Since I saw it roar into space fifteen days ago, Endeavour has had a busy schedule. As all shuttle crews have done since Columbia’s demise, the crew of Endeavour made it their first order of business to inspect the condition of the tiles using a camera at the end of the remote manipulator arm. Some damaged tiles were found on the underside of the orbiter, but upon closer inspection they were cleared for reentry. Endeavour docked with the International Space Station on day three of the mission, and a traditional welcome ceremony was held between the six-person crew of ISS and the six crew members of Endeavour.
The combined crew unloaded new components of the International Space Station and unpacked supplies from Endeavour. Crew members did a total of four spacewalks to install new equipment on ISS and to service existing equipment. On day eight of Endeavour’s time in space, three of the six ISS crew members—Dmitri Kondraytev of Russia, Paolo Nespoli of Italy, and Cady Coleman of the United States—finished their six-month missions, and after the others had gone to sleep for the night, the three of them crawled into their Soyuz spacecraft, detached from Station, and fell to Earth. On day twelve of the mission, astronaut Mike Fincke surpassed Peggy Whitson’s record as the American astronaut with the most time in space, 377 days.
In between doing their work, the crew also spoke with Pope Benedict XVI, four hundred students in an elementary school in Arizona, the Italian president, students and faculty members at the University of Arizona, PBS, NPR, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, AP, Reuters, Gannett, the Voice of America, and Fox News.
Today, May 31, is day sixteen of Endeavour’s mission. The astronauts have undocked Endeavour from the ISS, and they have spent most of today testing the shuttle’s systems, stowing equipment, and going over plans for deorbit and reentry. They will start the deorbit burn tonight at 1:29 a.m. and, assuming all goes well, land here at the Kennedy Space Center at 2:35 a.m.
It’s easy enough to follow all these goings-on on the NASA site, or on other sites like Spaceflight Now or Space.com. What’s harder is to guess what it feels like to the crew to know that they are doing many of these things for the last time. The following shuttle mission, which will be the last one for all time, will not include any space walks because of the smaller crew size and limited training time. So all the little rituals of shuttle space walks—sleeping in the airlock to purge their bodies of nitrogen, donning the space suits piece by piece, opening the airlock and stepping outside—all these are happening for the last time. The ISS crew will be able to do space walks to maintain the station as necessary, but never again will astronauts slip out the air lock of a space shuttle orbiter to float and work in space.
“It’s ready,” Omar announces. He has continued to monitor his work radio, and apparently people are saying to each other that the hydraulic problem has been fixed and that rollout is about to start. We direct our attention toward the Vehicle Assembly Building door, where still no movement can be detected.
“I think I see it,” says Frank at length. He is watching the VAB through binoculars. He politely hands them over to me, and I look too; the eyepieces are still warm from his face. At first I think his claim that the shuttle is moving was wishful thinking, but then I think I see it too. I choose a frame of reference, a girder just inside the door, and watch to see whether the space between the girder and the right-hand solid rocket booster is shrinking. I think it might be. I hand the binoculars back.
Behind me, a few space fans start clapping and hooting, the way people at rock shows do to let each other know that they were the first to notice the band stepping onstage. The noise catches the attention of the people around us, and soon everyone has stopped their conversations to concentrate on the open door. The rollout has officially started at 8:42 p.m.
Atlantis is definitely moving now; the stack is visible in the doorway, no longer behind the threshold, as it was a minute ago. We watch and watch, and now the stack is mostly outside the doorway. People continue to clap and holler. The sound of the crawler transporter is monumental, like hundreds of heavy-duty tractors running at once, which, I guess, is more or less what it is. In the footage I’ve seen of rollouts, the sound of the crawler has always been left out or minimized, but in person the deafening rumble is inescapable. The stack is also preceded by a diesel smell that, like the engine noise, I should have known to anticipate but somehow did not. A toxic cloud like the idling of a hundred eighteen-wheelers wafts over the crowd. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that a lot of people who might normally object to the climate-change impact of the space program choose not to think of it in those terms, simply because it seems less stupid and wasteful than so many of the other ways in which large amounts of resources are consumed or, in this case, large amounts of carbon dioxide released.
