Leaving Orbit

CHAPTER 8. The End of the Future: Wheel Stop

STS-135 Landing: July 21, 2011

The Orlando airport is one of the busiest in the country, but late at night it quiets down considerably, and after midnight, when my flight lands, it is nearly abandoned. In the rental car area, there is only one polo-shirted employee for every two or three rental company counters, and a lone janitor vacuums around the stanchions marking empty paths for customer lines. I find the glowing neon logo of the company with which I’d reserved a car shortly before getting onto my flight in Knoxville, only a few hours before. I’m fully prepared for them to have no record of my reservation and am hoping they’ll have a car to give me anyway. I wait while the only other rental car patron here tonight conducts his transaction in easy, slangy Spanish. When the customer leaves, the man behind the counter finishes writing on a printout, looks up at me, and instantly switches to unaccented English.

“What can I do for you this evening?” A glance at his watch. “I mean, this morning?”

“Reservation under Dean?” I ask skeptically. He taps at his terminal.

“Dean,” he says. “Got you right here. Compact?” By some miracle, my reservation has stuck. It’s one in a string of lucky breaks I’ve had today. But as we make our way through the process of entering all my information into his computer, we hit a snag.

“Address where you’ll be staying?” he asks.

“Um—I won’t have one,” I tell him. Only then do his eyes lift from his screen to meet mine. There’s an awkward pause.

“Just need to know what hotel you’re going to be staying at,” he says, fingers twitching over his keyboard. He now wears the completely blank look of someone struggling not to betray his contempt for another person’s stupidity.

“The thing is, I’m not staying in a hotel,” I say. “I’m driving straight to the Kennedy Space Center, then the space shuttle will land in a few hours, then I’ll drive back here in the afternoon, return the car, and get back on a plane. No hotel.”

The agent blinks at me once, slowly.

“I’ma put Holiday Inn Cocoa Beach,” he announces.

“Fine,” I say, feeling mildly alarmed that no one else has attempted what I am trying to pull off today. Or maybe they have been smart enough to lie about it.

He does some more typing, tries unsuccessfully to upsell me on a few things, then hands me my voucher.

“Have a nice stay in Florida,” he says, in a voice not entirely free of irony. I go out to the parking structure where they keep the cars, climb into a silver one, start it up, and head toward the coast.

Yesterday afternoon I got an e-mail from NASA detailing some upcoming media events, and one of them was the landing of Atlantis. I had known all along when the landing would be—it had at first been scheduled for July 20, then put off till July 21 at a few minutes before six in the morning, to allow the crew more time to finish up work at the International Space Station. I knew that my press badge from the launch would get me in to see the landing, and I had privately mourned a bit that I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the opportunity. Compared to launches, which are visible to anyone for many miles around, landings can only be seen by those on NASA grounds and are never open to the public. And this one will be the last landing of a space shuttle, ever; very likely the last landing of an American spacecraft within my lifetime, since none of the spacecraft proposed to replace the shuttle are reusable. But I had decided not to go—in fact, had never really considered the possibility of going—because I had promised my patient and overextended husband that I was done going to Florida. I’d said these exact words to him. As I’d packed my car for the last launch of Atlantis, only thirteen days earlier, he’d asked, wearily, “This is the last one, right?”

And I’d looked him in the eye and answered, “Yes. This is the last one. After this, I’ll be done going to Florida.” And then I’d driven away, leaving him to care for our son and our home by himself.

I’ve now made this trip to Cape Canaveral five times in the last calendar year—disappeared for three or four days at a time with no promise that I’ll come back when I’m expected (scrubs are a part of spaceflight!) and no clear schedule as to when my next trip will be (slips are a part of spaceflight!). Each of those mornings my husband has dressed and fed our little son, driven him to preschool, and managed the grocery shopping and dishes and laundry and temper tantrums and playdates and bedtimes. Chris is fully engaged in the responsibilities of parenthood—he is not the type of man who uses the word babysitting to describe caring for his own child—but he’s tired of doing so much by himself, and I don’t blame him. For my own part, I’m tired of asking him to do it.

So I chose not to go to Houston to visit Mission Control while Atlantis was on orbit, though my media badge would have allowed me access, though Norman Mailer went to Mission Control while Apollo 11 was in space. This is an important difference between Norman Mailer and me—when Mailer went off to Cape Canaveral and Houston, for as long as he pleased, he left behind five children with three different mothers and does not seem to have been troubled with much guilt over who would wash their clothes or fix their meals or get up with them in the middle of the night when they wet their beds. He probably wasn’t participating in these activities even when he was home. And even if by some chance he had been troubled by guilt, it would have been out of fashion to mention those feelings in his space book. Domestic life was thought to exist entirely outside the scope of his work, less relevant than his reflections on the design of the Saturn V or his reminiscences of going to war. In my world, domestic life continues to exist, even when I’m not at home to participate in it. Children need to be fed and lawns need to be mowed and cars’ oil changed and dishwashers to be filled and emptied and filled again. This work gets done when I’m not there. It gets done by another writer who is giving up some of his own writing time in order to do it.

At the last launch, I’d assumed that I would see the end of the story, the symbolic counterpoint to the launch of Apollo 11, the Grand Finale. I assumed that the scene in which Atlantis tears into the sky as a crowd of media, space fans, and spaceworkers cry up at it from the ground would be the climactic scene of my book. But I’d found that this wasn’t the end of the story, because a launch is a moment of triumph, everyone giddy from the fireworks display. Even at the postlaunch party Omar had taken me to, where everyone there was either a spaceworker or a serious space fan, a sense of celebration had drowned out the incredulous disappointment that we wouldn’t be doing this again.

