By the Late Morning's Light
Mallon, Thomas
Thomas Mallon BY THE LATE MORNING'S LIGHT The first shuttle launch since Challenger raised questions about the future and purpose of America's presence in space. From the Cape, a first-hand...
...Asked whether, since the astronauts will have their lives on the line tomorrow, they think their jobs should be on the line, too, one of the men says: "I think I do...
...Americans want to explore...
...Things proceed pessimistically, though at 7:20 Frank Merlino says the crew can suit up, and fifteen minutes later he tells them to go to the pad...
...and then Pad 39-B, where the shuttle itself, still scaffolded by both the Rotating Service Structure (RSS) and FSS, points the dull reddish head of its liquid fuel tank toward tomorrow morning...
...1986), STS-14 astronaut Joseph P. Allen, intending not irony but enthusiasm, wrote that the "astronauts aboard each shuttle mission are no longer simply space explorers but, rather, a collection of skilled space workers . ." Simply explorers...
...The Air Force, in particular, is not happy with the shuttle and would rather send up some of its payloads on refurbished Titan boosters...
...What does one expect them to say...
...Like most NASA officials he has the job of assuring the public that everyone's being super-careful this time even though they were never really sloppy before...
...The moment everyone wants to get past...
...He'd have more takers if he looked less Brokavian...
...t 1:00 p.m...
...Nervous laughter in thebleachers: STAR WARS...
...a bad fuse...
...I like the process," Mr...
...There are those who argue that man is unnecessary in space, that all these satellites can be as easily launched and manipulated by remote control...
...George Will has observed that "We haven't had a space policy since May 25, 1961...
...only having done that were we free to surrender to it, to sink roots, to be possessed by it, addicted to it as to home, the eventual absence from which makes one sick...
...0r1 _ S^11111 condition facilities to the point where 26 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 the agency's real business seems to be not space research but cryogenics...
...There had been that day the human-interest angle: the teacher going up...
...What's the point...
...These anchors, telegenic and under-informed, are the androids of the whole business, made, it seems, of Velcro and Naugahyde...
...At certain \ ‘k' 001 1 -4"11C- Irv' r' /•4 ',-",- ..--,---" I n p l NI il ^Ili% Mallon's most recent book is moments on L-1, Wednesday, one can Thomas '0'4 •40 , 1 A a ^ A _ see condensation on their big picture ,` II . MO eh o' q if the novel Arts and Sciences (Ticknor & ':z.704 jr- , ! ! !-', - windows: the NASA habit is to airFields...
...There is standing room only inside the auditorium, and a row of video cameras on tripods, like a firing squad, at the back...
...TDRS-B blew up with Challenger...
...The Discovery's crew are already sailing over Madagascar, and outside, over pad 39-B, dark clouds are gathering and rain is ready to fall...
...I ask Angel if he thinks we ought to go to Mars, and he says, "That's all beyond me," but it's plain that if his country would only sound the call, he and Bill Meeks would gladly put their shoulders to the gyroscope...
...From the Cape, a first-hand report...
...After a stop there the pad numbers drop and the years fall away...
...But there is really only one purpose to this mission, and everybody knows it...
...the multiple one—like an Asian earthquake—seems too haphazard to engage our imaginations in the same way...
...past 19, off which Geminis flew...
...A banner, sounding like a network's fall-season promo, declares: "America's Pride: The Journey Continues...
...We can even give But the native boosterism, like the (IIIII‘ them the maps, which we've had for space program itself, was tinged with more than a decade: 97 percent of Mars nostalgia...
...Truly and Myers and the three others sit between the bleachers and the countdown clock at a dais made of crudely smoothed concrete...
...It's suddenly clear that this is not Old Paint, it is a charger, the night before the race of its life, and no one wants to say good night to it, no one wants to stop stroking its beautiful mane with his lens...
...By contrast NASA has a whole about the relaunching of the space southeastern sky, only about was quoted as saying of the temporarily palette of splashy ideas—they've shuttle, only thirty-six hours away...
...The press in the bleachers, who have been living on Cremora and doughnuts for the last couple of days, pay them little mind...
