Leaving Orbit

CHAPTER 3. Good-bye, Discovery

STS-133: February 24, 2011

I have in my phone a picture of the space shuttle Discovery stacked on the launchpad for its last flight. I snapped the picture out the window of Omar’s car as we drove by at a crawl on Family Day. There is no visual evidence of the circumstances under which the picture was taken—I was careful to keep the edges of the car window out of the frame—but I still feel that sense of motion when I look at it.

A few weeks after Family Day, my son was looking through my phone and, in that uncanny way small children have of intuiting technology, he found the photo of Discovery and reset it as the phone’s wallpaper, replacing a picture of himself. He showed me, pleased with his work.

“Face shuttle,” he lisped.

“That’s right,” I agreed. It occurred to me to wonder, not for the first time, whether he understands the difference between the shuttle and imaginary space vehicles like the Millennium Falcon. Because there are models and images of space shuttles all over his house, and he has only flown on planes a couple of times, space travel seems to him much more common than air travel. He has a charming habit of asking out-of-town visitors whether they traveled here on the space shuttle.

I got distracted before I had the chance to change the picture back; the next time I went to use my phone, I was surprised and pleased to see Discovery gleaming there. As the memory of that day quickly receded behind the pressures of the semester, it was nice to be reminded that I had been there, that I was going back for the last launch. In the picture, the Rotating Servicing Structure has been pulled back, presumably so the Family Day visitors could see the whole spaceship. Discovery’s white back is to us in the picture, its wings’ full spread visible. Behind it, the orange external tank peeks up over its shoulder. On either side of the tank, the white solid rockets stand like sentinels. One of the rockets is partially obscured by the arm extending from the gantry to Discovery’s hatch, the walkway the astronauts will cross to reach the crew cabin a few hours before launch. I can make out the path of tan gravel used by the crawler transporter and the complicated metal gantries that surround the shuttle stack. A lightning rod balances upon the highest point of the launch tower. Central Florida is prone to lightning, and many spacecraft have attracted strikes during their time waiting on the pad or, more frighteningly, during launch.

In the foreground of the picture squats a low guard building, a few cars and trucks belonging to the employees working the pad that day. A flagpole flies both the American flag and the shuttle flag that will later be hung in the Vehicle Assembly Building as a souvenir of this launch. The elaborate fencing and gates, blocked off with cones that day. Behind it all, the weird Cape Canaveral sky, the clouds pressing down on the launchpad in a way that’s almost menacing.

The image remained as my phone’s wallpaper. It’s there still as I write this, as Discovery is gathering its first layer of cobwebs at the Air and Space Museum. In the long delays leading up to the launch, every time I looked at my phone, I was reminded that Discovery still stood poised on that launchpad, just as in this picture, still stacked and ready to go.

First it was a problem in the orbital maneuvering system, the thrusters that allow the space shuttle to maneuver itself while in orbit. An OMS pod was leaking helium and nitrogen. Launch date was moved one day to November 2, 2010.

Then a slip to allow more time to refuel the helium tank. Launch date No Earlier Than November 3, 2010.

Then another scrub, after fueling had already begun, due to problems with a controller on the center main engine. Launch date NET November 4, 2010.

Then a scrub due to predictions of bad weather later in the day. Launch date NET November 5, 2010.

Then a scrub due to a hydrogen leak discovered during tanking. In addition to the leak, inspectors found a crack in the foam insulation on the external tank. This crack especially captured the attention of engineers and managers because it had been a chunk of foam falling from the external tank that had doomed Columbia. Fixing the shuttle while it is assembled and stacked vertically on the launchpad is difficult and time-consuming. Launch date NET November 30, 2010.

Then another slip to allow more time for repairs to the external tank. Launch date NET December 3, 2010.

Then another slip to allow more time to determine the likelihood of additional cracks in the external tank during launch. NET December 17, 2010.

Then another slip to make more time to validate repairs to the external tank. NET February 3, 2011.

Then another slip because engineers needed even more time to assess the cracks that were still forming, inexplicably, on the tank. The same day that slip was announced, US Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot, along with eighteen other people, at a public appearance in Tucson, Arizona. The incident caused a national uproar and a renewed debate over gun control, but for space fans the shooting had an additional meaning. Giffords is married to astronaut Mark Kelly, who was slated to command the next mission after Discovery’s—Endeavour’s last—less than three months away. Would he leave his wife in critical or uncertain condition to go to space? Or would he back out of the last mission he could ever hope to fly, leaving the end of the shuttle program in chaos, as a new commander would barely have time to train? Launch date NET February 24, 2011.

A week after Gabrielle Giffords was shot, an astronaut on the Discovery mission, Tim Kopra, fell off his bicycle and broke his hip. With the target launch date now less than six weeks away, it wasn’t clear whether the launch would have to be postponed. Let us take a moment to pity Tim Kopra: he trained for this mission for over a year, suited up for multiple scrubbed launch attempts, and then once it seemed all the problems for his launch had been solved, he injured himself in a leisure activity and lost his chance to fly on the shuttle ever again. Media and space fans waited anxiously to learn whether Mark Kelly would be replaced as well.

In late January, another mission was added to the manifest. A contingency mission, to be launched only if the crew of Endeavour was in need of rescue, became an official mission, STS-135, on Atlantis, with a target launch date of June 28, 2011. This was something of an audacious move on the part of NASA, since STS-135 still hadn’t been funded. A few weeks later, NASA managers announced that STS-135 would fly regardless of the funding situation in Congress. Omar and I communicated about these developments via e-mail; I told him I appreciated NASA’s boldness in planning for an unfunded launch and suggested they should take this approach more often.

So now we knew for certain what the last space shuttle launches would be: first Discovery, if the kinks could finally be worked out; then Endeavour in the spring, and Atlantis would be the very last, in the summer. In photographs, the crew of Atlantis all looked slightly bewildered that they were being pressed into service as the Last Crew, representatives and spokespeople for the entire shuttle program.

I texted Omar:

How likely do you think it is the problem w Discovery is really fixed?

Hard to say

I’ll let you know if I hear anything.

After thanking him, I went to turn off my phone, but stopped to look at the image of Discovery gleaming there on the glass screen. Discovery looked enormous and permanent, like it wasn’t going anywhere. I found it hard to believe that Omar and I were discussing plans for this thing to leave the ground. The history of spaceflight teaches us that the more serious the cause of a shuttle delay, the less accurate the first guesses as to how long it might take to fix it. Omar and I both knew the No Later Than date of February 24 was a guess.

Yet as weeks went by, February 24 stayed on the manifest. I could, if I got lucky, witness in person the last launches of each of the three orbiters. Of course, it was also possible I could travel to Florida many times only to witness many scrubs and never see a launch at all.

