Leaving Orbit (34 page)

The Astrovan convoy slows, then stops. This is unusual, the stopping. An astronaut in a blue flight suit pops out. He is along for the Astrovan ride—the astronauts going to space today are dressed in orange pressure suits. He has his picture taken with the gathered crowd. As he climbs back in, I peer at the windows of the Astrovan. I can see the astronauts’ hands waving, their faces lost in shadows. I can make out the lock rings on their wrists where their gloves will connect before their suits are pressurized.

Four Americans are going to space today.

The Press Site at the Kennedy Space Center is just south of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Back behind the handful of buildings visible from the road lurks its largest structure, the News Center. This is where press conferences are held before and after launches, and it is also where the NASA Media Office does most of its work. The main room of the News Center has rows of Formica desks with electric outlets and data plugs, though there are not nearly as many desks as journalists today, not by a long shot, and the ones set up here have the settled look of having staked their claims many hours, maybe even days, earlier. More journalists, some in suits and ties, have camped along the walls, having plugged in their laptops and devices wherever they could find an outlet. There is something thrillingly old-school about this way of gathering news—reporters watching the monitors, getting announcements, yelling questions to the Media Office people and scrawling down the answers in those steno notebooks all the print journalists use, typing stuff up on their laptops and talking urgently into their phones.

It’s pleasant for a first-time holder of press credentials to simply stroll around the Press Site. These structures of varying solidity have grown up at the Press Site over the decades, and, aside from a few losses to hurricanes, their permanence tends to correlate with age. So some of the networks and newspapers have concrete buildings that date back to Apollo 4, outlets that came later in the sixties have trailers, and the websites and foreign agencies have tents or awnings. Under each outdoor structure, a stand-up TV journalist does a standard prelaunch patter against the backdrop of the countdown clock and far-off launch stack, speaking various languages, many of them wearing shorts and flip-flops with their jackets and ties and makeup.

The overall architectural feel at the Press Site is distinctly utilitarian Apollo-era. The restroom building is a case in point, classic early-sixties sloping-roof exterior and salmon-pink tile interior. I’m surprised there were enough female journalists at the time the Press Site was built to merit the five or so stalls allocated to us. I take pictures inside the bathroom, especially of a janitor’s trolley emblazoned with old mission patch stickers. It pleases me to see that even the janitors are proud of what goes on here. I have long dreamed of seeing a launch from the Press Site, and though this facility is supposed to be a means to an end, I’ve become fascinated with the Press Site itself, with the history of the people who have written about spaceflight, the people who have dedicated their careers to the task of telling this story. Now that it’s the end, everything seems important to me, everything historic.

Now that I’m here, there is more waiting. After getting up so ungodly early, then idling in the line of creeping cars to show my badge to the guards, I had started to feel anxious that I had arrived too late, that I had underestimated the traffic, wouldn’t make it to the Press Site in time. Yet now it is still not seven, and the launch is over four hours off. The other journalists, of course, had to get here so insanely early because they are putting together their coverage in real time. I am one of very few credentialed writers who is free to roam around taking in the scene, who does not have to make sense of what I’m seeing immediately. It is a great luxury.

I make my way to the center of the Press Site, a grassy field bordering on the Turn Basin, which I’m now seeing from a different angle than I did at the launch of
Endeavour.
I move downfield, close to the lip of the Turn Basin, where all the photographers are set up, nearly shoulder to shoulder now. You’ve seen it: the forest of enormous lenses, all pointing in the same direction across the water. The photographers got here even earlier than everyone else in order to stake their claims for prime tripod real estate, and they are the only ones who have bothered to bring lawn chairs. Oriana Fallaci, at the Press Site for a test launch of the Saturn V, commented that “journalists are always a disaster when they get together,” that space journalists were even worse, women space journalists worst of all. In general, the feeling here at the Press Site is both friendly and every-man-for-himself. Leave a seat for a moment, a good vantage point, a socket where a phone can be recharged, and it will be snatched up unapologetically. This does not preclude a sense of friendliness or collegiality, however.

