Riding Rockets (33 page)

The toilet was a bountiful source of male juvenile humor. By far the best toilet joke was pulled by Bill Shepherd (class of 1984). On one of his missions he carried a piece of sausage from his breakfast into the toilet. After finishing a bowel movement, he set the sausage free to float upstairs. As panicked crewmembers ricocheted from wall to wall in a mad retreat from the offending planetoid, Bill chased after it with a piece of toilet tissue. He finally grabbed it and then, to the horror of all, he ate it.

For me, cleanup was next. I used a tissue to blot the remaining dampness from my penis. Wiping after urinating was such a feminine act I almost felt compelled to hack up a luggie to reestablish my sexual identity. I pulled the solid waste collector lever closed, lifted my thigh restraints, and floated from the seat. I was now free to wipe myself, putting the used tissue in the disposable vacuum bag.

Besides cleaning myself, I also had to clean the toilet. It would be a serious violation to leave any fecal smears on or around the slide cover for the next user to confront. And there were always some smears. Even after the camera-aim practice in the toilet trainer in Houston, it was difficult to get a direct hit during a BM. The feces almost invariably made some contact with the inner sides of the collector hole. As one astronaut had once lamented, “Turds come out curved. If only they were straight, we might have better luck in cleanly using the toilet.” I used a NASA-provided disinfectant to wipe away my smears and put the soiled tissue in the vacuum bag. I then sealed that bag and stowed it in a container at the back of the toilet. While the retention of solid waste and BM tissues suggested a bad odor problem could develop, the toilet designers had done an excellent job of routing airflow through the toilet and filtering it with activated charcoal filters. There were never any toilet smells in the cockpit.

Finally, I dressed. From start to finish, a task that might have taken me five minutes on Earth had consumed nearly thirty minutes in space (and covered about eight thousand miles). There are times in an astronaut’s life he or she would pay dearly to have a gravity vector. Using the toilet is one of those times.

Our third and last communication satellite was successfully deployed on flight day three. Compared with the missions of the early space program this was blue-collar work, completely devoid of glory. We weren’t beating the Russians to anything. We weren’t planting an American flag in alien soil. On Earth, there was no Walter Cronkite removing his dorky glasses, wiping his forehead, and shaking his head in relief while telling a waiting, breathless world, “They’ve done it! The
Discovery
crew has just released another communication satellite!” The space program had become a freight service, justifiably ignored by the press and public. But not one of us in that cockpit was complaining. Even Hank would have hauled Lenin’s taxidermied body into orbit and sung the “
Internationale”
for all the communists in the world, if that’s what it took to put him in space.

On flight day four Judy activated the controls of our final major payload, a solar energy panel. A collapsible motor-driven truss unfurled the 110-foot-long-by-10-foot-wide Mylar sail out of its payload bay container. There were no active solar cells on the sail. The experiment was only to gather data on the dynamics of the deployment and retraction system. When the panel was completely up and in tension, she radioed MCC, “Houston, it’s up and it’s big.” In numerous simulations Judy had joked that she was going to make that call. We had teased her about the obvious sexual innuendo. She made the call nevertheless. That was Judy. She could be extremely defensive of her status as a feminist standard bearer but could then turn around and yuck it up with us guys about a solar panel erection. I often wondered if that was the reason she was flying as the
second
American woman in space—NASA management knew she wasn’t a pure enough feminist to satisfy the NOW crowd.

After our major payload work, we gathered on the flight deck to accept a congratulatory call from President Reagan. Each of us was tense and nervous as we handed around the microphone to answer his questions. Thank God we were in space while a Republican president was in office. I shudder to think how Hank would have handled a call from a Democrat. He probably would have asked the president’s latitude and longitude coordinates in anticipation of his next BM. When it was his turn, Mike Coats was able to deliver the pro-navy observation that most of what he saw from the windows was water.
That’s why the navy is so important, Mr. President
was his implication. Hank Hartsfield defended the air force: “ALL of the Earth is covered by air, Mr. President.” There are no circumstances under which astronauts will not compete. Even having the president of the United States in the conversation wasn’t an inhibition.

