Riding Rockets Read online

  “Houston, MECO. Right on the money.” At Hank’s call another cheer swept the cockpit.Discovery had given us a perfect ride.

  Chapter 21

  Orbit

  MECO was silent. The Gs just stopped. I had no sense of being hurled forward as some space movies depict. There was nothud, thunk, bang, or any other noise to indicate the end of powered flight. MECO could only be noted as the termination of acceleration. In a blink we went from a silent 3-Gs to a silent 0-G.

  At this pointDiscovery was headed for an impact into the Pacific Ocean. We still were not in orbit. The ascent was intentionally designed so as not to drag the 50,000-pound gas tank into orbit, where it would become a threat to populations below. Better to keep it on a sub-orbital trajectory, where its impact could be predicted. There was a heavythunk in the cockpit as the ET was exploded away to continue toward a Pacific grave. Hank moved his translational hand controller to the up position, and the thrusters in the nose and tail fired to clear us of the tumbling mass. The nose jets, merely a few yards forward of the windows, hammered the cockpit as if howitzers were firing next to us. Checklists strained at their Velcro anchors.

  Now clear of the ET,Discovery ’s computers fired her Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engines, twin 6,000-pound trust rockets mounted at the tail. Compared with the SSMEs, these were mere popguns, giving us only a ¼-G acceleration. The engines burned for two minutes to finish the orbit insertion. Then our silent free-fall began. We were in orbit 200 miles above the planet traveling at a speed of nearly 5 miles per second. The entire ascent had taken just ten minutes. In all likelihood Donna and the kids had not even had time to walk from the LCC roof.

  I watched Mike activate the switches to close the ET doors. These covered two large openings onDiscovery ’s belly through which passed seventeen-inch-diameter fuel and oxidizer feed pipes from the gas tank. These pipes had been disconnected during the jettison of the ET. Now the doors had to close over the openings to complete the belly heat shield. If they failed to close, we were dead…but endowed with the power to choose the manner of our deaths: slow suffocation in orbit as our oxygen was depleted or incineration on deorbit. The open cavities would be pathways for frictional heat to melt the guts out ofDiscovery ’s belly on reentry. I didn’t lift my eyes from the ET door indicators until I saw them flip toCLOSED .

  I was still strapped to my seat and didn’t yet feel weightless but the cockpit scene made it obvious we were. My checklist hovered in midair. A handful of small washers, screws, and nuts floated by our faces. An X-Acto blade tumbled by my right ear.Discovery had been ten years in the factory. During that time hundreds of workers had done some type of wrench-bending in her cockpit. While NASA employed strict procedures to keep debris from being lost in the vehicle, it was impossible to prevent some dropped items. Now weightlessness resurrected those from various nooks and crannies. A live mosquito also flew into view. It had entered through the side hatch during the many hours of prelaunch operations and had hitched a ride into space. I slapped it dead between my hands.

  While I had trained for thousands of hours to immediately dive into the postinsertion checklist, I couldn’t overcome the temptation to look at our planet, now filling the forward windows. Blue, white, and black were the only colors. Swirls of lacey clouds patterned an otherwise limitless expanse of deep blue Atlantic Ocean. All of this was framed in a pre-Genesis black. There was no blackness on Earth to compare…not the blackest night, the blackest cave, or the abysmal depths of any sea. To say the view was overwhelmingly beautiful would be an insult to God. There are no human words to capture the magnificence of the Earth seen from orbit. And we astronauts, cursed with our dominant left brains, are woefully incapable of putting in words what the eyes see. But still we try.

  I forced myself back to the checklist as we configuredDiscovery for orbit. Steve Hawley and I disassembled our seats, and he floated them downstairs for stowage. During the Houston simulations we had nearly popped hernias while moving these 100-pound monsters. Now we pushed them with our fingers.

  We loaded the orbit software intoDiscovery ’s brain; her decade-old IBM computers didn’t have the memory capacity to hold ascent, orbit, and entry software simultaneously. Next we opened the payload bay doors. The inside of those doors contained radiators used to dump the heat generated by our electronics into space. If they failed to open, we’d have only a couple hours to getDiscovery back on Earth before she fried her brains. But both doors swung open as planned, another milestone passed.

