[As long and as rambling and as navel-gazing as this is, it's only the briefest outline of the last two and a half years of my life. Fourteen trips to Florida. Eight scrubs. Eight launches. Somewhere, some day, I hope to publish the entire (fully illustrated) saga, but lining up all of the pictures and texts and other telemetry may take a while.]
I stepped onto this path on March 10th, 2009. Completely spontaneous. I'd idly talked about going down to see a launch some day, but had never escalated that to any sort of plan. But that day, after work, my eyes glanced at the "STS-119?" on my calendar at about 5:35 pm, and I was rather suddenly heading to the airport at 6:30 pm. Shockingly easy to line up spur of the moment travel arrangements in the PayPal era – a flight and a hotel and a car and a Gator tour bus ticket took only a few mouse clicks. I had a few sick days saved up. Why not?
Running home to get my bigger camera and toss a change of clothes and a toothbrush into a backpack cost me my flight, but a nice lady at the AirTran counter (I hadn’t yet learned that it’s Southwest or nothing) booked me a flight first thing out the next morning. This gave me the chance to go home and actually pack a bag.
You know the rest. My introduction to the phrase "Ground Umbilical Carrier Plate" was inside the Mission Status Center dome tent at Kennedy Space Center; just after my first ride on the Shuttle Launch Experience. "But... But I'm
IN FLORIDA!" I whispered to myself. "I came all the way
DOWN here." Tried to make the best of the day that remained, spent Thursday at Disney and flew back to work Friday morning. I couldn't call in sick a third day in a row without a doctor's note. And I couldn't justify the expense of staying down there five whole days for the rescheduled sunset launch attempt on Sunday. But next time, I said to myself, next time would be different. I would learn everything I could, and plan the hell out of it. I would do it right.
I took a pass on STS-125 in favor of STS-127's early morning launch. Vacation was actually scheduled in advance this time. Bags were carefully packed. And travel plans from June 11th to the 14th had to be stretched on-site to the 17th, (essentially living off of credit cards) because of that pesky GUCP. I was getting to a lot of theme parks as consolation prizes, but two trips to Florida and three scrubs later I was no closer to the grand prize of actually seeing a shuttle launch.
I had a bad feeling about the flight on July 10th. I'd vowed to fly out Monday morning whether Endeavour was off of the ground or not – that unanticipated full week off in June had cost me dearly in more ways than one, and I just couldn't afford to stay past the weekend. When I woke up on Saturday to hear that the launch had been pushed to Sunday, I had to laugh. "Of COURSE it did. Screw everything; I'm going to Sea World!" Sunday's thunderstorms escalated the whole thing to a strange form of epic dark comedy. I watched STS-127's Wednesday launch online, back at work, through gritted teeth, well aware that the quest was becoming an obsession.
"Whatever it takes," I thought to myself.
By the time Monday's thunderstorms scrubbed STS-128's first attempt on August 24th, I'd borrowed a telescope and a sturdy tripod. Woke up late on Tuesday to hear that Causeway tickets were on sale at the KSCVC box office, and elected to forgo another trip on a Gator bus in favor of driving myself. Took a nap in the parking lot at one point and woke up to a bunch of empty parking spaces around me. "They... They didn't... Oh God."
Flew back to work on Wednesday. "God DAMMIT NASA," was the joking refrain to my friends. "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME??"
I had to do a Jedi mind trick on my boss to get him to let me out early on Friday, after such a short week at work. Paying summer rates with same-day purchases to fly back to Florida in the same week was insane, absolutely insane, but at this point I had reached "Clark Griswold at the end of
National Lampoon's Vacation" levels of hysteria. Eight launch attempts, four trips to Florida, and nothing to show for it but a checking account in tatters. But I would not be thwarted.
I'd been following NASASpaceFlight's forums religiously by that point, but I created an account on Friday the 28th to report my findings from talking to KSCVC about the state of Causeway tickets.
My emotional state in the dank Florida night when they completed the poll, just before coming out of the nine minute hold that night, was nothing less than a panic attack. Was this actually about to happen? After so many failed attempts? ...Was I ready?
