Leaving Orbit (29 page)

“It’s ready,” Omar announces. He has continued to monitor his work radio, and apparently people are saying to each other that the hydraulic problem has been fixed and that rollout is about to start. We direct our attention toward the Vehicle Assembly Building door, where still no movement can be detected.

“I think I see it,” says Frank at length. He is watching the VAB through binoculars. He politely hands them over to me, and I look too; the eyepieces are still warm from his face. At first I think his claim that the shuttle is moving was wishful thinking, but then I think I see it too. I choose a frame of reference, a girder just inside the door, and watch to see whether the space between the girder and the right-hand solid rocket booster is shrinking. I think it might be. I hand the binoculars back.

Behind me, a few space fans start clapping and hooting, the way people at rock shows do to let each other know that they were the first to notice the band stepping onstage. The noise catches the attention of the people around us, and soon everyone has stopped their conversations to concentrate on the open door. The rollout has officially started at 8:42 p.m.

Atlantis
is definitely moving now; the stack is visible in the doorway, no longer behind the threshold, as it was a minute ago. We watch and watch, and now the stack is mostly outside the doorway. People continue to clap and holler. The sound of the crawler transporter is monumental, like hundreds of heavy-duty tractors running at once, which, I guess, is more or less what it is. In the footage I’ve seen of rollouts, the sound of the crawler has always been left out or minimized, but in person the deafening rumble is inescapable. The stack is also preceded by a diesel smell that, like the engine noise, I should have known to anticipate but somehow did not. A toxic cloud like the idling of a hundred eighteen-wheelers wafts over the crowd. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that a lot of people who might normally object to the climate-change impact of the space program choose not to think of it in those terms, simply because it seems
less
stupid and wasteful than so many of the other ways in which large amounts of resources are consumed or, in this case, large amounts of carbon dioxide released.

As the stack gets closer to us, Frank and Omar get to work snapping pictures of it. It’s still not full dark out yet, and enormous xenon lights are bathing the shuttle in an unearthly white that is quite beautiful to the naked eye but hard to photograph. I take a couple of pictures of it, but, as with launches, I don’t make any real effort to capture it.

The stack is nearly directly in front of us after moving for about fifteen minutes, and it’s only at this point that I notice there are a handful of
people
riding on it. Mostly men, mostly dressed in the jeans and T-shirts of technicians, they are riding on the mobile launch platform. Some of them walk up and down, waving to the crowd. A few of them seem to be working up there, seem to be actually checking on the equipment and monitoring the base of the stack. But most seem to be along for the ride—standing at the railing, or sitting on lawn chairs facing out at the crowd, waving at us as if the mobile launch platform were the biggest float in a small-town parade.

“There are
people
on it,” I say to Omar. By now, I reflect, he has probably gotten used to me making incredibly obvious statements in his presence. He never gives me a hard time about it.

“Yep,” he confirms. “The crawler was built to keep the Saturn Vs steady, so it’s gotta be a pretty smooth ride.” It’s true that none of the people standing and walking appear to be unstable on their feet. The ride is probably much smoother than it would be on a flatbed truck.

Seeing the stack go by this slowly, I notice things I have never seen before. From here I can see clearly the struts that attach the orbiter to the external tank, with explosive bolts in between to blow the tank free once it’s empty. The way the tiles hug the graceful curve of the orbital maneuvering system pods. The way the orbiter’s name,
Atlantis
, was clearly painted onto the orbiter’s flank by hand rather than using decals or stencils. This isn’t the closest I’ve ever been to an orbiter—that would still be my visit to the Orbiter Processing Facility on Family Day, when
Endeavour
was so close I could read the serial numbers on its tiles. But I’ve never seen an orbiter this close up when it’s stacked upright for launch, and neither have most people. Even space nuts who come out for every launch only get to see the stack from miles away.

“Want your picture with it?” Omar asks, as he always does. We snap each other’s pictures without trying too hard to get great shots. Our cameras can’t really capture the spectacle of the bright white ship, the warm orange tank, the gray grumbling crawler, all against the black sky of night. We want pictures that show our own faces only so that we can tell people that we were here.

Norman Mailer’s description of the rollout compares the slowly moving launch vehicle to a “ghost galleon of the Caribbean.” I’ve always thought that description sounded fanciful, and because Mailer was never here for a rollout himself, it was easy to assume that his speculation may have been overly romantic. But it’s true there is something nautical about the way the thing creaks along, the multiple levels of walkways and stairways and signs and safety equipment and flags, the little lights hanging all over it, the way a crowd has come to see it off. The people standing and sitting at the railings are waving to us like old-timey travelers embarking on a cruise, as if the crawler transporter were an enormous cruise ship leaving port and the Kennedy Space Center a calm blue sea. They are close enough that we can read their expressions, but they are inexorably separated from us—not by their distance, but by their trajectory. They are on their way to somewhere, and we are stuck here.

