Leaving Orbit (27 page)

The next morning, I drive home to Knoxville. There is only one shuttle launch left.

When the Kennedy Space Center was constructed, it was with the knowledge that incredibly large objects, skyscraper-sized objects, were going to have to be moved about the landscape like children’s toys by some means that had yet to be invented. The Mercury rockets had been simply set to vertical at their launchpads on Cape Canaveral, but the new facilities for the Apollo project were going to have to be more elaborate. First of all, the moon rockets would need to be assembled indoors, and that indoor space, which was the Vehicle Assembly Building, had to be separated from the launchpads by at least three miles for the disconcerting reason that an explosion at the launchpad would destroy everything within that radius; NASA managers understandably hoped to minimize the losses in case of such a disaster. But this separation of three miles between assembly building and launchpad meant that the assembled Apollo-Saturn, a spacecraft taller than the Statue of Liberty, would somehow have to be moved across three miles and up a steep incline, an unimaginable engineering challenge. The world’s most powerful ground vehicle would have to be invented, and it would have to be capable of keeping the enormous spacecraft perfectly level. The vehicle that resulted, the crawler transporter, is one of the components of the space program that would be remarkable on its own but can disappear among the other astounding and record-setting innovations that surround it.

The crawler transporters survived the transition between Apollo and shuttle. In the shuttle era, the space shuttle launch vehicle is assembled atop a mobile launch platform, the enormous metal structure we saw in the VAB on Family Day eight months ago. The presence of the word
mobile
in the name is misleading; the platform looks like an oil rig, like a building, like a permanent structure that isn’t going anywhere. Each one weighs 8.2 million pounds by itself, 11 million pounds with a space shuttle assembled on it, even more once the shuttle’s external tank is filled with fuel. Once the shuttle is stacked on the MLP, the crawler transporter slides up underneath the platform and shrugs the entire stack up onto its shoulders before rolling it out to the launchpad three miles away.

For the first rollout at Kennedy, for Apollo 4 in 1967, spaceworkers were encouraged to bring their families to see the show. Rollouts have sometimes been open to workers and their guests, but they haven’t always been big events, since they often took place in the middle of the night and were not well lit. This year, with the end of the program in sight, NASA has started inviting workers to bring their families again and has brought out massive spotlights to make the stack visible. Tonight I’ll be among them for the last rollout in shuttle history.

It’s only been fifteen days since the launch of
Endeavour
, which is still on orbit and is due to land tonight at 2:35 a.m. In the meantime,
Atlantis
has been mated with its external tank and solid rocket boosters for its last flight; this process takes place in the VAB, a dramatic ballet of engineering in which the orbiter is hoisted up into the air using a crane built into the ceiling, then lowered with incredible delicacy onto the external tank. Omar was there in the VAB to see the stacking process, which takes eight to ten hours. Tonight the assembled vehicle will roll out of the building and out to the launchpad. Omar has invited me to join him and his father and some friends for yet another “last.” After checking with my husband, I’d agreed and flown out.

On launch days, hundreds of thousands of people show up and vie with one another for hotel rooms, seats in restaurants, and launch viewing sites, but today will be different. Rollouts are open only to NASA employees and their families, so my visit will not coincide with the visits of hundreds of thousands of other tourists; I’m getting to see the Space Coast as it is most of the time for the people who live here. Because the causeways won’t be clogged with traffic, I have a wider range of options and don’t have to stay on Merritt Island, at my Florida Home. Instead, I’m staying in a hotel in Cocoa Beach for the first time. A beachfront room here during an off week costs the same as the unglamorous Clarion during a launch.

This morning when I wake up in that hotel room in Cocoa Beach, I am disoriented, at first, to hear the ocean. I dress and step out onto the beach, blinking at the white-hot sun. A few families are already setting up their blankets and umbrellas and coolers and rafts and Frisbees. The surf is calm, and children are wading in to stand waist high and shriek while they splash water onto each other. Out on the horizon I can make out an enormous cruise ship, one of the many that leave from Port Canaveral on their way to the Caribbean, moving almost imperceptibly slowly. Watching it embark is like a form of meditation. I breathe in the saltwater air with my toes in the surf, snap a picture with my phone to prove I’ve been to a beach, then get in my car and head toward the Space Center.

