High Tide of Anxiety on the Space Coast

MERRITT ISLAND, Fla. —  Grabbing a burger to go at Shuttles Bar & Grill near the Kennedy Space Center, Ken MacKay gave a quick rundown on how tense it has been waiting to get America’s space shuttles flying again.

“Every day, you’ve got mixed emotions,” said the 30-year-old electrical technician at the space center. “It feels great to get another bird in the air. But, of course, there are also all those steps that have had to be taken to make everybody feel better about the launch.”

Almost 2 1/2 years since the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry, the people at Kennedy Space Center and the surrounding area, commonly called the Space Coast, are impatient to resume manned spaceflight.

If the scheduled Wednesday launch of the shuttle Discovery goes as planned, it will be a welcome return to normality in a region so space crazy it’s reflected in its area code: 321.

“Having shuttle launches is part of our culture, part of our nature,” said Lynda Weatherman, president of the Space Coast Economic Development Commission. “We’re ready for it, for people to come and see the orbiter in the air and know we’re back in the game.”

Kennedy Space Center and its aerospace contractors are the biggest economic engine on this stretch of central Florida’s Atlantic coast, responsible for an estimated 14,500 jobs and $1.4 billion a year in business.

Spaceflight is a part of life here, reflected in everything from the number of burgers sold to the look of an afternoon sky when it is filled with plumes of rocket exhaust.

It’s also a powerful tourist lure. For the blastoff of Discovery, 300,000 spectators -- twice the average for a shuttle launch -- are expected to clog the roads.

The Space Coast has already experienced a pair of wrenching economic downturns: the end of the Apollo program in the early 1970s and an earlier moratorium on shuttle missions after the 1986 Challenger accident

These days, the local economy is more diversified, which has cushioned the effect of the freeze on launches since the Columbia disaster in 2003. Even the current space business has diversified with more launches of civilian and military payloads atop conventional rockets.

But even if the Discovery mission is picture perfect, most people know that the golden years of the shuttle program are over. NASA has set the program to end within five years.

The next generation of smaller manned space vehicles is barely on the drawing boards and may not be operational until years after the shuttles are retired.

Some space workers are concerned about layoffs or other changes when the big orbital vehicles are phased out. What will come after the shuttle program is a question that looms large over the area.

“Everybody’s wondering what’s going to happen next,” said Richard Eastes, a professor at the Florida Space Institute.

*

Shuttles Bar & Grill, located a little more than two miles from the south entrance of Kennedy Space Center along State Route 3, is the closest spot to the spaceport for a beer and a burger.

It’s a windowless, no-frills eatery that’s as good a place as any to take the emotional temperature of the Space Coast.

“Right now, it seems to me they’re optimistic, but it seems to me there is also a real apprehension in case something goes wrong,” said Kristina Miller, manager of Shuttles for the last five years.

The bar and grill opened about the time of the first shuttle flights in the early 1980s. It once featured sandwiches named after Challenger and Columbia, but no more. The outside wall by one of the doors has been painted with large replicas of the mission patches of the two doomed shuttle flights.

Astronauts sometimes come to the bar to relax or take part in the parties that traditionally follow mission shakedown exercises.

Owner Kenneth Kalata, 55, a former moving van driver, recalled that a shuttle astronaut once ordered a Reuben sandwich to go -- into space, that is. (The order apparently never got filled.)

Shuttles, like the space program that provided its name and a fair part of its clientele, has had its own ups and downs.

Jerry Woodcock, 67, a retired engineer and service representative for rocket guidance and navigation systems, said he came in the day it opened 20 years ago. “I didn’t like it,” said Woodcock, who can now be found most afternoons perched at the east end of the bar, sipping beer on the rocks from a large pitcher.

The founder of the place, originally named Mugs, ran into some financial trouble and left, Woodcock said. The mortgage holder sold it to another man who wrote the menu still in use and renamed the place Shuttles to appeal to the space center set.

Kalata said he bought the place in 1988.

The bar and the space center have grown close over the years.

On the day of the Columbia accident, the crowd at Shuttles was dumbstruck, people recall. They had been awaiting the sonic booms that heralded the spacecraft’s landing. Instead, there was silence.

“Everybody felt like a family,” said Jane Skipper, a Shuttles patron who works as a seamstress nearby. “You’d see big guys in here. You’d see them crying tears two days later while having a beer and a sandwich.”

Timothy Gagnon, 48, a custodian at nearby Divine Mercy Catholic School, eats here occasionally. A longtime space buff, he is the head of the school’s Young Astronauts chapter.

He said the Columbia disaster was “like a kick to the stomach.”

He no longer feels that sense of shock and dismay. It has been replaced with worry over the Discovery mission and the stress the shuttle workers must feel.

“They’re going to hold their breath” for the whole mission, he said. “They’re going to go to bed wondering, ‘Did I miss anything?’ ”

Kara Schmidt, 21, who has worked as a structural engineer since January tending to the “nuts and bolts” of the shuttle’s airframe, said she thought that the Columbia disaster ultimately brought the space community closer.

“Everyone just bonded together,” she said while picking up a hamburger with melted provolone and mushrooms from Shuttles before heading back to the spaceport. “They bonded together in saying, ‘We realize there have been mistakes, and here’s what we need to do to fix them.’ ”

MacKay, who had been working the second shift, popped in at Shuttles on his 7 p.m. lunch break. In his fifth year as an employee of United Space Alliance, a major contractor at Kennedy Space Center, the former Air Force specialist works on the large metal structure that supplies the shuttle orbiter with electricity, oxygen and fuel.

He has trained as a member of the “red crew,” which stands ready to don air packs to solve problems near launch time.

For space center workers, when it comes to the shuttle, “the attitude is, what you need to get done, we’ll do it,” MacKay said.

As the countdown clocks tick down for the scheduled 12:51 p.m. PDT launch of Discovery, Shuttles has moved into its own buzz of preflight activity.

Miller thinks that the Discovery launch calls for a celebration -- dollar draft beers and a special on chicken wings. “We really have to do something,” she said. “It’s been two years.”

Kalata is expecting a big crowd and is counting on his ex-wife, son and daughter to help serve. If the launch goes as scheduled, the special of the day will be a $5.25 Discovery burger.

No one can be certain what business will be like after the hullabaloo dies down and the shuttle program fades away.

Walt Johnson, a municipal development official in nearby Titusville, said that what follows Discovery and the other orbiters should provide another economic boon for the Space Coast.

“If there were another program that would replace the shuttle, it would be just as important,” Johnson said.

Schmidt also isn’t worried about a world without the shuttle. The private contractor that employs her at the space center is paying for her graduate studies in physics.

She’s optimistic about the future of space.

“I can just go to work for someone else or go into business for myself,” she said.