I believe the most important stories today reveal the connection between the personal and the historical; that is, they reveal how individual lives reflect the most important aspects of the broader culture around us. Good storytelling is the best form of understanding and education. Generation Space will appeal to a broad range of readers and will be a very human and compelling contribution to our understanding of how we all have been influenced by rapid technological change.

—Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden

Weaving together personal narratives while telling a broader cultural story, Anna Leahy and Doug Dechow have written a book that is as delightful as it is instructive. The Challenger shuttle exploded on my eighth birthday, and in curious ways it seems that my life has been framed and punctuated by space travel; after reading this book, I understand why. If I’ve never felt comfortable with the label Generation X, it’s because I’m more accurately a member of Generation Space. Exploring linguistic subtleties and technological details, ranging across scientific anecdotes and poetic insights, Generation Space: A Love Story is truly an adventure, and a discovery.

—Christopher Schaberg, author of The End of Airports

In this engaging and deeply reported memoir, Anna Leahy and Douglas Dechow capture the unique mixture of nostalgia, hope, and derring-do that surrounds humanity’s successful attempt to puncture the veil of space. Generation Space is a book that will resonate with the children of that Apollo era and one that asks the urgent question that few seem willing to answer in the 21st century: where do we go from here?

—Tom Zoellner, author of Train

Generation Space is an engaging tale of two love affairs: the authors’ love for one another and America’s fascination with lunar landings and interplanetary travel. Like twin moons in similar orbits, the stories become inseparable. Kudos to Anna Leahy and Douglas R. Dechow for reminding us of all the reasons we constantly reach for the stars.

—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire and Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy

Generation Space presents a unique and personal history of the American space program, focusing not so much on NASA’s already well-documented pioneers or the iconic astronauts and technicians of the moon landings, but on what came after…the space journeys of the past few decades, journeys that have retained the fascination, romance and adventure of their more widely publicized Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo predecessors. Told in alternating chapters by the married couple Anna Leahy and Doug Dechow, a poet and a scientist, this fascinating history is interwoven skillfully with the story of their partnership, shared passion, and personal explorations. “Following the shuttles reminded me that I’d had childhood dreams, that life is full of potential,” writes Dechow. Generation Space is likewise inspiring.

—Gordon McAlpine, author of Woman with a Blue Pencil and The Misadventures of Edgar & Allan Poe series

This book is great fun—an entertaining love story by two writers whose prose makes you feel you are in marvelous company, as you move from Leahy’s perspective to Dechow’s, and the whole thing is full of what I like to call knowledge-bearing sentences: the story of our involvement and fascination with space, and space travel, through their eyes, and in light of their love of each other. A sweet ride all the way.

—Richard Bausch, author of Before, During, After and Something Is Out There

© 2017 by Anna Leahy & Douglas R. Dechow

SECOND STILLHOUSE EDITION, APRIL 2017

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.

All inquiries may be directed to:

Stillhouse Press

4400 University Drive, 3E4 Fairfax, VA 22030 www.stillhousepress.org

Stillhouse Press is an independent, student-run nonprofit press based out of Northern Virginia and established in collaboration with the Fall for the Book festival.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951542

ISBN-10: 0-9969816-1-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-9969816-1-3

eISBN: 978-0-9969816-2-0

Cover design by Douglas J. Luman Interior layout by Kady Dennell

Printed in the United States of America.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR

BOTH

Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.

— Pico Iyer

Ours has never been a conventional love story. We first met on Valentine’s Day of 1989, months after space shuttle Discovery’s return-to-flight mission following the Challenger accident. We became a couple on Thanksgiving of that same year, as Discovery orbited two hundred miles overhead on a secret mission. At the time, we had no idea that we’d meet four of the astronauts who flew those missions.

We’ve been wanderers, looking together for our place in the universe. America’s love affair with space exploration has never been conventional, either. Like NASA, we’ve belonged many places, in our case seven states and even more cities and apartments. In the 1990s, we moved to the DC-area and spent hours upon hours at the National Air and Space Museum, the world’s busiest museum, where we touched a Moon rock with our own fingers. We wended our way through graduate degrees and jobs, and, all the while, the shuttle hummed in the background of our lives, for us and for our whole generation.

Pico Iyer, a visiting writer at our university, wrote, “And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” In 2008, we traveled to new jobs at a university—one of us a poet-professor and the other a scientist-turned-librarian—in Southern California, the birthplace of the space shuttle. Only then, in refreshing foolishness, did we let ourselves get taken in and fall in love again, both with each other and with the Space Age.

The song “When You Wish Upon a Star” claims that it doesn’t matter who you are for your dreams to be fulfilled, that fate intersects with desire in unlikely ways that make all the difference. We wondered whether the reality of our adulthood could match the dreams of our childhood, when we’d wished upon a star. Generation Space chronicles the intertwined love stories of us as a couple and of a culture that has fallen for space and space exploration.

