Leaving Orbit (37 page)

“Now you have a great day,” he tells me.

The whole time I’m in Florida, I keep hearing optimists say this isn’t the end of American spaceflight, that this is a hiatus, a hiccup, a pause to regroup. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this week that “it’s in the American DNA to explore.”

Countries don’t have DNA
, I want to snark back.
They have policies and budgets.
I do know what these people mean—they mean they hope that maybe once we notice that we’ve stopped going to space, it will occur to us that we want to start going again. Maybe seeing fresh-faced astronauts like Serena Auñón in their blue flight suits will make us want to call our congressional representatives and tell them we support NASA. Maybe we will. But how long will it take us to notice? The hiatus between Apollo and shuttle was eight years—eight years when the space shuttle project was already funded, its plans already under way, as the last Apollo mission was leaving Earth. Optimists (the DNA people) predict it will be ten to fifteen years before NASA launches its next human spaceflight. Pessimists say that yesterday’s launch was the last for all history.

Norman Mailer doesn’t mention having visited the Visitor Complex; if he had, I’m sure his comments would have been about how fat and sweaty his fellow Americans were, how slow-moving the lines for cold drinks, how unintentionally goofy the language used in the brochures and on the signage, some of which he would quote for our amusement. Or maybe I’m being unfair to him—Norman Mailer was a snob, but like me he could also be a sucker for the broad populist appeal of spaceflight, the way it can pull together Americans who have little else in common. Maybe he would have enjoyed the Rocket Garden, the simplicity of its implied phallic rhetoric: Look at these rockets. These rockets are awesome.

Norman Mailer admired the mettle of the astronauts and the technological achievement of the moon shot, yet he never gave up questioning the effort and expense—again, the contradictions. After the launch of Apollo 11, he wrote, speaking of himself in the third person, “It was the event of his lifetime, and yet it had been a dull event.” I always wondered whether he still felt that way—that it had been the event of a lifetime—as his own lifetime was coming to its close. In interviews in the seventies and eighties, he didn’t refer to the experience of watching Apollo 11 much, a fact I’m never sure how to interpret. Was it because his interest in spaceflight was brief, fading as soon as the book was finished? Or was it because his feelings about it were too complex? Maybe the contradictions he wrote about stayed with him, as they have with me. Maybe he both loved the spectacle of spaceflight and questioned its point. Maybe he understood the risk to be part of the heroism and simultaneously felt betrayed by the deaths, by the details of the risks that killed seventeen men and women. Maybe all this complexity kept him from making casual reference to Apollo 11, and so he soon came to sound like any other American who had never experienced a launch at all, like anyone else who wasn’t sure what to believe or what to hope for.

Omar is a member of a group on Twitter called the Space Tweep Society, a thriving Venn diagram of overlapping circles of NASA insiders, outsiders, and wannabes including astronauts, spaceworkers, physicists, astronomers, engineers, technicians, journalists, writers, teachers, science fiction buffs, and nerds of all stripes. The group has over eleven thousand followers and is steadily growing. A lot of the Space Tweeps have made the trip for the last launch, and plans for this party have been under discussion for a long time. I’m not sure how the party got the name Endless BBQ (discussions of it are indicated with the hashtag #endlessbbq), but I’m relieved it’s not called a Tweetup as so many Twitter-based parties are.

I’ve only recently joined the Space Tweep Society, at Omar’s urging—I’ve been on Facebook forever but am still having trouble getting the hang of Twitter. For instance, if I hadn’t been invited by Omar, I tell him, I never would have driven out to the home of a person I don’t know to attend a party with a bunch of strangers.

“They’re not
strangers
,” Omar says. “We know them on Twitter.”

The party is being held at the home of a local Space Tweep who used to work at the Cape with Omar but who left awhile back. Whether under the first waves of layoffs or by his own choice I don’t know, but he has remained a space fan, as so many space workers are. His home is a small one-story house, like all the houses I’ve seen in central Florida. As we approach the front door, I notice a sign taped to it warning us that images, sound, and video from this party will be made available on social media and that by entering we are agreeing to allow this. The legal formality of the sign strikes me as odd, though upon further reflection I suppose it’s more responsible than what happens at most parties, which is that people’s images are shared without their knowledge or permission.

In the entryway, a table is set up where the hosts are greeting people and guests are asked to make name tags. The host whose home we’re in is named Chris, but because I knew him on Twitter first, I can only ever remember his Twitter handle. Also hosting is the Space Tweep Society’s founder and driving force, Jen Scheer. Jen was a shuttle technician until last year, and now she seems to be a professional social media expert and a natural leader of online enthusiasm for spaceflight. Omar introduces me to both of them, and they are both friendly even though I have not been anywhere near active enough on Twitter for them to recognize my handle—we are supposed to put our Twitter handles as well as our real names on the name tags. In fact, some people aren’t bothering with real names at all.