But that Wednesday afternoon, the e-mail I received from NASA detailing the events for the day of the landing stopped me and made me reconsider everything:

I’ve seen OPF; I was there with Omar on Family Day and saw Endeavour being prepared there for its last mission. So while I was reading this e-mail I could picture the area outside OPF-2 where the employee appreciation party was to be held: empty tarmac, a wide stretch of asphalt between two hangars. The idea of holding a party out there in the brutal sun, a sad celebration for the dwindling number of still-unlaid-off shuttle workers, people who have been working nonstop for years or decades to get one shuttle after another off the ground—what sort of “party” would this be, on such a distinctly unpartylike occasion? Even with a space shuttle in attendance like the world’s most expensive party decoration, even with the astronauts there, just back from space—wouldn’t this be the biggest bummer of a party ever? Might some of the answers to my questions be found here? I couldn’t miss it.

I sat in my office on campus and read the e-mail over and over. Some pages I’d been working on before I left rested on the top of a pile on my desk. A sentence spilling over from the previous page read, “—and now the space shuttle era is ending.” I looked at it for a long time before getting a pen, scratching out the last word, and writing in, “—and now the space shuttle era is over.” This is what it means to be aware of history, I suppose, but it feels oddly like living through a death, the way little reminders, little inanimate things, conspire to keep surprising you, to keep fresh the change you weren’t really ready for, didn’t really want.

From the moment my eyes touched this e-mail, the landing was only about fourteen hours off. Not only short notice, but maybe not physically enough time to buy a plane ticket, pack a bag, get to the airport, and make the flight that would land me in Orlando in time to drive out to the space center, through security, and out to the landing site. Probably all the flights were full or insanely expensive, but even assuming I could get a seat, if either of two flights were delayed at all, a very high likelihood so late in the day, I would miss the whole thing anyway. I opened a new browser window for a travel site, to see what it would cost. There was one seat left on a flight going through Charlotte, and it was mysteriously cheap. I had always known that fares go up as the travel date approaches, but apparently they fall again right before the flight, the airlines finally backing down in their endless game of chicken with passengers. This flight was only a few hours away, and it was now cheaper than if I had bought it a month in advance.

The look on Chris’s face when I told him about the landing, about the towback and party and the oddly cheap fare, could best be described as be-wearied.

“It sounds like you should try to be there,” he said.

“I’d be back Thursday afternoon in time to get him from preschool,” I told him. “No matter what. And I’d keep him all that day and the next, I promise.”

“Do what you need to do,” he said. Did Norman Mailer’s wife (and ex-wives) send him off with a phrase like this? Did he even ask their permission at all, or did he simply inform them of his plans?

I clicked “buy” on the plane ticket, took my son to the pool for an hour (he’d been promised the pool, and such promises cannot be broken even for space shuttle landings), brought him home, changed out of my swimsuit, and threw a few things into a bag. Packing is much easier when you know you won’t have the chance to go to bed. I kissed my husband and son, jumped into my car, and sped to the airport.

When I pass through the checkpoint at the south gate to the Kennedy Space Center, I show my badge to the armed guard a bit warily. I’ve confirmed more than once that the badge that got me in to the launch is still good through the end of the mission, yet I still wonder whether that can really be true. I suppose it’s because of the trouble I went through to get the badge in the first place—it’s hard to believe that I don’t have to keep going through the same process every time I want to get past the gates. So when I hold out my badge and photo ID to the guard, there is a part of me that expects him to hand everything back, shaking his head. But he doesn’t. With the combination of scrupulousness and friendliness I have come to expect from the guards at these checkpoints in the middle of the night, he greets me, examines my badge and ID letter for letter, peers in at my face to compare it to the photo on my driver’s license, makes some friendly chatter about Tennessee and what a long way I have come, then sends me on my way into the humid dark. I head in toward the Press Site. It’s a few minutes past three in the morning.

I’ve tried to describe the hugeness of the Kennedy Space Center in daylight, but now I realize it’s at night that this place truly reveals its sheer square mileage, how very much empty land is separating everything. In the distance, I can see the Vehicle Assembly Building lit up like the prow of some massive ship, the row of workshops and other buildings just before it, but there are miles between here and there punctuated only with infrequent streetlights. I roll down the windows to keep myself awake on the straightaway. Outside I can hear the croaking of frogs and the strange bellowing noise alligators make. The smell of Cape Canaveral I can never quite remember when I’m not here, the night air a wet and lightless forest in the nose. Somehow, I reflect, all this feels like home now, though a home I still wonder at. A spaceport home.

I have a picture I snapped with my phone at three thirty in the morning, while I stood in line with a couple hundred other badged members of the media next to a row of idling buses. You can’t see much in the photo—I’d been standing there, deafened by the idling diesels and sickened by the fumes, exhausted and annoyed that other journalists standing around had told me I needed to check in at the News Center but then after my long walk up to the News Center I was told to come back down here to the parking lot and wait in line for a bus, a process that drained some of my precious remaining energy and put me a few dozen people behind in line. I’d been stewing about this injustice, but then I suddenly remember where I am. I am at the Kennedy Space Center, well past the security checkpoint, in the middle of the night. I am on hallowed ground, a place other space fans would give their eyeteeth to be, even once. In a couple of hours, the last space shuttle is going to make its last landing. And after today, I might never get the chance to come here again.

The picture I snap of the VAB at that moment does not come out well—it was shot in the kind of light that the human eye can see but that a camera can’t capture much at all, at least not the camera in my phone. I’ve saved the image, though, because when I look through my photos and see that blurry square that I know to be the Vehicle Assembly Building and the blurry shapes I know to be my fellow journalists, I remember what it was like to stand out there that night, the odd combination of heat and chill, of annoyance and privilege, of exhaustion and eagerness.

The bus is heading to the Shuttle Landing Facility, one of the few parts of the Kennedy Space Center where I haven’t spent much time. I’ve seen the runway, but I’ve never had a clear idea of where people actually stand to watch landings. In spite of my better judgment, I keep picturing us onlookers—the astronauts’ families, NASA officials, a pack of photojournalists, and me—all standing on the scrubby grass and bushes to one side of a normal airport runway, shielding our faces from the wind.

