Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight

CHAPTER 5. Good-bye, Endeavour

STS-134: May 16, 2011

On May 16, 2011, nearly three months after the launch of Discovery, my phone alarms me out of sleep at 4:00 a.m. I wake and wonder where I am for a few seconds in this strange room with its cheap slick bedspread, its seventies-era brown color scheme, a smell of cheap air freshener barely covering cigarette smoke, faint mildew, and underneath that, the salt of the ocean.

This is the Clarion Hotel in Merritt Island, Florida, the place Omar told me about last time. I haul myself out of bed, turn on the TV, and start dressing and organizing my things by its light. Like Norman Mailer before me, I have had only two hours of sleep before heading to the Space Center. I did not create this similarity on purpose, but I decide to embrace it. Sleep deprivation, like waiting itself, is part of the launch experience. I check the status of the launch: the countdown is continuing, and the weather is 70 percent go. It’s now T minus five hours.

This mission had been set for April 19 when I was here last for Discovery, but that date had changed to April 29 because of a conflict with a Russian trip to the International Space Station. I did not want the launch date to be April 29. I was scheduled to be at a conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, a meeting of space historians I had managed to worm my way into by proposing a paper months before. As the date approached, I kept one eye on the calendar, hoping the launch attempt would slip. I told people I “had a feeling” the launch would be postponed, but what I meant by that was I hoped very much that it would be. I hassled Omar constantly about how things were looking and whether it still seemed the 29th would be the day. He replied diplomatically each time—this launch had already slipped multiple times, which made it seem entirely likely that it would slip again, but we couldn’t know what would happen until it was announced.

When April 29 stayed on the launch manifest for a while, and especially when the mission passed its flight readiness review, I panicked. On the 27th, I headed off to the space history conference in DC, thinking maybe I could write about going to two of the three last launches. Maybe my missing the last launch of Endeavour could somehow be smoothed over, or made into some sort of metaphor. Maybe there was a way, rhetorically, to make that work. I was going to have to think of one because I couldn’t miss the conference, and I also had no intention of abandoning this last-launch project.

The conference in DC, titled “1961/1981: Key Moments in Human Spaceflight,” was cosponsored by NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. According to the call for papers I had stumbled across on the NASA website, the conference was meant to “bring together scholars, practitioners, and the interested public to consider the place of human spaceflight in modern culture.” I liked the idea of parlaying my obsession with sixties writers’ treatments of spaceflight into a chance to visit NASA Headquarters, meet space historians, and learn more about the history of the space program. A few months earlier I’d considered myself something of an expert on the subject. Now I was only learning how much I didn’t know, and that made me want to meet the people who knew more.

NASA Headquarters is noticeably different from the other NASA sites I had visited. It is a normal-looking office building in downtown DC rather than an outsized experimental and training facility (Houston) or a spaceport (Kennedy). On the first morning of the conference, NASA administrator Charles Bolden addressed us, and while his speech mostly consisted of general remarks about the importance of history, of understanding where we have been in order to envision where we are going next, he also told a story about meeting President Obama not long before that made me sit up in my seat.

“I stood in the Oval Office,” Bolden told the assembled attendees, “stood square in front of the president, and I asked him, ‘Mr. President, do you believe in human spaceflight?’”

It was a bit thrilling, the idea of the NASA administrator, a former astronaut himself, going toe to toe with the president of the United States. Not long ago, the idea that both men in this dialogue would be African American would have sounded unbelievable.

“And the president looked me in the eye, and he said, ‘Yes, I do.’”

We all clapped furiously. This is a great NASA administrator anecdote in the way it implies a faith in spaceflight, an intention to move forward, without any actual commitment or, especially, budget. But even we space historians and space curators and scholars of many disciplines, we who should know better than anyone, seem to lack any built-in resistance to this anecdote. We want very much for General Bolden to have confronted the president, want very much for the president to have confirmed his commitment to human spaceflight, even if we haven’t seen much evidence of that.

