Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight

It is one of the ironies of history that what is not discovered is often better remembered than what is discovered. This is certainly the case with Juan Ponce’s first journey to the land he called La Florida, for when one hears the name Ponce de León, the first thing that comes to mind is the Fountain of Youth.

—Robert H. Fuson, Juan Ponce de León and the Spanish Discovery of Puerto Rico and Florida

CHAPTER 9. The Future

Discovery Day, Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, April 19, 2012

SpaceX Dragon launch attempt, May 19, 2012

When I flip through all the notebooks I’ve been carrying back and forth to Florida over the past year and a half, I see the same sentence scrawled over and over again, in different pens under different dates: The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings. This always seems meaningful to me as I’m writing it, as if it will be the key to something, but I’ve never been sure what. The first time I wrote it, I was thinking of the many times in the past when it had seemed spaceflight might end—the early rocket failures before the successes of 1961, then the Apollo 1 fire, then the premature cancellation of Apollo, then the compromises and threats to the developing shuttle project. Then Challenger, then Columbia. Each of these events put its mark on the fate of the program, but only the last did in fact cause American spaceflight to end.

After the landing of Atlantis in July of 2011, I returned home again to try to make sense of the whole mess. I organized my receipts and labeled my photos and videos and uploaded all the texts in my phone. I save all of it, even the blurry photos, even the texts that are nonsensical out of context, because I never know what might help me piece together some detail, the detail that turns out to be that surprising spark that can illuminate it all.

I’d filled another notebook, which I added to the knee-high pile in my study. Coffee-stained, sunscreen-stained, margarita-stained, sun-bleached, and humidity-warped, some of their bindings breaking down from being left in my oven-hot car for long Florida afternoons. Some of them have grains of sand caught in their bindings, tiny smashed bugs, little bits of vegetation from those times I sat on the ground while I was waiting for something to happen. Stuck between the pages are brochures from Florida attractions, business cards from people I’ve met, a McDonald’s straw wrapper, ticket stubs from the Visitor Complex, a NASA meatball sticker, and a temporary tattoo of Yuri Gagarin’s helmeted head that one of the Space Tweeps gave me. Omar’s home address is scrawled on the back pages of at least three of them, and the cell numbers and Twitter handles of my new space friends. There are descriptions and half-descriptions and single-word triggers to remind me of the moments I’ve witnessed on all my trips to Florida, all the bizarre and beautiful and mundane things I have seen, all my research and all my childhood memories and my interviews and notes from the books I’ve read. The notebooks are as messy as the inside of my head, and I’m convinced that somewhere within them is the story I’ve been trying to write, the answers to the Question: What does it mean that we went to space for fifty years and now we are stopping?

And the books themselves: they’ve long since overfilled the shelves allocated to them, shelves that were already full after I finished my Challenger novel, and they’ve piled up in great vertical drifts that don’t seem like they should be able to balance. From time to time I’m inspired to try to organize the piles into categories: a JFK and Mercury stack, a Gemini and Apollo stack, a special stack for Apollo 11. A Kennedy Space Center stack including histories of Florida, the Cape, the voyages of Ponce de León. A shuttle development stack, an eighties-and-nineties shuttle stack, a Challenger disaster stack, a Columbia disaster stack. A Norman Mailer stack, his self-referential meditations on topics that always just eluded his understanding, like feminism or the Vietnam War or Hitler or Marilyn Monroe. But some books defy piling. What to do with, for instance, the science fiction novel Buzz Aldrin cowrote in the nineties? It includes scenes that take place on a fictional space shuttle, but it hardly goes with the factual shuttle books, nor does it seem to go with the Apollo 11 books, where I keep other titles by and about Buzz. The mass-market paperback floats from pile to pile, nagging at me every time it catches my eye. And what do I do with the books I’ve read about the voyages of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century, a subject that has nothing to do with anything except that two of the space shuttle orbiters were named for his ships, a connection that has led me to read about Captain Cook’s voyages late at night after my family is asleep, after I’ve written all I can for the day but still want to press forward on this project somehow, want somehow to be rocked to sleep on the creaking wooden sailing ships Discovery and Endeavour, their names and adventures evoking the odd image of galleons sailing straight up into the night sky with the aid of external tanks and solid rocket boosters?

I keep thinking at some point I will step back and the larger pattern will pop into focus. Sometimes I think I can almost see it out of the corner of my eye, almost sense a passing glimmer of an answer. When I pull out my notebook to try to catch it, I hesitate, not knowing how to start. I get a pen and write: The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings. Then I don’t know what to write next.

Even before the last launches, NASA had announced the final destinations for each of the orbiters—Endeavour to the California Science Center in Los Angeles, Atlantis to the Visitor Complex at Kennedy Space Center, and Discovery to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where I spent so much of my childhood. Each of the orbiters will be displayed in a different configuration: Endeavour will be stacked vertically as if for launch with a mock external tank and mock solid rocket boosters; Discovery will be standing on its wheels horizontally as if having just landed; and Atlantis will be hung from the ceiling, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle with its payload bay doors open and robotic arm outstretched, as if working in space. Omar approves of the multiconfiguration plan—he likes the idea that a visitor to all three exhibits would get to see what the shuttle looked like throughout its workflow—but he admits that he doesn’t care for the idea of Atlantis being displayed at an angle. “It’s like taxidermy,” he told me, with a look of distaste.

Omar and I have said many times that we both plan to be at the Discovery welcoming ceremony at Air and Space in DC, and I hope he is serious—partly because I’d like to see him, but also for the murkier motivation that I think it will be poignant to see him say his good-byes with Discovery, and I want that scene for my book.

In October, a few months after we saw each other at the landing of Atlantis, I send Omar a chunk of what I have been writing, about fifty pages that tell my experiences with the final launches of Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis. Family Day is left out entirely, as is the landing, as is a lot of other stuff he helped me get access to, and I feel self-conscious about how my shaping of the story will come across to Omar, who will know, better than anyone, what I am leaving out.

He corrects a technical error (diplomatically, of course)—I’ve misunderstood the meaning of the abort mode known as negative return. I’d written that negative return marks the point after which the shuttle could no longer safely return to Earth, when, in fact, Omar explains, negative return means only that the shuttle can’t return to the runway at the Kennedy Space Center. It can still land at one of the emergency landing sites elsewhere around the globe. Somehow, my error feels symbolic, maybe because the term itself is so poetic. It seems significant that I’d thought things were a little worse than they actually are.

Nearly six months later, I’m standing around with Omar in a roped-off VIP area in a large grassy field outside the Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport. This is a second site the Air and Space Museum added in 2003, a pair of hangars large enough to display more of the museum’s many airplanes, spacecraft, and other artifacts than can the smaller marble building on the National Mall that I still think of as being Air and Space.

The ceremony isn’t due to begin for over an hour, and while we talk, Omar and I watch the final stages of the setup. Folding chairs in the first two rows are marked with signs that read RESERVED FOR ASTRONAUTS, each one with a small American flag resting on it. The sound system is put through its final preparations; the opera singer who will perform the national anthem does a brief sound check, singing the song’s first line and then its highest notes, “and the rockets’ red glare …”

Omar is wearing a neon orange wristband that a few minutes ago I pried off my own wrist and slipped to him surreptitiously through a fence separating media and VIPs from the general public. I wasn’t even supposed to have press credentials myself, hadn’t thought to register for them, but last night at my hotel I ran into my space friends Anna and Doug, whom I met at the launch of Atlantis, and they let me tag along with them to the media registration table and allow myself to be mistaken for a journalist with the same publication. Once I had the orange wristband, it became clear to me what its value would be, that the spacious area directly in front of the dais was open only to accredited media and to VIPs designated by NASA—mostly astronauts, administrators, and museum officials. Omar and I had been texting each other all morning, and I was pleased with myself when I hit upon the plan to sneak him in, pleased that I could get him in somewhere he wouldn’t have been able to get into otherwise, as he has done for me so many times.

