Exit Strategy

Nobody magazine is a big inspiration for The Mortar. I love the way that it sets writers free, giving them a platform for telling the stories that are important to them. In this one, Megan Gannon investigates the often bizarre world of human space flight, and in doing so reflects on the changes she has experienced over the last decade in rocket science, journalism, and her own personal life.

On a Thursday evening in August 2013, I boarded a flight from New York to Albuquerque, New Mexico. A Ford Focus waited for me in the rental car parking lot at the airport and I drove it to a dingy hotel across the street from a liquor store. When I complained that my room stank of cigarettes, the receptionist handed me a bottle of air freshener, which made the smell worse. This was before I developed a standard for booking a bad hotel on a limited budget: look for the one with the fewest mentions of “blood” in the reviews. 

I pulled a T-shirt from my still-packed bag, wrapped it around my face, and tried to get some sleep. Just a few hours later, at around four in the morning, I got up, gathered my things, and started driving south. When I got far enough away from the glow of Albuquerque, I gripped the steering wheel and screamed when I saw the spine of stars in the sky. I had spent most of my life up until that point in a dense, light-polluted suburb; I had only seen the Milky Way a handful of times before. 

Quite a humbling admission for someone who would soon have to introduce herself as a space reporter. 

Not that being a real space reporter requires standing under the Milky Way each night to commune with the cosmos. But what did I know? On an average workday, I looked more like a telemarketer than a hard-hitting journalist. I wore a headset inside a crowded open office in Manhattan, where I was employed by a pair of news websites that covered developments in science and space with an urgency more appropriate for a firefighter entering a burning building. 

Driving to New Mexico’s new spaceport, near the town of Truth or Consequences, and then onto a museum in Alamogordo would be a break from my shift at the nozzle of the science content firehose. It was my first real reporting trip, and I would attend a conference to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first test flight of a rocket called the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, in the White Sands Desert. 

The rocket wasn’t exactly a household name. I hadn’t heard of it until my editor suggested I go to this event: one of the occasional trips that I suspected was a treat to keep us writers motivated. Wasn’t work travel supposed to be a little glamorous, even if I had to foot the bill myself and hold tightly to every linty receipt? Allegedly, it was a chance to slow down and pay attention, though at the time I was unfamiliar with how a journalist should behave away from a computer screen. In return, I expected to be asked to squeeze out a few stories about a moment in space history. What I didn’t expect was a crisis of faith.

At the conference, I found myself among a group of retired or almost-retired men, ex-DC-X crew members, who all assumed I was a student or someone’s daughter. They were proud of their U.S. military-funded work to build a reusable rocket – one that, after launching, could land by itself, ready to take flight over and over again. 

A truly reusable rocket was supposed to make spaceflight cheaper, faster, and, most importantly, routine. It would be an innovation akin to the invention of the commercial airplane. But instead of allowing people to cross countries and continents with increasing ease, regular rocket flights promised to deliver the future envisioned by sci-fi writers of the early 20th century. Mars would be populated with suburbs. Floating colonies inside spinning cylinders would be built at gravitationally stable points a million miles away while Earth would be preserved as some sort of nature park. 

Developing reusable rockets was seen as a crucial step in making these futures a reality. Getting a rocket to land intact, gently and vertically, is difficult, and it hadn’t been done before DC-X. The first flight in New Mexico’s White Sands Desert in 1993 was radical. The cone-shaped sub-scale prototype flew for only 59 seconds and reached an altitude of only 150 feet. But it still showed what might be possible. 

Twenty years later, I was watching the DC-X crew’s induction into the International Space Hall of Fame. There were flattering speeches and glittering trays of green chili lasagna and an atmosphere tinged with disappointment. The men around me didn’t see any floating colonies or Mars encampments or any other signs of the spacefaring civilization they thought they were building. A reusable commercial rocket remained an elusive innovation. NASA’s Space Shuttle program had recently ended. The U.S. was dependent on Russia to send its astronauts to the International Space Station. Likewise, American efforts to go back to the Moon, or far beyond Earth, to Mars, had been killed, just like DC-X had been killed – all victims of government bureaucrats. 

Before arriving at the event, I had expected technical conversations. I had even expected jingoistic speeches about the importance of maintaining an American presence in space for some geopolitical advantage. But all these men seemed to have much greater ambitions about humanity’s place in the universe. And the fatalistic urgency in seeing this project achieved seemed to be the only thing anyone wanted to talk about. 