Only months after we’d settled into our home in California, on Saturday, November 29, 2008, space shuttle Endeavour had been orbiting Earth for more than two weeks. Thunderstorms and crosswinds that day made landing at Kennedy Space Center on the eastern edge of Florida too dangerous. NASA didn’t want Endeavour to wait a couple of days for better weather there.

Despite the weather predictions, NASA would decide whether a Kennedy landing would be okay when the time came for the deorbit burn, the point at which Endeavour—orbiting upside-down and tail-first—would fire its engines against the direction it was traveling to slow down and begin its fall through Earth’s atmosphere. Once deorbit burn occurred, there was no stopping descent, no changing their minds. NASA hoped for the best, planned alternatives, and, once committed, saw its plan through. Even though no one expected good enough weather for a safe return to Florida, NASA had two separate times on Sunday at which they could give the “go” for the deorbit burn to land at Kennedy.

Meanwhile, NASA had a backup plan: landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where the military has long done flight testing and which was home to NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center (renamed for Neil Armstrong since then). For the initial three years of the Shuttle program,

Edwards had been the first-choice landing site, but landing shuttles where they launched saved money. Edwards became the backup in 1984, with landings there uncommon and expensive because they required the shuttle to be strapped to the top of a 747 and ferried back to Florida for its next launch. A “no go” at Kennedy would mean that Endeavour would land in its California birthplace, not far from where we’d moved only three months earlier.

“We should go see the shuttle land tomorrow.” A lark, but the idea gripped us. That quick exchange began our path to this book.

That Sunday, the two of us woke before 9:00 a.m. to hang on words from the local radio and stalk CNN for updates. We checked websites for NASA’s updates. We hadn’t wished this hard for bad weather since we longed for snow days in our Midwestern childhoods.

For the shuttle, a complete orbit of Earth took about ninety minutes, and California highway speed limits top out at seventy miles per hour. The situation called to mind a story problem from our grade-school textbooks. Because Endeavour circled Earth almost twice between a final “no go” for Florida and a “go” for California, we would have enough time for the drive to Edwards.

At Edwards, only one possible landing time existed: 1:25 p.m. We became giddy, then worried that our anticipation had the power to clear clouds and calm winds across the country in Florida.

By 9:30 a.m. in California, the first landing opportunity for Kennedy was a “no go.” Two missions earlier, in March, Endeavour’s first opportunity at Kennedy was called off for weather, with better conditions ninety minutes later. By 10:50 a.m. our time, we would know whether the second chance in Florida was also a “no go.” We dressed quickly and then paced from kitchen to living room and back.

The crew on Endeavour had serviced and repaired two rotary joints for the solar arrays of the International Space Station. These joints allow the solar panels, which provide power, to rotate to track the Sun as the space station circles the globe. These arrays of two-sided panels create the illusion of rectangular wings, and they give the otherwise clunky, modular object an elegance, making it look as if the station is floating instead of zipping at almost five miles per second—roughly 17,500 miles per hour—around Earth. The solar panel arrays are why anyone can look up on the right night at the right time and see overhead a spark of light—Sun reflecting off panels—that contains human beings. We have an app on our phones so that we can catch glimpses together.

That Thursday had been Thanksgiving, the day that we’ve celebrated as our own anniversary, when we first kissed and admitted to falling

in love with each other. The crew of Endeavour and the residents of the space station—one Russian among the Americans—ate a traditionally American holiday dinner, complete with turkey, stuffing, and yams. An out-of-this-world celebration of togetherness.

On Sunday, the astronauts woke to the song “Gonna Fly Now” and waited to be told where they would land. We waited alongside, as they circled Earth roughly 250 miles above us. We printed out driving directions from our house in Orange to Edwards Air Force Base.

By 11:00 a.m., both Florida landing times were “no go.” We had roughly two-and-a-half hours to get to Edwards. We grabbed soda and protein bars and jumped into our car. We guided each other; we played to our strengths. The shuttle was coming to California; we would greet it.

In reality, we hadn’t planned ahead well. We had to stop for gas on the way out of town, taking valuable minutes needed at the other end of our journey. Though we saw on the map an entrance with public access to the Air Force Base, we didn’t know where to go from there. In addition, because the mountains lie between our home and the landing site, no direct path existed. The two of us rushed against NASA’s clock with anticipation instead of information.

