Leaving Orbit (18 page)

On my computer’s screen, more photos and texts flow by. A row of cars glinting in the hot sun on the 528 causeway. A heron perched on the roof of my car in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Launch pad 39A shimmering in the heat across the Banana River. Already it seems long ago.

On Tuesday afternoon, I walk into the classroom where my Writing Creative Nonfiction class meets to find that students have already arranged the chairs into a circle. They are chatting about the readings rather than about the weekend’s football and parties, a good sign, and they seem to be saying positive things. When I call the class to order, the students seem eager to share their impressions. My most talkative student raises his hand first.

“It was cool that both of the writers brought out their own personal feelings about what they were seeing,” he says. “They didn’t try to be objective, and I’m starting to get why that’s a good thing.”

“Right, that’s what Tom Wolfe said in his definition of the New Journalism,” I say. “He felt that objectivity was no longer going to be a useful standard.”

“I thought it was interesting to see two different writers talking about the same moment,” another student says. “The way they write about it is so different, you’d never know they were in the same place at the same time.”

“Well, they were in the same
place
, at Cape Canaveral, but not at the same
time
,” I correct her. “Wolfe was writing about the Mercury era, the first astronauts to travel in space in the early sixties, and Mailer was writing about the missions to the moon, in the late sixties and early seventies.”

Blank faces.

“But the Russians had already gotten to the moon first, right?” my most talkative student asks.

I’m opening my mouth to respond when another student cuts in.

“Of course not,
we
won the space race. We got to space first.”

“Actually, you’re both wrong,” I say, and everyone laughs. I laugh too, but I’m a bit shocked. These are the most basic facts, the ones I would have thought everyone would know.

“Let’s get back to the structure of these chapters,” I say. “We’ve been talking about the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe’s idea that we should write in scenes wherever possible. What are some places in
The Right Stuff
where he chose
not
to do that?”

But as we go on discussing Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and the New Journalism and the way in the sixties everyone thought they were reinventing everything, the optimism embodied in redefining literature once and for all, the optimism of sending human beings to space, two things become clear to me: my students did not grow up with the same idea of the sixties that I did. Maybe because their parents were born too late to remember that era as their own, as my parents do. Maybe these kids didn’t grow up with stories about how great the sixties were, how much better than any decade that dared try to follow. The phrase “the sixties” for them conjures not an emotion or a set of values, but only a vague idea of fashion, music, a historical event or two, the same useless window dressing I get when I think of “the twenties” or “the eighteen fifties.” Whatever ideas my students have about the sixties, their ideas of spaceflight are not attached to the sixties as a historical era, as they are for my elders and for me.

The next time my Writing Creative Nonfiction class meets, I get to the classroom fifteen minutes early. I’m intrigued by my students’ ignorance about spaceflight, and I’m hoping to get the chance to learn more from them without cutting into our official class time. As students file in, I put a few questions on the board:

As I write, my students perk up and look curious.

“
Don’t
look these up on your phones,” I order them, because I know this will be their first instinct. They dutifully lock their screens and place their phones facedown on their desks, even more intrigued now.

“You don’t have to participate in this discussion,” I tell them, “because it has nothing to do with our class. But this is something I’m curious about, if you’re interested.”

They lean forward.

“Let’s start with the first one,” I say. “What year did the first human being travel in space?”

The United States got to space first, in 1956. Humiliated, the Soviets put forth a new and arbitrary goal: to put a man on the moon. They accomplished this feat in 1962; NASA didn’t get the first American (John Glenn) to the moon until 1965. He traveled there on the space shuttle, a vehicle that is capable of voyages beyond the moon to Mars and Jupiter, up to 40 million miles into outer space. The most recent mission to the moon was in 2001—in the decades the space shuttle has been going to the moon, over 400 people have walked on its surface. NASA gets 20–30% of the federal budget.

This account was provided by one of my undergraduate students, and as far off the mark as it is, the wildness of its guesses is typical of the group’s responses. Only a minority of my students can correctly place the sequence of “firsts,” that the Soviets got to space first, after which Americans got to the moon first. I’m not looking for correct dates here, only the correct order; the number of students who knew the correct
dates
for these events was one.

My students have an invariably positive, even affectionate, opinion of NASA, even if they aren’t entirely sure what the scope of NASA’s mandate is, or how old it is. In this respect NASA has shown itself to be one of only two government agencies (the other is the FBI) that consistently has a positive public image. Former NASA administrator Dan Goldin once said of his agency that it was “the one organization in American society whose sole purpose is to make sure our future will be better than our past.”

A lot of my students think American spaceflight started in the forties or fifties. Many believe women have walked on the moon. Some think American astronauts have traveled to other planets. But to me, these are not the worst misunderstandings. Much more troubling is the extent to which they conflate the two eras of spaceflight into one big lump. When students are asked when the space shuttle first flew, they tend to give the same dates that they gave for the first human spaceflight—in other words, they seem to think there has only ever been one space vehicle. My students don’t understand that there was a significant change between the heroic era and the shuttle era, separated by years and a great leap in technology and fanfare that was very moving to little children in the early eighties. I’m left with the disconcerting fact that they don’t actually know what the space shuttle
is.
And if they think the space shuttle has already been going to Mars since before their parents were born, why would they agree, as taxpayers, to pay billions for the first
actual
mission to Mars?

I tell my students that when I missed class last week, it was because I was at the Kennedy Space Center to see
Discovery
launch. They are impressed, though I have to explain that
Discovery
is not
the
space shuttle, but one of three. I tell them that this mission is
Discovery
’s last, that when
Discovery
returns to Earth it will be sent to the Air and Space Museum. My students’ mouths fall open. They had no idea.

“So—we won’t be going to space anymore?” one student asks.

“American astronauts will still travel to the International Space Station, but they’ll have to hitch a ride with the Russians, on their Soyuz spacecraft.”

Some of my students actually gasp with horror. They had no idea. They wear the outraged expression of people who feel they should have been consulted. But then I tell them that
Discovery
’s construction started in 1979, making it a thirty-two-year-old vehicle. My students, most of whom were born in the early nineties, are dismayed to hear this. Thirty-two sounds pretty old to them. The space shuttle
should
be retired if it’s that old, they feel, but we should have a newer spacecraft to replace it with. They are shocked that we don’t.

“So what are the answers?”

They are all looking at me. I wish I could get this kind of attention from them when I’m trying to get them to map out the structure of an essay, when I’m trying to explain what a comma splice is.

I look at my watch. Seven minutes before class starts. We talk through some of the answers: Only twelve people have walked on the moon. All of them were white men, all of them American. The space shuttle can only go to low Earth orbit, 240 miles above Earth. As I go on, students express bewilderment at how much less has been accomplished than what they had thought. They are embarrassed that they didn’t know the facts, but they also seem indignant that their optimistic narratives have not come to pass.

In one way it’s touching. I hadn’t known to expect this credulous faith in their own country’s relentless conquering of space. This faith is supported, no doubt, by the wildly exaggerated beliefs most people hold about NASA’s funding: a multiyear survey asking Americans to guess what percentage of the federal budget goes to NASA regularly turned up an average of over 20 percent, a percentage reflected in my students’ guesses. Worse: the Americans polled who guessed the correct category (0–1 percent) were, in some years, outnumbered by those who chose “over 50 percent.” I would like to repeat this for emphasis: a significant number of adult Americans walking among us believe that NASA receives
over 50 percent of the entire federal budget.