I heard a variety of complaints and counterfactuals from the men in attendance. We’re trapped on Earth, with little chance of becoming multi-planetary anytime soon. We’re suffering from an excess of democracy. Any successful space program is run by elites and is anti-democratic in the extreme. We’re way too concerned with bringing astronauts home alive. 

This ‘precious’ treatment of astronauts was the particular obsession of a overfamiliar man named Rand who encouraged me to buy his self-published book on the subject, “Safe Is Not An Option,” a play on the famous “failure is not an option” line attributed to former NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz, who – incidentally – had guided all of the Apollo 13 astronauts home intact. 

I would eventually have to block Rand on various social media channels for reasons having nothing to do with space, but the eager commentary helped me understand that I was surrounded by hardline libertarians like him who believed the colonization of other planets was the only worthy goal of space travel. 

Up until this point, I had taken for granted that putting humans in space was at least neutral and inevitable, if not also cool and good. Even if I felt cynical about the pace of my job, I found writing and aggregating news about science – and space in particular – energizing. The work offered a way out of squishy thinking, a framework for organizing the world, a big dose of momentum, and endless novelty. Theories were tested. Mysteries were solved. New species were identified. Old bones were found. Rockets burned and left the atmosphere.

In 2013, being a person who professionally explained those phenomena on the internet was aspirational, at least to me. It was the Obama era, the “I Fucking Love Science” era. Ezra Klein was probably somewhere out there pitching Vox to investors. Wonks ruled, and maybe with enough practice I could leave the content aggregation mines and become one. 

In New Mexico, however, I felt out of the realm of the empirical and squarely on one side of a holy war. The glamor of space exploration had been stripped down to a badly lit room full of rumpled, emotional men impatient to get off the planet. They knew their nostalgic vision of the future was not inevitable or already decided, and so they seemed determined to steer the course of the human race towards it. 

The men perked up when an Air Force guy got on stage and projected the text of an email from Elon Musk, whose private rocket-making company SpaceX had completed a vertical takeoff and landing with its reusable Grasshopper prototype just days before. The flight looked uncannily similar to the DC-X flight, and the email consisted of a one-line message responding to the congratulations sent by the men in attendance: “Thanks, Just continuing the great work of the DC-X program!" 

The Elon Musk of 2013 was still on his way to becoming one of the richest and most polarizing figures on the planet. He had not yet bought and burned up Twitter. It was not yet common to see his name in the same sentence as the word “ketamine.” He had not yet made SpaceX functionally an arm of NASA. (In the 2022 fiscal year, SpaceX contracts accounted for $2 billion of NASA’s $24 billion approved budget.) In 2013, SpaceX was still only a decade old, and its robotic Dragon capsule had only just started ferrying cargo to the International Space Station. 

But if one thing has remained consistent, it’s that since he entered the industry, Musk has always claimed that his ultimate goal is colonizing Mars – a step, in his mind, toward making humans multiplanetary, a hedge against extinction. “I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future,” Musk told Aeon in 2014, a sentiment he’s repeated many times over since.

In New Mexico, I found myself standing in the ideological puddle he seemed to have emerged from. 

After the event was over, I made a detour on my way back to the airport in order to visit Roswell, the site of an infamous 1947 UFO incident that gave rise to an entire movement of conspiracy theorists who believe in alien contact. 

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was possibly complicit in some political project that I didn’t entirely understand; a fish just realizing it’s in water. I was hoping to make up for my stupidity by turning in a pithy little travel article about Roswell. I surely knew better than the anti-science freaks who believed in aliens of the little green men variety. As I neared the city, the mountains disappeared from my rearview mirror and the earth flattened. 

Once in town, I drove past a silver UFO-shaped McDonald’s and lamp posts with lights like little alien heads. In the display windows of gift shops, aliens made from all sorts of earthly materials arranged themselves in all sorts of earthly poses. They reclined on picnic chairs. They played cards. They chugged beers. They were tourists, enjoying their extended vacation in America. 

I parked, and went into the International UFO Museum and Research Center, which was really just one large room, radiating low energy, its walls lined with bulletin board displays of amateur drawings and testimonies about extraterrestrial experiences. The most impressive came from Apollo 14 astronaut Ed Mitchell, who claimed that NASA was hiding credible reports of UFOs and said he had conducted successful telepathic experiments while standing on the Moon. 

The place left me more uneasy than amused. I had come here thinking I would be able to laugh at it all, to crawl my way back into the comfort of the empirical and the decided by way of the absurd. But I realized maybe I didn’t have the right to mock those who believed in alien encounters. I had just spent three days with men who earnestly believed it was our destiny to leave the planet. To become, ourselves, extraterrestrials. Was it really more plausible to believe that Earthlings belonged in space? 