Discovery had left the Kennedy Space Center for the last time two days earlier. Omar was there working that day, watching and taking pictures as Discovery rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building on its way to the mate-demate device that would lift it atop the back of the shuttle carrier aircraft—I got to see his, and other space fans’, pictures of it all day on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Yesterday I drove from Knoxville to Washington, and it felt odd to head north instead of south, to drive eight hours rather than twelve. I’d thought the drive would be easier, but I didn’t find it to be so—I didn’t know any of the landmarks, never knew where would be a safe place to stop, how much farther I had to go. It was oddly disorienting.

Enterprise has already been pulled out of its old spot in the museum and parked on a paved area behind the dais. It’s already wearing the tail cone that will help stabilize it on its trip to New York. Discovery is going to be pulled up in the other direction, and the two orbiters will be posed nose to nose for a few hours, a rare sight.

Enterprise was the first orbiter to be constructed, assembled without engines or tiles for early flight dynamics tests. It was flown atop the shuttle carrier aircraft repeatedly to test the safety of the mated configuration, then was dropped from a plane and landed manually by astronauts to test its gliding abilities. All this happened in 1977, when I was in kindergarten. The original plan had been for Enterprise to be fitted with engines and to become the second working orbiter, after Columbia, but a number of design changes were made as Columbia was being assembled, making it more practical to refit an existing test frame as a new orbiter and to retire Enterprise. The test frame became Challenger, and Enterprise went on a goodwill tour of the world before being sent to Air and Space. It was in storage from 1985 until 2003, when the Udvar-Hazy Center opened and there was finally enough room to display it. The one thing people seem to remember about Enterprise is that it was going to be named Constitution until a letter-writing campaign convinced President Gerald Ford to ask NASA to change the name to that of the spaceship from Star Trek. When Enterprise rolled out of the plant where it had been assembled in Palmdale, California, it was feted in a ceremony including some of the original show’s cast. It’s a distinct moment of midseventies culture: in the pictures from that day, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, and NASA managers are all wearing leisure suits. I’ve never seen Enterprise in person, and I find it strange to look at. In size and proportion it’s identical to the other orbiters, as is its black nose. But the fuselage and payload bay doors are wrong, solid white without the familiar tiles that protect working space shuttles. And the whole thing is too clean, without the wear and tear that Discovery and the others have earned over dozens of space flights.

As we wait, Omar and I catch up on what’s been going on since we saw each other last. It doesn’t feel at all unusual to be standing with him in a grassy field with a lot of other people milling around waiting for something to begin, but it feels wrong not to be doing so in Florida. Omar always acts as a host, subtly, when we are together at the Cape, answering my questions, introducing me to people, making sure I get a clear view of whatever we are looking at. Here in DC he doesn’t know any more than I do, and I find that disorienting too.

“It’s the least I could do,” I answer. “It would be wrong if you couldn’t see the ceremony, after you’ve dedicated so much of your life to Discovery.”

“Still,” Omar points out, “if they let in everyone who’s ever worked with Discovery, there wouldn’t be any room for anyone else.”

The ceremony gets started. Michael Curie from the NASA Communications Office directs our attention to a countdown being displayed on video screens. He tries to lead the crowd in counting down from ten, but it’s a little awkward, and most people don’t join in. I fold my arms and remain silent. There is something sacred about the poetry of countdown, and I feel it’s not to be evoked inappropriately. At six, the video creates the sound of main engine start, and when the countdown reaches zero the screens display footage of Discovery launching, that fire under the launchpad and the steam billowing up, the bright light as the spacecraft starts its climb against gravity. People applaud, but I scowl at the video screen. There is something awful about showing video of launch today when everyone here would rather be at a launch than at a museum dedication. I sneak a look at Omar, who looks skeptical but is clapping.

Then Michael Curie explains to us that as Discovery returned home from space, the twin sonic booms always announced its arrival, and that now we should listen for that telltale sound. The sound system then produces a recording of the sonic booms, such a faint facsimile of the real thing I feel a flare of anger. Most people here have never heard the shuttle’s sonic boom and never will, and to play them this weak recording and tell them it’s what the shuttle sounded like, I feel, is a disservice to all. I wonder whether Omar feels the same way, but he is watching the far end of the tarmac, the direction from which Discovery will approach us.

“Here she comes,” Omar says. As Discovery creeps closer, we can see that it is accompanied by astronauts wearing their bright blue flight suits. I recognize a few, including Eileen Collins, the first woman to serve as a space shuttle commander. As they walk, one of the astronauts pats the landing gear door affectionately, the way you’d pat a horse. I feel Omar flinch almost imperceptibly next to me. The imperative to keep people from touching Discovery’s tiles will never leave him.

As promised, Discovery is pulled nose to nose with Enterprise, and the crowd applauds this sight.

Speeches ensue: One from the director of the Air and Space Museum, who gets choked up and has to take a moment to compose himself. Then the NASA administrator, Charlie Bolden, who starts out by recognizing the spaceworkers who have made the trip today, the people who worked on Discovery with their own hands. This earns a huge round of applause.

The rest of Bolden’s speech emphasizes that the next steps are under way: NASA is partnering with private companies to get astronauts and cargo back and forth from the International Space Station, and NASA will now focus on long-range spaceflight. The same story we’ve been hearing all along, yet the Space Launch System is still underfunded and unpopular with many spaceflight advocates. In a best-case scenario, SLS won’t get astronauts back into space before 2021, and won’t get us any farther than we’ve already been until 2025 or later. This is tough to get excited about, especially when so many in Congress are eager to make a name for themselves by killing this relatively unambitious plan altogether.

John Glenn is introduced by the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Wayne Clough, who uses the same F. Scott Fitzgerald quote to introduce him that I used to introduce Buzz Aldrin two years ago: “There are no second acts in American lives.” I am seized with horror that this quote I thought was so clever is actually incredibly obvious, that maybe Buzz listened to me reading it so confidently in my introduction of him and rolled his eyes, having heard it a million times before. “Now Discovery begins its own second act as an engine of imagination, education, and inspiration,” Clough finishes.

John Glenn takes the podium. He is ninety years old. Like all of us, he has been sitting out here for over an hour in the beating sun. Some people a fraction of his age are looking worse for wear, but he stands straight as a stick and looks out at us with bright eyes. I think of Oriana Fallaci’s fantastic description of him when he was in his forties: he reminded her of the GIs who showed up to liberate Italy and gave her chocolate when she was a child. “[A] whirlwind of freckles and strong white teeth … a pair of sparkling green eyes, whether shrewd or innocent I couldn’t tell.” The description is still oddly fitting despite the passage of forty-five years. Same freckles, same sparkling green eyes. John Glenn begins.

“Perhaps it started with the pioneers who first lived in this new land, but Americans have always had a curious, questing nature that has served us well.” He is a born public speaker; we are in the palm of his hand.

John Glenn points out that the wagon trains that took settlers west in the nineteenth century considered ten miles to be a good day’s trip. Discovery, the spacecraft upon which he became the oldest astronaut in history at age seventy-seven, could cover the same distance in less than two seconds. He reminds us that only twenty-three years after railroads replaced the wagon trains, the Wright brothers flew their first plane at Kitty Hawk. Only fifty-nine years after that, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. Seven years later, Neil and Buzz walked on the moon. Some of us do math in our heads, dismayed. How long will it be until we can add another leap?

