Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight

Space flight is a dream, and dreams do not have to be entirely real in order to motivate behavior.

—Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination

CHAPTER 4. A Brief History of the Future

March–April 2011

I’m sitting in my office at the University of Tennessee the Monday after I return from the launch of Discovery, still sunburned and sleep-deprived from the trip. It’s hard to believe I’m going to do the same thing at least two more times. I’ve plugged my phone into my computer to upload the images from the trip; as they flow by on my screen, I’m startled by how many pictures I’ve taken. A picture of my odometer as it clicked over to forty thousand, one of a sign welcoming cars to Merritt Island that reads WHERE DREAMS ARE LAUNCHED!, one of a huge peach-colored full moon hanging low in the sky, the kind of moon that must have made a tempting target for the newly transplanted spaceworkers of the sixties.

As the photos upload, I start preparing to teach my next class, Writing Creative Nonfiction. I’ve built into the syllabus a unit I call A Brief History of Creative Nonfiction, in which we spend a few weeks reading Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, John McPhee, Hunter S. Thompson, James Agee, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer—important writers who were working in that moment in the sixties when literary journalism converged with a thread of creative writing and the genre we now call creative nonfiction was born.

On the syllabus for tomorrow are selections from Tom Wolfe, who is rightfully credited with being one of the founding fathers of creative nonfiction by helping to define the New Journalism. I open the file and flip through pages covered with my notes from previous semesters. I stop on a random page from The Right Stuff.

The passion that now animated NASA spread out even into the surrounding community of Cocoa Beach. The grisliest down-home alligator-poaching crackers manning the gasoline pumps on Route A1A would say to the tourists, as the No-Knock flowed, “Well, that Atlas vehicle’s given us more fits than a June bug on a porch bulb, but we got real confidence in that Redstone, and I think we’re gonna make it.” Everyone who felt the spirit of NASA at that time wanted to be part of it. It took on a religious dimension that engineers, no less than pilots, would resist putting into words. But all felt it.

That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time. It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America. It was an extraordinary thing, being the sort of mortal who brought tears to other men’s eyes.

At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants—it was hard to say, since you could never see them—rose up from out of the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink’s.

As I read, I reach down and scratch at my ankles, the raised red spots where the invisible bugs got me while I waited on the causeway. Flip.

There was no such thing as “first-class accommodations” or “red-carpet treatment” in Cocoa Beach. The red carpet, had anyone ever tried to lay one down, would have been devoured in midair by the No See’um bugs, as they were called, before it ever touched the implacable hardcracker ground.

I’ve taught excerpts from The Right Stuff many times, and it always leads to a useful discussion. My students respond to the audacity of Wolfe’s voice, and as the semester goes on they remember him as a key example of what we mean when we use the adjective voicey. It makes me proud when my students can identify little echoes of this voice in David Foster Wallace, in John D’Agata, in Susan Orlean. This semester I’ve also added to the syllabus the first chapter of Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon, which we will be discussing tomorrow as well. I’ve always talked about Norman Mailer’s role in defining literary journalism and thus creative nonfiction, but not until this semester have I tried to teach an example of his work. He is generally more resistant to excerpting than most. I’m curious what students will think of the differences in the ways Wolfe and Mailer write about spaceflight; for all the similarities that come with the era and the subject matter, the differences between them are stark. For one thing, Wolfe is obsessed with character, clearly believes that character is at the center of everything, and he creates dozens of characters big and small: astronauts, engineers, gas station attendants, astronauts’ wives, reporters, even chimpanzees being trained for spaceflight. For Mailer, the only real character in the book is Norman Mailer; even the astronauts are there only as archetypes upon which to project his own ideas about himself.

I look over the pages of Mailer’s I’ve assigned for tomorrow. His sentences are dense, paragraphs long and wandering, scenes structured by free association rather than anything like theme or plot. I fear that my students won’t get him, that I might be the only reader who could fall in love with prose like this. For instance, about the moment of launch:

The flames were enormous. No one could be prepared for that. Flames flew in cataract against the cusp of the flame shield, and then sluiced along the paved ground down two opposite channels in the concrete…. In the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville’s Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Madonna in half the churches of the world, this thin slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky, slow as Melville’s Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for the air.

On my computer’s screen, more photos and texts flow by. A row of cars glinting in the hot sun on the 528 causeway. A heron perched on the roof of my car in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Launch pad 39A shimmering in the heat across the Banana River. Already it seems long ago.

On Tuesday afternoon, I walk into the classroom where my Writing Creative Nonfiction class meets to find that students have already arranged the chairs into a circle. They are chatting about the readings rather than about the weekend’s football and parties, a good sign, and they seem to be saying positive things. When I call the class to order, the students seem eager to share their impressions. My most talkative student raises his hand first.

“It was cool that both of the writers brought out their own personal feelings about what they were seeing,” he says. “They didn’t try to be objective, and I’m starting to get why that’s a good thing.”

“Right, that’s what Tom Wolfe said in his definition of the New Journalism,” I say. “He felt that objectivity was no longer going to be a useful standard.”

“I thought it was interesting to see two different writers talking about the same moment,” another student says. “The way they write about it is so different, you’d never know they were in the same place at the same time.”

“Well, they were in the same place, at Cape Canaveral, but not at the same time,” I correct her. “Wolfe was writing about the Mercury era, the first astronauts to travel in space in the early sixties, and Mailer was writing about the missions to the moon, in the late sixties and early seventies.”

“But the Russians had already gotten to the moon first, right?” my most talkative student asks.

“Actually, you’re both wrong,” I say, and everyone laughs. I laugh too, but I’m a bit shocked. These are the most basic facts, the ones I would have thought everyone would know.

“Let’s get back to the structure of these chapters,” I say. “We’ve been talking about the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe’s idea that we should write in scenes wherever possible. What are some places in The Right Stuff where he chose not to do that?”

But as we go on discussing Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and the New Journalism and the way in the sixties everyone thought they were reinventing everything, the optimism embodied in redefining literature once and for all, the optimism of sending human beings to space, two things become clear to me: my students did not grow up with the same idea of the sixties that I did. Maybe because their parents were born too late to remember that era as their own, as my parents do. Maybe these kids didn’t grow up with stories about how great the sixties were, how much better than any decade that dared try to follow. The phrase “the sixties” for them conjures not an emotion or a set of values, but only a vague idea of fashion, music, a historical event or two, the same useless window dressing I get when I think of “the twenties” or “the eighteen fifties.” Whatever ideas my students have about the sixties, their ideas of spaceflight are not attached to the sixties as a historical era, as they are for my elders and for me.

The next time my Writing Creative Nonfiction class meets, I get to the classroom fifteen minutes early. I’m intrigued by my students’ ignorance about spaceflight, and I’m hoping to get the chance to learn more from them without cutting into our official class time. As students file in, I put a few questions on the board:

What year did the first human being travel in space?

What nation achieved this first?

What year did the first human being land on the moon?

What nation achieved this first?

How many human beings have walked on the moon total?

What year did the space shuttle first fly?

What is the furthest the space shuttle can go from the earth?

What percentage of the federal budget goes to NASA?

“Don’t look these up on your phones,” I order them, because I know this will be their first instinct. They dutifully lock their screens and place their phones facedown on their desks, even more intrigued now.

