Leaving Orbit (14 page)

Discovery
was the return-to-flight orbiter after the loss of
Challenger
and then again after the loss of
Columbia.
To me, this gives it a certain feeling of bravery and hope.
Don’t worry, Discovery
seemed to tell us by gamely rolling her snow-white self out to the launchpad.
Don’t worry, we can still dream of space. We can still leave the earth.
And then she did.

Around me, cars and trucks cruise up and down the causeway, looking for places to wedge themselves in. T minus five hours and counting. We all watch our phones and wait. It’s been my observation that each launch offers a different experience of waiting, different shades of waiting, flavors of waiting, moods of waiting. Buddhists might appreciate the way each launch wait brings about in spectators a different quality of boredom, then acceptance, then calm, then something like a childlike openness, an ability to take in the sight we are about to see with minds wiped clear of desire, warped of time.

All along the causeway, those of us who got here earlier take walks and greet our fellow space fans. I’m reminded of Jules Verne’s description of the people who showed up in Florida to see the first space launch in his 1865 novel. He imagined a tent city of space enthusiasts from all over the world, speaking different languages and “mingled together in terms of absolute equality.” He describes a sense of anticipation that includes a hint of something like fear—“a dull, noiseless agitation, such as precedes great catastrophes.” Verne got a few things wrong in his invention of what spaceflight would be like, but this is one of the many details he got right.

I’ve experienced the specific enthusiasm of space people before, at my other visits to the Kennedy Space Center and especially at the launch I saw in 2001; I saw more of them at Buzz Aldrin’s book event in Nashville. Among the people I met on those occasions were some serious space fanatics, people for whom space is the main thing in their lives—the interest they read about, talk about, spend eBay money on, and chat with other people over the Internet about. Some of these people work in vaguely aerospace-related fields, but for more of them this has nothing to do with their jobs. They just love space, and for these people the Kennedy Space Center is something of a mecca. I am not really one of the space people, as much as my friends might mistake me for one of them. I’ve read a hundred books about spaceflight and traveled here to see a launch in person, but I did so as research for a book I was writing. I can’t imagine putting this much energy into it just for its own sake.

When the space people come in contact with each other, which they do in great numbers on launch days like today, they have a sort of code for interacting. They list the previous launches they have seen, share thoughts on controversial subjects within the community (Did Gus Grissom really screw up and blow the hatch early on the
Liberty Bell 7
in 1961, or did it go off by itself as he claimed? Will any of the private aerospace companies be able to get astronauts into space safely, and if so which one[s]? Who was the most badass moonwalker? And so on). They exchange reviews of recent space books, trade the names of aging astronauts whose hands they have shaken. They wear T-shirts and caps and buttons and pins and patches and memorabilia from other launches. I’d almost forgotten about these people, how obsessed and knowledgeable and friendly they are. At a time when it seems all but self-evident that shuttle is ending because the general public no longer cares about spaceflight, these people controvert that broad claim with every molecule of their being. They care enough for all of us, and they are heartbroken by our leaders’ shortsightedness.

The car nearest mine has license plates from Ohio. A friendly couple in their early fifties, just starting to gray, who drove two days to see their first launch before it was too late. The husband wears wraparound sunglasses and a T-shirt that says LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF THOSE WHO THREATEN IT on the back. The wife is carefully made up and coiffed, but she wears baggy capris and sensible shoes, a popular look for women at shuttle launches. After locating the launchpad through his binoculars with my help, the husband tells me that we are all going to be forced to live under sharia law before too long, a conclusion based on “the way things are going in England.” (When pressed, he reveals that his main piece of evidence for England’s inevitable transition to Islamic theocracy is the fact that Mohammed is the most popular name for newborn boys in London.)

“Do you know why Obama killed the shuttle program?” he asks me, as his wife joins us to offer everyone Combos. “The answer may surprise you.”

“Um, I don’t think Obama really killed the shuttle program,” I reply vaguely, helping myself to some Combos. “That decision was made after the
Columbia
disaster, in 2003.” I restrain myself from adding the obvious:
under Bush.

“But Obama could have
revived
it.” The man points his finger at me in a
gotcha
gesture. He leans toward me in his excitement; I can see myself reflected in his sunglasses. Next to him, his wife fiddles with her iPhone, trying to get NASA TV to come in.

“Obama’s under orders by the Bilderberg Group.” The man pauses, waiting to see whether I know what the Bilderberg Group is. I do, from reading Jon Ronson’s
Them
: it’s a group of global leaders and captains of industry that holds mysterious meetings, a cabal popular with conspiracy theorists. “He’s under orders to destroy as many sources of national pride as possible. I mean, think about it. If the American people aren’t proud of their country anymore, the One World Order can take over and we won’t rise up in defense of our country.”

“Don’t you think it’s more likely that he needs to make a show of austerity during a recession? Extending the space shuttle would look too spendy while people are losing their homes.”

“Austerity,” the man repeats. He looks at
Discovery
off on the horizon. “That’s a good point, actually.”

“I’m going to go get a Coke from my cooler,” I announce. “Would you like anything to drink?”

“No, thanks. You might actually be right, though, about that austerity thing. I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

Crouched by my cooler, I scribble down everything the man said. I imagine getting similar interviews with other people, assembling a catalog of the kooks who show up for shuttle launches. Then it occurs to me that I am the only person within sight to have arrived by myself, to have driven twelve hours alone. I may be the only professor here missing classes today, the only mother to have left her child for three days, all to see a space shuttle launch. I feel a moment of shame for wanting to mock the Ohio man. But I write down everything he said anyway.

