Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (13 page)

After the week-long interviews, it was time to wait. And wait. And wait. “I think I was [at Johnson for the interview] in August or something,” Covey recalled. “And so it was go home and wait for five months to see what happened. And nothing; there was nothing. It was real quiet during that time period.”

Finally, in January 1978 the phone calls started going out. John Fabian remembers where he was when he first heard that the new class had been selected, before he knew whether he had been chosen or not. “I was in bed that morning when my wife and I heard an announcement that
NASA
had selected thirty-five astronauts and among this group there would be six women,” he said. “And my wife said, ‘That’s too many,’ which sounds funny today. But, of course, her concern was that, if there are six women selected, that’s six slots that my husband isn’t going to fill.”

It wasn’t until later that day at work that Fabian got the phone call from
NASA
as he was preparing to go teach a class. “Mr. Abbey was on the other end, and he said, ‘John, this is George Abbey; I’m calling from the Johnson Space Center. I’m interested to know if you’re still interested in becoming an astronaut.’ I said, ‘Yes, I certainly am.’ He said, ‘Well then, I’m pleased to tell you that your name is on this list.’ So I had to have somebody else go teach my class, because I was psychologically not prepared to go lecture at that particular time. It was a great thrill, a real honor.”

At the time Mike Mullane got his phone call, he was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida but was on temporary duty to Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Mullane was phoned by his wife, who told him George Abbey had called their home to talk to him. Like several others, Mullane was aware the selection had been made because he had heard on the news about the women who were selected. Finally, he talked with Abbey himself and got the official word that he had been chosen. “I just went out and screamed with joy. I remember that night I bought some beer for the rest of the people that I was working with there at Mountain Home in the hangar there, and we had a little party. I remember . . . stopping out in the desert. This is out in Idaho. It’s like New Mexico. Go out in the desert; it’s like being in space. Black sky. I remember standing out there and just looking at the sky and thinking that I had this chance of actually flying in space.”

Mullane said that, despite the news of his selection and that moment in the desert, he still had doubts that he would ever actually make it into orbit.

I’m one of these guys that tend to think of all the things that can go wrong, like a medical problem or the rocket blows up or whatever it is. . . . Even though Abbey called and told me that I’m an astronaut, I felt like there’s still a lot that could go wrong that would prevent me from actually flying in space, but I still had this overwhelming sense of joy that I had this shot at getting into space. It was a lifetime dream come true to be an astronaut. But again, I didn’t really ever consider myself an astronaut until the
SRB
s ignited on my first mission. All the rest of it I just thought it was name only. But it certainly was an overwhelming, joyful experience of the first magnitude.

We tend to set these goals and think that once we reach this goal, it’s going to make you happy for the rest of your life. . . . Of course, that never happens. I remember telling my wife that if I just flew one time in space, just one time in space, that’s all that I would need to be infinitely happy. And then I’ll bet within two days after landing from my first mission, I said, “I sure would like another mission.” It’s just one of those things. It’s a joyful experience to be told that you’re going to get a shot at riding into space. So I was weightless at that point, I think. I was just floating around, already weightless.

Norm Thagard also had the yo-yo experience of assuming that finding out about the selection on the news meant that he hadn’t been picked, only
to get the phone call the next day at work from George Abbey saying that he had been chosen.

I hung up the phone and turned to the group that was there and said, “I guess I’m an astronaut.” Then I went back in my room and put my head down on the desk and was real depressed for the rest of the day. That’s honest. I was depressed. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on, but I finally think I understood that I’d always had goals, I always wanted to do this, that, and the other, but I never had really any goals beyond being an astronaut. So you’re all of a sudden faced [with] there’s nothing left to live for. Then you realize, well, yes, there is, because you still hadn’t flown in space. So life goes on. But my reaction really surprised me at first, because it was depression. I mean, I was not elated at all. I remember feeling, on the one hand, sort of gratified, but on the other hand, just feeling real down.

The Thirty-Five New Guys were the first class of astronauts to come in as astronaut candidates, or AsCans. “In previous selections they had had some people that didn’t really particularly care for the job and maybe didn’t know what the job entailed and left,” Mike Mullane said. “I think to avoid whatever embarrassment that might cause
NASA
or the individual, they established this plan which you come in for a couple of years and you go through training and evaluation. Then at the end of that period you either become no longer a candidate, and now you’re an astronaut, or it’s decided either mutually or by one party or the other that, yes, this probably wasn’t the right move, so we agree to part company at this point. No hard feelings.”

Mullane said he was afraid that the new process might mean that he would never earn the official title of astronaut.

I realistically thought there was a chance in a couple of years they might get rid of me. So I was concerned about that. I knew this was going to be an interesting mix of people, and I knew that there were going to be people that knew a lot more about stuff that was important than I knew, and there were going to be these pilots and all that other stuff, so I was a little concerned how we would all get along. But I think primarily I was just concerned about would I be able to really do the things that would be expected of me.

This first group of AsCans was so large that its members became the majority of the Astronaut Office when they reported for duty in July 1978. Loren Shriver recalled,

I think the folks who were still in the Astronaut Office, which, of course, had been between programs for several years of that period, were glad to see us there on the one hand, because they were all really busy doing the technical things that astronauts do while they’re waiting to go fly—various inputs to boards and panels and safety inputs and crew displays and all that kind of thing. They were all really busy, and I think they were happy to see us show up so that we would be able to help them and take some of the load. At the same time, I think there was a bit of the “Oh, no, all these new guys. How are we ever going to get them trained and up to speed? Will they ever be ready to go fly in space?” Well, that’s kind of a natural reaction to the group of people who has been there and done that a lot. That’s a bit of a different aspect of “We’re happy to have them here, but I don’t know, it’s maybe just a little more work for a while until we get them all checked out.”