I drive through Cocoa Beach along the tacky stretch of A1A. Tom Wolfe says of Cocoa Beach that it “was so Low Rent that nothing on this earth could ever change it…. Even the beach at Cocoa Beach was Low Rent.” In stark contrast to the unspoiled green flats of the Space Center on Merritt Island, there is nothing beautiful about Cocoa Beach along A1A. Not the surreal sculpture of a surfer balancing on a concrete slab of wave, not the chain hotels done up in pastel colors, not the souvenir ships with multicolored signs advertising SHELLS (who
buys
shells?) and WOMEN’S BIKINIS (who else buys bikinis?) and BEACH TOYS and SUNSCREEN. Not the fake tiki lounges left over from the early sixties when the Mercury astronauts first came here for their training and tests and launches, those old-school crew-cut astronauts who declared the Cape a “no-wives zone” and called the young women who followed them back to their motel rooms “Cape cookies.”

I cross the Banana River on the 520 causeway to reach the Kennedy Space Center from the south and pass through Merritt Island. I take the turn for the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. You can’t miss the turn: it’s marked by a life-size mockup of the space shuttle launch vehicle. The Visitor Complex boasts a museum, a rocket garden, an IMAX theater, a beautifully preserved Saturn V housed in its own hangar, a seriously well stocked gift shop, and an attraction called the Shuttle Launch Experience that I’ve never done because I’m always here alone and I’d feel stupid getting on an amusement ride by myself. Once you’re in the Visitor Complex, you can board a bus to take a tour inside the working part of the space center, including the Vehicle Assembly Building (only as far as the parking lot) and an observation gantry overlooking the launchpads. Most tourists leave here thoroughly propagandized about spaceflight and their nation’s role in it.

The Visitor Complex has become so familiar to me, I decline the map the ticket seller offers me. I know where the vintage space suits are displayed, where to find the diorama of local wildlife, where the least-used bathrooms are, where to buy ice cream without waiting in a long line. Omar has been hoping to join me after he runs some errands, but he keeps texting me about delays. Finally he decides that he won’t have time to join me after all, texting me by way of explanation:

Goin to buy some hay now

Hay?
It takes me a moment to remember that Omar’s girlfriend, Karen, owns horses, and that Omar helps out with their care. I text him back:

21st century transport by day, 19th century transport by night Omar’s response:

Karen just LOL’d

Later, I sit on a bench in the Rocket Garden by myself, eating an ice cream cone in the beastly heat. Behind me squats the enormous silver base of the Atlas rocket, gleaming in the sun like a piece of metal sculpture. It’s easy to forget, unless I look straight up, that I am sitting among rockets. Tourists swirl around me, reading the plaques and taking pictures. A tour guide, a paunchy white man in his fifties, tests his microphone and encourages visitors to gather around. A few families wander over; I remain on my bench but listen, curious. The man clears his throat loudly into his microphone, a signal that he is ready to begin.

“Welcome to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex Rocket
Garden!
I would like to tell you about some of the important and historic rockets we are proud to have on display here in the Rocket
Garden!
This right here is the mighty Atlas
rocket!
” His delivery is odd, deadpan, punctuated with an emphasis at the end of each sentence, as if someone has encouraged him to vary his tone.

“The Atlas was first developed as an intercontinental ballistic
missile!
Or ICB
M!
Perhaps you’ve heard of
those!
How many of you have heard of the Atlas
rocket
?” A few uncertain hands wander up. No one wants to be called on.

“The Atlas rocket ran on a mixture of liquid oxygen and a type of kerosene known as RP-one! The Mercury astronauts trusted the Atlas with their lives when they climbed into their capsules perched at the top of these mighty
rockets
!” A practiced pause. I wonder whether the tour guide is paid by Delaware North, the company that runs the Visitor Complex, or whether he is a volunteer. He has the affect of an enthusiast, an evangelist.

“Can you
imagine
—!” and here he gives a gesture toward the top of the rocket, ten stories, while his gathered listeners shade their eyes against the bright Florida sun to dutifully tilt their faces up—“Can you imagine what it felt like to those seven astronauts who trusted their lives to this mighty
warrior
?”

“
Four
, not seven,” I whisper into my ice cream. The first two Americans in space flew on Redstone rockets, not Atlas; also, one of the Mercury astronauts, Deke Slayton, had been grounded for a heart condition. That left
four
who trusted Atlas with their lives. I feel a moment’s self-satisfaction—I will report to my husband later that I knew a fact this tour guide did not—but then I wonder, what kind of person takes pleasure in correcting a tour guide, even if she does so too quietly to be heard? I’ve kept telling myself that I’m not one of the hard-core space people, that I am somehow different from them because I’m a writer, because I would not have come here just for my own enjoyment. Maybe this was true at one point, but I’m starting to question how different I really am.