Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight

[There must be] some secret pleasure taken in the magnified luxury of treating all the workers at the Space Center to the pleasure of watching their mighty moonship edge along the horizon from morning to dusk, or even more spectacularly at night, with lanterns in the rigging, like a ghost galleon of the Caribbean! The beginning of the trip to the moon was as slow as the fall of the fullest flake of snow.

—Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

CHAPTER 6. A Brief History of Spacefarers

STS-135 Rollout: May 31, 2011

When the Kennedy Space Center was constructed, it was with the knowledge that incredibly large objects, skyscraper-sized objects, were going to have to be moved about the landscape like children’s toys by some means that had yet to be invented. The Mercury rockets had been simply set to vertical at their launchpads on Cape Canaveral, but the new facilities for the Apollo project were going to have to be more elaborate. First of all, the moon rockets would need to be assembled indoors, and that indoor space, which was the Vehicle Assembly Building, had to be separated from the launchpads by at least three miles for the disconcerting reason that an explosion at the launchpad would destroy everything within that radius; NASA managers understandably hoped to minimize the losses in case of such a disaster. But this separation of three miles between assembly building and launchpad meant that the assembled Apollo-Saturn, a spacecraft taller than the Statue of Liberty, would somehow have to be moved across three miles and up a steep incline, an unimaginable engineering challenge. The world’s most powerful ground vehicle would have to be invented, and it would have to be capable of keeping the enormous spacecraft perfectly level. The vehicle that resulted, the crawler transporter, is one of the components of the space program that would be remarkable on its own but can disappear among the other astounding and record-setting innovations that surround it.

The crawler transporters survived the transition between Apollo and shuttle. In the shuttle era, the space shuttle launch vehicle is assembled atop a mobile launch platform, the enormous metal structure we saw in the VAB on Family Day eight months ago. The presence of the word mobile in the name is misleading; the platform looks like an oil rig, like a building, like a permanent structure that isn’t going anywhere. Each one weighs 8.2 million pounds by itself, 11 million pounds with a space shuttle assembled on it, even more once the shuttle’s external tank is filled with fuel. Once the shuttle is stacked on the MLP, the crawler transporter slides up underneath the platform and shrugs the entire stack up onto its shoulders before rolling it out to the launchpad three miles away.

For the first rollout at Kennedy, for Apollo 4 in 1967, spaceworkers were encouraged to bring their families to see the show. Rollouts have sometimes been open to workers and their guests, but they haven’t always been big events, since they often took place in the middle of the night and were not well lit. This year, with the end of the program in sight, NASA has started inviting workers to bring their families again and has brought out massive spotlights to make the stack visible. Tonight I’ll be among them for the last rollout in shuttle history.

It’s only been fifteen days since the launch of Endeavour, which is still on orbit and is due to land tonight at 2:35 a.m. In the meantime, Atlantis has been mated with its external tank and solid rocket boosters for its last flight; this process takes place in the VAB, a dramatic ballet of engineering in which the orbiter is hoisted up into the air using a crane built into the ceiling, then lowered with incredible delicacy onto the external tank. Omar was there in the VAB to see the stacking process, which takes eight to ten hours. Tonight the assembled vehicle will roll out of the building and out to the launchpad. Omar has invited me to join him and his father and some friends for yet another “last.” After checking with my husband, I’d agreed and flown out.

On launch days, hundreds of thousands of people show up and vie with one another for hotel rooms, seats in restaurants, and launch viewing sites, but today will be different. Rollouts are open only to NASA employees and their families, so my visit will not coincide with the visits of hundreds of thousands of other tourists; I’m getting to see the Space Coast as it is most of the time for the people who live here. Because the causeways won’t be clogged with traffic, I have a wider range of options and don’t have to stay on Merritt Island, at my Florida Home. Instead, I’m staying in a hotel in Cocoa Beach for the first time. A beachfront room here during an off week costs the same as the unglamorous Clarion during a launch.

This morning when I wake up in that hotel room in Cocoa Beach, I am disoriented, at first, to hear the ocean. I dress and step out onto the beach, blinking at the white-hot sun. A few families are already setting up their blankets and umbrellas and coolers and rafts and Frisbees. The surf is calm, and children are wading in to stand waist high and shriek while they splash water onto each other. Out on the horizon I can make out an enormous cruise ship, one of the many that leave from Port Canaveral on their way to the Caribbean, moving almost imperceptibly slowly. Watching it embark is like a form of meditation. I breathe in the saltwater air with my toes in the surf, snap a picture with my phone to prove I’ve been to a beach, then get in my car and head toward the Space Center.

I drive through Cocoa Beach along the tacky stretch of A1A. Tom Wolfe says of Cocoa Beach that it “was so Low Rent that nothing on this earth could ever change it…. Even the beach at Cocoa Beach was Low Rent.” In stark contrast to the unspoiled green flats of the Space Center on Merritt Island, there is nothing beautiful about Cocoa Beach along A1A. Not the surreal sculpture of a surfer balancing on a concrete slab of wave, not the chain hotels done up in pastel colors, not the souvenir ships with multicolored signs advertising SHELLS (who buys shells?) and WOMEN’S BIKINIS (who else buys bikinis?) and BEACH TOYS and SUNSCREEN. Not the fake tiki lounges left over from the early sixties when the Mercury astronauts first came here for their training and tests and launches, those old-school crew-cut astronauts who declared the Cape a “no-wives zone” and called the young women who followed them back to their motel rooms “Cape cookies.”

I cross the Banana River on the 520 causeway to reach the Kennedy Space Center from the south and pass through Merritt Island. I take the turn for the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. You can’t miss the turn: it’s marked by a life-size mockup of the space shuttle launch vehicle. The Visitor Complex boasts a museum, a rocket garden, an IMAX theater, a beautifully preserved Saturn V housed in its own hangar, a seriously well stocked gift shop, and an attraction called the Shuttle Launch Experience that I’ve never done because I’m always here alone and I’d feel stupid getting on an amusement ride by myself. Once you’re in the Visitor Complex, you can board a bus to take a tour inside the working part of the space center, including the Vehicle Assembly Building (only as far as the parking lot) and an observation gantry overlooking the launchpads. Most tourists leave here thoroughly propagandized about spaceflight and their nation’s role in it.

The Visitor Complex has become so familiar to me, I decline the map the ticket seller offers me. I know where the vintage space suits are displayed, where to find the diorama of local wildlife, where the least-used bathrooms are, where to buy ice cream without waiting in a long line. Omar has been hoping to join me after he runs some errands, but he keeps texting me about delays. Finally he decides that he won’t have time to join me after all, texting me by way of explanation:

Hay? It takes me a moment to remember that Omar’s girlfriend, Karen, owns horses, and that Omar helps out with their care. I text him back:

21st century transport by day, 19th century transport by night Omar’s response:

Later, I sit on a bench in the Rocket Garden by myself, eating an ice cream cone in the beastly heat. Behind me squats the enormous silver base of the Atlas rocket, gleaming in the sun like a piece of metal sculpture. It’s easy to forget, unless I look straight up, that I am sitting among rockets. Tourists swirl around me, reading the plaques and taking pictures. A tour guide, a paunchy white man in his fifties, tests his microphone and encourages visitors to gather around. A few families wander over; I remain on my bench but listen, curious. The man clears his throat loudly into his microphone, a signal that he is ready to begin.