As I discover, the term “Shuttle Landing Facility” refers to a 500-acre area on the north side of the Kennedy Space Center, an area that includes the runway, an aircraft parking apron, a tow-way, a recovery convoy staging area, the mate-demate device, and the building everyone (confusingly) also calls SLF. The runway is nearly three miles long, one of the longest in the world, and with good reason. When the space shuttle comes in for a landing, it has only one chance. It has no engines to pull up, circle around, and try again, as airplanes do. It’s a fact that shuttle pilots take a nontrivial amount of pride in: the winged object that’s hardest to land (in early days it was nicknamed “the flying brickyard” because of its poor glide ratio) is also one with absolutely no margin for error.

Our bus parks in a field already lined with vehicles, mostly satellite uplink trucks. We pile out of our buses and start hiking up toward the SLF building. Knee-high weeds whip at everyone’s ankles, barely keeping the dirt from turning to mud in the unaccustomed churning. The moon is waning gibbous. I find it hard to keep my footing in the dark, despite the floodlights. We reach the building, a sort of mashup of small-town control tower and racetrack observation deck; there are two stories of seating (all already filled with photojournalists setting up their tripods) and a concrete pad upon which many others stand about and where still more photojournalists are setting up still more tripods and stepladders. Everyone looks out toward the runway, which is, at this hour, still swallowed in darkness and whose existence we must take on faith. A digital countdown clock, much smaller than the one at the Press Site, marks the time in red LED numbers. I feel an instant prejudice against this countdown clock, solely because it is not the other countdown clock, the big one I know and love from the Press Site. The smallness, redness, and newness of this one all offend me nonsensically.

All in all, this place does not feel big enough to contain our numbers, though of course it must be noted that most landings over the past thirty years have drawn but a fraction of this crowd. Though I’ve never been here before, I’ve seen images and videos of landings on the NASA site and on people’s Flickr and YouTube accounts: in them, there is always plenty of space for everyone in and around the SLF building, unlike today. And, maddeningly, the landings in the pictures are usually daytime landings. As of right now, I bitterly envy all the people who have ever come out here to see a landing during daylight hours. They got to see the orbiter streaking in from miles away, framed against the blue sky. We can’t see a thing out there, and we know the sun will not yet have risen when Atlantis comes screaming toward this runway. I know I won’t be able to see it until it’s practically on top of us, if at all. We have come out here to witness something we might not actually be able to see.

I stake out a spot on the concrete to slump to the ground, my back against the wall of the building. It’s T minus ninety minutes, and I discover it feels amazing to sit down. I’ve been up for twenty-two hours. A few feet to my left, a young journalist is similarly slumped, asleep or willing himself to sleep, his steno notebook and phone clutched in one hand, his mission badge firmly clipped to his lapel. Every thirty seconds, he swats at a mosquito without opening his eyes.

The NASA public affairs people are out here, identifiable by their blue polo shirts with the NASA meatball logo on them and by their general appearance of wakefulness and helpfulness. I don’t know when these people sleep. I eavesdrop on a conversation between one of their number, a chipper middle-aged man with the physical fitness and intelligent look of an astronaut, and a journalist from Reuters (if the neckband bearing her badge is to be trusted).

Reuters woman: I thought of you the other day. On NBC Nightly News, the reporter was saying it was “the end of American spaceflight” and I knew you wouldn’t like that.

Public Affairs guy: Well, you’re right, we don’t like hearing it put that way. But you know I think I watched the same broadcast and he did say “as we know it,” so I think that clears up a lot of the confusion.

Reuters woman: “The end of American spaceflight as we know it”—that’s better than “the end of American spaceflight”?

Public Affairs guy: Oh yes.

Then their conversation turns to other things, but I’m left wondering: do normal TV-watchers know the difference between “the end of American spaceflight as we know it” and “the end of American spaceflight”? Does the former conjure up images of the SpaceX Dragon or the Space Launch System? Having spoken to many people on these topics, I have to say I doubt it. Either way, I disagree with the public affairs man’s assumption, one that seems to be embedded in most of NASA’s communications of late, that the best message to send to the public is that NASA is focusing on the future, accentuating the positive, that everything is fine. Everything is not fine. We have no space vehicle anymore. Like my students, the public needs to know that American spaceflight stopped, and to feel sad about that, before they will clamor to rebuild it.

A few paces to the right of where this concrete slab ends, a waist-high chicken-wire fence separates us from other observers, dark figures who mill around in the grass and take seats on a small set of outdoor bleachers. The VIP area. This is where astronauts’ families sit, NASA higher-ups, politicians, other invited guests. In their boredom, some of the journalists go over to the fence and try to lure over VIPs for interviews. The people on the VIP side are bored too, and so they drift over gamely, and from where I’m slumped I can overhear several leisurely conversations getting started at once, the opening questions, the VIPs spelling their names into the outstretched digital voice recorders of the journalists.

“Oh, it’s very exciting,” I hear someone say carefully. “It’s the end of an era.”

People around me start to complain about the wait, which is odd considering that landings involve a lot less waiting than launches, which presumably most of us have attended before. In fact, I overhear a woman, wandering by, tell another journalist that she just saw two simultaneous references to Beckett on Twitter. En Attendant Atlantis. Waiting for the Shuttle. This strikes me as a little overdramatic. Why would the wait for landing be worse than the wait for launch? Maybe we are subconsciously aware that a delay in landing means something inherently much worse. The people who stood or slumped where we are standing or slumping for the landing of Columbia were witnesses to the horror of Columbia’s absence. They waited and waited that morning, and if they hadn’t given up and gone home they would still be waiting, because Columbia was destroyed and the crew was dead while those spectators still waited. If a launch is delayed it’s a nuisance; if a landing is delayed it’s a disaster.

