Riding Rockets (36 page)

The manner in which I had been treated cleared up one source of wonder for me. Over the years, I could not understand why the air force hadn’t done something about Abbey’s preferential treatment of the navy astronauts. The next three missions to follow STS-41D were all to be commanded by navy pilots. On one of those, navy captain Bob Crippen would be flying his third mission as a shuttle commander before his peer, USAF colonel Karol Bobko, would fly his first. Why didn’t the USAF see this as I and the other air force astronauts did—a slap in the face of the air force? Now I had my answer. The shuttle program and its air force astronaut corps were invisible to the top leadership in the U.S. Air Force. We were interruptions to more pressing business. When I got back to JSC, I spread the depressing word to others within the air force community. “Don’t expect help from the Pentagon. We’re on our own,” was my message. Abbey could do whatever he wanted with us and there would be no outrage from our leaders. We were a forgotten squadron.

Chapter 24

Part-time Astronauts

The shuttle program introduced several new crewmember positions, besides mission specialists, to the business of spaceflight. There were payload specialists (PSes) like Charlie Walker, who operated his McDonnell Douglas Corporation experiment on STS-41D. There were also military space engineers (MSEs), officers the Department of Defense wanted to fly on some secret missions. There were European scientists assigned by the European Space Agency (ESA) to fly as PSes on Spacelab missions. The Canadian Space Agency was supplying the shuttle robot arm, so some of that agency’s astronauts were put aboard the shuttle. NASA was also promising seats to other nations as a marketing tool.
Launch your satellite on the shuttle and we’ll throw in a ride for one of your citizens
. An example of this program was when Prince Sultan Salman Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia flew as a passenger on a mission carrying a Saudi communication satellite. Another category included U.S. passengers, for example schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. And, finally, there were a handful of politicians who used their lawmaking positions to assign themselves to shuttle missions. What all of these people had in common was that they were not career NASA astronauts and usually flew only a single mission. They were part-time astronauts.
^*

Training for part-timers was limited to their experiments, shuttle emergency escape procedures, and habitability practices: how to eat, sleep, and use the toilet. Mission commanders provided their own additional training in the form of the admonishment “Don’t touch any shuttle switches!”

Another thing these people had in common was that, to a large degree, they were not welcomed by NASA astronauts, particularly by mission specialists. Before
Challenger,
twenty-two out of a total of seventy-five MS-available seats were filled by personnel who were not career NASA astronauts. That hurt. The line into space was long and these part-timers made it longer. No, they were not welcome.
^*

While it would be easy to discount MS complaints about stolen seats as nothing more than union-esque protectionism, there was a legitimate reason for us to want the part-timer programs to be canceled. There was potential for these astronauts to imperil us. Imagine being in an airliner and hearing this comment over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. We are cruising at 35,000 feet so sit back and enjoy the flight. Oh, by the way, we have Mr. Jones up here in the cockpit. He doesn’t have a clue what all these switches are for but I’ve told him not to touch any. I assume he won’t. And I don’t really know how this guy would respond in stressful situations since I’ve only known him for a short time. But my airline headquarters says he’ll be fine. Of course, they know him even less than I do, but what the heck, he seems like a nice guy. So don’t worry when you see me step out of the cockpit to use the toilet. Mr. Jones should be fine sitting up here by himself.”

Beginning in 1984, NASA HQ began putting a lot of Mr. Joneses in the shuttle in the form of part-time astronauts and we didn’t really know who they were. I mean
really
know. I doubt many of them really knew themselves, at least in the sense of how they might react in stressful, even life-threatening, situations.

