Out of Orbit (27 page)

Come morning, they had each drawn the same conclusion: despite their gut wishes, maybe they had been gone for long enough. Maybe they needed to start thinking about going home. Maybe they needed to answer the questions of when and where and how. Maybe it was time.

Because the earth had been spinning on its axis, and they had been spinning on theirs, but now they knew that they’d been traveling in opposite directions for all of this time, and they felt as though they had never been so far away.

Down there it’s a relic, gone to tumble, waiting to be felled like a tree. On the western edge of the great dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base, a square, timber-framed platform rises high above the cracked ground. Up a creaky flight of stairs and over a railing that wouldn’t withstand more than a good push, there’s still a commanding view of the desert flats, with runways marked out in oil. Beyond the slicks, mountains rise in the distance set against a pale sky.

Underfoot, scraps of outdoor carpet remain pinned down by rusted staples, and a phone line, long since dead, hangs loose nearby. Once there was a red phone plugged into one end of it, in anticipation of President Ronald Reagan’s probable visit, just in case he ran out of jelly beans or decided that he needed to drop a few bombs. That was only twenty-five years ago, when this platform stood at the center of the universe, and STS-001,
Columbia
’s first flight, prepared to touch down in front of it. But for a visitor standing there today in the teeth of the wind, it’s hard to imagine this place was ever anything more than the easy metaphor it’s become.

Until
Columbia
’s liftoff—until the morning of April 12, 1981—space had been the exclusive property of the Soviets for six long years. Closer to home, America was trapped in an even longer losing streak. Vietnam was still a too-fresh nightmare; rescue helicopters had buried themselves into the Iranian desert; Three Mile Island was a horror story nearly come true. Even iron-hard Detroit had been forced into retreat, pinned down by an unstoppable influx of cheap, reliable cars with strange names from Japan. For the first
time since the Great Depression, “Buy American” had more pleading than pride in it.

Until that lit-up morning, the space program had only added to the feeling that another one of history’s great empires had run its course, the last days of the latest Rome. The new shuttle was two years late, bogged down by technological failure and a flawed design and the malaise that had gripped the rest of the nation. But under cloudless blue skies, in front of an audience of thousands in Florida and millions more in classrooms and taverns and basement dens, John Young and Robert Crippen helped pull off the miracle comeback. They successfully guided
Columbia
into the first of a long string of orbits, and it felt, in that instant, as if everything might be put in its proper order once again. All that remained was the long wait for the shuttle’s arrival in California. Young and Crippen had each taken out life insurance policies worth
$800,000
. No one was ready to celebrate until those papers had been made worthless.

A little more than fifty-four hours of national breath-holding later, that wood platform was filled, as was the wide viewing area marked out more than three miles from the landing site, as were the mountains. (The president was not among those in attendance after all; having taken John Hinckley’s bullet to the chest only two weeks earlier, he was forced to watch from the Lincoln Bedroom.) Ignoring warnings of rattlesnakes and traffic snarls, more than 200,000 bird-watchers congregated. They stuck American flags into the dry ground, pulled on their
EAT YOUR HEARTS OUT
, R
USSIANS!
T-shirts, and turned their eyes to the sky.

At ten o’clock in the morning, they heard a pair of sonic booms, after the shuttle had bolted across the Pacific coast, the San Joaquin valley, and the Tehachapi Mountains. (At Mission Control in Houston, flight director Don Puddy announced, “Room, get ready for exhilaration.”) The crowds and television cameras first caught sight of the light that banked off the shuttle’s cockpit windows, and then they saw its black underbelly dropping out of the blue. Across the country, factory workers shut down the assembly lines and raced into lunchrooms. Office meetings came to a halt. A
fitter in a Manhattan men’s shop dashed off, leaving a customer pinned up in an unfinished suit. All of them gathered around televisions and radios to watch and hear
Columbia
soar over the dry lakebed, loop back, and touch down in a cloud of dust and the wash of a mirage. Finally, again, Americans had been part of something perfect.

