Drivers will abandon their cars, and customers will pour out of the Village Inn, where Mr. Galorneau is the general manager, as they will at businesses up and down Route 1, which serves as a main street for this city of 45,000.
Shortly before 4 p.m., all eyes will turn toward the Kennedy Space Center, 12 miles east across the wide expanse of the Indian River Lagoon. There, at Launch Pad 39A, if the weather allows, the shuttle Endeavour will thunder into the sky on a pedestal of flame, carrying six astronauts on a two-week mission to the International Space Station.
“The place will clear out,” Mr. Galorneau said Wednesday while waitresses bustled around him, and every diner got a free piece of pie for Pie Rush Wednesday. “Everybody crowds down to the river. And then, as soon it goes up, 10 minutes later I have a packed restaurant and I have a waiting list for hours.”
The brief but jaw-dropping spectacle that is a shuttle launching has occurred 133 times before, and Mr. Galorneau has seen his share (except for the time he was stuck inside making pancake batter — “You can’t run a pancake house without pancake batter,” he said — and got to feel the building shake). This launching is expected to be one of the biggest ever, with perhaps three-quarters of a million people jamming Titusville, Cape Canaveral and other nearby towns.
Some of the interest in the Endeavour mission is no doubt because of the drama involving its commander, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, whose wife, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, was gravely wounded in a shooting in January. She is here to watch the launching. And some of it is no doubt because of an anticipated visit by President Obama.
But the main draw is the fact that after this liftoff, and the launching of the Atlantis in two months, there will be no more space shuttle voyages. After three decades, the program has just about reached the end of the line.
“You’re not going to see another one — this is going to be it,” said Truman Scarborough, who was Titusville’s mayor in the 1980s and served as a Brevard County commissioner for 20 years.
Mr. Scarborough and others said that for the past three or four launchings, the crowds have been getting larger as the program nears its end. Officials were forecasting perhaps a million or more for the Atlantis launch, a crowd that would rival the glory days of the space program, when a mammoth Saturn V rocket propelled the Apollo 11 astronauts toward the moon.
At the space center, the program’s demise is apparent in the physical changes taking place. At Launch Pad 39B, a twin to the pad where the Endeavour sits, workers were dismantling, bit by bit, the giant steel structures that coddled many shuttles before liftoff — including the Challenger, which rocketed off in 1986, never to return.
Several miles away, at a huge bay where workers would normally be swarming over the shuttle Discovery to ready it for its next mission, they were instead preparing it to be shipped next year to the Smithsonian Institution.
But in Titusville and other towns nearby, the changes are being measured in terms of humans, not hardware. While the shuttle program never really achieved its lofty goal of making spaceflight routine, it did provide a routine for thousands of aerospace workers here.
Some of them — mostly employees of contractors, not NASA — have already received pink slips. Many more layoffs and buyouts are to come this summer — in all, about 8,000.
“It’s been our livelihood forever,” said the Rev. Tom Porter, pastor of Temple Baptist Church here, who said some laid-off members of his congregation had already left for new jobs elsewhere.
Titusville and other communities saw this coming; discussions about the end of the shuttle program began as early as seven years ago. And old-timers have seen this kind of thing before, especially when the Apollo moon program ended in 1973. “In the early ’70s, I used to come over here from St. Petersburg, and it was a ghost town,” Pastor Porter said.
Indeed, it was the shuttle program that shook the area out of its post-Apollo doldrums. And while NASA plans eventually to replace the shuttles with commercial manned rockets that would use the space center, no one knows how soon that would happen.
Local officials say that the region is much more diverse economically now and that the effect of the space industry, for better or worse, is not as great as it used to be. With its many shuttered businesses — the Miracle City Mall, just down the block from Mr. Galorneau’s restaurant, is a shell of its former self, with only a few stores open — Titusville is not that different from other Florida cities, far from the Space Coast, which overbuilt in the boom years only to fall hard in the economic downturn.
Aside from the economic diversity, the pastor said, there is something else that is different this time: life is more complicated. Apollo employed a lot of young engineers who quickly pulled up stakes when the program closed. These days the engineers and other workers are older, and many of their spouses work. Leaving for a new job may not be so easy; it may not even be desired.
“Breaking and running, when you’re within 10 or 15 years of retirement, doesn’t seem to be making sense to them,” Mr. Scarborough said. “Which is not what happened after Apollo.”
Pastor Porter said that this week his congregation prayed that President Obama, who has continued to nudge the manned spaceflight program away from NASA and toward private companies, “would see the launch and be so moved to keep the program going.” Did he think that would happen? “No,” he said. “Humanly speaking, no way.”
Pastor Porter said that some workers have already taken steps to be ready for layoffs. But others have not.
“The Bible says consider the ants,” he said. “The ants — you know, they toil, they save up, they prepare. Yeah, in a perfect world that would be great.”
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