A conversation with the woman who witnessed the end of a nationally celebrated era.

by Kinzy Janssen

photo credit: Stu Maschwitz

Part-memoir, part-historical document, part-manifesto, Margaret Lazarus Dean’s perceptive new book Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight (which will be released May 19) asks the question, ”What does it mean that we have been going to space for 50 years and have decided to stop?” 

As the American era of human spaceflight comes to an end (Atlantis was the last-ever NASA shuttle to fly, launching on July 8, 2011), Dean tells the story of the space-workers who were left jobless, the American astronauts who are now training for Russian spacecraft, and space fans like her who were left wondering what happened. As Dean spends more and more time at Kennedy Space Center during those final launches and landings, she excavates the real meaning (and contradictions) of spaceflight. Why are Americans so unwilling to pay for it, even when it inspires us so uniformly? Were people paying less attention to spaceflight in the reusable shuttle era because it was safer and less glamorous than the burn-up rockets and one-shot capsules of Apollo? Do Americans even know that we’ve stopped flying in space?

Instead of a series of answers to these questions, the book is moreso a portrait of an American era—a portrait that is simultaneously triumphant and sad, brilliant and bleak. I ask her about the ethics of nonfiction, particularly as it pertains to her main contact at Kennedy Space Center, the shuttle worker Omar Izquierdo, who becomes a close friend. She also takes on conspiracy theories, the ironic popularity of space-travel movies, and whether or not Twitter could have saved the shuttle program.

Kinzy Janssen: You mention that, if we could only restore a sense of danger and of achieving the impossible, we could start to rebuild NASA. Do you think movies are trying to revive that feeling now? Is there a reason that Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014) came out after the shuttles were retired?

Margaret Lazarus Dean: I thought it was interesting the way these films revealed that we apparently still have this desire to see human spaceflight—in fact, in both of those movies, NASA sends minimally-trained non-astronauts on these spectacular missions. Just as those movies were coming out, I saw space enthusiasts react by saying that this was a hopeful sign, that people miss seeing the shuttle, and so these films were evidence that people will support another spacecraft. Another more negative view about these films also emerged, mostly phrased as a sarcastic statement that if the money spent on these films had been spent on real spaceflight instead, that we would still be flying in space. The cynical interpretation is that people would rather have the spectacle than the real thing, with its delays and lack of drama. From talking to people myself, I don’t think the average moviegoer necessarily sees these films in relation to the real NASA at all—a lot of people seem to assume that the shuttle is still flying, just as it is in Gravity.

As a personal side note, I want to say that the only inauthenticity about Gravity that really bugged me was the way George Clooney pronounced the word Soyuz.

KJ: The way you compare spaceflight to an “artistic gesture” really resonated with me. However, you also talk about the “built-in pointlessness” of both art and space exploration. As an artist yourself, how do you fight against that? Do you think people who appreciate art are more willing to appreciate (and fund) human spaceflight?

MLD: I don’t know whether it’s necessarily the case that artists “get it” more than others—in my experience, the people who can be counted on to support spaceflight most are scientists and engineers. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the little kids who fall in love with spaceflight, if they hang onto that love, are more likely than the average person to grow up to be scientists and engineers. But I think the charge of “pointlessness” can best be understood when compared to other “pointless” efforts—like making art, or raising children. Ayn Rand was at the launch of Apollo 11, and she wrote that the moon landing was “a demonstration of man at his best.” She absolutely gushed about how fantastic it was that NASA had sent human beings to the moon, but that’s weird, isn’t it? Because NASA is an agency of the federal government, not normally a source of enthusiasm for Ayn Rand, and Apollo was one of the largest taxpayer-funded projects in history. One of the things I love spaceflight is that it’s an interesting exception to so many rules. People find excuses to love it, even when it goes against their most deeply held beliefs.

KJ: When you mention the conspiracy theory that NASA did not actually succeed in putting a man on the moon, you say “there is a pleasure in doubting.” I got a sense of this in relation to vaccines in Eula Biss’s On Immunity, too. Do you think that doubt (especially doubt in our government) is holding our generation back in some ways?

MLD: Yes, I thought about that too while I was reading On Immunity, which is such a deeply smart book—the pleasure of doubting, but also the near-impossibility of convincing a doubter to change her mind and trust the dominant narrative. Of course people who become convinced of that “truth” will be accused of being dupes by the other side. I don’t know that the younger generations are necessarily more susceptible to conspiracy theories than older generations were. I do think there is a popular attitude right now, popular among young and old alike, that government always mucks everything up by its very nature, that private enterprise can always do everything better, and that attitude is particularly dangerous to funding big unprofitable projects like spaceflight. I meet a lot of people who are under the impression that SpaceX is going to take over, and improve upon, everything NASA did, but that’s a misunderstanding of the scope of SpaceX’s plans. A project like going to Mars, which is the next logical step, is so massively expensive it can only be paid for by a federal government. So if we want to go there, we are going to have to learn to trust.

KJ: I find it interesting that there are many questions you consider unaskable, especially of Omar, a shuttle worker who became your friend. There’s something very honest and human about your refusal to foist questions on unsuspecting people, though you say it might be “squeamishness.” I thought it actually allowed us to get to know you and trust you as our narrator, but were you worried you weren’t getting the answers you needed?