“Welcome to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex Rocket Garden! I would like to tell you about some of the important and historic rockets we are proud to have on display here in the Rocket Garden! This right here is the mighty Atlas rocket!” His delivery is odd, deadpan, punctuated with an emphasis at the end of each sentence, as if someone has encouraged him to vary his tone.

“The Atlas was first developed as an intercontinental ballistic missile! Or ICBM! Perhaps you’ve heard of those! How many of you have heard of the Atlas rocket?” A few uncertain hands wander up. No one wants to be called on.

“The Atlas rocket ran on a mixture of liquid oxygen and a type of kerosene known as RP-one! The Mercury astronauts trusted the Atlas with their lives when they climbed into their capsules perched at the top of these mighty rockets!” A practiced pause. I wonder whether the tour guide is paid by Delaware North, the company that runs the Visitor Complex, or whether he is a volunteer. He has the affect of an enthusiast, an evangelist.

“Can you imagine—!” and here he gives a gesture toward the top of the rocket, ten stories, while his gathered listeners shade their eyes against the bright Florida sun to dutifully tilt their faces up—“Can you imagine what it felt like to those seven astronauts who trusted their lives to this mighty warrior?”

“Four, not seven,” I whisper into my ice cream. The first two Americans in space flew on Redstone rockets, not Atlas; also, one of the Mercury astronauts, Deke Slayton, had been grounded for a heart condition. That left four who trusted Atlas with their lives. I feel a moment’s self-satisfaction—I will report to my husband later that I knew a fact this tour guide did not—but then I wonder, what kind of person takes pleasure in correcting a tour guide, even if she does so too quietly to be heard? I’ve kept telling myself that I’m not one of the hard-core space people, that I am somehow different from them because I’m a writer, because I would not have come here just for my own enjoyment. Maybe this was true at one point, but I’m starting to question how different I really am.

Omar has told me to be at his parents’ house at 6:00 p.m. so we can head over to the rollout together in Frank’s SUV. When I pull into his neighborhood, I recognize the house, the same house where I’d picked him up for the launch of Endeavour. On that morning it had still been dark, so I didn’t get a very good look at it and hadn’t gone inside. It’s a small white house on a cul-de-sac. Today I park, knock on the front door, and am greeted by Omar and a small white dog who goes so insane with barking that he has to be put out back.

Inside, the house has an open floor plan, all cream-colored carpet and tile, opening out toward a pool. Omar introduces me to his mother and his grandmother. His mother, Angie, is a small dark-haired woman who smiles politely and shakes my hand, then disappears into the kitchen again. Omar has told me that his mother is not much interested in space and that she hasn’t been to any shuttle launches other than the very first one in 1981—this in stark contrast to her husband’s record of 134. When Omar tells me this detail about his mother, I remind him that in my novel, the main character’s mother has also boycotted all the shuttle launches after the first, while the father takes his space-obsessed child to every launch. “That is weird,” Omar agrees. It pleases me when things I made up turn out to be true for someone. I think about a line from a letter Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald about character—“make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

Omar and I sit in the living room catching up while we wait for his other friends to arrive. He tells me about having escaped another round of layoffs; he’s been told he will keep his job for at least a few more months. He shows me his new laptop and clicks through some photos he and Karen have taken recently at the Space Center. One of Karen’s shows a launch vehicle stacked on the pad, photographed from the crawlerway; she has arranged the shot so that some of the crawlerway’s pebbles are visible at the bottom of the frame, looking huge and marbled and distinct, while behind them the stack looms like futuristic architecture.

“That’s gorgeous,” I say. Part of what we are admiring, when we admire the image, is the vantage point itself. Most photographers, even those who get press credentials from NASA, would never get the chance to take a picture like this. The launchpads are among the most tightly restricted sites at the space center. It’s one of the things that keeps Omar working here as long as they will let him.

Omar’s friends Kris and Dayra show up, and we all pile into Frank’s Suburban. I met Kris at Family Day; Dayra is a friend of Omar’s from the University of Central Florida. I’d forgotten, until I’m chatting with her about the classes she and Omar took together, that Omar was a history major.

At the checkpoint, Frank shows the guard his badge. The two men share a joking exchange that makes it seem as though they’ve met here many times before. We pass through the gate, and the geography changes abruptly into the straightaway of Kennedy Parkway with the green wetlands on either side of us. The early-evening sunlight makes everything golden, and the Vehicle Assembly Building is lit up like a religious destination. The others don’t interrupt their conversations, but I stop talking to look out the window at it. I was here only two weeks ago, but I’m surprised by how pleased I am to see the VAB again. This is my fourth visit within eight months, but I never seem to get used to the sight of it. If anything, I become more emotionally involved with it the closer we get to the end. I snap a picture through Frank’s windshield and post it on Facebook. “Are you back there again already?” a friend from graduate school comments under the picture. “Or do you live in Florida now?”

As we pull into the grassy area where cars are parking in neat rows, we pass a bus whose front sign reads PRESS. When I peer inside, I can see row after row of white men in their fifties, some of them balancing large tripods in the aisle. I feel a surge of jealousy, as I did when I passed the Press Site on my first visit here with Omar.

“Press,” I point out to the others in the car. “Those guys think they’re better than me.”

“You should try again for the next NASATweetup,” Omar says. He had reminded me faithfully of every deadline for the selections for spots to see launches from up close. He doesn’t enter them himself, he told me once, because as a badged employee he already gets better access than most, and he feels he should let someone else have a chance.

“I don’t think I’m on Twitter enough to get chosen,” I say. The selection process is supposed to be random, but the people who are chosen tend to have suspiciously high numbers of followers. “I’ll keep trying, though.”

“You should try again for regular press credentials, too,” Omar says. I’ve complained to him that after being turned down a number of times I had become frustrated and given up trying. But he’s right—it wouldn’t hurt to try again.

We pile out of the SUV and follow Frank and Omar to a good spot in the field. They know from past rollouts where the best place is to stand.

Once again, I’m standing in a grassy field at the Kennedy Space Center with Omar and Frank, the Vehicle Assembly Building filling the sky as a backdrop, waiting for something to happen. The sun is setting, and people mill around us excitedly, chatting and buzzing with anticipation, like every other time I’ve been here. Classic rock plays over giant speakers. Children chase each other, some of them dressed in tiny flight suits and helmets. Reporters and photographers wander among the crowd, getting shots of the kids playing and asking people what they think is the significance of today’s event.

