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"FacebookPinterest\n\n NIGHT TO DAY\n\n a man steps off a ladder. \n\nThis is not a setup for a joke. It is the greatest accomplishment in human history.\n\n\n\n forty years later, I was in a convertible. My destination: Kennedy Space Center, or KSC, in Cape Canaveral, where the first Americans had left the planet. It was the day before launch (L-1, in NASA parlance), and I was going to watch what NASA still calls the Space Transportation System (STS)\u2014and the rest of the world calls the space shuttle\u2014head for low earth orbit (LEO). (NASA is a constellation of acronyms, so many and so arcane that they take on a quasi-mystical quality\u2014as though the administration were speaking in tongues. To quote one public-affairs officer (PAO), \"We have all these wonderful acronyms.\u2026 I can't remember what half of them mean.\") The shuttle, flying for nearly thirty years now, ideally offers very little in the way of excitement\u2014but with the whole program slated for retirement in 2010, this mission (STS-126) was the last one scheduled to launch by night, and I'd been told to expect drama, the sky relit by a controlled explosion of rocket fuel turning night back into day.\n\n The road to Canaveral was like a line across a flat green mirror\u2014trees, water, reflections of trees\u2014till nature gave way to the asphalt and advertising of the coast. I checked into the Cocoa Beach Hilton, went swimming, and read Tom Wolfe's classic history of early cowboy-era space flight, The Right Stuff. Wolfe devotes some of his more scalding observations to the Cocoa Beach nightlife, full of contractors, street-racing astronauts, and former Nazi rocket scientists who \"materialized as if from out of a time warp\u2026pummeling the piano in the cocktail lounge and singing the \u2018Horst Wessel Song'!\" (the Third Reich's national anthem). When Cape Canaveral became the launching site for NASA, those first astronauts had also rented convertibles and headed to Cocoa for \"a little Drinking &amp;amp; Driving &amp;amp; the rest of the real pilot's life.\"\n\n That sounded research-worthy, so after sunset I crashed a prelaunch party happening on my hotel's deck. I walked in with no problem, a goofy/boozy atmosphere in effect\u2014congressmen and contractors mingling and drinking. By a buffet, I heard a woman in a trilby, chest decorated with an illuminated brooch of earth-orbiting LEDs, ask, \"Are you the movie star?\"\n\n A man replied, suavely, \"I was in a movie.\"\n\n \"What movie?\"\n\n \"Office Space.\"\n\n He then signed her ID badge: Ron Livingston. I introduced myself and asked what he was doing there.\n\n \"I'm going into space.\"\n\n I thought, Office space? and said, \"Yeah?\"\n\n \"If a monkey can do it, they figure I can.\"\n\n I gave this a good laugh.\n\n He gestured to the man next to him (\"This is Bert from NASA\"), who invited me to a \"night viewing\" of the shuttle: the last public opportunity to get up close and see the thing illuminated on the launch platform before the following day's liftoff. \"Come to the Residence Inn at midnight,\" Bert said.\n\n I went up to my room, and when I came back down a big man in black, his arm around a young woman in a khaki shirt, was shouting to another man, \"Hey\u2014I'm squeezin' on yer wife!\"\n\n Smiling, the woman asked him something, and he replied, \"Them? They've got whores in their room.\"\n\n Delirious female laughter.\n\n The man whose wife was being squeezed said to another young woman, \"You're such a Pollyanna.\"\n\n She said, \"What?\"\n\n Man: \"You're such a rule follower. You're like, \u2018Schnell! Schnell!' Pollyanna.\"\n\n More laughter from squeezer and -ee.\n\n Between my hotel and the Residence Inn was Cheaters gentlemen's club, its lot full of cars, and the Lido Cabaret, where a sign read go endeavour ksc launch afterparty here. (It's not much of a stretch to ascribe the loucheness of Cocoa to the virile proximity of rocketry.) On the bus to the viewing, I wound up in the front row with Livingston, who was studying up for his role in a TV series about international astronauts on a six-year space mission. A man with a microphone, who'd been \"the 143rd person hired by NASA,\" stood up, pointed to his arm, and spoke into a PA: \"If you were to cut a vein, rocket fuel would come out I am sure.\" He then told a joke about Eskimos having \"the most ICBMs.\" (It's phonetic.) As we started to roll, Rocket Fuel said, \"Young people often wonder what good the space program does. I always tell them, \u2018Your cell phones, your GPS\u2014throw those out. They wouldn't exist without the space program.' \"\n\n Out the window I could see KSC's main landmark, the vehicle-assembly building (VAB), a towering white cube emblazoned with an American flag and a massive NASA logo: a blue circle full of stars bisected by a forked red velocity trail, known, mysteriously, as \"the meatball.\" After passing through security, we marveled at KSC's time-capsule-like assemblage of midcentury buildings (like visiting the future and the 1960s simultaneously) and the juxtaposition of so much nature\u2014white birds that looked like Egyptian ibis, reptilian marshes\u2014and so much technology.\n\n At the viewing site, Bert from NASA warned me, \"Watch out for alligators.\"\n\n \"Seriously?\"\n\n \"Seriously.\"\n\n Most other night viewers were thronged around a jumpsuited astronaut posing for pictures. I moved away and got as close as I could to the shuttle, finally leaning on a fence beside a couple of other loners: a solidly built, slightly thick-in-the-middle older man on my left and a tall, thin man in his fifties on my right\u2014though flashes popped frantically behind us, it was dark, still-primeval Florida here. The three of us seemed to be in a shared trance, looking at the moon-and-non-lit scene: huge shuttle (which up close looked homemade, hand-painted, arts-and-craftsy), boosters, fuel tank, American flag, the words united states in Helvetica lettering. Rockets\u2014flying up there in our national anthem\u2014are as old and as American as America. Our flag has space sewn into its corner. Forty years earlier, in his book about Apollo, Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer described this place, pad 39-A\u2014the actual liftoff point from which the massive Saturn V rocket had carried America's astronauts to the moon\u2014as \"a shrine\u2026welcoming footsore travelers at dusk.\" In the distance, hydrogen overflow was being burned off, calling to mind a ceremonial torch.\n\n Later, when I found Bert from NASA he was talking with Rocket Fuel about someone called Neil.\n\n \"Who's Neil?\" I asked.\n\n \"Neil Armstrong,\" Bert said. \"You were standing right near him.\"\n\n\n\n you are reading this because you have no idea what NASA is doing. And NASA, tongue-tied by jargon, can't figure out how to tell you. But the agency is engaged in work that can be more enduring and far-reaching than anything else this country is paying for. At NASA's inception the government declared that \"activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind,\" and this is one of the few promises in American history that have been kept.