MLD Q & A

In a sense, this novel began when I was a child visiting the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. My family lived in the DC suburbs when I was in grade school, and when my parents divorced when I was seven, my father took my brother and me every Saturday. Air and Space was something we could all agree on, even my three-year-old brother, so we went there a lot. Many of the displays seem to have worked themselves into my consciousness—Apollo capsules that had splashed down at the end of moon missions, space suits and spacewalking equipment, a piece of moon rock. I especially remember the movie The Dream Is Alive, which we probably saw a dozen times. It documents a space shuttle mission from 1984, and a lot of details have stayed with me and later made their way into the book. This movie is also where I first remember seeing Judith Resnik, the astronaut Dolores idolizes in the book.

In the mid-nineties, I came across a website about Challenger that included a “Memory Forum”—a place where visitors were invited to share their memories of where they were and what they were doing when the space shuttle exploded. There were already over 10,000 postings, which was a remarkable number so early in the life of the web. One of the memories was from a woman about my age (thirteen at the time of the disaster). She described watching the launch in a classroom with her teacher and classmates. This was exactly what I remembered too, but when the shuttle exploded, she wrote, all the kids ran outside to see the cloud formations in the sky. The signature from her post put her in Christmas, Florida, which I later learned is a small town on the Space Coast. I was captivated by the idea of these kids watching the launch on TV like all the other kids in the country, but once they realized something had gone wrong, wanting to see it in person. The image of those kids running outside to see the clouds of smoke stayed with me, and I started writing about them, about what it must have been like to see the disaster that way, many of them knowing that their parents had worked on this shuttle, that their jobs might be at stake now. That story became THE TIME IT TAKES TO FALL.

I learned much later that this experience of watching the launch live was shared almost exclusively by those who were school kids at the time. A lot of people remember watching the explosion live, but in fact no national networks outside the Space Coast area carried it. But because of the Teacher in Space, NASA had arranged for public schools to get live cable feeds of the launch. It amazed me to learn that almost the only people to see the launch live—schoolchildren—were also those least prepared to deal with what they saw. It’s also interesting how many people have told me they remember watching the launch live on TV at home or at work, when they almost certainly couldn’t have. I think the experience of watching the footage was so shocking that it had that sense of immediacy to it, even though it wasn’t live.

I started out by learning about the history of the moon project and why Cape Canaveral was chosen as the launch site in the fifties. Once this area in Florida was chosen, it went from being almost uninhabited to very developed incredibly quickly. Ever since then, the region’s fortunes have risen and fallen with those of NASA, which makes for a volatile history.

I visited Florida twice while I was writing this book, but most of my ideas of what the Space Coast is like came from reading and my own imagination of what that area must have been like in the 1980s. My father recently read the book, and he remarked upon how Palmetto Park, the fictional Space Coast town where the book takes place, really had the feeling of being a “company town.” My own family had never lived in a company town in the strict sense of the term, but we did live in Washington, DC, and it’s true that a lot of the things I observed about DC as a child—for instance, the way children compared parents’ jobs within the federal government as a way of determining status—made their way into the book, though in most respects DC and the Space Coast couldn’t be more different.

I learned a lot from various technical books about the space shuttle and about the Challenger disaster. Researching for writing can be both fun and frustrating—I often thought I understood some aspect of the shuttle program, but then when I went to have Dolores explain it, I found that I couldn’t as thoroughly as she would be able to, so I’d have to go back to the books. I especially wanted to know more about the jobs done by people like Dolores’s father—the technicians who work on various parts of the space shuttle with their own hands—but it was hard to find detailed accounts of their work. I tracked down names of people with his job, either from the presidential commission’s report or from the web, but sadly no one ever agreed to answer my questions. So I had to do my best with my imagination and the information I could find.

I knew from early on that Dolores would be interested in physics, but I really had no background in it myself; I’d managed to get through high school and college without ever taking a single physics course. Part way into writing this book, I realized that Dolores needed to be deeply familiar with physics, and that meant I was going to have to learn about it. So I audited a physics course at the University of Michigan. I wasn’t sure how the professor would receive me—an instructor from the English department—and I felt very self-conscious explaining to him that I needed to learn about physics for a novel I was writing. But he said he understood completely because he had been trying to find the time to write a novel about the history of his family in India and Pakistan. He was very welcoming, and we often chatted about writing during breaks and after class. In the end, I’m glad I took the course, because I was able to make more of Dolores’s interest in physics than I would have been able to otherwise. I also learned the ballistics equations that allowed Dolores to determine how long the crew cabin took to fall to earth, which became an important moment in the book.

