Leaving Orbit (43 page)

It’s true what I scribbled in my notebook when I first arrived here to meet Omar, back in the fall of 2010, for Family Day: Norman Mailer’s generation got to see the beginning of things and mine has gotten the ends. But though Norman Mailer thought he was seeing the start of something, he was wrong. In fact, he was seeing its pinnacle. I have the sad advantage of traveling to Florida knowing I’m seeing the end. I’m glad, I suppose, to know exactly what I’m seeing.

When I flip through all the notebooks I’ve been carrying back and forth to Florida over the past year and a half, I see the same sentence scrawled over and over again, in different pens under different dates:
The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings.
This always seems meaningful to me as I’m writing it, as if it will be the key to something, but I’ve never been sure what. The first time I wrote it, I was thinking of the many times in the past when it had seemed spaceflight might end—the early rocket failures before the successes of 1961, then the Apollo 1 fire, then the premature cancellation of Apollo, then the compromises and threats to the developing shuttle project. Then
Challenger
, then
Columbia.
Each of these events put its mark on the fate of the program, but only the last did in fact cause American spaceflight to end.

After the landing of
Atlantis
in July of 2011, I returned home again to try to make sense of the whole mess. I organized my receipts and labeled my photos and videos and uploaded all the texts in my phone. I save all of it, even the blurry photos, even the texts that are nonsensical out of context, because I never know what might help me piece together some detail, the detail that turns out to be that surprising spark that can illuminate it all.

I’d filled another notebook, which I added to the knee-high pile in my study. Coffee-stained, sunscreen-stained, margarita-stained, sun-bleached, and humidity-warped, some of their bindings breaking down from being left in my oven-hot car for long Florida afternoons. Some of them have grains of sand caught in their bindings, tiny smashed bugs, little bits of vegetation from those times I sat on the ground while I was waiting for something to happen. Stuck between the pages are brochures from Florida attractions, business cards from people I’ve met, a McDonald’s straw wrapper, ticket stubs from the Visitor Complex, a NASA meatball sticker, and a temporary tattoo of Yuri Gagarin’s helmeted head that one of the Space Tweeps gave me. Omar’s home address is scrawled on the back pages of at least three of them, and the cell numbers and Twitter handles of my new space friends. There are descriptions and half-descriptions and single-word triggers to remind me of the moments I’ve witnessed on all my trips to Florida, all the bizarre and beautiful and mundane things I have seen, all my research and all my childhood memories and my interviews and notes from the books I’ve read. The notebooks are as messy as the inside of my head, and I’m convinced that somewhere within them is the story I’ve been trying to write, the answers to the Question: What does it mean that we went to space for fifty years and now we are stopping?

And the books themselves: they’ve long since overfilled the shelves allocated to them, shelves that were already full after I finished my
Challenger
novel, and they’ve piled up in great vertical drifts that don’t seem like they should be able to balance. From time to time I’m inspired to try to organize the piles into categories: a JFK and Mercury stack, a Gemini and Apollo stack, a special stack for Apollo 11. A Kennedy Space Center stack including histories of Florida, the Cape, the voyages of Ponce de León. A shuttle development stack, an eighties-and-nineties shuttle stack, a
Challenger
disaster stack, a
Columbia
disaster stack. A Norman Mailer stack, his self-referential meditations on topics that always just eluded his understanding, like feminism or the Vietnam War or Hitler or Marilyn Monroe. But some books defy piling. What to do with, for instance, the science fiction novel Buzz Aldrin cowrote in the nineties? It includes scenes that take place on a fictional space shuttle, but it hardly goes with the factual shuttle books, nor does it seem to go with the Apollo 11 books, where I keep other titles by and about Buzz. The mass-market paperback floats from pile to pile, nagging at me every time it catches my eye. And what do I do with the books I’ve read about the voyages of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century, a subject that has nothing to do with anything except that two of the space shuttle orbiters were named for his ships, a connection that has led me to read about Captain Cook’s voyages late at night after my family is asleep, after I’ve written all I can for the day but still want to press forward on this project somehow, want somehow to be rocked to sleep on the creaking wooden sailing ships
Discovery
and
Endeavour
, their names and adventures evoking the odd image of galleons sailing straight up into the night sky with the aid of external tanks and solid rocket boosters?

I keep thinking at some point I will step back and the larger pattern will pop into focus. Sometimes I think I can almost see it out of the corner of my eye, almost sense a passing glimmer of an answer. When I pull out my notebook to try to catch it, I hesitate, not knowing how to start. I get a pen and write:
The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings.
Then I don’t know what to write next.

Even before the last launches, NASA had announced the final destinations for each of the orbiters—
Endeavour
to the California Science Center in Los Angeles,
Atlantis
to the Visitor Complex at Kennedy Space Center, and
Discovery
to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where I spent so much of my childhood. Each of the orbiters will be displayed in a different configuration:
Endeavour
will be stacked vertically as if for launch with a mock external tank and mock solid rocket boosters;
Discovery
will be standing on its wheels horizontally as if having just landed; and
Atlantis
will be hung from the ceiling, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle with its payload bay doors open and robotic arm outstretched, as if working in space. Omar approves of the multiconfiguration plan—he likes the idea that a visitor to all three exhibits would get to see what the shuttle looked like throughout its workflow—but he admits that he doesn’t care for the idea of
Atlantis
being displayed at an angle. “It’s like taxidermy,” he told me, with a look of distaste.

