Riding Rockets Read online

  Day after day, Red Flash and I would take off from El Paso and search the Chihuahuan desert for twelve thousand feet of straight, flat, firm earth. And day after day, I would return to El Paso with my butt cheeks fatigued from an hour of ass-clinching fear. It wasn’t that Dave was a bad pilot. Rather he was too cocky, the type of pilot who thinks he’s bulletproof even when he’s sober. (All fighter pilots think they’re bulletproof when they’re intoxicated.) He was the pilot that backseaters had in mind when they had coined this joke:

  Question: “What are the last words a dead backseater ever hears from his pilot?”

  Answer: “Watch this.”

  I was living that grim joke in Dave’s backseat. When we spied a likely playa from altitude, Dave would say, “Watch this,” and dive for the sand. To my left or right I would see our plane’s shadow paralleling us at 300 knots. It would porpoise over hill and dale, quickly drawing closer and closer as Dave dropped lower and lower, until it finally disappeared underneath us. If our jet had had the curb-feelers of a ’59 Edsel, I would have heard them scratching a warning into the desert a foot underneath us. Our engine exhaust had to be frying lizards, snakes, prairie dogs, and other ground-hugging fauna. And while I was white with fear, Dave was jotting observations about the condition of the terrain on his knee board.

  In the early morning hours of April 12, 1981, Dave and I and the rest of the chase team were in the El Paso airport flight operations office, gathered around a TV watching the final moments ofColumbia ’s countdown. The previous night I had slept lightly and each time I awoke I would pray for Young and Crippen. I had a strong sense of dread about the mission. WhenColumbia ’s hold-down bolts blew, her crew would be irrevocably committed to a flight that was more experimental than any manned flight in history. Forget Alan Shepard, John Glenn, or Neil Armstrong as astronauts who had taken unequaled gambles. Their Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn rockets had all been proven before they had ever climbed on board. Young and Crippen would be making history by riding a rocket on its very first launch. They weren’t doing so reluctantly. The astronaut office had no problems with this decision, even though it would have been relatively easy to modify the vehicle to fly a first test mission unmanned. (In 1988 the Russians successfully flew,unmanned, the first and only mission of their space shuttle. It made two orbits of the Earth then flew under autopilot control to a perfect touchdown.) While the manned/unmanned debate overColumbia ’s maiden flight had occurred before TFNGs had arrived at NASA, I could easily guess how long astronauts had discussed the topic before concluding a manned flight was the way to go…about five seconds. Astronauts will always be ready to jump into a cockpit. Any cockpit. Any time. There wasn’t a single TFNG who wouldn’t have volunteered to be ballast aboardColumbia.

