Riding Rockets (59 page)

Pepe’s practice countdown in the briefing room chair had been useless in preparing him for another pad wait. It didn’t take more than thirty minutes before he was once again entertaining us with his complaints. He ended one session with “My organs are shoving my diaphragm into my throat.”

I replied, “You’re wearing a diaphragm?” Everyone laughed so hard the engineers in MCC probably saw
Atlantis
’s vibrations in their accelerometer data. J.O. fell into a gagging wet cough. He was still not well, a fact that had made the
Houston Chronicle.
An unnamed source was quoted in that newspaper suggesting that J.O. was actually suffering from viral influenza. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that was the case, but I was glad he was soldiering on. The longer our delay, the greater the chances I would become infected. (I would fall ill a day after landing.) I seriously doubted NASA HQ would hold the launch for my recovery, or the recovery of any infected MS, for that matter. As CDR and PLT, J.O. and John Casper were relatively irreplaceable. But with three MSes trained on the payload, any one of us was expendable. Given HQ’s attention to the flight rate, I suspected management had already instructed JSC to have some MS substitutes standing by just in case. I prayed for a weather miracle.

Pepe outlasted me as the cockpit clown. He joked and complained without pause. Now he was reviewing all the movies we had watched during the past two weeks: “
Lawrence of Arabia, The Great Escape, How the West Was Won, The Terminator, Predator, Alien, Top Gun
…” We had seen more blood and guts than a meat packer. I resolved that the next movie I watched would be
Heidi.

The T-9 minute hold dragged on…thirty minutes…an hour. Pepe gave us another item to consider. “I was just calculating…Since we started this never-go mission we’ve logged more than thirteen hours of on-the-back time. J.O. has even more time because he’s first in and last out. In fact, J.O., you’ve been on your back for five hours just on this countdown.”

“Thanks for cheering me up, Pepe.”

I didn’t have a body part that wasn’t complaining. To ease the pain in my back, I loosened my harness and arched my hips upward. The restored circulation was heaven-sent but I couldn’t hold the position for more than a moment. As my butt collapsed into the seat, a tide of cold urine squeezed from the diaper, climbed up my ass crack, and washed over my testicles. This was particularly disgusting knowing that, if we ever launched, I wouldn’t see a shower for five days. If I did this tomorrow, which seemed certain, I was going to take my chances with the condom UCD.

As the groans and moans ricocheted among us, Dave Hilmers broke into song, “When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad.” That threw me into the punch-drunk giggles again.

Pepe suggested a new song for Max-q (the astronaut band): “Holding at Nine and Hurting.” It would have been a hit. At one time or another most astronauts have been there.

Rain continued to fall at KSC and the TAL weather looked grim, but observers at both places predicted a brief moment of acceptable launch conditions. The chances those moments would coincide were slim, but, with our launch window nearing a close, the launch director decided to give it a shot. He released the clock and we counted to T-5 minutes and held there. The wives were on the LCC roof. No doubt the rain made it even more miserable for them.

The wait extended. Even Pepe couldn’t find anything more to say. The only sounds were the steady breath of
Atlantis
’s cooling system and the irritating high-pitched whine of our pressure suit fans. The latter gave me a headache on top of my other pains. I refused to look at my watch, certain the digits were changing in quarter time. If there had been a glimmer of hope we would actually launch, the wait wouldn’t have been so interminable. But we were all certain our investment in pain and adrenaline was going to be for naught. We would hold for the weather until the close of the launch window and then scrub. We would have to do it all again tomorrow.

I listened to the urgent voices of the launch controllers. Like us, they were exhausted and wanted to put the flight behind them and escape the inhuman sleep-work cycle. We were all gripped with a dangerous “launch fever,” a headlong rush to get
Atlantis
flying. The sane one among us was our launch director, Bob Sieck. Nobody was going to stampede him into a wrongheaded decision. As he did a final poll of his LCC team he was calm, deliberate. Mr. Rogers singing “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood” sounded manic compared with Bob’s measured voice. Everybody listening wanted to jump in and finish his sentences. He was the perfect man for one of the most stressful jobs within NASA…and another person I would remember forever.

