Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight

[The astronauts] would get in their cars and go barreling into Cocoa Beach for the endless, seamless party. And what lively cries and laughter would be rising up on all sides as the silvery moon reflected drunkenly on the chlorine blue of the motel pools! And what animated revelers were to be found!

—Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

And out on the beaches and the causeways and river-banks, another audience was waiting for the launch. America like a lazy beast in the hot dark was waiting for a hint in the ringing of the night…. In bed by two in the morning, he would be up by four. An early start was necessary, for traffic on the road to the Press Site would be heavy.

—Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

CHAPTER 7. Good-bye, Atlantis

STS-135: July 8, 2011

A million visitors are expected to descend on the Space Coast for the last launch of the space shuttle program on July 8, 2011, more than have visited since the launch of Apollo 11. In the weeks and days leading up to it, I see more and more news stories about the end of shuttle. Some are elegiac, focusing on layoffs and the loss to the economy in central Florida. Some strike an optimistic tone, implying that the end of shuttle will open the door for the Next Thing. In reality, the only Next Thing on the books is the Space Launch System, a stripped-down version of the canceled Constellation program. SLS is discussed as a replacement for shuttle with varying degrees of credulity about whether it will ever fly. But anyone who knows anything about how NASA gets funded knows that SLS has no long-term budget. To its critics, SLS is not a vehicle for getting astronauts to space so much as it is a mechanism for allowing politicians to avoid taking responsibility for canceling the future. It’s a talking point, a place to put our hopes, but whether it will ever take astronauts to space remains to be seen.

When I make the trip from Knoxville to the Space Coast this time, two months after the launch of Endeavour and five weeks after the rollout of Atlantis, it’s an easy drive. I’ve done it so many times now, I know all the landmarks by heart—the change in scenery when Tennessee becomes Georgia, which always reminds me of a line from Flannery O’Connor: “Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills.” Roadside shacks, shopping malls, rest stops with peaches and boiled peanuts. The thickening traffic around Atlanta. I was curious to see whether the WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE? billboard would come down after the birth certificate was revealed between Discovery’s last launch and Endeavour’s; it did not. A Cracker Barrel I’ve become especially fond of in Valdosta, Georgia. As I pass into Florida after dark, the terrain becomes more tropical, palm trees appearing, the humidity thickening. I cut across the state on 528, a road that for some reason demands nearly seven dollars in tolls, at four different tollbooths, to travel about fifteen miles. The toll workers are invariably friendly and alert, no matter how late I pass through. This is how I know I’m almost at the Space Coast, when all the change in my ashtray has been handed out to four smiling, Hawaiian-shirted toll workers. When I was here last, I accidentally got into the lane reserved for people with those devices on their cars and missed the tollbooth altogether; weeks later I received a bill in the mail, complete with an image of my car speeding past the camera. I hung up the ticket on the corkboard in my office along with my other space souvenirs. Now I know which lane to stay in, and my change is at the ready.

After the third tollbooth, I leave the window open as I accelerate back into traffic. It’s one of the small pleasures of cross-country driving: the feeling of accelerating away from a tollbooth, the perfectly legal yet still thrilling feeling of flooring the gas and letting the hot, humid night rush in past me.

I pay my last toll on 528 and approach the Space Coast a few minutes after midnight. The press badging office is scheduled to open for the day at 1:00 a.m., and even though it means I’ll get even less sleep, I decide to drive out there and get badged up before checking into my motel. For this launch, I’ve managed to get press credentials for the first time by pitching a story to my local newspaper. Credentialing, it turned out, is a byzantine and archaic weeks-long process that involves a NASA employee speaking with my editor on the telephone to confirm that I exist, am a published writer, and am not a terrorist. It had been a harrowing wait to hear back from the media office—I still hadn’t heard back the day before I needed to leave for Florida. When I’d finally called, the harassed-sounding woman on the phone promised to e-mail me, and when she did, saying that my application for credentials had been accepted, I burst into tears of relief at my computer.

The Press Site is closer to the launchpad than I’ve ever been: the site from which Norman Mailer watched the launch of Apollo 11, the site from which Walter Cronkite narrated the moon landings, the site from which all the space journalists have watched all the launches. Over twenty-seven hundred journalists from all over the world are expected to cover this launch (also a record unmatched since Apollo 11), and I hope not to get caught in the line for badges behind too many of them.

The press badging office turns out to be a tiny shack on State Road 3, a fluorescent-lit Apollo-era building staffed by a few slightly harried but extremely competent middle-aged women, the same women who spoke to everyone’s editors on the phone. A hand-painted fifties-style sign warns us not to use the office phones, a quaint reminder of a time before each journalist carried his or her own.

A couple of other journalists are there ahead of me, chatting up the women behind the counter with the easy rhythm of coworkers. The journalists clip on their badges, both men in their fifties who have the type of physique that comes with eating bad food and sitting at press sites and on press buses for twenty-hour days. When it’s my turn to check in, the woman behind the counter seems mildly irritated that I don’t already know what to do—apparently most journalists who are covering this launch have been here many times before. I’m supposed to fill out a form with information about the media organization I’m representing and my emergency contacts. The media center woman looks up my name while I sign a form agreeing that I won’t participate in unprofessional behavior, which includes, but is not limited to, peddling materials for profit, possessing alcoholic beverages or firearms, and autograph-seeking.

