Across the street from my motel is its sister business, the Pelican Spa, one of ten locally owned hot-spring spas in town. I soaked in a steel tub in a little room with one tiny window and a giant PVC spigot spewing steaming water like a fire hydrant. A nearby washing machine wobbled, and a family of five in the tub next door were having a contest about who could cackle the loudest. Blum might not have liked it. But it seemed pretty good to me. I could dip my head under the steaming water and the rumbling of the washing machine felt something like a rocket ride, and then when I surfaced, all the nearby laughter brought me back to earth. The hot springs flow from beneath Truth or Consequences at over 2 million gallons a day, pumped into baths all over downtown and even to the backyards of some houses. The geothermal waters come up at over a hundred degrees, spiked by the earth with minerals including gold and silver and mercury, a brew championed for centuries by locals as having vast healing properties. In the first half of the twentieth century, Hot Springs, New Mexico, was a major destination for those seeking a therapeutic experience, physical and spiritual, boasting as many as fifty medicinal spas for the old body-and-soul soak. So Mulcahy’s call to step up and say we’re gonna manage this deal is as much about seizing economic opportunity as it is about preserving the culture that, even without the spaceport, makes the place unique. It’s a mysticism that dates all the way back to early Native American tribes, who used the hot springs and surrounding area as sacred ground—neutral in war and prized for healing battle wounds and prime for talks of peace. It’s a mysticism that seems born to cradle, many centuries later, the launching point for that more spiritual notion of the Overview Effect where the blue marble becomes the only way we see ourselves, all calm and in it together.
When we talk to people about why they want to spend the money to go up to space, we hear a lot about that view when they look back at Earth. That it is weirdly an incredibly grounding experience, says the New Mexico tourism secretary Monique Jacobson. We think that’s actually what a trip to New Mexico can do for people, even if you’re not able to go to space and look down at Earth, coming here can really ground you. The culture and adventures here are so unique—how you feel when you leave and how they’re truly adventures that feed your soul.
As part of Governor Susana Martinez’s administration for the last three years, Jacobson has worked aggressively to rebrand the state, a skill she first honed with Gatorade and Quaker oatmeal. Her campaign is called New Mexico True and the slogan she repeats several times as we talk is Adventure steeped in culture. Indeed, much of the tourism campaign for New Mexico is about recreational activities alongside Native American and Hispanic culture. The New Mexico True brand largely ignores the presence of the aerospace industry, suggesting maybe that aerospace is not True to New Mexico. But Jacobson thinks this can change and says she does have plans to create a Space Trail that will originate at Spaceport America and direct Terrestrial Space Tourists to related sites around the state via touch-screen kiosks.
Currently the New Mexico tourism website features nothing about Spaceport America, though film locations and ghost towns and the state’s penchant for green-chili cheeseburgers are featured. The True brand is taking its time going Galactic, either because they (like everyone else) are waiting for Galactic’s first flight or because current governor Martinez was a bit annoyed at inheriting the old Gov’s troubled legacy project or because they are mindful of not letting Galactic overshadow traditional New Mexican culture. That last bit is likely the case, so a tussle surrounds Spaceport America, a battle to be the defining brand.
Even the New Mexico Spaceport Authority has gotten into the branding game in the last year, sporting a new logo that looks like the Star Trek insignia dipped in the Stars and Stripes and tipped on its side. The logo is on T-shirts and hats and looms large in the tiny Operations Center adjacent to the Gateway to Space. All three of these brands, Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America and New Mexico True, need to coexist for the spaceport to succeed. The Overview Effect (the real potential for political and social change), because it is not a brand, may get lost in all that marketing. And anyway, at this point Galactic’s brand undeniably dominates. Consider the very architecture of the building. The spaceport is not just any mythological eyeball rising out of the desert. The Gateway to Space, when all lit up, is designed to resemble the Virgin Galactic logo: a blue iris painstakingly modeled after Richard Branson’s own eye. From a descending SpaceShipTwo, after you’ve seen the holy curve of Earth, you’ll get to glide quietly down into the big eye of a billionaire.