Driving in our aging Saturn, we saw what boom and bust meant in the early days of the nation’s economic collapse. A couple of hours from the established suburbs surrounding Los Angeles, looming signs pointed to deals on large houses, many of which had never been occupied and some of which hadn’t even been finished and stood abandoned. A gas station and one fast food restaurant survived in front of a strip mall that displayed mostly empty storefronts. SUVs buzzed around the equivalent of a few blocks, but the surrounding land looked empty for miles, as if this place were a social experiment or a town quarantined. We’d never before seen somewhere indefinitely half-accomplished. We did not say aloud then what this meant to us: this unnerving landscape echoed NASA’s announcement that shuttles would stop flying; it echoed the abandonment of manned space exploration. Space exploration remained half-accomplished too; we haven’t yet set foot on Mars.

We drove on, headed onto a crest above Rogers Dry Lake. With landing time approaching quickly, we pulled off where a dozen other cars had formed a haphazard line on the side of the road. We walked a few steps in one direction, then in another. We didn’t see many people at this juncture, so there must have been somewhere else more suitable. Tiny lizards scurried through the underbrush. We saw the runway in the distance below and didn’t have time to search for a better location.

“Is that west?” We traced our fingers along a possible flight path. We pondered aloud. “We came in from the north. The ocean is over there?”

That sunny November day in the California desert, we had no map of the blue sky, no coordinates. Our hats and hands shaded our eyes. Another couple in our proximity guessed at a direction from which the shuttle would appear, and our eyes followed their gestures. We both scanned the horizon, our minds focused on the singular task.

We heard the first sonic boom, air ripping apart then slapping back together as the shuttle passed through it faster than the speed of sound. Then, immediately after, the second boom. The startling rhythm of a shuttle landing. But we didn’t see the vehicle. When a jet flies overhead, its engines emit a sensory cue so that ears, then eyes, orient us toward the aircraft’s flight path. The over-in-an-instant double bang of the shuttle’s sonic boom wasn’t enough visceral information; our minds didn’t keep up with the shuttle’s path.

“Where is it?” We heard each other’s desperation. “Do you see it?”

How far away was the orbiter when we heard the booms? We didn’t know. We should have. We’d read about the shuttle and how it works. How steep was the final glide? Seven times steeper than for an airliner, we’d read. The orbiter slowed, dropped below the speed of sound. From this distance, how big was it supposed to look? We’d lost perspective. Gear dropped with fifteen seconds left. Landing was imminent. But we couldn’t catch a glimpse. Our eyes searched ocean of sky, glanced over mottled lakebed. We wanted to know this orbiter personally.

In days to come, we said, “We drove to Edwards to see the shuttle land.” A semantically true statement that let friends think we saw wheels touch down, chute opening behind to slow the most complex machine ever built. Later, we learned that Endeavour didn’t land on the main runway, which was being upgraded at the time. So even if we’d known the shuttle’s usual path, we didn’t know to look for the shorter, temporary Runway 4 Left. At a military base, runways aren’t marked for spectators. Our mistakes that day prepared us for the launches that we did see.

That day in 2008, Endeavour—a real-life spaceship—stood small in the distance, in front of a clump of buildings. We saw it with our own eyes. “I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof,” Douglas Adams wrote in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. “But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also absolutely be like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not.” Hours earlier, this object had flown beyond Earth’s atmosphere. We squinted to make out the orbiter’s contours. We felt like children, fascinated, curious.

We leaned into each other, our hands coming to rest in familiar places, physically reminding ourselves—pinch me!—that we were in this place overlooking a space shuttle, that we shared this experience, including our mistakes. Love can’t be explained so much as it must be lived. That shuttle-bolt out of the sky imparted inexplicable clarity we’d never before felt about the long-term future: we wanted to build our lives together, and we wanted space exploration to continue. Our hearts were in these two dreams.

As we stared at Endeavour, a small group of vehicles approached the orbiter. One truck hosed away whatever toxic materials and fumes surrounded the orbiter. The astronauts usually crawled out within an hour of wheel-stop. At Edwards, no press waited for comments, and spectators like us were far away. Shortly after landing at Edwards, the crew could be eating Mexican food at a renowned local restaurant.

We left too soon. As far away as we were from the tarmac, we couldn’t have discerned one astronaut from another. Of the seven astronauts we didn’t see that day, four flew on the last three Shuttle flights. We saw those four astronauts up close and in person in the years that followed, in the years that we followed Shuttle’s end and made this book.

In our photographs of Endeavour that day, it is a white speck you’d need to know to look for and trust that it is what we say it is. The real proof that we were there and saw a space shuttle rests in each other. The Thanksgiving trek to the desert was a shifting point in our lives. The result: we married in Las Vegas the following Thanksgiving, a year after this unexpected epiphany and twenty years after we’d first kissed, and we reoriented our lives around the end of Shuttle a year after that. We let our longings lead us.

