Riding Rockets (30 page)

August 30. Another day. Another launch attempt. While awaiting our turns to enter the cockpit Judy and I slapped mosquitoes off each other’s back. The little bastards could drill right through our flight suits. Judy observed that the insects seemed worse than yesterday. I told her it was because our launch scrubs had trained them. “They knew we’d be standing here this morning. And they know we’ll be standing here at this exact time tomorrow, the next day, and every day afterward. We’re on their menu every day.”

Judy brushed away my pessimism. “We’ll do it today, Tarzan. I’ve got good vibes.”

I didn’t share her enthusiasm. I was emotionally exhausted. Clinical depression was on the horizon, suicide to follow.

A call came from the white room that it was my turn to be harnessed up. For the fourth time I embraced Judy. “This is the only thing fun about these scrubs. I get to hug you every morning.”

Judy smiled. “That’s sexual harassment, Tarzan.”

“I hope so.”

I wished her good luck and walked toward the cockpit.

She called after me. “See you in space, Tarzan.”

As the hours ticked by, I began to believe Judy’s vibes were right. The count proceeded smoothly. Milestone after milestone came and went without a negative word being spoken. The weather was great in Florida and at our abort sites. A little sunshine began to melt my black pessimism.

Then it happened again. We were notified the T-9 minute hold would be extended. This time the problem was with the Ground Launch Sequencer (GLS). I guessed we’d never get off the ground until everything broke at least one time. I ached for Donna and the kids, back on the LCC roof. It had to be killing them.

Just as the discussions on the GLS began to sound promising we were slapped with another problem. Some bozo in a light airplane had entered the closed airspace around the pad. We would have to hold until that plane was out of the area. The intercom seethed in our rage. We all simultaneously developed Tourette’s syndrome. Even Judy swore like a convict.
Shoot the fucker down,
was the general consensus. Previous shuttles had been delayed for the same reason, as well as for pleasure boats violating the offshore danger areas. Every astronaut thought these violators should be shot from the sky and sunk in the sea. Even astronauts enjoying a smooth countdown had no tolerance for idiots getting in the way of their launch, much less a crew as abused as ours.

As we waited, the LCC cleared the GLS problem. Now it was a matter of waiting until the light airplane exited the area. After nearly a seven-minute delay, its pilot pulled his head out of his ass and flew off. We all wished him engine failure. The count resumed.

Mike started the APUs at T-5 minutes. They all looked good. The sweep of the flight control system followed. It was also error-free.

At T-2 minutes we closed our helmet visors. Bob Sieck, the launch director, wished us good luck. Hank acknowledged, thanking him and his team for their efforts. I was glad I didn’t have to say anything at this point. My mouth was a desert.

T-1 minute. Hank reminded us, “Eyes on the instruments.”

T-31 seconds. “Go for auto-sequence start.” I made one last prayer for Donna and the kids…and again to God, “If you’re going to kill me, please do it above fifty miles altitude.”

T-10 seconds. “Go for main engine start.” The engine manifold pressures shot up.

T-6 seconds. For the second time in my life I felt the violence of SSME start. Two months earlier I had thought these vibrations were a guarantee for liftoff. No longer. Until there were goose eggs on the clock I would remain skeptical.

5…4…3…We finally entered new countdown territory.

2…1…At zero there was no doubt we had finally slipped the surly bonds of earth. As the hold-down bolts were blown, we were slapped with a combined thrust of more than 7 million pounds. A new wave of intense vibrations roared over us.

“Houston,
Discovery
is in the roll.”

“Roger, roll,
Discovery.
”
Discovery
’s autopilot was in control. Hank and Mike reached to their Attitude Director Indicator (ADI) switches and flipped them to change the mode of the ball. I watched Hank’s ADI reflect
Discovery
’s tilt toward the risen sun. If our ascent was nominal, the ADI switch would be the only switch touched until MECO…8½ minutes, 4 million pounds of propellant, and 17,300 miles per hour away.
Please, God, that it be so.
Having to use other switches could only mean one thing: something wasn’t nominal. My eyes fell on the contingency abort cue card Velcroed to Hank’s window frame. It detailed procedures for ditching the shuttle, which all of us knew would be death. NASA called all the other abort modes “intact aborts”—the orbiter and crew would be recovered “intact” either in the United States, Europe, or Africa. But they couldn’t bring themselves to call a ditching abort a “not intact abort.” Like sailors of old painting the decks red so the blood of battle wouldn’t shock a crew, NASA camouflaged the ditching procedures with the title “contingency abort.” One of the card’s helpful suggestions was to ditch parallel to the waves. Astronauts joked that the contingency abort procedures were just something to read while we were dying. For some reason the joke seemed funnier while standing at the office coffee bar.

