Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “There’s a system called Constellation—”

  “The launches to the space station will be contracted out to private companies like SpaceX—”

  “A system called SLS, for Space Launch System I think, it looks like the Saturn V—”

  “Wait, I thought Constellation was canceled—”

  “But wasn’t SLS part of Constellation? Wait, what’s Orion?”

  Even to those of us who make a point of keeping up, all this is a bit mushy. Omar tells a story about a mobile launch tower designed for Constellation that was being built at Kennedy, a gantry I saw on my visit for Family Day. It’s now being dismantled, without ever having been used for anything, because Constellation was canceled. Some people were relieved when Constellation was canceled—I myself have referred to the decision as Constellation having been put out of its misery, and Buzz Aldrin called its cancellation President Obama’s “JFK moment.” The six of us at this table all have different reasons for being interested in spaceflight, and probably we all have different political views—but we all agree that this story about the gantry is infuriating.

  Every time the shuttle takes off on the TVs, people raise their glasses and cheer.

  As the six of us say our good-byes in the parking lot, Omar asks me whether I’ve decided to stay another day. I tell him I’m not sure.

  “If you do, there’s a party tomorrow you should come to,” he says. “A lot of the space people on Twitter will be there. The NASATweetup people too.”

  “That would be fun,” I say. “I’ll text you tomorrow.”

  I’m not sure my family can spare me another day. But when I call home, Chris says they are doing fine, that I should do what I need to do so I won’t have to come back again. We’ve agreed this will be my last trip.

  Today, the day after the last launch of the space shuttle, the Visitor Complex feels different. It’s busy—packed, in fact, with visitors. A lot of them wear the I WAS THERE shirts, and the festive mood persists, but these artifacts have changed somehow. I wander the displays, and all the space suits look forlorn in their display cases. I realize what it is: the last time I was here, only five weeks ago, Atlantis was making its way to the launchpad, and the Kennedy Space Center was a working spaceport. Now, everything has become historical. The mockup of the launch vehicle that greets us at the gates is, as of today, obsolete. Even while Atlantis orbits by in the sky above us, we know that never again will an orbiter be joined with an external tank and solid rocket boosters in that configuration. It’s now a historical display, demonstrating something that used to happen. The surge of anger and sorrow I feel about this surprises me.

  I carry this glum feeling through my afternoon at the Visitor Complex. I sit in the Rocket Garden for a few minutes, looking at the old Titan and Redstone rockets, and try to console myself with the idea that the space shuttle will take its place among them. A spacecraft that is now obsolete, but that represented an important step on the path to the next thing. But without knowing what that next thing will be, it’s hard not to imagine this tourist attraction, with its boosterism and optimism for the future, becoming a depressing joke, an artifact of a more ambitious time.

  On my way out, I pass through the gift shop. A table near the front always bears merchandise specific to the most recent launch, and a mob of sunburned people is now wedged there shoulder to shoulder, pawing through piles of shirts, while an employee tries to unpack a fresh box straight onto the pile. A ten-year-old girl near me picks up a shirt, looks at the tag, and starts to put it back.

  “Don’t put it down!” her mother shrieks. Indeed, another woman was eyeing the shirt, ready to snatch it up if the girl had dropped it.

  Outside, I stop at a refreshment kiosk. The man who rings up my bottle of water is in his forties. He wears space shuttle pins on his name tag, as the gas station attendant was wearing yesterday.

  “Sure is busy today,” he comments while he counts out my change.

  “It’s crazy,” I answer. “Do you think everyone’s here for the last launch?”

  The man doesn’t hear me, or pretends not to hear me. He gives me my receipt.

  “Now you have a great day,” he tells me.

  The whole time I’m in Florida, I keep hearing optimists say this isn’t the end of American spaceflight, that this is a hiatus, a hiccup, a pause to regroup. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this week that “it’s in the American DNA to explore.”

