Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  Serena tells me that every new astronaut is assigned a mentor when he or she arrives at Johnson Space Center in Houston, an experienced astronaut who can help gain entry to the sometimes-bewildering NASA culture with its alphabet soup of acronyms.

  “That’s interesting,” I answer. “If it’s not inappropriate, can I ask who your mentor is?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s Doug Hurley,” she says. Doug Hurley is a Right Stuff type Marine pilot who is scheduled to fly on Atlantis’s last mission. It’s interesting that she was assigned a mentor who was not a woman, not a minority, and not a scientist, despite there being plenty of astronauts in the corps who would meet one or more of those criteria. Maybe it means that things have progressed to a point where these factors are not as prominent as they once were, that Serena and Doug are well matched in terms of personality, or that they knew each other from Star City when Serena was his flight surgeon. “He’s someone I trust,” Serena says with genuine warmth in her voice.

  I wonder what John Glenn thinks of this turn of events in the history of the astronaut, that getting along with others is now prized over lightning-fast reflexes or superhuman daring, that Serena’s place in the astronaut corps is so unremarkable that Doug Hurley, a Marine pilot like himself, would be assigned to mentor a nonpilot Hispanic woman, and that the two would be great friends. Later, I would read that when Doug Hurley’s wife, Karen Nyberg, flew her own mission to space, a six-month stint on the International Space Station, Hurley took care of their son. He shut down reporters’ attempts to define his parenting as an unusual or excessive burden—he pointed out to the Houston Chronicle, “Every other man up on the space station has children, too. Why is it different for her?” Yet as published, the piece focuses on his burdens over her accomplishments and bears the subtitle “Mr. Mom.”

  “So, I have this question I’ve been asking as many people as I can,” I tell Serena. “What does it mean that we have been flying American spacecraft in space for fifty years and now have decided to stop?”

  Serena pauses. Then she sighs heavily into the phone.

  “Yeah, that’s a tough question,” she says. “It’s true that this is a weird time. This is a gap when we don’t have an American vehicle. It’s the first time we’ve really had to reeducate people about the space station. Now that shuttle is retiring, we are hearing more about the ISS, and maybe that’s a good thing.

  “I find myself explaining to people a lot what the state of our space program is,” she says. “People think that NASA is shutting down, or that Johnson Space Center is shutting down.”

  “I’ve heard visitors say that at the Cape,” I say. “People show up and are surprised the facilities are still there.”

  “Right,” Serena says. “It’s like people thought shuttle was all there was. Now that shuttle will be gone, we’ll have the chance to let people know what else we’ve been doing all this time.”

  “That’s true,” I say grudgingly.

  “Look, it may be kind of sad, but we are ending this program successfully,” she points out. “People should be proud of that.”

  We are proud of that, I tell her. I know this from seeing the people who show up at launches, the simple joy they take in seeing spacecraft leave Earth. At the same time, this statement hinges on a definition of success I’m not sure everyone would agree with.

  Most Americans probably couldn’t name a single active astronaut. Yet there is still something about the way an astronaut looks in a blue flight suit. Fit, fearless, competent. Ready to take on the burdens of our dreams. When I ask Serena about the flight suit, what it’s like to put it on and go out to meet the public, she laughs.

  “It’s true, the flight suit does energize people,” she says. “And our job is to inspire. What helps inspire me is knowing that kids of today know what that blue flight suit means, and they care. It’s hope and promise of the future, and hopefully it symbolizes someone they can look up to.”

  I decide to ask Serena something I have always wondered.

  “What’s it like,” I ask her, “when you’re in a bank or getting your taxes done, and someone asks you what your occupation is, and you get to say ‘astronaut’? Is that the best thing ever?”

  Serena laughs happily and at first seems to be at a loss as to how to answer. I go on.

  “I mean, it’s like, when someone asks you what your job is, answering ‘I’m Batman.’”

  Serena laughs some more, and I’m about to apologize for putting her on the spot when she finally replies.

  “It is pretty cool,” she says. “I’m not going to lie. Every time I say it, I get to remember it’s true, and maybe at some point it will get old, but—it hasn’t yet.”

  When we talk about the future, Serena repeats the standard-issue Charles Bolden talk about how commercial ventures will be up and running by 2016—17. I am as skeptical as always about whether SpaceX or any of the other space startups can achieve human spaceflight on anything like the time frame we are being promised. Yet I have to admit this happy talk sounds better coming from a member of the astronaut corps than it does coming from a politician. Serena has put everything at stake hoping for the happy talk to come true, and at least for the time I’m talking with her, I feel it can come true too.

  I didn’t have much of a relationship with the Mercury astronauts at first. Even as I started writing my Challenger book, I found the shuttle astronauts more accessible, more human, more like people I knew. Part of this appeal was that some of the shuttle astronauts were women, but also that they did things like juggle and do somersaults, clowned around in weightlessness. They seemed to have a sense of humor about it all. They took the time to enjoy it. The Mercury astronauts were all military pilots, laconic and square-jawed. They’d been given a tough job to do and they did it with machine-like precision. They brooked no goofing off.