Omar and I have said many times that we both plan to be at the
Discovery
welcoming ceremony at Air and Space in DC, and I hope he is serious—partly because I’d like to see him, but also for the murkier motivation that I think it will be poignant to see him say his good-byes with
Discovery
, and I want that scene for my book.

In October, a few months after we saw each other at the landing of
Atlantis
, I send Omar a chunk of what I have been writing, about fifty pages that tell my experiences with the final launches of
Discovery, Endeavour
, and
Atlantis.
Family Day is left out entirely, as is the landing, as is a lot of other stuff he helped me get access to, and I feel self-conscious about how my shaping of the story will come across to Omar, who will know, better than anyone, what I am leaving out.

Omar texts me back within hours, God bless him.

A very good read!

He corrects a technical error (diplomatically, of course)—I’ve misunderstood the meaning of the abort mode known as negative return. I’d written that negative return marks the point after which the shuttle could no longer safely return to Earth, when, in fact, Omar explains, negative return means only that the shuttle can’t return to the runway at the Kennedy Space Center. It can still land at one of the emergency landing sites elsewhere around the globe. Somehow, my error feels symbolic, maybe because the term itself is so poetic. It seems significant that I’d thought things were a little worse than they actually are.

Nearly six months later, I’m standing around with Omar in a roped-off VIP area in a large grassy field outside the Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport. This is a second site the Air and Space Museum added in 2003, a pair of hangars large enough to display more of the museum’s many airplanes, spacecraft, and other artifacts than can the smaller marble building on the National Mall that I still think of as being Air and Space.

The ceremony isn’t due to begin for over an hour, and while we talk, Omar and I watch the final stages of the setup. Folding chairs in the first two rows are marked with signs that read RESERVED FOR ASTRONAUTS, each one with a small American flag resting on it. The sound system is put through its final preparations; the opera singer who will perform the national anthem does a brief sound check, singing the song’s first line and then its highest notes, “and the rockets’ red glare …”

Omar is wearing a neon orange wristband that a few minutes ago I pried off my own wrist and slipped to him surreptitiously through a fence separating media and VIPs from the general public. I wasn’t even supposed to have press credentials myself, hadn’t thought to register for them, but last night at my hotel I ran into my space friends Anna and Doug, whom I met at the launch of
Atlantis
, and they let me tag along with them to the media registration table and allow myself to be mistaken for a journalist with the same publication. Once I had the orange wristband, it became clear to me what its value would be, that the spacious area directly in front of the dais was open only to accredited media and to VIPs designated by NASA—mostly astronauts, administrators, and museum officials. Omar and I had been texting each other all morning, and I was pleased with myself when I hit upon the plan to sneak him in, pleased that I could get him in somewhere he wouldn’t have been able to get into otherwise, as he has done for me so many times.

Discovery
had left the Kennedy Space Center for the last time two days earlier. Omar was there working that day, watching and taking pictures as
Discovery
rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building on its way to the mate-demate device that would lift it atop the back of the shuttle carrier aircraft—I got to see his, and other space fans’, pictures of it all day on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Yesterday I drove from Knoxville to Washington, and it felt odd to head north instead of south, to drive eight hours rather than twelve. I’d thought the drive would be easier, but I didn’t find it to be so—I didn’t know any of the landmarks, never knew where would be a safe place to stop, how much farther I had to go. It was oddly disorienting.

Enterprise
has already been pulled out of its old spot in the museum and parked on a paved area behind the dais. It’s already wearing the tail cone that will help stabilize it on its trip to New York.
Discovery
is going to be pulled up in the other direction, and the two orbiters will be posed nose to nose for a few hours, a rare sight.

Enterprise
was the first orbiter to be constructed, assembled without engines or tiles for early flight dynamics tests. It was flown atop the shuttle carrier aircraft repeatedly to test the safety of the mated configuration, then was dropped from a plane and landed manually by astronauts to test its gliding abilities. All this happened in 1977, when I was in kindergarten. The original plan had been for
Enterprise
to be fitted with engines and to become the second working orbiter, after
Columbia
, but a number of design changes were made as
Columbia
was being assembled, making it more practical to refit an existing test frame as a new orbiter and to retire
Enterprise.
The test frame became
Challenger
, and
Enterprise
went on a goodwill tour of the world before being sent to Air and Space. It was in storage from 1985 until 2003, when the Udvar-Hazy Center opened and there was finally enough room to display it. The one thing people seem to remember about
Enterprise
is that it was going to be named
Constitution
until a letter-writing campaign convinced President Gerald Ford to ask NASA to change the name to that of the spaceship from
Star Trek.
When
Enterprise
rolled out of the plant where it had been assembled in Palmdale, California, it was feted in a ceremony including some of the original show’s cast. It’s a distinct moment of midseventies culture: in the pictures from that day, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, and NASA managers are all wearing leisure suits. I’ve never seen
Enterprise
in person, and I find it strange to look at. In size and proportion it’s identical to the other orbiters, as is its black nose. But the fuselage and payload bay doors are wrong, solid white without the familiar tiles that protect working space shuttles. And the whole thing is too clean, without the wear and tear that
Discovery
and the others have earned over dozens of space flights.