While in the midst of this White House call, a cockpit alarm tone sounded. It was a “systems alert,” an indication of a minor malfunction. Still, we needed to respond. In a grand display of the thoroughness of NASA’s training we worked the malfunction while continuing to humor Mr. Reagan. Steve Hawley grabbed the massive shuttle malfunction book and began to move through the fault tree, pantomiming to Mike which computer displays to call up. When Hawley had the correct response identified, he passed the book to Judy, who was nearest the appropriate switch panel. She flipped a switch to activate a backup heater, the specified response to the alert. Meanwhile, the rest of us continued, “Thank you, Mr. President. Everything is just fine, Mr. President.”

After our payload activities were finished, we posed for our weightless crew photo. It was a tradition for each crew to take a self-portrait in orbit. We dressed in golf shirts and shorts, set up a camera on the mid-deck, and activated the self-timer. To squeeze everybody into the frame, we posed in three tiers with Hank and Mike lowest, then Steve, Charlie, and me floating above them. Judy floated highest. While we didn’t intend it, the pose suggested a cheerleader’s pyramid. Adding to the effect were Judy’s legs. They dominated the photo…tan, perfectly proportioned, beautiful. Judy would later receive hate mail from feminist activists who thought her pose was disgusting and degrading to women. Breaking barriers was a task fraught with all manner of perils.

Around this time in the mission, MCC became suspicious of a temperature indication in our urinal plumbing. Urine is collected in a tank that is periodically emptied via an opening on the port side of the cockpit. Heaters on the exit nozzle are supposed to ensure the fluid separates cleanly from the vehicle and does not freeze to it. But MCC noticed that the temperature at the nozzle was anomalous and suspected some ice might have formed on it during our last urine dump. No windows provided a direct view of the nozzle, so Hank Hartsfield was instructed to use the camera on the end of the robot arm to take a look. We had TVs in the cockpit to monitor the camera view. When Hank positioned the arm, we saw we had grown a urine-sicle.

The image suddenly explained a mystery from STS-41B. After that mission landed, engineers were puzzled to find damage to several heat tiles on the port-side OMS pod at the rear of the fuselage. The damage had certainly occurred during reentry because the same heat tiles had been visible from the back windows during the orbit phase of the mission and the crew didn’t see any damage. A similar urine-sicle must have formed during the waste-water dumps on the STS-41B mission. During reentry, the ice had broken off and flown backward, hitting and damaging the OMS pod tile. MCC was now concerned
Discovery
could suffer the same or worse damage. Theoretically it was possible the heat tiles could be so damaged by the ice,
Discovery
’s tail could burn off. I had imagined many scenarios in which my life could be threatened as an astronaut—engine failures, turbo-pump explosions, decompression—but I had never imagined a threat from a frozen block of urine. I had an image of Peter Jennings reporting, “The astronauts were killed by their own urine.” It wasn’t a heroic-sounding epitaph.

Letting the Sun melt the ice wasn’t an option. In the vacuum of space, water doesn’t exist in liquid form. It goes from ice to vapor in a very slow process called sublimation. We wouldn’t be able to stay in space long enough for sublimation to get rid of our hitchhiker. So MCC directed Hank to tap the ice away using the robot arm.

Then came the bad news. We were told we could not use the urinal for the rest of the mission for fear another ice ball could jeopardize us. We would have to urinate in “Apollo bags.” These bags had been
the
toilet for the Apollo astronauts and were stowed aboard the shuttles for just this type of contingency. NASA wasn’t going to prematurely end a billion-dollar space mission because of a failed toilet. To our great relief we would still be able to use the solid waste collection feature of our commode. We wouldn’t have to use the bags for our BMs as did the Apollo astronauts (they were
real
men).

I looked at Judy. “I sure bet you have penis envy now.”

She tersely replied, “I’ll manage.”

