Leaving Orbit (49 page)

As the exhausted rocket drifts down and down, I can make out the dark stripes of my hair bands along its fuselage. The horizon heaves itself up into the frame—a row of perfect white clouds, a soccer goal, a faraway stand of perfect green palm trees, some stucco houses. Florida. Watching the video today, on a cool gray day in Tennessee, the sight of those palm trees stirs in me something like homesickness, though Florida has never been my home, though I still don’t understand it. What was the metaphor I thought would present itself in this rocket launch? When I watch the video, I can’t quite remember. Something about a success after yesterday’s scrub, a joke about SpaceX or about my scrubless record, but when I watch the little video in my phone I feel only the weird spaceport homesickness, that Florida nostalgia, and then the surprise and pleasure of how high and fast the actual model rocket flies. After it finishes drifting back to earth and plops itself unceremoniously onto the grass, the camera swings around again to find my friend Omar walking toward me, a huge smile on his face.

“That was a success,” my voice says, and Omar laughs happily, and then the video ends.

On August 6, 2012, the Mars rover Curiosity approached the surface of Mars after a nine-month journey through interplanetary space. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a room full of flight controllers and engineers bit their nails and paced the floor while Curiosity went through its complicated and daring entry sequence, nicknamed the “seven minutes of terror.” Flight control erupted in emotion when the signal indicated that Curiosity was safe on Mars. A record number of people (3.2 million) watched the landing live online, so many that the server became overloaded and temporarily shut down. A crowd gathered in Times Square to watch the landing on the big screen together, and after the successful touchdown chanted “NASA! NASA! NASA!” Millions more watched subsequently on YouTube. The flight director, a young man with a Mohawk named Bobak Ferdowsi, became an instant Internet celebrity and gained twenty thousand Twitter followers in twelve hours.

The enormous level of enthusiasm for Curiosity was encouraging for space fans like me still mourning shuttle. NASA’s deft handling of social media seemed to come to the attention of more people than ever. Curiosity has 1.4 million Twitter followers who watch its progress each day on the surface of Mars. The extent to which so many people seem to feel a personal connection to a robot, the sort of mission that used to be dismissed as too boring to keep the public interest, gives me hope. And the enthusiasm only serves to underscore the frustrating notion that Twitter might have been able to save the shuttle, if only it had come along a few years earlier.