Riding Rockets (42 page)

The remains were held at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for pathologists to identify. A few weeks later I watched NASA’s TV broadcast as a procession of hearses drove onto the KSC runway and unloaded seven flag-draped caskets. Each was accompanied by an astronaut. A military honor guard reverently carried the remains into the belly of an air force C-141 transport aircraft. There was no dialogue to accompany the TV footage. The silence made the images even more heartrending. The camera followed the plane as it rolled down the runway and receded to just a dot in the sky. The
Challenger
crew was finally returning to their families.

On May 19 a horse-drawn caisson slowly bore the remains of Dick Scobee toward his final resting place in Arlington National Cemetery. The day was sultry and the air tinted with the odor of horse dung and freshly mowed grass. A military band, playing a medley of patriotic arrangements, led our procession. A formation of skin-headed GI pallbearers, dressed in mirror-polished livery, marched with them. Another group of buzz-cut soldiers bore the American flag and other standards streaming blue and red battle ribbons. Rivulets of sweat poured into their eyes from under their headgear, but they did not break the precision of their march to wipe it away. The astronaut corps and a handful of our spouses trailed the entourage. Between music selections the drummer maintained a solo staccato. The clop of hooves on the cobblestone mingled with the tapping of the women’s heels to compete with the drummer’s cadence. A symphony of other mournful sounds tugged at the heart: the choking sobs of women, the creak of the caisson, the groan of the leather tack, the jingle of a bridle.

The chaplain conducted a brief graveside service. Then an honor guard fired a rapid three-shot rifle salute, each shot punctuated by the metallic tinkle of the ejected brass. The young children and some of the adults startled visibly at the loudness of the firings. Other soldiers lifted the flag from the casket and folded it with machinelike precision. It was handed to George Abbey, who, in turn, presented it to June Scobee. A flight of four NASA T-38s zoomed into view in fingertip formation. Over the grave the number-two pilot jerked his plane upward and disappeared into the clouds leaving the missing man gap. Then the play of “Taps” drew out a new wave of sobs.

My grief wasn’t refreshed in any way by the scene. It couldn’t be. I had reached my limits of that emotion. But as the notes of “Taps” floated in the air I was stirred anew in my anger at NASA management. This should have never happened. It was completely preventable. There had been four years of warnings.

I wondered if any of them at that grave felt culpable. I suspected those who knew nothing of the O-ring problem, and most at JSC and HQ had not, felt they were off the responsibility hook. In my book they were not. It wasn’t an O-ring failure that brought us to this Arlington service. That was merely a symptom. The real failure was in the leadership of NASA. Over many years it had allowed the agency to degenerate into a loose confederation of independent fiefdoms. As proof of that, the Roger’s Commission was finding that many at MSFC had been aware of the O-ring issue, but the problem had not been communicated to the appropriate offices at HQ and JSC, including Young’s and Abbey’s offices. Neither did the Thiokol engineers’ eleventh-hour worries about launching in cold temperature get to the launch director at KSC. And astronaut concerns about the lack of an escape system and the passenger program were unknown to NASA’s senior management, of that I was certain. NASA was filled with incredibly talented people, some of the world’s best. But the agency lacked the leadership necessary to bind everyone together into an effective and safe team. The NASA administrators were largely budget lobbyists beholden to the White House and Congress. They didn’t lead NASA. They certainly didn’t lead
me.
I couldn’t recall any administrator ever visiting the astronaut office to solicit our opinions. I had heard one TFNG grumble, “We should fly every new NASA administrator on a shuttle mission. Maybe if they had the shit scared out of them they’d be more beholden to us.” That was a part-timer program I would endorse.

“Who led NASA?” was the question. Nobody. That’s why we were standing in Arlington listening to “Taps” for Dick Scobee. It was even a mystery to me who led my fiefdom. Who was in charge at JSC? George Abbey seemed to be absolute ruler of his own little duchy. Even now, a previously planned new astronaut selection was still rolling along. The shuttle wouldn’t fly again for years. Why bring in more astronauts now? We couldn’t understand why the JSC director or NASA HQ didn’t order a stop to it. It was more proof to us that when it came to anything associated with astronauts,
everybody,
including the JSC director and NASA administrator, worked for Abbey. He didn’t answer to anybody. How many other similarly independent fiefdoms existed within NASA? What were their kings like? What frustrations burdened their serfs? I could only speak of my own. Lack of leadership at JSC and in Washington, D.C., had allowed the astronaut office to become dominated by fear. Even outsiders had become aware of it. In a vitriolic March 12, 1986, memo addressed to John Young, Colonel Larry Griffin, commander of the air force detachment to NASA (he was not an astronaut), wrote, “…my personal experience in working with the astronaut office is that nearly everyone there is absolutely afraid to voice any opinion that does not agree with yours. You criticizing anyone for ‘pressure’ is ludicrous when the primary axiom in the astronaut office is, ‘Don’t cross John if you ever want to fly.’ That’s pressure!” Colonel Griffin had it slightly wrong. We were afraid to voice any opinion that did not agree with that of Young
or
Abbey. Did the JSC director or the NASA administrator have any idea how fearful we were of our management? If they had been involved in our lives, they would have known and could have fixed the problem. That’s what good leaders do.