  Countries don’t have DNA, I want to snark back. They have policies and budgets. I do know what these people mean—they mean they hope that maybe once we notice that we’ve stopped going to space, it will occur to us that we want to start going again. Maybe seeing fresh-faced astronauts like Serena Auñón in their blue flight suits will make us want to call our congressional representatives and tell them we support NASA. Maybe we will. But how long will it take us to notice? The hiatus between Apollo and shuttle was eight years—eight years when the space shuttle project was already funded, its plans already under way, as the last Apollo mission was leaving Earth. Optimists (the DNA people) predict it will be ten to fifteen years before NASA launches its next human spaceflight. Pessimists say that yesterday’s launch was the last for all history.

  Norman Mailer doesn’t mention having visited the Visitor Complex; if he had, I’m sure his comments would have been about how fat and sweaty his fellow Americans were, how slow-moving the lines for cold drinks, how unintentionally goofy the language used in the brochures and on the signage, some of which he would quote for our amusement. Or maybe I’m being unfair to him—Norman Mailer was a snob, but like me he could also be a sucker for the broad populist appeal of spaceflight, the way it can pull together Americans who have little else in common. Maybe he would have enjoyed the Rocket Garden, the simplicity of its implied phallic rhetoric: Look at these rockets. These rockets are awesome.

  Norman Mailer admired the mettle of the astronauts and the technological achievement of the moon shot, yet he never gave up questioning the effort and expense—again, the contradictions. After the launch of Apollo 11, he wrote, speaking of himself in the third person, “It was the event of his lifetime, and yet it had been a dull event.” I always wondered whether he still felt that way—that it had been the event of a lifetime—as his own lifetime was coming to its close. In interviews in the seventies and eighties, he didn’t refer to the experience of watching Apollo 11 much, a fact I’m never sure how to interpret. Was it because his interest in spaceflight was brief, fading as soon as the book was finished? Or was it because his feelings about it were too complex? Maybe the contradictions he wrote about stayed with him, as they have with me. Maybe he both loved the spectacle of spaceflight and questioned its point. Maybe he understood the risk to be part of the heroism and simultaneously felt betrayed by the deaths, by the details of the risks that killed seventeen men and women. Maybe all this complexity kept him from making casual reference to Apollo 11, and so he soon came to sound like any other American who had never experienced a launch at all, like anyone else who wasn’t sure what to believe or what to hope for.

  Omar is a member of a group on Twitter called the Space Tweep Society, a thriving Venn diagram of overlapping circles of NASA insiders, outsiders, and wannabes including astronauts, spaceworkers, physicists, astronomers, engineers, technicians, journalists, writers, teachers, science fiction buffs, and nerds of all stripes. The group has over eleven thousand followers and is steadily growing. A lot of the Space Tweeps have made the trip for the last launch, and plans for this party have been under discussion for a long time. I’m not sure how the party got the name Endless BBQ (discussions of it are indicated with the hashtag #endlessbbq), but I’m relieved it’s not called a Tweetup as so many Twitter-based parties are.

  I’ve only recently joined the Space Tweep Society, at Omar’s urging—I’ve been on Facebook forever but am still having trouble getting the hang of Twitter. For instance, if I hadn’t been invited by Omar, I tell him, I never w
ould have driven out to the home of a person I don’t know to attend a party with a bunch of strangers.

  “They’re not strangers,” Omar says. “We know them on Twitter.”

  The party is being held at the home of a local Space Tweep who used to work at the Cape with Omar but who left awhile back. Whether under the first waves of layoffs or by his own choice I don’t know, but he has remained a space fan, as so many space workers are. His home is a small one-story house, like all the houses I’ve seen in central Florida. As we approach the front door, I notice a sign taped to it warning us that images, sound, and video from this party will be made available on social media and that by entering we are agreeing to allow this. The legal formality of the sign strikes me as odd, though upon further reflection I suppose it’s more responsible than what happens at most parties, which is that people’s images are shared without their knowledge or permission.

  In the entryway, a table is set up where the hosts are greeting people and guests are asked to make name tags. The host whose home we’re in is named Chris, but because I knew him on Twitter first, I can only ever remember his Twitter handle. Also hosting is the Space Tweep Society’s founder and driving force, Jen Scheer. Jen was a shuttle technician until last year, and now she seems to be a professional social media expert and a natural leader of online enthusiasm for spaceflight. Omar introduces me to both of them, and they are both friendly even though I have not been anywhere near active enough on Twitter for them to recognize my handle—we are supposed to put our Twitter handles as well as our real names on the name tags. In fact, some people aren’t bothering with real names at all.

