Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  I know what he means. The masculine envy of which he speaks is not masculine at all. It’s integral to the experience of watching people soaring into the heavens while we, with pen and paper, are stuck on the ground. I feel it too, and that envy is at the heart of a kinship between Norman Mailer and me that transcends forty-two years, a change in space vehicle, and even gender—a difference not insignificant to Norman Mailer, who once remarked to Orson Welles in a television interview that all women should be kept in cages. But I understand him, I feel him, just the same. I’ve read accounts of the launch of Apollo 11 by each of the three men on board, by the flight director and dozens of other people closely tied to the mission, and I’ve clung to every word; yet it’s Norman Mailer’s wrestling with his own detachment, his own desire to feel something for that gray stick, that stays with me, that makes me feel I’ve been let in on what it was like to be there.

  While I wait for the launch of Discovery, I text back and forth with Omar about whether the launch will go off on time, about weather predictions, about where we should have dinner afterward. He is watching the launch across the street from the Vehicle Assembly Building in a van equipped with badge boards and walkie-talkies, the equipment he will need in the event the launch is scrubbed and he has to go back to work resecuring the launchpad.

  I haven’t been to Florida since Family Day five months ago, but I still see Omar at least once a day on Facebook, and we play a lot of online Scrabble. He is a surprisingly serious opponent and beats me more often than not. I’ve started to think of him in the same category as my siblings—people I feel respect and affection for and don’t see as often as I’d like. In the intervening time, I’ve gathered more of an idea of his life: he works a lot and enjoys it, both because he takes pride in doing the work well and because there are spaceships and astronauts at his workplace, which he never stops being excited by. There are things he learns that he’s not supposed to tell anyone, and he is absolutely scrupulous about following those rules. He’ll mention to me once in a while that he took a picture of something, but that he can’t post it until he’s given permission, which will probably not be until after the shuttles are retired. So he doesn’t post it, and won’t even tell his friends exactly what it is. When he is not working, he spends time with friends and family—there are pithy quotes here and there from his grandmother. He also helps out a lot with horses that belong to his girlfriend, horses whose snapshots populate his Facebook feed. A picture starts to come together of a man whose overwhelming attribute is reliability rather than ambition. (Or rather, a man whose single ambition—to be near space shuttles as much as possible—has been satisfied.) Either way, he is a person who does what he says he will do, and he does things for others rather than for himself.

  After Discovery’s last flight, Omar might get another year or so working here—there will be a great deal of work to be done removing Discovery’s engines, cleaning it up and readying it for its new life as a flightless museum display. After that, he will have to find another purpose, like thousands of other people at the Cape.

  Several “holds” are built into the countdown, pauses to provide a cushion in case the launch crews encounter any complications and need to catch up. One is at T minus twenty minutes, another at T minus nine. Traditionally, the T minus nine minute hold is when people start getting serious about their viewing spots. Floridians who don’t care to go out of their way to see a launch will often at least stop what they are doing and step outside, find a roof, or pull over in their cars when they hear the announcement for the T-9 hold, then look in the direction of the launchpads.

  At T-9, I take the lens cap off my camera and clamber up onto the roof of my car. The metal is hot and bumps about under me disconcertingly, but I persevere. Now the causeway is packed—in the last hour, people have started trying to cram their cars and trucks at odd angles into any tiny gap between the vehicles of those of us who arrived earlier, and some tension results. A sedan manages to slide past the Ohio couple and park on the other side of them, partially blocking their view. The Ohio man steams about it to his wife, hands on his hips. When the driver of the sedan emerges and turns out to be brown-skinned, Arab or South Asian, I fear what ugly confrontation might ensue. But the driver is an elaborately polite older man with very little English, making it hard for the Ohio man to start any kind of real argument. Soon the two are sharing binoculars, the Ohio man pointing out the stack on the horizon. I eavesdrop for a while, but when I don’t hear the words sharia or Mohammed after a few minutes, I lose interest.

  It continues to startle me, the range of political ideologies that are compatible with enthusiasm for spaceflight. Tax-and-spend liberals of the Great Society stripe, obviously—but also spending-slashing Tea Partiers, hippie peaceniks, fierce libertarians, military loyalists, and apathetics of every shade. So very many of us seem to feel that a love of human spaceflight is reconcilable with our beliefs, and we can all explain why. This belief doesn’t always translate to actual funding; the launch we witness today was made possible by budget squabbles that happened last year, ten years ago, forty years ago. This man from Ohio sees the space shuttle as a natural offshoot of military aviation and an expression of American exceptionalism; I see it as a grand act of civic performance art. We are both right. This man and I are far apart on pretty much everything else (he tells me later that women are genetically disabled in terms of our spatial relations, especially at night, a disability responsible for as many traffic accidents as alcohol; when I ask him politely why, if this is so, women have successfully landed the space shuttle—the most difficult feat any pilot or astronaut can face—including twice at night, he answers, “affirmative action”), but we have spaceflight in common, and so today we share binoculars, information, and snacks. We look off agreeably into the sky together, and our companionship today, the companionship of many unexpected groupings and pairings like this one, is one of those things the space program has given us that is hard to put a value on.

