Leaving Orbit (32 page)

“So, I have this question I’ve been asking as many people as I can,” I tell Serena. “What does it mean that we have been flying American spacecraft in space for fifty years and now have decided to stop?”

Serena pauses. Then she sighs heavily into the phone.

“Yeah, that’s a tough question,” she says. “It’s true that this is a weird time. This is a gap when we don’t have an American vehicle. It’s the first time we’ve really had to reeducate people about the space station. Now that shuttle is retiring, we are hearing more about the ISS, and maybe that’s a good thing.

“I find myself explaining to people a lot what the state of our space program
is
,” she says. “People think that NASA is shutting down, or that Johnson Space Center is shutting down.”

“I’ve heard visitors say that at the Cape,” I say. “People show up and are surprised the facilities are still there.”

“Right,” Serena says. “It’s like people thought shuttle was all there was. Now that shuttle will be gone, we’ll have the chance to let people know what else we’ve been doing all this time.”

“That’s true,” I say grudgingly.

“Look, it may be kind of sad, but we are ending this program successfully,” she points out. “People should be proud of that.”

We are proud of that, I tell her. I know this from seeing the people who show up at launches, the simple joy they take in seeing spacecraft leave Earth. At the same time, this statement hinges on a definition of success I’m not sure everyone would agree with.

Most Americans probably couldn’t name a single active astronaut. Yet there is still something about the way an astronaut looks in a blue flight suit. Fit, fearless, competent. Ready to take on the burdens of our dreams. When I ask Serena about the flight suit, what it’s like to put it on and go out to meet the public, she laughs.

“It’s true, the flight suit does energize people,” she says. “And our job is to inspire. What helps inspire
me
is knowing that kids of today know what that blue flight suit means, and they care. It’s hope and promise of the future, and hopefully it symbolizes someone they can look up to.”

I decide to ask Serena something I have always wondered.

“What’s it like,” I ask her, “when you’re in a bank or getting your taxes done, and someone asks you what your occupation is, and you get to say ‘astronaut’? Is that the best thing ever?”

Serena laughs happily and at first seems to be at a loss as to how to answer. I go on.

“I mean, it’s like, when someone asks you what your job is, answering ‘I’m Batman.’”

Serena laughs some more, and I’m about to apologize for putting her on the spot when she finally replies.

“It
is
pretty cool,” she says. “I’m not going to lie. Every time I say it, I get to remember it’s true, and maybe at some point it will get old, but—it hasn’t yet.”

When we talk about the future, Serena repeats the standard-issue Charles Bolden talk about how commercial ventures will be up and running by 2016—17. I am as skeptical as always about whether SpaceX or any of the other space startups can achieve human spaceflight on anything like the time frame we are being promised. Yet I have to admit this happy talk sounds better coming from a member of the astronaut corps than it does coming from a politician. Serena has put everything at stake hoping for the happy talk to come true, and at least for the time I’m talking with her, I feel it can come true too.

I didn’t have much of a relationship with the Mercury astronauts at first. Even as I started writing my
Challenger
book, I found the shuttle astronauts more accessible, more human, more like people I knew. Part of this appeal was that some of the shuttle astronauts were women, but also that they did things like juggle and do somersaults, clowned around in weightlessness. They seemed to have a sense of humor about it all. They took the time to enjoy it. The Mercury astronauts were all military pilots, laconic and square-jawed. They’d been given a tough job to do and they did it with machine-like precision. They brooked no goofing off.

It wasn’t until I was well into my research, well past the Right Stuff stage and into individual accounts, that I started to see the Mercury Seven as individuals and thus started to love them. Gus Grissom was the one I understood first, with his engineering degree and his hangdog expression always recognizable among the others. John Glenn, of course, has a boyish bow-tie appeal and a charismatic kind of intelligence. Gordo Cooper, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton. One by one I started to be able to pick them out and started to call them by their first names. Soon I know the Gemini and Apollo astronauts as well. Neil Armstrong has a goofy sincerity. Gene Cernan has a tough visage right out of a spaghetti western. Michael Collins lends a folksy, humorous light touch to the most serious or technical of discussions. Alan Bean exudes gratitude for his adventures more than the others and has a huggable grandpa quality. And so on. I understand that I don’t actually
know
these men at all, that the simple caricatures I have made of them in my head are not the same as actual human beings. But still it’s irresistible to indulge in this kind of hero worship, because this is precisely their job.

