Dad and I sat in the mission control room and watched Mom blast off.
During the long wait before the countdown we talked like it was any other day. “You see the game last night?” he asked.
“Which game?”
“Any game.”
“No.”
He sighed. “Me neither.”
That’s the kind of conversation we had. No jokes that made either of us laugh. No topics that drew our interest enough to make time pass. And nothing at all about Mom. It was weird because we were both clearly avoiding talking about the obvious, but it was obvious that neither of us wanted to start the conversation we should have been having.
When the countdown started, Dad took my hand the way he did when I was little. He needed to. I needed to hold on to him, too. We sat there watching the dual image of the exterior view of the rocket and the interior-cockpit live stream of the technical crew aboard the transit rocket, all of them in their color-coded space suits. With each tick of the clock, each number counted down audibly by the mission control officer, Dad and I clutched each other harder.
“We have liftoff,” said the controller, and that froze us there, holding hands as if our combined strength could hoist the rocket up and fling it safely into orbit.
The command vehicle sat on one of the Falcon rockets leased from SpaceX. This was a pressurized capsule and payload hull resting atop a reusable rocket that needed to reach a minimum orbital speed of at least 9,300 meters per second in order to beat the pull of gravity and aerodynamic drag. To lift all of that mass that high and that fast the rocket burned a lot of very flammable fuel. Which meant Mom was sitting on top of a big bomb.
If things went bad.
If things went the right way, the rocket was a well-designed and well-constructed machine that would carry her safely into orbit.
The fact is that “we do this all the time” is a comfort all the time except when you’re sitting there watching one of those big sticks of dynamite take your mother away from you.
Dad squeezed my hand, I squeezed his, and both of us wore these stupid grins that probably looked like happy smiles to anyone with the IQ or insight of a garden slug. We watched as the huge first stage burned through its fuel. Then there was that moment when the controller’s voice said, very clinically and dry, “Detaching first stage.”
The launch stage dropped away as the second stage fired. I knew there was nothing left in the first stage, but it was somehow weird and scary to see it suddenly stall and then fall back to Earth. Then the big parachutes deployed and the dead fall jerked to a stop and the empty rocket began drifting down. It descended slowly out of shot, falling onto someone else’s screens over at SpaceX. It was their rocket; they’d recover and reuse it.
My eyes were glued on the second stage, watching it push up and up and up. The image switched from ground-based cameras to a satellite keyed to track it. So instead of it moving away from our point of view, it was suddenly coming toward us. The atmosphere thinned around the ship as it rose and then it crossed that line of sixty-two miles from the surface. It’s not an official marker, but most people say that’s where Earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins. It’s the point at which you can say that you’ve left the planet.
The ship kept going, though. No longer up but “out.”
Then, almost as if this was just a normal day at work, the controller said, “Orbit achieved.”
Dad held my hand for another two seconds, then let it go and rubbed both his palms on his thighs to dry off the sweat.
“Well,” he said, “that was fun.”
“Yeah,” I said.
We sat there for a few minutes, staring at nothing. Finally Dad turned to me. “You, um, want to do something? Grab lunch? Talk? Whatever . . . ?”
I shook my head. He looked relieved, I think. I know I was. Dad stood up, stretched, patted me on the shoulder, and left the room. I watched him go. He was as tall as me but not as muscular. Wiry and thin. A happy man who was having an unhappy day.
I sat there for a long time, alone with my thoughts.