The CAPCOM went on to explain there was enough remaining volume in the waste-water tank for about three man-days of urine. It was obvious to us what they were thinking: Judy would be able to use the urinal for the rest of the mission. We men could get by with the bags. All of us thought this was fair enough, but Judy saw a feminist trap. If she used the urinal while we men were stuck with the bags, word would eventually get around. It would be another damning sin against the feminist cause. In fact it would be a far more egregious sin than the hair-jam incident. Her use of the urinal would be a shout from the rooftops that a penis
was
necessary to deal with certain shuttle emergencies. Judy wasn’t going to fall into the trap. She elected to use the Apollo bags like the rest of us.

I have no idea how Judy managed with the bags but I’m sure she paid a messy price for her feminist stand. It was a mess even for us males. On my first attempt, I just held the bag around myself and let fly. Bad idea. The urine splashed into the bottom of the bag and bounced right back, soaking my crotch. Not only that, some fluid escaped and I became the proverbial one-armed paperhanger, trying to hold the bag at my crotch and blot the little yellow planets out of the sky with a tissue in my free hand. Others made similar rookie mistakes. But we quickly came up with a solution. We stuffed washcloths in the bottom of the bags. In weightlessness the “wicking” action of cloth was still effective. We could aim our stream onto the cloth and the fluid would be wicked away instead of splashing around. There was just one catch: If we urinated too fast, the wicking action couldn’t keep up with the stream and splashing would result. If we slowed our stream too much, the fluid wouldn’t separate from us and a large ball of urine would grow on our penises. We learned it was necessary to very precisely regulate our urine flow to achieve a stream of perfect balance. Even then, there would always be a significant “last drop” that had to be wiped away with a tissue.

Our greatest challenge occurred when we had bowel movements. It was virtually impossible to regulate urine flow while bearing down for a BM. On the second day of our toilet purgatory, I heard another Hank Hartsfield cheer rise from the toilet. “I did it! I did it!”

Since Cuba wasn’t at our nadir, I couldn’t imagine the source of Hank’s glee. “What did you do, Hank?”

“I took a shit without pissing!”

From the look on Hank’s face you would have thought his earlier turd had reentered the atmosphere and nailed Castro right between the eyes. But I could appreciate his joy. Turning off one’s urine while having a BM was a real trick. The things they didn’t teach us at astronaut school.

As our washcloths were consumed we turned to using our socks. When I had exhausted my extras, I began to use my towels. On one occasion with my bladder near rupture, I threw a covetous glance at the clean socks Judy was wearing. I flew straight at her and began to rip them from her feet. She knew exactly what I was doing and jokingly screamed, “Help! I’m being socked!”

By the final day of the mission our wet-trash container was becoming seriously overburdened. Under us floated a volume of vomit, urine, and decomposing food containers. My earlier
Star Wars
prank about alien creatures living in the trash container didn’t seem so funny now. Nobody wanted to put their hands in the mess. We would jam our urine bags past the grommet, jerk away, and quickly rip into an alcohol hand wipe.

As we configured
Discovery
for our last sleep period, I repeated my day-one routine. I moved my sleep restraint upstairs and tied it beneath the overhead windows. I intended to stay awake as long as possible to stuff my brain with space memories. While I had every intention of making this trip again, I couldn’t be sure there would ever be a second opportunity.
Discovery
’s engine problem had delayed the program by two months. What other problems were lurking? Could one result in a program delay of years, or even total program cancellation? Even if the shuttles continued to fly on schedule, office politics could end my career. It was impossible to know where you stood with Abbey. He might never assign me to another mission. I was going to assume these would be my last hours in space and I wasn’t going to waste them sleeping.

So I watched the Kalahari Desert pass beneath me and rammed its beauty into my overflowing memory banks. The Atlantic blue contrasted sharply with the ocher colors of Saharan Africa. Enormous sand dunes shouldered the beach and rippled inland like tan water. I watched clouds of every imaginable shape and texture: circular swirls of low pressure areas, wispy mare’s tails, cumulonimbus monsters with anvil heads stretching across the sky like the headdresses of Indian chiefs. In sunset and sunrise terminators, thunderstorms cast hundreds of mile-long shadows. Fair-weather cumulus clouds floated over oceans like popcorn scattered on blue carpet. Unseen jet streams rippled solid blankets of white like a stone dropped into heavy cream.