Leaving Orbit (21 page)

Pity those of us who were children in the flightless years of the late seventies, when the space shuttle was under construction but took forever to emerge. Pity the dreamy little kids who wanted to be able to aspire to spaceflight but had no actual American astronauts to emulate. The space shuttle’s design had been approved, but it had not yet appeared. We had to imagine it. My children’s books about space from the seventies are filled with conceptual paintings, the type from midcentury trade show magazines, in which the colors are strangely muted. Brushstrokes are visible in the clouds, in the flames from the hypothetical rockets, in the hair of the hypothetical astronauts. The artists’ rendering portrays the futuristic and imaginary nature of the space shuttle, and it evokes a futuristic nostalgia, to look at these pictures now that the shuttle is being retired.

In that era of budget defensiveness, even the books for children tended to highlight NASA innovations that had proven themselves useful here on Earth—weather satellites, metal alloys, advances in microchips. Velcro always gets a special mention. I want to shout backward into the past: Stop emphasizing the Velcro.
People don’t care that much about Velcro.
People care about the unutterable awe of American heroes stabbing into the heavens on columns of fire. But it’s too late: in the midseventies, the first orbiter,
Columbia
, is still years away from rolling out to the launchpad for its maiden flight. And from where I write,
Columbia
has already burned up into pieces all over Arizona and Texas.

NASA engineers had wanted a two-piece spacecraft that would be fully reusable—one piece a booster whose sole purpose would be to get the other piece, the orbiter, off the ground. Both segments would land like planes and would be able to fly again and again. The space transportation system envisioned by engineer Max Faget looked like two airplanes piggybacked, stacked upright for launch. But this concept would have been expensive to design and test, and once the budget started to decline, NASA shifted its goals downward to a reusable orbiter and two booster rockets for the first stage. The boosters would carry the shuttle to a certain altitude and then drop off, with built-in parachutes to soften their landing in the Atlantic. The rockets could then be reused, a key part of the proposal, though as historian Howard McCurdy points out, “Flight engineers were understandably nervous about reusing rocket engines that had been dunked in salt water and were discouraged that they had lost their airplane-like first stage.”

Then the decision was made to use solid fuel in the booster rockets, rather than a more easily controlled liquid fuel, again to save cost. This series of decisions in essence wrote the fate of
Challenger
, which would fall victim to the specific weaknesses of the solid rocket boosters—that they can’t be shut down if something goes wrong.

Predictions from the seventies about how often the shuttle could fly, and how cost-effective it would be, seem insane to us now in their optimism. A launchpad technician I know recently e-mailed me an image that had been used to promote the space shuttle concept in the seventies—it showed an orbiter, looking much like the ones we know, being maintained and reloaded for a new flight. A simple staircase has been rolled up to it, with a jumpsuited worker doing some light repairs. As it turns out, the orbiters need a much more elaborate hangar, the Orbiter Processing Facility, in which the spacecraft can be hoisted up to have the tiles of its underside repaired while workers on levels above attend to the engines, payload bay, orbital maneuvering system, and other components. The caption to this ludicrous image estimates that each orbiter can be turned around in two weeks. In reality, the shortest turnaround ever was eight weeks, and the average was measured in months. To be self-sustaining, the shuttle project would need to launch at least twenty-five times a year, with most missions being dedicated to the Department of Defense or customers paying to launch commercial satellites. This was a pace that might have been possible had the turnaround times been anywhere near what was predicted, but the compromises on the shuttle’s design had led to more complicated and costly maintenance procedures. In reality, the most shuttle launches NASA ever accomplished in a single calendar year was nine, in 1985—far short of the magic number of twenty-five. New regulations recommended by the
Challenger
Commission slowed the pace of flights, and the
Columbia
Accident Investigation Board imposed even more. In recent years, the record for most launches in a year was five, in 2009. The fact that shuttle was meant to be self-sustaining and never was made the promise of new space projects even murkier.

When I arrive at our classroom the following week, my students are already there, ready with their questions. They’ve gotten into the habit of these space discussions before class starts.

Why can’t we go back to the moon now?
they want to know.
Can’t we just rebuild the rockets from the sixties?

Did we really go to the moon? How can we be sure it wasn’t a hoax?

What is NASA doing with all the money if they’re not flying the shuttle anymore?

Why
are we stopping?

As a writing professor, I don’t often get the experience of imparting empirical knowledge to my students. I almost never get to explain to them things that I know to be true that they don’t yet know. I never get to
lecture.
And while it goes against my idea of my own strengths as a teacher, I find that it’s a pleasurable experience to be listened to as an authority on facts rather than always being a facilitator of discussions in which no one is necessarily holding the right answer.

