Riding Rockets Read online

  Robot arm operations were challenging. A camera at the end of the arm transmitted images to a screen in the cockpit. MSes would look at these images and simultaneously use two hand controls to bring the arm’s business end to a successful grapple with the target. Using these hand controls while tracking a moving target on a display screen (how we would grapple a free-flying satellite) was like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. It required lots of practice. To assist us in developing tracking skills, the engineers provided a moving target that hung from the ceiling of the building.

  In one of my MDF sessions, I employed my newly acquired tracking skills to tease Judy Resnik. I knew from the schedule that she was next up for the training and watched for her to enter the building. When she did, I maneuvered the end of the robot arm so as to track her with the camera at its tip. She glanced up and saw the huge boom dipping and swaying and twisting to her every turn and knew exactly what I was doing. She stopped, and I flew the arm outward as if it were reaching for her, then slowly tilted the wrist joint so the camera scanned her body from head to toe. When she entered the cockpit, she smiled and said, “You’re a pig, Mullane.” I smiled back and pretended not to understand, but of course she was right.

  While I eagerly looked forward to SMS, WETF, and MDF simulations, there was one simulator I could have done without…. NASA’s zero-G plane, nicknamed “the Vomit Comet.” This was a modified Boeing 707 aircraft. Large sections of seats had been removed and the interior surfaces padded. After taking off from Ellington Field, the pilot would steer for the Gulf of Mexico, where he would fly the craft in a roller-coaster trajectory. While climbing toward the top of each “hill,” he would push forward on the controls so the trajectory of the plane exactly matched the pull of gravity. The result was a thirty-second free fall in which everything in the plane was weightless. Unrestrained astronauts in the back would float in their padded chamber. At the end of the dive, the pilot would perform a 2-G pullout that would smash everybody to the padded floor. He would then advance the throttles, climb back to 33,000 feet, and start all over. On a typical mission the process would be repeated about fifty times.

  It took only one flight in the jet to understand why it was named the Vomit Comet. The plane was a barf factory. Just climbing aboard, the nose would detect a faint odor of bile. Like cigarette smoke that cannot be removed from the drapes of a two-pack-a-day addict, the smell of stomach fluid had permeated the very aluminum structure of the machine. Even when its aged bones are someday sold for scrap and melted down, the recycled aluminum will still bear the aroma of our stomach acid.

  I quickly learned that the videos NASA released to the public of Vomit Comet–borne astronauts laughing and tumbling were recorded on the first couple dives because by the tenth weightless parabola someone would have already retreated into his or her seat and be vomiting copiously. Like the chain reaction of a nuclear explosion, the odor of fresh barf would drift through the cabin and send a few more over the edge. Those new smells would combine to affect yet more people. Even those who tried to block the smell by breathing through their mouths could not shield their senses, for the guttural sounds of the damned would fill the volume like a pack of barking German shepherds. By the twentieth parabola there were few smiles remaining. By the thirtieth parabola, some would be wishing the flight controls would freeze and the plane would smash into the sea at 600 knots and put them out of their misery. But through it all there would be the lucky minority, the immune who would smile and whoop and tumble and ask for more. I hated them.

  I never barfed on any of my Vomit Comet rides, but I had wanted to on all of them. From the fifth dive onward my gorge was continually at the back of my throat and only by a super-human effort was I able to keep it there. I sucked on Life Savers by the gross, hoping the constant swallowing reflex they generated would keep my stomach where it belonged. I knew I would have felt better had I periodically retreated to the rear of the plane and vomited, but that would have been a sign of weakness and a violation of rule number one: Better dead than look bad. Besides, there were female TFNGs unaffected by the maneuvers. The image of me strapped into the back with my head in a barf bag while Anna Fisher and Judy Resnik did loop-de-loops was too much for my testicles to take. So I faked it. When Judy suggested we do simultaneous somersaults I smiled through gritted teeth and nodded agreement, all the while cursing my balls for their bravado.

  Of all of NASA’s simulators, none was more memorable than the toilet trainer. It occupied a room next to the fixed-base SMS so astronauts could practice on it when they were in those training sessions. And practice was certainly needed.

  The shuttle toilet was basically a vacuum cleaner. (Do not try this at home.) The urinal was a suction hose with attachable funnels to accommodate male and female users. Because of its strong suction (one marine proposed marriage), the toilet checklist contained a warning for males not to allow the most cherished part of their anatomy to get too deep into the funnel. If an inattentive astronaut’s appendage got sucked into the hose, he would find himself qualified for a second career as a circus freak working under a banner heralding, “See the world’s longest and skinniest penis!”

  Urine was collected in a holding tank and dumped into space every few days. I would later find these urine dumps spectacular to watch. The fluid would freeze into thousands of ice crystals and shoot into space like tracer bullets.

  The toilet solid waste collection feature also used airflow as a flush medium. A plastic toilet seat sat atop a “transport tube” approximately four inches in diameter and a couple inches in length. Users attached themselves to the seat with padded thigh clamps then pulled a lever to open the transport tube cover and turn on the steering air jets. The waste would be directed into a large bulbous container directly beneath the user. Astronaut solid waste is not dumped outside but is retained in the toilet, no doubt to the great relief of the rest of humanity. If solid waste is ever dumped into space, it will give new meaning to the phenomenonmeteor shower.

  One feature of the toilet made it particularly difficult to use…the narrow opening of the solid waste transport tube. This was an engineering necessity to achieve an effective downward airflow, but it made transport tube “aim” critical to waste collection success. A user not perfectly aligned in the center of the tube could find their feces stuck to the sides of the tube and smeared over their rear end. To help the astronauts find their a-holes, NASA installed a camera at the bottom of the toilet simulator transport tube. A light inside the trainer provided illumination to a part of the body that normally didn’t get a lot of sunshine. A monitor was placed directly in front of the trainer with a helpful crosshair marker to designate the exact center of the transport tube. In our training we would clamp ourselves to this toilet and wiggle around until we were looking at a perfect bull’s-eye. When that was achieved we would memorize the position of our thighs and buttocks in relation to the clamps and other seat landmarks. By duplicating the same position on a space mission we could be assured of a perfect “shack” (fighter pilot lingo for a perfect bomb drop). Needless to say, this training took a lot of the glamour out of being an astronaut.

  The toilet design was essentially complete by the time TFNGs were undergoing waste management training, but an Edwards AFB Vomit Comet pilot told me of some of the early development efforts. These included female nurse volunteers who flew hundreds of weightless parabolas. They drank gallons of iced tea and during the thirty-second weightless falls would void into various toilet designs. Volunteers for the solid waste collection tests included a USAF lieutenant. The Vomit Comet would be parked near a taxiway with all the ground support equipment attached and ready to go, just like a Cold War nuclear bomber. And just like those bomber crews, the Vomit Comet pilots made sure they were ready for the scramble call…not from the president of the United States but rather from the bowel-distressed lieutenant screaming, “I’ve got to go!” At that, everybody would run to the plane, fire up the engine
s, and roar skyward. The weightless parabolas would begin and the test subject would have multiple thirty-second intervals to try a bowel movement. Where do we get such men?

  Urine collection for spacewalking females proved to be a particularly challenging engineering problem. Catheterization was quickly eliminated—too dangerous and uncomfortable. Diapers were messy. The most bizarre design was the brainchild of a gynecologist. He proposed that a mold of the inside of a woman’s vagina could be used as an alignment tool for urine collection. Before dressing in the spacesuit, the woman would insert her personal mold into her body, which would bring the exterior-mounted urine collector into a seal around the urethra. Urine could then be cleanly collected as it left the body. A test subject was needed to try the design and a call went out for volunteers. Kandy answered.

  Kandy was a free-spirited Ellington Field flight operations secretary with a wonderful sense of humor. She easily tolerated the AD astronauts, as when she pulled up a chair to join a group of us waiting for the fog to lift so we could fly our ’38s. Several of the navy astronauts were telling “beat this” stories about bizarre tattoos they had seen. One pilot recalled a photograph of a man’s crotch in the window of a Filipino tattoo parlor. Tattooed on the thighs of both his legs were huge elephant ears that gave the man’s penis the appearance of the animal’s trunk. (Who says we men aren’t in touch with our inner feelings?) Kandy joined in our laughter.

  It was later in my TFNG life when, at a party, she recounted being the volunteer for the vaginal-insert urine collection design. The gynecologist had made the mold and she had tried it, but with limited success. Eventually the design was rejected and diapers were adopted as the best solution. Kandy finished her story: “I’ve got the mold sitting on my coffee table at home.” Upon hearing that, I choked, shooting beer out my nose in the process. I had an instantaneous vision of a guest at Kandy’s home picking up the object and asking, “What’s this unique knickknack?” I told Kandy NASA should have given her a medal, or at least mounted the device on a plaque signed by the NASA administrator with an inscription,For service above and beyond the call of duty.

  NASA is filled with thousands of men and women who have labored in anonymity to put astronauts in space and make our lives somewhat comfortable once we get there. As I once heard an astronaut say, “We stand on their shoulders to get into orbit.” In the case of Kandy and those other toilet testers, we stood on other parts of their bodies.

  In our space-wardrobe fitting sessions, we encountered one other waste collection detail, which included a man’s worst nightmare. These sessions were conducted by white-smocked young ladies armed with tape measures, calipers, and clipboards. They measured our skulls, hands, limbs, and feet for helmets, gloves, and spacesuits. During my session I was as witty and charming as Burt Reynolds. I was a brand-new astronaut being fitted for a spacesuit. A bottle of tequila couldn’t have gotten me higher.

  At the end of the session a particularly sweet little custard walked me to a corner of the room that was screened from the rest of the facility. “Step inside and tell me what size fits you.”

  I pulled back the curtain and boldly walked forward, expecting to find a fitting room for underwear. But I was wrong. I had stepped into male hell. Forget about blowing up on a space shuttle. This wasreal fear. On a table, laid out like indictments, were four different-size condoms.

  I would learn an open-ended condom was part of the male urine collection system worn under the pressure-suit cooling garment. One end of the latex slipped over the penis, the other end was connected to a waist-worn nylon bladder. Urine could pass through the condom, through a one-way valve, and into the nylon bladder. After a launch, landing, or spacewalk (the three times when the toilet was inaccessible) the bladder/condom combination, known as a Urine Collection Device (UCD), could be stripped from the body and thrown away. In a really cruel joke, God created different-size penises, so NASA provided different-size condoms. The cute little filly on the other side of the curtain needed my stud size on her clipboard so the correct condom could be loaded in my personal locker when I finally flew in space.

  With all the enthusiasm of a prisoner walking to the gallows I dropped my pants. Until this moment in my life I had worn a condom only during brief periods in my marriage when my wife had stopped her birth control pills. On those occasions there had been a sense of urgency and enthusiasm about donning the one-size-fits-all latex scabbard. Not now. I looked down at an appendage that was in the process of renouncing circumcision and finding some heretofore unknown foreskin to hide behind.

  I reached for the largest condom. Astronauts are the most competitive people in the world. From supplying an autograph to fitting a rubber, we’re out to be the best, the fastest, the smartest…thebiggest. If there had been a hula hoop on that table, male astronauts would have seized it with hope in their souls.

  I grabbed my cowering little friend and began work. “Don’t you have anything bigger?” I nervously joked to the cutie on the other side of the curtain. I’m sure she had never heard that one before.

  Why didn’t they have a man collecting this information?I wondered. Then, I thought,That would be even worse .