I wasn't ready. "He says the sun came out that night," says a holy man in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, "he says it sang to him." Yep. That's pretty much the long and short of it.
"Well, congratulations," was the refrain when I returned home. "So, you finally did it."
"Yep," I said. "I can totally
STOP GOING TO FLORIDA now."
...No, I couldn't. As a result of the
trauma First-World Problems I'd suffered over the space of lining up those five trips, I'd become an
expert at the whole process. And, my God, that glorious fire. That amazing thunder. To see and hear that again... Yes, I was going to keep trying for more. I didn't really have any choice.
Improbably, STS-129 went up on the first try on November 16th. "WAS THAT SO HARD, NASA??" I texted to a friend from under a tent at the Causeway. instead of trying to shoot through the telescope, I had tried a new setup with a 200x lens and a 2x adapter, which finally netted me the launch shots I'd been seeking all year.
On Thursday, February 4th, 2010, looking at the weather maps for the impending snowpocalypse heading for my home in the DC area, I told my boss I was leaving for STS-130 a day early. Mine was one of the last planes to successfully leave the tarmac before the area airports shut down that morning.
After the first scrub of STS-130 (sigh...), the forecast for the following week back home turned dismal, with a second blizzard rolling in right after the first. By the time I'd slept off two all-nighters in a row (that glorious fire; that amazing thunder), my flight home had been cancelled; my job shut down. I was stuck in Florida for another week.
Seeing the scrub and then the launch of SDO meant being on-site at KSCVC the day tickets went on sale for STS-131, but, perversely, unable to buy tickets (phone or online only). But I knew just what to tell a friend back home, who had graciously volunteered to buy tickets on my behalf. I got her email telling me I was going back to the Causeway upon getting on the bus back from the Saturn V center after the SDO launch.
...STS-131 was my favorite. Hands-down. All-time. The quiet stillness of the pre-dawn night. Crowds as reverent as I was. (On my digital camera video the guy ten feet to my left says, “it’s so bright” just after liftoff, but that’s it – no other sound but the thunder.) Cool but not cold. No mosquitoes to speak of. The Last Launch crowds hadn’t shown up yet. The hushed holding of breath as the ISS made its glorious horizon-to-horizon pass twenty minutes before launch. The mother of pearl exhaust clouds in the pre-dawn light. I'd mastered the process, and was fully ready to both photograph the launch and watch it with my own eyes. No lie: I could live in that moment forever.
STS-132 left me feeling like maybe I should have quit while I was ahead. Compared to the comfortable November afternoon I spent under a tent before STS-129, I saw Atlantis's first last launch under a blazing May sun, surrounded by noisy tourists. It was a brutal return to the paradigm of the daytime launch. (Still: fire; thunder.)
And just when my checking account was starting to groan again after two launches in six weeks, there came an unexpected five-month reprieve. By the time I showed up on Halloween for STS-133, I had over a dozen friends flying down with me for a trip to Disney that happened to coincide with the launch, their tickets spread across the Causeway and the Visitor Complex and the Astronaut Hall of Fame. After it got rained out and scrubbed indefinitely due to the Revenge of the GUCP, I could only hold up my palms sheepishly. "Yep... Sorry guys... This is just like what my first four trips to Florida were like. So... Epcot?"
STS-133's range problems on February 24th caught in my throat. My Gator bus was one of the first to leave KSCVC and I'd actually secured a space under one of the tents, a happy accident that I knew wouldn't be repeated if we had to try again the next day. Delighted to see it go up a few minutes later. As always, no matter how long and drawn out the process of getting there is, at the poll coming out of the nine minute hold it all fades away and there's just me and the reason I came. Glorious; amazing.
STS-134 turned on me. A two-hour flight delay and trouble with the rental car ate up any time I might have had for getting any sleep at all the night before. The scrub was announced while we were on the bus to the Causeway, the news sinking in through bleary-eyed exhaustion. "I hate to say it," I said to a friend of mine at the time, "but I think I might be done."
Took a few decent nights' sleep, but I was eventually feeling better enough about things to plan another sick day and rolled the dice on a weekend flight two weeks later. Don't know what I would have done if Endeavour hadn't gone up the morning of the 16th; I had no Plan B.
