I hang around the News Center for a while waiting for the press conference. It had been scheduled for 7:00 a.m. but is being moved up because of the scrub. While I wait, I curl up for a short nap on the floor with my head pressed up against the wall. When I awaken, the monitor turned to NASA TV is showing an image of the rocket on the pad, presumably having been safed. A crawl at the bottom of the screen reads “Endeavour launch scrubbed.” I blink at it a couple of times. Then those words disappear and are quickly replaced with “SpaceX/Falcon 9 launch scrubbed.”
I poke around the News Center a bit, and against one wall I find a floor-to-ceiling shelf offering material of all kinds for journalists to take. All of this information is presumably online as well, but I am apparently not the only writer who is still tempted by paper handouts. The shelf holds packets specific to each mission as well as other packets providing information of all kinds about the space program. There are also copies of a newsletter for space center workers called Spaceport News. I grab a copy at random and start reading.
Guards watch over Discovery during final rollover
By Rebecca Sprague
Spaceport News
Nearly every Hollywood celebrity has at least one bodyguard on their payroll. At any given time, NASA’s three space shuttles have about 80.
Officially called access control monitors and orbiter integrity clerks, the “guards” make sure the shuttles are safe and secure in Kennedy Space Center’s orbiter processing facilities, the Vehicle Assembly Building, on the launch pads and when they’re on the move.
The article describes the last rollover of Discovery from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building; only then do I realize that this issue of Spaceport News must be an old one. I find the date: September 17, 2010.
Dressed in jeans, sneakers and blue United Space Alliance (USA) collared shirts, Discovery’s guards stood watch about 50 feet away.
“Obviously, people like to get as close as they can, so we have to maintain some sort of control,” said USA’s Omar Izquierdo, who specifically is designated to guard Discovery. “We have a list of who gets to be how close and then we control that.”
I smile and shake my head. Of course Omar was the one the writer approached; I’m not even surprised to find him here. The article goes on to quote the vehicle manager for Discovery, Jennifer Nufer: “These folks perform a very critical job for America’s space program.”
I stash a copy of the newsletter along with some other handouts in my bag. September 17, 2010, was just eight days before I came here for Family Day. In the intervening week, Discovery was mated with an external tank and two solid rocket boosters in the Vehicle Assembly Building. Then it was rolled out to the launchpad for the last time. The photo on my phone is still the snapshot I took of Discovery on Family Day, riding by in Omar’s car, and whenever I see it I remember that day, that sense of possibility even as we knew this would be Discovery’s last flight.
The SpaceX press conference is pretty much what you would expect—a lot of reminders that this is a new rocket, that spaceflight is an untested business, a lot of cautious optimism for the next attempt, which won’t be for a few days because of a scheduled Soyuz docking that takes precedence. I get my first good look at Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX. She is whip smart in that put-together way you would expect in the president of an experimental tech company. But she is also intense and sincere and kind of adorable. She smiles a lot, her eyes twinkle. Her answers to questions are thoroughly well considered—her pauses between thoughts remind me of the pauses politicians leave themselves to scan what they are about to say for possible controversy—but a real love for what she does shines through. I came here planning to dislike SpaceX, and while Gwynne Shotwell doesn’t exactly defy my every expectation, I still find myself liking her in spite of myself. In part, I know that I am a sucker for women involved in spaceflight, for women in jobs traditionally closed to them, and I can’t help but suspect that Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, had this appeal in mind when he chose her to run his space company.
I’m at a postlaunch party, my second official EndlessBBQ (“It really is endless,” I joke on Twitter, before noticing how many other people have made the same joke), standing on the deck behind the Cocoa Beach Brewing Company with a few dozen space people. The sun is setting as I drink one of the microbrews made here and talk with Omar and some of the people I’ve met at launches and on Twitter. A lot of them are here with the NASASocial. It’s a beautiful evening, not too humid for once.
