Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  This is the Clarion Hotel in Merritt Island, Florida, the place Omar told me about last time. I haul myself out of bed, turn on the TV, and start dressing and organizing my things by its light. Like Norman Mailer before me, I have had only two hours of sleep before heading to the Space Center. I did not create this similarity on purpose, but I decide to embrace it. Sleep deprivation, like waiting itself, is part of the launch experience. I check the status of the launch: the countdown is continuing, and the weather is 70 percent go. It’s now T minus five hours.

  This mission had been set for April 19 when I was here last for Discovery, but that date had changed to April 29 because of a conflict with a Russian trip to the International Space Station. I did not want the launch date to be April 29. I was scheduled to be at a conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, a meeting of space historians I had managed to worm my way into by proposing a paper months before. As the date approached, I kept one eye on the calendar, hoping the launch attempt would slip. I told people I “had a feeling” the launch would be postponed, but what I meant by that was I hoped very much that it would be. I hassled Omar constantly about how things were looking and whether it still seemed the 29th would be the day. He replied diplomatically each time—this launch had already slipped multiple times, which made it seem entirely likely that it would slip again, but we couldn’t know what would happen until it was announced.

  When April 29 stayed on the launch manifest for a while, and especially when the mission passed its flight readiness review, I panicked. On the 27th, I headed off to the space history conference in DC, thinking maybe I could write about going to two of the three last launches. Maybe my missing the last launch of Endeavour could somehow be smoothed over, or made into some sort of metaphor. Maybe there was a way, rhetorically, to make that work. I was going to have to think of one because I couldn’t miss the conference, and I also had no intention of abandoning this last-launch project.

  The conference in DC, titled “1961/1981: Key Moments in Human Spaceflight,” was cosponsored by NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. According to the call for papers I had stumbled across on the NASA website, the conference was meant to “bring together scholars, practitioners, and the interested public to consider the place of human spaceflight in modern culture.” I liked the idea of parlaying my obsession with sixties writers’ treatments of spaceflight into a chance to visit NASA Headquarters, meet space historians, and learn more about the history of the space program. A few months earlier I’d considered myself something of an expert on the subject. Now I was only learning how much I didn’t know, and that made me want to meet the people who knew more.

  NASA Headquarters is noticeably different from the other NASA sites I had visited. It is a normal-looking office building in downtown DC rather than an outsized experimental and training facility (Houston) or a spaceport (Kennedy). On the first morning of the conference, NASA administrator Charles Bolden addressed us, and while his speech mostly consisted of general remarks about the importance of history, of understanding where we have been in order to envision where we are going next, he also told a story about meeting President Obama not long before that made me sit up in my seat.

  “I stood in the Oval Office,” Bolden told the assembled attendees, “stood square in front of the president, and I asked him, ‘Mr. President, do you believe in human spaceflight?’”

  It was a bit thrilling, the idea of the NASA administrator, a former astronaut himself, going toe to toe with the president of the United States. Not long ago, the idea that both men in this dialogue would be African American would have sounded unbelievable.

  “And the president looked me in the eye, and he said, ‘Yes, I do.’”

  We all clapped furiously. This is a great NASA administrator anecdote in the way it implies a faith in spaceflight, an intention to move forward, without any actual commitment or, especially, budget. But even we space historians and space curators and scholars of many disciplines, we who should know better than anyone, seem to lack any built-in resistance to this anecdote. We want very much for General Bolden to have confronted the president, want very much for the president to have confirmed his commitment to human spaceflight, even if we haven’t seen much evidence of that.

  During the two days of the conference, I went to as many presentations as I could, gave my own paper on representations of spaceflight in literature, and met many of the historians whose work I had been reading. On the last day, I got up early to catch my flight home. I spent the day in airports, obsessively refreshing the NASA app on my phone, hoping to get some news of the Endeavour launch. I learned that Gabrielle Giffords had made the trip from Houston and would be watching from the roof of the Launch Control Center. President Obama had come to Cape Canaveral with his family, and they too would be atop Launch Control. Still, I hoped for a scrub, ideally a long delay that would buy me some time to finish my semester and get final grades in. At 12:20 p.m. I got my wish: problems had been discovered with the auxiliary power unit fuel line heater. Hundreds of thousands of people, including the president and his family, left the Cape in disappointment.

