Leaving Orbit (24 page)

Consider that the people who know best how to feel about the space shuttle might be the people who worked on it every day. I have heard spaceworkers call the shuttle “a magnificent space vehicle,” “an elegant space plane,” “the most complex human invention ever built,” and “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” I have always wondered whether the space shuttle’s workaday name robs it of some of the wonder it deserves. A “shuttle” is what you take from an economy parking lot to an airport terminal, not a beautiful machine. A name pulled from mythology, like Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo, might have better told us how to feel about it.

At any rate, the people who knew the shuttles best, the workers at Kennedy, tend to talk about individual orbiters and call them by name—they know what was accomplished by
Endeavour
, what was accomplished by
Discovery.
They believe these spacecraft are the best things that have ever flown, and they are proud to have helped make them fly.

On May 16, 2011, nearly three months after the launch of
Discovery
, my phone alarms me out of sleep at 4:00 a.m. I wake and wonder where I am for a few seconds in this strange room with its cheap slick bedspread, its seventies-era brown color scheme, a smell of cheap air freshener barely covering cigarette smoke, faint mildew, and underneath that, the salt of the ocean.

This is the Clarion Hotel in Merritt Island, Florida, the place Omar told me about last time. I haul myself out of bed, turn on the TV, and start dressing and organizing my things by its light. Like Norman Mailer before me, I have had only two hours of sleep before heading to the Space Center. I did not create this similarity on purpose, but I decide to embrace it. Sleep deprivation, like waiting itself, is part of the launch experience. I check the status of the launch: the countdown is continuing, and the weather is 70 percent go. It’s now T minus five hours.

This mission had been set for April 19 when I was here last for
Discovery
, but that date had changed to April 29 because of a conflict with a Russian trip to the International Space Station. I did not want the launch date to be April 29. I was scheduled to be at a conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, a meeting of space historians I had managed to worm my way into by proposing a paper months before. As the date approached, I kept one eye on the calendar, hoping the launch attempt would slip. I told people I “had a feeling” the launch would be postponed, but what I meant by that was I hoped very much that it would be. I hassled Omar constantly about how things were looking and whether it still seemed the 29th would be the day. He replied diplomatically each time—this launch had already slipped multiple times, which made it seem entirely likely that it would slip again, but we couldn’t know what would happen until it was announced.

When April 29 stayed on the launch manifest for a while, and especially when the mission passed its flight readiness review, I panicked. On the 27th, I headed off to the space history conference in DC, thinking maybe I could write about going to two of the three last launches. Maybe my missing the last launch of
Endeavour
could somehow be smoothed over, or made into some sort of metaphor. Maybe there was a way, rhetorically, to make that work. I was going to have to think of one because I couldn’t miss the conference, and I also had no intention of abandoning this last-launch project.

The conference in DC, titled “1961/1981: Key Moments in Human Spaceflight,” was cosponsored by NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. According to the call for papers I had stumbled across on the NASA website, the conference was meant to “bring together scholars, practitioners, and the interested public to consider the place of human spaceflight in modern culture.” I liked the idea of parlaying my obsession with sixties writers’ treatments of spaceflight into a chance to visit NASA Headquarters, meet space historians, and learn more about the history of the space program. A few months earlier I’d considered myself something of an expert on the subject. Now I was only learning how much I didn’t know, and that made me want to meet the people who knew more.

NASA Headquarters is noticeably different from the other NASA sites I had visited. It is a normal-looking office building in downtown DC rather than an outsized experimental and training facility (Houston) or a spaceport (Kennedy). On the first morning of the conference, NASA administrator Charles Bolden addressed us, and while his speech mostly consisted of general remarks about the importance of history, of understanding where we have been in order to envision where we are going next, he also told a story about meeting President Obama not long before that made me sit up in my seat.

“I stood in the Oval Office,” Bolden told the assembled attendees, “stood square in front of the president, and I asked him, ‘Mr. President, do you believe in human spaceflight?’”

It was a bit thrilling, the idea of the NASA administrator, a former astronaut himself, going toe to toe with the president of the United States. Not long ago, the idea that both men in this dialogue would be African American would have sounded unbelievable.

“And the president looked me in the eye, and he said, ‘Yes, I do.’”

We all clapped furiously. This is a great NASA administrator anecdote in the way it implies a faith in spaceflight, an intention to move forward, without any actual commitment or, especially, budget. But even we space historians and space curators and scholars of many disciplines, we who should know better than anyone, seem to lack any built-in resistance to this anecdote. We want very much for General Bolden to have confronted the president, want very much for the president to have confirmed his commitment to human spaceflight, even if we haven’t seen much evidence of that.

