Leaving Orbit (28 page)

Omar has told me to be at his parents’ house at 6:00 p.m. so we can head over to the rollout together in Frank’s SUV. When I pull into his neighborhood, I recognize the house, the same house where I’d picked him up for the launch of
Endeavour.
On that morning it had still been dark, so I didn’t get a very good look at it and hadn’t gone inside. It’s a small white house on a cul-de-sac. Today I park, knock on the front door, and am greeted by Omar and a small white dog who goes so insane with barking that he has to be put out back.

Inside, the house has an open floor plan, all cream-colored carpet and tile, opening out toward a pool. Omar introduces me to his mother and his grandmother. His mother, Angie, is a small dark-haired woman who smiles politely and shakes my hand, then disappears into the kitchen again. Omar has told me that his mother is not much interested in space and that she hasn’t been to any shuttle launches other than the very first one in 1981—this in stark contrast to her husband’s record of 134. When Omar tells me this detail about his mother, I remind him that in my novel, the main character’s mother has also boycotted all the shuttle launches after the first, while the father takes his space-obsessed child to every launch. “That
is
weird,” Omar agrees. It pleases me when things I made up turn out to be true for someone. I think about a line from a letter Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald about character—“make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

Omar and I sit in the living room catching up while we wait for his other friends to arrive. He tells me about having escaped another round of layoffs; he’s been told he will keep his job for at least a few more months. He shows me his new laptop and clicks through some photos he and Karen have taken recently at the Space Center. One of Karen’s shows a launch vehicle stacked on the pad, photographed from the crawlerway; she has arranged the shot so that some of the crawlerway’s pebbles are visible at the bottom of the frame, looking huge and marbled and distinct, while behind them the stack looms like futuristic architecture.

“That’s gorgeous,” I say. Part of what we are admiring, when we admire the image, is the vantage point itself. Most photographers, even those who get press credentials from NASA, would never get the chance to take a picture like this. The launchpads are among the most tightly restricted sites at the space center. It’s one of the things that keeps Omar working here as long as they will let him.

Omar’s friends Kris and Dayra show up, and we all pile into Frank’s Suburban. I met Kris at Family Day; Dayra is a friend of Omar’s from the University of Central Florida. I’d forgotten, until I’m chatting with her about the classes she and Omar took together, that Omar was a history major.

At the checkpoint, Frank shows the guard his badge. The two men share a joking exchange that makes it seem as though they’ve met here many times before. We pass through the gate, and the geography changes abruptly into the straightaway of Kennedy Parkway with the green wetlands on either side of us. The early-evening sunlight makes everything golden, and the Vehicle Assembly Building is lit up like a religious destination. The others don’t interrupt their conversations, but I stop talking to look out the window at it. I was here only two weeks ago, but I’m surprised by how pleased I am to see the VAB again. This is my fourth visit within eight months, but I never seem to get used to the sight of it. If anything, I become more emotionally involved with it the closer we get to the end. I snap a picture through Frank’s windshield and post it on Facebook. “Are you back there again already?” a friend from graduate school comments under the picture. “Or do you
live
in Florida now?”

As we pull into the grassy area where cars are parking in neat rows, we pass a bus whose front sign reads PRESS. When I peer inside, I can see row after row of white men in their fifties, some of them balancing large tripods in the aisle. I feel a surge of jealousy, as I did when I passed the Press Site on my first visit here with Omar.

“Press,” I point out to the others in the car. “Those guys think they’re better than me.”

“You should try again for the next NASATweetup,” Omar says. He had reminded me faithfully of every deadline for the selections for spots to see launches from up close. He doesn’t enter them himself, he told me once, because as a badged employee he already gets better access than most, and he feels he should let someone else have a chance.

“I don’t think I’m on Twitter enough to get chosen,” I say. The selection process is supposed to be random, but the people who are chosen tend to have suspiciously high numbers of followers. “I’ll keep trying, though.”

“You should try again for regular press credentials, too,” Omar says. I’ve complained to him that after being turned down a number of times I had become frustrated and given up trying. But he’s right—it wouldn’t hurt to try again.

We pile out of the SUV and follow Frank and Omar to a good spot in the field. They know from past rollouts where the best place is to stand.

Once again, I’m standing in a grassy field at the Kennedy Space Center with Omar and Frank, the Vehicle Assembly Building filling the sky as a backdrop, waiting for something to happen. The sun is setting, and people mill around us excitedly, chatting and buzzing with anticipation, like every other time I’ve been here. Classic rock plays over giant speakers. Children chase each other, some of them dressed in tiny flight suits and helmets. Reporters and photographers wander among the crowd, getting shots of the kids playing and asking people what they think is the significance of today’s event.

Frank, Omar, and I are standing not far from where we stood for the launch of
Endeavour
, fifteen days ago. That day, people had been finding good spots with a clear view to the northeast, toward the launchpad, but today we are facing west, toward the massive doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building. The launch vehicle will emerge from the VAB, roll along the crawlerway directly in front of us, and then head off toward the launchpad. It will move so slowly, about half a mile an hour at its fastest, that we will have plenty of time to take it in while it moves this short distance.