\n\n NASA is now fifty. The moonwalk was forty years ago this month. The NASA of yore did the unimaginable in eight years, making good on President Kennedy's assertion 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.\" It succeeded for two reasons: access to a staggering 4.4 percent of the federal budget (now it's half a percent) and, more importantly, perhaps resurgently, a national desire to believe in ourselves\u2014and in something more than ourselves. Since then, NASA, vision flickering, public imagination uncaptured, has stooped to offering belittling practical justifications for spaceflight (GPS, cell phones) that ground and practicalize the sublime, killing its poetry.\n\n In explaining why space is worth exploring, as NASA frequently finds itself doing, there's a mistaken supposition, because\u2014as with anything of real value\u2014the benefits are largely unknown. It's a philosophical matter, almost religious in its insolubility. Why do we need to love or live at all? The answer is in wondering. And NASA is about wonder. Its last administrator, Michael Griffin, attempted to reinstill that wonder when he gave a series of soaring, sermonlike speeches, and asked, \"What is the value to the United States of being involved in enterprises which lift up human hearts everywhere when we do them?\" His answer: making the world unite. (Or, in flawless NASA-ese: doing \"the kinds of things that make others want to work with us to do them.\") A Star Trek\u2013like ideal, in line with Kennedy's vision in the early '60s. But now, just a few decades into the endeavor, all is uncertainty. Obama, a Kennedy-like president who wants NASA to \"inspire the world,\" took office; Griffin was let go. Nobody outside NASA knows what we're doing in space.\n\n Here are some obscure, suppressed, declassified, wonderful, and weird facts:\n\n Apollo astronauts navigated with sextants and liked to refer to people on earth as \"cats.\" Humans can perceive a scant 5 percent of what exists in the universe\u2014the rest is \"dark energy\" or \"dark matter,\" descriptors for things about which we know nothing at all. Laurie Anderson was NASA's first, and only, artist in residence. In 2005 she told an interviewer: \"I keep thinking what it would be like to be a kid in this country. I think it would be really depressing, except for NASA.\"\n\n The shuttle will stop flying in 2010, and the Russians, now our partners, will bring American astronauts into space for the following five years. Meanwhile, NASA will embark on the Constellation program, an Apollo-dwarfing series of missions that entails going to the moon, building a base, and staying there as we get set for Mars. Thirty-eight hundred people are currently employed in building Constellation equipment, including the enormous Ares V rocket, the largest ever\u2014designed to produce 11.8 million pounds of thrust (that of fifty 747s) and have us back to the moon by 2020. (If the recession doesn't kill the program first\u2014the Obama administration has just begun a review of Constellation to make sure it isn't wildly off course.)\n\n According to an article in Cosmos magazine, an astronaut was \"so inebriated\" at a Russian launch site that a flight surgeon \"stayed in his room overnight for fear that he might choke to death in his sleep.\" NASA went into full denial mode, calling stories of drunken astronauts \"urban legend\"\u2014though a half-empty bottle of tequila was found at another site's crew quarters. Apollo 11's lunar-module copilot, Buzz Aldrin, drank wine on the moon and, after returning to earth, used his NASA-issue T-38 supersonic jet to fly from Houston to New York and cheat on his wife. Aldrin's NASA nickname: Dr. Rendezvous. The wine: for Communion.\n\n One of the most popular foods in space is the tortilla. The most useful cooking implement is duct tape. (To hold the tortillas down.) Apollo 8, the first manned mission to orbit the moon, was plagued by nausea and diarrhea and other bodily intrusions. An excerpt from the flight transcript:\n\nfrank borman, commander: I'm going to take a leak, a little leak would feel good.&amp;gt;\n\njames a. lovell jr., command module pilot:\u2026went floating by here.&amp;gt;undefined&amp;gt;\n\nborman: Huh? &amp;gt;undefined&amp;gt;\n\nlovell: A bunch of crap just went floating by\u2026a little piece that got away from somebody.\u2026 Boy, there's some things in my pocket they don't know about.\n\nA Mars mission will last two and a half years. A projected 520-day Mars simulation will begin in Moscow this year. During a shorter simulated confinement, two Russians got into a fistfight. Per The Boston Globe, they fought \"so viciously that they left bloodstains on the capsule walls.\" (Vodka was blamed.) Then a Russian grabbed the one female participant\u2014a French-Canadian who, fearing for the simulation's safety, had hidden all the knives\u2014and, as she said, began \"really aggressing my personal space\" via a \"very intrusive\u2026kiss with the tongue.\" One space-psychology researcher, when asked about an eventual Mars mission, suggested that astronauts choose \"expedition spouses\" to serve as temporary sexual partners\u2014they would \"have an exclusive relationship\u2026for six to nine months\" and then \"return to their normal lives and families.\"\n\n David Baker, a NASA systems analyst on the Apollo missions, suggests that a lot of veterans of the U.S. space program are \"convinced that UFOs exist.\" When a lunar-conspiracy theorist confronted Buzz Aldrin (72 at the time), saying, \"You're the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn't.\u2026 You're a coward and a liar and a\u2014\" Aldrin punched him in the face.\n\n NASA operates like its own country and, at its best, like countries don't even exist. The International Space Station, 669,000 pounds of metal and tortillas two hundred miles above you right now, assembled by former enemies, has been described as \"the greatest engineering project in the history of mankind.\" But much as looking at the night sky clarifies the insignificance of mankind, looking at the federal budget clarifies the insignificance of NASA. After we beat the Russians, the public lost interest in Apollo. And the interest never really came back. Now, with Constellation's plans for some of the most astounding things we've ever done in space, the agency is on the cusp of either a period of renewed health\u2014a redux\u2014or something like extinction.\n\n There is a lot to explain.\n\n\n\n the day after the night viewing I headed for the press site, a rectangular building on a rise overlooking the launchpad filled with desks that faced a tall counter, a pair of TVs, and a countdown clock. I was given the site's last desk and an excellent chair: red, swivelable, with padded arms. The area was alive with journalists, engineers, corporate spokespeople, high school students, NASA retirees, congressmen\u2014all interviewing, glad-handing, walking to the cafeteria and back, watching NASA TV (an astronaut adhering globules of water to a mirror; cosmonauts drinking champagne), watching the clock. To my left was a teacher and students from a Kentucky high school, and to my right, a tall, serious man who said he was with the German space agency (Deutsches Zentrum f\u00FCr Luft und Raumfahrt) and who, after neatly arranging his papers, computer, two-liter plastic Coke bottle, and fluted highball glass\u2026managed to steal my chair.