Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  All in all, this place does not feel big enough to contain our numbers, though of course it must be noted that most landings over the past thirty years have drawn but a fraction of this crowd. Though I’ve never been here before, I’ve seen images and videos of landings on the NASA site and on people’s Flickr and YouTube accounts: in them, there is always plenty of space for everyone in and around the SLF building, unlike today. And, maddeningly, the landings in the pictures are usually daytime landings. As of right now, I bitterly envy all the people who have ever come out here to see a landing during daylight hours. They got to see the orbiter streaking in from miles away, framed against the blue sky. We can’t see a thing out there, and we know the sun will not yet have risen when Atlantis comes screaming toward this runway. I know I won’t be able to see it until it’s practically on top of us, if at all. We have come out here to witness something we might not actually be able to see.

  I stake out a spot on the concrete to slump to the ground, my back against the wall of the building. It’s T minus ninety minutes, and I discover it feels amazing to sit down. I’ve been up for twenty-two hours. A few feet to my left, a young journalist is similarly slumped, asleep or willing himself to sleep, his steno notebook and phone clutched in one hand, his mission badge firmly clipped to his lapel. Every thirty seconds, he swats at a mosquito without opening his eyes.

  The NASA public affairs people are out here, identifiable by their blue polo shirts with the NASA meatball logo on them and by their general appearance of wakefulness and helpfulness. I don’t know when these people sleep. I eavesdrop on a conversation between one of their number, a chipper middle-aged man with the physical fitness and intelligent look of an astronaut, and a journalist from Reuters (if the neckband bearing her badge is to be trusted).

  Reuters woman: I thought of you the other day. On NBC Nightly News, the reporter was saying it was “the end of American spaceflight” and I knew you wouldn’t like that.

  Public Affairs guy: Well, you’re right, we don’t like hearing it put that way. But you know I think I watched the same broadcast and he did say “as we know it,” so I think that clears up a lot of the confusion.

  Reuters woman: “The end of American spaceflight as we know it”—that’s better than “the end of American spaceflight”?

  Public Affairs guy: Oh yes.

  Then their conversation turns to other things, but I’m left wondering: do normal TV-watchers know the difference between “the end of American spaceflight as we know it” and “the end of American spaceflight”? Does the former conjure up images of the SpaceX Dragon or the Space Launch System? Having spoken to many people on these topics, I have to say I doubt it. Either way, I disagree with the public affairs man’s assumption, one that seems to be embedded in most of NASA’s communications of late, that the best message to send to the public is that NASA is focusing on the future, accentuating the positive, that everything is fine. Everything is not fine. We have no space vehicle anymore. Like my students, the public needs to know that American spaceflight stopped, and to feel sad about that, before they will clamor to rebuild it.

  A few paces to the right of where this concrete slab ends, a waist-high chicken-wire fence separates us from other observers, dark figures who mill around in the grass and take seats on a small set of outdoor bleachers. The VIP area. This is where astronauts’ families sit, NASA higher-ups, politicians, other invited guests. In their boredom, some of the journalists go over to the fence and try to lure over VIPs for interviews. The people on the VIP side are bored too, and so they drift over gamely, and from where I’m slumped I can overhear several leisurely conversations getting started at once, the opening questions, the VIPs spelling their names into the outstretched digital voice recorders of the journalists.

  “Oh, it’s very exciting,” I hear someone say carefully. “It’s the end of an era.”

  People around me start to complain about the wait, which is odd considering that landings involve a lot less waiting than launches, which presumably most of us have attended before. In fact, I overhear a woman, wandering by, tell another journalist that she just saw two simultaneous references to Beckett on Twitter. En Attendant Atlantis. Waiting for the Shuttle. This strikes me as a little overdramatic. Why would the wait for landing be worse than the wait for launch? Maybe we are subconsciously aware that a delay in landing means something inherently much worse. The people who stood or slumped where we are standing or slumping for the landing of Columbia were witnesses to the horror of Columbia’s absence. They waited and waited that morning, and if they hadn’t given up and gone home they would still be waiting, because Columbia was destroyed and the crew was dead while those spectators still waited. If a launch is delayed it’s a nuisance; if a landing is delayed it’s a disaster.

