Leaving Orbit (7 page)

“I’m surprised you know so much about Apollo, not just shuttle,” I say. Over the course of my day here I’ve learned to say “shuttle,” not “the shuttle,” when I’m referring to the entire program rather than a single vehicle.

“Oh, I’m interested in all of it,” Omar says. “Ever since I was a little kid. Maybe it’s because I grew up here and because my dad works here.”

“For some people, growing up with something like this makes it
less
interesting,” I say.

“That’s true,” Omar says thoughtfully. “I guess I’m lucky. The things I think are really cool are the things I get to see every day.”

Omar lets us use his employee discount to buy the things we’ve picked out. My father buys an astronaut suit and astronaut teddy bear for my son. I buy NASA T-shirts for my husband and son, a coffee mug for myself, books and key chains for friends. Omar gives me a mission patch from the most recent flight that he got from his father. Patches are sold in the gift shop as well, but this is one of the patches the NASA insiders give to their friends and families.

Standing in the gift shop in front of a wall displaying all the mission patches from every spaceflight, I think about all I’ve seen today, all that will still occur here over the next year. The idea forms in my mind again that I could witness and write about these last launches. Or rather, it might be more accurate to say it’s at this moment the idea solidifies into intent. Because it’s been brewing all day, the idea I keep pushing to the back of my mind, this feeling that I should come back for these launches and write about them. I felt it in the VAB, and I felt it in the Orbiter Processing Facility, where it seemed I could almost reach up to touch the landing gear of
Endeavour.
I felt it at the Landing Facility with its three miles of runway dotted with alligators who are under the impression that the warm concrete has been laid out for their sunbathing comfort. That night at dinner with Omar and my family, he tells us about the excitement of launch days when he was little, about being awakened by the sonic booms of orbiters punching through the atmosphere in the middle of the night. He tells us about the terrible day his father came home from work after having spent the day in Launch Control searching his data screens for some sign of what had happened to
Challenger.

All the books I’ve read about American spaceflight are about a trajectory still on the upswing. Even the books written post-
Columbia
envision a shuttle program righting itself, restoring our faith, and carrying us over until the next vehicle is ready to launch. No one has yet tried to grapple with the end that is now in sight. Only when something ends can we understand what it has meant.

In the parking lot, my father and Judy shake hands with Omar and thank him for everything he’s done today. While they get into the rental car and set the GPS for the airport, Omar tells me I should come back for the
Discovery
launch.

“I’d love to,” I say. “But it’ll probably be during a busy time in my semester.”

“Sure,” Omar says nodding. “I understand it’s hard to get away. But remember—it’s the last one.”

I hug him before getting into the backseat of the car with my family. Omar stands in the parking lot waving as we pull away, until he is a tiny dot in the rearview mirror.

I’ve read that the twentieth century might be remembered only for the atomic bomb, the industrialized slaughter of human beings, and the first steps away from our home planet. If this is true, the end of American spaceflight is going to be one of the more significant moments of my lifetime, significant beyond the three missions left and the sixteen astronauts still preparing to go into space. By the end of Family Day, when we are all saying our good-byes, I have come to feel that the end of the space shuttle is going to be the ending of a story, the story of one of the truly great things my country has accomplished, and that I want to be the one to tell it.

The night I get home from Cape Canaveral, I e-mail Omar to thank him again for inviting me, then go to the NASA website and find the shuttle launch manifest. One more mission for
Discovery
in the fall and one for
Endeavour
the following spring. A last mission for
Atlantis
, if it’s added, will be in the summer. After that there will be no more.

In another window on my computer is a Flickr photo set belonging to a woman I don’t know. The photo set shows the woman visiting the Kennedy Space Center on some sort of special escorted trip. The way her captions are written tells me she doesn’t know nearly as much about shuttle as I do—she uses slightly the wrong terms for everything. Worse, her writing lacks the enthusiasm I feel properly befits her experience. Not only does she not report crying upon entering the Vehicle Assembly Building, she doesn’t even seem to understand it as a special privilege. As the photos continue to scroll by, I get more upset, because here she is donning a full-body cover-up and climbing into the crew cabin of an orbiter, an enormous privilege. The astronauts themselves don’t take this lightly. In the pictures, the woman looks pleased and amused but not mind-blown. It was NASA’s message about the space shuttle from the beginning that it would be cheaper, safer, more routine, than Apollo, more like commercial air travel. Maybe that message sank in too far with some people, and maybe this is part of what has doomed the shuttle. I stare at the woman’s pictures for a while longer, then close the browser window.

“I know my rockets,” I’d assured Omar, but did I? There are always people who know more, have seen more. I’ve seen one launch, which is more than most people can say. But Omar has kept company with the orbiters themselves. He has seen dozens of launches and has spent workdays, workweeks, work years inside the buildings I’ve waited a lifetime to enter. I’ve been inside the VAB now, but this horrible woman has been inside the crew cabin. There will always be someone who has seen more.

