Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (48 page)

The launch of 61
C
was delayed seven times. Originally set for 18 December 1985, the launch was delayed one day when additional time was needed to close out the orbiter’s aft compartment. On 19 December the launch scrubbed at T minus fourteen seconds due to a problem with the right solid rocket booster hydraulic power unit. “As it turned out,” Charlie Bolden said, “when we finally got out of the vehicle and they detanked and went in, they determined that there wasn’t really a problem. . . . It was a computer problem, not a physical problem with the hydraulic power unit at all, and it probably would have functioned perfectly normally, and we’d have had a great flight.”

The launch was pushed out eighteen days, to 6 January 1986. The third attempt stopped at T minus thirty-one seconds due to the accidental draining of approximately four thousand pounds of liquid oxygen from the external tank. The next day launch scrubbed at T minus nine minutes due to bad weather at both transoceanic abort landing sites.

Two days later, on 9 January, launch was delayed yet again, this time because a launchpad liquid oxygen sensor broke off and lodged in the number two main engine prevalve. “That time we got down to thirty-one seconds, and one more time things weren’t right,” Bolden said. “So we got out, and it was another main engine valve. This time they found it. There had actually been a probe, a temperature probe, that in the defueling, they had broken the temperature probe off, and it had lodged inside the valve, keeping the valve from closing fully. So that would have been a bad day. That would have been a catastrophic day, because the engine would have exploded had we launched.”

A 10 January launch was delayed two days due to heavy rains. After so many delays, despite the adverse weather conditions, the crew was still loaded onto the vehicle, on the off chance that things would happen to clear up. “It was the worst thunderstorm I’d ever been in,” Bolden said.

We were really not happy about being there, because you could hear the lightning. You could hear stuff crackling in the headset. You know, you’re sitting out there on the top of two million pounds of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and two solid rocket boosters, and they told you about this umbrella that’s over the pad, that keeps lightning from getting down there, but we had seen lightning actually hit the lightning-arrester system on
STS
-8, which was right there on the launchpad. So none of us were enamored with being out there, and we started talking about the fact that we really ought not be out here.

While some astronauts found multiple scrubs and launch attempts frustrating, Steve Hawley said he wasn’t bothered by it. “My approach to that has always been, hey, you know, I’d go out to the launchpad every time expecting not to launch,” Hawley said.

If you think about all the things that have to work, including the weather at several different locations around the world, in order to make a launch happen, you would probably conclude, based on the numbers, that it’s not even worth trying. So I always figured that we’re going to turn around and come back. So I’m always surprised when we launch. So my mindset was always, you know, we’ll go out there and try and see what happens. So I never really viewed it as a disappointment or anything. I always feel a little bad for, you know, maybe family and guests that may have come out to watch, that now they have to deal with the fact there’s a delay and whether they can stay, whether they have to leave, and that’s kind of a hassle for them, but it never bothered me particularly.

In those days, Hawley pointed out, the launch windows were much longer than they were later in the program for International Space Station docking missions. In the early days launch windows were two and a half hours, versus five to ten minutes for
ISS
flights. The longer windows were advantageous in terms of probability of launch but could be adverse in terms of crew comfort. “You’re out there on your back for five or six hours, and that gets to be pretty long, day after day, but the fact that you didn’t launch never bothered me particularly.”

Having been part of multiple scrubs on his earlier 41
D
mission, Hawley had a reputation for not being able to launch. “I don’t remember how we came up with the specifics of the disguise, but I decided that if it didn’t
know it was me, then maybe we’d launch, and so I taped over my name tag with gray tape and had the glasses-nose-mustache disguise and wore that into the [white] room. I had the commander’s permission, but I don’t remember if we had told anybody else we were going to do that. . . . Evidently it worked, because we did launch that day.”

