of Family Day, when we are all saying our good-byes, I have come to feel that the end of the space shuttle is going to be the ending of a story, the story of one of the truly great things my country has accomplished, and that I want to be the one to tell it.
The night I get home from Cape Canaveral, I e-mail Omar to thank him again for inviting me, then go to the NASA website and find the shuttle launch manifest. One more mission for Discovery in the fall and one for Endeavour the following spring. A last mission for Atlantis , if it’s added, will be in the summer. After that there will be no more.
In another window on my computer is a Flickr photo set belonging to a woman I don’t know. The photo set shows the woman visiting the Kennedy Space Center on some sort of special escorted trip. The way her captions are written tells me she doesn’t know nearly as much about shuttle as I do—she uses slightly the wrong terms for everything. Worse, her writing lacks the enthusiasm I feel properly befits her experience. Not only does she not report crying upon entering the Vehicle Assembly Building, she doesn’t even seem to understand it as a special privilege. As the photos continue to scroll by, I get more upset, because here she is donning a full-body cover-up and climbing into the crew cabin of an orbiter, an enormous privilege. The astronauts themselves don’t take this lightly. In the pictures, the woman looks pleased and amused but not mind-blown. It was NASA’s message about the space shuttle from the beginning that it would be cheaper, safer, more routine, than Apollo, more like commercial air travel. Maybe that message sank in too far with some people, and maybe this is part of what has doomed the shuttle. I stare at the woman’s pictures for a while longer, then close the browser window.
“I know my rockets,” I’d assured Omar, but did I? There are always people who know more, have seen more. I’ve seen one launch, which is more than most people can say. But Omar has kept company with the orbiters themselves. He has seen dozens of launches and has spent workdays, workweeks, work years inside the buildings I’ve waited a lifetime to enter. I’ve been inside the VAB now, but this horrible woman has been inside the crew cabin. There will always be someone who has seen more.
I print out the launch manifest and make some notes in the margins. After we get our son to bed, I show the printout to my husband, and though he clearly dreads the chaos this project will cause in our household, he agrees that this story needs to be written. Chris is a writer too, and a freelance editor; each of my absences will seriously cut into his time to work. He will care for our three-year-old son while I go to Florida multiple times and on a maddeningly ever-changing schedule. I will have to drive twelve hours each way to save money and to give me flexibility in those cases when the launch scrubs until the following day. When launches are delayed for longer periods of time, I will leave Florida empty-handed and start over. I will have to impose on my colleagues to cover classes for me when the launch schedule conflicts with my academic calendar. In order to start this project, I will have to set aside the novel I’m already halfway through, a novel I’m expected to publish soon in order to qualify for tenure and keep my job, which is the sole source of benefits for my family. And I will have to impose more on Omar, the only local and NASA insider I know. All this might well turn out to be for nothing. But I’ve decided to try.
Over the following months, people will ask me what I expect to find by going to the last launches, and I will have to admit that I have no idea. I’ll find it when I see it, I tell them—or else, I won’t, and all this will have been a waste. I know I want to write about those places where the technical and the emotional intersect—like the smell of space, or the schoolchildren watching Challenger
The night I get home from Cape Canaveral, I e-mail Omar to thank him again for inviting me, then go to the NASA website and find the shuttle launch manifest. One more mission for Discovery in the fall and one for Endeavour the following spring. A last mission for Atlantis , if it’s added, will be in the summer. After that there will be no more.
In another window on my computer is a Flickr photo set belonging to a woman I don’t know. The photo set shows the woman visiting the Kennedy Space Center on some sort of special escorted trip. The way her captions are written tells me she doesn’t know nearly as much about shuttle as I do—she uses slightly the wrong terms for everything. Worse, her writing lacks the enthusiasm I feel properly befits her experience. Not only does she not report crying upon entering the Vehicle Assembly Building, she doesn’t even seem to understand it as a special privilege. As the photos continue to scroll by, I get more upset, because here she is donning a full-body cover-up and climbing into the crew cabin of an orbiter, an enormous privilege. The astronauts themselves don’t take this lightly. In the pictures, the woman looks pleased and amused but not mind-blown. It was NASA’s message about the space shuttle from the beginning that it would be cheaper, safer, more routine, than Apollo, more like commercial air travel. Maybe that message sank in too far with some people, and maybe this is part of what has doomed the shuttle. I stare at the woman’s pictures for a while longer, then close the browser window.
“I know my rockets,” I’d assured Omar, but did I? There are always people who know more, have seen more. I’ve seen one launch, which is more than most people can say. But Omar has kept company with the orbiters themselves. He has seen dozens of launches and has spent workdays, workweeks, work years inside the buildings I’ve waited a lifetime to enter. I’ve been inside the VAB now, but this horrible woman has been inside the crew cabin. There will always be someone who has seen more.
I print out the launch manifest and make some notes in the margins. After we get our son to bed, I show the printout to my husband, and though he clearly dreads the chaos this project will cause in our household, he agrees that this story needs to be written. Chris is a writer too, and a freelance editor; each of my absences will seriously cut into his time to work. He will care for our three-year-old son while I go to Florida multiple times and on a maddeningly ever-changing schedule. I will have to drive twelve hours each way to save money and to give me flexibility in those cases when the launch scrubs until the following day. When launches are delayed for longer periods of time, I will leave Florida empty-handed and start over. I will have to impose on my colleagues to cover classes for me when the launch schedule conflicts with my academic calendar. In order to start this project, I will have to set aside the novel I’m already halfway through, a novel I’m expected to publish soon in order to qualify for tenure and keep my job, which is the sole source of benefits for my family. And I will have to impose more on Omar, the only local and NASA insider I know. All this might well turn out to be for nothing. But I’ve decided to try.
Over the following months, people will ask me what I expect to find by going to the last launches, and I will have to admit that I have no idea. I’ll find it when I see it, I tell them—or else, I won’t, and all this will have been a waste. I know I want to write about those places where the technical and the emotional intersect—like the smell of space, or the schoolchildren watching Challenger
Similar Books