As the stack gets closer to us, Frank and Omar get to work snapping pictures of it. It’s still not full dark out yet, and enormous xenon lights are bathing the shuttle in an unearthly white that is quite beautiful to the naked eye but hard to photograph. I take a couple of pictures of it, but, as with launches, I don’t make any real effort to capture it.
The stack is nearly directly in front of us after moving for about fifteen minutes, and it’s only at this point that I notice there are a handful of people riding on it. Mostly men, mostly dressed in the jeans and Tshirts of technicians, they are riding on the mobile launch platform. Some of them walk up and down, waving to the crowd. A few of them seem to be working up there, seem to be actually checking on the equipment and monitoring the base of the stack. But most seem to be along for the ride—standing at the railing, or sitting on lawn chairs facing out at the crowd, waving at us as if the mobile launch platform were the biggest float in a small-town parade.
“There are people on it,” I say to Omar. By now, I reflect, he has probably gotten used to me making incredibly obvious statements in his presence. He never gives me a hard time about it.
“Yep,” he confirms. “The crawler was built to keep the Saturn Vs steady, so it’s gotta be a pretty smooth ride.” It’s true that none of the people standing and walking appear to be unstable on their feet. The ride is probably much smoother than it would be on a flatbed truck.
Seeing the stack go by this slowly, I notice things I have never seen before. From here I can see clearly the struts that attach the orbiter to the external tank, with explosive bolts in between to blow the tank free once it’s empty. The way the tiles hug the graceful curve of the orbital maneuvering system pods. The way the orbiter’s name, Atlantis, was clearly painted onto the orbiter’s flank by hand rather than using decals or stencils. This isn’t the closest I’ve ever been to an orbiter—that would still be my visit to the Orbiter Processing Facility on Family Day, when Endeavour was so close I could read the serial numbers on its tiles. But I’ve never seen an orbiter this close up when it’s stacked upright for launch, and neither have most people. Even space nuts who come out for every launch only get to see the stack from miles away.
“Want your picture with it?” Omar asks, as he always does. We snap each other’s pictures without trying too hard to get great shots. Our cameras can’t really capture the spectacle of the bright white ship, the warm orange tank, the gray grumbling crawler, all against the black sky of night. We want pictures that show our own faces only so that we can tell people that we were here.
Norman Mailer’s description of the rollout compares the slowly moving launch vehicle to a “ghost galleon of the Caribbean.” I’ve always thought that description sounded fanciful, and because Mailer was never here for a rollout himself, it was easy to assume that his speculation may have been overly romantic. But it’s true there is something nautical about the way the thing creaks along, the multiple levels of walkways and stairways and signs and safety equipment and flags, the little lights hanging all over it, the way a crowd has come to see it off. The people standing and sitting at the railings are waving to us like old-timey travelers embarking on a cruise, as if the crawler transporter were an enormous cruise ship leav
ing port and the Kennedy Space Center a calm blue sea. They are close enough that we can read their expressions, but they are inexorably separated from us—not by their distance, but by their trajectory. They are on their way to somewhere, and we are stuck here.
Like so many things we wait so long to see, the rollout is both fast and slow. We stand there a long time marveling at it, long enough to resume our conversations, long enough to post to Twitter, long enough to notice some of our fellow space fans again, to notice what they are doing and wearing and saying to each other out here in the floodlit dark, long enough to return our attentions a second and third time to the massive stack and to realize that it is past us now, and now showing us its back side, and now definitely on the wane. Some observers leave as soon as the crawler is well past, some while it was still quite visible, but the Izquierdo party stays until only the lit stack is still visible in the distant vicinity of launch pad 39A, the glowing white of Atlantis’s back and spread wings. The crawler underneath has disappeared in the dark, so the ghost ship seems to move by itself, imperceptibly slowly, out to its destination still a couple of miles, and many hours, away.