So finally, on 12 January 1986 the mission made it off the ground. By this time the crew members were wondering if they’d ever really go. “We did all kinds of crazy stuff,” Bolden said, “fully expecting that we wouldn’t launch, because I think the weatherman had given us a less than 50 percent chance that the winds were going to be good or something, so we went out and we were about as loose as you could be that morning. And they went through the countdown, came out of the holds and nothing happened. ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six.’ And we looked at each other and went, ‘Holy—we’re really going to go. We’d better get ready.’ And the vehicle started shaking and stuff, and we were gone.”

Within seconds of lifting off, an alarm sounded. “I looked down at what I could see, with everything shaking and vibrating, and we had an indication that we had a helium leak in—I think it was the right-hand main engine,” Pilot Bolden recalled. “Had it been true, it was going to be a bad day. . . . We didn’t have a real problem. We had a problem, but it was an instrumentation problem.”

With the determination made that the indicator was giving a false reading, the crew continued on into space. “We got on orbit and it was awesome,” said Bolden of his first spaceflight. “It was unlike anything I’d expected. Technically, we were fully qualified, fully ready, and everything. Emotionally, I wasn’t even close. I started crying. Not bawling or anything, but just kind of tears rolling down my cheek when I looked out the window and saw the continent of Africa coming up. It looked like a big island. Just awesome, unlike anything I’d ever imagined.”

Pinky Nelson said he found the entire mission rather frustrating, describing the mission as trivial. “We launched one satellite, and we did this silly material science experiment out in the payload bay which didn’t work. I knew it wasn’t going to work when we launched. Halley’s Comet was up at the time and we had this little astronomy thing to look at Halley’s Comet, and it was launched broken, so it never worked. So the mission itself, to say what we did, I don’t know. I deployed a satellite.
Steve deployed a satellite. We threw a bunch of switches, took a bunch of pictures.”

According to Bolden, the crew referred to its mission as an end-of-year-clearance flight. “We had picked up just tons of payload, science payloads that Marshall [Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama] had been trying to fly for years, and some of the Spacelab experiments and stuff that they couldn’t get flown,” Bolden said. “So we had Congressman Nelson and every experiment known to man that they couldn’t get in. There was nothing spectacular about our mission. It was almost like a year-end clearance sale.”

Hawley said there was a general feeling at the time that without Nelson on the flight the mission might have been canceled. “We all suspected, although no one ever said, that because of the delays that we got into and the fact that, frankly, our payload wasn’t very robust, that were it not for his presence on the flight, we might have been canceled. . . . We wondered about that and always thought, without knowing for sure, that that might have happened if we hadn’t had a congressman, but this was his flight, and so we had some guarantee that it would happen.”

In addition to launching the
RCA
satellite
SATCOM
KU
-
I
, the mission was assigned the Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program (
CHAMP
) experiment, which was a 35 mm camera that was to be used to photograph Halley’s Comet. But the camera didn’t work properly due to battery problems. Science experiments on board were the Materials Science Laboratory-2, Hitchhiker
G
-1, Infrared Imaging experiment, Initial Blood Storage experiment, Handheld Protein Crystal Growth experiment, three Shuttle Student Involvement Program experiments, and thirteen Getaway Specials.

“The big challenge,” Bolden said,

was arguing with the ground about how we should do some of the experiments. There were some that we could see were not going exactly right. I didn’t have the problem as much as Pinky. Pinky was the big person working a lot of the material sciences experiments. And while we had very little insight into what was going on inside the box, we could tell that because of the data that we were seeing on board, we could tell that if we were just given an opportunity to reenergize an experiment, or to turn the orbiter a different way, or do something, we might be able to get some more data for the principal investigators. The principal investigators agreed, but the flight control crew on the ground
[said] that wasn’t in the plan. They weren’t interested in ad-libbing. They had a flight to fly and a plan to fly, and so forget about these doggone experiments.

Bolden said there was generally always a power struggle between the flight director on the ground and the commander of the shuttle in space, an issue that dated back to the earliest U.S. spaceflights.

