Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight

CHAPTER 1. The Beginnings of the Future: This Is Cape Canaveral

Family Day: September 25, 2010

Say the words out loud: Cape Canaveral. Say them in JFK’s voice, in John Glenn’s voice, in Walter Cronkite’s voice. The very syllables connote rockets and bravery, the countdown to zero, heroes in helmets, banks of inscrutable computers. So it’s strange that when you visit the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, when you make the drive from Orlando or from the beach towns south or north, you must first drive through miles of green flats, the low pulsing of insects all around you, alligators lurking in ditches, before you finally encounter the structures built by NASA in the sixties.

You wouldn’t necessarily know that you were at the Kennedy Space Center, the swampy, improbable spaceport that inhabits 219 square miles of mostly untouched wilderness in central Florida. The only clue to what goes on here is a roadside sign with the NASA logo and changeable numbers reminding workers how many days remain until the next launch. Kennedy Parkway runs past a wild beach and, past that, the narrow strip of land from which American spaceships leave Earth. Most of this square mileage is a wildlife refuge, closed to any type of development for over fifty years because of the potentially explosive nature of what goes on here. In this way, the tour guides tell their busloads of tourists, technology and nature can help each other.

It’s fall 2010. I’m sitting in the backseat of a rental car being driven by my father; in the passenger seat is his wife, Judy. We all found each other at baggage claim in the Orlando airport late last night, having flown in from two different cities, and shared a car out to the coast. There is a special urgency to this trip because the space shuttle program will end soon, and this is one of the last opportunities I or anyone else will have to see the Kennedy Space Center as a working spaceport. The era of American spaceflight that started in 1961 when Alan Shepard became the first American to travel in space is about to come to an end, and few people seem to notice or care. Two more space shuttle missions are scheduled: STS-133 and STS-134. (STS stands for Space Transportation System, the original name for the space shuttle program from the seventies). A third mission, STS-135, will be added if NASA can get approval from Congress. This would mean one final launch for each of the three remaining space shuttle orbiters: Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis.

The decision to end the shuttle program was made quietly, and as a result many people are still not aware it’s ending. In the wake of the loss of Columbia in 2003, the investigation board tasked with uncovering the causes of the disaster pointed out the age of the fleet—the oldest surviving orbiter, Discovery, was then twenty years old. The investigation board’s report includes, on page 227, an item titled R9.2-1, Recertification. It recommends that NASA, “prior to operating the Shuttle beyond 2010, develop and conduct a vehicle certification at the material, component, subsystem, and system levels.” The destruction of Columbia had not been attributable to its age, but the board clearly feared the next disaster might be. The word sounds benign, but recertification would require the shuttles to be taken apart, examined, tested, and rebuilt from the ground up. This process would be prohibitively expensive, and everyone knew it; the inevitable consequence of this recommendation, barring some unforeseen change, was that NASA would have no choice but to retire the shuttle when this date arrived. In this paragraph the end of the shuttle is written.

By adopting the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s recommendations, the Bush administration in effect set a 2010 end date for the shuttle. That date will be extended a bit to allow for assembly of the final components of the International Space Station, but now in the fall of 2010, the last mission is in sight. Space fans and especially the spaceworkers around here have hoped the retirement decision would be reversed somehow, and still do, hoping against hope.

Wilderness, marshes, palm trees—then, all of a sudden, the Vehicle Assembly Building. From a distance, it looms. I’m directing my father from the backseat, using both the GPS function on my phone and a printout of e-mailed directions. I’m tempted to use the Vehicle Assembly Building as a landmark, but I know better because I’ve been here before: the vast size of the VAB makes it impossible to tell whether you are one mile or three miles away from it, and a turn that seems to be right before the VAB may in fact be three turns earlier. Marked with an American flag the size of a football field on one side and an equally huge blue NASA logo on the other, the VAB was the biggest building in the world by volume when it was completed in 1966, and it remains among the largest by volume to this day. No other single-story building comes close to equaling its size, if you are willing to accept that its 525-foot height constitutes a single story. The building is simply enormous in a way that people react to viscerally and emotionally, and its enormity is part of the reason the Kennedy Space Center was named one of the Engineering Wonders of the World. Visitors have not been allowed inside for over thirty years, and the tour buses that constantly crawl through the Kennedy Space Center all stop at the outer edge of the VAB’s parking lot. Tourists pile out to take pictures of each other, leaning back in an effort to fit more of the building into the frame. My own picture of myself outside the VAB dates to 2001, and in it only a small part of the building is visible over my shoulder. But today, I have plans to meet a stranger who says he can take me inside.

I’ve been here at the Kennedy Space Center twice before, twice have ridden the tour buses past the launchpads and hangars and landing strip, twice have paid my admission at the Visitor Complex to look at the artifacts, watch the IMAX movies, and eat at the Lunch Pad. Both times I was here to do research for my first novel, which revolved around the Challenger disaster. On those trips I’d known that I could come back if I wanted to, take another tour, see another launch, and it’s different now to approach the enormous facilities of the Space Center knowing how profoundly everything here is about to change. The relentless conquering of the future for which this place has always stood is now coming to a close.

I tell my father how far the turn will be from here. He grunts in agreement; he is following our progress using the GPS on his own phone. A terrible sense of direction is one of my father’s legacies to me; another is a love of spaceflight. When I e-mailed to tell him about the invitation I’d received for a behind-the-scenes visit, my father first responded that he very much hoped to be able to join me, but that he would have to check on some things first, to see whether everything could be covered at work. He e-mailed me again a few minutes later to say that yes, he would go, regardless. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he was going to be there no matter what. I’m pleased that I will be able to get him access to this experience, a re-creation of the Saturdays we spent exploring the National Air and Space Museum when I was a child.