“You don’t have to participate in this discussion,” I tell them, “because it has nothing to do with our class. But this is something I’m curious about, if you’re interested.”

“Let’s start with the first one,” I say. “What year did the first human being travel in space?”

The United States got to space first, in 1956. Humiliated, the Soviets put forth a new and arbitrary goal: to put a man on the moon. They accomplished this feat in 1962; NASA didn’t get the first American (John Glenn) to the moon until 1965. He traveled there on the space shuttle, a vehicle that is capable of voyages beyond the moon to Mars and Jupiter, up to 40 million miles into outer space. The most recent mission to the moon was in 2001—in the decades the space shuttle has been going to the moon, over 400 people have walked on its surface. NASA gets 20–30% of the federal budget.

This account was provided by one of my undergraduate students, and as far off the mark as it is, the wildness of its guesses is typical of the group’s responses. Only a minority of my students can correctly place the sequence of “firsts,” that the Soviets got to space first, after which Americans got to the moon first. I’m not looking for correct dates here, only the correct order; the number of students who knew the correct dates for these events was one.

My students have an invariably positive, even affectionate, opinion of NASA, even if they aren’t entirely sure what the scope of NASA’s mandate is, or how old it is. In this respect NASA has shown itself to be one of only two government agencies (the other is the FBI) that consistently has a positive public image. Former NASA administrator Dan Goldin once said of his agency that it was “the one organization in American society whose sole purpose is to make sure our future will be better than our past.”

A lot of my students think American spaceflight started in the forties or fifties. Many believe women have walked on the moon. Some think American astronauts have traveled to other planets. But to me, these are not the worst misunderstandings. Much more troubling is the extent to which they conflate the two eras of spaceflight into one big lump. When students are asked when the space shuttle first flew, they tend to give the same dates that they gave for the first human spaceflight—in other words, they seem to think there has only ever been one space vehicle. My students don’t understand that there was a significant change between the heroic era and the shuttle era, separated by years and a great leap in technology and fanfare that was very moving to little children in the early eighties. I’m left with the disconcerting fact that they don’t actually know what the space shuttle is. And if they think the space shuttle has already been going to Mars since before their parents were born, why would they agree, as taxpayers, to pay billions for the first actual mission to Mars?

I tell my students that when I missed class last week, it was because I was at the Kennedy Space Center to see Discovery launch. They are impressed, though I have to explain that Discovery is not the space shuttle, but one of three. I tell them that this mission is Discovery’s last, that when Discovery returns to Earth it will be sent to the Air and Space Museum. My students’ mouths fall open. They had no idea.

“American astronauts will still travel to the International Space Station, but they’ll have to hitch a ride with the Russians, on their Soyuz spacecraft.”

Some of my students actually gasp with horror. They had no idea. They wear the outraged expression of people who feel they should have been consulted. But then I tell them that Discovery’s construction started in 1979, making it a thirty-two-year-old vehicle. My students, most of whom were born in the early nineties, are dismayed to hear this. Thirty-two sounds pretty old to them. The space shuttle should be retired if it’s that old, they feel, but we should have a newer spacecraft to replace it with. They are shocked that we don’t.

They are all looking at me. I wish I could get this kind of attention from them when I’m trying to get them to map out the structure of an essay, when I’m trying to explain what a comma splice is.

I look at my watch. Seven minutes before class starts. We talk through some of the answers: Only twelve people have walked on the moon. All of them were white men, all of them American. The space shuttle can only go to low Earth orbit, 240 miles above Earth. As I go on, students express bewilderment at how much less has been accomplished than what they had thought. They are embarrassed that they didn’t know the facts, but they also seem indignant that their optimistic narratives have not come to pass.

In one way it’s touching. I hadn’t known to expect this credulous faith in their own country’s relentless conquering of space. This faith is supported, no doubt, by the wildly exaggerated beliefs most people hold about NASA’s funding: a multiyear survey asking Americans to guess what percentage of the federal budget goes to NASA regularly turned up an average of over 20 percent, a percentage reflected in my students’ guesses. Worse: the Americans polled who guessed the correct category (0–1 percent) were, in some years, outnumbered by those who chose “over 50 percent.” I would like to repeat this for emphasis: a significant number of adult Americans walking among us believe that NASA receives over 50 percent of the entire federal budget.

I give my students the real numbers. “NASA gets 0.4 percent of the national budget,” I tell them, “and that’s been true for most of its history. Most of you said around 20 percent—you should know that 20 percent is more than the entire defense budget. Last year NASA’s total budget was less than the cost of air-conditioning for troops in Iraq. The bank bailout of 2008 cost more than the entire fifty-year budget for NASA.”

My students sneak looks at each other. Can this be right? It’s hard to comprehend numbers in the billions. When people talk about the cost of spaceflight, they usually refer to it in terms of a project that, whatever its inspirational qualities, is not an investment that will pay off financially. Yet in my reading I recently came across a surprising quote from Lyndon Johnson—he once remarked that the information gained from satellite photography alone was worth “ten times what the whole program has cost.” Before the space program had made satellite spying possible, gaining information about our enemies’ military capabilities was difficult, costly in money and lives, and often unreliable. Inaccurate data led the American military to overprepare to meet threats that turned out to be exaggerated or nonexistent. “Indirectly,” historian Howard McCurdy explains, “space research enhanced the funds available for domestic development.” NASA’s public image might be even more positive if it were generally known that the space program might in fact have paid for itself.

When my students are given the sad facts and asked why they gave such outlandish answers, they shift their feet and look embarrassed. But one brave woman gives an interesting response.

“I knew we went to the moon in the sixties,” she explains, reddening, “so I assumed whatever we’re doing now with all the technology we have is—like—better than that.” It’s true, technology does generally work that way. If your parents had big slow expensive computers, you get fast cheap portable computers. If your parents got to go to the moon, you get to go to Mars. It’s sound enough logic, if innocent of the realities of public policy.

As frustrating as my students’ misunderstandings are, I can’t say I blame them. People my own age aren’t much better informed. We didn’t get to watch that one small step for a man live on TV, can only view that footage now through layers of history and cliché. MTV’s reappropriation of Buzz planting the flag, the bits and images used again and again to symbolize, variously and contradictorily, HISTORY and THE FUTURE. It’s boring to hear other people tell their dreams, and people too young to remember the moon shot have grown tired of listening to this one. Encumbered by such dreams myself, I squint at the footage brought back from the moon landings, and I have to agree that we who are watching from 2011 can’t ever really see what those innocents who watched those events unfold in real time saw, what it looked like to watch while the dream came true.

It’s close to three years after Neil and Buzz’s giant leap for mankind, April 1972. Two men bounce along together, almost skipping, exuberant and unstable as toddlers in their bulky space suits. This is Apollo 16, NASA’s sixth mission to the moon, and while the journey to the moon will never become routine, it is no longer regarded with the same breathlessness and wonder as it once was. The number of people who turn out to see the launches on the Space Coast has steadily shrunk, as have the TV audiences. Politicians have started to wonder aloud why we need to keep going to the moon when the race with the Soviets, ostensibly the reason for doing all this, is over. NASA’s budget is in steep decline. I won’t be born for another four months.

