Leaving Orbit Read online

  LEAVING ORBIT

  Also by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  The Time It Takes to Fall

  LEAVING ORBIT

  Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight

  Margaret Lazarus Dean

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2015 by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-709-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-341-4

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2015

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014960047

  Cover design: Kimberly Glyder Design

  Cover photo: Personnel in the Launch Control Center watch the launch of Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. Kennedy Space Center Media Gallery, NASA.

  To Elliot, and the future

  Lovell: Well, how about let’s take off our gloves and helmets, huh?

  Anders: Okay.

  Lovell: I mean, let’s get comfortable. This is going to be a long trip.

  —Transcript of Apollo 8, first mission to lunar orbit, 1968

  It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

  —Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That,” 1968

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Air and Space

  Chapter 1. The Beginnings of the Future: This Is Cape Canaveral

  Chapter 2. What It Felt Like to Walk on the Moon

  Chapter 3. Goodbye, Discovery

  Chapter 4. A Brief History of the Future

  Chapter 5. Goodbye, Endeavour

  Chapter 6. A Brief History of Spacefarers

  Chapter 7. Goodbye, Atlantis

  Chapter 8. The End of the Future: Wheel Stop

  Chapter 9: The Future

  Epilogue

  Timeline of American Spaceflight

  Bibliography

  LEAVING ORBIT

  PROLOGUE: Air and Space

  The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, has a grand entrance on Independence Avenue, a long row of smoked-glass doors set into an enormous white edifice. Most of the buildings nearby are marble or stone, neoclassical, meant to appear as old as the Capitol and the Washington Monument, which flank them. The Air and Space Museum, completed in 1976, is an exception: it is meant to look ultramodern, futuristic, which is to say it looks like a 1970s idea of the future.

  I remember pulling open one of those doors as a child, the air-conditioning creating a suction that fought me for the door’s weight. When I was seven, in 1979, I first visited the Air and Space Museum with my father and little brother, and for years of weekends after. This was what we did now that my parents had officially separated, now that our court-ordered visitation arrangements gave our weekends a sense of structure they had never had before. Divorce is supposed to be traumatic for children, and as time went on ours would become so, but not yet. For the time being, there was something festive about leaving our normal old lives and going on an outing with our father. Where we went each weekend was Air and Space.

  We stepped over the threshold and into the chilled hush of the interior, one enormous room open many stories high to reveal old-timey relics of flight hanging by invisible wires from the ceiling. I knew the names of the artifacts long before I understood what they had done: The Spirit of St. Louis. The Wright Flyer. Friendship 7. As a child, I was vaguely aware that everything was out of chronological order, but I wasn’t sure what the correct order was. The artifacts were simultaneously elegant and crude, all of them covered with an equalizing layer of dust. I liked to hear the sound of my father’s voice, and I liked the way he explained to me things that most adults would assume were beyond my comprehension. My father was in law school, in the midst of switching careers, but being with him at Air and Space revealed how much he missed the math and engineering he studied most of his life, all the way through a PhD from MIT. He told me about orbits, gravity, escape velocity, the Coriolis effect. I tried to understand because I wanted him to think I was smart.

  I was often bored in Air and Space, but I was often bored in general: boredom was a natural state for a dreamy little kid often left, benignly, to her own devices. At home and at school I read a lot, stared out windows blankly, and took in whatever music was floating through my fuzzy consciousness: Bach’s Brandenburg concertos at my father’s apartment, the Supremes and the Pointer Sisters in my mother’s car, Top 40 radio at my school’s extended day program where those of us with working parents went after class: “Rock with You.” “Do That to Me One More Time.” “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” “Another Brick in the Wall.”

  Even at its busiest, Air and Space was always hushed, the only sound the faraway murmurings of tourists who walked reverently past exhibits silent behind their glass. I looked at the exhibits. In the past, apparently, men ate food from toothpaste tubes while floating in space: here was one of the tubes, displayed in a case. In the past, men walked on the moon wearing space suits. Here was one of the suits, moon dust still ground into its seams. Here were the star charts the astronauts used to find their way in space—sometimes they had to do the math themselves, in pencil, and I could see their scrawled figures in the margins. Here was a moon rock, brought back to Earth in 1972, the year I was born. People lined up to touch the relic. At Air and Space, spaceflight seemed like an experience both transcendently pleasurable (the amniotic floating in zero G, the glowing blue world out the window like a jewel in its black velvet case) and also gruelingly uncomfortable (the cramped capsules and stiff space suits). No way to bathe and no privacy, the merciless nothingness just outside the spaceships’ hastily constructed hulls.