Later in the morning, the woman from Ohio with the Combos approaches me. Her hair has flattened a bit in the humidity, and some of her makeup has sweated off. She wants to know whether there is any officially sanctioned place for women to pee.

“I’ve been wondering about that too,” I admit. All morning we have watched men and boys stroll down an embankment and disappear briefly into some tropical foliage, but it’s not clear what our options are.

“Let’s shield each other,” she suggests. A third woman joins us, and the three of us set up a makeshift stall using two beach towels in some secluded bushes. The third woman, who is from West Palm Beach, has a bad knee, and so she needs to hold on to my shoulder to keep her balance while she squats. I brace myself against her weight, hold up my end of the beach towel, and look up at some helicopters passing against the clear blue sky. They will monitor the weather up until the moment of launch. Today six Americans are going to space.

Forty-two years ago, Norman Mailer woke up in a motel in Cocoa Beach, Florida, after two hours of sleep and drove to the Kennedy Space Center. He felt cranky, out of sorts, and hot. Too many other Very Important Persons had turned out for the launch, and Norman Mailer disliked them both individually and as a group. But in the moments right before liftoff, he had an insight:
He knew now why he was so irritated with everything and why he could not feel a thing. It was simple masculine envy. He too wanted to go up in the bird.

I know what he means. The masculine envy of which he speaks is not masculine at all. It’s integral to the experience of watching people soaring into the heavens while we, with pen and paper, are stuck on the ground. I feel it too, and that envy is at the heart of a kinship between Norman Mailer and me that transcends forty-two years, a change in space vehicle, and even gender—a difference not insignificant to Norman Mailer, who once remarked to Orson Welles in a television interview that all women should be kept in cages. But I understand him, I feel him, just the same. I’ve read accounts of the launch of Apollo 11 by each of the three men on board, by the flight director and dozens of other people closely tied to the mission, and I’ve clung to every word; yet it’s Norman Mailer’s wrestling with his own detachment, his own desire to feel something for that gray stick, that stays with me, that makes me feel I’ve been let in on what it was like to be there.

While I wait for the launch of
Discovery
, I text back and forth with Omar about whether the launch will go off on time, about weather predictions, about where we should have dinner afterward. He is watching the launch across the street from the Vehicle Assembly Building in a van equipped with badge boards and walkie-talkies, the equipment he will need in the event the launch is scrubbed and he has to go back to work resecuring the launchpad.

I haven’t been to Florida since Family Day five months ago, but I still see Omar at least once a day on Facebook, and we play a lot of online Scrabble. He is a surprisingly serious opponent and beats me more often than not. I’ve started to think of him in the same category as my siblings—people I feel respect and affection for and don’t see as often as I’d like. In the intervening time, I’ve gathered more of an idea of his life: he works a lot and enjoys it, both because he takes pride in doing the work well and because there are spaceships and astronauts at his workplace, which he never stops being excited by. There are things he learns that he’s not supposed to tell anyone, and he is absolutely scrupulous about following those rules. He’ll mention to me once in a while that he took a picture of something, but that he can’t post it until he’s given permission, which will probably not be until after the shuttles are retired. So he doesn’t post it, and won’t even tell his friends exactly what it is. When he is not working, he spends time with friends and family—there are pithy quotes here and there from his grandmother. He also helps out a lot with horses that belong to his girlfriend, horses whose snapshots populate his Facebook feed. A picture starts to come together of a man whose overwhelming attribute is reliability rather than ambition. (Or rather, a man whose single ambition—to be near space shuttles as much as possible—has been satisfied.) Either way, he is a person who does what he says he will do, and he does things for others rather than for himself.

After
Discovery
’s last flight, Omar might get another year or so working here—there will be a great deal of work to be done removing
Discovery
’s engines, cleaning it up and readying it for its new life as a flightless museum display. After that, he will have to find another purpose, like thousands of other people at the Cape.

Several “holds” are built into the countdown, pauses to provide a cushion in case the launch crews encounter any complications and need to catch up. One is at T minus twenty minutes, another at T minus nine. Traditionally, the T minus nine minute hold is when people start getting serious about their viewing spots. Floridians who don’t care to go out of their way to see a launch will often at least stop what they are doing and step outside, find a roof, or pull over in their cars when they hear the announcement for the T-9 hold, then look in the direction of the launchpads.

At T-9, I take the lens cap off my camera and clamber up onto the roof of my car. The metal is hot and bumps about under me disconcertingly, but I persevere. Now the causeway is packed—in the last hour, people have started trying to cram their cars and trucks at odd angles into any tiny gap between the vehicles of those of us who arrived earlier, and some tension results. A sedan manages to slide past the Ohio couple and park on the other side of them, partially blocking their view. The Ohio man steams about it to his wife, hands on his hips. When the driver of the sedan emerges and turns out to be brown-skinned, Arab or South Asian, I fear what ugly confrontation might ensue. But the driver is an elaborately polite older man with very little English, making it hard for the Ohio man to start any kind of real argument. Soon the two are sharing binoculars, the Ohio man pointing out the stack on the horizon. I eavesdrop for a while, but when I don’t hear the words
sharia
or
Mohammed
after a few minutes, I lose interest.