\n\n Before I could protest, I was called over to talk with Bob Bagdigian, a cheerful man from Alabama's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in charge of the newest piece of tech in NASA's environmental-control and life-support system (ECLSS), a Dumpster-sized machine that can reprocess wastewater, including sweat and urine, into drinking water. It is a critical piece of hardware if your goal is to create a long-term, self-sustaining human presence in space. A \"big Brita in the sky\" is how one friend described it\u2014one you can pee in!\n\n A near scale mock-up was sitting in the middle of the room.\n\n Jennifer Morcone, a public-affairs officer from Marshall dressed entirely in purple, half-curtsied as she gave me a sample of the water. I felt like I'd been offered a refreshment in the Old South. Bob said, \"Some of that's me.\"\n\n I took a sip. Weird aftertaste.\n\n Bob replied, \"Antimicrobial iodine. We put it in there for storage. It'll be removed.\"\n\n \"There's water in solid waste, too\u2014can you recycle that?\n\n \"We're working on it.\"\n\n \"So astronauts will have to urinate first, and then defecate?\"\n\n Bob looked a tiny bit uncomfortable with this line of questioning but carried on: \"It's a special potty. And the urinal hose system is discriminatory. It has different interfaces for different-gendered crew.\"\n\n I followed up with, \"So for a penis it's a hose, and for a vagina?\"\n\n \"A hose with a cup attachment. I'm sure we have a technical name for that, but I'm not sure what it is.\"\n\n Female urine receptacle (FUR).\n\n When I got back to my desk, my new German neighbor, whose name was Gerhard, looked at my name tag and said, \"GQ, what is it?\"\n\n I explained my own acronym.*\n\n He regarded me not so much neutrally as nihilistically. Then, after a few beats, I said, \"Hey, did you know that they're giving out samples of the urine-and-sweat water?\"\n\n The availability of beverage-grade urine and sweat was transformative information for Gerhard.\n\n \"Who can get this for me?\"\n\n \"Jennifer, in purple, from Alabama.\"\n\n His face was illuminated. \"I know exactly who you mean.\" He leaped up from my chair and galloped away.\n\n When he returned with his toilet water Gerhard was made anew, as though he himself had been run through the ECLSS. Kindly, he volunteered to explain launch protocol: \"There is forty-three hours counting time, and this includes built-in holds.\u2026 One at minus twenty minutes, which is about ten minutes long, and another, for forty-five minutes, at minus nine minutes. Then the control groups are polled to \u2018go' or \u2018not go.' Then the launch director proceeds.\" I forgave him for stealing my chair.\n\n More people were gathering in the press area. On live NASA TV the astronauts walked through what looked like the set of Office Space, past clapping cubicle workers. In a parking lot they lined up beside a silver Airstream, then rolled down Kennedy Parkway circled by Huey helicopters. At pad 39-A suit technicians dressed them. Hatch technicians helped them into the shuttle. They lay on their backs and waited. Mission Control came on the com: \"This is Houston.\" Dusk arrived. Someone said, \"That looks beautiful.\" It was true. The shuttle was in the gloaming. A hatch technician picked his nose.\n\n A nearby journalist said, \"There is a moon over the launchpad that's amazing.\"\n\n I walked outside. A huge yellow moon, crossed with orange continent-like shapes, hung over 39-A. The non-bathed shuttle glowed in the distance. An outdoor countdown clock was illuminated. Clusters of press and VIPs had begun to gather on a sloping lawn. Multiple newscasts were in the process of filing reports.\n\n Jennifer Morcone came up to me and said, \"I should have asked you if you were allergic to iodine. Some people are. I could have killed you.\"\n\n Back inside, I looked for Gerhard. The only person nearby was Jack King, known as the Voice of Apollo, whom millions heard intone, \"Liftoff. We have a liftoff. Thirty-two minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11,\" when we went to the moon. I introduced myself and asked him something I'd been saving for an old-timer: \"Mr. King, can you tell me why the NASA logo is called \u2018the meatball'?\"\n\n \"Because of the roundness.\"\n\n A voice said, \"SRO is go.\"\n\n Voice: \"I do concur. Go for launch.\"\n\n Voice: \"Vehicle's in good shape, weather's beautiful, so on behalf of the entire launch team, good luck, Godspeed\u2026\"\n\n I walked back outside with King. The PA said, \"Legacy\u2026quest for knowledge\u2026Godspeed\u2026got launch\u2026BLT has been cleared.\" Two minutes on the clock. A collectively held inhalation. An accentless female voice, futuristic in its clarity, uttered the words: \"90 seconds to launch of space shuttle Endeavour\u2026auto sequence set\u2026.10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, booster ignition, and liftoff of space shuttle Endeavour!\"\n\n The glow of the non lights surrounding the pad expanded into a marshmallow, then a half circle of pure white light, inflating to a thousand feet on either side, and then leaving the earth, becoming a circle, rising up to meet the moon, with a calligraphic black trail of smoke connecting it to the ground. We were all bathed in light and silence till the circle passed the moon and the sound arrived: firecrackers everywhere.\n\n As the shuttle rose, the percussion of its solid rocket boosters amplified until the sound took on a physical quality. It felt like the sky was trying to shake me awake. (Apollo's Jack King: \"Solid fuel pulses and burns rough. It's like a fork in your garbage disposal.\") The sound was rummaging around in the trees behind the press area. I imagined all of KSC's gators hidden there, about to panic, then stampede. I turned and looked. Nothing but stillness\u2014the effect was pure ventriloquism. When I turned back, the shuttle was at high altitude, with haloing clouds spreading out from its path. Soon it was a bright dot. Everyone applauded. A chopper landed in the parking lot.\n\n I asked King about the halo clouds.\n\n \"Ionization, the vehicle stacking and compressing air, creating a shock wave. Never seen that before.\" He shook his head, paused. \"Conditions were perfect.\"\n\n \"Out of all the launches you've seen, how'd that rank?\"\n\n \"Twenty-seven. Ha. You didn't see Saturn V.\"\n\n I found Gerhard, shook his hand, said, \"How about that?\"\n\n He replied, \"Gut. Perfect.\"\n\n\n\n Part II\n\n A NAZI PARTY ON MARS\n\n after leaving kennedy I was scheduled to inspect infrastructure for the Constellation program at three other space centers: Marshall in Alabama, Stennis in Mississippi, and Johnson in Houston, where I'd been going for thirty years to visit my aunt Glendora, who lived in El Lago, a few blocks from Neil Armstrong's house. Being a Texan, and a dangerous driver, Aunt Glen favored Cadillacs and wrecked one every five years, once taking out 300 feet of NASA fence. Her husband continued to buy them for her and name them after her, putting the word Baby before her name to make the car's name. Aunt Glen doted on me, as she had no babies of her own. But she did do some naming: of a local park, after Neil Armstrong. He'd told her he did not wish to have a park named after him. She pushed it through anyway. She also created an Astronaut Wall of Fame in El Lago, collecting dozens of photos from the town's spacegoing citizenry (Armstrong among them). I always felt that she expected me to be on that wall one day.\n\n The shuttle launch left me with a desire to do the one thing no writer had done before: go into space. (Norman Mailer had wanted this but despaired: \"NASA would opt for Updike!\") Tom Wolfe said that to have the right stuff, a man must \"have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and\u2026pull it back in the last yawning moment.\" Wolfe's astronauts in The Right Stuff got used to weightlessness \"in the cargo holds of C-131 transports\" that repeatedly climbed and dove in parabolic arcs, their contents floating. This seemed to me like the craziest possible thing I might have a chance of actually doing. So I made some inquiries and was told I could do it\u2014in a hollowed-out 727, flown by a private contractor called Zero G. Only later did I discover that this aircraft was known as the Vomit Comet.\n\n I planned my trip so that I'd have four days to visit the three space centers and then get to Washington, D.C., where I'd fly fifteen parabolas. My first stop was Marshall, inside the Redstone Arsenal, a military base where signs said no knives or firearms and limit your movements. After arriving I was met by a public-affairs rep who said he'd convey me to \"the Cedar Room.\" I anticipated juleps and southern hospitality.\n\n Alas, my destination was not some bower of comfort but the collaborative engineering and design-analysis room (known by an acronym, of course), where I was reunited with Jennifer Morcone, who'd supplied me with the recycled urine and sweat at KSC. She introduced me to Danny Davis, in charge of building and testing the upper stage of the new Ares I rocket, which will launch Constellation astronauts into orbit. He explained the complexity of the engineering, saying, \"The good Lord gave us a really tough equation to solve.\" I mentioned a recent New York Times article describing a \"chorus of naysayers\" who believed Ares was a terrible solution, that its controversial solid-fueled engine would vibrate dangerously, that it was being designed by autocrats convinced they could \"mandate reality,\" that existing satellite-delivery rockets could be adapted to do the job just as well.\n\n Davis told me simply, \"We've made the right decision,\" and then added, \"We need advocates.\"\n\n This resembled something Wernher von Braun, Marshall's first director and the scientist behind the Saturn V rocket, said to Norman Mailer: \"You must help us give a shove to the program.\" There's a particular strain of Ph.D. that has become a shorthand for anyone of giant intellectual prowess: the rocket scientist. But the original, the ur\u2013rocket scientist, was von Braun. Born a baron, he was recruited by the German army in the 1930s when found launching jerry-rigged rockets in an abandoned ammo dump. The young baron had actually wanted to be an astronaut but became a terrorist instead\u2014his V-2 was what Nazi Germany used to attack London during the final months of World War II.\n\n Von Braun's von isn't what the V in V-2 stands for. It stands for vergeltungswaffe (vengeance weapon). Mostly it killed, and was expected to kill, civilians. At the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, there's a display on the rocket showing a victim, pants blown off, lying uncovered in the street. A placard makes one of the only references to von Braun, who in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, disported himself at a costume ball thrown by German rocket engineers (theme: the first Nazi party on Mars) and\u2014riding history as few ever have\u2014a few decades later created a masterpiece, the Saturn V (its V recalling another V). A public-affairs person at Marshall marveled that von Braun was perhaps the only person to have worked for both Hitler and Kennedy. Moreover (moreover!), his Saturn V may have had its infancy in a mythic program that remains undiscussed at both Marshall and in D.C.: Projekt Amerika, which supposedly called for a suicide-piloted two-stager to fly in half an hour from Germany to the edge of space, across the Atlantic, and then\u2026straight into the Empire State Building!\n\n Near the war's end von Braun engineered his own capture by the U.S., was never prosecuted as a war criminal, and became the presiding genius of NASA. Installed in Alabama, he not only put us on the moon but built up the agency's infrastructure to such a degree that it is now largely prepared to go to Mars. I saw much of this infrastructure, and it is astounding. Of course, if it hadn't been for the tragedy of Nazism, this infrastructure might not have been in Alabama but in Germany, and the Deutsches Zentrum f\u00FCr Luft und Raumfahrt might be on Mars already. Von Braun, not Armstrong, could have been the first man on the moon. Omitting him from the history of the space program, as the Air and Space Museum largely has, is like omitting Jesus from the history of Christianity.\n\n But von Braun is still Jesus at Marshall. Or God. As Jennifer Morcone and I drove around the center's test stands and mock-ups, we encountered his numerous progeny, objects of biblical proportion, among them the vibration-test stand, thirty-six stories high, where fully stacked rockets are put through launch simulations; a skyscraper-sized engine-test stand and \"flame bucket\" designed to take 12 million pounds of thrust from an eventual Mars vehicle; and relics, huge Redstone and Atlas rockets, in a \"rocket garden.\" Surveying this domain: a heroic sculpture of von Braun, decked out in a space suit and ready for the first NASA party on Mars.\n\n Morcone and I kept picking up engineers, security personnel, and Ph.D.'s as we went along. At one test facility, I had a six-person entourage. An engine had recently been fired, and we looked at the scorch marks where the flames had hit. Someone explained that the material was an ablative heat absorber: \"Ablatives take energy out of heat.\"\n\n This reminded me of Neil Armstrong. If von Braun is the fiery, egomaniacal archetype of space exploration, Armstrong is the opposite. And successful rocketry, a science of combustibles and supercoolants, is all about the creation of velocity through the proximity of opposites. Mailer thought Armstrong had a personality of \"unequalled banality,\" as compared with von Braun's \"obvious funds of charisma.\" When we launched the moon rocket, the German issued this statement: \"I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on land.\" Armstrong, when explaining what had inspired his immortal and off-the-cuff line (\"That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind\"), said, \"I thought, well, when I step off I'm\u2026 It's just gonna be a little step. Gonna be a step from there down to there. But then I thought about all those 400,000 people that had given me the opportunity to make that step. I thought, It's gonna be a big something for all those folks.\u2026 So it was a kind of a simple correlation of thoughts.\" The first man on the moon was an ablative taking out all the hype and bringing the endeavor back to earth.\n\n Space is not about ego. It's about all of us. One of NASA's most noble qualities is humbleness. You shouldn't overstate, or claim to possess, the sublime. You should share it, as Armstrong did, even by Mailer's definition\u2014\"banal\" meaning trite, trivial, petty, but also something communal. I like to think of the man, who didn't even want my aunt to name a small park after him (but wouldn't presume to stop her), as democratizing the sublime.\n\n But it also took the German's ego to ensure our success.\n\n Von Braun's dead. Armstrong, now 78, was asked recently if he'd like to go to Mars with Constellation.\n\n He replied, \"I don't want to say I'm not available.\"\n\n\n\n Part III: \n\n CONSTELLATION \n\n the next morning, in Houston, I woke up early and headed for Johnson, where I met a public-affairs officer who'd asked me on the phone, \"Do you want to talk to any women or just guys?\" Confused, I'd told her I definitely wanted to talk with both genders. Now I inquired, \"Am I going to meet some women today?\"\n\n She replied, \"You're not gonna see any women. I told everyone GQ was coming and the guys are just clamoring.\"\n\n So, masculine conversation, in which the following was disclosed: Orion, the Constellation crew capsule that is scheduled to replace the shuttle in 2015, is meant to splash down in the ocean but can also land on land. (The project manager told me, \"I'm not saying it'll be fun\u2014but they'll survive.\") Constellation will launch two rockets almost simultaneously\u2014the new Ares V will go up with 157,000 pounds of cargo for building the moon base, and once Mission Control has verified that all systems are go, then its companion, the Ares I, will go up with the crewed Orion capsule on top. Logos for Constellation were commissioned from a Star Trek: The Next Generation designer.\n\n Then lunch at a conference table in a corner office with the top men on Constellation: Jeff Hanley, an elegant, self-contained midwesterner, and Doug Cooke, a ruddy, quiet Texan. It was a Last Supper of sorts. After our meeting, Hanley and Cooke were attending Constellation's budget-development meeting (at which the allocation of $6.9 billion would be determined). They were not looking forward to it.\n\n I began by saying, \"The public at large has no idea what the Constellation program is or, really, that it even exists.\" This brought on strong cringing, after which both men's faces sank into resigned sadness. They nodded beleagueredly at each other.\n\n Then I asked if the Ares rockets weren't maybe a mistake.\n\n Hanley, the midwesterner, cool and restrained, in an off-white suit jacket: \"The Ares V's the biggest rocket anybody will have ever built. This gets lost in discussions of performance. To redesign and human-rate\"\u2014i.e., make it safe for humans to fly into orbit on it\u2014\"an existing launch vehicle would cost a lot of time. There's a lot of momentum behind Ares. It'll improve crew safety by a factor of ten. Airlines have a one-in-10,000 fatality rate. The shuttle has a one-in-sixty\u2026as safe as getting in your car.\u2026 We're shooting for one in 1,000.\"\n\n Cooke, in a blazer, from behind his lunch: \"Preliminary design review went very well.\"\n\n Hanley: \"We're opening up all locations on the moon for exploration. Apollo only went to the near side and the equatorial regions.\"\n\n I asked about getting to Mars and, once there, how we would get back.\n\n Hanley: \"We can make fuel from the Martian atmosphere\u2014that's simple chemistry.\"\n\n Cooke: \"There's an opportunity to send something to Mars every twenty-six months. It'll take six Ares V rockets to do a Mars mission. But first we've got to close the life-support-system loop.\" Hence the moon base, where lunar soil\u2014regolith\u2014will be converted to oxygen, water, and fuel, and where options for growing food will be explored.\n\n \"What about leaving the solar system?\"\n\n Hanley: \"Barring some breakthrough\u2026 A hundred years ago, nobody would've guessed we'd go to the moon. Visiting other planet bodies\u2014that's why I'm here.\" Then, wistfully, \"Seems like it's taking a long time.\"\n\n\n\n in six missions, Apollo astronauts spent only eighty hours on the moon. Constellation will take us back long-term, maybe permanently. What will we do when we get there?\n\n That afternoon, outside a gray building marked hangar x, I was given some answers. My informant was Robert Howard, an African-American man in his midthirties with a Vandyke and a crew cut, who's in charge of \"human factors\" for the new lunar lander, called Altair. In the background loomed a hulking, steel, two-story mock-up of the spacecraft, which will separate, Apollo-style, from a large command module and descend to the lunar surface. Howard's colleague, Clinton Dorris, the deputy project manager, said, \"We brought Armstrong and the others to see this and they said, \u2018Holy smokes\u2014it's huge!' It has three times the mass of Apollo's lander.\"\n\n The three of us climbed through an air lock (airplane-lavatory-sized) and into the crew module (twice as big). Howard said, \"We're a couple of generations out of phase from knowing how to get to the moon.\" Translation: We've forgotten how to get there. \"So you think, What's going to kill the crew? Then you think comfort. You need hammocks. Jungle or rigid? Four people will be in here. So we figured three hammocks and one on the floor. But when we brought the astronauts in, nobody wanted to sleep on the floor.\"\n\n I said, \"I'd want to sleep on the floor.\"\n\n Dorris said, \"Yeah. Hammocks aren't that comfortable. But they're a lot more comfortable than some of the places I've slept.\" I gave him a where-have-you-slept look. \"Before coming to NASA, I did covert ops. I lived in a hole in the desert with three guys for a month.\u2026 I also flew Apache helicopters.\"\n\n We talked aviation for a minute, and I said I was going on the Vomit Comet.\n\n \"You guys ever been on?\"\n\n Howard said, \"I went on the Zero G one. About 30 percent of people throw up. It's always the people that don't take meds. Are you taking meds?\"\n\n \"I'm not sure.