  In the lobby was an artifact that at first looked like nothing more than a large charcoal-gray circle, thirteen feet in diameter, on a low platform in the middle of the room, encased in glass. That circle was the base of a cone-shaped object, which turned out, when you walked around it, to be the crew capsule from Apollo 11. The museum’s curators could have chosen to place the capsule on a pedestal, or to hang it from the ceiling, like so many of the others, but instead its position was unassuming, out on the floor where people could examine it closely. My father and brother and I did just that, and on the other side we encountered an open hatch revealing a beige interior with three beige dentist couches lying shoulder to shoulder facing a million beige switches.

  My father spoke behind me. “Three astronauts went to the moon in here.” I noted the reverence in his voice. “It took them eight days to get there and back.”

  “Mmm,” I said noncommittally. This made no sense, this claim that three full-grown men had crammed themselves into this container the size of a Volkswagen Beetle’s backseat, even for an hour. This story seemed like a misunderstanding best politely ignored.

  “Neil Armstrong sat there,” my father said, pointing at the couch at the far left. “Michael Collins sat here. And Buzz Aldrin sat here.”

  For the rest of my life, the syllables of those three names would call up for me this moment, those couches, that tiny cramped space, the way the capsule, then only te
n years old, felt both futuristic and outdated at the same time. Already the moon landings were fading into history; already my father had in his apartment a computer much more powerful than the one carried on board this spacecraft. For a child in 1979, the moon landings seemed largely fictional, an event our parents remembered from their own youth and liked to tell us about, and therefore boring and instructive. Yet standing in Air and Space I found there was something pleasing about the contradictions contained in that capsule: the cozy utility of its interior combined with the risk of death just past the hull. There was something about all this I loved in a way I couldn’t have described, still can’t. The closest I can come is to say that this was the first time I understood that, despite their long and growing list of appalling limitations, grown-ups had at least done this: they had figured out how to fly to space. They had, on at least a few occasions, used their might and their metal machines to make a lovely dream come true.

  As I grew up, we kept going back. On a visit in 1985, we watched The Dream Is Alive, a film shot by astronauts on three different space shuttle missions, in the museum’s IMAX theater. The camera pans around the empty cockpit of the space shuttle Discovery, where along the far wall, two large bright blue bundles float horizontally. The camera approaches and finds sleeping people. One of them is a woman of surprising beauty, her dark curly hair floating about her. This is Judith Resnik. She sleeps, or pretends to sleep; her long lashes rest on her cheeks. Her tanned arms linger in the air before her, and the look of peace on her face is captivating. Judith Resnik sleeps in space.

  I fell in love. My father, brother, and I came back to see this film over and over, and I practically memorized it frame for frame: the launch scenes, landing scenes, footage of Earth turning outside the windows of the space shuttle. Scenes of mundane domestic life lived inside the spaceship, smiling astronauts in shorts and sock feet. They work, eat, chat in their headsets with Houston, float companionably together. Judith Resnik sleeps in space.

  Six months later, in January 1986, Challenger would explode in the sky with Judith Resnik on board. The metal machines were no longer invincible, it turned out; the adults were not actually in control of them or of anything else. The space shuttle program would never recover from Challenger, its goals scaled back and its future curtailed. Seventeen years later, as I was writing my first novel, about children whose lives were changed by Challenger, space shuttle Columbia was destroyed during reentry, killing all seven astronauts and leaving debris across three states. The end of the program was written in its disasters: an accident board investigating the 2003 Columbia disaster recommended retiring the shuttle in 2010, a recommendation the government has adopted.

  Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it’s the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle’s story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures. It may also be a story with many futures—new spacecraft will leave Earth one day, whether they belong to NASA or not, and some of the spacefarers traveling on those new spacecraft will be killed. We are at a moment of reconsidering what this means.

  I kept going to Air and Space until, at thirteen, I would move away from Washington. But I would remember what I saw there, remember which artifacts were in which room, the way we remember our childhood homes. While I was doing research for my first novel, I would read that Gemini astronauts coming back into the airlock after the first space walks noticed a distinct smell coming in with them on their space suits, a smell of something cooked or burned, a smell both barren and homey. It was the smell of outer space itself. The astronauts found this smell hard to describe, but I could imagine it exactly: it smells like walking into the atrium of the Air and Space Museum with my father and my brother on a hot Saturday morning in the early 1980s. People often ask me how I became interested in space, and I usually share a more logical beginning—I tell about taking astronomy my first year in college, or about seeing Challenger explode on TV as an eighth-grader, or about witnessing my first shuttle launch in 2001. All these things are true, but the real truth is a little more confused and intimate, as it always is. The truth is the air-conditioned, musty smell of Air and Space, the crisp homey smell of the cosmos, a space-scarred Apollo capsule, the floating black curls of Judith Resnik, and my father’s calm voice.