Then the woman asks for my name again, this time asks me to spell it. She looks through her files a second time.

“Knoxville News Sentinel,” I answer. She reaches the end of her files and starts over, a doubtful look on her face.

My heart starts pounding. There’s been a mistake, I didn’t get press credentials at all, I’ll have to find somewhere else to watch the launch from even though all the good spots have been taken for days. While I wait, a few more journalists straggle in (again, all men in their fifties), give their names, and greet the media office women like old friends.

“When did you get your confirmation you would be credentialed?” the woman asks.

“The day before yesterday,” I answer. “I can show you the e-mail I got.”

“Yeah, okay, that would help,” she says. She comes over, takes my phone from me, and peers at the e-mail I’ve called up there.

“Yup, you did get accepted,” she agrees. “I don’t know what happened. I’m gonna make you a badge.”

She types at a computer, then goes over to a laminator, which starts up with a hum. She pulls the piece of plastic off the machine, attaches a metal clip, and hands over my badge. It is still warm. I am pleased to discover that the badges have not changed since the Apollo era. Mine is much like those worn by all the journalists to have written about American spaceflight since Apollo 4.

When I finally check in to my motel—I’m at my Florida home, the Clarion in Merritt Island—it’s close to 2:00 a.m. The young Indian man behind the counter, whose name tag reads PRAMOD, remembers me from the last time I was here. He types something into the computer while on the wall, a large flat-screen TV shows weather forecasts with an image of a space shuttle behind the numbers. Storms are predicted for the morning, but that can always go either way here on the Space Coast.

“Here for the space shuttle?” Pramod asks cheerily while he slips my keys into their little envelope and writes my room number inside. I always accept two keys, so no one suspects I am traveling alone.

“Yes,” I admit. I would rather tell him I’m here for anything else—a cruise leaving from Port Canaveral, a vacation at the beach—anything that isn’t about to happen for the very last time tomorrow. I watch him for a reaction. He knows as well as I do that tonight might be the last time this motel will be fully booked. But he seems unbothered by my answer.

“Park your car here,” he says, drawing on the photocopied map with a ballpoint pen, as all motel clerks do. “Ice machine is here. Breakfast is here. Breakfast starts at 6:30. But you’ll be long gone by then, won’t you?”

“Yup,” I agree. “I’ll be long gone.” I find my room, haul my things inside, and set my phone to go off in two hours.

On the morning of July 16, 1969, the morning of the launch of Apollo 11, Norman Mailer woke up in a motel room. He writes that in the predawn darkness, “the night air a wet and lightless forest in the nose, one was finally scared.” He says that waking early to see a spacecraft launch reminds him of waking before dawn to invade a foreign beach, “an awakening in the dark of the sort one will always remember, for such nights live only on a few mornings of one’s life.”

“One was scared.” An interesting turn of phrase, isn’t it? Any high school English teacher will tell you this is a grammatical evasion no less than “mistakes were made” (which President Nixon would not utter until three years on). Was Norman Mailer constitutionally incapable of writing the words “I was scared”? Was Norman Mailer unwilling to tell us, without the veil of fiction, of his own terror when, as a young soldier, he woke before dawn, after only fitful sleep, in order to storm the beaches of the Philippines?

I love the smell of Florida night described as a “wet and lightless forest in the nose.” There is a smell here, unlike that of any other place I’ve known. That smell has become inextricable from the feeling of waking here in the dark, knowing that, not far away, the enormous ship is steaming, creaking and groaning with fuel, coming to life for its launch.

On TV, a newscaster reports from the Kennedy Space Center. Over her shoulder, the launchpad is lit up with floodlights. Atlantis is stacked there, its white tiles glowing against the orange of its external tank. The newscaster talks of nothing but the weather, and she’s not saying encouraging things. To use NASA terminology, the weather is only 30 percent go. Storms lurking offshore are expected to blow in later this morning, in time to interfere with the launch window. This launch attempt will likely be scrubbed, hours or minutes or seconds before liftoff. A million people will moan in unison, and we’ll get up even earlier to do all this again tomorrow. All preparations are still moving forward as planned, though—NASA took a lot of criticism in the early years of the shuttle program for calling off launches based on weather predictions that never came true.

“Reporting live from the Kennedy Space Center,” the young newscaster says before throwing back to the anchor, and because I have stood outside not far from where she is standing, I know she is being bitten by many vicious mosquitoes and pretending not to be. The huge countdown clock behind her continues marking time left until launch by hundredths of a second in huge orange numbers. It’s now T minus seven hours.

I dress in layers, observing NASA’s requirement that we wear long pants and closed-toed shoes. Last time I was here I met a writer who was turned away from his one and only chance to go inside the Orbiter Processing Facility because he was wearing shorts. I cover all exposed skin with SPF 50 and bring the bottle with me to reapply throughout the day. I bring notebooks and pens, snacks and a great deal of water. I bring my phone’s charger and my computer in case I fill up my phone with pictures and recordings and need to dump data in the middle of the day. I bring rain gear, cash, and a change of clothes in case I don’t have time to get back to my motel before going out to dinner with Omar and some other space friends after the launch. I make sure my press badge is securely attached to me.

I slip into my car. It is still fully night, and already sticky hot. The motel parking lot is packed to capacity with cars bearing license plates from all over the country. I feel I must be the only person awake. But out on the causeways, strings of taillights blink like fireflies, other people already heading to the Cape.

