Hubbard sets out to see space shuttle launch

By Missy Wattenbarger / mwattenbarger@crossville-chronicle.com

They say that when one door closes, another one opens. That seemed to be the case for one former Tennessee resident, who was recently sent to the exit door with a pink slip. Though it may not have been the best timing because of the gloomy economy, it unexpectedly allowed him to rediscover a childhood dream and ultimately set the wheels into motion to make it a reality.

After being laid off from a Internet company two months ago, 32-year-old Nathan Hubbard, a self-proclaimed “computer geek” who resides in San Diego, CA, found himself contemplating about life and wondering what his future held. He spent several weeks on the beach “thinking about things,” he said, before deciding to go on a two-month long motorcycle trip to see the space shuttle Endeavour launch in Florida.

“I’ve been wanting to see that since I was three years old,” he stated. “I figured now’s the time while I do not have a job…and I set June 1 as my day to leave.”

Though most women would be hesitant for their man to be gone for that length of time, Hubbard’s fiancée, Tracy, gave him her blessing with two stipulations—she got to meet him somewhere in the middle of the trip and he had to carry a GPS device called a SPOT Tracker that has a 911 button and a satellite link to it so every 10 minutes his location could be updated on his Web site at n8moto.com.

Over the next two weeks, Hubbard bought a BMW F800GS, a dual-sport motorcycle, and loaded it with various gear he purchased with the severance money from his former job. To prepare himself for his cross-country adventure and test out his equipment, Hubbard drove from San Diego down the Baja Peninsula to the tip of Cabo almost entirely off road and without incident.

“That was kind of a test run for the trip I’m doing now,” he said. “That was 2,200 miles round trip.”

It gave him the confidence boost he needed and soon he was off to Arizona.



San Diego to Roswell

Hubbard left his San Diego home around 3 p.m. June 1, driving through the Sonoran Desert to Phoenix, AZ. He planned on traveling on more southern routes, but opted for northern territory instead because of the sweltering heat.

“It was extremely hot—nearly 115 degrees,” Hubbard stated. “That was pretty crazy, but I had a cool vest on that… I will not give up for anything. It’s like having air conditioning.”

Because Hubbard has always been interested in science, he decided to visit some attractions along the way that pertained to his interests. So from Phoenix he drove up into northern Arizona to see the meteor crater created near Flagstaff nearly 49,000 years ago.

He was awestruck by the size of the crater (it measures 0.74 miles in diameter and is 550 feet deep), saying in his blog, “It’s so immense that your eyes play tricks on you. There was an old rusty BBQ stove discarded in the center of the crater…at least that’s what it looked like…turns out it was a fuel container 15 feet long. It really is huge.”

He camped out near the site for the night before traveling south through Sedona, AZ, to Eager, NM to see the Very Large Array (VLA), which are satellite dishes like those featured in the Jodie Foster movie Contact.

After resting there, he went on to Roswell, NM, where supposedly an unidentified flying object crashed and its alien occupants were examined in 1947. Hubbard stopped by the UFO Museum, expecting some kind of evidence, but was only given stories. However, he did not leave the area without encountering a bit of a strange occurrence.

“When I drove through Area 51, my GPS and (other) electronics quit working on me,” he said. “I don’t believe in all that stuff, but the fact remains they quit working on me. As soon as I left Roswell and got out of that area, everything started working again.”



Galveston to Mobile

After that experience and visiting the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest, Hubbard headed to Texas. He described the northern part of the Lone Star State as “windy, flat, boring, straight and not interesting.” The only exception was the fields of wind farms along the roadway. He estimated that nearly 2,000 wind turbines were within his viewing circle.

Once he got to Austin, TX, he was fortunate to find a place to stay that did not involve pitching a tent. While at a gas station, he showed a kid how to get his motorcycle on the back of his truck, and in return, he arranged for Hubbard to stay with one of his friends who was also into motorcycles.

“That was kind of my plan to save money—to camp in a tent or stay with people I meet on the way,” Hubbard said.

The next day, Hubbard decided to tour Galveston, TX, where Hurricane Ike paid an unwelcome visit last year.

