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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a breathtaking elegy to the waning days of human spaceflight as we have known it
In the 1960s, humans took their first steps away from Earth, and for a time our possibilities in space seemed endless. But in a time of austerity and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger , that dream has ended. In early 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's last three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the end of an era. With Dean as our guide to Florida's Space Coast and to the history of NASA, Leaving Orbit takes the measure of what American spaceflight has achieved while reckoning with its earlier witnesses, such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Oriana Fallaci. Along the way, Dean meets NASA workers, astronauts, and space fans, gathering possible answers to the question: What does it mean that a spacefaring nation won't be going to space anymore?
Author Notes
Margaret Lazarus Dean is the author of The Time It. Takes to Fall. She is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Dean (The Time It Takes to Fall), an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, asks, "What does it mean that we have been going to space for 50 years and have decided to stop?" That question haunts her thoughtful and provocative book, a history and elegy not just for the U.S. space program, but also for the optimism and sense of wonder it inspired in a nation. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 heralded a realization that space exploration was more than science fiction, leading to the creation of NASA and the start of the "space race." Dean takes readers through NASA's "heroic era" to the "shuttle era," as the military crewcuts and larger-than-life personalities of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs gave way to astronauts who "took the time to enjoy it." She weaves her mesmerizing history around her trips to see the last three shuttle launches, meeting such characters as the folks who travel to watch every launch; astronaut emeritus Buzz Aldrin; and Omar Izquierdo, Kennedy Space Center's "orbiter integrity clerk," whose job title barely covers his role as "lay historian" and "ambassador" for American space flight. Dean deftly captures the thrill and discovery of American space exploration, as well as the disappointment and outrage she believes everyone should feel at its ending. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
We went to space for 50 years, and then we stopped. With no further space travel in the offing, the last American space-shuttle flight in 2011 could mark the end of an era. For Dean, who traces her love of space back to childhood trips to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., the question of what this means was troubling enough for her to commit to traveling to Florida for the three final shuttle launches. During this time, she shakes Buzz Aldrin's hand, becomes teary-eyed at the sheer size and magnificence of the Vehicle Assembly Building, and learns not to look frightened when an engineer starts talking in technical terms. This account of her visits, mixed with historical perspective on the space program, allows readers not only to visit Cape Canaveral while NASA was still sending Americans into space, but also to meet the workers and space fans for whom the sky was never the limit. With the countdown clock no longer ticking, Leaving Orbit offers a heartfelt eulogy for the dream and brief reality of American spaceflight.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LIKE HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT itself, which has yet to surpass the achievement of NASA's Apollo missions to the moon, the literary canon of astronautics is something that peaked too soon. Forty-five years on, Norman Mailer's "Of a Fire on the Moon" from 1970 remains the most potent and poetic account of the first Apollo lunar landing, and Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," released in 1979, offers unrivaled insight into the politics and personalities behind Project Mercury, the initial ramp-up to Apollo. Wolfe and Mailer were not satisfied with mere reportage; they sought to imbue their subjects with deeper, enduring meaning, and their books became cultural touchstones. As with most classic chronicles of American spaceflight, they concern events that scarcely span a single decade out of the five in which humans have ventured into space. Promising - and delivering - the moon is a hard act to follow. Still, something must be said for what came next, NASA's less glamorous, more pragmatic and far longer space shuttle program. The shuttles built the International Space Station, which has continuously hosted humans since the year 2000. They launched and serviced the Hubble Space Telescope, allowing it to peer across the cosmos, forever changing our view of the universe. In 135 flights over 30 years, the shuttles lofted more than half of all the humans (and, by weight, more than half of all the cargo) ever to reach orbit. Two of those flights, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, ended in disasters and the deaths of all aboard. And now, just like the moon rockets that powered Apollo, the shuttles are gone - relegated to museums after the program's end in 2011. "Only when something ends can we understand what it has meant," Margaret Lazarus Dean writes in "Leaving Orbit," her elegy to the shuttle era, the longest chapter of American spaceflight yet. By capturing "the beauty and the strangeness" of its end, Dean seeks to reveal the deeper meaning of the shuttle program, to do for it what Wolfe did for Project Mercury and what Mailer did for Apollo. She does not succeed. The book's fundamental flaw is its provocative and deeply misleading premise: It is not only the shuttle era that