  As I worked, I wondered if I would get sick. I questioned every gurgle, every swallow. Is that bile I taste? The rational part of my brain said I was okay, but my paranoia twisted every gastrointestinal sensation into something ominous. I checked and double-checked and then triple-checked that my numerous barf bags were ready for a quick draw. The veterans had warned us the sickness could come on very suddenly. They were right. The curse hit. Not me, but Mike Coats. He retched violently into his emesis bag. I felt something warm touch my cheek and reached up to wipe away yellow bile. Other tiny bits of the fluid floated in the cockpit. Mike was learning what we would all soon learn—it is impossible to completely contain fluids in weightlessness. Though he had his bag at the ready, some barf had escaped. The odor permeated the tight cockpit. Mike sealed his bag but, with work to do, he couldn’t leave his seat to stow it downstairs. I took it and floated to the wet-trash container. With somebody else’s emesis smearing my cheek, the smell in my nostrils, and a warm bag of the mess in my hand, I had every trigger in place to get sick myself but still I felt fine. I began to think maybe I had dodged the SAS bullet.

  Downstairs I got my first view of Judy, who was busy activating the toilet. Everybody was anxious for that to be declared operational. The weightlessness had liberated her black tresses to coil about her head like Medusa’s snakes. She would have made a great cannon cleaner. I lifted the floor-mounted trapdoor to access the wet-trash container and shoved Mike’s barf bag through the rubber grommet. I mimicked the garbage pit scene fromStar Wars and pretended my hand had been grabbed by an alien creature living inside. I made a few jerking motions and screamed for Judy to help me. She grabbed my arm, pretending to assist my escape. We tumbled together like fifth-graders on a playground, laughing all the while. With the terror of launch behind us and the intoxicant of beingreal astronauts, we had been transformed into kids.

  During a break in the work I went to my locker to change out of my coveralls and take off my UCD. I had often wondered how the privacy issue would play out when we finally got to orbit. In our training Judy had certainly seemed unflappable. She had not fled from the EVA simulation when Hawley and I had been standing naked in front of her rolling on condoms. Still, I wondered how the tight living conditions would affect her behavior. I waited until she had some upstairs duties to attend to and then stripped from my clothes. A few moments later, while I was completely nude and extracting underwear from my locker, Judy returned. She looked at me and said, “Nice butt, Tarzan,” then went back to her work. For once, I was speechless.

  This wasn’t the only time that day Judy showed how comfortable she felt around us men. While she was searching for something in her own locker she pulled out a chain of tampons. Like a magician pulling out a seemingly endless rope of scarves from a hat, she kept pulling and pulling. Each of the products was shrink-wrapped in plastic, each precisely separated from the other. The floating belt had all the appearance of a fully loaded bandolier of cotton bullets. Judy smiled. “I can tell you that a man packed this locker.” I laughed at the image of a crusty old NASA engineer addressing the issue of how many feminine hygiene products should be loaded. He probably got a number from his wife and then applied a NASA safety factor and then added a few contingency days on top of that number. And then, incanting Gene Kranz’s famousApollo 13 challenge, “Failure is not an option,” he added some more.

  As she wrestled the belt back into its tray, Judy commented, “If a woman had to use all of these, sh
e would be dead from blood loss.”

  Our first day continued with payload preparations. We rolled out the robot arm and closed the sunshades on our trio of satellites. Charlie Walker began work on his experiment. Mike loaded the IMAX camera. Throughout the mission he and Hank would be filming some space scenes for the Walter Cronkite–narrated IMAX movie,The Dream Is Alive.

  At one point I was alone in the upstairs cockpit when Hank called to me from the toilet, “Mike, let me know when we’re passing over Cuba.” I grabbed a camera, assuming he wanted me to photograph the island as part of our Earth observation experiment.

  “We’re about five minutes out.”

  “Give me a countdown to Havana.”

  Shit, I didn’t know where Havana was. I scrambled to find it in our booklet of maps. “Ten seconds, Hank. It’s coming up quick. I’ll get the photo for you.” I aimed the Hasselblad and began to click away.

  From below I heard Hank in his own countdown, “Three…two…one,” followed by a cheer.

