Riding Rockets (6 page)

When I was sufficiently sober, I left for my apartment. The base was far out in the desert and the road was deserted. I honked the horn and screamed like a teenage girl at a rock concert. I rolled down the window and screamed into the icy wind. I detoured into the desert, got out of the car, and screamed some more. I couldn’t calm down. I punched the air with my fists. I jumped and sprinted and kicked the sand and laughed out loud. Finally, I hopped onto the warm hood, lay back, and watched the stars turn over my head, just as I had done on countless occasions as a child. When a satellite twinkled over, my heart gave a small lurch. God willing, in a few years, I would be riding rockets. I would be in a satellite…the space shuttle.

Now, two weeks later, I was standing with the other thirty-four astronauts of my group. Though our official report date wasn’t until July, NASA had gathered us all together for an early, formal introduction to the world.

The Astronaut Class of 1978

(towns and cities are birthplaces)

Pilot Astronauts

Daniel Brandenstein, Watertown, WI, Lieutenant Commander, USN, age 34

Michael Coats, Sacramento, CA, Lieutenant Commander, USN, age 32

Richard Covey, Fayetteville, AR, Major, USAF, age 31

John “J. O.” Creighton, Orange, TX, Lieutenant Commander, USN, age 34

Robert “Hoot” Gibson, Cooperstown, NY, Lieutenant, USN, age 31

Frederick Gregory, Washington, D.C., Major, USAF, age 37

David Griggs, Portland, OR, Civilian, age 38

Frederick Hauck, Long Beach, CA, Commander, USN, age 36

Jon McBride, Charleston, WV, Lieutenant Commander, USN, age 34

Steven Nagel, Canton, IL, Captain, USAF, age 31

Francis “Dick” Scobee, Cle Elum, WA, Major, USAF, age 38

Brewster Shaw, Cass City, MI, Captain, USAF, age 32

Loren Shriver, Jefferson, IA, Captain, USAF, age 33

David Walker, Columbus, GA, Lieutenant Commander, USN, age 33

Donald Williams, Lafayette, IN, Lieutenant Commander, USN, age 35

Military Mission Specialist Astronauts

Guion “Guy” Bluford, Philadelphia, PA, Major, USAF, age 35

James Buchli, New Rockford, ND, Captain, USMC, age 32

John Fabian, Goosecreek, TX, Major, USAF, age 38

Dale Gardner, Fairmont, MN, Lieutenant, USN, age 29

R. Michael Mullane, Wichita Falls, TX, Captain, USAF, age 32

Ellison Onizuka, Kealakekua, Kona, HI, Captain, USAF, age 31

Robert Stewart, Washington, D.C., Major, U.S. Army, age 35

Civilian Mission Specialist Astronauts

Anna Fisher, New York City, NY, age 28

Terry Hart, Pittsburgh, PA, age 31

Steven Hawley, Ottawa, KS, age 26

Jeffrey Hoffman, Brooklyn, NY, age 33

Shannon Lucid, Shanghai, China, age 35

Ronald McNair, Lake City, SC, age 27

George “Pinky” Nelson, Charles City, IA, age 27

Judith Resnik, Akron, OH, age 28

Sally Ride, Los Angeles, CA, age 26

Margaret “Rhea” Seddon, Murfreesboro, TN, age 30

Kathryn Sullivan, Paterson, NJ, age 26

Norman Thagard, Marianna, FL, age 34

James “Ox” van Hoften, Fresno, CA, age 33

Actually, I was standing with thirty-four other astronaut
candidates.
Our group, ultimately to be known as the TFNGs or Thirty-Five New Guys, became the first to have the suffix
candidate
added to our astronaut titles. Until the TFNG handle stuck, we would be known as Ascans. (A later class would call themselves Ashos for
Astronaut Hopefuls.
) NASA had learned the hard way that the title
astronaut
by itself had some significant cachet. In one of the Apollo-era astronaut groups, a disillusioned scientist had quit the program before ever flying into space and had written a book critical of the agency. Since his official title had been astronaut, his publisher had been able to legitimately promote the book with the impressive astronaut byline. Now NASA was hedging its bets with our group. For two years we would be candidates on probation with the agency. If one of us decided to quit and go public with some grievance, NASA would be able to dismiss us as nothing more than a candidate, not a real astronaut. Personally, I felt the titling was an exercise in semantics. In my mind you weren’t an astronaut until you rode a rocket, regardless of what a NASA press release might say.