There’s always a pull and tug between the flight director, who is in charge—nobody argues that point—and the crew commander, who, by the General Prudential Rule of Seamanship of navigation at sea, has ultimate responsibility for the safety of the crew and vessel. If there’s a disagreement between the commander and the flight director—and that’s happened on very, very few occasions, but every once in a while it happens—the commander can do what he or she thinks is the right thing to do and is justified in doing that by the General Prudential Rule. And even
NASA
recognizes that. Now, you could be in deep yogurt when you come back, if something goes wrong. But you have the right to countermand the direction of the flight director. Almost never happens.

Bolden recalled that because the agency wanted to get
Challenger
and the Teacher in Space mission off the ground, 61
C
was cut from six days to four. The flight was scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center—which would have made it the first flight to land there since the blown-tire incident on 51
D
—but the weather in Florida once again didn’t cooperate.

“They kept waving us off and making us wait another day to try to get back into
KSC
,” Hawley recalled. “What I remember is that by the third day we had sort of run out of most everything, including film, and part of our training had been to look for spiral eddies near the equator, because the theory was, for whatever reason, you didn’t see them near the equator, and Charlie was looking out the window and claimed to see one, and I told him, ‘Well, you’d better draw a picture of it, because we don’t have any film.’ So we couldn’t take a photograph.”

After two days of bad weather preventing the shuttle from landing in Florida, it was decided to send
Columbia
to Edwards Air Force Base. “The first attempt at Edwards was waved off because the weather there was bad,” Bolden said. “Finally, on our fifth attempted landing . . . in the middle of the night on 18 January, we landed at Edwards Air Force Base, which was interesting because with a daytime scheduled landing, you would have thought
that we wouldn’t have been ready for that. And Hoot, in his infinite wisdom, had decided that half of our landing training was going to be nighttime, because you needed to be prepared for anything. And so we were as ready for a night landing as we could have been for anything.”

The landing was smooth, but Bolden said Congressman Nelson was disappointed not to have landed in his home state. “He really had these visions of landing in Florida and taking a Florida orange or something, and boy, the crew that picked us up was unmerciful, because they came out with a big—it wasn’t a bushel basket, it was a peck—basket of California oranges and grapefruits. And even having come from space, he was just not in a good mood. So that was a joke that he really did not appreciate.”

Pinky Nelson recalled that Bill Nelson was struggling with not feeling well after landing but kept going anyway. “Most people don’t feel very good their first day or two in space, but don’t have too much trouble when they get back on the ground,” Pinky said. “Bill had a really hard time for a few hours after we landed, but boy, he was a trooper. He was suffering, but he—you know, good politician—put on a good face, and we had to do our little thing out at Edwards and all that and get back on the plane. He really sucked it up and hung in there, even though he was barely standing. And the rest of us, of course, cut him no slack at all.”

Bolden described being in awe of Gibson’s skills as a pilot and told how the five-time shuttle veteran took Bolden under his wing. “The way that I was trained with Hoot was you don’t ever wing anything,” Bolden said.

I credit him with my technique as a commander. He preached from day one, “We don’t ever do anything from memory. We don’t ever wing it. If something’s going to happen, there is a procedure for it. And if there’s not a procedure for it, then we’re going to ask somebody, because somebody should have thought about it.” And so what we did was we trained ourselves just to know where to go in the book. And hopefully, crews still train like that, although I always flew with people who would invariably want to wing it, because they prided themselves in having photographic memories or stuff like that. The orbiter and just spaceflight is too critical to rely on memory, when you’ve got all of these procedures that you can use, and the ground to talk to.

Gibson taught him what Bolden referred to as Hoot’s Law, a piece of wisdom that has stayed with him ever since. “We were in the simulator one
day,” Bolden said, “in the
SMS
[Shuttle Motion Simulator], and I was still struggling. It was in my struggling phase. And I really wanted to impress everybody on the crew and the training team. We had an engine go out, boom, like that, right on liftoff.”