Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “Park your car here,” he says, drawing on the photocopied map with a ballpoint pen, as all motel clerks do. “Ice machine is here. Breakfast is here. Breakfast starts at 6:30. But you’ll be long gone by then, won’t you?”

  “Yup,” I agree. “I’ll be long gone.” I find my room, haul my things inside, and set my phone to go off in two hours.

  On the morning of July 16, 1969, the morning of the launch of Apollo 11, Norman Mailer woke up in a motel room. He writes that in the predawn darkness, “the night air a wet and lightless forest in the nose, one was finally scared.” He says that waking early to see a spacecraft launch reminds him of waking before dawn to invade a foreign beach, “an awakening in the dark of the sort one will always remember, for such nights live only on a few mornings of one’s life.”

  “One was scared.” An interesting turn of phrase, isn’t it? Any high school English teacher will tell you this is a grammatical evasion no less than “mistakes were made” (which President Nixon would not utter until three years on). Was Norman Mailer constitutionally incapable of writing the words “I was scared”? Was Norman Mailer unwilling to tell us, without the veil of fiction, of his own terror when, as a young soldier, he woke before dawn, after only fitful sleep, in order to storm the beaches of the Philippines?

  I love the smell of Florida night described as a “wet and lightless forest in the nose.” There is a smell here, unlike that of any other place I’ve known. That smell has become inextricable from the feeling of waking here in the dark, knowing that, not far away, the enormous ship is steaming, creaking and groaning with fuel, coming to life for its launch.

  On TV, a newscaster reports from the Kennedy Space Center. Over her shoulder, the launchpad is lit up with floodlights. Atlantis is stacked there, its white tiles glowing against the orange of its external tank. The newscaster talks of nothing but the weather, and she’s not saying encouraging things. To use NASA terminology, the weather is only 30 percent go. Storms lurking offshore are expected to blow in later this morning, in time to interfere with the launch window. This launch attempt will likely be scrubbed, hours or minutes or seconds before liftoff. A million people will moan in unison, and we’ll get up even earlier to do all this again tomorrow. All preparations are still moving forward as planned, though—NASA took a lot of criticism in the early years of the shuttle program for calling off launches based on weather predictions that never came true.

  “Reporting live from the Kennedy Space Center,” the young newscaster says before throwing back to the anchor, and because I have stood outside not far from where she is standing, I know she is being bitten by many vicious mosquitoes and pretending not to be. The huge countdown clock behind her continues marking time left until launch by hundredths of a second in huge orange numbers. It’s now T minus seven hours.

  I dress in layers, observing NASA’s requirement that we wear long pants and closed-toed shoes. Last time I was here I met a writer who was turned away from his one and only chance to go inside the Orbiter Processing Facility because he was wearing shorts. I cover all exposed skin with SPF 50 and bring the bottle with me to reapply throughout the day. I bring notebooks and pens, snacks and a great deal of water. I bring my phone’s charger and my computer in case I fill up my phone with pictures and recordings and need to dump data in the middle of the day. I bring rain gear, cash, and a change of clothes in case I don’t have time to get back to my motel before going out to dinner with Omar and some other space friends after the launch. I make sure my press badge is securely attached to me.

  I slip into my car. It is still fully night, and already sticky hot. The motel parking lot is packed to capacity with cars bearing license plates from all over the country. I feel I must be the only person awake. But out on the causeways, strings of taillights blink like fireflies, other people already heading to the Cape.

  Right outside the entrance to the Kennedy Space Center squats an all-night gas station, its outdoor sodium lights pitched at such a brightness and angle it seems to be an alien starship just landed. The lights lure me in, as surely they are meant to, and I stop for coffee. Inside, the place is overrun, the coffee service area a wasteland of spilled creamer and abandoned stir sticks, devastated by the many space fans who came through even earlier than me. The people with whom I wait in line to pay are a nice mix of Launch People: first-timers overly energetic for this hour in the morning; launch veterans who play it cool, showing off their Tshirts and hats commemorating previous launches. I am wearing my press badge, and I feel a certain geeky pride when the other space fans in line notice it, then look closer at me, wondering whether I’m someone important.

