
No one played dramatic music.
The work was too serious for performance.
A large display showed OBSIDIAN-7's current pressure behavior, orbital state, and the coupled harmonic Adrian had added to the monitoring layout at Isaac's request.
Eleanor stood to Isaac's right.
Adrian stood to his left holding a printed verification copy.
Isaac did not personally possess unilateral command authority. The approved parameter set had passed through independent verification, and the actual transmission would be executed through the authorized flight-control chain. That distinction mattered to him.
He was not there to be the lone genius pressing a magic button.
He was there because the system had finally built a process capable of using what he knew without pretending one person could replace the process itself.
The flight controller read back the approved configuration.
Grace confirmed the structural model.
Priya confirmed the material-response range.
Adrian confirmed the telemetry-monitoring criteria.
Eleanor gave the final program concurrence.
The command package was transmitted.
Then everyone waited.
Eight seconds meant nothing in ordinary life.
In that room, eight seconds contained six years.
The first telemetry update arrived.
The pressure trace shifted out of the red band.
Orange.
No one moved.
The secondary harmonic dropped sharply but did not disappear.
"Expected," Isaac said.
The next orbital cycle passed.
The pressure behavior stabilized further.
Yellow.
Adrian stared at the harmonic monitor.
"Phase amplitude is down sixty-eight percent."
"Don't celebrate percentages," Isaac said. "Wait for the cycle."
They waited.
Ninety-three minutes later, the next transition came.
The harmonic returned weaker.