I’ve been instructed to wear long pants and closed-toed shoes for my safety. I’ve been told to bring a picture ID that confirms my US citizenship. I’ve been warned that my tour may be canceled at any time for any reason because the Kennedy Space Center is a working space facility. A few days before, I booked a last-minute flight, asked my husband, Chris, to care for our three-year-old son by himself, and arranged for a colleague to cover my classes. My father and his wife made similarly hasty plans.

Now that I’m here on the Space Coast, I’m feeling nervous about meeting my host, Omar Izquierdo, a spaceworker who has invited me here today as his guest. I feel I know Omar because we are Facebook friends and because we share a love for the space shuttle, but, my more pragmatic friends point out, I don’t actually know him at all, don’t know for sure that he even exists. I’m grateful my father and his wife are here with me, though I know I would have come even if they hadn’t been able to make it. In my eagerness to visit restricted areas here and meet people who have worked to put spaceships into the sky, the risk that Omar is not what he claims to be is a risk I’m willing to take.

American spaceflight did not begin at the Kennedy Space Center; nor did it begin at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station across the Banana River from here. It began in the early twentieth century when three men working independently in three different countries all developed the same ideas more or less simultaneously about how rockets could be used for space travel. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Oberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I’ve seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men’s biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne’s 1865 novel De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon). The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne’s book apart from other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel—his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists—the Russian, the German, and the American—were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer.

Spaceflight began in earnest on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. The degree to which Americans were shaken by Sputnik is all but incomprehensible to people born too late to remember the Cold War. We can only know it from books and films—my favorite is Homer Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys, in which he describes standing outside on cold October evenings to watch the tiny light of Sputnik go by. We can only imagine their panic when they heard on the radio that steady Soviet beeping. The thing was streaking by like a star over Americans’ cities and towns. And what was to stop it from raining weapons down upon Americans from that vantage point? If Sputnik wasn’t actually big enough to have weapons capabilities, maybe the next satellite would be.

It is fair to say that Sputnik completely changed the way Americans in positions of power thought about both weapons and spaceflight. Up until that fall of 1957, the idea of using the rockets developed for World War II to make science fiction fantasies come true was at best a tough sell. But once everyone heard that ominous beeping, the goal of getting an American satellite up there too suddenly became urgent.

A tiny government agency called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had been in charge of overseeing the development of new airplane technology, including the plane that Chuck Yeager had flown to break the sound barrier in 1947, but their ambitious plans for sending pilots into space had always been dismissed as too expensive, too dangerous, and ultimately pointless. After Sputnik, President Eisenhower took a new interest in the activities of NACA and turned it into NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, with an infusion of funding. NASA was meant to beat the Soviets at their own game. The space race was on, and it seemed that the Soviets already might have won it.

Project Mercury began the same day NASA did, folding in a poorly funded Air Force project known as Man in Space Soonest. Everyone knew how far ahead the Soviets were, but it suddenly seemed there was no choice but to try to catch up. Not to do so would be to concede defeat. Entering the race would mean a justification for a huge upsurge in government spending, some for new projects, some for existing but underfunded ones. Public education was one of the first areas to feel the effects—high schools revamped their curricula to include more math and science, as well as Russian-language instruction.

At the end of World War II, the best of Germany’s rocket designers had been recruited to the United States by a covert government group that later became the CIA. The project was called Operation Paperclip because the Germans’ affiliation with the Nazi party and/or the SS had to be covered up through fake documents, which were paperclipped to their files. The most important German rocket expert was Wernher von Braun, who had been responsible for the development of the V-2 rocket used to bomb Allied cities. Now an American citizen, von Braun had been working to develop rockets for the US Army since 1945 and had been finding the support and funding offered him and his staff at Fort Bliss to be insultingly inadequate. But all that changed in 1957 with Sputnik, and the rocket designers soon found themselves working for NASA and enjoying much better accommodations. Suddenly everyone was interested in what von Braun and his team could do and wanted them to have all the money they needed to do it.

As it turned out, the United States came close to being the first to put a human being in space, had it not been for a couple of setbacks and an abundance of caution. As it was, a Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, made the historic first flight into space on April 12, 1961, and Alan Shepard followed soon after, on May 5. Riding the wave of that enthusiasm, and needing a way to recover from the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba, President Kennedy made his move.

On May 25, 1961, Kennedy spoke to a joint session of Congress and made an ambitious pitch: “that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” Not long before, Kennedy had had nothing but skeptical things to say about human spaceflight. The Soviets had changed the script for him. When I watch his speech to Congress now, I am struck first of all by his youth. He was forty-three years old, one of the youngest people in the room, and he appears younger than his years. I’ve always known that in this speech he urges lawmakers to strike out on a bold path, but I never knew until I watched the entire speech myself that he does so with such sincerity and humility. He emphasizes how difficult and expensive the project will be, that there is no guarantee of success. He admits that “I came to this conclusion with some reluctance,” and then closes with this: “You must decide yourselves, as I have decided. And I am confident that whether you finally decide in the way I have decided or not, that your judgment, as my judgment, was reached in the best interest of our country.”

What Congress decided was to embark on what would turn out to be the largest peacetime engineering project ever undertaken by the US government. They felt they had little choice, with the terrifying possibility of Soviet weapons in orbit and on the moon. The role of this fear in influencing space policy is not to be underestimated, and proponents of spaceflight would try to keep this fear alive as long as it had any plausibility. Kennedy’s speech to Congress is a rousing piece of rhetoric and a key moment in spaceflight history, but it also shows us the first instance of a recurring spectacle: an impassioned spaceflight advocate begging a fickle Congress for money. The script would be rewritten again and again for the space shuttle and the International Space Station, and the results would never be as unequivocally favorable again.

Gus Grissom flew next, in July, repeating Shepard’s suborbital flight, then John Glenn became the first American to orbit the planet, on February 20, 1962. Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra followed, and Gordon Cooper made the last Mercury flight, becoming the first American to spend over a day in space and the last to travel in space alone. Already the Gemini project was under way, named for the two-man crews who would work through the problems necessary for getting to the moon: creating larger and more reliable rockets, mastering the biomedical challenges of enabling astronauts to survive in space for weeks at a time, developing methods for docking two vehicles together in space, and testing the space suits and other equipment necessary for space walks.