* * *
The November ice finally melts off the road and runs into the dam. The bus rumbles through the canyon and over a few cattle guards, and the water in Elephant Butte Lake is rising for the first time in years. After soaking at the Pink Pelican and drinking at the Pine Knot I’m finally headed to the spaceport again. As we steer around stray cattle, Spaceport America peeks out of the red desert horizon. We get closer and it finally blinks open, three stories of glass gleaming in the sun. Looking directly at it requires a hard wince.
I wonder what it might be like to sit inside, just before rocketing to space. I think of Dr. Pat Hynes, director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium and a Galactic ticket holder, who told me of sitting in the third floor of the Gateway to Space, which will become the Astronaut Lounge, complete with a champagne bar. She was there one afternoon, meeting with the UK spaceport delegation, when everyone stopped to watch as a thunderstorm rolled into the valley, the whole of the storm visible because of the open desert horizon and the massively panoramic windows looking north over the runway. That view from inside the Astronaut Lounge must be great, a stark precursor to what Galactic ticket holders will see from above.
But most of us, the Terrestrial Space Tourists, will be gazing at the building as I am, from the outside. We will get the same panorama of New Mexico landscape but it will be a reflection on the windows’ exteriors, the curvature of those three stories of glass, like a sphere, throwing the mirrored image of the desert back at us. That perspective is strange, the opposite of the Overview Effect and kind of sidelong, so the world is not growing smaller and more whole in the distance but is magnified all around you and your own reflection is enveloped in it, a kind of fish-eye perspective that forces you to see yourself as tiny in the emptiness it reflects. It is beautiful, that perspective. But also, because of that same curvature and the way it warps your body’s reflection, it’s more than a little bit like a giant fun-house mirror.
BEFORE THE FALL
THE VIOLENCE OF THE WIND AND THE EDDIES AND AT THE SAME TIME THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE TEMERITY
•
In the Year of Our Lord 2012
Start the cameras and our guardian angel will take care of ya is the final thing we hear over the communications radio from Joe in Ground Control. This is a high-tech affair but the radio cracking and beeping into our stream is anachronistic, as if our daredevil in a hulking space suit with so many bells and whistles and gizmos ought to be able to get messages sent straight to his brain—straight to our brains—as he stands on the ledge of a gondola, a shiny space capsule, a fiberglass teardrop floating twenty-four miles above Earth. And angels—those winged anachronisms—what use are they up here? No good angel has ever fallen. And so the nerves kick in. Our daredevil’s heart beats three times per second, and fifteen cameras inside and outside the teardrop record thirty frames per second each in glorious 4K HD. And still there are more cameras. Start the cameras … says Joe in Ground Control, and he means the body cameras, the one on the chest and two on the waist and one on each thigh: a view from our daredevil’s chest up past the dark visor of his eight-pound helmet and the view down the left leg of his puffy white pressure suit and the view from his back as if we have saddled him like a horse. Giddyup. All of time has passed since a fall was experienced so much, so far and wide. But this will be a literal fall in which gravity will work on flesh as on object, a fall we have just begun to believe is really goi
ng to happen because Joe in Ground Control has invoked our guardian angel and we feel the tickle of nerves as we stand here, floating twenty-four miles high. Our daredevil is the one in the pressure suit but make no mistake: the fall will be ours. We can see it all. We are 8 million people: 16 million eyes drowning in a Net stream of the teardrop’s cameras and our daredevil is not yet falling but just standing on the ledge. We are on the ledge. See the blackness around us? Look at great big Earth below and the fragile polyethylene balloon above—fabric thinner than a strand of human hair—which has slowly expanded over the last two and a half hours as it rose and its helium that is now too dense in the light air of the stratosphere to carry our thirty-two-hundred-pound teardrop any higher. Feel the breath inside the helmet. See the fog on the visor. Feel the heart beat inside the suit, inside the restraining mesh and gas membrane and thermal liner, inside the flesh-and-bone cage. In the weeks leading up to this moment the news reported again and again about the possibility of “his blood boiling, brain bursting, and eyeballs popping out.” During the fall he will catch up with and push through his own sound waves and experience vibrations that could, sinew by sinew, tear his body apart. He had to be told twice to unbuckle his seat belt. Told four times to disconnect his oxygen. But Joe says the magic words only once: Start the cameras. We look down. We will fall. Joe has invoked our guardian angel and now there is no choice.