Just six hectic hours later, Young and Crippen, still zipped up in their blue flight suits, stepped down from a plane and into a crowd 1,500-strong at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas. They were greeted as heroes.

Young, a veteran of four previous trips into space and a walk on the moon, was enthusiastic about his latest ride. “The spaceship
Columbia
is phenomenal,” he said. “It is an incredibly amazing piece of machinery. Anytime you can take something that big and put it into space and bring it back and land it, you have accomplished something just short of a miracle.”

Crippen, a first-time flier, had trouble finding the words to describe the experience. “For me,” he said finally, “it was the darnedest time I’ve ever had in my entire life.”

The international response was no less effusive. Congratulations came in from the Canadian parliament, Italian president Sandro Pertini, and the Polish soccer nut who had just become Pope John Paul II. The launch and the landing had also found places on a thousand front pages and led off newscasts in a hundred languages.
The Guardian
in London wrote: “The shuttle is
Star Trek, Star Wars
and
The Empire Strikes Back
in life. It is beautiful, futuristic and patriotic in an era when Americans have found little to cheer about.” The French business daily
Les Echos
went one step further: “The unbelievable has become reality … Man will go into space now as easily as he crosses the English Channel.”

But it was the laid-up president who had already best summed up the measure of that almost impossibly wonderful trip.

“Through you,” Reagan told the astronauts before their launch, “we feel as giants once again.”

·   ·   ·

The feeling lasted nearly five years, until
Challenger
turned into pink vapor one chilly day in January 1986. Long before, the networks had each set up permanent offices in Houston, trailers anchored in the shadows of the Johnson Space Center’s big-box architecture. As in the days of
Mercury, Gemini
, and
Apollo
, each of the shuttle’s flights had been a headline event. But after the loss of seven astronauts had been analyzed and replayed until it had been turned into a spot memory, one of those rare moments in history that can be instantly recalled by tens of millions, space had lost its luster once again. Sometime during the more than two years it took for another shuttle to slip the surly bonds of earth, Americans found different things to hold close to their hearts. Like the platform at Edwards Air Force Base, the network trailers first were shuttered, and then left to rot, and, like dreams, they were finally forgotten. Astronauts who had come of age under flashbulbs suddenly found themselves working in two vacuums, home and away.

(The greatest all-time episode of
The Simpsons
centered around NASA’s attempts to lure back its former audiences by sending Homer J. Simpson, American Everyman, into space. The agency was spurred to take that desperate step when its most recent launch was outdrawn by
A Connie Chung Christmas.
)

Even without
Challenger
and the wrung-out quiet that followed it, the shuttle program was probably on the verge of being shoved out of the spotlight. The national attention span is only so long, and the shuttle’s seemingly endless loop of launches and landings had started to blur into a spectacular routine. The missions in between, too, weren’t the sort of finite adventures—like walking on the moon—that grabbed people by the shoulders and dropped jaws. To ordinary Americans, it looked more and more like their astronauts had become glorified truck drivers, following the same routes, hauling the same boxed-up cargo, running the same (seemingly unimportant) errands. And the truth is, as incredible as shuttle flights remain even today—when you stop to think about the physics and chemistry and psychology behind them—it’s hard for millions of grounded mortals to get excited about the same fresh-faced few doing
backflips, chasing down wonky satellites, and taking long-range photographs of oil spills. It can feel as though it’s not worth the effort to strain our necks anymore.

Part of that feeling has been by design. Since
Challenger
, NASA’s brass has viewed yawns and empty press conferences as good things, today’s versions of standing ovations and tickertape parades. No news is good news, everything having gone off according to boring plan. But beyond their desire for peace and quiet, they also know that if new ground is ever going to be broken, the old ground must become as well worn as donkey tracks. Moon colonies, space tourism, manned missions to Mars—none of them is possible without first making near space seem less like an ocean and more like a wading pool. That’s where the International Space Station comes in. And that’s why NASA desperately needs its rockets to seem ordinary, even though they never really have been, for the next horizon to appear within reach of them.

