Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (25 page)

Although Mattingly and the rookie astronaut Hartsfield had never flown together before, their assignment to
STS
-4 was a reunion of sorts: Hartsfield had served as CapCom during Mattingly’s Apollo flight to the moon.

In
[Apollo] 16
, Hank and I had developed a better-than-average rapport, I think, because in lunar orbit, Hank ran the show and all the flight plan from the ground. I told him, “You only get to go to the moon once, so I don’t want to miss a minute of looking out the window. So you run the spacecraft, and I’ll look and tell you about it.” And he really did a magnificent job on that, and as a result, we got a lot of stuff done that we wouldn’t have otherwise. So on
STS
-4, it was kind of fun to go back to working together that way, and we were still trying to see how much we could cram into this thing.

Hartsfield added that not only did the two astronauts get along well, they had a unique commonality. “We both went to Auburn. I think it’s the only time the entire crew went to the same university in the spaceflight business. We used to take a lot of ribbing from the University of Alabama folks, saying the only reason they put two Auburn guys on one flight, that way we’d only mess up one. So we had to take a lot of ribbing, but it was a lot of fun.”

STS
-4 CapCom Pinky Nelson described having an interesting working relationship with the
STS
-4 commander. “T. K. Mattingly is probably the most technically capable person who has ever been an astronaut, just in terms of his capacity to stuff things between his ears,” Nelson voiced.

He knew absolutely everything, and had to know everything, and was fanatical about tracking everything, and drove me nuts, because I don’t work that way. I tend to work in a way where you take in a lot of information, but you have a filter. You say, okay, this is important, this might be important, this is probably not important, and you prioritize things, where T.K. works that everything is on the top line. He’s able to work that way just because of his incredible capacity, and I wasn’t, so he and I had kind of an odd relationship. If I didn’t see the point of having to do something, I wouldn’t do it, basically.

Despite their differences, Mattingly and Nelson had enough in common, and enough willingness to coexist where they were different, that they actually had a decent working relationship.

T. K. and I really got along. We were able to communicate fairly well because we had the same kind of style of no extra words kind of communication. But, boy, he was a hard taskmaster, I thought. He just didn’t see the forest, but he saw every tree, and he expected everybody else to do that, and they just couldn’t. He really wore some people down. That kind of thing doesn’t bother me so much. I was able to just kind of ignore it and say, “Okay, I’m going to catch some flak for this, but I deserve it. I don’t care. I’m not going to do it anyway.” . . . Some newspaper article about the mission called me the “laconic and taciturn CapCom.” That was great.

When launch day came, Hartsfield was excited that, after sixteen years in the air force and
NASA
astronaut corps, he was finally going to fly.

To me, it was kind of an emotional thing. I remember when we were going out to the pad in the van, and just before we got up to the pad to get out and go to get in the bird, it just sort of hit me, and I said, . . . “Ken, I can’t believe it. I think we’ll really get to do this.” It hit me emotionally, because tears started welling up in my eyes. You know, I had to wipe my eyes. It just, to me, was an emotional thought, after all that time, I was finally going to get to fly, it appeared. And I did.

Mattingly’s perspective on the ascent was different from that of many of his peers, as he was one of only a few astronauts who could compare launch on the large Saturn V rocket and the Space Shuttle. Many shuttle astronauts have commented on the power and vibration of the solid rockets during the first two minutes of flight; Mattingly, on the other hand, noted how relatively smooth the launch was. “Compared to the Saturn, the shuttle is like electric propulsion; it doesn’t make any noise, it doesn’t shake and rattle, it just goes. It’s just nothing like the Saturn, or, as I understand, the Gemini or the Titan.”

Hartsfield recalled that the launch was not without complications, due to a hailstorm the night before.

About nine o’clock that night, after the storm passed over and it quit raining, we went out to the pad with a lot of other people to look at the orbiter. And the black tiles all had little white specks all over where they’d been pelted with the hail. So Ken and I went back to the crew quarters thinking, “Shit, we ain’t go
ing nowhere tomorrow.” So we were real down. And we went to bed and couldn’t believe it the next morning when these guys were hammering [on] the door, saying, “Come on, get up, guys, we’re going.” We said, “What, we’re going?” “Yeah, they cleared it.” They flew some guy from Houston in a
T
-38 down there, one of these tile experts, and he went out and walked around and decided that it was okay to go, that the tiles weren’t damaged that badly.

