When last we spoke, Friday’s launch of the space shuttle Endeavour had been scrubbed, and tweetup plans were put into motion should NASA be able to reschedule for Monday or Tuesday. As became clear over the course of the day on Saturday, the problem was not going to be solved by a simple thermostat swap-out, and as confirmed by NASA on Sunday, there will be no launch any earlier than May 8, with an actual date still to be set.
Which means, in effect, now my NASA Tweetup experience is over, barring any headway on something of a Hail Mary play which those of you who follow me on Twitter already know about, and about which I’m not going to say much of anything here, for the moment.
So I have rescheduled my return flight to Portland for tomorrow morning. Today I sit in my $41/night Howard Johnson in DeLand (to which I moved after the $56/night Day’s Inn in Titusville) hoping to make some real headway on culling and uploading pictures from Kennedy Space Center.
As it became clear on Saturday that the hoped-for early week launch and therefore extended tweetup was not going to happen, it would be a lie to claim my mood did not darken considerably. What I’ve not said publicly prior to this post is that for awhile on Saturday, I was unconvinced that talks in the tent and a tour of the VAB were experiences matching the expense, and I felt to no small degree that I had just wasted a lot of other people’s money.
On the latter point, it is, of course, not my call; it’s theirs. On the former point, I’m afraid I will need a bit more distance — both temporal and geographical — before I know if that’s what I really think. The reality is that my inner five-year-old, the wannabe outer space moving van driver, didn’t come for the Vehicle Assembly Building. He came to get close to the shuttle (but the pad trip didn’t happen) and see it launch (which didn’t happen). With some time, he might put a little more weight behind listening to three completely different astronauts speak in person about their rather extraordinary job, but emotionally that time isn’t here yet.
I’m going to need the time and distance before I can tell if the experience I did have outweighs the one I did not. I know everyone else seems to have instantly known that what they did get was worth it. I’m not yet in a place where I can say that.
Last night, fighting off both the general depression caused by the above and my usual instincts, I caught a ride down to Port Canaveral for what had been dubbed the STS-134 NASATweetup First Attempt “Closeout” Mixer, or (to some) NASAScrubUp. If you’re a bored masochist, you can watch the archived videos because we were streaming live from the table. Swordfish, mojitos, and goodbyes.
It’s true that tweetup participants will be invited back to actually see the launch once it’s rescheduled. But having already been through two rounds (original trip, and extended stay) of family, friends, and near-complete strangers funding my trip, there’s little hope that I will be amongst the returnees barring the aforementioned longshot Hail Mary play.
As it stands today, the closest I and that five-year-old me will ever get to a space shuttle is to visit a retired one put on display. Early discussions have begun about an STS-134 NASATweetup reunion at the California Science Center for the dedication of their Endeavour exhibit. As I sit here still in Florida, waiting to return to a much lesser life, I look forward to that at the same time it serves to underscore the experience I am not going to have here.
For now, there’s just burying myself in culling through and uploading photos from Kennedy Space Center, distracting myself with some sort of work. I can try to process photos, but for now I can’t fully process, let alone dispense with, my disappointment.