Leaving Orbit (39 page)

I’ve seen OPF; I was there with Omar on Family Day and saw
Endeavour
being prepared there for its last mission. So while I was reading this e-mail I could picture the area outside OPF-2 where the employee appreciation party was to be held: empty tarmac, a wide stretch of asphalt between two hangars. The idea of holding a party out there in the brutal sun, a sad celebration for the dwindling number of still-unlaid-off shuttle workers, people who have been working nonstop for years or decades to get one shuttle after another off the ground—what sort of “party” would this be, on such a distinctly unpartylike occasion? Even with a space shuttle in attendance like the world’s most expensive party decoration, even with the astronauts there, just back from space—wouldn’t this be the biggest bummer of a party ever? Might some of the answers to my questions be found here? I couldn’t miss it.

I sat in my office on campus and read the e-mail over and over. Some pages I’d been working on before I left rested on the top of a pile on my desk. A sentence spilling over from the previous page read, “—and now the space shuttle era is ending.” I looked at it for a long time before getting a pen, scratching out the last word, and writing in, “—and now the space shuttle era is over.” This is what it means to be aware of history, I suppose, but it feels oddly like living through a death, the way little reminders, little inanimate things, conspire to keep surprising you, to keep fresh the change you weren’t really ready for, didn’t really want.

From the moment my eyes touched this e-mail, the landing was only about fourteen hours off. Not only short notice, but maybe not physically enough time to buy a plane ticket, pack a bag, get to the airport, and make the flight that would land me in Orlando in time to drive out to the space center, through security, and out to the landing site. Probably all the flights were full or insanely expensive, but even assuming I could get a seat, if either of two flights were delayed at all, a very high likelihood so late in the day, I would miss the whole thing anyway. I opened a new browser window for a travel site, to see what it would cost. There was one seat left on a flight going through Charlotte, and it was mysteriously cheap. I had always known that fares go up as the travel date approaches, but apparently they fall again right before the flight, the airlines finally backing down in their endless game of chicken with passengers. This flight was only a few hours away, and it was now cheaper than if I had bought it a month in advance.

The look on Chris’s face when I told him about the landing, about the towback and party and the oddly cheap fare, could best be described as
be-wearied.

“It sounds like you should try to be there,” he said.

“I’d be back Thursday afternoon in time to get him from preschool,” I told him. “No matter what. And I’d keep him all that day and the next, I promise.”

“Do what you need to do,” he said. Did Norman Mailer’s wife (and ex-wives) send him off with a phrase like this? Did he even ask their permission at all, or did he simply inform them of his plans?

I clicked “buy” on the plane ticket, took my son to the pool for an hour (he’d been promised the pool, and such promises cannot be broken even for space shuttle landings), brought him home, changed out of my swimsuit, and threw a few things into a bag. Packing is much easier when you know you won’t have the chance to go to bed. I kissed my husband and son, jumped into my car, and sped to the airport.

When I pass through the checkpoint at the south gate to the Kennedy Space Center, I show my badge to the armed guard a bit warily. I’ve confirmed more than once that the badge that got me in to the launch is still good through the end of the mission, yet I still wonder whether that can really be true. I suppose it’s because of the trouble I went through to get the badge in the first place—it’s hard to believe that I don’t have to keep going through the same process every time I want to get past the gates. So when I hold out my badge and photo ID to the guard, there is a part of me that expects him to hand everything back, shaking his head. But he doesn’t. With the combination of scrupulousness and friendliness I have come to expect from the guards at these checkpoints in the middle of the night, he greets me, examines my badge and ID letter for letter, peers in at my face to compare it to the photo on my driver’s license, makes some friendly chatter about Tennessee and what a long way I have come, then sends me on my way into the humid dark. I head in toward the Press Site. It’s a few minutes past three in the morning.

I’ve tried to describe the hugeness of the Kennedy Space Center in daylight, but now I realize it’s at night that this place truly reveals its sheer square mileage, how very much empty land is separating everything. In the distance, I can see the Vehicle Assembly Building lit up like the prow of some massive ship, the row of workshops and other buildings just before it, but there are miles between here and there punctuated only with infrequent streetlights. I roll down the windows to keep myself awake on the straightaway. Outside I can hear the croaking of frogs and the strange bellowing noise alligators make. The smell of Cape Canaveral I can never quite remember when I’m not here, the night air a wet and lightless forest in the nose. Somehow, I reflect, all this feels like home now, though a home I still wonder at. A spaceport home.