Today, John Young and Charlie Duke are walking on the moon. Far ahead of them, mountains stand stark white against the deep black of the sky. These men have work to do here on the Plain of Descartes, but they enjoy themselves as they work. You can see it in the way they jump higher than is strictly necessary, you can hear the glee in their voices through the crackling of the static between the moon and Houston. Even without looking up the video online, you can picture their low-gravity antics: you’ve seen it many times. Envision the astronauts bobbing along gently in their white space suits, their light-heartedness in strange contrast to the alien hostility of the terrain, in contrast to the risk of death all around them, the risk of death ahead of them on their way back home. You aren’t concerned for them; you already know they’ll get home safely.

As they work, John Young and Charlie Duke chat happily with each other, with their crewmate Ken Mattingly, alone in lunar orbit, and with Mission Control in Houston. In the course of a daily news update, the astronauts learn that Congress has just approved a budget for fiscal 1973. This budget includes funding NASA has requested to get started on its still-hypothetical space shuttle program. When he hears the news, John Young remarks, “The country needs that shuttle mighty bad. You’ll see.” He doesn’t know yet that he will command the very first space shuttle mission, and he also doesn’t know how frustratingly long it will take to get that shuttle flying. He can’t guess the mixed history the shuttle will live out, the way it will be doomed by compromises even before it rolls out to the launchpad for the first time. He can’t know that two shuttle disasters will kill fourteen of his fellow astronauts, forever changing the history of American spaceflight.

It is this moment I want to describe to my students who don’t understand the difference between Apollo and shuttle. This moment, a moonwalker reacting with joy on the surface of the moon because the shuttle era has officially begun, is the seam between the two.

After one last moonwalk, John Young and Charlie Duke climb back into their lunar module, secure their haul of new moon rocks, and fire the ascent rockets to lift them up to orbital rendezvous with Ken Mattingly and the command module. After a four-day journey back to Earth, the crew in their capsule splash into the Pacific Ocean and are greeted aboard the USS Ticonderoga with the same patriotic fanfare with which every American astronaut has been welcomed home. But when I study those photographs now, I can see a wistful, bewildered look in the eyes of the astronauts, a look that can be seen in the eyes of the current crop of American astronauts. It’s a look of being grounded, of being trapped on the surface of the home planet. A look of wanting to go up in the bird, though they had only just returned. A masculine envy of their own selves.

When we think about the Apollo project now, we think of it as being a time when all Americans were united behind a project they could take pride in. The fact is that Americans were slowly falling out of love with Apollo right from the beginning. Even before Neil, Buzz, and Mike made it to the moon, only about a third of Americans thought the moon project was worth the cost. At the same time, a clear majority of Americans throughout the sixties said they approved of Apollo; in other words, uneasiness about the cost of spaceflight has always been paired with widespread positive feelings about spaceflight. This contradiction has made NASA the site of one of the deeper ambiguities of American culture: spaceflight is an achievement we take great pride in, paid for with our own money, over our objections.

Hugely wasteful; hugely grand. Adjust the focus of your eyes and the same project goes from being the greatest accomplishment of humankind to a pointless show of misspent wealth.

None of my students have heard of Wernher von Braun or the German rocket program. Von Braun ran the rocket design facility for the Third Reich at Peenemünde, where he was responsible for the development of the V-2 rocket, the first human-made object to enter space, a weapon used to bomb Allied cities. At the end of the war, von Braun and his team surrendered to the United States and managed to immigrate here in order to resume their work on rockets. Von Braun’s membership in the SS and the Nazi party would haunt him, and throughout his life he would have to answer to new charges about what he knew and what he was responsible for, especially having to do with the slave laborers forced to construct the V-2. As popular a public figure as he was in the United States, von Braun could never entirely get away from the specter of the concentration camps, and even at the moment of triumph for his Saturn rocket, his adopted country couldn’t quite forget his past. Von Braun maintained all his life that he only wanted to build rockets for the peaceful exploration of space, and that he worked on weapons only because doing so allowed him to continue his research. The evidence seems to bear this out—in researching his biography of von Braun, historian Michael J. Neufeld uncovered documents that show von Braun resisting joining the SS as long as possible, even after he had become director at Peenemünde. Though when it became clear that his failure to join would not be overlooked, von Braun did join the SS and was seen wearing the uniform on a number of occasions, including in several surviving photographs. Some survivors later accused him of overseeing beatings and executions of prisoners, though historians question whether this was a case of mistaken identity.

Von Braun himself has always denied that he had anything to do with violence against prisoners, or that he knew the extent of their mistreatment. Of course, he knew his rockets were being built by prisoners, and to some this is enough. To many, though, surprisingly many, von Braun’s crimes can be if not forgiven at least contextualized. When Oriana Fallaci met him, she described his large frame, his “heavy paunch, the florid complexion of a beer drinker,” his handsome face. She describes his Prussian accent: he “manages to make the softest words sound hard: such as Moon.”

As he talks he stands erect like a general addressing a stupid recruit and his smile is so cold that it seems more like a threat than a smile. Odd: by all rights he should be unlikable and yet he isn’t. For half an hour I made myself dislike him. To my utter astonishment I found myself feeling just the opposite.

As an Italian who worked for the Resistance and lost a great deal in the war, Fallaci is well positioned to articulate certain grudges, to argue that von Braun was an opportunist and a murderer. But she finds she can’t. “Although I am one who doesn’t forget,” she writes, “I find it dishonest and unfair to deny von Braun what is von Braun’s, to leave him out of a tale of this kind.” She points out that Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer made the atom bomb that killed civilians in Japan. Is von Braun different?

When Fallaci asks von Braun whether he would go to the moon himself, he answers that he’d go in a second. (Neufeld’s biography reveals that this has been his desire since childhood, that the dream of space travel is what led him to develop rockets in the first place.) “Maybe they’ll put up with me on flight number 10,” von Braun muses to Fallaci, “like you put up with a grumbling old uncle, to make me happy.” When the space shuttle emerged as the spacecraft to follow his Saturn V, with its lesser physical demands on astronauts, von Braun speculated it might be an appropriate vehicle for an older spacefarer to travel on, and indeed NASA may have let him, as they indulged John Glenn in a flight on Discovery at age seventy-seven, but by the time the shuttle was ready to fly, von Braun was dead, from pancreatic cancer, at age sixty-five.

Apollo 17, the last mission ever flown on von Braun’s Saturn V, is remembered largely for a photograph the astronauts took of Earth once they were far enough away to see the whole thing. Nicknamed the “Blue Marble,” the image was the first to show the entirety of Earth illuminated and suspended in space. Carl Sagan called the photograph an “icon of our age.” Africa can clearly be seen, and the white cloud cover over Antarctica swirls like a delicate lace. The image is one of the most widely distributed photographs ever taken—next time you see an image of the whole earth in any context, look closely: it’s probably the Blue Marble. The image has even been credited with the rise of the environmental movement in the seventies. A few years ago, I met Jack Schmitt, a geologist who flew on Apollo 17 and walked on the moon. There is some debate over which of the astronauts actually snapped the picture, but Schmitt told me it was him, and I believe him. There is a large framed copy of the photograph hanging on the wall in my son’s room, with an inscription Schmitt wrote for him: “To Elliot, and the future.”

