Riding Rockets (39 page)

The shuttle was not operational and the close calls—STS-9’s APU fire, STS-51D’s brake problem, STS-51F’s ascent abort, and STS-61C’s valve problems (not even considering what was going on with the SRB O-rings)—were clear warnings to that effect. Yet, nothing changed. The shuttle continued to fly with passengers and without an in-flight escape system, the two most visible manifestations of the operational label. Senior management saw the dodged bullets as validation that shuttle redundancy would always save the day. Meanwhile, astronauts saw the near misses as indicative of the experimental nature of the craft. When backup systems saved the shuttle, we cheered the genius of the engineers just as management did. The gods of Apollo were damn good. But we also knew these incidents were just the tip of the iceberg. There were more unknowns lurking in the shuttle design, and when they finally reared their ugly heads, redundancy might not be enough to save us.

Astronaut concerns about the shuttle’s operational label, the lack of an escape system, and the passenger program should have been heard by every key manager, from Abbey to the JSC center director to the NASA administrator. But they were not. We were terrified of saying anything that might jeopardize our place in line to space. We were not like normal men and women who worried about the financial aspects of losing a job, of not being able to make the mortgage payment or pay the kids’ tuition. We feared losing a dream, of losing the very thing that made us
us.
When it came to our careers, we were risk averse in the extreme. Effective leaders would have done everything possible to eradicate that fear. George Abbey, the JSC director, and the NASA administrator all should have been frequent visitors to the astronaut office, actively polling our concerns, and each visit should have started with these or similarly empowering words: “There is nothing you can say to me that will jeopardize your place in the mission line. Nothing! If you think I’m doing something crazy, I want to hear it.” I had experienced this form of leadership many times in my air force career. I saw it on an F-4 mission in which a general officer was serving as my pilot. I was a first lieutenant—and terrified. I had never flown with a flag officer before. But this man was a leader who understood how fear could jeopardize the team and did his best to eliminate it. As my foot touched the cockpit ladder, the general stopped me and said, “See these stars,” and pointed to his shoulder. “If I make a mistake they won’t save our lives. If you see anything that doesn’t look right on this flight, tell me. There’s no rank in this jet. Flying is dangerous enough as it is without having crewmembers afraid to speak up.” It was an empowering moment. The astronaut office desperately needed the same empowering moments, but they never came. Fear ruled—a fear rooted in Abbey’s continuing secrecy on all things associated with flight assignments. We kept our mouths shut.

It was in the Golden Age that Judy Resnik was assigned to her second mission, STS-51L. She would join TFNGs Dick Scobee, El Onizuka, and Ron McNair as well as pilot Mike Smith (class of 1980) for a flight aboard
Challenger.
Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire schoolteacher, would later join the crew. Her assignment to 51L was linked to Judy’s. NASA logically wanted Christa to fly with a veteran female astronaut. Greg Jarvis, another part-timer, would ultimately draw a
Challenger
slot when Congressman Bill Nelson bumped him from STS-61C.

I don’t blame Nelson or Abbey or anybody else for how the chips fell on the
Challenger
crew composition. Only God can explain the how and why of that. In fact, many months prior to
Challenger,
Mike Smith was named as a backup to a mission pilot who was suffering a potentially career-ending health problem. That pilot recovered and Smith wasn’t needed. But had the sick pilot’s convalescence taken just a few more weeks, Mike would have flown on the earlier mission and another pilot would have died on
Challenger.

I congratulated Judy and the others at their Outpost celebration. With a gold pin in my bureau drawer it was easy to be sincere. No more fake smiles. Still, I felt a touch of envy. The 51L crew would be deploying an IUS fitted with a NASA communication satellite. The Boeing engineers had finally fixed that booster rocket so Judy had a proven payload. It was one less thing to get in the way of her launch date. She would have a second flight long before I would and that was something to envy.