We have come to understand that those of us born after Sputnik in 1957 and before the first space shuttle mission in 1981 are Generation Space. It’s an alternative way to understand the slice of time into which the two of us were born and the transition in the United States from post-WWII Baby Boomers to supposedly well-educated, change-hungry, racially heterogeneous Gen Xers. The two of us were born into Apollo a few years before the Moon landing and were in high school when the shuttle first took flight in 1981, twenty years to the day after Yuri Gargarin had become the first human in space. We were in college when Challenger broke apart in 1986, and much of Generation Space was in grade school or high school then, watching, knowing that a school teacher had perished before their eyes. We grew up thinking travel to Mars was inevitable, perhaps not far off in the future. To understand Generation Space offers one way to understand the legacy and potential we leave to Millennials as well.

Our Space Age love story is a way to understand history, culture, technology, and each other more deeply. Even among the dedicated space reporters we met, few connected the minutia with which they were fascinated to their own lives or to cultural views and moods. News and science reporting provide important versions of the story, but our version explores who the two of us are, both as a couple and as part of a generation.

We made a pact to retain the joy we felt that day in the desert but never to be as clueless in our pursuit. Part of that pact became following the last space shuttle launches, knowing by experience in addition to reputation. In Moby-Dick, the classic tale of searching for one’s whale—the object of one’s obsession—Herman Melville writes, “there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally.” We wanted to know our white whales personally. We became explorers together—witnesses and investigators—of Generation Space.

In Generation Space: A Love Story, we take turns as a poet and as a scientist-librarian, investigating where this generation has been and where we’re going. While the two of us share many interests and experiences, we don’t always think about ideas and information the same way. Each of us tells different parts—different chapters—of this story; each chapter is in the voice of one or the other of us. We intend this back-and-forth to encompass more than either of us can on our own and, thereby, to capture a body of thought and emotion for our generation.

To tell the story of the Space Age, we begin with Sputnik and the Mercury project, which occurred before we were born, and the Gemini and Apollo programs of our childhood. Then, we chronicle our experiences with Shuttle’s end and how that led us to understand the Space Age, Generation Space, and our own personal relationship. We hope that readers will fall in love with the Space Age all over again, as we did, and, in doing so, understand this shared slice of history. In the end, we ponder whether—or, rather, when—we’re going to Mars. We thought we’d be there already, but maybe that’s a multigenerational story we’ve only begun to narrate.

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING

ANNA

We know what we can see:

that which reflects light, catches our eyes in the night,

hits the mirror of our collective telescope.

—Anna Leahy, from “The Visible Universe”

When my sister was in kindergarten (at the age when precocious Doug started browsing Popular Mechanics), she, like multitudes of kindergarteners in Catholic schools in 1972, made a holiday ornament for the family Christmas tree. Her teacher handed out toothpicks and foam the shape and size of golf balls. Brigid stuck a few toothpicks into the white polystyrene. Then, the teacher spray-painted it silver. Brigid sprinkled it with glitter. Behold, my sister had created the Star of Bethlehem.

At five years of age, my sister thought of stars as twinkle-twinkles that catch one’s eyes in the night sky. She didn’t know then that the twinkle we see is the result of a thermonuclear reaction that transforms hydrogen into helium. She didn’t know about different kinds of stars— red giants, white dwarfs, pulsating stars—nor that the Sun is the star at the center of our solar system. The Star of Bethlehem may have been a planet or a comet, but my sister knew it as the “star of wonder, star of night.” But when Brigid held her ornament by its thick velvet ribbon to show our mother what she’d made in school, our mother exclaimed with great pride, “You made Sputnik!” That my mother recognized a spacecraft shows how deeply space exploration entered people’s consciousness. My mother had been a history major and finished her law degree shortly after I was born. When my sister produced this marvel, my mother was a leader in state government and still a practicing Catholic. She had little interest in science, and it’d be decades before the Church acknowledged Galileo shouldn’t have been imprisoned for saying Earth orbited the Sun. Still, my mother, like most of her generation, knew Sputnik when she saw it, even when it was meant to be something else.

On October 4, 1957, from the desert steppe of what is now Kazakhstan, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. For the first time, something human-made reached beyond Earth’s atmosphere and into space, circling there. At the time, my parents hadn’t yet met. My father had graduated from college as an English major (like me) though he was the first in his family to go to college and was doing his requisite military service as an enlisted man; his number had come up in the draft, so he’d put off career and love. While the future astronauts were busy as military test pilots, he was stationed overseas at a depot with underground caves for maintaining ready-to-roll forces. East Germany—the Soviet Bloc—wasn’t far from where he cleaned nuclear warheads. I imagine everyone there on alert, waiting to see whether Sputnik meant war.