  “T minus ten minutes and counting,” I hear someone say. I feel I’ve lost some time and wonder whether I have actually fallen asleep; all around me, people are dusting themselves off, stretching. The photojournalists are taking the lens caps off their cameras; the print journalists are finding good viewing spots. It’s still full dark outside, and I’m still unclear on where we’re supposed to be looking, which part of the sky Atlantis will appear in.

  I know that the sonic boom will be coming soon, and I remember hearing Endeavour’s return when I was here for the Atlantis rollout. For that landing I was fifteen miles away, but I remember the way the sound was more momentous than what we usually call “sound”—the way it wasn’t so much a sound I heard with my ears as something that happened. T minus five minutes on the clock. I still don’t really know where to look; people aren’t all looking in the same direction. When I’d first arrived here I’d had the idea that the runway is parallel to the front of the building, but now I’m not sure. How long Atlantis will be visible in the air before it touches down, whether it will touch down up that way or down that way or right in front of us—of none of this am I confident. And all of this seems terribly important, because I have come a long way, and gone to a great deal of trouble, to be able to see this. I’m determined not to be looking in the wrong direction when it happens.

  As I am dithering over which direction I should be looking, the sonic boom tears through the sky twice in quick succession. Boom-boom. The sound is heart-stoppingly loud. It startles me to the core, startles everyone here. We all knew it was coming, but it doesn’t matter. We jump anyway. Some of us even cry out with surprise. A few people burst into applause, as if the noise of the sonic boom were like the noise of the launch, a noise that contains an accomplishment in and of itself. Some people look around to meet another human’s gaze, to share what they’ve just experienced, and some of those people have tears glistening in their eyes. The spectators here are all journalists, professionally unimpressed by things. Some of them have been out here for many landings and have been startled many times before. It doesn’t matter. This is a phenomenon you would never get used to.

  The sound rolls over the land, the way thunder does—I can hear the sound traveling away from us and bouncing off buildings and hills and gantries and then rolling on and disappearing out into the ocean. The sound will wake people, rattle windows, and set off dogs barking, including the Izquierdos’ dog, for forty miles around.

  “Where is it?” a few people call to each other. But most of us know that after the sonic boom it will still be another few minutes before Atlantis is actually visible.

  Minutes go by. We stand around and wait, not sure where to look.

  “There it is! There it is!” I hear people yell, and I try to follow their fingers, and I’m looking in slightly the wrong direction at first. Then I do see it, and for a second, the sight is oddly incongruous, fake. Look, it’s a space shuttle, I want to tell people standing near me. The familiar old space shuttle as I’ve seen it in a million pictures and a million videos and in The Dream Is Alive as a child, as I’ve seen it up close and in person, the actual enormous space shuttle. But this time it is suspended in the air, which
seems to make no sense. It’s much too big to do such a thing. It hangs before me in the dark, gliding in straight toward us. Ghostly trails come off the tips of its wings and its tail fin. Of course, it’s not producing noise—if we were watching a plane of comparable size, a 747, say, we’d all be deafened by the shrieking engines, but on the shuttle there are no landing engines at all. The event is not silent; there is a profound noise that comes with the air moving under the wings of Atlantis, but it’s still eerily quiet given the sheer size of the thing we are watching barreling down toward us.

  The speakers near me crackle.

  “Having fired the imagination of a generation …” It’s a man’s voice—I don’t know whether it’s the commander, Chris Ferguson, or the public affairs officer, or someone from Mission Control. I lean in to hear better.

  “Having fired the imagination of a generation, a ship like no other, its place in history secured, the space shuttle pulls into port for the last time, its voyage at an end,” says the voice. Later, when I look up the audio recording of the landing online, I learn the voice is that of Mission Control commentator Rob Navias.