  A moment later Hank’s head popped above the cockpit floor. He wore an expansive grin. “I just squeezed out a muffin on that fucker Castro. I’ve always wanted to shit on that commie.”

  Every military astronaut was a Red-hater. We’d been shot at by communist bullets in Vietnam. Many had experienced long separations from families while deployed to remote Cold War outposts. Hank had claimed his small revenge by giving birth to an all-American turd two hundred miles above that commie clown. Hank wistfully continued, “Damn, I wish our orbit took us over Ted Kennedy.” Mr. Kennedy was spared Castro’s fate by our orbit path. The only parts of the continental United States we flew over were the extreme southern portions of Texas and Florida. Our orbit inclination (tilt to the equator) fixed the traces of our orbits between 28 degrees north latitude and 28 degrees south latitude.

  For several hours we were immersed in our checklists to deploy our first communication satellite and its booster rocket. It, like the others, was destined for an orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth’s equator. At that extreme altitude the orbit speed of the satellite matched the turn of the Earth so, to Earth observers, it would appear parked in the sky. At the contractor’s ground receiving stations, satellite dishes could be pointed at the satellite and the Earth’s rotation would do the tracking.

  Hawley monitored the satellite-deployment computer displays from the front cockpit while Judy and I worked the release controls in the back. We opened the baby buggy–like sunshield, spun up the payload to 40 revolutions per minute (for stabilization during its uphill rocket burn), then activated the switches to pop it free ofDiscovery. The orbiter shivered as the 9,000-pound mass was shed.

  The successful payload deployment refreshed our euphoria. We knew there were a hundred sets of very critical eyes watching our performance—all belonging to fellow astronauts. Any screwup would be our legacy. Astronauts have elephantine memories when it comes to crews who make mistakes.

  Afterward we relaxed around our supper of dehydrated shrimp cocktail, beef patties, and vegetables. The food was packaged in plastic dishes and rehydrated with water from our fuel cells. After nearly burning a hole in my esophagus by swallowing a blob of inadequately hydrated horseradish powder, I learned to mix the food and water a bit longer. Fuel cell water was also used for drinking. It was dispensed into plastic containers, some of which contained various flavored powders (yes, including Tang). Because nothing can be poured in weightlessness, the drinks had to be sucked from straws. I quickly learned never to drink plain water. Iodine was used as a disinfectant and the water was tinged yellow with it and tasted of the chemical. While we ate much better than the early astronauts, who had to squeeze their food out of tubes, I still longed for the day the NASA food engineers would come up with dehydrated beer and pizza.

  After cleaning up and cycling through our toilet we prepared for sleep. This was not a “shift” mission so we all slept at the same time. We would depend uponDiscovery ’s caution-and-warning system to alert us if something bad happened. Each of us had a sleep restraint, a cloth bag we pinned to the walls and zipped into. There was no privacy. Like bats in a cave, we bunked cheek to jowl in the lower cockpit. We slept downstairs because the lack of windows made it darker and cooler than the upstairs cockpit.

  As I floated inside my restraint I joined in the chorus of complaints about a fierce backache. In weightlessness the vertebrae of the spine spread apart, resulting in a height increase of an inch or two. The strain on the lower back muscles is significant and painful. All of us but Judy were bothered by it. Why she was immune I had no idea, but she grew weary of our complaints and exploited her advantage: “I’m probably the first woman in history to go to bed with five men and all of them have backaches.”

  I couldn’t sleep…and it wasn’t because of any backache. I didn’twant to sleep. I wanted to celebrate. From MECO to this moment, I had been too busy with checklists to really consider the life-changing experience of the past twelve hours. I had done it! I was an astronaut in the cockpit of a spaceship orbiting the Earth. I was living what Willy Ley had written about inThe Conquest of Space. I wanted to scream and shout and punch my fists in the air. Fortunately for the rest of the crew, I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I floated my sleep restraint upstairs.Floated! God, I still couldn’t get my mind around the reality of it. I tied the bag under the overhead windows and slipped inside. I would celebrate by sightseeing. Since the autopilot was holding the shuttle with its top to the Earth, I now had the planet in my face.