“T minus ten minutes and counting,” I hear someone say. I feel I’ve lost some time and wonder whether I have actually fallen asleep; all around me, people are dusting themselves off, stretching. The photojournalists are taking the lens caps off their cameras; the print journalists are finding good viewing spots. It’s still full dark outside, and I’m still unclear on where we’re supposed to be looking, which part of the sky Atlantis will appear in.

I know that the sonic boom will be coming soon, and I remember hearing Endeavour’s return when I was here for the Atlantis rollout. For that landing I was fifteen miles away, but I remember the way the sound was more momentous than what we usually call “sound”—the way it wasn’t so much a sound I heard with my ears as something that happened. T minus five minutes on the clock. I still don’t really know where to look; people aren’t all looking in the same direction. When I’d first arrived here I’d had the idea that the runway is parallel to the front of the building, but now I’m not sure. How long Atlantis will be visible in the air before it touches down, whether it will touch down up that way or down that way or right in front of us—of none of this am I confident. And all of this seems terribly important, because I have come a long way, and gone to a great deal of trouble, to be able to see this. I’m determined not to be looking in the wrong direction when it happens.

As I am dithering over which direction I should be looking, the sonic boom tears through the sky twice in quick succession. Boom-boom. The sound is heart-stoppingly loud. It startles me to the core, startles everyone here. We all knew it was coming, but it doesn’t matter. We jump anyway. Some of us even cry out with surprise. A few people burst into applause, as if the noise of the sonic boom were like the noise of the launch, a noise that contains an accomplishment in and of itself. Some people look around to meet another human’s gaze, to share what they’ve just experienced, and some of those people have tears glistening in their eyes. The spectators here are all journalists, professionally unimpressed by things. Some of them have been out here for many landings and have been startled many times before. It doesn’t matter. This is a phenomenon you would never get used to.

The sound rolls over the land, the way thunder does—I can hear the sound traveling away from us and bouncing off buildings and hills and gantries and then rolling on and disappearing out into the ocean. The sound will wake people, rattle windows, and set off dogs barking, including the Izquierdos’ dog, for forty miles around.

“Where is it?” a few people call to each other. But most of us know that after the sonic boom it will still be another few minutes before Atlantis is actually visible.

Minutes go by. We stand around and wait, not sure where to look.

“There it is! There it is!” I hear people yell, and I try to follow their fingers, and I’m looking in slightly the wrong direction at first. Then I do see it, and for a second, the sight is oddly incongruous, fake. Look, it’s a space shuttle, I want to tell people standing near me. The familiar old space shuttle as I’ve seen it in a million pictures and a million videos and in The Dream Is Alive as a child, as I’ve seen it up close and in person, the actual enormous space shuttle. But this time it is suspended in the air, which seems to make no sense. It’s much too big to do such a thing. It hangs before me in the dark, gliding in straight toward us. Ghostly trails come off the tips of its wings and its tail fin. Of course, it’s not producing noise—if we were watching a plane of comparable size, a 747, say, we’d all be deafened by the shrieking engines, but on the shuttle there are no landing engines at all. The event is not silent; there is a profound noise that comes with the air moving under the wings of Atlantis, but it’s still eerily quiet given the sheer size of the thing we are watching barreling down toward us.

The speakers near me crackle.

“Having fired the imagination of a generation…” It’s a man’s voice—I don’t know whether it’s the commander, Chris Ferguson, or the public affairs officer, or someone from Mission Control. I lean in to hear better.

“Having fired the imagination of a generation, a ship like no other, its place in history secured, the space shuttle pulls into port for the last time, its voyage at an end,” says the voice. Later, when I look up the audio recording of the landing online, I learn the voice is that of Mission Control commentator Rob Navias.

I lose Atlantis for a second in the dark, and when I find it again, it’s by the screeching of rubber hitting concrete. It touches down, its tile-covered flank flashing by me like a shark flashing by the window of an aquarium. Atlantis has released its drogue chute and is slowing—still moving fast, but slowing, slowing.

Slowing, slowing.

Stops.

“Mission complete, Houston.” This is the voice of the commander, Chris Ferguson. He speaks carefully, a little self-consciously, like he’s reading off index cards prepared in advance. His language is slightly off here; usually the commander says “Wheel stop,” not “Mission complete.”

“After serving the world for over thirty years, the space shuttle has earned its place in history. It’s come to a final stop.”

“We copy your wheels stopped, and we’ll take this opportunity to congratulate you, Atlantis, as well as the thousands of passionate individuals across this great, space-faring nation who truly empower this incredible spacecraft, which for three decades has inspired millions around the globe,” replies another voice (capcom Butch Wilmore). “Job well done, America.”

It’s kind of sweet, I suppose, the way these speeches have clearly been scripted in advance. Somehow their formality and stiff delivery combine to make the whole exchange feel more sincere, rather than less so, like a nervous couple exchanging their scripted wedding vows.

“Hey thanks, Butch, great words, great words,” Ferguson says, in what sounds like an awkward attempt to make their dialogue sound spontaneous. “You know, the space shuttle has changed the way we view the world and it’s changed the way we view our universe. There are a lot of emotions today, but one thing is indisputable—America’s not going to stop exploring.

“Thank you, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavour, and our ship, Atlantis. Thank you for protecting us and bringing this program to such a fitting end. God bless all of you, God bless the United States of America.”

In spite of the stiffness and prewritten tone, the names of the lost orbiters still bring tears to my eyes. Of the people around me, some seem equally moved, while others aren’t really paying attention. Instead they text and tweet, tell each other their impressions of what we’ve just seen, pointing up at the same empty sky, which is still dark, tinged now with light gray at the horizon.

That phrase sticks in my mind: “America’s not going to stop exploring.” I keep hearing this kind of vaguely patriotic talk that implies another space program is inevitable simply because the American spirit demands it. But we’ve been proud of what space exploration says about our country all along. We have to decide it’s also worth paying for.