During the two days of the conference, I went to as many presentations as I could, gave my own paper on representations of spaceflight in literature, and met many of the historians whose work I had been reading. On the last day, I got up early to catch my flight home. I spent the day in airports, obsessively refreshing the NASA app on my phone, hoping to get some news of the Endeavour launch. I learned that Gabrielle Giffords had made the trip from Houston and would be watching from the roof of the Launch Control Center. President Obama had come to Cape Canaveral with his family, and they too would be atop Launch Control. Still, I hoped for a scrub, ideally a long delay that would buy me some time to finish my semester and get final grades in. At 12:20 p.m. I got my wish: problems had been discovered with the auxiliary power unit fuel line heater. Hundreds of thousands of people, including the president and his family, left the Cape in disappointment.

Launch was rescheduled for No Earlier Than May 2, then May 8, then May 10. In the coming week, the target launch date slipped again to May 16 at 8:56 a.m., then held there. I started to make tentative plans.

On the morning of the 15th, the day I made the drive from Knoxville, I got a weather update from Omar by text: Weather is good, 70% chance acceptable.

I smiled down at my phone, was about to start tapping out a response, when I got another text:

My grandpa came into town, he may not come tomorrow cause it’s so early, so today he said he’d let me know if he’s coming with us. If he’s not then you’re in. Sorry it’s so last minute

Grandpa? As far as I knew, all of Omar’s extended family was in Puerto Rico, so this grandpa must have come a long way, and unless he was planning to come back in a couple of months, this was going to be Grandpa’s last chance to see a space shuttle launch. None of this boded very well for my chances of getting in to the employee viewing site, and I began making peace with the fact that I would probably be watching from a public spot, maybe Space View Park in Titusville this time. Maybe Omar could get me in for the last one.

I drove all day. This time, I had a sense of how long seven hundred miles would take, and I knew what I-75 had to offer. As with my last trip here, I kept thinking I should listen to audiobooks and return phone calls, but once I was in motion I remembered how pleasant it was to let my mind go blank. I ate junk food and drank sugary drinks all day, listened to music for many long miles. There’s something pleasing about the accomplishment of the miles ticking by on my odometer by the hundreds, seeing the changing landscape pass with the day. An unusual sense of satisfaction in getting out of my car in a state different from the one in which I climbed into it, finding palm trees, birds, and bugs, finding the land has a different smell, the air grown humid. The sun high in the sky at a truck stop outside Atlanta, then the sky washed with pink as the sun starts to dip at a gas station south of Cordele.

In the evening, I was eating dinner at a Cracker Barrel in Valdosta and reading a book about the Apollo project when my phone buzzed. Omar.

Ok you’re in!

Alone at my table with my pancakes, I clapped my hands over my mouth, then smiled at the truckers seated around me. Some of them smiled politely back.

Text you bout when to meet later. Gonna be eeeaaarrrlly

I texted Omar back that I would be wherever he wanted me to be, at whatever time.

This turned out to be his parents’ house, at quarter to five in the morning.

I was going to get onto NASA grounds.

When I pull into Omar’s neighborhood before dawn, I switch off my headlights so as not to wake his neighbors. The houses are like the ones I took pictures of when I was researching my novel—square one-story houses with tiny yards and big swimming pools. Before I can ring the bell, Omar’s dog senses me and starts barking. Then Omar steps out wordlessly into the dark, looking as tired as I feel. We get into my car and head north.

Since I was here last, an engineer named James Vanover committed suicide by jumping from the gantry at pad 39A, where Endeavour was being prepared for launch. Like many employees of long standing, Vanover had been offered an early retirement package. Many considered this preferable to taking their chances waiting to be laid off, as nearly everyone at Kennedy will be eventually. Vanover had accepted the offer, then reconsidered and tried to revoke his decision but was told he could not; he would have to leave NASA. James Vanover had worked on the space shuttle project since 1982. I didn’t ask Omar, when I first read about the death, whether he knew Vanover—I figured it might be more appropriate to ask in person. Now, sitting beside him at quarter to five in the morning, I know I won’t. It’s only a twenty-minute drive to the main gate of the Kennedy Space Center; we pass the DAYS TO LAUNCH sign, which now bears the huge white numeral 0.

At the south gate to the Kennedy Space Center, we show a guard our papers, and he leans in to greet us, smiling. After he waves us through, we drive through miles of darkened tropics, alive with insects even in the dark. We reach an intersection clogged with vehicles. A trail of red brake lights ahead of us marks a string of stopped cars. Guards are holding up traffic in both directions.