  I lose Atlantis for a second in the dark, and when I find it again, it’s by the screeching of rubber hitting concrete. It touches down, its tile-covered flank flashing by me like a shark flashing by the window of an aquarium. Atlantis has released its drogue chute and is slowing—still moving fast, but slowing, slowing.

  Slowing, slowing.

  Stops.

  “Mission complete, Houston.” This is the voice of the commander, Chris Ferguson. He speaks carefully, a little self-consciously, like he’s reading off index cards prepared in advance. His language is slightly off here; usually the commander says “Wheel stop,” not “Mission complete.”

  “After serving the world for over thirty years, the space shuttle has earned its place in history. It’s come to a final stop.”

  “We copy your wheels stopped, and we’ll take this opportunity to congratulate you, Atlantis, as well as the thousands of passionate individuals across this great, spacefaring nation who truly empower this incredible spacecraft, which for three decades has inspired millions around the globe,” replies another voice (capcom Butch Wilmore). “Job well done, America.”

  It’s kind of sweet, I suppose, the way these speeches have clearly been scripted in advance. Somehow their formality and stiff delivery combine to make the whole exchange feel more sincere, rather than less so, like a nervous couple exchanging their scripted wedding vows.

  “Hey thanks, Butch, great words, great words,” Ferguson says, in what sounds like an awkward attempt to make their dialogue sound spontaneous. “You know, the space shuttle has changed the way we view the world and it’s changed the way we view our universe. There are a lot of emotions today, but one thing is indisputable—America’s not going to stop exploring.

  “Thank you, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavour, and our ship, Atlantis. Thank you for protecting us and bringing this program to such a fitting end. God bless all of you, God bless the United States of America.”

  In spite of the stiffness and prewritten tone, the names of the lost orbiters still bring tears to my eyes. Of the people around me, some seem equally moved, while others aren’t really paying attention. Instead they text and tweet, tell each other their impressions of what we’ve just seen, pointing up at the same empty sky, which is still dark, tinged now with light gray at the horizon.

  That phrase sticks in my mind: “America’s not going to stop exploring.” I keep hearing this kind of vaguely patriotic talk that implies another space program is inevitable simply because the American spirit demands it. But we’ve been proud of what space exploration says about our country all along. We have to decide it’s also worth paying for.

  After the landing, I stand for a long time and look out at Atlantis, motionless now, as the photojournalists pack up their tripods and cameras, ready to move out to the next photo op. Atlantis stands steaming, the heat of reentry still radiating off its skin, while specially trained crews rush in to “safe” the vehicle—to remove any residue of toxic fuel from the exterior before extracting the astronauts. A few minutes ago that object was screaming toward the runway at four hundred miles per hour; for the previous two weeks it was traveling at seventeen thousand miles per hour as it orbited Earth, faster than a bullet shot from a rifle. Now it is dead still, and it will never move under its own power again. Later today it will be towed back to the Orbiter Processing Facility, then subsequently stored in the Vehicle Assembly Building until the new museum at the Visitor Complex is ready to receive it, at which time a flatbed truck will carry it slowly down NASA Parkway to its final resting place. But for now, it is motionless, the astronauts still strapped inside, running through their postflight checklist. I still can’t take my eyes off it.