Military aviation, the background of many astronauts, is a dangerous and stress-filled occupation, frequently complicated by long separations from spouse and family. It is quick to eliminate the slow and the weak, either through an early death or administrative action. It is for this reason most aviators have an intrinsic trust of other aviators who have survived this winnowing process and a deep suspicion of passengers who, for whatever reason, are given cockpit access. This was the reason most of the military TFNGs had harbored doubts about the post-docs and other civilians when we had first come together in 1978. Who were these people? What stress-filtering processes had they been through? How were they going to react in dangerous situations? They had a lot to prove, and they did. NASA’s astronaut training program made sure they had continuing chances to prove themselves in environments where mistakes could kill. They regularly flew in the backseat of T-38 jet trainers. They experienced sphincter contractions like the rest of us during various in-flight emergencies and bad weather instrument approaches. They went through sea-survival training. They dressed in spacesuits and trained in vacuum chambers where one mistake would give them a few seconds to feel their blood boil inside their body before death came. After several years of this stress exposure, the military TFNGs had come to trust our civilian counterparts. They had
earned
that trust. But the part-time-astronaut training program was measured in months and didn’t provide the sustained and comprehensive stress-testing needed to truly evaluate a person’s mettle. Part-timers got a ride or two in the Vomit Comet, a couple rides in the backseat of the T-38, and some sea-survival training. These were helpful evaluation venues, but hardly sufficient. So, it didn’t surprise any TFNG when disturbing stories about the behavior of some of these part-timers began to make their way to the Monday meetings.

One shuttle commander told of being very concerned about his part-timer’s interest in the side hatch opening mechanism. The shuttle side hatch is very easy to open, intentionally designed so because of the
Apollo I
tragedy. The initial Apollo capsules had a complex opening mechanism that is believed to have hindered that crew’s escape from their burning cockpit. Determined not to repeat that mistake with the shuttle, engineers designed its hatch to open with just one turn of a handle. And the hatch opens
outward.
Since the shuttle flies in the vacuum of space with the cockpit pressurized at 14.7 pounds per square inch, there are thousands of pounds of force acting to push the hatch open. If the handle was ever turned to the open position in space, the hatch would explode outward, immediately decompressing the cockpit and killing everybody aboard. Knowing this, how would you feel if a person
you really didn’t know
took an unusual interest in the hatch opening system? I daresay you would feel as that commander had…very concerned. It was after this mission that a padlock arrangement was placed on the hatch handle and only commanders were given the key.

Another part-timer story involved a PS on a mission from hell. First, he fell victim to space sickness. Then, his experiment failed. After years of peer reviews and shuttle delays, he was finally getting his one and only chance to operate the device in space. Its failure severely depressed him and he surrendered to episodes of crying. But this was just the beginning of his torture. He turned out to be a cleanliness freak. What he imagined life would be like aboard the space shuttle for two weeks with possible vomiting, no running water, and few changes of clothes was anybody’s guess. Living aboard the shuttle doesn’t leave its occupants feeling springtime fresh. If the toilet had functioned normally, the part-timer in question might have had a chance. But as luck would have it, the commode suffered a low-airflow malfunction. In his debriefing the commander had explained the situation: “We had to use our glove-wrapped fingers to separate the feces from our bodies.” The already stressed-out PS now faced another significant challenge. His solution was to refuse to allow himself a BM. Over several days he miserably constipated himself, which aggravated his depression. A doctor aboard eventually convinced him to take a laxative, but afterward he refused to eat any solid foods to avoid more BMs. This lack of nutrition further compromised his mental and physical health. In debriefing, the mission CDR summarized the situation he had faced: “I had a depressed, crying, constipated PS on my hands. I thought I was going to have to place him under a suicide watch.” It was only by the grace of God that some of these part-timers didn’t cause problems that would have jeopardized mission success or worse.