Of course, part of the plan for getting to the moon involved building a moon port. The facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station were not going to be adequate—not for the size of the new rockets themselves; not for the numbers of people necessary to take part in assembly, maintenance, and launch control; not for the number of launches that would have to be prepared simultaneously. In 1962, NASA chose a site nearby on Merritt Island, the landmass just to the west of Cape Canaveral, and began acquiring the land and designing the facilities. Mission Control would be housed at a facility near Houston first called the Manned Spaceflight Center, later renamed for President Lyndon Johnson after his death in 1973. Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral on November 16, 1963, and was shown around by Wernher von Braun and other NASA luminaries. He looked over the new Saturn rocket and the new moon port with excitement. Kennedy then flew from Florida to Dallas, where he was shot to death six days later.

Historians have debated why Kennedy chose to put so much of his political currency into Apollo. After all, he had shown little indication of caring about spaceflight before Sputnik, and even after Gagarin’s flight he seemed reluctant to make spaceflight a national priority. The most convincing discussion I’ve read is from historian John Logsdon, who argues that what caused Kennedy to make his decision was (1) “a conviction of American exceptionalism,” (2) the geopolitical situation of the moment, and (3) JFK’s individual values and style.

The day before he died, Kennedy gave a speech at the dedication of the nation’s first aerospace medical health center, in San Antonio. He reiterated how important the moon project was, in spite of the risks:

Back at home, I have hanging over my desk an image of the Kennedy Space Center as it looked in 1963, girders rising improbably out of the surrounding swamp. The wetland had been drained, then tons of sand packed into the earth to make it stable enough for the construction of the world’s largest building. Workers who came out to pack the sand and drive the pilings found themselves covered with mosquitoes; many witnesses describe a white shirt turning black with blood-sucking insects within minutes. Histories of the Kennedy Space Center acknowledge without exaggeration that the obstacle posed by the mosquitoes was so serious that NASA quite literally could not have put a man on the moon by Kennedy’s “before the decade is out” deadline without the invention of DDT. In this way, the challenges of spaceflight reveal themselves to be distinctly terrestrial.

When the Vehicle Assembly Building was finally completed, NASA invited Life magazine to do a spread about the new moon port. Life photographers were given full access to the grounds, where they shot images of the largest building in the world from every angle. After returning home and processing thousands of photos, the photographers admitted that they had failed. They had not found a way to capture, in a single frame, the outsize scale of the VAB. One photographer tried to convey how large it was by photographing a man standing next to the building, but at the distance necessary to get the entire building into the frame, the man had disappeared, smaller than the grain of the film. The size of the Vehicle Assembly Building was officially unphotographable.

After the last successful Gemini mission, in 1966, the next step was to test the new Apollo-Saturn, the largest rocket ever built. Three astronauts were training for the first Apollo mission to fly with a crew. On January 27, 1967, they were doing a rehearsal at Cape Canaveral when a fire broke out in the sealed crew capsule on the launchpad. Gus Grissom (the second American in space), Ed White (the first American to ever do a space walk), and Roger Chaffee (who was training for his first spaceflight) all died in the fire.

Not long before, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had interviewed many of the astronauts and had asked them about the risk. John Glenn, whom Fallaci took a special liking to as “the most perfect fantastic Boy Scout in a nation of Boy Scouts,” spoke eloquently about the risks:

The Apollo 1 fire made the risks of spaceflight seem real to Americans for the first time—up to that point, nothing had ever gone seriously wrong, and it had started to seem as though the exploration of space would be without human cost. NASA recovered quickly from the setback, but future disasters would take greater tolls. Some space fans suspect Americans had a greater tolerance for risk in the sixties than we do now, but it may be that this first disaster seemed like an anomaly. A second (Challenger) seems like a betrayal; a third (Columbia) seems like a pattern of failure.

The Vehicle Assembly Building was designed to house the simultaneous assembly of four moonbound rockets, and as such it stands as a monument to a long-past era in American history. There never did come a time when four Saturn V rockets were assembled at once. The history of American spaceflight is a history of doing less than had been planned, less than had been hoped for. Space fans angry about the end of the shuttle seem to think that their disappointment is something new, but in fact the dreams of space enthusiasts have been scaled back from the start. A lunar base, a permanent space station, a reusable spaceship with a booster section that could land like an airplane, a Mars expedition—all these were to have been undertaken by the eighties. Not only were the new projects tabled, but the last three Apollo missions were scrapped before the third crew of moonwalkers landed.

Family Day is a Kennedy Space Center tradition that began in the mid-1960s, when spaceworkers’ families complained that they had no idea what went on behind the gates, what was keeping their spouses and parents so frantically busy for so many hours and so distracted even when they were at home. Certain Saturdays were established when workers could bring their families inside the gates and show them around. Family Days decreased in frequency after the debut of the space shuttle, with its more dangerous solid rockets. And after the terrorist attacks of 2001 led to heightened security at government facilities, Family Days stopped altogether. But now that the retirement of the shuttle is within sight, there is a last-chance feeling around the Kennedy Space Center, and a few final Family Days will be held before the end. Today is one of them.

My first contact with Omar Izquierdo was in 2007, when he sent me the first e-mail I received about my Challenger novel, the day after its official publication date.

For a first-time author, hearing from a complete stranger the week my book came out, a stranger who walked into a bookstore of his own accord and chose my book from among all the other books, then actually read it, felt like a miracle. But when I got to the second paragraph about how Omar grew up near the Kennedy Space Center himself, and works there now, I felt a sinking dread. All the facts I must have gotten wrong suddenly seemed to glow like badly buried radioactive waste. This reader, this Omar Izquierdo, would expose my errors, would lead the charge against me. After all, I had taken his hometown, his childhood, and his life’s work and made them into a backdrop for a story I, an outsider, had made up.