  As always in the hours before a launch, strangers nod and smile at each other with a shared sense of patriotism and common purpose. I hear a variety of Englishes spoken: Louisiana, New England, London. A sleepy blond mother whispers to her daughters in German. The man who rings up my coffee is wearing a name tag studded with shuttle mission pins. He smiles and tells me to have a great day, and as I thank him I wonder whether his business will suffer after the shuttle workers are laid off and few people drive past here on their way to work anymore.

  I leave the gas station and find State Road 3 jammed with cars waiting to get through the checkpoint. It takes me forty-five minutes to travel about one mile, a rate reminiscent of that of the crawler transporter, by which time the sun is starting to come up. When I reach the booth, an armed guard looks over my badge with exquisite care, compares the name to the one on my driver’s license letter by letter, then scrutinizes my face in comparison with the photo on my ID.

  “Have a good one, Margaret,” he says finally with a wink. I roll on. A few minutes later, I reach another checkpoint with another guard, and we go through the same process. This one calls me “young lady” and advises me to take it easy.

  I almost miss the turnoff to the Press Site because once again I’ve made the mistake of using the Vehicle Assembly Building as a landmark. When I finally get there, the parking lots are already full, and another guard directs me to a nearby patch of grass to park on. As I lock up my car, I hear, then see, a black helicopter go by overhead. Then a few black SUVs. There is no mistaking it: the Astrovan is coming through. A small herd of people is running to the roadside to get a closer look.

  The Astrovan convoy slows, then stops. This is unusual, the stopping. An astronaut in a blue flight suit pops out. He is along for the Astrovan ride—the astronauts going to space today are dressed in orange pressure suits. He has his picture taken with the gathered crowd. As he climbs back in, I peer at the windows of the Astrovan. I can see the astronauts’ hands waving, their faces lost in shadows. I can make out the lock rings on their wrists where their gloves will connect before their suits are pressurized.

  Four Americans are going to space today.

  The Press Site at the Kennedy Space Center is just south of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Back behind the handful of buildings visible from the road lurks its largest structure, the News Center. This is where press conferences are held before and after launches, and it is also where the NASA Media Office does most of its work. The main room of the News Center has rows of Formica desks with electric outlets and data plugs, though there are not nearly as many desks as journalists today, not by a long shot, and the ones set up here have the settled look of having staked their claims many hours, maybe even days, earlier. More journalists, some in suits and ties, have camped along the walls, having plugged in their laptops and devices wherever they could find an outlet. There is something thrillingly old-school about this way of gathering news—reporters watching the monitors, getting announcements, yelling questions to the Media Office people and scrawling down the answers in those steno notebooks all the print journalists use, typing stuff up on their laptops and talking urgently into their phones.

  It’s pleasant for a first-time holder of press credentials to simply stroll around the Press Site. These structures of varying solidity have grown up at the Press Site
over the decades, and, aside from a few losses to hurricanes, their permanence tends to correlate with age. So some of the networks and newspapers have concrete buildings that date back to Apollo 4, outlets that came later in the sixties have trailers, and the websites and foreign agencies have tents or awnings. Under each outdoor structure, a stand-up TV journalist does a standard prelaunch patter against the backdrop of the countdown clock and far-off launch stack, speaking various languages, many of them wearing shorts and flip-flops with their jackets and ties and makeup.