During the two days of the conference, I went to as many presentations as I could, gave my own paper on representations of spaceflight in literature, and met many of the historians whose work I had been reading. On the last day, I got up early to catch my flight home. I spent the day in airports, obsessively refreshing the NASA app on my phone, hoping to get some news of the
Endeavour
launch. I learned that Gabrielle Giffords had made the trip from Houston and would be watching from the roof of the Launch Control Center. President Obama had come to Cape Canaveral with his family, and they too would be atop Launch Control. Still, I hoped for a scrub, ideally a long delay that would buy me some time to finish my semester and get final grades in. At 12:20 p.m. I got my wish: problems had been discovered with the auxiliary power unit fuel line heater. Hundreds of thousands of people, including the president and his family, left the Cape in disappointment.

Launch was rescheduled for No Earlier Than May 2, then May 8, then May 10. In the coming week, the target launch date slipped again to May 16 at 8:56 a.m., then held there. I started to make tentative plans.

On the morning of the 15th, the day I made the drive from Knoxville, I got a weather update from Omar by text: Weather is good, 70% chance acceptable.

I smiled down at my phone, was about to start tapping out a response, when I got another text:

My grandpa came into town, he may not come tomorrow cause it’s so early, so today he said he’d let me know if he’s coming with us. If he’s not then you’re in. Sorry it’s so last minute

Grandpa? As far as I knew, all of Omar’s extended family was in Puerto Rico, so this grandpa must have come a long way, and unless he was planning to come back in a couple of months, this was going to be Grandpa’s last chance to see a space shuttle launch. None of this boded very well for my chances of getting in to the employee viewing site, and I began making peace with the fact that I would probably be watching from a public spot, maybe Space View Park in Titusville this time. Maybe Omar could get me in for the last one.

I drove all day. This time, I had a sense of how long seven hundred miles would take, and I knew what I-75 had to offer. As with my last trip here, I kept thinking I should listen to audiobooks and return phone calls, but once I was in motion I remembered how pleasant it was to let my mind go blank. I ate junk food and drank sugary drinks all day, listened to music for many long miles. There’s something pleasing about the accomplishment of the miles ticking by on my odometer by the hundreds, seeing the changing landscape pass with the day. An unusual sense of satisfaction in getting out of my car in a state different from the one in which I climbed into it, finding palm trees, birds, and bugs, finding the land has a different smell, the air grown humid. The sun high in the sky at a truck stop outside Atlanta, then the sky washed with pink as the sun starts to dip at a gas station south of Cordele.

In the evening, I was eating dinner at a Cracker Barrel in Valdosta and reading a book about the Apollo project when my phone buzzed. Omar.

Ok you’re in!

Alone at my table with my pancakes, I clapped my hands over my mouth, then smiled at the truckers seated around me. Some of them smiled politely back.

Text you bout when to meet later. Gonna be eeeaaarrrlly

I texted Omar back that I would be wherever he wanted me to be, at whatever time.

This turned out to be his parents’ house, at quarter to five in the morning.

I was going to get onto NASA grounds.

When I pull into Omar’s neighborhood before dawn, I switch off my headlights so as not to wake his neighbors. The houses are like the ones I took pictures of when I was researching my novel—square one-story houses with tiny yards and big swimming pools. Before I can ring the bell, Omar’s dog senses me and starts barking. Then Omar steps out wordlessly into the dark, looking as tired as I feel. We get into my car and head north.

Since I was here last, an engineer named James Vanover committed suicide by jumping from the gantry at pad 39A, where
Endeavour
was being prepared for launch. Like many employees of long standing, Vanover had been offered an early retirement package. Many considered this preferable to taking their chances waiting to be laid off, as nearly everyone at Kennedy will be eventually. Vanover had accepted the offer, then reconsidered and tried to revoke his decision but was told he could not; he would have to leave NASA. James Vanover had worked on the space shuttle project since 1982. I didn’t ask Omar, when I first read about the death, whether he knew Vanover—I figured it might be more appropriate to ask in person. Now, sitting beside him at quarter to five in the morning, I know I won’t. It’s only a twenty-minute drive to the main gate of the Kennedy Space Center; we pass the DAYS TO LAUNCH sign, which now bears the huge white numeral 0.