Riding Rockets Read online

  Chapter 17

  Prime Crew

  I knew there were binoculars focused on us as we made the trek to Building 1. I was in the company of four others who had also been called for the same appointment: Hank Hartsfield, a veteran of STS-4, and fellow TFNGs Mike Coats, Steve Hawley, and Judy Resnik. There was no mistaking the meaning of this gaggle. It screamedflight assignment . It was all I could do not to break into a sprint for the headquarters building.

  It might have been the very first time in my five years as a TFNG that I had been to Abbey’s office. As befitting a deity, it was a large corner office on the eighth floor that looked out on our home, Building 4. None of us believed that sight line was an accident. George wanted his shadow to fall over his subjects at all times.

  The secretary waved us through and we entered to find him standing behind his expansive desk. He wore a coat and tie, the coat unbuttoned and his belly prominent. Though it was midmorning his jowls were already darkened with a faint beard. Several documents and an overflowing in or out box (I couldn’t tell which) littered the mahogany. I had a momentary wonder,What was all the paper about? It was a standing TFNG joke that Abbey never left a paper trail. Few could recall ever seeing his signature on any document.

  “Have a seat.” He motioned us to a ring of chairs.

  “We’ve been looking at the mission manifest…” As was his custom, George never made significant eye contact and he mumbled his words. I could sense everybody leaning forward to gain another decibel. “…and think it’s time to assign some more crews. I was wondering if you would be interested in STS-41D? It would be the first flight ofDiscovery. ” It was beyond what I had prayed for. Not only was I being offered a mission, I was being offered a position on the first flight of the orbiterDiscovery. Aviators live for the day they might be the first to take a new jet into the air, and we were being offered the first flight of a space shuttle. Like the Stockholm Syndrome hostages we were, we all groveled in thanks.

  George asked us not to publicly mention the assignment until the press release was made in a couple days. Mike Coats whispered to me, “When I get home, I’m calling everybody in my Rolodex.” There was no way I was going to withhold this information from my family, either.

  On the walk back to Building 4, I considered my incredible fortune. Besides getting the first flight ofDiscovery, I was also part of a great crew. At age forty-nine, snowy-haired Hank Hartsfield was the old man. He had come to NASA in 1969 as an air force test pilot with more than seven thousand hours of fighter jet flying time. STS-41D would be his second space mission and first as a commander. Unlike a number of his peers who were so anal that even the rest of us anal-retentives noticed, Hank was easygoing and quick with a laugh. He was an Alabama boy who had retained the drawling speech and the political ideals of the Deep South. Hank was so far right on the political spectrum he made even the John Birch Society look like a collection of hankie-wringing, pantywaist liberals.

  Mike Coats would be our PLT. He was a former Navy A-7E attack pilot with movie-star good looks. My daughter hadn’t been wrong when she likened him to Christopher Reeve’s Superman character. A curl of black hair would periodically fall across his forehead, making the Clark Kent appearance complete. Mike was a quiet family man, devoted to his wife, Diane, and their two children. I never heard him swear or bring a disgusting joke to the table or get intoxicated or look twice at any of the beautiful women we met on our trips. Mike was a rare exception to the rule that military aviators are root-bound on Planet AD.

  I was also happy to be crewed with Judy. It wasn’t just because she was so AD tolerant, although that was a big reason. She was smart, hardworking, and dependable, all the things you would want in a fellow crewmember. Of course the male in me also appreciated her beauty. The five years since our arrival at JSC had been kind to JR (her nickname). As most of us had done (under the hammer of astronaut competitiveness) she had taken to jogging and dropped her weight. Her ravishingly curly anthracite black hair now framed a leaner, bronze tan face.