A year after my trip to New Mexico, I left the websites and the country altogether, telling everyone I needed more time and cheaper rent to pursue more ambitious projects. I would learn that “ambition” wouldn’t be a natural feature of my next chapter, as a freelancer in Berlin, though I started to make peace with the fact that, in one way or another, I would always be searching for the right conditions to be a writer. When Berlin stopped feeling right, I moved again to work in local journalism for a weekly paper in a remote town in Alaska, and then again to become a ceramics teacher while living on a houseboat in Seattle.  

All that is to say, I don’t find myself at space industry events much these days. But in the time since I left the day-to-day work of such reporting, SpaceX graduated from blasting nonhuman cargo into orbit to flying manned NASA missions. The company has also begun regularly reusing its Falcon 9 rockets. A piece of the DC-X dream has come true. The landscape of American spaceflight today is very different than it was a decade ago.

So last year, when an astronaut I had kept in touch with invited me to see her launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, I decided to go to the frontlines again. She was headed to the International Space Station for six months as part of a SpaceX mission for NASA. I had traveled long distances to witness the weddings of friends and family. Why not put the same effort into seeing someone I know essentially strap themselves to a bomb and leave Earth?

Finally witnessing a crewed launch might also help answer a question – arguably, the only question – I could think about since that anti-climatic event in New Mexico: What is the point of sending humans to space? And why does it elicit such a specific strain of emotional fanaticism?

One could argue that manned space exploration helps further science, expanding our knowledge about the origins of our existence itself. But robots and satellites can do that work pretty well, sniffing out traces of water, methane, and other elements in the solar system, without humans getting in the way. Others look to the skies and see dollar signs on the Moon or asteroids. But, again, robots could theoretically mine these other bodies without the need for expensive and complicated human life-support systems. 

The only explanation that made sense to me was that human spaceflight has become a quasi-religion – one that burst into popularity in the 1950s and has, since then, maintained a tight hold on our collective consciousness. 

This was a framework first posited by former NASA historian Roger Launius in his 2013 paper titled “Escaping Earth: Human Spaceflight as Religion.” Launius argues that aggressive space exploration advocates operate in a belief system that has all the elements of a religion – saints, martyrs, demons, sites of pilgrimage, sacred texts. Most importantly, it has a message of salvation, promising to ensure humanity’s future through expansion to other realms of the cosmos – a message of salvation, other scholars and critics have pointed out, not dissimilar to the justifications European explorers once used for the violent conquest of the New World. A space age manifest destiny.

While government space officials have historically tended to shy away from any talk of fate, of ‘divine decrees,’ this isn’t the case for modern high priests like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, whose preaching has, over the years, only grown more fervent. 

That said, Musk and Bezos are not modern anomalies. Both fit into a long tradition of public figures who have claimed that our species’ destiny lies in expanding far beyond Earth. Their ideas can be traced all the way back to 19th-century Russian Orthodox “cosmists” who took Christianity’s tenets about propagating life and extended them into space. 

Many iterations of this type of philosophy followed in more secular crowds. German rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke, who worked with the Nazi aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, came up with the "Extraterrestrial Imperative,” a concept that said humans had a responsibility to leave the closed system of Earth. 

These days, space expansionism, alongside transhumanism, is a core component of “longtermism,” a type of philosophy associated with tech billionaires who claim to be looking out for the lives of theoretical generations in a far-distant and abstract future. Powerful longtermists  like Musk and Bezos use an ends-justify-the-means approach to drive their political agendas and technological innovations while sucking resources away from less extravagant efforts like universal basic income and healthcare. 

Yet, whether this approach serves as a marketing ploy, or just a useful cudgel against their inconvenient problems on Earth, like unsafe and unethical labor conditions at their companies, is beside the point. Any question of ‘intention’ doesn’t really matter when they command the funding and power to continue the project of human spaceflight and shape its expansion. 

I didn’t have any illusions that seeing a crewed SpaceX launch in Florida would offer any more clarity about the continued project of getting humans off Earth, but I thought I should at least bear witness to one of these important religious events where the lives of saints were at stake, where I could feel the sonic boom and see the white glow of thousands of gallons of combusting liquid oxygen. 

On a Sunday morning in February 2024, my husband and I boarded what would be our first in a series of three flights from Alaska to Orlando, the closest major city to Cape Canaveral. A few days before the scheduled launch, we drove to the Kennedy Space Center and parked our rental car in a huge lot with sections marked by the names of different astronauts. We left our GMC Acadia under a banner of Wally Schirra, a major saint in American spaceflight cosmology: the only astronaut to have flown in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. We waited behind a long line of cruise ship tourists to pass through a metal detector. 