Right outside the entrance to the Kennedy Space Center squats an all-night gas station, its outdoor sodium lights pitched at such a brightness and angle it seems to be an alien starship just landed. The lights lure me in, as surely they are meant to, and I stop for coffee. Inside, the place is overrun, the coffee service area a wasteland of spilled creamer and abandoned stir sticks, devastated by the many space fans who came through even earlier than me. The people with whom I wait in line to pay are a nice mix of Launch People: first-timers overly energetic for this hour in the morning; launch veterans who play it cool, showing off their T-shirts and hats commemorating previous launches. I am wearing my press badge, and I feel a certain geeky pride when the other space fans in line notice it, then look closer at me, wondering whether I’m someone important.

As always in the hours before a launch, strangers nod and smile at each other with a shared sense of patriotism and common purpose. I hear a variety of Englishes spoken: Louisiana, New England, London. A sleepy blond mother whispers to her daughters in German. The man who rings up my coffee is wearing a name tag studded with shuttle mission pins. He smiles and tells me to have a great day, and as I thank him I wonder whether his business will suffer after the shuttle workers are laid off and few people drive past here on their way to work anymore.

I leave the gas station and find State Road 3 jammed with cars waiting to get through the checkpoint. It takes me forty-five minutes to travel about one mile, a rate reminiscent of that of the crawler transporter, by which time the sun is starting to come up. When I reach the booth, an armed guard looks over my badge with exquisite care, compares the name to the one on my driver’s license letter by letter, then scrutinizes my face in comparison with the photo on my ID.

“Have a good one, Margaret,” he says finally with a wink. I roll on. A few minutes later, I reach another checkpoint with another guard, and we go through the same process. This one calls me “young lady” and advises me to take it easy.

I almost miss the turnoff to the Press Site because once again I’ve made the mistake of using the Vehicle Assembly Building as a landmark. When I finally get there, the parking lots are already full, and another guard directs me to a nearby patch of grass to park on. As I lock up my car, I hear, then see, a black helicopter go by overhead. Then a few black SUVs. There is no mistaking it: the Astrovan is coming through. A small herd of people is running to the roadside to get a closer look.

The Astrovan convoy slows, then stops. This is unusual, the stopping. An astronaut in a blue flight suit pops out. He is along for the Astrovan ride—the astronauts going to space today are dressed in orange pressure suits. He has his picture taken with the gathered crowd. As he climbs back in, I peer at the windows of the Astrovan. I can see the astronauts’ hands waving, their faces lost in shadows. I can make out the lock rings on their wrists where their gloves will connect before their suits are pressurized.

The Press Site at the Kennedy Space Center is just south of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Back behind the handful of buildings visible from the road lurks its largest structure, the News Center. This is where press conferences are held before and after launches, and it is also where the NASA Media Office does most of its work. The main room of the News Center has rows of Formica desks with electric outlets and data plugs, though there are not nearly as many desks as journalists today, not by a long shot, and the ones set up here have the settled look of having staked their claims many hours, maybe even days, earlier. More journalists, some in suits and ties, have camped along the walls, having plugged in their laptops and devices wherever they could find an outlet. There is something thrillingly old-school about this way of gathering news—reporters watching the monitors, getting announcements, yelling questions to the Media Office people and scrawling down the answers in those steno notebooks all the print journalists use, typing stuff up on their laptops and talking urgently into their phones.

It’s pleasant for a first-time holder of press credentials to simply stroll around the Press Site. These structures of varying solidity have grown up at the Press Site over the decades, and, aside from a few losses to hurricanes, their permanence tends to correlate with age. So some of the networks and newspapers have concrete buildings that date back to Apollo 4, outlets that came later in the sixties have trailers, and the websites and foreign agencies have tents or awnings. Under each outdoor structure, a stand-up TV journalist does a standard prelaunch patter against the backdrop of the countdown clock and far-off launch stack, speaking various languages, many of them wearing shorts and flip-flops with their jackets and ties and makeup.

The overall architectural feel at the Press Site is distinctly utilitarian Apollo-era. The restroom building is a case in point, classic early-sixties sloping-roof exterior and salmon-pink tile interior. I’m surprised there were enough female journalists at the time the Press Site was built to merit the five or so stalls allocated to us. I take pictures inside the bathroom, especially of a janitor’s trolley emblazoned with old mission patch stickers. It pleases me to see that even the janitors are proud of what goes on here. I have long dreamed of seeing a launch from the Press Site, and though this facility is supposed to be a means to an end, I’ve become fascinated with the Press Site itself, with the history of the people who have written about spaceflight, the people who have dedicated their careers to the task of telling this story. Now that it’s the end, everything seems important to me, everything historic.

Now that I’m here, there is more waiting. After getting up so ungodly early, then idling in the line of creeping cars to show my badge to the guards, I had started to feel anxious that I had arrived too late, that I had underestimated the traffic, wouldn’t make it to the Press Site in time. Yet now it is still not seven, and the launch is over four hours off. The other journalists, of course, had to get here so insanely early because they are putting together their coverage in real time. I am one of very few credentialed writers who is free to roam around taking in the scene, who does not have to make sense of what I’m seeing immediately. It is a great luxury.