\"\n\n \"You should take meds. Those who don't, lose it. Two on my flight did. They didn't get to their bags on time, either. They have a bag zipped into your jumpsuit right here\"\u2014he pointed to his left shoulder\u2014\"but nobody ever gets to it in time. They call that \u2018a kill,' when you throw up on the Vomit Comet.\"\n\n \"Big mess?\" I asked.\n\n A wry smile: \"It floats.\"\n\n I started to feel claustrophobic. Three of us filled the entirety of the crew module, yet there was supposed to be another astronaut and a ton of gear in the same volume when it was on the moon.\n\n I said, \"Maybe let's get out of here.\"\n\n Dorris, Howard, and I drove over to another hangar to see the new lunar electric rover (LER), a long-range vehicle that will make wide swaths of the surface available to exploration. I'd imagined a buggy but found what looked like a party van mounted on a swiveling twelve-wheeled chassis. We got in. A tall, rangy astronaut in a blue jumpsuit followed. This was Mike Gernhardt, head of the rover project, the man who'd piloted it in Obama's inaugural parade (and who hopes to drive it on the moon someday). He stood up straight, so his head touched the roof.\n\n As we shook hands, someone said, \"We made it one Gernhardt tall\u2014ninety-fifth-percentile white American male.\"\n\n Meanwhile, Howard was reconfiguring the back of the rover to create a private stateroom. He drew a curtain, apparently made out of some proprietary NASA material, that instantly canceled all noise and light. Then he opened it to say, \"There's a misting hose for sponge baths.\" He reclined the gray leatherette seats into beds and loungers.\n\n It was not just a party van; it was a make-out van!\n\n Gernhardt said, \"With a nonpressurized rover, you could only make short trips. But this one can go out for weeks. And I'll spend most of my time in shirtsleeves with a cup of coffee.\" He opened a medicine-cabinet-sized air lock at the rear and accessed a surface suit hanging off the rover. \"I can step straight into it\"\u2014he grabbed a bar and half swung through\u2014\"close this air lock, depressurize, and then walk outside. I did the first spacewalk from the space station. It took me six hours to get out the door. Here I'll be able to do it in twenty minutes.\" He got in the driver's seat and said, \"We had Humvees chasing us in the field, and they could not keep up because of the terrain-crossing ability.\"\n\n The rover is operated with fighter-pilot-style control sticks. Every wheel can turn a full 360 degrees. It also has huge blind spots. Gernhardt pushed his stick forward. We glided smoothly out of the hangar\u2014until we felt an impact and a voice over the radio said, \"Mike, you hit a box.\"\n\n Gernhardt mumbled, \"I didn't see that.\"\n\n An older man, jumpsuit matching Gernhardt's, sauntered in to observe our predicament. After my close encounter with Armstrong, I thought he might also be an Apollo veteran\u2014maybe Gene Cernan, who reputedly uttered the last words spoken on the moon (\"Let's get this mutha outta here!\").\n\n I asked Gernhardt.\n\n A wry smile, \"He's the Space Center Houston tram driver.\" Then, cleared to proceed, he added, \"We would have won, and the box would have lost.\"\n\n From the back: \"So far we've never had any automobile accidents in this.\"\n\n Gernhardt switched on the AC (which slowly began to leak on him) and said, \"We're going to do excursions up to 1,000 kilometers long.\" We were crabbing on a smooth diagonal across a vast expanse of sunny lawn beside the hangar\u2014the moon to us. \"If I find a vein that a geologist wants to follow, we can move sideways right alongside, the geologist down on the floor\"\u2014he pointed to a round bubble at the bottom of the rover's front canopy\u2014\"inches away.\"\n\n He spun straight ahead and floored it for a drainage ditch, where the shocks absorbed the impact and translated it into a smooth curve, then said, \"You want to drive?\"\n\n \"Yeah.\"\n\n I tried diagonals, laterals, and hitting the irrigation ditch.\n\n I asked if Gernhardt had been on the Vomit Comet.\n\n Gernhardt: \"I flew fifty or sixty parabolas this morning.\"\n\n I lowered the rover, nose to lawn, like a grazing animal. The air-conditioning was leaking hard now. Dorris, the Apache pilot, asked to take over driving, and I moved back. Gernhardt requested towels: \"I'm getting showered.\"\n\n Howard started opening up ingenious storage compartments. I felt a strong desire to have NASA organize my apartment. Dorris hooked and sliced, Apache-style.\n\n \"Wanna race the tram?\" Gernhardt called back to me.\n\n I did not. Suddenly I was in danger of throwing up and being the first \"kill\" for the LER\u2014if I couldn't handle this, I was doomed when it came to parabolas.\n\n\n\ngernhardt was a deep-sea diver who repaired oil platforms before joining NASA. He had the look of someone who'd spent a lot of time in saltwater\u2014like a surfer with a Ph.D. in bioengineering. He was wearing combat boots that came up to midcalf and were wrapped, for reasons I couldn't figure out, in leather cord. Having flown four shuttle missions, he's one of the most experienced astronauts at NASA. We talked a bit back at the hangar. I asked him, \"How much sleep do you actually get in space?\"\n\n \"You're so excited to be there. You're working your tail off. Six hours. Sometimes two. Post-mission I'm shot.\" He thought the moon would be a much different environment, work-and-stress-wise. \"With the new suit we'll go out for pleasure\u2014just to take a walk. Picture the games you can play. Lunar basketball; the high jump. We tried powering the rover with an ergometer, which is good ercise\u2014you pedal in Fred Flintstone mode\u2014and it worked. But we didn't get going very fast.\"\n\n Then he mentioned that he liked to write. Fiction. So I asked him to send me some stories. Most were about diving, but one described what it felt like to go into orbit:\n\nI remember when I first looked out the window at earth. It took my breath away. The jewel blue earth suspended in black space, swirling white clouds, vast empty oceans, continents, countries without borders, everyone you know covered by your raised thumb. For a fleeting moment, things made sense. Then back to work, details, and checklist after checklist for hours, then days on end.\u2026 [E]verything a blur, not quite real, almost like you weren't really there, like you were watching yourself from a dream or some other place.\u2026 [O]ne reason I got in this business was to recognize I was alive, to feel it, to know it. Sure, the ride up made you feel alive because you were so close to death, but with your mind focused on your job, it seemed like it was over in an instant.\n\n\"You know who I don't like but is in The New Yorker all the time?\" Gernhardt asked.\n\n \"T. C. Boyle?\"\n\n \"No. John Updike.\"\n\n In the novel Rabbit Redux, Updike described astronauts as \"pretty boys in the sky.\"\n\n \"He just died,\" I said.\n\n Brief pause.\n\n Gernhardt said, \"I still don't like the way he puts things.\"\n\n\n\n that evening I found myself walking around my hotel room saying, \"It really does stupefy me how great this agency is and how little the country appreciates it.