“It’s the astronauts,” Omar tells me, as if this were no big deal. We see a string of helicopters fly overhead along the road from west to east, after which a convoy of vehicles comes down the road, mostly dark SUVs. At the convoy’s midpoint: an old silver Airstream trailer emblazoned with the NASA logo. I know this vehicle from pictures and movies—all space fans do. It’s the Astrovan, carrying the astronauts from their crew quarters to the launch pad. Six people are going to space today.

Once the Astrovan has passed, Omar and I continue on. We pull into the parking lot of the Headquarters Building, one of the many nondescript low-slung midsixties office buildings at the Kennedy Space Center, where we wait, idling in the dark, for Omar’s father to emerge. The parking lot is full, even at this hour. I’ve been hearing about Frank for a long time but have not yet met him, and I’m curious what he’ll be like. Before too long we see a figure emerge from the main entrance and approach us.

Like all mechanical engineers, Frank dresses neatly—a polo shirt, khakis, tidy hair, and glasses. As we transfer our stuff to Frank’s SUV, Omar makes the introductions. Frank is as friendly as his son, but he seems unsure what to make of me, a married woman his son met on the Internet, traveling alone with vague plans to write about the end of shuttle, about the end of his life’s work.

We park in a field of grass pressed into service as a parking lot. As I circle around the back of the SUV, I notice that Frank has a special license plate with an image of the space shuttle on it that says CHALLENGER · COLUMBIA across the bottom. We carry lawn chairs and tripods to the viewing area; the Vehicle Assembly Building, as it always does, looms over everything. We settle in for the wait—T minus three hours.

When I ask Frank about his work, he is reticent at first, as engineers tend to be when they are talking to nonengineers. He gives simple, nontechnical answers to my questions: I’ve worked on the main engines and on procedures for tanking fuels. I know from Omar that Frank has been in Launch Control for a number of launches, including Challenger’s last, and part of me wants to ask him about that: At what point did you realize something had gone wrong? How did you feel when you realized the astronauts were dead? Instead I ask him about the more mundane aspects of his work.

I’ve found that all it usually takes to draw out an engineer is to ask a couple of technical questions and then remain calm while listening to the answers. Most people tend to take on a blank, frightened look as soon as they realize that a technical explanation is under way; if you can resist giving this reaction and simply listen, your engineer will open up and tell you everything you ever wanted to know.

Soon Frank is telling me about the complexities of tanking cryogenic gases, the leak check procedures he developed. His eyes light up as he tells me an anecdote about erratic readings on a mass spectrometer. With some prodding, Frank describes to me the first shuttle launch, a test flight of Columbia. The launch had been delayed for months and years as unexpected problems with the shuttle system emerged and branched into multiple new problems, some of which Frank helped to solve. Now, finally, the day had arrived when the shuttle was ready to take to the sky. He had been given a pass to watch from the Turn Basin site, but security was so lax in those days that he drove his family all the way up to the VAB, and held one-year-old baby Omar up to the horizon, trying in vain to interest him in the show.

Like Omar and everyone else I’ve met here, Frank has nothing negative to say about the decision to end the shuttle program, about NASA, or about his own work here. If he is upset that the spacecraft he’s spent his life working on is being mothballed before its time, he will not betray a hint of that disappointment—at least, not to me, not today.

T minus two hours. Omar and I go for a walk. This area is known as the Turn Basin site because it edges up against a human-made body of water known as the Turn Basin, an extension of the Banana River that allows the external tanks to be delivered by barge directly to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Attached to the VAB is the Launch Control Center, the building where I saw the mission patches with the missing dates on Family Day. It’s a building with huge windows facing the launchpads, the building from which launch directors and their teams of engineers have controlled every launch since Apollo 4 in 1967. On the roof of the Launch Control Center is the viewing area where the astronauts’ families gather for launches. Since Challenger, the families have been removed from the general spectators—never again will the deaths of astronauts play out on the faces of their families on the front pages of newspapers. This morning, Gabrielle Giffords is sitting up there with the other crew families to see her husband launch into space. Omar has heard that she is in a wheelchair, wearing a helmet to protect her head because her skull has not been entirely rebuilt, and that she is sitting behind a privacy curtain so no one takes pictures of her in this state.