The next day it was discovered that there was a side effect of the damage that the expert had failed to anticipate. During launch, controllers noticed that the vehicle was not getting the performance it should for the amount of fuel being used. It turned out the hail had damaged the waterproof coating of the tiles, and they’d absorbed water during the storm. “They calculated later that we’d carried about two thousand pounds of water with us that had soaked into the tiles,” Hartsfield explained. “So all this flight planning that we’d worked on for so long and had down pat went out . . . the window. We spent seventy-two hours with the belly to the sun trying to bake out the tiles. Because they were concerned that if you had water in those tiles and then got entry heating, they didn’t know whether you might get some steam or something generated and blow the tiles out or crack them or something.”

With the excitement and drama of launch done, the arrival in orbit was a moment of wonder even for veteran astronaut Mattingly.

The most magical thing was, after working on this device for ten years, you got on orbit and . . . we opened the payload bay doors for the first time towards the Earth. So all of a sudden, it was like you pulled the shades back on a bay window, and the Earth appeared. We got on orbit, and this thing worked. And I just couldn’t get over the fact that . . . people that I knew, that were friends, had built and conceived this whole thing, and it works. It’s just magic. It does all of these things that we dreamed of, but the visuals are better than the simulator now. So we just had a wonderful time of it.

Flying around the Earth is just so spectacular. I don’t care how long you’re up there, I can’t imagine anyone ever getting tired of it. It’s just beautiful, and the orbiter with these big windows, it is just wonderful. Hank would say, “You know, we probably ought to get some sleep here.” I’d say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re right. We’ve got another day’s work tomorrow.” . . . So all the kids are in bed, and now you can look out the window. I told the ground I went to sleep so they won’t bother me, and I’d sit there, having a wonderful time.

When he finally got tired enough to stop looking out the window and try to get some sleep, Mattingly decided to see what it would be like to sleep freely, instead of hanging from a wall in his sleeping bag. Since Hartsfield was sleeping on the mid-deck, Mattingly had the flight deck to himself, and he decided to try just lying down on the floor.

I worked at getting all steady and not moving and stopped right behind the two seats that had a little space over the hatches that come up from the mid-deck and in between the aft control panel and the back of the ejection seats, which there’s a lot more room today since they took the ejection seats out. So it was a place probably two feet wide, maybe two and a half. I got all stable in there. “Ah, this is nice. Go to sleep.” Well, the next thing I know, there’s something on my nose, and it’s a window, and god-dang, I was sure I had gotten stable. So I went back and set up again, not moving, did it again, ended up with my nose in the window, in the overhead window. That bothered me. I finally put a Velcro strap over me just to keep me from floating up. I just thought that was really curious. So the next morning I was telling Hank about it, and he said, “Well, I didn’t have any trouble. I just was floating in the middle of the mid-deck.” Hmm.

Hartsfield pointed out that during the sleep shift the orbiter had been carrying out passive thermal control maneuvers. In order to better understand the thermal characteristics of the vehicle, flight controllers would change its orientation to expose different parts of it to sunlight for periods of time, taking advantage of instrumentation that wouldn’t be used after this last development flight.

“[Hartsfield] says, ‘You know, I was almost on the center of rotation, and you were up here. This is centrifugal force,’” Mattingly recalled.

I said, “Oh, come on, Hank. What was it, . . . five revolutions an hour, or some gosh-awful thing? . . . That can’t be.” He said, “Well, we’ve got another one scheduled for tonight. Let’s try it both ways.” We tried it, and sure enough, every time. If this thing was rotating at this really slow rate, there’s no other force; these little forces become important. And after we stopped, he says, “Try it again.” I did, and sure enough, no problem. So this is kind of added to some of the little micro physics things that you see in space that are so interesting.