John Glenn gives a rundown of the accomplishments of Discovery. Then he hits a part of the speech that gets everyone’s attention.

The unfortunate decision made eight-and-a-half years ago to terminate the shuttle fleet, in my view, prematurely grounded Discovery and delayed our research. But those decisions have been made, and we recovered and now we move on with new programs and possibilities unlimited.

It’s one sentence of criticism, immediately followed by a hedge. The line gets applause, but it’s not entirely clear whether the crowd is clapping for the criticism, for the “new programs and possibilities” line, or because he has paused. Omar raises his eyebrows in surprise and we exchange a look. No one at any of these events has ever said anything even vaguely negative about the decision to retire the space shuttle—the closest you’ll hear is the word bittersweet. But here John Glenn himself has criticized the retirement directly. I feel oddly elated.

We recently celebrated a 50th anniversary of our first orbital flight. In a speech to Congress following that flight, I closed with a statement that I would repeat today. “As our knowledge of the universe in which we live increases, may God grant us the wisdom and guidance to use it wisely.” Thank you.

A document officially transferring ownership of Discovery from NASA to the Smithsonian is produced. It’s signed with great flourishes, John Glenn serving as witness.

For nearly as long as I’ve been reading about spaceflight, I have had strong and conflicting emotions about John Glenn. He is, on the one hand, the most charismatic Mercury astronaut, the appealingly boyish bow-tied moralist who earned the ire of the others by suggesting that they not cheat on their wives. At the same time, he is the man who testified at the 1962 hearing on the possibility of letting women into the astronaut corps that it is “a fact of our social order” that women don’t belong in space, who found it so hard to grasp the simple fact that the women in the same room with him harbored the same dream he did. I don’t know whether John Glenn regrets saying what he did in 1962, or whether he no longer believes it to be true. But I do know that in 1998 he chose to climb into space shuttle Discovery with a woman, Chiaki Mukai, among his crewmates, thereby trusting his life to her competence. There are no reports of his having had any qualms about doing so.

The director of the Smithsonian formally introduces Discovery as the newest holding in the museum’s collection, and though everyone claps, I’m surprised by how awful that sounds to me. I knew I was coming here to see Discovery put into a museum, yet it still catches me off guard, the finality of the sentence. Discovery, which has flown into space thirty-nine times, which I personally watched tear into the sky on two different occasions ten years apart, which Omar has dedicated his adult life to keeping safe, is now officially a museum piece.

For most of the afternoon, the two orbiters stand nose to nose while people converge and disperse, taking each other’s pictures. Omar stands out on the field for a few minutes, shading his eyes, looking at Discovery and Enterprise. I watch him, trying to put myself in his place. Omar has been around space shuttles since before he can remember. Discovery specifically he has spent many hundreds of hours with—he has seen it standing on the launchpad readied for flight and parked in the Orbitor Processing Facility for repairs and rolling horizontally to the Vehicle Assembly Building and rolling vertically on the crawler out to the launchpad. He has seen Discovery slung up on its harness dangling from a crane affixed to the ceiling of the VAB, being joined to its external tank and solid rocket boosters. He has seen it steaming on the runway fresh from its return to space. Omar has crawled inside the crew compartment, sat in the commander’s seat, and felt how his weight settled in that position from which astronauts have waited so many hours to launch. He has traveled to California, twice, to help out when Discovery was forced to land at Edwards Air Force Base and overseen it being mated to the shuttle carrier aircraft. He has seen Discovery on rainy days and on sunny ones, when there have been threats of hurricanes and while its engines were removed after its last flight, when it was being prepared for the end of its life. The engineers who created Discovery and kept it working have not spent nearly as many hours in the personal company of Discovery as Omar has. Certainly not the astronauts themselves, who live in Houston and train in simulators, visiting the actual orbiters only briefly before flying in them.

I try not to show that I am watching him surreptitiously, watching for a profound moment.

Omar Izquierdo stood in the bright sun, a wistful look of affection on his face for “his bird,” Discovery.

Omar Izquierdo stood watching as Discovery shone in the sunlight for the last time before being forever interred in the dark museum.

Omar Izquierdo stood vigil with his orbiter for the last time, his jaw grinding in anger as he struggled to accept that his bird would never fly again—

“Hey, you want to know something I’ve never really noticed before?” Omar breaks into my thoughts. “You can see the old worm logo on Discovery. You see, right there? You can see where they removed it but it’s still sort of showing through.”

Omar is right—I can see where the letters of the worm logo have been removed, their traces still visible only from this distance and in bright sun. For all the time he’s spent with Discovery, for all the sacrifices he’s made in order to be part of preparing it for flight, there are still things Omar doesn’t know, still new things to learn about it even as it’s being put away for the last time.

“Do you like the worm?” I ask, just to have something to ask. The things I really want to ask him are unaskable.

“Yeah, I guess,” he answers. “It’s pretty seventies. I like the meatball better.”

We stand for a long time feeling—what? The mandatoriness of emotion, I guess. All the people waving little American flags and the little kids wearing their astronaut suits and the grown-ups wearing their red I WAS THERE shirts and the press shouldering past one another steadying their enormous cameras, all of us trying to tell ourselves that this is the last time we are ever going to be able to see a thing like this, that nothing like this will ever happen again.

Later, when we are standing inside the hangar where Discovery has been parked, the brand-new rope to keep visitors at a safe distance being installed all around it, Omar and I glance at a map of the room, a schematic with labeled outlines corresponding to the artifacts. In the center of the rectangle representing the room is an outline of a space shuttle orbiter, the word Enterprise printed next to it. Omar points to it.

A couple of hours later, I hug Omar good-bye and wish him safe travels. He’s headed to the airport to catch his flight back to Florida. I’m not sure when I’ll see him again, and it’s the first time since we met that this is true.

In the car on my way home from DC, I hear a new pop song, “Starships.” It’s a generic dance hit, an attempt to build on the popularity of the “baby, you’re a firework” song, which is still getting radio play. I hear “Starships” enough times that I start to learn the words: “Starships were meant to fly. / Hands up and touch the sky. / Let’s do this one last time.”

As with “Firework,” this song is not about the space shuttle, only a pop confection urging us to dance and to think much of ourselves, like all the other pop songs. Still, it’s hard not to hear in it a reference to what I’ve just seen, an odd confluence of disparate emotions, a celebration of something sad.

When I get home, my family has already gone to sleep. I stay up for a while to organize my notes and upload data from my phone. As I noticed at the Atlantis landing, it seems to be NASA policy to consistently thumbs-up the decision to retire the shuttle program, to always emphasize the importance of looking ahead. And I still can’t fault them for this—it’s really their only choice. Criticizing the decisions of lawmakers who determine its future budgets is not judicious for any government agency. Yet I can’t help but feel there has to be a way of conveying a more complex reaction to these retirements than this false celebration. NASA will always do as much as they can with what they are given. We saw this to be the case at the end of Apollo, when the grand visions of an orbiting shipyard and transports to Mars were compromised down to the space shuttle. Surely Charles Bolden believes, as I do, that when we are sending American astronauts to space again in American spacecraft launched from Florida, that will be better than what we are doing now, which is putting our only working spacecraft in museums and paying the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station. This is why it meant so much to me to hear John Glenn say what he said. Just to hear the words unfortunate and prematurely at one of these events, in front of God and Charlie Bolden and Discovery herself.