It’s hard to imagine what it was like for the crew of Apollo 17 to splash down, board the aircraft carrier, strip off their space suits, and write up their reports. They had spent their adult lives preparing for this adventure, they had accomplished it, and no one was planning to go back again. The moon rocks they brought back, including the one I have touched in the Air and Space Museum, would be the last to come back for generations. No one has gone to the moon since, and it would be nearly as difficult for us to try to re-create their trip now as it was to accomplish it then.

The space shuttle is a far more advanced vehicle than was Apollo/Saturn, but because it lacked the pure thrust to get any farther than low Earth orbit, it felt like a step backward to many Americans. The next vehicle should go farther than the previous one, it seemed obvious. After discovering the New World, Columbus did not take a renewed interest in the area around the Mediterranean. Yet the public had tired of the expense of Apollo even before the missions to the moon had gotten started. After a brief resurgence in interest caused by the drama on Apollo 13, Americans went back to caring less and less about Apollo, saying in larger numbers that it was pointless and too expensive. A scaled-back space vehicle funded partly for its ability to get military and commercial satellites into orbit—a reusable shuttle with a large payload bay—was the only one that had a chance of gaining the approval of Congress. As it was, the shuttle’s funding was the subject of constant wrangling and severe cuts over the years of its development, and it was in danger of being axed altogether multiple times.

Unlike average Americans, though, rocket engineers saw the space shuttle concept as a huge step forward. If they could build a spaceship the way they wanted to, not with the Soviets breathing down their necks but with the time to build it properly from the ground up, what would that spaceship look like? It would look more like a space plane. It would look elegant. It would be capable of carrying different types of payloads, not only human beings. And it would be reusable. “When I was a kid reading Buck Rogers, the spacecraft all looked like bullets or saucers, with sweeping fins and fancy tail skids,” said astronaut Michael Collins. “We are beginning to see Buck’s dream emerge in the squat but elegant space shuttle.”

The concept of reusability had been a fantasy of engineers from the beginning—rather than building expendable rockets that would be abandoned in space or burned up in the atmosphere, NASA wanted a vehicle that could launch like a rocket, fly in space, and land like an airplane on a runway. “There’s no way that you can make a railroad cost-effective,” explained a NASA representative, “if you throw away the locomotive every time.” After some maintenance on the ground, a reusable spacecraft could be loaded with new cargo and a new crew of astronauts, to be launched again. An ideal (and, it turns out, entirely unrealistic) turnaround time on the ground was two weeks. The urgency of Apollo, the before-the-decade-is-out deadline, had ruled out anything but the quick-and-dirty approach of attaching hastily designed capsules to rockets of the type that had been developed as weapons. Now that that deadline had been met, rocket engineers had time to go back to their childhood fantasies of spaceflight, their science fiction dreams.

Most people don’t realize that since the time of Apollo we’ve been in a feedback loop: as a nation, we elect representatives who thwart NASA, and then we blame NASA for its lack of vision. There is a simple and frustratingly predictable pattern: first NASA comes up with an exciting and ambitious long-term plan for getting to Mars, or for getting back to the moon, or for building a space station, or for traveling to an asteroid. Once there is a plan on the table, it is scrutinized and called too ambitious, redundant, unrealistic, or ridiculous. Always it’s called too expensive. One instance of such a vision was Wernher von Braun’s plan for an expedition to Mars, presented to the Senate Space Committee in 1969. He impressed the committee by announcing that on precisely November 12, 1981, two spacecraft would leave Earth for Mars simultaneously. The plan was serious, well thought out, technically sound, and incredibly expensive. It went nowhere. Another example was the Vision for Space Exploration endorsed by George W. Bush in 2004, which called for an extended human presence on the moon. Mostly these long-term plans are rejected by Congress altogether, but once a generation a plan is approved.

In that rare instance when a plan is approved, it’s always in a scaled-back way, always a compromise of the original lofty vision. Most importantly, it’s always structured in such a way that a future Congress will have to put up the majority of the money, making the whole thing feel precarious at best. Why will a future Congress and president make political sacrifices to fund a project they won’t get credit for in the minds of the public? Congress is a group of ever-changing politicians who answer to constituents of the present, not a fantasy for the far-off future.

But then of course the scaled-back, cheaper vision is opened up for national ridicule. Why doesn’t NASA dream bigger? Americans complain. Why aren’t they pushing out farther? They’re playing it safe, they’ve lost their vision, lost their way. Once we’re done criticizing the plan, we will start to love it, because spaceflight is fun, and because this is all we’ve got. But then (in the case of shuttle) some of the technical compromises Congress demanded in order to save money will lead to accidents, and NASA will be blamed again, this time for its lack of attention to safety.

There are four warring interests in spaceflight: ambitiousness of vision, urgency of timetable, reduction of cost, and safety to astronauts. These can never be entirely reconciled. In the sixties, urgency and ambitiousness were the driving factors, and because this was understood and accepted, the massive cost and risk were accepted as well. We now seem to be at a moment when reduction of cost is paramount, with safety coming in a very close second. This being the case, we should not be surprised that ambitiousness and urgency have had to be set aside altogether. But it’s ludicrous to claim, as I often hear people do, that “NASA has lost its vision.” NASA has lost support, not vision.

Wernher von Braun’s plan for Mars was complex. Getting astronauts to a planet 140 million miles away is even more difficult than getting them to the moon; to travel that far, one would have to construct a much larger space vehicle than could be built on Earth. The best way to assemble such a large vehicle would be to do so in low Earth orbit, using an orbiting space station as a base of operations. And in order to construct a space station, one needs a smaller launch vehicle—ideally a reusable shuttle—to haul the pieces of the station, and then later pieces of the Mars transport, up to Earth orbit. NASA’s plan was for a reusable shuttle with which to construct an orbiting space station with which to construct a large interplanetary spacecraft. As enthusiasm waned toward the end of Apollo, funding became scarce, and most politicians found it expedient to set themselves apart from the expense of spaceflight without going so far as to close down any NASA sites or major contractors, many of which were located in the states and districts of important members of Congress. So NASA got only the budget for the shuttle. By all accounts, it was lucky to get that much. Apollo 17 was the last mission to the moon, launched in December 1972. Meanwhile, Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were unceremoniously canceled, their crews left earthbound until the space shuttle would be ready to fly. Soon NASA’s budget was only one-third what it had been at its peak.

When President Nixon approved the plan for the space shuttle in 1972, he released a statement:

I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970’s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980’s and 90’s….

The new system will differ radically from all existing booster systems, in that most of this new system will be recovered and used again and again—up to 100 times. The resulting economies may bring operating costs down as low as one-tenth of those [of] present launch vehicles.

If you get the chance to talk with a modern-day NASA engineer or manager, don’t mention that one-tenth figure unless you want to see her beverage come out of her nose. It’s not NASA’s fault that the projection never came true—with the generous resources of the Apollo era, they probably could have done it.

Students of space policy might wonder why in the seventies, with the goals of Apollo accomplished, the government didn’t simply shut NASA down entirely. The agency had been created to accomplish a very specific task and had accomplished it. But Caspar Weinberger, who was then deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, warned Nixon that ending NASA would lead to claims that “our best years are behind us.” He said, “America should be able to afford something besides increased welfare, programs to repair our cities, or Appalachian relief and the like.” This is another great example of the ways in which spaceflight can be made to seem a paragon of, or negation of, any political ideology. But Weinberger’s argument won: Nixon did not want to be remembered as the president who shut down a source of national pride, the president who canceled the future. No president does.