\" Gernhardt's coolness, his obvious funds of right stuff, had pushed me over the edge: The man could fly into space at 17,000 miles per hour and denigrate John Updike! I wanted to be like that. And this feeling only deepened when, the next morning, I found myself in an air lock with Carlton C. Allen, a white-haired man in his sixties, who casually explained the origins of life.\n\n A sign designated the room beyond the air lock a bunny suit area, so we were dressed completely in white\u2014jumpsuits, gloves, caps, booties. Before suiting up, Allen, who runs Johnson's Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office, had handed me an asteroid that was 4.5 billion years old, saying, \"Fourteen billion years ago was the big bang. This rock is one-third that age. That is the oldest thing you will ever touch.\"\n\n Then he told me: \"One of the things that modern astronomy and planetary science has come to understand is that there is a natural way of delivering complicated organics to the planets, as they were forming. We think that a lot of the organic chemistry that we see in life on earth was delivered by meteorites.\u2026 Life came from space.\"\n\n From the air lock we entered a bright fluorescent rectangle full of stainless chambers accessed by glove bos. The glove bos were covered with white caps, because uncapped gloves flutter, setting off motion detectors, and \"serious people come around if you get an alarm in this lab.\" At the far end of the room was a Federal Reserve bank vault.\n\n \"These are the only lunar rocks in the world,\" Allen said. \"We keep them as if it took a $30 billion program to get them and we're not going to get any more.\"\n\n The vault is closed with two dials, and no one person knows both combinations.\n\n As we walked through the room in our bunny suits, looking at abducted chunks of the moon, Allen told me that some still had \"very faint traces of the ancient lunar magnetic field.\" Others had a pumicelike quality\u2014\"think of freshly broken crystals.\" The moon may as well be covered in teeth. That's how sharp these broken crystals are. And carrying on with the oral metaphor, the moon is thirsty. If an astronaut were to take off her suit on the moon, a NASA Web site explains, \"the water would get sucked out of the astronaut's unsuited body in an effort to even out the water-vapor pressure\u2026very quickly and completely, leaving behind dry dust.\"\n\n I imagined Gernhardt and Allen on the moon, Gernhardt propelling the rover with his own effort, Allen in the observation bubble, inches away from the surface.\n\n Gut. Perfect.\n\n\n\n  Part IV: \n\n CONFLAGRATION \n\n from houston I flew to New Orleans, where that night I went to see a trumpeter called Kermit Ruffins, who had a regular gig in the Ninth Ward. Ruffins played a short set, then announced it was time for a \"cannabis break.\" While he fired up, I took a beer outside and talked with a Canadian woman in her sixties named Nancy, who was wearing a yellow bourbon street T-shirt and a flowing skirt. She said she'd ridden a motorcycle across America, then asked what I was doing. I explained about NASA.\n\n She asked, \"With NASA what's your aspect?\"\n\n I had no idea what she meant. \"Aspect? Do you mean what's my angle?\"\n\n \"Yeah, angle. What's your angle on NASA?\"\n\n \"Just to try and understand what they're doing.\"\n\n She thought about that for a minute, then asked, seriously, \"Can I come with you?\"\n\n\n\n just across the Mississippi border, at the Stennis Space Center (SSC), I was met by Paul Foerman, fiftyish, with a boyish face, my guide. Foerman and I took a government van for a \"windshield tour.\" Our driver, who looked like she had recently been a high school soccer player, was Stennis's visitor-relations specialist, or VRS (Foerman: \"Yeah, we're big into acronyms\"). The place was enormous, surrounded by an \"acoustical buffer zone\"\u2014411 square miles that used to be forest, swamp, and five towns, until the government took it over, turned the towns into ghosts, and named it all after the state's most powerful senator. During one von Braun test at Stennis, involving 7.5 million pounds of Saturn V thrust, the reverberation was felt more than a hundred miles away, in Baton Rouge, and broke the bank windows in the town of Picayune. Now shuttle and satellite-delivery engines are tested there. It will be a huge proving ground for Constellation.\n\n I recounted the prior night's outing. Foerman translated \"cannabis break\" for the VRS: \"Smokin' some dope.\"\n\n She cried, \"Mr. Paul!\"\n\n We turned off Trent Lott Parkway and came round a corner, and I got a look at a structure more than twice as big as the biggest engine-test stand in Huntsville, a steel-and-concrete monolith with double flame buckets and a red control tower emblazoned with a huge meatball, like the burning-blue-and-bloodshot eye of a cyclops. I asked, \"What's that?\"\n\n Foerman: \"B stand.\"\n\n Forty-three years ago, when NASA hadn't yet launched an Apollo spacecraft, von Braun built this monster to hold in 12 million pounds of thrust, almost twice the capacity of the Saturn V. (He had even bigger plans in mind.) Pratt &amp;amp; Whitney was leasing it for the long term. \"It's on the plate for Ares V tests.\"\n\n I asked if we could tour it, and Foerman said that was up to the lessee. So we found the company's strategic-planning manager, who agreed to show us around. They were setting up to hoist an engine into position.\n\n I said, \"I'd love to get a photo of that.\"\n\n Negative from Strategic Planning: \"Lotta tech on that engine that we don't want other countries getting hold of.\"\n\n We all took an elevator to the top of the stand\u2014warm on the ground, but 340 feet up we'd punctured another atmosphere. Out through some blast doors and the view carried on across Mississippi and deep into Louisiana\u2014trees and water as far as the eye could see. Someone pointed out a site where NASA was building another stand for the Ares engine tests. Called A-3, it would be the first large-scale test facility since Apollo. A test engineer who'd joined our group matched his stride with mine and said, \"You can't write about how you feel when you see something you worked on go to space. I used to tell my mother it was like kissing a pretty girl. The same loss of memory\u2026 You ever feel that?\" He said poetry did a good job explaining. \"I've got an 1860s book in my truck, poetry from Hansboro, where my daddy was the postmaster.\"\n\n On to an engine plant. As we entered a room full of rocketry, Foerman shouted, \"Shut off your phone!\"\n\n The plant manager explained: \"There are shunts on the pyrotechnics that are installed in our hot-gas drive assembly, and if the shunts should fail, then it would\u2026uh\u2026it would go off. It's pyrotechnic. And that would not be good.\"\n\n Cafeteria lunch. A can of something called Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning had a high-profile spot on the counter. Foerman and I joined Lonnie Dutreix, project manager for A-3, and a group of rowdy test engineers.\n\n \"Do you guys like blowing things up?