Leaving Orbit
Page 3
Up to today it has cost us little: only work and money. So many men went, so many came back. But it won’t always be like this, I know, we know. Some of us will die, maybe a whole crew will die: but remember, it’s worth it all the same. And because it’s worth it, we will accept our losses and continue with those who remain…. Yes, we must go up there, we must. And one day those who are against it will look back and be pleased at what we’ve done.
The Apollo 1 fire made the risks of spaceflight seem real to Americans for the first time—up to that point, nothing had ever gone seriously wrong, and it had started to seem as though the exploration of space would be without human cost. NASA recovered quickly from the setback, but future disasters would take greater tolls. Some space fans suspect Americans had a greater tolerance for risk in the sixties than we do now, but it may be that this first disaster seemed like an anomaly. A second (Challenger) seems like a betrayal; a third (Columbia) seems like a pattern of failure.
The Vehicle Assembly Building was designed to house the simultaneous assembly of four moonbound rockets, and as such it stands as a monument to a long-past era in American history. There never did come a time when four Saturn V rockets were assembled at once. The history of American spaceflight is a history of doing less than had been planned, less than had been hoped for. Space fans angry about the end of the shuttle seem to think that their disappointment is something new, but in fact the dreams of space enthusiasts have been scaled back from the start. A lunar base, a permanent space station, a reusable spaceship with a booster section that could land like an airplane, a Mars expedition—all these were to have been undertaken by the eighties. Not only were the new projects tabled, but the last three Apollo missions were scrapped before the third crew of moonwalkers landed.
Family Day is a Kennedy Space Center tradition that began in the mid-1960s, when spaceworkers’ families complained that they had no idea what went on behind the gates, what was keeping their spouses and parents so frantically busy for so many hours and so distracted even when they were at home. Certain Saturdays were established when workers could bring their families inside the gates and show them around. Family Days decreased in frequency after the debut of the space shuttle, with its more dangerous solid rockets. And after the terrorist attacks of 2001 led to heightened security at government facilities, Family Days stopped altogether. But now that the retirement of the shuttle is within sight, there is a last-chance feeling around the Kennedy Space Center, and a few final Family Days will be held before the end. Today is one of them.
My first contact with Omar Izquierdo was in 2007, when he sent me the first e-mail I received about my Challenger novel, the day after its official publication date.
From: Omar Izquierdo
Subject: Comments about your Book, The Time It Takes to Fall
To: Margaret Lazarus Dean
I picked up your book last Monday night. I was first drawn to your book by the photo on the cover. I grew up on Merritt Island, and I was 6 years old when Challenger happened, and my dad worked (and still works) at the Kennedy Space Center. I also work out there now, and so when I saw the book, I instinctively decided to give it a closer look.
Mistakenly, I assumed at first that it was a true story about a girl who grew up on the Space Coast around that era, and since I also grew up under those circumstances, I immediately purchased the book, looking forward to see how similar this girl’s childhood perspectives on that day and time would be to my own.
I was 25 pages into it, before I realized that the book was a work of fiction. I am a bonehead.
However, I decided to continue reading, and I finished the book 5 days later. Interestingly, I finished it at work while I was on break, sitting literally 10 feet away from the huge left wing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, as it was being worked on in the VAB for the upcoming mission.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that I still did find your book enjoyable. Since I was 6 when Challenger occurred, and the character in your book was 13 (and a girl), I’m afraid I can’t offer you relevant feedback and say that my experiences and hers during that era were completely similar. What we did have in common was an obsession with everything having to do with shuttle, and feelings of confusion when the Challenger accident occurred. Since my father (in 1986) worked with the shuttle main engines, his job was not affected by the accident as severely as Dolores’ father was in the book.