I print out the launch manifest and make some notes in the margins. After we get our son to bed, I show the printout to my husband, and though he clearly dreads the chaos this project will cause in our household, he agrees that this story needs to be written. Chris is a writer too, and a freelance editor; each of my absences will seriously cut into his time to work. He will care for our three-year-old son while I go to Florida multiple times and on a maddeningly ever-changing schedule. I will have to drive twelve hours each way to save money and to give me flexibility in those cases when the launch scrubs until the following day. When launches are delayed for longer periods of time, I will leave Florida empty-handed and start over. I will have to impose on my colleagues to cover classes for me when the launch schedule conflicts with my academic calendar. In order to start this project, I will have to set aside the novel I’m already halfway through, a novel I’m expected to publish soon in order to qualify for tenure and keep my job, which is the sole source of benefits for my family. And I will have to impose more on Omar, the only local and NASA insider I know. All this might well turn out to be for nothing. But I’ve decided to try.

Over the following months, people will ask me what I expect to find by going to the last launches, and I will have to admit that I have no idea. I’ll find it when I see it, I tell them—or else, I won’t, and all this will have been a waste. I know I want to write about those places where the technical and the emotional intersect—like the smell of space, or the schoolchildren watching
Challenger
explode with a teacher aboard, or an adult woman hiding her tears in the cathedralic heights of the Vehicle Assembly Building, or a bored child in a movie theater watching a beautiful astronaut float in her sleep. I want to see the beauty and the strangeness in the last days of American spaceflight, in the last moments of something that used to be cited as what makes America great. I want to see the end of the story whose beginning was told by some of the writers I admire most. I want to know, most of all, what it means that we went to space for fifty years and that we won’t be going anymore.

Maybe you’ve seen it. Many people have—at least 800,000 have clicked on various YouTube iterations of the same moment. It looks like nothing at first. The video is fuzzy, amateur, handheld. We hear the muffled verityé sound of wind against the microphone, of the excited breath of the camera operator. People are standing around, their postures reflecting boredom, their faces and movements obscured by the shaky camera work and low resolution.

On YouTube, of course, this poor video quality, combined with a high hit count, contains an inverse promise:
something is about to happen.

We can make out a white-haired man in a blue blazer, partially obscured by a sign. He seems to be talking to another man, in a black jacket, whose back is to the camera. Out of any context, the white-haired man would be unrecognizable because of the bad video quality, but if you know to look for him—and you do, because of the title on the YouTube page—the man is recognizable as astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot of Apollo 11, one of the first two men to walk on the moon.

The muffled audio obscures the voice of the black-jacketed man, who is speaking now. Passion or nervousness makes his voice waver.

“You’re the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn’t,” the man says. He is holding an object out to Buzz. A subsequent Google search reveals that it’s a Bible—he is trying to make Buzz swear upon it.

Overlapping him, Buzz Aldrin’s voice says, clearly and unwaveringly, “Get away from me.”

“—calling the kettle black. You’re a coward and a liar and a thief—”

At that moment Buzz’s arm comes up and cracks the black-jacketed man in the jaw. Even with the poor video, we can see that it’s an impressive punch, well-aimed and powerful. We can’t see the punched man’s face, but we see his head recoil backward. The camera recoils too, as if in sympathy. Something has changed in the scene, you can sense it. One public figure’s image has been complicated, another person now has a story to tell, a video to put on YouTube.

“Did you get that on camera?” the man in the black jacket asks breathlessly, a note of joy in his voice. The black-jacketed man is Bart Sibrel, moon hoax conspiracist. He believes that all of the trips to the moon were faked, were in fact physically impossible, and that the Apollo astronauts have agreed to uphold the lie because they benefit personally and financially. (He has also stated at other times that the astronauts are not consciously lying but were subjected to mind control by the government to convince them that they did in fact go to the moon. Today, clearly, he is working from the former theory.) He has made it his life’s work to expose the conspiracy.

“Did you get that on camera?” This line of dialogue, spoken so clearly and happily, subsequently helps to acquit Buzz Aldrin, seventy-two years old at the time of the incident, of assault charges.

Everyone agrees that NASA’s finest hour was the journey of Apollo 11, which left Earth with Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins aboard on July 16, 1969. During the three days it took them to get to the moon, the astronauts grew beards, took measurements of the stars out their windows using sextants to make sure they were still on course, chatted with Houston, listened to music on tape, shot films of each other doing somersaults and making ham sandwiches in microgravity, got mildly on one another’s nerves, and refrained from considering the enormity of their undertaking. Each of them has said in the years since that they actively kept themselves from thinking about the long chain of risky events it would take to get them back home. This particular avoidance was an ability they had honed as test pilots of experimental aircraft. It seems desirable for astronauts to be able to resist grand and potentially panic-inducing trains of thought, yet all three of them have expressed regret that this same character trait kept them from being able to adequately convey to us spectators what it was like to experience the things they experienced.