has ended, Dean maintains, but also the entirety of American spaceflight. We have turned our backs forever on the heavens, and never again will we venture forth into outer space. Dean waffles on this here and there in the text, telegraphing that she knows how overstated her claim is, but she sticks to it just the same. It hangs like a cloud of ignorance over the book, waiting to be dissipated by the barest hint of informed sunlight. "The political will to keep spaceflight going just doesn't exist anymore, hasn't for a long time," she writes. On the contrary, what doesn't exist anymore is the political will to kill human spaceflight, even if NASA is adrift in purpose: The agency's plans for future rockets presently have powerful bipartisan support in Congress, as they have had for years, though little consensus exists on programmatic goals or optimal budget levels. The post-shuttle generation of space transportation is already waiting in the wings, with NASA's heavy-lift Space Launch System and crew-carrying Orion spacecraft in intensive development. Meanwhile, several private companies are building smaller, cheaper human-rated rockets of their own. Even if none of this were occurring, the truth is the nation could readily repurpose military rockets such as the Atlas V and the Delta IV to launch humans into space if desired. Dean's strong claims call for strong repudiation: No, we are not leaving orbit. No, these are not the last days of American spaceflight. Unless, that is, these are the last days of America - which would be the topic of a different book. Even so, there is much here to like and even love. The book is a joy to read if you can overlook the author's excessive pessimism. Dean, an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, clearly adores NASA's human space program. She has also written a novel based on the Challenger disaster, and for "Leaving Orbit," she traveled to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to witness the last three shuttle launches. She describes her experiences in superb prose that is perhaps the next best thing to being there. Astronauts freshly returned to Earth readjusting to gravity wear "an expression of a child shaken from a happy dream," and shuttles are seen launching from afar in "silent-film majesty." Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, makes a marvelous extended cameo. Dean even manages to squeeze in a pocket history of spaceflight that links the launches at Cape Canaveral with the 19th-century writings of Jules Verne and the 16th-century explorations of Ponce de León. Throughout the book, however, her main focus isn't really on the scenery, or the spacecraft, or "the unutterable awe of American heroes stabbing into the heavens on columns of fire," but rather on "the people who knew the shuttles best," the rank-and-file workers at Kennedy whom she interviews and occasionally befriends. The small details in the stories Dean tells about these individuals as they shepherd the shuttles through their last launches and landings are often enlightening and sometimes heartbreaking, like the time she encounters a wall in the launch control center lined with plaques for each and every shuttle mission, save for the two that never came home. The wall is in a restricted area far from public access, yet the two empty spaces are still discolored from the countless reverent touches of passing NASA employees. These are people, the story suggests, who love and live for spaceflight with all their hearts and souls. And, despite rejecting the book's central premise, I often found myself agreeing with the deep truths Dean elegantly conveys about America's space program. Why is it that the shuttle program is ending? In part, Dean notes, it's because large numbers of Americans mistakenly believe NASA consumes huge fractions of the federal budget, when in fact its allotment is about 0.4 percent. The Wall Street bailouts of 2008 consumed more funds than NASA has during its entire existence. "Uneasiness about the cost of spaceflight has always been paired with widespread positive feelings about spaceflight," she writes. "Spaceflight is an achievement we take great pride in, paid for with our own money, over our objections." The shuttles, like the space program they were a part of, meant different things to different people. To some, human spaceflight is just geopolitical posturing, or perhaps a loss leader for advanced technology development or robotic exploration purely for science's sake. To others, it seems to be mostly very expensive and risky fireworks. To at least a few, spaceflight is a survival imperative for human-kind. Dean, for her part, calls it "a grand act of civic performance art." One extended sequence from the book - her visits to NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building - will stay with me for a long time. Designed to house multiple moon rockets and shuttles, it is one of the largest buildings by volume in the world. Dean writes of photographers trying and failing to capture the building on film, because a person standing beside it for scale becomes too small to see at the distances necessary to fit the whole structure in a frame. The building is so large the mind cannot easily grasp its dimensions. With its 135 flights across three decades, the space shuttle program is the same way - too vast, sprawling, complex and multipurposed to easily contain within any human narrative. All that came before - the razor-focused race to space and then the moon - could not be more different, which is probably why writers like Mailer and Wolfe had any hope of transmuting it into their canonical classics. Dean's task may in fact have been impossible. The definitive saga of the space shuttle remains unwritten. Perhaps it always will be. LEE BILLINGS is an editor at Scientific American and the author of "Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars."
