Riding Rockets (58 page)

God, let us go
was my prayer. The thought of having to do this tomorrow made me nauseous. Maybe the cards had been a sign. Maybe seven would be my lucky number. At least I had Pepe’s rookie complaints to entertain me. They came over the intercom in a nonstop flood: “Oh God, my back is killing me…My bladder is ready to explode…My stomach is being pushed out of my mouth…I got a cramp in my calf…I’m dying of thirst…I’m going to puke before I even get into space.” J.O. jokingly asked how he would throw up in the LES while strapped to his seat. Ever the engineer, Pepe gave the question a moment of serious thought and replied, “I’ll just roll my head around and puke in the back of my helmet.”

Maybe I was just punch-drunk with exhaustion and fear but I found Pepe’s constant dialogue hilarious. I was going to puke from laughing. J.O. warned, “Don’t make me laugh, Pepe. I’ll fall into another coughing fit.” J.O. could barely talk without inducing a phlegmy hack.

After several waves of complaints, Pepe prefaced his next chapter with “Guys, I know I’m not a wimp, but…” and then continued the litany. John Casper picked up on the preamble and began to use it every time he had a complaint. “Guys, I know I’m not a wimp, but…” Soon the entire upstairs cockpit was doing it. Pepe heard my laughing cackle and continued his comedy routine by mimicking it…an explosion of rapid and high-pitched
hee, hee, hee
s. That got me giggling even more. If the launch director was listening he probably thought we had all gone insane.

Pepe’s complaints faded and we looked for other ways to occupy our time and take our minds off our misery. We resorted to the old standby—roasting the flight surgeon. He was a captive audience, required to monitor our intercom but forbidden to speak to us directly unless we requested a conversation, and none of us were about to do that.

“I hear the doc’s wife is having an affair with a chiropractor.”

“And his daughter is sleeping with a malpractice lawyer.”

“And his son is studying to be a malpractice lawyer.”

There was a fake “Shhhhh…He might hear us.”

“He’s not listening. He’s going over his stock portfolio.”

“He’s on the phone with his Hong Kong broker getting the fix on gold and the yen.”

“He’s probably phoning for a tee time.”

“Hell, it’s Sunday. He’s not even there. Docs don’t work on Sunday.”

“Well, they don’t work
sober
on Sundays.”

Then we began to enumerate the perks the flight surgeons enjoyed. “They get hired by NASA as GS Infinities,” a reference to the higher government service pay grade they were given.

“They get reserved parking places.”

“They get preferential tee times.”

“They just have to ask and women take off their clothes for them.”

The banter finally ended and the intercom fell silent. Even Pepe got quiet. We all retreated into our own little chaotic worlds of pain and fear and prayer. Around T-45 minutes the range safety officer threw in the first wrench of what had been a smooth countdown. “RSO is no-go for blast.” The blast to which he referred was the space shuttle being blown up. The RSO’s computers had determined atmospheric conditions would amplify the power of the shuttle’s destruction and jeopardize the safety of those around the LCC. His no-go call elicited groans and profanities in the cockpit. We’d reached the point of,
I’ll kill anybody who gets in the way of our launch.
The RSO must have sensed the universal outrage at his no-go call and quickly reran the calculations to come up with acceptable numbers. “The RSO is go for blast.” We all cheered…and laughed at the irony. We were cheering because a detonating shuttle would now kill only us and that was
good
because it meant the countdown could continue.

At T-5 minutes Casper started the APUs and the flight control system checkout followed. Everything was nominal and I was beginning to actually believe I had carried my luck from the card table to the cockpit.

“
Atlantis
…close helmet visors.” Before complying with LCC’s call I heard J.O. and John snort Afrin for a last time. I would be flying with a CDR and PLT on drugs.

I rechecked my harness. Other than look at a wall of lockers, it was all I could do. God, how I wished I was upstairs and had the distraction of the instruments. I had nothing whatsoever to do but dwell on my fear. I was the gas chamber victim waiting for the tablets to fall.

And then…“RSO is no-go for backup computer.”

The intercom was immediately alive with our colorful assessments of the RSO:
bastard, asshole, sonofabitch!
We were now at the point of
I’ll kill anybody AND THEIR WIFE AND CHILDREN AND MOTHER who gets in the way of our launch.