Because there is always a fall at the beginning of things. With falling there is immediately an engaging story. From where? To where? What flight aborted? What mistakes? What banishment and why? What injuries now needing to be overcome? What loved ones now gnashing with grief? What dreams on which we rose so high? This is why falling is our prime mover of a metaphor, why our big religions use it to describe the beginning of human history. The fall makes for a good start to the story. The way it’s told most, we fell from where we were supposed to be and now we suffer until we can get back. But then falling might also be an escape. From here on the ledge looking down it’s a matter of whether we’re better off down there.
When we click through the excess of video in the coming weeks, we will know that this ledge moment lasts less than a minute, a mere fifty seconds before the fall. But in this moment we linger to the point of paralysis. We swell the hesitance because still the only important question is unanswered, the question anyone always asks on a ledge: Why? Or, what’s the point?
Our daredevil and his team mostly avoid calling this mission a fall. They say jump or dive or, if the word must be used (and it must because they seek world records for highest and longest free fall) they say free fall, but try to make clear that falling is only one part of the mission and that, on the whole, it will be a controlled descent.
They say again and again, This is no stunt.
Everything is under control. Everything happens for a reason.
They call it the Mission to the Edge of Space and the Space Dive and the Supersonic Jump, though none of those are totally accurate. Traditionally we’ve drawn a line in the air at sixty-two miles and labeled everything beyond it with that eloquently ambiguous term space. But Earth’s atmosphere roams as far as five hundred miles beyond its surface. The International Space Station orbits at two hundred forty-nine miles. American pilots earn their astronaut wings flying as low as fifty miles. We cruise at around six miles with our tray tables down and our economy seats reclined at a maddening 106-degree angle. Anything above twelve miles will start to rip at unprotected sinew. So the twenty-four-mile height of our floating teardrop is somewhere between here and there, smack-dab in the middle of a place called the stratosphere. Our birds don’t come this high. Our storms rarely storm this high. But this is not that fabled far-off space. This is a kind of skyward purgatory where we are not home or totally away from home. And if our daredevil goes supersonic, it will not be because he is jumping but because he is falling. But say Fall from Somewhere Less Than Halfway to Space and nobody pays attention. So: Space Dive.
And: This is not a stunt.
The mission team in Ground Control is nearly two hundred people including experts in aviation engineering, skydiving, ballooning, meteorology, and medical science. The director of the medical team for the mission is Dr. Jonathan Clark, a former NASA crew surgeon. Clark’s wife, Dr. Laurel Clark, was among the seven astronauts killed when the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry and showered West Texas with debris in 2003. For sixteen days, orbiting Earth at over two hundred miles, Laurel helped complete nearly eighty experiments in zero gravity on Space Shuttle Columbia. She studied the lick of flames, saw silkworms morph to moths and cancer cells morph to more cancer cells, gasped as roses bloomed without any gravity to pull at their petals, and stared hard at sand trying to understand how sand moves, she said, and where to build homes on an Earth that shakes. But she never made it home. Her husband became obsessed with spacecraft emergency escape. He helped NASA write a report declaring that what the Columbia crew endured—loss of air pressure and an explosion at thirty-eight miles high—was absolutely unsurvivable. Dr. Clark has never liked the odds of unsurvivable. He wants space travelers to have a last resort, even though some of us already consider space travel itself the last resort for when Earth is too hot for flowers or shakes too much for homes.
Who will want to escape when we are all already escaping?
And what is it like to pore over all that grim research and then have to explain, in words that come one after another, all the ways your astronaut wife passed through the sky fire and returned again to just the chaos grains of star stuff from which we all came?
But Dr. Clark is pragmatic about the realities of space travel in the here and now. He wants something useful to come from his wife’s death, and in this way his pragmatism about the Mission to the Edge of Space becomes kind of heart-wrenching. And in this way he is the most convincing of anyone on the mission team when he talks about egress, the word they throw around when questioned about the point of sending a man via balloon to fall from the stratosphere. We are pioneers, they say, in the future of space egress.
