Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  Omar has brought three other friends for Family Day, all of them locals who grew up with space shuttles rattling their windows. We all climb into Omar’s SUV and approach the checkpoint at the south gate to the Kennedy Space Center. Omar shows his work badge to the armed guard, who allows us through. Now on NASA grounds, we pass the DAYS TO LAUNCH sign. Discovery’s last flight is scheduled for November 1, 2010, thirty-six days from now. Discovery is already stacked on the launchpad—if all goes as planned, we’ll get to see it up close later today.

  As we drive toward the VAB, Omar tells me more about his job. He is one of the thousands of people who work at the Cape doing various things that need to be done in order to get spaceships off the ground—in his case, making sure that only authorized people get access to Discovery at the various points along its work flow and making sure that any object that enters the crew cabin comes out again. His official title is orbiter integrity clerk. Delightfully, part of his job involves watching for birds to make sure they don’t damage the vehicle on the launchpad (this responsibility was added in the nineties after woodpeckers damaged an external tank to such an extent that it had to be rolled back to the VAB for repairs). Omar loves what he does—I know this already from the cumulative impression of his Facebook postings—and he takes pride in what his employer does, more than anyone else I know. In another context, a person with his job description might be called a security guard, but I would not call Omar that. Partly because in his job the stakes are so high—a single errant screw could endanger the mission, the spacecraft, and the astronauts. But also because Omar’s pride in his work here, like that of every single person I have ever met at the Cape, makes the job title itself almost irrelevant. Omar works on the space shuttle. Specifically, he works on Discovery, and though he is modest and unassuming by nature, I have heard him refer to Discovery in conversation as his, as in, with reference to a specific mission, “that was my bird.”

  Now Discovery has only one mission left to go. This upcoming flight was supposed to be the final mission for the shuttle, but then NASA announced one more would follow, on Endeavour. Now rumor has it they might add one more, which, if it happens, will be on Atlantis. I ask Omar as we drive up Kennedy Parkway whether this adding-on will continue, whether NASA can tack on one more mission, then one more mission, indefinitely.

  “I don’t think so,” Omar says. “The site in Louisiana that makes the external tanks delivered the last one, and now they’re shutting the facility down. If NASA wanted to contract for more, they’d have to start it up again.”

  “Oh,” I say, disappointed. “I’d hoped they might be able to keep extending it.”

  “I mean, that’s just what I’ve heard,” Omar clarifies. “I don’t know that for sure.” As I get to know Omar, I will continue to be impressed by his insistence on differentiating what he knows to be true from claims based on unofficial sources, rumor, or his own extremely educated guesses. He is an epistemological purist, an orbiter integrity clerk of truth.

  “It seems like a waste to retire the shuttles when they still have life in them,” I say experimentally. I have never known Omar to make a negative comment about NASA, and I’m wondering whether he’ll open up a bit more in person.

  Omar nods, but doesn’t elaborate. He knows he will almost certainly be laid off after Discovery’s retirement in a few months. Yet for now, he’s always at work. For now, the Kennedy Space Center is bustling, as it has been for forty-eight years, with the effort to prepare spaceships for multiple missions simultaneously.

  There will be two or at most three more launches, and then all this will be over. I think about my favorite books about spaceflight, those writers who faced the task of rendering an exciting, brand-new, seemingly limitless future. They struggled to define what these achievements were going to mean, where all this innovation was going to lead us. And where exactly has it led? Even with the knowledge I’ve spent the last ten years gaining, I realize I still don’t know. If Mailer and Wolfe and Fallaci were here, what would they say? The more I think about it, the more clearly I can imagine them—Mailer cussing and snarling at everything, Wolfe sweating through his trademark white suit, Fallaci bristling at all the no-smoking signs. All of them disgusted that the future they worked so hard to understand and to put on the page has been canceled.

  What would it mean to go to the last launch and write about it the way Mailer wrote about the launch of Apollo 11? To spend time with the people involved and write about them the way Fallaci did? The last launch of the space shuttle would unfold with all the glory and boredom and strangeness of Apollo 11, would provide an ending to the story. I think about how time-consuming and expensive it would be to try to do this—after all, fewer than half of shuttle missions launch on the first attempt; some have taken as many as seven attempts (separated by days or weeks or months) to get off the ground. A person could travel to Florida five or six separate times and never manage to catch a launch at all. Some space fans have suffered similar bad luck.

