Leaving Orbit (25 page)

At the south gate to the Kennedy Space Center, we show a guard our papers, and he leans in to greet us, smiling. After he waves us through, we drive through miles of darkened tropics, alive with insects even in the dark. We reach an intersection clogged with vehicles. A trail of red brake lights ahead of us marks a string of stopped cars. Guards are holding up traffic in both directions.

“It’s the astronauts,” Omar tells me, as if this were no big deal. We see a string of helicopters fly overhead along the road from west to east, after which a convoy of vehicles comes down the road, mostly dark SUVs. At the convoy’s midpoint: an old silver Airstream trailer emblazoned with the NASA logo. I know this vehicle from pictures and movies—all space fans do. It’s the Astrovan, carrying the astronauts from their crew quarters to the launch pad. Six people are going to space today.

Once the Astrovan has passed, Omar and I continue on. We pull into the parking lot of the Headquarters Building, one of the many nondescript low-slung midsixties office buildings at the Kennedy Space Center, where we wait, idling in the dark, for Omar’s father to emerge. The parking lot is full, even at this hour. I’ve been hearing about Frank for a long time but have not yet met him, and I’m curious what he’ll be like. Before too long we see a figure emerge from the main entrance and approach us.

Like all mechanical engineers, Frank dresses neatly—a polo shirt, khakis, tidy hair, and glasses. As we transfer our stuff to Frank’s SUV, Omar makes the introductions. Frank is as friendly as his son, but he seems unsure what to make of me, a married woman his son met on the Internet, traveling alone with vague plans to write about the end of shuttle, about the end of his life’s work.

We park in a field of grass pressed into service as a parking lot. As I circle around the back of the SUV, I notice that Frank has a special license plate with an image of the space shuttle on it that says CHALLENGER · COLUMBIA across the bottom. We carry lawn chairs and tripods to the viewing area; the Vehicle Assembly Building, as it always does, looms over everything. We settle in for the wait—T minus three hours.

When I ask Frank about his work, he is reticent at first, as engineers tend to be when they are talking to nonengineers. He gives simple, nontechnical answers to my questions:
I’ve worked on the main engines and on procedures for tanking fuels.
I know from Omar that Frank has been in Launch Control for a number of launches, including
Challenger
’s last, and part of me wants to ask him about that:
At what point did you realize something had gone wrong? How did you feel when you realized the astronauts were dead?
Instead I ask him about the more mundane aspects of his work.

I’ve found that all it usually takes to draw out an engineer is to ask a couple of technical questions and then remain calm while listening to the answers. Most people tend to take on a blank, frightened look as soon as they realize that a technical explanation is under way; if you can resist giving this reaction and simply listen, your engineer will open up and tell you everything you ever wanted to know.

Soon Frank is telling me about the complexities of tanking cryogenic gases, the leak check procedures he developed. His eyes light up as he tells me an anecdote about erratic readings on a mass spectrometer. With some prodding, Frank describes to me the first shuttle launch, a test flight of
Columbia.
The launch had been delayed for months and years as unexpected problems with the shuttle system emerged and branched into multiple new problems, some of which Frank helped to solve. Now, finally, the day had arrived when the shuttle was ready to take to the sky. He had been given a pass to watch from the Turn Basin site, but security was so lax in those days that he drove his family all the way up to the VAB, and held one-year-old baby Omar up to the horizon, trying in vain to interest him in the show.

Like Omar and everyone else I’ve met here, Frank has nothing negative to say about the decision to end the shuttle program, about NASA, or about his own work here. If he is upset that the spacecraft he’s spent his life working on is being mothballed before its time, he will not betray a hint of that disappointment—at least, not to me, not today.

T minus two hours. Omar and I go for a walk. This area is known as the Turn Basin site because it edges up against a human-made body of water known as the Turn Basin, an extension of the Banana River that allows the external tanks to be delivered by barge directly to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Attached to the VAB is the Launch Control Center, the building where I saw the mission patches with the missing dates on Family Day. It’s a building with huge windows facing the launchpads, the building from which launch directors and their teams of engineers have controlled every launch since Apollo 4 in 1967. On the roof of the Launch Control Center is the viewing area where the astronauts’ families gather for launches. Since
Challenger
, the families have been removed from the general spectators—never again will the deaths of astronauts play out on the faces of their families on the front pages of newspapers. This morning, Gabrielle Giffords is sitting up there with the other crew families to see her husband launch into space. Omar has heard that she is in a wheelchair, wearing a helmet to protect her head because her skull has not been entirely rebuilt, and that she is sitting behind a privacy curtain so no one takes pictures of her in this state.

Down here at the Turn Basin, there is a set of bleachers, but most people have brought lawn chairs or blankets to sit on for the wait. It’s still full dark, and generators roar to maintain floodlights. A few children run around; others sleep in their parents’ laps. Some people line up for the snack truck and to look over the offerings at a mobile gift shop offering souvenirs. I’ve noticed that space vendors are extremely effective at anticipating and meeting any possible demand for space-related swag—T-shirts, hats, pins, postcards, plush toys—including on this field of grass early on a Monday morning.

T minus one hour. Once we are settled in lawn chairs with our coffee, I ask Frank, “How many of the space shuttle launches have you seen?”

He pauses modestly for a moment.

“All of them,” he answers.

“
All
of them?”

