Riding Rockets

I stopped outside the launchpad perimeter fence, where the tourist buses parked, and stepped from the car. The visitors center was closed and tours had ended so I knew I wouldn’t be disturbed.Columbia was being prepared for her tenth mission and was almost completely hidden by the rotating service structure. Only her right wing and nose and the tips of the SRBs were visible. I had wanted to drive to the pad and take the elevator to the cockpit level, but I knew that would have been a bureaucratic hassle. Even astronauts weren’t free to move through security checkpoints. So my last view ofColumbia would be as the tourists saw her: from a quarter mile away, wrapped in her steel cocoon, hardly looking like a spaceship at all.

The sun had recently set and the pad xenon lights were on. The wind brought muted loudspeaker calls to my ear and the techno-talk spun me back to the summer of 1984, which had been filled with so much fear, disappointment, and joy. But mostly it was the joy of August 30 that now sharpened in my mind’s eye. My heart accelerated at the memory of engine start. I could feel the rattle of max-q and see the fade-to-black asDiscovery raced toward her orbit. Hank’s voice was as clear in my brain now as it had been six years earlier: “Congratulations, rookies. You’re officially astronauts.” I could hear the cheers of Judy, Mike, and Steve at the realization our silver pins had undergone the alchemy of fifty miles altitude and been transformed into gold.

I got back in the car and steered for the astronaut beach house. My last moments as an astronaut had to end on that beach. No other place conjured up more memories or more emotions than its sands. Its quiet solitude and proximity to the infinity of the sea and sky gave my soul a release unattainable anywhere else.

I pulled into the driveway, climbed the stairs, and opened the door. The house was deserted, as I knew it would be. Except for prelaunch picnics and spousal good-byes, few astronauts or NASA officials ever visited the facility.

Nothing had changed since my STS-36 visits. In fact, nothing had changed since my first beach house visit twelve years earlier. A framed abstract painting, which suggested a collision of multiple sailboats, hung on a wall. It had probably been selected by the same decorator who had chosen an exploding volcano for crew quarters wall art. (We were astronauts, for chrissake. What would be so wrong with some space and rocket photos?) The mantel of the fireplace was still crowded with various liquor and wine bottles. Some had probably been emptied by Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and other legendary astronauts. On the windowsills and end tables were shells, sand dollars, and other flotsam collected by generations of astronauts and their spouses. I was sure their beachcombing, like Donna’s and mine, had merely been a distraction from that impending final good-bye. The small den was still crowded with the same Ozzie and Harriet–era furniture: orange vinyl chairs, orange vinyl sofa, faux-wood coffee and lamp tables, and ceramic light fixtures decorated with splatters of, what else, orange paint. A small television, old enough to have captured the 1960s Gemini launches, sat on another imitation-wood piece.

I walked to the kitchen, ignored the desiccated carcass of a roach on the countertop, shoved a few dollars in the honor cash box, and liberated a Coors from the refrigerator. I sipped on that as I continued my tour in the back bedroom. It held another astronaut artifact, the convertible sofa bed Hoot and Mario had used for their high jinks with the STS-36 wives. I knew the bed had supported more than just that one prank—at a Houston party one tipsy TFNG wife had jokingly complained, “I hated doing it at the beach house on a bare mattress.” I looked in the closet. There was still no linen. If Hoot and the wives had thought about the multidecadespecial use of that particular piece of furniture, I doubt they would have climbed onto it. Even dressed in an LES, I wouldn’t have sat on it.

On the other side of the den was the dining/conference room and I entered it. A large table dominated the area. An easel holding a blackboard and chalk sat at one end. The board featured a hieroglyphics of engineering data from a premission briefing on a prior shuttle launch. It was easy for me to imagine the crew in the surrounding chairs hanging on every word of the VITT presenter, praying he wouldn’t use the D word…delay. I would never miss those worries.