Like so many things we wait so long to see, the rollout is both fast and slow. We stand there a long time marveling at it, long enough to resume our conversations, long enough to post to Twitter, long enough to notice some of our fellow space fans again, to notice what they are doing and wearing and saying to each other out here in the floodlit dark, long enough to return our attentions a second and third time to the massive stack and to realize that it is past us now, and now showing us its back side, and now definitely on the wane. Some observers leave as soon as the crawler is well past, some while it was still quite visible, but the Izquierdo party stays until only the lit stack is still visible in the distant vicinity of launch pad 39A, the glowing white of
Atlantis
’s back and spread wings. The crawler underneath has disappeared in the dark, so the ghost ship seems to move by itself, imperceptibly slowly, out to its destination still a couple of miles, and many hours, away.

After dropping off Frank, we head to dinner. Omar asks that we go to a place with a TV in the bar so he can keep an eye on an important basketball game, so we choose an Applebee’s. While we wait for our food to arrive, Dayra asks Omar and me how we met. Omar and I look at each other bashfully for a second, conscious of how the telling will seem to spin the meaning of our friendship.

“Well, Margaret wrote a book about
Challenger
,” Omar begins, “and I read it.”

“Wow, you wrote a
book
?” Dayra repeats. Somehow in all our chatting today I’d mentioned that I’m a professor but not that I’m a writer.

“Then Omar wrote me to tell me about the errors I made,” I continue, ribbing him.

“I wrote to say I liked it,” Omar corrects. “And you had very few errors, considering.”

“Later I found him accidentally on Facebook,” I explain. I tell them about the group called “If You Oppose NASA in Any Way I Will Punch You in the Face.” Everyone laughs and agrees that that is
so Omar.

Our food arrives, and we eat in companionable silence. Everyone’s food is covered with cheese. Whenever something exciting happens in the basketball game Omar is watching, a table of three young men near us erupts in cheers. Omar sails a friendly comment their way, and soon they are exchanging banter and predictions about the rest of the season. Omar has made yet more new friends.

That night, I’m sleeping in my motel bed in Cocoa Beach when the sound of the space shuttle
Endeavour
entering the atmosphere rips through the air with a sonic boom. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before—not exactly a sound, more like a low-level molecular event—and, as Omar told me it would happen, I know exactly what it is the moment I hear it. I almost feel as though I knew the split second
before
I heard it, the way dreams can seem to predict events in the waking world. The sonic boom: a disturbance to the air caused by
Endeavour
traveling toward Earth faster than the speed of sound, breaking through the sound barrier twice, once with its nose and once with its wings.
Boom-boom.
I look at the clock and it’s 2:30 a.m., right on time.

I know from my reading that
Endeavour
has broken the sound barrier at an altitude of sixty thousand feet and won’t touch down for another five minutes. The mission won’t officially be over until
Endeavour
comes to a full stop at the end of the runway at Kennedy.
Wheel stop
, they call it, the official end of the mission. Journalists are out there right now, maybe some of the same journalists on that press bus I saw at the rollout, waiting at the Shuttle Landing Facility to take pictures of
Endeavour
gliding in and touching down. I feel faintly jealous of them. There is always someone who will get to see more.

When I get home I look up the current corps of astronauts on the NASA website and click through their smiling portraits in their blue flight suits, looking for the one I met at the rollout. I find her easily enough: Serena Auñón. The bio on her page says that before being selected as an astronaut she worked for NASA as a flight surgeon. She lived in Houston, Texas, and Star City, Russia, caring for astronauts and cosmonauts on their way to missions to space, having gone through one of the country’s few residencies in aerospace medicine. When I Google the term “aerospace medicine,” I’m taken to a page that informs me that while other branches of medicine deal with abnormal physiology in a normal environment, flight surgeons deal with normal physiology in an abnormal environment.

Astronauts are hard to get hold of when they are about to go to space or have recently returned, but an astronaut candidate from the most recently selected group who has yet to be assigned to a mission is easier to secure a interview with. After filling out a form online with the Astronaut Office’s media liaison describing who I am and what sort of interview I’m trying to get, I receive an e-mail back telling me when to call for a phone interview with Serena.

The call for applications for this new class of astronauts went out in 2007. That announcement was forwarded to me multiple times by friends as a joke, suggesting that I should apply, though I lack the ad’s most basic requirement, a degree in math or science. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to join the astronaut corps at a time when the only American spacecraft is being retired, to join the ranks of astronauts who have flown on shuttle and to know they would never get to fly on it themselves. This is the first class of astronauts who know they will not launch from Cape Canaveral; they will wait, probably for years, to get to fly with the Russians to the International Space Station. What would it be like, I wonder, to compete as hard as previous classes of astronauts have to get a spot, but for the spot to be such a compromised one?