Except for the noise, vibrations, and G-forces, the ride was just like the simulator, which is akin to the circus Human Cannonball saying, “Except for the earsplitting explosion, the G-forces, and the wind up your nose, it’s just like sitting on a case of unlit dynamite.” NASA would never duplicate this ride in any ground simulator.

“Throttle down.” We were forty seconds up and the vibrations intensified as the vehicle punched through the sound barrier. Everything was shocking the air…the giant, bulbous nose of the ET, the pointed cones of the SRBs, the orbiter’s nose, wings, and tail, the struts holding everything together. The interplaying shock waves were an aerodynamic cacophony and the engines throttled back to keep the vehicle from tearing itself apart.

Our seats wiggled and groaned under the stress. I was amazed by the flexibility of the machine. It reminded me of times in my childhood when I would slide down a bumpy, snow-filled arroyo in a cardboard box. Now, as then, I wondered how my cockpit could stay together through all the bouncing and shaking.

“Throttle up.” The air was thinning and the aerodynamic pressure decreasing. The three Rocketdyne beauties at our backs were once again spiraling to full power. What a rush it was to feel the buildup of thrust, just like jamming the throttles of a fighter into the afterburner detents. I suspect every shuttle pilot would have loved to snatch the controls from the autopilot and manually throttle the engines to full power. How many times in your life would you have 1.5 million pounds of thrust wrapped around your fingers?

The prayers flying from the souls of everybody in the cockpit were identical, that God would continue to smile upon the SSMEs. We most feared these engines, and for good cause. There had been many SSME ground-test explosions and premature shutdowns. We were also strapped to two SRBs, each burning nearly 5 tons of propellant per second, but nobody gave a second thought to them. No engineer had ever come to a Monday morning meeting to explain away a SRB ground-test failure. The SRBs had always worked. But even as we scorched the prayer line with our pleas for flawless SSME function, both SRBs were betraying us. A primary O-ring at different joints in each tube had failed to seal as the motors had ignited. Tentacles of flame from the combustion area had wiggled between the segment facings. Like something alive and trapped, the gas had been wild to escape. It had reached the leak points and started to consume the O-ring rubber. The leak on the left-side SRB was bad enough for hot gas to actually get past the primary O-ring. Though we wouldn’t know it until after the
Challenger
disaster, we had just experienced the first case of what the Thiokol engineers would later define as “blow-by.” Hot gas had penetrated into the space between the primary and backup O-rings. Had our leak continued moments longer, the primary and backup O-rings would have been consumed and history would have recorded the
Discovery
disaster instead of
Challenger.
It would have been Zoo Crew’s names etched in an Arlington Cemetery monument. But the leak hadn’t continued. Inexplicably the primary O-rings had resealed.

The clock was approaching T+2 minutes and the Gs rose to 2.5. An invisible hand pushed me deeper into the seat. I reached forward, drew my hand back, then reached forward again. The veterans had warned it was tough to maneuver an arm under G-loads and it was a good idea to practice in case an ascent emergency later required a reach for a switch.

“You see that?” At Hank’s question I was reminded of Judy’s warning about not ending any sentence with the word
that.
Needless to say, my ears perked up.

Mike replied, “Yeah, it looks like foam from the tank is flaking off.”

Mike and Hank continued a brief discussion about the particles that were racing past the windows, sometimes striking them. There was no concern in their voices and I quickly dismissed their comments. The ET insulation foam was so light I couldn’t imagine it would damage any part of the vehicle. Nineteen years later a briefcase-size chunk of foam ripping from the gas tank would doom
Columbia.

“P-C less than fifty.” Hank relayed the message on his computer screen that the chamber pressure inside the SRBs had fallen to less than 50 pounds per square inch. A loud metallic bang shook the cockpit and a flash of fire whipped the windows as the boosters separated from the ET. Both SRBs tumbled away to parachute into the ocean.