...He seems to be talking about a more generous geographical fall of missile shrapnel than was once thought to occur...
...more miles of videotape, all of it of an empty, motionless rocket...
...This seems a bit much in the hard-boiled humor line, until I realize he's saying that on Monday he plans to be in California, at Edwards, for the landing...
...they'll just pass us in the State Road 3. cosmos's left lane...
...And yet, it all suddenly seems to be moving too fast...
...Several thousand more pictures...
...The five officials, in an act of collective will, decide it's not worth turning around to watch...
...Meeks says he felt "a part of history...
...Even that launch had attracted more than what was, by then, usual...
...Having secured an unmerited green card and cleared four checkpoints with it, I am back at KSC before 2 a.m., and an hour and a half after that am in Multifunction Facility K6-1145—the cafeteria and gift shop...
...Someone from Aviation Week asks Myers, who wears a black eyepatch, to contrast the current mood with that immediately after Challenger...
...A million and a half people are thought to be coming to watch the launch, most of them from campers and RVs they've already started parking on the roadsides...
...It isn't even a technological experience...
...As if to underline this, a fire truck and ambulance can suddenly be heard racing in the distance...
...then the parked crawler that gets 18 feet to the gallon when it takes the shuttle from the VAB to the pad...
...From then on we have had the chance to do God's work in the heavens, and a motive for leaving far stronger, finally, than any to do with science or adventure...
...The heavy woman next to Merlino reminds us that there is an "acronym dictionary" available in the dome...
...She hadn't asked for one in years...
...It will also never be cheap, he tells the BBC man who inquires about all the boats and planes that will be deployed in the area tomorrow...
...observer to realize that a successful 1But late on L-2 (Tuesday, two days launch could only put us where we had before launch) there was no time to been three years ago, before Challenger...
...But hours pass and the issue seems forgotten...
...and looked up to see that the Chrysler Building, which was there just a minute ago, had somehow disappeared...
...Inside the musty blockhouse of launch complex 26 one can touch the toggle switch that sent Explorer I into orbit, a few months behind Sputnik, and look at a roomful of huge Univacstyle equipment, all of the information it held now stowable in a single laptop...
...Questioned about press restrictions, Truly says that they are the result not of Challenger but of other recent findings—like the "dispersal" problem noted after the recent accident with a Titan 34-D...
...Myers says yes: "The issue of continuity is to me inevitable...
...Cooperating with TDRS-A, it will eliminate the need for the necklace of tracking stations NASA has had to maintain for three decades in intermittently friendly countries around the globe...
...The final decision on whether to launch will come tomorrow morning from Captain Robert L. Crippen, who flew the first shuttle with John Young, back in 1981...
...The parking lot is emptying with no more trouble than if a concert or ballgame had just gotten out...
...Phobos I, an unmanned probe, to the might think: a Phobos 2 had already on the outdoor pool, the floodlit palm There was however, one sight to be Martian moon...
...Past 34, site of the 1967 Apollo fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee...
...most of the press are in the bleachers, cans of diet soda and mosquito repellent beside their keyboards, for a briefing from five One looks out across the grass, across the water, and thinks: it can't possibly make it...
...You can read U.S...
...Only government—not Morton Thiokol—will get us there...
...So where does that leave us...
...It's as if one were crossing Lexington Ave...
...Still, I'm having trouble staying awake and warm, so I decide to cross the road to the KSC fire station and ask if I can talk to some of the people on duty tonight...
...But your ears don't matter, because it's just been spotted, between two clouds, higher still, in a patch of wild blue yonder, and now you know that it's going to make it, and you search your mind for the first descriptive words it can think of, and they come, feeble and appropriate: like nothing on God's earth...
...But they can recall how before Challenger the occasional standby (having a firetruck nearby while something like welding went on) was eliminated...
...Having been granted, outright, a second gift, the know-how, we should be mindful that God is not likely to forgive us, if we fail to use it in order to meet Him, literally, halfway...
...Thomas Paine, former head of NASA, is having a split-screen debate with former NASA historian Alex Roland...
...But continuity won't extend to every office...