Frank, Omar, and I are standing not far from where we stood for the launch of Endeavour, fifteen days ago. That day, people had been finding good spots with a clear view to the northeast, toward the launchpad, but today we are facing west, toward the massive doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building. The launch vehicle will emerge from the VAB, roll along the crawlerway directly in front of us, and then head off toward the launchpad. It will move so slowly, about half a mile an hour at its fastest, that we will have plenty of time to take it in while it moves this short distance.

One of the enormous VAB doors has already been opened, the seven metal panels folded vertically up on each other to reveal a sliver of the stacked launch vehicle. Bleachers are set up out here for spectators, as always, but more people are sitting on blankets, walking around, and visiting the booths that have been set up with snacks and drinks and (of course) space souvenirs. Most people have gathered at the rope barrier marking off a safe distance from the crawlerway. The setting sun is lighting everything up rose gold—the VAB, the clouds in the distance, the NASA families with their binoculars and their American flags and their cameras.

The rollout is scheduled to start at 8:00 p.m., but at five after, ten after, we still haven’t detected any movement. Omar has brought his work radio with him, and from it he learns that the crawler transporter has a hydraulic leak. The rollout is going to be delayed at least fifteen or twenty minutes.

After we learn that the hydraulic leak will cause a delay, Dayra and I go for a walk while Frank and Omar set up their tripods. We stop by the snack booth to buy bottles of water, then notice a clump of people who seem to be gathering excitedly near the bleachers, lining up. We drift over to see what’s going on.

“It’s an astronaut!” Dayra gasps. A moment later I spot the figure she’s pointing to: a woman wearing the bright blue flight suit that turns an otherwise normal-looking person—in this case, a woman in her thirties with curly brown hair—into a celebrity and a figure of fascination. People are clamoring to get autographs and pictures taken with this astronaut, whose name patch reads AUÑÓN.

“Let’s get pictures with her!” Dayra says, and, grabbing my arm, steers me into the line. I tell Dayra I suspect this astronaut is from the new class chosen in 2009. This group is unique among astronaut classes in that they were hired knowing they would not get to fly on an American spacecraft. They will be assigned to missions on the International Space Station, which they will reach via the Russians’ Soyuz spacecraft. The 2009 class is the first group of astronauts for whom fluency in the Russian language will be a necessity.

When we reach the front of the line, the astronaut greets us. We clutch her hand in turn, then take each other’s pictures with her. Up close, I can see in the astronaut’s eyes that she is a bit overwhelmed by all the attention. Her expression, while friendly, is a bit bewildered.

“Not yet,” the astronaut answers with the practiced smile of someone who has answered the same question a hundred times today. Both Dayra and I know enough not to ask her when she will. She doesn’t know. She might not be assigned to a mission for years, and the waiting, though part of the job, must be excruciating. Dayra and I thank her before starting to walk away. A little boy is already offering her a space shuttle book he wants signed.

“Good luck!” Dayra calls over her shoulder to the astronaut, who smiles back. As we rejoin our group, I realize what I saw in her expression: she is out here at a space shuttle rollout, answering questions about the space shuttle, but she knows she will never get to fly on a space shuttle, that they will all be sealed up in museums by the time her training is complete. I’ve never before met an astronaut who hasn’t been to space. An astronaut candidate, but not a space-flown astronaut. An earthbound spacefarer. You’d think the limited opportunities for astronauts would dampen the appeal of the position, but in this last round of astronaut hiring, NASA counted more applications than it has ever received. There are still a great number of people who just want to go to space, who are willing to dedicate their lives to that chance.

Since I saw it roar into space fifteen days ago, Endeavour has had a busy schedule. As all shuttle crews have done since Columbia’s demise, the crew of Endeavour made it their first order of business to inspect the condition of the tiles using a camera at the end of the remote manipulator arm. Some damaged tiles were found on the underside of the orbiter, but upon closer inspection they were cleared for reentry. Endeavour docked with the International Space Station on day three of the mission, and a traditional welcome ceremony was held between the six-person crew of ISS and the six crew members of Endeavour.

The combined crew unloaded new components of the International Space Station and unpacked supplies from Endeavour. Crew members did a total of four spacewalks to install new equipment on ISS and to service existing equipment. On day eight of Endeavour’s time in space, three of the six ISS crew members—Dmitri Kondraytev of Russia, Paolo Nespoli of Italy, and Cady Coleman of the United States—finished their six-month missions, and after the others had gone to sleep for the night, the three of them crawled into their Soyuz spacecraft, detached from Station, and fell to Earth. On day twelve of the mission, astronaut Mike Fincke surpassed Peggy Whitson’s record as the American astronaut with the most time in space, 377 days.

In between doing their work, the crew also spoke with Pope Benedict XVI, four hundred students in an elementary school in Arizona, the Italian president, students and faculty members at the University of Arizona, PBS, NPR, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, AP, Reuters, Gannett, the Voice of America, and Fox News.

Today, May 31, is day sixteen of Endeavour’s mission. The astronauts have undocked Endeavour from the ISS, and they have spent most of today testing the shuttle’s systems, stowing equipment, and going over plans for deorbit and reentry. They will start the deorbit burn tonight at 1:29 a.m. and, assuming all goes well, land here at the Kennedy Space Center at 2:35 a.m.

It’s easy enough to follow all these goings-on on the NASA site, or on other sites like Spaceflight Now or Space.com. What’s harder is to guess what it feels like to the crew to know that they are doing many of these things for the last time. The following shuttle mission, which will be the last one for all time, will not include any space walks because of the smaller crew size and limited training time. So all the little rituals of shuttle space walks—sleeping in the airlock to purge their bodies of nitrogen, donning the space suits piece by piece, opening the airlock and stepping outside—all these are happening for the last time. The ISS crew will be able to do space walks to maintain the station as necessary, but never again will astronauts slip out the air lock of a space shuttle orbiter to float and work in space.

“It’s ready,” Omar announces. He has continued to monitor his work radio, and apparently people are saying to each other that the hydraulic problem has been fixed and that rollout is about to start. We direct our attention toward the Vehicle Assembly Building door, where still no movement can be detected.

“I think I see it,” says Frank at length. He is watching the VAB through binoculars. He politely hands them over to me, and I look too; the eyepieces are still warm from his face. At first I think his claim that the shuttle is moving was wishful thinking, but then I think I see it too. I choose a frame of reference, a girder just inside the door, and watch to see whether the space between the girder and the right-hand solid rocket booster is shrinking. I think it might be. I hand the binoculars back.

Behind me, a few space fans start clapping and hooting, the way people at rock shows do to let each other know that they were the first to notice the band stepping onstage. The noise catches the attention of the people around us, and soon everyone has stopped their conversations to concentrate on the open door. The rollout has officially started at 8:42 p.m.