  Launch was rescheduled for No Earlier Than May 2, then May 8, then May 10. In the coming week, the target launch date slipped again to May 16 at 8:56 a.m., then held there. I started to make tentative plans.

  On the morning of the 15th, the day I made the drive from Knoxville, I got a weather update from Omar by text: Weather is good, 70% chance acceptable.

  I smiled down at my phone, was about to start tapping out a response, when I got another text:

  My grandpa came into town, he may not come tomorrow cause it’s so early, so today he said he’d let me know if he’s coming with us. If he’s not then you’re in. Sorry it’s so last minute

  Grandpa? As far as I knew, all of Omar’s extended family was in Puerto Rico, so this grandpa must have come a long way, and unless he was planning to come back in a couple of months, this was going to be Grandpa’s last chance to see a space shuttle launch. None of this boded very well for my chances of getting in to the employee viewing site, and I began making peace with the fact that I would probably be watching from a public spot, maybe Space View Park in Titusville this time. Maybe Omar could get me in for the last one.

  I drove all day. This time, I had a sense of how long seven hundred miles would take, and I knew what I-75 had to offer. As with my last trip here, I kept thinking I should listen to audiobooks and return phone calls, but once I was in motion I remembered how pleasant it was to let my mind go blank. I ate junk food and drank sugary drinks all day, listened to music for many long miles. There’s something pleasing about the accomplishment of the miles ticking by on my odometer by the hundreds, seeing the changing landscape pass with the day. An unusual sense of satisfaction in getting out of my car in a state different from the one in which I climbed into it, finding palm trees, birds, and bugs, finding the land has a different smell, the air grown humid. The sun high in the sky at a truck stop outside Atlanta, then the sky washed with pink as the sun starts to dip at a gas station south of Cordele.

  In the evening, I was eating dinner at a Cracker Barrel in Valdosta and reading a book about the Apollo project when my phone buzzed. Omar.

  Ok you’re in!

  Alone at my table with my pancakes, I clapped my hands over my mouth, then smiled at the truckers seated around me. Some of them smiled politely back.

  Text you bout when to meet later. Gonna be eeeaaarrrlly

  I texted Omar back that I would be wherever he wanted me to be, at whatever time.

  This turned out to be his parents’ house, at quarter to five in the morning.

  I was going to get onto NASA grounds.

  When I pull into Omar’s neighborhood before dawn, I switch off my headlights so as not to wake his neighbors. The houses are like the ones I took pictures of when I was researching my novel—square one-story houses with tiny yards and big swimming pools. Before I can ring the bell, Omar
’s dog senses me and starts barking. Then Omar steps out wordlessly into the dark, looking as tired as I feel. We get into my car and head north.

  Since I was here last, an engineer named James Vanover committed suicide by jumping from the gantry at pad 39A, where Endeavour was being prepared for launch. Like many employees of long standing, Vanover had been offered an early retirement package. Many considered this preferable to taking their chances waiting to be laid off, as nearly everyone at Kennedy will be eventually. Vanover had accepted the offer, then reconsidered and tried to revoke his decision but was told he could not; he would have to leave NASA. James Vanover had worked on the space shuttle project since 1982. I didn’t ask Omar, when I first read about the death, whether he knew Vanover—I figured it might be more appropriate to ask in person. Now, sitting beside him at quarter to five in the morning, I know I won’t. It’s only a twenty-minute drive to the main gate of the Kennedy Space Center; we pass the DAYS TO LAUNCH sign, which now bears the huge white numeral 0.

