Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  What would Norman Mailer think of me, a mother and wife, following in his footsteps at Kennedy? If time could fold back upon itself, if he and I could both be standing on that field of grass by the countdown clock at the Press Site on the same hot Florida day rather than days separated by forty-two years, what would we see in each other? I doubt very much that our encounter would be anything like those I’ve had with other space people in my own time—I doubt we’d swap stories of slips and delays, of lonely nights in Space Coast motels, of bad food and sunburns, of the finer points of liquid fuels and hypergolic thrusters. Would he walk right by me, assuming me to be somebody’s secretary, somebody’s wife, a nonwriter, nonartist, non-ego with nothing to contribute to the world but to care for and feed a male ego and his babies? He’d said not long before that “the prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate possible for herself, and conceive children who will improve the species.”

  Or would he, out of boredom and isolation and the lowered standards that come with launch conditions, attempt to bed me? Would he corner me at a space party, ask me to dinner, ply me with wine? Does it make me shallow that of these scenarios, the latter seems least depressing, because in trying to seduce me he’d at least have to pay attention to me, look me in the eye, talk to me and pretend to listen?

  It’s important to remember that, as destructive as attitudes like Mailer’s were to women (both the individual women he knew and women as a group in society), it was also a loss to men of his time that they were denied the pleasures of taking care of children, the pleasures of home life to which they contributed more than a paycheck and a last name. And they were denied the honest uncomplicated friendship of women: professional collaboration and respect, intellectual rapport, gossip, comfort, advice, simple favors one friend does for another, games of online Scrabble. As much as I envy Norman Mailer the events he got to take part in, I can’t really envy him his era. He and I never could have been friends in it. I would not have been allowed to be a writer in it. Or if I had, if I’d managed to make a place for myself as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag did, readers would have hastened to assure each other that, smart as I may have been, I was a bad mother, a bad wife, not pretty or nice enough. This is familiar from the narratives about women astronauts—you can go, but we’ll say you abandoned your children. You can go, but we’ll say you are unnatural for choosing not to have children. It’s a dream still, the dream of being allowed full participation. The dream is alive, I suppose. The dream is still in the process of coming true.

  Just as it did the last time I was driving toward the south gate of the Kennedy Space Center in the middle of the night, the gas station on State Road 3 beckons to me with its alien landing lights, its promise of coffee. I haven’t stopped here since the launch of Atlantis, ten months ago, and as I park to go inside I remember how overrun this place was that day, space fans from all over the world sloshing coffee on the counters and waiting in line to pay for their snacks before heading out to see something historical. There are only a couple of cars parked here now, and I know it will be different today, but I’m still not prepared for how different the scene is when I walk in. A young woman is mopping the floor while a bored-looking man stares into space behind the counter. I am the only customer, and every surface is clean. Neither employee wears any space pins or patches.

  As I push back out into the humid night, I hear a sound coming from the other side of the gas station. Instead of getting back into my car, I wander around the corner of the building to try to hear it better. Back there it’s surprisingly undeveloped, the type of wetland that covers the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. It still takes me a second to place the sound: it’s alligators bellowing to each other in the dark.

  I’m once again back on the Space Coast, once more adding another visit after the one I had thought would be my last. On the drive here, which I now know so well, I felt happy. Part of me had been missing Florida, had been trying to think of an excuse to come here again. I think of Oriana Fallaci heading back to the Space Coast—the first time she came here, she’d described it as being “so ugly that if you saw it you’d agree to go to the Moon, which might not be better but certainly couldn’t be worse.” But after several visits, after making the acquaintance of astronauts and engineers and managers and seeing a launch, Fallaci started to feel the same way about the Space Coast that I do.

  I was on my way back to Cape Kennedy: happy to see my friends, to see the launching of the Saturn rocket, to be going home. Now I liked Florida that I’d described so cruelly…. Suddenly it was my home.

  I’m here to see the first launch from Cape Canaveral operated by a private company, SpaceX. Today SpaceX will attempt to launch its own spacecraft, the Dragon, to dock with the International Space Station and deliver supplies. This would be a first, and it would make SpaceX the front-runner to become the contractor NASA hires to get people and cargo up and down to the International Space Station. Even if today’s launch is successful, Dragon will have to fly many more resupply missions, over a period of years, before it can be considered safe for astronauts.

  I’ve never been a believer in privatized spaceflight—getting to space as cheaply as possible with an emphasis on catering to paying customers only serves to rob spaceflight of the things I love most about it. But I started to notice how many of my space friends—people I would have thought would be NASA-only snobs like me—were getting excited about the SpaceX launch, were posting updates about it online and making plans to come out for the launch. The NASASocial (the new, more inclusive name for NASATweetup) organized around this launch seemed to engender more chatter than many of them in the past. SpaceX has established a significant launch operation here in Florida but isn’t hiring many ex-NASA people. The rumor is that the company doesn’t want workers who have been steeped in NASA culture, especially NASA’s extreme concern for safety (and, I can’t help but cynically suspect, the relatively high wages, solid job security, and generous benefits of government contractors). If Omar were somehow to get hired at SpaceX in spite of this bias, it would likely be with a cut in pay and certainly a cut in benefits.