Once inside, fatigue set in quickly. A grandiose, orchestral soundtrack blared over speakers as we argued about whether the rockets in the rocket garden were real or replicas or even built to scale. I didn’t really care to figure out who was right, nor did we feel like getting shaken up in the flight simulator or like waiting in line at Starbucks. 

We were experiencing a crisis of hyperreality. In its music and architecture and theming, the place felt like a cheap imitation of what we had seen at Disney World, where we’d just spent a few days with my family, exhausting our capacity for ironic enjoyment while waiting in line for Space Mountain and other space-themed rides. Real rocket scientists – including von Braun – had helped Walt Disney create his amusement park vision of the future in the 1950s. Now this real space center felt faker than the fake versions. 

In the gift shop, I found a souvenir for my coworker, a magnet that said “FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION” in bold letters with an Apollo 13 mission logo. While waiting in line to pay, I looked at the Wikipedia article for the phrase and learned that Gene Kranz didn’t even utter the words attributed to him. It was written into the script of the Tom Hanks movie Apollo 13 and was later adopted by Kranz as the title of his memoir. Now it was being used to sell epoxy magnets for $4.99.

The day before the launch, I boarded one of the seven coach buses hired for friends and family, to attend a “wave across,” one last socially-distanced goodbye to the astronauts. After a few minutes of waiting in a nondescript parking lot, the astronauts arrived, wearing their blue flight suits and riding in Mustang convertibles, one black, one red – a distinctly nostalgic performance of astronautness. 

The other guests and I deboarded the buses and stood across from the roped-off crew members for a half hour of greetings and shout-conversations held at an awkward volume and physical distance. 

The handlers kept gently reminding the astronauts to step further away. “Don’t feed the animals,” my astronaut friend joked after she was chided. One of her friends had shown up in a Darth Vader mask. Another made a few dozen placards with our astronaut’s face on it. These little displays of levity seemed to release some of the pressure of the tearful goodbyes ahead of a long and potentially dangerous deployment. My friend took a socially-distanced selfie with me before getting back in her car to return to crew quarters. 

I wished I could separate my happiness for her – this was a long-awaited mission, maybe the highest point in her career – from my questions about whether any of this was a good idea. Instead, I just felt a little guilty, like a sinner entering church. 

Our buses departed for a tour of other pilgrimage sites around the space center. We drove to Launch Complex 39A, the massive pad built in the 1960s for the Apollo missions to the Moon, where our astronauts would launch from. In the foreground, our tour guide pointed out the new pad SpaceX was building for its Starship, the tallest rocket ever built: the vessel that’s supposed to help Musk in his tireless mission to colonize Mars, delivering 100 passengers at a time. 

Further down the beach, Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin (named after his own vision to move entirely off our planet – ‘our blue origin’ – for the supposed benefit of Earth) was working on its own reusable rocket. Our attention was then directed to a more earthly sight, out beyond the launch pads: a series of haphazard ditches. “If you look to the right, that’s what the hogs do to the ground out here,” our tour guide said, “They just tear it up.” 

Throughout the week, we received news that the winds and waves were making the conditions too dangerous for liftoff. Delays are a normal and maddening aspect of waiting around for a launch, but my real life was encroaching. I had to get back to my day job, and by Sunday, I decided I couldn’t afford to wait around for another week hoping the weather would get better. It was time to face reality, and make my exit.

I was still in the air, flying home to Alaska, when the launch finally took place. As we landed, I pulled up the NASA broadcast and saw the glow of the rocket on my phone. The announcers informed us that main-engine cutoff was successful. They had made it to space. After all that effort, I ended up watching it all through my dirty five-inch screen, cranky and uncomfortable in a middle seat in economy class, after a hellish 18-hour travel day that made me curse the invention of flight. But maybe in the end it was better to stay away from the holy sacrament. I might have returned home a convert.

Nobody is a Berlin-based print magazine about people, and the stories, places, and things they carry. It was created by two writers frustrated with the “clickbatey” nature of mainstream media, where experimentation and creativity can feel unattainable. Nobody is a space for other creators to step outside of these confines and reach beyond the headlines.

Megan Gannon is a writer currently based in Seattle, Washington. She is a former staff reporter for The Nome Nugget and has covered science, the environment, and history for many other publications.

Bio for Cold Bones, including https://coldbones.myportfolio.com/work