Leaving Orbit (33 page)

I pay my last toll on 528 and approach the Space Coast a few minutes after midnight. The press badging office is scheduled to open for the day at 1:00 a.m., and even though it means I’ll get even less sleep, I decide to drive out there and get badged up before checking into my motel. For this launch, I’ve managed to get press credentials for the first time by pitching a story to my local newspaper. Credentialing, it turned out, is a byzantine and archaic weeks-long process that involves a NASA employee speaking with my editor on the telephone to confirm that I exist, am a published writer, and am not a terrorist. It had been a harrowing wait to hear back from the media office—I still hadn’t heard back the day before I needed to leave for Florida. When I’d finally called, the harassed-sounding woman on the phone promised to e-mail me, and when she did, saying that my application for credentials had been accepted, I burst into tears of relief at my computer.

The Press Site is closer to the launchpad than I’ve ever been: the site from which Norman Mailer watched the launch of Apollo 11, the site from which Walter Cronkite narrated the moon landings, the site from which all the space journalists have watched all the launches. Over twenty-seven hundred journalists from all over the world are expected to cover this launch (also a record unmatched since Apollo 11), and I hope not to get caught in the line for badges behind too many of them.

The press badging office turns out to be a tiny shack on State Road 3, a fluorescent-lit Apollo-era building staffed by a few slightly harried but extremely competent middle-aged women, the same women who spoke to everyone’s editors on the phone. A hand-painted fifties-style sign warns us not to use the office phones, a quaint reminder of a time before each journalist carried his or her own.

A couple of other journalists are there ahead of me, chatting up the women behind the counter with the easy rhythm of coworkers. The journalists clip on their badges, both men in their fifties who have the type of physique that comes with eating bad food and sitting at press sites and on press buses for twenty-hour days. When it’s my turn to check in, the woman behind the counter seems mildly irritated that I don’t already know what to do—apparently most journalists who are covering this launch have been here many times before. I’m supposed to fill out a form with information about the media organization I’m representing and my emergency contacts. The media center woman looks up my name while I sign a form agreeing that I won’t participate in unprofessional behavior, which includes, but is not limited to, peddling materials for profit, possessing alcoholic beverages or firearms, and autograph-seeking.

Then the woman asks for my name again, this time asks me to spell it. She looks through her files a second time.

“What organization are you with?” she asks.

“Knoxville News Sentinel,”
I answer. She reaches the end of her files and starts over, a doubtful look on her face.

My heart starts pounding. There’s been a mistake, I didn’t get press credentials at all, I’ll have to find somewhere else to watch the launch from even though all the good spots have been taken for days. While I wait, a few more journalists straggle in (again, all men in their fifties), give their names, and greet the media office women like old friends.

“When did you get your confirmation you would be credentialed?” the woman asks.

“The day before yesterday,” I answer. “I can show you the e-mail I got.”

“Yeah, okay, that would help,” she says. She comes over, takes my phone from me, and peers at the e-mail I’ve called up there.

“Yup, you did get accepted,” she agrees. “I don’t know what happened. I’m gonna make you a badge.”

She types at a computer, then goes over to a laminator, which starts up with a hum. She pulls the piece of plastic off the machine, attaches a metal clip, and hands over my badge. It is still warm. I am pleased to discover that the badges have not changed since the Apollo era. Mine is much like those worn by all the journalists to have written about American spaceflight since Apollo 4.

When I finally check in to my motel—I’m at my Florida home, the Clarion in Merritt Island—it’s close to 2:00 a.m. The young Indian man behind the counter, whose name tag reads PRAMOD, remembers me from the last time I was here. He types something into the computer while on the wall, a large flat-screen TV shows weather forecasts with an image of a space shuttle behind the numbers. Storms are predicted for the morning, but that can always go either way here on the Space Coast.

“Here for the space shuttle?” Pramod asks cheerily while he slips my keys into their little envelope and writes my room number inside. I always accept two keys, so no one suspects I am traveling alone.

“Yes,” I admit. I would rather tell him I’m here for anything else—a cruise leaving from Port Canaveral, a vacation at the beach—anything that isn’t about to happen for the very last time tomorrow. I watch him for a reaction. He knows as well as I do that tonight might be the last time this motel will be fully booked. But he seems unbothered by my answer.

“Park your car here,” he says, drawing on the photocopied map with a ballpoint pen, as all motel clerks do. “Ice machine is here. Breakfast is here. Breakfast starts at 6:30. But you’ll be long gone by then, won’t you?”

“Yup,” I agree. “I’ll be long gone.” I find my room, haul my things inside, and set my phone to go off in two hours.

On the morning of July 16, 1969, the morning of the launch of Apollo 11, Norman Mailer woke up in a motel room. He writes that in the predawn darkness, “the night air a wet and lightless forest in the nose, one was finally scared.” He says that waking early to see a spacecraft launch reminds him of waking before dawn to invade a foreign beach, “an awakening in the dark of the sort one will always remember, for such nights live only on a few mornings of one’s life.”