...At times today Congressman Bill Nelson, who got to take a Jake Garn joyride on STS-24, the shuttle justbefore Challenger, can be spotted in the press dome hoping to be interviewed...
...Perhaps /,____,----.-- //Ae / Kennedy Space Center press site, small 1 / the least onward-and-upward signs of - t\ \ structures with bright logos that look ,--_---, "alb.-m -1 , ,,., \ \ / all were the green ribbons hung all over 'p,,,v ,*.,"01 4 WN)Y \ \ like beachfront condos...
...He reminds us that building a space station is administration policy—we're signing a treaty with our allies tomorrow in Washington...
...The shuttle, says NASA, is "still a vital part" of the space program—which makes it sound more like Old Paint than a snorting charger...
...They wear great looking blazers and blouses, and male or female have hair sprayed to withstand winds stronger than ones it would take to scrub tomorrow's launch...
...But enough of that...
...He compares the change to the recovery of spirit that took place after the '67 Apollo fire...
...Throughout the hotel and all could, if we wanted it to, be pointing becoming," Dr...
...If Discovery blows up tomorrow, five stories will be too many to absorb...
...Roland doesn't see the point of trying to do something before the technology is really ready...
...there is a press briefing from Frank Merlino, NASA Test Director at the KSC...
...Something that will have meaning only if the tribe gives it meaning...
...Paine, who favors colonization (as opposed to the mine-and-run moon missions), declares his confidence that the first generation of Martians is already toddling around down here on Earth...
...There's a lot of resentment and perplexity about the restrictions...
...It's not a problem...
...There is little inclination on the press's part to pursue this into the realm of contradiction...
...they're going to be helping us—but he can't tell us that going to Mars is official policy, because it isn't...
...Later, you realize that the camera, after all, lies...
...The NASA reps remind everyone that the site will be cleared by midnight...
...Jerry Angel and Bill Meeks have been at the Cape for more than twenty years each...
...T he purpose of STS-26 (the twenty-sixth flight of the Space Transportation System) is to test out the hundreds of changes made to equipment and procedures since Challenger and the Rogers Commission, and to launch, from the shuttle's cargo bay, TDRS-C, Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-C, into a geosynchronous orbit of the earth...
...In rebuttal, NASA continues to talk of how there are certain quick-decision contingencies to which man's nifty brain responds better than a computer's...
...NASA, despite its fixed smiles and uninflected voices, is quite mindful of theatricality, and it saves the best for last...
...Which is to say, it was our fate to seize it...
...That was then...
...The dome tries to maintain the same sunniness of the local merchants...
...someone asks a NASA rep, meaning can they watch it from here tomorrow morning...
...The count resumes, after the last built-in hold, at T-9 minutes...
...the sky is purple and the press are taken to a second stop, probably no more than a thousand feet from the pad...
...Most outfits smaller than the networks make do with trailers, and there are at least four times as many reporters here now than were present on January 28, 1986...
...all the local anchors sent down here come out to do "stand-ups" near the countdown clocks...
...this is now—a time when we know more than we know what to do with...
...it evokes the Flint-stones, though one supposes the designer was striving for something lunar...
...President Reagan, whose only memorable contribution to space exploration will remain the words he spoke the day of the Challenger accident, was, nonetheless, in September, given enough wing by his lame-duck status to revive a nineteenth-century imperial cry, declaring: "It is mankind's manifest destiny to bring our humanity into space, to colonize this galaxy...
...The explanation that the Discovery isn't there because it's flown away seems implausible...
...At 3:30 the place is pretty crowded...
...It's too big, too ugly, asymmetrical, not a flying thing at all...
...Paine is saying we need to go to Mars now, and Roland, echoing something Senator Proxmire has said ("Space is going to be there for a long time"), insists that the heavens can wait...
...Truly says that maybe there's some paperwork they could "tease out of the system"—but, of course, "you can't have too much safety," and space flight will never be without risk...
...And as a nation we have the power to determine whether America will lead or follow...
...If we go, we will go alone...
...trees, and the porno-receptive satellite seen Tuesday night, a light, one that prise ourselves with how bold we are A police state, a plan, a probe, a dishes...