Once again, thanks for the good read. It seems you did significant research, and your descriptions of the Space Center in particular are fairly accurate (with the exception of two things, 1.) It would be impossible for a child to sneak past security at KSC, and 2.) Nobody is allowed to bring non-employees into the Vehicle Assembly Building, ESPECIALLY while the Orbiter is hanging from the crane above the stack during Orbiter/ET Mate).
Thank you very much.
Omar Izquierdo
For a first-time author, hearing from a complete stranger the week my book came out, a stranger who walked into a bookstore of his own accord and chose my book from among all the other books, then actually read it, felt like a miracle. But when I got to the second paragraph about how Omar grew up near the Kennedy Space Center himself, and works there now, I felt a sinking dread. All the facts I must have gotten wrong suddenly seemed to glow like badly buried radioactive waste. This reader, this Omar Izquierdo, would expose my errors, would lead the charge against me. After all, I had taken his hometown, his childhood, and his life’s work and made them into a backdrop for a story I, an outsider, had made up.
Soon after that initial exchange, I went on Facebook to create an identity for my book’s main character (authors were encouraged to do this during the brief period after Facebook became ubiquitous and before Facebook’s fan pages were introduced). When I went looking for Facebook groups my character might join, I came across one called “If You Oppose NASA in Any Way I Will Punch You in the Face.” Perfect for Dolores. I clicked on it, and the first name I saw among the existing members was Omar Izquierdo. So I friended him.
A Facebook friendship evolves either more quickly or more slowly than a face-to-face one; mine with Omar evolved quickly. We are both on Facebook multiple times a day, both click Like often on each other’s postings, especially ones that involve our shared interest in spaceflight. And his space-related posts are to die for: images of Discovery being prepared for launch, interiors of restricted spaces like the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Orbiter Processing Facility, or the often-dramatic weather at the Cape. But I’ve found you can also learn a lot about a person by what he finds funny, by his comments on everyday happenings, and I came to feel that I knew Omar well through his posts even if I’d never been in the same room with him.
Omar’s father is a mechanical engineer who has worked at Kennedy his entire adult life. He was recruited right out of engineering school in Puerto Rico in 1979, when NASA was gearing up for the first shuttle launch, and was given a choice of whether to go to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He chose Kennedy because he had heard that Alabama was more racist. He brought his young wife to Florida, bought a house, put down roots, and Omar and his sister were born here soon after.
Before leaving home, I’d looked back over all the e-mails and Facebook messages Omar and I have sent each other, and I’d reread that first e-mail in which one of the errors in my book he points out is a scene in which an employee brings an outsider inside the VAB. Neither of us could have imagined when he wrote those words that three years later he would be taking me inside the VAB himself.
Back in my hotel room I’ve left the stack of books I brought with me to Florida. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Lipartito and Butler’s History of the Kennedy Space Center, William E. Burrows’s This New Ocean, Diane Vaughan’s The Challenger Launch Decision, Oriana Fallaci’s If the Sun Dies, Michael Collins’s Carrying the Fire, and Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon.
Each of thes
e books offers different layers of the infinitely layered story—Wolfe’s bombastic lionizing of the Mercury astronauts; Burrows’s thorough tracing of the currents of history across three nations; Vaughan’s tireless unpacking of the seemingly benign decisions that would doom two shuttles. When I was researching my Challenger novel, I’d thought at first that once I understood the outlines of the history of American spaceflight, I would be able to stop reading about it and get back to writing. But I found I loved reading multiple accounts of the same event—say, the first glimpse of the lunar surface on Apollo 8 in 1968, or the first space shuttle launch in 1981. When the point of view changes, details emerge and disappear, meanings shift, emotions transmute themselves. The very import of the event can change. My research was turning into something more like an obsession, and even once my Challenger novel was published, I kept reading, wanting to be able to grasp a historical era that in many ways seemed better than my own.
