As I’m trying to remember everything that happened over the past few days, everywhere I went, everything I saw, I keep returning to the fact that the astronauts are still in space right now, those people I saw riding in the Astrovan, completely normal-looking middle-aged people, are currently floating in space somewhere overhead. There is simply no getting used to this—not for space fans, not for spaceworkers, not for astronauts themselves. It has never become normal, even after fifty years, not even when we know this will be the last one.
We may remember the intense sympathy which had accompanied the travelers on their departure. If at the beginning of the enterprise they had excited such emotion both in the old and new world, with what enthusiasm would they be received on their return! The millions of spectators which had beset the peninsula of Florida, would they not rush to meet these sublime adventurers?
—Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, 1865
CHAPTER 8. The End of the Future: Wheel Stop
STS-135 Landing: July 21, 2011
The Orlando airport is one of the busiest in the country, but late at night it quiets down considerably, and after midnight, when my flight lands, it is nearly abandoned. In the rental car area, there is only one polo-shirted employee for every two or three rental company counters, and a lone janitor vacuums around the stanchions marking empty paths for customer lines. I find the glowing neon logo of the company with which I’d reserved a car shortly before getting onto my flight in Knoxville, only a few hours before. I’m fully prepared for them to have no record of my reservation and am hoping they’ll have a car to give me anyway. I wait while the only other rental car patron here tonight conducts his transaction in easy, slangy Spanish. When the customer leaves, the man behind the counter finishes writing on a printout, looks up at me, and instantly switches to unaccented English.
“What can I do for you this evening?” A glance at his watch. “I mean, this morning?”
“Reservation under Dean?” I ask skeptically. He taps at his terminal.
“Dean,” he says. “Got you right here. Compact?” By some miracle, my reservation has stuck. It’s one in a string of lucky breaks I’ve had today. But as we make our way through the process of entering all my information into his computer, we hit a snag.
“Address where you’ll be staying?” he asks.
“Um—I won’t have one,” I tell him. Only then do his eyes lift from his screen to meet mine. There’s an awkward pause.
“Just need to know what hotel you’re going to be staying at,” he says, fingers twitching over his keyboard. He now wears the completely blank look of someone struggling not to betray his contempt for another person’s stupidity.
“The thing is, I’m not staying in a hotel,” I say. “I’m driving straight to the Kennedy Space Center, then the space shuttle will land in a few hours, then I’ll drive back here in the afternoon, return the car, and get back on a plane. No hotel.”
The agent blinks at me once, slowly.
“I’ma put Holiday Inn Cocoa Beach,” he announces.
“Fine,” I say, feeling mildly alarmed that no one else has attempted what I am trying to pull off today. Or maybe they have been smart enough to lie about it.
He does some more typing, tries unsuccessfully to upsell me on a few things, then hands me my voucher.
“Have a nice stay in Florida,” he says, in a voice not entirely free of irony. I go out to the parking structure where they keep the cars, climb into a silver one, start it up, and head toward the coast.
Yesterday afternoon I got an e-mail from NASA detailing some upcoming media events, and one of them was the landing of Atlantis. I had known all along when the landing would be—it had at first been scheduled for July 20, then put off till July 21 at a few minutes before six in the morning, to allow the crew more time to finish up work at the International Space Station. I knew that my press badge from the launch would get me in to see the landing, and I had privately mourned a bit that I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the opportunity. Compared to launches, which are visible to anyone for many miles around, landings can only be seen by those on NASA grounds and are never open to the public. And this one will be the last landing of a space shuttle, ever; very likely the last landing of an American spacecraft within my lifetime, since none of the spacecraft proposed to replace the shuttle are reusable. But I had decided not to go—in fact, had never really considered the possibility of going—because I had promised my patient and overextended husband that I was done going to Florida. I’d said these exact words to him. As I’d packed my car for the last launch of Atlantis, only thirteen days earlier, he’d asked, wearily, “This is the last one, right?”
And I’d looked him in the eye and answered, “Yes. This is the last one. After this, I’ll be done going to Florida.” And then I’d driven away, leaving him to care for our son and our home by himself.
I’ve now made this trip to Cape Canaveral five times in the last calendar year—disappeared for three or four days at a time with no promise that I’ll come back when I’m expected (scrubs are a part of spaceflight!) and no clear schedule as to when my next trip will be (slips are a part of spaceflight!). Each of those mornings my husband has dressed and fed our little son, driven him to preschool, and managed the grocery shopping and dishes and laundry and temper tantrums and playdates and bedtimes. Chris is fully engaged in the responsibilities of parenthood—he is not the type of man who uses the word babysitting to describe caring for his own child—but he’s tired of doing so much by himself, and I don’t blame him. For my own part, I’m tired of asking him to do it.