...It's near the corner of Saturn Causeway and Instrumentation Rd., just down from the old moon rocket that lies like an immense beached hypodermic, thrown away after injecting the species onto its first extraterrestrial sphere...
...Merlino says when he's asked about the new leadership role the astronauts have been given since Challenger...
...You can attend it inside the auditorium or you can watch it on NASA Select Satellite SATCOM F-2R, Transponder 13—which is to say, the TV monitors in front of the press bleachers and inside the dome...
...ly out of control late in August, but of Cape Canaveral, the moon, like a memories of hostages, terror, and On July 7 the Soviet Union launched that wasn't as big a setback as one neglected mistress, was looking down Carter-like malaise...
...All sorts of preparations and problem-solvings continue—the balky fan in Colonel Covey's suit...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 29...
...it's too big, too ugly, asymmetrical, not a flying thing at all...
...Richard H. Truly, the former shuttle astronaut who is now Associate Administrator for Space Flight, and Dale D. Myers, NASA Deputy Administrator...
...Are they trying to limit the number of pictures of another accident to, say, 1,000 instead of 5,000...
...STS-26 is about finding the nerve, once more, to get up on the high wire...
...As the sky gets darker, the floodlights on the shuttle are incrementally brightened, prompting a restrained version of the oohs that come on summer nights between a really good firework's flare and boom...
...But if we so fear homesickness that we are afraid to seize the next place, it will no doubt be our fate to die from a graver sickness, failure of nerve...
...The Democrats' platform had no space plank...
...Once again, the adversarial mood is decidedly muted...
...Lynn Sherr of ABC asks if there isn't perhaps too much caution this time...
...You can apologize and justify and rationalize why we've been doing this for thirty years...
...You can feel everyone in the press dome getting ready to write the afternoon headline: GOOD WEATHER SCRUBS LAUNCH...
...Paine is the one making, if you will, common sense...
...But people here will remember Captain Crippen as the man whose life was shattered by saying yes...
...At 5:00 p.m...
...Those words were reduced to a half-truth eighty-two days later, on April 12, 1961, when Gagarin went into orbit around the planet, a severance that one day we will realize as the equivalent of the first division of a cell in the Earth's biosphere...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 27 officials, including Rear Adm...
...Can he elaborate on "the abrasion on the forward thruster...
...Two countries that can't keep ballet dancers, wheat, and Olympic athletes flowing reliably between them from year to year will not find a way to hold hands for thirty years and 75 million miles...
...The real problem of the shuttle is that, like TDRS-C, it is essentially going nowhere...
...If man isn't good enough to go into space as an end in himself, for his own willful pleasure, then what's a rocket for...
...A card with a mere orange stripe will allow you on the press site only until midnight...
...Down the road \ %tel !:li 7 from the hotel one could enter a small The networks and wire services establishment called "Apollo Hair \ 1 ).it I have permanent quarters at the Systems —a baldness clinic...
...There's even an isolated "hear, hear" from the bleachers when, in an opening announcement, the weather is said to be looking good for tomorrow morning...
...on L-1 a press bus drives out to the ghost-town portions of the KSC, the places where, twenty-five years ago and more, not hand-wringing but chest-thumping was the order of the day...
...The onboard computers are programmed for stronger, autumn winds, and the ones now in the upper altitudes are officially described as "springlike...
...Dukakis said we should talk to the Soviets, and just about everyone else, about going to Mars...
...As it hap- at the Holiday Inn on Merritt everything was "go for launch," they the year before we abandoned the pens, Phobos I began spinning useless-Island, Florida, about ten miles south instead gave subliminal stimulus to moon...
...There's no point in dreaming of private enterprise and Mars...
...A reporter asks about the "AFE" problem--"acronyms for everything"—the briefing's real laugh line, a preface to a real question about the FSS, the Fixed Service Structure at the pad...
...At 11:25 he says it's going to go, and cheers go up...
...If you've got a green card you can come back...
...and on to the most audacious one of all, 14, from which Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra and Cooper rose, an eerie silver 7, entwined with the symbol of Mercury, now standing on the spot, celebrating the first group of astronauts...