  Steve Hawley was a gift to all of us. More than any other post-doc, baby-faced Hawley was the source of my conversion from doubter to believer in the capabilities of the TFNG scientists. A Kansan with a PhD in astrophysics, Hawley was living proof an advanced civilization of aliens have visited Earth. He was one of them. No human had a comparable brain. In just a glance, Steve could commit the most complex shuttle schematics to permanent memory. Every checklist, including the two-volume malfunction massif, was in a virtual file drawer in his brain, ready for instant retrieval at the sound of a cockpit warning tone. He was a maestro in simulations, directing responses to ten different system failures simultaneously. John Creighton once commented that to have Hawley in the cockpit was to have a sixth GPC aboard, a play on the fact that the shuttle computer system consisted of only five IBM General Purpose Computers (GPC). Steve had so much brainpower, the space shuttle was hardly enough to occupy him. He found additional challenges. One was to attend professional baseball umpire camp over his vacation (he was a sports addict). It wouldn’t have surprised me to have learned he was also ghostwriting Stephen Hawking’s books. Hawley was held in such high regard by the military TFNGs that the pilots christened him “Attack Astronomer.” Since pilots were particular about their own titles—fighter pilot, attack pilot, gunship pilot—Hawley’s title was an honorific. Steve was recently married to Sally Ride and for the sake of that marriage he was trying to distance himself from us AD bottom feeders. But it was a struggle. Hoot kept pulling him back to the dark side.

  There would also be a sixth crewmember aboard, a McDonnell Douglas employee, Charlie Walker, flying as a payload specialist (PS) to operate a company experiment.

  That night, February 3, 1983, Donna and I celebrated over dinner and later in bed. As she slept beside me, I stared at the ceiling and thanked God for passage through one more gate on my journey to space. I finally had a mission. Space was looking closer than ever. But there were six other shuttle flights in front of me. A lot could yet go wrong. I prayed for the crews of those missions. I prayed for their safety and success. I prayed more fiercely than they were praying for themselves. I wanted them out of the way.

  The official NASA press release followed within a couple days and we bought the beer at an Outpost happy hour. George had also named the STS-41C crew so there was a total of seven TFNGs who had jumped to the sunlit side of the unassigned/assigned fence. I was now the one being congratulated and I ached for the others who showed me their fake smiles.

  During the party I heard one frustrated astronaut redefine TFNG—thanks for Nothing, George. I would never understand George Abbey. Some interpreted his dictatorial style as megalomania, but I never saw him seek a spotlight. In fact, a recent newspaper photo had appeared on the astronaut B-board showing Abbey shaking hands with a shuttle crew. It was captioned, “Unidentified NASA official welcomes astronauts.” We all laughed at that. It was as if a photo of the pope had appeared in a newspaper over the caption, “Unidentified papal official welcomes pilgrims.” But it was an indication of how invisible Abbey was. Though his management of the astronaut corps provided many opportunities for him to be in the press and on TV, he was never featured in either. Abbey was no megalomaniac. I don’t think anybody had a clue what he was. Hoot Gibson would later offer me his best guess…that Abbey loved us, but, like a stern parent, he didn’t care how we felt. He knew what was best for us and would give it to us at the time and place of his choosing. The problem was, we weren’t children. We were freakin’ astronauts who would have gladly taken whatever he thought was best for us, if he would have just told us what that was. Abbey’s secretive leadership style was a cancer on astronaut morale.

  Our 41D crew was at the end of the training line for the JSC simulators, but there were still opportunities for payload training and we traveled to Seattle to learn the intricacies of the 25,000-pound Boeing-built Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) rocket booster that would be our primary cargo. After we de
ployed it fromDiscovery ’s cargo bay, it would lift a large communication satellite to geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. At the contractors’ factories, we also did some widows and orphans appearances, passing out “Maiden Voyage ofDiscovery ” safety posters to the workers. Judy had me laughing when she whispered, “There are nomaidens on this flight.”

  Maiden or not, Judy was the center of attention wherever we traveled. At one contractor event a young engineer went, quite literally, mad for her. Throughout a daylong factory visit, he was constantly at her side trying to anticipate her needs. When she had none, he created some, bringing her water, soft drinks, and snacks. When we sat for briefings he would stand in a corner and stare at her like a Labrador waiting for the Frisbee to fly. On our factory tour he would rush ahead to hold a door until she walked past, then sprint ahead to the next. If there had been a puddle anywhere on our route, I was certain he would have flung himself face first into it, offering his back as a bridge. I expected the senior contractor official to tell his drooling puppy to get lost, but he turned a blind eye. I could tell Judy was seriously upset by the attention, but she was too much of a lady to say what needed to be said—“Fuck off!” We all breathed a sigh of relief when we were finally in our cars and on the way to the sanctuary of our T-38s. Those were parked at the gate-guarded military apron of Los Angeles International Airport. Then, to our astonishment, as we sat in our cockpits with the engines running, Judy’s want-to-be paramour appeared out of nowhere, rushed under her jet, and pulled the chocks!