“That place looked like it had an atomic bomb dropped on it,” he recalled. “You would drive up and see a sign that says ‘Eat at Joe’s’ and go a little further than another one would say ‘Here’s Joe’s,’ except it’s just a flat piece of concrete where it’s just been leveled. Everything was like that.”

From there, Hubbard traveled through Mississippi to New Orleans, where he stayed with someone he had been in contact with after announcing his trip on an adventure motorcycling forum called ADV Rider. He also met up with his friend Jason from Nashville, who also wanted to see the shuttle launch.

During his overnight stay, Hubbard witnessed the transformation that has taken place in New Orleans since the damaging winds and flood waters of Hurricane Katrina paid a visit. He said he especially enjoyed riding the city’s cable cars and relished the good food.

The following morning Hubbard and his friend set their sights on the longest bridge in the world, the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway.

“It’s so big it has its own zip code, and its own weather (radar). There’s a police station in the middle because there are so many cars on it at one time,” Hubbard stated.

The bridge led them to Mobile, AL and closer to reaching his goal of seeing the shuttle liftoff on June 13.



The Florida Panhandle

They arrived in Florida two days before the scheduled launch. During their first day there, Hubbard and his friend drove around Pensacola and stopped by a visitors center before heading towards the beach.

“I kinda expected Florida beach towns to be like California beach towns, you know, laid back, but they weren’t,” said Hubbard, adding that it was weird how aggressive the drivers were and how the towns resembled Las Vegas.

The two men set up camp on the beach in the Apalachicola National Forest‎, which turned out to be a bad idea.

“It was just beautiful, but it was 95 degrees at night with 100 percent humidity and the bugs were insane,” Hubbard explained.

They spent the rest of their stay at the Florida home of one of Jason’s aunts and prepared to head out early to the VIP section to watch the launch with the astronauts’ families, politicians and celebrities.

“Don’t ask me how I managed that. I can’t reveal my source,” he quickly stated.

With the launch scheduled for 7:17 a.m. EDT, Hubbard and his friend got up at 3 a.m. to head over to the site. They boarded a bus at 4:30 a.m. to the Kennedy Space Center, where they did “cool NASA stuff” like viewing a full-scale mockup of a space shuttle.



Breaktime in Tennessee

Hubbard’s excitement soon turned to disappointment when the launch was unexpectedly delayed due to a hydrogen leak. After six days of waiting, Hubbard decided to head north towards Knoxville to visit with his little brother.

The two rules Hubbard made for himself before leaving on his trip were to eat only at local restaurants (meaning no fast food) and not take any major freeways if he could help it. So traveled on the Cherohala Skyway, a 36-mile long national scenic byway that opened in 1996 when he was in college.

“I actually drove that road the weekend it opened and it was kind of cool to go back and see it now because it’s all grown up and not black asphalt anymore. It was beautiful…,” he stated.

He thought about taking on the Dragon’s Tail, a popular motorcycle road that is 11 miles long and has 318 curves. However, he decided against taking that route because of the weight two months of traveling gear put on his motorcycle. He pointed out that the Dragon’s Tail is not a sightseeing road and calls for concentration.

While in East Tennessee, Hubbard was given a tour of the supercomputing facilities at the Oak Ridge Laboratories. When he got to Crossville, his father, Levonn Hubbard, gave him a tour of downtown, including the courthouse, Palace Theatre and the Crossville Depot.

“That stuff is pretty neat,” he said.

Following his rule, he avoided Interstate 40 and traveled the back roads of Tennessee to Nashville, taking in the splendor of the natural world around him.

“The roads around here are really beautiful because the trees kind of make a canopy,” he explained. “Those are perfect motorcycling roads—two lanes with nobody on them, they’re usually cool because the sun is not on you and there’s almost always a creek right next to them.”

Hubbard stayed in Nashville for 10 days and kept his word to spend time with his fiancée. He visited his mother, old friends and coworkers and did some sightseeing throughout the city. Then came the news he was waiting for—a new launch date had been set.



