“For this mission, I wondered whether they were going to roll back Discovery and demate it,” I say.
Omar grunts noncommittally, and it occurs to me that he might know something about this that he’s not supposed to tell me. I don’t want to sound as though I am prodding him to break a confidence.
Omar has his video camera with him, and he shows me the footage he shot from the VAB parking lot. It’s impressive: in his camera’s frame, the stack is much bigger than what I saw today, the controlled explosion of the solid fuel much sharper and brighter. It’s a completely different experience, a different launch. I try to hide my jealousy.
We eat mediocre Mexican food and I drink two beers. I probably should stick to one, but I’ve had a long day, I’m relieved that everything has gone as planned, and I’m falling for the celebratory postflight atmosphere. Omar considers getting a beer but keeps ordering Cokes instead. Now that I’m a little tipsy, I ask Omar a question I’ve wanted to ask him for a while: I ask him about the masculine envy Norman Mailer experienced at the launch of Apollo 11. I tell him that, like all space writers, I am asked from time to time whether I would go up on the space shuttle if I had the chance. I tell him I’m not sure what to say because in reality, I think I would be terrified.
“Still, you’d have to go if you had the chance, right?” I asked. “After all, the track record is pretty good.” 98.5 percent of space shuttle missions have returned their crews safely; the statistics get even better if you count Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
Omar pauses. “That’s something I think about a lot. I grew up wanting to go. Now that I work there, I’ve seen everything that goes wrong as they’re preparing to launch,” he says. “All the stuff they catch and fix.”
I know what he means. One faulty part, one procedure not executed correctly. What destroyed Challenger was the failure of a simple rubber O-ring, like you have in your faucets. What destroyed Columbia was a dent on one of the tiles.
“But they catch them and fix them, right?” I ask. The astronauts themselves don’t know all the details about problems found on the orbiter and the other components. They are busy training for their own roles; they have to trust that the engineers and technicians are doing their jobs.
“They’d only have to miss one thing,” Omar says. He pauses, smiling broadly. “But I’d still go.”
If the shuttle continued flying a hundred more missions, statistics dictate another one would probably be lost, maybe to something equally mundane. In 1967, the crew of Apollo 1 was killed in a training exercise on the launchpad. The plan to go to the moon went on without too much controversy, but now, it seems, we no longer have the stomach for burying astronauts. After Challenger, the space agency was criticized for undervaluing safety in favor of budget and scheduling pressures; after Columbia, the board tasked with investigating the disaster recommended that crew safety become “the overriding priority” in NASA’s next space transportation system, “rather than trade safety against other performance criteria, such as low cost and reusability, or against advanced space operation capabilities.” This requirement would make spaceflight slower, more expensive, and less ambitious—exactly the opposite direction from what proponents of heroic-era lofty goals demand.
On the way out of the restaurant, we pass a small clump of people wearing brightly colored badges that read “NASATweetup.” The badges display the NASA logo and the person’s Twitter handle, indicated by the leading @ sign. Omar points them out to me as if they are celebrities, but he doesn’t approach them.
“Those are the people chosen for the NASATweetup,” he tells me. When I look confused, he explains. “NASA started doing it for the last few launches. They choose 150 people who follow NASA on Twitter and give them special access to the launch. They get to meet astronauts and stuff like that. A few weeks ago I saw a bunch of them when they got to go inside OPF. They looked like kids in a candy store.”
When I was here for Family Day, I learned to refer to the hangars where the space shuttles are maintained between missions as “OPF,” not “the OPF,” as I had been doing.
“I got to go inside OPF,” I brag needlessly.
Omar smiles. “Yeah, you did.”
Outside, Omar tells me that he recognized the Twitter handle of a woman who had traveled from Australia for the previous launch attempt but couldn’t afford to return for this one. The space community on Twitter took up a collection for her, and a few locals offered her free places to stay. This is a great example of the fellow feeling that exists among the hard-core space enthusiasts online—they give each other money, are welcome in one another’s homes. Omar is clearly delighted to see the Australian woman has made it here. When I ask why he doesn’t approach her and congratulate her in person, he shrugs and says she looked like she was busy talking to her friends. Omar’s shyness is a lot like my own, I realize. He likes people and wishes the best for them. He is willing to e-mail strangers (as he did me after he read my book) or to reach out to them on Twitter, but to walk up to a woman in a restaurant and introduce himself is another matter, farther than he is willing to go. I am moved all over again that he made the bold gesture of inviting me for Family Day.
Omar has tried to impress upon me how awful the traffic will be tonight, especially heading west toward Orlando, which is where I’m going. He’s explained that a lot of NASA people choose to live in Merritt Island because it’s the only town on the same landmass as the Kennedy Space Center, the only one from which a car can reach the gates of the Kennedy Space Center without having to cross a body of water using one of the causeways, which clog up unspeakably after launches. The epic traffic is largely due to the bottlenecking of these causeways, and Omar points out that the one and only motel in the town of Merritt Island, the Clarion, while not luxurious, would save me half an hour to forty-five minutes prelaunch and inestimable hours afterward, when up to a million people will be trying to get off Merritt Island at once.