I-75 starts at the Canadian border in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and traces a path south through the lengths of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, all the way to Miami. From my house in Knoxville, Tennessee, it’s only fifteen miles to get to I-75; then after a full day of driving and an exit near Orlando, it’s only a couple of hours to cut across the middle of Florida to the eastern shore.

It’s boring to describe one’s interstate route, or any driving directions. But I’ve never given as much thought to any interstate as I have given to I-75 in recent weeks. I will drive this route alone, down and back, for each launch attempt I go to. The space shuttle’s likelihood of getting off the ground in any one attempt, though it’s gotten better over the years, is still not a very good gamble. With the shuttle’s millions of delicate and critical moving parts and Florida’s volatile climate, the possibility of delays remains high. I know I will spend a great deal of time on I-75 over the coming months.

When I first thought to write about the end of shuttle, I had neglected to consider that three of the things I have avoided most in my life are driving long distances alone, talking to people I don’t know, and getting up early in the morning. I have ruled out entire careers because they interfere with these aversions. So I-75 looms large in my imagination in the weeks, then days, before the last launch of Discovery. Twelve hours is a long drive. But I’ve decided to go.

For a while there, the target dates had been falling during my university’s winter break, which would have worked nicely in terms of my teaching schedule, but the additional slips have placed the February attempt squarely in the middle of my semester. A fellow professor is covering one class for me today, and one of my graduate students is covering the other. My husband, Chris, has had to plan his week around being a single father. With each slip, he has listened patiently when I gave him the new No Earlier Than date, then answered with a nod and a “Just keep me updated.” Once I leave for Florida, I can’t say for sure when I’ll be back. If the February 24 attempt slips till Friday, I’ll stay till Friday; if it slips to Saturday, I’ll stay till then.

So I pack some warm-weather clothes and a few supplies into the back of my car, then hit the road after dropping my son off at preschool. The sun is shining as I pull onto the freeway and join traffic. I’m not used to interstate driving, and I feel like I’m going too fast even before I get up to the speed of the other cars on the road. My little car feels too light, insubstantial, its engine whining at the frequency of a mosquito. I think of the tires that have to grip the road, of the brake lines that have to transmit the signals from my nervous foot to the brake, of the pistons and fuel lines, steering fluid and god knows what else—I have no idea how cars work. All of it Criticality 1, in the language of NASA. All the worn pieces, nicked and abraded and fatigued, that are checked and fixed before each shuttle launch.

One can only stay panicked so long, though, especially in as boring a situation as long-distance driving. And, I discover, I-75 is a generous and forgiving road. It offers few major interchanges, no surprise exit-only lanes, very little construction work, and light traffic. I find myself settling into the task of driving enough to start letting my mind wander. I have loaded some long audiobooks onto my phone, and I will listen to them at some point, but for now it’s pleasant to just drive. Georgia goes on and on at some length, with the appalling traffic of Atlanta right in the middle of it, and I don’t mind that much either. I-75 is studded with many gas stations and Waffle Houses and even Starbucks and Paneras in the more suburban stretches. Roadside vendors sell peanuts and peaches. A billboard in Georgia reads WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?—a succinct expression of a faddish right-wing skepticism about the president’s birthplace. I stop for dinner at Cracker Barrel somewhere past Moultrie and watch the stars come out near Valdosta. Through to north Florida and on into central Florida, where I cut over to Orlando.

In a song that keeps coming on the pop stations, a woman sings plaintively, “Baby, you’re a firework.” Yesterday I was reading a book about the early developments of rocket science, and it had included the observation that, from an engineering standpoint, there are no real differences between rockets, fireworks, and bombs. Norman Mailer’s description of the launch of Apollo 11 compares the light of launch to “the most beautiful of fireworks.” The “firework” song is not about rockets or bombs but, I suppose, about letting one’s inner light shine, a cliche of teen anthems. Still, I sing along.

On the morning of February 24, 2011, I wake up in a motel near the Orlando airport, pack up what I’ll need for the day, and drive an hour to the coast. I would have liked to stay closer to Cape Canaveral, but I waited to make my travel plans until the last minute, and this is all that was available. Each launch creates a huge surge in tourism, even more so now that these launches are to be the last. My hotel room, I discovered when I arrived late the night before, is saturated with a swampy mildew smell that we don’t have in climates farther north. As on my last visit, I’m struck with the strangeness of the terrain here. Palm trees, giant bugs, a long, low horizon, and huge sky a hot blue. At points in my hour’s journey, I’m unsure which landmass I’m on, whether the mainland or Merritt Island or Cape Canaveral—or even if I’m on one at all, given that some of the causeways were constructed by bulldozers. The geography itself eludes me—I have only a rough outline in my mind. Going west to east: there’s the coast of the mainland, with the town of Titusville to the north and Cocoa to the south; then there’s the Indian River (which is actually an estuary); then Merritt Island (which is actually, I think, a peninsula) with the Space Center on the north half and the town of Merritt Island on the south; then the Banana River (which is actually a lagoon); then the headland we call Cape Canaveral (though we also call this whole area Cape Canaveral) and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station that sits at the point of that cape, and the barrier island that extends southward, which includes the (confusingly named) town of Cape Canaveral, and south of that Cocoa Beach (not to be confused with the town of Cocoa, of course, back on the mainland); then the Atlantic Ocean.

Each of these places has a different look and feel to it, a different history and a different idea of itself. At certain moments I think to ask Omar what it’s like to have grown up on such an uncertain landscape, but I can never quite think how to phrase the question.

I reach the 528 causeway where it spans the Banana River. Hundreds of people drive across this causeway, this unbeautiful strip of land, every day to get from Merritt Island to Cocoa Beach and back, but today is one of the few days of the year when this scrubby margin of sand and grass becomes precious territory. The RV people have been camped here for days, staking their claims, and when I pull up, I find clumps of cars already parked, families setting up as if for a day at the beach. It’s even busier than I had anticipated, almost completely packed, though the launch is still nearly nine hours away.

I find one of the last spots with an unobstructed view on the north side of the causeway. I’ve packed a cooler with food and cold drinks, books to read, student work to grade, a transistor radio, sunscreen, bug repellent, and emergency supplies in case I’m stuck in traffic for an extended period of time after the launch. By the time I set up my lawn chair and settle in, the astronauts are suiting up and the tanking of cryogenic gases has begun—I watch all this streaming live on the NASA app on my phone. All around me, couples and families are setting up their lawn chairs, talking and playing, eating sandwiches, smearing sunscreen on each other, listening to their radios, throwing Frisbees, going for walks. Most of all, people are looking out, either with binoculars or with the naked eye, toward where Discovery stands on pad 39A. And all of them are listening to the NASA announcer on their radios and watching the NASA app on their phones, shielding their screens with one hand against the glare of the white Florida sun.