Failure to Launch

Once it was confirmed that the hydrogen leak was fixed and only weather could delay the flight, Hubbard and his buddy Jason jumped in a truck around 7 a.m. Friday, July 10, and made the 13-hour drive back to Florida.

“It was too much to drive the bike down there and back as quick as possible,” he explained.

But the launch did not take place the next day as scheduled. It was scrubbed because of lightning strike issues from a storm that passed through the night before. On Sunday, the men headed to the VIP section at Banana Creek, about 3.3 miles from the launch pad.

“Normally, if you go down there, you can pay… some pretty good amount to get within six miles of the launch. The seats I had were a little over three miles,” he said, still keeping quiet how he was able to get them.

Again, the launch was canceled because of weather. Even after Hubbard was hooked up with the “real VIP spot” closer to the launch pad on the following Monday, the shuttle launch was scrubbed due to weather. This time, NASA waited 48 hours before making another attempt.

Though he planned on spending more time with his father, Hubbard decided to stay in Florida and head back to Banana Creek on July 15 for the sixth launch attempt.

“We both said that it was probably worth it. We had put this much time in so far… So we waited until the sixth one.”



We Have Liftoff

Fortunately for the two bikers, the launch went off without a hitch.

“It was just awesome!” Hubbard stated. “It was so good after we put in so much time and this was the goal of the trip."

The shuttle launched at 6:03 p.m.

According to Hubbard, the countdown to liftoff is several hours long, with the clock stopping for various lengths for "holds." The last hold is 40 minutes long and occurs at T-9:00. This is when NASA officials start figuring out if the weather is going to cooperate, he explained. Once the hold is over, the clocks starts back to ticking, with nine minutes left until liftoff. At this point, there is no stopping the launch unless there is an emergency because various tasks are programmed to be completed every second from that point on, noted Hubbard.

“During all the other launch (attempts), it always was ‘Ground OK,’ ‘Systems OK’…everything was OK until you got to weather…," he said.

Hubbard felt the nine minutes went by like seconds. Then the moment came that he had been waiting for all his life: “You see the puffy cloud of smoke and it (the shuttle) starting to lift off. It’s kind of slow at first…You’re still far enough away, even though we were pretty close, that you don’t hear the sound for a little while…and then the sound comes and, man, it’s loud. It rode that pillar of fire all the way up real slow. You can’t tell the perspective of it because it’s really big…It made this real pretty arch, which was really cool, and we got to see it for about two minutes.

“It’s funny," he added. "The whole trip boiled down to two minutes."



The Journey Continues

As soon as the launch was over, Hubbard and his pal got to meet a few interesting people, including astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Then they quickly headed back to Nashville, arriving around 7:30 a.m. the next day. Two days later, Hubbard was back on his motorcycle on his way back to Crossville to say goodbye to his father and share his story with the Chronicle.

He explained that his next destination was Lexington, OH, to see the Honda AMA Superbike Race at Mid Ohio Sports Car Course and spend more time with his fiancée where she grew up.

Then, he planned to head out West. At the time of the interview with the Chronicle, Hubbard was not sure what route he wanted to take. Typically, what he does is get out his map every morning and figure out what he is going to do that day.

He said he was either going to go up to Montana to visit a friend and then back down the whole West Coast or go straight across through Colorado and Utah where there are some more friends he could visit.

“I want to go northern because it’ll be cooler,” he said with a chuckle.

His SpotTracker shows he decided to travel across Indiana and Illinois to Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming and Nevada to see the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore and the Devils Tower. Last Tuesday, he “tweeted” that he was in Santa Monica visiting his brother.

Soon, he will be home in San Diego with his fiancée to prepare for their upcoming wedding. As his trip of a lifetime draws to a close, Hubbard is seeing the familiar door of employment reopen with a few job offers waiting in the wings. Although he is pleased with what he sees, Hubbard is thinking about waiting a little while before reentering.

“I’m having the best summer of my life,” he said. “Why ruin it now?”



Missy Wattenbarger can be reached at mwattenbarger@crossville-chronicle.com.

Text Only