Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (12 page)

Hauck didn’t grow up with an interest in space, and as a child there had been no space program for him to aspire to. “The word
Apollo
didn’t even exist in terms of spaceflight when I was thinking about becoming a naval aviator,” said Hauck, who was a junior in college when Alan Shepard made his first spaceflight in 1961. “Even before I became an aviator, while I was at [The U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in] Monterey, I had read that
NASA
was recruiting scientists to become astronauts, and I wrote a letter to
NASA
saying, ‘I’m in graduate school. You could tailor my education however you saw fit to optimize my benefit to the program, and I’d be very interested in becoming an astronaut.’ I got a letter back saying, ‘Thank you very much for your interest. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.’ That was in early ’65, I think, so it was twelve years later that I was accepted into the astronaut program.”

Sally Ride, the United States’ first female astronaut to fly in space, saw the ad for a new class of astronauts in the Stanford University newspaper, placed there by the Center for Research on Women at Stanford. “The ad made it clear that
NASA
was looking for scientists and engineers, and it also made it clear that they were going to accept women into the astronaut corps. They wanted applications from women, which is presumably the reason the Center for Research on Women was contacted and the reason that they offered to place the ad in the Stanford student newspaper.”

8.
Astronauts training to experience weightlessness on board the
NASA
KC
-135. Courtesy
NASA
.

Another member of the eighth class, air force pilot Dick Covey, got to
NASA
by studying and following a career path similar to those of the early astronauts. “As I looked at what it looked like those original astronauts had done . . . that became a path for me to follow,” Covey said. He majored in astronautical engineering and participated in a cooperative master’s program between the Air Force Academy and Purdue University. According to Covey, fifteen of the selected Thirty-Five New Guys participated in the program at the same time as he.

We gave up our graduation vacation time. All my [other] classmates got two months to go off and party and tour the world and do whatever and then go to their flight training, while we all went immediately, right after graduation to Purdue and started school again. But in January following graduation in June,
we all had our master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics, and those of us that were going to flight training already had our flight-training date, and we went immediately to flight training. So, for someone that wanted to be an astronaut, being able to go through the Air Force Academy, major in astronautical engineering, and get a master’s degree from Purdue in aeronautics and astronautics within seven months and then go immediately to flight training was an extraordinary opportunity. I often wonder, if I had not done that, whether I would have ever become an astronaut. . . . One of the reasons Purdue has so many astronauts is there’s all these Air Force Academy guys who went through that program over time, and it added to their numbers then.

When the announcement was made, Covey applied through the air force. The air force had decided, as the other services did, that it would have its own selection of those it would nominate to
NASA
, and Covey was selected as one of the air force’s applicants.

Hauck and Dan Brandenstein were test pilot school classmates and squadron mates six years prior to their selection to the corps. Hauck said the two talked a lot back then about whether or not they would apply to the astronaut program.

Part of the preinterview process was the folks in Houston took each folder. Some of the people were rejected immediately. Some, they said, “Well, let’s find out more about this person.” They make a lot of phone calls. “Hey, do you know Rick?” or, “Do you know Dan? What do you think about him?” So I got a call one day in my office at Whidbey Island, Washington, and it was John Young. And John said, “I’m on the selection board for this astronaut program.” He didn’t say anything about knowing that I was applying. He said, “Dan Brandenstein, he’s in your squadron there. What do you think about him?” And I told him, I said, “I think he’s a great guy. He’d be a super astronaut.” He said, “Okay, thank you very much.” And I said, “Excuse me, but I’m applying also.” He said, “I know. I know. Thank you very much.”

Covey said that his selection as one of the air force’s candidates for the new class of astronauts was the first of a series of milestones that made the possibility of achieving his goal seem a little more real. “When they started [interviewing candidates] we knew they were doing it,” Covey said, recalling that, at the same time,
NASA
was conducting glide-flight tests of the prototype orbiter,
Enterprise
.

So everybody’s getting excited about the shuttle now. . . . We knew that
NASA
was getting ready. I had a vacation planned. I had just taken my wife and kids and put them on an airplane. They were on their way to California, and I was supposed to join them within a day or two. I got a call, and it was from Jay Honeycutt. Jay was calling to invite me to come to Houston. . . . It was very short notice for an interview. That was the first day they were calling anybody. Finally had got their list down and alphabetically they started calling people to come. I’m sitting there. I just sent my wife out. I’m supposed to go join her on this vacation out here. I remember thinking—I mean, this was the hardest question I was going to ask. I said, “Jay, so if I said I couldn’t come next week, will you invite me back another time?” I later talked to Jay, and he said that he said, “Well, just a second. Let me check.” So I go, “Oh, no.”

Covey said that Honeycutt told him later that he had to go ask whether they could schedule another time for a candidate, since it was a possibility that hadn’t been discussed. “They expect that everybody will say, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ you know. So he came back and says, ‘Yeah, we’ll invite you back.’ Well, so I go on my vacation, and I’m going, ‘Oh, my God. They haven’t called me yet. When are they going to call me?’ So it was a terrible vacation. It was a terrible vacation. Toward the end of it they finally called; said, ‘Well, we’re getting our stuff together. We want you to come week after next.’”

The interview process lasted a week and included physical, psychiatric, and psychological exams. “The physical exams included lab work of everything that they could measure,” recalled Hauck. The psychiatric exam, Hauck said, involved interviews with a “good-guy psychiatrist” and a “bad-guy psychiatrist,” each of whom played a different role in the test.