I make my way to the center of the Press Site, a grassy field bordering on the Turn Basin, which I’m now seeing from a different angle than I did at the launch of Endeavour. I move downfield, close to the lip of the Turn Basin, where all the photographers are set up, nearly shoulder to shoulder now. You’ve seen it: the forest of enormous lenses, all pointing in the same direction across the water. The photographers got here even earlier than everyone else in order to stake their claims for prime tripod real estate, and they are the only ones who have bothered to bring lawn chairs. Oriana Fallaci, at the Press Site for a test launch of the Saturn V, commented that “journalists are always a disaster when they get together,” that space journalists were even worse, women space journalists worst of all. In general, the feeling here at the Press Site is both friendly and every-man-for-himself. Leave a seat for a moment, a good vantage point, a socket where a phone can be recharged, and it will be snatched up unapologetically. This does not preclude a sense of friendliness or collegiality, however.

While I wait, I look again at what Norman Mailer wrote about his wait in this place:

It is country beaten by the wind and water … unspectacular country, uninhabited by men in normal times and normal occupations….

To the right of the photographers was a small grove of pure jungle. Recollections of his platoon on a jungle trail, hacking with machetes entered his head. A hash of recollections.

I look over to the right of the photographers. There it is, the small grove of pure jungle. The visible line between mowed field and jungle is a border between space center and wild preserve, space and Earth, home and an alien world. The jungle is a terrain we are supposed to fear—untamed, uncivilized, teeming with poisonous plant life and vicious animal life, populated by monkeys in the trees (an astronaut is the opposite of a woman and he is also the opposite of a monkey). But, in 2011, I have no associations with jungles other than—oddly—space shuttle launches. So many writers have made much of the rockets-and-alligators contrast inherent in the landscape of the Kennedy Space Center, but that contrast, so captivating to me the first few times I visited here, has now become one of the fixtures of spaceflight itself, and at this point I can’t imagine a launch of an American rocket without palm trees, humidity, and mosquitoes. I can’t imagine American spacecraft being serviced by anyone but Floridians. The Cape and its remarkable geography are as much a part of the story of American spaceflight as President Kennedy’s “before this decade is out,” as much as the test pilot corps from which the first astronauts were selected, as much as the blue NASA meatball logo, as much as the countdown.

I’m working, on north side of VAB. I’ll head to the front parking lot at T-15 min.

Omar has some flexibility in his schedule, and when he wants to see a launch—which he always does—he usually requests that day off work so he can be assured the freedom to find a good vantage point. So the fact that he’s chosen to be at work today means he’s guessing, as I am, that today’s attempt will scrub. He’s gambling on it, in fact, as there’s always a risk he could be engaged in some actual work at the moment of the launch.

Someone wandering by tells me that the weather is now no-go. The storm clouds must be blowing in.

“Are they continuing the countdown?” I ask him. If the answer is no, there will be an unspeakable traffic jam to get out of here, but then I’ll be able to go back to my motel, take a nap, have dinner with Omar and some other spaceworkers, meet some kooky space people to get quotes from, and do all this launch business again tomorrow after a decent night’s sleep. The guy looks down at his phone.

Atlantis was the fourth orbiter constructed, completed in April 1985. The name Atlantis comes from the oceanographic Research Vessel Atlantis, a sailing ship built in 1930. Atlantis was the primary research vessel for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and is the oldest serving oceanographic research vessel in the world. The undeniably nautical feel to the name somehow blends with the legend of the sunken city, and so the space shuttle Atlantis has always carried with it a sense of watery mystery.

The first flight of Atlantis was a secret mission for the Department of Defense, as were two of its subsequent five flights. These missions, presumably to deploy spy satellites, were conducted without the usual fanfare and without the typical flood of information from NASA. In the handouts given to reporters, a column titled “primary payload,” where generally one finds a long, chatty description of cargo and experiments, offers only a simple “D o D.” This secrecy, along with its sleek name, made Atlantis seem more streamlined, slicker and sneakier, than the others.

Atlantis was the first orbiter to launch an interplanetary probe, Magellan, which traveled to Venus. On its next flight, Atlantis launched the Galileo probe to Jupiter. Both probes’ missions were considered enormous successes, and both have greatly expanded our knowledge of the solar system. In the midnineties, Atlantis made seven consecutive flights to dock with the Russian space station Mir; when they were linked, Atlantis and Mir together formed the largest spacecraft in orbit to date.

Of all the orbiters, Atlantis was the one I could never quite get a handle on, the one that never really developed a personality for me, and so maybe it’s fitting that it should be the last, that it should be the one I have to say good-bye to.

Within the last hour before launch, the weather has been given a go, then a no-go again, then back to go. The countdown continues. While I’m making my way back to the field in front of the countdown clock, I hear the T minus nine minute hold has been released. The weather is go again, but I don’t assume it will continue to be. If I had to bet, I’d still put my money on a scrub today. It will be my first. The numbers on the huge digital countdown clock flow by, counting hundredths of a second.

People are starting to find their viewing spots. Omar is probably in place at the VAB parking lot. After the T minus nine hold is released, the photographers stop talking to each other and go into semimeditative game-face trances. They check and double-check their equipment.

Someone tall steps in front of me, covering the launchpad with his head. I tap him firmly on the shoulder. Without turning back to meet my eyes, the man steps back to where he had been. I still don’t think the launch will go off, but we are getting awfully close on the countdown.