Back home in the United States, as Howard E. McCurdy recalls in Space and the American Imagination, Sputnik became “the media event of the decade.” That Sputnik weekend in 1957, in my mother-in-law’s childhood home, the firstborn in a litter of kittens was named Sputnika in homage to the satellite that had captivated the world’s attention. An odd choice on the Cold War home front in the Midwestern heartland. At the same time, in Pasadena, California—several times farther away from Illinois than Sputnik was from Earth—a young girl who’d grow up to be my husband’s boss walked in the San Rafael hills, near a hub of American rocketry, to catch a nighttime glimpse of Sputnik as it passed overhead. Across the United States, people strained to see the Russian orb glittering in the infinite darkness.

Sputnik 1 was a gleaming, aluminum sphere weighing 184 pounds and studded with four radio antennae. Sputnik is a Russian word for fellow traveler. This particular companion, roughly the size of a beach ball, became the first stride in the Space Race that ran through the next decade into which I was born. Sputnik launched on a Friday.

By the following Monday, physicists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory hummed with the news. George Weiffenbach and William Guier, two physicists, grabbed a receiver and decided to try to pick up Sputnik’s signals. The Soviets were broadcasting an accessible signal, proof to the world so that nobody could claim it a hoax. Even amateurs quickly picked up the satellite’s radio signals.

Of course, there were tape recorders on hand. Weiffenbach and Guier began to wonder whether they could figure out the satellite’s movement based on changes in the waveform of the signals. The Doppler effect explains why the sound of an ambulance siren seems to change in pitch as it gets closer, passes, and moves away, even though the siren emits the same patterned sound all along. The scientists surmised Sputnik’s movements by listening to it like a siren. Within a few hours, they calculated both Sputnik’s speed and course overhead.

Sputnik’s ninety-two-minute orbit was elliptical, rather than a perfect circle, so that, at its most distant point—known as the apogee of its ellipsis—Sputnik was almost 600 miles away from Earth. The perigee— its closest point—was a mere 134 or so miles from the ground, roughly the distance between Philadelphia and Washington, DC. In order to remain suspended in its gravitational dance with Earth, Sputnik traveled at a speed of eighteen thousand miles per hour.

At first, my father surely didn’t realize that what was going on overhead would change the future, that it had made real the space travel of the B-movies he liked. He rode the secret elevator into caves with three fellow soldiers, tossed his radiation detection badge into a bin every now and then, and dreamed of fried eggs and bacon. He did not realize Sputnik would change soldiering, nor his family’s sense of security at home.

The following spring, a higher-up—probably running through national security scenarios—asked those scientists at Johns Hopkins another question: If you know the satellite’s path and position, can you use the satellite to determine the location of a stationary receiver or user on the ground? That was a huge switch in perspective: not only could we get a satellite into space to learn about what’s out there, but we could use it to find and track what’s down here. Indeed, a transmitting object in space could tell us exactly where an object with a receiver was on the ground. Within three years, a year after my father was honorably discharged, the United States military was using satellites to aid submarine navigation on Earth. Years later, we have unmanned drones—a controversial development—navigated via satellite mapping and tracking.

In other words, those two physicists in 1957 spent a few hours understanding an idea that gave birth to Transit, the first satellite navigation system and the precursor to the Global Positioning System (GPS), an idea hatched in 1973. This system of satellite-based navigation was shared for civilian use in 1983, when it was called the Defense Navigation Satellite System. Today, GPS tells us when to make a turn, as if we can follow the second star to the right like Peter Pan and go straight on till morning. More than a thousand satellites now thread through space above us in low-Earth orbit.

When Sputnik launched, my mother was in high school. Children, including my mother, must have watched the satellite’s trail in awe. Adults—parents, teachers, businessmen, national leaders, and soldiers like my dad—soon had a different reaction: fear. They’d grown up crouching under their school desks for nuclear attack drills (as I had for tornado drills), and, if the Soviets could put a satellite into space, they could put nuclear warheads on similar rockets and send them anywhere. In his book Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower, James R. Killian, who advised the president about science, recounts what he’d thought at the time: “Sputnik I created a crisis of confidence that swept the country like a windblown forest fire. Overnight there developed a widespread fear that the country lay at the mercy of the Russian military machine.”

Fear of and competition with the Soviets upped the stakes for the United States to get a satellite into orbit quickly. For Americans, secondbest didn’t jive with the previous decade’s sense of self-satisfaction. This country had invented the atom bomb and won World War II with it. Though Russia had been on the winning side in that war, that nation had lost millions of its people, and her cities and industries had been devastated. When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, the United States responded by developing the bigger, badder thermonuclear bomb. The United States was not to be outdone. This country had been first in flight, with Orville and Wilbur Wright taking to the air in 1903. Chuck Yeager had been first to break the sound barrier, flying high above the desert in the blue, blue California sky in 1947. So, in space, an arena that was clearly an outgrowth of aviation, how had this country finished last in a two-nation race? Last, in the Cold War, could mean dead last.