Soon after that initial exchange, I went on Facebook to create an identity for my book’s main character (authors were encouraged to do this during the brief period after Facebook became ubiquitous and before Facebook’s fan pages were introduced). When I went looking for Facebook groups my character might join, I came across one called “If You Oppose NASA in Any Way I Will Punch You in the Face.” Perfect for Dolores. I clicked on it, and the first name I saw among the existing members was Omar Izquierdo. So I friended him.

A Facebook friendship evolves either more quickly or more slowly than a face-to-face one; mine with Omar evolved quickly. We are both on Facebook multiple times a day, both click Like often on each other’s postings, especially ones that involve our shared interest in spaceflight. And his space-related posts are to die for: images of Discovery being prepared for launch, interiors of restricted spaces like the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Orbiter Processing Facility, or the often-dramatic weather at the Cape. But I’ve found you can also learn a lot about a person by what he finds funny, by his comments on everyday happenings, and I came to feel that I knew Omar well through his posts even if I’d never been in the same room with him.

Omar’s father is a mechanical engineer who has worked at Kennedy his entire adult life. He was recruited right out of engineering school in Puerto Rico in 1979, when NASA was gearing up for the first shuttle launch, and was given a choice of whether to go to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He chose Kennedy because he had heard that Alabama was more racist. He brought his young wife to Florida, bought a house, put down roots, and Omar and his sister were born here soon after.

Before leaving home, I’d looked back over all the e-mails and Facebook messages Omar and I have sent each other, and I’d reread that first e-mail in which one of the errors in my book he points out is a scene in which an employee brings an outsider inside the VAB. Neither of us could have imagined when he wrote those words that three years later he would be taking me inside the VAB himself.

Back in my hotel room I’ve left the stack of books I brought with me to Florida. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Lipartito and Butler’s History of the Kennedy Space Center, William E. Burrows’s This New Ocean, Diane Vaughan’s The Challenger Launch Decision, Oriana Fallaci’s If the Sun Dies, Michael Collins’s Carrying the Fire, and Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon.

Each of these books offers different layers of the infinitely layered story—Wolfe’s bombastic lionizing of the Mercury astronauts; Burrows’s thorough tracing of the currents of history across three nations; Vaughan’s tireless unpacking of the seemingly benign decisions that would doom two shuttles. When I was researching my Challenger novel, I’d thought at first that once I understood the outlines of the history of American spaceflight, I would be able to stop reading about it and get back to writing. But I found I loved reading multiple accounts of the same event—say, the first glimpse of the lunar surface on Apollo 8 in 1968, or the first space shuttle launch in 1981. When the point of view changes, details emerge and disappear, meanings shift, emotions transmute themselves. The very import of the event can change. My research was turning into something more like an obsession, and even once my Challenger novel was published, I kept reading, wanting to be able to grasp a historical era that in many ways seemed better than my own.

The books that mean the most to me are the firsthand accounts, the people who grapple with what they have seen and experienced, and by doing so take on the emotional meanings of spaceflight. Michael Collins, who went to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, is also a first-rate prose stylist with a natural feel for detail and a light touch with humor; his book sounds a lot like what you would expect if E. B. White had qualified as an astronaut and flown to the moon. Tom Wolfe undertook to grasp the courage of the astronauts and uncovered a brotherhood that is both unprecedented and ageless. Oriana Fallaci was an Italian journalist who traveled to Houston, Huntsville, and the Cape at the height of the excitement for Apollo but before the success of the first moon landing. She met astronauts, rocket engineers, and NASA managers engaged in the as-yet-uncertain project of beating the Russians to the moon, and she questioned the project constantly—will they get to the moon by the deadline, and if so what will that accomplish?—while also admiring the adventure and the adventurers. When she meets Neil Armstrong, for example, he is just another astronaut in a large group, described in terms of his resemblance to John Glenn, not as the first man on the moon. When she meets Deke Slayton, a chance remark reveals that he was one of the pilots responsible for a bombing raid on Fallaci’s home city of Florence during World War II, a raid that injured her and destroyed her family home. If nothing else, this episode should remind us of how very recent the war had been, and the fact that Oriana and Deke became great friends anyway is an example of the way spaceflight brings people together. I envy Fallaci most in the scenes where she flirts her way through the astronaut corps, one by one, drinking martinis with them in the motel bars of the Space Coast, smoking like a chimney and eliciting from von Braun eloquent observations about the moon project. It can’t be a coincidence that the sixties era of creative nonfiction overlaps so perfectly with the heroic era of American spaceflight, the big egotistical voices turning journalism inside out at the same time the innovators in Houston and Huntsville and the Cape were redefining what machines were capable of, what human beings were capable of.

Norman Mailer’s book is about witnessing the launch of Apollo 11—Life magazine had commissioned him to go to the Cape to write about the launch in exchange for a sum of money rumored to be somewhere between extraordinary and obscene. I hadn’t known, before I came across it, that Norman Mailer had written a book about Apollo 11—I knew him for having written the best-selling novel The Naked and the Dead, for cofounding the Village Voice and helping to spearhead New Journalism, for winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Armies of the Night, for running for mayor of New York and finishing fourth out of a field of five in the Democratic primary, and for stabbing his second wife, nearly to death, at a dinner party. But here, it seems, he had also written a book about spaceflight. The article in Life, and the book that subsequently expanded on it, are both ungainly wandering things with oceans of technical details and self-conscious linguistic tics. Norman Mailer could never quite get both arms around the subject, but he tries in a way that few have, and I witness in his very struggle one of the best expressions I’ve seen of what American spaceflight means: the boredom of waiting, the wondering whether one should be feeling something more, then, suddenly, feeling it—excitement, or patriotism, or pride in one’s own species, the big-brained nonquitting species that would set itself such a ridiculous goal and then meet it so spectacularly.

