Leaving Orbit (4 page)

Of course, part of the plan for getting to the moon involved building a moon port. The facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station were not going to be adequate—not for the size of the new rockets themselves; not for the numbers of people necessary to take part in assembly, maintenance, and launch control; not for the number of launches that would have to be prepared simultaneously. In 1962, NASA chose a site nearby on Merritt Island, the landmass just to the west of Cape Canaveral, and began acquiring the land and designing the facilities. Mission Control would be housed at a facility near Houston first called the Manned Spaceflight Center, later renamed for President Lyndon Johnson after his death in 1973. Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral on November 16, 1963, and was shown around by Wernher von Braun and other NASA luminaries. He looked over the new Saturn rocket and the new moon port with excitement. Kennedy then flew from Florida to Dallas, where he was shot to death six days later.

Historians have debated why Kennedy chose to put so much of his political currency into Apollo. After all, he had shown little indication of caring about spaceflight before Sputnik, and even after Gagarin’s flight he seemed reluctant to make spaceflight a national priority. The most convincing discussion I’ve read is from historian John Logsdon, who argues that what caused Kennedy to make his decision was (1) “a conviction of American exceptionalism,” (2) the geopolitical situation of the moment, and (3) JFK’s individual values and style.

The day before he died, Kennedy gave a speech at the dedication of the nation’s first aerospace medical health center, in San Antonio. He reiterated how important the moon project was, in spite of the risks:

Back at home, I have hanging over my desk an image of the Kennedy Space Center as it looked in 1963, girders rising improbably out of the surrounding swamp. The wetland had been drained, then tons of sand packed into the earth to make it stable enough for the construction of the world’s largest building. Workers who came out to pack the sand and drive the pilings found themselves covered with mosquitoes; many witnesses describe a white shirt turning black with blood-sucking insects within minutes. Histories of the Kennedy Space Center acknowledge without exaggeration that the obstacle posed by the mosquitoes was so serious that NASA quite literally could not have put a man on the moon by Kennedy’s “before the decade is out” deadline without the invention of DDT. In this way, the challenges of spaceflight reveal themselves to be distinctly terrestrial.

When the Vehicle Assembly Building was finally completed, NASA invited
Life
magazine to do a spread about the new moon port.
Life
photographers were given full access to the grounds, where they shot images of the largest building in the world from every angle. After returning home and processing thousands of photos, the photographers admitted that they had failed. They had not found a way to capture, in a single frame, the outsize scale of the VAB. One photographer tried to convey how large it was by photographing a man standing next to the building, but at the distance necessary to get the entire building into the frame, the man had disappeared, smaller than the grain of the film. The size of the Vehicle Assembly Building was officially unphotographable.

After the last successful Gemini mission, in 1966, the next step was to test the new Apollo-Saturn, the largest rocket ever built. Three astronauts were training for the first Apollo mission to fly with a crew. On January 27, 1967, they were doing a rehearsal at Cape Canaveral when a fire broke out in the sealed crew capsule on the launchpad. Gus Grissom (the second American in space), Ed White (the first American to ever do a space walk), and Roger Chaffee (who was training for his first spaceflight) all died in the fire.

Not long before, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had interviewed many of the astronauts and had asked them about the risk. John Glenn, whom Fallaci took a special liking to as “the most perfect fantastic Boy Scout in a nation of Boy Scouts,” spoke eloquently about the risks:

The Apollo 1 fire made the risks of spaceflight seem real to Americans for the first time—up to that point, nothing had ever gone seriously wrong, and it had started to seem as though the exploration of space would be without human cost. NASA recovered quickly from the setback, but future disasters would take greater tolls. Some space fans suspect Americans had a greater tolerance for risk in the sixties than we do now, but it may be that this first disaster seemed like an anomaly. A second
(Challenger)
seems like a betrayal; a third
(Columbia)
seems like a pattern of failure.

The Vehicle Assembly Building was designed to house the simultaneous assembly of four moonbound rockets, and as such it stands as a monument to a long-past era in American history. There never did come a time when four Saturn V rockets were assembled at once. The history of American spaceflight is a history of doing less than had been planned, less than had been hoped for. Space fans angry about the end of the shuttle seem to think that their disappointment is something new, but in fact the dreams of space enthusiasts have been scaled back from the start. A lunar base, a permanent space station, a reusable spaceship with a booster section that could land like an airplane, a Mars expedition—all these were to have been undertaken by the eighties. Not only were the new projects tabled, but the last three Apollo missions were scrapped before the third crew of moonwalkers landed.

Family Day is a Kennedy Space Center tradition that began in the mid-1960s, when spaceworkers’ families complained that they had no idea what went on behind the gates, what was keeping their spouses and parents so frantically busy for so many hours and so distracted even when they were at home. Certain Saturdays were established when workers could bring their families inside the gates and show them around. Family Days decreased in frequency after the debut of the space shuttle, with its more dangerous solid rockets. And after the terrorist attacks of 2001 led to heightened security at government facilities, Family Days stopped altogether. But now that the retirement of the shuttle is within sight, there is a last-chance feeling around the Kennedy Space Center, and a few final Family Days will be held before the end. Today is one of them.

My first contact with Omar Izquierdo was in 2007, when he sent me the first e-mail I received about my
Challenger
novel, the day after its official publication date.

For a first-time author, hearing from a complete stranger the week my book came out, a stranger who walked into a bookstore of his own accord and chose my book from among all the other books, then actually read it, felt like a miracle. But when I got to the second paragraph about how Omar grew up near the Kennedy Space Center himself, and works there now, I felt a sinking dread. All the facts I must have gotten wrong suddenly seemed to glow like badly buried radioactive waste. This reader, this Omar Izquierdo, would expose my errors, would lead the charge against me. After all, I had taken his hometown, his childhood, and his life’s work and made them into a backdrop for a story I, an outsider, had made up.

Soon after that initial exchange, I went on Facebook to create an identity for my book’s main character (authors were encouraged to do this during the brief period after Facebook became ubiquitous and before Facebook’s fan pages were introduced). When I went looking for Facebook groups my character might join, I came across one called “If You Oppose NASA in Any Way I Will Punch You in the Face.” Perfect for Dolores. I clicked on it, and the first name I saw among the existing members was Omar Izquierdo. So I friended him.

A Facebook friendship evolves either more quickly or more slowly than a face-to-face one; mine with Omar evolved quickly. We are both on Facebook multiple times a day, both click Like often on each other’s postings, especially ones that involve our shared interest in spaceflight. And his space-related posts are to die for: images of
Discovery
being prepared for launch, interiors of restricted spaces like the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Orbiter Processing Facility, or the often-dramatic weather at the Cape. But I’ve found you can also learn a lot about a person by what he finds funny, by his comments on everyday happenings, and I came to feel that I knew Omar well through his posts even if I’d never been in the same room with him.

Omar’s father is a mechanical engineer who has worked at Kennedy his entire adult life. He was recruited right out of engineering school in Puerto Rico in 1979, when NASA was gearing up for the first shuttle launch, and was given a choice of whether to go to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He chose Kennedy because he had heard that Alabama was more racist. He brought his young wife to Florida, bought a house, put down roots, and Omar and his sister were born here soon after.