  Back in Houston, over an Outpost beer, we laughed off the incident as a one-time case of extreme infatuation. It wasn’t. It proved to be Jody Foster–John Hinckley creepy. Judy began to receive letters, poems (“your raven hair and eyes”), and gifts. JSC security was notified and they promised to call the wacko’s employer and have them discipline the man. I thought that was the end of it until one night I received a panicked call from Judy. “Tarzan, can you come over right away? I just got home and there was a package at my door from that engineer. It doesn’t have any postage on it.” The implication was obvious: It had been hand delivered. He was in town. The guy was a stalker and Judy his prey.

  By the time I arrived, Judy had already called the JSC security people and they had sent a car to patrol around her house through the night. They had also promised to call the man’s employer…again. But, again, whatever warnings were delivered didn’t take. A few weeks later the man walked into our office! I could only assume he was there on official contractor business because he wore the proper JSC badges. He went immediately to Judy’s desk and asked her to autograph one of his poems. She refused. He begged her to write him one letter a year. She refused. He begged her to come to dinner with him. She refused. As this was going on, I was moving to Judy’s side, watching the man like a secret service agent watching the crowd at a presidential event. He didn’t look violent, but if he reached into his briefcase I was going to tackle him. Grabbing JR by the arm I said, “We’ve got a meeting to attend,” and escorted her from the room. We called security and, this time, whatever they did apparently had the desired effect—the stalking ended. Beauty and celebrity had their downside, as Judy was learning.

  Our crew soon acquired nicknames. Tarzan stuck on me. Judy christened Hawley, my Bo Derek salivating cohort, Cheetah. I’m sure Steve would have preferred the more macho handle Attack Astronomer, but Cheetah stuck. In keeping with the Ape Man theme, I branded JudyJane, asking her as I did so, “Would you like to swing on my vine?” She replied, “Sure, Tarzan. But first I’ll have to tie a knot in it so I have something to hold on to.” Judy always had a comeback for my AD bullshit. Mike Coats maintained his Superman call sign. Upon hearing these titles the office secretaries began to refer to STS-41D as the “Zoo Crew” and Hank Hartsfield naturally became the “Zookeeper.”

  God apparently didn’t hear my prayers to watch over every mission in front of us. STS-6 returned home safely but the IUS booster rocket it deployed, identical to the one we would carry onDiscovery, malfunctioned. Its communication satellite was released into an unusable orbit. It was going to take as much as a year for the Boeing engineers to fix the IUS, meaning several IUS missions—including ours—had just lost their payloads. I was miserable. Any ripples in the flight schedule could generate changes in flight assignments. But after many tense weeks of worry, we acquired a new payload of two smaller communication satellites with different booster rockets. Best of all, we still retained the first flight ofDiscovery.

  We set to work on our crew patch design. SinceDiscovery was named after one of Captain Cook’s eighteenth-century ships, we included a sailing vessel morphing into the space shuttleDiscovery. We also teased Judy about adding the symbol for the female gender to the patch . There was precedent for this: The STS-7 crew had included a da Vinci Vitruvian Man–like representation on their patch. Four “male” symbols, arrows radiating outward, formed the head, arms, and one leg, while a lone female symbol—obviously representing Sally Ride—formed the other leg. When the patch appeared, Mike Coats observed, “Sally wears her gender like a chip on her shoulder.” I jokingly suggested to Judy we add something similar to our STS-41D patch and penciled an idea. It had the + of the female symbol as thecenter of the creature and five male arrows pointed inward at it. It would have been interesting to see how HQ would have reacted to that design.

  STS-7 and -8 flew into history and I prayed my hallelujahs.

