Leaving Orbit (15 page)

It continues to startle me, the range of political ideologies that are compatible with enthusiasm for spaceflight. Tax-and-spend liberals of the Great Society stripe, obviously—but also spending-slashing Tea Partiers, hippie peaceniks, fierce libertarians, military loyalists, and apathetics of every shade. So very many of us seem to feel that a love of human spaceflight is reconcilable with our beliefs, and we can all explain why. This belief doesn’t always translate to actual funding; the launch we witness today was made possible by budget squabbles that happened last year, ten years ago, forty years ago. This man from Ohio sees the space shuttle as a natural offshoot of military aviation and an expression of American exceptionalism; I see it as a grand act of civic performance art. We are both right. This man and I are far apart on pretty much everything else (he tells me later that women are genetically disabled in terms of our spatial relations, especially at night, a disability responsible for as many traffic accidents as alcohol; when I ask him politely why, if this is so, women have successfully landed the space shuttle—the most difficult feat any pilot or astronaut can face—including twice at night, he answers, “affirmative action”), but we have spaceflight in common, and so today we share binoculars, information, and snacks. We look off agreeably into the sky together, and our companionship today, the companionship of many unexpected groupings and pairings like this one, is one of those things the space program has given us that is hard to put a value on.

The night before the launch of Apollo 11, Norman Mailer visited sites where tourists had gathered to watch the launch—maybe this very spot, he doesn’t specify. He describes the people he saw there:

The scene here today is oddly like the scene here forty years ago. Not much has changed. People still drive for days to get here, still camp out, still sit on lawn chairs. People still look across the miles at the shrine.

In Mailer’s book, he spins a fantasy of an archetypal working-class couple, a ridiculously offensive composite born of Mailer’s imagintion and class prejudice—the man all faded high-school glory and physical work and beer belly, the woman all aging sass and sexuality. I can only imagine that if Norman Mailer had watched the actual launch from here among everyday Americans, rather than from the NASA Press Site surrounded by credentialed journalists, he and the man from Ohio would have bloodied each other’s noses by mid-afternoon. Or they may have gotten drunk together at a postlaunch celebration in a local bar. Or maybe both. There are ways in which I won’t follow in Mailer’s footsteps.

T minus five minutes. T minus two minutes. I start to feel a buzzy anticipation in my fingertips, a bit like stage fright. Time moves differently at this point, and I’ve read that it does for the astronauts as well. Each second seems to take forever, yet there is also something merciless about the way the seconds keep spilling forward. The time it takes to speak a sentence or check a camera setting feels like it should have taken thirty seconds, but when we check our watches again, only two seconds have gone by.

T minus thirty seconds. The announcer starts chanting the countdown at
fifteen
, and we pick up the count and chant along with him.
Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.
These words, spoken with such reverence and emphasis, are part of the poetry of spaceflight. But when we get close to zero, the countdown stops.

A general groan goes up. The announcer explains that there is an electrical problem.

There is only a ten-minute window each day during which the rotation of Earth brings Cape Canaveral within rendezvous range with the space station; if
Discovery
can’t get off the ground within this launch window, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the next attempt. I will have to tell Chris I’ll be away for one more day; I’ll have to find someone to cover another day of classes. We lean toward our phones and turn up our car radios and squint through our binoculars at the horizon while those ten minutes slowly tick away.

When the time is nearly up, we see a light on the horizon. Only two seconds before the end of the window, the main engines ignite, creating an orange glow. Then the solid rocket boosters. The stack lifts itself, silently at first. The sound takes longer to travel the fourteen miles than does the light, so the first bright moments of launch always have a silent-film majesty.

And now the sound comes toward us: bassy, crackly, like a fireworks display that never lets up. The sound goes right through you, and if you have become too emotionally involved in the space program, this sound will make you cry. It’s the sound of American exploration, the sound of missiles put to better use than killing or threatening to kill, a sound that means we came in peace for all mankind. The man from Ohio is trying to watch through binoculars and shoot video of the launch with his phone at the same time; his wife is exclaiming “
Oh
my God!
Oh
my God!” over and over. We cry and tip our heads back to trace the bright light up.

At T plus two minutes, the solid rocket boosters drop off. Like others who have watched the
Challenger
footage too many times, I’m never fully satisfied that a space shuttle has launched successfully until I see with my own eyes those boosters drop off safely and arc away. From this distance,
Discovery
now looks mostly like a flare of flame followed by a streak of white arcing up into the sky, a streak that seems to curve inward with the bowl of the heavens until it’s almost directly overhead, where it slowly disappears into a single point like any star.