Atlantis is definitely moving now; the stack is visible in the doorway, no longer behind the threshold, as it was a minute ago. We watch and watch, and now the stack is mostly outside the doorway. People continue to clap and holler. The sound of the crawler transporter is monumental, like hundreds of heavy-duty tractors running at once, which, I guess, is more or less what it is. In the footage I’ve seen of rollouts, the sound of the crawler has always been left out or minimized, but in person the deafening rumble is inescapable. The stack is also preceded by a diesel smell that, like the engine noise, I should have known to anticipate but somehow did not. A toxic cloud like the idling of a hundred eighteen-wheelers wafts over the crowd. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that a lot of people who might normally object to the climate-change impact of the space program choose not to think of it in those terms, simply because it seems less stupid and wasteful than so many of the other ways in which large amounts of resources are consumed or, in this case, large amounts of carbon dioxide released.

As the stack gets closer to us, Frank and Omar get to work snapping pictures of it. It’s still not full dark out yet, and enormous xenon lights are bathing the shuttle in an unearthly white that is quite beautiful to the naked eye but hard to photograph. I take a couple of pictures of it, but, as with launches, I don’t make any real effort to capture it.

The stack is nearly directly in front of us after moving for about fifteen minutes, and it’s only at this point that I notice there are a handful of people riding on it. Mostly men, mostly dressed in the jeans and T-shirts of technicians, they are riding on the mobile launch platform. Some of them walk up and down, waving to the crowd. A few of them seem to be working up there, seem to be actually checking on the equipment and monitoring the base of the stack. But most seem to be along for the ride—standing at the railing, or sitting on lawn chairs facing out at the crowd, waving at us as if the mobile launch platform were the biggest float in a small-town parade.

“There are people on it,” I say to Omar. By now, I reflect, he has probably gotten used to me making incredibly obvious statements in his presence. He never gives me a hard time about it.

“Yep,” he confirms. “The crawler was built to keep the Saturn Vs steady, so it’s gotta be a pretty smooth ride.” It’s true that none of the people standing and walking appear to be unstable on their feet. The ride is probably much smoother than it would be on a flatbed truck.

Seeing the stack go by this slowly, I notice things I have never seen before. From here I can see clearly the struts that attach the orbiter to the external tank, with explosive bolts in between to blow the tank free once it’s empty. The way the tiles hug the graceful curve of the orbital maneuvering system pods. The way the orbiter’s name, Atlantis, was clearly painted onto the orbiter’s flank by hand rather than using decals or stencils. This isn’t the closest I’ve ever been to an orbiter—that would still be my visit to the Orbiter Processing Facility on Family Day, when Endeavour was so close I could read the serial numbers on its tiles. But I’ve never seen an orbiter this close up when it’s stacked upright for launch, and neither have most people. Even space nuts who come out for every launch only get to see the stack from miles away.

“Want your picture with it?” Omar asks, as he always does. We snap each other’s pictures without trying too hard to get great shots. Our cameras can’t really capture the spectacle of the bright white ship, the warm orange tank, the gray grumbling crawler, all against the black sky of night. We want pictures that show our own faces only so that we can tell people that we were here.

Norman Mailer’s description of the rollout compares the slowly moving launch vehicle to a “ghost galleon of the Caribbean.” I’ve always thought that description sounded fanciful, and because Mailer was never here for a rollout himself, it was easy to assume that his speculation may have been overly romantic. But it’s true there is something nautical about the way the thing creaks along, the multiple levels of walkways and stairways and signs and safety equipment and flags, the little lights hanging all over it, the way a crowd has come to see it off. The people standing and sitting at the railings are waving to us like old-timey travelers embarking on a cruise, as if the crawler transporter were an enormous cruise ship leaving port and the Kennedy Space Center a calm blue sea. They are close enough that we can read their expressions, but they are inexorably separated from us—not by their distance, but by their trajectory. They are on their way to somewhere, and we are stuck here.

Like so many things we wait so long to see, the rollout is both fast and slow. We stand there a long time marveling at it, long enough to resume our conversations, long enough to post to Twitter, long enough to notice some of our fellow space fans again, to notice what they are doing and wearing and saying to each other out here in the floodlit dark, long enough to return our attentions a second and third time to the massive stack and to realize that it is past us now, and now showing us its back side, and now definitely on the wane. Some observers leave as soon as the crawler is well past, some while it was still quite visible, but the Izquierdo party stays until only the lit stack is still visible in the distant vicinity of launch pad 39A, the glowing white of Atlantis’s back and spread wings. The crawler underneath has disappeared in the dark, so the ghost ship seems to move by itself, imperceptibly slowly, out to its destination still a couple of miles, and many hours, away.

After dropping off Frank, we head to dinner. Omar asks that we go to a place with a TV in the bar so he can keep an eye on an important basketball game, so we choose an Applebee’s. While we wait for our food to arrive, Dayra asks Omar and me how we met. Omar and I look at each other bashfully for a second, conscious of how the telling will seem to spin the meaning of our friendship.

“Well, Margaret wrote a book about Challenger,” Omar begins, “and I read it.”

“Wow, you wrote a book?” Dayra repeats. Somehow in all our chatting today I’d mentioned that I’m a professor but not that I’m a writer.

“Then Omar wrote me to tell me about the errors I made,” I continue, ribbing him.

“I wrote to say I liked it,” Omar corrects. “And you had very few errors, considering.”

“Later I found him accidentally on Facebook,” I explain. I tell them about the group called “If You Oppose NASA in Any Way I Will Punch You in the Face.” Everyone laughs and agrees that that is so Omar.

Our food arrives, and we eat in companionable silence. Everyone’s food is covered with cheese. Whenever something exciting happens in the basketball game Omar is watching, a table of three young men near us erupts in cheers. Omar sails a friendly comment their way, and soon they are exchanging banter and predictions about the rest of the season. Omar has made yet more new friends.

That night, I’m sleeping in my motel bed in Cocoa Beach when the sound of the space shuttle Endeavour entering the atmosphere rips through the air with a sonic boom. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before—not exactly a sound, more like a low-level molecular event—and, as Omar told me it would happen, I know exactly what it is the moment I hear it. I almost feel as though I knew the split second before I heard it, the way dreams can seem to predict events in the waking world. The sonic boom: a disturbance to the air caused by Endeavour traveling toward Earth faster than the speed of sound, breaking through the sound barrier twice, once with its nose and once with its wings. Boom-boom. I look at the clock and it’s 2:30 a.m., right on time.

