Leaving Orbit (26 page)

I’d thought seeing
Endeavour
launch from the Turn Basin site, watching it with the NASA workers and their families, might be even more jubilant than what I experienced on the causeway with
Discovery.
But I should have guessed from my talks with Frank and Omar that the reaction here would be more subdued. There are very few first-timers; everyone here knows how to watch a launch. At T minus sixty seconds, Omar and Frank take the lens caps off their cameras and recheck the shots they had lined up. They both take deep breaths, plant their weight squarely on both feet, then look behind them to make sure they aren’t blocking my view.

“It’s cloudy,” Omar frets. He’s seen launches called off this late due to weather.

But at T minus six seconds, the main engines light up, exactly as they are meant to, and at zero,
Endeavour
begins to rise.

The light emanating from a space shuttle launch is different in color, quality, and intensity from any other kind of light. Photographs and videos can only approximate it, can only serve as a souvenir to the odd sensation, the combination of beauty and near-painfulness of that specific brightness in the sky. And this launch of
Endeavour
is the brightest I’ve seen so far, in part because this is closer than I’ve ever been, but partly because a low blanket of cloud cover bounces the light back at us. And the sound—the engine’s roar is deep and loud, satisfyingly rumbly.

People around us cheer. A woman to my right shouts her encouragement: “Go! Go!” Frank, Omar, and I stand and watch silently, the light and the noise and the vibration pressing back against us. None of us cheers, none of us cries. We watch it go up and up for about fifteen seconds; then it punches through the opaque cloud cover and is not seen again. A few minutes later, we discover that people in airplanes were startled to see
Endeavour
emerge on their side of the clouds. Their pictures show up on Twitter before we leave the Turn Basin.

Later in the day, we also learn that Gabrielle Giffords, from her vantage point atop Launch Control, reported that her overwhelming emotion was relief when her husband and his crew achieved orbit.

Good-bye,
Endeavour.

When
Endeavour
is gone, we admire the steam trail it leaves behind. One thing I had never known to expect before experiencing space shuttle launches in person: the steam trail itself is an unusual object in the sky, a solid-looking vertical fluffy sculpture, and for the few or many minutes it lingers, depending on the speed and direction of the wind, spectators like to observe it and discuss its quirky behavior, the unearthly shadows it casts.

Frank and Omar set about dismantling their tripods while I pack up the lawn chairs. The steam trail remains, but we are keen to get to the car and beat some of the traffic. On our way through the parking area, we pass a family wearing matching T-shirts that read THANK YOU SHUTTLE! AMERICA’S WINGS TO THE FUTURE. We pass a car with a custom license plate that reads NDEAVR. Seated in Frank’s Suburban, we creep forward in a flood of other cars.

Outside the gates of the Space Center, we see mom-and-pop souvenir shops displaying GO ENDEAVOUR signs. We pass a McDonald’s with an enormous space shuttle mockup on its Playland structure. Banks, nail salons, more palm trees. A roadside vendor with a pile of cantaloupe displays a hastily hand-lettered sign: SPACE MELONS.

The people who live in these towns around the Space Center have known for a long time now that the space shuttle is coming to an end. No one I’ve met down here will speak a word of self-pity, or any regret over having devoted their lives to the project of sending people to space. To an individual, they are positive about their time with NASA and positive about the future.

But this region is called the Space Coast for a reason. Before NASA chose Cape Canaveral as its moon port, almost no one lived here. Cocoa Beach, Florida, for instance, saw a 1,000 percent increase in population between 1950 and 1960. This region does not seem to offer any other way to support the thousands of people who work at the space center or who depend on the business of those workers and the tourists the launches bring, the many thousands who have migrated here over decades, generations. These are people who know how to do one thing, and do it very well: maintain and fly a fleet of spacecraft. Some spaceworkers, when they’re feeling sanguine, offer each other the analogy of the seventies—the people who didn’t give up and stuck around for the eight-year lapse, Frank’s graybeards, were the ones who got the chance to work on shuttle. But in that situation there was already another spacecraft in the works; it had already been designed, and its funding approved, before the end of Apollo. Spaceworkers in 2011 who say they want to wait for the next era of spaceflight are not only going to wait for a spacecraft to become operational, as the spaceworkers in the seventies did; they are also waiting for it to be fully funded. How much longer than eight years might that take?

Frank goes back to work for the day; Omar and I have breakfast at a Steak ’n Shake. As always, there is a festive atmosphere in the packed restaurants right after the launch, a patriotic and fun-loving common cause. People smile and make eye contact when we recognize each other by sunburn and memorabilia.

A lot of people are wearing bright red T-shirts from the Visitor Complex gift shop commemorating the last launches that say: I WAS THERE. The hard-core space fans who have been here before, the people who are now showing up for a launch because it will soon be too late, the only vaguely interested who came along but have now caught the fever and wear the lovesick look of the newly converted. All of us are already anticipating a moment when all this will be in the past, will be a chapter in history. The risk, the messiness, the work, the specific brightness of the fire from the main engines, the way its sound bounced off the VAB and back at us—all this will be robbed of its reality.
I was there.
We are already preparing ourselves to tell the next generation, those who will doubt whether any of this happened, those who are bored and don’t care, that we saw it with our own eyes.

As we are finishing our eggs, I tell Omar about how Norman Mailer said the Vehicle Assembly Building is the ugliest building in the world from the outside and the most beautiful from the inside. I think Omar will find this interesting because he spends a lot of his time inside the VAB. But he looks confused.