After dropping off Frank, we head to dinner. Omar asks that we go to a place with a TV in the bar so he can keep an eye on an important basketball game, so we choose an Applebee’s. While we wait for our food to arrive, Dayra asks Omar and me how we met. Omar and I look at each other bashfully for a second, conscious of how the telling will seem to spin the meaning of our friendship.
“Well, Margaret wrote a book about Challenger,” Omar begins, “and I read it.”
“Wow, you wrote a book?” Dayra repeats. Somehow in all our chatting today I’d mentioned that I’m a professor but not that I’m a writer.
“Then Omar wrote me to tell me about the errors I made,” I continue, ribbing him.
“I wrote to say I liked it,” Omar corrects. “And you had very few errors, considering.”
“Later I found him accidentally on Facebook,” I explain. I tell them about the group called “If You Oppose NASA in Any Way I Will Punch You in the Face.” Everyone laughs and agrees that that is so Omar.
Our food arrives, and we eat in companionable silence. Everyone’s food is covered with cheese. Whenever something exciting happens in the basketball game Omar is watching, a table of three young men near us erupts in cheers. Omar sails a friendly comment their way, and soon they are exchanging banter and predictions about the rest of the season. Omar has made yet more new friends.
That night, I’m sleeping in my motel bed in Cocoa Beach when the sound of the space shuttle Endeavour entering the atmosphere rips through the air with a sonic boom. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before—not exactly a sound, more like a low-level molecular event—and, as Omar told me it would happen, I know exactly what it is the moment I hear it. I almost feel as though I knew the split second before I heard it, the way dreams can seem to predict events in the waking world. The sonic boom: a disturbance to the air caused by Endeavour traveling toward Earth faster than the speed of sound, breaking through the sound barrier twice, once with its nose and once with its wings. Boom-boom. I look at the clock and it’s 2:30 a.m., right on time.
I know from my reading that Endeavour has broken the sound barrier at an altitude of sixty thousand feet and won’t touch down for another five minutes. The mission won’t officially be over until Endeavour comes to a full stop at the end of the runway at Kennedy. Wheel stop, they call it, the official end of the mission. Journalists are out there right now, maybe some of the same journalists on that press bus I saw at the rollout, waiting at the Shuttle Landing Facility to take pictures of Endeavour gliding in and touching down. I feel faintly jealous of them. There is always someone who will get to see more.
When I get home I look up the current corps of astronauts on the NASA website and click through their smiling portraits in their blue flight suits, looking for the one I met at the rollout. I find her easily enough: Serena Auñón. The bio on her page says that before being selected as an astronaut she worked for NASA as a flight surgeon. She lived in Houston, Texas, and Star City, Russia, caring for astronauts and cosmonauts on their way to missions to space, having gone through one of the country’s few residencies in aerospace medicine. When I Google the term “aerospace medicine,” I’m taken to a page that informs me that while other branches of medicine deal with abnormal physiology in a normal environment, flight surgeons deal with normal physiology in an abnormal environment.
Astronauts are hard to get hold of when they are about to go to space or have recently returned, but an astronaut candidate from the most recently selected group who has yet to be assigned to a mission is easier to secure a interview with. After filling out a form online with the Astronaut Office’s media liaison describing who I am and what sort of interview I’m trying to get, I receive an e-mail back telling me when to call for a phone interview with Serena.
The call for applications for this new class of astronauts went out in 2007. That announcement was forwarded to me multiple times by friends as a joke, suggesting that I should apply, though I lack the ad’s most basic requirement, a degree in math or science. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to join the astronaut corps at a time when the only American spacecraft is being retired, to join the ranks of astronauts who have flown on shuttle and to know they would never get to fly on it themselves. This is the first class of astronauts who know they will not launch from Cape Canaveral; they will wait, probably for years, to get to fly with the Russians to the International Space Station. What would it be like, I wonder, to compete as hard as previous classes of astronauts have to get a spot, but for the spot to be such a compromised one?