Wheels stop of Endeavour and the stack rollout of Atlantis on the same night cemented my resolve to go back, once and for all, one last time. "We've gone from three spacecraft to one spacecraft and two museum pieces," I said at one point. "I have to go back."
...I almost didn't get on the plane. It was so abundantly clear that it wasn't going to launch that weekend; NWS listed a 40% chance of the front moving through over the weekend turning into a tropical cyclone, for Pete's sake. A wet Saturday at Disney world was the best I could hope to get out of all of the expense, with back-to-back soakings on the Causeway before they rescheduled for, if I was lucky, the following weekend.
Thunderstorms pushed the flight down an hour (and, it turns out, positively soaked my luggage). So much for any sleep the night before. Again. I forlornly watched the cabin door close me in on the plane that night and went through the motions like it was a pointless dress rehearsal.
"okay, nasa, here's the deal," I posted to Facebook at MCO. "she's not going up tomorrow, and we both know it. but if you call a scrub @ 1:45, i can get to titusville and take some awesome pictures of the launch pad all lit up at night."
No such luck. But someone passing out fliers to the lines for the security screening at KSCVC alerted me to something I'd not considered: they were still running the Saturn V tour. If I moved fast, I could get night shots of the pad from Banana Creek and be back in time to get in line for the Causeway bus. Probably the most I could hope to get out of the evening, since she so obviously wasn't going to launch that morning. Bought my traditional t-shirt and program and patch from the gift shop at the Saturn V center, and threw an official KSCVC poncho onto the pile. I'd need something to protect my cameras, after all.
Even three and a half rainless hours on the Causeway later, it just didn't seem possible that it was going to launch. Then they took the poll, coming out of the nine-minute hold. That dress rehearsal feeling quickly faded, like waking up in the middle of sleepwalking. The failure at 31 seconds barely afforded me enough time to think "Ah ha! See?!? I knew it!!" before they had resolved the fault and were back on the countdown.
And then it was gone. I almost felt tricked out of hours of reflection, of being overwhelmed with "This Is The Last Time Ever" milestones, of letting myself sink under the gravitas of it all. Instead, I'd coasted through all of it, not letting myself believe it was ever really the end. Couldn't quite tell you if that was a kindness or not. I cried a lot less than I probably otherwise would have, and was able to function at all of the right moments. Which is better than the alternative, I suppose.
What's left is sifting though text messages and photo cards and souvenirs like parking placards and blue KSCVC tickets, reading the various theories about whose fault it was, and, for me, trying to think of a new (perhaps less expensive) (and more reliably predictable) hobby.
I use the metaphor of the cassette deck vs. the mp3 player when trying to describe what's happened to human space flight. But instead of an uninterrupted stream of technology, like the path that music players actually followed, we've been asked to take a five-year hiatus. Our cassettes have been taken away from us, dragged off kicking and screaming, and there's no alternative mechanism for us to use in the meantime. What's to come will be smaller and lighter and oh so much more amazing and affordable, (honestly, would anyone who's used an iPod for so much as an hour ever go back to a Walkman?), but in the meantime, nothing.
That metaphor got me through most of it. It wasn't until the last three wheel stops that it really sank in and I started to feel angry. Watching Atlantis roll out to the pad for STS-135 – wait, seriously? This is it? This is the last time that big orange thing is getting strapped to those two white things? SERIOUSLY?? ...The shuttle was MY spaceship, and it was being taken away from me. How dare they.
We can go back and forth endlessly over the various theories – I have my own, including where Karl Rove walks into the White House in December of 2003 with a PowerPoint presentation titled "How to Pretend to Care About the Space Program on Camera" – and we're going to have plenty of time to do that over the next few years. That, and work on our memoirs.
In the meantime, there is gratitude. Gratitude to everyone in the program, to everyone on this forum and the weird support network it's provided (by now everyone I know in real life just rolls their eyes when I bring up the shuttle program),
to the opportunity to have been a part of so much of it.
See you at Wallops Island. Or Udvar-Hazy. Or a desert in California...
to the opportunity to have been a part of so much of it. 