When I read all these books, I’m encountering other minds struggling with the same questions while walking the same landscape. With Norman Mailer especially, the only one of the three to undertake to describe a launch, I feel as though he and I are tugging on opposite ends of the same thread, a thread forty years long. I am often struck with jealousy for the era he lived in. Sometimes it seems as though Norman Mailer’s generation got to see the beginnings of things and mine has gotten the ends.

Juan Ponce de León stumbled across Cape Canaveral in 1513 while he was searching a new land for gold, slaves, and the Fountain of Youth. He’d left his home in San Juan Bautista (now called Puerto Rico) aboard the ship Santiago and headed north, toward a landmass that had been sighted clearly enough to be included on maps, but upon which no European had yet made a landing. The chronicler Antonio de Herrera writes in 1610:

Books still use the word discovery to refer to this voyage, but that term doesn’t quite seem to apply when some of the natives Juan Ponce encountered on the shores of the new land had actually traveled to San Juan Bautista; some even greeted him in his own language. The landmass we now call Florida was not understood, at first, to be a peninsula, and in fact Juan Ponce died believing that what he had “discovered” was a largish island.

We don’t know where exactly on Florida’s east coast Juan Ponce de León first landed, but we do know that shortly afterward, in April 1513, his travels down the coast brought him to Cape Canaveral. There he found only scrubland and unwelcoming natives. By all accounts, Juan Ponce and his men declared Cape Canaveral uninhabitable and piled back into their boats to see what else this new land had to offer. After they abandoned the Cape to the wind and the mosquitoes, no Europeans returned for nearly three hundred years, by which time the native people who had inhabited the Cape had either been wiped out by disease and violence with other tribes or had migrated elsewhere. A few European families raised citrus groves—the Indian River region is especially well suited to growing high-quality oranges—but aside from them, the area remained almost entirely uninhabited. That is, until after World War II, when the Air Force was scouting sites for testing rockets. A rocket range has some odd geographical requirements: it needs to be as close to the equator as possible (so Earth’s rotation can help propel lifting bodies), it requires a great deal of undeveloped space in case of mishap on the ground, and ideally it should border on a great deal of water, in case errant rockets fail or have to be shot down. Cape Canaveral met all of these requirements.

According to an uncredited Air Force publication about the history of the Cape charmingly titled From Sand to Moondust, Ponce de León sailed the coast of Florida “meeting at every landing hostile Indians whose appearance gave no indication of wealth and who did not offer to lead him to hidden treasure or magic fountains.” It’s true that Juan Ponce would never find either, but his fantasies of youth and wealth have somehow embedded themselves into the underlying fantasy of Florida itself. At any rate, Florida is the oldest surviving European place name in the United States. Today, the landscape around the Kennedy Space Center is in most ways oddly unchanged from the day Ponce de León abandoned it in frustration. This incidental preservation is one of the many strange gifts of spaceflight.

My father drives calmly down Kennedy Parkway, the Vehicle Assembly Building filling the windshield. I’m glad he’s driving; I’m anxious about being late to meet Omar and might have been prone to speeding. I try to anticipate what our first face-to-face conversation will be like. As I’m considering what we might say to each other, we pass an SUV being driven slowly, just below the speed limit, and when I glance out the backseat window over at the driver, a young Hispanic man chatting with his passenger, I think, Oh, that’s my friend Omar. I’ve only seen small blurry pictures of Omar on his Facebook page and would not have thought I would recognize him. But a few minutes later, when we find the parking lot with the Redstone rocket Omar has told me to look for, the SUV is there too. The driver steps out and asks, cautiously, “Margaret?”

Omar is neatly dressed in an athletic shirt and khaki shorts. He is about my height with a round, kind face and a buzz cut like a Mercury astronaut’s. It’s not until that moment, as I’m introducing myself and my family, that I consider that Omar took a risk by meeting me too, that he might not have known what to expect from a female English professor with a spaceflight obsession—that he might have been as anxious about our meeting as I was, and he went out of his way to invite me here anyway.

“I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding it,” Omar says politely after shaking everyone’s hands, though he’s given me both detailed directions and an iPhone map image with a pin dropped at the exact spot. “I realized later that ‘Redstone rocket’ might not be the most helpful landmark for everyone.”

“I know my rockets,” I assure him.

“Ah. I figured you might,” Omar says. A second later he adds, “You don’t really look like your picture. But I knew you anyway.”

Here under the Redstone rocket, I reach out and hug him, though I am not generally a touchy person. I’m so pleased to discover that this is my friend Omar: he is exactly who he seemed to be, exactly who I thought he was all along. My father snaps a picture of the two of us together under the Redstone, the first of many he will take today.

Omar has brought three other friends for Family Day, all of them locals who grew up with space shuttles rattling their windows. We all climb into Omar’s SUV and approach the checkpoint at the south gate to the Kennedy Space Center. Omar shows his work badge to the armed guard, who allows us through. Now on NASA grounds, we pass the DAYS TO LAUNCH sign. Discovery’s last flight is scheduled for November 1, 2010, thirty-six days from now. Discovery is already stacked on the launchpad—if all goes as planned, we’ll get to see it up close later today.

As we drive toward the VAB, Omar tells me more about his job. He is one of the thousands of people who work at the Cape doing various things that need to be done in order to get spaceships off the ground—in his case, making sure that only authorized people get access to Discovery at the various points along its work flow and making sure that any object that enters the crew cabin comes out again. His official title is orbiter integrity clerk. Delightfully, part of his job involves watching for birds to make sure they don’t damage the vehicle on the launchpad (this responsibility was added in the nineties after woodpeckers damaged an external tank to such an extent that it had to be rolled back to the VAB for repairs). Omar loves what he does—I know this already from the cumulative impression of his Facebook postings—and he takes pride in what his employer does, more than anyone else I know. In another context, a person with his job description might be called a security guard, but I would not call Omar that. Partly because in his job the stakes are so high—a single errant screw could endanger the mission, the spacecraft, and the astronauts. But also because Omar’s pride in his work here, like that of every single person I have ever met at the Cape, makes the job title itself almost irrelevant. Omar works on the space shuttle. Specifically, he works on Discovery, and though he is modest and unassuming by nature, I have heard him refer to Discovery in conversation as his, as in, with reference to a specific mission, “that was my bird.”