“Good tip,” I say. “That will be my new Florida home.”
Omar suggests that in order to kill time we go to Barnes & Noble and look around in their space book section. This is only the second time Omar and I have met in person, and it’s already the second time we have wound up perusing books together. As a writer I tend to find myself in bookstores or libraries wherever I visit, but it’s unusual to meet a nonwriter who seems to share the same instinct. We find the Space area within the Science section, and as with the Visitor Center gift shop book section, Omar seems to have read every book in the place. He points books out to me, I point books out to him. I show him Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon, recently reprinted in a coffee-table version with huge glossy photos.
As Omar pages through the book, I try to tell him about Norman Mailer, about how the book came to be written. I tell him that I find Norman Mailer unbearable, but also quite brilliant. I tell him about the things Norman Mailer saw and described that no one else did, like Wernher von Braun’s speech at a Titusville country club the night before the launch of Apollo 11 or the cold drink machine at the Press Site whose malfunction became an extended metaphor for American technology and arrogance. Omar and I flip through the book, talking about which of the Apollo-era images we have seen before. Only one of them is new to Omar, an aerial shot of the launchpad with Apollo/Saturn stacked and pointing at the sky, tiny workers visible on the gantry. Omar looks at it for a long time before putting it back. Then he picks up another book he’s read, a history of the space shuttle, and shows me his father’s name in the acknowledgments. Frank Izquierdo.
“Your dad’s name is Frank?” I ask. “That was the name I gave the dad who worked at KSC in my book,” I remind him.
“Oh yeah,” Omar says. “I’d forgotten about that. Coincidence, right? My father’s real name is Francisco.”
I’m more surprised by the coincidence than Omar seems to be. I try to remember why I chose the name Frank for the father. I wanted him to be a little bit square, a nerdy, old-fashioned hardwo
rking dad. And I wanted him to be honest, dependable—frank—a man of his word.
Omar has to work early in the morning, so we say our good-byes. I’m going to hang around in the bookstore for a while, since the traffic getting off the island has probably not let up.
“See you for 134?” he asks after we hug.
“Yes, 134,” I say, happy to have a next launch to look forward to in a couple of months.
I stay in the bookstore’s café area, making notes from the day, until it closes at nine o’clock. Surely traffic has let up by now, I think, four hours after launch, but when I get onto the 528 causeway leading back to Orlando I find it’s still a parking lot. People are getting out of their cars to walk around on the grass, drink beer, and hang out as if they were tailgating, exactly as they were twelve hours ago. When we finally do start moving again, it’s at a creep. Toward eleven, I finally pass the spot from which I watched the launch earlier today. Now that seems like a lifetime ago.
In the morning, as I am leaving town, I decide to drive back inland along a different route in order to try to better understand the confusing geography. I have written a book set here, but in that book the child protagonist has only a loose understanding of the Cape beyond the fixed sets of her backyard, her school, and the Kennedy Space Center. In order to write this place from her point of view, I had to gain only as much of an understanding as she would have. On my second visit since finishing that book, I still don’t feel confident I know where things are. I still don’t understand why everything is called something other than what it is, why the same names mean two or three different things. Confusing naming practices are often associated with areas closed to outsiders, but the Space Coast has been welcoming tourists almost as long as it has been home to space families. The names have to do with the elusiveness of the place itself, my working theory goes, the way the land and the freshwater and the seawater all blend into each other in unexpected ways. The way water seems to be on all sides at all times, though none of these areas quite meet the definition of an island, just as in Omar’s video of the launch the fire plume of Discovery’s engines blends complexly into the steam beneath it, so that it’s hard to tell whether any one point is fire or steam. The way the marshiness of the terrain makes one piece of land either an island or a peninsula, the same spot brown on some maps and blue on others. The way the isolation of this place defined it until the rockets came in, and how quickly it’s grown since. It’s a community of transplants and immigrants. These are big towns now, with traffic and shopping centers and miles and miles of strip malls, but before Omar’s generation very few people could say they had been born and raised here. Almost no one knew it as their native place.
I drive across the causeway spanning the Indian River to Cocoa, a dense little town that feels like it’s been here longer than the others, maybe because it doesn’t seem as touristy. Then north to Titusville. Everyone in the area makes fun of Titusville, but I can’t really see how it’s different from anything else around here—it’s strip-mally and a little rundown, but so are the other towns. The streets are lined with motels with space-themed signs, as they are in Cocoa Beach and Port St. John and everywhere else. I suppose every area needs one town to make fun of.
I cross back to Merritt Island using a different causeway, and rather than heading toward the gate of the Space Center I take the turn for the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. This place is beautiful in a prehistoric kind of way, wetlands with palmettos and slash pine, everywhere the sounds of alligators and frogs, exotic-looking birds touching down and taking off again. Across the Mosquito Lagoon, the Vehicle Assembly Building and the launch towers stand sentinel on the horizon, a reminder of why all this is here. I’ve visited this refuge a couple of times before, and every time I come here I envision the landscape as an inch-for-inch replica of what Ponce de León found when he landed here in 1513. There are few places like this left on either coast, places where you can imagine the European explorers encountering this land for the first time.
