Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  In a song that keeps coming on the pop stations, a woman sings plaintively, “Baby, you’re a firework.” Yesterday I was reading a book about the early developments of rocket science, and it had included the observation that, from an engineering standpoint, there are no real differences between rockets, fireworks, and bombs. Norman Mailer’s description of the launch of Apollo 11 compares the light of launch to “the most beautiful of fireworks.” The “firework” song is not about rockets or bombs but, I suppose, about letting one’s inner light shine, a cliche of teen anthems. Still, I sing along.

  On the morning of February 24, 2011, I wake up in a motel near the Orlando airport, pack up what I’ll need for the day, and drive an hour to the coast. I would have liked to stay closer to Cape Canaveral, but I waited to make my travel plans until the last minute, and this is all that was available. Each launch creates a huge surge in tourism, even more so now that these launches are to be the last. My hotel room, I discovered when I arrived late the night before, is saturated with a swampy mildew smell that we don’t have in climates farther north. As on my last visit, I’m struck with the strangeness of the terrain here. Palm trees, giant bugs, a long, low horizon, and huge sky a hot blue. At points in my hour’s journey, I’m unsure which landmass I’m on, whether the mainland or Merritt Island or Cape Canaveral—or even if I’m on one at all, given that some of the causeways were constructed by bulldozers. The geography itself eludes me—I have only a rough outline in my mind. Going west to east: there’s the coast of the mainland, with the town of Titusville to the north and Cocoa to the south; then there’s the Indian River (which is actually an estuary); then Merritt Island (which is actually, I think, a peninsula) with the Space Center on the north half and the town of Merritt Island on the south; then the Banana River (which is actually a lagoon); then the headland we call Cape Canaveral (though we also call this whole area Cape Canaveral) and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station that sits at the point of that cape, and the barrier island that extends southward, which includes the (confusingly named) town of Cape Canaveral, and south of that Cocoa Beach (not to be confused with the town of Cocoa, of course, back on the mainland); then the Atlantic Ocean.

  Each of these places has a different look and feel to it, a different history and a different idea of itself. At certain moments I think to ask Omar what it’s like to have grown up on such an uncertain landscape, but I can never quite think how to phrase the question.

  I reach the 528 causeway where it spans the Banana River. Hundreds of people drive across this causeway, this unbeautiful strip of land, every day to get from Merritt Island to Cocoa Beach and back, but today is one of the few days of the year when this scrubby margin of sand and grass becomes precious territory. The RV people have been camped here for days, staking their claims, and when I pull up, I find clumps of cars already parked, families setting up as if for a day at the beach. It’s even busier than I had anticipated, almost completely packed, though the launch is still nearly nine hours away.

  I find one of the last spots with an unobstructed view on the north side of the causeway. I’ve packed a cooler with food and cold drinks, books to read, student work to grade, a transistor radio, sunscreen, bug repellent, and emergency supplies in case I’m stuck in traffic for an extended period of time after the launch. By the time I set up my lawn chair and settle in, the astronauts are suiting up and the tanking of cryogenic gases has begun—I watch all this streaming live on the NASA app on my phone. All around me, couples and families are setting up their lawn chairs, talking and playing, eating sandwiches, smearing sunscreen on each other, listening to their radios, throwing Frisbees, going for walks. Most of all, people are looking out, either with binoculars or with the naked eye, toward where Discovery stands on pad 39A. And all of them are listening to the NASA announcer on their radios and watching the NASA app on their phones, shielding their screens with one hand against the glare of the white Florida sun.

  Discovery stands upright on the horizon, fourteen miles north of us across the Banana River. It looks about the size of a paper clip. Fourteen miles sounds far, but this spot is one of the very best vantage points for viewing a launch—that is, for people who don’t have access to NASA grounds. And the only people who have access are employees (including Omar and his father) and credentialed media. NASA gives credentials only to journalists who can prove they are representing an established media outlet or who can show a contract with an established publisher. When I was working on my novel, it struck me as tragic that this policy excluded me altogether in a catch-22—I couldn’t get a contract with a publisher until I had written my book, and I felt I couldn’t write my book properly without first getting access to the Kennedy Space Center. (Though I did have to admit, especially after the terrorist attacks of 2001, that a policy allowing someone like me unfettered access to a secure government installation would be in effect a policy without security at all, since any lunatic could claim to be “working on a novel.”) So I paid for a ticket to ride the tourist bus, and I drove to a causeway in the middle of the night to watch the launch of STS-102, Discovery, a beautiful night launch in unseasonably cold weather that lit up the sky for miles around. I had to write the parts of my novel that took place on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center using films, pictures, guesswork, and sheer fabrication—all the more reason to be terrified by that first e-mail from Omar, an eyewitness to my omissions and errors.

  At any rate, my lack of press credentials today is a mixed fate. Although part of me wants access to the NASA viewing site from which Norman Mailer watched the launch of Apollo 11, I also want to see what it’s like to watch a launch with other regular space fans, with people who have taken time off work to travel out here to see this event because they care about it, not because this is their job.