After the landing, I stand for a long time and look out at Atlantis, motionless now, as the photojournalists pack up their tripods and cameras, ready to move out to the next photo op. Atlantis stands steaming, the heat of reentry still radiating off its skin, while specially trained crews rush in to “safe” the vehicle—to remove any residue of toxic fuel from the exterior before extracting the astronauts. A few minutes ago that object was screaming toward the runway at four hundred miles per hour; for the previous two weeks it was traveling at seventeen thousand miles per hour as it orbited Earth, faster than a bullet shot from a rifle. Now it is dead still, and it will never move under its own power again. Later today it will be towed back to the Orbiter Processing Facility, then subsequently stored in the Vehicle Assembly Building until the new museum at the Visitor Complex is ready to receive it, at which time a flatbed truck will carry it slowly down NASA Parkway to its final resting place. But for now, it is motionless, the astronauts still strapped inside, running through their postflight checklist. I still can’t take my eyes off it.

Everyone piles back into the buses and rides back to the News Center at the Press Site. Most of the journalists race to grab desks, plug in their laptops and devices. Just as at the launch, they shout facts and figures to each other, and generally cause a lot of commotion grabbing handouts, asking questions of the Media Office employees, and eventually, it seems, writing things. I assume they are throwing together breaking-news pieces and blog posts for their publications. We all watch the monitors showing replays of the landing. Some of the journalists read information loudly into their phones, as in old movies—exact times, the spelling of names. I elect not to try for a desk since I don’t really need one; I didn’t even bring a laptop. Not for the first time, I reflect on the luxury I have in not having to write about all this today. I can take in these events more fully, precisely because I don’t have the burden of writing as I’m experiencing them. I’m free to wander around eavesdropping on journalists’ conversations, chat with the Media Office people, page through a book of laminated bios of journalists whose names are up on the wall in metal letters under the heading THE CHRONICLERS. I can go for a walk and take pictures of things around the Press Site, think about what I’m seeing and what I’ve seen and what it all means to me. I can watch events replay on NASA TV. I can slump against a wall and take a nap. I do all of these things in the time it takes the journalists to pull together their first stories about the landing. When I go to write my own chapter about the landing, I will be able to use their news stories to get the details right. I will watch their videos and study their still photos and listen to their audio recordings, and that hardly seems fair. At the same time, their work of documenting what happens today, as challenging and important is it is, will be done by the time they leave the Press Site today, while my self-appointed job of reflection will just be beginning.

The monitors show the live feed on NASA TV, where the astronauts are being helped out of Atlantis’s hatch. They wear the same expressions that astronauts always wear upon returning to Earth—tired, elated, a little confused by the unaccustomed pull of gravity, an expression of a child shaken from a happy dream.

Nearby, I hear two journalists greet each other.

“Boom-boom.”

“Hey, and a boom-boom to you as well.”

A sign posted on the wall in the News Center reminds us that we aren’t to go anywhere other than the Press Site or the Launch Control cafeteria without an escort. After passing this sign a few times, it occurs to me that the implication is that we are allowed to go to the Launch Control cafeteria without an escort. I ask a journalist wearing a Mars rover T-shirt whether we can really cross the street to go to the cafeteria, and he answers “of course,” with a look as though I am crazy for asking.

“The food’s not great, though,” he warns me, as if I came here for the cuisine.

Walking to the cafeteria, I stop at a crosswalk on VAB Road to let a tour bus go by. The visitors riding the bus look out at me with great curiosity, their faces shadowed by the smoked glass. It occurs to me that they probably think that I work for NASA, that I’m an engineer or a physicist or even an astronaut. I wave at them experimentally; several wave back. One mother points out the window at me, and her children lean in to wave as the bus disappears around the bend.

The Launch Control cafeteria seats a couple hundred people, and judging from the colors and materials, I’d guess it hasn’t been updated since the mideighties. It’s relatively empty at this hour, 9:30 a.m. or so, but by some miracle they are still serving breakfast. I order eggs, hashbrowns, an enormous biscuit (another notch in the “central Florida is part of the South” column), and coffee. As I eat, I scribble notes, and though I sneak looks at my fellow diners, none of the few badged employees eating nearby seems to recognize me as an interloper. They pitch their voices low, either because they are discussing something classified or because they don’t want to disturb me. I wish they wouldn’t—I’d love to hear what they’re talking about. Even when I can make out what people are saying, I keep losing the threads of their conversations in my exhaustion. The space workers all eat quickly and get back to work, but I linger over a second cup of coffee, killing time before the next scheduled photo op: the towback.

The area where we wait to board the buses to take us to the towback is unsheltered, and though no one has passed out completely, we are all starting to wilt a bit in the unrelenting sun. It’s over 90 degrees and nearing 100 percent humidity. I tried to plan ahead for a range of temperatures—I’ve already peeled off several layers—but I still have a serious problem: I have no sunscreen with me. If I’d packed any, security restrictions would have forced me to check a bag on my flight, and a wait at luggage claim might very well have made me miss the landing. Some people knew to cover their heads, but a lot of journalists still insist upon dressing in some version of professional attire, which precludes shade-giving hats. A few enterprising journalists have made makeshift hats out of handkerchiefs by tying knots in the four corners. I am wearing a white cotton scarf I had the good sense to throw around my neck before heading to the airport—it helped keep me warm this morning before the sun came up, but now that the sun is beating down, I’ve draped it over my head like Lawrence of Arabia.

Not nearly as many of us have elected to watch the towback, I realize when I climb onto the bus. It’s a smaller bus than the one we rode out to the Shuttle Landing Facility this morning, and not nearly as luxurious. I also soon realize that I am the only person on the bus without cameras, tripods, and bags of other equipment. This is, apparently, a photo op, but not an event print journalists feel the need to view in person. It makes sense, I suppose—there will probably be a live feed of the towback on closed-circuit TV that one can watch from the air-conditioned comfort of the News Center, and seeing with one’s own eyes the sight of Atlantis being towed back to the hangar from the runway would not in any way add to the veracity or detail of the stories most of the journalists are writing. I feel self-conscious finding a seat on the bus carrying only my notebook. I am also the only woman here.