I wind up in a long conversation with Jen Scheer, a woman I met at the party after Atlantis but never really talked to. I know her well from Twitter because she tweets avidly about space and is the founder and organizer of the Space Tweep Society, which makes her a celebrity of the online space community. Jen worked maintaining the hypergolic systems in the orbital maneuvering system pods and was one of the few female techs to work at the space center. Tonight, while we drink beer, I’m quizzing her about safety procedures—I’ve been trying to get a handle on whether NASA became overly safety conscious after Columbia, as some insiders have told me, or not safety conscious enough—when Omar drifts over. Jen asks about how work has been, and he tells her how unnerving it’s been that visitors are now allowed to touch the orbiters.
“Hey, Omar,” Jen starts with a big smile, “do you know what we used to call the tiles?”
“What?” Omar asks warily.
“Wrench cushions.” Jen waits, open mouthed, for his reaction. Omar flinches.
“Aaagh,” he moans quietly. “Don’t put your wrenches on my tiles.”
Jen laughs. “Of course if any tiles got damaged the tile techs would replace them,” she assures me.
“I’m going to get another beer,” Omar says, “and when I come back we’ll be talking about something else.”
Omar has told me how upsetting it’s been seeing procedures change after the last landings, watching equipment that had been maintained with exquisite care now torn apart for scrap. Seeing visitors invited to touch things he spent years of his life making sure never got touched seems to elicit something like primal panic in Omar, and if he were less good-hearted that panic might metastasize into rage and resentment. Instead, he seems a little fuzzy these days, a little confused. When he comes back from the bar, we do talk about something else. Jen has been out of the space center workforce for a while now, so she has had time to get used to the changes. Omar still goes in every day, still walks through the same motions, but with no real purpose.
Later I strike up a conversation with Andy Scheer, Jen’s husband, also a spaceworker. Andy tells me he is a pad rat, which means that rather than working with a specific orbiter, he works on a specific launchpad.
“Was there a rivalry,” I ask him, “between people who worked at one pad or the other?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “Just like anyplace. Pad A people made fun of Pad B people, Pad B people made fun of Pad A people. Then it came down to one pad, and the people who were left had to work together.”
I’ve heard a rumor that Andy was at work the day James Vanover, the engineer who had tried to rescind his early retirement and was told he could not, committed suicide by jumping off the launch tower, back in March 2011. When it had first happened, I’d thought I should ask Omar about the meaning of Vanover’s gesture, but when I saw Omar next, the morning of the launch of Endeavour, it didn’t seem right to bring it up. But now I decide to ask Andy.
“Yeah, I was there,” Andy tells me. He’s quiet for a minute.
“We’d walk around the pad first thing when we started a shift, looking for loose debris or anything out of place, and out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something fall. I was the closest to him when he hit. I knew right away what had happened.”
“That’s awful,” I say. I don’t know what else to add.
“Yeah. Paramedics came pretty quickly. But until they arrived, there was nothing I could do except to sit with him.�
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We both look down into our beers.
“I know he cared about what he did,” Andy adds. “I know he loved what he did and loved that place. His whole life was out there and that was coming to an end.”
Put this way, it’s remarkable that there haven’t been more suicides, more violence, more family tragedies. Vanover’s whole life was out there, and that was coming to an end, and the same is true for tens of thousands of people.
“So what’s your book about?” Andy asks. “Omar said you’re writing a book.”
“Oh, it’s about the end of shuttle,” I answer. “I’m asking what it means that we went to space for fifty years and have decided not to go anymore.”
“Good question,” Andy says. I used to feel silly repeating this question, but I’ve come to realize that no one feels confident about having a good answer to it. Everyone says it’s a good question. “What do you think is the answer?”
“I don’t entirely know yet,” I tell him. “But I think it has to do with the beginning, with how it started. The start was an accident. Without Sputnik, and a new president, and the Cold War, and then that president getting assassinated—without the German rocket designers who fled to the United States instead of the Soviet Union—it never would have happened at all.”