...There's a strange Good Friday feeling...
...Sometimes we sur- gone up on July 12...
...A t 11:30 I fall asleep with "Night-line" going at the foot of the bed...
...The shuttle is "the key for support for the space station," he says...
...With this life-anddeath power, he is in some ways the big story here, the emotional focus, almost as a single Mercury astronaut would have been a quarter-century ago...
...the sun and the astronauts are up, but there is a problem with the weather: it's lovely...
...Beyond that lie the covered silos of an abandoned missile site, grass coming up through the bricks as if they made up city sidewalks instead of lids on Armageddon...
...The Republican platform urged a Mars mission around the year 2000, and Bush supported the space station...
...The second Kennedy quotation is his peroration, in which he said that "here on earth God's work must truly be our own...
...there are still more than two hours available—except for the six minutes from 12:13 to 12:19 during which a collision with the Soviet space station would be possible...
...Merlino from any heavy going, however unlikely, and reminding the press that they can ask anything they like at the 1:00 p.m...
...How do they feel tonight...
...There are two other Kennedy quotations we ought to be keeping in mind now...
...The fact is that no one spoke with real specificity—or much interest...
...They agree that people at the Cape are especially serious now—not that things were ever really sloppy...
...It's also over...
...Beyond T + 73 seconds...
...The computers can't cope...
...I'm a little bit apprehensive," allows Meeks...
...But the "future of the program" isn't the story today...
...The only story is whether or not the astronauts will survive the flight...
...Both of them were off the day Challenger blew up, but Angel, who was out in the woods 45 miles away, could tell even from there that something had gone wrong: "You couldn't have felt any worse if you'd been right there...
...Not anymore...
...D y 7 a.m...
...t 9 a.m...
...The TV and newspaper people are making for Houston...
...First we pass the inhumanly scaled Vehicle Assembly building...
...garbled voice checks—yet they seem to be going on just in case there's a change in the weather...
...But the flames have begun to force their way out of it, and it lifts...
...Truly says, just before a good wind blows into the reporters' sunburning faces, that they're not going to push the weather "one iota...
...Let's try to go with the Russians, he says, but let's be prepared to go by ourselves "if the promised collaboration does not materialize...
...Pushed up to 22,300 miles, it will be on a sort of celestial treadmill, flying at the same speed the planet does, and therefore, more or less, standing still...
...rT1 he afternoon passes lazily...
...At 10 a.m...
...In his book Entering Space (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, rev...
...Circuses shoot one man out of a cannon instead of five, not for cost-effectiveness, but because the single death is a fate, a destiny...
...read the --% , rate we are going, the Soviets won't fast-food marquees along Rte...
...Lists of "Photo Opportunities" and "Bus Departures" are posted, as is "Shuttle Weather," updates of conditions at the Cape and the various landing sites, scheduled and emergency...
...however unA big press-kit button (made in Isure of its destination, America was Canada) showed the phone number for \ --- I ,...,- / ///// once more ready, in the words of more information about Florida's Chuck Yeager and Alan Shepard, to Space Coast: 1-800-USA-1969, the last \ fa / "light the candle...
...Elsewhere there's a small, almost cheerful, needlepoint memorial to them...
...The gentle questions follow...
...But Angel guesses that the novelty wears off anything, and you've got to remember he was 25 when he started here...
...Dukakis, after having wanted it cut back (surprise) during the primary season, showed up in Huntsville in August to say he was all for it...
...Forty minutes later I'm sitting in the auditorium watching instant replay after instant replay of the launch, taken from the different remote cameras and a helicopter, and available for use by the TV news people...
...Can anybody watch it from here...
...It won't, of course...
...TDRS-A has been in the skies since 1983...
...One looks out across the grass, across the water, and thinks: it can't possibly make it...
...As a nation we will shrink to Holland, and as a species we will be the passenger pigeon...
...At 6:00 p.m...
...Can you trust your ears, knowing how long the crackle probably took to get across the water and grass...
...Looking beyond tomorrow morning, Myers notes that a space station will take us "either to the Moon or Mars," putting them, at least, into a climactic sequence...