Dick Covey said that the remaining veterans were quite welcoming to the large surge of rookie astronauts. “I never felt like they saw us coming in as ‘Oh, my God, we’ve got more people than we need,’” he said. “I’ve seen that since then, as the Astronaut Office has gone through huge swells and stuff, but I didn’t sense that from them. I got the sense that the twenty something of them that were still in the office were looking forward to some additional help. We seemed to be welcomed very graciously, particularly by the [previous class]. They really embraced our arrival, and I always felt like they felt like they needed more people to do the work for the office and getting ready to fly.”

The warm welcome was also experienced by Rick Hauck, who agreed that the “real astronauts” were grateful for the extra hands.

They’d already started gearing up for shuttle and they needed help. So we were there to be helpful in any way we can. They wanted to get us as smart about the systems as soon as they could. . . . Everyone was very hospitable to us, bending over backwards to make us comfortable and telling us how much they needed us. We felt wanted, and contrast that with Dick Truly and Bob Crippen, [who] had joined from the
MOL
program, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, and when they arrived there, I forget whether it was Deke Slayton or someone else said, “We didn’t ask for you. We didn’t want you. Stay out of the way.” Big difference. So I think that they were even sensitive to that kind of a reception.

John Fabian said that he had also heard horror stories about how the last class—Group 7—had been treated when the recruits arrived in 1969. Unlike the other classes, Group 7 had not been chosen through an open selection. The air force had formed its own astronaut corps, independent of
NASA
, to support its Manned Orbiting Laboratory space station program. When that program was canceled, the air force closed its corps and asked
NASA
to take on its excess astronauts. At the time,
NASA
’s astronaut corps had more people than it needed for the remaining Apollo-era seats available. There were reportedly multiple attempts at the
JSC
flight operations level to get rid of the new recruits, which were overruled by
NASA
leadership, eager to have the air force’s support as the agency sought funding for the Space Shuttle.

“We heard some bad stories about the way the
MOL
guys were treated when they came in, as kind of a leper colony, and we weren’t treated that way at all,” Fabian said. “I think they were glad to see us come. The shuttle program was just around the corner, we thought. It turns out it wasn’t quite just around the corner, but we thought it was, and there was a lot of work to be done, and there was a lot of legwork that needed to be accomplished. . . . So I think they were glad to see us. They got some new hands and legs, and I think that they counted on us being somewhat motivated and somewhat capable. So it was a very pleasant thing.”

Steven Hawley was a little less sure what the veterans thought of his AsCan class.

We hadn’t really been flying a lot in ’78; . . . since we’d landed on the moon, there’d only been like four crews to get to fly, and here’s this new bunch of guys walking in the door. I could see how some of the guys that had been around for a while waiting to fly might have been a little resentful. If they were, that didn’t come across in any way, because our training was separate from what most everybody else was doing. Everybody else was doing mainstream support of shuttle and development of everything that needed to be done before
STS-
1. We would cross paths at the Monday morning meeting or you’d run into them at the gym or something like that, but mostly we did our own thing.

Initially, Hawley said, the main interaction between the new class and the veteran astronauts came in the form of
NASA
history lessons during their
training. “They thought it was important, and I think it is, that we hear from people that had flown Apollo and had flown Skylab and
ASTP
. So I remember we got lectures from some of the guys that were still there, some of the guys that had left but came back to talk to us about their flights and what it was like back then. . . . These were my heroes, and to actually get to sit in a room and listen to them talk about their flights was pretty awesome.”

Veteran Apollo astronaut T. K. Mattingly confirmed that the corps was glad for the new class and the needed help it provided.

Once we got these folks on, the
OV
-101 [
Enterprise
] was rapidly approaching the time to get ready to go. So we put together the training program for the new folks and helped them get started on that. Then we split them up, . . . just spread amongst the few of us that had been around. [The shuttle’s robot arm] and a lot of these other activities were all getting sort of a lick and a promise instead of real attention till the ’78 group came on board, and once they went to work, then they really took hold and played very key roles in the development.

Of course, the “Thirty-Five New Guys” weren’t just “guys.” The veteran flyboys of the astronaut corps also welcomed for the first time six women who were part of the new class. Sally Ride pointed out that her class presented a double whammy for those who had already been in the corps—not only were they now outnumbered by rookies, they were the minority in an office that was suddenly much more diverse. “They seemed to accept us pretty well,” recalled Ride.

We had them outnumbered, so I’m not sure they had a choice. It was clearly very different for them. They were used to a particular environment and culture. Most of them were test pilots. There were a few scientists, but most were test pilots. Of course the entire astronaut corps had been male, so they were not used to working with women. And there had been no additions to the astronaut corps in nearly ten years, so even having a large infusion of new blood changed their working environment.

But they knew that this was coming and they’d known it was coming for a couple of years. Well before the announced upcoming opportunity to apply for the astronaut corps,
NASA
had decided that women were going to be a part of it. So I think that the existing astronauts had a couple of years to adjust and come to terms with it. By the time that we actually arrived, they had adapted to the idea. We really didn’t have any issues with them at all. It was easy to tell, though, that the males in our group were really pretty comfortable with us, while the astronauts who’d been around for a while were not all as comfortable and didn’t quite know how to react. But they were just fine and didn’t give us a hard time at all.