March–April 2011
I’m sitting in my office at the University of Tennessee the Monday after I return from the launch of Discovery, still sunburned and sleep-deprived from the trip. It’s hard to believe I’m going to do the same thing at least two more times. I’ve plugged my phone into my computer to upload the images from the trip; as they flow by on my screen, I’m startled by how many pictures I’ve taken. A picture of my odometer as it clicked over to forty thousand, one of a sign welcoming cars to Merritt Island that reads WHERE DREAMS ARE LAUNCHED!, one of a huge peach-colored full moon hanging low in the sky, the kind of moon that must have made a tempting target for the newly transplanted spaceworkers of the sixties.
As the photos upload, I start preparing to teach my next class, Writing Creative Nonfiction. I’ve built into the syllabus a unit I call A Brief History of Creative Nonfiction, in which we spend a few weeks reading Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, John McPhee, Hunter S. Thompson, James Agee, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer—important writers who were working in that moment in the sixties when literary journalism converged with a thread of creative writing and the genre we now call creative nonfiction was born.
On the syllabus for tomorrow are selections from Tom Wolfe, who is rightfully credited with being one of the founding fathers of creative nonfiction by helping to define the New Journalism. I open the file and flip through pages covered with my notes from previous semesters. I stop on a random page from The Right Stuff.
The passion that now animated NASA spread out even into the surrounding community of Cocoa Beach. The grisliest down-home alligator-poaching crackers manning the gasoline pumps on Route A1A would say to the tourists, as the No-Knock flowed, “Well, that Atlas vehicle’s given us more fits than a June bug on a porch bulb, but we got real confidence in that Redstone, and I think we’re gonna make it.” Everyone who felt the spirit of NASA at that time wanted to be part of it. It took on a religious dimension that engineers, no less than pilots, would resist putting into words. But all felt it.
Flip a chunk of pages.
That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time. It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America. It was an extraordinary thing, being the sort of mortal who brought tears to other men’s eyes.
Flip.
At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants—it was hard to say, since you could never see them—rose up from out of the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink’s.
As I read, I reach down and scratch at my ankles, the raised red spots where the invisible bugs got me while I waited on the causeway. Flip.
There was no such thing as “first-class accommodations” or “red-carpet treatment” in Cocoa Beach. The red carpet, had anyone ever tried to lay one down, would have been devoured in midair by the No See’um bugs, as they were called, before it ever touched the implacable hardcracker ground.
I’ve taught excerpts from The Right Stuff many times, and it always leads to a useful discussion. My students respond to the audacity of Wolfe’s voice, and as the semester goes on they remember him as a key example of what we mean when we use the adjective voicey. It makes me proud when my students can identify little echoes of this voice in David Foster Wallace, in John D’Agata, in Susan Orlean. This semester I’ve also added to the syllabus the first chapter of Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon, which we will be discussing tomorrow as well. I’ve always talked about Norman Mailer’s role in defining literary journalism and thus creative nonfiction, but not until this semester have I tried to teach an example of his work. He is generally more resistant to excerpting than most. I’m curious what students will think of the differences in the ways Wolfe and Mailer write about spaceflight; for all the similarities that come with the era and the subject matter, the differences between them are stark. For one thing, Wolfe is obsessed with character, clearly believes that character is at the center of everything, and he creates dozens of characters big and small: astronauts, engineers, gas station attendants, astronauts’ wives, reporters, even chimpanzees being trained for spaceflight. For Mailer, the only real character in the book is Norman Mailer; even the astronauts are there only as archetypes upon which to project his own ideas about himself.
I look over the pages of Mailer’s I’ve assigned for tomorrow. His sentences are dense, paragraphs long and wandering, scenes structured by free association rather than anything like theme or plot. I fear that my students won’t get him, that I might be the only reader who could fall in love with prose like this. For instance, about the moment of launch:
The flames were enormous. No one could be prepared for that. Flames flew in cataract against the cusp of the flame shield, and then sluiced along the paved ground down two opposite channels in the concrete…. In the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville’s Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Madonna in half the churches of the world, this thin slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky, slow as Melville’s Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for the air.
On my computer’s screen, more photos and texts flow by. A row of cars glinting in the hot sun on the 528 causeway. A heron perched on the roof of my car in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Launch pad 39A shimmering in the heat across the Banana River. Already it seems long ago.
On Tuesday afternoon, I walk into the classroom where my Writing Creative Nonfiction class meets to find that students have already arranged the chairs into a circle. They are chatting about the readings rather than about the weekend’s football and parties, a good sign, and they seem to be saying positive things. When I call the class to order, the students seem eager to share their impressions. My most talkative student raises his hand first.
“It was cool that both of the writers brought out their own personal feelings about what they were seeing,” he says. “They didn’t try to be objective, and I’m starting to get why that’s a good thing.”
“Right, that’s what Tom Wolfe said in his definition of the New Journalism,” I say. “He felt that objectivity was no longer going to be a useful standard.”