  But Young and Crippen would be taking an enormous risk and I feared for their lives. The only thing that had been positively demonstrated about the shuttle design was that it would glide from 25,000 feet to a landing. Four flight tests off the back of a 747 carrier aircraft had proven that. The solid rocket boosters and SSMEs had been ground-tested multiple times but had never actually flown in space. In fact, the SRBs had never even been tested vertically. In each of their firings, the rocket had been in a horizontal position, a fact that made many of us doubt the tests were really duplicating the stresses and strains of a vertical launch. The massive gas tank had never experienced the shake, rattle, and roll of a launch. There had been no full-scale flight tests of the 24,000-heat-tile mosaic that was glued toColumbia ’s belly. How would it do in the 17,000-mile-per-hour, 3,000-degree wind of reentry? And no spacecraft had ever glided 12,000 miles to a “one-chance” landing—but that’s exactly whatColumbia was going to have to do. And the unknowns weren’t just in the STS hardware. The shuttle’s computer system contained hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Billions of dollars and years of labor had been spent to validate that software but there were still thousands of permutations that had not been tested and that could contain fatal flaws. Would an engine failure at precisely T+1:13 in conjunction with an unexpected wind sheer at 65,000-feet altitude cause a software switch in some black box to flip to a different polarity and sendColumbia out of control? To an extent never before seen in spaceflight, the space shuttle was certified to carry astronauts based upon the wizardry of computer modeling. For a decade, engineers conducted thousands of ground tests in every imaginable engineering specialty: aeronautical, electrical, chemical, mechanical, hypersonic flight dynamics, cryogenic fluid dynamics, propulsion, flutter dynamics, aeroelasticity, and a hundred others. They digitized data gleaned from wind tunnel tests, engine tests, hydraulic tests, heat tile tests, and flight control tests and dumped the results into computers humming with the equations of Max Planck, Bernoulli, and Fourier. When the thousands of answers were finally assembled and examined, the engineers cheered. Computer models said their new shuttle system would work, that its twin SRBs and three SSMEs burning 4 million pounds of propellant in81 /2minutes would propel a quarter-million-pound winged orbiter to a speed of nearly 5 miles per second and an altitude of 200 miles. These same models also assured their brainy authors the orbiter would be able to make a powerless hemispheric-long glide to a 15,000-foot-long strip of runway. Of course, many of these same engineers had done the same thing in the development of the Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn rockets of the past manned programs, but in those programs, after all their testing and modeling were complete and the answer was “This rocket will fly,” they had still walked cautiously. “We could be wrong in this model, or maybe in this model, or in this one,” they had said. “We better test this puppy unmanned a couple times before we strap astronauts to it. And when we do, we better give the crew a way of surviving a booster failure throughall of ascent.” And they had. But not with the space shuttle. Its cherry flight was going to be manned. The engineers had foreseen the possibility of catastrophe and had included SR-71 Blackbird ejection seats for the two-man crew, but those were only usable during the first two minutes of launch; after that, the shuttle would be too high and too fast for an ejection seat bailout. The seats wouldn’t again be usable until the shuttle was below about 100,000 feet and Mach 3.0, about ten minutes prior to landing. During the rest of the ride Crippen and Young would have zero chance of escape. Actually, the two-minute launch envelope of the ejection seat was even suspect. Many felt there was a good chance an ejection during launch would send them through the 5,000-degree plume of the SRBs. They would be vaporized. There was no doubt about it. Young and Crippen were human guinea pigs like no other astronauts before. It was another manifestation of Apollo hubris. Mere mortals might not be able to certify a rocket asman-ready with computers, but the gods of Apollo could.

  I watched on TV asColumbia ’s SSMEs came to life and a cloud of steam billowed from the flame bucket. When the SRBs ignited andColumbia was airborne, I almost pissed my pants. We jumped from our seats cheering. It was an act duplicated around televisions at Johnson Space Center and Marshall Spaceflight Center and on the floors of countless aerospace factories and in millions of living rooms around the country. The TV showed a man at the Kennedy Space Center jumping up and down and punching his fist into the sky like a Little Leaguer celebrating a home run flying over the centerfield fence. Another view showed a man standing on top of an RV wildly waving an American flag as he watchedColumbia ’s smoke trail arc to the east. Another camera caught a woman dabbing at her tearing eyes. Everywhere the cameras captured a frenzied public. It was Woodstock, a NASCAR race, and a Virgin Mary appearance all wrapped into one overpowering, soul-capturing Happening.

  And it only got better. At T+2 minutes and 12 seconds a flash of fire and smoke signaled the separation of the boosters. It was another computer-modeled milestone successfully passed.Columbia rapidly diminished to just a blue-white star and then disappeared completely. But we didn’t need to see her to know how things were going. We could tell by the abort boundary calls coming from MCC: Negative return, Two Engine TAL, S
ingle-Engine TAL, Press to MECO. It was gobbledygook to most of America, but for astronauts it was the sweet song of nominal flight. At Young’s call of “MECO!” we all cheered again.Columbia had given her crew a perfect ride. I knew our celebration was premature. There was still a lot that could go wrong beforeColumbia was safely back on Earth. But, like the Apostle Thomas, I had seen with my own eyes and now I believed. If those gods of Apollo could put her into orbit with their computer models, they could certainly bring her safely home on the wings of their computer models.