  For Americans of my parents’ generation, it takes no mental effort to conjure the feelings that came along with the heroic era of spaceflight from 1961 to 1972: the wonder and the awe, the risk and the ambiguity. But for those under forty-five or so, who are now in the majority, those feelings about spaceflight are clichés, the stories of our elders and the sound tracks of the movies, the lone trumpet signifying the daring and the grace.

  Though I’m under forty-five, too young to have seen Neil and Buzz climb out of their lunar module, too young to have witnessed the prime of NASA, I love the idea of spaceflight. I love the audacity of the handsome young president challenging us to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard; I love the young scientists and engineers who took his charge as their personal religion and made inestimable sacrifices to meet John Kennedy’s challenge after his death. I love the fire and the rockets, the thundering wonder of building-sized objects hauling themselves off the launchpads and past the grip of gravity. The badass steeliness and crew cuts of the test-pilot sixties astronauts, the engineers in their short-sleeved dress shirts and dark ties, the technicians in their greasy uniforms. I love the old ladies wearing cat’s-eye glasses and drinking tea while they stitch together the seams of the space suits that will be the only barrier between moonwalkers and the sucking black vacuum of space. Above my desk is a photograph of the stainless steel plaque that rests on the Sea of Tranquility on the surface of the moon. Printed on it are these words:

  HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH

  FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON

  JULY 1969, A. D.

  WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND

  Is this not stirring? Rarely is such grandiose language earned by such specific and deliberate action, and this action is the counterbalance to the legacy of the failures. Few Americans were aware of it at the time, but looking back we can see that the beginnings of the end of spaceflight were already present at the triumphant moment of Apollo 11—the funding already reduced, the goals already compromised, three dead astronauts already martyred to the cause. In the future, fourteen more will die, and the shuttle project will never entirely recover from their deaths. But the plaque knows nothing of all that, and I love it for that reason, for the vigorous simplicity of its language. I love the language of spaceflight: the go and the no-go, the translunar injection burn, the nod and the twang. The names Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The sonorousness of the very acronym NASA. These are the sounds of dreams. Can we who were not there be blamed for wondering whether it was all a dream?

  The trees rose solid as a rampart, the last boundary of the Earth, and beyond stretched the spaceport for the space flight to the Moon: a silence of sand and water, a handful of islands thrown down by God on the seventh day when He couldn’t think what else to do with them…. The tallest and biggest building seemed to touch the clouds.

  —Oriana Fallaci, If the Sun Dies

  The most important events in America seemed to take place in all the lonely spaces.

  —Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon


  Cape Canaveral was in Florida, but not any part of Florida you would write home about.

  —Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

  CHAPTER 1. The Beginnings of the Future: This Is Cape Canaveral

  Family Day: September 25, 2010

  Say the words out loud: Cape Canaveral. Say them in JFK’s voice, in John Glenn’s voice, in Walter Cronkite’s voice. The very syllables connote rockets and bravery, the countdown to zero, heroes in helmets, banks of inscrutable computers. So it’s strange that when you visit the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, when you make the drive from Orlando or from the beach towns south or north, you must first drive through miles of green flats, the low pulsing of insects all around you, alligators lurking in ditches, before you finally encounter the structures built by NASA in the sixties.

  You wouldn’t necessarily know that you were at the Kennedy Space Center, the swampy, improbable spaceport that inhabits 219 square miles of mostly untouched wilderness in central Florida. The only clue to what goes on here is a roadside sign with the NASA logo and changeable numbers reminding workers how many days remain until the next launch. Kennedy Parkway runs past a wild beach and, past that, the narrow strip of land from which American spaceships leave Earth. Most of this square mileage is a wildlife refuge, closed to any type of development for over fifty years because of the potentially explosive nature of what goes on here. In this way, the tour guides tell their busloads of tourists, technology and nature can help each other.

  It’s fall 2010. I’m sitting in the backseat of a rental car being driven by my father; in the passenger seat is his wife, Judy. We all found each other at baggage claim in the Orlando airport late last night, having flown in from two different cities, and shared a car out to the coast. There is a special urgency to this trip because the space shuttle program will end soon, and this is one of the last opportunities I or anyone else will have to see the Kennedy Space Center as a working spaceport. The era of American spaceflight that started in 1961 when Alan Shepard became the first American to travel in space is about to come to an end, and few people seem to notice or care. Two more space shuttle missions are scheduled: STS-133 and STS-134. (STS stands for Space Transportation System, the original name for the space shuttle program from the seventies). A third mission, STS-135, will be added if NASA can get approval from Congress. This would mean one final launch for each of the three remaining space shuttle orbiters: Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis.