End of an era: the shuttle takes off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, a regular sight that will happen at most three more times
You know you’re in Brevard County when you start seeing rockets. As soon as you reach the Atlantic edge of Interstate 4, the highway that sways across central Florida, depictions of spacecraft begin to adorn the stores, diners and payday loan places. These are the towns of Titusville, Rockledge and Port St John, communities that for the past 50 years have made sure America’s astronauts have reached the Beyond. Their livelihood is visible long before the road finally sweeps up and crosses the wide rivers and cane reeds of Cape Canaveral and you see the distant red blinks of the launch pads, the shimmer of the vast buildings of KSC, the Kennedy Space Centre. Nasa has 18 facilities across the US, from Maryland to California, and its major contractors, companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, have dozens more. But no place has assumed the identity of the country’s space programme quite like Brevard County. A mosquito-bitten slip of coast, 20 miles wide and 70 miles long, it was somewhere people used to drive through on their way to Palm Beach, until the US army decided to start testing its missiles there in October 1946. And then, quite suddenly, it was colonised. The arrival of Wernher von Braun, designer of the V2 rocket, and the other founding fathers of the US space programme, made Brevard the fastest-growing county in America. Nasa, founded in 1958, built bridges and water systems, and when the space race reached its exorbitant heights in the mid-1960s, Brevard was the edge of the world. Astronauts raced their cars on the beach, newsmen camped out on their lawns and the county was given the dialling code 3-2-1 after the launch sequence. In 1973, Brevard put the Moon landing on its county seal. The Apollo boom was followed by bust: 10,000 people lost their jobs when the programme was cancelled in 1972. But since then, Brevard has rebuilt itself around the space shuttle, Nasa’s longest-serving spacecraft and one of the most recognisable vehicles ever to fly. The parts may be manufactured elsewhere and its missions managed from Houston, but for the past three decades Brevard County and KSC have been, in Nasa-speak, where the rubber hits the road. The tourist-friendly launches and everlasting work of 132 missions have made the shuttle the central activity of America’s Space Coast—the stuff of daily life and conversation. If you spend any time in Brevard, you get used to finding shuttle murals, crew portraits, newspaper clippings and mission badges in most places you go: houses, offices, restaurant bathrooms. Shuttle jargon—orbiters, crawlers, flame trenches, propulsion agents—comes up without any warning. One afternoon in Titusville I sat and listened to a pastor explain that, “Where we’re going, we don’t need those boosters.”
INTERVIEW: What are we losing? Sam Knight talks to Robert Crippen, a former Nasa astronaut, about the end of the shuttle programme “The end of the shuttle is a social issue. It isn’t just about the hardware, software and propellants: it is the people. It was a major portion of my life, as it was for thousands of others, and for us, this moment is bittersweet. The shuttle was the longest-running human spaceflight programme. Nothing lasts forever, but I wish we hadn’t cancelled it until we had another way of getting our people into space. In the early 1970s, Nasa wanted to build a space station and have a way of getting up and back with a spacecraft that could handle a lot of cargo. But it couldn’t afford both things simultaneously, so it decided to build the spacecraft first. I had the pleasure of being involved in the initial design, in 1973, and later I was chosen to fly the first flight, with John Young, in 1981. I still take a great deal of pride in that. I wish I had the words to describe flying the shuttle. It’s much more satisfying to be able to land something rather than drop in on parachutes. It also has so much power. The first time I flew, my eyes were as big as saucers for the eight and a half minutes it took to get up into orbit; it went by so fast it felt like 30 seconds. In fact, the G-forces were nowhere near as bad as they had been, only 3Gs, not five or six, as they had been on earlier rockets. So it was not uncomfortable for someone like me who had experience flying jet aircraft. The shuttle was larger than other spacecraft so you had the opportunity to move around, and then in the space station even more. Microgravity is a delightful experience. About half the people who go up have some discomfort in their tummies, but