Choice Review
The present moment is one of the few times in the last half century when the US has had no human launch capability. NASA is dependent on Russian space vehicles to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. The last three flights of the space shuttle were in February, May, and July of 2011. Dean (English, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville) attended these launches and here describes her personal feelings and observations about the end of the shuttle era (which started in 1981). She discusses her friendship with a NASA worker who directed her to some insider information on the space shuttle and on launch preparations. Included are observations on how political vagaries affect NASA's ability to effectively conduct space exploration. The author intersperses her evocative commentaries with words of various seminal writers (e.g., Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe) and stories from the heroic era of spaceflight, the 1960s. The overall feeling of the book is one of sadness about the end of an important part of recent US history. One of the best recent treatments of the US space program this reviewer has read, this book comes at the subject from a fascinating perspective. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --John Z. Kiss, University of Mississippi
Kirkus Review
Beguiled at an early age by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Dean (English/Univ. of Tennessee; The Time It Takes to Fall, 2007) deftly chronicles the history of American spaceflight and what the end of the space program means for American culture.The author structures her narrative around trips to the Kennedy Space Center in order to witness the final space shuttle launches. Seeking "to write about those places where the technical and emotional intersect," Dean introduces readers to Florida's Space Coast; the NASA technicians who work on the shuttles; and astronauts, avid space fans, and the locals whose livelihoods depend on the space agency. Like any great storyteller, the author weaves in numerous cultural, political, historical, literary, and personal threads, widening the story's focus and enriching its texture. Dean notes that the style of writing known as creative nonfiction smoothly overlapped with the beginnings of American spaceflight in the 1960s. The author enlists the voices of such writers as Tom Wolfe, William Burrows, Norman Mailer and Oriana Fallaci for their insights into the saga of American space travel. Dean frequently reiterates her passion for the literature of spaceflight. "When I read all these books," she writes, "I'm encountering other minds struggling with the same questions while walking the same landscape." The author analyzes her struggles assembling her manuscript, providing useful insight into her creative process, and she includes her students' remarkable ideas regarding the space program and its conclusion. Dean recounts the ruthless tactics of professional autograph seekers during a book signing by Buzz Aldrin and shows how Americans' perceptions of space travel changed after the 1986 Challenger disaster. Throughout, the author's stimulating prose enhances topics that at first glance might seem lacking in broad appeale.g., engineering issues or the politics of NASA's perpetual underfunding. One of those books you can't put down, don't want to finish, and won't soon forget. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Intrigued by American spaceflight, Dean (English, Univ. of Tennessee; The Time It Takes To Fall) accepted an invitation from an online NASA acquaintance and traveled to Florida's Space Coast during the waning days of the space shuttle program. Viewing rollout, launch, and landing of different missions, the author sought to discover what it means "that we went to space for fifty years and now we are stopping"-but never found an answer. Well-crafted vignettes describe Buzz Aldrin interacting with autograph seekers, a motley crew of tourists at one launch and the more homogeneous press corps at another, a roomful of Space Tweep partygoers silently engaging with social media, and more. Unfortunately, the author also complains about writing difficulties and self-indulgently wonders what Norman Mailer would think of her work. -VERDICT Dean focuses on human interaction, not technical detail, so this book may appeal to a wider audience of creative nonfiction readers than does most popular space literature. Also consider Pat Duggins's Final Countdown and Greg Klerkx's Lost in Space.-Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: Air and Space | p. 3 |
| Chapter 1 The Beginnings of the Future: This Is Cape Canaveral | p. 11 |
| Chapter 2 What It Felt Like to Walk on the Moon | p. 43 |
| Chapter 3 Good-bye, Discovery | p. 71 |
| Chapter 4 A Brief History of the Future | p. 105 |
| Chapter 5 Good-bye, Endeavour | p. 143 |
| Chapter 6 A Brief History of Spacefarers | p. 161 |
| Chapter 7 Good-bye, Atlantis | p. 195 |
| Chapter 8 The End of the Future: Wheel Stop | p. 229 |
| Chapter 9 The Future | p. 257 |
| Epilogue | p. 295 |
| Timeline of American Spaceflight | p. 303 |
| Bibliography | p. 307 |