Down here at the Turn Basin, there is a set of bleachers, but most people have brought lawn chairs or blankets to sit on for the wait. It’s still full dark, and generators roar to maintain floodlights. A few children run around; others sleep in their parents’ laps. Some people line up for the snack truck and to look over the offerings at a mobile gift shop offering souvenirs. I’ve noticed that space vendors are extremely effective at anticipating and meeting any possible demand for space-related swag—T-shirts, hats, pins, postcards, plush toys—including on this field of grass early on a Monday morning.

T minus one hour. Once we are settled in lawn chairs with our coffee, I ask Frank, “How many of the space shuttle launches have you seen?”

He pauses modestly for a moment.

“All of them,” he answers.

“All of them?”

He nods. “Well, I live nearby. And I work here, so it’s not too hard.”

Sure, but—all of them? One hundred and thirty-four, as of today. Night launches, day launches, scrubbed launches, delayed launches. Launches in 100-degree weather, launches in mosquito season, and launches that require spectators to get up in the middle of the night only to wait for hours. Launches called off at the last second before liftoff due to weather or mechanical problems, single missions that took a half dozen attempts to get off the ground. Challenger’s last was one of these.

It occurs to me that if I were a different sort of person I would really dig in now. I would ask him what the space shuttle means to him, how he feels about this era coming to an end. But I don’t press. Neither did Norman Mailer, incidentally—he only rarely reports asking a direct question of a specific person. We could chalk this up to laziness, or to an understanding of the linguistic banalities and evasions of astronauts and scientists. Or it may be squeamishness about asking people to reveal emotions they may not have revealed to their spouses, or even to themselves. Frank Izquierdo has dedicated his professional life to the space shuttle. It is his life’s work, his family history, his migration story. Like Ponce de León, Frank Izquierdo made the trip from Puerto Rico to Florida knowing this place would become his new home. He knew this was the place where his children would be born, the site of his life’s work. Whatever he feels deep in his heart about the end of this project, I feel certain he wouldn’t tell me even if I asked.

Instead, I ask him more about something he’d mentioned earlier, about how he developed procedures to check for leaks during fueling.

“When I first got here, I spent a lot of time talking to the engineers who had worked on the Saturn Vs. The hardware wasn’t exactly the same, but they still had a lot of experience that helped me.”

I express surprise that Apollo engineers were still around in the space shuttle era, considering the long lag between projects.

“Oh, sure. We called them the graybeards. They stayed around to pass on what they had learned firsthand. It was crucial for us to be able to get their input on things. Saved us a lot of trial and error.”

“I think it’s too bad,” I say cautiously, “that you won’t be able to pass on your knowledge to the people who come along to design the next thing.” I’m reminded of instances of lost knowledge in history—a civilization inventing a device, or navigating an ocean, or curing a disease, and then forgetting how, leaving their descendants to struggle through it all over again, sometimes multiple times. The truth is that Frank’s generation of space workers will very likely be retired, moved away, or gone from this earth by the time the next big spaceflight project is under way, if there is one at all. In computing the costs of a huge engineering project, the cost of this loss is hard to quantify—the cost of knowledge hard-won over a lifetime that could have been passed on to another generation and won’t be. This is maybe the biggest waste of all, bigger than the waste of the orbiters themselves, which everyone agrees still have useful life left in them. And it cheats Frank out of the engineer’s great love: explaining to others the things he has figured out.

Frank nods. “Yeah, it’s too bad,” he says lightly, as if a waiter has told him the restaurant has run out of his first choice of entrée.

We watch our phones and listen to our radios and wait.

As the sun starts to come up, Omar mentions that his girlfriend, Karen, is making her way over to join us. She came in on another Turn Basin pass with a bunch of friends in an RV. I’ve been hearing Omar talk about Karen for a while now—she was on base when I was here for Family Day back in September, but on that occasion, too, she was bringing in a carful of friends on her own badge and we never quite managed to be in the same place at the same time. Karen is a spaceworker like Omar, which makes sense; the job seems to be so demanding, and Merritt Island such a company town, it’s hard to imagine how spaceworkers could hope to meet anyone any other way. Karen works in the same position as Omar; other than that, I don’t know much about her except that she owns and rides horses. Omar often posts pictures of the horses’ antics on Facebook.