  In November our crew celebrated Hank’s fiftieth birthday at the Monday meeting. Because he wore his political leanings on his sleeve, he was an easy target to lampoon. We presented him outrageously satirical gifts, including a copy ofMs. magazine dedicated and autographed to him by Gloria Steinem, “In recognition of your support of the feminist movement.” (Sally Ride, a friend of Ms. Steinem, had secured the magazine and her autograph, a one-of-the-guys act that shocked me.) We read fake congratulatory messages from Hank’s supporters, including the ACLU, Jane Fonda, and the Nuclear Freeze Movement. There was also a congratulatory card from Yuri Andropov thanking Hank for “promoting global communism,” as well as a card from Senator Ted Kennedy thanking him for his recent donation to the Democratic party. A final gift, a box of Ayds diet candy, was from the gay rights political caucus acknowledging Hank’s support for their cause. The gift card read,Here are some AIDS for you. Nothing was out of bounds when it came to astronaut humor.

  On December 8, 1983, my dream of spaceflight, not to mention the entire shuttle program, almost ended when STS-9 landed on fire. During the final moments ofColumbia ’s approach, one of its hydraulic pumps experienced a propellant leak that dumped hydrazine, a particularly wicked fuel, into the aft engine compartment. The resulting fire quickly spread to a second hydraulic system and both systems failed shortly after touchdown. Had the fire started a moment earlier, it probably would have caused all three hydraulic systems to fail whileColumbia was still airborne. Like a car losing power steering, the controls would have frozen.Columbia would have rolled out of control and crashed into the desert. John Young and his crew missed death by a handful of seconds. As I later examined photos of the fire damage, I thought of John’s earlier pronouncement, “God watches out for babies, drunks, and astronauts.”

  The failure mode that caused the hydrazine leak was quickly identified and corrected. The shuttle program rolled on and my spirits soared…and then, just as quickly, came crashing back to Earth. On the very next mission, STS-41B, both of its deployed satellites failed to reach their intended orbit due to booster rocket malfunctions. I was thrown back into hell. We had the identical booster rocket attached to one of our two communication satellites. It was unlikely NASA would launchDiscovery with only a single satellite as freight. For weeks we fretted and sweated while NASA HQ shuffled payloads and, for a second time, we survived withDiscovery. One mission to go.

  We were now practically living in the simulators—one session was fifty-six hours in duration. Hank and Mike were spending most of their t
ime practicing launch aborts and landings. Steve, Judy, and I were consumed with payload training. There was also spacewalk training. None was planned for our mission but every shuttle crew included two astronauts who were prepared for an emergency spacewalk. This was to provide one more line of defense against things that could kill a crew, like not being able to close the Payload Bay Doors (PLBD). To attempt reentry with those open would be certain death. This was why every component associated with the door closing and locking systems was redundant. Redundant motors were powered by redundant electrical systems through a myriad of redundant black boxes and redundant wiring. One failure of anything would not prevent an astronaut crew from closing and locking the doors. But that wasn’t good enough for NASA. They wanted to back up even this redundancy with astronaut spacewalkers who could manually string a lanyard to a door edge and winch it closed, then hand-install and manually tighten locks. Other contingencies also had to be considered. The shuttle’s high-gain antenna and the robot arm were both mechanisms that could become stuck outside the PLBD envelope and interfere with door closure. The two-man contingency spacewalkers were trained to muscle these devices inside the bay and tie them down. Hank designated Hawley and me as the EVA (spacewalk) crewmembers and Judy as our Intra-Vehicular Activity (IVA) crewmember. It would be her job to help us dress in the 300-pound Extra-vehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), i.e., a spacesuit, assist us in the suit checkout, and follow us in the EVA checklists to ensure we didn’t make a mistake. A spacewalking crewmember entered a whole new arena of risks. When pressurized, the suits became as hard as a steel-belted radial, severely impairing movement and tactile feel. In this condition a mistake was possible, perhaps a deadly one. If Hawley and I had to do a spacewalk, Judy would be our omnipresent guardian angel, watching us from insideDiscovery and making certain we followed every procedure exactly.