All of the accounts of the disaster give a lot of attention to the organizational issues at NASA that helped lead to the accident. The presidential commission’s report deals with both the technical causes (meaning the burnt O-ring and faulty Solid Rocket Booster design) and the internal causes, meaning the organizational structures at NASA that allowed a flawed design to keep flying and that kept the engineers’ objection to launching in the cold from being reported up the chain of command. The investigation revealed that as massive and unweildy an organization as NASA is, it’s crucial to keep information flowing both ways, and the failure to do so caused the accident as much as the O-ring did.

Some of the inner workings and politics, it’s important to note, are made up for the book. Mr. Biersdorfer is a fictional character, and I made up a fictional position for him—the Director of Launch Safety. There is not and never has been a person with this title, and the things Mr. Biersdorfer does in the book are not things I have ever heard of anyone at NASA doing. On the other hand, Dolores’s family’s constant anxiety over Frank being laid off is accurate according to my reading, and people in those jobs are dealing with that uncertainty now more than ever.

This is absolutely fact. I first learned the details of the astronauts’ deaths in a book about Challenger called No Downlink by Claus Jensen. This was the first book I read about Challenger—at this point, I was interested in writing fiction about the disaster but hadn’t yet figured out how. That book explains the facts of the astronauts’ deaths in a short chapter titled “Two Minutes and Forty-Five Seconds.” Some of the astronauts’ emergency oxygen packs were found in the wreckage, and the oxygen had been almost completely used up, which means the crew knew something had gone wrong (the oxygen packs had to be switched on manually) and that they breathed up most of their air in the time it took to fall back to Earth. I remember lying in bed reading this book and feeling complete horror. I was amazed that I had never heard this fact, though I’d been very aware of the accident and the investigation. I knew this revelation would be an important part in whatever story I wrote about Challenger, though I still didn’t yet know how.

I was lucky enough to see the launch of STS-102 in March of 2001. I was well into the book and had already written a chapter in which Dolores goes to a launch and describes it in some detail. I had already written it as best I could using books and watching footage of shuttle launches, but I wanted to get to Florida and see it for myself. At that point, I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan’s MFA program, and the English department gave me a research travel grant that allowed me to spend a few days in Florida and to see the launch. That morning was the coldest it had ever been since the Challenger launch, and the temperature was right at the new minimum temperature that had been set after the disaster (41° F). I stood outside shivering, seriously worried that I might witness another cold-related failure. But the shuttle launched on time and without problems, and of course it was beautiful and awe-inspiring to see.

In the end, the chapter I had already written about the launch didn’t change at all. What I had imagined was actually very accurate to what I experienced, and I didn’t see anything at the launch that I felt I needed to add (though of course I didn’t mention this in my report to the travel grant committee). But visiting Florida, seeing the complex at Kennedy, the towns and the houses, the birds and trees and plants, talking to people who lived there, all gave me invaluable details to help bring Dolores’s town to life.

No, Franks’ opinion is one I don’t entirely share. Like Dolores, I was born in 1972, so I can’t say from my own observations, but I imagine that the end of the Apollo era must have been really hard on people like Frank. Up to that point, the government and the American people shared his commitment to going to space, but he didn’t realize that they shared that interest for different reasons—Frank was interested in the pure science, the technological achievement, while most Americans just wanted to beat the Russians and enjoy the adventure of spaceflight. Once the Russians were beaten and everyone had grown used to seeing moon landings on TV, it didn’t seem worth all the trouble any more to many people. I don’t think Frank understood that difference at all, and in fact by the end of the novel I think he still doesn’t get it. I have a lot of sympathy for his point of view that spaceflight is important for its own sake, but I also understand those who questioned the expense.

This is such an interesting question because I’ve always been able to see it both ways. I thought that writing this book would help me to answer it, but instead I feel as though I can see both viewpoints even more clearly now. The financial investment is significant (though most people tend to overestimate it, I think, remembering the huge expense of the Apollo program. The shuttle program is much cheaper—NASA’s budget is less than 1% of federal spending, compared to over 5% at the height of the Apollo era). In a country that doesn’t spend as much as it could on other branches of science, not to mention the humanities and the arts, it’s always valid to ask why we are spending this money and what we get for it in return. And especially when lives are lost, as they were on Challenger and Columbia, those questions because even more pointed.

