Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Even though it was not quite seven in the morning, the roads to the Cape were lined with cars that had pulled over on the shoulder, eager to watch the launch.
Children sat on the hoods next to their parents, dogs running around and barking, picnic baskets laid out for families who had decided to make an outing of a group of American men orbiting the Moon.
Thankfully, the weather was good today, something she knew the astronauts and their wives always worried about before a launch.
There was a lot of frustration when launches were scrapped due to weather conditions, and as nervous as Vivian was about today, the only thing she could imagine that would be worse than having to go through this anticipation once was having to go through it twice because of a redo.
The excitement in the air was palpable, and the entire thing had taken on the air of a day at the beach or a giant party as a group tossed a football around, another playing with a Frisbee.
The decision made, Vivian navigated Joe’s sporty convertible into an open spot on the shoulder of the road and killed the engine, climbing out of the car and sliding her heels off before perching on the hood, hoping she hadn’t scratched the paint.
She could see the launch site off in the distance, the mighty Saturn V rocket that was going to carry her husband to space.
Around her, someone had tuned the car radio to the launch broadcast, the announcer’s voice calling out the countdown.
“T-minus thirty minutes and counting.”
Joe and the other astronauts would be standing by on the launchpad waiting for all the systems checks, talking to Mission Control to make sure that everything was operating as it should.
Vivian could envision the scene playing out as clearly as if she were standing there herself.
The sentimentality that Joe had displayed last night when they’d embraced on the beach, the vulnerability he’d shared with her, would be gone, and the man standing on that launchpad would be a different iteration of her husband.
Joe would be wholly focused on the mission at hand, his concentration and attention on making sure that the spacecraft was safe, checking out the systems as he had done before, when he flew a jet.
The radio announcer walked them through what was happening on the launchpad, Vivian’s ears perking up every single time they said Joe’s name. By the sound of it, everything was operating as it should, no problems or concerns with any of the systems.
Maybe she had worried for nothing. Maybe everything was going to be fine.
“T-minus ten minutes and counting.”
All around her, the excitement became even more noticeable, cameras pointed at the rocket as people shot pictures, smiling faces on the other side of the lens.
Some of the sheen might have worn off the space program, but you wouldn’t know it by the crowd who had assembled today to watch this momentous trip to lunar orbit.
Today her husband was making history.
She thought of President Kennedy, of his audacious promise that Americans would go to the Moon, of that same sense of shared purpose she had felt despite her reservations in the crowd at Rice that day.
His legacy was being played out in the Apollo program, and while there were still more missions to go before they could accomplish the goal of putting a man on the Moon, this was one important step in a long line of them.
“Four minutes and counting.”
She knew Joe was busy in the spacecraft preparing for the launch, but she wished he could see the enthusiasm on this stretch of road, thought of the little boy who had once dreamed of flight, remembered the man who spoke to her of his passion for flying and space that fateful night at the bar, the same man who had watched Alan Shepard’s spaceflight with longing.
How far he had come, likely further than his wildest imaginings.
Or maybe not. Maybe he’d foreseen this moment from the beginning, when he was playing with toy rockets and dreaming up ways to launch himself into space.
“Three minutes and counting.”
Vivian glanced around her as the excitement surrounding her reached a fever pitch, and she was at once back in her apartment in Arlington watching the first launch, and at Rice University listening to President Kennedy speak, and in what had been a truly horrible year for the country at large and herself personally, she saw what Joe had spoken of, what the president had alluded to, how space could perhaps bring the world together and provide hope where it was desperately needed.
“Two minutes and counting. T-minus two minutes and counting.”
Her heart beat in time with the countdown, time slowing so that everyone else around her disappeared, falling into the ether, and it was just her breath, her heartbeat, and the countdown of the rocket that would take her husband to space.
The announcer continued to run through the systems checks, and some of them she recognized, others she didn’t, but she took comfort in the knowledge that Joe had his training to guide him, that he’d run through these same simulations time after time until they had become rote.
And as hard as the last four months had been, as difficult as it had been to see so little of her husband considering what they faced, now that they were here at this moment, she was grateful for the training that he’d had, the preparation that would bring him home.
“T-minus fifty seconds and counting.”
There was no turning back now.
She heard President Kennedy’s voice in her head, his speech that day at Rice, telling the American people that they would go to the Moon.
What would they find there?
What version of her husband would come back to her after an experience like that?
“Three. Two. One.”
Liftoff.
Tears filled her eyes as she watched the Saturn V rocket soar into the sky.
The crowd cheered around her, and Vivian held her breath, her gaze pinned on its ascent, waiting, watching, feeling as though her heart had left her body as she stayed rooted to the ground, her husband headed to space, on his way to the Moon.