  It wasn’t until I was well into my research, well past the Right Stuff stage and into individual accounts, that I started to see the Mercury Seven as individuals and thus started to love them. Gus Grissom was the one I understood first, with his engineering degree and his hangdog expression always recognizable among the others. John Glenn, of course, has a boyish bow-tie appeal and a charismatic kind of intelligence. Gordo Cooper, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton. One by one I started to be able to pick them out and started to call them by their first names. Soon I know the Gemini and Apollo astronauts as well. Neil Armstrong has a goofy sincerity. Gene Cernan has a tough visage right out of a spaghetti western. Michael Collins lends a folksy, humorous light touch to the most serious or technical of discussions. Alan Bean exudes gratitude for his adventures more than the others and has a huggable grandpa quality. And so on. I understand that I don’t actually know these men at all, that the simple caricatures I have made of them in my head are not the same as actual human beings. But still it’s irresistible to indulge in this kind of hero worship, because this is precisely their job.

  When I think back on how those first six women astronauts looked to me as a child, I remember a fierce admiration that’s hard to describe. It has a lot to do with the possibilities of competent femininity. This was only a few years after Star Wars came out, after all, and infected a generation of girls with the role model of Princess Leia. In that scene when we first see her, when her spaceship is being boarded by storm troopers, she steps out of the shadows warily, holding a blaster muzzle-up beside her head. Baby-faced, with that strange sleek hairdo picking up red alarm lights, her face in a serious glower. Her lip gloss is perfect. She is beautiful, and she is ready to commit violence in pursuit of values larger than herself. I saw that again when the women astronauts were introduced. I remember the first time I saw them, in some footage on the evening news, all of them leaning against a fence. They looked fantastic.

  A few years later, the space shuttle documentary The Dream Is Alive I saw at the Air and Space Museum showed me Judith Resnik sleeping in space. In that film, she no longer looks uncomfortable, as she had leaning against the
fence. She smiles at her male crewmates and somersaults in space. She no longer wears lip gloss, but she doesn’t have to. Her femininity is no longer as marked as it once was; already it’s no longer as remarkable. She belongs in space, it seems to the children watching her for the first time—at least, until she dies on her way to space in 1986.

  I’ve been talking to my fellow Americans about what they will miss about spaceflight, and I’m gratified by how many people share my simple love for the astronauts, both the famous ones and the obscure ones. A lot of women my age remember those first six and the way they seemed to open up possibilities for all of us. When I talk to people about the astronauts, about the end of American spaceflight, they want to know whether the shuttle is really ending, whether anything can be done to save it, as I asked Omar the first time I met him for Family Day. I find it depressing to have to explain to these people why nothing can save it now. And I hadn’t realized how much, even now, people still hope it could be saved.

  [The astronauts] would get in their cars and go barreling into Cocoa Beach for the endless, seamless party. And what lively cries and laughter would be rising up on all sides as the silvery moon reflected drunkenly on the chlorine blue of the motel pools! And what animated revelers were to be found!

  —Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

  And out on the beaches and the causeways and river-banks, another audience was waiting for the launch. America like a lazy beast in the hot dark was waiting for a hint in the ringing of the night…. In bed by two in the morning, he would be up by four. An early start was necessary, for traffic on the road to the Press Site would be heavy.

  —Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

  CHAPTER 7. Goodbye, Atlantis

  STS-135: July 8, 2011

  A million visitors are expected to descend on the Space Coast for the last launch of the space shuttle program on July 8, 2011, more than have visited since the launch of Apollo 11. In the weeks and days leading up to it, I see more and more news stories about the end of shuttle. Some are elegiac, focusing on layoffs and the loss to the economy in central Florida. Some strike an optimistic tone, implying that the end of shuttle will open the door for the Next Thing. In reality, the only Next Thing on the books is the Space Launch System, a stripped-down version of the canceled Constellation program. SLS is discussed as a replacement for shuttle with varying degrees of credulity about whether it will ever fly. But anyone who knows anything about how NASA gets funded knows that SLS has no long-term budget. To its critics, SLS is not a vehicle for getting astronauts to space so much as it is a mechanism for allowing politicians to avoid taking responsibility for canceling the future. It’s a talking point, a place to put our hopes, but whether it will ever take astronauts to space remains to be seen.

  When I make the trip from Knoxville to the Space Coast this time, two months after the launch of Endeavour and five weeks after the rollout of Atlantis, it’s an easy drive. I’ve done it so many times now, I know all the landmarks by heart—the change in scenery when Tennessee becomes Georgia, which always reminds me of a line from Flannery O’Connor: “Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills.” Roadside shacks, shopping malls, rest stops with peaches and boiled peanuts. The thickening traffic around Atlanta. I was curious to see whether the WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE? billboard would come down after the birth certificate was revealed between Discovery’s last launch and Endeavour’s; it did not. A Cracker Barrel I’ve become especially fond of in Valdosta, Georgia. As I pass into Florida after dark, the terrain becomes more tropical, palm trees appearing, the humidity thickening. I cut across the state on 528, a road that for some reason demands nearly seven dollars in tolls, at four different tollbooths, to travel about fifteen miles. The toll workers are invariably friendly and alert, no matter how late I pass through. This is how I know I’m almost at the Space Coast, when all the change in my ashtray has been handed out to four smiling, Hawaiian-shirted toll workers. When I was here last, I accidentally got into the lane reserved for people with those devices on their cars and missed the tollbooth altogether; weeks later I received a bill in the mail, complete with an image of my car speeding past the camera. I hung up the ticket on the corkboard in my office along with my other space souvenirs. Now I know which lane to stay in, and my change is at the ready.