Discovery stands upright on the horizon, fourteen miles north of us across the Banana River. It looks about the size of a paper clip. Fourteen miles sounds far, but this spot is one of the very best vantage points for viewing a launch—that is, for people who don’t have access to NASA grounds. And the only people who have access are employees (including Omar and his father) and credentialed media. NASA gives credentials only to journalists who can prove they are representing an established media outlet or who can show a contract with an established publisher. When I was working on my novel, it struck me as tragic that this policy excluded me altogether in a catch-22—I couldn’t get a contract with a publisher until I had written my book, and I felt I couldn’t write my book properly without first getting access to the Kennedy Space Center. (Though I did have to admit, especially after the terrorist attacks of 2001, that a policy allowing someone like me unfettered access to a secure government installation would be in effect a policy without security at all, since any lunatic could claim to be “working on a novel.”) So I paid for a ticket to ride the tourist bus, and I drove to a causeway in the middle of the night to watch the launch of STS-102, Discovery, a beautiful night launch in unseasonably cold weather that lit up the sky for miles around. I had to write the parts of my novel that took place on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center using films, pictures, guesswork, and sheer fabrication—all the more reason to be terrified by that first e-mail from Omar, an eyewitness to my omissions and errors.

At any rate, my lack of press credentials today is a mixed fate. Although part of me wants access to the NASA viewing site from which Norman Mailer watched the launch of Apollo 11, I also want to see what it’s like to watch a launch with other regular space fans, with people who have taken time off work to travel out here to see this event because they care about it, not because this is their job.

First-time visitors tend to imagine sitting at the base of the stack and feeling the heat of ignition on their faces, but this a misunderstanding caused by the footage we’ve all seen in movies. Those sequences are shot using remote cameras; any living thing that close to the launchpad would be killed instantly. Even the emergency rescue teams wait out the launch from bunkers three miles away. An explosion on the launchpad, always a risk with tons of rocket fuel coursing through many miles of fuel lines, would destroy everything in sight.

I check my phone: T minus eight hours and counting. Because I’ve been to a launch before, I know that spaceflight is all about waiting. Five hours, eight hours, twelve hours. First-timers are often confused, then annoyed, then stupefied by this waiting. You can spot them the minute they pile out of their cars too quickly, with too much bounce, their adrenaline high as they scan the horizon for the launch gantry and point and shout, “There it is!”

Relax. There it will remain, until no earlier than 4:48 p.m., or maybe until tomorrow, or maybe until May. Space fans need to learn to pace themselves. Best not to use up all of your enthusiasm too soon. If there’s a scrub you’ll feel disgusted and vaguely humiliated; you will mistakenly view the scrub as a failure of NASA’s, and this will mark you as an outsider more than anything else. Insiders know that scrubs are part of spaceflight.

While I wait, I read from Of a Fire on the Moon. Norman Mailer gripes about being packed into buses with the other journalists, all of them sweating through their shirts and ties, smoking and cursing the brutal Florida heat. I have the luxury of driving my own air-conditioned car; instead of a shirt and tie I wear a sundress, a beach hat, and enormous sunglasses that I hope make me look like Joan Didion.

When Norman Mailer gets off the bus at the Press Site, he recounts his impressions (in the third person) of feeling slightly disconnected from the events happening so near yet so far away. He says that people had built up for him how unforgettable the launch experience would be, that he had been promised that the ground would shake. But he couldn’t match his lived experience with this expectation. “He had no sense at all of three psyches full of awareness on the edge of the horizon. Just that gray stick out there.” I see it too: only with binoculars does that gray stick come into focus as black-and-white Discovery against its orange external tank, flanked by white solid rocket boosters. The astronauts’ “psyches full of awareness” (six, in this case) are as hard to imagine today as they were in 1969. The idea of that gray stick lifting itself into the sky is still as hard to imagine as it was then, the fact of people on it just as wondrous.

Discovery first flew in 1984, the third orbiter to join the fleet. It was named for one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook. Space shuttle Discovery is the most-flown orbiter; today will be its thirty-ninth and final launch. By the end of this mission, it will have flown a total of 365 days in space, making it the most well traveled spacecraft in history. Discovery was the first orbiter to carry a Russian cosmonaut and the first to visit the Russian space station Mir. On that flight, in 1995, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot an American spacecraft. Discovery flew twelve of the thirty-eight missions to assemble the International Space Station, and it was responsible for deploying the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. This was perhaps the most far reaching accomplishment of the shuttle program, as Hubble has been called the most important telescope in history and one of the most significant scientific instruments ever invented. It has allowed astronomers to determine the age of the universe, postulate how galaxies form, and confirm the existence of dark energy, among many other discoveries. Astronomers and astrophysicists, when they are asked about the significance of Hubble, will simply say that it has rewritten the astronomy books. In the retirement process, Discovery will be the “vehicle of record,” being kept as intact as possible for future study.

Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter after the loss of Challenger and then again after the loss of Columbia. To me, this gives it a certain feeling of bravery and hope. Don’t worry, Discovery seemed to tell us by gamely rolling her snow-white self out to the launchpad. Don’t worry, we can still dream of space. We can still leave the earth. And then she did.

Around me, cars and trucks cruise up and down the causeway, looking for places to wedge themselves in. T minus five hours and counting. We all watch our phones and wait. It’s been my observation that each launch offers a different experience of waiting, different shades of waiting, flavors of waiting, moods of waiting. Buddhists might appreciate the way each launch wait brings about in spectators a different quality of boredom, then acceptance, then calm, then something like a childlike openness, an ability to take in the sight we are about to see with minds wiped clear of desire, warped of time.

All along the causeway, those of us who got here earlier take walks and greet our fellow space fans. I’m reminded of Jules Verne’s description of the people who showed up in Florida to see the first space launch in his 1865 novel. He imagined a tent city of space enthusiasts from all over the world, speaking different languages and “mingled together in terms of absolute equality.” He describes a sense of anticipation that includes a hint of something like fear—“a dull, noiseless agitation, such as precedes great catastrophes.” Verne got a few things wrong in his invention of what spaceflight would be like, but this is one of the many details he got right.

I’ve experienced the specific enthusiasm of space people before, at my other visits to the Kennedy Space Center and especially at the launch I saw in 2001; I saw more of them at Buzz Aldrin’s book event in Nashville. Among the people I met on those occasions were some serious space fanatics, people for whom space is the main thing in their lives—the interest they read about, talk about, spend eBay money on, and chat with other people over the Internet about. Some of these people work in vaguely aerospace-related fields, but for more of them this has nothing to do with their jobs. They just love space, and for these people the Kennedy Space Center is something of a mecca. I am not really one of the space people, as much as my friends might mistake me for one of them. I’ve read a hundred books about spaceflight and traveled here to see a launch in person, but I did so as research for a book I was writing. I can’t imagine putting this much energy into it just for its own sake.