In spite of the record number of missions in 1985 and flight opportunities for astronauts, morale continued to suffer under the leadership of John Young and George Abbey, particularly the morale of the USAF pilots. Air force pilot Fred Gregory filled my ear on a T-38 mission. “Of the twenty-eight CDR and PLT seats available on the first fourteen missions, only six have been filled with air force pilots. Fifteen went to navy pilots.” Fred went on to complain that of the six CDR and PLT seats available on the first three Spacelab missions, four were being filled by air force pilots. (He was one of those four.) He didn’t have to explain the meaning of the latter statistic: If any space missions could be considered routine, they were the Spacelab missions, and the USAF astronauts were getting more than their fair share of those. The navy pilots were getting the challenging and historic missions that included hands-on-the-stick rendezvous time and interviews on national TV. The most egregious example of an air force TFNG being screwed was when pilot Steve Nagel was assigned to fly his first mission—not as a PLT, but as a mission specialist! Even some navy astronauts were outraged by this travesty. Steve was known to be a far superior pilot and to have much better judgment than several of the USN pilots who had drawn front-seat assignments. And Abbey’s preferential treatment of the navy didn’t just stop with shuttle crew assignments. He also picked navy astronauts (Walker, Gibson, and Richards) to serve as directors of NASA’s flying operations at Ellington Field, and navy pilot Don Williams was assigned a position in the JSC Shuttle Program Office.

Ironically, the flight assignment situation with the air force pilots turned in my favor. On February 6, 1985, Abbey phoned me (no office visit this time) to tell me I was being assigned to the first shuttle mission to fly from Vandenberg AFB in California. Abbey had finally drawn the air force’s attention when he assigned Bob Crippen, a navy captain, to command the most “air force” of all missions—the first Vandenberg flight. The air force was the lead service in DOD military space operations, and it was a fact of orbital mechanics that many of their satellites had to be launched into polar orbits. For a spy satellite to see all of America’s potential enemies, it has to have a view of all the Earth. A satellite orbiting around the Earth’s poles gets such a view as the Earth spins underneath it. But it is impossible to launch polar orbiting satellites from the Kennedy Space Center, because a north- or south-directed launch from KSC would endanger populations below the rocket flight path. Polar orbiting satellites have to be carried into orbit by rockets launched from Vandenberg AFB, located near Point Conception, California. A rocket launched on a southern trajectory from this point will achieve polar orbit while flying safely over the ocean. The air force had spent a decade and several billion dollars building a shuttle launchpad at Vandenberg AFB. It was their launchpad and the first mission to be flown from it would carry an air force payload. The air force had wanted it commanded by an air force pilot, but Abbey had other ideas and assigned Bob Crippen. In the ensuing discussions between the USAF and NASA, the air force had accepted Crippen, but with the caveat that the majority of the rest of the crew would be air force. (Or so the rumor mill had it. As always, there was nothing but rumors on the subject of flight assignments.) In a strange twist, I became a beneficiary of Crippen’s commandership of the first Vandenberg mission, a fact made clear to me when Crippen later commented, “You have the right color uniform for the flight.”

I was deliriously happy about my good fortune. The Vandenberg mission was going to be a true first. It would carry me and the rest of the crew into polar orbit, something no human had ever done. The poor schmucks flying out of KSC on the commercial communication satellite deployment missions only got to see a narrow strip of the Earth between 28 degrees north and 28 degrees south latitude (as I had done on STS-41D). How boring. In a polar orbit we would see all of the Earth. We would fly
through
the northern and southern lights. We would fly over the Greenland ice cap and the mountain ranges of Antarctica. We would pass over all of the Soviet Union. It was a mission Hank Hartsfield would have loved—he could have made the Kremlin a target for one of his BMs. I was back in my pre–STS-41D frame of mind. I was mad to get into space on this mission. But the liftoff date—originally scheduled for spring 1986—was slipping to the right. The new Vandenberg launchpad and launch control center had to be finished and checked out. The State Department had to complete its negotiations to secure shuttle abort landing rights on Easter Island’s runway, a task being made more difficult by a Soviet Union disinformation campaign that shuttle operations would destroy the island’s stone figures. The Soviets understood that most of the payloads carried out of Vandenberg would be spying on them and were doing their best to lay down obstacles.