  First-time visitors tend to imagine sitting at the base of the stack and feeling the heat of ignition on their faces, but this a misunderstanding caused by the footage we’ve all seen in movies. Those sequences are shot using remote cameras; any living thing that close to the launchpad would be killed instantly. Even the emergency rescue teams wait out the launch from bunkers three miles away. An explosion on the launchpad, always a risk with tons of rocket fuel coursing through many miles of fuel lines, would destroy everything in sight.

  I check my phone: T minus eight hours and counting. Because I’ve been to a launch before, I know that spaceflight is all about waiting. Five hours, eight hours, twelve hours. First-timers are often confused, then annoyed, then stupefied by this waiting. You can spot them the minute they pile out of their cars too quickly, with too much bounce, their adrenaline high as they scan the horizon for the launch gantry and point and shout, “There it is!”

  Relax. There it will remain, until no earlier than 4:48 p.m., or maybe until tomorrow, or maybe until May. Space fans need to learn to pace themselves. Best not to use up all of your enthusiasm too soon. If there’s a scrub you’ll feel disgusted and vaguely humiliated; you will mistakenly view the scrub as a failure of NASA’s, and this will mark you as an outsider more than anything else. Insiders know that scrubs are part of spaceflight.

  While I wait, I read from Of a Fire on the Moon. Norman Mailer gripes about being packed into buses with the other journalists, all of them sweating through their shirts and ties, smoking and cursing the brutal Florida heat. I have the luxury of driving my own air-conditioned car; instead of a shirt and tie I wear a sundress, a beach hat, and enormous sunglasses that I hope make me look like Joan Didion.

  When Norman Mailer gets off the bus at the Press Site, he recounts his impressions (in the third person) of feeling slightly disconnected from the events happening so near yet so far away. He says that people had built up for him how unforgettable the launch experience would be, that he had been promised that the ground would shake. But he couldn’t match his lived experience with this expectation. “He had no sense at all of three psyches full of awareness on the edge of the horizon. Just that gray stick out th
ere.” I see it too: only with binoculars does that gray stick come into focus as black-and-white Discovery against its orange external tank, flanked by white solid rocket boosters. The astronauts’ “psyches full of awareness” (six, in this case) are as hard to imagine today as they were in 1969. The idea of that gray stick lifting itself into the sky is still as hard to imagine as it was then, the fact of people on it just as wondrous.

  Discovery first flew in 1984, the third orbiter to join the fleet. It was named for one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook. Space shuttle Discovery is the most-flown orbiter; today will be its thirty-ninth and final launch. By the end of this mission, it will have flown a total of 365 days in space, making it the most well traveled spacecraft in history. Discovery was the first orbiter to carry a Russian cosmonaut and the first to visit the Russian space station Mir. On that flight, in 1995, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot an American spacecraft. Discovery flew twelve of the thirty-eight missions to assemble the International Space Station, and it was responsible for deploying the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. This was perhaps the most far reaching accomplishment of the shuttle program, as Hubble has been called the most important telescope in history and one of the most significant scientific instruments ever invented. It has allowed astronomers to determine the age of the universe, postulate how galaxies form, and confirm the existence of dark energy, among many other discoveries. Astronomers and astrophysicists, when they are asked about the significance of Hubble, will simply say that it has rewritten the astronomy books. In the retirement process, Discovery will be the “vehicle of record,” being kept as intact as possible for future study.

  Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter after the loss of Challenger and then again after the loss of Columbia. To me, this gives it a certain feeling of bravery and hope. Don’t worry, Discovery seemed to tell us by gamely rolling her snow-white self out to the launchpad. Don’t worry, we can still dream of space. We can still leave the earth. And then she did.

  Around me, cars and trucks cruise up and down the causeway, looking for places to wedge themselves in. T minus five hours and counting. We all watch our phones and wait. It’s been my observation that each launch offers a different experience of waiting, different shades of waiting, flavors of waiting, moods of waiting. Buddhists might appreciate the way each launch wait brings about in spectators a different quality of boredom, then acceptance, then calm, then something like a childlike openness, an ability to take in the sight we are about to see with minds wiped clear of desire, warped of time.

  All along the causeway, those of us who got here earlier take walks and greet our fellow space fans. I’m reminded of Jules Verne’s description of the people who showed up in Florida to see the first space launch in his 1865 novel. He imagined a tent city of space enthusiasts from all over the world, speaking different languages and “mingled together in terms of absolute equality.” He describes a sense of anticipation that includes a hint of something like fear—“a dull, noiseless agitation, such as precedes great catastrophes.” Verne got a few things wrong in his invention of what spaceflight would be like, but this is one of the many details he got right.

  I’ve experienced the specific enthusiasm of space people before, at my other visits to the Kennedy Space Center and especially at the launch I saw in 2001; I saw more of them at Buzz Aldrin’s book event in Nashville. Among the people I met on those occasions were some serious space fanatics, people for whom space is the main thing in their lives—the interest they read about, talk about, spend eBay money on, and chat with other people over the Internet about. Some of these people work in vaguely aerospace-related fields, but for more of them this has nothing to do with their jobs. They just love space, and for these people the Kennedy Space Center is something of a mecca. I am not really one of the space people, as much as my friends might mistake me for one of them. I’ve read a hundred books about spaceflight and traveled here to see a launch in person, but I did so as research for a book I was writing. I can’t imagine putting this much energy into it just for its own sake.