...four digits inviting one to think: what \ y ,;(-i- ////// a falling off was there...
...Aside from releasing TDRS-C, the Discovery crew will do the usual array (or at least four days' worth) of onboard experiments, and will broadcast a tribute to the crew of STS-25 (Challenger...
...Back to the Future" read was charted by the barely remembered '1 one popular button, leaving its Viking probes of the seventies...
...Late Tuesday night, September 27, town: meant to convey faith that to Earth than at any time since 1971, tion are now being debated...
...The truth is that if two men—or seven—blow up, those witnessing the catastrophe will feel less anguish than if it were only one...
...The latest information is marked in black wax pencil, an anachronistic touch, as if everyone were here keeping watch on Lindbergh or Amelia Earhart...
...In a day or two, boyish Pinky Nelson, the most colorful of the crew, will get mixed up in our minds with Colonel Covey or Commander Hauck...
...think about these things...
...One of them isn't really his, but Robert Frost's (from "The Gift Outright") and was recited at the inauguration: "The land was ours before we were the land's...
...At first one hears only the still-even voice of the Shuttle Launch Controller, and the applause, and the screams, but then it's past the tower, and going faster, rolling, as it's supposed to, like a great whale, and an immense crackling forest-fire roar washes toward the bleachers, vibrating them and the ribs of everyone standing and crying...
...briefing from higher-ups...
...Their real business is preparing for launches...
...By 7:30 p.m...
...An alumna of the Phyllis Oakley Spokesperson School of Imperturbability, she weeds out questions not dealing strictly with the "launch process," saving Mr...
...Most people assume he's an anchor...
...I overhear one reporter telling another: "If you want to see the rock fall, you gotta be there...
...He was referring, of course, to President Kennedy's declaration, made that day to Congress, that we should pursue the "exciting adventure of space" and reach the moon "before this decade is out...
...At 8:30 a.m...
...But gone safely...
...One more thing Jerry Angel and Bill Meeks agree on is that people at NASA do feel as if they're working for their country, not just punching some multinational's clock...
...As Michael Collins, the only real writer to come out of the astronaut corps, puts it in Liftoff (Grove Press, 1988): "In a fundamental way Project Apollo was about leaving, the first move outward . . . I don't want to feel a lid over my head, or the heads of my children...
...Hey, guys, we could put on a show...
...After that you're to be cleared out of the KSC and made to watch the liftoff from the causeway...
...Behind the foreign reporters' assistance desk is a small sketch of the seven Challenger astronauts, bordered in black...
...In the head of the Space Research Institute, going...
...Around 11:00 word comes that the latest weather balloon shows wind conditions are better, i.e., worse...
...We're in a prolonged, built-in hold that allows the ground crews to catch up on their work...
...It isn't really a visual experience...
...That much he has to say...
...But eventually the buses back to the press dome must be boarded, and when one gets there one notices that the countdown clock, frozen all day at T-11:00:00, is now moving...
...How can it be gone...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 There is great American enthusiasm for space—only 18 percent in one recent poll would trim the NASA budget—but neither side in the vacuous presidential campaign really bothered to tap it...
...The appropriations are simply too massive and, even more to the point, only government can provide the inspiration...
...but the questions are mild and predictable, as if the reporters don't want further to worry a man who's already got so much on his mind...
...today the white press dome serving all the media is filled with reporters trying to find out if they're sheep or goats...
...What you remember is the sound, the feel of your hands on the plank of wood in front of you...
...The rest of his forecast is less than ringing...
...Still, the cheerful ex-astronaut adds, as if to appease the gods, another accident is "inevitable . . . in the cards...
...Even stranger isthe sight of the FSS without the rocket...
...Well, yes...
...Angel's wife and 75-year-old father-in-law are coming, and Meeks's wife recently told him to try to get her a pass, one of seven allotted to the fire station...
...These statements usually suffer from sounding defensive and sentimental, but the truth is that they're not sentimental enough...
...The Soviets are committed to over the island, people were thinking unequivocally into the future...