Yet I still agree with those who think that spaceflight is an important project and that there is a great deal of value in the government (rather than private enterprise) being behind it. As long as NASA is a government agency, spaceflight has to be intended for the common good, not just for profit. The vehicles and their discoveries have to belong to all of us, and any American child can dream of being an astronaut. I think that’s important, and I hope to see NASA continue leading the world in space exploration.

This voice came very easily for me in some ways because my own memories of the Challenger disaster and of the mid-eighties are wrapped up in being Dolores’s age. She and I don’t have much in common except for age, but the idea of her being about thirteen at the time of this disaster seemed crucial. For people who were adults at the time, the explosion of Challenger was sad, but for many of those who were children or young adolescents, this disaster was a kind of betrayal of what we thought adults were capable of and what we thought our country was all about. Rockets had been taking off safely since before we were born, so to see this one fail due to negligence, with a schoolteacher on it, was a real loss of innocence.

I wanted Dolores’s perspective to be completely reliable about the technical things—the reader needs to be able to trust her about things like how the space shuttle is assembled and the investigation into the accident. Dolores is a reliable narrator in the sense that she tells the truth as far as she understands it—one thing I like about her is that she’s very honest about her own behavior and motivations and readily admits to being mean or selfish when she has been. At the same time, she is too young and too personally involved to be an entirely reliable narrator about a lot of the emotional aspects—there’s a lot she doesn’t understand, and so I hope readers can see around her at times.

I think I started with the idea of Deborah being a NASA wife—a person whose life is completely bound up in the fortunes of the space program but without being personally involved or being able to affect events herself. Once I put her into this situation where her husband had been laid off but wasn’t doing anything himself to try to get his job back, it just made sense that she would do what she could to help her family by any means necessary. Some readers have been troubled by her behavior, saying she’s manipulative, uses her daughter’s connections in a way that’s unethical, etc., but I have a lot of admiration for her. She’s not perfect, but I don’t see why mothers have to be more perfect than other characters. She’s in a very stressful situation where she has no power, and I think we have to give her credit for doing what she can even if we judge her behavior.

When I started writing Deborah’s secret meetings with Mr. Biersdorfer, I wasn’t sure myself what the meaning of them would be. I could see her getting involved with him in order to help her family, but I could also see Dolores reading way too much into an innocent situation because she was already suspicious of her mother and of Biersdorfer. In the end, I felt that it wasn’t important whether she did have an affair with him or not—I liked the idea of Dolores deciding it was actually none of her business, and, oddly, I felt as though it wasn’t really any of my business either.

My account of the investigation is true. There was in fact a late-night teleconference the night before the launch, when engineers argued against launching because the O-rings might not function properly in the cold. A piece of the solid Rocket Booster was in fact recovered from the ocean floor—it’s been called the “smoking gun” because you can clearly see where a jet of hot gas burned through the joint, providing clear evidence that it was in fact a burnt-through O-ring that caused the explosion.

The question of whether there was a cover-up is one of the things that is really misunderstood about the disaster. When I started researching for this book, I assumed that there had been a cover-up, and that in fact NASA had made a calculated decision to send up a faulty O-ring design in order to save money and stay on schedule. My assumptions were turned around by a book called The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan, which shows how NASA really did follow their own internal rules quite conscientiously both before and after the explosion—the negligence was not caused by calculated wrongdoing, but by the rules themselves and by the structure of the organization. In many ways, I find that more interesting than the kind of evil calculation I expected. The Columbia disaster in 2003 showed that these problems still had not been adequately addressed—the same lapses in communication crept back in despite the Rogers commission’s attempts to correct them.

I love the idea of going to the moon and Mars—I would advocate seeing my tax dollars spent that way, and I would be absolutely glued to the coverage. At the same time, the nostalgia for spaceflight in THE TIME IT TAKES TO FALL is false nostalgia, because it’s a nostalgia for time when we thought spaceflight would be free of risk to human life. We learned in 1986, and again in 2003, that exploration is not without risk, and I don’t think it needs to be in order to continue. Every astronaut knows that he or she is climbing into an experimental vehicle, and many of them have said publicly that they understand they are risking their lives and that they accept that risk. Of course, they also have the right to expect that that risk has been made as small as possible in every aspect of the vehicle and the mission, and NASA failed the astronauts who died on Challenger and Columbia by not minimizing the risk as much as they could have. I hope that new projects to visit the moon and Mars would bring in innovative ideas about risk management as well as rocket science, and that astronauts will be more involved in high-level decisions concerning their own safety.