I couldn’t point to any single individual and say, “He did it!” but, collectively, NASA management put Scobee and the other six in their graves. I wanted them all gone. So did most of the astronaut corps. But we were so jaded by our NASA experiences, we doubted it would happen. Already it was more than three months since
Challenger
and there had been no firings. I saw the future and it looked remarkably like the past. Of course there would be new “oversight committees” and a new “safety emphasis,” but to a significant degree the same people would remain in leadership positions and that meant nothing would really change. I would later hear a TFNG describe it perfectly. “You can paint a different tail number on the squadron dog [referring to the most malfunction-prone jet] but it’s still the same dog.”

I walked away from the Arlington ceremony angry, bitter, depressed, and guilt-ridden…making a mental note to tell Donna that if I died on a shuttle mission I didn’t want Abbey or Young or anybody from NASA HQ anywhere near my grave. I certainly didn’t want any of them handing her the flag from my coffin. (Upon my return to Houston, I did make that request of Donna.)

The only positive thought I could muster was that at least there would be no more scab pulling. The crew was buried. Now the healing could begin.

But God granted us only the briefest of reprieves. A week after Scobee’s funeral, astronaut Steve Thorne, class of 1985, died in an off-duty recreational plane crash. It was another body blow to the astronaut corps.

*
Enterprise,
the first orbiter, was never designed for spaceflight. It was used in pre–STS-1 glide tests off the back of NASA’s 747 carrier aircraft.

Chapter 27

Castle Intrigue

Several weeks after
Challenger
I was finally given a job: to review the design of the Range Safety System (RSS). NASA wasn’t just focusing on the SRB O-ring design. It wanted to be certain there were no other deadly failure modes lurking in other shuttle components. Astronauts were assigned to work with experts from every subsystem to root out any safety issues. I was assigned the RSS, the system designed to terminate the flight of an errant shuttle. It would prove to be an assignment that would nearly terminate my career.

Most astronauts grudgingly accepted that the RSS was needed to protect civilian population centers. But there was no denying we hated it because it directly threatened our lives. Over several months I traveled to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to meet with the RSS personnel—they were not NASA employees. By congressional law the protection of the civilian population from rocket mishaps was the responsibility of the Department of Defense, and DOD had given the job to the USAF. And the only way the air force could guarantee that protection was to place explosives on everybody’s rockets, NASA’s as well as all military and commercial missiles. (On the shuttle, the explosives were placed on each SRB and the gas tank. While there was none on the orbiter, detonation of the other explosives would also destroy the orbiter and kill the crew.) During every missile launch, USAF officers, who served as RSOs, monitored the machine’s trajectory. If a rocket strayed off course, it would be remotely blown up to prevent it from falling on a city.

In multiple meetings I examined every aspect of the design of the RSS and the selection and training of the RSOs. (I would learn that RSOs routinely declined invitations to attend KSC social functions with astronauts. They did not want their launch-day judgment impaired by a friendship with crewmembers they might have to kill.) The system was as fail-safe as humanly possible. In these same meetings I also learned that the Range Safety Office was proposing some changes to shuttle launch abort procedures. They worried that in some aborts, pieces of the jettisoned gas tank could land in Africa. Their suggested solution was to have astronauts burn the OMS engines during these aborts. The additional thrust produced in the burn would result in an ET trajectory that would drop the fuel tank into the Indian Ocean.