I know from my reading that Endeavour has broken the sound barrier at an altitude of sixty thousand feet and won’t touch down for another five minutes. The mission won’t officially be over until Endeavour comes to a full stop at the end of the runway at Kennedy. Wheel stop, they call it, the official end of the mission. Journalists are out there right now, maybe some of the same journalists on that press bus I saw at the rollout, waiting at the Shuttle Landing Facility to take pictures of Endeavour gliding in and touching down. I feel faintly jealous of them. There is always someone who will get to see more.

When I get home I look up the current corps of astronauts on the NASA website and click through their smiling portraits in their blue flight suits, looking for the one I met at the rollout. I find her easily enough: Serena Auñón. The bio on her page says that before being selected as an astronaut she worked for NASA as a flight surgeon. She lived in Houston, Texas, and Star City, Russia, caring for astronauts and cosmonauts on their way to missions to space, having gone through one of the country’s few residencies in aerospace medicine. When I Google the term “aerospace medicine,” I’m taken to a page that informs me that while other branches of medicine deal with abnormal physiology in a normal environment, flight surgeons deal with normal physiology in an abnormal environment.

Astronauts are hard to get hold of when they are about to go to space or have recently returned, but an astronaut candidate from the most recently selected group who has yet to be assigned to a mission is easier to secure a interview with. After filling out a form online with the Astronaut Office’s media liaison describing who I am and what sort of interview I’m trying to get, I receive an e-mail back telling me when to call for a phone interview with Serena.

The call for applications for this new class of astronauts went out in 2007. That announcement was forwarded to me multiple times by friends as a joke, suggesting that I should apply, though I lack the ad’s most basic requirement, a degree in math or science. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to join the astronaut corps at a time when the only American spacecraft is being retired, to join the ranks of astronauts who have flown on shuttle and to know they would never get to fly on it themselves. This is the first class of astronauts who know they will not launch from Cape Canaveral; they will wait, probably for years, to get to fly with the Russians to the International Space Station. What would it be like, I wonder, to compete as hard as previous classes of astronauts have to get a spot, but for the spot to be such a compromised one?

One of the things that makes the job title astronaut different from other jobs is that it existed in the collective imagination for centuries before it was ever actually anyone’s occupation. In the second century CE, Lucian of Samosata imagined travelers going to the moon and fighting a war with its inhabitants. In Jules Verne’s immensely influential 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, the word astronaut is never used, but three men seal themselves into a metal capsule in order to fly to the moon. Many of the details Verne came up with were so outlandish as to invite ridicule if they had not become reality a hundred years later in the Apollo program, including a launch from Florida and a safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Verne’s three space travelers behave in some ways we now associate with astronauts—they solve problems that arise on their mission, analyze new information they observe outside their windows, and do calculations to figure out their location and speed. On the other hand, they indulge in non-astronaut-like behaviors such as getting drunk, becoming histrionic about unexpected problems, and expressing doubt about the meaning of their journey, about whether they should be doing this at all.

One of the first uses of the word astronaut to refer to a human traveling in space was in Neil R. Jones’s short story “The Death’s Head Meteor” in 1930.

The young astronaut entered the space flyer, closed the door, and was alone in the air-tight compartment just large enough to accommodate him. On the instrument board before him were dials, levers, gauges, buttons and queer apparatus which controlled and operated the various features of the craft. He turned on his oxygen supply and his air rejuvenator so that the air could be used more than once, after which he shoved his starting lever forward. The craft raced suddenly off the roof and into the cloudless sky above the vast city of the twenty-sixth century.

Jones was probably as surprised as anyone to learn how soon his new word became an actual job title, only twenty-nine years later. In between, during World War II, the first actual rockets emerged. This was the beginning of a new era in which the astronaut became a consistent character to tell stories about, if still speculative. Though the rockets weren’t ready to safely contain humans, their streamlined hulls brought with them a clearer image of the astronaut fantasy. Part fighter pilot, part frontiersman, the helmeted spaceman climbed into sleek machines and left Earth in the black-and-white television shows of the fifties. In 1954, Walt Disney created Man in Space, a series intended to promote his new Disneyland, which was set to open the following year. In the opening shot of the series, Walt himself speaks into the camera. “One of man’s oldest dreams has been the desire for space travel,” he tells us with an avuncular twinkle. “Until recently this seemed to be an impossibility.”

Man in Space gives a brief history of rockets, complete with a racist cartoon of the first Chinese rocket builders. This historical overview is politely evasive about the German rocket program, referring to the V-2 rockets as “forerunners to space travel” rather than as instruments used to rain death upon our allies in Europe. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer responsible for the V-2, gives a talk about multistage launches. Von Braun is movie-star handsome and looks disturbingly like a textbook illustration of what Hitler’s anthropologists meant by the term Aryan. His English is extremely fluent, but his unmistakable German accent must have sounded jarring to an American audience not all that many years after the war.

Man in Space dramatizes the experiences astronauts were expected to encounter, especially the experience of weightlessness. “How will man’s subconscious mind react,” the cartoon voice-over asks, “to his first experiences with space travel? Will he not suddenly be aware of his precarious situation trapped in a tiny metal box floating through the incomprehensible nothingness of space? We do not know.”

The idea of the astronaut evolved significantly in 1959, the year the Mercury astronauts were chosen. Crew-cut, Caucasian, and confident, most were veterans of World War II or Korea or both. They were all husbands and fathers. They embodied the contradictions embedded in the American masculine ideal: they were military men (rule followers, patriots) on the one hand and test pilots (steely-eyed maverick cowboys) on the other. Their names tripped off the tongue: Carpenter, Cooper, Glenn, Grissom, Schirra, Shepard, and Slayton. They were handsome and daring. Asked at their first press conference whether they would be willing to launch into space tomorrow, they all raised a hand. Some of them raised two. Even for those of us who hadn’t been born yet then, in many ways what we imagine when we say the word astronaut is still those seven men.

Stories about astronauts are stories about risks. It is precisely the risks they take that make us admire them, that makes the wonders they encounter so wondrous. Tom Wolfe started writing about the Mercury astronauts after he met some of them at the last Apollo launch; in a foreword to The Right Stuff, Wolfe describes his motivation for writing the book: to understand what gave the astronauts the courage to undertake such daring missions. “What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle … and wait for someone to light the fuse?” The answer, as Wolfe constructs it, is the so-called Right Stuff. He uses an extended analogy with the ancient concept of single-combat warfare—the strongest combatant from each army would fight each other one-on-one. By doing so, the single-combat warrior took the burdens of an entire war upon himself, risked death so none of his countrymen would have to. At the same time, the single-combat warriors were “revered and extolled, songs and poems were written about them, every reasonable comfort and honor was given them, and women and children and even grown men were moved to tears in their presence.” More than the best and the brightest, more than role models, the Mercury astronauts embodied the best we were capable of. Astronauts still do. They are our avatars for our dreams of spaceflight, for our dreams of escaping Earth.

The world was divided into those who had it and those who did not. This quality, this it, was never named, however, nor was it talked about in any way.