The bummer, however, is that in making itself look like another humdrum government bureaucracy, NASA has begun to act like one. It is impenetrable and slow to respond, tongue-tied and nearly impossible to get to know. For the few brave reporters who have chosen space as their beat, it can sometimes feel as though they would enjoy better access if they covered spies for a living. (How telling is it that a grand total of three reporters followed
Columbia
’s last mission from beginning to end?) Only at NASA could it seem like a good idea for members of the press office to have the acronym IMPASS stamped on their business cards, and for the press office to live up to the label.

All of which helps explain that if astronauts land on today’s front pages, it’s probably because they’ve been blown to bits.

·   ·   ·

The day after Expedition Six rocketed toward station, the launching of seven men into space failed to earn even a brief in the
New York Times
, the nation’s newspaper of record. Instead, that morning’s bleak front page was dominated by President Bush’s stumping for war against Iraq, including speeches at rallies in Vilnius, Lithuania,
and Bucharest, Romania. “The people of Romania know that dictators must never be appeased or ignored,” the president said. “They must be opposed.” Below the fold, there was news of a New York City transit worker who was killed when he was struck by a train, and Hollywood was keeping its fingers crossed, hoping for a lucrative Christmas season.

There remained an almost institutional silence on space, in fact, until
Columbia
fell out of it.
SHUTTLE BREAKS UP
, 7
DEAD
was the lead story’s hard-nut headline on February 2, 2003. There were eleven pages of comprehensive coverage inside, including an editorial that sang the following lament: “Once again we were jolted out of a sustained period of success in exploring the world outside our planet—a run of good work and good luck that ran so long we had the luxury of taking it all for granted. Most Americans were probably cheerfully unaware, over the past 16 days, that seven men and women were circling the planet.”

Now space was back in the news, as, finally, was Expedition Six, although they merited mentioning for only two days. The morning after the disaster, at the bottom of page 25, there was a low-key story that foretold of nothing of consequence.
DELAYS EXPECTED IN EXPANDING ORBITING LABORATORY, AND PERHAPS IN RETRIEVING
3
ASTRONAUTS
. A NASA spokesman named Pat Ryan snuffed out what might have turned into a good old-fashioned serial drama with his blunt assessment of the crew’s fate. “The reality for all the astronauts is that when you launch, the mission is over when somebody comes to get you, and it may not always be when we planned,” he said. Russia’s
Progress
was already on its way to the International Space Station, he hastened to add, delivering enough food and water (and garlic paste and poetry) to keep Bowersox, Pettit, and Budarin going at least through June.

Expedition Six earned a second and final mention the following day, in the middle of another twelve pages of coverage:
NASA KEEPS THREE ASTRONAUTS ABOARD SPACE STATION INFORMED OF EVENTS ON GROUND
. There was a stock photograph of the crew, but no words from them. Instead, Bob Cabana, now NASA’s director of flight crew operations in Houston, passed along their
thoughts. “They’re grieving up there also, and they feel a little isolated. They want to get through the process, and it’s harder for them being detached from it in space.” That hardly seemed to provide a finishing note on their story, but for the time being, it did.

Stories on the investigation into the disaster continued for a little while longer, but by February 17,
Columbia
had lost its last grip on the front page.
Challenger
had occupied the nation’s consciousness for two years. Just two weeks after
Columbia
had come apart, the last few of its pieces were swept away and promptly forgotten. Perhaps because it was the second shuttle disaster and not the first, or perhaps because the pictures of catastrophe weren’t as dramatic this time around, or perhaps because the nation was about to go to war, the story was considered complete. All that remained was the occasional poke at the embers of a dying fire, left virtually unattended in favor of another, now just starting to throw off sparks.

·   ·   ·

Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were left hanging in limbo, and limbo is death for a story. The opening scenes of their adventure had the makings for something dramatic, had the potential for emotional fireworks and a heart-tugging score, but by spring, it had been drawn out for too long to sustain its audience. It had lost its momentum. There was no conflict or progress or tidy resolution in sight. It was all verse and no chorus.