that normally passes. Then there is the chance to look back at this spaceship Earth that we are all travelling on. One of the things you have to worry about is not stopping and staring all the time. I served with the US navy in the Mediterranean and on my final flight I looked up out of the cockpit and I could see the entire Mediterranean Sea, from the Greek islands to the straits of Gibraltar, the boot of Italy to the Nile delta. They have wonderful satellite images nowadays but there is nothing like seeing it for yourself. I’m not a tree hugger or anything like that, but you see this thin line, our delicate atmosphere which allows us to live on earth and I think everyone that goes up comes back with a new sense of how we better take care of this place, it’s all we got. I understand why the shuttle is being retired. This year, it will be 30 years since John and I flew that first flight. I’m a real supporter of the commercial space sector. But I also like a clear programme, I like a goal, and we are losing some of that. I think that is going to be hugely detrimental to Nasa because people are not going to be able to understand what it is doing. I was here on the Space Coast in the late 1960s, early 1970s when they were transitioning from Apollo, and Brevard County was a pretty austere place. I’m afraid it’s going to look like that again. It’s going to be a pretty desolate place for the next decade or so. So I’ve spoken out, and written op-eds, but I’m retired and I don’t think there is anything that we can do out in the hinterlands to change their minds. Hopefully there will be someone in Washington who can put us back on track. I like to think I’m an optimist. You don’t want to climb on one of those vehicles if you’re a pessimist.” Robert Crippen is a former Nasa astronaut (1969-84), director of the shuttle programme (1990-92) and director of Kennedy Space Centre (1992-95)
You know you’re in Brevard County when you start seeing rockets. As soon as you reach the Atlantic edge of Interstate 4, the highway that sways across central Florida, depictions of spacecraft begin to adorn the stores, diners and payday loan places. These are the towns of Titusville, Rockledge and Port St John, communities that for the past 50 years have made sure America’s astronauts have reached the Beyond. Their livelihood is visible long before the road finally sweeps up and crosses the wide rivers and cane reeds of Cape Canaveral and you see the distant red blinks of the launch pads, the shimmer of the vast buildings of KSC, the Kennedy Space Centre. Nasa has 18 facilities across the US, from Maryland to California, and its major contractors, companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, have dozens more. But no place has assumed the identity of the country’s space programme quite like Brevard County. A mosquito-bitten slip of coast, 20 miles wide and 70 miles long, it was somewhere people used to drive through on their way to Palm Beach, until the US army decided to start testing its missiles there in October 1946. And then, quite suddenly, it was colonised. The arrival of Wernher von Braun, designer of the V2 rocket, and the other founding fathers of the US space programme, made Brevard the fastest-growing county in America. Nasa, founded in 1958, built bridges and water systems, and when the space race reached its exorbitant heights in the mid-1960s, Brevard was the edge of the world. Astronauts raced their cars on the beach, newsmen camped out on their lawns and the county was given the dialling code 3-2-1 after the launch sequence. In 1973, Brevard put the Moon landing on its county seal. The Apollo boom was followed by bust: 10,000 people lost their jobs when the programme was cancelled in 1972. But since then, Brevard has rebuilt itself around the space shuttle, Nasa’s longest-serving spacecraft and one of the most recognisable vehicles ever to fly. The parts may be manufactured elsewhere and its missions managed from Houston, but for the past three decades Brevard County and KSC have been, in Nasa-speak, where the rubber hits the road. The tourist-friendly launches and everlasting work of 132 missions have made the shuttle the central activity of America’s Space Coast—the stuff of daily life and conversation. If you spend any time in Brevard, you get used to finding shuttle murals, crew portraits, newspaper clippings and mission badges in most places you go: houses, offices, restaurant bathrooms. Shuttle jargon—orbiters, crawlers, flame trenches, propulsion agents—comes up without any warning. One afternoon in Titusville I sat and listened to a pastor explain that, “Where we’re going, we don’t need those boosters.”
