Willy Trolove: Space programme caught by an irresistible force

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Gravity is a demanding mistress. Bit by bit and year by year she wears us down until, at last, we give in to her irresistible embrace.

We think that time is our enemy but it is gravity that sneaks into our bedrooms at night and carves lines in our faces, chisels cartilage from our joints, and stretches the muscles that hold our stomachs in place.

Without gravity we could thumb our noses at time, but, as Einstein found, you can't have one without the other. Gravity is time. Or she is time's sister. Or her sister-in-law. Or, quite possibly, her transvestite uncle. I can never remember. But somehow they are relatives.

We fantasise about defying gravity. If you're anything like me, you've spent absurd chunks of your life dreaming about being an astronaut, living in space, or floating around the office in antigravity underpants. And if you're anything like me, you can't go to Florida without visiting Cape Canaveral - the global headquarters of gravity defiance.

I have timed my visit well. Today there is a 50m Atlas rocket on launchpad 36A waiting for someone to light its fuse. Inside its nosecone is a Japanese satellite, ready to be slotted into an orbital parking space 36,000km above the Pacific so it can beam business communications to Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

The launch is scheduled for tonight, so I have the day to look around.

Next door to the commercial launch facilities at Cape Canaveral is the Kennedy Space Centre, the home of Nasa's manned space programme. I board a tour bus at the visitor centre. Our tour guide is a Texan and sounds just enough like George W. Bush that it's unnerving.

Off we go, into the Merritt Island National Wildlife Reserve, towards the awesome bulk of the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the Apollo rockets were put together.

The Kennedy Space Centre sits in 56,656ha of wilderness. Space station modules are prepared in the midst of swamps and scrub. Space shuttles live among loggerhead turtles, manatees and peregrine falcons.

"On yer left," points our guide, "is where the Apollo 11 astronauts put on their spacesuits before they went to the moon. On yer right is a 10ft alligator we call Suzie."

Nasa's space shuttles have been grounded since Columbia burned up on re-entry in February last year. Inside the giant sheds of the Orbiter Processing Facility, the three remaining shuttles - Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour - sit idle, waiting for the chance to fly.

Nearby is another giant structure, a nest of tangled branches up a tree. Poking their scraggly heads out of the nest are three bald eagle chicks, sitting idle and waiting - just as surely - for their chance to fly.

We pass the crawler transporters, three-storey high mobile platforms the size of five tennis courts, that carry the space shuttles to their launchpads.

For now they lie quietly rusting in the sea air. Wild pigs have rooted around their feet.

The launchpad gantries soar up out of the scrub within earshot of the pounding surf, perched on the edge of the Atlantic just as a rocket before lift-off is perched on the edge of space. But with the shuttles grounded, they seem lonely and forlorn.

Our tour guide's enthusiastic commentary can't disguise the fact that the United States space programme is in trouble, not so much lost in space as caught, for the moment, in gravity's arms.

We pull up to the Apollo Centre, where a huge Saturn V moon-rocket lies on display. Our tour guide bids us farewell.

"Y'all take care," he says, "and keep on dreaming."

According to its mission statement, Nasa is supposed to inspire the next generation of explorers, but for now, the best it can offer is yesterday's glories.

Luckily, the commercial operators at Cape Canaveral aren't inspired by dreams. They are driven by money, a more reliable guarantor of success. If tonight's rocket goes off as planned, it will be the 71st flawless Atlas launch in a row.

Night falls and I make my way to Port Canaveral, 10km from the Cape.

At 8.45pm the darkness turns to brilliant day, waking the manatees, alarming the loggerhead turtles and startling the bald eagles. A vast glowing orb struggles up out of the wilderness on a plume of white silence.

Then the noise arrives, late, untidy, and loud - a stumbling drunken thundering noise, creasing and folding and ripping the air as the light strains upwards, clawing at the sky.

For a few minutes the rocket gains height and speed, taking its shambling din with it, as it throws away the spent parts of itself, empty sacrifices to the world it leaves behind.

And then, at last, the light fades and becomes a new star, the wildlife goes back to sleep, and a Japanese communications satellite bids farewell to Mistress Gravity forever.