“What’s that?” she asks suspiciously.
“They’re held at convention centers and such. They charge admission, and all of the astronauts set their own fees for autographs and memorabilia and what have you.”
“You mean you charge money?” the woman asks, recoiling. I’m a single parent. I can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars to go to these places and get these signatures.”
Buzz shrugs. “We all get a lot of requests for autographs,” he explains. “Some of us are reaching a point where we would think about saying no to everyone, and this is a way where we can do it where it’s a little more fair.”
“I don’t see how it’s fair,” the woman answers as she takes her autograph book back from Buzz. I don’t know who else has signed it, but it’s now worth at least $500.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Buzz says evenly. He may be sincere or completely sarcastic. He may be trying to get rid of her. This puts her over the edge, and she raises a single finger to lecture Buzz and me.
“I’m an American citizen,” she says firmly. “I helped pay for the moon landings. I helped pay for your trip to the moon. Now I want the autographs of the astronauts I paid to send, and you’re telling me I can’t get them unless I pay them money?”
“Neil Armstrong won’t do it at all,” I put in. “He doesn’t make public appearances anymore.” She gives me a look of hatred before turning her attention to Buzz again.
Buzz apologizes noncommittally, and she wanders away. It’s an interesting question, actually. Surely we who help pay for spaceflight have a right to the knowledge and images that come out of those missions. But how much access to these actual human beings have our taxes bought us? For how many years, how many decades afterward do they owe us their autographs and their answers to the question, yet again, how it felt to walk on the moon?
Over the course of the afternoon, as the line slowly wanders its way through the courtyard, I hear Buzz Aldrin asked dozens of times what it felt like to walk on the moon. He does not have a pat prepared answer—he tries to answer sincerely each time he is asked, and the answer takes on different nuances each time.
We were really just focused on staying alive, he says to some people.
We had a lot of work to do so we didn’t really have time to reflect, he says to others.
The feeling of one-sixth gravity was a lot of fun but also challenging to get used to, so we really had to concentrate on doing our jobs and not falling on our faces.
When we got back, we sort of felt we’d missed out on the whole thing.
When Buzz Aldrin expresses frustration at not being able to describe his impressions of space as well as a writer might, his statement is, on one level, merely a polite thing to say when he is excusing himself from answering a tough question for the millionth time. But taken literally, it means something quite startling. It means that Buzz Aldrin envies Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and Oriana Fallaci, that—even more ludicrous—he envies me. Yet the thing we space writers have in common is the extent to which we admire and envy Buzz his experience of walking on the moon. We envy him so much that at times it’s hard for us to see Buzz at all, to see his accomplishment as something he did, a risk he took gambling against his own death, rather than simply as something we will never get to do.
Leading up to our day together, I’d tried to imagine what Buzz Aldrin would say about the retirement of the space shuttle. I anticipated that someone who has risked his life to walk on the surface of the moon probably thinks that the space shuttle, which can only reach low Earth orbit, has been a frustrating waste of energy and maybe a step in the wrong direction. But I would not have predicted that a conservative eighty-year-old Korean War veteran would support government funding for a massive science project as a general principle, or even less that he would support President Obama’s decision to cancel the Constellation project the following year, calling this “Obama’s JFK moment.”
It’s hard to reach conclusions about my day with Buzz Aldrin. One unavoidable fact: he is a pro at all this. Meeting hundreds of people who are in awe of him, people who ask the same questions over and over. The day I spent with him was an honor but also an exhausting ordeal—speaking to a packed auditorium, meeting hundreds of people, including several weepy and/or emotionally disturbed space enthusiasts. For Buzz and Lois, the event in Nashville was bracketed by two flights and followed by another event that same evening in another city. By the end of our day together, I was in need of a strong drink and a lie-down with a cold washcloth over my eyes, but Buzz was still going strong. He has had days like this nearly every day since he came back from the moon forty years ago. One can forgive astronauts like Neil Armstrong who found they simply could not take it and tried to disappear from the public eye. For his part, Buzz Aldrin is completely accustomed to being Buzz Aldrin and the fawning energy that generates itself around him, the way people want to have their pictures taken with him, the way they hold on to his hand a little too long.