As to just what this ineffable quality was … well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life…. No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite.

Yet Wolfe describes a growing concern among the astronauts: they were accustomed to testing themselves and besting one another through their flying, but the Mercury capsule itself would require no piloting. We tend to forget from our vantage point in history that even as the astronauts were chosen there was still controversy over whether space travel should involve humans at all. Robotic spacecraft could send back scientific data at half the cost, pragmatists pointed out; public opinion on the issue was divided. In 1960, President Eisenhower refused NASA’s request to fund the first steps in the proposed Apollo program—a three-man spacecraft and a rocket powerful enough to get to the moon—because his Science Advisory Committee had informed him that the motives for a moon shot involving astronauts were “emotional compulsions.” If this seems like a laugh line now that we know Apollo was in fact funded and did in fact carry out its missions successfully, it’s useful to keep in mind that this analysis was also pretty accurate.

The debate over whether it’s important for humans to go to space is a debate about the dream lives of taxpayers. The scientists and engineers didn’t see the point of sending astronauts, but the people who romanticize spaceflight—the ones who want to see their science fiction fantasies come true—felt in their geeky hearts that sending astronauts to space, seeing human protagonists for our stories of leaving Earth, was in fact the whole point. And those geeks won. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon was devoured, and loved, by Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and Goddard, the three geniuses who developed rocketry more or less simultaneously and in isolation from one another; it was also read and loved in childhood by Wernher von Braun, who developed the rocket that actually achieved the goal. Viewed from more than a century on, the most outlandish bit of invention in Verne’s novel is the idea that a flight to the moon could be funded entirely by a subscription service—regular citizens all over the world voluntarily paying into the project with no hope of being paid back.

The Mercury Seven were so deluged with media requests for their time that they signed contracts with Life magazine for the exclusive right to their personal stories. Life paid them half a million dollars, a great deal of money for astronauts who were still living on military salaries, and gave them the added benefit of letting the astronauts and their managers at NASA control the story that reached the public. The Life contract did as much to cultivate and burnish the image of what it means to be an astronaut as anything else NASA did. One of the reporters for Life later admitted:

I knew, of course, about some very shaky marriages, some womanizing, some drinking and never reported it. The guys wouldn’t have let me, and neither would NASA. It was common knowledge that several marriages hung together only because the men were afraid NASA would disapprove of divorce and take them off flights.

As Wolfe describes it, the risks of single-combat warfare earned the astronauts certain privileges (“every reasonable comfort and honor”), and drinking and womanizing were among them. Historian Margaret Weitekamp writes, “Such macho excesses did not worry NASA decision makers. The space agency viewed this particular kind of manhood as part and parcel of the talents NASA needed.”

I read The Right Stuff for the first time while I was researching my first novel. When I went back to the book before interviewing Serena Auñón, I found a note in the margin, in my own handwriting, that I didn’t remember writing: “A man is the opposite of a woman, and he is also the opposite of a monkey.” It was in a chapter about the astronauts’ medical testing at the Lovelace Clinic in Arizona. A monkey was going to make the first flight, attacking the definition of astronauts from one side; simultaneously, the definition was being attacked from the other side by women pilots who were demanding to know why they couldn’t be included in the space program.

A strange precedent had been set in the early days of the airplane—promoters had encouraged women to learn to fly and to do so publicly, with the idea that seeing a woman in lipstick and heels climb into a cockpit and fly away would encourage the public to think of aviation as easy and safe. As a result, there was an unexpectedly high number of very qualified women pilots around the time the Mercury astronauts were chosen, and some of the women wanted to go to space. A small group organized themselves to approach NASA.

The women were experienced pilots. Many of them had broken records; some had broken the sound barrier. Their efforts to get NASA to recognize them as potential astronaut candidates were met with evasion. When the women managed to gain access to the same rigorous physical and psychological testing the Mercury Seven had gone through at the Lovelace Clinic, thirteen of them passed. Some of the women beat records set by the men. By doing so, these thirteen women managed to create enough pressure that a congressional hearing was held to address the question of women joining the astronaut corps. In July 1962, only a few months after his triumphant orbital flight, John Glenn testified at the hearing and argued against the inclusion of women in space with a remarkable piece of circular logic:

I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized really. It is just a fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order. It may be undesirable.

Margaret Weitekamp notes that Glenn’s assertion of essentialism (“it is just a fact”) is at odds with his attempt to justify and explain these roles—not to mention his willful ignorance of the women testifying at the same hearing who did, in fact, “fly the airplanes.”

Six of the seven Mercury astronauts got to fly in space, each of them setting a record or achieving a “first” of some kind. (The seventh, Deke Slayton, would get his chance on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.) Once the moon program was under way, five more classes of astronauts were chosen and trained. As their numbers grew, it became harder to keep track of their names and faces, as it had been possible to do when there were only seven. But the word astronaut still meant the same thing, and in July 1969 everyone knew the names of the three men who were on their way to the moon to fulfill Kennedy’s challenge.

The seventies were a dead period in the history of the American astronaut. Two projects were cooked up to use leftover Saturn V rockets that had been assembled before Apollo was canceled: Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. But no new astronauts were recruited between the class introduced in August 1969 and the new batch presented to the public in January 1978, over eight years later. By that time, the Mercury Seven were past fifty years old. This was during a period you may recall being associated with a “malaise” (though President Carter never actually used that term), a post-Vietnam distrust of anything having to do with the military or government. What it would mean to be an astronaut in this era would have to be different from what it meant for the Mercury astronauts.

The new class of astronauts introduced in 1978, soon dubbed the Thirty-Five New Guys, was the largest astronaut class ever chosen and was profoundly different from the classes that had come before. The TFNGs were introduced at a press conference at Johnson, and their uniqueness as a class was apparent from the moment we set eyes on them. With larger crews of up to seven on each flight, the shuttle did not require that all astronauts be able to fly the spacecraft, removing the official barrier that had kept women out of the astronaut corps. Some of the new astronauts were doctors or scientists, some were women, and some were African American. One was Asian American. Two were Jewish. NASA had never had a policy against minority astronauts (just as it had not had a policy specifically prohibiting female astronauts), but the group of military test pilots from which potential astronauts had been drawn had included almost no minorities.

For a bit of perspective: at the same time the Mercury astronauts were being chosen, a nine-year-old African American boy was being asked to leave his town’s whites-only public library in Lake City, South Carolina. Fourth-grader Ronald McNair refused to leave until he could check out the books he had chosen, prompting the librarian to call the police. McNair eventually earned a PhD in physics from MIT, was selected in the astronaut class of 1978, and flew in space for the first time in 1984. He was killed in the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. The library where he was once denied service is now named for him.