As historian Howard McCurdy puts it, Nixon’s “need to maintain political support in aerospace states such as California and Texas contributed to his decision to maintain the human space flight effort, but so did his sense that NASA oversaw one of the few remaining technologies of optimism at that time.”

The Apollo project had put Nixon in an impossible position—everyone knew the vision had been Kennedy’s, and so the credit would go to his memory regardless of what president was in office at the time the goal was accomplished. Yet Nixon had no choice but to continue support for Apollo, as canceling the program would mean making the billions that had already been spent wasted money, not to mention disappointing everyone.

Nixon’s behavior toward the space program in 1969–70 was disingenuous. He was quick to associate himself with the astronauts and the triumphs of Apollo when it was politically convenient, and he was equally quick to slash the budget of NASA when choices had to be made between agencies.

Neufeld points out that NASA saved the last Apollo mission from being canceled “by cutting a secret political deal with the White House to postpone it until after the November 1972 presidential election.” Presumably, this last launch would be the cause of some hand-wringing and soul-searching about the end of spaceflight and the shortsightedness of politicians, just as we are seeing in this present moment, and Nixon did not want those lamentations to become part of his opponent’s campaign.

This starts to clarify why a person like Buzz Aldrin would praise President Obama’s cancellation of Constellation as a courageous move. It’s easy to let a plan limp along, slowly starving to death via budget erosion; it takes some boldness to declare the project dead, thereby accepting the ire of people who support the project, or any spaceflight project.

Pity those of us who were children in the flightless years of the late seventies, when the space shuttle was under construction but took forever to emerge. Pity the dreamy little kids who wanted to be able to aspire to spaceflight but had no actual American astronauts to emulate. The space shuttle’s design had been approved, but it had not yet appeared. We had to imagine it. My children’s books about space from the seventies are filled with conceptual paintings, the type from midcentury trade show magazines, in which the colors are strangely muted. Brushstrokes are visible in the clouds, in the flames from the hypothetical rockets, in the hair of the hypothetical astronauts. The artists’ rendering portrays the futuristic and imaginary nature of the space shuttle, and it evokes a futuristic nostalgia, to look at these pictures now that the shuttle is being retired.

In that era of budget defensiveness, even the books for children tended to highlight NASA innovations that had proven themselves useful here on Earth—weather satellites, metal alloys, advances in microchips. Velcro always gets a special mention. I want to shout backward into the past: Stop emphasizing the Velcro. People don’t care that much about Velcro. People care about the unutterable awe of American heroes stabbing into the heavens on columns of fire. But it’s too late: in the midseventies, the first orbiter, Columbia, is still years away from rolling out to the launchpad for its maiden flight. And from where I write, Columbia has already burned up into pieces all over Arizona and Texas.

NASA engineers had wanted a two-piece spacecraft that would be fully reusable—one piece a booster whose sole purpose would be to get the other piece, the orbiter, off the ground. Both segments would land like planes and would be able to fly again and again. The space transportation system envisioned by engineer Max Faget looked like two airplanes piggybacked, stacked upright for launch. But this concept would have been expensive to design and test, and once the budget started to decline, NASA shifted its goals downward to a reusable orbiter and two booster rockets for the first stage. The boosters would carry the shuttle to a certain altitude and then drop off, with built-in parachutes to soften their landing in the Atlantic. The rockets could then be reused, a key part of the proposal, though as historian Howard McCurdy points out, “Flight engineers were understandably nervous about reusing rocket engines that had been dunked in salt water and were discouraged that they had lost their airplane-like first stage.”

Then the decision was made to use solid fuel in the booster rockets, rather than a more easily controlled liquid fuel, again to save cost. This series of decisions in essence wrote the fate of Challenger, which would fall victim to the specific weaknesses of the solid rocket boosters—that they can’t be shut down if something goes wrong.

Predictions from the seventies about how often the shuttle could fly, and how cost-effective it would be, seem insane to us now in their optimism. A launchpad technician I know recently e-mailed me an image that had been used to promote the space shuttle concept in the seventies—it showed an orbiter, looking much like the ones we know, being maintained and reloaded for a new flight. A simple staircase has been rolled up to it, with a jumpsuited worker doing some light repairs. As it turns out, the orbiters need a much more elaborate hangar, the Orbiter Processing Facility, in which the spacecraft can be hoisted up to have the tiles of its underside repaired while workers on levels above attend to the engines, payload bay, orbital maneuvering system, and other components. The caption to this ludicrous image estimates that each orbiter can be turned around in two weeks. In reality, the shortest turnaround ever was eight weeks, and the average was measured in months. To be self-sustaining, the shuttle project would need to launch at least twenty-five times a year, with most missions being dedicated to the Department of Defense or customers paying to launch commercial satellites. This was a pace that might have been possible had the turnaround times been anywhere near what was predicted, but the compromises on the shuttle’s design had led to more complicated and costly maintenance procedures. In reality, the most shuttle launches NASA ever accomplished in a single calendar year was nine, in 1985—far short of the magic number of twenty-five. New regulations recommended by the Challenger Commission slowed the pace of flights, and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board imposed even more. In recent years, the record for most launches in a year was five, in 2009. The fact that shuttle was meant to be self-sustaining and never was made the promise of new space projects even murkier.

When I arrive at our classroom the following week, my students are already there, ready with their questions. They’ve gotten into the habit of these space discussions before class starts.

Why can’t we go back to the moon now? they want to know. Can’t we just rebuild the rockets from the sixties?

What is NASA doing with all the money if they’re not flying the shuttle anymore?

As a writing professor, I don’t often get the experience of imparting empirical knowledge to my students. I almost never get to explain to them things that I know to be true that they don’t yet know. I never get to lecture. And while it goes against my idea of my own strengths as a teacher, I find that it’s a pleasurable experience to be listened to as an authority on facts rather than always being a facilitator of discussions in which no one is necessarily holding the right answer.

I tell them why going back to the moon would be almost as challenging now as it was in the sixties. The plans for millions of pieces of hardware are scattered among the storage facilities of dozens of contractors all over the country, if not lost altogether—not to mention the issue of the software, which would have to be re-created from the ground up. The deep, hard-earned knowledge of the problems involved, and how to solve them, locked in the minds of engineers now in their eighties and nineties or gone altogether.

“So what about the hoax?” an impatient student asks without raising his hand. “Do you believe it’s true that they went?”

“I’d like to hear what you believe first,” I say instead. “What you’ve heard.”

My students say they are not sure what to think. Many of them have heard enough of the “evidence” for the hoax to put them in the “serious doubts” category, but they are not among the True Believers of conspiracy. (Bart Sibrel—the man who sued Buzz Aldrin for punching him in the face—has said that he would bet his life that astronauts have never walked on the moon, and I believe he is sincere.) The conspiracists make some good claims, my students explain, and they have never heard anyone answer them.

I tell my students my favorite answers to the conspiracy theories—Michael Collins’s point about four hundred thousand people keeping a secret for forty years, the one about the moon rocks. I have others. I have explanations for the various pieces of “evidence” my students have heard. But underlying all of this for many of my students, I know, is an assumption that a government agency can’t have accomplished something so awesome. They are proud of their country, but not of their government. Apollo would seem to run against so many popular understandings about government, about government bureaucracy, about government spending. All of us were born after Watergate. In so many ways it’s easier to believe the whole thing was a lie. That would better fit what they have been told.