Now Discovery has only one mission left to go. This upcoming flight was supposed to be the final mission for the shuttle, but then NASA announced one more would follow, on Endeavour. Now rumor has it they might add one more, which, if it happens, will be on Atlantis. I ask Omar as we drive up Kennedy Parkway whether this adding-on will continue, whether NASA can tack on one more mission, then one more mission, indefinitely.

“I don’t think so,” Omar says. “The site in Louisiana that makes the external tanks delivered the last one, and now they’re shutting the facility down. If NASA wanted to contract for more, they’d have to start it up again.”

“Oh,” I say, disappointed. “I’d hoped they might be able to keep extending it.”

“I mean, that’s just what I’ve heard,” Omar clarifies. “I don’t know that for sure.” As I get to know Omar, I will continue to be impressed by his insistence on differentiating what he knows to be true from claims based on unofficial sources, rumor, or his own extremely educated guesses. He is an epistemological purist, an orbiter integrity clerk of truth.

“It seems like a waste to retire the shuttles when they still have life in them,” I say experimentally. I have never known Omar to make a negative comment about NASA, and I’m wondering whether he’ll open up a bit more in person.

Omar nods, but doesn’t elaborate. He knows he will almost certainly be laid off after Discovery’s retirement in a few months. Yet for now, he’s always at work. For now, the Kennedy Space Center is bustling, as it has been for forty-eight years, with the effort to prepare spaceships for multiple missions simultaneously.

There will be two or at most three more launches, and then all this will be over. I think about my favorite books about spaceflight, those writers who faced the task of rendering an exciting, brand-new, seemingly limitless future. They struggled to define what these achievements were going to mean, where all this innovation was going to lead us. And where exactly has it led? Even with the knowledge I’ve spent the last ten years gaining, I realize I still don’t know. If Mailer and Wolfe and Fallaci were here, what would they say? The more I think about it, the more clearly I can imagine them—Mailer cussing and snarling at everything, Wolfe sweating through his trademark white suit, Fallaci bristling at all the no-smoking signs. All of them disgusted that the future they worked so hard to understand and to put on the page has been canceled.

What would it mean to go to the last launch and write about it the way Mailer wrote about the launch of Apollo 11? To spend time with the people involved and write about them the way Fallaci did? The last launch of the space shuttle would unfold with all the glory and boredom and strangeness of Apollo 11, would provide an ending to the story. I think about how time-consuming and expensive it would be to try to do this—after all, fewer than half of shuttle missions launch on the first attempt; some have taken as many as seven attempts (separated by days or weeks or months) to get off the ground. A person could travel to Florida five or six separate times and never manage to catch a launch at all. Some space fans have suffered similar bad luck.

In humid weather, clouds sometimes gather within the unprecedented single-story height of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Technicians feel raindrops, then look up from their work assembling the spacecraft to find that it’s raining lightly, the far-off ceiling windows obscured by indoor rain clouds.

Omar has never seen this himself, he tells me when I ask, but he has heard that it happens. He pulls into the enormous parking lot, and we pass the point where the tour buses always stop, where I’ve stood twice to try to get the VAB into my camera’s frame. It gives me a thrill to ride right past that point and keep going, all the way up to the gate surrounding the building. We pile out and approach the VAB. I soon give up trying to tip my head back to take it in, as doing so impedes my ability to walk in a straight line. The entrance is like that of any large industrial building—heavy rolling door, polished concrete floor, safety signs posted on either side. BICYCLES PROHIBITED IN VAB. HAVE A SAFE DAY. But then I step into the interior, which is not like any other space in the world. I hold my breath while I follow Omar across the threshold and look up.

The sweeping vertical expanses made possible by flying buttresses in the twelfth century were meant to draw the eye up, and thus the spirit—the architecture was meant to stir the emotions and connect visitors with God. I look up. Other visitors, other NASA families, stream in on either side of me while I stand and gape. The space comes into focus in all its unphotographable enormousness. I have studied many images of the VAB, but I have never before quite grasped the way it all fits together, the way the four high bays mark four corners divided by the transfer aisle through the center of the building. Like all cathedrals, the Vehicle Assembly Building is laid out like a cross.

I can recite all the tour guides’ facts about the VAB: Each of its four doors opens wide enough to take in the United Nations building and tall enough to take in most skyscrapers. Its volume is three-and-a-half times that of the Empire State Building. Its roof is big enough to contain more than six football fields.

But I couldn’t ever have pictured quite how big it really is. Looking up, I see floor after floor of girders with their orderly rows of little white work lights twinkling. I peer into one of the four high bays in which the rockets are stacked. The ceiling windows whirl at a dizzying height that seems higher than the zenith of the sky itself. The human beings at the other end of the building disappear, too small to make out, even though we are all in the same room. In his book about Apollo 11, Norman Mailer wrote that the Vehicle Assembly Building may be the ugliest building in the world from the outside, but that from the inside it was a candidate for the most beautiful. I can finally see what he means.

This is where spaceships are assembled, every rocket to the moon, every space shuttle. I feel the enormity of the work that has been done here, the days and weeks and years of work, birthdays missed, children grown up, the endless and delicate work of assembling machines for going to space. I feel tears form in my eyes. I have been to Notre Dame and the Supreme Court and the Grand Canyon and Fallingwater and other sites imbued with a special grandeur, an urgent frisson of importance and here-ness, but none of them has made me cry. I look around at the other Family Day visitors chatting, wandering, pointing things out to each other in normal tones. None of them are weeping. I dry my eyes, hoping none of my companions have seen. Most people are milling through, in one door and out the other. I try not to judge them too harshly. To be fair, just to walk from one end of the building to the other does take a significant amount of time.

