Remember the space shuttle, that lemon?

After the pioneering triumphs of the Apollo program, the workaday shuttle introduced by President Nixon to “routinize” spaceflight was bound to be a disappointment. It’s in the names. “Apollo”: Greek god of truth and light. “Shuttle”: the thing you take to the airport Hilton.

But the shuttle failed by even by its own prosaic standards, and, when NASA mothballed the chunky white spaceplane in 2011, it ended a 40-year national embarrassment. Intended as a cost saver, it was supposed to take material to orbit for the bargain-bin price of $650 a pound; that figure ended up closer to $25,000. It was supposed to have a launch turnaround time of two weeks; the final average was six months. It was supposed to make one-off rockets obsolete; those one-offs turned out to be cheaper and more versatile. Unlike previous manned spacecraft the shuttle had no escape system, so when two of the five vehicles exploded, 14 astronauts died. Toward the end of the shuttle’s moribund career, NASA engineers could be found trawling eBay in search of its discontinued parts. All this for a spaceship that could travel only one six-hundredth the distance to the moon.

And yet. Who didn’t love the space shuttle? It looked simultaneously so purposeful and so cute. It made a great inflatable toy. It had that cool Canadian arm. For all but the very oldest and youngest of us, the shuttle was American spaceflight.

Margaret Lazarus Dean, an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, loved the shuttle more than most. She loved it so much that she attributed distinct personalities to the individual vehicles. Columbia was “bumbly, a chunky older sister forever dropping crumpled tissues from her sleeves”; Challenger “the fuzziest, friendliest of the orbiters”; Endeavour “a quirky cousin from another country.” She loved the shuttle program so much that over and again in 2011 she forsook her students and husband and young son to drive the 700 miles between Knoxville and Cape Canaveral and witness the surviving shuttles’ final launches. She loved it so much that she wrote a book about these trips: Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight. A memoir of technological obsession, it reminds us that even when a machine fails by all other criteria, it can still succeed erotically.

Like so many obsessions, Dean’s began in pain. After her parents’ divorce, she spent childhood weekends with her father at the National Air and Space Museum, marveling at the high-tech relics and thinking that “despite their long and growing list of appalling limitations, grown-ups had at least done this: they had figured out how to fly to space.” On a film shot by shuttle astronauts she saw Judith Resnik, fourth woman in space, destined to die in the 1986 Challenger disaster, floating asleep and surrounded by the dark ringlets of her hair: “I fell in love.” In a passage that reads almost like Freudian fetish origination, Dean explains that her obsession began there, with “the air-conditioned, musty smell of Air and Space … a space-scarred Apollo capsule, the floating black curls of Judith Resnik, and my father’s calm voice.” Dean grew up, became a writer, and wrote a first novel about Challenger and a NASA engineer’s daughter. When the shuttle’s retirement was announced, she knew what her second book’s subject would be.