I realize now how much I was hoping to see Omar betray some emotion, but as always, Omar chooses to see the best side of things. Certainly he doesn’t seem as angry as I am.

As I scribble notes, the pictures and videos and voice memos in my phone are uploading into my computer, each of them showing itself briefly before being replaced by the next. I become distracted watching my own photographic experience go by: A picture of Enterprise alone wearing its tail cone. A picture of a row of folding chairs, each of them marked by a sign reading RESERVED FOR ASTRONAUTS and a little American flag. A picture of the two orbiters nose to nose; from this angle, they seem to be kissing. A picture of John Glenn I snapped surreptitiously, standing close enough to reach out and touch his arm, though I didn’t. Pictures of children wearing miniature orange astronaut suits posing in front of the two orbiters nose to nose. I have no pictures of Omar with Discovery—I offered repeatedly throughout the day, but each time he refused.

The last video is taken from within the dark interior space of the Udvar-Hazy Center and shows Discovery moving, bit by bit, into the museum. It’s broad daylight outside, so the first seconds of my video are too bright, crushed out to white. But as Discovery slowly creeps inside, its nose and wings become visible in sharp detail. As I shoot this video I’m as close as I’ve ever been to a space shuttle orbiter. Discovery gets bigger and bigger in my frame, then the massive hangar door slides closed behind it. Once the door is shut, the light changes, the camera adjusts, Discovery is suddenly sharply detailed in the newly balanced light. I take in the spaceship before me. It will never move again.

When he came back from covering the moon landing and finished writing his space book, Norman Mailer embarked on an experiment. He rented a house in Maine and spent part of the summer there with five of his six children to demonstrate that he could care for them and run a household himself. He had something to prove, because his fourth wife, Beverly Bentley, had just left him, claiming that her career as an actress had been buried under the domestic work necessary to let Norman Mailer go out into the world and be Norman Mailer.

Though the original challenge was to show he could do everything himself, Mailer almost immediately hired a local woman to do cleaning and laundry. He also depended on the oldest three children, all girls, who “did their chores and helped the boys to dress and go to bed, aided with the cooking and the dishes and the pots and with the wire perambulators in the shopping marts.” Then he called in his sister for two weeks and, after she’d left, a “mistress” who at first came for a brief stay, but soon returned for the rest of the summer. It’s hard not to imagine that the sister and the “mistress” took over much or all of the work of running the household, the very work Mailer had meant to demonstrate he could do. Some scorekeepers might say he cheated at his own game—my husband certainly would. But when I imagine which aspects of Mailer’s account of this challenge would most frustrate Beverly, it’s that the experiment had an end date, that it required him to do this work for only a finite and predetermined period of time. Even on the worst rainy afternoons, he knew that at the end of the summer he could give the children back to their mothers and go back to being Norman Mailer. None of his children’s mothers had that luxury, had any end point in sight. They wouldn’t be able to set down this burden for the years or decades until their children were grown. This distinction Mailer seemed to have missed altogether, or chose to miss. Yet he did claim to have taken one lesson from the experience: “Yes, he could be a housewife for six weeks, even for six years if it came to it, even work without help if it came to it, but he did not question what he would have to give up forever.”

What he would have to give up forever: his writing. His life’s work, his ego, his fame. His travels, his affairs, his one-night stands, his television appearances, his campus lectures, his outrageous interviews. His freedom to accept when Life asks him to go to Cape Canaveral to cover the launch of Apollo 11. All the powerful and ruthless men I’ve been reading about—Juan Ponce, James Cook, von Braun, the Mercury astronauts—had this freedom; they also had wives and children who carried on without them with varying degrees of success. This admission of Norman Mailer’s does not carry the power of transformation, or even of any type of insight, because he attributes his freedom to the biological fact that he’s a man: “[H]e could not know whether he would have found it endurable to be born a woman.” He guessed that being a woman might have driven him insane.

An interesting thing happened at the end of the summer of 1969: more than the usual number of marriages in Norman Mailer’s social circle broke up, including his own. There is a weird moment toward the end of Of a Fire on the Moon when, just home from Cape Canaveral, Mailer catches sight of Beverly at a party.

Aquarius watched his wife at the other end of the lawn and knew again as he had known each day of this summer that their marriage was over. Something had touched the moon and she would never be the same.

Something had touched the moon. Mailer reminds us throughout his book of the possibility that some spiritual balance would be altered by the violation of man’s boot touching a celestial body, the feminine moon. Something magical, mystical, astrological. He does, after all, refer to himself as Aquarius throughout and gives a great deal of attention to the astrological signs of the astronauts. Why not blame on the boots of Armstrong and Aldrin the tectonic shifts in a woman’s heart, rather than his own failure to take seriously his wife’s work?

Immediately after the launch of Apollo 11, the press corps was taken around to visit the wives of the three astronauts then on their way to the moon. Norman Mailer found Jan Armstrong appealing in a plain and hardworking way; Pat Collins he found unremarkable. But Joan Aldrin he found quite captivating. He didn’t fail to notice that, like his own wife, she was an actress who had given up her craft for a husband with an overwhelmingly public career. He saw in the theatricality of her answers to reporters’ banal questions a hint of the frustration he saw in his own wife. Mailer couldn’t have known that Buzz and Joan Aldrin were to divorce, just like Beverly and himself, shortly after.

What would Norman Mailer think of me, a mother and wife, following in his footsteps at Kennedy? If time could fold back upon itself, if he and I could both be standing on that field of grass by the countdown clock at the Press Site on the same hot Florida day rather than days separated by forty-two years, what would we see in each other? I doubt very much that our encounter would be anything like those I’ve had with other space people in my own time—I doubt we’d swap stories of slips and delays, of lonely nights in Space Coast motels, of bad food and sunburns, of the finer points of liquid fuels and hypergolic thrusters. Would he walk right by me, assuming me to be somebody’s secretary, somebody’s wife, a nonwriter, nonartist, non-ego with nothing to contribute to the world but to care for and feed a male ego and his babies? He’d said not long before that “the prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate possible for herself, and conceive children who will improve the species.”

Or would he, out of boredom and isolation and the lowered standards that come with launch conditions, attempt to bed me? Would he corner me at a space party, ask me to dinner, ply me with wine? Does it make me shallow that of these scenarios, the latter seems least depressing, because in trying to seduce me he’d at least have to pay attention to me, look me in the eye, talk to me and pretend to listen?

It’s important to remember that, as destructive as attitudes like Mailer’s were to women (both the individual women he knew and women as a group in society), it was also a loss to men of his time that they were denied the pleasures of taking care of children, the pleasures of home life to which they contributed more than a paycheck and a last name. And they were denied the honest uncomplicated friendship of women: professional collaboration and respect, intellectual rapport, gossip, comfort, advice, simple favors one friend does for another, games of online Scrabble. As much as I envy Norman Mailer the events he got to take part in, I can’t really envy him his era. He and I never could have been friends in it. I would not have been allowed to be a writer in it. Or if I had, if I’d managed to make a place for myself as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag did, readers would have hastened to assure each other that, smart as I may have been, I was a bad mother, a bad wife, not pretty or nice enough. This is familiar from the narratives about women astronauts—you can go, but we’ll say you abandoned your children. You can go, but we’ll say you are unnatural for choosing not to have children. It’s a dream still, the dream of being allowed full participation. The dream is alive, I suppose. The dream is still in the process of coming true.