When the space people come in contact with each other, which they do in great numbers on launch days like today, they have a sort of code for interacting. They list the previous launches they have seen, share thoughts on controversial subjects within the community (Did Gus Grissom really screw up and blow the hatch early on the Liberty Bell 7 in 1961, or did it go off by itself as he claimed? Will any of the private aerospace companies be able to get astronauts into space safely, and if so which one[s]? Who was the most badass moonwalker? And so on). They exchange reviews of recent space books, trade the names of aging astronauts whose hands they have shaken. They wear T-shirts and caps and buttons and pins and patches and memorabilia from other launches. I’d almost forgotten about these people, how obsessed and knowledgeable and friendly they are. At a time when it seems all but self-evident that shuttle is ending because the general public no longer cares about spaceflight, these people controvert that broad claim with every molecule of their being. They care enough for all of us, and they are heartbroken by our leaders’ shortsightedness.

The car nearest mine has license plates from Ohio. A friendly couple in their early fifties, just starting to gray, who drove two days to see their first launch before it was too late. The husband wears wraparound sunglasses and a T-shirt that says LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF THOSE WHO THREATEN IT on the back. The wife is carefully made up and coiffed, but she wears baggy capris and sensible shoes, a popular look for women at shuttle launches. After locating the launchpad through his binoculars with my help, the husband tells me that we are all going to be forced to live under sharia law before too long, a conclusion based on “the way things are going in England.” (When pressed, he reveals that his main piece of evidence for England’s inevitable transition to Islamic theocracy is the fact that Mohammed is the most popular name for newborn boys in London.)

“Do you know why Obama killed the shuttle program?” he asks me, as his wife joins us to offer everyone Combos. “The answer may surprise you.”

“Um, I don’t think Obama really killed the shuttle program,” I reply vaguely, helping myself to some Combos. “That decision was made after the Columbia disaster, in 2003.” I restrain myself from adding the obvious: under Bush.

“But Obama could have revived it.” The man points his finger at me in a gotcha gesture. He leans toward me in his excitement; I can see myself reflected in his sunglasses. Next to him, his wife fiddles with her iPhone, trying to get NASA TV to come in.

“Obama’s under orders by the Bilderberg Group.” The man pauses, waiting to see whether I know what the Bilderberg Group is. I do, from reading Jon Ronson’s Them: it’s a group of global leaders and captains of industry that holds mysterious meetings, a cabal popular with conspiracy theorists. “He’s under orders to destroy as many sources of national pride as possible. I mean, think about it. If the American people aren’t proud of their country anymore, the One World Order can take over and we won’t rise up in defense of our country.”

“Don’t you think it’s more likely that he needs to make a show of austerity during a recession? Extending the space shuttle would look too spendy while people are losing their homes.”

“Austerity,” the man repeats. He looks at Discovery off on the horizon. “That’s a good point, actually.”

“I’m going to go get a Coke from my cooler,” I announce. “Would you like anything to drink?”

“No, thanks. You might actually be right, though, about that austerity thing. I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

Crouched by my cooler, I scribble down everything the man said. I imagine getting similar interviews with other people, assembling a catalog of the kooks who show up for shuttle launches. Then it occurs to me that I am the only person within sight to have arrived by myself, to have driven twelve hours alone. I may be the only professor here missing classes today, the only mother to have left her child for three days, all to see a space shuttle launch. I feel a moment of shame for wanting to mock the Ohio man. But I write down everything he said anyway.

Later in the morning, the woman from Ohio with the Combos approaches me. Her hair has flattened a bit in the humidity, and some of her makeup has sweated off. She wants to know whether there is any officially sanctioned place for women to pee.

“I’ve been wondering about that too,” I admit. All morning we have watched men and boys stroll down an embankment and disappear briefly into some tropical foliage, but it’s not clear what our options are.

“Let’s shield each other,” she suggests. A third woman joins us, and the three of us set up a makeshift stall using two beach towels in some secluded bushes. The third woman, who is from West Palm Beach, has a bad knee, and so she needs to hold on to my shoulder to keep her balance while she squats. I brace myself against her weight, hold up my end of the beach towel, and look up at some helicopters passing against the clear blue sky. They will monitor the weather up until the moment of launch. Today six Americans are going to space.

Forty-two years ago, Norman Mailer woke up in a motel in Cocoa Beach, Florida, after two hours of sleep and drove to the Kennedy Space Center. He felt cranky, out of sorts, and hot. Too many other Very Important Persons had turned out for the launch, and Norman Mailer disliked them both individually and as a group. But in the moments right before liftoff, he had an insight: He knew now why he was so irritated with everything and why he could not feel a thing. It was simple masculine envy. He too wanted to go up in the bird.

I know what he means. The masculine envy of which he speaks is not masculine at all. It’s integral to the experience of watching people soaring into the heavens while we, with pen and paper, are stuck on the ground. I feel it too, and that envy is at the heart of a kinship between Norman Mailer and me that transcends forty-two years, a change in space vehicle, and even gender—a difference not insignificant to Norman Mailer, who once remarked to Orson Welles in a television interview that all women should be kept in cages. But I understand him, I feel him, just the same. I’ve read accounts of the launch of Apollo 11 by each of the three men on board, by the flight director and dozens of other people closely tied to the mission, and I’ve clung to every word; yet it’s Norman Mailer’s wrestling with his own detachment, his own desire to feel something for that gray stick, that stays with me, that makes me feel I’ve been let in on what it was like to be there.

While I wait for the launch of Discovery, I text back and forth with Omar about whether the launch will go off on time, about weather predictions, about where we should have dinner afterward. He is watching the launch across the street from the Vehicle Assembly Building in a van equipped with badge boards and walkie-talkies, the equipment he will need in the event the launch is scrubbed and he has to go back to work resecuring the launchpad.

I haven’t been to Florida since Family Day five months ago, but I still see Omar at least once a day on Facebook, and we play a lot of online Scrabble. He is a surprisingly serious opponent and beats me more often than not. I’ve started to think of him in the same category as my siblings—people I feel respect and affection for and don’t see as often as I’d like. In the intervening time, I’ve gathered more of an idea of his life: he works a lot and enjoys it, both because he takes pride in doing the work well and because there are spaceships and astronauts at his workplace, which he never stops being excited by. There are things he learns that he’s not supposed to tell anyone, and he is absolutely scrupulous about following those rules. He’ll mention to me once in a while that he took a picture of something, but that he can’t post it until he’s given permission, which will probably not be until after the shuttles are retired. So he doesn’t post it, and won’t even tell his friends exactly what it is. When he is not working, he spends time with friends and family—there are pithy quotes here and there from his grandmother. He also helps out a lot with horses that belong to his girlfriend, horses whose snapshots populate his Facebook feed. A picture starts to come together of a man whose overwhelming attribute is reliability rather than ambition. (Or rather, a man whose single ambition—to be near space shuttles as much as possible—has been satisfied.) Either way, he is a person who does what he says he will do, and he does things for others rather than for himself.