“I thought it was interesting to see two different writers talking about the same moment,” another student says. “The way they write about it is so different, you’d never know they were in the same place at the same time.”
“Well, they were in the same place, at Cape Canaveral, but not at the same time,” I correct her. “Wolfe was writing about the Mercury era, the first astronauts to travel in space in the early sixties, and Mailer was writing about the missions to the moon, in the late sixties and early seventies.”
Blank faces.
“But the Russians had already gotten to the moon first, right?” my most talkative student asks.
I’m opening my mouth to respond when another student cuts in.
“Of course not, we won the space race. We got to space first.”
“Actually, you’re both wrong,” I say, and everyone laughs. I laugh too, but I’m a bit shocked. These are the most basic facts, the ones I would have thought everyone would know.
“Let’s get back to the structure of these chapters,” I say. “We’ve been talking about the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe’s idea that we should write in scenes wherever possible. What are some places in The Right Stuff where he chose not to do that?”
But as we go on discussing Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and the New Journalism and the way in the sixties everyone thought they were reinventing everything, the optimism embodied in redefining literature once and for all, the optimism of sending human beings to space, two things become clear to me: my students did not grow up with the same idea of the sixties that I did. Maybe because their parents were born too late to remember that era as their own, as my parents do. Maybe these kids didn’t grow up with stories about how great the sixt
ies were, how much better than any decade that dared try to follow. The phrase “the sixties” for them conjures not an emotion or a set of values, but only a vague idea of fashion, music, a historical event or two, the same useless window dressing I get when I think of “the twenties” or “the eighteen fifties.” Whatever ideas my students have about the sixties, their ideas of spaceflight are not attached to the sixties as a historical era, as they are for my elders and for me.
The next time my Writing Creative Nonfiction class meets, I get to the classroom fifteen minutes early. I’m intrigued by my students’ ignorance about spaceflight, and I’m hoping to get the chance to learn more from them without cutting into our official class time. As students file in, I put a few questions on the board:
What year did the first human being travel in space?
What nation achieved this first?
What year did the first human being land on the moon?
What nation achieved this first?
How many human beings have walked on the moon total?
What year did the space shuttle first fly?
What is the furthest the space shuttle can go from the earth?
What percentage of the federal budget goes to NASA?
As I write, my students perk up and look curious.
“Don’t look these up on your phones,” I order them, because I know this will be their first instinct. They dutifully lock their screens and place their phones facedown on their desks, even more intrigued now.
“You don’t have to participate in this discussion,” I tell them, “because it has nothing to do with our class. But this is something I’m curious about, if you’re interested.”
They lean forward.
“Let’s start with the first one,” I say. “What year did the first human being travel in space?”
The United States got to space first, in 1956. Humiliated, the Soviets put forth a new and arbitrary goal: to put a man on the moon. They accomplished this feat in 1962; NASA didn’t get the first American (John Glenn) to the moon until 1965. He traveled there on the space shuttle, a vehicle that is capable of voyages beyond the moon to Mars and Jupiter, up to 40 million miles into outer space. The most recent mission to the moon was in 2001—in the decades the space shuttle has been going to the moon, over 400 people have walked on its surface. NASA gets 20–30% of the federal budget.
This account was provided by one of my undergraduate students, and as far off the mark as it is, the wildness of its guesses is typical of the group’s responses. Only a minority of my students can correctly place the sequence of “firsts,” that the Soviets got to space first, after which Americans got to the moon first. I’m not looking for correct dates here, only the correct order; the number of students who knew the correct dates for these events was one.
My students have an invariably positive, even affectionate, opinion of NASA, even if they aren’t entirely sure what the scope of NASA’s mandate is, or how old it is. In this respect NASA has shown itself to be one of only two government agencies (the other is the FBI) that consistently has a positive public image. Former NASA administrator Dan Goldin once said of his agency that it was “the one organization in American society whose sole purpose is to make sure our future will be better than our past.”
A lot of my students think American spaceflight started in the forties or fifties. Many believe women have walked on the moon. Some think American astronauts have traveled to other planets. But to me, these are not the worst misunderstandings. Much more troubling is the extent to which they conflate the two eras of spaceflight into one big lump. When students are asked when the space shuttle first flew, they tend to give the same dates that they gave for the first human spaceflight—in other words, they seem to think there has only ever been one space vehicle. My students don’t understand that there was a significant change between the heroic era and the shuttle era, separated by years and a great leap in technology and fanfare that was very moving to little children in the early eighties. I’m left with the disconcerting fact that they don’t actually know what the space shuttle is. And if they think the space shuttle has already been going to Mars since before their parents were born, why would they agree, as taxpayers, to pay billions for the first actual mission to Mars?
I tell my students that when I missed class last week, it was because I was at the Kennedy Space Center to see Discovery launch. They are impressed, though I have to explain that Discovery is not the space shuttle, but one of three. I tell them that this mission is Discovery’s last, that when Discovery returns to Earth it will be sent to the Air and Space Museum. My students’ mouths fall open. They had no idea.
