THIS is NOT how it ends!

April 10, 2011|By Charles P. Pierce

All the way to every horizon, the whole day shines. The sand of the distant beach and the foam of the waves breaking on it. The white birds circling above, and, like opposites, like angels from alternative universes, the vultures, black and resonant, drifting in their higher orbits. Even the sky itself, a brilliant blue that seems to extend all the way to the Azores. Looking out from atop the gantry at Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, the immediate universe seems suffused with a common luminance, except for the vehicle, standing there stolid in the full spring sunshine. There is something charming about the fact that it does not sparkle the way the rest of the day does.
Built in 1991 to replace the doomed Challenger,Endeavour is still the newest of America’s space shuttles. On this day, it’s being prepared for its final flight, the second to last of the entire shuttle program. Endeavour looks old and worn, dinged and scarred. Its hull, once gleaming and white, is scorched to a dull gray in long streaks along its side and seared to black around its tail. It has to it the aspect of one of the old pickup trucks you pass along State Road 405 on the way down to the space center, their wheels half on the highway and half on the shoulder, their drivers disappeared into the scrub and brush to hunt alligators, or wild pigs, or bales of dope dropped off by runners from the Bahamas.
If the space center looks like the realization of what Florida hoped itself to be, the Florida that attracted generations of dreamers stretching from Ponce de Leon to Walt Disney, then the Endeavour, there on its pad, awaiting its last trip into space, looks like a bit of the cobbled-together Florida that always was. The shuttle may be a triumph of technology, cousin in its own way to the Corvettes that the space jockeys used to run recklessly along the shining beaches, but it still has about it the feel of something a mechanic would drive to work.
If all goes according to plan, Endeavour will lift off for the last time on April 29, its historic mission designated STS-134. The launch has already become an event for reasons far beyond the fact that it will be the vehicle’s final one. The commander of STS-134 is Mark Kelly, the husband of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt on January 8 in Tucson. Kelly has said his wife is planning on coming to the launch, and this has set off something of a feeding frenzy for the NASA press people to deal with.
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