“You mean, the other way around?” he tries to correct me. Omar tells me how dirty and disused certain areas of the VAB are, areas I didn’t see on Family Day, that have sat empty or been pressed into service as storage since Apollo.

“I think he means when you just walk in and look up for the first time,” I explain. I don’t mention that I wept when I walked in there myself, that I stayed several paces behind him and the others so they wouldn’t see.

“I guess I can see that,” Omar concedes.

We drink our coffee and compare the photos in our cameras, and I decide not to bring up my theory that, though the VAB was designed with nothing but function in mind, its form reflects with utter clarity the purity of its ambitions. That sometimes out at the edges of human expression it’s hard to tell whether what you’re looking at is ugly or beautiful, stupid or brilliant.

When we finish eating and go outside, the cloud cover has cleared and the sun seems too bright, as if someone has turned it up beyond the point that cloudlessness and proximity to the equator can logically provide. The Florida sun often seems this way to me, and I keep thinking I’ll get used to it. Instead, I am always squinting, despite my sunglasses, and always manage to get a sunburn through the SPF 50 I copiously reapply throughout my days here.

Omar has to go to work for the rest of the day, so we hug and say our good-byes until the launch of
Atlantis
, the last one, in the summer. I will head back to Knoxville at first light.

I go back to my hotel and take a nap. When I wake up again I have the weird feeling that this is the real morning, that the predawn events never happened, that I never woke and dressed and went to the Kennedy Space Center and witnessed a spacecraft leaving the earth with six astronauts aboard and then ate eggs and toast with my friend Omar. These memories all seem weak, provisional, like the trailing details of a dream that you won’t remember if you don’t tell them to someone. It makes me panicky. I get into my car and drive back to the Barnes & Noble, where I sit in the café section with a giant coffee and scribble frantic notes until the store closes. I have to write down what I’ve seen today before it slips away.

Within a few hours, Omar has uploaded his video of the launch to YouTube and posted a link on Facebook. It makes me a bit self-conscious of my own postmodernity to take a break from writing my impressions of the launch in one app in order to watch Omar’s video of the same event in another.

At first the video shows a nondescript shot of horizon with a little bit of gantry and a little bit of a pole from a satellite uplink van, with the squiggly cord tracing its length. If you know where to look, you can see the tip of the launch vehicle next to the gantry, the tip of the external tank tinged gray-orange, while everything around it is misty gray. The overcast sky makes everything flat and boring. No people are visible, a minor miracle given how many spectators were out there this morning, and given that Omar and his father didn’t make any particular effort to get their equipment up above everyone else’s heads. They would never do that, I know, as doing so would be inconsiderate of the spectators standing behind them.

Soon after the video starts, Omar’s voice can be heard saying, “Thirty-nine seconds.” He must have seen this on his phone; no NASA announcer can be heard. Around his voice, lots of people chatter. When I press my earbuds hard into my ears, I think I can hear my own voice speaking to Frank, then laughing—but I can’t be sure it’s me.

Then I hear Omar talking quietly, and at first I can’t make it out but then I do: “Let me get out of your way, there.” I remember the moment: he’s talking to me. He hadn’t been standing in my way at all, of course.

The camera’s frame starts to shake subtly. Then a steam cloud starts to emerge above the trees. The main engines have ignited. The voices of the crowd start to lift, hesitantly—they aren’t sure at first whether they are seeing what they think they are seeing. But then the tip of the external tank starts to rise, to separate itself from the gantry. Within a few seconds, it’s lifted itself far enough that we can see the whole of the launch vehicle rising in the air—external tank,
Endeavour
, the twin solid rocket boosters, and the impossibly bright light emerging from beneath the stack. The steam cloud spreads itself majestically underneath, and soon
Endeavour
is gone, has disappeared past the top of the camera’s frame. The bright plume continues behind it, fading into the ever-fattening steam column that billows up beneath it. The camera does not tilt up to follow
Endeavour
into the sky; Omar has told me that he prefers to use a fixed camera on a tripod to catch the start of the launch, but that he wants to be able to watch it himself rather than trying to follow it squinting through a viewfinder. This makes sense to me. The launch will be thoroughly photographed and filmed from every angle by professionals with better equipment. The people who come out here to see it in person, I agree, should experience it with their own eyes.

In Omar’s video, the crowd lifts their voices, sounding a little incredulous, then a little frantic, as though it is their enthusiasm and nothing else keeping
Endeavour
on its path straight up. I watch the video, leaning in to my laptop, then watch a few more clips that YouTube suggests based on that page, different views of the same launch, some from professionals working for NASA TV or for news outlets, some shot by amateurs. Omar’s appears to be the only amateur video shot from the Turn Basin, at least so far.

I remember how, when I was here for the last launch of
Discovery
in February, the video that Omar had shot from the VAB parking lot filled me with envy. But now, in a weird way, this video makes me feel envious too, even though I was there with him, was standing right at Omar’s elbow, right at the camera’s vantage point, as this video was being made. There is something about the way the video fixes the event in a frame that makes it possible to understand it, describe it, in a way I haven’t quite been able to for any of the three launches I’ve now seen in person. Somehow, the lived experience is prone to slippage, confusion, interference from the thoughts and recollections passing through my mind and the distractions—the people all around with their irrelevant sounds and expressions. The way things smelled, a sudden gust of wind. All of the things I could see and half-see beyond the narrow scope of the camera’s frame. I watch Omar’s video over and over. And while I wouldn’t trade, for anything, the experience of being out there this morning, I’m also aware that I wasn’t really able to
describe
this launch, to understand what makes it different from the others, until I could watch
this
version, the version anyone with Internet access can see, that dozens already have seen, all over the world.