Leaving Orbit (16 page)

“It was a nice one,” Omar agrees. “How did it compare to the one you saw before?”

“That was a night launch, so—really different,” I say. “But I guess I assumed that for the most part day launches are all the same, and night launches are all the same.”

Omar shakes his head. “The funny thing is, they’re all different. They all have a really distinct look to them. I guess it has to do with weather—how much cloud cover there is, humidity, wind, especially. Each one puts on a different show.”

It occurs to me that there are a lot of people who have seen a single launch, but relatively few can compare multiple shuttle launches. There are people out here—not many, but they exist—who have seen every shuttle launch. I read about one man who has seen every single launch of anything, including probes and satellites. His father worked for Cape Canaveral Air Force Station even before NASA was formed and took him to see the first secret launches when he was a toddler. There is always someone who has seen more.

Omar and I talk more about how the day went. He shows concern over whether I had trouble finding the location he’d suggested for me to watch the launch from, whether I had trouble finding this restaurant. I’d forgotten this about him since Family Day, the way he seems to feel responsible for everything I experience here at the Cape. Not only the launch itself, but also things like weather, the behavior of other space fans, the service I encounter in restaurants and hotels, and the performance of the space shuttle program itself. I get the impression that if today’s launch had scrubbed, as it seemed for so long that it was going to, Omar would have apologized and taken it upon himself to make it up to me in some way.

While we wait for our food, we browse through news stories on our phones about the launch. I read one tidbit out loud to Omar: STS-133 had the longest vertical flow (170 days) since STS-35 in 1990, still the record-holder at 183 days.

“Oh yeah, I remember that one,” Omar tells me. “That was
Columbia.
My father was involved in fixing the tanking problems. It actually rolled back to VAB, demated, and went back into OPF to start all over again. Then it had to roll back to VAB a second time because a hurricane was going to come through. That one seemed cursed there for a while.”

“For this mission, I wondered whether they were going to roll back
Discovery
and demate it,” I say.

Omar grunts noncommittally, and it occurs to me that he might know something about this that he’s not supposed to tell me. I don’t want to sound as though I am prodding him to break a confidence.

Omar has his video camera with him, and he shows me the footage he shot from the VAB parking lot. It’s impressive: in his camera’s frame, the stack is much bigger than what I saw today, the controlled explosion of the solid fuel much sharper and brighter. It’s a completely different experience, a different launch. I try to hide my jealousy.

We eat mediocre Mexican food and I drink two beers. I probably should stick to one, but I’ve had a long day, I’m relieved that everything has gone as planned, and I’m falling for the celebratory postflight atmosphere. Omar considers getting a beer but keeps ordering Cokes instead. Now that I’m a little tipsy, I ask Omar a question I’ve wanted to ask him for a while: I ask him about the masculine envy Norman Mailer experienced at the launch of Apollo 11. I tell him that, like all space writers, I am asked from time to time whether I would go up on the space shuttle if I had the chance. I tell him I’m not sure what to say because in reality, I think I would be terrified.

“Still, you’d have to go if you had the chance, right?” I asked. “After all, the track record is pretty good.” 98.5 percent of space shuttle missions have returned their crews safely; the statistics get even better if you count Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

Omar pauses. “That’s something I think about a lot. I grew up wanting to go. Now that I work there, I’ve seen everything that goes wrong as they’re preparing to launch,” he says. “All the stuff they catch and fix.”

I know what he means. One faulty part, one procedure not executed correctly. What destroyed
Challenger
was the failure of a simple rubber O-ring, like you have in your faucets. What destroyed
Columbia
was a dent on one of the tiles.

“But they catch them and fix them, right?” I ask. The astronauts themselves don’t know all the details about problems found on the orbiter and the other components. They are busy training for their own roles; they have to trust that the engineers and technicians are doing their jobs.

“They’d only have to miss one thing,” Omar says. He pauses, smiling broadly. “But I’d still go.”

If the shuttle continued flying a hundred more missions, statistics dictate another one would probably be lost, maybe to something equally mundane. In 1967, the crew of Apollo 1 was killed in a training exercise on the launchpad. The plan to go to the moon went on without too much controversy, but now, it seems, we no longer have the stomach for burying astronauts. After
Challenger
, the space agency was criticized for undervaluing safety in favor of budget and scheduling pressures; after
Columbia
, the board tasked with investigating the disaster recommended that crew safety become “the overriding priority” in NASA’s next space transportation system, “rather than trade safety against other performance criteria, such as low cost and reusability, or against advanced space operation capabilities.” This requirement would make spaceflight slower, more expensive, and less ambitious—exactly the opposite direction from what proponents of heroic-era lofty goals demand.

On the way out of the restaurant, we pass a small clump of people wearing brightly colored badges that read “NASATweetup.” The badges display the NASA logo and the person’s Twitter handle, indicated by the leading @ sign. Omar points them out to me as if they are celebrities, but he doesn’t approach them.

“Those are the people chosen for the NASATweetup,” he tells me. When I look confused, he explains. “NASA started doing it for the last few launches. They choose 150 people who follow NASA on Twitter and give them special access to the launch. They get to meet astronauts and stuff like that. A few weeks ago I saw a bunch of them when they got to go inside OPF. They looked like kids in a candy store.”

When I was here for Family Day, I learned to refer to the hangars where the space shuttles are maintained between missions as “OPF,” not “
the
OPF,” as I had been doing.

“
I
got to go inside OPF,” I brag needlessly.

Omar smiles. “Yeah, you did.”