When Karen makes her way over to us, I see that she is in her early thirties, about Omar’s age, with sandy blond hair and tanned skin. She’s friendly, but a little more reserved than Omar. We shake hands, and I’m relieved to see that she seems relaxed around me. I wondered at first how she would feel about her boyfriend spending time with me when I’m here and keeping in touch with me when I’m not. But as I’ve gotten to know Omar, it’s become clear that he has a lot of friends of both genders and that neither of them think that’s a problem. While Frank and Omar work on setting up their cameras, Karen and I chat about the weather and chances for launch today. She tells me about her photography hobby—she likes to take pictures of the shuttles and facilities here. She flips through some of her favorites on her iPad, and I tell her she has a great eye for color and proportion. The shuttle and its gantries are in many of the images, of course, but many of her photographs feature the wildlife here. This place is a photographer’s dream. After a while, Karen goes back to the RV to watch the launch with her friends. We’re getting close to T minus nine, and it’s time to choose our final viewing sites.

Endeavour was built to replace Challenger, largely from spare parts, making it the only orbiter that would not have existed if not for the destruction of another. As such it is the youngest orbiter, and when it is retired after this mission it will have flown twenty-five flights to Discovery’s thirty-nine and Atlantis’s thirty-three. Like Discovery, Endeavour was named after one of the ships in Captain James Cook’s eighteenth-century fleet, and the British spelling came with it. Endeavour’s odd name and complicated origins set it apart from the others, as does its relative youth. Though it’s been flying for eighteen years and has some high-profile accomplishments to its credit (it flew the first Hubble servicing mission and the first mission to assemble the International Space Station), Endeavour still seems a new and slightly peculiar addition to the family—a quirky cousin from another country, a foreign exchange student with a strange accent.

I’d thought seeing Endeavour launch from the Turn Basin site, watching it with the NASA workers and their families, might be even more jubilant than what I experienced on the causeway with Discovery. But I should have guessed from my talks with Frank and Omar that the reaction here would be more subdued. There are very few first-timers; everyone here knows how to watch a launch. At T minus sixty seconds, Omar and Frank take the lens caps off their cameras and recheck the shots they had lined up. They both take deep breaths, plant their weight squarely on both feet, then look behind them to make sure they aren’t blocking my view.

“It’s cloudy,” Omar frets. He’s seen launches called off this late due to weather.

But at T minus six seconds, the main engines light up, exactly as they are meant to, and at zero, Endeavour begins to rise.

The light emanating from a space shuttle launch is different in color, quality, and intensity from any other kind of light. Photographs and videos can only approximate it, can only serve as a souvenir to the odd sensation, the combination of beauty and near-painfulness of that specific brightness in the sky. And this launch of Endeavour is the brightest I’ve seen so far, in part because this is closer than I’ve ever been, but partly because a low blanket of cloud cover bounces the light back at us. And the sound—the engine’s roar is deep and loud, satisfyingly rumbly.

People around us cheer. A woman to my right shouts her encouragement: “Go! Go!” Frank, Omar, and I stand and watch silently, the light and the noise and the vibration pressing back against us. None of us cheers, none of us cries. We watch it go up and up for about fifteen seconds; then it punches through the opaque cloud cover and is not seen again. A few minutes later, we discover that people in airplanes were startled to see Endeavour emerge on their side of the clouds. Their pictures show up on Twitter before we leave the Turn Basin.

Later in the day, we also learn that Gabrielle Giffords, from her vantage point atop Launch Control, reported that her overwhelming emotion was relief when her husband and his crew achieved orbit.

Good-bye, Endeavour.

When Endeavour is gone, we admire the steam trail it leaves behind. One thing I had never known to expect before experiencing space shuttle launches in person: the steam trail itself is an unusual object in the sky, a solid-looking vertical fluffy sculpture, and for the few or many minutes it lingers, depending on the speed and direction of the wind, spectators like to observe it and discuss its quirky behavior, the unearthly shadows it casts.

Frank and Omar set about dismantling their tripods while I pack up the lawn chairs. The steam trail remains, but we are keen to get to the car and beat some of the traffic. On our way through the parking area, we pass a family wearing matching T-shirts that read THANK YOU SHUTTLE! AMERICA’S WINGS TO THE FUTURE. We pass a car with a custom license plate that reads NDEAVR. Seated in Frank’s Suburban, we creep forward in a flood of other cars.