In addition to the standard tests of the orbiter systems,
STS
-4 was the first shuttle flight to include a classified military experiment. In order to
preserve secrecy, the experiment had its own classified checklist with coded section names that could be discussed over the unsecure communications channel. The experiment itself was kept in a padlocked locker. While the shuttle was in orbit, the crew members could leave it unlocked, but once the experiment was completed, they had to stow it and lock it back up to keep it secure after landing. Hartsfield recalled that about thirty minutes after they finished the experiment and locked it away, they got a call from the military flight control for the experiment.

The CapCom came on, the military guy, and says he wanted me to do Tab November. Ken said, “What’s Tab November?” I said, “I ain’t got the foggiest idea. I’m going to have to get the checklist out to see.” So I got the padlock off and got the drawer and dug down and got the checklist out and went to Tab November, and it says, “Put everything away and secure it.” Ken and I really laughed about it. It was just aggravating to have to undo all that, because that locker, the stuff we had just barely fit in there, so it was really a stowage issue here. If there’s one thing you learn in zero g—things are always neatly packed [before flight] and you get it up there, and once you pull it out, it doesn’t always go back in, because it expands or does something in zero g and it doesn’t fit very well.

Like the first three flights,
STS
-4 involved experiments to test the capabilities and tolerances of the orbiter. One particular experiment, testing the thermal tolerances of the payload bay doors, resulted in a tense moment for the crew. In the experiment, the orbiter was kept in a position to expose the doors to the sun for three days.

“After seventy-two hours to the sun, it came time to cycle the payload bay doors,” Hartsfield said.

We brought the port door down. We’re looking out, and the door comes down. And all of a sudden, the left collar of that thing hits the bulkhead and the door just warps. And by the time I got it stopped, it’s already done. And we tried to call the ground and say we’ve got a problem here, but about that time, we went
LOS
. [On the ground] they’re panicked. They see what’s happened, that the door is hung up on the bulkhead or something, and the door’s warped. And you know, [
JSC
director Chris] Kraft was not a flight director, but he sat in the back watching everything. “Tell ’em to open the door. Tell ’em to reopen the
door! Tell ’em to open the goddamn door!” They tell me he was just getting furious. . . . And they couldn’t get it to us. So Ken and I were saying, “Holy shit, that door is really bent.”

Hartsfield and Mattingly wondered if the door was broken, which would create a catastrophic situation. During entry and landing, the structural integrity of the orbiter required the doors to be closed and all but one set of the latches to be latched. “So we were wondering if we’d broken something and weren’t going to able to latch the doors back up to come home. Well, as soon as we got
AOS
again, they told us to open the door, and I started driving it, and it all of a sudden—boing—the door vibrated and it went back to its normal shape. And we went, ‘Whew.’ . . . Thank God it’s a composite material, so it does have some kind of resiliency to keep its shape once you take the load off of it.”

While earlier flights had landed in the dry lake bed at Edwards or at White Sands,
STS
-4 would be another stepping stone for the shuttle program by being the first to return from space on an aircraft runway, and Mattingly was hoping to avoid a repeat of Haise’s infamous bounce landing of
Enterprise
. “Our job, like Freddo’s, was to plan to make the first concrete runway landing. You know, as much as we trained for that thing, I just had this image of doing Freddo’s trick all over again. It was, you know, bad karma or something. Oh, that bothered me. I could think of nothing else.”

Mattingly had promised Hartsfield that he would let the pilot fly a part of the entry so that he could say he had actually flown the orbiter, normally the sole privilege of the commander. “When we did come in and got out at Edwards and came around,” Mattingly said,

we got on the heading alignment circle and I was tracking it, and I turned to look at Hank, and I was about to say, “Well, okay, here, you take it for a bit now,” . . . and all of a sudden my gyros tumbled and I just had one of the worse cases of vertigo I’ve ever had. . . . It was just really overwhelming. I went back and started focusing on the eight ball and looking at the displays, and Hank says, “Are you going to let me fly?” And I said, “No, no. I can’t talk about it now.” And we came around and did our thing, and I was still having this vestibular sensation that was unusual, but once we got on the glide slope it seemed like . . . normal.