The nation settled into the notion of mutually assured destruction. The effects were writ large across America, and I was born into it. Seemingly overnight, K-12 classrooms, for instance, refocused curricula to produce future engineers and scientists who would lead the United States to number one again. So-called New Math emerged to turn kids’ attentions from abstract formulas to practical conundrums that could be solved mathematically. If a couple leaves their house by 11:00 a.m. and travels at an average of 60 miles per hour over the mountains and through the desert—how long before we see a space shuttle land? Though New Math had been discussed decades earlier, education expert Angela Walmsley points out that its popularity soared in part because “federal funds […] became available through the United States National Defense Education act of 1958, partly as a result of Sputnik.” Cause: Sputnik. Effect: me, as a fourth-grader sixteen years later, poring over frustrating story problems for hours.

It’s not as if the United States hadn’t been working on its own satellite. But the initial foray worsened the US position in the Space Race. On December 6, 1957, roughly two months after Sputnik, in a live nationwide television broadcast from Cape Canaveral, viewers witnessed the catastrophic explosion of America’s first attempted satellite launch, Vanguard Test Vehicle Three, or TV3. I think of the engineers that day and cringe; I can hardly imagine the pressure and disappointment as those in the blockhouse watching the launch saw it rise a few feet and then drop back to the ground in a hellfire.

Vanguard means on the forefront, on the cutting edge. That’s what the United States wanted to reclaim from the Communists; for the Soviets, the term referred to the revolutionary working classes under Vladimir Lenin’s rule. A Soviet newspaper called it “pshik,” and the London Daily Mirror exclaimed, “OH DEAR!!!” As the lore goes, even Americans called the failed mission “Kaputnik,” “Flopnik,” and “Stayputnik.” According to NASA history, haughty delegates to the United Nations from the Soviet Union offered US delegates technical assistance through their program to aid backward nations.

Vanguard was planned as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), an idea that emerged at a party in 1950 at physicist James Van Allen’s home. By the time it began in 1957, this eighteen-month collaboration among researchers in sixty-seven nations included the Soviet Union and Communist Bloc countries. It was designed to better understand Earth— its landmasses, its oceans, its atmosphere, and even its relationship with the Sun. People wanted to see Earth as it really was, and they were going to do it together, as a planet. The IGY’s idealistic planetary unity, though, was a thin veneer of civility over Cold War divisions.

And then Sputnik beat us.

Despite President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s reticence to use military hardware for space exploration, especially during a year designated for international cooperation, the US satellite Explorer 1 rose from Florida’s coast into orbit on January 31, 1958, atop a Jupiter C, the civilian version of an Army surface-to-surface missile. To my mind, the image of Explorer’s success is a photograph of its builder William Pickering, its instrument designer Van Allen, and Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist responsible for the V-2 combat missile that had demolished London and Antwerp in World War II. I look at that photograph now: three smiling men, arms raised to hoist a model of the eighty-inch Explorer 1 above their heads. All wore dark suits and ties, their white shirt cuffs revealed as they reached up. Van Allen stretched as if on tip toes between the two others, his fingertips on the model. The tall von Braun grasped the top third of the rocket firmly and smiled the widest. They liked building rockets; they liked being winners.

During the four months it collected data, Explorer made one of the most dramatic discoveries of the IGY: radiation counts varied with the satellite’s distance above Earth. Data collected by Explorer 3, launched in March, confirmed that this planet is encircled by two distinct bands of charged particles spanning thousands of miles, named the Van Allen radiation belts for the man whose instruments detected them.

The universe became more visible. My interest in this discovery is as much about seeing my surroundings as a poet as it is about my genuine interest in science. It is as much about the connection between the scientific and artistic worldviews as it is about my and also Doug’s way of looking at the world around us. As Leonard Schlain says in his book Art & Physics, “While their methods differ radically, artists and physicists share the desire to investigate the ways the interlocking pieces of reality fit together.” When I see visual representations of these belts, I imagine Earth in its larger context, surrounded by a reverberation, a shadow of sorts stretched like a Slinky or a tire. There’s more to beauty than words, despite my ability and desire to form ideas through language.

Vanguard, initially a debacle, got back into action on March 17, 1958 (more than five months after Sputnik 1 and about six weeks after Explorer 1). At three-and-a-quarter pounds, roughly sixty times smaller than Sputnik, the Vanguard satellite was a pipsqueak compared with Sputnik and Explorer. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev called it the grapefruit satellite. Yet, of those three early missions to space—Sputnik, Explorer, Vanguard—only Vanguard is still up there. In fact, Vanguard 1, though quiet now, should circle the planet for two hundred years; Vanguard 3 may drift a hundred years after that. These satellites, built by human hands and launched before I was born, will outlast everyone now on Earth.