Phones and handheld radios squawk out the voice of George Diller, the public affairs officer. He sounds excited but professional. The long pauses between his comments are probably no longer than they have been all morning, but they seem troublingly long, insanely long, now that we are hanging on every word.

Fuel cells going to internal, external tank camera being activated at this time.

At T minus thirty-one seconds, the countdown pauses. There is a problem with the oxygen vent hood—it is not retracting properly. These types of small issues often crop up and get resolved without delaying the launch, but the closer we get to T minus zero the more likely it is a small problem like this one could cause a scrub. I can picture the hood, which is nicknamed the “beanie cap” (as in the transcript of crew chatter before Challenger’s fateful launch—Commander Dick Scobee says, “There goes the beanie cap”). But I have no idea how difficult it might be to fix one. We wait and watch and listen.

At one, the solid rocket boosters ignite. I see the flash on the horizon, and the unmistakable orange of that flash makes me gasp with something like horror. I clasp both hands to my chest, because it suddenly hurts. I’m aware that this is a ridiculous gesture, but I can’t help myself. I’d become convinced this launch wasn’t going to happen today, that I’d get the chance to do this all again tomorrow. But once the solid rocket boosters ignite, they can’t be shut down. We are going to space.

Atlantis pulls itself away from the grip of gravity, slowly at first, then faster. The flames streaking from the shuttle’s main engines light up the sky. Once Atlantis has been in the air a few long seconds, the sound reaches us, that deeply satisfying rumble, and here at the Press Site that rumble reverberates everywhere, against the VAB, against the countdown clock, against Walter Cronkite’s CBS building and all the others, against the trees in Norman Mailer’s jungle, against our very hearts and bodies, against the hearts and bodies of those watching with us.

“Max Q,” speaks the voice of the public affairs officer one minute after launch. The shuttle has reached the peak of aerodynamic pressure. Then, at two minutes, the solid rocket boosters jettison for the last time.

Every space shuttle launch is a little different. With this launch, what I will remember most is the brightness, the intense orange flame that almost burns my eyes. Knowing that this launch is the last, and seeing it against the backdrop of such a gray and uncertain sky, I can’t help but see Atlantis’s brightness as some sort of defiance.

“Negative return,” speaks the voice of the public affairs officer, at four minutes after launch, the point past which the vehicle can no longer abort and return to Kennedy. He says it with a hint of a thrill in his voice, a satisfaction that everything has gone as planned, but to us standing with our heads tipped back, gawking at the sky, it sounds like a declaration, for the millionth time, that something we love is now over.

“ET separation,” capcom says. This means the giant orange fuel tank has dropped off to burn up in the atmosphere, that now Atlantis is traveling by itself, the black-and-white space plane alone. Ten minutes after launch, we wouldn’t be able to make out Atlantis even if the sky were clear. It would be too small; it’s gone.

“Atlantis is now on orbit,” the public affairs officer announces, and it’s hard to believe that those hands we saw waving from their Astrovan here on Earth a few hours ago are now floating weightless, waving at black sky with stars out Atlantis’s windows.

All around me, people are crying and hugging. The photojournalists are snapping pictures of people crying and hugging. I am still watching the now-empty sky, staring at the enormous fluffy column of steam Atlantis left hanging there, trying to absorb that this really happened, that the shuttle will really never launch again.

Before NASA sent men to the moon, when the Kennedy Space Center was still new, components of the Apollo spacecraft were constructed in California and brought here, romantically, by ship. They left port from the California coast and sailed south on the Pacific, made their way through the Panama Canal, then north again through the Caribbean and up the Gulf Stream to Cape Canaveral. The Gulf Stream had been discovered 453 years earlier by Juan Ponce de León who, we all agree now, was wrong to look for gold and the Fountain of Youth. These things weren’t here, and he killed many people trying to find them. He took slaves instead, and the way some accounts try to make excuses for his treatment of his fellow human beings reminds me of those apologists for Wernher von Braun who try to minimize his complicity with the Nazi regime that forced slave laborers to build his rockets. We remember Juan Ponce as an explorer, a man of courage and conviction. Like Wernher von Braun, like Norman Mailer, like Captain James Cook and the other ruthless men whose stories I have learned, Ponce de León believed that the vision in his mind was more important than anything else, more important than the people standing in his way. What he saw that spring day in 1513, when he climbed out of his stinking, flea-infested galleon, is oddly similar to what I see today. Miles of marsh, a hot sky, a lot of canebrake. He climbed back into his ship and moved on. He didn’t come back for eight years—the same length of time between the end of Apollo and the start of shuttle—and he came back that second time with the intention of creating a permanent colony. In between he wrote to his king, Charles V, begging for money: “That which is made or seen in those places where I shall go will be reported to Your Majesty upon my return, and I shall ask for favors. And from now on I pray they are brought to me, because I cannot imagine undertaking such a grand thing.” Like Christopher Columbus, with whom Juan Ponce had made his first voyage to the New World, he faced the problem of bankrolling a second voyage when the first had been found to be culturally and geographically thrilling but financially disappointing. His tone echoes that of a NASA budget proposal, referring to lofty goals and the grand attributes of a great nation in the face of profitlessness. As historian Robert Fuson writes, “There was a need for something spectacular to come out of the voyage if support for it was to be sustained.” On his second voyage to La Florida, Juan Ponce engaged in a battle with natives and died from an arrow wound to the thigh. The settlement he had dreamed of founding was a failure, and Florida would not be home to Europeans until the founding of Saint Augustine in 1561, forty years later—the same length of time since we’ve been to the moon.