One of the enormous VAB doors has already been opened, the seven metal panels folded vertically up on each other to reveal a sliver of the stacked launch vehicle. Bleachers are set up out here for spectators, as always, but more people are sitting on blankets, walking around, and visiting the booths that have been set up with snacks and drinks and (of course) space souvenirs. Most people have gathered at the rope barrier marking off a safe distance from the crawlerway. The setting sun is lighting everything up rose gold—the VAB, the clouds in the distance, the NASA families with their binoculars and their American flags and their cameras.

The rollout is scheduled to start at 8:00 p.m., but at five after, ten after, we still haven’t detected any movement. Omar has brought his work radio with him, and from it he learns that the crawler transporter has a hydraulic leak. The rollout is going to be delayed at least fifteen or twenty minutes.

We watch the VAB doors and wait.

After we learn that the hydraulic leak will cause a delay, Dayra and I go for a walk while Frank and Omar set up their tripods. We stop by the snack booth to buy bottles of water, then notice a clump of people who seem to be gathering excitedly near the bleachers, lining up. We drift over to see what’s going on.

“It’s an astronaut!” Dayra gasps. A moment later I spot the figure she’s pointing to: a woman wearing the bright blue flight suit that turns an otherwise normal-looking person—in this case, a woman in her thirties with curly brown hair—into a celebrity and a figure of fascination. People are clamoring to get autographs and pictures taken with this astronaut, whose name patch reads AUÑÓN.

“Let’s get pictures with her!” Dayra says, and, grabbing my arm, steers me into the line. I tell Dayra I suspect this astronaut is from the new class chosen in 2009. This group is unique among astronaut classes in that they were hired knowing they would not get to fly on an American spacecraft. They will be assigned to missions on the International Space Station, which they will reach via the Russians’ Soyuz spacecraft. The 2009 class is the first group of astronauts for whom fluency in the Russian language will be a necessity.

When we reach the front of the line, the astronaut greets us. We clutch her hand in turn, then take each other’s pictures with her. Up close, I can see in the astronaut’s eyes that she is a bit overwhelmed by all the attention. Her expression, while friendly, is a bit bewildered.

Dayra asks her if she’s been to space.

“Not yet,” the astronaut answers with the practiced smile of someone who has answered the same question a hundred times today. Both Dayra and I know enough not to ask her when she will. She doesn’t know. She might not be assigned to a mission for years, and the waiting, though part of the job, must be excruciating. Dayra and I thank her before starting to walk away. A little boy is already offering her a space shuttle book he wants signed.

“Good luck!” Dayra calls over her shoulder to the astronaut, who smiles back. As we rejoin our group, I realize what I saw in her expression: she is out here at a space shuttle rollout, answering questions about the space shuttle, but she knows she will never get to fly on a space shuttle, that they will all be sealed up in museums by the time her training is complete. I’ve never before met an astronaut who hasn’t been to space. An astronaut candidate, but not a space-flown astronaut. An earthbound spacefarer. You’d think the limited opportunities for astronauts would dampen the appeal of the position, but in this last round of astronaut hiring, NASA counted more applications than it has ever received. There are still a great number of people who just want to go to space, who are willing to dedicate their lives to that chance.

Since I saw it roar into space fifteen days ago,
Endeavour
has had a busy schedule. As all shuttle crews have done since
Columbia
’s demise, the crew of
Endeavour
made it their first order of business to inspect the condition of the tiles using a camera at the end of the remote manipulator arm. Some damaged tiles were found on the underside of the orbiter, but upon closer inspection they were cleared for reentry.
Endeavour
docked with the International Space Station on day three of the mission, and a traditional welcome ceremony was held between the six-person crew of ISS and the six crew members of
Endeavour.

The combined crew unloaded new components of the International Space Station and unpacked supplies from
Endeavour.
Crew members did a total of four spacewalks to install new equipment on ISS and to service existing equipment. On day eight of
Endeavour
’s time in space, three of the six ISS crew members—Dmitri Kondraytev of Russia, Paolo Nespoli of Italy, and Cady Coleman of the United States—finished their six-month missions, and after the others had gone to sleep for the night, the three of them crawled into their Soyuz spacecraft, detached from Station, and fell to Earth. On day twelve of the mission, astronaut Mike Fincke surpassed Peggy Whitson’s record as the American astronaut with the most time in space, 377 days.

In between doing their work, the crew also spoke with Pope Benedict XVI, four hundred students in an elementary school in Arizona, the Italian president, students and faculty members at the University of Arizona, PBS, NPR, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, AP, Reuters, Gannett, the Voice of America, and Fox News.

Today, May 31, is day sixteen of
Endeavour
’s mission. The astronauts have undocked
Endeavour
from the ISS, and they have spent most of today testing the shuttle’s systems, stowing equipment, and going over plans for deorbit and reentry. They will start the deorbit burn tonight at 1:29 a.m. and, assuming all goes well, land here at the Kennedy Space Center at 2:35 a.m.

It’s easy enough to follow all these goings-on on the NASA site, or on other sites like Spaceflight Now or
Space.com
. What’s harder is to guess what it feels like to the crew to know that they are doing many of these things for the last time. The following shuttle mission, which will be the last one for all time, will not include any space walks because of the smaller crew size and limited training time. So all the little rituals of shuttle space walks—sleeping in the airlock to purge their bodies of nitrogen, donning the space suits piece by piece, opening the airlock and stepping outside—all these are happening for the last time. The ISS crew will be able to do space walks to maintain the station as necessary, but never again will astronauts slip out the air lock of a space shuttle orbiter to float and work in space.