Just as it did the last time I was driving toward the south gate of the Kennedy Space Center in the middle of the night, the gas station on State Road 3 beckons to me with its alien landing lights, its promise of coffee. I haven’t stopped here since the launch of Atlantis, ten months ago, and as I park to go inside I remember how overrun this place was that day, space fans from all over the world sloshing coffee on the counters and waiting in line to pay for their snacks before heading out to see something historical. There are only a couple of cars parked here now, and I know it will be different today, but I’m still not prepared for how different the scene is when I walk in. A young woman is mopping the floor while a bored-looking man stares into space behind the counter. I am the only customer, and every surface is clean. Neither employee wears any space pins or patches.

As I push back out into the humid night, I hear a sound coming from the other side of the gas station. Instead of getting back into my car, I wander around the corner of the building to try to hear it better. Back there it’s surprisingly undeveloped, the type of wetland that covers the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. It still takes me a second to place the sound: it’s alligators bellowing to each other in the dark.

I’m once again back on the Space Coast, once more adding another visit after the one I had thought would be my last. On the drive here, which I now know so well, I felt happy. Part of me had been missing Florida, had been trying to think of an excuse to come here again. I think of Oriana Fallaci heading back to the Space Coast—the first time she came here, she’d described it as being “so ugly that if you saw it you’d agree to go to the Moon, which might not be better but certainly couldn’t be worse.” But after several visits, after making the acquaintance of astronauts and engineers and managers and seeing a launch, Fallaci started to feel the same way about the Space Coast that I do.

I was on my way back to Cape Kennedy: happy to see my friends, to see the launching of the Saturn rocket, to be going home. Now I liked Florida that I’d described so cruelly…. Suddenly it was my home.

I’m here to see the first launch from Cape Canaveral operated by a private company, SpaceX. Today SpaceX will attempt to launch its own spacecraft, the Dragon, to dock with the International Space Station and deliver supplies. This would be a first, and it would make SpaceX the front-runner to become the contractor NASA hires to get people and cargo up and down to the International Space Station. Even if today’s launch is successful, Dragon will have to fly many more resupply missions, over a period of years, before it can be considered safe for astronauts.

I’ve never been a believer in privatized spaceflight—getting to space as cheaply as possible with an emphasis on catering to paying customers only serves to rob spaceflight of the things I love most about it. But I started to notice how many of my space friends—people I would have thought would be NASA-only snobs like me—were getting excited about the SpaceX launch, were posting updates about it online and making plans to come out for the launch. The NASASocial (the new, more inclusive name for NASATweetup) organized around this launch seemed to engender more chatter than many of them in the past. SpaceX has established a significant launch operation here in Florida but isn’t hiring many ex-NASA people. The rumor is that the company doesn’t want workers who have been steeped in NASA culture, especially NASA’s extreme concern for safety (and, I can’t help but cynically suspect, the relatively high wages, solid job security, and generous benefits of government contractors). If Omar were somehow to get hired at SpaceX in spite of this bias, it would likely be with a cut in pay and certainly a cut in benefits.

I found myself wondering what this launch was going to be like, how it would be different from shuttle launches both in terms of the rocket itself and in terms of the social experience of seeing it. A lot of the space fans I know are laid-off, or soon-to-be-laid-off, shuttle workers. What would this launch experience be like for them?

So I started making plans to go. Thankfully, this launch fell after the end of my semester and before my son’s preschool ends, a quieter time than usual at my house and less disruptive for me to be gone. Still, the number of trips beyond the “definitely last one” is now three and growing, which is lost on neither my husband nor me.

Today’s launch is scheduled for 4:55 a.m. Unlike the shuttle, the SpaceX Dragon has an “instantaneous launch window,” a phrase whose implications I don’t care for. Whereas the shuttle had a ten-minute window in which to get off the ground (even longer back in the days when they weren’t trying to rendezvous with the International Space Station), Dragon has much less capacity to maneuver in space and so must arrive on a pinpoint trajectory from Earth. If it doesn’t launch at exactly 4:55, they will have to scrub and try again another day.

It’s only a few minutes from the gas station to the south gate of the Kennedy Space Center, but when I reach the gate it’s closed and barricaded.

I sit for a minute, trying to think of what to do next. The north gate, the only other gate I’ve ever used, is up by Titusville, a half-hour drive away. That can’t be what I’m supposed to do. So after a moment’s contemplation, I text Omar:

VC means Visitor Complex, I know that much. But I’m still not sure what he’s talking about, because this isn’t the way I usually go to the Visitor Complex, and because the iPhone map offers no details within a restricted government installation, and because it’s three in the morning.

Twenty-nine seconds later, I recognize Omar’s silver Mustang pulling into the lot. He rolls down his window just long enough to flash a smile and gesture for to me to follow him. Once he takes the turnoff toward the Visitor Complex, I realize where we are and what he was talking about—this little side road offers a second way in.

After we both get past the checkpoint, Omar gives a wave and drives off heading north. He is going to try to watch from the Vehicle Assembly Building roof. He still works here; his layoff has been rescinded one more time. I head toward the Press Site. We’ve made plans to have breakfast after the launch and the postlaunch press conference.

It’s a new experience to be at the Press Site for a non-NASA launch. I would have thought the NASA Media Office people would hold themselves at arm’s length from this one, but they seem to be doing their traditional fine job of getting us the information we need and answering our questions. They are handing out packets of material with the SpaceX logo on them in exactly the same way they used to hand out packets bearing the mission patch corresponding to each space shuttle launch. On the closed-circuit TVs, the SpaceX Falcon (the rocket that carries Dragon, the spacecraft) is steaming nicely on the launchpad.

So much of the answer to the question of what the end of the shuttle means depends upon what comes next. The existence of a next step already in development, the space shuttle, gave space fans living through the end of Apollo a sense that we were still moving forward, gave them an event to look forward to, even if it was still years off. For me, commercial spaceflight doesn’t adequately fill this gap, for several reasons. One: the type of big, grand, daring spaceflight projects I’m interested in are, by definition, not good investments. They are exploratory, scientific, ennobling, and expensive, with no clear end point and certainly no chance of making a profit. What will we find when we get to the moon? people wondered in the sixties. They didn’t know, but they were pretty sure they wouldn’t find anything that could come close to compensating them financially for the cost of getting there, and they were right.

Two: as long as spaceflight is run by a government agency, any American child can reasonably dream of flying in space one day. For many of them, that dream will shape their early lives in important and beneficial ways. If spaceflight belongs to private companies, space travel will be a privilege of the incredibly wealthy, and space-obsessed children will have no particular motivation to do their algebra homework or serve in the military, knowing that their only hope of earning a seat lies in getting rich.

Three: since the beginning, it has been part of NASA’s mandate to make its projects available to the American public. This means that everything—images, films, discoveries, transcripts of crew chatter—belongs to all of us. Not so with SpaceX. As a private company, SpaceX can keep private whatever they want, and they do. Some of my online space friends have been indignant to learn that they can’t download specs and diagrams for Dragon and Falcon, as we have always been able to do for shuttle and other NASA spacecraft—the SpaceX designs are industry secrets. NASA makes moon rocks available to scientists all over the world for the asking, and they have let scientists send experiments to space on their spacecraft for very negotiable fees, often negotiated down to nothing. SpaceX is under no obligation to do anything of the kind, and I don’t expect they will.

But maybe the privatization proponents are right that NASA has actually been holding us back. Maybe the end of shuttle will be like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Only with the behemoths gone could the little mammals that became our ancestors start to make a place for themselves.