  The overall architectural feel at the Press Site is distinctly utilitarian Apollo-era. The restroom building is a case in point, classic early-sixties sloping-roof exterior and salmon-pink tile interior. I’m surprised there were enough female journalists at the time the Press Site was built to merit the five or so stalls allocated to us. I take pictures inside the bathroom, especially of a janitor’s trolley emblazoned with old mission patch stickers. It pleases me to see that even the janitors are proud of what goes on here. I have long dreamed of seeing a launch from the Press Site, and though this facility is supposed to be a means to an end, I’ve become fascinated with the Press Site itself, with the history of the people who have written about spaceflight, the people who have dedicated their careers to the task of telling this story. Now that it’s the end, everything seems important to me, everything historic.

  Now that I’m here, there is more waiting. After getting up so ungodly early, then idling in the line of creeping cars to show my badge to the guards, I had started to feel anxious that I had arrived too late, that I had underestimated the traffic, wouldn’t make it to the Press Site in time. Yet now it is still not seven, and the launch is over four hours off. The other journalists, of course, had to get here so insanely early because they are putting together their coverage in real time. I am one of very few credentialed writers who is free to roam around taking in the scene, who does not have to make sense of what I’m seeing immediately. It is a great luxury.

  I make my way to the center of the Press Site, a grassy field bordering on the Turn Basin, which I’m now seeing from a different angle than I did at the launch of Endeavour. I move downfield, close to the lip of the Turn Basin, where all the photographers are set up, nearly shoulder to shoulder now. You’ve seen it: the forest of enormous lenses, all pointing in the same direction across the water. The photographers got here even earlier than everyone else in order to stake their claims for prime tripod real estate, and they are the only ones who have bothered to bring lawn chairs. Oriana Fallaci, at the Press Site for a test launch of the Saturn V, commented that “journalists are always a disaster when they get together,” that space journalists were even worse, women space journalists worst of all. In general, the feeling here at the Press Site is both friendly and every-man-for-himself. Leave a seat for a moment, a good vantage point, a socket where a phone can be recharged, and it will be snatched up unapologetically. This does not preclude a sense of friendliness or collegiality, however.

  While I wait, I look again at what Norman Mailer wrote about his wait in this place:

  It is country beaten by the wind and water … unspectacular country, uninhabited by men in normal times and normal occupations….

  To the right of the photographers was a small grove of pure jungle. Recollections of his platoon on a jungle trail, hacking with machetes entered his head. A hash of recollections.

  I look over to the right of the photographers. There it is, the small grove of pure jungle. The visible line between mowed field and jungle is a border between space center and wild preserve, space and Earth, home and an alien world. The jungle is a terrain we are supposed to fear—untamed, uncivilized, teeming with poisonous plant life and vicious animal life, populated by monkeys in the trees (an astronaut is the opposite of a woman and he is also the opposite of a monkey). But, in 2011, I have no associations with jungles other than—oddly—space shuttle launches. So many writers have made much of the rockets-and-alligators contrast inherent in the landscape of the Kennedy Space Center, but that contrast, so captivating to me the first few times I visited here, has now become one of the fixtures of spaceflight itself, and at this point I can’t imagine a launch of an American rocket without palm trees, humidity, and mosquitoes. I can’t imagine American spacecraft being serviced by anyone but Floridians. The Cape and its remarkable geography are as much a part of the story of American spaceflight as President Kennedy’s “before this decade is out,” as much as the test pilot corps from which the first astronauts were selected, as much as the blue NASA meatball logo, as much as the countdown.

  A text comes in from Omar: Make it to the press site ok?

  Yep, I answer. Where are you?

  I’m working, on north side of VAB. I’ll head to the front parking lot at T-15 min.

  Omar has some flexibility in his schedule, and when he wants to see a launch—which he always does—he usually requests that day off work so he can be assured the freedom to find a good vantage point. So the fact that he’s chosen to be at work today means he’s guessing, as I am, that today’s attempt will scrub. He’s gambling on it, in fact, as there’s always a risk he could be engaged in some actual work at the moment of the launch.

  Someone wandering by tells me that the weather is now no-go. The storm clouds must be blowing in.

  “Are they continuing the countdown?” I ask him. If the answer is no, there will be an unspeakable traffic jam to get out of here, but then I’ll be able to go back to my motel, take a nap, have dinner with Omar and some other spaceworkers, meet some kooky space people to get quotes from, and do all this launch business again tomorrow after a decent night’s sleep. The guy looks down at his phone.

  “They’re continuing the countdown.”

  Atlantis was the fourth orbiter constructed, completed in April 1985. The name Atlantis comes from the oceanographic Research Vessel Atlantis, a sailing ship built in 1930. Atlantis was the primary research vessel for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and is the oldest serving oceanographic research vessel in the world. The undeniably nautical feel to the name somehow blends with the legend of the sunken city, and so the space shuttle Atlantis has always carried with it a sense of watery mystery.

  The first flight of Atlantis was a secret mission for the Department of Defense, as were two of its subsequent five flights. These missions, presumably to deploy spy satellites, were conducted without the usual fanfare and without the typical flood of information from NASA. In the handouts given to reporters, a column titled “primary payload,” where generally one finds a long, chatty description of cargo and experiments, offers only a simple “D o D.” This secrecy, along with its sleek name, made Atlantis seem more streamlined, slicker and sneakier, than the others.

  Atlantis was the first orbiter to launch an interplanetary probe, Magellan, which traveled to Venus. On its next flight, Atlantis launched the Galileo probe to Jupiter. Both probes’ missions were considered enormous successes, and both have greatly expanded our knowledge of the solar system. In the midnineties, Atlantis made seven consecutive flights to dock with the Russian space station Mir; when they were linked, Atlantis and Mir together formed the largest spacecraft in orbit to date.

  Of all the orbiters, Atlantis was the one I could never quite get a handle on, the one that never really developed a personality for me, and so maybe it’s fitting that it should be the last, that it should be the one I have to say good-bye to.

  Within the last hour before launch, the weather has been given a go, then a no-go again, then back to go. The countdown continues. While I’m making my way back to the field in front of the countdown clock, I hear the T minus nine minute hold has been released. The weather is go again, but I don’t assume it will continue to be. If I had to bet, I’d still put my money on a scrub today. It will be my first. The numbers on the huge digital countdown clock flow by, counting hundredths of a second.

  People are starting to find their viewing spots. Omar is probably in place at the
VAB parking lot. After the T minus nine hold is released, the photographers stop talking to each other and go into semimeditative game-face trances. They check and double-check their equipment.

  T minus five minutes and counting.

  T minus three minutes and counting.

  Someone tall steps in front of me, covering the launchpad with his head. I tap him firmly on the shoulder. Without turning back to meet my eyes, the man steps back to where he had been. I still don’t think the launch will go off, but we are getting awfully close on the countdown.

  Phones and handheld radios squawk out the voice of George Diller, the public affairs officer. He sounds excited but professional. The long pauses between his comments are probably no longer than they have been all morning, but they seem troublingly long, insanely long, now that we are hanging on every word.

  Verifying now that the main engines are in their start position.

  Starting now the retraction of the gaseous vent arm, the vent hood.

  PLT, OTC, verifying no unexpected errors.

  Fuel cells going to internal, external tank camera being activated at this time.

  OTC, PLT, no unexpected errors.

  Flight crew, OTC, close and lock your visors and initiate O2 flow.

  T minus two minutes and counting.

  T minus one minute and counting.

  At T minus thirty-one seconds, the countdown pauses. There is a problem with the oxygen vent hood—it is not retracting properly. These types of small issues often crop up and get resolved without delaying the launch, but the closer we get to T minus zero the more likely it is a small problem like this one could cause a scrub. I can picture the hood, which is nicknamed the “beanie cap” (as in the transcript of crew chatter before Challenger’s fateful launch—Commander Dick Scobee says, “There goes the beanie cap”). But I have no idea how difficult it might be to fix one. We wait and watch and listen.