  Other than the breath of the cabin fans and the white-noise hiss of the UHF radio, the cockpit was midnight still. In the silence I felt as if we had stopped dead in space. In all my other life experiences speed meant noise…the howl of wind gripping a cockpit, the roar of an engine. Now I was traveling at nearly 5 miles per second and there was only silence. It was as if I were hovering in a balloon, and the Earth was silently turning beneath me.

  I was also gripped with a powerful sense of detachment from the rest of humanity. There was nothing at the windows to suggest any other life in the universe. I was looking to a horizon more than a thousand miles distant and could see only the unrelieved blue of the Pacific. In each passing second that horizon was being pushed another five miles to the east but still nothing changed. There was no vapor trail of a jetliner, no wake of a ship, no cities, no glint of Sun from a piece of glass or metal. There was no signature of life on Earth. And the view into space was even more lonely. The brilliance of the Sun had overwhelmed the faint light of the stars and planets. Space was as featureless black as the ocean was blue.

  The Sun was intense and the cockpit grew uncomfortably hot. I pushed from my sleep restraint and hovered in my underwear a few inches from the glass. In my relaxed state my arms and legs folded inward as if trying to return to their fetal position. I had become a hairy2001: A Space Odyssey embryo.

  The forty-five minutes of my orbit “day” drew to an end and I was treated to another space sight of such breathtaking beauty it would challenge the most gifted poet. AsDiscovery raced eastward, behind her the Sun plunged toward the western horizon. Beneath me, the terminator, that hazy shadow that separates brilliant daylight from the deep black of night, began to dim the crenellated ocean blue. High clouds over this terminator glowed tangerine and pink in the final rays of the Sun.Discovery entered this shadow world and I turned my head to the back windows to watch the Sun dip below the horizon. Its light, which to this moment had been as pure white as a baby’s soul, was now being split by the atmosphere. An intense color spectrum, a hundred times more brilliant than any rainbow seen on Earth, formed in an arc to separate the black of earth night from the perennial black of space. Where it touched the Earth, the color bow was as red as royal velvet and faded upward through multiple shades of orange and blue and purple until it dissipated into black. AsDiscovery sped farther from it, the bow slowly shrank along the Earth’s limb toward the point of sunset, diminishing in reach and thickness and intensity, a
s if the colors were a liquid being drained from the sky. Finally, only an eyelash-thin arc of indigo remained. Then it winked out andDiscovery was fully immersed in the oblivion of an orbit night.

  Suddenly the uniform black of daytime space was transformed into the stuff of dreams. The Milky Way arced across the sky like glowing smoke. Other stars pierced the black in whites, blues, yellows, and reds. Jupiter rose in the sky like a coachman’s lantern. For planet and stars alike, there was no twinkle. In the purity of space they were fixed points of color.

  I stared down into the dark of the Earth. Lightning flashed in faraway Central American thunderstorms. Shooting stars streaked to their deaths in multihued flashes. To the northeast I could see the sodium glow of an unknown city. At the horizon the atmosphere had a faint glow caused by sunlight scattering completely around the Earth. In this glow the air was visible as several distinct layers of gray.

  I watched a satellite twinkle through the western sky. ThoughDiscovery was in darkness, the other machine was far enough to the west to still reflect sunlight.

  With the instrument lights off and the Sun gone, the cockpit chilled and I floated back into my restraint to attempt sleep. I had just nodded off when a streak of light flashed in my brain and startled me awake. Veteran astronauts had warned of this phenomenon. The flash was the result of a cosmic ray hitting my optic nerve. The electrical pulse generated by that impact caused my brain to “see” a streak of light even though my eyes were closed. I wondered what those cosmic rays were doing to the rest of my brain.Oops, there goes second grade.

  I slept fitfully through the night, waking with each sunrise and whispering, “Wow!” At one point I floated into the lower cockpit to retrieve a drink container and entered a scene straight out of a science fiction movie. A light had been left on in the toilet and it dimly illuminatedDiscovery ’s sleeping crew. They were in their restraints, some pinned to the forward wall, others stretched horizontally across the mid-deck. In the relaxation of sleep their arms floated chest high in front of them. It appeared as if they were in suspended animation. I was tempted to join them in the cool darkness, but the pull of the windows was too great. I floated back upstairs.