At about four thirty in the morning, people start heading outside to the grassy field at the Press Site. Before I even get close I see a familiar orange glow on the horizon, and I can’t believe it: it’s the countdown clock. I look at the people on my left and right, looking to see whether they are incensed as well, but no one else seems to notice.

The light from the countdown clock is so bright, it’s a little eerie. Since it’s still full dark, without even any moon, the light of the countdown clock in my face makes it hard to see where I’m stepping, and I trip and stumble on the uneven ground. Rather than looking down into the useless dark surrounding my feet, I look out into the field and follow the swarm of glowing rectangles, one for each phone of the spectators. Bleachers have been set up, as they were for Atlantis, and many of the glowing phones are clustered there. Many of these are the NASASocial people, I can tell, because they are excitedly narrating into their phones or, in some cases, tiny video cameras. In fact, maybe it’s all NASASocial people out here—maybe all the print journalists are watching on NASA TV from the safety of the News Center rather than stumbling around out here getting bitten by mosquitoes.

I walk all the way down to the lip of the Turn Basin. The SpaceX launchpad is not dead center ahead of us, as the Apollo and shuttle launchpads were, but off to the right, almost hidden behind the foliage making up Norman Mailer’s jungle. I learn I’ve been looking in the wrong direction only when I hear some NASASocial people point out the launchpad to each other. I follow their fingers and see a bright haze rising from the horizon, the rocket lit up by floodlights.

I stand by the Turn Basin for a minute before I realize I’m hearing a splashing sound coming from the water. The sound is intermittent and quiet but distinct. Then I hear a faint ribbit. It’s nocturnal frogs that live in the Turn Basin, going about their froggy business. Just as at the gas station, the sounds of wildlife are coming through now that everything is quiet.

At T minus nine, I move toward the bleachers to try to get a good spot to watch from. The chatter coming over the speakers is a little different for this launch, as one would expect—it’s different people in a different launch control room using different procedures to prepare a different spacecraft. I feel hostility toward this countdown, a strong conviction that they are using the wrong language, are doing everything wrong. When the flight director (or whatever SpaceX calls her) polls the room (or whatever SpaceX calls it), one of the managers in the sequence doesn’t answer when called on for a “go” or “no go.” A few seconds of silence go by. I look around at some of the NASASocial people and we share an eye-roll-y look. NASA flight directors would never fall asleep at the wheel like that, we agree silently.

Everyone looks up. The sky is a bit overcast, so I think the shouting man might be overoptimistic, but when I look up in the direction he’s pointing, I see it. It’s unmistakable. The International Space Station. Brighter than any star, it moves surprisingly fast. I know the ISS is as long as a football field, has the volume of a three-bedroom house, that it’s two hundred miles away and moving at seventeen thousand miles per hour.

“We’re sending you up some stuff!” one of the NASASocial people shouts. Some of them try to take video of it, uselessly.

As always, I get caught up in the countdown. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. The NASASocial people are so excited, it’s hard not to share their enthusiasm. I count along.

At zero, we see a quick flash on the horizon. Flash isn’t even quite the word. It’s more like the hazy halo over the launchpad gets more intense for a second, then goes back to normal. An uncertain cheer rises around me. I wait to see the spacecraft enter my field of vision—I know from experience how slow the first seconds of launch can appear to be—but it never does.

The announcer on the speaker tells us there has been an abort, that the spacecraft is now being safed. I stand, gawking openmouthed in the direction of the launchpad. I was fooled by the light on the horizon: in the days of the space shuttle, the solid rocket boosters couldn’t be shut down, so if you saw a light, you could be sure you were going to space today. But the SpaceX Falcon is powered by liquid fuel, which means it can shut itself down. And did, at the first sign of a problem. We all look at each other, a little bewildered. I hear someone say the word scrub into his phone, narrating the event to his followers. Only then do I understand: this is a scrub, my first. I tweet, “No longer scrubless,” and get some sympathetic responses from space friends who have woken up to watch the launch live online. It’s an odd feeling to come so far and wait so long to have everything called off in a fraction of a second. This is a feeling that many space fans have had many times. It’s only fair that I should experience it once.

People start making their way back up to the News Center. I look at Twitter to see what’s being said about the scrub, and I see a new tweet from André Kuipers, a Dutch astronaut living on the International Space Station. He has tweeted a picture he took of Cape Canaveral just a few minutes before as he passed overhead. The image is like any satellite image taken at night, mostly black, the landmasses and causeways traced in pale yellow light. It’s brightest right where we are standing.

I follow all the astronauts living on the ISS on Twitter, so I see the pictures they take of Earth passing below them every day. I always stop to look at them because they are insanely gorgeous. But I’ve never seen a picture taken from space that I know I am in. I was standing on that ground looking up at him while he was looking down at us, and the image is one I’ll save.

I hang around the News Center for a while waiting for the press conference. It had been scheduled for 7:00 a.m. but is being moved up because of the scrub. While I wait, I curl up for a short nap on the floor with my head pressed up against the wall. When I awaken, the monitor turned to NASA TV is showing an image of the rocket on the pad, presumably having been safed. A crawl at the bottom of the screen reads “Endeavour launch scrubbed.” I blink at it a couple of times. Then those words disappear and are quickly replaced with “SpaceX/Falcon 9 launch scrubbed.”

I poke around the News Center a bit, and against one wall I find a floor-to-ceiling shelf offering material of all kinds for journalists to take. All of this information is presumably online as well, but I am apparently not the only writer who is still tempted by paper handouts. The shelf holds packets specific to each mission as well as other packets providing information of all kinds about the space program. There are also copies of a newsletter for space center workers called Spaceport News. I grab a copy at random and start reading.

Guards watch over Discovery during final rollover

By Rebecca Sprague

Spaceport News

Nearly every Hollywood celebrity has at least one bodyguard on their payroll. At any given time, NASA’s three space shuttles have about 80.

Officially called access control monitors and orbiter integrity clerks, the “guards” make sure the shuttles are safe and secure in Kennedy Space Center’s orbiter processing facilities, the Vehicle Assembly Building, on the launch pads and when they’re on the move.

The article describes the last rollover of Discovery from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building; only then do I realize that this issue of Spaceport News must be an old one. I find the date: September 17, 2010.

Dressed in jeans, sneakers and blue United Space Alliance (USA) collared shirts, Discovery’s guards stood watch about 50 feet away.

“Obviously, people like to get as close as they can, so we have to maintain some sort of control,” said USA’s Omar Izquierdo, who specifically is designated to guard Discovery. “We have a list of who gets to be how close and then we control that.”

I smile and shake my head. Of course Omar was the one the writer approached; I’m not even surprised to find him here. The article goes on to quote the vehicle manager for Discovery, Jennifer Nufer: “These folks perform a very critical job for America’s space program.”

I stash a copy of the newsletter along with some other handouts in my bag. September 17, 2010, was just eight days before I came here for Family Day. In the intervening week, Discovery was mated with an external tank and two solid rocket boosters in the Vehicle Assembly Building. Then it was rolled out to the launchpad for the last time. The photo on my phone is still the snapshot I took of Discovery on Family Day, riding by in Omar’s car, and whenever I see it I remember that day, that sense of possibility even as we knew this would be Discovery’s last flight.