Outside, Omar tells me that he recognized the Twitter handle of a woman who had traveled from Australia for the previous launch attempt but couldn’t afford to return for this one. The space community on Twitter took up a collection for her, and a few locals offered her free places to stay. This is a great example of the fellow feeling that exists among the hard-core space enthusiasts online—they give each other money, are welcome in one another’s homes. Omar is clearly delighted to see the Australian woman has made it here. When I ask why he doesn’t approach her and congratulate her in person, he shrugs and says she looked like she was busy talking to her friends. Omar’s shyness is a lot like my own, I realize. He likes people and wishes the best for them. He is willing to e-mail strangers (as he did me after he read my book) or to reach out to them on Twitter, but to walk up to a woman in a restaurant and introduce himself is another matter, farther than he is willing to go. I am moved all over again that he made the bold gesture of inviting me for Family Day.

Omar has tried to impress upon me how awful the traffic will be tonight, especially heading west toward Orlando, which is where I’m going. He’s explained that a lot of NASA people choose to live in Merritt Island because it’s the only town on the same landmass as the Kennedy Space Center, the only one from which a car can reach the gates of the Kennedy Space Center without having to cross a body of water using one of the causeways, which clog up unspeakably after launches. The epic traffic is largely due to the bottlenecking of these causeways, and Omar points out that the one and only motel in the town of Merritt Island, the Clarion, while not luxurious, would save me half an hour to forty-five minutes prelaunch and inestimable hours afterward, when up to a million people will be trying to get off Merritt Island at once.

“Good tip,” I say. “That will be my new Florida home.”

Omar suggests that in order to kill time we go to Barnes & Noble and look around in their space book section. This is only the second time Omar and I have met in person, and it’s already the second time we have wound up perusing books together. As a writer I tend to find myself in bookstores or libraries wherever I visit, but it’s unusual to meet a nonwriter who seems to share the same instinct. We find the Space area within the Science section, and as with the Visitor Center gift shop book section, Omar seems to have read every book in the place. He points books out to me, I point books out to him. I show him Norman Mailer’s
Of a Fire on the Moon
, recently reprinted in a coffee-table version with huge glossy photos.

As Omar pages through the book, I try to tell him about Norman Mailer, about how the book came to be written. I tell him that I find Norman Mailer unbearable, but also quite brilliant. I tell him about the things Norman Mailer saw and described that no one else did, like Wernher von Braun’s speech at a Titusville country club the night before the launch of Apollo 11 or the cold drink machine at the Press Site whose malfunction became an extended metaphor for American technology and arrogance. Omar and I flip through the book, talking about which of the Apollo-era images we have seen before. Only one of them is new to Omar, an aerial shot of the launchpad with Apollo/Saturn stacked and pointing at the sky, tiny workers visible on the gantry. Omar looks at it for a long time before putting it back. Then he picks up another book he’s read, a history of the space shuttle, and shows me his father’s name in the acknowledgments. Frank Izquierdo.

“Your dad’s name is Frank?” I ask. “That was the name I gave the dad who worked at KSC in my book,” I remind him.

“Oh yeah,” Omar says. “I’d forgotten about that. Coincidence, right? My father’s real name is Francisco.”

I’m more surprised by the coincidence than Omar seems to be. I try to remember why I chose the name Frank for the father. I wanted him to be a little bit square, a nerdy, old-fashioned hardworking dad. And I wanted him to be honest, dependable—
frank
—a man of his word.

Omar has to work early in the morning, so we say our good-byes. I’m going to hang around in the bookstore for a while, since the traffic getting off the island has probably not let up.

“See you for 134?” he asks after we hug.

“Yes, 134,” I say, happy to have a next launch to look forward to in a couple of months.

I stay in the bookstore’s café area, making notes from the day, until it closes at nine o’clock. Surely traffic has let up by now, I think, four hours after launch, but when I get onto the 528 causeway leading back to Orlando I find it’s still a parking lot. People are getting out of their cars to walk around on the grass, drink beer, and hang out as if they were tailgating, exactly as they were twelve hours ago. When we finally do start moving again, it’s at a creep. Toward eleven, I finally pass the spot from which I watched the launch earlier today. Now that seems like a lifetime ago.

In the morning, as I am leaving town, I decide to drive back inland along a different route in order to try to better understand the confusing geography. I have written a book set here, but in that book the child protagonist has only a loose understanding of the Cape beyond the fixed sets of her backyard, her school, and the Kennedy Space Center. In order to write this place from her point of view, I had to gain only as much of an understanding as she would have. On my second visit since finishing that book, I still don’t feel confident I know where things are. I still don’t understand why everything is called something other than what it is, why the same names mean two or three different things. Confusing naming practices are often associated with areas closed to outsiders, but the Space Coast has been welcoming tourists almost as long as it has been home to space families. The names have to do with the elusiveness of the place itself, my working theory goes, the way the land and the freshwater and the seawater all blend into each other in unexpected ways. The way water seems to be on all sides at all times, though none of these areas quite meet the definition of an island, just as in Omar’s video of the launch the fire plume of
Discovery
’s engines blends complexly into the steam beneath it, so that it’s hard to tell whether any one point is fire or steam. The way the marshiness of the terrain makes one piece of land either an island or a peninsula, the same spot brown on some maps and blue on others. The way the isolation of this place defined it until the rockets came in, and how quickly it’s grown since. It’s a community of transplants and immigrants. These are big towns now, with traffic and shopping centers and miles and miles of strip malls, but before Omar’s generation very few people could say they had been born and raised here. Almost no one knew it as their native place.