I feel Omar materialize at my shoulder.

“What do you think?” he asks. I’m surprised by the hopeful tone in his voice, the expression on his face when I turn to meet his eyes. He is actually concerned that I might not be having a good time.

“It’s stunning,” I tell him. “I’m stunned.” He laughs before moving toward the mobile launch platform in one of the high bays. He tells me how the space shuttle launch vehicle is stacked vertically on the MLP before the crawler transporter lifts the whole business to move it slowly out to the launchpad. If Omar noticed I had tears in my eyes, he does an admirable job of not letting on. My father wanders over, and Omar explains more about how the platform works. My father snaps a picture of it.

The first segment of the first Saturn V reached the Vehicle Assembly Building in August 1966, and for the first time workers used the VAB’s full height to stack the vehicle’s stages one atop the other. I have a photo of the crew capsule being lowered onto the Saturn second stage, the Vehicle Assembly Building’s cranes being put to use for the first time. Workers, ridiculously tiny, stand upon the enormous cylinder of the second-stage rocket, heedless of the massive spacecraft dangling above their heads. I would love to have seen the VAB then, when it was new and first being put to its intended, and still fantastical, use. It took a full year to stack that first Apollo/Saturn. When the assembled vehicle was finally complete, the access doors opened almost the full height of the building, and Apollo 4 rolled majestically out, its bright black-and-white paint job visible for miles, as the spaceworkers who had built it sat on picnic blankets with their families and applauded.

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.

We pile back into Omar’s SUV and ride around to the other sites that are open to visitors. We visit the Orbiter Processing Facility, where the space shuttles are prepared horizontally before being rolled over to the VAB for stacking. We visit the launchpad where Discovery is poised nose up and ready to go. We see the Landing Facility and the mate/demate device, a ten-story contraption for lifting an orbiter onto and off of the 747 that ferries it back from California when it has to land there. We visit the Launch Control building, where on one wall of the seventies-style lobby are hung the mission patches of every human spaceflight that has ever been launched from here, 149 to date. Beneath each mission patch is a small plaque showing the launch and landing dates. Two of them—Challenger’s STS-51L and Columbia’s STS-107—are missing landing dates, because both of these missions ended in disasters that destroyed the orbiters and killed their crews. The blank spaces on the wall where those landing dates should have been are discolored from the touch of people’s hands. This would be unremarkable if this place were a tourist attraction, or regularly open to the public. But with the rare exception of Family Days, this building is open only to people who work here. In other words, it’s launch controllers, managers, and engineers who have been touching these empty spaces with their hands, on their way to and from doing their jobs.

After getting back on the road, we pass the Press Site, an agglomeration of buildings and decks centered around a large open field facing a body of water known as the Turn Basin, and beyond that, the launchpads. At the edge of the grassy field stands the huge countdown clock, the one you’ve seen in photos and news footage of launches, alongside an enormous flagpole flying an American flag. The buildings that belong to various news outlets have logos painted on them. I can make out only the ones closest to the road: CBS (whose Walter Cronkite narrated the iconic news coverage of the moon landings) and Florida Today. I crane my neck to see as much of the Press Site as I can, feeling a surprising jealousy of the people I see moving in and out of buildings there. They get access to people and places I can’t, even as Omar’s guest.

Near the Orbiter Processing Facility, Omar points out a gantry being constructed for Constellation, the program meant to follow the shuttle’s retirement. President George W. Bush had announced Constellation in 2004 with great fanfare—it is designed to be more modular and flexible than the shuttle program, allowing different boosters and different crew or cargo configurations for missions of varying lengths. The plan is to get astronauts and payloads into low Earth orbit again within ten years and, eventually, on to the moon, asteroids, and Mars.

But even at the time of the announcement, few people believed a second wave of moon landings could actually take place on anything resembling the schedule Bush described, a schedule that required future Congresses to increase NASA’s budget precipitously. Like many ambitious projects, it’s set up such that a future president and Congress will be forced to either foot the bulk of the cost or else kill the program, a time-honored way for politicians to claim credit for a bold move without having to pick up the tab. To no one’s surprise, President Obama announced in February 2010 that he planned to cancel Constellation and by doing so earned the ire of many NASA employees and spaceflight enthusiasts. That summer Congress voted to approve Obama’s NASA Authorization Act, a plan to increase NASA’s finding by $6 billion over five years, a continued commitment to support development of commercial capabilities in low Earth orbit, and a more streamlined long-range space vehicle, which would come to be called the Space Launch System. Constellation contracts would remain in place until Congress voted to overturn the previous mandate, leaving workers at the Cape to continue work that was almost sure to be undone sometime in the future. Obama’s bill also allowed for one more launch to be added, STS-135, on Atlantis, though this mission had yet to be funded and so was not certain to fly.

We drive to the Visitor Complex, an independently funded tourist attraction adjacent to the space center, and browse through the gift shop. There, while my father and Judy pick out space-themed gifts for my son, Omar and I stand shoulder to shoulder for a long time in the book department. He shows me the ones he likes (he’s read most of the books here), and I tell him about the ones I’ve read. He shows me the big-ticket items in the glass cases that he covets: detailed metal models of all five orbiters, signed glossy photographs of Apollo astronauts, space-flown medallions in jewel boxes.

“I’m surprised you know so much about Apollo, not just shuttle,” I say. Over the course of my day here I’ve learned to say “shuttle,” not “the shuttle,” when I’m referring to the entire program rather than a single vehicle.

“Oh, I’m interested in all of it,” Omar says. “Ever since I was a little kid. Maybe it’s because I grew up here and because my dad works here.”

“For some people, growing up with something like this makes it less interesting,” I say.

“That’s true,” Omar says thoughtfully. “I guess I’m lucky. The things I think are really cool are the things I get to see every day.”