  When the space people come in contact with each other, which they do in great numbers on launch days like today, they have a sort of code for interacting. They list the previous launches they have seen, share thoughts on controversial subjects within the community (Did Gus Grissom really screw up and blow the hatch early on the Liberty Bell 7 in 1961, or did it go off by itself as he claimed? Will any of the private aerospace companies be able to get astronauts into space safely, and if so which one[s]? Who was the most badass moonwalker? And so on). They exchange reviews of recent space books, trade the names of aging astronauts whose hands they have shaken. They wear Tshirts and caps and buttons and pins and patches and memorabilia from other launches. I’d almost forgotten about these people, how obsessed and knowledgeable and friendly they are. At a time when it seems all but self-evident that shuttle is ending because the general public no longer cares about spaceflight, these people controvert that broad claim with every molecule of their being. They care enough for all of us, and they are heartbroken by our leaders’ shortsightedness.

  The car nearest mine has license plates from Ohio. A friendly couple in their early fifties, just starting to gray, who drove two days to see their first launch before it was too late. The husband wears wraparound sunglasses and a T-shirt that says LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF THOSE WHO THREATEN IT on the back. The wife is carefully made up and coiffed, but she wears baggy capris and sensible shoes, a popular look for women at shuttle launches. After locating the launchpad through his binoculars with my help, the husband tells me that we are all going to be forced to live under sharia law before too long, a conclusion based on “the way things are going in England.” (When pressed, he reveals that his main piece of evidence for England’s inevitable transition to Islamic theocracy is the fact that Mohammed is the most popular name for newborn boys in London.)

  “Do you know why Obama killed the shuttle program?” he asks me, as his wife joins us to offer everyone Combos. “The answer may surprise you.”

  “Um, I don’t think Obama really killed the shuttle program,” I reply vaguely, helping myself to some Combos. “That decision was made after the Columbia disaster, in 2003.” I restrain myself from adding the obvious: under Bush.

  “But Obama could have revived it.” The man points his finger at me in a gotcha gesture. He leans toward me in his excitement; I can see myself reflected in his sunglasses. Next to him, his wife fiddles with her iPhone, trying to get NASA TV to come in.

  “Obama’s under orders by the Bilderberg Group.” The man pauses, waiting to see whether I know what the Bilderberg Group is. I do, from reading Jon Ronson’s Them: it’s a group of global leaders and captains of industry that holds mysterious meetings, a cabal popular with conspiracy theorists. “He’s under orders to destroy as many sources of national pride as possible. I mean, think about it. If the American people aren’t proud of their country anymore, the One World Order can take over and we won’t rise up in defense of our country.”

  “Don’t you think it’s more likely that he needs to make a show of austerity during a recession? Extending the space shuttle would look too spendy while people are losing their homes.”

  “Austerity,” the man repeats. He looks at Discovery off on the horizon. “That’s a good point, actually.”

  “I’m going to go get a Coke from my cooler,” I announce. “Would you like anything to drink?”

  “No, thanks. You might actually be right, though, about that austerity thing. I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

  Crouched by my cooler, I scribble down everything the man said. I imagine getting similar interviews with other people, assembling a catalog of the kooks who show up for shuttle launches. Then it occurs to me that I am the only person within sight to have arrived by myself, to have driven twelve hours alone. I may be the only professor here missing classes today, the only mother to have left her child for three days, a
ll to see a space shuttle launch. I feel a moment of shame for wanting to mock the Ohio man. But I write down everything he said anyway.

  Later in the morning, the woman from Ohio with the Combos approaches me. Her hair has flattened a bit in the humidity, and some of her makeup has sweated off. She wants to know whether there is any officially sanctioned place for women to pee.

  “I’ve been wondering about that too,” I admit. All morning we have watched men and boys stroll down an embankment and disappear briefly into some tropical foliage, but it’s not clear what our options are.

  “Let’s shield each other,” she suggests. A third woman joins us, and the three of us set up a makeshift stall using two beach towels in some secluded bushes. The third woman, who is from West Palm Beach, has a bad knee, and so she needs to hold on to my shoulder to keep her balance while she squats. I brace myself against her weight, hold up my end of the beach towel, and look up at some helicopters passing against the clear blue sky. They will monitor the weather up until the moment of launch. Today six Americans are going to space.

  Forty-two years ago, Norman Mailer woke up in a motel in Cocoa Beach, Florida, after two hours of sleep and drove to the Kennedy Space Center. He felt cranky, out of sorts, and hot. Too many other Very Important Persons had turned out for the launch, and Norman Mailer disliked them both individually and as a group. But in the moments right before liftoff, he had an insight: He knew now why he was so irritated with everything and why he could not feel a thing. It was simple masculine envy. He too wanted to go up in the bird.