  Putting a flaccid penis in a condom is like shoving toothpaste back in the tube. I finally managed to corral the beast and did a few jiggles to see if the rubber would stay on. It fell to the floor. My testicles might as well have joined it. I had been emasculated. Clearly, I wasn’t going to place first in this competition. Of course I could have lied and said I needed theannihilator size, but to do so would have been to invite disaster during a spacewalk. If the condom didn’t fit, it would leak or even come off altogether, in which case the cooling garment would become a urine sponge. As uncomfortable as that sounds, it would be the least of the victim’s problems. An astronaut would never outlive the teasing.

  I finally made a fit and gave the technician my size, wanting to add, “I’ll have you know I’ve fathered three children with this!”

  Many years later astronauts were outraged when a pilot’s medical records were compromised to the press. Some in the media were questioning his suitability to command an important shuttle mission since he had been treated for kidney stones. Astronauts were livid that the flight surgeon’s office had somehow leaked this private medical information. As the brouhaha raged, I told a fellow TFNG, “I don’t care if they publish my medical records in theNew York Times. I just hope the record of my condom size is locked up in a vault in Cheyenne Mountain.” He understood. There are worse things to read about in the paper than the fact that you have passed a kidney stone.

  Chapter 14

  Adventures in Public Speaking

  With the astronaut title came two duties few of us had ever performed in our past careers: giving public speeches and press interviews. While NASA didn’t force astronauts onto the speaking circuit, they did expect everybody to voluntarily take about a dozen trips a year to represent the agency at the head tables of America. The astronaut office received hundreds of requests a month for speakers, so there were plenty of events to pick from.

  Like the majority of people, most astronauts fear public speaking more than death. As the joke goes, “Most people would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.” I witnessed this hierarchy of terrors one dark and stormy night in the backseat of a T-38. My pilot was Blaine Hammond (class of 1984). After finishing a day of practice shuttle approaches at the White Sands shuttle runway, we were making a night takeoff from El Paso’s airport for our return to Houston. Our eastward departure was sending us into an ink black sky over a similarly darkened desert. Just as Blaine pulled the nose from the runway, I noticed a yellow flickering in the cockpit rearview mirrors and was about to comment on it when the El Paso tower interrupted. “Departing NASA jet, you’re on fire. There’s a flame trailing from your aircraft.” We were already airborne and well beyond our maximum abort speed. We had no choice but to continue our climb. I quickly informed Blaine of the flickering yellow
in the mirrors. Clearly, our jet was burning behind us. Blaine yanked the engines out of afterburner (AB) and declared an emergency. El Paso tower immediately cleared us to land on any runway we could make. My thoughts were on ejection. The checklist was clear: In bold lettering it read, “Confirmed Fire—Eject.” You don’t get better confirmation than having the tower tell you you’re riding a meteor. I cinched my harness to the point of pain and placed my hands on the ejection handles and mentally reviewed the bailout procedures. As I was doing so, I continued to watch the engine instruments. The nozzle position on the left engine was the only off-nominal indication. At the power setting of the throttle the nozzle should have been more closed than what was indicated. There were no firelights and the fire-warning circuitry checked okay. I snatched my mask from my face and breathed the ambient air. There was no odor of smoke. The tower was telling us we were on fire, but there was no indication of it in the cockpit.

  “Something’s wrong with the left engine. I’m going to keep it at idle and make a single-engine approach.” Blaine stated his intention and immediately banked the plane toward the nearest runway.

  I challenged the decision. “That’s not what the checklist says we should be doing.” I didn’t have to say the wordeject. Blaine knew the emergency procedures as well as I did.

  “I know, but she’s flying fine.” I could tell in his voice Blaine was as frightened as I was about our predicament. The planewas flying fine and neither of us wanted to leave the security of his cockpit for the black outside. The thought of pulling those handles was absolutely terrifying. But, by staying with the plane, we were in clear violation of the emergency procedures.

  I heard the tower wave off an airliner to give us every option for landing. We had the field to ourselves. I wondered if we would soon be putting on a fireworks display for a planeload of TWA passengers.