What does it mean that we have been going to space for fifty years and have decided to stop? Maybe it’s only a fantasy that the explorers of the past were met with better funding and smoother travels. Maybe they all had to beg for money; they all found themselves doing less than had been planned, less than had been hoped for. They all compromised the morals that had been the ostensible inspiration for the voyage. Maybe it was true for them as much as it is for NASA, that their discoveries are celebrated only once they have been successful. Only in retrospect does the support seem to have been inevitable. Only in retrospect does the dream seem to have fully come true.

I think of Omar, who is still on the other side of the VAB. Like me, he had guessed today’s attempt would scrub, that he would be able to come back and see this tomorrow.

A minute goes by. Everyone out here is crying and hugging, texting, and describing what they saw all at once. Omar’s response finally comes through.

Back inside the News Center, a closed-circuit TV shows the White Room, the staging area directly outside the hatch to the crew cabin. This room is the territory of the closeout crew, whose responsibilities include strapping the crew violently into their seats one by one, making sure the right objects are inside of (and outside of) the spacecraft, closing the hatch, and pressurizing the crew cabin before taking shelter for launch.

The closed-circuit view of the White Room has shown these closeout guys all morning doing their job, which includes a lot of standing around and talking into their headsets. There were exciting moments each time one of the pumpkin-suited astronauts arrived to make last-minute preparations—donning cumbersome emergency parachutes, straightening out hoses and comm wires, then climbing through the hatch one by one to take their seats. There is always a fair amount of handshaking and shoulder-clapping, much of it ritualistic, maybe even superstitious. The closeout crew wear emergency equipment of their own—yellow safety harnesses and oxygen packs on their backs in case of disaster on the pad. They are trained, along with the astronauts, to escape clouds of toxic fuels by running down a bright yellow path painted onto the catwalk, nicknamed the Yellow Brick Road, and jumping into baskets that zip down trip wires the nineteen stories to the ground. None of this has ever been used in an actual emergency, and it’s possible none of it would help anyway. But it still serves to make the closeout crew seem like badasses. They are regarded by other spaceworkers with some degree of awe, partly because of the risk and importance of their work, and partly because of their proximity to the astronauts. Every description I have ever seen of the closeout crew has mentioned that they are the last to see and shake hands with the astronauts before they leave Earth.

Now, in the aftermath of the launch, we see in the White Room one of the technicians position himself in front of the camera. He holds up a sign printed on whiteboard. At one edge is printed an image of the launch vehicle, a billowing steam cloud forming under it, against a rippling American flag. In the center of the sign are printed the words:

He is, like most of them, a former-military-looking guy. His white ball cap bears the United Space Alliance logo. He stands before the camera, looking right into it, holding up his sign, and he appears to be in equal measure uncomfortable with the public nature of this act and pride-filled that he gets to carry it out. He steps away, his tool belt clanging against his legs, and is replaced by another member of the closeout crew, this one older, maybe in his fifties. His sign reads:

He too looks right into the camera, looking mildly embarrassed, but then he lifts his chin, almost defiantly, and holds the sign up a bit more. Both bashful and sincere, a combination I find somehow heartrending. The idea of all these introverts collaborating in this very extroverted gesture, knowing their images would remain for all time. He is replaced by another one, this one a little more smiley and chipper. His sign reads:

The next guy a little more laconic, straight-faced, but he too relifts his sign a few seconds into his turn, pushes it a bit more toward the camera.

He is replaced by yet another guy, proud to get to hold this particular sign. He is the only one to mouth the words on his sign, though he knows we cannot hear him. Then he salutes.

Last to go is a short man with a Wilford Brimley mustache. He is the chief of the closeout crew, Travis Thompson. He does not smile, and of all of them he looks most solemn, most self-conscious, maybe closest to tears. He is the only one whose headset is still plugged into the comm box behind him, a curling black cord tethering his head to the wall. He opens his mouth as if to say the words, but then chooses not to, or can’t. His sign says:

I watch all this on the monitor, feeling aware of the people watching around me. Some of them seem to be glued to the closeout crew’s messages and their implied import, as I am. Some of them seem to be moved nearly to tears by it, as I am. Some glance up at the monitor, register the signs, and keep talking to each other, messing with their cameras and their phones, moving about as if the screen were showing nothing other than the closeout crew going about their prescribed business.

I know I will look up this video online later, when I get back to my motel. It’s probably already on NASA TV—or if it’s not yet, it will be shortly. I know I will watch it again and again in an attempt to write about it, a document of a document. It’s the best way I know of to get a moment to hold still and reveal itself.

For each of these launches I have studied videos afterward and have noticed that I always see more in the videos than I did in real time. The real experience always goes too fast, is too multisensory—a fellow space fan brushing against my elbow at Endeavour, struggling to keep my balance on the roof of my car at Discovery, the eerie storm clouds, the merciless orange numbers of the countdown clock at Atlantis. The lived detail of each actual launch is too much to take in. But the videos, with their finite frames and running times, those I can put words to.

