Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  The crawler transporters survived the transition between Apollo and shuttle. In the shuttle era, the space shuttle launch vehicle is assembled atop a mobile launch platform, the enormous metal structure we saw in the VAB on Family Day eight months ago. The presence of the word mobile in the name is misleading; the platform looks like an oil rig, like a building, like a permanent structure that isn’t going anywhere. Each one weighs 8.2 million pounds by itself, 11 million pounds with a space shuttle assembled on it, even more once the shuttle’s external tank is filled with fuel. Once the shuttle is stacked on the MLP, the crawler transporter slides up underneath the platform and shrugs the entire stack up onto its shoulders before rolling it out to the launchpad three miles away.

  For the first rollout at Kennedy, for Apollo 4 in 1967, spaceworkers were encouraged to bring their families to see the show. Rollouts have sometimes been open to workers and their guests, but they haven’t always been big events, since they often took place in the middle of the night and were not well lit. This year, with the end of the program in sight, NASA has started inviting workers to bring their families again and has brought out massive spotlights to make the stack visible. Tonight I’ll be among them for the last rollout in shuttle history.

  It’s only been fifteen days since the launch of Endeavour, which is still on orbit and is due to land tonight at 2:35 a.m. In the meantime, Atlantis has been mated with its external tank and solid rocket boosters for its last flight; this process takes place in the VAB, a dramatic ballet of engineering in which the orbiter is hoisted up into the air using a crane built into the ceiling, then lowered with incredible delicacy onto the external tank. Omar was there in the VAB to see the stacking process, which takes eight to ten hours. Tonight the assembled vehicle will roll out of the building and out to the launchpad. Omar has invited me to join him and his father and some friends for yet another “last.” After checking with my husband, I’d agreed and flown out.

  On launch days, hundreds of thousands of people show up and vie with one another for hotel rooms, seats in restaurants, and launch viewing sites, but today will be different. Rollouts are open only to NASA employees and their families, so my visit will not coincide with the visits of hundreds of thousands of other tourists; I’m getting to see the Space Coast as it is most of the time for the people who live here. Because the causeways won’t be clogged with traffic, I have a wider range of options and don’t have to stay on Merritt Island, at my Florida Home. Instead, I’m staying in a hotel in Cocoa Beach for the first time. A beachfront room here during an off week costs the same as the unglamorous Clarion during a launch.

  This morning when I wake up in that hotel room in Cocoa Beach, I am disoriented, at first, to hear the ocean. I dress and step out onto the beach, blinking at the white-hot sun. A few families are already setting up their blankets and umbrellas and coolers and rafts and Frisbees. The surf is calm, and children are wading in to stand waist high and shriek while they splash water onto each other. Out on the horizon I can make out an enormous cruise ship, one of the many that leave from Port Canaveral on their way to the Caribbean, moving almost imperceptibly slowly. Watching it embark is like a form of meditation. I breathe in the saltwater air with my toes in the surf, snap a picture with my phone to prove I’ve been to a beach, then get in my car and head toward the Space Center.

  I drive through Cocoa Beach along the tacky stretch of A1A. Tom Wolfe says of Cocoa Beach that it “was so Low Rent that nothing on this earth could ever change it…. Even the beach at Cocoa Beach was Low Rent.” In stark contrast to the unspoiled green flats of the Space Center on Merritt Island, there is nothing beautiful about Cocoa Beach along A1A. Not the surreal sculpture of a surfer balancing on a concrete slab of wave, not the chain hotels done up in pastel colors, not the souvenir ships with multicolored signs advertising SHELLS (who buys shells?) and WOMEN’S BIKINIS (who else buys bikinis?) and BEACH TOYS and SUNSCREEN. Not the fake tiki lounges left over from the early sixties when the Mercury astronauts first came here for their training and tests and launches, those old-school crew-cut astronauts who declared the Cape a “no-wives zone” and called the young women who followed them back to their motel rooms “Cape cookies.”