I tell them why going back to the moon would be almost as challenging now as it was in the sixties. The plans for millions of pieces of hardware are scattered among the storage facilities of dozens of contractors all over the country, if not lost altogether—not to mention the issue of the software, which would have to be re-created from the ground up. The deep, hard-earned knowledge of the problems involved, and how to solve them, locked in the minds of engineers now in their eighties and nineties or gone altogether.

“So what about the hoax?” an impatient student asks without raising his hand. “Do you believe it’s true that they went?”

“I do,” I answer.

“Why?”

Because Buzz Aldrin told me so
, I think of saying.

“I’d like to hear what you believe first,” I say instead. “What
you’ve
heard.”

My students say they are not sure what to think. Many of them have heard enough of the “evidence” for the hoax to put them in the “serious doubts” category, but they are not among the True Believers of conspiracy. (Bart Sibrel—the man who sued Buzz Aldrin for punching him in the face—has said that he would bet his life that astronauts have never walked on the moon, and I believe he is sincere.) The conspiracists make some good claims, my students explain, and they have never heard anyone answer them.

I tell my students my favorite answers to the conspiracy theories—Michael Collins’s point about four hundred thousand people keeping a secret for forty years, the one about the moon rocks. I have others. I have explanations for the various pieces of “evidence” my students have heard. But underlying all of this for many of my students, I know, is an assumption that a government agency can’t have accomplished something so awesome. They are proud of their country, but not of their government. Apollo would seem to run against so many popular understandings about government, about government bureaucracy, about government spending. All of us were born after Watergate. In so many ways it’s easier to believe the whole thing was a lie. That would better fit what they have been told.

“You have to weigh the evidence for yourselves,” I tell them. “But don’t assume it can’t be true just because it’s cool. Sometimes people manage to pull off cool things. We are allowed to enjoy them.”

“Why
are
we stopping, then?” a student wants to know. “Why are we not going to space anymore?” Such a simple question, one I should be able to answer as easily as the others. But it’s not. This is a question that intelligent and well-informed people can argue about. It’s a question with layers and contradictions, a question that depends how far back you want to go in history, how technical you want to get. A question that depends on what you believe about big concepts like Human Nature and the American Spirit.

“There are a lot of reasons. It’s maybe easier to answer why we went in the first place and then to talk about why those forces have weakened or disappeared. But at the simplest level, we’re stopping because the
Columbia
Accident Investigation Board called for it in 2003.”

A student who is normally quiet raises her hand.

“Was there one that blew up?” she asks. I’m taken aback for a moment that this knowledge seems so uncertain to her. Was there one that blew up? I don’t know whether she’s talking about
Columbia
, which was lost when she was thirteen—or
Challenger
, which was lost when
I
was thirteen.

Columbia
was the first space shuttle completed, the first to fly, and as such it will for many Americans forever be The Space Shuttle. We first laid eyes on it when it rolled out of a hangar in California in spring 1979. In the footage shown on the news, it was nighttime, and lights played over the orbiter.
Columbia
backed out of the hangar then straightened itself, the huge metal bells of its three main engines pointing at us, the tail fin rising above. When it turned, its long white flank became visible for the first time,
NASA
and the orbiter’s name inscribed on its side. A great cheer went up among the crowd of assembled aerospace workers.

After years of waiting, space fans were finally able to lay eyes on the world’s first true spaceship, the first real step forward in spaceflight since the Saturn V. America’s space plane. Even though work on
Columbia
had fallen way behind schedule, NASA managers decided to send it on the journey from California to the Kennedy Space Center as scheduled. The work would be completed in Florida. The most visible of
Columbia
’s deficiencies was its thermal protection system: over and over the procedures for attaching the tiles securely to the orbiter’s skin had failed, and not all of the tiles were in place when
Columbia
rolled out. Temporary fake tiles were attached for the journey.

Crowds of people were invited out to watch and cheer
Columbia
’s arrival at Kennedy Space Center. But, as it turned out, the glue on the temporary tiles failed, and the tiles loosened in transit. Many people’s first look at
Columbia
was the humiliating spectacle of the new orbiter shedding black and white tiles like confetti behind her, tiles we had been told were necessary to the survival of the ship and crew. Frank Izquierdo, who was standing on the runway for the welcoming ceremony at Kennedy, still shakes his head ruefully when he relates this story. “She looked like a dog after a big fight,” he told me. The space shuttle project was made to look ridiculous at best, a failure at worst. As was NASA. As was the idea of continuing to fly in space. It would be another two years before
Columbia
would finally be ready for flight, and that image would remain in many people’s minds throughout that time.