The bad-guy psychiatrist evaluated how you did under pressure. For example, “I’m going to read off a list of numbers. Tell me what they are in inverse order.” And you start with two, five, and you say, “Five, two.” And then three numbers, then four numbers, then five, then six, and you’re sitting there just thinking, “I can’t do this.” At some point, you make a mistake. Inevitably, at some point you make a mistake and the psychiatrist said, “That’s wrong,” with a scowl on his face. “Can’t you do better than that?” Blah, blah, blah. And, of course, he doesn’t care whether you did it with five numbers, three numbers, or eight numbers. He’s more interested in seeing whether you get flustered, wheth
er you get antagonistic. And as I recall, I might have said, “That’s the best I can do, yes.” “That’s okay.”

The role of the other interviewer, Hauck said, focused more on the candidate’s emotions and interpersonal relationship styles. “The good-guy psychiatrist would ask you questions such as if you were to wear a T-shirt and there were an animal on the front of the T-shirt and you wanted that to sort of be your symbol, what would that animal be? I forget what I said, and I’m sure he drew some conclusions whether you said a tiger or a turtle or a rat or what.”

In another part of the test, he said, candidates were zipped up individually into a fabric sphere.

In order to get into it, you had to get into a fetal position, into a ball, and the concept of the sphere was it was just small enough so that it could go through the crew hatch in the Space Shuttle in the event that you had to rescue people from one shuttle to another. The charter was, “We’re going to put you in this. You have oxygen. You have communications. We’re not going to tell you how long you’re going to be in there. At the end, we want you to write a flight report on what you think are the upsides, downsides, what more needs to be studied for this concept.”

So that was fascinating. There was really two objectives there. One is, see how analytical you are about analyzing . . . a piece of hardware or software. Number two is a claustrophobia test, because you literally couldn’t move very much, and it would be very clear if you had claustrophobic tendencies. As I recall, I found it most comfortable to sort of lie on my back with my knees up, and I almost fell asleep.

The “big deal” of the process, Hauck said, was the board interview with Johnson Space Center officials who made the selection decisions.

They’d say, “Tell us about yourself,” and just let you talk. I don’t remember getting any surprise questions, but some of the people got surprise questions. For example, President Carter was president at the time. He had just signed the bill that transferred the Panama Canal back to Panama, and one of the questions was, “What do you think about the Suez Canal situation?” And of course, the person might have started commenting about the Panama Canal because that was what was in the news, and then one of the board members might say, “Why are you telling us about the Panama Canal? We asked you about the Suez Canal.” And again, it’s an opportunity to see how people react under some level of stress and so on.

Interviewees were called to Houston in groups. John Fabian said his group comprised about twenty-two people, and he was convinced that any of them would have made fine astronauts. “It was all rather intimidating and awe-inspiring,” Fabian said, “but somehow, at the end of it, some people got lucky, and other people didn’t, and I was one of the lucky ones.”

At six feet one, Fabian was too tall for earlier astronaut selections, but with the Space Shuttle program came a new maximum height of six feet four. Before that, he’d not given it much thought, he said. “I’ve always had the philosophy that you shouldn’t try to be something you can’t. I couldn’t be an astronaut if I was six foot one, and that was above the height limit.”

The highlight of the interview week for Terry Hart was the selection committee, led by Director of Flight Operations George Abbey, in part due to an unusual circumstance in another part of the interview. Hart’s blood tests early in the week were flagged for being outside the parameters for uric acid.

“The basic message I was getting was that that was going to be disqualifying,” Hart said.

And in a sense I think that really helped me, because I went into the interview just [like] I was down here for the experience and everything. I was relatively relaxed as you could be for such an interview and went through that interview process and finished the week up. I went home and told my wife that it was a wonderful experience, but I wasn’t going to make it, which is what I thought from the beginning. But I was a little disappointed at that point, because as you get into the process, your competitive juices start flowing and everything. You really want to be part of this very exciting adventure that was about to begin. Yet realistically, I’d met all these people that . . . seemed to be so much more qualified than I was.

On the flip side, Norm Thagard found himself feeling like he was in the hot seat during his interview, particularly over a comment he made about women.

You sit there at a table and there are people on all sides of you during the interview and they’re firing questions at you. . . . The question George [Abbey] asked me was, “Well, I see that you made a C in ballroom dancing. Why was that?” I said, “Well, our instructor was a woman who liked to lead.” Which was true. “I found that very difficult to learn to dance with someone who was leading.” But then the next question was, “Well, what do you have against women?” And, you know, they’re firing these questions from all over and you’re turning
this way and then you’re turning that way. [I heard] a little ruffle of movement and I see someone get up and leave. When I turn back, Carolyn Huntoon, who was the only female member on the thing, had gotten up and left. I said, “Well, this is just great.” First of all, they’ve drawn this thing out, which to me, I thought was an innocent enough response, but now they’re making a big deal out of it. Now this woman is obviously a feminist and offended that I’ve said this, and so she’s left.

After the selection announcement, Thagard would find out what had happened when he and the other new astronauts were brought to Johnson Space Center for media events. “Carolyn Huntoon was the one that babysat our kids, because we brought them along for that,” he said. “She took us in our car over to some of the events at
JSC
. I reminded Carolyn that she had gotten up and left during my interview and what I had thought was the reason why. She says, ‘Oh, no, I had to get up to leave because my babysitter had to go home.’ So it took me a long time to realize that, in fact, it hadn’t been all that bad.”