  In humid weather, clouds sometimes gather within the unprecedented single-story height of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Technicians feel raindrops, then look up from their work assembling the spacecraft to find that it’s raining lightly, the far-off ceiling windows obscured by indoor rain clouds.

  Omar has never seen this himself, he tells me when I ask, but he has heard that it happens. He pulls into the enormous parking lot, and we pass the point where the tour buses always stop, where I’ve stood twice to try to get the VAB into my camera’s frame. It gives me a thrill to ride right past that point and keep going, all the way up to the gate surrounding the building. We pile out and approach the VAB. I soon give up trying to tip my head back to take it in, as doing so impedes my ability to walk in a straight line. The entrance is like that of any large industrial building—heavy rolling door, polished concrete floor, safety signs posted on either side. BICYCLES PROHIBITED IN VAB. HAVE A SAFE DAY. But then I step into the interior, which is not like any other space in the world. I hold my breath while I follow Omar across the threshold and look up.

  The sweeping vertical expanses made possible by flying buttresses in the twelfth century were meant to draw the eye up, and thus the spirit—the architecture was meant to stir the emotions and connect visitors with God. I look up. Other visitors, other NASA families, stream in on either side of me while I stand and gape. The space comes into focus in all its unphotographable enormousness. I have studied many images of the VAB, but I have never before quite grasped the way it all fits together, the way the four high bays mark four corners divided by the transfer aisle through the center of the building. Like all cathedrals, the Vehicle Assembly Building is laid out like a cross.

  I can recite all the tour guides’ facts about the VAB: Each of its four doors opens wide enough to take in the United Nations building and tall enough to take in most skyscrapers. Its volume is three-and-a-half times that of the Empire State Building. Its roof is big enough to contain more than six football fields.

  But I couldn’t ever have pictured quite how big it really is. Looking up, I see floor after floor of girders with their orderly rows of little white work lights twinkling. I peer into one of the four high bays in which the rockets are stacked. The ceiling windows whirl at a dizzying height that seems higher than the zenith of the sky itself. The human beings at the other end of the building disappear, too small to make out, even though we are all in the same room. In his book about Apollo 11, Norman Mailer wrote that the Vehicle Assembly Building may be the ugliest building in the world from the outside, but that from the inside it was a candidate for the most beautiful. I can finally see what he means.

  This is where spaceships are assembled, every rocket to the moon, every space shuttle. I feel the enormity of the work that has been done here, the days and weeks and years of work, birthdays missed, children grown up, the endless and delicate work of assembling machines for going to space. I feel tears form in my eyes. I have been to Notre Dame and the Supr
eme Court and the Grand Canyon and Fallingwater and other sites imbued with a special grandeur, an urgent frisson of importance and here-ness, but none of them has made me cry. I look around at the other Family Day visitors chatting, wandering, pointing things out to each other in normal tones. None of them are weeping. I dry my eyes, hoping none of my companions have seen. Most people are milling through, in one door and out the other. I try not to judge them too harshly. To be fair, just to walk from one end of the building to the other does take a significant amount of time.

  I feel Omar materialize at my shoulder.

  “What do you think?” he asks. I’m surprised by the hopeful tone in his voice, the expression on his face when I turn to meet his eyes. He is actually concerned that I might not be having a good time.

  “It’s stunning,” I tell him. “I’m stunned.” He laughs before moving toward the mobile launch platform in one of the high bays. He tells me how the space shuttle launch vehicle is stacked vertically on the MLP before the crawler transporter lifts the whole business to move it slowly out to the launchpad. If Omar noticed I had tears in my eyes, he does an admirable job of not letting on. My father wanders over, and Omar explains more about how the platform works. My father snaps a picture of it.

  The first segment of the first Saturn V reached the Vehicle Assembly Building in August 1966, and for the first time workers used the VAB’s full height to stack the vehicle’s stages one atop the other. I have a photo of the crew capsule being lowered onto the Saturn second stage, the Vehicle Assembly Building’s cranes being put to use for the first time. Workers, ridiculously tiny, stand upon the enormous cylinder of the second-stage rocket, heedless of the massive spacecraft dangling above their heads. I would love to have seen the VAB then, when it was new and first being put to its intended, and still fantastical, use. It took a full year to stack that first Apollo/Saturn. When the assembled vehicle was finally complete, the access doors opened almost the full height of the building, and Apollo 4 rolled majestically out, its bright black-and-white paint job visible for miles, as the spaceworkers who had built it sat on picnic blankets with their families and applauded.

  Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.

  We pile back into Omar’s SUV and ride around to the other sites that are open to visitors. We visit the Orbiter Processing Facility, where the space shuttles are prepared horizontally before being rolled over to the VAB for stacking. We visit the launchpad where Discovery is poised nose up and ready to go. We see the Landing Facility and the mate/demate device, a ten-story contraption for lifting an orbiter onto and off of the 747 that ferries it back from California when it has to land there. We visit the Launch Control building, where on one wall of the seventies-style lobby are hung the mission patches of every human spaceflight that has ever been launched from here, 149 to date. Beneath each mission patch is a small plaque showing the launch and landing dates. Two of them—Challenger’s STS-51L and Columbia’s STS-107—are missing landing dates, because both of these missions ended in disasters that destroyed the orbiters and killed their crews. The blank spaces on the wall where those landing dates should have been are discolored from the touch of people’s hands. This would be unremarkable if this place were a tourist attraction, or regularly open to the public. But with the rare exception of Family Days, this building is open only to people who work here. In other words, it’s launch controllers, managers, and engineers who have been touching these empty spaces with their hands, on their way to and from doing their jobs.

  After getting back on the road, we pass the Press Site, an agglomeration of buildings and decks centered around a large open field facing a body of water known as the Turn Basin, and beyond that, the launchpads. At the edge of the grassy field stands the huge countdown clock, the one you’ve seen in photos and news footage of launches, alongside an enormous flagpole flying an American flag. The buildings that belong to various news outlets have logos painted on them. I can make out only the ones closest to the road: CBS (whose Walter Cronkite narrated the iconic news coverage of the moon landings) and Florida Today. I crane my neck to see as much of the Press Site as I can, feeling a surprising jealousy of the people I see moving in and out of buildings there. They get access to people and places I can’t, even as Omar’s guest.

  Near the Orbiter Processing Facility, Omar points out a gantry being constructed for Constellation, the program meant to follow the shuttle’s retirement. President George W. Bush had announced Constellation in 2004 with great fanfare—it is designed to be more modular and flexible than the shuttle program, allowing different boosters and different crew or cargo configurations for missions of varying lengths. The plan is to get astronauts and payloads into low Earth orbit again within ten years and, eventually, on to the moon, asteroids, and Mars.

  But even at the time of the announcement, few people believed a second wave of moon landings could actually take place on anything resembling the schedule Bush described, a schedule that required future Congresses to increase NASA’s budget precipitously. Like many ambitious projects, it’s set up such that a future president and Congress will be forced to either foot the bulk of the cost or else kill the program, a time-honored way for politicians to claim credit for a bold move without having to pick up the tab. To no one’s surprise, President Obama announced in February 2010 that he planned to cancel Constellation and by doing so earned the ire of many NASA employees and spaceflight enthusiasts. That summer Congress voted to approve Obama’s NASA Authorization Act, a plan to increase NASA’s finding by $6 billion over five years, a continued commitment to support development of commercial capabilities in low Earth orbit, and a more streamlined long-range space vehicle, which would come to be called the Space Launch System. Constellation contracts would remain in place until Congress voted to overturn the previous mandate, leaving workers at the Cape to continue work that was almost sure to be undone sometime in the future. Obama’s bill also allowed for one more launch to be added, STS-135, on Atlantis, though this mission had yet to be funded and so was not certain to fly.

  We drive to the Visitor Complex, an independently funded tourist attraction adjacent to the space center, and browse through the gift shop. There, while my father and Judy pick out space-themed gifts for my son, Omar and I stand shoulder to shoulder for a long time in the book department. He shows me the ones he likes (he’s read most of the books here), and I tell him about the ones I’ve read. He shows me the big-ticket items in the glass cases that he covets: detailed metal models of all five orbiters, signed glossy photographs of Apollo astronauts, space-flown medallions in jewel boxes.

  “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 Tshirts 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.