So I chose not to go to Houston to visit Mission Control while Atlantis was on orbit, though my media badge would have allowed me access, though Norman Mailer went to Mission Control while Apollo 11 was in space. This is an important difference between Norman Mailer and me—when Mailer went off to Cape Canaveral and Houston, for as long as he pleased, he left behind five children with three different mothers and does not seem to have been troubled with much guilt over who would wash their clothes or fix their meals or get up with them in the middle of the night when they wet their beds. He probably wasn’t participating in these activities even when he was home. And even if by some chance he had been troubled by guilt, it would have been out of fashion to mention those feelings in his space book. Domestic life was thought to exist entirely outside the scope of his work, less relevant than his reflections on the design of the Saturn V or his reminiscences of going to war. In my world, domestic life continues to exist, even when I’m not at home to participate in it. Children need to be fed and lawns need to be mowed and cars’ oil changed and dishwashers to be filled and emptied and filled again. This work gets done when I’m not there. It gets done by another writer who is giving up some of his own writing time in order to do it.
At the last launch, I’d assumed that I would see the end of the story, the symbolic counterpoint to the launch of Apollo 11, the Grand Finale. I assumed that the scene in which Atlantis tears into the sky as a crowd of media, space fans, and spaceworkers cry up at it from the ground would be the climactic scene of my book. But I’d found that this wasn’t the end of the story, because a launch is a moment of triumph, everyone giddy from the fireworks display. Even at the postlaunch party Omar had taken me to, where everyone there was either a spaceworker or a serious space fan, a sense of celebration had drowned out the incredulous disappointment that we wouldn’t be doing this again.
But that Wednesday afternoon, the e-mail I received from NASA detailing the events for the day of the landing stopped me and made me reconsider everything:
Also at about 10 a.m., Atlantis will be towed from the runway and parked outside Orbiter Processing Facility-2 (OPF-2) for several hours to give employees an opportunity to walk around and photograph the shuttle. At 11:45 a.m., [NASA administrator Charles] Bolden and [KSC director Robert] Cabana will host an employee appreciation event outside OPF-2.
Immediately after a 20
minute media question-and-answer session, the astronauts will go to the employee appreciation event to talk briefly to the work force.
I’ve seen OPF; I was there with Omar on Family Day and saw Endeavour being prepared there for its last mission. So while I was reading this e-mail I could picture the area outside OPF-2 where the employee appreciation party was to be held: empty tarmac, a wide stretch of asphalt between two hangars. The idea of holding a party out there in the brutal sun, a sad celebration for the dwindling number of still-unlaid-off shuttle workers, people who have been working nonstop for years or decades to get one shuttle after another off the ground—what sort of “party” would this be, on such a distinctly unpartylike occasion? Even with a space shuttle in attendance like the world’s most expensive party decoration, even with the astronauts there, just back from space—wouldn’t this be the biggest bummer of a party ever? Might some of the answers to my questions be found here? I couldn’t miss it.
I sat in my office on campus and read the e-mail over and over. Some pages I’d been working on before I left rested on the top of a pile on my desk. A sentence spilling over from the previous page read, “—and now the space shuttle era is ending.” I looked at it for a long time before getting a pen, scratching out the last word, and writing in, “—and now the space shuttle era is over.” This is what it means to be aware of history, I suppose, but it feels oddly like living through a death, the way little reminders, little inanimate things, conspire to keep surprising you, to keep fresh the change you weren’t really ready for, didn’t really want.
From the moment my eyes touched this e-mail, the landing was only about fourteen hours off. Not only short notice, but maybe not physically enough time to buy a plane ticket, pack a bag, get to the airport, and make the flight that would land me in Orlando in time to drive out to the space center, through security, and out to the landing site. Probably all the flights were full or insanely expensive, but even assuming I could get a seat, if either of two flights were delayed at all, a very high likelihood so late in the day, I would miss the whole thing anyway. I opened a new browser window for a travel site, to see what it would cost. There was one seat left on a flight going through Charlotte, and it was mysteriously cheap. I had always known that fares go up as the travel date approaches, but apparently they fall again right before the flight, the airlines finally backing down in their endless game of chicken with passengers. This flight was only a few hours away, and it was now cheaper than if I had bought it a month in advance.
The look on Chris’s face when I told him about the landing, about the towback and party and the oddly cheap fare, could best be described as be-wearied.
“It sounds like you should try to be there,” he said.
“I’d be back Thursday afternoon in time to get him from preschool,” I told him. “No matter what. And I’d keep him all that day and the next, I promise.”
“Do what you need to do,” he said. Did Norman Mailer’s wife (and ex-wives) send him off with a phrase like this? Did he even ask their permission at all, or did he simply inform them of his plans?
I clicked “buy” on the plane ticket, took my son to the pool for an hour (he’d been promised the pool, and such promises cannot be broken even for space shuttle landings), brought him home, changed out of my swimsuit, and threw a few things into a bag. Packing is much easier when you know you won’t have the chance to go to bed. I kissed my husband and son, jumped into my car, and sped to the airport.