I’ve been reading about Juan Ponce and about Captain James Cook, whose ships Discovery and Endeavour were the namesakes for two of the space shuttle orbiters. On his first voyage, Cook established an observatory in Tahiti to record the transit of Venus across the sun. He was the first to circumnavigate New Zealand, took possession of Australia for Great Britain, and became the first European to visit Hawaii. After his second voyage, he was already famous and could have rested on his laurels, but instead he kept looking for an excuse for another expedition. He set off for his third and final voyage in 1776. Legend holds that the Hawaiian natives mistook him for a god, though this has been disputed; these same natives stabbed him to death and preserved his remains as they preserved their chiefs’. Cook wrote that he intended to go not only “farther than any man has been before me, but as far as it is possible for a man to go.”
Reading about their voyages, I keep thinking how strange it is that these grand vague ideas of discovery and endeavor actually become, when you look at them closely, weirdly specific stories of weirdly specific people, adventures that take place at particular moments and under certain pressures. These were actual human beings who climbed into actual boats for actual reasons, many of those reasons being less grand and lofty than the names of their ships. Juan Ponce and James Cook and the others wanted to be rich, or to impress people, or to escape something at home, or to make a name for themselves. Taken as a whole, their achievements have less of a feeling of grandeur than of something like coincidence: if the conditions that made their trips advantageous hadn’t come about when they did, someone else would have made the trip at another time, and the contact between cultures would not be exactly what it was, the New World would not be exactly what it is. The story would be a different one.
I get back in my car and drive across the causeway to Cocoa Beach. There is a motel here that was once owned jointly by the seven Mercury astronauts, the place they stayed when they came to town to race their hot rods up and down A1A and laugh at the local sheriff and get drunk around the pool. That motel, when I stop in, is now owned by a chain. The lobby has no space memorabilia, no indication that the first Americans to go to space owned it, slept here. When I ask the young woman behind the counter, she acknowledges it’s true but doesn’t seem particularly energized by the fact. She looks young enough that she was probably born after Challenger; the Mercury astronauts are probably older than her grandparents, their accomplishments prehistoric and irrelevant.
The drive home to Tennessee is easier and quicker than the drive down—the trip home always seems faster, I suppose. On the way to Cape Canaveral two days earlier I’d passed through Florida entirely in the dark, but coming back I get to see the outskirts of Orlando and the swampy landscapes of central Florida. Many billboards advertise upcoming rest stops and their free orange juice. I know from reading John McPhee that the orange juice will be the same concentrate one buys at any grocery store in Knoxville, or in Minnesota, or in Siberia. Other billboards denounce President Obama. Still others implore me in more and more urgent terms not to have an abortion.
To pass the time, I listen to audiobooks—I get through the latest well-reviewed literary doorstopper and start another. I stop for lunch somewhere in south Georgia. At sunset, as a gorgeous orange light is filling my car and everything else, I notice myself: I’m sucking on a milkshake, tearing down the highway at eighty miles per hour, singing along to a pop song I’d never heard until several days ago, thinking about where to stop for dinner. For today, I don’t have to worry about my son’s nap schedule or answer my students’ e-mails. I can stop wherever I want without accommodating someone else’s preferences. I can listen to trashy music or talk to myself or think, just sit quietly in the hushed luxury of my own secondhand car, the landscape of Georgia whistling by outside the window.
I hear the “Firework” song again. “Baby you’re a firework Come on, show ’em what you’re worth Make ’em go, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ / As you sho
ot across the sky-y-y.”
I pull into my driveway in Knoxville late that night, and my house is already dark. I carry my bags in as quietly as I can. The house is tidy, the dishwasher humming and sloshing, my husband and son asleep, seemingly undamaged by my absence. I kiss them both and crawl into bed exhausted, still smelling of the swamps of Florida, the red dirt of Georgia, smelling of fast food and all the diesel fumes of all the truck stops of the Southeast. I’d feared making this trip, had felt it a necessary inconvenience to transport my eyeballs and brain down to the launch site to be able to say that I had personally witnessed the event myself. Now, having experienced unexpected and complicated things, having felt the heat and having smelled the smells, I see what it means to actually go to the Cape, to make the drive covering every inch between my driveway and the causeway, to get dirty, get drunk, get sunburned, and pee in the bushes. It was important to feel the light of the launch against my own face, its vibration pushing against my clothes. I’d thought I had to be there in person in order to get the real story; in fact, by being there, I—a tiny bit—changed the story.
Before I’m awake the next morning, my phone buzzes with an incoming text. I roll over in bed and squint at the screen with one eye. The text is from Omar.
Good morning. Home safe?
I smile. Only Omar.
Yup, I tap out with my thumbs. Got in at 11pm. Lots of traffic around Atlanta.
Soon, we will make plans to go to the launch of STS-134, the last mission for Endeavour. Mark Kelly has announced that he will remain on the crew as its commander. It’s scheduled for No Earlier Than April 19, 2011.
Space flight is a dream, and dreams do not have to be entirely real in order to motivate behavior.
—Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination
CHAPTER 4. A Brief History of the Future
Leaving Orbit Page 11