  After the third tollbooth, I leave the window open as I accelerate back into traffic. It’s one of the small pleasures of cross-country driving: the feeling of accelerating away from a tollbooth, the perfectly legal yet still thrilling feeling of flooring the gas and letting the hot, humid night rush in past me.

  I pay my last toll on 528 and approach the Space Coast a few minutes after midnight. The press badging office is scheduled to open for the day at 1:00 a.m., and even though it means I’ll get even less sleep, I decide to drive out there and get badged up before checking into my motel. For this launch, I’ve managed to get press credentials for the first time by pitching a story to my local newspaper. Credentialing, it turned out, is a byzantine and archaic weeks-long process that involves a NASA employee speaking with my editor on the telephone to confirm that I exist, am a published writer, and am not a terrorist. It had been a harrowing wait to hear back from the media office—I still hadn’t heard back the day before I needed to leave for Florida. When I’d finally called, the harassed-sounding woman on the phone promised to e-mail me, and when she did, saying that my application for credentials had been accepted, I burst into tears of relief at my computer.

  The Press Site is closer to the launchpad than I’ve ever been: the site from which Norman Mailer watched the launch of Apollo 11, the site from which Walter Cronkite narrated the moon landings, the site from which all the space journalists have watched all the launches. Over twenty-seven hundred journalists from all over the world are expected to cover this launch (also a record unmatched since Apollo 11), and I hope not to get caught in the line for badges behind too many of them.

  The press badging office turns out to be a tiny shack on State Road 3, a fluorescent-lit Apollo-era building staffed by a few slightly harried but extremely competent middle-aged women, the same women who spoke to everyone’s editors on the phone. A hand-painted fifties-style sign warns us not to use the office phones, a quaint reminder of a time before each journalist carried his or her own.

  A couple of other journalists are there ahead of me, chatting up the women behind the counter with the easy rhythm of coworkers. The journalists clip on their badges, both men in their fifties who have the type of physique that comes with eating bad food and sitting at press sites and on press buses for twenty-hour days. When it’s my turn to check in, the woman behind the counter seems mildly irritated that I don’t already know what to do—apparently most journalists who are covering this launch have been here many times before. I’m supposed to fill out a form with information about the media organization I’m representing and my emergency contacts. The media center woman looks up my name while I sign a form agreeing that I won’t participate in unprofessional behavior, which includes, but is not limited to, peddling materials for profit, possessing alcoholic beverages or firearms, and autograph-seeking.

  Then the woman asks for my name again, this time asks me to spell it. She looks through her files a second time.

  “What organization are you with?” she asks.

  “Knoxville News Sentinel,” I answer. She reaches the end of her files and starts over, a doubtful look on her face.

  My heart starts pounding. There’s been a mistake, I didn’t get press credentials at all, I’ll have to find somewhere else to watch the launch from even though all the good spots have been taken for days. While I wait, a few more journalists straggle in (again, all men in their fifties), give their names, and greet the media office women like old friends.

  “When did you get your confirmation you would be credentialed?” the woman asks.

  “The day before yesterday,” I answer. “I can show you the e-mail I got.”

  �
��Yeah, okay, that would help,” she says. She comes over, takes my phone from me, and peers at the e-mail I’ve called up there.

  “Yup, you did get accepted,” she agrees. “I don’t know what happened. I’m gonna make you a badge.”

  She types at a computer, then goes over to a laminator, which starts up with a hum. She pulls the piece of plastic off the machine, attaches a metal clip, and hands over my badge. It is still warm. I am pleased to discover that the badges have not changed since the Apollo era. Mine is much like those worn by all the journalists to have written about American spaceflight since Apollo 4.

  When I finally check in to my motel—I’m at my Florida home, the Clarion in Merritt Island—it’s close to 2:00 a.m. The young Indian man behind the counter, whose name tag reads PRAMOD, remembers me from the last time I was here. He types something into the computer while on the wall, a large flat-screen TV shows weather forecasts with an image of a space shuttle behind the numbers. Storms are predicted for the morning, but that can always go either way here on the Space Coast.

  “Here for the space shuttle?” Pramod asks cheerily while he slips my keys into their little envelope and writes my room number inside. I always accept two keys, so no one suspects I am traveling alone.

  “Yes,” I admit. I would rather tell him I’m here for anything else—a cruise leaving from Port Canaveral, a vacation at the beach—anything that isn’t about to happen for the very last time tomorrow. I watch him for a reaction. He knows as well as I do that tonight might be the last time this motel will be fully booked. But he seems unbothered by my answer.