STS-51G, which included the Saudi prince and a Frenchman, provided another part-timer story. (Among TFNGs, STS-51G was known as the “Frog and the Prince” mission.) Prince Al-Saud brought a handful of experiments from Saudi universities to fly into space along with a request to observe the new moon, which would be visible at the end of the flight. NASA approved this request and included it in the Crew Activity Plan (CAP), giving it the label LCO, or Lunar Crescent Observation. The LCO was actually religious in nature. The mission was going to occur in the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, the fast of Ramadan. This period of fasting and spiritual contemplation ended at the sighting of the new crescent moon. Prince Al-Saud just wanted to be a space observer to the end of the fast of Ramadan. The new moon–observation request was apparently approved by HQ without knowledge of its religious importance. When the mission commander, Dan Brandenstein, later learned of its significance, he was concerned the prince might be planning to use the shuttle as a 200-mile-high minaret to make a religious announcement over the radio. If that happened, the American press would fillet NASA for allowing a U.S. spacecraft to be employed by a foreign national for religious purposes. Knowing he would be at the center of that shit-storm, Brandenstein confronted the prince and made him agree on the exact wording he would use if he discussed the moon observation on the air-to-ground link, wording devoid of anything religious. While this issue was merely a distraction for Brandenstein, it was one he didn’t need. Shuttle commanders had enough on their plate getting ready for a flight. They didn’t need to be worrying about what passengers might say over the radios.

It wasn’t just mission commanders who were bothered with part-timer issues. While I was a CAPCOM for the Frog and the Prince mission, Shannon Lucid’s bare legs were an issue that came to my desk. (Shannon was an MS on the crew.) Like most crews, the STS-51G astronauts had changed into shorts and golf shirts for their orbit operations. There had been several TV downlinks in which Shannon had been seen working in her shorts. Prior to the orbit news conference, the public affairs officer sent the flight director a note requesting that the crew “dress in pants for the press conference.” When the note came to me I understood its intent. Public affairs was concerned the Arab world might find it offensive for one of their princes to be seen hovering in midair with a woman’s naked legs prominently displayed next to him. I tossed the note in the garbage. HQ could fire me but I wasn’t going to tell an American woman to modify her dress to accommodate the values of a medieval, repressive society where women couldn’t drive cars, much less fly space shuttles. I wanted to call Shannon and tell her to wear a thong for the press conference. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was taking a stand for women’s rights! Feminist America owes Mike Mullane one. As it was, the framing of the camera for the press conference only captured the crew’s upper bodies. Shannon’s legs, covered or not, were not visible.

Other cultural issues with foreign nationals surfaced. One guest crewmember told his CAPCOM he wanted the national anthem of his country played every morning as the wake-up music…and he wasn’t joking. The request was denied. Another foreigner provided the name of the immediate family member he wanted on the LCC roof to watch his launch. NASA assumed the woman was his wife but it turned out to be his mistress. He had left his wife at home.

Another example of the negative impact of the part-timer program on mission operations occurred with the fatal
Challenger
flight. The primary objective of that mission was actually to launch a several-hundred-million-dollar communication satellite that was critical to NASA’s and the U.S. Air Force’s space operations. But an outsider would never have known that from the way HQ acted. In their eyes the mission was to put a teacher in space. If the satellite was deployed, well, that would be nice, too. But as long as Christa McAuliffe’s space lesson got beamed into every elementary school in America, the mission would be successful. Unfortunately, as the mission moved toward launch, a weather delay pushed the flight twenty-four hours to the right—and Christa’s space lesson to a Saturday. For NASA’s PR team this was a disaster. The space lesson would not be live. It would have to be recorded and rebroadcast. To the surprise of no astronauts, NASA went to work to revise the flight plan and move the space lesson to a school day. All who were aware of what was going on were outraged. Astronauts and MCC live by the motto “Plan the flight and fly the plan.” Tens of millions of dollars are spent in simulations to prepare crews for their missions. The Crew Activity Plan, the mission bible, is fixed early in the training flow for the very purpose of ensuring the crew and MCC are thoroughly prepared. Major CAP modifications, even months from a launch, are rarely done and then only when essential to the success of the primary mission objective. Significant flight plan changes close to a launch merely to accommodate a secondary mission objective were unheard of. For any other mission, if someone suggested a flight plan rewrite
twenty-four hours prior to launch
to facilitate a secondary objective they would have been staked out in the launchpad flame bucket. But STS-51L wasn’t any other mission: It was the “Teacher-in-Space” mission. The flight plan was rewritten.