Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

Author:Margaret Lazarus Dean [Dean, Margaret Lazarus]
Language: eng
Format: azw
ISBN: 9781555973414
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2015-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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