The women astronauts were a late-seventies dream of second-wave feminism with their graduate degrees in science and engineering, their feathered hair and lip gloss. I thought they looked fantastic. Rhea Seddon even looked a little like my mother, with her blond flip and her petite frame. My mother had been one of the first women to graduate from her law school; Rhea Seddon was a surgeon and would be one of the first women to go to space. The role of astronaut, the role that defined masculinity like none other, was now open to young women, young mothers, even. To some people this meant an important barrier had fallen, as when as a few years later Sandra Day O’Connor would be appointed to the Supreme Court, and a few years after that Geraldine Ferraro would run for vice president. To many, the fact that space travel was now a challenge women were capable of facing meant that it was no longer exciting. Weitekamp: “the very presence of women in orbit would indicate that space no longer remained a battlefield for international prestige.” Wernher von Braun, asked about female astronauts in the sixties, had joked that the men in charge were “reserving 110 pounds of payload for recreational equipment.”

This is the odd thing about the shuttle era: it wasn’t only that the ranks of astronauts were infiltrated by women, nonwhites, nonmilitary, and nonpilots. It wasn’t only that the astronauts were now numerous and anonymous. More than that, the vehicle itself changed the nature of what it meant to fly in it. A vehicle that can only go to low Earth orbit, can come back safely to land on a runway, exactly as you and I do at our local unexciting airports, diminishes, for some, the entire meaning of spaceflight. Stories about astronauts are stories about risk. So if we imagine the risks to have changed, the astronauts had to have changed as well.

As the program has gone on, thirteen more classes of astronauts have been chosen since that groundbreaking class of 1978, for a total of 335 American astronaut candidates altogether. Viewed another way: of all the American astronauts in the history of NASA, 55 were accepted into the corps during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo “heroic” era, and 266 were accepted during the shuttle era. Yet if you can name any of them off the top of your head, they are probably heroic-era astronauts, with the possible exception of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

Part of what it means to be an astronaut today is that the “firsts” are all used up. Not only the first human in space, the first to orbit Earth, the first spacewalk, and the first to walk on the moon—these were all in the history books before Serena or I was born—but the demographic firsts as well. Serena Auñón is a Hispanic woman, but when she goes to space she will not be the first woman in space, the first astronaut of Hispanic descent in space, or the first Hispanic woman in space. Nor will she be a first for any of these categories to live on an orbiting space station. If she were to one day set foot on the moon, of course, she would be achieving any number of firsts (including first astronaut to walk on the moon who was born after the most recent moonwalk), but there are no plans for this under way. Maybe it’s a good thing for this crop of astronauts that they don’t have to go to space as representatives of demographic groups anymore—what sort of pressure did it put on Sally Ride not only to prepare for her own responsibilities on her mission but also to bear the burden of representing all female humans in history? When Serena goes to space she will bear no such burden; her every move will not be scrutinized as a data point in an argument about whether certain types of people can or can’t be astronauts. It’s been established that they can. She can go as herself.

More than 3,500 people responded to the 2007 call for applicants for new astronauts. That pool was first culled for those who didn’t meet the basic requirements, then winnowed again. Semifinalists were brought to Houston in groups for interviews and medical tests. The finalists were brought back again for even more interviews. The screening process has put increased emphasis on psychological fitness since the scandal caused by Lisa Nowak, the astronaut who drove from Houston to the Cape with intent to harm the girlfriend of a fellow astronaut. NASA hopes to avoid future embarrassments like this one by identifying applicants with psychological problems, but everyone seems to agree that it’s impossible to predict who will and who will not crack under the pressure.

The day of my appointment to talk to Serena Auñón on the phone, I type up a tidy list of questions to ask her. At the appointed time, I hang a sign on my office door warning people not to knock on it, then dial the number I was e-mailed by the Johnson Space Center media liaison. A few rings, then someone picks up.

“Good morning, Astronaut Office?” a friendly female voice answers. This is a delightful way to answer a phone, I think, but I don’t say anything about it out loud. I’m suddenly taken back to Oriana Fallaci’s description of the Astronaut Office in 1967:

[A] very long corridor with a lot of doors, each opening into the office of a new astronaut. Each door is generally wide open so that you can see the astronaut sitting at his desk surrounded by papers and pencils—say about twenty pencils to each astronaut. Why the astronauts should have so many pencils no one has ever been able to explain to me.

I mention my appointment with Serena, and the woman puts me through. Serena answers on the first ring. She seems comfortable on the phone, more at ease than when I saw her at the rollout.

“I’m going to be eating my lunch while I talk to you,” she announces with a smile in her voice. “So excuse me in advance if I make chewing sounds in your ear.” Even as an astronaut candidate who hasn’t been assigned to a flight yet, she is already on a busy schedule learning the systems on the ISS and the Soyuz, training for spacewalks in the underwater mockup, and studying the Russian language intensively. Serena is warm and friendly when I explain my nebulous-sounding project. “My mom is a novelist too,” she tells me, “and her name is also Margaret. So I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

I start out by asking her what made her want to become an astronaut. Serena answers that she was inspired by watching shuttle launches as a child and that when she told her parents she wanted to be an astronaut, they didn’t laugh at her. Her father encouraged her to study engineering, as he had. So she did, earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, then went on to medical school and then to work as a flight surgeon for NASA. Serena tells me she didn’t make any choices specifically in order to make herself a more appealing candidate to be an astronaut; she says that at every stage she chose to follow her passion.

I ask Serena whether there are personality traits that she and her fellow recruits have in common. I mention the Right Stuff stereotype and the way it seems to cling to the job.

“Honestly,” Serena says, “the biggest thing I’ve found is that they’re all so down to earth it will shock you. You wouldn’t know walking in the door that this person has flown on the ISS. They are sisters and brothers and moms and dads and have all the same interests that other people do, like going to movies and going to sporting events.” She allows that while in the sixties NASA was looking for military pilots, the astronaut corps is now made up of “scientists, researchers, physicians … now when we look at flying to ISS, they really look at how people perform in extreme environments, how well they’re able to handle their own weaknesses, how people get along. That’s what they’re looking for.” In other words, NASA is no longer looking for the badass loner maverick cowboy; it is looking for team players, people who can keep from getting on each other’s nerves.

Serena tells me that every new astronaut is assigned a mentor when he or she arrives at Johnson Space Center in Houston, an experienced astronaut who can help gain entry to the sometimes-bewildering NASA culture with its alphabet soup of acronyms.

“That’s interesting,” I answer. “If it’s not inappropriate, can I ask who your mentor is?”

“Oh, sure. It’s Doug Hurley,” she says. Doug Hurley is a Right Stuff type Marine pilot who is scheduled to fly on Atlantis’s last mission. It’s interesting that she was assigned a mentor who was not a woman, not a minority, and not a scientist, despite there being plenty of astronauts in the corps who would meet one or more of those criteria. Maybe it means that things have progressed to a point where these factors are not as prominent as they once were, that Serena and Doug are well matched in terms of personality, or that they knew each other from Star City when Serena was his flight surgeon. “He’s someone I trust,” Serena says with genuine warmth in her voice.