“You have to weigh the evidence for yourselves,” I tell them. “But don’t assume it can’t be true just because it’s cool. Sometimes people manage to pull off cool things. We are allowed to enjoy them.”

“Why are we stopping, then?” a student wants to know. “Why are we not going to space anymore?” Such a simple question, one I should be able to answer as easily as the others. But it’s not. This is a question that intelligent and well-informed people can argue about. It’s a question with layers and contradictions, a question that depends how far back you want to go in history, how technical you want to get. A question that depends on what you believe about big concepts like Human Nature and the American Spirit.

“There are a lot of reasons. It’s maybe easier to answer why we went in the first place and then to talk about why those forces have weakened or disappeared. But at the simplest level, we’re stopping because the Columbia Accident Investigation Board called for it in 2003.”

“Was there one that blew up?” she asks. I’m taken aback for a moment that this knowledge seems so uncertain to her. Was there one that blew up? I don’t know whether she’s talking about Columbia, which was lost when she was thirteen—or Challenger, which was lost when I was thirteen.

Columbia was the first space shuttle completed, the first to fly, and as such it will for many Americans forever be The Space Shuttle. We first laid eyes on it when it rolled out of a hangar in California in spring 1979. In the footage shown on the news, it was nighttime, and lights played over the orbiter. Columbia backed out of the hangar then straightened itself, the huge metal bells of its three main engines pointing at us, the tail fin rising above. When it turned, its long white flank became visible for the first time, NASA and the orbiter’s name inscribed on its side. A great cheer went up among the crowd of assembled aerospace workers.

After years of waiting, space fans were finally able to lay eyes on the world’s first true spaceship, the first real step forward in spaceflight since the Saturn V. America’s space plane. Even though work on Columbia had fallen way behind schedule, NASA managers decided to send it on the journey from California to the Kennedy Space Center as scheduled. The work would be completed in Florida. The most visible of Columbia’s deficiencies was its thermal protection system: over and over the procedures for attaching the tiles securely to the orbiter’s skin had failed, and not all of the tiles were in place when Columbia rolled out. Temporary fake tiles were attached for the journey.

Crowds of people were invited out to watch and cheer Columbia’s arrival at Kennedy Space Center. But, as it turned out, the glue on the temporary tiles failed, and the tiles loosened in transit. Many people’s first look at Columbia was the humiliating spectacle of the new orbiter shedding black and white tiles like confetti behind her, tiles we had been told were necessary to the survival of the ship and crew. Frank Izquierdo, who was standing on the runway for the welcoming ceremony at Kennedy, still shakes his head ruefully when he relates this story. “She looked like a dog after a big fight,” he told me. The space shuttle project was made to look ridiculous at best, a failure at worst. As was NASA. As was the idea of continuing to fly in space. It would be another two years before Columbia would finally be ready for flight, and that image would remain in many people’s minds throughout that time.

When I first saw Columbia roll out of the Vehicle Assembly Building on TV as a third-grader, the launch vehicle was an ungainly appealing sight, a lash-up of orbiter, external tank, and solid rocket boosters. I had never seen anything like it. The orbiter, the space plane, clung to the external tank affectionately, like a baby animal to its mother.

Columbia first took to the sky on April 12, 1981, flown by Apollo veteran John Young and pilot Robert Crippen. The launch was a success, and more journalists came out to KSC than had appeared there since Apollo 11. John Young, who was fifty, became the hero of the transition story—he had not only walked on the moon on Apollo 16, but before that had flown with Michael Collins on Gemini 10. His presence symbolized that shuttle was a natural and logical vehicle to follow Apollo-Saturn, and his age implied that the task of flying the shuttle was different from that of flying an Apollo mission—a man well into middle age could safely do it.

The shuttle encountered problems on each of its four test flights, but it was declared operational and began flying missions with full crews and cargo, most often commercial satellites. A second orbiter, Challenger, made its maiden voyage in 1983. From the start, the idea of the shuttle had been an idea for a fleet, with the reliability that comes with multiple identical vehicles. One orbiter could be prepared for flight while another was in space and yet another undergoing repairs. Ultimately, the fleet was to consist of five orbiters, taking astronauts and cargo to space with a regularity more like a commercial airline’s than the risky one-off ventures of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

The space shuttle Challenger was named for HMS Challenger, a British Royal Navy warship that in 1872 undertook the first global marine research expedition. HMS Challenger sailed the world, making the first thorough survey of the oceans and discovering forty-seven hundred previously unknown species; the expedition is credited with giving rise to the field of oceanography. In preparation for the expedition, HMS Challenger’s guns were removed and its interior outfitted with laboratories, an operation that will strike some as reminiscent of the swords-to-plowshares process of converting missiles into rockets for the peaceful exploration of space.

In its three years of use, space shuttle Challenger flew more often than any other orbiter. No doubt there is a technical reason for this, but to young space fans it felt as though NASA simply liked Challenger the most. To me, Challenger will always be a bear cub, or some other kind of mammal—maybe a sweet and solid dog of unpretentious pedigree. Challenger is the fuzziest, friendliest of the orbiters, its edges somehow more rounded than the others’, yet also the most dependable.

Some of the bright cheer and innocence of the eighties sticks to it—I suppose because Challenger is the only orbiter that resides forever in the eighties—or perhaps it’s the innocence of my childhood. Maybe I’m getting some interference from Christa McAuliffe’s personality, her bubbly motherly sweetness, since the name Challenger is forever connected with her fame, and her death.

On Challenger’s second flight, Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space. Its third mission flew the first African American astronaut, Guy Bluford, and on its fourth mission Challenger landed at Kennedy Space Center rather than the lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base, the first time a spacecraft landed back at its launch site. A third orbiter, Discovery, was added in 1984, the same year two women went to space together for the first time. In 1985, the fourth orbiter, Atlantis, made its first flight.

In all, twenty-four missions launched and landed successfully between April 1981 and January 1986.

We said good-bye to Challenger first. It broke up in the skies above the Kennedy Space Center seventy-three seconds into flight on January 28, 1986, at 11:38 a.m.

If you were born between 1968 and 1980, you were probably in school that morning. If you went to a public school, chances are decent that you watched the events of that day unfold live. The year before, NASA had run a contest for a teacher to fly in space, the first step of what was to be an ongoing civilian-in-space program. The teacher chosen for the flight was Christa McAuliffe, a likable social studies teacher from New Hampshire. Because of McAuliffe’s inclusion on this mission, NASA had made special efforts to make this launch available to schoolchildren, including arranging for many public schools to receive a live feed. No national networks outside of the Space Coast area carried the launch live, so it’s one of the ironies of the day that the only people to have witnessed the disaster in real time on TV were children, those least prepared to deal with what they saw.

We watched in school multipurpose rooms, sitting cross-legged on the floor. We watched in classrooms, bored, staring at TVs on rolling carts, the blinds drawn against the glare of the morning. We watched the seven astronauts emerge from their quarters, single file, waving to a rising cheer and the flashes of cameras, watched them climb into the van that would take them to the launchpad. I was in the eighth grade, and starting to understand that it wasn’t cool to get visibly excited about something like a space shuttle launch. For my friends and me, any disruption to the normal school day was a fresh opportunity to make an elaborate show of being unimpressed.