Good-bye,
Discovery.

I dry my eyes and gather up my things. I wonder whether Omar is crying. I feel I don’t know him quite well enough to ask. A few seconds later, I get a text from him.

2 words. Buzzer beater.

A few people pull out onto the causeway and drive off while
Discovery
is still visible in the sky, the sort of people who leave baseball games during the eighth inning. But most of us stand and watch the whole thing, which takes ten minutes, long enough to take our eyes off it and talk to other people and check Twitter while we are still tracking its progress up, up, up to the top of the sky. The couple from Ohio seems to be in no hurry to leave. They are watching NASA TV on her phone and taking pictures of each other with the steam trail, taking pictures of their car against the backdrop of palm trees and faraway gantries, of the crowd up and down the causeway. But then they consult each other quickly, hop into their car, and drive away. The woman barely has time to call good-bye to me as they pull out onto the road. Up ahead, we can see, traffic is already getting backed up at the first interchange, and I suppose they are smart to leave now. I feel oddly lonely once they are gone. But now that I’m alone I am free to take notes on everything they said. I scrawl some notes in my unprofessional-looking children’s black-and-white composition notebook. They’re not even notes, exactly, but triggers, strange details that I hope will be the spark that contains the whole moment, as our every cell contains the whole of our DNA.

Thinking about the Ohio couple now, it pleases me to think that I am in some of their pictures, a part of the online album they will share on Flickr or Facebook. Even though we never exchanged names, I’m glad they will remember me, my beach hat and lawn chair and car with Tennessee plates.

Omar and I have agreed to meet at a Mexican restaurant as soon as traffic slows enough to let us through. The streets of Merritt Island are busy but not clogged—as Omar had predicted, most people have headed east or west. Waiting at a red light, I notice that the car in front of me is covered with space stickers. Patches from multiple missions, bumper stickers advertising the visitor centers at multiple NASA sites, as well as the two versions of the NASA logo: the blue circle with the stars and chevron dating to NASA’s founding in 1959, and the simple stripped-down letters from the seventies. A few days ago I was reading about the two versions of the logo. The NASA website describes the components of the old version: “the sphere represents a planet, the stars represent space, the red chevron is a wing representing aeronautics (the latest design in hypersonic wings at the time the logo was developed), and then there is an orbiting spacecraft going around the wing.”

This logo was hard to reproduce after the invention of the photocopier, and by the seventies some felt it had started to feel dated. In the pause between Apollo and shuttle, NASA hoped a redesigned logo would refresh the agency’s image as forward-thinking and futuristic, and the new logo reflected this ideal: just the four letters NASA, so simplified and stylized that even the cross strokes on the As were removed as if to make the acronym more aerodynamic. You can see in the new logo an aesthetic argument that a stripped-down space program, a lean-and-mean reusable shuttle, was a thing to be proud of rather than a compromise to apologize for. If the old logo was made for lofty and expensive goals, the new logo was made for deploying satellites for paying customers and conducting experiments in low Earth orbit. The agency in the seventies and eighties didn’t need to compete with the agency of the sixties on its own terms; the new agency would pay its own way or come close to it, and that would be its own achievement. The new design was given the unflattering nickname “the worm.” (The old logo, to differentiate it, was called “the meatball.”) Arguments about the logo became encoded arguments about NASA’s narrative. What did it mean for NASA to be a collaborator with commercial interests rather than just a standard-bearer for our dreams? It should shock no one that this new worm logo, as appealing as it may have been to members of Congress, was bewildering and uninspiring to the public. In the midnineties the meatball came back and has been the dominant logo ever since. The reassertion of the meatball may mean that our affection for the spirit of the heroic era is still as strong as ever; it also may mean that the agency’s best days are behind it.

It’s been long enough that I’m a bit nervous again about seeing Omar—I even wonder as I’m approaching the restaurant whether we will have trouble recognizing each other. I have come to feel I know him well, but we only spent one day together, five months ago. Everything else we know about each other is through life lived online.

But of course I do know him the moment I see him, in a booth near the door, and he knows me too. We greet each other easily, without any of the awkwardness I feared. It seems we will be the sort of friends who can pick up where we left off. The restaurant is packed, the waitresses turning sideways and lifting their trays over their heads. All the patrons are sweat-stained, sunburned, wind-rumpled, and smiling, like us.

“So what did you think?”

“Awesome,” I reply. I have trouble thinking what more to say about the launch. Sometimes the most complex experiences are best summed up in a single word.