Dr. Chris Kraft, the JSC director, welcomed us. As a teenager I had seen his picture in
Life
magazine articles about the Apollo program. Now, he was welcoming me into the NASA family.
Pinch me,
I ordered my guardian angel.

A NASA public relations officer began to read each of our names and an audience of NASA employees applauded. There were fifteen pilot astronauts. I was one of twenty mission specialist (MS) astronauts. MSes would not be at the stick and throttle controls of the shuttle. In fact, most of us were not pilots. Our responsibilities would include operating the robot arm, performing experiments, and doing spacewalks. As the name implied, we would be the specialists for the orbit activities of the mission.

As the role call neared the “Ms,” my heart was trying to make like an alien and explode out of my chest. I still couldn’t believe this was for real. When he got to it, I expected the announcer to pause on my name, look bewildered, consult with Chris Kraft, and then say, “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a mistake on this list. You can scratch R. Michael Mullane. He’s a typo. He couldn’t count backward by 7s.” Then, two burly security guards would grab me by the elbows and escort me to the main gate.

But the announcer read my name without hesitation. He didn’t stumble. He didn’t consult Dr. Kraft. He read it like I was
supposed
to be on the list.
It’s truly official now,
I thought. I had to believe it. I was a new astronaut…candidate.

The diversity of America was represented on that stage. There was a mother of three (Shannon Lucid), two astronauts of the Jewish faith (Jeff Hoffman and Judy Resnik), and one Buddhist (El Onizuka). There were Catholics and Protestants, atheists and fundamentalists. Truth be known, there were probably gay astronauts among us. The group included three African Americans, one Asian American, and six females. Every press camera was focused on this rainbow coalition, particularly the females. I could have mooned the press corps and I would not have been noticed. The white TFNG males were invisible.

Another first was the political diversity of the group. Military pilots, the mainstay of prior astronaut selections, were almost always politically conservative. They were highly educated, self-reliant, critical thinkers who scorned the “everybody’s a victim” ethos of liberalism. But the reign of the right ended with the large number of civilian astronauts standing on that stage. Among their ranks were people who had probably protested the Vietnam War, who thought Ted Kennedy’s likeness should be on Mount Rushmore, who had marched for gay rights, abortion rights, civil rights, and animal rights. For the first time in history, the astronaut title was being bestowed on tree-huggers, dolphin-friendly fish eaters, vegetarians, and subscribers to the
New York Times.

There was another uniqueness about the civilians…their aura of youthful naïveté. While the average age difference between the military and civilian astronauts wasn’t extreme (approximately five years), the life-experience difference was enormous. Some of the civilians were “post-docs,” a title I had first heard that inauguration day. Literally, they had been perpetual students, continuing their studies at universities after earning their PhDs. These were men and women who, until a few weeks ago, had been star gazing in mountaintop observatories and whose greatest fear had been an A- on a research paper. Their lives were light-years apart from those of the military men of the group. We were Vietnam combat veterans. One helicopter pilot, told of making low-level rocket attacks and having exploded body parts hit the windshield of his gunship and smear it with blood. We were test pilots and test engineers. In our work a mistake wasn’t noted by a professor in the margin of a thesis, but instead brought instant death. Rick Hauck, a navy pilot, had barely escaped death in an ejection from a crashing fighter. I had my own fighter-jet ejection experience.

It wasn’t just this proximity to war and death that differentiated the military flyers from the post-docs, it was also the civilians’ lack of exposure to life…at least their exposure to the rawer side of life. On a stopover in the Philippines on my way to Vietnam I checked into a hotel and was handed a San Miguel beer and a loose-leaf binder with photos of the available prostitutes. It was room service. Place your order now. As they say, one of the first casualties of war is innocence. To sit at a Vietnamese bar was to have a woman immediately at your side stroking your crotch, trying to make a sale. Everybody had a favorite number at the Happy Ending Massage Parlor (to simplify identification, available girls wore numbered placards around their necks) and I knew many aviators in Vietnam who had their PCOD circled on their calendar. This was their Pussy Cutoff Date, the date at which they would have to stop their whoring to allow the incubation period for STDs to pass (and for a cure to be achieved) before going home. One navy TFNG told of sitting in a dirt-floored Southeast Asia bar while a naked GI got it on with a prostitute on an adjacent table. It was just a wild guess on my part, but I doubted any of the post-docs had similar experiences in the Berkeley SUB. There was a softness, an innocence in their demeanor that suggested they had lived cloistered lives. It was hard for me to look at some of them and not think they were kids. Some might still have been virgins. Steve Hawley, George (Pinky) Nelson, and Anna Fisher were exceptionally young in the face. There was no way they were going to get inside a bar without being carded. Jeff Hoffman was the picture of academia. He had arrived at NASA with a beard and a collapsible bicycle suitable for the Boston subway. He didn’t even own a car. He rode to work on his bike and carried a lunch pail. All that was missing were suede elbow patches on his suit coat and a pipe in his mouth to make the “professor” picture complete.

