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(Emma Freer/Austonia)
Austinites gathered outside the Texas Capitol on Nov. 7 to celebrate President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, as supporters of President Trump protested the results nearby.
In just over two months, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will take office, where they will be tasked with responding to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it has precipitated.
Biden and Harris have made clear that they will take a different approach than President Donald Trump, urging Americans to wear masks and promising to "listen to science" as they form their public health policies.
Once inaugurated on Jan. 20, they will likely oversee the distribution of a COVID vaccine—and attempt to unify a divided country.
A state divided
Don Kettl, a professor of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, said this will be a challenge.
"Texas has seen some of the sharpest tensions in the country between the state and local governments, especially between the state and its largest cities," he wrote in an email to Austonia.
Earlier in the pandemic, officials in Austin and other large Texas cities implored Gov. Greg Abbott to impose a state-wide mask mandate and grant them the authority to limit gatherings. Ultimately, Abbott allowed local jurisdictions to require businesses to mandate masks on their premises.
With COVID cases and hospitalizations increasing in Austin and across Texas, this dynamic is likely to recur.
"The virus, sadly, is flaring up again, and that is likely to bring all those tensions to the surface," Kettl wrote. "This time, getting people to follow tighter restrictions will be even harder."
The moving average number of new COVID cases reported in Travis County each day has been increasing steadily.(Austin Public Health)
Dr. Diana Fite, president of the Texas Medical Association and an ER physician in Houston, said the current surge appears to be larger than the one that occurred over the summer, which she attributed to school reopenings and the recent elections.
But it also appears to be less deadly.
"There's no question that we aren't seeing quite as serious of cases, which is good news," she said.
This is due to many reasons: more cases are occurring among young people, doctors are more familiar with the disease and how to treat it, and high-risk groups are more likely to reduce their risk of exposure—or have already died of COVID.
Although TMA cannot predict how the incoming administration might change the COVID response in Texas, Fite said she hopes its "decisions are driven by data and science."
Austin-Travis County Interim Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott said that Biden and Harris will have the dual challenges of encouraging Americans to mitigate the spread of COVID while also depoliticizing their message.
"There's going to be work to be done to ensure that folks do not feel that this is a political effort," he said last week. "It is science, and we've got to work hard to convince those who have not been convinced so far that the threat is real, that it is a danger to our community and that we will still have hundreds of thousands of people who may lose their lives because of COVID-19."
Beyond COVID
Division will also likely affect other areas of governance—at both the federal and state levels.
Nationally, Trump's refusal to concede the race has prevented Biden's transition team from having access to key members of the current administration—such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—or to the daily intelligence briefing, Kettl said.
"The first problem can create a lot of speed bumps," he added. "The second can sow the seeds of a genuine foreign policy crisis if the handoff of sensitive issues creates an opportunity for a foreign power."
This tension may also trickle down to the state level.
"After Biden's inauguration, polarization is likely to get even worse," Kettl said, pointing to the upcoming session of the Texas Legislature, where lawmakers will set the state's budget and redraw district boundaries, and the 2022 gubernatorial race.
"The battle lines will be sharp, and the battles will begin almost immediately."
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Bruce McCandless II's untethered spacewalk made history in 1984. The red stripes above his knees were the only way that NASA could determine which astronaut was Bruce and which was his fellow spacewalker, Bob Stewart. (NASA)
'Wonders All Around' is a new book by Austinite Bruce McCandless III about his dad, the astronaut Bruce McCandless II. (Bruce McCandless III)
I met McCandless III, who lives in Austin with his wife Pati, for a coffee a few months ago, thanks to the introduction from a mutual friend. As we talked about losing our dads, being writers and parents and living in Austin while still dealing with COVID, his dad's famous flight didn't come up, but the process of writing such an epic biography of a complex, only recently passed man was something worth unpacking over coffee.
I hadn't read the book yet, but over the next few weeks, I got to know the McCandless family in such a sweet way that I wanted to write a little about the book here to perhaps inspire you to seek out a copy of "Wonders All Around."
As much as this is a book about space, it's also a book about grief. And persistence. And stoicism. And masculinity and maternality.
The elder McCandless died in 2017, just a few years after losing his wife, Bernice, to cancer.