One of the things that makes the job title astronaut different from other jobs is that it existed in the collective imagination for centuries before it was ever actually anyone’s occupation. In the second century CE, Lucian of Samosata imagined travelers going to the moon and fighting a war with its inhabitants. In Jules Verne’s immensely influential 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, the word astronaut is never used, but three men seal themselves into a metal capsule in order to fly to the moon. Many of the details Verne came up with were so outlandish as to invite ridicule if they had not become reality a hundred years later in the Apollo program, including a launch from Florida and a safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Verne’s three space travelers behave in some ways we now associate with astronauts—they solve problems that arise on their mission, analyze new information they observe outside their windows, and do calculations to figure out their location and speed. On the other hand, they indulge in non-astronaut-like behaviors such as getting drunk, becoming histrionic about unexpected problems, and expressing doubt about the meaning of their journey, about whether they should be doing this at all.
One of the first uses of the word astronaut to refer to a human traveling in space was in Neil R. Jones’s short story “The Death’s Head Meteor” in 1930.
The young astronaut entered the space flyer, closed the door, and was alone in the air-tight compartment just large enough to accommodate him. On the instrument board before him were dials, levers, gauges, buttons and queer apparatus which controlled and operated the various features of the craft. He turned on his oxygen supply and his air rejuvenator so that the air could be used more than once, after which he shoved his starting lever forward. The craft raced suddenly off the roof and into the cloudless sky above the vast city of the twenty-sixth century.
Jones was probably as surprised as anyone to learn how soon his new word became an actual job title, only twenty-nine years later. In between, during World War II, the first actual rockets emerged. This was the beginning of a new era in which the astronaut became a consistent character to tell stories about, if still speculative. Though the rockets weren’t ready to safely contain humans, their streamlined hulls brought with them a clearer image of the astronaut fantasy. Part fighter pilot, part frontiersman, the helmeted spaceman climbed in
to sleek machines and left Earth in the black-and-white television shows of the fifties. In 1954, Walt Disney created Man in Space, a series intended to promote his new Disneyland, which was set to open the following year. In the opening shot of the series, Walt himself speaks into the camera. “One of man’s oldest dreams has been the desire for space travel,” he tells us with an avuncular twinkle. “Until recently this seemed to be an impossibility.”
Man in Space gives a brief history of rockets, complete with a racist cartoon of the first Chinese rocket builders. This historical overview is politely evasive about the German rocket program, referring to the V-2 rockets as “forerunners to space travel” rather than as instruments used to rain death upon our allies in Europe. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer responsible for the V-2, gives a talk about multistage launches. Von Braun is movie-star handsome and looks disturbingly like a textbook illustration of what Hitler’s anthropologists meant by the term Aryan. His English is extremely fluent, but his unmistakable German accent must have sounded jarring to an American audience not all that many years after the war.
Man in Space dramatizes the experiences astronauts were expected to encounter, especially the experience of weightlessness. “How will man’s subconscious mind react,” the cartoon voice-over asks, “to his first experiences with space travel? Will he not suddenly be aware of his precarious situation trapped in a tiny metal box floating through the incomprehensible nothingness of space? We do not know.”
The idea of the astronaut evolved significantly in 1959, the year the Mercury astronauts were chosen. Crew-cut, Caucasian, and confident, most were veterans of World War II or Korea or both. They were all husbands and fathers. They embodied the contradictions embedded in the American masculine ideal: they were military men (rule followers, patriots) on the one hand and test pilots (steely-eyed maverick cowboys) on the other. Their names tripped off the tongue: Carpenter, Cooper, Glenn, Grissom, Schirra, Shepard, and Slayton. They were handsome and daring. Asked at their first press conference whether they would be willing to launch into space tomorrow, they all raised a hand. Some of them raised two. Even for those of us who hadn’t been born yet then, in many ways what we imagine when we say the word astronaut is still those seven men.
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