“One was scared.” An interesting turn of phrase, isn’t it? Any high school English teacher will tell you this is a grammatical evasion no less than “mistakes were made” (which President Nixon would not utter until three years on). Was Norman Mailer constitutionally incapable of writing the words “I was scared”? Was Norman Mailer unwilling to tell us, without the veil of fiction, of his own terror when, as a young soldier, he woke before dawn, after only fitful sleep, in order to storm the beaches of the Philippines?

I love the smell of Florida night described as a “wet and lightless forest in the nose.” There
is
a smell here, unlike that of any other place I’ve known. That smell has become inextricable from the feeling of waking here in the dark, knowing that, not far away, the enormous ship is steaming, creaking and groaning with fuel, coming to life for its launch.

On TV, a newscaster reports from the Kennedy Space Center. Over her shoulder, the launchpad is lit up with floodlights.
Atlantis
is stacked there, its white tiles glowing against the orange of its external tank. The newscaster talks of nothing but the weather, and she’s not saying encouraging things. To use NASA terminology, the weather is only 30 percent go. Storms lurking offshore are expected to blow in later this morning, in time to interfere with the launch window. This launch attempt will likely be scrubbed, hours or minutes or seconds before liftoff. A million people will moan in unison, and we’ll get up even earlier to do all this again tomorrow. All preparations are still moving forward as planned, though—NASA took a lot of criticism in the early years of the shuttle program for calling off launches based on weather predictions that never came true.

“Reporting live from the Kennedy Space Center,” the young newscaster says before throwing back to the anchor, and because I have stood outside not far from where she is standing, I know she is being bitten by many vicious mosquitoes and pretending not to be. The huge countdown clock behind her continues marking time left until launch by hundredths of a second in huge orange numbers. It’s now T minus seven hours.

I dress in layers, observing NASA’s requirement that we wear long pants and closed-toed shoes. Last time I was here I met a writer who was turned away from his one and only chance to go inside the Orbiter Processing Facility because he was wearing shorts. I cover all exposed skin with SPF 50 and bring the bottle with me to reapply throughout the day. I bring notebooks and pens, snacks and a great deal of water. I bring my phone’s charger and my computer in case I fill up my phone with pictures and recordings and need to dump data in the middle of the day. I bring rain gear, cash, and a change of clothes in case I don’t have time to get back to my motel before going out to dinner with Omar and some other space friends after the launch. I make sure my press badge is securely attached to me.

I slip into my car. It is still fully night, and already sticky hot. The motel parking lot is packed to capacity with cars bearing license plates from all over the country. I feel I must be the only person awake. But out on the causeways, strings of taillights blink like fireflies, other people already heading to the Cape.

Right outside the entrance to the Kennedy Space Center squats an all-night gas station, its outdoor sodium lights pitched at such a brightness and angle it seems to be an alien starship just landed. The lights lure me in, as surely they are meant to, and I stop for coffee. Inside, the place is overrun, the coffee service area a wasteland of spilled creamer and abandoned stir sticks, devastated by the many space fans who came through even earlier than me. The people with whom I wait in line to pay are a nice mix of Launch People: first-timers overly energetic for this hour in the morning; launch veterans who play it cool, showing off their T-shirts and hats commemorating previous launches. I am wearing my press badge, and I feel a certain geeky pride when the other space fans in line notice it, then look closer at me, wondering whether I’m someone important.

As always in the hours before a launch, strangers nod and smile at each other with a shared sense of patriotism and common purpose. I hear a variety of Englishes spoken: Louisiana, New England, London. A sleepy blond mother whispers to her daughters in German. The man who rings up my coffee is wearing a name tag studded with shuttle mission pins. He smiles and tells me to have a great day, and as I thank him I wonder whether his business will suffer after the shuttle workers are laid off and few people drive past here on their way to work anymore.

I leave the gas station and find State Road 3 jammed with cars waiting to get through the checkpoint. It takes me forty-five minutes to travel about one mile, a rate reminiscent of that of the crawler transporter, by which time the sun is starting to come up. When I reach the booth, an armed guard looks over my badge with exquisite care, compares the name to the one on my driver’s license letter by letter, then scrutinizes my face in comparison with the photo on my ID.

“Have a good one, Margaret,” he says finally with a wink. I roll on. A few minutes later, I reach another checkpoint with another guard, and we go through the same process. This one calls me “young lady” and advises me to take it easy.

I almost miss the turnoff to the Press Site because once again I’ve made the mistake of using the Vehicle Assembly Building as a landmark. When I finally get there, the parking lots are already full, and another guard directs me to a nearby patch of grass to park on. As I lock up my car, I hear, then see, a black helicopter go by overhead. Then a few black SUVs. There is no mistaking it: the Astrovan is coming through. A small herd of people is running to the roadside to get a closer look.