I wonder what John Glenn thinks of this turn of events in the history of the astronaut, that getting along with others is now prized over lightning-fast reflexes or superhuman daring, that Serena’s place in the astronaut corps is so unremarkable that Doug Hurley, a Marine pilot like himself, would be assigned to mentor a nonpilot Hispanic woman, and that the two would be great friends. Later, I would read that when Doug Hurley’s wife, Karen Nyberg, flew her own mission to space, a six-month stint on the International Space Station, Hurley took care of their son. He shut down reporters’ attempts to define his parenting as an unusual or excessive burden—he pointed out to the Houston Chronicle, “Every other man up on the space station has children, too. Why is it different for her?” Yet as published, the piece focuses on his burdens over her accomplishments and bears the subtitle “Mr. Mom.”

“So, I have this question I’ve been asking as many people as I can,” I tell Serena. “What does it mean that we have been flying American spacecraft in space for fifty years and now have decided to stop?”

“Yeah, that’s a tough question,” she says. “It’s true that this is a weird time. This is a gap when we don’t have an American vehicle. It’s the first time we’ve really had to reeducate people about the space station. Now that shuttle is retiring, we are hearing more about the ISS, and maybe that’s a good thing.

“I find myself explaining to people a lot what the state of our space program is,” she says. “People think that NASA is shutting down, or that Johnson Space Center is shutting down.”

“I’ve heard visitors say that at the Cape,” I say. “People show up and are surprised the facilities are still there.”

“Right,” Serena says. “It’s like people thought shuttle was all there was. Now that shuttle will be gone, we’ll have the chance to let people know what else we’ve been doing all this time.”

“Look, it may be kind of sad, but we are ending this program successfully,” she points out. “People should be proud of that.”

We are proud of that, I tell her. I know this from seeing the people who show up at launches, the simple joy they take in seeing spacecraft leave Earth. At the same time, this statement hinges on a definition of success I’m not sure everyone would agree with.

Most Americans probably couldn’t name a single active astronaut. Yet there is still something about the way an astronaut looks in a blue flight suit. Fit, fearless, competent. Ready to take on the burdens of our dreams. When I ask Serena about the flight suit, what it’s like to put it on and go out to meet the public, she laughs.

“It’s true, the flight suit does energize people,” she says. “And our job is to inspire. What helps inspire me is knowing that kids of today know what that blue flight suit means, and they care. It’s hope and promise of the future, and hopefully it symbolizes someone they can look up to.”

“What’s it like,” I ask her, “when you’re in a bank or getting your taxes done, and someone asks you what your occupation is, and you get to say ‘astronaut’? Is that the best thing ever?”

Serena laughs happily and at first seems to be at a loss as to how to answer. I go on.

“I mean, it’s like, when someone asks you what your job is, answering ‘I’m Batman.’”

Serena laughs some more, and I’m about to apologize for putting her on the spot when she finally replies.

“It is pretty cool,” she says. “I’m not going to lie. Every time I say it, I get to remember it’s true, and maybe at some point it will get old, but—it hasn’t yet.”

When we talk about the future, Serena repeats the standard-issue Charles Bolden talk about how commercial ventures will be up and running by 2016—17. I am as skeptical as always about whether SpaceX or any of the other space startups can achieve human spaceflight on anything like the time frame we are being promised. Yet I have to admit this happy talk sounds better coming from a member of the astronaut corps than it does coming from a politician. Serena has put everything at stake hoping for the happy talk to come true, and at least for the time I’m talking with her, I feel it can come true too.

I didn’t have much of a relationship with the Mercury astronauts at first. Even as I started writing my Challenger book, I found the shuttle astronauts more accessible, more human, more like people I knew. Part of this appeal was that some of the shuttle astronauts were women, but also that they did things like juggle and do somersaults, clowned around in weightlessness. They seemed to have a sense of humor about it all. They took the time to enjoy it. The Mercury astronauts were all military pilots, laconic and square-jawed. They’d been given a tough job to do and they did it with machine-like precision. They brooked no goofing off.

It wasn’t until I was well into my research, well past the Right Stuff stage and into individual accounts, that I started to see the Mercury Seven as individuals and thus started to love them. Gus Grissom was the one I understood first, with his engineering degree and his hangdog expression always recognizable among the others. John Glenn, of course, has a boyish bow-tie appeal and a charismatic kind of intelligence. Gordo Cooper, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton. One by one I started to be able to pick them out and started to call them by their first names. Soon I know the Gemini and Apollo astronauts as well. Neil Armstrong has a goofy sincerity. Gene Cernan has a tough visage right out of a spaghetti western. Michael Collins lends a folksy, humorous light touch to the most serious or technical of discussions. Alan Bean exudes gratitude for his adventures more than the others and has a huggable grandpa quality. And so on. I understand that I don’t actually know these men at all, that the simple caricatures I have made of them in my head are not the same as actual human beings. But still it’s irresistible to indulge in this kind of hero worship, because this is precisely their job.

When I think back on how those first six women astronauts looked to me as a child, I remember a fierce admiration that’s hard to describe. It has a lot to do with the possibilities of competent femininity. This was only a few years after Star Wars came out, after all, and infected a generation of girls with the role model of Princess Leia. In that scene when we first see her, when her spaceship is being boarded by storm troopers, she steps out of the shadows warily, holding a blaster muzzle-up beside her head. Baby-faced, with that strange sleek hairdo picking up red alarm lights, her face in a serious glower. Her lip gloss is perfect. She is beautiful, and she is ready to commit violence in pursuit of values larger than herself. I saw that again when the women astronauts were introduced. I remember the first time I saw them, in some footage on the evening news, all of them leaning against a fence. They looked fantastic.

A few years later, the space shuttle documentary The Dream Is Alive I saw at the Air and Space Museum showed me Judith Resnik sleeping in space. In that film, she no longer looks uncomfortable, as she had leaning against the fence. She smiles at her male crewmates and somersaults in space. She no longer wears lip gloss, but she doesn’t have to. Her femininity is no longer as marked as it once was; already it’s no longer as remarkable. She belongs in space, it seems to the children watching her for the first time—at least, until she dies on her way to space in 1986.

I’ve been talking to my fellow Americans about what they will miss about spaceflight, and I’m gratified by how many people share my simple love for the astronauts, both the famous ones and the obscure ones. A lot of women my age remember those first six and the way they seemed to open up possibilities for all of us. When I talk to people about the astronauts, about the end of American spaceflight, they want to know whether the shuttle is really ending, whether anything can be done to save it, as I asked Omar the first time I met him for Family Day. I find it depressing to have to explain to these people why nothing can save it now. And I hadn’t realized how much, even now, people still hope it could be saved.