He polled the STA weather pilot and we heard Mike Coats reply, “Go.” Next he polled the TAL weather pilot in Zaragoza, Spain, and got another go. There had been a blessed nexus of satisfactory weather conditions on both sides of the Atlantic. We were cleared to fly.

“
Atlantis,
we’ll be coming out of the count in a few moments. It’s been a real pleasure working with you guys. Good luck and godspeed.”

I was shocked. For hours I had been convinced we would scrub. Now Casper was going through the APU start procedures. The clock was running. God had smiled on us. It had to have been Dave Hilmers’s work. The rest of us reprobates didn’t warrant any breaks from the Almighty.

I cinched my harness. My fear, which had ebbed with my certain belief the launch would be canceled, now roared over me like an avalanche. My mouth was metallic with it. My heart ran away with it. My hands shook with it. The palsy was a first for me. It had to be the combined effects of being downstairs and suffering from last-mission syndrome. Now, I was glad to be out of sight. Everybody knew everybody else was terrified, but nobody wanted to
see
their neighbor’s fear, and trembling hands were a sure sign of it.

At T-2 minutes I closed my visor and turned on my oxygen. Again, I could hear J.O. and Casper snorting Afrin before they dropped their faceplates.

J.O. gave me a count. “One minute, Mike.”

I squeaked out a “Roger.”

“Thirty seconds, go for auto-sequence start.”

“Fifteen seconds.”

“Ten seconds…go for main engine start.”

There was a heavy rumble followed by a 2-G slap. We were off. The rest of my life was just 510 seconds away.

Chapter 40

Last Orbits

At MECO I silently celebrated life. For the first time in what seemed an age, it occurred to me that I might live long enough to die a natural death.

We went to work on our mission activities, most of which I’m forbidden to describe. But the classified nature of both my DOD missions produced a mighty temptation for me. Riches and fame beyond anything any astronaut has ever achieved could be mine if I just told the world the
truth
…that on these hush-hush missions we actually rendezvoused with aliens. Given the vast population of conspiracy theorists, my claims would not be questioned. “Of course the government is hiding contact with aliens under the guise of military space shuttle operations,” they would shout. I would be their hero for revealing what they have long suspected. Book and movie deals would net me millions. I would just need a convincing sperm-extraction and anal-probe story for my Barbara Walters interview…and to be able to look pained and violated as I told it.

On one occasion since leaving NASA, I did publicly make the “alien rendezvous” claim. I did it at Pepe’s retirement ceremony. “Yes, we linked up with aliens,” I told that audience, “and then had sex with them. It wasn’t too bad after we got by the tentacles. Of course, Pepe, being a navy guy, picked the ugliest one.”

One unclassified experiment aboard
Atlantis
proved immensely entertaining—a human skull loaded with radiation dosimeters. After returning to Earth those dosimeters would yield an exact measure of how much radiation was penetrating the brains of astronauts.

To reduce the creepiness factor of the experiment, the investigators had used a plastic filling to give the head an approximation of a face. The result was far more menacing than plain bone would have been. The face was narrow, cadaverous, with two bolts at the back of the skull looking like horns. Satan himself was riding with us. During a break in our payload work, I floated into a sleep restraint and extended my arms through the armholes, then ducked my head into the bag. Pepe and Dave taped the skull on top of the restraint so it appeared our friend had a body. (Your tax dollars at work.) They silently floated the bag to the flight deck and maneuvered me behind John Casper, who was engaged at an instrument panel. When he turned to find the creature in his face with arms waving, it scared the bejesus out of him. Later, we clamped Satan on the toilet. No doubt my desecration of the poor anonymous soul who had volunteered his body (and skull) to science has earned me a few more millennia in hell’s fires.