  I found myself wondering what this launch was going to be like, how it would be different from shuttle launches both in terms of the rocket itself and in terms of the social experience of seeing it. A lot of the space fans I know are laid-off, or soon-to-be-laid-off, shuttle workers. What would this launch experience be like for them?

  So I started making plans to go. Thankfully, this launch fell after the end of my semester and before my son’s preschool ends, a quieter time than usual at my house and less disruptive for me to be gone. Still, the number of trips beyond the “definitely last one” is now three and growing, which is lost on neither my husband nor me.

  Today’s launch is scheduled for 4:55 a.m. Unlike the shuttle, the SpaceX Dragon has an “instantaneous launch window,” a phrase whose implications I don’t care for. Whereas the shuttle had a ten-minute window in which to get off the ground (even longer back in the days when they weren’t trying to rendezvous with the International Space Station), Dragon has much less capacity to maneuver in space and so must arrive on a pinpoint trajectory from Earth. If it doesn’t launch at exactly 4:55, they will have to scrub and try again another day.

  It’s only a few minutes from the gas station to the south gate of the Kennedy Space Center, but when I reach the gate it’s closed and barricaded.

  “What the hell?” I ask out loud in my car, of no one.

  I sit for a minute, trying to think of what to do next. The north gate, the only other gate I’ve ever used, is up by Titusville, a half-hour drive away. That can’t be what I’m supposed to do. So after a moment’s contemplation, I text Omar:

  South gate is closed ??

  Omar’s answer comes through right away. Gotta go to gate by VC.

  VC means Visitor Complex, I know that much. But I’m still not sure what he’s talking about, because this
isn’t the way I usually go to the Visitor Complex, and because the iPhone map offers no details within a restricted government installation, and because it’s three in the morning.

  Another text from Omar comes through: Where are you? I’m on my way

  I text: Badge office

  He answers: Hang on, be there in 30 secs

  Twenty-nine seconds later, I recognize Omar’s silver Mustang pulling into the lot. He rolls down his window just long enough to flash a smile and gesture for to me to follow him. Once he takes the turnoff toward the Visitor Complex, I realize where we are and what he was talking about—this little side road offers a second way in.

  After we both get past the checkpoint, Omar gives a wave and drives off heading north. He is going to try to watch from the Vehicle Assembly Building roof. He still works here; his layoff has been rescinded one more time. I head toward the Press Site. We’ve made plans to have breakfast after the launch and the postlaunch press conference.

  It’s a new experience to be at the Press Site for a non-NASA launch. I would have thought the NASA Media Office people would hold themselves at arm’s length from this one, but they seem to be doing their traditional fine job of getting us the information we need and answering our questions. They are handing out packets of material with the SpaceX logo on them in exactly the same way they used to hand out packets bearing the mission patch corresponding to each space shuttle launch. On the closed-circuit TVs, the SpaceX Falcon (the rocket that carries Dragon, the spacecraft) is steaming nicely on the launchpad.

  So much of the answer to the question of what the end of the shuttle means depends upon what comes next. The existence of a next step already in development, the space shuttle, gave space fans living through the end of Apollo a sense that we were still moving forward, gave them an event to look forward to, even if it was still years off. For me, commercial spaceflight doesn’t adequately fill this gap, for several reasons. One: the type of big, grand, daring spaceflight projects I’m interested in are, by definition, not good investments. They are exploratory, scientific, ennobling, and expensive, with no clear end point and certainly no chance of making a profit. What will we find when we get to the moon? people wondered in the sixties. They didn’t know, but they were pretty sure they wouldn’t find anything that could come close to compensating them financially for the cost of getting there, and they were right.

  Two: as long as spaceflight is run by a government agency, any American child can reasonably dream of flying in space one day. For many of them, that dream will shape their early lives in important and beneficial ways. If spaceflight belongs to private companies, space travel will be a privilege of the incredibly wealthy, and space-obsessed children will have no particular motivation to do their algebra homework or serve in the military, knowing that their only hope of earning a seat lies in getting rich.

  Three: since the beginning, it has been part of NASA’s mandate to make its projects available to the American public. This means that everything—images, films, discoveries, transcripts of crew chatter—belongs to all of us. Not so with SpaceX. As a private company, SpaceX can keep private whatever they want, and they do. Some of my online space friends have been indignant to learn that they can’t download specs and diagrams for Dragon and Falcon, as we have always been able to do for shuttle and other NASA spacecraft—the SpaceX designs are industry secrets. NASA makes moon rocks available to scientists all over the world for the asking, and they have let scientists send experiments to space on their spacecraft for very negotiable fees, often negotiated down to nothing. SpaceX is under no obligation to do anything of the kind, and I don’t expect they will.

  But maybe the privatization proponents are right that NASA has actually been holding us back. Maybe the end of shuttle will be like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Only with the behemoths gone could the little mammals that became our ancestors start to make a place for themselves.