\" I asked. \"What challenges you as test engineers?\"\n\n The choral response: \"Biggest challenge? Keeping management away from us!\"\n\n \"I'm worried about nozzle hoop strength.\"\n\n \"I like fires. Blowing stuff up.\"\n\n \"Expensive things.\"\n\n \"Biggest challenge? Yeah, keeping management away from us! I concoah with that.\"\n\n \"When NASA wants smart people, they always look out of state.\"\n\n \"Uh, I'm from Mississippi.\"\n\n \"Well, yeah.\"\n\n \"We're friggin' cool down heah\u2014stuffed shirts everywheah else!\"\n\n \"I'm seriously worried about the nozzle.\"\n\n Finally, a quick windshield tour of A-3 in the shirtsleeve environment of Dutreix's SUV. Mostly steel girders, the stand resembled a bridge mistakenly built vertical. Dutreix: \"I don't want to be the project manager who builds this facility and it doesn't work\u2014got a big bungee-jumping stand here.\" If it works, it'll create a vacuum simulating atmospheric conditions at 100,000 feet, the altitude at which the second stage of the Ares I is expected to start. This huge new thing, being built by a Native American contractor, called to mind the construction of Stennis itself\u2014a Soviet-looking endeavor involving thousands of workers (and more mosquitoes). Of the workers back then, Dutreix said, \"A lot of 'em just quit. They couldn't take it.\"\n\n\n\n i got back to New Orleans in time to stop at a bar called Cooter Brown's for a pint, a dozen oysters, and some cheese fries. A long-haired guy next to me in a black concert shirt was having J\u00E4ger shots. He turned out to be a space enthusiast. When I told him I was to fly on the Vomit Comet in the morning, he said, \"And you're eating that shit?!\"\n\n At the airport my plane had mechanical problems, so I cabbed it back to New Orleans, wolfed down a big African stew with spicy peanut sauce, Creole tomatoes, and more beer, then left four hours later for another flight, hungover and sleep deprived.\n\n From the Web site for Zero G: \"We recommend you to be well rested for the flight day, and avoid alcohol the night before.\u2026\"\n\n\n\n Part V: \n\n FEET DOWN! \n\n i arrived in d.c. the next morning, just in time to meet my plane\u2014G-Force One\u2014on the tarmac at Dulles. A Zero G representative gave me a jumpsuit, then briefed me on safety. I'd already released them and NASA from liability by signing a waiver that stated, \"Inherent risks include\u2026personal injury or illness (minor or serious) and/or death...resulting from weightlessness.\"\n\n I boarded the plane with a couple of dozen other passengers, all quiet, except for a boisterous group of Mexicans. We entered by a staircase at the rear, through a military green snarl of cables, wires, hydraulics. The interior was completely covered in padding. Ropes ran up and down the cabin, stopping at the back third, which was filled with seats. Everything was stowed, stripped bare, tied down. My seatmates were a neurologist and a Defense Department employee. The Mexicans, salesmen who'd sold hard and won this trip, sang. Everyone was seemingly on major meds. Many had not eaten dinner the night before. I contemplated my beer, oysters, stew, lack of even Dramamine. I had wanted an unfiltered experience.\n\n We all lay down on the floor, feet forward. I had brought along a yellow skateboarding helmet and put it on. Someone explained that at the end of each parabola we'd hear a shout, \"Feet down, coming out!\" our cue to right ourselves and lie on our backs for a period of intensified 1.8 g's.\n\n The plane climbed steeply, then went over the top. Martian gravity. I weighed sixty-five pounds! I was an 8-year-old with the strength of a man! The Mexicans did rapid-fire push-ups across from me! \"Feet down!\" I weighed over 300 pounds! Now lunar! More feats of strength from Mexico! \"Feet down!\" Zero! Levitation! A kick in the head from someone. \"Feet down!\" Skateboarding moves I'd been trying my whole life\u2014now effortless! Aerials! A perfect stalled handplant! \"Feet down!\" Zero G unleashed some toys! A blowfish-like blue orb, a dog toy, whizzed by, and I caught it, then hurled it at Jorge from Guerrero, who booted it back! I flew up toward the ceiling, somersaulted, and lost track of which way was up\u2014complete detachment of meaning from direction. Everyone was screaming and laughing. (Except one young woman, who was so sick she had to go strap herself in for the rest of the weightlessness.)\n\n I softly sailed up and over to one of G-Force One's two windows, in the emergency exits. Direction doesn't matter when you're weightless. Up and down are no longer markers. I suddenly understood how in space there is only everywhere. And this revelation was accompanied by the fleeting physical knowledge of what it was to leave the earth. I could move in any direction. All was calm and effortless. And to an astonishing degree\u2014astonishing largely because the understanding was so matter-of-fact, as though I'd begun to internalize my own understated Neil Armstrong\u2014this sort of comfort with wonder felt like the goal of both science and spirituality. Here I was with a bunch of Mexican salesmen, on the Vomit Comet, doing the kinds of things that make others want to either throw up or, in NASA-ese, \"work with us to do them,\" and lo, it was good. I looked outside and saw that we were canted violently toward the ocean, like a bombing run or a suicide mission\u2014like Projekt Amerika, D.C.-bound, coming in. A wave of vertigo\u2026 \"Feet down!\"\n\n Later a woman told me the sensation of weightlessness was \"familiar\u2014I have flying dreams all the time.\" She was, in fact, like Neil Armstrong, who once described the following recurring dream: \"I could, by holding my breath, hover over the ground. Nothing much happened. I neither flew nor fell in those dreams; I just hovered.\"\n\n I had passed my own test. I'd flown the Vomit Comet on no sleep, hungover, full of oysters and stew, hung my hide out over the yawning abyss, and come back. Strapped in again, my neurologist neighbor said, \"You must have an iron stomach. And I'm glad to see you wore a helmet. There's a lot of potential for injury here.\" Aunt Glen would have been proud.\n\n As we flew, the Mexican salesmen all sang together:\n\nAy, ay, ay, ay&amp;gt;\n\nCanta y no llores&amp;gt;undefined&amp;gt;\n\nPorque cantando se alegran&amp;gt;undefined&amp;gt;\n\nCielito lindo, los corazonesundefined&amp;gt; Sing, and don't cry&amp;gt;\n\n Because singing makes you happy&amp;gt;\n\n\n\n Beautiful little sky, the hearts.\n\n*By the way, I made that FUR one up. I asked Morcone for the technical name and she responded, \"I'm on it.\u2026\" But not long after, she told me, \"Sorry to disappoint you, but the urine-collection hose is officially called the urine receptacle. It does not have a special name/adapter for male/female.\"\n\nsean wilsey is the author of a memoir, Oh the Glory of It All. He is at work on a book about NASA (and would like to go into space)."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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