As the bus grinds through its gears, I realize that it is something like the converted school bus that Norman Mailer rode for Apollo 11. Rather than being completely un-air-conditioned, as Mailer complained his was, this bus does have air-conditioning—at least it boasts air-conditioning vents—but the system seems to lack the wherewithal to stand up to fifty sweating journalists, many of them oversized. The temperature inside is probably similar to that outside, only more stagnant and fragrant. After about ten minutes, the bus pulls over right where a tow road leading from the landing strip connects with Kennedy Parkway. We pile out of the bus. The photographers’ shirts are stained with enormous sweat spots. And the mosquitoes have come out as well, tiny vicious mosquitoes. It occurs to me that in addition to having no sunscreen, I also have no bug spray.

“This sucks! I’m never coming to one of these again!” cries out a huge sweating journalist. Everyone laughs.

The roadside at the intersection is uneven, moist without quite being swampy, the ubiquitous canebrake brushing against everyone’s pants legs. Running parallel to both roads are ditches filled with brackish water. One of the more experienced photographers points out to us an alligator lurking in the ditch on our side of the road. It is a safe distance away, but I’ve been told alligators can move surprisingly fast. We all keep one eye on it as we move around finding our vantage points. The photographers busy themselves setting up their tripods and stepladders; a few intrepid stand-up journalists attempt to smooth themselves out enough to appear on camera. Judging by the logos on their microphones, none of them are from networks or news agencies I have ever heard of, and I wonder whether they now regret the idea of attempting to speak briskly into the camera as Atlantis rolls by behind them, whether it has now become clear to them that this was not a good plan.

We see the caravan coming a long way off.

First a black SUV.

Then the convoy command vehicle, a converted motor home that’s used as a sort of mobile mission control during safing procedures after landings.

Then a stair car. It had never occurred to me that NASA must own stair cars, but of course the astronauts have to get out of the orbiter somehow. This pleases me unreasonably.

These lead vehicles are moving exquisitely slowly, barely a slow walking pace. Behind them, soon, we can see the silhouette of Atlantis, its enormous tail fin and the curved shape of the orbital maneuvering system pods against the sky. In the minutes it takes the orbiter to come fully into view, the photographers scurry around, revising their guesses as to where the best vantage points will be. The few stand-up TV journalists run through their patter, all of them speaking earnestly into their cameras, all of them turning now and then to gesture toward Atlantis.

As Atlantis comes near enough that we can make out more details, we see that there are people walking alongside it, men and women, wearing work clothes and jeans. They walk slowly and reverentially, pallbearers, and though I know from my reading that this towback is always done slowly, today it seems intentional that they move as slowly as a funeral procession.

I hear a single pair of hands clapping behind me, and when I turn to look it’s a photographer’s assistant who has tucked his camera pole under his arm to applaud. He holds his chin up a bit self-consciously, knowing everyone is looking at him, but he has decided to go through with this gesture. Maybe he knew for weeks he wanted to do this, or maybe he’s only decided right this moment, when those people came into view, the workers walking beside Atlantis, hugging close to its side. Even from here we can see that the spaceworkers are not chatting, are not smiling or drifting off thinking about what they are going to do after work or what to make for dinner. They face straight ahead, their expressions solemn. They can see the clump of us journalists on the roadside; they know they are having their pictures taken, and this is the face they want to wear in these pictures. A lot of them are going to get their layoff notices tomorrow, Omar has told me, but for right now it is their privilege to walk alongside their spacecraft. This is what makes me tear up, finally, as more and more people around me pick up the applause, photojournalists actually let go of their cameras, let their cameras dangle from their neck straps, to clap as loudly as they can, holding their arms up so our applause can be seen by those we are applauding. Unencumbered by equipment, I tuck my phone into my back pocket and clap until my palms sting. I’m moved by the sight of the great ship, now forever flightless, crawling along with its keepers at its sides.

We stand on that roadside forever, watching Atlantis go by, still keeping one eye on that alligator. We are in no hurry to leave. We watch patiently as Atlantis slowly passes us in its own sweet time. And then we watch it navigate the soft turn onto Kennedy Parkway, and we watch it make its way up toward the area outside the Orbiter Processing Facility, where the employee appreciation party is under way. We watch until we can see only the outlines of the tail fin again, and as Atlantis navigates into its place of honor at the head of the area where the party is to be held, we hear a cheer rising from the crowd gathered there.

Once we’ve all piled back into the stagnant, fragrant bus, we sit motionless for a long time. Our driver, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nelson Mandela, keeps the bus idling in a vain effort to get us some air.

Waiting long periods of time in close quarters makes people chatty. The photojournalists strike up conversations. They gossip about others among their number who couldn’t make it to this event. They gossip about layoffs, journalism being another one of the occupations, like space work, in which even the best among them are being laid off in large numbers. The photojournalist who made the joke about not coming back has decided to give nicknames to those sitting closest to him. A tiny videographer carrying a giant camera is dubbed Gator Bait; soon everyone is calling him that. The journalists swap stories of previous space events, and the discussions spread out to more rows of seats as they call out mission numbers and the names of orbiters. I was here for the last launch of Columbia. I was here for the last landing of Columbia. I was here for return to flight after Columbia. I WAS HERE. All of us, it seems, were here for the last launch of Atlantis, only thirteen days ago. That feels like another lifetime.

“Get any good shots?” my seatmate asks me, casting a curious eye over my small bag and empty hands.

“I’m not a photographer,” I answer, and then because he seems to be waiting for something more, “I’m a writer.”

“A writer. What do you write?”