The books that mean the most to me are the firsthand accounts, the people who grapple with what they have seen and experienced, and by doing so take on the emotional meanings of spaceflight. Michael Collins, who went to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, is also a first-rate prose stylist with a natural feel for detail and a light touch with humor; his book sounds a lot like what you would expect if E. B. White had qualified as an astronaut and flown to the moon. Tom Wolfe undertook to grasp the courage of the astronauts and uncovered a brotherhood that is both unprecedented and ageless. Oriana Fallaci was an Italian journalist who traveled to Houston, Huntsville, and the Cape at the height of the excitement for Apollo but before the success of the first moon landing. She met astronauts, rocket engineers, and NASA managers engaged in the as-yet-uncertain project of beating the Russians to the moon, and she questioned the project constantly—will they get to the moon by the deadline, and if so what will that accomplish?—while also admiring the adventure and the adventurers. When she meets Neil Armstrong, for example, he is just another astronaut in a large group, described in terms of his resemblance to John Glenn, not as the first man on the moon. When she meets Deke Slayton, a chance remark reveals that he was one of the pilots responsible for a bombing raid on Fallaci’s home city of Florence during World War II, a raid that injured her and destroyed her family home. If nothing else, this episode should remind us of how very recent the war had been, and the fact that Oriana and Deke became great friends anyway is an example of the way spaceflight brings people together. I envy Fallaci most in the scenes where she flirts her way through the astronaut corps, one by one, drinking martinis with them in the motel bars of the Space Coast, smoking like a chimney and eliciting from von Braun eloquent observations about the moon project. It can’t be a coincidence that the sixties era of creative nonfiction overlaps so perfectly with the heroic era of American spaceflight, the big egotistical voices turning journalism inside out at the same time the innovators in Houston and Huntsville and the Cape were redefining what machines were capable of, what human beings were capable of.
Norman Mailer’s book is about witnessing the launch of Apollo 11—Life magazine had commissioned him to go to the Cape to write about the launch in exchange for a sum of money rumored to be somewhere between extraordinary and obscene. I hadn’t known, before I came across it, that Norman Mailer had written a book about Apollo 11—I knew him for having written the best-selling novel The Naked and the Dead, for cofounding the Village Voice and helping to spearhead New Journalism, for winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Armies of the Night, for running for mayor of New York and finishing fourth out of a field of five in the Democratic primary, and for stabbing his second wife, nearly to death, at a dinner party. But here, it seems, he had also written a book about spaceflight. The article in Life, and the book that subsequently expanded on it, are both ungainly wandering things with oceans of technical details and self-conscious linguistic tics. Norman Mailer could never quite get both arms around the subject, but he tries in a way that few have, and I witness in his very struggle one of the best expressions I’ve seen of what American spaceflight means: the boredom of waiting, the wondering whether one should be feeling something more, then, suddenly, feeling it—excitement, or patriotism, or pride in one’s own species, the big-brained nonquitting species that would set itself such a ridiculous goal and then meet it so spectacularly.
When I read all these books, I’m encountering other minds struggling with the same questions while walking the same landscape. With Norman Mailer especially, the only one of the three to undertake to describe a launch, I feel as though he and I are tugging on opposite ends of the same thread, a thread forty years long. I am often struck with jealousy for the era he lived in. Sometimes it seems as though Norman Mailer’s generation got to see the beginnings of things and mine has gotten the ends.
Juan Ponce de León stumbled across Cape Canaveral in 1513 while he was searching a new land for gold, slaves, and the Fountain of Youth. He’d left his home in San Juan Bautista (now called Puerto Rico) aboard the ship Santiago and headed north, toward a landmass that had been sighted clearly enough to be included on maps, but upon which no European had yet made a landing. The chronicler Antonio de Herrera writes in 1610:
And thinking that this land was an island, they called it La Florida, because it presented a beautiful vista of many blossoming trees and was low and flat; and also because they discovered it during the time of Easter [Pascua Florida]. Juan Ponce wanted the name to conform to [agree with] these two aspects [reasons]. They went ashore to gather information and to take possession.
