Leaving Orbit (47 page)

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 light 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”