  Everyone piles back into the buses and rides back to the News Center at the Press Site. Most of the journalists race to grab desks, plug in their laptops and devices. Just as at the launch, they shout facts and figures to each other, and generally cause a lot of commotion grabbing handouts, asking questions of the Media Office employees, and eventually, it seems, writing things. I assume they are throwing together breaking-news pieces and blog posts for their publications. We all watch the monitors showing replays of the landing. Some of the journalists read information loudly into their phones, as in old movies—exact times, the spelling of names. I elect not to try for a desk since I don’t really need one; I didn’t even bring a laptop. Not for the first time, I reflect on the luxury I have in not having to write about all this today. I can take in these events more fully, precisely because I don’t have the burden of writing as I’m experiencing them. I’m free to wander around eavesdropping on journalists’ conversations, chat with the Media Office people, page through a book of laminated bios of journalists whose names are up on the wall in metal letters under the heading THE CHRONICLERS. I can go for a walk and take pictures of things around the Press Site, think about what I’m seeing and what I’ve seen and what it all means to me. I can watch events replay on NASA TV. I can slump against a wall and take a nap. I do all of these things in the time it takes the journalists to pull together their first stories about the landing. When I go to write my own chapter about the landing, I will be able to use their news stories to get the details right. I will watch their videos and study their still photos and listen to their audio recordings, and that hardly seems fair. At the same time, their work of documenting what happens today, as challenging and important is it is, will be done by the time they leave the Press Site today, while my self-appointed job of reflection will just be beginning.

  The monitors show the live feed on NASA TV, where the astronauts are being helped out of Atlantis’s hatch. They wear the same expressions that astronauts always wear upon returning to Earth—tired, elated, a little confused by the unaccustomed pull of gravity, an expression of a child shaken from a happy dream.

  Nearby, I hear two journalists greet each other.

  “Boom-boom.”

  “Hey, and a boom-boom to you as well.”

  A sign posted on the wall in the News Center reminds us that we aren’t to go anywhere other than the Press Site or the Launch Control cafeteria without an escort. After passing this sign a few times, it occurs to me that the implication is that we are allowed to go to the Launch Control cafeteria without an escort. I ask a journalist wearing a Mars rover T-shirt whether we can really cross the street to go to the cafeteria, and he answers “of course,” with a look as though I am crazy for asking.

  “The food’s not great, though,” he warns me, as if I came here for the cuisine.

  Walking to the cafeteria, I stop at a crosswalk on VAB Road to let a tour bus go by. The visitors riding the bus look out at me with great curiosity, their faces shadowed by the smoked glass. It occurs to me that they probably think that I work for NASA, that I’m an engineer or a physicist or even an astronaut. I wave at them experimentally; several wave b
ack. One mother points out the window at me, and her children lean in to wave as the bus disappears around the bend.

  The Launch Control cafeteria seats a couple hundred people, and judging from the colors and materials, I’d guess it hasn’t been updated since the mideighties. It’s relatively empty at this hour, 9:30 a.m. or so, but by some miracle they are still serving breakfast. I order eggs, hashbrowns, an enormous biscuit (another notch in the “central Florida is part of the South” column), and coffee. As I eat, I scribble notes, and though I sneak looks at my fellow diners, none of the few badged employees eating nearby seems to recognize me as an interloper. They pitch their voices low, either because they are discussing something classified or because they don’t want to disturb me. I wish they wouldn’t—I’d love to hear what they’re talking about. Even when I can make out what people are saying, I keep losing the threads of their conversations in my exhaustion. The space workers all eat quickly and get back to work, but I linger over a second cup of coffee, killing time before the next scheduled photo op: the towback.

  The area where we wait to board the buses to take us to the towback is unsheltered, and though no one has passed out completely, we are all starting to wilt a bit in the unrelenting sun. It’s over 90 degrees and nearing 100 percent humidity. I tried to plan ahead for a range of temperatures—I’ve already peeled off several layers—but I still have a serious problem: I have no sunscreen with me. If I’d packed any, security restrictions would have forced me to check a bag on my flight, and a wait at luggage claim might very well have made me miss the landing. Some people knew to cover their heads, but a lot of journalists still insist upon dressing in some version of professional attire, which precludes shade-giving hats. A few enterprising journalists have made makeshift hats out of handkerchiefs by tying knots in the four corners. I am wearing a white cotton scarf I had the good sense to throw around my neck before heading to the airport—it helped keep me warm this morning before the sun came up, but now that the sun is beating down, I’ve draped it over my head like Lawrence of Arabia.