Andy is quiet for a long moment. I’m afraid I’ve offended him by calling his life’s work an accident.
Omar waves us over—he wants to show us something on his phone.
“Check this out,” Omar says. He’s found a video on NASA TV documenting the Discovery Day event we were at together. Exciting electronic music plays over a montage of Discovery arriving at Dulles and Enterprise being wheeled out of the museum.
“Look, right here!” It’s a swooping crane shot of Discovery moving toward the building—I remember seeing the crane with the movie camera on it when we were out there—but then suddenly, in the bottom of the frame, I see Omar and myself, the backs of our heads, standing shoulder to shoulder watching Discovery roll by. We are unmistakable, Omar in his white ball cap, me with my blond ponytail, trying to take a picture of Discovery with my phone.
Omar seems pleased to find himself in the video commemorating the celebration of his bird, and he should—it’s a document he can show his grandchildren. I was there. The video already has more than thirty thousand hits. But I find it disconcerting. I’m trying to write about these things that I’ve experienced, and in trying to write about them I often consult pictures and video I find online to help me understand where everything was, to reconstruct what things looked like. It’s an unsettlingly postmodern experience to find myself in one of these documents, like looking up a word in the dictionary and finding my own name.
As the evening goes on, people talk about whether they will come back for the next attempt or not. I will not. This will be my first time leaving Florida with the spacecraft I came to see launch still on the ground.
As I’m getting ready to leave, Omar asks if I’d like to set off a model rocket with him in the morning. He’s bought a scale model of the SpaceX Falcon, and he offers it as a sort of consolation because I didn’t get to see the real one go off.
I answer immediately, “Of course!” We make plans for when to meet up. I have a twelve-hour drive tomorrow and really should be hitting the road as early as possible. But I like the idea of seeing Omar one more time before I go, and besides that, I sense a metaphor.
What does it mean that we’ve done so much, and what does it mean that we’ve decided to stop? I talked to Andy about the unlikely chain of events that led to the start of NASA and Project Mercury, and though it goes against some of the patriotic pride we usually take in our space program, I’ve had to accept that the political will to keep spaceflight going just doesn’t exist anymore, hasn’t for a long time. We have been infected by the myth of public support for spaceflight for so long, it’s kept us from properly understanding how we got to where we are. As historian John Logsdon writes, “Apollo was a product of a particular moment in time…. Its most important significance may well be simply that it happened. Humans did travel to and explore another celestial body.” It happened, but we never quite understood why we were doing it. There was never enthusiastic public support for human spaceflight for its own sake. I should probably say this again: There was never enthusiastic public support for human spaceflight for its own sake. At best, there was support for beating the Soviets at a game that they had grabbed a head start on, a game that seemed to have to do with military, not scientific, superiority. People said they didn’t want to go to bed under a Soviet moon, and they were serious. The power of that brief surge of emotion was enough to start Apollo, but the moon project had lost its relevance as a national project by the time it was actually accomplished. The power of that brief interest, combined with the immense fun and pageantry and good feeling brought about by the successes of the heroic era, and its heroes, has been enough to fuel fifty years of NASA. This is remarkable in and of itself, of course. Few projects based on such short-lived support have shown themselves to have such endurance.
But maybe this is a part of the answer to the question I’ve been torturing myself with all this time: Why are we stopping this when everyone seems to like it? The answer is that public support for spending the money, to the extent it ever existed, was long gone by the time I was born. The whole thing depended on a confluence of forces that can’t be recreated. Those of us who love it should count ourselves lucky that it somehow accidentally happened at all, and, I suppose, we should accept the fact that it’s finally run its course.