Eight years before I was born, Sputnik marked the beginning of the Space Age. Very little scientific data, however, was collected and relayed back to Earth by the three Sputnik spacecraft. They were mostly for show. Instead, information gathered through that space program led to improvements in guidance systems of intercontinental ballistic missiles. So, the events of the official year of global unity made more effective our ability to destroy each other.

Within a year of Sputnik’s launch, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, was formed. Even the burgeoning beatnik counter-culture formed its name as a portmanteau of Beat Generation and Sputnik. My parents—in 1957, one was a teenager, the other, a young adult—knew a world before Sputnik, before NASA. I never did. I was born into this new way of seeing Earth and envisioning the future; I am Generation Space.

CHAPTER 2

LIGHT THIS CANDLE

ANNA

Star sailor, history’s tailor, spacefarer,

how far you’ve needled your path through air, past blue halo, our circle of vapor,

past the vast figure-eight of plasma swathes,

how near to infinity and back.

That happy past has gone by, is bygone, and then it came slapping back again, booming on boosters, rolling upside down,

catching its breath as if overcoming dynamic forces requires only great inspiration. Will posterity shear gravity along the seam, trail a wake,

wake us? The astronaut’s trajectory

has stitched the warp and weft of history.

—Anna Leahy, “Trajectory”

In early May of 1961, more than four years before I was born and long before she deemed my sister’s holiday ornament Sputnik, my mother, still a college student, was in a car accident. Bruised and sore, she lay in a hospital bed. When a nurse brought her personal effects from the Emergency Room, my mother noticed cash missing from her wallet. The nurse said that Chicago’s police accepted such items as perks of the job and she was lucky all her jewelry was there. This was Mayor Richard J. Daley’s city, known not only for corruption that included the police but also for vote rigging in the presidential election of John F. Kennedy the year before. (My mother, much to her satisfaction, would later win as an Independent candidate to the Illinois Constitutional Convention against Daley’s political machine.)

On the morning of May 5, a doctor came into my mother’s room. He turned on the TV, and other physicians wandered in. My mother’s room was one of few in the hospital to have a television set; it was crowded that Friday. Across the country, forty-five million people watched the same event: the first American in space.

While a quarter of the nation prepared to watch on television the launch of Alan Shepard inside his Freedom 7 capsule, the beaches and roadways near Cape Canaveral were also crowded with the curious. This launch was the culmination of a two-year public spectacle. Since the first press-packed announcement of the hopeful spacefarers of the Mercury program—the Mercury Seven, as they were commonly called—these astronauts-in-training had never been far from the public eye. The Cold War American media fed the public’s gaze.

The nightly news, which gained influence and power steadily through the 1960s, followed the popular story, but the most in-depth and detailed coverage appeared in newspapers and magazines. In fact, each of the seven astronauts was signed to an exclusive deal with Life magazine, which featured them on the September 14, 1959, cover, with the promise of a print version of today’s reality show: “First-Person Reports by the Astronauts. Start of Continuing Exclusive Stories of Epochal Mission.” Readers saw John Glenn in a spacesuit, Deke Slayton spinning on his back in a training simulator, and Alan Shepard testing the capsule seat molded to fit his body. Image after image of astronauts and their nuclear families were displayed for all of America to see. The public savored every tidbit about each homegrown space sailor.

That morning of the first launch of an astronaut, the blockhouse for Launch Complex-5, where the flight would be controlled and monitored, stood barely a hundred yards from the steaming, popping Redstone rocket. Atop that rocket, rising sixty-five feet into the Florida sky, a silver-suited Shepard sat in the Freedom 7 spacecraft, growing more impatient by the moment. I’ve toured that blockhouse, which is now a part of a museum and has the aura of a mausoleum. Everything is entombed behind glass; you can see, but you can’t touch. Each console contains an ashtray, many of which are pulled open and still hold a cigarette butt or two. Shepard may have been testy because it had been so long since his last cigarette.

In May, Florida is damp and hot. This blockhouse must have felt especially cramped and clammy that day, with 130 engineers, scientists, managers, and fellow astronauts—all with anxious hopes—crammed into the tiny area. I imagine Wernher von Braun, tanned with slickedback hair, smoking incessantly while leaning to look at changing numbers on a monitor. The view of Shepard’s rocket through thick safety glass would have been a thin-section, ever-so-brief view of the launch.