The SpaceX press conference is pretty much what you would expect—a lot of reminders that this is a new rocket, that spaceflight is an untested business, a lot of cautious optimism for the next attempt, which won’t be for a few days because of a scheduled Soyuz docking that takes precedence. I get my first good look at Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX. She is whip smart in that put-together way you would expect in the president of an experimental tech company. But she is also intense and sincere and kind of adorable. She smiles a lot, her eyes twinkle. Her answers to questions are thoroughly well considered—her pauses between thoughts remind me of the pauses politicians leave themselves to scan what they are about to say for possible controversy—but a real love for what she does shines through. I came here planning to dislike SpaceX, and while Gwynne Shotwell doesn’t exactly defy my every expectation, I still find myself liking her in spite of myself. In part, I know that I am a sucker for women involved in spaceflight, for women in jobs traditionally closed to them, and I can’t help but suspect that Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, had this appeal in mind when he chose her to run his space company.

I’m at a postlaunch party, my second official EndlessBBQ (“It really is endless,” I joke on Twitter, before noticing how many other people have made the same joke), standing on the deck behind the Cocoa Beach Brewing Company with a few dozen space people. The sun is setting as I drink one of the microbrews made here and talk with Omar and some of the people I’ve met at launches and on Twitter. A lot of them are here with the NASASocial. It’s a beautiful evening, not too humid for once.

I wind up in a long conversation with Jen Scheer, a woman I met at the party after Atlantis but never really talked to. I know her well from Twitter because she tweets avidly about space and is the founder and organizer of the Space Tweep Society, which makes her a celebrity of the online space community. Jen worked maintaining the hypergolic systems in the orbital maneuvering system pods and was one of the few female techs to work at the space center. Tonight, while we drink beer, I’m quizzing her about safety procedures—I’ve been trying to get a handle on whether NASA became overly safety conscious after Columbia, as some insiders have told me, or not safety conscious enough—when Omar drifts over. Jen asks about how work has been, and he tells her how unnerving it’s been that visitors are now allowed to touch the orbiters.

“Hey, Omar,” Jen starts with a big smile, “do you know what we used to call the tiles?”

“Wrench cushions.” Jen waits, open mouthed, for his reaction. Omar flinches.

Jen laughs. “Of course if any tiles got damaged the tile techs would replace them,” she assures me.

“I’m going to get another beer,” Omar says, “and when I come back we’ll be talking about something else.”

Omar has told me how upsetting it’s been seeing procedures change after the last landings, watching equipment that had been maintained with exquisite care now torn apart for scrap. Seeing visitors invited to touch things he spent years of his life making sure never got touched seems to elicit something like primal panic in Omar, and if he were less good-hearted that panic might metastasize into rage and resentment. Instead, he seems a little fuzzy these days, a little confused. When he comes back from the bar, we do talk about something else. Jen has been out of the space center workforce for a while now, so she has had time to get used to the changes. Omar still goes in every day, still walks through the same motions, but with no real purpose.

Later I strike up a conversation with Andy Scheer, Jen’s husband, also a spaceworker. Andy tells me he is a pad rat, which means that rather than working with a specific orbiter, he works on a specific launchpad.

“Was there a rivalry,” I ask him, “between people who worked at one pad or the other?”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “Just like anyplace. Pad A people made fun of Pad B people, Pad B people made fun of Pad A people. Then it came down to one pad, and the people who were left had to work together.”

I’ve heard a rumor that Andy was at work the day James Vanover, the engineer who had tried to rescind his early retirement and was told he could not, committed suicide by jumping off the launch tower, back in March 2011. When it had first happened, I’d thought I should ask Omar about the meaning of Vanover’s gesture, but when I saw Omar next, the morning of the launch of Endeavour, it didn’t seem right to bring it up. But now I decide to ask Andy.

“We’d walk around the pad first thing when we started a shift, looking for loose debris or anything out of place, and out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something fall. I was the closest to him when he hit. I knew right away what had happened.”

“Yeah. Paramedics came pretty quickly. But until they arrived, there was nothing I could do except to sit with him.”

“I know he cared about what he did,” Andy adds. “I know he loved what he did and loved that place. His whole life was out there and that was coming to an end.”

Put this way, it’s remarkable that there haven’t been more suicides, more violence, more family tragedies. Vanover’s whole life was out there, and that was coming to an end, and the same is true for tens of thousands of people.

“So what’s your book about?” Andy asks. “Omar said you’re writing a book.”

“Oh, it’s about the end of shuttle,” I answer. “I’m asking what it means that we went to space for fifty years and have decided not to go anymore.”

“Good question,” Andy says. I used to feel silly repeating this question, but I’ve come to realize that no one feels confident about having a good answer to it. Everyone says it’s a good question. “What do you think is the answer?”

“I don’t entirely know yet,” I tell him. “But I think it has to do with the beginning, with how it started. The start was an accident. Without Sputnik, and a new president, and the Cold War, and then that president getting assassinated—without the German rocket designers who fled to the United States instead of the Soviet Union—it never would have happened at all.”

Andy is quiet for a long moment. I’m afraid I’ve offended him by calling his life’s work an accident.

“Check this out,” Omar says. He’s found a video on NASA TV documenting the Discovery Day event we were at together. Exciting electronic music plays over a montage of Discovery arriving at Dulles and Enterprise being wheeled out of the museum.

“Look, right here!” It’s a swooping crane shot of Discovery moving toward the building—I remember seeing the crane with the movie camera on it when we were out there—but then suddenly, in the bottom of the frame, I see Omar and myself, the backs of our heads, standing shoulder to shoulder watching Discovery roll by. We are unmistakable, Omar in his white ball cap, me with my blond ponytail, trying to take a picture of Discovery with my phone.

Omar seems pleased to find himself in the video commemorating the celebration of his bird, and he should—it’s a document he can show his grandchildren. I was there. The video already has more than thirty thousand hits. But I find it disconcerting. I’m trying to write about these things that I’ve experienced, and in trying to write about them I often consult pictures and video I find online to help me understand where everything was, to reconstruct what things looked like. It’s an unsettlingly postmodern experience to find myself in one of these documents, like looking up a word in the dictionary and finding my own name.

As the evening goes on, people talk about whether they will come back for the next attempt or not. I will not. This will be my first time leaving Florida with the spacecraft I came to see launch still on the ground.

As I’m getting ready to leave, Omar asks if I’d like to set off a model rocket with him in the morning. He’s bought a scale model of the SpaceX Falcon, and he offers it as a sort of consolation because I didn’t get to see the real one go off.

I answer immediately, “Of course!” We make plans for when to meet up. I have a twelve-hour drive tomorrow and really should be hitting the road as early as possible. But I like the idea of seeing Omar one more time before I go, and besides that, I sense a metaphor.

What does it mean that we’ve done so much, and what does it mean that we’ve decided to stop? I talked to Andy about the unlikely chain of events that led to the start of NASA and Project Mercury, and though it goes against some of the patriotic pride we usually take in our space program, I’ve had to accept that the political will to keep spaceflight going just doesn’t exist anymore, hasn’t for a long time. We have been infected by the myth of public support for spaceflight for so long, it’s kept us from properly understanding how we got to where we are. As historian John Logsdon writes, “Apollo was a product of a particular moment in time…. Its most important significance may well be simply that it happened. Humans did travel to and explore another celestial body.” It happened, but we never quite understood why we were doing it. There was never enthusiastic public support for human spaceflight for its own sake. I should probably say this again: There was never enthusiastic public support for human spaceflight for its own sake. At best, there was support for beating the Soviets at a game that they had grabbed a head start on, a game that seemed to have to do with military, not scientific, superiority. People said they didn’t want to go to bed under a Soviet moon, and they were serious. The power of that brief surge of emotion was enough to start Apollo, but the moon project had lost its relevance as a national project by the time it was actually accomplished. The power of that brief interest, combined with the immense fun and pageantry and good feeling brought about by the successes of the heroic era, and its heroes, has been enough to fuel fifty years of NASA. This is remarkable in and of itself, of course. Few projects based on such short-lived support have shown themselves to have such endurance.