Omar lets us use his employee discount to buy the things we’ve picked out. My father buys an astronaut suit and astronaut teddy bear for my son. I buy NASA T-shirts for my husband and son, a coffee mug for myself, books and key chains for friends. Omar gives me a mission patch from the most recent flight that he got from his father. Patches are sold in the gift shop as well, but this is one of the patches the NASA insiders give to their friends and families.

Standing in the gift shop in front of a wall displaying all the mission patches from every spaceflight, I think about all I’ve seen today, all that will still occur here over the next year. The idea forms in my mind again that I could witness and write about these last launches. Or rather, it might be more accurate to say it’s at this moment the idea solidifies into intent. Because it’s been brewing all day, the idea I keep pushing to the back of my mind, this feeling that I should come back for these launches and write about them. I felt it in the VAB, and I felt it in the Orbiter Processing Facility, where it seemed I could almost reach up to touch the landing gear of Endeavour. I felt it at the Landing Facility with its three miles of runway dotted with alligators who are under the impression that the warm concrete has been laid out for their sunbathing comfort. That night at dinner with Omar and my family, he tells us about the excitement of launch days when he was little, about being awakened by the sonic booms of orbiters punching through the atmosphere in the middle of the night. He tells us about the terrible day his father came home from work after having spent the day in Launch Control searching his data screens for some sign of what had happened to Challenger.

All the books I’ve read about American spaceflight are about a trajectory still on the upswing. Even the books written post-Columbia envision a shuttle program righting itself, restoring our faith, and carrying us over until the next vehicle is ready to launch. No one has yet tried to grapple with the end that is now in sight. Only when something ends can we understand what it has meant.

In the parking lot, my father and Judy shake hands with Omar and thank him for everything he’s done today. While they get into the rental car and set the GPS for the airport, Omar tells me I should come back for the Discovery launch.

“I’d love to,” I say. “But it’ll probably be during a busy time in my semester.”

“Sure,” Omar says nodding. “I understand it’s hard to get away. But remember—it’s the last one.”

I hug him before getting into the backseat of the car with my family. Omar stands in the parking lot waving as we pull away, until he is a tiny dot in the rearview mirror.

I’ve read that the twentieth century might be remembered only for the atomic bomb, the industrialized slaughter of human beings, and the first steps away from our home planet. If this is true, the end of American spaceflight is going to be one of the more significant moments of my lifetime, significant beyond the three missions left and the sixteen astronauts still preparing to go into space. By the end of Family Day, when we are all saying our good-byes, I have come to feel that the end of the space shuttle is going to be the ending of a story, the story of one of the truly great things my country has accomplished, and that I want to be the one to tell it.

The night I get home from Cape Canaveral, I e-mail Omar to thank him again for inviting me, then go to the NASA website and find the shuttle launch manifest. One more mission for Discovery in the fall and one for Endeavour the following spring. A last mission for Atlantis, if it’s added, will be in the summer. After that there will be no more.

In another window on my computer is a Flickr photo set belonging to a woman I don’t know. The photo set shows the woman visiting the Kennedy Space Center on some sort of special escorted trip. The way her captions are written tells me she doesn’t know nearly as much about shuttle as I do—she uses slightly the wrong terms for everything. Worse, her writing lacks the enthusiasm I feel properly befits her experience. Not only does she not report crying upon entering the Vehicle Assembly Building, she doesn’t even seem to understand it as a special privilege. As the photos continue to scroll by, I get more upset, because here she is donning a full-body cover-up and climbing into the crew cabin of an orbiter, an enormous privilege. The astronauts themselves don’t take this lightly. In the pictures, the woman looks pleased and amused but not mind-blown. It was NASA’s message about the space shuttle from the beginning that it would be cheaper, safer, more routine, than Apollo, more like commercial air travel. Maybe that message sank in too far with some people, and maybe this is part of what has doomed the shuttle. I stare at the woman’s pictures for a while longer, then close the browser window.

“I know my rockets,” I’d assured Omar, but did I? There are always people who know more, have seen more. I’ve seen one launch, which is more than most people can say. But Omar has kept company with the orbiters themselves. He has seen dozens of launches and has spent workdays, workweeks, work years inside the buildings I’ve waited a lifetime to enter. I’ve been inside the VAB now, but this horrible woman has been inside the crew cabin. There will always be someone who has seen more.

I print out the launch manifest and make some notes in the margins. After we get our son to bed, I show the printout to my husband, and though he clearly dreads the chaos this project will cause in our household, he agrees that this story needs to be written. Chris is a writer too, and a freelance editor; each of my absences will seriously cut into his time to work. He will care for our three-year-old son while I go to Florida multiple times and on a maddeningly ever-changing schedule. I will have to drive twelve hours each way to save money and to give me flexibility in those cases when the launch scrubs until the following day. When launches are delayed for longer periods of time, I will leave Florida empty-handed and start over. I will have to impose on my colleagues to cover classes for me when the launch schedule conflicts with my academic calendar. In order to start this project, I will have to set aside the novel I’m already halfway through, a novel I’m expected to publish soon in order to qualify for tenure and keep my job, which is the sole source of benefits for my family. And I will have to impose more on Omar, the only local and NASA insider I know. All this might well turn out to be for nothing. But I’ve decided to try.

Over the following months, people will ask me what I expect to find by going to the last launches, and I will have to admit that I have no idea. I’ll find it when I see it, I tell them—or else, I won’t, and all this will have been a waste. I know I want to write about those places where the technical and the emotional intersect—like the smell of space, or the schoolchildren watching Challenger explode with a teacher aboard, or an adult woman hiding her tears in the cathedralic heights of the Vehicle Assembly Building, or a bored child in a movie theater watching a beautiful astronaut float in her sleep. I want to see the beauty and the strangeness in the last days of American spaceflight, in the last moments of something that used to be cited as what makes America great. I want to see the end of the story whose beginning was told by some of the writers I admire most. I want to know, most of all, what it means that we went to space for fifty years and that we won’t be going anymore.