Leaving Orbit (36 page)

Last to go is a short man with a Wilford Brimley mustache. He is the chief of the closeout crew, Travis Thompson. He does not smile, and of all of them he looks most solemn, most self-conscious, maybe closest to tears. He is the only one whose headset is still plugged into the comm box behind him, a curling black cord tethering his head to the wall. He opens his mouth as if to say the words, but then chooses not to, or can’t. His sign says:

He stands there for a minute, letting his message sink in.

I watch all this on the monitor, feeling aware of the people watching around me. Some of them seem to be glued to the closeout crew’s messages and their implied import, as I am. Some of them seem to be moved nearly to tears by it, as I am. Some glance up at the monitor, register the signs, and keep talking to each other, messing with their cameras and their phones, moving about as if the screen were showing nothing other than the closeout crew going about their prescribed business.

I know I will look up this video online later, when I get back to my motel. It’s probably already on NASA TV—or if it’s not yet, it will be shortly. I know I will watch it again and again in an attempt to write about it, a document of a document. It’s the best way I know of to get a moment to hold still and reveal itself.

For each of these launches I have studied videos afterward and have noticed that I always see more in the videos than I did in real time. The real experience always goes too fast, is too multisensory—a fellow space fan brushing against my elbow at
Endeavour
, struggling to keep my balance on the roof of my car at
Discovery
, the eerie storm clouds, the merciless orange numbers of the countdown clock at
Atlantis.
The lived detail of each actual launch is too much to take in. But the videos, with their finite frames and running times, those I can put words to.

In recent years much has been made of the way our ever-present cameras and connections to social media interfere with our ability to live our lives in real time through our own senses. We are too busy photographing our lunches to taste them, the argument goes, too busy Facebook messaging our friends to talk to them or listen to them. To some extent I get this—when Omar chose not to try to tilt his camera to follow
Endeavour
’s path, he was choosing the lived experience over the burden of documenting it, and in that I think he chose well. Yet the video he shot contains a permanence that the real experience doesn’t, and as such it will be viewed by many people who couldn’t be at the launch, including people who haven’t been born yet, people for whom American spaceflight might have been only an idea, a vague claim, if not for Omar’s document of that moment that lets them experience a version of it for themselves.

I know I’m supposed to value lived experiences more than I do their digital records, but for me, this video in the White Room is not a simulacrum of something else; it is precisely what its makers intended it to be. The experience of watching this video, as with videos of launches and other events I will watch over and over,
is
an experience, just as seeing the real event was, and as I watch it, through my watching, each video becomes more of what it is about.

That night, I have dinner with Omar, three photographers, and a filmmaker. It’s a table only a shuttle launch could bring together—one woman and five men, all with drastically different backgrounds and interests, no two of whom live in the same state (one lives in New Zealand). But we chat happily together about what we saw today. We have chosen a local seafood restaurant popular with tourists, the kind of place with a lot of nautical bric-a-brac on the walls, restroom doors labeled BUOYS and GULLS. This place has been busy every time I’ve been here, but tonight it is truly overrun. Our waiter has the blank look of a person who has been harried for over four hours and has settled into his suffering, a look that tells us we won’t be getting our food any time soon.

People are made patient by unusual circumstances, and the familiar postlaunch sunburn-and-patriotism atmosphere prevails even though the waitstaff can’t keep drinks refilled quickly enough for anyone to really be drunk. We are all sleep-deprived and have the fuzzy giddiness that drunks and college students call “the second wind.” Rather than napping this afternoon, I drank coffee and stayed up to write pages and pages of frantic notes. The photographers stayed up as well, to work on digitally processing their shots. One of them, the photographer from New Zealand, has been up for over forty-eight hours.

We talk about previous launches we’ve been to, how they were different from today’s. As usually happens when people start comparing launch experiences, a lot of the stories are about spending hours at a viewing spot only to see the launch called off, the empty feeling of going home without having seen anything. It takes me a moment to realize that I will never see a shuttle launch scrub. For some reason this makes me feel triumphant, like I have won something.

“I’m scrubless!” I announce to the table. They applaud me politely. It’s a nearly unbelievable bit of luck—the chances of seeing four launches with zero scrubs are very low. The risk of having to return to Florida for multiple attempts for each mission was great enough to make me doubt whether I should embark on this project at all. I announce my scrubless status on social media, though most of my friends will have no idea what this word means. While I’m looking in my phone, I flip through images of the launch online—shots taken by people at this table, shots by photographers from Reuters and AP, shots from random people posting on Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. It’s perhaps too obvious to bear mentioning, but the number and range of photos is astounding, the different colors and moods of the same object, the same event, the same few minutes. Each one feels different, each carries a slightly different meaning. I receive via e-mail a photo taken by a new space friend, Anna, who was standing behind me—it’s a shot of the back of my head with
Atlantis
seeming to emerge from it. I show the others. This, I tell them, I will treasure forever.