I discovered at this attempt that it’s simply impossible to stand outside in the middle of the night watching an enormous object on the horizon try to launch itself into space and not root for it. At least, it’s impossible for me. And once you’ve stood out there and rooted for it, you kind of hope for it to succeed even once you’re not watching it in person anymore. A few days later, I will set my alarm for the middle of the night in order to wake up and watch the second attempt to launch Dragon. I will be pleased and confused when it does launch successfully. I find I have started to care about this spacecraft. Not in the same way that I care about the space shuttle or the Saturn V, or even the Redstones and Atlases—nothing would ever come close to that—but when the little white Dragon on my phone’s screen slowly pulls itself up into the sky, the way spaceships do, I will feel a surge of joy for it, clap my hand over my mouth to keep from waking my husband. Then I will have to stop and think about what that means.
What does it mean that we went to space for fifty years and then decided not to anymore? This question is as difficult to grapple with as ever because, I’ve discovered, it’s actually many questions at once. What does it mean to stop exploring? What does it mean to disappoint children? What does it mean to cancel the future? What does it mean to hobble the one government agency that people feel good about? What does it mean to hope for private companies to take over something we used to do as a nation? What does it mean to stop spending the money?
One thing I notice every time I’m at the Cape is how literal all the workers are about their work. I’ve kept calling the work here some kind of dream, yet what I see over and over is that, to the people who do the work, nothing is a dream, a metaphor, a fairy tale: everything is exactly what it is. If the work here results in something beautiful, it is beautiful by accident, as form follows function. It is the reflected beauty of our intentions I’m seeing, not someone’s abstract idea of beauty.
Hugely wasteful, hugely grand? If we wanted to go back to the moon now, we couldn’t do it. We’d have to start over. But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: the goal itself was beautiful, beautiful in its imagery and in its impossibility. It was a dream that even the literal-minded could share—even Neil Armstrong, as a boy, had dreamed a recurring dream that he could hover above the earth by holding his breath. The dream came true, even if it was only a fluke. Even if it was only for a while.
In t
he morning, I find Omar at the park, a perfect location with four full-sized soccer fields, all of them unused today. We walk into the center of the four fields, leaving as much empty space as we can around us. Omar carefully unpacks the model’s pieces and starts setting it up, telling me about how it works as he assembles it. But a piece is missing; it must have fallen out in his car. He heads back to the parking lot to find it, a five-minute round trip. To pass the time, I snap a few pictures of the rocket and tweet one along with the words:
w/ @izqomar: Failure is not an option.
Ten seconds later, I look up to see Omar heading back toward me with the missing piece held aloft triumphantly. He’s still far away, but I see him startle, then make an expression exactly as if his phone has just vibrated in his pants. He fishes the phone out of a pocket, looks at it, and smiles. He’s seen what I put on Twitter.
“That’s pretty funny,” he calls out as soon as he’s within earshot. A second later, my phone buzzes. Omar has retweeted me, and now a few of his followers are weighing in—he has over five hundred. Now with all the pieces in hand, Omar kneels down to finish assembling the rocket.
“Now, I’ve made a few mods,” Omar explains from his position on the ground. He shows me where a tube meant to guide the rocket along a metal rod had fallen off the fuselage earlier—Omar had replaced it by supergluing a fast-food straw in its place. This adaptation held together through one previous launch, but today it looks to be coming apart. Soon the straw comes off in Omar’s hand. He grunts in exasperation.
“That’s definitely a scrub,” he announces, disappointed.
“But I’ve already tweeted that failure is not an option,” I point out. I’m only kind of joking.
“Do you have any duct tape in your car, or anything like that?” Omar asks. I don’t, but I start thinking about other ways to attach the straw to the body of the rocket. I come up with the idea of using my hair elastics, and that seems to work. Our jury-rigged rocket is set up on its stand, its white body striped with my brown hair elastics, poised for launch. Omar and I step away as far as the detonator cord will let us. Omar is extremely careful working with the wires and the detonator, and he describes what he’s doing as he does it, probably a safety thing he learned at work. Once everything is set up to his satisfaction, Omar takes a deep breath and says, “Okay. You ready?”
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