As promised, Discovery is pulled nose to nose with Enterprise, and the crowd applauds this sight.
Speeches ensue: One from the director of the Air and Space Museum, who gets choked up and has to take a moment to compose himself. Then the NASA administrator, Charlie Bolden, who starts out by recognizing the spaceworkers who have made the trip today, the people who worked on Discovery with their own hands. This earns a huge round of applause.
The rest of Bolden’s speech emphasizes that the next steps are under way: NASA is partnering with private companies to get astronauts and cargo back and forth from the International Space Station, and NASA will now focus on long-range spaceflight. The same story we’ve been hearing all along, yet the Space Launch System is still underfunded and unpopular with many spaceflight advocates. In a best-case scenario, SLS won’t get astronauts back into space before 2021, and won’t get us any farther than we’ve already been until 2025 or later. This is tough to get excited about, especially when so many in Congress are eager to make a name for themselves by killing this relatively unambitious plan altogether.
John Glenn is introduced by the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Wayne Clough, who uses the same F. Scott Fitzgerald quote to introduce him that I used to introduce Buzz Aldrin two years ago: “There are no second acts in American lives.” I am seized with horror that this quote I thought was so clever is actually incredibly obvious, that maybe Buzz listened to me reading it so confidently in my introduction of him and rolled his eyes, having heard it a million times before. “Now Discovery begins its own second act as an engine of imagination, education, and inspiration,” Clough finishes.
John Glenn takes the podium. He is ninety years old. Like all of us, he has been sitting out here for over an hour in the beating sun. Some people a fraction of his age are looking worse for wear, but he stands straight as a stick and looks out at us with bright eyes. I think of Oriana Fallaci’s fantastic description of him when he was in his forties: he reminded her of the GIs who showed up to liberate Italy and gave her chocolate when she was a child. “[A] whirlwind of freckles and strong white teeth … a pair of sparkling green eyes, whether shrewd or innocent I couldn’t tell.” The description is still oddly fitting despite the passage of forty-five years. Same freckles, same sparkling green eyes. John Glenn begins.
“Perhaps it started with the pioneers who first lived in this new land, but Americans have always had a curious, questing nature that has served us well.” He is a born public speaker; we are in the palm of his hand.
John Glenn points out that the wagon trains that took settlers west in the nineteenth century considered ten miles to be a good day’s trip. Discovery, the spacecraft upon which he became the oldest astronaut in history at age seventy-seven, could cover the same distance in less than two seconds. He reminds us that only twenty-three years after railroads replaced the wagon trains, the Wright brothers flew their first plane at Kitty Hawk. Only fifty-nine years after that, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. Seven years later, Neil and Buzz walked on the moon. Some of us do math in our heads, dismayed. How long will it be until we can add another leap?
John Glenn gives a rundown of the accomplishments of Discovery. Then he hits a part of the speech that gets everyone’s attention.
The unfortunate decision made eight-and-a-half years ago to terminate the shuttle fleet, in my view, prematurely grounded Discovery and delayed our research. But those decisions have been made, and we recovered and now we move on with new programs and possibilities unlimited.
It’s one sentence of criticism, immediately followed by a hedge. The line gets applause, but it’s not entirely clear whether the crowd is clapping for the criticism, for the “new programs and possibilities” line, or because he has paused. Omar raises his eyebrows in surprise and we exchange a look. No one at any of these events has ever said anything even vaguely negative about the decision to retire the space shuttle—the closest you’ll hear is the word bittersweet. But here John Glenn himself has criticized the retirement directly. I feel oddly elated.
He closes with this:
We recently celebrated a 50th anniversary of our first orbital flight. In a speech to Congress following that flight, I closed with a statement that I would repeat today. “As our knowledge of the universe in which we live increases, may God grant us the wisdom and guidance to use it wisely.” Thank you.
A document officially transferring ownership of Discovery from NASA to the Smithsonian is produced. It’s signed with great flourishes, John Glenn serving as witness.
