Leaving Orbit (12 page)

I have in my phone a picture of the space shuttle
Discovery
stacked on the launchpad for its last flight. I snapped the picture out the window of Omar’s car as we drove by at a crawl on Family Day. There is no visual evidence of the circumstances under which the picture was taken—I was careful to keep the edges of the car window out of the frame—but I still feel that sense of motion when I look at it.

A few weeks after Family Day, my son was looking through my phone and, in that uncanny way small children have of intuiting technology, he found the photo of
Discovery
and reset it as the phone’s wallpaper, replacing a picture of himself. He showed me, pleased with his work.

“Face shuttle,” he lisped.

“That’s right,” I agreed. It occurred to me to wonder, not for the first time, whether he understands the difference between the shuttle and imaginary space vehicles like the
Millennium Falcon.
Because there are models and images of space shuttles all over his house, and he has only flown on planes a couple of times, space travel seems to him much more common than air travel. He has a charming habit of asking out-of-town visitors whether they traveled here on the space shuttle.

I got distracted before I had the chance to change the picture back; the next time I went to use my phone, I was surprised and pleased to see
Discovery
gleaming there. As the memory of that day quickly receded behind the pressures of the semester, it was nice to be reminded that I had been there, that I was going back for the last launch. In the picture, the Rotating Servicing Structure has been pulled back, presumably so the Family Day visitors could see the whole spaceship.
Discovery
’s white back is to us in the picture, its wings’ full spread visible. Behind it, the orange external tank peeks up over its shoulder. On either side of the tank, the white solid rockets stand like sentinels. One of the rockets is partially obscured by the arm extending from the gantry to
Discovery
’s hatch, the walkway the astronauts will cross to reach the crew cabin a few hours before launch. I can make out the path of tan gravel used by the crawler transporter and the complicated metal gantries that surround the shuttle stack. A lightning rod balances upon the highest point of the launch tower. Central Florida is prone to lightning, and many spacecraft have attracted strikes during their time waiting on the pad or, more frighteningly, during launch.

In the foreground of the picture squats a low guard building, a few cars and trucks belonging to the employees working the pad that day. A flagpole flies both the American flag and the shuttle flag that will later be hung in the Vehicle Assembly Building as a souvenir of this launch. The elaborate fencing and gates, blocked off with cones that day. Behind it all, the weird Cape Canaveral sky, the clouds pressing down on the launchpad in a way that’s almost menacing.

The image remained as my phone’s wallpaper. It’s there still as I write this, as
Discovery
is gathering its first layer of cobwebs at the Air and Space Museum. In the long delays leading up to the launch, every time I looked at my phone, I was reminded that
Discovery
still stood poised on that launchpad, just as in this picture, still stacked and ready to go.

First it was a problem in the orbital maneuvering system, the thrusters that allow the space shuttle to maneuver itself while in orbit. An OMS pod was leaking helium and nitrogen. Launch date was moved one day to November 2, 2010.

Then a slip to allow more time to refuel the helium tank. Launch date No Earlier Than November 3, 2010.

Then another scrub, after fueling had already begun, due to problems with a controller on the center main engine. Launch date NET November 4, 2010.

Then a scrub due to predictions of bad weather later in the day. Launch date NET November 5, 2010.

Then a scrub due to a hydrogen leak discovered during tanking. In addition to the leak, inspectors found a crack in the foam insulation on the external tank. This crack especially captured the attention of engineers and managers because it had been a chunk of foam falling from the external tank that had doomed
Columbia.
Fixing the shuttle while it is assembled and stacked vertically on the launchpad is difficult and time-consuming. Launch date NET November 30, 2010.

Then another slip to allow more time for repairs to the external tank. Launch date NET December 3, 2010.

Then another slip to allow more time to determine the likelihood of additional cracks in the external tank during launch. NET December 17, 2010.

Then another slip to make more time to validate repairs to the external tank. NET February 3, 2011.

Then another slip because engineers needed even more time to assess the cracks that were still forming, inexplicably, on the tank. The same day that slip was announced, US Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot, along with eighteen other people, at a public appearance in Tucson, Arizona. The incident caused a national uproar and a renewed debate over gun control, but for space fans the shooting had an additional meaning. Giffords is married to astronaut Mark Kelly, who was slated to command the next mission after
Discovery
’s
—Endeavour
’s last—less than three months away. Would he leave his wife in critical or uncertain condition to go to space? Or would he back out of the last mission he could ever hope to fly, leaving the end of the shuttle program in chaos, as a new commander would barely have time to train? Launch date NET February 24, 2011.