After Discovery’s last flight, Omar might get another year or so working here—there will be a great deal of work to be done removing Discovery’s engines, cleaning it up and readying it for its new life as a flightless museum display. After that, he will have to find another purpose, like thousands of other people at the Cape.

Several “holds” are built into the countdown, pauses to provide a cushion in case the launch crews encounter any complications and need to catch up. One is at T minus twenty minutes, another at T minus nine. Traditionally, the T minus nine minute hold is when people start getting serious about their viewing spots. Floridians who don’t care to go out of their way to see a launch will often at least stop what they are doing and step outside, find a roof, or pull over in their cars when they hear the announcement for the T-9 hold, then look in the direction of the launchpads.

At T-9, I take the lens cap off my camera and clamber up onto the roof of my car. The metal is hot and bumps about under me disconcertingly, but I persevere. Now the causeway is packed—in the last hour, people have started trying to cram their cars and trucks at odd angles into any tiny gap between the vehicles of those of us who arrived earlier, and some tension results. A sedan manages to slide past the Ohio couple and park on the other side of them, partially blocking their view. The Ohio man steams about it to his wife, hands on his hips. When the driver of the sedan emerges and turns out to be brown-skinned, Arab or South Asian, I fear what ugly confrontation might ensue. But the driver is an elaborately polite older man with very little English, making it hard for the Ohio man to start any kind of real argument. Soon the two are sharing binoculars, the Ohio man pointing out the stack on the horizon. I eavesdrop for a while, but when I don’t hear the words sharia or Mohammed after a few minutes, I lose interest.

It continues to startle me, the range of political ideologies that are compatible with enthusiasm for spaceflight. Tax-and-spend liberals of the Great Society stripe, obviously—but also spending-slashing Tea Partiers, hippie peaceniks, fierce libertarians, military loyalists, and apathetics of every shade. So very many of us seem to feel that a love of human spaceflight is reconcilable with our beliefs, and we can all explain why. This belief doesn’t always translate to actual funding; the launch we witness today was made possible by budget squabbles that happened last year, ten years ago, forty years ago. This man from Ohio sees the space shuttle as a natural offshoot of military aviation and an expression of American exceptionalism; I see it as a grand act of civic performance art. We are both right. This man and I are far apart on pretty much everything else (he tells me later that women are genetically disabled in terms of our spatial relations, especially at night, a disability responsible for as many traffic accidents as alcohol; when I ask him politely why, if this is so, women have successfully landed the space shuttle—the most difficult feat any pilot or astronaut can face—including twice at night, he answers, “affirmative action”), but we have spaceflight in common, and so today we share binoculars, information, and snacks. We look off agreeably into the sky together, and our companionship today, the companionship of many unexpected groupings and pairings like this one, is one of those things the space program has given us that is hard to put a value on.

The night before the launch of Apollo 11, Norman Mailer visited sites where tourists had gathered to watch the launch—maybe this very spot, he doesn’t specify. He describes the people he saw there:

The scene here today is oddly like the scene here forty years ago. Not much has changed. People still drive for days to get here, still camp out, still sit on lawn chairs. People still look across the miles at the shrine.

In Mailer’s book, he spins a fantasy of an archetypal working-class couple, a ridiculously offensive composite born of Mailer’s imagintion and class prejudice—the man all faded high-school glory and physical work and beer belly, the woman all aging sass and sexuality. I can only imagine that if Norman Mailer had watched the actual launch from here among everyday Americans, rather than from the NASA Press Site surrounded by credentialed journalists, he and the man from Ohio would have bloodied each other’s noses by mid-afternoon. Or they may have gotten drunk together at a postlaunch celebration in a local bar. Or maybe both. There are ways in which I won’t follow in Mailer’s footsteps.

T minus five minutes. T minus two minutes. I start to feel a buzzy anticipation in my fingertips, a bit like stage fright. Time moves differently at this point, and I’ve read that it does for the astronauts as well. Each second seems to take forever, yet there is also something merciless about the way the seconds keep spilling forward. The time it takes to speak a sentence or check a camera setting feels like it should have taken thirty seconds, but when we check our watches again, only two seconds have gone by.

T minus thirty seconds. The announcer starts chanting the countdown at fifteen, and we pick up the count and chant along with him. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. These words, spoken with such reverence and emphasis, are part of the poetry of spaceflight. But when we get close to zero, the countdown stops.

A general groan goes up. The announcer explains that there is an electrical problem.

There is only a ten-minute window each day during which the rotation of Earth brings Cape Canaveral within rendezvous range with the space station; if Discovery can’t get off the ground within this launch window, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the next attempt. I will have to tell Chris I’ll be away for one more day; I’ll have to find someone to cover another day of classes. We lean toward our phones and turn up our car radios and squint through our binoculars at the horizon while those ten minutes slowly tick away.

When the time is nearly up, we see a light on the horizon. Only two seconds before the end of the window, the main engines ignite, creating an orange glow. Then the solid rocket boosters. The stack lifts itself, silently at first. The sound takes longer to travel the fourteen miles than does the light, so the first bright moments of launch always have a silent-film majesty.

And now the sound comes toward us: bassy, crackly, like a fireworks display that never lets up. The sound goes right through you, and if you have become too emotionally involved in the space program, this sound will make you cry. It’s the sound of American exploration, the sound of missiles put to better use than killing or threatening to kill, a sound that means we came in peace for all mankind. The man from Ohio is trying to watch through binoculars and shoot video of the launch with his phone at the same time; his wife is exclaiming “Oh my God! Oh my God!” over and over. We cry and tip our heads back to trace the bright light up.

At T plus two minutes, the solid rocket boosters drop off. Like others who have watched the Challenger footage too many times, I’m never fully satisfied that a space shuttle has launched successfully until I see with my own eyes those boosters drop off safely and arc away. From this distance, Discovery now looks mostly like a flare of flame followed by a streak of white arcing up into the sky, a streak that seems to curve inward with the bowl of the heavens until it’s almost directly overhead, where it slowly disappears into a single point like any star.

Good-bye, Discovery.

I dry my eyes and gather up my things. I wonder whether Omar is crying. I feel I don’t know him quite well enough to ask. A few seconds later, I get a text from him.

2 words. Buzzer beater.

A few people pull out onto the causeway and drive off while Discovery is still visible in the sky, the sort of people who leave baseball games during the eighth inning. But most of us stand and watch the whole thing, which takes ten minutes, long enough to take our eyes off it and talk to other people and check Twitter while we are still tracking its progress up, up, up to the top of the sky. The couple from Ohio seems to be in no hurry to leave. They are watching NASA TV on her phone and taking pictures of each other with the steam trail, taking pictures of their car against the backdrop of palm trees and faraway gantries, of the crowd up and down the causeway. But then they consult each other quickly, hop into their car, and drive away. The woman barely has time to call good-bye to me as they pull out onto the road. Up ahead, we can see, traffic is already getting backed up at the first interchange, and I suppose they are smart to leave now. I feel oddly lonely once they are gone. But now that I’m alone I am free to take notes on everything they said. I scrawl some notes in my unprofessional-looking children’s black-and-white composition notebook. They’re not even notes, exactly, but triggers, strange details that I hope will be the spark that contains the whole moment, as our every cell contains the whole of our DNA.