  The night before the launch of Apollo 11, Norman Mailer visited sites where tourists had gathered to watch the launch—maybe this very spot, he doesn’t specify. He describes the people he saw there:

  And men and women, tired from work and travel, sat in their cars and sat outside their cars on aluminum pipe and plastic-webbing folding chairs, and fanned themselves, and looked across the miles at the shrine. Out a car window projected the sole of a dirty foot. The big toe pointed straight up to Heaven in parallel to Saturn V.

  The scene here today is oddly like the scene here forty years ago. Not much has changed. People still drive for days to get here, still camp out, still sit on lawn chairs. People still look across the miles at the shrine.

  In Mailer’s book, he spins a fantasy of an archetypal working-class couple, a ridiculously offensive composite born of Mailer’s imagintion and class prejudice—the man all faded high-school glory and physical work and beer belly, the woman all aging sass and sexuality. I can only imagine that if Norman Mailer had watched the actual launch from here among everyday Americans, rather than from the NASA Press Site surrounded by credentialed journalists, he and the man from Ohio would have bloodied each other’s noses by mid-afternoon. Or they may have gotten drunk together at a postlaunch celebration in a local bar. Or maybe both. There are ways in which I won’t follow in Mailer’s footsteps.

  T minus five minutes. T minus two minutes. I start to feel a buzzy anticipation in my fingertips, a bit like stage fright. Time moves differently at this point, and I’ve read that it does for the astronauts as well. Each second seems to take forever, yet there is also something merciless about the way the seconds keep spilling forward. The time it takes to speak a sentence or check a camera setting feels like it should have taken thirty seconds, but when we check our watches again, only two seconds have gone by.

  T minus thirty seconds. The announcer starts chanting the countdown at fifteen, and we pick up the count and chant along with him. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Th
ese words, spoken with such reverence and emphasis, are part of the poetry of spaceflight. But when we get close to zero, the countdown stops.

  A general groan goes up. The announcer explains that there is an electrical problem.

  There is only a ten-minute window each day during which the rotation of Earth brings Cape Canaveral within rendezvous range with the space station; if Discovery can’t get off the ground within this launch window, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the next attempt. I will have to tell Chris I’ll be away for one more day; I’ll have to find someone to cover another day of classes. We lean toward our phones and turn up our car radios and squint through our binoculars at the horizon while those ten minutes slowly tick away.

  When the time is nearly up, we see a light on the horizon. Only two seconds before the end of the window, the main engines ignite, creating an orange glow. Then the solid rocket boosters. The stack lifts itself, silently at first. The sound takes longer to travel the fourteen miles than does the light, so the first bright moments of launch always have a silent-film majesty.

  And now the sound comes toward us: bassy, crackly, like a fireworks display that never lets up. The sound goes right through you, and if you have become too emotionally involved in the space program, this sound will make you cry. It’s the sound of American exploration, the sound of missiles put to better use than killing or threatening to kill, a sound that means we came in peace for all mankind. The man from Ohio is trying to watch through binoculars and shoot video of the launch with his phone at the same time; his wife is exclaiming “Oh my God! Oh my God!” over and over. We cry and tip our heads back to trace the bright light up.

  At T plus two minutes, the solid rocket boosters drop off. Like others who have watched the Challenger footage too many times, I’m never fully satisfied that a space shuttle has launched successfully until I see with my own eyes those boosters drop off safely and arc away. From this distance, Discovery now looks mostly like a flare of flame followed by a streak of white arcing up into the sky, a streak that seems to curve inward with the bowl of the heavens until it’s almost directly overhead, where it slowly disappears into a single point like any star.

  Goodbye, Discovery.

  I dry my eyes and gather up my things. I wonder whether Omar is crying. I feel I don’t know him quite well enough to ask. A few seconds later, I get a text from him.

  2 words. Buzzer beater.

  A few people pull out onto the causeway and drive off while Discovery is still visible in the sky, the sort of people who leave baseball games during the eighth inning. But most of us stand and watch the whole thing, which takes ten minutes, long enough to take our eyes off it and talk to other people and check Twitter while we are still tracking its progress up, up, up to the top of the sky. The couple from Ohio seems to be in no hurry to leave. They are watching NASA TV on her phone and taking pictures of each other with the steam trail, taking pictures of their car against the backdrop of palm trees and faraway gantries, of the crowd up and down the causeway. But then they consult each other quickly, hop into their car, and drive away. The woman barely has time to call good-bye to me as they pull out onto the road. Up ahead, we can see, traffic is already getting backed up at the first interchange, and I suppose they are smart to leave now. I feel oddly lonely once they are gone. But now that I’m alone I am free to take notes on everything they said. I scrawl some notes in my unprofessional-looking children’s black-and-white composition notebook. They’re not even notes, exactly, but triggers, strange details that I hope will be the spark that contains the whole moment, as our every cell contains the whole of our DNA.