When I pass through the checkpoint at the south gate to the Kennedy Space Center, I show my badge to the armed guard a bit warily. I’ve confirmed more than once that the badge that got me in to the launch is still good through the end of the mission, yet I still wonder whether that can really be true. I suppose it’s because of the trouble I went through to get the badge in the first place—it’s hard to believe that I don’t have to keep going through the same process every time I want to get past the gates. So when I hold out my badge and photo ID to the guard, there is a part of me that expects him to hand everything back, shaking his head. But he doesn’t. With the combination of scrupulousness and friendliness I have come to expect from the guards at these checkpoints in the middle of the night, he greets me, examines my badge and ID letter for letter, peers in at my face to compare it to the photo on my driver’s license, makes some friendly chatter about Tennessee and what a long way I have come, then sends me on my way into the humid dark. I head in toward the Press Site. It’s a few minutes past three in the morning.
I’ve tried to describe the hugeness of the Kennedy Space Center in daylight, but now I realize it’s at night that this place truly reveals its sheer square mileage, how very much empty land is separating everything. In the distance, I can see the Vehicle Assembly Building lit up like the prow of some massive ship, the row of workshops and other buildings just before it, but there are miles between here and there punctuated only with infrequent streetlights. I roll down the windows to keep myself awake on the straightaway. Outside I can hear the croaking of frogs and the strange bellowing noise alligators make. The smell of Cape Canaveral I can never quite remember when I’m not here, the night air a wet and lightless forest in the nose. Somehow, I reflect, all this feels like home now, though a home I still wonder at. A spaceport home.
I have a picture I snapped with my phone at three thirty in the morning, while I stood in line with a couple hundred other badged members of the media next to a row of idling buses. You can’t see much in the photo—I’d been standing there, deafened by the idling diesels and sickened by the fumes, exhausted and annoyed that other journalists standing around had told me I needed to check in at the News Center but then after my long walk up to the News Center I was told to come back down here to the parking lot and wait in line for a bus, a process that drained some of my precious remaining energy and put me a few dozen people behind in line. I’d been stewing about this injustice, but then I suddenly remember where I am. I am at the Kennedy Space Center, well past the security checkpoint, in the middle of the night. I am on hallowed ground, a place other space fans would give their eyeteeth to be, even once. In a couple of hours, the last space shuttle is going to make its last landing. And after today, I might never get the chance to come here again.
The picture I snap of the VAB at that moment does not come out well—it was shot in the kind of light that the human eye can see but that a camera can’t capture much at all, at least not the camera in my phone. I’ve saved the image, though, because when I look through my photos and see that blurry square that I know to be the Vehicle Assembly Building and the blurry shapes I know to be my fellow journalists, I remember what it was like to stand out there that night, the odd combination of heat and chill, of annoyance and privilege, of exhaustion and eagerness.
The bus is heading to the Shuttle Landing Facility, one of the few parts of the Kennedy Space Center where I haven’t spent much time. I’ve seen the runway, but I’ve never had a clear idea of where people actually stand to watch landings. In spite of my better judgment, I keep picturing us onlookers—the astronauts’ families, NASA officials, a pack of photojournalists, and me—all standing on the scrubby grass and bushes to one side of a normal airport runway, shielding our faces from the wind.
As I discover, the term “Shuttle Landing Facility” refers to a 500-acre area on the north side of the Kennedy Space Center, an area that includes the runway, an aircraft parking apron, a tow-way, a recovery convoy staging area, the mate-demate device, and the building everyone (confusingly) also calls SLF. The runway is nearly three miles long, one of the longest in the world, and with good reason. When the space shuttle comes in for a landing, it has only one chance. It has no engines to pull up, circle around, and try again, as airplanes do. It’s a fact that shuttle pilots take a nontrivial amount of pride in: the winged object that’s hardest to land (in early days it was nicknamed “the flying brickyard” because of its poor glide ratio) is also one with absolutely no margin for error.
Our bus parks in a field already lined with vehicles, mostly satellite uplink trucks. We pile out of our buses and start hiking up toward the SLF building. Knee-high weeds whip at everyone’s ankles, barely keeping the dirt from turning to mud in the unaccustomed churning. The moon is waning gibbous. I find it hard to keep my footing in the dark, despite the floodlights. We reach the building, a sort of mashup of small-town control tower and racetrack observation deck; there are two stories of seating (all already filled with photojournalists setting up their tripods) and a concrete pad upon which many others stand about and where still more photojournalists are setting up still more tripods and stepladders. Everyone looks out toward the runway, which is, at this hour, still swallowed in darkness and whose existence we must take on faith. A digital countdown clock, much smaller than the one at the Press Site, marks the time in red LED numbers. I feel an instant prejudice against this countdown clock, solely because it is not the other countdown clock, the big one I know and love from the Press Site. The smallness, redness, and newness of this one all offend me nonsensically.
Leaving Orbit Page 25