The launch director ordered the countdown held at T-31 seconds in the hopes the RSO could clear his problem and the count could resume. But we couldn’t hold for long with the APUs burning their fuel. A minute ticked away.
Come on…come on…fix your freakin’ computer and give us a go for launch!
But as we waited, the liquid oxygen inlets on all of the SSMEs got too cold. The mission was scrubbed. I just melted into a formless blob. The suit technicians would have to look for me in the bottom of the LES.

Upon our return to the crew quarters we were offered the opportunity to go to the beach house and visit the wives. I called Donna and we both agreed we didn’t want another beach good-bye. I could sense her complete exhaustion…mental and physical. I called my mom, the iron woman who had birthed six children and raised them with an invalid husband, and she was similarly incapacitated. The only silver lining to the scrub was that it reinforced my retirement decision. If stress was the killer the docs were saying it was, I was killing Donna, the kids, my mom, and myself with these launch attempts.

When the crew returned from the beach house, they found me in the conference room watching a movie. Pepe tilted his chair onto its back on the floor and lay in it to watch TV. “What the hell are you doing?” I was certain he had lost his mind.

“I’ve got to acclimate myself to lying in the orbiter. I was ready to die out there.”

“Pepe, you’re crazy. That’s like practicing getting kicked in the balls. You’ll never acclimate yourself.”

But Pepe was not dissuaded. He remained in the reclined position throughout
Lawrence of Arabia.
I don’t know how he did it. Only a gun to my head would have made me practice for tomorrow. I barely had the strength to lift a beer to my lips.

The next morning we relived it: Olan’s Cajun face at my door, faking a smile for the photographers, having my nuts squeezed in the LES pressure test, confronting my fears on the drive to the pad, getting a kiss and a glowing light stick from Jeannie, laughing at Pepe’s complaints, worrying about death, praying for life, and finally hearing, “
Atlantis,
the RTLS weather is no-go. We’re going to have to pull you out.” I didn’t even have the strength to swear. This time the launch director decided to slip the mission by forty-eight hours to give everybody time to rest. Our next try would be on February 28.

Back in the crew quarters the techs stripped me out of the LES. After grabbing two beers from the kitchen, I walked to the bathroom, shed my long johns (reeking of sweat and faintly of urine), unfastened my diaper, and stood at the mirror. The craters under my eyes could have hidden a moon buggy. I wondered what a decent night of chemical-free REM sleep would feel like. It had been so long I couldn’t imagine the experience. My neck was ringed red from the chafing of the LES neck dam. There were other suit tattoos: ruptured capillaries on the insides of my arms and bruises on my biceps from trying to move while the LES was pressurized. There were still multiple shaved and sandpaper-roughened hickeys on my chest from the EKG attachments applied during a prequarantine medical test. My thighs and calves had similar shaved and roughened patches of skin marking the attachment locations of sensors for a muscle-response test. The end of my penis was cherry red with what I could only hope was temporary diaper rash. Whatever it was, I wasn’t about to bring it to the attention of the flight surgeons. If I had a urinary tract infection, it would come along for the ride. I had invested far too much in this mission to be pulled from it now. I entered the shower, stood under the cascading hot water, and drank my beer.

By the time we completed our debriefings the sun had risen and J.O. suggested we meet our wives at the beach house. I called Donna and this time we agreed it would be fun to get together.

The five of us entered the beach house living area to find it strewn with clothing: shirts, shoes, socks, panty hose, bras. There was even a bra swinging from the end of a ceiling fan. It was obvious we had entered a joke in progress. Sure enough, when we walked into the bedroom we found the family escorts, Hoot Gibson and Mario Runco, lying shirtless on the bed. Crowded next to them were all the wives, clothed but for their underthings, pretending to be
shocked
at our appearance. Everyone laughed, something we all needed as much as a good night’s sleep.

Hoot teased us with the obvious point of the joke. “You guys are taking so long to get this mission going, your wives are developing some real
need
issues.”

I threw it back in his face. “I’m not worried. You and Mario are navy officers. You have to be heterosexual to know what a woman needs. I’m surprised you guys aren’t in a bedroom by yourselves.”

