What Need of Man?

A narrator who once flew for a classified space program recounts how an automated escape-velocity test killed a colleague, how leadership insisted on removing manual controls, and how an animal passenger was used for public consumption. Technical failures, blind faith in telemetry, and official cover-ups produce moral outrage, a hearing, and the narrator's dismissal; the account examines mistrust of automation, the erasure of human agency in experimental technology, and the ethical cost of pursuing ostensibly infallible scientific systems.