When Buzz and I are saying our good-byes, I decide to blurt out my big question. “I have to ask you,” I stammer, “what do you think of the end of the space shuttle?”
Buzz shrugs.
“It’s too bad,” he says thoughtfully. “It’s all still perfectly good hardware, and we’ve got the facilities and the people who know how to keep it flying. We should have something newer by now, but we should be building on what we already have, not starting over.”
Buzz kisses my cheek before bundling Lois back into the limo with a daredevil’s wave.
In the end, Buzz Aldrin can’t tell me what to think. It’s hard for anyone to say, on this particular October day in Nashville, Tennessee, when seven hundred miles south of us Atlantis is stacked on the launchpad for the 129th space shuttle flight, what it means for American spaceflight to be winding itself down. Only when an era ends do you get to figure out what it has meant. Buzz Aldrin is a human being who personally planted an American flag on the surface of the moon. He doesn’t care if the shuttle is retired now or a few years from now. He knows, better than most of us, that the space shuttle is late-seventies technology. He had hoped to see an American go to Mars and has dedicated much of his post-Apollo life toward that goal. But he knows as well as I do that after the last shuttle launches, NASA won’t send up another crewed spaceship of its own until after he is gone from this earth.
The world will hardly admit of an excuse for a man leaving a Coast unexplored he has once discover’d, if dangers are his excuse he is than charged with Timorousness and want of Perseverance and at once pronounced the unfitest man in the world to be employ’d as a discoverer; if on the other hand he boldly incounters all the dangers and obstacles he meets and is unfortunate enough not to succeed he is than changed with Temerity and want of conduct. The former of these aspersins cannot with Justice be laid to my charge and if I am fortunate enough to surmount all the dangers we may meet the latter will never be brought in question.
—Journals of Captain James Cook, 1770
CHAPTER 3. Goodbye, Discovery
STS-133: February 24, 2011
I have in my phone a picture of the space shuttle Discovery stacked on the launchpad for its last flight. I snapped the picture out the window of Omar’s car as we drove by at a crawl on Family Day. There is no visual evidence of the circumstances under which the picture was taken—I was careful to keep the edges of the car window out of the frame—but I still feel that sense of motion when I look at it.
A few weeks after Family Day, my son was looking through my phone and, in that uncanny way small children have of intuiting technology, he found the photo of Discovery and reset it as the phone’s wallpaper, replacing a picture of himself. He showed me, pleased with his work.
“Face shuttle,” he lisped.
“That’s right,” I agreed. It occurred to me to wonder, not for the first time, whether he understands the difference between the shuttle and imaginary space vehicles like the Millennium Falcon. Because there a
re models and images of space shuttles all over his house, and he has only flown on planes a couple of times, space travel seems to him much more common than air travel. He has a charming habit of asking out-of-town visitors whether they traveled here on the space shuttle.
I got distracted before I had the chance to change the picture back; the next time I went to use my phone, I was surprised and pleased to see Discovery gleaming there. As the memory of that day quickly receded behind the pressures of the semester, it was nice to be reminded that I had been there, that I was going back for the last launch. In the picture, the Rotating Servicing Structure has been pulled back, presumably so the Family Day visitors could see the whole spaceship. Discovery’s white back is to us in the picture, its wings’ full spread visible. Behind it, the orange external tank peeks up over its shoulder. On either side of the tank, the white solid rockets stand like sentinels. One of the rockets is partially obscured by the arm extending from the gantry to Discovery’s hatch, the walkway the astronauts will cross to reach the crew cabin a few hours before launch. I can make out the path of tan gravel used by the crawler transporter and the complicated metal gantries that surround the shuttle stack. A lightning rod balances upon the highest point of the launch tower. Central Florida is prone to lightning, and many spacecraft have attracted strikes during their time waiting on the pad or, more frighteningly, during launch.
