I bought the ticket. Flew all night, drove all day. From Hong Kong to New York to Orlando, where I picked up a rental, parked it on a sandy stretch of the south Atlantic shore and fell asleep in the back seats with the windows open and the lukewarm Florida breeze drifting through. No room at the inn. Jetlagged, I woke up without an alarm just as the sun rose over the Cape and the familiar figure in the distance, the size of my thumb. As morning grew, so did the crowd around me, thousands, cars lined up along the coast as far as you could see. A family of four stepped out of the minivan next to me and began to unload their picnic wares; the father offered me a beer. I unfurled a towel, stepped up and onto the hood of my rental, and took a swig. Daydreamed I was halfway to Tranquility and then, T-minus nothing at 11:26 a.m. eastern daylight time, I heard the rumble, felt the tremor before the truth, the storm before the storm, like plates shifting, grinding. The ground shook, the people shouted, and I watched, as Atlantis rocketed into a powder blue sky. The last one of its kind.
STS-135, the way I dream it.
I went to Space Camp in the eighth grade. This is probably the best time to go: at 13, you're just starting to be able to understand how cool some of the science is, how real it is, how there are these invisible forces that propel us, forward, and how explosive are the chemical reactions that power our progress. At the same time, at 13, at least when I was 13, you're not yet beset by either peer or parental pressure to get your head out of the clouds. You get to be the launch controller during a shuttle mission simulation, you get to try on the spacesuit and bounce around on the one-sixth gravity chair, and you think, yeah, I could do this one day. I could go to space.
The names help. Discovery. Endeavour. Atlantis. Heavy with gravitas, built to inspire. They would be corny if they weren't imprinted on the wing of a spacecraft that launches itself 200 miles into the sky, can make a three-point turn while in orbit and dock with an international space station or parallel park near a super space telescope so its astronauts can do a spacewalk and pull out some tools and fix the telescope. In outer space. And then this 200,000 pound machine makes its way back to Earth, burning through the atmosphere, landing like any other airplane on a runway. How is this for real? Spacewalk. Space telescope. Space station. Spacecraft. This is the stuff dreams are made of; even just the idea that there are wings on the thing and we are talking about flying.
I could've gone, could've been on that flight to New York tonight. I have the money, even the time. But I can't. It's a step too indulgent, a stretch, like if I did this I would be messing with my karma. I've gotten to go to a lot of awesome things in my life, to the Olympics in Beijing, the Inauguration in DC, and so many, many places that are the stuff of other people's dreams. I'm scared of pushing my luck, that that rainy day will come and I won't be able to afford an umbrella. You can't have everything. You can't be everywhere. Some things in life you just miss; you miss them because you never had them, or you miss them because you had them and lost them. I'm lucky enough, so very lucky, that I don't miss much. If I'm 13 and I want to go to Space Camp, I go. If I want to go to the Olympics, or the Inauguration, I go. If I want to be a lawyer, or a writer, I go. But you don't get everything. Some things in life just suck; some things you just miss. I wish I was going to watch the last space shuttle launch tomorrow. I wish I could see the crowds, feel the earth shake like no other way there is. I wish I could feel my dreams rising with the shuttle, the closest realest thing we have to seeing ourselves go to infinity and beyond. I wish. We are promised as children that we can go wherever our dreams will take us, and no wonder some of us dream to be astronauts, so we can go as far as we can go, dream as far as we can dream.
I will never have the space shuttle. Even if I left right now, I wouldn't make it in time. I will never have in my eyes its smoky trajectory burning through the sky, or the rocket fumes in my nose, or the thundering in my ears, the trembling at my feet. I will never have the space shuttle. I will only ever be able to dream it.
Which is probably just the way it should be.
