Riding Rockets (32 page)

After cleaning up and cycling through our toilet we prepared for sleep. This was not a “shift” mission so we all slept at the same time. We would depend upon
Discovery
’s caution-and-warning system to alert us if something bad happened. Each of us had a sleep restraint, a cloth bag we pinned to the walls and zipped into. There was no privacy. Like bats in a cave, we bunked cheek to jowl in the lower cockpit. We slept downstairs because the lack of windows made it darker and cooler than the upstairs cockpit.

As I floated inside my restraint I joined in the chorus of complaints about a fierce backache. In weightlessness the vertebrae of the spine spread apart, resulting in a height increase of an inch or two. The strain on the lower back muscles is significant and painful. All of us but Judy were bothered by it. Why she was immune I had no idea, but she grew weary of our complaints and exploited her advantage: “I’m probably the first woman in history to go to bed with five men and all of them have backaches.”

I couldn’t sleep…and it wasn’t because of any backache. I didn’t
want
to sleep. I wanted to celebrate. From MECO to this moment, I had been too busy with checklists to really consider the life-changing experience of the past twelve hours. I had done it! I was an astronaut in the cockpit of a spaceship orbiting the Earth. I was living what Willy Ley had written about in
The Conquest of Space.
I wanted to scream and shout and punch my fists in the air. Fortunately for the rest of the crew, I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I floated my sleep restraint upstairs.
Floated!
God, I still couldn’t get my mind around the reality of it. I tied the bag under the overhead windows and slipped inside. I would celebrate by sightseeing. Since the autopilot was holding the shuttle with its top to the Earth, I now had the planet in my face.

Other than the breath of the cabin fans and the white-noise hiss of the UHF radio, the cockpit was midnight still. In the silence I felt as if we had stopped dead in space. In all my other life experiences speed meant noise…the howl of wind gripping a cockpit, the roar of an engine. Now I was traveling at nearly 5 miles per second and there was only silence. It was as if I were hovering in a balloon, and the Earth was silently turning beneath me.

I was also gripped with a powerful sense of detachment from the rest of humanity. There was nothing at the windows to suggest any other life in the universe. I was looking to a horizon more than a thousand miles distant and could see only the unrelieved blue of the Pacific. In each passing second that horizon was being pushed another five miles to the east but still nothing changed. There was no vapor trail of a jetliner, no wake of a ship, no cities, no glint of Sun from a piece of glass or metal. There was no signature of life on Earth. And the view into space was even more lonely. The brilliance of the Sun had overwhelmed the faint light of the stars and planets. Space was as featureless black as the ocean was blue.

The Sun was intense and the cockpit grew uncomfortably hot. I pushed from my sleep restraint and hovered in my underwear a few inches from the glass. In my relaxed state my arms and legs folded inward as if trying to return to their fetal position. I had become a hairy
2001: A Space Odyssey
embryo.

The forty-five minutes of my orbit “day” drew to an end and I was treated to another space sight of such breathtaking beauty it would challenge the most gifted poet. As
Discovery
raced eastward, behind her the Sun plunged toward the western horizon. Beneath me, the terminator, that hazy shadow that separates brilliant daylight from the deep black of night, began to dim the crenellated ocean blue. High clouds over this terminator glowed tangerine and pink in the final rays of the Sun.
Discovery
entered this shadow world and I turned my head to the back windows to watch the Sun dip below the horizon. Its light, which to this moment had been as pure white as a baby’s soul, was now being split by the atmosphere. An intense color spectrum, a hundred times more brilliant than any rainbow seen on Earth, formed in an arc to separate the black of earth night from the perennial black of space. Where it touched the Earth, the color bow was as red as royal velvet and faded upward through multiple shades of orange and blue and purple until it dissipated into black. As
Discovery
sped farther from it, the bow slowly shrank along the Earth’s limb toward the point of sunset, diminishing in reach and thickness and intensity, as if the colors were a liquid being drained from the sky. Finally, only an eyelash-thin arc of indigo remained. Then it winked out and
Discovery
was fully immersed in the oblivion of an orbit night.