The sudden loss of 6 million pounds of thrust accompanied by dead silence caught me by surprise. Had all three of the SSMEs also shut down? I leaned to my left and stared at the engine status lights and for several heartbeats I expected to see them illuminate in a deadly red glow. But the lights remained off, the radios quiet. I swallowed back my heart. Apparently I had been asleep in training when somebody had described SRB separation and the quiet, velvet smoothness that followed. There was nothing wrong with the vehicle.
Discovery
had put most of the atmosphere behind her. There was no air to grip the machine or rattle us with shock waves. And the SSMEs were as finely tuned as a Rolex. They continued to deliver nearly 1.5 million pounds of thrust 100 feet behind our backs without a whisper of noise or ripple of vibration. The ride became as smooth as a politician’s lie.

Hank’s altitude and velocity tapes scrolled upward as the sky faded to abysmal black. Sunlight was streaming through the windows and yet the sky was utterly dark. It was my first real space experience, something I had never and could never experience as an earthling…simultaneous night and day, simultaneous high noon and deep midnight.

Our various abort windows began to open and close. “
Discovery,
you’re two-engine TAL.” We had acquired enough altitude and speed to fly across the Atlantic and land in Senegal, Africa, if one engine failed, a maneuver known as a Transatlantic Landing abort (TAL). NASA had positioned an astronaut at the Dakar international airport to help air traffic control personnel if we declared an abort. He also had our passports and visas. I had a vision of standing in the customs line at the Dakar airport in our shuttle flight suits with our helmets in the crook of our arms while a fez-headed, accented bureaucrat asked, “Anything to declare?” It was something I hoped never to experience.

“
Discovery,
you’re negative return.” The Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort window closed. We were now too far from Florida and headed too fast to the east to be able to return to a landing at KSC. If an engine failed, we were committed to a “straight ahead” abort. That was okay by all of us. Nobody wanted to do a turnaround RTLS abort. It was an unnatural act of physics. If selected, it would pitch the shuttle around in an outside loop to point us toward Florida. But it would take minutes to cancel our several-thousand-miles-per-hour eastward velocity, so we would actually be traveling backward over the Atlantic. Ultimately we would end up as a million-pound helicopter, fifty miles high, with zero forward speed. Then, we would begin the slow acceleration toward our objective, Florida, only two hundred miles away. The experts swore it would work and Mike and Hank had practiced RTLS aborts in the sim about a thousand times, but nobody wanted to be the first to field-test the procedure.

Discovery
continued a nominal ascent. Passing about thirty miles altitude, it occurred to me I could die without ever having seen the Earth from space. The shuttle’s nose was so high and I was sitting so far aft in the cockpit I couldn’t see anything of the planet. But there was a window above and just slightly behind my head and since the shuttle flies to orbit upside down, that window did provide a view of the Earth. It was a mighty temptation.

I looked furtively at Steve Hawley. His head was making small jerking motions like Data from
Star Trek
as he moved his eyes to every display. There wasn’t an electron running in
Discovery
’s body that Hawley’s brain wasn’t also processing. With him at my side, I rationalized, I wouldn’t be missed for a moment of sightseeing. Under the mounting G-forces I craned my neck upward and backward until I thought it would break. The contortion worked. I could see the Earth receding below us. Scattered cumulus clouds had been reduced to points of white. The variations in sea depth were evident in different shades of blue. It wasn’t much of a view and I was condemning myself to one hell of a neck ache to capture it, but it was enough for the moment. If God took me now, at least I would have a story to tell while waiting in line for the down escalator to Bible/feminist/post-doc hell.

We were approaching fifty miles, the magic line that would officially make us astronauts. I had always thought this altitude requirement was bean-counter bullshit. Effectively it was a statement that riding a rocket didn’t really get dangerous until you hit fifty miles. In reality if you didn’t make it to fifty miles on the shuttle, it probably meant the machine had killed you, as was later to be the case with the
Challenger
crew. Mike Smith was a rookie killed on that mission and by the official definition he didn’t die as an astronaut since he only made it to ten miles altitude. (Note to NASA: When the hold-down bolts blow, you’ve earned your gold.)