Which brings us back to the machine and the people in the full-body protective gear and three pairs of gloves. The little unmanned aerial vehicle is a Honeywell T-Hawk, an 18-pound flying machine that is a bit like a big fan powered by a two-stroke gasoline engine. The T-Hawk carries radios and communication equipment in one pod and avionics equipment in the other. The T-Hawk's payload is a gimbaled camera with a 10x zoom that can rotate in any direction.

Born of DARPA, the drone's new mission was to fly right into the heart of the Fukushima complex and get images of what was going wrong.

The operations center was simple. Honeywell's Brad Welch set up a folding table for his equipment. Then, he unfolded a metal chair for himself and sat down with the Panasonic Toughbook that controlled the T-Hawk. He pulled out the stylus he used to manipulate the touchscreen, and was ready to go.

Outside, his partners Lindsey Ballard and Jeffrey Lumpkin were starting up the UAV. The machine was mounted on a stand and one of them pulled its starter cord. Once the engine was running, they set it down on its thin landing legs.

Welch could hear the T-Hawk start up, whining like a weed wacker, and started ticking through his preflight checklist. Meanwhile, the machine itself went through its own self-test, checking its fuel and batteries. When they both finished, Welch sent the T-Hawk a launch command and, after a ten-second delay, it buzzed straight up into the air. They were on their way to the reactor. They had forty minutes. Then, the gas would run out.

It wasn't like Afghanistan or Iraq, Welch knew. He'd spent thirteen months training T-Hawk pilots over there, and it was easier to operate in those conditions. For one, he didn't have three pairs of gloves and a PPE suit on. And, once he got up in the air in Afghanistan or the desert outside Albuquerque, where he trained, he could pretty much just fly. In Japan, there were a lot more obstructions, so it was going to be tougher.

And there was the problem of the wind. The UAV weighs as much as a small dog, so it's susceptible to getting blown around. If the winds get above 23 miles per hour, the drone could be in trouble, and it can't land in more than 15 mph winds. Even at lesser wind speeds, Welch had to keep the pods properly aligned to avoid turning the T-Hawk into a big sail.

Flying the T-Hawk is not like flying a plane. Welch flies by the video streaming back from the drone's camera, glancing at a few other readings like his altitude, wind speed and battery power. There is no joystick. Once the drone is aloft, a rosette appears on his screen with his commands. He can give the plane instructions to go forward at a given speed, or rotate, or hover. He can point at something and keep the T-Hawk's camera focused on it while the UAV moves or bring up a map and tell it to go to a specific location. At any time, he can tell the drone to hover in midair and stare. It's during those moments when the drone imaged the devastation at Fukushima. As Welch flew, his colleagues could review the video to make sure they'd gotten what they needed.