Suddenly the uniform black of daytime space was transformed into the stuff of dreams. The Milky Way arced across the sky like glowing smoke. Other stars pierced the black in whites, blues, yellows, and reds. Jupiter rose in the sky like a coachman’s lantern. For planet and stars alike, there was no twinkle. In the purity of space they were fixed points of color.

I stared down into the dark of the Earth. Lightning flashed in faraway Central American thunderstorms. Shooting stars streaked to their deaths in multihued flashes. To the northeast I could see the sodium glow of an unknown city. At the horizon the atmosphere had a faint glow caused by sunlight scattering completely around the Earth. In this glow the air was visible as several distinct layers of gray.

I watched a satellite twinkle through the western sky. Though
Discovery
was in darkness, the other machine was far enough to the west to still reflect sunlight.

With the instrument lights off and the Sun gone, the cockpit chilled and I floated back into my restraint to attempt sleep. I had just nodded off when a streak of light flashed in my brain and startled me awake. Veteran astronauts had warned of this phenomenon. The flash was the result of a cosmic ray hitting my optic nerve. The electrical pulse generated by that impact caused my brain to “see” a streak of light even though my eyes were closed. I wondered what those cosmic rays were doing to the rest of my brain.
Oops, there goes second grade.

I slept fitfully through the night, waking with each sunrise and whispering, “Wow!” At one point I floated into the lower cockpit to retrieve a drink container and entered a scene straight out of a science fiction movie. A light had been left on in the toilet and it dimly illuminated
Discovery
’s sleeping crew. They were in their restraints, some pinned to the forward wall, others stretched horizontally across the mid-deck. In the relaxation of sleep their arms floated chest high in front of them. It appeared as if they were in suspended animation. I was tempted to join them in the cool darkness, but the pull of the windows was too great. I floated back upstairs.

Reveille came in the form of rock music. It was traditional for the CAPCOM to provide music for MCC to send up as a wake-up call. But the tune was unrecognizable. Apparently NASA’s budget was running low when it came time to procure speakers. Pop music from these Radio Shack rejects sounded like fingernails being drawn across a chalkboard.

To my surprise I did not wake up alone. My closest friend was alert and waiting. I had an erection so intense it was painful. I could have drilled through kryptonite. I would ultimately count fifteen space wake-ups in my three shuttle missions, and on most of these and many times during the sleep periods my wooden puppet friend would be there to greet me. Flight surgeons have attributed this phenomenon to the fluid shift that occurs in weightlessness. On the Earth, gravity holds more blood in our lower legs. In orbit that blood is equally distributed throughout our bodies. For men the result is a Viagra effect. There are beneficial effects for the female anatomy, too. The same fluid shift makes for skinnier calves and thighs and larger, nonsag breasts. If NASA wants to secure its financial future, it would be smart to advertise the rejuvenating effects of weightlessness. Taxpayers would demand that Congress quadruple NASA’s budget to finance the construction of orbiting spas where visitors from Earth could turn back time.

Fortunately for me, my brain was quickly flooded with thoughts of the workday and my body melted in response.

On day two we successfully launched our second satellite, Syncom, but not without mishap. As Hank was filming its release with the huge and unwieldy IMAX camera, a shank of Judy’s frizzed-out hair was snatched into the machine by the belt drive of the film magazine. It was as if her hair had been caught up in the fan belt of an automobile. She screamed and I grabbed at her tresses to prevent them from being ripped out of her scalp, but, with nothing to hold me in place, I tumbled out of control. Judy did the same. Through her increasingly urgent screams, I heard the camera labor to a grinding stop. The hair had clogged the motor, finally stalling it and popping a cockpit circuit breaker.

We cut Judy free with scissors. Strands of loose hair floated everywhere. They were in our eyes and mouths. Mike Coats, who was the principal operator of the IMAX, took the machine to the mid-deck and began work at restoring its operation. The hair was so thoroughly jammed into the motor gears we doubted the machine would ever pull another frame of film. IMAX was going to be severely disappointed. They had spent millions to fly their camera in space and we had only recorded a fraction of our film targets. Even if the camera could be cleaned of hair and made to work again, a quick glance at the flight plan showed the next several film opportunities were certainly going to be missed. IMAX would have to do some replanning. We all knew this was the type of trivial screwup that would become the focus of an otherwise successful mission. The press wouldn’t talk about how our crew had successfully taken
Discovery
on its maiden flight or how we had successfully released thirty thousand pounds of satellites. Instead, they would zero in on our hair incident. But we had no alternative other than to come clean with MCC. The flight planners needed to assume the camera could be repaired and get started on rescheduling our targets.