Books still use the word discovery to refer to this voyage, but that term doesn’t quite seem to apply when some of the natives Juan Ponce encountered on the shores of the new land had actually traveled to San Juan Bautista; some even greeted him in his own language. The landmass we now call Florida was not understood, at first, to be a peninsula, and in fact Juan Ponce died believing that what he had “discovered” was a largish island.
We don’t know where exactly on Florida’s east coast Juan Ponce de León first landed, but we do know that shortly afterward, in April 1513, his travels down the coast brought him to Cape Canaveral. There he found only scrubland and unwelcoming natives. By all accounts, Juan Ponce and his men declared Cape Canaveral uninhabitable and piled back into their boats to see what else this new land had to offer. After they abandoned the Cape to the wind and the mosquitoes, no Europeans returned for nearly three hundred years, by which time the native people who had inhabited the Cape had either been wiped out by disease and violence with other tribes or had migrated elsewhere. A few European families raised citrus groves—the Indian River region is especially well suited to growing high-quality oranges—but aside from them, the area remained almost entirely uninhabited. That is, until after World War II, when the Air Force was scouting sites for testing rockets. A rocket range has some odd geographical requirements: it needs to be as close to the equator as possible (so Earth’s rotation can help propel lifting bodies), it requires a great deal of undeveloped space in case of mishap on the ground, and ideally it should border on a great deal of water, in case errant rockets fail or have to be shot down. Cape Canaveral met all of these requirements.
According to an uncredited Air Force publication about the history of the Cape charmingly titled From Sand to Moondust, Ponce de León sailed the coast of Florida “meeting at every landing hostile Indians whose appearance gave no indication of wealth and who did not offer to lead him to hidden treasure or magic fountains.” It’s true that Juan Ponce would never find either, but his fantasies of youth and wealth have somehow embedded themselves into the underlying fantasy of Florida itself. At any rate, Florida is the oldest surviving European place name in the United States. Today, the landscape around the Kennedy Space Center is in most ways oddly unchanged from the day Ponce de León abandoned it in frustration. This incidental preservation is one of the many strange gifts of spaceflight.
My father drives cal
mly down Kennedy Parkway, the Vehicle Assembly Building filling the windshield. I’m glad he’s driving; I’m anxious about being late to meet Omar and might have been prone to speeding. I try to anticipate what our first face-to-face conversation will be like. As I’m considering what we might say to each other, we pass an SUV being driven slowly, just below the speed limit, and when I glance out the backseat window over at the driver, a young Hispanic man chatting with his passenger, I think, Oh, that’s my friend Omar. I’ve only seen small blurry pictures of Omar on his Facebook page and would not have thought I would recognize him. But a few minutes later, when we find the parking lot with the Redstone rocket Omar has told me to look for, the SUV is there too. The driver steps out and asks, cautiously, “Margaret?”
Omar is neatly dressed in an athletic shirt and khaki shorts. He is about my height with a round, kind face and a buzz cut like a Mercury astronaut’s. It’s not until that moment, as I’m introducing myself and my family, that I consider that Omar took a risk by meeting me too, that he might not have known what to expect from a female English professor with a spaceflight obsession—that he might have been as anxious about our meeting as I was, and he went out of his way to invite me here anyway.
“I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding it,” Omar says politely after shaking everyone’s hands, though he’s given me both detailed directions and an iPhone map image with a pin dropped at the exact spot. “I realized later that ‘Redstone rocket’ might not be the most helpful landmark for everyone.”
“I know my rockets,” I assure him.
“Ah. I figured you might,” Omar says. A second later he adds, “You don’t really look like your picture. But I knew you anyway.”
Here under the Redstone rocket, I reach out and hug him, though I am not generally a touchy person. I’m so pleased to discover that this is my friend Omar: he is exactly who he seemed to be, exactly who I thought he was all along. My father snaps a picture of the two of us together under the Redstone, the first of many he will take today.