He nods. “Well, I live nearby. And I work here, so it’s not too hard.”

Sure, but—
all
of them? One hundred and thirty-four, as of today. Night launches, day launches, scrubbed launches, delayed launches. Launches in 100-degree weather, launches in mosquito season, and launches that require spectators to get up in the middle of the night only to wait for hours. Launches called off at the last second before liftoff due to weather or mechanical problems, single missions that took a half dozen attempts to get off the ground.
Challenger
’s last was one of these.

It occurs to me that if I were a different sort of person I would really dig in now. I would ask him what the space shuttle means to him, how he feels about this era coming to an end. But I don’t press. Neither did Norman Mailer, incidentally—he only rarely reports asking a direct question of a specific person. We could chalk this up to laziness, or to an understanding of the linguistic banalities and evasions of astronauts and scientists. Or it may be squeamishness about asking people to reveal emotions they may not have revealed to their spouses, or even to themselves. Frank Izquierdo has dedicated his professional life to the space shuttle. It is his life’s work, his family history, his migration story. Like Ponce de León, Frank Izquierdo made the trip from Puerto Rico to Florida knowing this place would become his new home. He knew this was the place where his children would be born, the site of his life’s work. Whatever he feels deep in his heart about the end of this project, I feel certain he wouldn’t tell me even if I asked.

Instead, I ask him more about something he’d mentioned earlier, about how he developed procedures to check for leaks during fueling.

“When I first got here, I spent a lot of time talking to the engineers who had worked on the Saturn Vs. The hardware wasn’t exactly the same, but they still had a lot of experience that helped me.”

I express surprise that Apollo engineers were still around in the space shuttle era, considering the long lag between projects.

“Oh, sure. We called them the graybeards. They stayed around to pass on what they had learned firsthand. It was crucial for us to be able to get their input on things. Saved us a lot of trial and error.”

“I think it’s too bad,” I say cautiously, “that you won’t be able to pass on your knowledge to the people who come along to design the next thing.” I’m reminded of instances of lost knowledge in history—a civilization inventing a device, or navigating an ocean, or curing a disease, and then forgetting how, leaving their descendants to struggle through it all over again, sometimes multiple times. The truth is that Frank’s generation of space workers will very likely be retired, moved away, or gone from this earth by the time the next big spaceflight project is under way, if there is one at all. In computing the costs of a huge engineering project, the cost of this loss is hard to quantify—the cost of knowledge hard-won over a lifetime that could have been passed on to another generation and won’t be. This is maybe the biggest waste of all, bigger than the waste of the orbiters themselves, which everyone agrees still have useful life left in them. And it cheats Frank out of the engineer’s great love: explaining to others the things he has figured out.

Frank nods. “Yeah, it’s too bad,” he says lightly, as if a waiter has told him the restaurant has run out of his first choice of entrée.

We watch our phones and listen to our radios and wait.

As the sun starts to come up, Omar mentions that his girlfriend, Karen, is making her way over to join us. She came in on another Turn Basin pass with a bunch of friends in an RV. I’ve been hearing Omar talk about Karen for a while now—she was on base when I was here for Family Day back in September, but on that occasion, too, she was bringing in a carful of friends on her own badge and we never quite managed to be in the same place at the same time. Karen is a spaceworker like Omar, which makes sense; the job seems to be so demanding, and Merritt Island such a company town, it’s hard to imagine how spaceworkers could hope to meet anyone any other way. Karen works in the same position as Omar; other than that, I don’t know much about her except that she owns and rides horses. Omar often posts pictures of the horses’ antics on Facebook.

When Karen makes her way over to us, I see that she is in her early thirties, about Omar’s age, with sandy blond hair and tanned skin. She’s friendly, but a little more reserved than Omar. We shake hands, and I’m relieved to see that she seems relaxed around me. I wondered at first how she would feel about her boyfriend spending time with me when I’m here and keeping in touch with me when I’m not. But as I’ve gotten to know Omar, it’s become clear that he has a lot of friends of both genders and that neither of them think that’s a problem. While Frank and Omar work on setting up their cameras, Karen and I chat about the weather and chances for launch today. She tells me about her photography hobby—she likes to take pictures of the shuttles and facilities here. She flips through some of her favorites on her iPad, and I tell her she has a great eye for color and proportion. The shuttle and its gantries are in many of the images, of course, but many of her photographs feature the wildlife here. This place is a photographer’s dream. After a while, Karen goes back to the RV to watch the launch with her friends. We’re getting close to T minus nine, and it’s time to choose our final viewing sites.

Endeavour
was built to replace
Challenger
, largely from spare parts, making it the only orbiter that would not have existed if not for the destruction of another. As such it is the youngest orbiter, and when it is retired after this mission it will have flown twenty-five flights to
Discovery
’s thirty-nine and
Atlantis
’s thirty-three. Like
Discovery, Endeavour
was named after one of the ships in Captain James Cook’s eighteenth-century fleet, and the British spelling came with it.
Endeavour
’s odd name and complicated origins set it apart from the others, as does its relative youth. Though it’s been flying for eighteen years and has some high-profile accomplishments to its credit (it flew the first Hubble servicing mission and the first mission to assemble the International Space Station),
Endeavour
still seems a new and slightly peculiar addition to the family—a quirky cousin from another country, a foreign exchange student with a strange accent.