With STS-36 I dodged the SAS bullet for the third time. Maybe, I thought, God had given me a free pass in space because I had vomited enough for ten men in the backseat of the F-4 during my early flying career. Whatever the reason, I was happy to stow my unused barf bag. John Casper looked as if he might need it, but maybe not for SAS. It could have been his meal of eggplant and tomatoes. Gag. The NASA dietician included it because John’s other meal choices (heavy on butter cookies, M&Ms, and chocolate pudding) would leave him short of magnesium. I would have rather chewed on a magnesium flare. John hadn’t eaten the entrails-looking dish, but just rehydrating it would have made me sick. Regardless of the cause, John was feeling poorly and called on Dave Hilmers to inject him with the antinausea drug Phenergan. NASA had all but given up on patches and pills to treat SAS and had converted to industrial-strength injectable drugs. I reminded John of the warning the potion carried, “Do not operate an automobile under the influence of this drug.” He replied, “Lucky for me it doesn’t say anything about operating a space shuttle.”

Dave Hilmers was no doctor. He just played one in space. His premission training with needles had consisted of jabbing one into a piece of fruit. I would have to have been near death before I would have let a marine come near me with a needle. I expected to see blood and I wasn’t disappointed. Dave accidentally moved the needle while it was embedded in John’s ass and blood followed. A line of ruby planets shot from the wound like soap bubbles being blown out of a ring (giving new meaning to the term “airborne pathogen”). We chased the spheres with tissues. (Dave Hilmers must have been inspired by his needle work. After retirement from NASA he completed medical school and is now a pediatrician with a practice in Houston.)

While I had no nausea, I did experience the same painful backache from spine lengthening that I had encountered on STS-41D and 27. I also noticed the same Viagra effect. Every morning I would find myself painfully afflicted with a diamond-cutter erection, just like the geezers in the movie
Cocoon.
And I wasn’t the only one dealing with this problem. On one reveille, as we all floated in our sleep restraints, Pepe looked at me and said, “I must have had a great dream about Cheryl [his “snort” cute wife]. I’ve got a terrific boner.”

I smiled and replied, “I must have had a great dream about Cheryl, too.”

Pepe laughed. “Damn you, Mullane! Keep my wife out of that filthy brain of yours.”

Someday the blood shift of weightless flight will make for some very happy space colonists.

During the last sleep period of the mission, I stayed awake in the upper cockpit to soak up the space sights that would have to last the rest of my terrestrial life. I wanted to listen to music as I did so and searched for my NASA-supplied Walkman. It took me a moment to find it. The inside of the cockpit was covered with Velcro pads, and everything we carried, from pencils to cameras to food containers to flashlights, had Velcro “hooks” glued to them so they could be anchored to a pad. The only problem was remembering where you anchored everything. On Earth, nobody ever had to look on a wall or ceiling for a misplaced item. In space you did.

I put on headphones and inserted one of my personal-mix music tapes in the player (NASA allowed us six), then switched off the cockpit lights. Floating horizontally, I rolled belly up and pulled forward until my head was nearly touching a forward cockpit window. It was a trick Hank Hartsfield had taught me on STS-41D. With
Atlantis
in a ceiling-to-Earth attitude, my orientation had me lying facedown toward Earth. Though this attitude caused my body to brush against the ceiling instrument panels, which contained some of the most critical shuttle switches, I wasn’t worried about bumping one out of position. All the switches were set between two wire wickets so they could only be accessed by a thumb and forefinger inserted between those hoops.

The real joy of my new position was the illusion it created. I could put my head so far forward that the shuttle’s structure disappeared behind me. My view of Earth was completely unobstructed. It brought back memories of snorkeling in the Aegean Sea and watching the undersea life through my face mask. As I had then, I now had a powerful sense of being part of the element in which I was immersed, not a foreign visitor. When I steadied myself with my fingertips and then pulled those away, I would momentarily float free of any contact with
Atlantis,
enhancing the sensation of being a creature of space, not an astronaut locked in a machine.

To the strings of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” I watched my planet silently move under me. But this time I was seeing it as never before. Not only was our orbit steeply tilted to the equator, we were also in one of the lowest orbits ever flown by a space shuttle. We were scarcely 130 statute miles above the Earth, approximately the distance from New York City to the eastern tip of Long Island, or Los Angeles to San Deigo. At this altitude the planet was hugely close and there were new details of its earth, sea, and sky to thrill me.