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Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight
by Margaret Lazarus Dean
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In the lobby was an artifact that at first looked like nothing more than a large charcoal- gray circle, thirteen feet in diameter, on a low platform in the middle of the room, encased in glass. That circle was the base of a cone-shaped object, which turned out, when you walked around it, to be the crew capsule from Apollo 11. The museum's curators could have chosen to place the capsule on a pedestal, or to hang it from the ceiling, like so many of the others, but instead its position was unassuming, out on the floor where people could examine it closely. My father and brother and I did just that, and on the other side we encountered an open hatch revealing a beige interior with three beige dentist couches lying shoulder to shoulder facing a million beige switches.
My father spoke behind me. "Three astronauts went to the moon in here." I noted the reverence in his voice. "It took them eight days to get there and back."
"Mmm," I said noncommittally. This made no sense, this claim that three full- grown men had crammed themselves into this container the size of a Volkswagen Beetle's backseat, even for an hour. This story seemed like a misunderstanding best politely ignored.
"Neil Armstrong sat there," my father said, pointing at the couch at the far left. "Michael Collins sat here. And Buzz Aldrin sat here."
For the rest of my life, the syllables of those three names would call up for me this moment, those couches, that tiny cramped space, the way the capsule, then only ten years old, felt both futuristic and outdated at the same time. Already the moon landings were fading into history; already my father had in his apartment a computer much more powerful than the one carried on board this spacecraft. For a child in 1979, the moon landings seemed largely fictional, an event our parents remembered from their own youth and liked to tell us about, and therefore boring and instructive. Yet standing in Air and Space I found there was something pleasing about the contradictions contained in that capsule: the cozy utility of its interior combined with the risk of death just past the hull. There was something about all this I loved in a way I couldn't have described, still can't. The closest I can come is to say that this was the first time I understood that, despite their long and growing list of appalling limitations, grown- ups had at least done this: they had figured out how to fly to space. They had, on at least a few occasions, used their might and their metal machines to make a lovely dream come true.
As I grew up, we kept going back. On a visit in 1985, we watched The Dream Is Alive, a film shot by astronauts on three different space shuttle missions, in the museum's IMAX theater. The camera pans around the empty cockpit of the space shuttle Discovery, where along the far wall, two large bright blue bundles float horizontally. The camera approaches and finds sleeping people. One of them is a woman of surprising beauty, her dark curly hair floating about her. This is Judith Resnik. She sleeps, or pretends to sleep; her long lashes rest on her cheeks. Her tanned arms linger in the air before her, and the look of peace on her face is captivating. Judith Resnik sleeps in space.
I fell in love. My father, brother, and I came back to see this film over and over, and I practically memorized it frame for frame: the launch scenes, landing scenes, footage of Earth turning outside the windows of the space shuttle. Scenes of mundane domestic life lived inside the spaceship, smiling astronauts in shorts and sock feet. They work, eat, chat in their headsets with Houston, float companionably together. Judith Resnik sleeps in space.
Six months later, in January 1986, Challenger would explode in the sky with Judith Resnik on board. The metal machines were no longer invincible, it turned out; the adults were not actually in control of them or of anything else. The space shuttle program would never recover from Challenger, its goals scaled back and its future curtailed. Seventeen years later, as I was writing my first novel, about children whose lives were changed by Challenger, space shuttle Columbia was destroyed during reentry, killing all seven astronauts and leaving debris across three states. The end of the program was written in its disasters: an accident board investigating the 2003 Columbia disaster recommended retiring the shuttle in 2010, a recommendation the government has adopted.
Margaret Lazarus Dean, excerpt from Leaving Orbit. Copyright © 2015 by Margaret Lazarus Dean. Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
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