  The place is packed and loud, so Omar and I wander a bit looking for something to drink and a little more space. He knows a lot of people here, both in person and on Twitter—more than one person looks at his name tag, recognizes his handle, and hugs him. A DJ is working a console, one headphone pressed to his head (I later find out he is someone I follow on Twitter, a fellow Space Tweep). We go to the kitchen, where we are offered drinks, and I eat a pudding shot. I haven’t eaten a dessert prepared as a vehicle for vodka since college, and I’m not sure why it seems like the thing to do here. I guess not since college have I been surrounded by so many people I didn’t know but felt sure I had a lot in common with anyway; nor have I felt so simultaneously happy and sad that it seemed like a good idea to ingest a lot of alcohol straightaway.

  As we make our way to the back of the house, I find that the host has a large screened-in pool, as so many of the little one-story houses here do, as well as a hot tub. I’m still getting my bearings, hanging out while Omar catches up with the seemingly hundreds of people he knows or who know him, when I see a woman I recognize getting out of the pool. It takes me a minute to place her because the context is so different: she is one of the space scholars I met at the conference in DC. Last I saw her, she was wearing a dark pants suit and standing on a stage at NASA Headquarters giving a PowerPoint presentation; now she is dripping wet in a red bathing suit laughing with fellow Space Tweeps. She doesn’t seem as surprised to see me here as I am to see her—I guess the people who have been inside the space culture for a while are used to this kind of crossover. We talk about the conference, about the proceedings we might both be published in, about today’s launch, and about our earliest space memories.

  I go inside to find a quiet enough space to call home to say goodnight to my family. The kitchen is packed, as it always is at parties (on the way through I eat another pudding shot and grab a beer); the dining room is packed, entryway packed. I turn a corner to go into the living room, and for a second I’m caught up short. The room is completely darkened, blinds over the windows, with no source of light except for dozens of phones and iPads pointed up at dozens of people’s glowing faces. No one here is speaking to anyone else; everyone is typing. A couple of people are speaking quietly into their devices using earbuds, and it’s hard to tell whether they are shooting video of themselves narrating to their blog followers or just chatting on FaceTime.

  I find an empty corner to plug in my own earbuds and call my husband.

  “I’m calling you from this room,” I tell Chris, “where every single person is looking at a phone rather than talking to anyone else.”

  “That’s funny,” he says.

  “No, I mean, there’s like thirty people in this room, and no one is looking at anyone.”

  “Sounds creepy,” Chris says.

  “It is,” I say. “But it’s also kind of cool. I’ve never been to a party where thirty people are writing.”

  In the coming weeks, I will read through dozens of blog posts and Twitter feeds looking for other people’s accounts of today’s launch, and eventually it will dawn on me that at least a few of the accounts I’m reading must have been written in that darkened room while I was there.

  A bit later I’m sitting in a white plastic lawn chair talking with a computer scientist about the manicure she got for the launch: rockets on one hand and galaxies on the other. We talk about how she wanted to be an astronaut when she was a little girl. At times I feel like the only space fan here who didn’t harbor that dream, and in one way I’m jealous—it’s a dream that seems to have spurred each of them to accomplish things they might not otherwise have accomplished—but at the same time I’m grateful not to have gone through the painful process of letting go of that dream. Some of these people still have not entirely let it go, and this woman talks about the possibilities of civilian spaceflight—unlikely glimmers, all of them—with a goofy look of hope on her face.

  A couple of pudding shots later, I find myself sitting on the concrete lip of the pool with Omar, our pants legs rolled up and feet submerged in the warm chlorinated water, drinking beer from cans and talking about his prospects for the future. He’s been taking classes in computer science one or two at a time, and when he is officially unemployed he plans to finish that degree and try to get work in the space industry writing software. He is aware that he may have to move away from the Space Coast in order to make this happen. He mentions that Karen has had a couple of interviews at aerospace firms in other states.