That morning, while the men in the blockhouse and television viewers across the United States waited, Alan Shepard’s mercurial temperament turned snappish. He had to pee. The countdown had proceeded in fits and starts. Stoppages for cloud cover and a glitch in a power supply unit had turned the affair into a more-than-four-hour ordeal. His silver spacesuit—a Frankenstein-like wrapping of zippers and straps based on the Navy’s Mark IV high-altitude flight suit—was designed for a very short flight, with no accommodation for bodily waste elimination. Chatter among the medical team, flight controllers, and engineers undoubtedly suggested, Can he hold it? If he could have, he surely would have. That’s a skill I learned when I was a toddler, with my sister on the way and my mother unable to fathom two kids in diapers with a legal and political career underway. Shepard was a test pilot with an iron will, a Navy man, and one of the most private astronauts in the history of manned spaceflight. If he got out of the spacecraft to urinate, not only would the whole world find out, but the already-delayed launch would be delayed yet again. So he peed in his suit.

Finally, after all those hours, near the end of his patience, Shepard uttered one of the more famous one-liners of the Space Age: “Light this candle!” In full, he said, “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” I’ve seen the quote written in both forms—with a question mark, with an exclamation point—and, while the question mark is grammatically correct, the exclamation point is emphatically correct. He was ready to leave the ground.

A short burst of white smoke shot from the rocket’s tail: the mission had begun. Shepard’s launch vehicle, the Army’s Redstone ballistic missile, was similar to the machine that launched Explorer 1, with modifications to make it a little safer for human flight. The rocket’s rise began slowly. Gaining speed, to be sure, but America’s first astronaut didn’t disappear in the blink of an eye. My breath still catches when I watch that rise, that slight bend, even on my computer screen.

Freedom 7 burst through the atmosphere. It arced for a few minutes. It came rushing back down as planned. The astronaut was subjected to weightlessness, but he was strapped so tightly to his perfectly fitted seat that he didn’t really experience it. Shepard’s path into history was described as a ballistic, suborbital trajectory. Ballistic comes a Greek word meaning to throw, and Freedom 7, with Shepard nestled tightly inside, was thrown roughly 116 miles above Earth’s surface and out over the Atlantic some three hundred miles downrange from Florida’s coast, where he had begun. Shepard’s trip lasted just over fifteen minutes.

The astronaut had little time to do much of anything during the flight. He demonstrated some control over the small spacecraft by firing hydrogen peroxide powered jets to change its pitch (nose up and down) and yaw (nose side to side). He glanced through the tiny window afforded the astronauts to discern what outer space looked like, but his vantage wasn’t great. Freedom 7 was also equipped with a periscope, which extended out and above the spacecraft’s side after it was beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Shepard used that to look back at our world. He mentioned cloud cover and said, “What a beautiful view.” But that view probably wasn’t very beautiful. Tom Wolfe described Shepard’s situation in his book The Right Stuff:

He knew he was in space, but there was no way to tell it!… He looked out the periscope, the only way he had of looking at the earth. The goddamned gray filter! He couldn’t see any colors at all! He had never changed the filter! The first American to ever fly this high above the earth—and it was a black-and-white movie.

Despite the filter and physically limited view, Shepard kept his lack of clear and vibrant vision to himself. However it appeared, the perspective from space was an inherently beautiful view.

In my mother’s hospital room, the hubbub was over more quickly than she’d expected. That’s what she remembered: how fast it happened. Forty years later, I stood in the sand of Cocoa Beach, which I knew well from my favorite show as a five-year-old, I Dream of Jeannie, and its space program, its magic. Standing there myself, I looked in the direction Shepard’s flight took. I’ve thought about his fifteen minutes and wondered if that’s where Andy Warhol got his notion about fame, because, although he was famous before his flight—as all of the Mercury Seven were—that fifteen minutes of sitting on his back and talking over a radio made Shepard more famous than he could have imagined. There were parades for him in Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C. More television interviews. More meetings with heads-of-state. More, more, more, and the nation couldn’t get enough.

When Shepard launched, it was the third scheduled attempt in four days. Even before that, launch day had been pushed back and back again for the better part of a year, as engineers worked on the man-rated version—approved for launching human beings into space—of the military’s Redstone booster. If delays hadn’t occurred, Shepard would have been the first human in space. He wasn’t.

Instead, during those delays, Yuri Gagarin flew to space on April 12, 1961, less than a month before Shepard. The Soviet Union beat the United States in the Space Race—first with a satellite, then with a man. I visited the Soviet Union as a college student in 1986, shortly after the Challenger space shuttle accident, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, and my father’s death from cancer at age fifty-three. I was twenty-one years old, on the cusp of adulthood, the same age my mother was when she watched Shepard’s flight in that upside-down year: the numbers nineteen and sixty-one are upside-down images of each other, and the year became topsy-turvy with Cold War tensions. That January, President Eisenhower had warned of what he called “the military industrial complex” of which he must have thought Shepard’s flight was a part. Then, John F. Kennedy, on whom my mother pinned her hopes for a more just world, became president, only to be faced with the attempted overthrow of Cuba’s communist dictator, Fidel Castro, in the Bay of Pigs invasion days before the Soviets beat the United States to space.