...From the moment Project Gemini begansending two men into space instead of one, the mythic lone-eagle aspect of launching was lost...
...The floodlitshuttle, now more like Rockefeller Center than the Taj Mahal, can be seen in the distance, or you can watch a continual live shot of it, just standing on the pad, on the TV monitors in the dome...
...and the walls are decorated with spectacular photos of past liftoffs that have been signed and donated by press regulars...
...Jerry Angel and Bill Meeks remember Apollo, and they agree things were more exciting then...
...There is a great American enthusiasm for space, but neither side in the vacuous presidential campaign really bothered to tap it...
...Nothing definitive gets said, but now the assumption is that it will go...
...Can the space program survive another disaster...
...And there are more green ribbons...
...everyone boards buses for the sunset photo op...
...520 and bury us...
...If we go, we should go now, rather than wait for the more comfortable technology or for the depleted ozone layer to evict us...
...Minutes before liftoff, he's supposed to poll a 21-member management team—engineers, contractors, a weatherman, a safety expert—before he himself says, finally, yes or no...
...The event, however, is established...
...The clicking and the whirring, weird and worshipful, goes on and on in the dark and nobody cares about the mosquitoes and the sandspurs because nobody wants to leave...
...The RSS has been rolled back, and reporters sitting in the bleachers gaze across the grass and water at the Discovery's three conical boosters like tourists who've decided to rest their feet in front of the Taj Mahal or the Kremlin...
...The "window" lasts until 1:30 today...
...What one wants instead, like an immigrant, is the "green card"—a badge that, after midnight, will allow one back onto the press site for a view from the bleachers in front of the huge digital countdown clock...
...then a white sphere, looking like the Montgolfier brothers' balloon, holding liquid nitrogen...
...What is the mood of the launch team...
...He says, "We're supposed to save lives and put out fires, but that's just in between...
...At 11:15 Captain Crippen is taking his poll...
...Still, there is something special about the morning that's only a couple of hours away...
...First there's the chance to take several thousand stills and miles of video of the shuttle from about 2500 feet...
...Is there "more attention to duty" now...
...and if you're wise you'll be back inside the KSC gates well before 4 a.m...
...GPO pamphlet 19860-730-017/41011, "Space Program Spinoffs," and nod approvingly at news of new flame-resistant materials, the REDOX battery, dental arch wire, and Thermaflex ("being used in the development of a Stay-dry' bicycle seat"), but you will be avoiding the truth that, from the beginning, this has all been directed toward saying goodbye...
...At the enthusiasm: GO DISCOVERY...
...The pad is fringed with thin poles, which hold the remote-operated cameras that will film the launch and keep the press photographers from incineration...
...After a minute it is gone, into a fluff of cumulus...
...It was Mars, closer this month thirty-year program of Mars explora- commitment for none of them...
...I think they're excited and looking forward to tomorrow...
...If you want to die," she cheerfully replies...
...And then we reach an early Redstone rocket, looking like a smaller version of the black-and-white Cape Canaveral lighthouse built in 1868...
...Roald Z. Sagdeyev, planet...
...It's ringed with an assortment of foreign flags (there's China's but the USSR's...
...Little green countdown clocks say -11:00:00...
...For this launch NASA has adopted a two-tier system of access...
...Actually, the best indication of how behind we are in this whole business...
...The American space program is not going to stop, manned or unmanned," says Truly: a hundred years from now reporters will be questioning people sitting where he now sits about trips to Mars, lunar outposts...
...it's "still a vital part" of the program—which makes it sound more like Old Paint than a snorting charger...
...The 36,000,000 miles above the pool, it was predictable glasnost with which the looked great in the newsmagazines mood officially declared by local shining much more invitingly than steps and technologies of the Soviets' these past few months—and a firm chambers of commerce was resolute usual...
...It's too primitive—more like a volcano, something erupting amidst, because of, prayer and fear...
...Ego and nationalism are not unworthy propellants, and in any case they will burn away to nothing in the first wholly alien atmosphere we reach, where everything will be unrecognizable and where, reinvented, we may somehow at last know ourselves for what we are...
Vol. 21 • December 1988 • No. 12