  I cross the Banana River on the 520 causeway to reach the Kennedy Space Center from the south and pass through Merritt Island. I take the turn for the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. You can’t miss the turn: it’s marked by a life-size mockup of the space shuttle launch vehicle. The Visitor Complex boasts a museum, a rocket garden, an IMAX theater, a beautifully preserved Saturn V housed in its own hangar, a seriously well stocked gift shop, and an attraction called the Shuttle Launch Experience that I’ve never done because I’m always here alone and I’d feel stupid getting on an amusement ride by myself. Once you’re in the Visitor Complex, you can board a bus to take a tour inside the working part of the space center, including the Vehicle Assembly Building (only as far as the parking lot) and an observation gantry overlooking the launchpads. Most tourists leave here thoroughly propagandized about spaceflight and their nation’s role in it.

  The Visitor Complex has become so familiar to me, I decline the map the ticket seller offers me. I know where the vintage space suits are displayed, where to find the diorama of local wildlife, where the least-used bathrooms are, where to buy ice cream without waiting in a long line. Omar has been hoping to join me after he runs some errands, but he keeps texting me about delays. Finally he decides that he won’t have time to join me after all, texting me by way of explanation:

  Goin to buy some hay now

  Hay? It takes me a moment to remember that Omar’s girlfriend, Karen, owns horses, and that Omar helps out with their care. I text him back:

  21st century transport by day, 19th century transport by night Omar’s response:

  Karen just LOL’d

  Later, I sit on a bench in the Rocket Garden by myself, eating an ice cream cone in the beastly heat. Behind me squats the enormous silver base of the Atlas rocket, gleaming in the sun like a piece of metal sculpture. It’s easy to forget, unless I look straight up, that I am sitting among rockets. Tourists swirl around me, reading the plaques and taking pictures. A tour guide, a paunchy white man in his fifties, tests his microphone and encourages visitors to gather around. A few families wander over; I remain on my bench but listen, curious. The man clears his throat loudly into his microphone, a signal that he is ready to begin.

  “Welcome to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex Rocket Garden! I would like to tell you about some of the important and historic rockets we are proud to have on display here in the Rocket Garden! This right here is the mighty Atlas rocket!” His delivery is odd, deadpan, punctuated with an emphasis at the end of each sentence, as if someone has encouraged him to vary his tone.

  “The Atlas was first developed as an intercontinental ballistic missile! Or ICBM! Perhaps you’ve heard of those! How many of you have heard of the Atlas rocket?” A few uncertain hands wander up. No one wants to be called on.

  “The Atlas rocket ran on a mixture of liquid oxygen and a type of kerosene known as RP-one! The Mercury astronauts trusted the Atlas with their lives when they climbed into their capsules perched at the top of these mighty rockets!” A practiced pause. I wonder whether the tour guide is paid by Delaware North, the company that runs the Visitor Complex, or whether he is a volunteer. He has the affect of an enthusiast, an evangelist.

  “Can you imagine—!” and here he gives a gesture toward the top of the rocket, ten stories, while his gathered listeners shade their eyes against the bright Florida sun to dutifully tilt their faces up—“Can you imagine what it felt like to those seven astronauts who trusted their lives to this mighty warrior?”

  “Four, not seven,” I whisper into my ice cream. The first two Americans in space flew on Redstone rockets, not Atlas; also, one of the Mercury astronauts, Deke Slayton, had been grounded for a heart condition. That left four who trusted Atlas with their lives. I feel a moment’s
self-satisfaction—I will report to my husband later that I knew a fact this tour guide did not—but then I wonder, what kind of person takes pleasure in correcting a tour guide, even if she does so too quietly to be heard? I’ve kept telling myself that I’m not one of the hard-core space people, that I am somehow different from them because I’m a writer, because I would not have come here just for my own enjoyment. Maybe this was true at one point, but I’m starting to question how different I really am.

  Omar has told me to be at his parents’ house at 6:00 p.m. so we can head over to the rollout together in Frank’s SUV. When I pull into his neighborhood, I recognize the house, the same house where I’d picked him up for the launch of Endeavour. On that morning it had still been dark, so I didn’t get a very good look at it and hadn’t gone inside. It’s a small white house on a cul-de-sac. Today I park, knock on the front door, and am greeted by Omar and a small white dog who goes so insane with barking that he has to be put out back.

