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Business News/ Opinion / Book Review | Leaving Orbit
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Book Review | Leaving Orbit

Margaret Lazarus Dean writes with the passion of a lifelong lover of space exploration

Photo: Sonny Figueroa/NYT Premium
Photo: Sonny Figueroa/NYT

In May 1961, US president John F. Kennedy said in a speech to Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Space, he declared the next year, “is the new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none".

Amazingly enough, Kennedy’s nearly surreal vision was achieved right on schedule, on 20 July 1969, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin setting foot on the dusty surface of the moon’s Sea of Tranquillity and later returning safely to Earth, a feat that Norman Mailer would compare to the voyages of Columbus and Magellan, and to Hannibal crossing the Alps with his legions.

The last moon landing, however, was made in 1972; and the last space shuttle flight came home in July 2011 amid fears that a rapidly downsizing National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), afflicted by budget cuts and a brain drain, could no longer capture the public imagination. In her wonderfully evocative new book Leaving Orbit, Margaret Lazarus Dean sets out to chronicle “the beauty and the strangeness in the last days of American spaceflight, in the last moments of something that used to be cited as what makes America great". Though she overstates the end-times nature of Nasa’s future—skimming lightly over its Mars exploration projects and other plans in a highly cursory epilogue—Dean writes with the passion of a lifelong lover of space exploration and an ability to communicate, with tremendous kinetic power, the glory and danger of its missions.

She retraces the “heroic era" of spaceflight (1961-72) and maps the less glamorous but still crucial achievements of the shuttle era, arguing that of the “four warring interests in spaceflight", “ambitiousness of vision" and “urgency of timetable" prevailed early on, giving way increasingly to “reduction of cost, and safety to astronauts". The personality traits Nasa looks for in astronauts also changed, she argues: Whereas the agency focused on military pilots in the 1960s—the sort of swaggering loner cowboys in The Right Stuff—it now employs scientists, researchers, doctors: team players, in the words of one current astronaut, who are able to get along and “handle their own weaknesses" in extreme environments like the International Space Station.

Dean is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee who teaches a creative nonfiction course featuring the work of writers such as Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer. Her book is very much haunted by two seminal works of New Journalism: Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (1979). Mailer, she writes, thought he was witnessing the start of something, but was actually seeing its pinnacle; her book is meant as a kind of bookend to his—a story of endings and a winding down.

At times, Dean overdoes the Mailer references, comparing her observations about Nasa to those he once made, her point of view to his. Her repeated taking of her own emotional temperature grows increasingly mannered as the book progresses—and imitative of Mailer’s in a way that serves only to underscore his original and utterly distinctive vision and voice.

When Dean simply lets her own love for spaceflight shine through, however, the result is a heartfelt paean to, and elegy for, a remarkable collective undertaking. She captures both the science and poetry of Nasa’s missions, and the romance of space travel, which dates back centuries, and was imagined in fiction such as Jules Verne’s 1865 classic From the Earth to the Moon. (In the early 20th century, she says, the Verne novel provided inspiration for three men working independently in three countries, developing similar ideas about using rockets for space travel.)

Dean conveys the different personalities of various shuttle orbiters: the oldest, Columbia, she says, was a bit heavier than the others and somehow seemed like “a chunky older sister", while Challenger struck her as some “kind of mammal—maybe a sweet and solid dog of unpretentious pedigree". She introduces us to dedicated Nasa employees such as Omar Izquierdo, a second-generation Nasa worker who plays Virgil to her Dante, guiding her through the maze of the Kennedy Space Center, as well as to avid space fans who regularly congregate in the mosquito-plagued environs to witness each shuttle launch. And she commemorates the touching idealism embodied in the plaque that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left on the moon: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind."

Enshrined in these pages is the fierce magic of a shuttle’s launching—the nearly painful brightness, the earthshaking rumble, the slow and then faster escape from gravity. And the almost equally extraordinary spectacle of its return to Earth, heralded by the roar of a double sonic boom and then the sight of the winged craft, gliding out of the sky, “ghostly trails" coming off the tips of its wings and its tail fin.

By the end of Leaving Orbit, Dean has come to the melancholy conclusion that “there was never enthusiastic public support for human spaceflight for its own sake", but at best, “support for beating the Soviets at a game" that “seemed to have to do with military, not scientific, superiority": “People said they didn’t want to go to bed under a Soviet moon." The “power of that brief interest," along with the successes of the heroic era, she contends, “has been enough to fuel 50 years of Nasa," but “those of us who love it" should “accept the fact that it’s finally run its course".

It’s too early to write an epitaph for Nasa and its underfunded yet ambitious plans, but then, as a Joan Didion epigraph Dean has chosen for this book reads: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends."

Michiko Kakutani is a literary critic for The New York Times.

Comments are welcome at views@livemint.com

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Published: 28 May 2015, 04:00 PM IST
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