Margaret Dean - Leaving Orbit

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, Omar texted back. 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.