But maybe this is a part of the answer to the question I’ve been torturing myself with all this time: Why are we stopping this when everyone seems to like it? The answer is that public support for spending the money, to the extent it ever existed, was long gone by the time I was born. The whole thing depended on a confluence of forces that can’t be re-created. Those of us who love it should count ourselves lucky that it somehow accidentally happened at all, and, I suppose, we should accept the fact that it’s finally run its course.

I discovered at this attempt that it’s simply impossible to stand outside in the middle of the night watching an enormous object on the horizon try to launch itself into space and not root for it. At least, it’s impossible for me. And once you’ve stood out there and rooted for it, you kind of hope for it to succeed even once you’re not watching it in person anymore. A few days later, I will set my alarm for the middle of the night in order to wake up and watch the second attempt to launch Dragon. I will be pleased and confused when it does launch successfully. I find I have started to care about this spacecraft. Not in the same way that I care about the space shuttle or the Saturn V, or even the Redstones and Atlases—nothing would ever come close to that—but when the little white Dragon on my phone’s screen slowly pulls itself up into the sky, the way spaceships do, I will feel a surge of joy for it, clap my hand over my mouth to keep from waking my husband. Then I will have to stop and think about what that means.

What does it mean that we went to space for fifty years and then decided not to anymore? This question is as difficult to grapple with as ever because, I’ve discovered, it’s actually many questions at once. What does it mean to stop exploring? What does it mean to disappoint children? What does it mean to cancel the future? What does it mean to hobble the one government agency that people feel good about? What does it mean to hope for private companies to take over something we used to do as a nation? What does it mean to stop spending the money?

One thing I notice every time I’m at the Cape is how literal all the workers are about their work. I’ve kept calling the work here some kind of dream, yet what I see over and over is that, to the people who do the work, nothing is a dream, a metaphor, a fairy tale: everything is exactly what it is. If the work here results in something beautiful, it is beautiful by accident, as form follows function. It is the reflected beauty of our intentions I’m seeing, not someone’s abstract idea of beauty.

Hugely wasteful, hugely grand? If we wanted to go back to the moon now, we couldn’t do it. We’d have to start over. But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: the goal itself was beautiful, beautiful in its imagery and in its impossibility. It was a dream that even the literal-minded could share—even Neil Armstrong, as a boy, had dreamed a recurring dream that he could hover above the earth by holding his breath. The dream came true, even if it was only a fluke. Even if it was only for a while.

In the morning, I find Omar at the park, a perfect location with four full-sized soccer fields, all of them unused today. We walk into the center of the four fields, leaving as much empty space as we can around us. Omar carefully unpacks the model’s pieces and starts setting it up, telling me about how it works as he assembles it. But a piece is missing; it must have fallen out in his car. He heads back to the parking lot to find it, a five-minute round trip. To pass the time, I snap a few pictures of the rocket and tweet one along with the words:

Ten seconds later, I look up to see Omar heading back toward me with the missing piece held aloft triumphantly. He’s still far away, but I see him startle, then make an expression exactly as if his phone has just vibrated in his pants. He fishes the phone out of a pocket, looks at it, and smiles. He’s seen what I put on Twitter.

“That’s pretty funny,” he calls out as soon as he’s within earshot. A second later, my phone buzzes. Omar has retweeted me, and now a few of his followers are weighing in—he has over five hundred. Now with all the pieces in hand, Omar kneels down to finish assembling the rocket.

“Now, I’ve made a few mods,” Omar explains from his position on the ground. He shows me where a tube meant to guide the rocket along a metal rod had fallen off the fuselage earlier—Omar had replaced it by supergluing a fast-food straw in its place. This adaptation held together through one previous launch, but today it looks to be coming apart. Soon the straw comes off in Omar’s hand. He grunts in exasperation.

“But I’ve already tweeted that failure is not an option,” I point out. I’m only kind of joking.

“Do you have any duct tape in your car, or anything like that?” Omar asks. I don’t, but I start thinking about other ways to attach the straw to the body of the rocket. I come up with the idea of using my hair elastics, and that seems to work. Our jury-rigged rocket is set up on its stand, its white body striped with my brown hair elastics, poised for launch. Omar and I step away as far as the detonator cord will let us. Omar is extremely careful working with the wires and the detonator, and he describes what he’s doing as he does it, probably a safety thing he learned at work. Once everything is set up to his satisfaction, Omar takes a deep breath and says, “Okay. You ready?”

I’m surprised at first that he doesn’t have a more technical term than “push the button.” But I suppose none of the terms used in spaceflight quite apply here. “Go for main engine start” isn’t quite accurate. “Ignition” would technically be correct, I suppose, but isn’t easily made into a verb in this context (“You want to ignite?”). “Liftoff” seems overly grand when we’re talking about pushing a small plastic button. Or maybe Omar doesn’t want to make a joke of this moment—maybe he wants to enjoy this model rocket for what it is rather than pretend it’s something it’s not.

“You sure?” Omar sounds genuinely disbelieving that I am refusing the pleasure of firing the rocket. To me, his skepticism only underscores that he considers it a privilege to push the button, and that only makes me want all the more to let him be the one to do it.

“I’m sure,” I say, and get out my phone to record a video of our triumph. “Light this candle.”

I have in my phone a thirty-second video of the model rocket launch. The video starts at the moment the rocket begins to lift itself off the stand, and I wish I had thought to start recording a few seconds earlier because I would like to know whether Omar and I counted down before launching. I don’t think we did.

In the video, Omar is holding the detonator button in his left hand, his white polo shirt and light khaki shorts blinding white in the Florida sun, his skin a glowing brown. As his thumb comes down on the button, I swing over to look at the rocket, and the camera finds it already lifting off, already a few inches off the ground, by the time I get there. Within a couple of seconds it’s flying so fast and so high I have trouble finding it again. A thin smoke trail streaks out behind it, adorably, a tiny echo of the enormous steam trail of the shuttle, and my camera follows that white stripe on the sky up, up, up, far higher than I had ever expected this little model rocket could go, and when I almost can’t see it anymore it stops traveling up and levels off, the curve it makes against the bright blue sky exactly like the curve made by Challenger in my childhood. A few seconds later, the smoke trail waning, the rocket slows way down. Its recovery chute has detonated, and soon it’s possible to make out the white smudge that is the parachute against the sky. Now it will drift down toward us, at a leisurely pace, quite a way downrange of us—it’s a good thing we left as much space as we did. The rocket swings crazily back and forth under its parachute.

As the exhausted rocket drifts down and down, I can make out the dark stripes of my hair bands along its fuselage. The horizon heaves itself up into the frame—a row of perfect white clouds, a soccer goal, a faraway stand of perfect green palm trees, some stucco houses. Florida. Watching the video today, on a cool gray day in Tennessee, the sight of those palm trees stirs in me something like homesickness, though Florida has never been my home, though I still don’t understand it. What was the metaphor I thought would present itself in this rocket launch? When I watch the video, I can’t quite remember. Something about a success after yesterday’s scrub, a joke about SpaceX or about my scrubless record, but when I watch the little video in my phone I feel only the weird spaceport homesickness, that Florida nostalgia, and then the surprise and pleasure of how high and fast the actual model rocket flies. After it finishes drifting back to earth and plops itself unceremoniously onto the grass, the camera swings around again to find my friend Omar walking toward me, a huge smile on his face.

“That was a success,” my voice says, and Omar laughs happily, and then the video ends.