A week after Gabrielle Giffords was shot, an astronaut on the
Discovery
mission, Tim Kopra, fell off his bicycle and broke his hip. With the target launch date now less than six weeks away, it wasn’t clear whether the launch would have to be postponed. Let us take a moment to pity Tim Kopra: he trained for this mission for over a year, suited up for multiple scrubbed launch attempts, and then once it seemed all the problems for his launch had been solved, he injured himself in a leisure activity and lost his chance to fly on the shuttle ever again. Media and space fans waited anxiously to learn whether Mark Kelly would be replaced as well.

In late January, another mission was added to the manifest. A contingency mission, to be launched only if the crew of
Endeavour
was in need of rescue, became an official mission, STS-135, on
Atlantis
, with a target launch date of June 28, 2011. This was something of an audacious move on the part of NASA, since STS-135 still hadn’t been funded. A few weeks later, NASA managers announced that STS-135 would fly regardless of the funding situation in Congress. Omar and I communicated about these developments via e-mail; I told him I appreciated NASA’s boldness in planning for an unfunded launch and suggested they should take this approach more often.

So now we knew for certain what the last space shuttle launches would be: first
Discovery
, if the kinks could finally be worked out; then
Endeavour
in the spring, and
Atlantis
would be the very last, in the summer. In photographs, the crew of
Atlantis
all looked slightly bewildered that they were being pressed into service as the Last Crew, representatives and spokespeople for the entire shuttle program.

I texted Omar:

How likely do you think it is the problem w Discovery is really fixed?

Hard to say, Omar texted back. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.

After thanking him, I went to turn off my phone, but stopped to look at the image of
Discovery
gleaming there on the glass screen.
Discovery
looked enormous and permanent, like it wasn’t going anywhere. I found it hard to believe that Omar and I were discussing plans for this thing to leave the ground. The history of spaceflight teaches us that the more serious the cause of a shuttle delay, the less accurate the first guesses as to how long it might take to fix it. Omar and I both knew the No Later Than date of February 24 was a guess.

Yet as weeks went by, February 24 stayed on the manifest. I could, if I got lucky, witness in person the last launches of each of the three orbiters. Of course, it was also possible I could travel to Florida many times only to witness many scrubs and never see a launch at all.

I-75 starts at the Canadian border in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and traces a path south through the lengths of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, all the way to Miami. From my house in Knoxville, Tennessee, it’s only fifteen miles to get to I-75; then after a full day of driving and an exit near Orlando, it’s only a couple of hours to cut across the middle of Florida to the eastern shore.

It’s boring to describe one’s interstate route, or any driving directions. But I’ve never given as much thought to any interstate as I have given to I-75 in recent weeks. I will drive this route alone, down and back, for each launch attempt I go to. The space shuttle’s likelihood of getting off the ground in any one attempt, though it’s gotten better over the years, is still not a very good gamble. With the shuttle’s millions of delicate and critical moving parts and Florida’s volatile climate, the possibility of delays remains high. I know I will spend a great deal of time on I-75 over the coming months.

When I first thought to write about the end of shuttle, I had neglected to consider that three of the things I have avoided most in my life are driving long distances alone, talking to people I don’t know, and getting up early in the morning. I have ruled out entire careers because they interfere with these aversions. So I-75 looms large in my imagination in the weeks, then days, before the last launch of
Discovery.
Twelve hours is a long drive. But I’ve decided to go.

For a while there, the target dates had been falling during my university’s winter break, which would have worked nicely in terms of my teaching schedule, but the additional slips have placed the February attempt squarely in the middle of my semester. A fellow professor is covering one class for me today, and one of my graduate students is covering the other. My husband, Chris, has had to plan his week around being a single father. With each slip, he has listened patiently when I gave him the new No Earlier Than date, then answered with a nod and a “Just keep me updated.” Once I leave for Florida, I can’t say for sure when I’ll be back. If the February 24 attempt slips till Friday, I’ll stay till Friday; if it slips to Saturday, I’ll stay till then.