Egress has long been the name for any kind of ejection or escape system in aviation, but the word has the rather casual Latin origins of gradi (to step) and ex- (out). Just stepping out for some air. Just a small egress, darling. The word’s most common usage these days is as a legal term about one’s lawful right to exit one’s own property. So here on the ledge, twenty-four miles above Earth, we are involved in a rather casual exercise of our right to survive, a right to easily come and go from a place we feel we own, a place that is not exactly home but is not exactly away from home: the stratospheric heavens. Dr. Clark says, The ultimate reason I am here is to validate that crews can survive stratospheric bailouts … We’re accumulating a huge amount of data that can further that effort. And we think of Laurel and how she never had the chance to bail out with her space roses and licking flames and all her questions about sand. And we think of how all humans have been perplexed by sand for all of time—how one grain of sand added to one grain of sand does not make a heap, and one grain of sand added to that still does not make a heap and so on and so on, but a child on the beach with a handful of sand running through her fingers will have notions of the infinite. In language philosophy they call it the problem of vagueness—our words, such as heap and egress and space, are unstable, not defined enough. But Laurel was not studying language. And with sand it’s a problem of accumulation. We’re accumulating a huge amount of data, says Dr. Clark. When will we accumulate enough to have a heap, to have notions of the infinite as the grains of it run through our fingers?
Joe in Ground Control also wants this to be more than a stunt. He is the famous Joe Kittinger, the living heritage of the Space Dive, the guy who first did all this ballooning and falling for the U.S. Air Force five decades ago. In 1957, Joe piloted a balloon to almost ninety-seven thousand feet as part of the U.S. Air Force’s Excelsior program. In 1959 and 1960 they added falling to the experiments, wanted to know if man could fall
from that high and live, and Joe did. His gondola was more basket than space capsule and there weren’t so many cameras, just three spring-wound film machines with hot-water bladders duct-taped to their sides to fend off freezing. In 1960 he set the record for world’s highest skydive at over nineteen miles but never bothered to fill out the official-world-record paperwork because skydiving is a sport and he was not falling nineteen miles for sport. He was a military man, and they were testing a parachute and the parachute worked and that was the only thing he figured fit for the history books. The drogue chute, they called it, a little parachute that would deploy before the main chute in any egress system, a chute not to slow a falling man down but just to keep a falling man from spinning out of control, from having his brain mushed by the spins. Our daredevil has a drogue parachute but no plans to use it. Our daredevil has filled out the official-world-record paperwork, and use of a drogue chute would be considered a crutch, a lifesaving measure that would eliminate his bid for world records. For the record, we risk spinning out of control.
Ever since Joe’s military balloon experiments, these high-altitude dives have been all about records. In 1962 a Soviet suited up and chased the record and died. He cracked the visor of his helmet on the way out of his gondola’s hatch and the liquids in his body vaporized. In 1966 a former truck driver and iguana salesman from New Jersey decided to suit up and try the fall but didn’t make it out of his gondola before something went awry with his visor. He remained inside for the entirety of the fall but his blood turned to vapor anyway and he died after four months in a coma. Our daredevil has been anxious about his visor too. During the ascent he worried it was frosting up too much, that the heater for the visor was broken and that, just like the Soviet and the iguana salesman before him, the need to see would be his undoing. But now our daredevil is mostly calm because he’s worked with a sports psychologist to become one with his twenty-eight-pound space suit. The suit has made him claustrophobic ever since he first tried it on, got riled into an angry panic, and was nearly booted from the mission. Fighting against my own mind is what he calls coping with being enveloped by the state-of-the-art suit-beast. Breathing exercises and visualizations of utopias and all manner of whispering under the breath as cognitive therapy were used to keep our daredevil’s mind from rejecting the suit-beast. The thing is shiny white and tailor-made and looks like an artist’s immaculate rendition of a space suit. Back in 1960, Joe was suited up too but his pressure suit looked more like a standard-issue Army sleeping bag just wrapped around and duct-taped to his body. Joe sported actual red duct tape on his ankles, calves, thighs, and back. He carried the weight of the over-hundred-pound suit like a turtle, hunched and moving slowly, legs wide for stability. Despite the bulk and the red tape and the dull green color, Joe’s suit seems cleaner, purer because there was no consideration of aesthetics in its creation. The duct tape did not look tacky but vital with a hint of desperation. Nothing on the suit was meant to do anything other than preserve Joe’s life.
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