In recent years much has been made of the way our ever-present cameras and connections to social media interfere with our ability to live our lives in real time through our own senses. We are too busy photographing our lunches to taste them, the argument goes, too busy Facebook messaging our friends to talk to them or listen to them. To some extent I get this—when Omar chose not to try to tilt his camera to follow Endeavour’s path, he was choosing the lived experience over the burden of documenting it, and in that I think he chose well. Yet the video he shot contains a permanence that the real experience doesn’t, and as such it will be viewed by many people who couldn’t be at the launch, including people who haven’t been born yet, people for whom American spaceflight might have been only an idea, a vague claim, if not for Omar’s document of that moment that lets them experience a version of it for themselves.

I know I’m supposed to value lived experiences more than I do their digital records, but for me, this video in the White Room is not a simulacrum of something else; it is precisely what its makers intended it to be. The experience of watching this video, as with videos of launches and other events I will watch over and over, is an experience, just as seeing the real event was, and as I watch it, through my watching, each video becomes more of what it is about.

That night, I have dinner with Omar, three photographers, and a filmmaker. It’s a table only a shuttle launch could bring together—one woman and five men, all with drastically different backgrounds and interests, no two of whom live in the same state (one lives in New Zealand). But we chat happily together about what we saw today. We have chosen a local seafood restaurant popular with tourists, the kind of place with a lot of nautical bric-a-brac on the walls, restroom doors labeled BUOYS and GULLS. This place has been busy every time I’ve been here, but tonight it is truly overrun. Our waiter has the blank look of a person who has been harried for over four hours and has settled into his suffering, a look that tells us we won’t be getting our food any time soon.

People are made patient by unusual circumstances, and the familiar postlaunch sunburn-and-patriotism atmosphere prevails even though the waitstaff can’t keep drinks refilled quickly enough for anyone to really be drunk. We are all sleep-deprived and have the fuzzy giddiness that drunks and college students call “the second wind.” Rather than napping this afternoon, I drank coffee and stayed up to write pages and pages of frantic notes. The photographers stayed up as well, to work on digitally processing their shots. One of them, the photographer from New Zealand, has been up for over forty-eight hours.

We talk about previous launches we’ve been to, how they were different from today’s. As usually happens when people start comparing launch experiences, a lot of the stories are about spending hours at a viewing spot only to see the launch called off, the empty feeling of going home without having seen anything. It takes me a moment to realize that I will never see a shuttle launch scrub. For some reason this makes me feel triumphant, like I have won something.

“I’m scrubless!” I announce to the table. They applaud me politely. It’s a nearly unbelievable bit of luck—the chances of seeing four launches with zero scrubs are very low. The risk of having to return to Florida for multiple attempts for each mission was great enough to make me doubt whether I should embark on this project at all. I announce my scrubless status on social media, though most of my friends will have no idea what this word means. While I’m looking in my phone, I flip through images of the launch online—shots taken by people at this table, shots by photographers from Reuters and AP, shots from random people posting on Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. It’s perhaps too obvious to bear mentioning, but the number and range of photos is astounding, the different colors and moods of the same object, the same event, the same few minutes. Each one feels different, each carries a slightly different meaning. I receive via e-mail a photo taken by a new space friend, Anna, who was standing behind me—it’s a shot of the back of my head with Atlantis seeming to emerge from it. I show the others. This, I tell them, I will treasure forever.

One of the photographers at the table, famous for his surreally beautiful travel photographs taken around the world, mentions to us that he was referred to Omar by two different mutual acquaintances. It’s an unfamiliar experience to share Omar with other people. I usually have him to myself.

“I heard about this guy named Omar who worked for NASA, and then my other friend was like, ‘Look for Omar the security guard! He’s really cool!’”

I flinch inwardly at the phrase “security guard,” and watch Omar for his reaction. As usual he betrays none; his smile is as friendly as always. Since even before I met him in person, since I started to get an idea of what his job was, I sensed that Omar was not a security guard, but played a role more demanding and much more important. Now that I have been here as his guest on five different occasions, have seen his and his father’s dedication to the project of sending people safely to space, have seen his encyclopedic knowledge of the work that has gone on here before him, the term strikes me as even more inappropriate, even offensive. I want to speak up and correct the photographer’s misunderstanding, but I’m not entirely sure what I would say. Omar is an orbiter integrity clerk, a lay historian of American spaceflight, an ambassador for the Kennedy Space Center, a good friend, and a fine human being. I say nothing. No one else seems to think much of the phrase one way or the other.

Another photographer asks the table what’s next, what the next step in spaceflight is supposed to be. I’ve been taken aback throughout the day by how tenuous a grasp of space history and space policy many of my fellow credentialed media representatives seem to have. A few of us start to answer simultaneously.

“The launches to the space station will be contracted out to private companies like SpaceX—”

“A system called SLS, for Space Launch System I think, it looks like the Saturn V—”

Even to those of us who make a point of keeping up, all this is a bit mushy. Omar tells a story about a mobile launch tower designed for Constellation that was being built at Kennedy, a gantry I saw on my visit for Family Day. It’s now being dismantled, without ever having been used for anything, because Constellation was canceled. Some people were relieved when Constellation was canceled—I myself have referred to the decision as Constellation having been put out of its misery, and Buzz Aldrin called its cancellation President Obama’s “JFK moment.” The six of us at this table all have different reasons for being interested in spaceflight, and probably we all have different political views—but we all agree that this story about the gantry is infuriating.

Every time the shuttle takes off on the TVs, people raise their glasses and cheer.

