Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [113]
I was able to call Gabby and ask her questions, but she couldn’t really answer or initiate much. Mostly it was me talking. But then, on the night of April 26, Gabby and I were on the phone and during a pause in the conversation, she said, “I miss you.” It took me by surprise. Until then, Gabby was almost never able to deliver a line like that unless someone else said it first. This was a new sentence, delivered all on her own, and it was a sentiment that went straight from her heart to mine.
TV networks and newspapers that day were full of stories about Great Britain’s Prince William and Kate Middleton, who would be getting married on the very morning of our scheduled launch. The royal wedding was gearing up with unprecedented pageantry. It was the biggest love story of the year, with satellite feeds to a billion people.
Yet on this day, I was reminded that love can also be small and simple. I was alone in quarantine. Gabby was stuck in the hospital and in her own mind. All we had was a phone line. And all it took was three words: “I miss you.”
This was the second-to-last space shuttle mission, so those days in April were a bittersweet time for all of us in the space program. Thousands of workers at NASA and its contractors, including many people I knew and admired, would be losing their jobs after the thirty-year shuttle program wound down. I was impressed and moved to see the dedication and professionalism of the space-program workforce—engineers, technicians, flight controllers, factory workers, simulator instructors—given that the end of the road was nearing for many of them.
This would be the 134th space shuttle launch. At NASA, we referred to our mission as STS-134; STS stands for Space Transportation System.
Endeavour, our spacecraft, took almost four years to build. Congress authorized its construction in August 1987, to replace Challenger, which had exploded eighteen months earlier. It was largely built from a collection of spare parts left over from the construction of Discovery and Atlantis.
In a national competition involving seventy thousand students, NASA selected Endeavour as the spacecraft’s name. Endeavour was a ship captained by explorer James Cook that sailed the South Pacific in 1768. Cook, an amateur astronomer, had brought along ninety-three crewmen, including eleven scientists and artists. They came to Tahiti to observe Venus as it traveled between the Sun and the Earth. That helped them estimate the distance from our planet to the Sun. Those Endeavour crew members from 1768 were groundbreakers. It was an honor to continue their efforts.
As a space shuttle, Endeavour was designed for one hundred missions. Before STS-134, it flew twenty-four flights, traveling 103,149,636 miles. There were many successes. Endeavour’s astronauts replaced the rocket motor on a nonfunctioning communications satellite in 1992; they were the first to service the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993; they delivered the first American component of the International Space Station in 1998.
Our mission’s highlight would be the delivery to the space station of the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a cosmic particle detector, which would help researchers study how the universe was formed. It was designed by Samuel Ting, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, and built by six hundred scientists and technicians from sixteen countries.
Once installed, the Spectrometer would help scientists understand complex high-energy particles, potentially solving mysteries of the universe such as the existence of antimatter and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. (Antimatter is defined as any substance that, after combining with an equal portion of matter, leads the entire substance