  Thinking about the Ohio couple now, it pleases me to think that I am in some of their pictures, a part of the online album they will share on Flickr or Facebook. Even though we never exchanged names, I’m glad they will remember me, my beach hat and lawn chair and car with Tennessee plates.

  Omar and I have agreed to meet at a Mexican restaurant as soon as traffic slows enough to let us through. The streets of Merritt Island are busy but not clogged—as Omar had predicted, most people have headed east or west. Waiting at a red light, I notice that the car in front of me is covered with space stickers. Patches from multiple missions, bumper stickers advertising the visitor centers at multiple NASA sites, as well as the two versions of the NASA logo: the blue circle with the stars and chevron dating to NASA’s founding in 1959, and the simple stripped-down letters from the seventies. A few days ago I was reading about the two versions of the logo. The NASA website describes the components of the old version: “the sphere represents a planet, the stars represent space, the red chevron is a wing representing aeronautics (the latest design in hypersonic wings at the time the logo was developed), and then there is an orbiting spacecraft going around the wing.”

  This logo was hard to reproduce after the invention of the photocopier, and by the seventies some felt it had started to feel dated. In the pause between Apollo and shuttle, NASA hoped a redesigned logo would refresh the agency’s image as forward-thinking and futuristic, and the new logo reflected this ideal: just the four letters NASA, so simplified and stylized that even the cross strokes on the As were removed as if to make the acronym more aerodynamic. You can see in the new logo an aesthetic argument that a stripped-down space program, a lean-and-mean reusable shuttle, was a thing to be proud of rather than a compromise to apologize for. If the old logo was made for lofty and expensive goals, the new logo was made for deploying satellites for paying customers and conducting experiments in low Earth orbit. The agency in the seventies and eighties didn’t need to compete with the agency of the sixties on its own terms; the new agency would pay its own way or come close to it, and that would be its own achievement. The new design was given the unflattering nickname “the worm.” (The old logo, to differentiate it, was called “the meatball.”) Arguments about the logo became encoded arguments about NASA’s narrative. What did it mean for NASA to be a collaborator with commercial interests rather than just a standard-bearer for our dreams? It should shock no one that this new worm logo, as appealing as it may have been to members of Congress, was bewildering and uninspiring to the public. In the midnineties the meatball came back and has been the dominant logo ever since. The reassertion of the meatball may mean that our affection for the spirit of the heroic era is still as strong as ever; it also may mean that the agency’s best days are behind it.

  It’s been long enough that I’m a bit nervous again about seeing Omar—I even wonder as I’m approaching the restaurant whether we will have trouble recognizing each other. I have come to feel I know him well, but we only spent one day together, five months ago. Everything else we know about each other is through life lived online.

  But of course I do know him the moment I see him, in a booth near the door, and he knows me too. We greet each other easily, without any of the awkwardness I feared. It seems we will be the sort of friends who can pick up where we left off. The restaurant is packed, the waitresses turning sideways and lifting their trays over their heads. All the patrons are sweat-stained, sunburned, wind-rumpled, and smiling, like us.

  “So what did you think?”

  “Awesome,” I reply. I have trouble thinking what more to say about the launch. Sometimes the most complex experiences are best summed up in a single word.

  “It was a nice one,” Omar agrees. “How did it compare to the one you saw before?”

  “That was a night launch, so—really different,” I say. “But I guess I assumed that for the most part day launches are all the same, and night launches are all the same.”

  Omar shakes his head. “The funny thing is, they’re all different. They all have a really distinct look to them. I guess it has to do with weather—how much cloud cover there is, humidity, wind, especially. Each one puts on a different show.”

  It occurs to me that there are a lot of people who have seen a single launch, but relatively few can compare multiple shuttle launches. There are people out here—no
t many, but they exist—who have seen every shuttle launch. I read about one man who has seen every single launch of anything, including probes and satellites. His father worked for Cape Canaveral Air Force Station even before NASA was formed and took him to see the first secret launches when he was a toddler. There is always someone who has seen more.

  Omar and I talk more about how the day went. He shows concern over whether I had trouble finding the location he’d suggested for me to watch the launch from, whether I had trouble finding this restaurant. I’d forgotten this about him since Family Day, the way he seems to feel responsible for everything I experience here at the Cape. Not only the launch itself, but also things like weather, the behavior of other space fans, the service I encounter in restaurants and hotels, and the performance of the space shuttle program itself. I get the impression that if today’s launch had scrubbed, as it seemed for so long that it was going to, Omar would have apologized and taken it upon himself to make it up to me in some way.

  While we wait for our food, we browse through news stories on our phones about the launch. I read one tidbit out loud to Omar: STS-133 had the longest vertical flow (170 days) since STS-35 in 1990, still the record-holder at 183 days.

  “Oh yeah, I remember that one,” Omar tells me. “That was Columbia. My father was involved in fixing the tanking problems. It actually rolled back to VAB, demated, and went back into OPF to start all over again. Then it had to roll back to VAB a second time because a hurricane was going to come through. That one seemed cursed there for a while.”