For nearly as long as I’ve been reading about spaceflight, I have had strong and conflicting emotions about John Glenn. He is, on the one hand, the most charismatic Mercury astronaut, the appealingly boyish bow-tied moralist who earned the ire of the others by suggesting that they not cheat on their wives. At the same time, he is the man who testified at the 1962 hearing on the possibility of letting women into the astronaut corps that it is “a fact of our social order” that women don’t belong in space, who found it so hard to grasp the simple fact that the women in the same room with him harbored the same dream he did. I don’t know whether John Glenn regrets saying what he did in 1962, or whether he no longer believes it to be true. But I do know that in 1998 he chose to climb into space shuttle Discovery with a woman, Chiaki Mukai, among his crewmates, thereby trusting his life to her competence. There are no reports of his having had any qualms about doing so.
The director of the Smithsonian formally introduces Discovery as the newest holding in the museum’s collection, and though everyone claps, I’m surprised by how awful that sounds to me. I knew I was coming here to see Discovery put into a museum, yet it still catches me off guard, the finality of the sentence. Discovery, which has flown into space thirty-nine times, which I personally watched tear into the sky on two different occasions ten years apart, which Omar has dedicated his adult life to keeping safe, is now officially a museum piece.
For most of the afternoon, the two orbiters stand nose to nose while people converge and disperse, taking each other’s pictures. Omar stands out on the field for a few minutes, shading his eyes, looking at Discovery and Enterprise. I watch him, trying to put myself in his place. Omar has been around space shuttles since before he can remember. Discovery specifically he has spent many hundreds of hours with—he has seen it standing on the launchpad readied for flight and parked in the Orbitor Processing Facility for repairs and rolling horizontally to the Vehicle Assembly Building and rolling vertically on the crawler out to the launchpad. He has seen Discovery slung up on its harness dangling from a crane affixed to the ceiling of the VAB, being joined to its external tank and solid rocket boosters. He has seen it steaming on the runway fresh from its return to space. Omar has crawled inside the crew compartment, sat in the commander’s seat, and felt how his weight settled in that position from which astronauts have waited so many hours to launch. He has traveled to California, twice, to help out when Discovery was forced to land at Edwards Air Force Base and overseen it being mated to the shuttle carrier aircraft. He has seen Discovery on rainy days and on sunny ones, when there have been threats of hurricanes and while its engines were removed after its last flight, when it was being prepared for the end of its life. The engineers who created Discovery and kept it working have not spent nearly as many hours in the personal company of Discovery as Omar has. Certainly not the astronauts themselves, who live in Houston and train in simulators, visiting the actual orbiters only briefly before flying in them.
I try not to show that I am watching him surreptitiously, watching for a profound moment.
Omar Izquierdo stood in the bright sun, a wistful look of affection on his face for “his bird,” Discovery.
Omar Izquierdo stood watching as Discovery shone in the sunlight for the last time before being forever interred in the dark museum.
Omar Izquierdo stood vigil with his orbiter for the last time, his jaw grinding in anger as he struggled to accept
that his bird would never fly again—
“Hey, you want to know something I’ve never really noticed before?” Omar breaks into my thoughts. “You can see the old worm logo on Discovery. You see, right there? You can see where they removed it but it’s still sort of showing through.”
Omar is right—I can see where the letters of the worm logo have been removed, their traces still visible only from this distance and in bright sun. For all the time he’s spent with Discovery, for all the sacrifices he’s made in order to be part of preparing it for flight, there are still things Omar doesn’t know, still new things to learn about it even as it’s being put away for the last time.
“Do you like the worm?” I ask, just to have something to ask. The things I really want to ask him are unaskable.
“Yeah, I guess,” he answers. “It’s pretty seventies. I like the meatball better.”
“Me too.”