  Floating in the pool are a few space-themed inflatables, one of them a space shuttle orbiter with an absurdly wide body and tiny wings. Without the black-and-white markings and American flag, it might not be recognizable as an orbiter at all. A young woman in a bikini swims over to it, then tries to climb up onto it and straddle it as if it were a horse. This is a cumbersome process, and it may be that pudding shots are involved in her decision making. As soon as she has clambered aboard, a man who has been skulking around the pool area with a huge professional-looking camera comes to life and shoots a series of pictures of her at fashion-shoot rate, his camera’s flash strobing out and blinding everyone.

  “Hey,” another guest shouts at him sternly, “you need to ask her before you do that.” The shouter strides over to the photographer and the two have words, gesturing at the camera. I’m impressed that the sign on the door does not create carte blanche for anyone to take pictures of young women in their bikinis.

  “I wonder if that’s his fetish,” I say quietly to Omar. “Bikini girls riding orbiters.”

  “He did spring into action suspiciously quickly,” Omar points out.

  “What would you do if Karen were offered the job at Boeing?” I ask. “Would you try to get in there too?” The alcohol has made me bold. I sneak a look at Omar—he looks thoughtful rather than offended, but then again I know him well enough to know that he wouldn’t show offense no matter how inappropriate my question.

  “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “It’s hard.”

  I find I can’t imagine Omar living in Seattle, though a job at an aerospace company might suit him. It’s impossible to imagine him leaving this place, even once there are no more shuttles to care for here.

  The next morning, as I pack up to leave, the parking lot at the motel is nearly empty. A chambermaid is the only person I see outside as I
carry my bags to the car.

  Pramod is at the front desk again when I stop in the lobby to settle my bill. He hands me my receipt with a flourish. We say good-bye and I turn to leave.

  “See you for the next one,” he calls to my back as I’m almost out the door. I look back at him quizzically, but he doesn’t seem to be joking.

  “See you for the next one,” I answer.

  On the drive back, I talk into the voice memo app on my phone until its memory is full. I talk about the badging office, about the light in the lobby of the Port Canaveral Clarion at 2:00 a.m., about the people in the gas station outside the south gate of the Kennedy Space Center at 4:30 a.m., about the way the sun looks coming up over the strange marshes and foliage of the wildlife refuge. About the friendly guards and the unfriendly photojournalists, the color of the tile in the women’s bathroom at the Press Site, about the brightness of launch and about the people I met at the party, about what it means to be scrubless. I’ve been thinking of my scrublessness as a stroke of luck, of the time and money it’s saved me in return trips, but then I think of Oriana Fallaci’s account of a scrubbed launch attempt of an unmanned test flight in 1966.

  Fallaci spent the extra two days afforded her by the scrub with the dozen or so astronauts who had made the trip. The scrub created a forty-eight-hour window during which neither she nor the astronauts had any obligations, and they spent the time sunning themselves and drinking beer by the motel pool. She got to know them, ate meals with them, got drunk with them, all because of the unscheduled days brought about by scrub conditions. I feel a sudden envy for this, for her unforgettable scene in which the astronauts in their swimming trunks take turns reciting from memory Mark Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

  Maybe Oriana Fallaci’s moment was an even rarer one than Norman Mailer’s, because of scrub conditions, because of the pre-Apollo 11 pace, and because of her gender. A moment when a writer could breeze through a motel bar with a cigarette and a martini, to be greeted with “Hi, dolly” by the chief astronaut and to respond “Hi, Deke” in return. There’s a disconcerting feeling in Fallaci’s book that everyone she quotes—all the astronauts, the media handlers, and even von Braun himself—wind up sounding like Oriana Fallaci, like voluble Italians, speaking in great flowing lines with little filigrees of repetition at the ends. But her physical impressions of people, especially the astronauts, are unequaled by any other space writer I have read. Is it because men are loath to describe other men? Or because Americans are loath to describe anyone? Fallaci looks at the astronauts hard, indelibly, at their skin and their gestures and their clothes and their flashing teeth. She admires them, details her attraction to them, while also noting that they are aging prematurely, that the job is making them into old men before their time, as if they live more per year than do the rest of us.