I have a picture I snapped with my phone at three thirty in the morning, while I stood in line with a couple hundred other badged members of the media next to a row of idling buses. You can’t see much in the photo—I’d been standing there, deafened by the idling diesels and sickened by the fumes, exhausted and annoyed that other journalists standing around had told me I needed to check in at the News Center but then after my long walk up to the News Center I was told to come back down here to the parking lot and wait in line for a bus, a process that drained some of my precious remaining energy and put me a few dozen people behind in line. I’d been stewing about this injustice, but then I suddenly remember where I am. I am at the Kennedy Space Center, well past the security checkpoint, in the middle of the night. I am on hallowed ground, a place other space fans would give their eyeteeth to be, even once. In a couple of hours, the last space shuttle is going to make its last landing. And after today, I might never get the chance to come here again.

The picture I snap of the VAB at that moment does not come out well—it was shot in the kind of light that the human eye can see but that a camera can’t capture much at all, at least not the camera in my phone. I’ve saved the image, though, because when I look through my photos and see that blurry square that I know to be the Vehicle Assembly Building and the blurry shapes I know to be my fellow journalists, I remember what it was like to stand out there that night, the odd combination of heat and chill, of annoyance and privilege, of exhaustion and eagerness.

The bus is heading to the Shuttle Landing Facility, one of the few parts of the Kennedy Space Center where I haven’t spent much time. I’ve seen the runway, but I’ve never had a clear idea of where people actually stand to watch landings. In spite of my better judgment, I keep picturing us onlookers—the astronauts’ families, NASA officials, a pack of photojournalists, and me—all standing on the scrubby grass and bushes to one side of a normal airport runway, shielding our faces from the wind.

As I discover, the term “Shuttle Landing Facility” refers to a 500-acre area on the north side of the Kennedy Space Center, an area that includes the runway, an aircraft parking apron, a tow-way, a recovery convoy staging area, the mate-demate device, and the building everyone (confusingly) also calls SLF. The runway is nearly three miles long, one of the longest in the world, and with good reason. When the space shuttle comes in for a landing, it has only one chance. It has no engines to pull up, circle around, and try again, as airplanes do. It’s a fact that shuttle pilots take a nontrivial amount of pride in: the winged object that’s hardest to land (in early days it was nicknamed “the flying brickyard” because of its poor glide ratio) is also one with absolutely no margin for error.

Our bus parks in a field already lined with vehicles, mostly satellite uplink trucks. We pile out of our buses and start hiking up toward the SLF building. Knee-high weeds whip at everyone’s ankles, barely keeping the dirt from turning to mud in the unaccustomed churning. The moon is waning gibbous. I find it hard to keep my footing in the dark, despite the floodlights. We reach the building, a sort of mashup of small-town control tower and racetrack observation deck; there are two stories of seating (all already filled with photojournalists setting up their tripods) and a concrete pad upon which many others stand about and where still more photojournalists are setting up still more tripods and stepladders. Everyone looks out toward the runway, which is, at this hour, still swallowed in darkness and whose existence we must take on faith. A digital countdown clock, much smaller than the one at the Press Site, marks the time in red LED numbers. I feel an instant prejudice against this countdown clock, solely because it is not the other countdown clock, the big one I know and love from the Press Site. The smallness, redness, and newness of this one all offend me nonsensically.

All in all, this place does not feel big enough to contain our numbers, though of course it must be noted that most landings over the past thirty years have drawn but a fraction of this crowd. Though I’ve never been here before, I’ve seen images and videos of landings on the NASA site and on people’s Flickr and YouTube accounts: in them, there is always plenty of space for everyone in and around the SLF building, unlike today. And, maddeningly, the landings in the pictures are usually
daytime
landings. As of right now, I bitterly envy all the people who have ever come out here to see a landing during daylight hours. They got to see the orbiter streaking in from miles away, framed against the blue sky. We can’t see a thing out there, and we know the sun will not yet have risen when
Atlantis
comes screaming toward this runway. I know I won’t be able to see it until it’s practically on top of us, if at all. We have come out here to witness something we might not actually be able to
see.

I stake out a spot on the concrete to slump to the ground, my back against the wall of the building. It’s T minus ninety minutes, and I discover it feels amazing to sit down. I’ve been up for twenty-two hours. A few feet to my left, a young journalist is similarly slumped, asleep or willing himself to sleep, his steno notebook and phone clutched in one hand, his mission badge firmly clipped to his lapel. Every thirty seconds, he swats at a mosquito without opening his eyes.

The NASA public affairs people are out here, identifiable by their blue polo shirts with the NASA meatball logo on them and by their general appearance of wakefulness and helpfulness. I don’t know when these people sleep. I eavesdrop on a conversation between one of their number, a chipper middle-aged man with the physical fitness and intelligent look of an astronaut, and a journalist from Reuters (if the neckband bearing her badge is to be trusted).

Reuters woman: I thought of you the other day. On
NBC Nightly News
, the reporter was saying it was “the end of American spaceflight” and I knew you wouldn’t like that.