  At the south gate to the Kennedy Space Center, we show a guard our papers, and he leans in to greet us, smiling. After he waves us through, we drive through miles of darkened tropics, alive with insects even in the dark. We reach an intersection clogged with vehicles. A trail of red brake lights ahead of us marks a string of stopped cars. Guards are holding up traffic in both directions.

  “It’s the astronauts,” Omar tells me, as if this were no big deal. We see a string of helicopters fly overhead along the road from west to east, after which a convoy of vehicles comes down the road, mostly dark SUVs. At the convoy’s midpoint: an old silver Airstream trailer emblazoned with the NASA logo. I know this vehicle from pictures and movies—all space fans do. It’s the Astrovan, carrying the astronauts from their crew quarters to the launch pad. Six people are going to space today.

  Once the Astrovan has passed, Omar and I continue on. We pull into the parking lot of the Headquarters Building, one of the many nondescript low-slung midsixties office buildings at the Kennedy Space Center, where we wait, idling in the dark, for Omar’s father to emerge. The parking lot is full, even at this hour. I’ve been hearing about Frank for a long time but have not yet met him, and I’m curious what he’ll be like. Before too long we see a figure emerge from the main entrance and approach us.

  Like all mechanical engineers, Frank dresses neatly—a polo shirt, khakis, tidy hair, and glasses. As we transfer our stuff to Frank’s SUV, Omar makes the introductions. Frank is as friendly as his son, but he seems unsure what to make of me, a married woman his son met on the Internet, traveling alone with vague plans to write about the end of shuttle, about the end of his life’s work.

  We park in a field of grass pressed into service as a parking lot. As I circle around the back of the SUV, I notice that Frank has a special license plate with an image of the space shuttle on it that says CHALLENGER · COLUMBIA across the bottom. We carry lawn chairs and tripods to the viewing area; the Vehicle Assembly Building, as it always does, looms over everything. We settle in for the wait—T minus three hours.

  When I ask Frank about his work, he is reticent at first, as engineers tend to be when they are talking to nonengineers. He gives simple, nontechnical answers to my questions: I’ve worked on the main engines and on procedures for tanking fuels. I know from Omar that Frank has been in Launch Control for a number of launches, including Challenger’s last, and part of me wants to ask him about that: At what point did you realize something had gone wrong? How did you feel when you realized the astronauts were dead? Instead I ask him about the more mundane aspects of his work.

  I’ve found that all it usually takes to draw out an engineer is to ask a couple of technical questions and then remain calm while listening to the answers. Most people tend to take on a blank, frightened look as soon as they realize that a technical explanation is under way; if you can resist giving this reaction and simply listen, your engineer will open up and tell you everything you ever wanted to know.

  Soon Frank is telling me about the complexities of tanking cryogenic gases, the leak check procedures he developed. His eyes light up as he tells me an anecdote about erratic readings on a mass spectrometer. With some prodding, Frank describes to me the first shuttle launch, a test flight of Columbia. The launch had been delayed for months and years as unexpected problems with the shuttle system emerged and branched into multiple new problems, some of which Frank helped to solve. Now, finally, the day had arrived when the shuttle was ready to take to the sky. He had been given a pass to watch from the Turn Basin site, but security was so lax in those days that he drove his family all the way up to the VAB, and held one-year-old baby Omar up to the horizon, trying in vain to interest him in the show.

  Like Omar and everyone else I’ve met here, Frank has nothing negative to say about the decision to end the shuttle program, about NASA, or about his own work here. If he is upset that the spacecraft he’s spent his life working on is being mothballed before its time, he will not betray a hint of that disappointment—at least, not to me, not today.

