08 July 2011 – Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida
Jeff Knox stepped off the shuttle bus and turned around. He watched his daughter Sabrina bounce off the NASA bus next. Her black ponytail pulled through the back of her Boston Bruins hat, swished from side to side with each step. Jeff grimaced at the thought of the boys who would soon swarm around his increasingly pretty little girl.
Jeff had scored tickets to watch the launch of STS-135, the last Space Shuttle mission, from within Kennedy Space Center’s confines rather than somewhere more distant. Thanks to a partnership between the Nashoba News Corporation and the Devens Regional High School Free Press, his eldest son Alex held valid press credentials. NASA upgraded their visitor passes to press passes, allowing them access to the press observation gantry at Complex 39, three miles from the launch pad. Allison Newbury, Ph. D. whispering a word or two in people’s ears hadn’t hurt, either. She’d been one of Jeff’s high school girlfriends, as well as the project lead on the astronomy package being launched today.
“Why are we wasting our time at this place again, Dad?” Ryan Knox griped as the family stepped off the bus.
“Ryan, I’ve explained this to you three times already. This is history, the final shuttle launch. We explored more of the space program’s history here during the last two days, also. If you pull your attention away from your phone for half a second, you might learn something – like where that all-important phone’s technology got started.”
“Right…” his middle child snorted and muttered under his breath.
Jeff ignored his son’s sullen response. Until the middle of the hockey season this spring, Ryan’s attitude hadn’t been an issue. Jeff figured the reason for the change was all the testosterone flooding Ryan’s body during puberty. Alex – Ryan’s twin – hadn’t changed much at all emotionally. Physically he was now three inches taller than his brother. Fraternal twins, not identical, he and Ryan had always been different. Jeff thanked God for that, especially now.
Jeff and Keiko led their family up the stairs to the platform that overlooked Launch Complex 39. Alex set up his camera and tripod to record the mission’s liftoff. Ryan unfolded his chair and sulked. Sabrina and Jeff looked around, taking in the view. He sighed. Alex walked over and joined them after setting up the camera.
“I’ve wanted to come here since I was a boy,” Jeff said in a low voice to Alex and Sabrina. “Touring the Space Center these last two days has been great, but watching a launch live? I’ve been dreaming of that since I can remember.”
“Yeah, the Mercury program must have been cool to see back when you were a kid, huh, Dad?”
Jeff rolled his eyes at Sabrina’s question. His daughter already used sarcasm far too well.
“Shaddap, kid,” they all said at the same time.
Jeff glared at Sabrina and Alex while his youngest and oldest laughed. He used that phrase often – too often, it seemed. Jeff sighed and shook his head before turning away to set up his chair.
NASA had scheduled the launch for 11:26 a.m. – a little over an hour and a half from now – but the mission clock showed only forty-five minutes remaining in the countdown. The difference was a product of planned ‘holds’ built into the launch countdown. As a result, they used the time to discuss various space-related topics, ranging from orbital mechanics to life aboard the spacecraft to physiologic stresses of spaceflight, just to fill the time.
Ryan continued to stare at his phone instead, more than a little miffed the family wasn’t somewhere he could at least watch a baseball game or two.
Most of the family rose from their chairs at T-minus nine minutes to get a clear view of the launch. Unfortunately, the gantry rail blocked part of it. The countdown restarted after the final planned hold. Ryan never got out of his chair. He just sat there with his phone in his hand, playing a game. He couldn’t look more bored if he tried. Radio transmissions to and from the pad, and announcements from Launch Control at KSC, echoed across the sun-splashed base adding narration to the moment.
Jeff recalled the Challenger disaster as he looked through the humid air at Atlantis in the distance. He remembered the buzz surrounding the mission slated for that fateful morning in January of 1986. A teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, would have been the first teacher, the first civilian in space, and would have returned to her classroom following the mission. A lump still formed in his throat when the images from that day surfaced in his mind.
Seventy-three seconds into the mission, the Challenger exploded, killing all aboard and causing the booster rockets to fly away wildly. The Y-shaped exhaust trail mocked the question everyone would soon ask over and over. Jeff watched the tragedy happen live on television in his physics class. A horrible, shocking silence swallowed the previous cheering in his classroom. Crying broke the silence moments later.
“Nothing worth doing is ever truly without risk,” Jeff often said to his kids, and that was why.
Jeff’s heart rate increased as the clock wound toward zero. The orbiter’s access arm retracted at T-minus seven minutes, thirty seconds, and the ‘cap’ atop the external fuel tank at T-minus two fifty-five. Those were the only visible indicators of a progressing countdown the family could see from where they stood. An unplanned hold at T-minus thirty-one seconds gave Jeff a chance to get his excitement under control again. At T-minus three seconds, the orbiter’s main engines fired, followed by the solid rocket boosters at zero, though no sound yet reached their ears.
The shockwave pushed the humidity in the air away from the pad in a briefly visible cloud. It sped across the Florida salt marshes, bending reeds and grasses before slamming into the family braced against the deafening roar of the spacecraft. The craft tore itself free of the planet’s gravity with over seven million pounds of thrust. A great gout of yellow-white flame pushed the white and orange spacecraft higher and higher. The thundering bass rumble vibrated the metal structure, the air around them, and the very organs inside their bodies.
“Go …” Jeff whispered into the roaring noise.
Every launch he’d watched on television – and now in-person – recalled the grief of that failed launch twenty-five years in the past. He still held his breath whenever Launch Control broadcast: “Go for throttle up!” The towering white exhaust trail grew as the craft rolled onto its back and climbed over the ocean to the east. Minutes passed as he tracked the progress of the orbiter long past the point he could see it. Finally, he blinked tears from his eyes and turned to his family.
Sabrina stood immobile. Her eyes stared wide, unblinking as she gazed skyward. She enjoyed watching launches on television with her dad, but this was orders of magnitude beyond that. The concussion from the initial engine ignition stunned her. The sustained roar awed her like nothing else ever had. Even after the orbiter had receded into the sky above, taking the sound and fury with it, she stood staring in fascination.
“What do you think?” her father asked in a low voice, startling her. “Do you want to build them now like your brother?”
“‘Build them?’” Sabrina echoed while turning to look at him. “No, Dad …” she whispered.
Her gaze returned to the sky. Her path in life was now clear.
“I wanna fly them!”