Thinking about the Ohio couple now, it pleases me to think that I am in some of their pictures, a part of the online album they will share on Flickr or Facebook. Even though we never exchanged names, I’m glad they will remember me, my beach hat and lawn chair and car with Tennessee plates.

Omar and I have agreed to meet at a Mexican restaurant as soon as traffic slows enough to let us through. The streets of Merritt Island are busy but not clogged—as Omar had predicted, most people have headed east or west. Waiting at a red light, I notice that the car in front of me is covered with space stickers. Patches from multiple missions, bumper stickers advertising the visitor centers at multiple NASA sites, as well as the two versions of the NASA logo: the blue circle with the stars and chevron dating to NASA’s founding in 1959, and the simple stripped-down letters from the seventies. A few days ago I was reading about the two versions of the logo. The NASA website describes the components of the old version: “the sphere represents a planet, the stars represent space, the red chevron is a wing representing aeronautics (the latest design in hypersonic wings at the time the logo was developed), and then there is an orbiting spacecraft going around the wing.”

This logo was hard to reproduce after the invention of the photocopier, and by the seventies some felt it had started to feel dated. In the pause between Apollo and shuttle, NASA hoped a redesigned logo would refresh the agency’s image as forward-thinking and futuristic, and the new logo reflected this ideal: just the four letters NASA, so simplified and stylized that even the cross strokes on the As were removed as if to make the acronym more aerodynamic. You can see in the new logo an aesthetic argument that a stripped-down space program, a lean-and-mean reusable shuttle, was a thing to be proud of rather than a compromise to apologize for. If the old logo was made for lofty and expensive goals, the new logo was made for deploying satellites for paying customers and conducting experiments in low Earth orbit. The agency in the seventies and eighties didn’t need to compete with the agency of the sixties on its own terms; the new agency would pay its own way or come close to it, and that would be its own achievement. The new design was given the unflattering nickname “the worm.” (The old logo, to differentiate it, was called “the meatball.”) Arguments about the logo became encoded arguments about NASA’s narrative. What did it mean for NASA to be a collaborator with commercial interests rather than just a standard-bearer for our dreams? It should shock no one that this new worm logo, as appealing as it may have been to members of Congress, was bewildering and uninspiring to the public. In the midnineties the meatball came back and has been the dominant logo ever since. The reassertion of the meatball may mean that our affection for the spirit of the heroic era is still as strong as ever; it also may mean that the agency’s best days are behind it.

It’s been long enough that I’m a bit nervous again about seeing Omar—I even wonder as I’m approaching the restaurant whether we will have trouble recognizing each other. I have come to feel I know him well, but we only spent one day together, five months ago. Everything else we know about each other is through life lived online.

But of course I do know him the moment I see him, in a booth near the door, and he knows me too. We greet each other easily, without any of the awkwardness I feared. It seems we will be the sort of friends who can pick up where we left off. The restaurant is packed, the waitresses turning sideways and lifting their trays over their heads. All the patrons are sweat-stained, sunburned, wind-rumpled, and smiling, like us.

“So what did you think?”

“Awesome,” I reply. I have trouble thinking what more to say about the launch. Sometimes the most complex experiences are best summed up in a single word.

“It was a nice one,” Omar agrees. “How did it compare to the one you saw before?”

“That was a night launch, so—really different,” I say. “But I guess I assumed that for the most part day launches are all the same, and night launches are all the same.”

Omar shakes his head. “The funny thing is, they’re all different. They all have a really distinct look to them. I guess it has to do with weather—how much cloud cover there is, humidity, wind, especially. Each one puts on a different show.”

It occurs to me that there are a lot of people who have seen a single launch, but relatively few can compare multiple shuttle launches. There are people out here—not many, but they exist—who have seen every shuttle launch. I read about one man who has seen every single launch of anything, including probes and satellites. His father worked for Cape Canaveral Air Force Station even before NASA was formed and took him to see the first secret launches when he was a toddler. There is always someone who has seen more.

Omar and I talk more about how the day went. He shows concern over whether I had trouble finding the location he’d suggested for me to watch the launch from, whether I had trouble finding this restaurant. I’d forgotten this about him since Family Day, the way he seems to feel responsible for everything I experience here at the Cape. Not only the launch itself, but also things like weather, the behavior of other space fans, the service I encounter in restaurants and hotels, and the performance of the space shuttle program itself. I get the impression that if today’s launch had scrubbed, as it seemed for so long that it was going to, Omar would have apologized and taken it upon himself to make it up to me in some way.

While we wait for our food, we browse through news stories on our phones about the launch. I read one tidbit out loud to Omar: STS-133 had the longest vertical flow (170 days) since STS-35 in 1990, still the record-holder at 183 days.

“Oh yeah, I remember that one,” Omar tells me. “That was Columbia. My father was involved in fixing the tanking problems. It actually rolled back to VAB, demated, and went back into OPF to start all over again. Then it had to roll back to VAB a second time because a hurricane was going to come through. That one seemed cursed there for a while.”

“For this mission, I wondered whether they were going to roll back Discovery and demate it,” I say.

Omar grunts noncommittally, and it occurs to me that he might know something about this that he’s not supposed to tell me. I don’t want to sound as though I am prodding him to break a confidence.

Omar has his video camera with him, and he shows me the footage he shot from the VAB parking lot. It’s impressive: in his camera’s frame, the stack is much bigger than what I saw today, the controlled explosion of the solid fuel much sharper and brighter. It’s a completely different experience, a different launch. I try to hide my jealousy.

We eat mediocre Mexican food and I drink two beers. I probably should stick to one, but I’ve had a long day, I’m relieved that everything has gone as planned, and I’m falling for the celebratory postflight atmosphere. Omar considers getting a beer but keeps ordering Cokes instead. Now that I’m a little tipsy, I ask Omar a question I’ve wanted to ask him for a while: I ask him about the masculine envy Norman Mailer experienced at the launch of Apollo 11. I tell him that, like all space writers, I am asked from time to time whether I would go up on the space shuttle if I had the chance. I tell him I’m not sure what to say because in reality, I think I would be terrified.

“Still, you’d have to go if you had the chance, right?” I asked. “After all, the track record is pretty good.” 98.5 percent of space shuttle missions have returned their crews safely; the statistics get even better if you count Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

Omar pauses. “That’s something I think about a lot. I grew up wanting to go. Now that I work there, I’ve seen everything that goes wrong as they’re preparing to launch,” he says. “All the stuff they catch and fix.”