We stand for a long time feeling—what? The mandatoriness of emotion, I guess. All the people waving little American flags and the little kids wearing their astronaut suits and the grown-ups wearing their red I WAS THERE shirts and the press shouldering past one another steadying their enormous cameras, all of us trying to tell ourselves that this is the last time we are ever going to be able to see a thing like this, that nothing like this will ever happen again.
Later, when we are standing inside the hangar where Discovery has been parked, the brand-new rope to keep visitors at a safe distance being installed all around it, Omar and I glance at a map of the room, a schematic with labeled outlines corresponding to the artifacts. In the center of the rectangle representing the room is an outline of a space shuttle orbiter, the word Enterprise printed next to it. Omar points to it.
“Wrong,” I say, and we laugh.
A couple of hours later, I hug Omar good-bye and wish him safe travels. He’s headed to the airport to catch his flight back to Florida. I’m not sure when I’ll see him again, and it’s the first time since we met that this is true.
In the car on my way home from DC, I hear a new pop song, “Starships.” It’s a generic dance hit, an attempt to build on the popularity of the “baby, you’re a firework” song, which is still getting radio play. I hear “Starships” enough times that I start to learn the words: “Starships were meant to fly. Hands up and touch the sky. Let’s do this one last time.”
As with “Firework,” this song is not about the space shuttle, only a pop confection urging us to dance and to think much of ourselves, like all the other pop songs. Still, it’s hard not to hear in it a reference to what I’ve just seen, an odd confluence of disparate emotions, a celebration of something sad.
When I get home, my family has already gone to sleep. I stay up for a while to organize my notes and upload data from my phone. As I noticed at the Atlantis landing, it seems to be NASA policy to consistently thumbs-up the decision to retire the shuttle program, to always emphasize the importance of looking ahead. And I still can’t fault them for this—it’s really their only choice. Criticizing the decisions of lawmakers who determine its future budgets is not judicious for any government agency. Yet I can’t help but feel there has to be a way of conveying a more complex reaction to these retirements than this false celebration. NASA will always do as much as they can with what they are given. We saw this to be the case at the end of Apollo, when the grand visions of an orbiting shipyard and transports to Mars were compromised down to the space shuttle. Surely Charles Bolden believes, as I do, that when we are sending American astronauts to space again in American spacecraft launched from Florida, that will be better than what we are doing now, which is putting our only working spacecraft in museums and paying the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station. This is why it meant so much to me to hear John Glenn say what he said. Just to hear the words unfortunate and prematurely at one of these events, in front of God and Charlie Bolden and Discovery herself.
I realize now how much I was hoping to see Omar betray some emotion, but as always, Omar chooses to see the best side of things. Certainly he doesn’t seem as angry as I am.
As I scribble notes, the pictures and videos and voice memos in my phone are uploading into my computer, each of them showing itself briefly before being replaced by the next. I become distracted watching my own photographic experience go by: A picture of Enterprise alone wearing its tail cone. A picture of a row of folding chairs, each of them marked by a sign reading RESERVED FOR ASTRONAUTS and a little American flag. A picture of the two orbiters nose to nose; from this angle, they seem to be kissing. A picture of John Glenn I snapped surreptitiously, standing close enough to reach out and touch his arm, though I didn’t. Pictures of children wearing miniature orange astronaut suits posing in front of the two orbiters nose to nose. I have no pictures of Omar with Discovery—I offered repeatedly throughout the day, but each time he refused.
The last video is taken from within the dark interior space of the Udvar-Hazy Center and shows Discovery moving, bit by bit, into the museum. It’s broad daylight outside, so the first seconds of my video are too bright, crushed out to white. But as Discovery slowly creeps inside, its nose and wings become visible in sharp detail. As I shoot this video I’m as close as I’ve ever been to a space shuttle orbiter. Discovery gets bigger and bigger in my frame, then the massive hangar door slides closed behind it. Once the door is shut, the light changes, the camera adjusts, Discovery is suddenly sharply detailed in the newly balanced light. I take in the spaceship before me. It will never move again.