“I’m trying to write about the end of the shuttle era. Trying to make sense of what all this means.” I gesture vaguely toward Atlantis. As I speak, I’m aware of how very iffy this all sounds.

“Huh.” He is quiet for a minute. “And what does it mean?”

I look out the window at a Japanese film crew packing up their elaborate setup, huge sheets of plywood they have laid out on the grass to enable them to get a smooth dolly shot, and I can’t imagine they got any images anywhere near worth the effort, but we watch while they haul all their equipment back into the van piece by piece against the totally unacceptable heat and humidity. The futility of their task seems to signify something.

“I have no idea what it means,” I tell him truthfully. “I’ve been out here for everything, and I have even less of a clue than when I started.”

He seems unsure of what to say to this, as if I’ve told him I’m dying of cancer. I’m struck with an idea. I turn in my seat to face him.

“What do you think it means?” I ask him. “You’ve been out here taking pictures, right? What do you think it means that we’re not going anymore?”

He takes a deep breath, leans his head back against the bus seat. I’m not sure whether he’s thinking or taking a brief nap.

Finally he speaks. “I don’t think it means anything, it means we’ve decided to stop,” he says. “It means a lot of people on this bus are about to lose their jobs.”

When we finally start moving, the bus circles around and delivers us to the opposite end of the Orbiter Processing Facility from where Atlantis is now displayed. We get out and look around. A small crowd presses toward a low barrier set up to keep us from touching the orbiter. People take turns snapping each other’s photos with it. Bins of ice cream and bottled water are on offer, and I immediately help myself to both. A number of awnings are set up—under one, people are invited to sign a banner commemorating this mission that will be hung in the Vehicle Assembly Building. I find a blank spot and write my son’s name and the date. Under another awning, a live band is playing R&B covers. They are with the Air Force Reserve, and they remind me of a high-end wedding band; they even have a horn section. Nearby, a woman in a union T-shirt is handing out cardboard fans with the NASA logo, and not far from her a man is handing out little American flags. People wandering by are taking one of each; I accept a fan and after a moment’s thought I decline the flag, thinking the stick is probably too long and pointy to carry on board my flight. The man handing out the flags scowls at me.

As I slink away, I see Omar emerge from OPF. I shout and wave, but he only raises a single hand to waist height to acknowledge me, looking totally unsurprised to find me here. I’ve texted him I was coming, and we’ve managed to find each other at other launches and events, but this one feels different. It’s an event for NASA employees only, and my sense that I’m not really supposed to be here, that I somehow got in on a technicality, makes me feel giddy about catching sight of my one friend who is also an employee.

Omar grabs two ice cream bars out of the nearest container and tosses me one. I don’t mention that I ate one two minutes ago and eat this one too.

“Want your picture with Atlantis?” Omar offers, and we make our way up to the barricade. We trade phones and take each other’s pictures with the orbiter peeking over our shoulders. It’s funny that so many of the people here, including Omar, have worked with these machines every day for years, yet they still clamor to take pictures with them like first-time tourists. Being close to this orbiter today is still a privilege.

A dais is set up with a microphone toward the center of the barricade, not far from where we have worked our way to the front of the crowd, and soon Charles Bolden, the NASA administrator, takes the stage to welcome us. He speaks for five minutes, somehow not repeating anything I heard him say at the history conference but not really saying anything new either. Then we hear from the crew of Atlantis. They have changed out of their orange reentry pressure suits and into blue flight suits (and, presumably, have showered). One by one they speak, thanking the people here for keeping them safe, for taking such good care of their ship. As Chris Ferguson steps aside to let Rex Walheim come to the microphone, I notice he stumbles over his feet a bit, a misstep then overcorrection, as if he is walking on the deck of a boat encountering swelling waves. I realize that what I am seeing is his readjustment to gravity.

“Isn’t it weird,” I say to Omar, “that these people just got back from space?” Even as I say this, I know the observation is idiotic. Of course they’re just back from space; that’s why we’re all here.

But Omar nods. “It really is,” he says.

After the speeches are over, the Air Force Reserve band tries to get the crowd dancing, but with limited success. A lot of partygoers are standing around watching amiably, maybe clapping along, but no one is dancing. If these bottles we’re holding contained beer instead of water, maybe. But at work in the middle of a weekday with no alcohol—not a chance.

But then one dude steps forward. Tall and rangy, probably not any older than me but with a weathered face that reflects years spent in the Florida sun. He dances by himself, to “Celebrate Good Times,” and his footwork is reminiscent of Chris Ferguson’s stumble at the microphone. This man appears to have somehow gotten some alcohol on base, and he is dancing accordingly. Everyone still stands around, but now we are all watching him.

Where he went wrong was in taking the word party literally, when the event is not in fact a party but a wake. Best to stand around somberly. A wake with speeches from astronauts and NASA officials, a wake with Atlantis, fresh from its reentry into the atmosphere, in attendance. A wake with ice cream, in hundred-degree heat, a party where most of the partygoers know they are about to be laid off. We watch him dance a few minutes more, then avert our eyes and move on.

Omar and I walk around. The crowd thins out more the farther we get from Atlantis, and past the entrance to OPF-1 there is almost no one. We step over a set of train tracks, built to deliver the solid rocket boosters directly to the Vehicle Assembly Building from the contractor in Utah. Past that, the cliff wall of the VAB. One of the high bay doors is open, and I shield my eyes, straining to see inside.

“Trying to see Discovery?” Omar asks, following my eyes. Discovery has been in the VAB, having its engines and other working parts removed, in preparation for transport to the Air and Space Museum. Omar has been tweeting and posting on Facebook about this dismantling process, and though he doesn’t go on and on about it, it’s clear he finds it disturbing, the lifelong mandate to keep the orbiter safe from harm suddenly reversed into overseeing its dismemberment.

“She’s in there,” Omar tells me. “But I don’t think you’ll be able to see anything from here.” As we move toward the fence, Omar wonders aloud whether he might be able to get me past the gate.