The place is packed and loud, so Omar and I wander a bit looking for something to drink and a little more space. He knows a lot of people here, both in person and on Twitter—more than one person looks at his name tag, recognizes his handle, and hugs him. A DJ is working a console, one headphone pressed to his head (I later find out he is someone I follow on Twitter, a fellow Space Tweep). We go to the kitchen, where we are offered drinks, and I eat a pudding shot. I haven’t eaten a dessert prepared as a vehicle for vodka since college, and I’m not sure why it seems like the thing to do here. I guess not since college have I been surrounded by so many people I didn’t know but felt sure I had a lot in common with anyway; nor have I felt so simultaneously happy and sad that it seemed like a good idea to ingest a lot of alcohol straightaway.

As we make our way to the back of the house, I find that the host has a large screened-in pool, as so many of the little one-story houses here do, as well as a hot tub. I’m still getting my bearings, hanging out while Omar catches up with the seemingly hundreds of people he knows or who know him, when I see a woman I recognize getting out of the pool. It takes me a minute to place her because the context is so different: she is one of the space scholars I met at the conference in DC. Last I saw her, she was wearing a dark pants suit and standing on a stage at NASA Headquarters giving a PowerPoint presentation; now she is dripping wet in a red bathing suit laughing with fellow Space Tweeps. She doesn’t seem as surprised to see me here as I am to see her—I guess the people who have been inside the space culture for a while are used to this kind of crossover. We talk about the conference, about the proceedings we might both be published in, about today’s launch, and about our earliest space memories.

I go inside to find a quiet enough space to call home to say goodnight to my family. The kitchen is packed, as it always is at parties (on the way through I eat another pudding shot and grab a beer); the dining room is packed, entryway packed. I turn a corner to go into the living room, and for a second I’m caught up short. The room is completely darkened, blinds over the windows, with no source of light except for dozens of phones and iPads pointed up at dozens of people’s glowing faces. No one here is speaking to anyone else; everyone is typing. A couple of people are speaking quietly into their devices using earbuds, and it’s hard to tell whether they are shooting video of themselves narrating to their blog followers or just chatting on FaceTime.

I find an empty corner to plug in my own earbuds and call my husband.

“I’m calling you from this room,” I tell Chris, “where every single person is looking at a phone rather than talking to anyone else.”

“That’s funny,” he says.

“No, I mean, there’s like thirty people in this room, and
no one
is looking at anyone.”

“Sounds creepy,” Chris says.

“It is,” I say. “But it’s also kind of cool. I’ve never been to a party where thirty people are
writing.”

In the coming weeks, I will read through dozens of blog posts and Twitter feeds looking for other people’s accounts of today’s launch, and eventually it will dawn on me that at least a few of the accounts I’m reading must have been written in that darkened room while I was there.

A bit later I’m sitting in a white plastic lawn chair talking with a computer scientist about the manicure she got for the launch: rockets on one hand and galaxies on the other. We talk about how she wanted to be an astronaut when she was a little girl. At times I feel like the only space fan here who didn’t harbor that dream, and in one way I’m jealous—it’s a dream that seems to have spurred each of them to accomplish things they might not otherwise have accomplished—but at the same time I’m grateful not to have gone through the painful process of letting go of that dream. Some of these people still have not entirely let it go, and this woman talks about the possibilities of civilian spaceflight—unlikely glimmers, all of them—with a goofy look of hope on her face.

A couple of pudding shots later, I find myself sitting on the concrete lip of the pool with Omar, our pants legs rolled up and feet submerged in the warm chlorinated water, drinking beer from cans and talking about his prospects for the future. He’s been taking classes in computer science one or two at a time, and when he is officially unemployed he plans to finish that degree and try to get work in the space industry writing software. He is aware that he may have to move away from the Space Coast in order to make this happen. He mentions that Karen has had a couple of interviews at aerospace firms in other states.

Floating in the pool are a few space-themed inflatables, one of them a space shuttle orbiter with an absurdly wide body and tiny wings. Without the black-and-white markings and American flag, it might not be recognizable as an orbiter at all. A young woman in a bikini swims over to it, then tries to climb up onto it and straddle it as if it were a horse. This is a cumbersome process, and it may be that pudding shots are involved in her decision making. As soon as she has clambered aboard, a man who has been skulking around the pool area with a huge professional-looking camera comes to life and shoots a series of pictures of her at fashion-shoot rate, his camera’s flash strobing out and blinding everyone.

“Hey,” another guest shouts at him sternly, “you need to ask her before you do that.” The shouter strides over to the photographer and the two have words, gesturing at the camera. I’m impressed that the sign on the door does not create carte blanche for anyone to take pictures of young women in their bikinis.

“I wonder if that’s his fetish,” I say quietly to Omar. “Bikini girls riding orbiters.”

“He did spring into action suspiciously quickly,” Omar points out.

“What would you do if Karen were offered the job at Boeing?” I ask. “Would you try to get in there too?” The alcohol has made me bold. I sneak a look at Omar—he looks thoughtful rather than offended, but then again I know him well enough to know that he wouldn’t show offense no matter how inappropriate my question.

“I don’t know,” he says eventually. “It’s hard.”

I find I can’t imagine Omar living in Seattle, though a job at an aerospace company might suit him. It’s impossible to imagine him leaving this place, even once there are no more shuttles to care for here.