When I think back on how those first six women astronauts looked to me as a child, I remember a fierce admiration that’s hard to describe. It has a lot to do with the possibilities of competent femininity. This was only a few years after
Star Wars
came out, after all, and infected a generation of girls with the role model of Princess Leia. In that scene when we first see her, when her spaceship is being boarded by storm troopers, she steps out of the shadows warily, holding a blaster muzzle-up beside her head. Baby-faced, with that strange sleek hairdo picking up red alarm lights, her face in a serious glower. Her lip gloss is perfect. She is beautiful, and she is ready to commit violence in pursuit of values larger than herself. I saw that again when the women astronauts were introduced. I remember the first time I saw them, in some footage on the evening news, all of them leaning against a fence. They looked fantastic.

A few years later, the space shuttle documentary
The Dream Is Alive
I saw at the Air and Space Museum showed me Judith Resnik sleeping in space. In that film, she no longer looks uncomfortable, as she had leaning against the fence. She smiles at her male crewmates and somersaults in space. She no longer wears lip gloss, but she doesn’t have to. Her femininity is no longer as marked as it once was; already it’s no longer as remarkable. She belongs in space, it seems to the children watching her for the first time—at least, until she dies on her way to space in 1986.

I’ve been talking to my fellow Americans about what they will miss about spaceflight, and I’m gratified by how many people share my simple love for the astronauts, both the famous ones and the obscure ones. A lot of women my age remember those first six and the way they seemed to open up possibilities for all of us. When I talk to people about the astronauts, about the end of American spaceflight, they want to know whether the shuttle is really ending, whether anything can be done to save it, as I asked Omar the first time I met him for Family Day. I find it depressing to have to explain to these people why nothing can save it now. And I hadn’t realized how much, even now, people still hope it could be saved.

A million visitors are expected to descend on the Space Coast for the last launch of the space shuttle program on July 8, 2011, more than have visited since the launch of Apollo 11. In the weeks and days leading up to it, I see more and more news stories about the end of shuttle. Some are elegiac, focusing on layoffs and the loss to the economy in central Florida. Some strike an optimistic tone, implying that the end of shuttle will open the door for the Next Thing. In reality, the only Next Thing on the books is the Space Launch System, a stripped-down version of the canceled
Constellation
program. SLS is discussed as a replacement for shuttle with varying degrees of credulity about whether it will ever fly. But anyone who knows anything about how NASA gets funded knows that SLS has no long-term budget. To its critics, SLS is not a vehicle for getting astronauts to space so much as it is a mechanism for allowing politicians to avoid taking responsibility for canceling the future. It’s a talking point, a place to put our hopes, but whether it will ever take astronauts to space remains to be seen.

When I make the trip from Knoxville to the Space Coast this time, two months after the launch of
Endeavour
and five weeks after the rollout of
Atlantis
, it’s an easy drive. I’ve done it so many times now, I know all the landmarks by heart—the change in scenery when Tennessee becomes Georgia, which always reminds me of a line from Flannery O’Connor: “Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills.” Roadside shacks, shopping malls, rest stops with peaches and boiled peanuts. The thickening traffic around Atlanta. I was curious to see whether the WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE? billboard would come down after the birth certificate was revealed between
Discovery
’s last launch and
Endeavour
’s; it did not. A Cracker Barrel I’ve become especially fond of in Valdosta, Georgia. As I pass into Florida after dark, the terrain becomes more tropical, palm trees appearing, the humidity thickening. I cut across the state on 528, a road that for some reason demands nearly seven dollars in tolls, at four different tollbooths, to travel about fifteen miles. The toll workers are invariably friendly and alert, no matter how late I pass through. This is how I know I’m almost at the Space Coast, when all the change in my ashtray has been handed out to four smiling, Hawaiian-shirted toll workers. When I was here last, I accidentally got into the lane reserved for people with those devices on their cars and missed the tollbooth altogether; weeks later I received a bill in the mail, complete with an image of my car speeding past the camera. I hung up the ticket on the corkboard in my office along with my other space souvenirs. Now I know which lane to stay in, and my change is at the ready.

After the third tollbooth, I leave the window open as I accelerate back into traffic. It’s one of the small pleasures of cross-country driving: the feeling of accelerating away from a tollbooth, the perfectly legal yet still thrilling feeling of flooring the gas and letting the hot, humid night rush in past me.