“I’m not supposed to take you in there,” Omar explains, then thinks something over. “It might depend on who’s working security, though.”

As we get closer, we see an idling black SUV with a single guard in it. He steps one foot out onto the tarmac and juts his chin at Omar.

“She wanted to try to see inside the VAB a bit,” Omar says in a chummy, what-do-you-say-bro tone of voice. I can tell he doesn’t know this guy at all.

“Badge?” the guard asks. Omar hands over his work badge. I unclip my media badge and hand that to him as well.

The guard looks me over thoroughly.

“Sorry, dog,” the guard tells Omar, handing us both back our badges. “I can really only let in folks specifically badged for VAB.” It occurs to me only then that he might have thought Omar was trying to impress a date, and that maybe we’d have had better luck if I kept my media badge to myself. I feel a little disappointed, partly because I want to see Discovery, wanted to walk into the cool, dark VAB with Omar and no one else. But also because the guard seemed to be basing his decision on something other than our badges, and I can’t help but think if I had been younger or cuter he would have let us in.

As we walk away, Omar is apologetic about not getting me into the VAB, and I tell him he has nothing to be sorry for, after everything he has gotten me into. I wonder privately what Omar would have done in that guard’s place—it’s impossible to imagine him bending the rules, but also hard to picture him failing to come through for a coworker asking a favor.

After some more wandering around, Omar tells me he has to go back to OPF—he’s working today, and people are taking turns coming out to the party. For a while after he’s gone I linger, watching the band, eavesdropping, eating more ice cream, watching Atlantis, and watching people watch it. A call goes out for media people to get back on the bus, but I ignore it. Even though I’ve signed a form saying I will stay with media escorts and won’t wander around unaccompanied, I feel pretty confident that I won’t get in any trouble today. If I’m caught, I will say I missed the last bus, which will more or less be true.

Eventually, when the crowd starts to thin out, I set out to head back to the Press Site by circling around the VAB on foot, a project that, I only now start to realize, is going to take me a while. For the millionth time, the building has fooled me with its hugeness. The sun is fully blazing now in the early afternoon, I realize it’s been hours since I applied some sunscreen I begged off a Scottish journalist, and I put my Lawrence of Arabia scarf back on my head. I haven’t slept for thirty-two hours. I walk and walk and walk and the huge building next to me hardly seems to change as I walk. It is city blocks long.

Then something strikes me: I am walking, by myself, next to the Vehicle Assembly Building in the middle of the day. I’m loose on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center. I’m walking through a strange landscape I have come to know so well in my mind it feels like another home to me, yet it still feels like a setting for science fiction. This is where the spaceships are assembled, and I will never get used to that—the people who assemble the spaceships themselves say they never get used to that—even as the spaceships are retired and will be assembled no longer.

For the many minutes it takes me to circumnavigate the enormous beige edifice, I look up at it. I think of the way architecture, over time, can become transmuted into pure emotion. I haven’t really been seeing the VAB, I just feel an overwhelming wonder and admiration and loss. But now I look closely. Turkey vultures circle endlessly overhead, as they always do. Seeing it this close up, I finally notice the many imperfections on the facade, places where the beige-gray paint has been touched up after hurricanes and doesn’t quite match, the way the corrugated surface, seen from directly below, distorts the huge NASA logo. When I pass the high bay doors, I squint inside again to try to catch a glimpse of Discovery. It’s too far away.

I get back to the Press Site, where my rental car waits in the parking lot, baking in the heat. It took me longer to walk back here than I thought it would, and I really need to be getting on my way to the airport. But before I get in the car, I decide to visit the grassy field with the countdown clock at the edge of the Turn Basin. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to visit the Press Site again, whether there will be another event that will allow me to get badged, whether I will ever have an excuse to come to the Kennedy Space Center again at all.

The press parking lot is still half full, and I imagine things are still bustling inside the News Center. But no one is out here near the countdown clock; nothing is launching. I compare in my mind what this grassy field looked like on the day of the launch, thirteen days ago—the tents and awnings and cameras and tripods and mic booms and thousands of journalists in clumps and pairs and singly, speaking a dozen different languages. All heady with excitement. The land shows no trace of this, except for some tire tracks cutting through the long grass. I look out at the Turn Basin, its calm water. I look at the countdown clock, now powered down, counting nothing. With my phone, I snap a picture of the clump of tropical foliage at the edge of the grassy field. All along I’ve been thinking that Norman Mailer had an experience similar to mine, that he and I saw similar events from the same vantage point. But now that a certain sense of history is catching up with those at my end of the rope, it seems more and more clear to me that what Norman Mailer and I saw could not have been more different. What he saw was a moment that felt like it was going to be the start of an era. I have never really tried to imagine what it would feel like to be inside that moment, the sixties optimism that my parents’ generation is always trying to make people younger than themselves understand, not yet ground down into a cliché but a real palpable hope, an actual optimism that here, now, people could make things different. That things could start to be better than they had been from that moment on. For as long as I’ve been alive that idea has been demonstrably false. But on the morning of the launch of Apollo 11, even the gruffest, most cynical of Americans, even Norman Mailer himself, could inhabit that optimism for a moment. For that moment, he thought it might be true that the achievement of going to the moon would permanently change the human condition. I’ve always envied him the simple experience of watching that launch, but now that I’ve come to understand what he saw, my envy is an entirely different kind. Because what must that have been like? To think everything was about to get better, that people, all of them, were going to change for the better, once and for all?

It’s true what I scribbled in my notebook when I first arrived here to meet Omar, back in the fall of 2010, for Family Day: Norman Mailer’s generation got to see the beginning of things and mine has gotten the ends. But though Norman Mailer thought he was seeing the start of something, he was wrong. In fact, he was seeing its pinnacle. I have the sad advantage of traveling to Florida knowing I’m seeing the end. I’m glad, I suppose, to know exactly what I’m seeing.