When I brought this request to John Young, he became as hot as a reentering ET, arguing it was a dumb idea. The OMS propellant was the gas used for the final push into orbit, for maneuvers while in orbit, and for the braking maneuver to get out of orbit. The RSOs were asking us to burn gas during ascent that we might later need—just to put another zero behind their already conservative risk-to-Africans probability numbers. I agreed with Young. But then the trajectory planners at MCC did their own studies and found that igniting the OMS engines pre-MECO (burning them at the same time as the SSMEs) would actually improve nominal and launch abort performance. In other words, it would improve the crew’s chances of reaching orbit or a runway. When I brought this data to Young, I expected him to enthusiastically endorse it, but I was stunned when he didn’t. His position was that we would never do an OMS burn on the uphill ride. I assumed I hadn’t made myself clear and tried again. “John, I’m not suggesting this be done to satisfy the RSO. This is our own FDO recommending it. The data shows it will improve performance during the abort.” John would hear none of it.

Over the next several weeks, in multiple meetings in Young’s office, I continued to bring him the results of various meetings on the pre-MECO OMS burn issue. The ball was rolling. It was going to happen.
^*
Young was beyond angry at this news and focused his anger at me. Again and again I tried to make him understand the pre-MECO OMS burn was something FDO wanted to do to protect the crew. But he was deaf to my logic. Instead he remained focused on the fact the Range Safety Office wanted the OMS burn to keep the ET off Africa.

I appealed for help from the JSC office pursuing the OMS burn change, the office of Flight Director Jay Greene. Jay had cut his teeth as a young MCC flight controller during the Apollo program. I held him in great esteem. He was heart-and-soul dedicated to crew safety. If he and FDO were saying that an uphill OMS burn was going to make things safer for the crews during some aborts, then it would. I asked him to come to Young’s office with the supporting engineers to make their case to Young. He would be happy to was his reply. I felt good about what I had arranged. Jay was a well-regarded flight director. John would
have
to listen to him.

At the appointed hour I rendezvoused with Jay and his entourage of engineers and we walked to Young’s office. It was empty. When I asked where he was, his secretary sheepishly replied, “He went to get a haircut.” I wanted to scream. He had stiff-armed me. His mind was made up. He didn’t want to hear any contrary arguments from anybody.

In an attempt to gain the support of other astronauts, I presented some data on the RSS situation at the September 15, 1986, Monday morning meeting. I was hardly able to finish a sentence. Young heckled me at every turn. I was humiliated. Over a beer I mentioned my travails to Hoot Gibson. Hoot exploded, “I’ve had the same problem with him on the issues I’m working and I’ve just quit listening and talking to him.”

As the weeks passed I fell further into the depression that had started with
Challenger
’s loss. I had lost friends. I had lost a mission into polar orbit. Now the core of my professional life, my work ethic, was slipping away. All my life I had been intent on getting the job done. When the first psychiatrist of my TFNG interview had asked me what my personal strength was, I had truthfully replied, “I always do my best.” It was my hallmark. I knew I wasn’t the smartest astronaut. But I was solid, reliable. I always got the job done…until now. I hated my job. I hated my boss. When I slept, which wasn’t much, I had dreams of Judy’s necklace and exploding shuttles and writhing SRBs and walking through the gore of a crash site.

My distress had long been known to Donna. Every evening I would recount my stories of abuse to her. As always, she listened and lent her support…and lit more bonfires of votive candles to send her prayers heavenward for my delivery from Young. We talked about leaving NASA. I could return to the air force, but I knew I wouldn’t be happy there. The only thing awaiting me in the USAF was a desk. I would never see the inside of a cockpit again. I was too old and too senior in rank. I would end up buried in the bowels of the Pentagon. I didn’t want to leave NASA. I wanted to fly again. My
Discovery
flight couldn’t compare with what some of my peers had done on their missions. Pinky Nelson, “Ox” van Hoften, Dale Gardner, and Bob Stewart had all done tetherless spacewalks. They had donned MMUs and, like real-life Buck Rogerses, had jetted away from their shuttles into the abyss of space. Kathy Sullivan, Dale Gardner, Dave Griggs, and Jeff Hoffman had done traditional tethered spacewalks. Sally Ride had used the robot arm to deploy and retrieve a satellite. Rhea Seddon had used the robot arm in an attempt to activate a malfunctioning satellite. I wanted to do similar things that challenged my skills as a mission specialist. I wanted a spacewalk flight. I wanted to fly a mission with an RMS task. I wanted a high-inclination orbit so I could see my Albuquerque home from space. And there was only one place on Earth I could do these things…at NASA. As much as I wanted to walk into Young’s office and tell him, “Take this job and shove it!” I couldn’t. There was no place else to go and ride a rocket into space. I would have to endure.