Florida's Space Coast
In Florida these days, however, rockets are not the only show in town. Competing for prominence on the landscape are the marks and scars of recession. Brevard hasn’t escaped the property crash and as I left the pastor’s church that day I passed signs on the roadside that said “Houses for Kash” and “Liquidators of all kinds.” There are empty malls and bereft-looking hotels offering “discount jungle adventures” to the nearby wetlands. Property values in Brevard County have fallen by 45 per cent since 2007 and are still falling—more than 10 per cent last year. About one in 200 homes are repossessed every month. The unemployment rate is 12.6 per cent. Yet it is nothing compared to what is to come, because the rockets and the recession are about to collide. There will be at least two or maybe three missions this year: Discovery, planned for February; the official final flight, Endeavour, scheduled for 1st April; and possibly a “final final” mission if Atlantis gets the go-ahead, most likely in June. But at some point in 2011, the space shuttle will fly for the last time. Within two months of the last touchdown, almost all of Florida’s 9,000 space workers will have lost their jobs. The layoffs have already begun. By the end of last year over 2,000 had been made redundant. Another cull began in January, with between 1,000 to 3,000 jobs at risk. A similar number of jobs will go in another round of cuts planned for the spring. Studies of comparable shocks, such as the closure of military bases and car plants, suggest that a further 14,000 people will lose their jobs in the local economy, from teachers to petrol-station workers. In all, 19 per cent of jobs in Brevard County, which has a population of half a million people, will disappear. Tax revenues are not expected to recover until 2018. These are the economic projections, but the Space Coast is also facing a less visible but equally unnerving identity crisis. Over the years, the shuttle has not just brought dollars to Brevard County—or to the rest of the US for that matter—but a unifying statement of daring and of America’s capacity to do what no other country can do. “Whenever we launch, it is an act of courage. It is an act of risk taking,” John Shannon, the director of the programme, told me. “Even though we are reminded after Challenger and Columbia that this is a risky business, we still choose to do that.” The former blew up in 1986, just over a minute after launch, the latter as it was on its way back to Earth, in 2003. After almost three decades, the retirement of the three surviving shuttles—Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour—is also the retirement of a set of American certainties. No one knows what is coming next. While politicians and scientists argue about the merits of America’s future in space, in Brevard they have more tangible concerns. One morning I went to a workshop for those facing redundancy at KSC. High above the massive complex, vultures rode the thermals coming off the Vehicle Assembly Building, the great cube—once the largest building in the world—where shuttles are fitted to their fuel tank and boosters. In a classroom across the road, a facilitator from Brevard Workforce, a non-profit organisation trying to match space workers to new jobs, was giving advice on how to shake hands before an interview. Neither too firm, nor too limp, she was saying: “Your shake should be somewhere in the middle.” Virtually all of the people due to lose their jobs at KSC are contractors rather than Nasa employees (the centre’s 2,000 or so civil servants will stay on). They range from secretaries to firefighters to physicists. During the workshop, though, it became clear just how specialised much of their work experience is. The group split into pairs to discuss a challenge at work that they had overcome—a typical interview question. But instead of stories of tricky clients and Excel spreadsheets, I heard a woman in her fifties with long grey hair and a purple cardigan tell her partner: “Then I heard the siren, the steam was gone and it was just flashing…” Across from her, a man with a comb-over was describing a major explosion. It’s not as if the shuttle workers aren’t getting help. Brevard Workforce has been given $15m by the department of labour to fund training and job-creation schemes, and last August, the White House announced a further $35m (to come out of Nasa’s budget) to help stimulate and diversify the local economy. The problem is that there just aren’t many substitutes in this world for working on space shuttles. For a start, Nasa pays well: the average space job, including benefits, is worth $77,000 a year, compared to the average wage of $43,000 in the rest of the county. (Non-space workers call the Indian River, which separates KSC from the mainland, “the holy water.”) Then there is the self-esteem in working for the space programme that many regard as irreplaceable. “We are looking at this as loss on multiple levels,” said Lisa Rice, president of Brevard Workforce. “It’s not just: ‘Hey, I lost my job.’ It’s: ‘Hey, I also lost my mission in life.’” Space workers can be oddly unsuited to anything else. I went to Titusville’s small airport to meet Robert Bial, who runs a plant that refurbishes aircraft landing gear. He is planning to hire up to 60 mechanics from the shuttle programme, but told me that a recent job fair at KSC was acutely depressing. An engineer with two PhDs had approached him, desperate for a job, but he had been so overqualified that Bial didn’t understand what he did. Finally, the engineer explained that he had invented a fibre now widely used in air-conditioning systems. “Here he is, a guy that our government is just going to let go,” said Bial. “How can we let these people leave?”A sign in Titusville celebrates the shuttle in 2005—but that launch was cancelled two hours before lift-off
The disintegration of the shuttle workforce—the shared knowledge of 15,000 welders, engineers, tile-painters, propulsion experts and safety technicians throughout the US—poses an obvious challenge for the future. “Chances are, we are going to have to relearn some lessons and probably kill some people before we get it right again,” one Nasa employee told me. But right now, the US does not know what it wants its space programme to be. President George W Bush announced the retirement of the shuttle programme in 2004. The plan was that the shuttles would complete the International Space Station (ISS) in 2010, a joint venture that includes the US, Russia, Europe and Japan, before being replaced by the next generation of space vehicles. This new programme, called Constellation, would return Americans to the Moon, and its vehicles—two rockets, a crew capsule and a lunar lander—would form the basis of Nasa’s exploration of the wider solar system, including Mars. Constellation was supposed to provide continuity from the shuttle, while breaking out of what Nasa calls low Earth orbit, the nearby space that it has been visiting and revisiting since 1961. Michael Griffin, then Nasa’s administrator, described Constellation as “Apollo on steroids.” Around 40 per cent of the shuttle’s parts were going to be reincarnated in the new vehicles, which would start flying in 2012, minimising disruption to Nasa’s workforce and ideals. There was nothing really wrong with the plan, except that there wasn’t enough money for it. To make the sums add up, Nasa suggested ending US involvement in the ISS in 2015, though it had contributed most of the estimated $100bn building cost. Money was raided from across the agency—Nasa’s research budget is now half its 2005 level. Some feared that Constellation would repeat the mistakes of the shuttle programme: spending too many resources putting rockets into space rather than doing anything scientifically valuable with them. By 2009, Constellation was four years behind schedule and a commission appointed by the new Administration found that “the US human spaceflight programme appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory.” Even so, the American space community got a terrible shock when the president cancelled the programme altogether last February. It meant another 2,000 job losses in Florida—a blow not softened much when President Barack Obama laid out his alternative policy: radically increased Nasa spending on research; the use of commercial space companies to deliver cargo to the ISS; and visiting Mars by mid-2030. Rather than build new rockets, under the Obama plan, Nasa would get an extra $6bn over the next five years to design robots and come up with the first new launch technologies since the 1970s. Plenty of scientists, venture capitalists and space experts thought Obama’s plan was brilliant. But it was not one for workers—or voters: Nasa might not put one of its own vehicles into space again until 2020, meaning a decade of American reliance on Russian Soyuz capsules to send astronauts to the ISS. Jobs-wise, it put its faith in a few commercial companies, such as SpaceX, Orbital Sciences and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, to fill a void left by one of the country’s most revered institutions. In 2010, a year of recession and elections, Congress could not stomach it. With jobs scarce and nationalist fervour easy to whip up over the Russians and the “manned spaceflight gap,” Democrats and Republicans with Nasa installations in their constituencies queued up to shoot the president down. During a summer of wrangling, the House of Representatives ignored the Obama plan and demanded the reinstatement of Constellation, before the Senate suggested a compromise: keep parts of the Bush-era project (namely one Nasa, heavy-lift rocket), bring in the private sector and retain a gutted version of Obama’s proposals. (Indeed, the Senate was so insistent about the heavy rocket that it even designed the vehicle itself. In an unlikely piece of rocket-science-by-legislative-committee it requested “an ‘in-line’ vehicle design, with a large centre tank structure with attached multiple liquid propulsion engines.”) The bargaining dragged on until the end of the year. On 8th December the private