I didn’t happen to be in a classroom with a TV during the launch that day, though other classrooms in my school carried the live feed. I didn’t hear what had happened until lunchtime, less than an hour later, when kids who had been watching the launch live were busy spreading the news. I remember feeling shocked but not particularly traumatized, as so many people my age say they were. I didn’t know until later that my favorite astronaut, Judith Resnik, had been on board Challenger. I didn’t know yet what far-reaching consequences this seemingly simple explosion would have. No one did, I guess.

We spent the rest of the school day watching the footage of the explosion replay over and over on TV. It was odd, seeing the launch from the start, because every time it seemed as though this time it might get off okay. Even the most cynical of us couldn’t help but respond to the poetry of countdown, to the three—two—one—. Even the coolest of us looked up at that sudden flash of light, held our breaths at the moment of ignition, the strange fire and shudder. At liftoff, the bolts detached, and for a second we could imagine the thunderous thrust of the rockets. For one long minute, the shuttle rose on a fat column of puffy steam.

Then the white pop in the sky. Something unscripted had happened—though it took a long time for the voice of the announcer to acknowledge it. Not until the next day was it clear that there was no hope that the crew might have survived. A lot of people, telling this story now, describe seeing a fireball on their televisions and knowing instantly that the crew was dead. But if you watch the unedited footage again, you might remember that feeling of uncertainty and dread as pieces slowly rained down from an altitude of eight miles, tracing fingers of white contrails across the bright blue Florida sky.

At school that day, some kids were visibly upset, crying or burying their faces in their crossed arms on their desks, but a more common response was blankness, a weirded-out adolescent whateverness. Some kids went straight to malicious laughter and making up Challenger jokes. (What kind of grades did Commander Scobee get in flight school? Below sea level! What do the Challenger and a penguin have in common? They’re both black and white and kinda cute, but neither one can fly!) Widespread tears were reported among teachers and principals. Some teachers made efforts to explain what had gone wrong, though no one on that day fully understood what had gone wrong; no one would for many months. Some teachers shut off the televisions and changed the subject, leaving the task of explaining the unexplainable to our parents. Other teachers tried to draw larger lessons, to talk about mishap and risk and death. My brother’s fourth-grade math teacher had the children flip to the page in their textbooks about astronaut Ronald McNair, one of a series of biographies intended to show children examples of women and minorities who use math in their jobs. Under his name was printed “1950– ,” and my brother and his classmates followed their teacher’s instructions to carefully write “1986” in the blank space.

We wouldn’t know it for a while, but that explosion marked the beginning of the end of American spaceflight. Mission STS-51L had been plagued by many slips and scrubs, the most frustrating of which had been the day before the launch. A special tool used to close the hatch to the crew compartment had broken off, and technicians had been unable to remove it within the launch window. If Challenger had taken off that day, a day much warmer than the fateful January 28, the rubber O-ring in the right solid rocket booster probably would not have stiffened with cold, and burning gases probably would not have escaped to detonate the external tank. Engineers, already aware of the O-ring problem, might have had a chance to fix it before the next attempt to launch in unusually cold weather. The space shuttle program might have moved forward as was intended, with the Department of Defense continuing to use it to deploy spy satellites. A second launch and landing facility might have been built, as planned, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Flights might have continued at a steadier pace, and the shuttle might have made itself more useful, might have earned more of a place in the national consciousness. A Congress and a public more convinced of the shuttle’s accomplishments might have been more likely to fund the next steps in spaceflight—a habitat on the moon, a trip to Mars. Instead, the space shuttle has quietly wound down without any spacecraft planned to follow it.

Frank Izquierdo was in Launch Control for Challenger’s last launch. When he tells me about it twenty-six years later, his memory seems precise and undistorted by emotion. Flight controllers dress up in suits and ties on launch days, partly a tradition of respect, but Frank also mentions that he was always glad to wear long sleeves and layers in the Firing Room, which was kept very cold to keep the computers safe. By the time the cryo tanks were being filled, Frank was chilled to the bone as well. When I ask Frank what it was like in the Firing Room that morning, he answers by telling me the facts—what happened in what order—rather than talking about emotions.

“First we lost comm,” he says. “Then we lost data. We were all looking at our screens trying to make sense of what we were seeing.”

“How long was it before you knew it hadn’t been caused by the main engines?” This is a polite way of asking how long it was before he knew the accident hadn’t been his fault. The engines were the most complex component, thought to have the highest risk of failure, and many people had assumed at first they were to blame for Challenger.

“It wasn’t too long,” he recalls. “They figured it out by looking at video and still images rather than telemetry. I’d say it was days rather than weeks.”

I comment that Frank must have been relieved to learn that the disaster had been caused by a faulty solid rocket booster and not one of his engines. But in his memory of that time, this distinction doesn’t seem to be nearly as relevant to him as I would have guessed.

“We all worked on shuttle,” he explains. “I worked on one part of it for a while, and then I’d be given more responsibility, and the parts I was responsible for would change. But we all worked on shuttle. We all worked to keep the astronauts safe.”

Months later, the presidential commission tasked with investigating Challenger issued its report. The cause of the explosion had been the solid rocket boosters, whose faulty design combined with the unseasonably cold weather in Florida to create a catastrophic failure. A picture in the paper showed Richard Feynman, a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, smirking and holding up a piece of O-ring he’d been soaking in ice water to show that it became brittle. Sally Ride, also on the commission along with Neil Armstrong, sat a few seats away, looking pissed. She’d trusted her life to Challenger twice. Only recently, since her death, has it come to light that the key piece of information about the O-rings had been supplied to another member of the commission by Sally Ride herself.

The commission’s report also revealed that the crew cabin had remained intact after the explosion, that the astronauts had been alive, though not necessarily awake, for the two minutes and forty-five seconds it took them to fall back to Earth. This revelation struck us children as horrifying, yet it somehow made sense. We’d already grown used to that portrait of the seven smiling astronauts standing for TRAGEDY rather than ADVENTURE. We’d seen updates about Christa McAuliffe’s family, her two small children readjusting to life without a mother. We had already come to realize that the adults in charge of making the world run smoothly actually had no idea what they were doing.

Challenger changed Americans’ perceptions of spaceflight irrevocably. Shortly after the disaster, a poll found that 47 percent of Americans reported their confidence in NASA had been shaken. Two years later, only one-third of that group indicated that their faith had been restored. If the first disaster during a launch had taken place during the heroic era, people might have understood the astronauts’ deaths to be a sacrifice in the name of progress. This certainly seemed to be the case for the Apollo 1 fire. But the disaster-free launches NASA ran from 1961 to 1986 gave people the sense that astronauts’ safety should be guaranteed. Losing a crew during the shuttle’s operational period seemed a worse failure, a worse betrayal of trust, than losing a Mercury capsule might have. Though the investigation into Challenger didn’t end the space shuttle program, as some feared it would, American spaceflight would never entirely recover.

Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter in 1988, and though the shuttle was still associated with a new sense of danger, people soon got used to the idea that things had been fixed. Another successful period followed, from 1988 to 2003, during which fewer missions flew, many of them devoted to delivering components of the International Space Station. The overly ambitious pace of the early eighties had been found to be partly to blame for Challenger, so the idea of making the shuttle pay for itself was officially abandoned.

As the oldest of the orbiters, Columbia was a bit heavier than the others—it missed out on a technological breakthrough involving stronger and lighter alloys—and as a result Columbia somehow always seemed bumbly, a chunky older sister forever dropping crumpled tissues from her sleeves. The fact that in coming years Columbia had a disproportionate number of delays compared to the others did nothing to contradict that dundering image.

Because they were lighter, Challenger and Discovery were always the ones to fly high-profile missions taking heavy and important cargo to space. Columbia became, unofficially, the science-mission orbiter. Predictable, reliable, unadventurous. It doesn’t seem right, then, that Columbia was the one that gave way to structural weakness, the heat of reentry sneaking itself between the tiles and pulling the ship apart over Texas on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members aboard. Debris was strewn across three states.

Maybe losing Challenger taught us how to say good-bye to space shuttles and their crews. Or maybe it was because the terrorist attacks of 2001 fell in between, forever readjusting our scale of horror. Either way, there was much less fanfare, much less hand-wringing, when we lost Columbia. Challenger’s disaster had been so dramatic, breaking up visibly in the sky during launch, during those two minutes when everyone was watching, tracking the bird through the clear Florida sky. Far fewer people turn out to watch landings; far fewer people were there with their faces turned up expectantly for Columbia. Even for those who were there, the only sign of Columbia’s demise was its absence. Columbia was supposed to land that morning, and simply did not.

Norman Mailer says of the Apollo astronauts, operating with the risk of their own deaths, “Like all good professional athletes, they had the modesty of knowing you could be good and still lose.” He was fascinated with the possibility of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin dying on the moon. On the one hand, the loneliness of that final resting place was terrifying to contemplate; on the other, Mailer considered the prospect of the souls rising—as so many who have had near-death experiences describe—rising faster, more cleanly than those earthbound, into a “transpostmortal insertion to the stars.”

As with Challenger, an investigation followed. Sally Ride became the only person to serve on the investigation boards for both Challenger and Columbia. As was expected, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB, pronounced “cabe” by insiders) found that the immediate cause of the disaster was a chunk of foam falling onto the tiles and that the organizational cause was a pattern of dismissing problems too easily, the “normalization of deviance” as Diane Vaughan put it so memorably in her study of Challenger. When a shuttle flew with a known issue and came back safely, the tendency among managers was to assume that the issue was not in fact a risk, using the previous success as “evidence.” “Try playing Russian roulette that way,” Richard Feynman remarked after Challenger. CAIB found that after a short period of vigilance, the same error of thinking had crept back into NASA decision making. The board stated in the report that “the causes of the institutional failure responsible for Challenger have not been fixed.”

The return-to-flight mission after Columbia was on Discovery, as the return-to-flight mission had been after Challenger. This one was commanded by Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a shuttle mission and one of only two women ever to do so. I remember seeing the front page of the newspaper the second day of that Discovery mission; a large color photograph showed the full black underside of Discovery pointed at a satellite to have its tiles examined, a new protocol demanded by CAIB. The tiles were found to be undamaged, and Discovery returned home safely, as has every shuttle to fly since then.

I keep thinking that The Dream Is Alive was a portrait of the space shuttle at its most hope-filled, and it is. But when I look up the date of the film’s release, I discover that the earliest I possibly could have seen it was June 1985. Six months after the film came out, Challenger exploded and one of the film’s stars, Judith Resnik, was dead. I’m not sure I ever got to enjoy this golden period of shuttle history that I’ve come to associate with my childhood. It may be that by the time I had any understanding of shuttle at all, Challenger was already lost, and that was the beginning of the end.

My students think spaceflight is cool. They are openly jealous that I got to see a launch. As we talk through the counterarguments to the hoax conspiracy theories, my students seem relieved to be able to believe in the triumphs of the heroic era; spaceflight is one of the few legends of the past they can feel an unambiguous pride in. They are saddened that shuttle is being shut down and would like to know whom to blame. Yet they misunderstand the vehicle’s capabilities and estimate insanely high numbers for its cost. Will they hang on to the new numbers I have given them and a new idea that a government agency has achieved a lot with a little?

We’re always being told unkind things about this generation of Millennials—that they are annoyingly attached to their devices and social networks, that their sense of entitlement leaves them without any work ethic, that their helicopter parents have made them helpless to care for themselves or others. This has not been my experience of them. Like young people of any generation, they think they are the first to experience everything. Like young people of any generation, they lack a sense of history. They are alarmingly vague about the events that seemed so earth-shattering to their elders, but so was my generation and so was my parents’. The ignorance is as unchanging as the outrage, as the belief that we were smarter when we were young. We were not. I had thought my students would have at least a sketchy idea of what their country has accomplished in space, and I had worried that they might be too cool to care about it. I was wrong on both counts. In other words, despite how much things have changed, not much has changed.

The space shuttle project never did get us any closer to Mars, but it deployed more than half the cargo ever carried to space and sent three hundred fifty-five people into orbit. Shuttle allowed repairs on satellites that could be fixed only by human hands, including repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, an instrument that has changed our view of the universe. Shuttle pieced together the International Space Station bit by bit over twelve years and carried thousands of experiments small and large for investigators ranging from National Science Foundation–backed scientists to elementary school children. The ISS alone is cited by many space advocates as having made the whole shuttle project worthwhile. The orbiting laboratory has been occupied nonstop since November 2, 2000—in other words, November 2000 was the last time all human beings were on the surface of the earth at once.

Is $209 billion a lot of money for the entire space shuttle program, or too little? Is 0.4 percent of the national budget way too much for NASA, or way too little? In comparing the two eras of American spaceflight, I’ve heard it said that Apollo was a mission in search of a vehicle while the space shuttle was a vehicle in search of a mission. This comparison is generally meant to be at the expense of the space shuttle, though I have never understood why shuttle has to suffer from the observation. Or rather, assuming that the comparison is an insult to shuttle reveals the speaker to be a heroic-era space fan who values “firsts” over all else. My parents’ generation tends to take it as an article of faith that setting a goal (“let’s go to the moon”) and then slapping together an odd-looking agglomeration of incredibly expensive single-use components to reach that goal was inherently cooler than designing a reusable and upgradable space vehicle from the ground up. Fewer people grasp the achievement of shuttle, suitable for many possible uses, some of which had not yet been dreamed of when Columbia was first being assembled.

Consider that the people who know best how to feel about the space shuttle might be the people who worked on it every day. I have heard spaceworkers call the shuttle “a magnificent space vehicle,” “an elegant space plane,” “the most complex human invention ever built,” and “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” I have always wondered whether the space shuttle’s workaday name robs it of some of the wonder it deserves. A “shuttle” is what you take from an economy parking lot to an airport terminal, not a beautiful machine. A name pulled from mythology, like Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo, might have better told us how to feel about it.

At any rate, the people who knew the shuttles best, the workers at Kennedy, tend to talk about individual orbiters and call them by name—they know what was accomplished by Endeavour, what was accomplished by Discovery. They believe these spacecraft are the best things that have ever flown, and they are proud to have helped make them fly.