In the foreground of the picture squats a low guard building, a few cars and trucks belonging to the employees working the pad that day. A flagpole flies both the American flag and the shuttle flag that will later be hung in the Vehicle Assembly Building as a souvenir of this launch. The elaborate fencing and gates, blocked off with cones that day. Behind it all, the weird Cape Canaveral sky, the clouds pressing down on the launchpad in a way that’s almost menacing.
The image remained as my phone’s wallpaper. It’s there still as I write this, as Discovery is gathering its first layer of cobwebs at the Air and Space Museum. In the long delays leading up to the launch, every time I looked at my phone, I was reminded that Discovery still stood poised on that launchpad, just as in this picture, still stacked and ready to go.
First it was a problem in the orbital maneuvering system, the thrusters that allow the space shuttle to maneuver itself while in orbit. An OMS pod was leaking helium and nitrogen. Launch date was moved one day to November 2, 2010.
Then a slip to allow more time to refuel the helium tank. Launch date No Earlier Than November 3, 2010.
Then another scrub, after fueling had already begun, due to problems with a controller on the center main engine. Launch date NET November 4, 2010.
Then a scrub due to predictions of bad weather later in the day. Launch date NET November 5, 2010.
Then a scrub due to a hydrogen leak discovered during tanking. In addition to the leak, inspectors found a crack in the foam insulation on the external tank. This crack especially captured the attention of engineers and managers because it had been a chunk of foam falling from the external tank that had doomed Columbia. Fixing the shuttle while it is assembled and stacked vertically on the launchpad is difficult and time-consuming. Launch date NET November 30, 2010.
Then another slip to allow more time for repairs to the external tank. Launch date NET December 3, 2010.
Then another slip to allow more time to determine the likelihood of additional cracks in the external tank during launch. NET December 17, 2010.
Then another slip to make more time to validate repairs to the external tank. NET February 3, 2011.
Then another slip because engineers needed even more time to assess the cracks that were still forming, inexplicably, on the tank. The same day that slip was announced, US Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot, along with eighteen other people, at a public appearance in Tucson, Arizona. The incident caused a national uproar and a renewed debate over gun control, but for space fans the shooting had an additional meaning. Giffords is married to astronaut Mark Kelly, who was slated to command the next mission after Discovery’s—Endeavour’s last—less than three months away. Would he leave his wife in critical or uncertain condition to go to space? Or would he back out of the last mission he could ever hope to fly, leaving the end of the shuttle program in chaos, as a new commander would barely have time to train? Launch date NET February 24, 2011.
A week after Gabrielle Giffords was shot, an astronaut on the Discovery mission, Tim Kopra, fell off his bicycle and broke his hip. With the target launch date now less than six weeks away, it wasn’t clear whether the launch would have to be postponed. Let us take a moment to pity Tim Kopra: he trained for this mission for over a year, suited up for multiple scrubbed launch attempts, and then once it seemed all the problems for his launch had been solved, he injured himself in a leisure activity and lost his chance to fly on the shuttle ever again. Media and space fans waited anxiously to learn whether Mark Kelly would be replaced as well.
In late January, another mission was added to the manifest. A contingency mission, to be launched only if the crew of Endeavour was in need of rescue, became an official mission, STS-135, on Atlantis, with a target launch date of June 28, 2011. This was something of an audacious move on the part of NASA, since STS-135 still hadn’t been funded. A few weeks later, NASA managers announced that STS-135 would fly regardless of the funding situation in Congress. Omar and I communicated about these developments via e-mail; I told him I appreciated NASA’s boldness in planning for an unfunded launch and suggested they should take this approach more often.
So now we knew for certain what the last space shuttle launches would be: first Discovery, if the kinks could finally be worked out; then Endeavour in the spring, and Atlantis would be the very last, in the summer. In photographs, the crew of Atlantis all looked slightly bewildered that they were being pressed into service as the Last Crew, representatives and spokespeople for the entire shuttle program.
I texted Omar:
How likely do you think it is the problem w Discovery is really fixed?
Hard to say, Omar texted back. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.