This passing of the torch from father to son left the younger McCandless inspired to take on this decades-long narrative. McCandless III sets the tone for the book with a memory of the family sitting around the dinner table at their home outside Johnson Space Center near Houston in the mid 1970s, when his dad, who joined NASA in 1966 at the age of 28, wasn't sure he'd ever actually make it to space.
"Our dinners were somber affairs. We ate around a rectangular Formica table in the breakfast nook. Tracy and I sat on benches padded with orange vinyl cushions. Mom and Dad occupied faux-Spanish style chairs with green felt upholstery. Despite the informal, Howard Johnson's-at-the-airport feel of the furnishings, there was a tension in the air that set in right around the time the frozen string beans started steaming. I had the feeling that my sister and I had forgotten to do something important, though I couldn't figure out what it was, or that judgment had been rendered on us and we'd been found guilty of … something — again, it was unclear what. Horseplay was prohibited. The TV and all sources of music or other frivolity were turned off, and singing was strictly forbidden. The only sound came from the aquarium pump. My father had a 100-gallon tank along the wall behind his chair. Sometimes the big plecostomus would attach itself by its mouth to the glass facing us, and I imagined it sucking all the oxygen out of the room."
Imagining what it must have been like to require oxygen to survive, not in outer space but in the living room with your family, sets up the story of the McCandless ancestors, including a guy who was killed by Wild Bill Hickok and the author's grandfather, who was an admiral in the U.S. Navy.
No pressure, Bruce.
It was fascinating to read about the 18 years that Bruce McCandless II worked for NASA before he finally had his first flight, which debuted the Manned Maneuvering Unit, a jet-fueled backpack that he and Ed Whitsett Jr. spent so many years developing. (That's the joystick-controlled machine he's wearing in that mind-bending poster that hung on millions of Americans' walls over the following decade.)
The author McCandless has the unenviable task of trying to put into words what that flight must have felt like. His dad flew 150 feet away from the shuttle Challenger, which would, of course, break into a million little pieces just a few years later.
When President Reagan called the shuttle to congratulate the astronauts that day in 1984, the command center set up a demonstration space walk to give the president a live view of McCandless through the shuttle window.
Bruce McCandless II, trains with Kathy Sullivan, right, in preparation to launch the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA)
The only problem was, there wasn't much fuel left. McCandless went out anyway, trying to stay within 10-15 feet of the spacecraft. He got into position and turned off the unit to preserve propellant. After the president said a few words and the video switched off, McCandless turned on the unit and "looked for the closest piece of the orbiter, pointed at it, put the hand controller in +X (and) got a sort of sighing noise as it accelerated in that direction." He ran out of fuel just as he grabbed onto a rail on the orbiter. Hand over hand, he brought himself back to the donning station.
It's that kind of suspense that made this book so thrilling to read.
There's space tension like when McCandless is operating as CAPCOM, the only person talking to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin while they are walking on the surface of the moon, and his commander wants him to break protocol and call them back early, even though there are no signs of distress.
The book is also so touching. I cried while reading about the declining health of Bernice, who survived so many astronaut wife struggles over the years and at the end of her life remained a loving partner and mother.
Bruce McCandless was a Navy pilot who was picked to join NASA in 1966. His first space flight wasn't until 1984. (NASA)
It's easy to forget that McCandless II had an entirely other memorable historic moment—launching the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990—and this one seems to have struck an even deeper chord with McCandless III.
The Hubble launch was McCandless' second and final flight. He was 52 and had worked at NASA for 24 years.
McCandless II spends the last chapters of the book making a compelling case that his dad's work to fix and update the Hubble are among the greatest achievements to science. He continued to work on Hubble for another two decades after retiring from NASA through his work at Lockheed Martin.
Bruce McCandless, left, and the flight crew that launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. He was 52 years old. (NASA)
He was the "nuts, bolts, screws, and wires guy," the auto mechanic rather than the scientist, who kept the telescope going 340 miles above Earth for more than twice its life expectancy. The Hubble has been cited in more than 18,000 scientific papers and has revealed countless secrets and unsolved mysteries from around the universe and beyond.
"The size, shape, and sheer spectral weirdness of the images boggle the imagination and make prophets and dreamers of us all," McCandless writes toward the end of "Wonders All Around. "Some of us pay therapists to tell us we're important and unique. Then we check in with Hubble so the satellite can inform us just how galactically marginal we all are. The truth is somewhere in the middle."
What a beautiful reminder.