MLD: Yes, if I’m being honest, I spent a lot of my time in Florida worrying that I wasn’t doing the right things, that I wasn’t being “investigative” enough, that maybe something more poignant was happening over there. In actually writing the chapters, I made that anxiety part of the narrative, and I now think that plays a useful role. Anxiety is always part of trying to write about real people. The people I met in Florida are not fictional characters, they are actual human beings, but I have to get them on the page by leaving behind almost everything about them. The ethics of that are really complicated, and at certain moments those ethics might interfere with my ability to learn as much information as I could. In some ways I envied the journalists I met at these launches, because their job was much more clearly defined. They already had a narrative framework in place, and within that narrative they needed to fit in human reactions from quotable sources for “color.” In this kind of project there is no scaffolding—I was starting from “color.” It was all “color.” That makes it much more high-stakes to poke at people’s emotions.

KJ: Your book isn’t just an elegy to human spaceflight. It’s also an elegy to journalism, and to good jobs with benefits. Was it your intention to capture the end of many eras, or did that happen organically?

MLD: I didn’t particularly go into the project with an idea about that. Once I got press credentials and started to meet the space journalists, I kept being struck by the way their industry is crumbling. You had reporters covering massive layoffs at the Kennedy Space Center, and the reporters themselves knew they were about to be laid off. There is a feeling that these institutions that everyone values, everyone respects, are crumbling, and that the smart people who have dedicated their lives to those institutions and ideals are no longer able to make their living at them, much to everyone’s detriment. The same thing is happening in academia, where I work.

KJ: At what point did you realize that your guilt about leaving your family was going to become part of the story on the page?

MLD: I really resisted making this part of the story, because it just seems like such a minefield. Aside from the fact that my family life and my feelings about it are really personal, I also didn’t want to wade into the so-called “Mommy Wars” (which I refuse to believe in or participate in). If you think about it, many (maybe most) writers at the Press Site for those last launches had left children behind in the care of another adult so they could be free to write this story; only the women are supposed to feel angst about that. I didn’t want to be part of the message that women do or should feel guilty about working, because I don’t think we should apologize for participating in the world outside our homes. But I feel like Norman Mailer really forced my hand, by continuing to talk about his wives the way he did, talking about women the way he did, all while going off to Florida and Texas and wherever else he wanted for as long as he wanted to. He forced the topic on me, though he’s been dead since before this project began, and eventually I felt this contrast between him and me—what it means for each of us to leave our children behind with the other parent in order to go to launches—had to be part of the book.

KJ: You point out that demographic “firsts” no longer existing in spaceflight, and that astronauts are finally able to go “as themselves,” not as members of the female gender or of a certain ethnicity. Ultimately, do you think the pros of spotlighting those “firsts” outweighed the cons?

MLD: I think it would have been impossible, and maybe not particularly useful, to avoid spotlighting those firsts. With gender, for instance, NASA had spent so long fighting the idea that women could go to space, when that finally changed and the first six women were recruited, it was a very significant change, one people took pleasure in, and rightfully so. It was certainly significant to little girls at the time, who could finally look at a group of astronauts and see that some of them had ponytails. But there was a huge price to be paid by the people who happened to be first, and I’m sure those first seven women would have preferred not to be pioneers. Everything they did was subjected to such scrutiny, and they were always being regarded in terms of their gender rather than their accomplishments. A recent biography of Sally Ride by Lynn Sherr tells this story really well. Sally Ride was a physicist, but she was always being asked about things like hair and makeup and whether she would cry. It really wore on her, and that scrutiny stayed with her throughout her life, with serious consequences.

KJ: In the Epilogue, you mention that Curiosity, the Mars rover, has 1.4 million Twitter followers. You also suggest that if Twitter had been popular earlier, when the space shuttles were being built and used, the shuttles may have been “saved” because at some point, Americans stopped noticing we were still flying. Why do you think we stopped noticing? Did they do a bad job with PR prior to this? Or is it all our fault?

MLD: One of the challenges of getting people excited about shuttle in particular was that its flights were repeated and routine, so the story lacks the drama of the risky one-shot flights of the earlier era. My impression is that NASA has always done a great job of telling the story of what they do, and they have recently used social media really intelligently and effectively in connecting people with everything NASA does—not just human spaceflight, but robotic missions, probes, scientific projects. For example, NASA regularly invites people who follow them on Twitter and Facebook to apply for what they call NASASocials—they select 150 people to take part in events and get behind-the-scenes access at various NASA sites. These people then spread the word to their social media followers, and a lot of them remain NASA advocates for life, boosting the signal for NASA’s message. It’s been an incredibly effective way to make contact with people who might not have taken the time to go to NASA’s website or read a newspaper article about a project, but they now get it and care about it. It might be a stretch to say that Twitter could have saved the shuttle program, but I do wonder what the effect would have been if social media had taken hold a bit earlier.

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Kinzy Janssen is The Riveter‘s associate editor. You can follow her @KinzyJ.