  Inside, the house has an open floor plan, all cream-colored carpet and tile, opening out toward a pool. Omar introduces me to his mother and his grandmother. His mother, Angie, is a small dark-haired woman who smiles politely and shakes my hand, then disappears into the kitchen again. Omar has told me that his mother is not much interested in space and that she hasn’t been to any shuttle launches other than the very first one in 1981—this in stark contrast to her husband’s record of 134. When Omar tells me this detail about his mother, I remind him that in my novel, the main character’s mother has also boycotted all the shuttle launches after the first, while the father takes his space-obsessed child to every launch. “That is weird,” Omar agrees. It pleases me when things I made up turn out to be true for someone. I think about a line from a letter Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald about character—“make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

  Omar and I sit in the living room catching up while we wait for his other friends to arrive. He tells me about having escaped another round of layoffs; he’s been told he will keep his job for at least a few more months. He shows me his new laptop and clicks through some photos he and Karen have taken recently at the Space Center. One of Karen’s shows a launch vehicle stacked on the pad, photographed from the crawlerway; she has arranged the shot so that some of the crawlerway’s pebbles are visible at the bottom of the frame, looking huge and marbled and distinct, while behind them the stack looms like futuristic architecture.

  “That’s gorgeous,” I say. Part of what we are admiring, when we admire the image, is the vantage point itself. Most photographers, even those who get press credentials from NASA, would never get the chance to take a picture like this. The launchpads are among the most tightly restricted sites at the space center. It’s one of the things that keeps Omar working here as long as they will let him.

  Omar’s friends Kris and Dayra show up, and we all pile into Frank’s Suburban. I met Kris at Family Day; Dayra is a friend of Omar’s from the University of Central Florida. I’d forgotten, until I’m chatting with her about the classes she and Omar took together, that Omar was a history major.

  At the checkpoint, Frank shows the guard his badge. The two men share a joking exchange that makes it seem as though they’ve met here many times before. We pass through the gate, and the geography changes abruptly into the straightaway of Kennedy Parkway with the green wetlands on either side of us. The early-evening sunlight makes everything golden, and the Vehicle Assembly Building is lit up like a religious destination. The others don’t interrupt their conversations, but I stop talking to look out the window at it. I was here only two weeks ago, but I’m surprised by how pleased I am to see the VAB again. This is my fourth visit within eight months, but I never seem to get used to the sight of it. If anything, I become more emotionally involved with it the closer we get to the end. I snap a picture through Frank’s windshield and post it on Facebook. “Are you back there again already?” a friend from graduate school comments under the picture. “Or do you live in Florida now?”

  As we pull into the grassy area where cars are parking in neat rows, we pass a bus whose front sign reads PRESS. When I peer inside, I can see row after row of white men in their fifties, some of them balancing large tripods in the aisle. I feel a surge of jealousy, as I did when I passed the Press Site on my first visit here with Omar.

  “Press,” I point out to the others in the car. “Those guys think they’re better than me.”

  “You should try again for the next NASATweetup,” Omar says. He had reminded me faithfully of every deadline for the selections for spots to see launches from up close. He doesn’t enter them himself, he told me once, because as a badged employee he already gets better access than most, and he feels he should let someone else have a chance.

  “I don’t think I’m on Twitter enough to get chosen,” I say. The selection process is supposed to be random, but the people who are chosen tend to have suspiciously high numbers of followers. “I’ll keep trying, though.”

  “You should try again for regular press credentials, too,” Omar says. I’ve complained to him that after being turned down a number of times I had become frustrated and given up trying. But he’s right—it wouldn’t hurt to try again.

  We pile out of the SUV and follow Frank and Omar to a good spot in the field. They know from past rollouts where the best place is to stand.