But we males had been missing the
real
issue. As Hank picked up the microphone to call MCC, Judy lashed out at him with something along the lines of, “If you so much as breathe a word to MCC about my hair jamming the camera, I’ll cut your heart out with a spoon.” Or perhaps she threatened a more vital area of his anatomy. There was a brief moment as we struggled to understand Judy’s rage. Then it dawned on us. She was only the second American woman to fly in space. The press had her under a magnifying glass, looking for the slightest flaw in her performance. The hair jam incident was just that: a mistake with her name on it. Not only that, it contained the worst possible sin against feminism. Judy had demonstrated, however innocently and however insignificantly, that women were indeed different from men.

Hank Hartsfield, a grizzled air force fighter pilot who had stared death in the eye on many a mission, now faced a man’s worst nightmare—a
really
pissed-off woman. No communist gunner had ever appeared as deadly as did Judy at that moment. Under her searing glare Hank did what we all would have done. He wanted to return with all of his appendages, so he called MCC and told them the IMAX had a film jam and Mike was working to clear it. He made no mention of the cause of the jam. Eventually Mike was able to breathe life back into the camera. With rescheduled targets, he and Hank continued their filming while Judy stayed far, far away.

Nature finally caught up with me and I floated into the shuttle toilet to face what was truly the most difficult part of any spaceflight—a bowel movement. The toilet provided little privacy. It was situated in the rear corner of the mid-deck on the port side. There was no door, only a folding curtain that could be Velcroed across the mid-deck–facing entry. Another curtain was Velcroed to form a ceiling and isolate the toilet from the upstairs cockpit. The lack of privacy was intimidating. I felt like I was back on my honeymoon, preparing for my first married-life BM. We’ve all been there.

After I was inside the curtained box, I took the advice of shuttle veteran Bob Crippen and stripped naked. “It’s a lot easier to wipe feces off your skin than it is to get it off your clothes” had been one of his STS-1 mission debriefing comments.

I located my personal urine funnel and twisted it on the end of the urinal hose, then loaded a disposable vacuum cleaner–like bag in a can on the left side of the toilet. Used tissue had to be placed in this bag. It could not be put in the toilet since that would require the ass to be lifted, which, in turn, could result in feces being released into the cabin. Suction at the bottom of the can would hold used tissue inside the bag.

I floated over the throne, lifted up on the thigh restraints, and twisted them inward to clamp my body to the plastic seat. Recalling my bore-sight alignment from the camera view in the toilet trainer, I wiggled my body until some freckles on my thighs were properly positioned in relation to the toilet landmarks. I switched on the toilet fan and welcomed the noise it generated. At least some of my BM noises would be camouflaged. Finally I pushed my penis into proper aim at the urinal funnel, reached for the solid waste collector lever, and pulled it back. Directly beneath me the waste opening was uncovered and the feces-steering airflow was activated. Suddenly a very sensitive part of my body was hit with a blast of chilled air. Few things are less conducive to promoting a BM than having cold air jetting around the principal performer in that act. The natural tendency is to clamp shut. But I convinced the orifice in question to ignore the cold gale and let fly. Simultaneously, I held the urine funnel at my front to collect my liquid waste. The vacuum flow into the urinal hose was very effective at sucking away the fluid until my bladder pressure fell. Then the urine refused to separate from my skin and a ball of it grew on the end of my penis. NASA’s engineers had anticipated this aspect of fluid dynamics and had provided a “last drop” feature. By squeezing buttons at the sides of the hose, the suction was boosted and I was able to wet-vac myself of most of the fluid. As the slurping sounds of this operation came through the curtains, Hank hollered, “More than five seconds and you’re playing with it, Mullane!”