Margaret Lazarus Dean documents the decline and death of the American space industry in ‘Leaving Orbit.’
by Kinzy Janssen
On July 8, 2011, the space shuttle Atlantis blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on a column of fire. It was the very last human-carrying spacecraft that would lift off under NASA’s control. In Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight, published May 19 by Graywolf Press, Margaret Lazarus Dean looks skyward, inward, backward and forward, asking how our pioneering nation went from witnessing “one giant leap for mankind” to retiring our most innovative spacecraft in just fifty years. Dean’s book is part memoir, part historical document, and part manifesto. She writes from a place of mourning, a mourning that is both public and private.
Leaving Orbit is also an antidote to apathy. Ever since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, Dean argues that Americans have been lulled into thinking space exploration would continue indefinitely. As an American who doesn’t typically follow “space news,” I’m just as guilty; I didn’t know we’d stopped launching altogether in 2011 and hadn’t been to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and that if we suddenly got the urge to go again, Dean says it would be “nearly as difficult for us to try to recreate their trip now as it was to accomplish then.” (Partly because NASA’s space vehicles are retired, and partly because the engineering knowledge won’t be passed on to another generation).
Dean is physically present for all of NASA’s “lasts:” Discovery’s and Endeavour’s last launches in Feb. and May 2011, respectively; Atlantis’s last landing; the last time Discovery would ever move, after being wheeled into the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. A NASA shuttle worker named Omar sends Dean a note of praise for her novel, The Time It Takes To Fall—about how the Challenger explosion dashed one girl’s astronaut dreams—and eventually, after an online friendship based on space fandom is born, invites her for a tour of Kennedy Space Center. . She’s immediately drawn to the energy of the Space Coast, and decides to road-trip down there again and again from her home in Tennessee to tag along with Omar to as many VIP and media-only access areas she can manage.
The fact that Margaret Lazarus Dean is a fiction and nonfiction writer, not an astronaut or engineer who might have relied on jargon, helped me access the logistics of spaceflight. Her love for all things space is infectious, beginning with childhood trips to DC’s Air and Space Museum in the ‘70s and glimpses of Judith Resnik’s astronaut portrait in the ‘80s.
Before reading the book, I considered myself neutral or somewhat skeptical of government-funded spaceflight, but my opinion began to shift while reading—especially after Dean makes a direct comparison between space travel and art. “I feel the built-in pointlessness at the heart of Apollo as much as I fiercely admire it,” she writes about the ‘60s-era NASA program known for its risky rockets and the first moon landing. “It’s the same pointlessness shared by any artistic gesture.” Art may be pointless in an economic or utilitarian sense, but we still love art, and many would argue that we need it.
Dean gets the sense that she’s witnessing the end of many other eras, too—especially as she boards buses full of journalists who are themselves about to be laid off.
One of those eras–that of career men having adventures while women stay at home— is still in flux. Throughout the book, she’s in imaginary conversation with Norman Mailer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and practitioner of New Journalism who covered the launch of Apollo 11 (the first moon-landing spacecraft) in 1969. “I feel as though he and I are tugging on opposite ends of the same thread, a thread forty years long,” Dean writes. “Norman Mailer’s generation got to see the beginnings of things and mine has gotten the ends.” The details of Mailer’s adulterous life bother Dean as much as his writing inspires her, and she wrestles with the fact that, as a woman in Mailer’s time, she wouldn’t have enjoyed the freedom to travel to Florida to write about space. (Not to mention aspire to be an astronaut…it was especially shocking to read about the sexism and infidelity practically endemic to NASA’s first astronauts). Yet she feels a complex guilt every time she leaves her husband and son for another launch, and this isn’t smoothed over or hidden from the reader. In fact, it’s part of the story.
There is a delicate balance in this book between what is documented and what is left undocumented. Dean is painfully aware that the space workers around her are losing their livelihoods, so she doesn’t ask prying questions. At the time, she doesn’t try to confirm rumors about a shuttle worker’s suicide at Kennedy Space Center. I found this to be a risky-yet-brilliant decision; it allowed me to better understand Dean as a human being with feelings, tact and friendships to maintain. I felt the weight of those questions hanging between them, unspoken: a big question mark, like the future of American spaceflight.
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Kinzy Janssen is The Riveter‘s associate editor. You can follow her @KinzyJ.