  At about four thirty in the morning, people start heading outside to the grassy field at the Press Site. Before I even get close I see a familiar orange glow on the horizon, and I can’t believe it: it’s the countdown clock. I look at the people on my left and right, looking to see whether they are incensed as well, but no one else seems to notice.

  The light from the countdown clock is so bright, it’s a little eerie. Since it’s still full dark, without even any moon, the light of the countdown clock in my face makes it hard to see where I’m stepping, and I trip and stumble on the uneven ground. Rather than looking down into the useless dark surrounding my feet, I look out into the field and follow the swarm of glowing rectangles, one for each phone of the spectators. Bleachers have been set up, as they were for Atlantis, and many of the glowing phones are clustered there. Many of these are the NASASocial people, I can tell, because they are excitedly narrating into their phones or, in some cases, tiny video cameras. In fact, maybe it’s all NASASocial people out here—maybe all the print journalists are watching on NASA TV from the safety of the News Center rather than stumbling around out here getting bitten by mosquitoes.

  I walk all the way down to the lip of the Turn Basin. The SpaceX launchpad is not dead center ahead of us, as the Apollo and shuttle launchpads were, but off to the right, almost hidden behind the foliage making up Norman Mailer’s jungle. I learn I’ve been looking in the wrong direction only when I hear some NASASocial people point out the launchpad to each other. I follow their fingers and see a bright haze rising from the horizon, the rocket lit up by floodlights.

  I stand by the Turn Basin for a minute before I realize I’m hearing a splashing sound coming from the water. The sound is intermittent and quiet but distinct. Then I hear a faint ribbit. It’s nocturnal frogs that live in the Turn Basin, going about their froggy business. Just as at the gas station, the sounds of wildlife are coming through now that everything is quiet.

  At T minus nine, I move toward the bleachers to try to get a good spot to watch from. The chatter coming over the speakers is a little different for this launch, as one would expect—it’s different people in a different launch control room using different procedures to prepare a different spacecraft. I feel hostility toward this countdown, a strong conviction that they are using the wrong language, are doing everything wrong. When the flight director (or whatever SpaceX calls her) polls the room (or whatever SpaceX calls it), one of the managers in the sequence doesn’t answer when called on for a “go” or “no go.” A few seconds of silence go by. I look around at some of the NASASocial people and we share an eye-roll-y look. NASA flight directors would never fall asleep at the wheel like that, we agree silently.

  Someone shouts and points straight up.

  “There goes the ISS!”

  Everyone looks up. The sky is a bit overcast, so I think the shouting man might be overoptimistic, but when I look up in the direction he’s pointing, I see it. It’s unmistakable. The International Space Station. Brighter than any star, it moves surprisingly fast. I know the ISS is as long as a football field, has the volume of a three-bedroom house, that it’s two hundred miles away and moving at seventeen thousand miles per hour.

  “We’re sending you up some stuff!” one of the NASASocial people shouts. Some of them try to take video of it, uselessly.

  As always, I get caught up in the countdown. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. The NASASocial people are so excited, it’s hard not to share their enthusiasm. I count along.

  Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

  At zero, we see a quick flash on the horizon. Flash isn’t even quite the word. It’s more like the hazy halo over the launchpad gets more intense for a second, then goes back to normal. An uncertain cheer rises around me. I wait to see the spacecraft enter my field of vision—I know from experience how slow the first seconds of launch can appear to be—but it never does.

  The announcer on the speaker tells us there has been an abort, that the spacecraft is now being safed. I stand, gawking openmouthed in the direction of the launchpad. I was fooled by the li
ght on the horizon: in the days of the space shuttle, the solid rocket boosters couldn’t be shut down, so if you saw a light, you could be sure you were going to space today. But the SpaceX Falcon is powered by liquid fuel, which means it can shut itself down. And did, at the first sign of a problem. We all look at each other, a little bewildered. I hear someone say the word scrub into his phone, narrating the event to his followers. Only then do I understand: this is a scrub, my first. I tweet, “No longer scrubless,” and get some sympathetic responses from space friends who have woken up to watch the launch live online. It’s an odd feeling to come so far and wait so long to have everything called off in a fraction of a second. This is a feeling that many space fans have had many times. It’s only fair that I should experience it once.

  People start making their way back up to the News Center. I look at Twitter to see what’s being said about the scrub, and I see a new tweet from André Kuipers, a Dutch astronaut living on the International Space Station. He has tweeted a picture he took of Cape Canaveral just a few minutes before as he passed overhead. The image is like any satellite image taken at night, mostly black, the landmasses and causeways traced in pale yellow light. It’s brightest right where we are standing.

  I follow all the astronauts living on the ISS on Twitter, so I see the pictures they take of Earth passing below them every day. I always stop to look at them because they are insanely gorgeous. But I’ve never seen a picture taken from space that I know I am in. I was standing on that ground looking up at him while he was looking down at us, and the image is one I’ll save.