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.