One of the photographers at the table, famous for his surreally beautiful travel photographs taken around the world, mentions to us that he was referred to Omar by two different mutual acquaintances. It’s an unfamiliar experience to share Omar with other people. I usually have him to myself.

“I heard about this guy named Omar who worked for NASA, and then my other friend was like, ‘Look for Omar the security guard! He’s really cool!’”

I flinch inwardly at the phrase “security guard,” and watch Omar for his reaction. As usual he betrays none; his smile is as friendly as always. Since even before I met him in person, since I started to get an idea of what his job was, I sensed that Omar was not a security guard, but played a role more demanding and much more important. Now that I have been here as his guest on five different occasions, have seen his and his father’s dedication to the project of sending people safely to space, have seen his encyclopedic knowledge of the work that has gone on here before him, the term strikes me as even more inappropriate, even offensive. I want to speak up and correct the photographer’s misunderstanding, but I’m not entirely sure what I would say. Omar is an orbiter integrity clerk, a lay historian of American spaceflight, an ambassador for the Kennedy Space Center, a good friend, and a fine human being. I say nothing. No one else seems to think much of the phrase one way or the other.

Another photographer asks the table what’s next, what the next step in spaceflight is supposed to be. I’ve been taken aback throughout the day by how tenuous a grasp of space history and space policy many of my fellow credentialed media representatives seem to have. A few of us start to answer simultaneously.

“There’s a system called
Constellation
—”

“The launches to the space station will be contracted out to private companies like SpaceX—”

“A system called SLS, for Space Launch System I think, it looks like the Saturn V—”

“Wait, I thought
Constellation
was canceled—”

“But wasn’t SLS part of
Constellation?
Wait, what’s
Orion
?”

Even to those of us who make a point of keeping up, all this is a bit mushy. Omar tells a story about a mobile launch tower designed for
Constellation
that was being built at Kennedy, a gantry I saw on my visit for Family Day. It’s now being dismantled, without ever having been used for anything, because
Constellation
was canceled. Some people were relieved when
Constellation
was canceled—I myself have referred to the decision as
Constellation
having been put out of its misery, and Buzz Aldrin called its cancellation President Obama’s “JFK moment.” The six of us at this table all have different reasons for being interested in spaceflight, and probably we all have different political views—but we all agree that this story about the gantry is infuriating.

Every time the shuttle takes off on the TVs, people raise their glasses and cheer.

As the six of us say our good-byes in the parking lot, Omar asks me whether I’ve decided to stay another day. I tell him I’m not sure.

“If you do, there’s a party tomorrow you should come to,” he says. “A lot of the space people on Twitter will be there. The NASATweetup people too.”

“That would be fun,” I say. “I’ll text you tomorrow.”

I’m not sure my family can spare me another day. But when I call home, Chris says they are doing fine, that I should do what I need to do so I won’t have to come back again. We’ve agreed this will be my last trip.

Today, the day after the last launch of the space shuttle, the Visitor Complex feels different. It’s busy—packed, in fact, with visitors. A lot of them wear the I WAS THERE shirts, and the festive mood persists, but these artifacts have changed somehow. I wander the displays, and all the space suits look forlorn in their display cases. I realize what it is: the last time I was here, only five weeks ago,
Atlantis
was making its way to the launchpad, and the Kennedy Space Center was a working spaceport. Now, everything has become historical. The mockup of the launch vehicle that greets us at the gates is, as of today, obsolete. Even while
Atlantis
orbits by in the sky above us, we know that never again will an orbiter be joined with an external tank and solid rocket boosters in that configuration. It’s now a historical display, demonstrating something that used to happen. The surge of anger and sorrow I feel about this surprises me.

I carry this glum feeling through my afternoon at the Visitor Complex. I sit in the Rocket Garden for a few minutes, looking at the old Titan and Redstone rockets, and try to console myself with the idea that the space shuttle will take its place among them. A spacecraft that is now obsolete, but that represented an important step on the path to the next thing. But without knowing what that next thing will be, it’s hard not to imagine this tourist attraction, with its boosterism and optimism for the future, becoming a depressing joke, an artifact of a more ambitious time.

On my way out, I pass through the gift shop. A table near the front always bears merchandise specific to the most recent launch, and a mob of sunburned people is now wedged there shoulder to shoulder, pawing through piles of shirts, while an employee tries to unpack a fresh box straight onto the pile. A ten-year-old girl near me picks up a shirt, looks at the tag, and starts to put it back.

“Don’t put it down!” her mother shrieks. Indeed, another woman was eyeing the shirt, ready to snatch it up if the girl had dropped it.

Outside, I stop at a refreshment kiosk. The man who rings up my bottle of water is in his forties. He wears space shuttle pins on his name tag, as the gas station attendant was wearing yesterday.

“Sure is busy today,” he comments while he counts out my change.

“It’s crazy,” I answer. “Do you think everyone’s here for the last launch?”

The man doesn’t hear me, or pretends not to hear me. He gives me my receipt.