As the six of us say our good-byes in the parking lot, Omar asks me whether I’ve decided to stay another day. I tell him I’m not sure.

“If you do, there’s a party tomorrow you should come to,” he says. “A lot of the space people on Twitter will be there. The NASATweetup people too.”

I’m not sure my family can spare me another day. But when I call home, Chris says they are doing fine, that I should do what I need to do so I won’t have to come back again. We’ve agreed this will be my last trip.

Today, the day after the last launch of the space shuttle, the Visitor Complex feels different. It’s busy—packed, in fact, with visitors. A lot of them wear the I WAS THERE shirts, and the festive mood persists, but these artifacts have changed somehow. I wander the displays, and all the space suits look forlorn in their display cases. I realize what it is: the last time I was here, only five weeks ago, Atlantis was making its way to the launchpad, and the Kennedy Space Center was a working spaceport. Now, everything has become historical. The mockup of the launch vehicle that greets us at the gates is, as of today, obsolete. Even while Atlantis orbits by in the sky above us, we know that never again will an orbiter be joined with an external tank and solid rocket boosters in that configuration. It’s now a historical display, demonstrating something that used to happen. The surge of anger and sorrow I feel about this surprises me.

I carry this glum feeling through my afternoon at the Visitor Complex. I sit in the Rocket Garden for a few minutes, looking at the old Titan and Redstone rockets, and try to console myself with the idea that the space shuttle will take its place among them. A spacecraft that is now obsolete, but that represented an important step on the path to the next thing. But without knowing what that next thing will be, it’s hard not to imagine this tourist attraction, with its boosterism and optimism for the future, becoming a depressing joke, an artifact of a more ambitious time.

On my way out, I pass through the gift shop. A table near the front always bears merchandise specific to the most recent launch, and a mob of sunburned people is now wedged there shoulder to shoulder, pawing through piles of shirts, while an employee tries to unpack a fresh box straight onto the pile. A ten-year-old girl near me picks up a shirt, looks at the tag, and starts to put it back.

“Don’t put it down!” her mother shrieks. Indeed, another woman was eyeing the shirt, ready to snatch it up if the girl had dropped it.

Outside, I stop at a refreshment kiosk. The man who rings up my bottle of water is in his forties. He wears space shuttle pins on his name tag, as the gas station attendant was wearing yesterday.

“It’s crazy,” I answer. “Do you think everyone’s here for the last launch?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next morning, as I pack up to leave, the parking lot at the motel is nearly empty. A chambermaid is the only person I see outside as I carry my bags to the car.

Pramod is at the front desk again when I stop in the lobby to settle my bill. He hands me my receipt with a flourish. We say good-bye and I turn to leave.

“See you for the next one,” he calls to my back as I’m almost out the door. I look back at him quizzically, but he doesn’t seem to be joking.

On the drive back, I talk into the voice memo app on my phone until its memory is full. I talk about the badging office, about the light in the lobby of the Port Canaveral Clarion at 2:00 a.m., about the people in the gas station outside the south gate of the Kennedy Space Center at 4:30 a.m., about the way the sun looks coming up over the strange marshes and foliage of the wildlife refuge. About the friendly guards and the unfriendly photojournalists, the color of the tile in the women’s bathroom at the Press Site, about the brightness of launch and about the people I met at the party, about what it means to be scrubless. I’ve been thinking of my scrublessness as a stroke of luck, of the time and money it’s saved me in return trips, but then I think of Oriana Fallaci’s account of a scrubbed launch attempt of an unmanned test flight in 1966.

Fallaci spent the extra two days afforded her by the scrub with the dozen or so astronauts who had made the trip. The scrub created a forty-eight-hour window during which neither she nor the astronauts had any obligations, and they spent the time sunning themselves and drinking beer by the motel pool. She got to know them, ate meals with them, got drunk with them, all because of the unscheduled days brought about by scrub conditions. I feel a sudden envy for this, for her unforgettable scene in which the astronauts in their swimming trunks take turns reciting from memory Mark Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

Maybe Oriana Fallaci’s moment was an even rarer one than Norman Mailer’s, because of scrub conditions, because of the pre-Apollo 11 pace, and because of her gender. A moment when a writer could breeze through a motel bar with a cigarette and a martini, to be greeted with “Hi, dolly” by the chief astronaut and to respond “Hi, Deke” in return. There’s a disconcerting feeling in Fallaci’s book that everyone she quotes—all the astronauts, the media handlers, and even von Braun himself—wind up sounding like Oriana Fallaci, like voluble Italians, speaking in great flowing lines with little filigrees of repetition at the ends. But her physical impressions of people, especially the astronauts, are unequaled by any other space writer I have read. Is it because men are loath to describe other men? Or because Americans are loath to describe anyone? Fallaci looks at the astronauts hard, indelibly, at their skin and their gestures and their clothes and their flashing teeth. She admires them, details her attraction to them, while also noting that they are aging prematurely, that the job is making them into old men before their time, as if they live more per year than do the rest of us.

As I’m trying to remember everything that happened over the past few days, everywhere I went, everything I saw, I keep returning to the fact that the astronauts are still in space right now, those people I saw riding in the Astrovan, completely normal-looking middle-aged people, are currently floating in space somewhere overhead. There is simply no getting used to this—not for space fans, not for spaceworkers, not for astronauts themselves. It has never become normal, even after fifty years, not even when we know this will be the last one.