I know what he means. One faulty part, one procedure not executed correctly. What destroyed Challenger was the failure of a simple rubber O-ring, like you have in your faucets. What destroyed Columbia was a dent on one of the tiles.

“But they catch them and fix them, right?” I ask. The astronauts themselves don’t know all the details about problems found on the orbiter and the other components. They are busy training for their own roles; they have to trust that the engineers and technicians are doing their jobs.

“They’d only have to miss one thing,” Omar says. He pauses, smiling broadly. “But I’d still go.”

If the shuttle continued flying a hundred more missions, statistics dictate another one would probably be lost, maybe to something equally mundane. In 1967, the crew of Apollo 1 was killed in a training exercise on the launchpad. The plan to go to the moon went on without too much controversy, but now, it seems, we no longer have the stomach for burying astronauts. After Challenger, the space agency was criticized for undervaluing safety in favor of budget and scheduling pressures; after Columbia, the board tasked with investigating the disaster recommended that crew safety become “the overriding priority” in NASA’s next space transportation system, “rather than trade safety against other performance criteria, such as low cost and reusability, or against advanced space operation capabilities.” This requirement would make spaceflight slower, more expensive, and less ambitious—exactly the opposite direction from what proponents of heroic-era lofty goals demand.

On the way out of the restaurant, we pass a small clump of people wearing brightly colored badges that read “NASATweetup.” The badges display the NASA logo and the person’s Twitter handle, indicated by the leading @ sign. Omar points them out to me as if they are celebrities, but he doesn’t approach them.

“Those are the people chosen for the NASATweetup,” he tells me. When I look confused, he explains. “NASA started doing it for the last few launches. They choose 150 people who follow NASA on Twitter and give them special access to the launch. They get to meet astronauts and stuff like that. A few weeks ago I saw a bunch of them when they got to go inside OPF. They looked like kids in a candy store.”

When I was here for Family Day, I learned to refer to the hangars where the space shuttles are maintained between missions as “OPF,” not “the OPF,” as I had been doing.

“I got to go inside OPF,” I brag needlessly.

Omar smiles. “Yeah, you did.”

Outside, Omar tells me that he recognized the Twitter handle of a woman who had traveled from Australia for the previous launch attempt but couldn’t afford to return for this one. The space community on Twitter took up a collection for her, and a few locals offered her free places to stay. This is a great example of the fellow feeling that exists among the hard-core space enthusiasts online—they give each other money, are welcome in one another’s homes. Omar is clearly delighted to see the Australian woman has made it here. When I ask why he doesn’t approach her and congratulate her in person, he shrugs and says she looked like she was busy talking to her friends. Omar’s shyness is a lot like my own, I realize. He likes people and wishes the best for them. He is willing to e-mail strangers (as he did me after he read my book) or to reach out to them on Twitter, but to walk up to a woman in a restaurant and introduce himself is another matter, farther than he is willing to go. I am moved all over again that he made the bold gesture of inviting me for Family Day.

Omar has tried to impress upon me how awful the traffic will be tonight, especially heading west toward Orlando, which is where I’m going. He’s explained that a lot of NASA people choose to live in Merritt Island because it’s the only town on the same landmass as the Kennedy Space Center, the only one from which a car can reach the gates of the Kennedy Space Center without having to cross a body of water using one of the causeways, which clog up unspeakably after launches. The epic traffic is largely due to the bottlenecking of these causeways, and Omar points out that the one and only motel in the town of Merritt Island, the Clarion, while not luxurious, would save me half an hour to forty-five minutes prelaunch and inestimable hours afterward, when up to a million people will be trying to get off Merritt Island at once.

“Good tip,” I say. “That will be my new Florida home.”

Omar suggests that in order to kill time we go to Barnes & Noble and look around in their space book section. This is only the second time Omar and I have met in person, and it’s already the second time we have wound up perusing books together. As a writer I tend to find myself in bookstores or libraries wherever I visit, but it’s unusual to meet a nonwriter who seems to share the same instinct. We find the Space area within the Science section, and as with the Visitor Center gift shop book section, Omar seems to have read every book in the place. He points books out to me, I point books out to him. I show him Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon, recently reprinted in a coffee-table version with huge glossy photos.

As Omar pages through the book, I try to tell him about Norman Mailer, about how the book came to be written. I tell him that I find Norman Mailer unbearable, but also quite brilliant. I tell him about the things Norman Mailer saw and described that no one else did, like Wernher von Braun’s speech at a Titusville country club the night before the launch of Apollo 11 or the cold drink machine at the Press Site whose malfunction became an extended metaphor for American technology and arrogance. Omar and I flip through the book, talking about which of the Apollo-era images we have seen before. Only one of them is new to Omar, an aerial shot of the launchpad with Apollo/Saturn stacked and pointing at the sky, tiny workers visible on the gantry. Omar looks at it for a long time before putting it back. Then he picks up another book he’s read, a history of the space shuttle, and shows me his father’s name in the acknowledgments. Frank Izquierdo.

“Your dad’s name is Frank?” I ask. “That was the name I gave the dad who worked at KSC in my book,” I remind him.

“Oh yeah,” Omar says. “I’d forgotten about that. Coincidence, right? My father’s real name is Francisco.”

I’m more surprised by the coincidence than Omar seems to be. I try to remember why I chose the name Frank for the father. I wanted him to be a little bit square, a nerdy, old-fashioned hardworking dad. And I wanted him to be honest, dependable—frank—a man of his word.

Omar has to work early in the morning, so we say our good-byes. I’m going to hang around in the bookstore for a while, since the traffic getting off the island has probably not let up.

“See you for 134?” he asks after we hug.

“Yes, 134,” I say, happy to have a next launch to look forward to in a couple of months.

I stay in the bookstore’s café area, making notes from the day, until it closes at nine o’clock. Surely traffic has let up by now, I think, four hours after launch, but when I get onto the 528 causeway leading back to Orlando I find it’s still a parking lot. People are getting out of their cars to walk around on the grass, drink beer, and hang out as if they were tailgating, exactly as they were twelve hours ago. When we finally do start moving again, it’s at a creep. Toward eleven, I finally pass the spot from which I watched the launch earlier today. Now that seems like a lifetime ago.