I felt a subtle hostility toward the civilian candidates. I know many of the military astronauts shared my feelings. In our minds the post-docs hadn’t paid their dues to be standing on that stage. We had. For us, it had been a life quest. If someone had told us our chances of being selected as an astronaut would improve if we sacrificed our left testicle, we would have grabbed a rusty razor and begun cutting. I couldn’t see that passion in the eyes of the civilians. Instead, I had this image of Sally Ride and the other post-docs, just a few months earlier, bebopping through the student union building in a save-the-whales T-shirt and
accidentally
seeing the NASA astronaut selection announcement on the bulletin board and throwing in an application on a lark. Now they were here. It wasn’t right.

As the photographers continued to flash-blind the females and minorities, I watched Judy Resnik and Rhea Seddon (pronounced “Ray”). Between them, there would be one more first represented in our group: the first “hotty” in space. Judy was a raven-haired beauty, Rhea a striking Tennessee blonde. No TFNG male was looking at them and fantasizing about their PhDs.

Chapter 6

The Space Shuttle

As we TFNGs gloried in our introduction, we were woefully ignorant of the machine we were going to fly. We knew the space shuttle would be different from NASA’s previous manned rockets, but we had no clue just how different or how the differences would affect the risks to our lives.

Before the space shuttle, every astronaut who had ever launched into space had ridden in capsules on throwaway rockets. The only thing that had ever come back to Earth was the capsule bearing the astronauts. Even these capsules had been tossed aside, placed in museums across America. While the capsules had grown in size to accommodate three men, and the rockets to carry them had grown bigger and more powerful, the basic Spam-in-a-can design, launched with expendable rockets, had been unchanged since Alan Shepard said, “Light this candle,” on the first Mercury-Redstone flight.

We would fly a winged vehicle, half spacecraft and half airplane. It would be vertically launched into space, just as the rockets of yesteryear, but the winged craft would be capable of reentering the atmosphere at twenty-five times the speed of sound and gliding to a landing like a conventional airplane. Thousands of silica tiles glued to the belly of the craft and sheets of carbon bolted to the leading edge of the wings and nose would protect it from the 3,000-degree heat of reentry. After a week or two of maintenance and the installation of another 65,000-pound payload in the cargo bay, it would be ready to launch on another mission.

The space shuttle orbiter (the winged vehicle) would have three liquid-fueled engines at its tail, producing a total thrust of nearly 1.5 million pounds. These would burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen from a massive belly-mounted gas tank or External Tank (ET). Eight and a half minutes after liftoff the empty ET would be jettisoned to burn up in the atmosphere, making it the only part of the “stack” that was not reusable.

As powerful as they were, the three Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) did not have the muscle to lift the machine into orbit by themselves. The extra thrust of booster rockets would be needed. NASA wanted a reusable liquid-fueled booster system but parachuting a liquid-fueled rocket into salt water posed major reusability issues. It would be akin to driving an automobile into the ocean, pulling it out, and then hoping it started again when you turned the key. Good luck. So the engineers had been faced with designing a system whereby the liquid-fueled boosters could be recovered on land. It quickly became apparent that it would be impossible to parachute such massive pieces of complex machinery to Earth without damaging them and posing a safety hazard to civilian population centers. So the engineers looked at gliding them to a runway landing. One of the earliest space shuttle designs incorporated just such a concept. Like mating dolphins, two winged craft, each manned, would lift off together, belly to belly. One would be a giant liquid-fueled booster/gas tank combination, the other, the orbiter. After lifting the smaller orbiter part of the way to space, the booster would separate and two astronauts would glide it to a landing at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The astronauts aboard the orbiter would continue to fly it into space using internal fuel for the final acceleration to orbit velocity.