Hoot and I had a well-deserved reputation for a disgusting synergy. Our exchanges devolved into more offensive comebacks and counter-comebacks until Donna finally hollered, “Enough! Will you guys ever grow up?” I had now heard that outburst from so many women so many times in my life, I thought it should be in Latin on the official shield of Planet Arrested Development—
umquam grow idiotum.

The rest of the visit was relaxing. We had all been cured of the need to deliver a Bergman-Bogey good-bye at the water’s edge, so we just sat around, drank beer, and traded stories. Pepe told us of his agony during the wait on the pad. Dave Hilmers shot him a hypothetical question: “Pepe, if NASA needs someone to replace an MS on the next flight, would you volunteer?” Pepe instantly replied, “Absolutely.” His eagerness embodied the astronaut conundrum. Even as we waited on the pad, scared shitless and physically tortured, none of us could imagine not taking every offered mission.

When we returned to the crew quarters we were greeted by the local news showing a large, unmanned, French-built Ariane rocket blowing up shortly after liftoff from its South American pad. The story wouldn’t have been covered anywhere else in America, but, on Florida’s space coast, the competing French space program was news. The stations played the video again and again. There was no way Donna and the rest of the families could possibly miss it and I was certain the images of the flaming rocket falling into the sea would add to their anxiety. And that wasn’t the end of it. That evening one of the networks was airing a docudrama on the
Challenger
disaster. The advertisements for that show were in all the newspapers and magazines, and the network was constantly hyping it. The wives were going to have to be sedated to get them to the LCC roof. With J.O.’s illness, the two scrubs, the Ariane blowing up, and the
Challenger
movie, it was a good thing I didn’t believe in omens.

The evening of February 26 our crew flew to Houston for a refresher simulation. It had been so long since J.O. and John had practiced ascent emergencies, the mission trainers thought it would be a good idea to get them back in the JSC sim. I made the trip even though I had no duties associated with ascent. I just couldn’t face the thought of sitting around the crew quarters all night with nothing to do. I had already watched more movies in the past thirteen days of quarantine than I had watched in the past thirteen years. I couldn’t watch another. After landing at Ellington Field, I left the crew to their sim, drove home, watered the houseplants, and went running.

On the flight back to Florida I was stabbed with regret at my decision to leave NASA. The pain and fear that, yesterday, had provided validation for my retirement plans had been temporarily forgotten. Cocooned in the warm cockpit with the stars as a blanket, I wondered if I would ever find fulfillment outside of this business. There was an unknown scarier than space and I was fast approaching it…my post-MECO future.

This time I asked Jeannie to put light sticks over the single cue card Velcroed on the locker in front of me. The downstairs lighting was poor and I wanted the extra illumination to read the card. It outlined the procedures for a launchpad escape, for bailing out, and for a crash landing escape. I had every step committed to memory and didn’t need the card but it gave me something to read during the wait. I also asked her to put a light stick next to the altimeter in front of me. In a bailout scenario, after pulling the emergency cockpit depressurization handle, I would watch the altimeter until it indicated we were below fifty thousand feet. Then, I would blow the side hatch and deploy the bailout slide boom. I would be the first out…into the ink black of a North Atlantic winter night and all the perils that it embodied.

Jeannie’s face was beaded in sweat as she crawled over me to make my connections. Kevin Chilton, one of the ASPs, was the last to leave the cockpit. He pulled the pin that locked a safety cover over the cockpit depressurization and hatch jettison handles. Assuming we made orbit, I would reinsert the pin. He handed it to me. “Good luck, Mike.”

“Thanks, Chilly. See you at Edwards.”

I heard the hatch close, the mechanical
thunking
noise carrying a note of finality. A few minutes later J.O. watched from his port-side window as the last pad workers hurried across the access arm and entered the elevator. “The close-out crew just left. We’re alone.” J.O.’s observation reminded us that we sat at ground zero. Everybody else was racing to get away from the shuttle kill zone.

For the ninth time in my life I waited for launch. I was certain there would be a tenth time, tomorrow. The KSC weather was bad. I could feel the vehicle shaking in the wind and J.O. and John reported heavy rains lashing their windows from passing squalls. And it wasn’t just the Florida weather that was a problem. Our two transatlantic abort sights—Zaragoza, Spain, and Morón, Spain (pronounced MORE-OWN)—also had weather issues. At T-9 the launch director held the count. God might have been punishing us for ignoring Dave’s request to turn off the Playboy Channel.