firm SpaceX carried out a successful test launch of “Dragon,” a capsule ultimately intended to take two astronauts to and from the ISS—an important milestone for corporate involvement in low Earth orbit. (Nasa has a $1.6bn contract with SpaceX, currently for cargo flights.) The same month, Nasa finally got its 2011 budget—at $19bn, what Obama wanted, and the shuttle programme got yet another confirmed final flight: STS 134, Endeavour (the Atlantis mission has been theoretically approved but may yet be blocked by the new Congress). The people of Brevard have followed each twist and turn, but not much of this has helped them. Early one morning, I went to meet Robin Fisher, the county commissioner whose district includes the space centre. Tall, broad and black, Fisher used to captain the University of Florida American football team. He was the only Democrat elected in the county on the night of Obama’s victory in 2008, and he hasn’t found the president’s space policy easy to digest at all. On Fisher’s wall was a poster of the now-doomed Constellation vehicles, and on his computer was a video of a campaign speech that Obama made in Titusville in 2008. He clicked play. “I remember my grandfather explaining to me, ‘This is what America is all about,’” Obama told the rally, recalling the triumphs of Apollo. Then, criticising Bush’s underfunding of Constellation, Obama made a series of promises to the people of the Space Coast, each more rapturously received than the next, until he got to the big one—“Ensuring that all those who work in the space industry do not lose their jobs when the shuttle is retired”—which brought the house down. Fisher played the video for a minute longer. “So,” he said slowly and looked at me. “The opposite.” Fisher tells me that a football coach once said to him that nothing in life is ever as good as you think it is, and nothing is ever as bad as you think it is, either. “I’m taking that lesson and putting it on this shuttle thing,” he said. ***** There are a few people in Brevard who think opportunities lie at the end of the shuttle programme. Dale Ketcham grew up in the county in the 1950s and 1960s, watching early rockets falling over and shooting in the sea. He now runs the Spaceport Research and Technology Institute, which has a small office at KSC that commissions research from universities, but is better known in space circles as an outspoken, slightly mischievous, figure for reform. We met for breakfast in Cocoa Beach, the old strip of motels and nightclubs that used to crackle with parties after each successful splashdown. Ketcham told me the shuttle had become, over time, a weight around Nasa’s neck. “It was a spectacular vehicle and people built their careers around it. Communities established their identities around it,” he said. “But in 50 years…” he searched for the right word: “I think it will be viewed as a constraint.” The shuttle was designed to fly every two weeks, with a minimum of fuss, but instead consumed about a third of Nasa’s budget (around $500m a month) just to keep running. “It was supposed to be a truck,” he said. “The problem is that it’s a Lamborghini truck.” In Ketcham’s view, the huge operation of flying the shuttles is part of the reason why KSC and Brevard County have been stuck in the same form since the 1950s: a glorified launch pad, rather than a research or manufacturing hub. The opportunity presented by Obama’s plan, particularly in commercial space flight, was for the region to use its natural benefits—climate, workforce and proximity to the equator, which reduces the amount of fuel needed to reach orbit—to become America’s undisputed space economy. “That has sort of been the holy grail for Florida for decades,” said Ketcham. The Obama vision offers a more fragmented, complicated future than the heroic government programmes of the past, but it could release Brevard County from the cycle of once-a-generation disasters that have come with the end of Apollo and the shuttle. “I think we will look back in ten or 15 years and go, ‘Thank God we ended that,’” said Ketcham. Shuttle workers do not speak this way. After meeting Ketcham I drove a few blocks to the meeting hall of Machinists Local 2061, a union of blue-collar aerospace workers—welders, crane operators, deliverymen—who expect to be more or less wiped out in the next year. Six middle-aged men, many of whose brothers, fathers and wives have worked at KSC, sat around a table and described their work on the shuttle. I asked them about Brevard’s future as envisaged by Obama and Ketcham and one of them, a crane operator called Lynn Beattie, invited his colleagues to tell me their ages: “60 in four months,” “55,” “61,” “49,” “57,” “50.” Beattie turned back to me. “How many jobs do you think there are out there for 55-year-old, 61-year-old men in this new and exciting environment?” he asked. “My ass is going to be sitting on unemployment until the Republicans refuse to extend unemployment—and then I’m going to be digging ditches or whatever I need to do to feed my family.” Another crane operator said he was going to be “a man whore,” and everyone laughed. It was clear they were all going to stay at KSC for as long as they could, mainly because they had heard rumours there might be a few jobs left at the end. But behind everything they said there seemed bafflement that this was happening at all. Not that the shuttle programme was ending—that was going to happen one day—but that there ever could be such obscurity about America’s future in space, and that their country could ever be so cavalier about the people and places that put it there. “Sending people into space is not the same as delivering shit from St Louis to Kansas City,” said Beattie. “It’s like a betterment,” said Carson Yates, a welder. “It’s a betterment for all mankind.” And as with every conversation I had in Brevard, there were references to Apollo, JFK, Challenger and Hubble, the pantheon of stars that made the Space Coast. On the wall was a framed message from JFK to the unions in the early 1960s, asking them not to strike and imperil the space programme. Beattie referred to him. “The president said: ‘We’re going to do it and we’re going to do it not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.’” He stopped. There was nothing to compare to those days, no all-powerful champion. “There’s nobody.” On my way out, one of the workers gave me a commemorative medal with the dates of the shuttle programme. On the back it said: “We Dreamed. We Dared. We Made History.”INTERVIEW: What are we losing? Sam Knight talks to Robert Crippen, a former Nasa astronaut, about the end of the shuttle programme “The end of the shuttle is a social issue. It isn’t just about the hardware, software and propellants: it is the people. It was a major portion of my life, as it was for thousands of others, and for us, this moment is bittersweet. The shuttle was the longest-running human spaceflight programme. Nothing lasts forever, but I wish we hadn’t cancelled it until we had another way of getting our people into space. In the early 1970s, Nasa wanted to build a space station and have a way of getting up and back with a spacecraft that could handle a lot of cargo. But it couldn’t afford both things simultaneously, so it decided to build the spacecraft first. I had the pleasure of being involved in the initial design, in 1973, and later I was chosen to fly the first flight, with John Young, in 1981. I still take a great deal of pride in that. I wish I had the words to describe flying the shuttle. It’s much more satisfying to be able to land something rather than drop in on parachutes. It also has so much power. The first time I flew, my eyes were as big as saucers for the eight and a half minutes it took to get up into orbit; it went by so fast it felt like 30 seconds. In fact, the G-forces were nowhere near as bad as they had been, only 3Gs, not five or six, as they had been on earlier rockets. So it was not uncomfortable for someone like me who had experience flying jet aircraft. The shuttle was larger than other spacecraft so you had the opportunity to move around, and then in the space station even more. Microgravity is a delightful experience. About half the people who go up have some discomfort in their tummies, but that normally passes. Then there is the chance to look back at this spaceship Earth that we are all travelling on. One of the things you have to worry about is not stopping and staring all the time. I served with the US navy in the Mediterranean and on my final flight I looked up out of the cockpit and I could see the entire Mediterranean Sea, from the Greek islands to the straits of Gibraltar, the boot of Italy to the Nile delta. They have wonderful satellite images nowadays but there is nothing like seeing it for yourself. I’m not a tree hugger or anything like that, but you see this thin line, our delicate atmosphere which allows us to live on earth and I think everyone that goes up comes back with a new sense of how we better take care of this place, it’s all we got. I understand why the shuttle is being retired. This year, it will be 30 years since John and I flew that first flight. I’m a real supporter of the commercial space sector. But I also like a clear programme, I like a goal, and we are losing some of that. I think that is going to be hugely detrimental to Nasa because people are not going to be able to understand what it is doing. I was here on the Space Coast in the late 1960s, early 1970s when they were transitioning from Apollo, and Brevard County was a pretty austere place. I’m afraid it’s going to look like that again. It’s going to be a pretty desolate place for the next decade or so. So I’ve spoken out, and written op-eds, but I’m retired and I don’t think there is anything that we can do out in the hinterlands to change their minds. Hopefully there will be someone in Washington who can put us back on track. I like to think I’m an optimist. You don’t want to climb on one of those vehicles if you’re a pessimist.” Robert Crippen is a former Nasa astronaut (1969-84), director of the shuttle programme (1990-92) and director of Kennedy Space Centre (1992-95)