  Once again, I’m standing in a grassy field at the Kennedy Space Center with Omar and Frank, the Vehicle Assembly Building filling the sky as a backdrop, waiting for something to happen. The sun is setting, and people mill around us excitedly, chatting and buzzing with anticipation, like every other time I’ve been here. Classic rock plays over giant speakers. Children chase each other, some of them dressed in tiny flight suits and helmets. Reporters and photographers wander among the crowd, getting shots of the kids playing and asking people what they think is the significance of today’s event.

  Frank, Omar, and I are standing not far from where we stood for the launch of Endeavour, fifteen days ago. That day, people had been finding good spots with a clear view to the northeast, toward the launchpad, but today we are facing west, toward the massive doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building. The launch vehicle will emerge from the VAB, roll along the crawlerway directly in front of us, and then head off toward the launchpad. It will move so slowly, about half a mile an hour at its fastest, that we will have plenty of time to take it in while it moves this short distance.

  One of the enormous VAB doors has already been opened, the seven metal panels folded vertically up on each other to reveal a sliver of the stacked launch vehicle. Bleachers are set up out here for spectators, as always, but more people are sitting on blankets, walking around, and visiting the booths that have been set up with snacks and drinks and (of course) space souvenirs. Most people have gathered at the rope barrier marking off a safe distance from the crawlerway. The setting sun is lighting everything up rose gold—the VAB, the clouds in the distance, the NASA families with their binoculars and their American flags and their cameras.

  The rollout is scheduled to start at 8:00 p.m., but at five after, ten after, we still haven’t detected any movement. Omar has brought his work radio with him, and from it he learns that the crawler transporter has a hydraulic leak. The rollout is going to be delayed at least fifteen or twenty minutes.

  We watch the VAB doors and wait.

  After we learn that the hydraulic leak will cause a delay, Dayra and I go for a walk while Frank and Omar set up their tripods. We stop by the snack booth to buy bottles of water, then notice a clump of people who seem to be gathering excitedly near the bleachers, lining up. We drift over to see what’s going on.

  “It’s an astronaut!” Dayra gasps. A moment later I spot the figure she’s pointing to: a woman wearing the bright blue flight suit that turns an otherwise normal-looking person—in this case, a woman in her thirties with curly brown hair—into a celebrity and a figure of fascination. People are clamoring to get autog
raphs and pictures taken with this astronaut, whose name patch reads AUÑÓN.

  “Let’s get pictures with her!” Dayra says, and, grabbing my arm, steers me into the line. I tell Dayra I suspect this astronaut is from the new class chosen in 2009. This group is unique among astronaut classes in that they were hired knowing they would not get to fly on an American spacecraft. They will be assigned to missions on the International Space Station, which they will reach via the Russians’ Soyuz spacecraft. The 2009 class is the first group of astronauts for whom fluency in the Russian language will be a necessity.

  When we reach the front of the line, the astronaut greets us. We clutch her hand in turn, then take each other’s pictures with her. Up close, I can see in the astronaut’s eyes that she is a bit overwhelmed by all the attention. Her expression, while friendly, is a bit bewildered.

  Dayra asks her if she’s been to space.

  “Not yet,” the astronaut answers with the practiced smile of someone who has answered the same question a hundred times today. Both Dayra and I know enough not to ask her when she will. She doesn’t know. She might not be assigned to a mission for years, and the waiting, though part of the job, must be excruciating. Dayra and I thank her before starting to walk away. A little boy is already offering her a space shuttle book he wants signed.

  “Good luck!” Dayra calls over her shoulder to the astronaut, who smiles back. As we rejoin our group, I realize what I saw in her expression: she is out here at a space shuttle rollout, answering questions about the space shuttle, but she knows she will never get to fly on a space shuttle, that they will all be sealed up in museums by the time her training is complete. I’ve never before met an astronaut who hasn’t been to space. An astronaut candidate, but not a space-flown astronaut. An earthbound spacefarer. You’d think the limited opportunities for astronauts would dampen the appeal of the position, but in this last round of astronaut hiring, NASA counted more applications than it has ever received. There are still a great number of people who just want to go to space, who are willing to dedicate their lives to that chance.