While I wait, I look again at what Norman Mailer wrote about his wait in this place:

I look over to the right of the photographers. There it is, the small grove of pure jungle. The visible line between mowed field and jungle is a border between space center and wild preserve, space and Earth, home and an alien world. The jungle is a terrain we are supposed to fear—untamed, uncivilized, teeming with poisonous plant life and vicious animal life, populated by monkeys in the trees (an astronaut is the opposite of a woman and he is also the opposite of a monkey). But, in 2011, I have no associations with jungles other than—oddly—space shuttle launches. So many writers have made much of the rockets-and-alligators contrast inherent in the landscape of the Kennedy Space Center, but that contrast, so captivating to me the first few times I visited here, has now become one of the fixtures of spaceflight itself, and at this point I can’t imagine a launch of an American rocket without palm trees, humidity, and mosquitoes. I can’t imagine American spacecraft being serviced by anyone but Floridians. The Cape and its remarkable geography are as much a part of the story of American spaceflight as President Kennedy’s “before this decade is out,” as much as the test pilot corps from which the first astronauts were selected, as much as the blue NASA meatball logo, as much as the countdown.

A text comes in from Omar: Make it to the press site ok?

Yep, I answer. Where are you?

I’m working, on north side of VAB. I’ll head to the front parking lot at T-15 min.

Omar has some flexibility in his schedule, and when he wants to see a launch—which he always does—he usually requests that day off work so he can be assured the freedom to find a good vantage point. So the fact that he’s chosen to be at work today means he’s guessing, as I am, that today’s attempt will scrub. He’s gambling on it, in fact, as there’s always a risk he could be engaged in some actual work at the moment of the launch.

Someone wandering by tells me that the weather is now no-go. The storm clouds must be blowing in.

“Are they continuing the countdown?” I ask him. If the answer is no, there will be an unspeakable traffic jam to get out of here, but then I’ll be able to go back to my motel, take a nap, have dinner with Omar and some other spaceworkers, meet some kooky space people to get quotes from, and do all this launch business again tomorrow after a decent night’s sleep. The guy looks down at his phone.

“They’re continuing the countdown.”

Atlantis
was the fourth orbiter constructed, completed in April 1985. The name
Atlantis
comes from the oceanographic Research Vessel
Atlantis
, a sailing ship built in 1930.
Atlantis
was the primary research vessel for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and is the oldest serving oceanographic research vessel in the world. The undeniably nautical feel to the name somehow blends with the legend of the sunken city, and so the space shuttle
Atlantis
has always carried with it a sense of watery mystery.

The first flight of
Atlantis
was a secret mission for the Department of Defense, as were two of its subsequent five flights. These missions, presumably to deploy spy satellites, were conducted without the usual fanfare and without the typical flood of information from NASA. In the handouts given to reporters, a column titled “primary payload,” where generally one finds a long, chatty description of cargo and experiments, offers only a simple “D o D.” This secrecy, along with its sleek name, made
Atlantis
seem more streamlined, slicker and sneakier, than the others.

Atlantis
was the first orbiter to launch an interplanetary probe, Magellan, which traveled to Venus. On its next flight,
Atlantis
launched the Galileo probe to Jupiter. Both probes’ missions were considered enormous successes, and both have greatly expanded our knowledge of the solar system. In the midnineties,
Atlantis
made seven consecutive flights to dock with the Russian space station
Mir
; when they were linked,
Atlantis
and
Mir
together formed the largest spacecraft in orbit to date.

Of all the orbiters,
Atlantis
was the one I could never quite get a handle on, the one that never really developed a personality for me, and so maybe it’s fitting that it should be the last, that it should be the one I have to say good-bye to.

Within the last hour before launch, the weather has been given a go, then a no-go again, then back to go. The countdown continues. While I’m making my way back to the field in front of the countdown clock, I hear the T minus nine minute hold has been released. The weather is go again, but I don’t assume it will continue to be. If I had to bet, I’d still put my money on a scrub today. It will be my first. The numbers on the huge digital countdown clock flow by, counting hundredths of a second.

People are starting to find their viewing spots. Omar is probably in place at the VAB parking lot. After the T minus nine hold is released, the photographers stop talking to each other and go into semimeditative game-face trances. They check and double-check their equipment.

T minus five minutes and counting.

T minus three minutes and counting.

Someone tall steps in front of me, covering the launchpad with his head. I tap him firmly on the shoulder. Without turning back to meet my eyes, the man steps back to where he had been. I still don’t think the launch will go off, but we are getting awfully close on the countdown.

Phones and handheld radios squawk out the voice of George Diller, the public affairs officer. He sounds excited but professional. The long pauses between his comments are probably no longer than they have been all morning, but they seem troublingly long, insanely long, now that we are hanging on every word.

Verifying now that the main engines are in their start position.