  T minus two hours. Omar and I go for a walk. This area is known as the Turn Basin site because it edges up against a human-made body of water known as the Turn Basin, an extension of the Banana River that allows the external tanks to be delivered by barge directly to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Attached to the VAB is the Launch Control Center, the building where I saw the mission patches with the missing dates on Family Day. It’s a building with huge windows facing the launchpads, the building from which launch directors and their teams of engineers have controlled every launch since Apollo 4 in 1967. On the roof of the Launch Control Center is the viewing area where the astronauts’ families gather for launches. Since Challenger, the families have been removed from the general spectators—never again will the deaths of astronauts play out on the faces of their families on the front pages of newspapers. This morning, Gabrielle Giffords is sitting up there with the other crew families to see her husband launch into space. Omar has heard that she is in a wheelchair, wearing a helmet to protect her head because her skull has not been entirely rebuilt, and that she is sitting behind a privacy curtain so no one takes pictures of her in this state.

  Down here at the Turn Basin, there is a set of bleachers, but most people have brought lawn chairs or blankets to sit on for the wait. It’s still full dark, and generators roar to maintain floodlights. A few children run around; others sleep in their parents’ laps. Some people line up for the snack truck and to look over the offerings at a mobile gift shop offering souvenirs. I’ve noticed that space vendors are extremely effective at anticipating and meeting any possible demand for space-related swag—Tshirts, hats, pins, postcards, plush toys—including on this field of grass early on a Monday morning.

  T minus one hour. Once we are settled in lawn chairs with our coffee, I ask Frank, “How many of the space shuttle launches have you seen?”

  He pauses modestly for a moment.

  “All of them,” he answers.

  “All of them?”

  He nods. “Well, I live nearby. And I work here, so it’s not too hard.”

  Sure, but—all of them? One hundred and thirty-four, as of today. Night launches, day launches, scrubbed launches, delayed launches. Launches in 100-degree weather, launches in mosquito season, and launches that require spectators to get up in the middle of the night only to wait for hours. Launches called off at the last second before liftoff due to weather or mechanical problems, single missions that took a half dozen attempts to get off the ground. Challenger’s last was one of these.

  It occurs to me that if I were a different sort of person I would really dig in now. I would ask him what the space shuttle means to him, how he feels about this era coming to an end. But I don’t press. Neither did Norman Mailer, incidentally—he only rarely reports asking a direct question of a specific person. We could chalk this up to laziness, or to an understanding of the linguistic banalities and evasions of astronauts and scientists. Or it may be
squeamishness about asking people to reveal emotions they may not have revealed to their spouses, or even to themselves. Frank Izquierdo has dedicated his professional life to the space shuttle. It is his life’s work, his family history, his migration story. Like Ponce de León, Frank Izquierdo made the trip from Puerto Rico to Florida knowing this place would become his new home. He knew this was the place where his children would be born, the site of his life’s work. Whatever he feels deep in his heart about the end of this project, I feel certain he wouldn’t tell me even if I asked.

  Instead, I ask him more about something he’d mentioned earlier, about how he developed procedures to check for leaks during fueling.

  “When I first got here, I spent a lot of time talking to the engineers who had worked on the Saturn Vs. The hardware wasn’t exactly the same, but they still had a lot of experience that helped me.”

  I express surprise that Apollo engineers were still around in the space shuttle era, considering the long lag between projects.

  “Oh, sure. We called them the graybeards. They stayed around to pass on what they had learned firsthand. It was crucial for us to be able to get their input on things. Saved us a lot of trial and error.”

  “I think it’s too bad,” I say cautiously, “that you won’t be able to pass on your knowledge to the people who come along to design the next thing.” I’m reminded of instances of lost knowledge in history—a civilization inventing a device, or navigating an ocean, or curing a disease, and then forgetting how, leaving their descendants to struggle through it all over again, sometimes multiple times. The truth is that Frank’s generation of space workers will very likely be retired, moved away, or gone from this earth by the time the next big spaceflight project is under way, if there is one at all. In computing the costs of a huge engineering project, the cost of this loss is hard to quantify—the cost of knowledge hard-won over a lifetime that could have been passed on to another generation and won’t be. This is maybe the biggest waste of all, bigger than the waste of the orbiters themselves, which everyone agrees still have useful life left in them. And it cheats Frank out of the engineer’s great love: explaining to others the things he has figured out.