Outside the gates of the Space Center, we see mom-and-pop souvenir shops displaying GO ENDEAVOUR signs. We pass a McDonald’s with an enormous space shuttle mockup on its Playland structure. Banks, nail salons, more palm trees. A roadside vendor with a pile of cantaloupe displays a hastily hand-lettered sign: SPACE MELONS.

The people who live in these towns around the Space Center have known for a long time now that the space shuttle is coming to an end. No one I’ve met down here will speak a word of self-pity, or any regret over having devoted their lives to the project of sending people to space. To an individual, they are positive about their time with NASA and positive about the future.

But this region is called the Space Coast for a reason. Before NASA chose Cape Canaveral as its moon port, almost no one lived here. Cocoa Beach, Florida, for instance, saw a 1,000 percent increase in population between 1950 and 1960. This region does not seem to offer any other way to support the thousands of people who work at the space center or who depend on the business of those workers and the tourists the launches bring, the many thousands who have migrated here over decades, generations. These are people who know how to do one thing, and do it very well: maintain and fly a fleet of spacecraft. Some spaceworkers, when they’re feeling sanguine, offer each other the analogy of the seventies—the people who didn’t give up and stuck around for the eight-year lapse, Frank’s graybeards, were the ones who got the chance to work on shuttle. But in that situation there was already another spacecraft in the works; it had already been designed, and its funding approved, before the end of Apollo. Spaceworkers in 2011 who say they want to wait for the next era of spaceflight are not only going to wait for a spacecraft to become operational, as the spaceworkers in the seventies did; they are also waiting for it to be fully funded. How much longer than eight years might that take?

Frank goes back to work for the day; Omar and I have breakfast at a Steak ’n Shake. As always, there is a festive atmosphere in the packed restaurants right after the launch, a patriotic and fun-loving common cause. People smile and make eye contact when we recognize each other by sunburn and memorabilia.

A lot of people are wearing bright red T-shirts from the Visitor Complex gift shop commemorating the last launches that say: I WAS THERE. The hard-core space fans who have been here before, the people who are now showing up for a launch because it will soon be too late, the only vaguely interested who came along but have now caught the fever and wear the lovesick look of the newly converted. All of us are already anticipating a moment when all this will be in the past, will be a chapter in history. The risk, the messiness, the work, the specific brightness of the fire from the main engines, the way its sound bounced off the VAB and back at us—all this will be robbed of its reality. I was there. We are already preparing ourselves to tell the next generation, those who will doubt whether any of this happened, those who are bored and don’t care, that we saw it with our own eyes.

As we are finishing our eggs, I tell Omar about how Norman Mailer said the Vehicle Assembly Building is the ugliest building in the world from the outside and the most beautiful from the inside. I think Omar will find this interesting because he spends a lot of his time inside the VAB. But he looks confused.

“You mean, the other way around?” he tries to correct me. Omar tells me how dirty and disused certain areas of the VAB are, areas I didn’t see on Family Day, that have sat empty or been pressed into service as storage since Apollo.

“I think he means when you just walk in and look up for the first time,” I explain. I don’t mention that I wept when I walked in there myself, that I stayed several paces behind him and the others so they wouldn’t see.

“I guess I can see that,” Omar concedes.

We drink our coffee and compare the photos in our cameras, and I decide not to bring up my theory that, though the VAB was designed with nothing but function in mind, its form reflects with utter clarity the purity of its ambitions. That sometimes out at the edges of human expression it’s hard to tell whether what you’re looking at is ugly or beautiful, stupid or brilliant.

When we finish eating and go outside, the cloud cover has cleared and the sun seems too bright, as if someone has turned it up beyond the point that cloudlessness and proximity to the equator can logically provide. The Florida sun often seems this way to me, and I keep thinking I’ll get used to it. Instead, I am always squinting, despite my sunglasses, and always manage to get a sunburn through the SPF 50 I copiously reapply throughout my days here.

Omar has to go to work for the rest of the day, so we hug and say our good-byes until the launch of Atlantis, the last one, in the summer. I will head back to Knoxville at first light.