STS-62A’s slippage provided time for me to pull other duties, including several missions as a CAPCOM. There were no
Apollo 13
dramatics on any of these flights but, like everything else in the astronaut business, even the mundane can be unique. One Saturday night I was on CAPCOM duty and nearly comatose in boredom. The orbiting crew was engrossed in their experiments and the shuttle was performing flawlessly. On rev after rev all I did was make Acquisition of Signal (AOS) and Loss of Signal (LOS) calls as the shuttle passed in and out of the coverage of various tracking stations. I tried to maintain an appearance of busy professionalism, knowing the public affairs wall-mounted cameras were focused on me. When no video was being streamed from the shuttle, the NASA PR officer would switch to these MCC cameras. Cable companies broadcast “NASA Select” video to their subscribers, including most astronaut households. My image was being dumped into living rooms throughout Clear Lake City and across America. Aware of this, I resisted the impulse to pick ear hairs and instead opened a shuttle malfunction checklist and pretended to study it. My eyes glazed over and my head nodded.

When my console phone rang I was instantly alert. The MCC phone numbers were unpublished. If a phone was ringing it was official business. I was glad for the interruption…
anything
to break the monotony. I snatched the receiver and answered in a crisp military manner, “CAPCOM, Mike Mullane speaking.”

What came into my ear was a soft, feminine voice. “Raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

I bolted upright. Was I hallucinating? “Pardon me” was the only rejoinder I could muster.

“Listen up, Mullane! I said, raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

It is in the DNA of men to respond to such a proposition in the affirmative, so my hand shot up like the space shuttle. The flight director and a couple of nearby MCC controllers looked at me like I had just had a seizure. No telling what the space geeks around the country watching me on TV thought had happened.

My brain quickly replayed the conversation and I identified the voice, a TFNG wife. It was a Saturday night. Somewhere there was an astronaut party. Someone had turned on the TV to check on the progress of the shuttle flight and found me bobbing toward unconsciousness. A crowd had gathered at the TV while this woman was given the CAPCOM phone number and made her call. I could imagine the roar of laughter when the party audience had seen my hand jerk skyward.

Now it was my turn to shock the caller. “You know this phone call is being recorded.” She just laughed me off. It was no more possible to embarrass this particular woman than it was to embarrass Madonna. But the call
had
been recorded. All MCC telephone conversations are recorded for accident investigation purposes. Somewhere in the National Archives are audiotapes with historic quotes from the space program, like Alan Shepard’s “Let’s light this candle,” and Neil Armstrong’s “Houston, the
Eagle
has landed,” and Gene Kranz’s “Failure is not an option,” and a TFNG wife’s “Raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

There were Monday meeting discussions that proved almost as attention-grabbing as this proposition. We received a status report on the subject of herpes-infected monkeys. STS-51B, a Spacelab mission, was to carry several primates as part of their life-science research and it was feared the virus, which was common in monkeys, could infect the crew. Needless to say this was a briefing that brought out the best in the Planet AD crowd.

“If you don’t screw the monkeys, you won’t catch herpes” came one call from the cheap seats.

“Good luck restraining the marines” came another.

“The ugliest one will come back pregnant by one of you air force perverts.”

As this inter-service banter continued, one of the post-docs was able to shoulder in a valid question. “Why don’t they just fly clean monkeys?”

The presenter replied, “It’s difficult and expensive to find herpes-free monkeys.” Then he added, “The scientists believe the herpes risks to astronauts are acceptable. They think there’s a greater chance of the shuttle exploding than the crew contracting herpes.” The scientists were right. Nobody on the 51B crew would be worried about catching herpes from a monkey while sitting on 4 million pounds of propellant.

Weeks later, during a STS-51B simulation, the Sim Sup introduced a simulated monkey “malfunction.” It wasn’t a herpes outbreak, but a monkey death. This was to help prepare the MCC PR people to deal with nightmare antivivisectionists scenarios. (A group of these people were protesting NASA’s Spacelab animal experiments.) Per Sim Sup’s instruction, the crew reported the simulated monkey was sick and bloated. A short while later they made the “monkey has died” call. At about the same time in the simulation, Sim Sup also introduced a human medical problem for the MCC flight surgeon to work—pilot Fred Gregory was ill with a fever and a urinary tract infection. The nearly simultaneous monkey illness and Fred’s simulated infection had Fred vigorously defending himself in the simulation debriefing: “I did not violate the monkey!”