In the morning, as I am leaving town, I decide to drive back inland along a different route in order to try to better understand the confusing geography. I have written a book set here, but in that book the child protagonist has only a loose understanding of the Cape beyond the fixed sets of her backyard, her school, and the Kennedy Space Center. In order to write this place from her point of view, I had to gain only as much of an understanding as she would have. On my second visit since finishing that book, I still don’t feel confident I know where things are. I still don’t understand why everything is called something other than what it is, why the same names mean two or three different things. Confusing naming practices are often associated with areas closed to outsiders, but the Space Coast has been welcoming tourists almost as long as it has been home to space families. The names have to do with the elusiveness of the place itself, my working theory goes, the way the land and the freshwater and the seawater all blend into each other in unexpected ways. The way water seems to be on all sides at all times, though none of these areas quite meet the definition of an island, just as in Omar’s video of the launch the fire plume of Discovery’s engines blends complexly into the steam beneath it, so that it’s hard to tell whether any one point is fire or steam. The way the marshiness of the terrain makes one piece of land either an island or a peninsula, the same spot brown on some maps and blue on others. The way the isolation of this place defined it until the rockets came in, and how quickly it’s grown since. It’s a community of transplants and immigrants. These are big towns now, with traffic and shopping centers and miles and miles of strip malls, but before Omar’s generation very few people could say they had been born and raised here. Almost no one knew it as their native place.

I drive across the causeway spanning the Indian River to Cocoa, a dense little town that feels like it’s been here longer than the others, maybe because it doesn’t seem as touristy. Then north to Titusville. Everyone in the area makes fun of Titusville, but I can’t really see how it’s different from anything else around here—it’s strip-mally and a little run-down, but so are the other towns. The streets are lined with motels with space-themed signs, as they are in Cocoa Beach and Port St. John and everywhere else. I suppose every area needs one town to make fun of.

I cross back to Merritt Island using a different causeway, and rather than heading toward the gate of the Space Center I take the turn for the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. This place is beautiful in a prehistoric kind of way, wetlands with palmettos and slash pine, everywhere the sounds of alligators and frogs, exotic-looking birds touching down and taking off again. Across the Mosquito Lagoon, the Vehicle Assembly Building and the launch towers stand sentinel on the horizon, a reminder of why all this is here. I’ve visited this refuge a couple of times before, and every time I come here I envision the landscape as an inch-for-inch replica of what Ponce de León found when he landed here in 1513. There are few places like this left on either coast, places where you can imagine the European explorers encountering this land for the first time.

I’ve been reading about Juan Ponce and about Captain James Cook, whose ships Discovery and Endeavour were the namesakes for two of the space shuttle orbiters. On his first voyage, Cook established an observatory in Tahiti to record the transit of Venus across the sun. He was the first to circumnavigate New Zealand, took possession of Australia for Great Britain, and became the first European to visit Hawaii. After his second voyage, he was already famous and could have rested on his laurels, but instead he kept looking for an excuse for another expedition. He set off for his third and final voyage in 1776. Legend holds that the Hawaiian natives mistook him for a god, though this has been disputed; these same natives stabbed him to death and preserved his remains as they preserved their chiefs’. Cook wrote that he intended to go not only “farther than any man has been before me, but as far as it is possible for a man to go.”

Reading about their voyages, I keep thinking how strange it is that these grand vague ideas of discovery and endeavor actually become, when you look at them closely, weirdly specific stories of weirdly specific people, adventures that take place at particular moments and under certain pressures. These were actual human beings who climbed into actual boats for actual reasons, many of those reasons being less grand and lofty than the names of their ships. Juan Ponce and James Cook and the others wanted to be rich, or to impress people, or to escape something at home, or to make a name for themselves. Taken as a whole, their achievements have less of a feeling of grandeur than of something like coincidence: if the conditions that made their trips advantageous hadn’t come about when they did, someone else would have made the trip at another time, and the contact between cultures would not be exactly what it was, the New World would not be exactly what it is. The story would be a different one.

I get back in my car and drive across the causeway to Cocoa Beach. There is a motel here that was once owned jointly by the seven Mercury astronauts, the place they stayed when they came to town to race their hot rods up and down A1A and laugh at the local sheriff and get drunk around the pool. That motel, when I stop in, is now owned by a chain. The lobby has no space memorabilia, no indication that the first Americans to go to space owned it, slept here. When I ask the young woman behind the counter, she acknowledges it’s true but doesn’t seem particularly energized by the fact. She looks young enough that she was probably born after Challenger; the Mercury astronauts are probably older than her grandparents, their accomplishments prehistoric and irrelevant.

The drive home to Tennessee is easier and quicker than the drive down—the trip home always seems faster, I suppose. On the way to Cape Canaveral two days earlier I’d passed through Florida entirely in the dark, but coming back I get to see the outskirts of Orlando and the swampy landscapes of central Florida. Many billboards advertise upcoming rest stops and their free orange juice. I know from reading John McPhee that the orange juice will be the same concentrate one buys at any grocery store in Knoxville, or in Minnesota, or in Siberia. Other billboards denounce President Obama. Still others implore me in more and more urgent terms not to have an abortion.

To pass the time, I listen to audiobooks—I get through the latest well-reviewed literary doorstopper and start another. I stop for lunch somewhere in south Georgia. At sunset, as a gorgeous orange light is filling my car and everything else, I notice myself: I’m sucking on a milkshake, tearing down the highway at eighty miles per hour, singing along to a pop song I’d never heard until several days ago, thinking about where to stop for dinner. For today, I don’t have to worry about my son’s nap schedule or answer my students’ e-mails. I can stop wherever I want without accommodating someone else’s preferences. I can listen to trashy music or talk to myself or think, just sit quietly in the hushed luxury of my own secondhand car, the landscape of Georgia whistling by outside the window.

I hear the “Firework” song again. “Baby you’re a firework / Come on, show ’em what you’re worth /Make ’em go, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ / As you shoot across the sky-y-y.”

I pull into my driveway in Knoxville late that night, and my house is already dark. I carry my bags in as quietly as I can. The house is tidy, the dishwasher humming and sloshing, my husband and son asleep, seemingly undamaged by my absence. I kiss them both and crawl into bed exhausted, still smelling of the swamps of Florida, the red dirt of Georgia, smelling of fast food and all the diesel fumes of all the truck stops of the Southeast. I’d feared making this trip, had felt it a necessary inconvenience to transport my eyeballs and brain down to the launch site to be able to say that I had personally witnessed the event myself. Now, having experienced unexpected and complicated things, having felt the heat and having smelled the smells, I see what it means to actually go to the Cape, to make the drive covering every inch between my driveway and the causeway, to get dirty, get drunk, get sunburned, and pee in the bushes. It was important to feel the light of the launch against my own face, its vibration pushing against my clothes. I’d thought I had to be there in person in order to get the real story; in fact, by being there, I—a tiny bit—changed the story.

Before I’m awake the next morning, my phone buzzes with an incoming text. I roll over in bed and squint at the screen with one eye. The text is from Omar.

Good morning. Home safe?

I smile. Only Omar.

Yup, I tap out with my thumbs. Got in at 11pm. Lots of traffic around Atlanta.

Soon, we will make plans to go to the launch of STS-134, the last mission for Endeavour. Mark Kelly has announced that he will remain on the crew as its commander. It’s scheduled for No Earlier Than April 19, 2011.