I go back to my hotel and take a nap. When I wake up again I have the weird feeling that this is the real morning, that the predawn events never happened, that I never woke and dressed and went to the Kennedy Space Center and witnessed a spacecraft leaving the earth with six astronauts aboard and then ate eggs and toast with my friend Omar. These memories all seem weak, provisional, like the trailing details of a dream that you won’t remember if you don’t tell them to someone. It makes me panicky. I get into my car and drive back to the Barnes & Noble, where I sit in the café section with a giant coffee and scribble frantic notes until the store closes. I have to write down what I’ve seen today before it slips away.

Within a few hours, Omar has uploaded his video of the launch to YouTube and posted a link on Facebook. It makes me a bit self-conscious of my own postmodernity to take a break from writing my impressions of the launch in one app in order to watch Omar’s video of the same event in another.

At first the video shows a nondescript shot of horizon with a little bit of gantry and a little bit of a pole from a satellite uplink van, with the squiggly cord tracing its length. If you know where to look, you can see the tip of the launch vehicle next to the gantry, the tip of the external tank tinged gray-orange, while everything around it is misty gray. The overcast sky makes everything flat and boring. No people are visible, a minor miracle given how many spectators were out there this morning, and given that Omar and his father didn’t make any particular effort to get their equipment up above everyone else’s heads. They would never do that, I know, as doing so would be inconsiderate of the spectators standing behind them.

Soon after the video starts, Omar’s voice can be heard saying, “Thirty-nine seconds.” He must have seen this on his phone; no NASA announcer can be heard. Around his voice, lots of people chatter. When I press my earbuds hard into my ears, I think I can hear my own voice speaking to Frank, then laughing—but I can’t be sure it’s me.

Then I hear Omar talking quietly, and at first I can’t make it out but then I do: “Let me get out of your way, there.” I remember the moment: he’s talking to me. He hadn’t been standing in my way at all, of course.

The camera’s frame starts to shake subtly. Then a steam cloud starts to emerge above the trees. The main engines have ignited. The voices of the crowd start to lift, hesitantly—they aren’t sure at first whether they are seeing what they think they are seeing. But then the tip of the external tank starts to rise, to separate itself from the gantry. Within a few seconds, it’s lifted itself far enough that we can see the whole of the launch vehicle rising in the air—external tank, Endeavour, the twin solid rocket boosters, and the impossibly bright light emerging from beneath the stack. The steam cloud spreads itself majestically underneath, and soon Endeavour is gone, has disappeared past the top of the camera’s frame. The bright plume continues behind it, fading into the ever-fattening steam column that billows up beneath it. The camera does not tilt up to follow Endeavour into the sky; Omar has told me that he prefers to use a fixed camera on a tripod to catch the start of the launch, but that he wants to be able to watch it himself rather than trying to follow it squinting through a viewfinder. This makes sense to me. The launch will be thoroughly photographed and filmed from every angle by professionals with better equipment. The people who come out here to see it in person, I agree, should experience it with their own eyes.

In Omar’s video, the crowd lifts their voices, sounding a little incredulous, then a little frantic, as though it is their enthusiasm and nothing else keeping Endeavour on its path straight up. I watch the video, leaning in to my laptop, then watch a few more clips that YouTube suggests based on that page, different views of the same launch, some from professionals working for NASA TV or for news outlets, some shot by amateurs. Omar’s appears to be the only amateur video shot from the Turn Basin, at least so far.

I remember how, when I was here for the last launch of Discovery in February, the video that Omar had shot from the VAB parking lot filled me with envy. But now, in a weird way, this video makes me feel envious too, even though I was there with him, was standing right at Omar’s elbow, right at the camera’s vantage point, as this video was being made. There is something about the way the video fixes the event in a frame that makes it possible to understand it, describe it, in a way I haven’t quite been able to for any of the three launches I’ve now seen in person. Somehow, the lived experience is prone to slippage, confusion, interference from the thoughts and recollections passing through my mind and the distractions—the people all around with their irrelevant sounds and expressions. The way things smelled, a sudden gust of wind. All of the things I could see and half-see beyond the narrow scope of the camera’s frame. I watch Omar’s video over and over. And while I wouldn’t trade, for anything, the experience of being out there this morning, I’m also aware that I wasn’t really able to describe this launch, to understand what makes it different from the others, until I could watch this version, the version anyone with Internet access can see, that dozens already have seen, all over the world.

The next morning, I drive home to Knoxville. There is only one shuttle launch left.