Friday, May 21, 2004

The Well-Hung Discovery

Last week at the Kennedy Space Center, the first of the reinforced carbon-carbon panels were hung on the leading edges of Discovery's delta wings.

Here is why I'm bothering you and me with this: In terms of retunring to flight, that tiny little carbon square is enormously significant.

Columbia, although destroyed on re-entry, was lost to us on the launch. We lost her the instant the solid rocket boosters lifted her off the pad, when debris falling from her orange external tank punched a hole in generally the same area techs are currently dressing on Discovery. That the titanium frame of Discovery, she who also first carried the torch after Challenger was lost, has now been graced with this vital element means we are patching over the holes, moving forward, inching our way back to the launchpad. I sat awash in bittersweetness when I read the news from my desk at my generous-with-the-benefits-but-not-so-much-with-the-happiness day job.

I don't write about the space program much. This is not because I do not care. It is because I care too much. It is because it pains me to see these lovely ladies grounded, their engines and gears and thrusters totally silent. I can't take that; I can't take the frustrating opposition to a Mars and Moon base, and I can't take the fact that I am now enclosed in a windowless office doing meaningless shitwork when I once stood before the American people with a tiny model orbiter in my hand and said, "This is who we are. And this is how we are, at this very moment, touching something much larger than you and me and John Glenn put together."

When I left the Kennedy Space Center, I badly needed reliability and hothouse handling; and so of course I fell into the emotionally stable world of Thoroughbred racing. Writing is my life and space is my passion, one of many-- but before there was writing, there were horses. Horses are home, the background music of my near-Kentucky childhood. Horses are summer--mountain streams, the anti-cage that was grade school, the aching bliss of an unplanned Tuesday afternoon. A horse has never, not once, asked me to add in my head or failed to call the next morning. A horse may fade in the stretch, throw a shoe, throw a rider, or break your heart when it breaks a leg, but a horse will not fall out of the sky in firey chunks when the best engineering in the history of man took the trouble to put it up there with such care and precision. Horses are nature, akin to God. Spacecraft, built upon numbers and metal and man, are fashioned in an attempt to touch God. I love them both, the runners and the rockets, with all of me; they have alternately wounded and exhilarated me in return. And I carry them both so closely next to me I can scarcely breathe, against my heart, my very being-- exactly the place where, I suppose, other people should be.

All this past year has proven is that structure in any form devastates me. I can't hack it. You who are normal, rejoice. These simple things that other people do every day--arise, make the breakfast, get the bills, do the job, back again--exhaust and frustrate me to a fury. I blame Clinton.

The loss of Columbia, combined with the devastating effects of a year of morale-busting at the hands of a subhuman subcontractor, pushed me here until I can dig myself out again. It was my choice to go there and my choice to leave. I would do it all over again. I miss it terribly. I miss explaining how one goes to the bathroom in space, I miss watching solid rocket booster skirts trundle past me on the highway.

And my God, the silence is deafening.

1 comment:

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