  On the flight back to Houston I couldn’t relax the smile on my face. It was giving me a headache. But I didn’t care. It had been nearly three years since I had entered NASA and this was the first time I really felt I had a chance of becoming an astronaut in anything but name only. Until I heard Young’s MECO call, I hadn’t truly believed it could happen. I had been convincedColumbia was going to end up on the bottom of the Atlantic and the closest I would ever get to space would be in a T-38. And I wasn’t the only doubter. I would later hear that Pinky Nelson, upon the MECO call, had jumped from his seat and shouted, “Now I can put in a swimming pool!” Pinky had been a heretic, too. He hadn’t truly believed in the gods of Apollo, and he had put off a decision to build a swimming pool until he knew he had a real job. InColumbia ’s 8½ minute ascent, his dream of spaceflight,all of our dreams of spaceflight, had taken a giant leap toward reality. Mine was no longer the diaphanous mirage I had been following for twenty-five years. The gods of Apollo had fashioned a machine that could turn my astronaut pin to gold.

  Chapter 16

  Pecking Order

  April 19, 1982, effectively marked the end of the TFNG brotherhood. It was on that day George Abbey assembled us to announce, “We’ve made some crew assignments.” Like Hollywood stars hearing, “Can I have the envelope, please,” we held our breath at Abbey’s words. For four years, in hundreds of Outpost Tavern happy hours, on thousands of T-38 flights, around countless supper tables, we had asked the question of one another, of ourselves, of our spouses, of God:When would we be assigned to a shuttle mission? The room was space-silent as Abbey read the names. “The STS-7 crew will be Crippen, Hauck, Fabian, and Ride. STS-8 will have Truly, Brandenstein, Bluford, and Gardner. STS-9 will be Young, Shaw, Garriott, Parker, and two payload specialists. Hopefully we’ll get more people assigned soon.” That was it. God walked from the room.

  Poof.With Abbey’s words TFNG camaraderie vaporized. I don’t believe there was ever again a social gathering of all TFNGs. As a group wallowing in a common uncertainty and united in a common distrust of our management, it had been easy to share a beer at the Outpost. Now we had been cleaved into haves and have-nots. There was a pecking order; some of us were better than others. I tried my best to be rational—somebodyhad to be first. We couldn’t all be. But I couldn’t accept that rationale and I doubted any of the others could either. We were too competitive. It wasThe Right Stuff syndrome as described by Tom Wolfe. The seven flight-assigned TFNGs had more of thatstuff than the rest of us. We, theunassigned, had been left behind. I would later see first-flight assignments have the same effect on every astronaut class. Their all-for-one and one-for-all camaraderie would end just as abruptly as ours had. The effect could have been somewhat assuaged if Young and Abbey had been open about the flight assignment process, but all Abbey left us with was “Hopefully we’ll get more people assigned soon.” That wasn’t a lot to hang on to. Abbey’s and Young’s silence on the mechanics and calendar of flight assignments was earning them a growing enmity.

  With George’s announcement still echoing in my brain, I wished for a hole in the earth to open and swallow me. I wanted to nurse my wounded ego in private, but that wasn’t an option. Like the also-rans at the Academy Awards, I had to don a fake smile and shake the hands of the winners. They were incandescent. You could feel the heat from their faces. Several of the blessed tried to mollify us with comments like, “You’ll be getting a flight soon” and “Your day is coming, too.” I was being pitied. I didn’t think I could feel lower. But I was wrong. I heard Sally comment, “George told us of the assignments a week ago, but he wanted us to keep it quiet until the press release.” I wondered how many times in the past week I had been eating lunch in the cafeteria with Rick Hauck or John Fabian and whining about the delay in flight assignments, and all the while he had been silently celebrating his mission appointment. God, I felt so pathetic.

  As I drifted from the room, I heard Fred Gregory’s sotto voce growl, “This is bullshit!” His head and shoulders slumped in depression. Another casualty. Then it dawned on me. He had not just been passed over for an early flight assignment. He was black. He had just been passed over as the first African American in space. Guy Bluford would seize that title on STS-8. I was just a white guy. My name would never be on anybody’s Trivial Pursuit card regardless of when I flew. But Guy Bluford would be history. And Sally Ride, as the first American woman in space, would become an icon. Some had lost more than just a mission assignment with Abbey’s announcement. Some had lost history and the payday that came with celebrity. Sally Ride, in particular, had just been handed a free ticket through life. As the first American woman in space she could look forward to book deals, speech honorariums, corporate board seats, and consulting fees that could earn her millions.