Goodbye, Discovery.
When he came back from covering the moon landing and finished writing his space book, Norman Mailer embarked on an experiment. He rented a house in Maine and spent part of the summer there with five of his six children to demonstrate that he could care for them and run a household himself. He had something to prove, because his fourth wife, Beverly Bentley, had just left him, claiming that her career as an actress had been buried under the domestic work necessary to let Norman Mailer go out into the world and be Norman Mailer.
Though the original challenge was to show he could do everything himself, Mailer almost immediately hired a local woman to do cleaning and laundry. He also depended on the oldest three children, all girls, who “did their chores and helped the boys to dress and go to bed, aided with the cooking and the dishes and the pots and with the wire perambulators in the shopping marts.” Then he called in his sister for two weeks and, after she’d left, a “mistress” who at first came for a brief stay, but soon returned for the rest of the summer. It’s hard not to imagine that the sister and the “mistress” took over much or all of the work of running the household, the very work Mailer had meant to demonstrate he could do. Some scorekeepers might say he cheated at his own game—my husband certainly would. But when I imagine which aspects of Mailer’s account of this challenge would most frustrate Beverly, it’s that the experiment had an end date, that it required him to do this work for only a finite and predetermined period of time. Even on the worst rainy afternoons, he knew that at the end of the summer he could give the children back to their mothers and go back to being Norman Mailer. None of his children’s mothers had that luxury, had any end point in sight. They wouldn’t be able to set down this burden for the years or decades until their children were grown. This distinction Mailer seemed to have missed altogether, or chose to miss. Yet he did claim to have taken one lesson from the experience: “Yes, he could be a housewife for six weeks, even for six years if it came to it, even work without help if it came to it, but he did not question what he would have to give up forever.”
What he would have to give up forever: his writing. His life’s work, his ego, his fame. His travels, his affairs, his one-night stands, his television appearances, his campus lectures, his outrageous interviews. His freedom to accept when Life asks him to go to Cape Canaveral to cover the launch of Apollo 11. All the powerful and ruthless men I’ve been reading about—Juan Ponce, James Cook, von Braun, the
Mercury astronauts—had this freedom; they also had wives and children who carried on without them with varying degrees of success. This admission of Norman Mailer’s does not carry the power of transformation, or even of any type of insight, because he attributes his freedom to the biological fact that he’s a man: “[H]e could not know whether he would have found it endurable to be born a woman.” He guessed that being a woman might have driven him insane.
An interesting thing happened at the end of the summer of 1969: more than the usual number of marriages in Norman Mailer’s social circle broke up, including his own. There is a weird moment toward the end of Of a Fire on the Moon when, just home from Cape Canaveral, Mailer catches sight of Beverly at a party.
Aquarius watched his wife at the other end of the lawn and knew again as he had known each day of this summer that their marriage was over. Something had touched the moon and she would never be the same.
Something had touched the moon. Mailer reminds us throughout his book of the possibility that some spiritual balance would be altered by the violation of man’s boot touching a celestial body, the feminine moon. Something magical, mystical, astrological. He does, after all, refer to himself as Aquarius throughout and gives a great deal of attention to the astrological signs of the astronauts. Why not blame on the boots of Armstrong and Aldrin the tectonic shifts in a woman’s heart, rather than his own failure to take seriously his wife’s work?
Immediately after the launch of Apollo 11, the press corps was taken around to visit the wives of the three astronauts then on their way to the moon. Norman Mailer found Jan Armstrong appealing in a plain and hardworking way; Pat Collins he found unremarkable. But Joan Aldrin he found quite captivating. He didn’t fail to notice that, like his own wife, she was an actress who had given up her craft for a husband with an overwhelmingly public career. He saw in the theatricality of her answers to reporters’ banal questions a hint of the frustration he saw in his own wife. Mailer couldn’t have known that Buzz and Joan Aldrin were to divorce, just like Beverly and himself, shortly after.
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