“So—we won’t be going to space anymore?” one student asks.
“American astronauts will still travel to the International Space Station, but they’ll have to hitch a ride with the Russians, on their Soyuz spacecraft.”
Some of my students actually gasp with horror. They had no idea. They wear the outraged expression of people who feel they should have been consulted. But then I tell them that Discovery’s construction started in 1979, making it a thirty-two-year-old vehicle. My students, most of whom were born in the early nineties, are dismayed to hear this. Thirty-two sounds pretty old to them. The space shuttle should be retired if it’s that old, they feel, but we should have a newer spacecraft to replace it with. They are shocked that we don’t.
“So what are the answers?”
They are all looking at me. I wish I could get this kind of attention from them when I’m trying to get them to map out the structure of an essay, when I’m trying to explain what a comma splice is.
I look at my watch. Seven minutes before class starts. We talk through some of the answers: Only twelve people have walked on the moon. All of them were white men, all of them American. The space shuttle can only go to low Earth orbit, 240 miles above Earth. As I go on, students express bewilderment at how much less has been accomplished than what they had thought. They are embarrassed that they didn’t know the facts, but they also seem indignant that their optimistic narratives have not come to pass.
In one way it’s touching. I hadn’t known to expect this credulous faith in their own country’s relentless conquering of space. This faith is supported, no doubt, by the wildly exaggerated beliefs most people hold about NASA’s funding: a multiyear survey asking Americans to guess what percentage of the federal budget goes to NASA regularly turned up an average of over 20 percent, a percentage reflected in my students’ guesses. Worse: the Americans polled who guessed the correct category (0–1 percent) were, in some years, outnumbered by those who chose “over 50 percent.” I would like to repeat this for emphasis: a significant number of adult Americans walking among us believe that NASA receives over 50 percent of the entire federal budget.
I give my students the real numbers. “NASA gets 0.4 percent of the national budget,” I tell them, “and that’s been true for most of its history. Most of you said around 20 percent—you should know that 20 percent is more than the entire defense budget. Last year NASA’s total budget was less than the cost of air-conditioning for troops in Iraq. The bank bailout of 2008 cost more than the entire fifty-year budget for NASA.”
My students sneak looks at each other. Can this be right? It’s hard to comprehend numbers in the billions. When people talk about the cost of spaceflight, they usually refer to it in terms of a project that, whatever its inspirational qualities, is not an investment that will pay off financially. Yet in my reading I recently came across a surprising quote from Lyndon Johnson—he once remarked that the information gained from satellite photography alone was worth “ten times what the whole program has cost.” Before the space program had made satellite spying possible, gaining information about our enemies’ military capabilities was difficult, costly in money and lives, and often unreliable. Inaccurate data led the American military to overprepare to meet threats that turned out to be exaggerated or nonexistent. “Indirectly,” historian Howard McCurd
y explains, “space research enhanced the funds available for domestic development.” NASA’s public image might be even more positive if it were generally known that the space program might in fact have paid for itself.
When my students are given the sad facts and asked why they gave such outlandish answers, they shift their feet and look embarrassed. But one brave woman gives an interesting response.
“I knew we went to the moon in the sixties,” she explains, reddening, “so I assumed whatever we’re doing now with all the technology we have is—like—better than that.” It’s true, technology does generally work that way. If your parents had big slow expensive computers, you get fast cheap portable computers. If your parents got to go to the moon, you get to go to Mars. It’s sound enough logic, if innocent of the realities of public policy.
As frustrating as my students’ misunderstandings are, I can’t say I blame them. People my own age aren’t much better informed. We didn’t get to watch that one small step for a man live on TV, can only view that footage now through layers of history and cliché. MTV’s reappropriation of Buzz planting the flag, the bits and images used again and again to symbolize, variously and contradictorily, HISTORY and THE FUTURE. It’s boring to hear other people tell their dreams, and people too young to remember the moon shot have grown tired of listening to this one. Encumbered by such dreams myself, I squint at the footage brought back from the moon landings, and I have to agree that we who are watching from 2011 can’t ever really see what those innocents who watched those events unfold in real time saw, what it looked like to watch while the dream came true.
It’s close to three years after Neil and Buzz’s giant leap for mankind, April 1972. Two men bounce along together, almost skipping, exuberant and unstable as toddlers in their bulky space suits. This is Apollo 16, NASA’s sixth mission to the moon, and while the journey to the moon will never become routine, it is no longer regarded with the same breathlessness and wonder as it once was. The number of people who turn out to see the launches on the Space Coast has steadily shrunk, as have the TV audiences. Politicians have started to wonder aloud why we need to keep going to the moon when the race with the Soviets, ostensibly the reason for doing all this, is over. NASA’s budget is in steep decline. I won’t be born for another four months.
Leaving Orbit Page 12