After thanking him, I went to turn off my phone, but stopped to look at the image of Discovery gleaming there on the glass screen. Discovery looked enormous and permanent, like it wasn’t going anywhere. I found it hard to believe that Omar and I were discussing plans for this thing to leave the ground. The history of spaceflight teaches us that the more serious the cause of a shuttle delay, the less accurate the first guesses as to how long it might take to fix it. Omar and I both knew the No Later Than date of February 24 was a guess.
Yet as weeks went by, February 24 stayed on the manifest. I could, if I got lucky, witness in person the last launches of each of the three orbiters. Of course, it was also possible I could travel to Florida many times only to witness many scrubs and never see a launch at all.
I-75 starts at the Canadian border in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and traces a path south through the lengths of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, all the way to Miami. From my house in Knoxville, Tennessee, it’s only fifteen miles to get to I-75; then after a full day of driving and an exit near Orlando, it’s only a couple of hours to cut across the middle of Florida to the eastern shore.
It’s boring to describe one’s interstate route, or any driving directions. But I’ve never given as much thought to any interstate as I have given to I-75 in recent weeks. I will drive this route alone, down and back, for each launch attempt I go to. The space shuttle’s likelihood of getting off the ground in any one attempt, though it’s gotten better over the years, is still not a very good gamble. With the shuttle’s millions of delicate and critical moving parts and Florida’s volatile climate, the possibility of delays remains high. I know I will spend a great deal of time on I-75 over the coming months.
When I first thought to write about the end of shuttle, I had neglected to consider that three of the things I have avoided most in my life are driving long distances alone, t
alking to people I don’t know, and getting up early in the morning. I have ruled out entire careers because they interfere with these aversions. So I-75 looms large in my imagination in the weeks, then days, before the last launch of Discovery. Twelve hours is a long drive. But I’ve decided to go.
For a while there, the target dates had been falling during my university’s winter break, which would have worked nicely in terms of my teaching schedule, but the additional slips have placed the February attempt squarely in the middle of my semester. A fellow professor is covering one class for me today, and one of my graduate students is covering the other. My husband, Chris, has had to plan his week around being a single father. With each slip, he has listened patiently when I gave him the new No Earlier Than date, then answered with a nod and a “Just keep me updated.” Once I leave for Florida, I can’t say for sure when I’ll be back. If the February 24 attempt slips till Friday, I’ll stay till Friday; if it slips to Saturday, I’ll stay till then.
So I pack some warm-weather clothes and a few supplies into the back of my car, then hit the road after dropping my son off at preschool. The sun is shining as I pull onto the freeway and join traffic. I’m not used to interstate driving, and I feel like I’m going too fast even before I get up to the speed of the other cars on the road. My little car feels too light, insubstantial, its engine whining at the frequency of a mosquito. I think of the tires that have to grip the road, of the brake lines that have to transmit the signals from my nervous foot to the brake, of the pistons and fuel lines, steering fluid and god knows what else—I have no idea how cars work. All of it Criticality 1, in the language of NASA. All the worn pieces, nicked and abraded and fatigued, that are checked and fixed before each shuttle launch.
One can only stay panicked so long, though, especially in as boring a situation as long-distance driving. And, I discover, I-75 is a generous and forgiving road. It offers few major interchanges, no surprise exit-only lanes, very little construction work, and light traffic. I find myself settling into the task of driving enough to start letting my mind wander. I have loaded some long audiobooks onto my phone, and I will listen to them at some point, but for now it’s pleasant to just drive. Georgia goes on and on at some length, with the appalling traffic of Atlanta right in the middle of it, and I don’t mind that much either. I-75 is studded with many gas stations and Waffle Houses and even Starbucks and Paneras in the more suburban stretches. Roadside vendors sell peanuts and peaches. A billboard in Georgia reads WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?—a succinct expression of a faddish right-wing skepticism about the president’s birthplace. I stop for dinner at Cracker Barrel somewhere past Moultrie and watch the stars come out near Valdosta. Through to north Florida and on into central Florida, where I cut over to Orlando.
Leaving Orbit Page 8