  As the seismic wave of Abbey’s announcement was tearing apart the TFNGs, we were blissfully ignorant of another 9.0 wave moving through the system. Five months earlier, one of the eight O-rings on STS-2’s recovered right-side booster had shown heat damage. This discovery had shocked the SRB engineers. Since the boosters were twelve feet in diameter, had a hollow center, and burned from the inside toward the outside, the perimeter-installed O-rings were far from the 5,000-degree gas throughout most of the burn. The unburned propellant served as an insulator. (In the final seconds of the burn, other insulation material at the walls kept the heat from the O-rings.) The O-rings should never show heat damage. And in seven ground tests and one mission (STS-1), involving a total of sixty-four primary and sixty-four backup O-rings, no heat damage had ever been recorded. The fact that an O-ring inside STS-2’s right-side booster had been damaged was an indication that, at some point in flight, it had not held the nearly 1,000-pounds-per-square-inch pressure inside the tube and a finger of fire had worked between the segment facings to touch it. This suggested a serious problem with the joint design. But no consideration was given to stopping shuttle flights and conducting more ground tests. The NASA PR machine had promised Congress and the American public a rapid expansion of the shuttle flight rate with a vehicle turnaround time measured in a few weeks.Schedule had become the 800-pound gorilla in shuttle operations. Nobody wanted to wrestle with it. Instead, engineers at Thiokol and NASA searched for a way to continue operations in spite of the STS-2 anomaly. So they intentionally damaged an O-ring to a much greater degree than the damage they had observed on STS-2, put it in a laboratory test article, and pressurized it to three times the pressure developed by a burning SRB. The damaged O-ring held the pressure. Armed with these impressive results the Thiokol engineers endorsed their product as flight worthy. Lost in this process, however, was the fact something never expected and not completely understood had been accepted.

  No astronaut was aware of the SRB O-ring problem. In fact, most of us were ignorant of the entire SRB design. There was only a single indication of SRB performance available in the cockpit of a launching shuttle. As the tube pressure fell to less than 50 pounds per square inch, a message flashed on the computer screens giving a warning that burnout and separation were near. Since we had little insight and no control over a burning SRB, we didn’t waste our time in studying its design. We had too many other things into which we did have insight and over which we did have control (the liquid-fueled engines, hydraulics, electrical system, etc.). We devoted our time to learning the design and operation of these systems. We were convinced the SRBs were just big, dumb skyrockets, as safe and reliable as a hobby st
ore model rocket. It was the SSMEs, which periodically blew up in ground tests, that we feared most.

  The Thiokol and NASA SRB engineers were buoyed when STS-3’s boosters returned with no O-rings damaged. It was full speed ahead with the shuttle program.

  And the program shifted into overdrive on July 4, 1982. It was then that President Ronald Reagan and the First Lady celebrated Independence Day at Edwards AFB by personally welcoming Ken Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield back from space after their successful STS-4 mission. Reagan called attention to the latest orbiter to join the shuttle fleet,Challenger. Fresh from the nearby Rockwell factory, that vehicle was mounted atop its 747 carrier aircraft ready to take off for Florida as soon as the president finished his comments. It was an incredibly intoxicating sight.Columbia sat on the cracked dirt of the lakebed looking every bit the veteran of four spaceflights, with her nose and fuselage streaked with soot from four blazing reentries.Challenger sparkled in her virgin newness. It was the perfect backdrop as the president continued his speech and declared the space shuttle program “operational.”

  That label had never really been defined, but it was easy to sense how most of NASA and all of the public interpreted it.Operational meant the shuttle was nothing more than a very high-flying airliner. I doubt there was a single military aviator astronaut who believed that. Fighter jets of far less complexity than the shuttle routinely suffered malfunctions resulting in crashes. We were certain one awaited the shuttle, too, and when it happened, it would mean death for her crew. While the operational label was nebulous, it did contain one certainty—all future shuttle missions would be flown in vehicles with no in-flight escape system. There were no ejection seats inChallenger ’s cockpit and the two inColumbia would soon be removed. That had been the plan from the very beginning. President Reagan’s “operational” declaration was merely photo-op tensile. But contained in it was a shuttle design feature that would condemn some of us to death.