Riding Rockets

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 word eject. 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 plane was 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.

As the runway lights came into view, I followed Blaine through the landing checklist, including making a computation of our touchdown speed…nearly 180 knots. We were full of gas, making a high-speed, single-engine landing on a high-elevation runway. To complicate things a thunderstorm had just passed over the field. The runways were sodden. This could get ugly was my thought. Assuming we made the runway, there was an excellent chance we were going to blow some tires. To run off the runway would probably result in death. That assumed we made the runway at all, which was far from guaranteed. The fire had already damaged the engine nozzle positioning system, which put it in the vicinity of the tail-control surfaces. If those failed while we were deep into our landing attempt, we would probably die. The ejection seat wouldn’t be able to save us in an out-of-control situation close to the ground.

The annals of military aviation are filled with stories of aircrews that died doing exactly what we were about to do…ignore the “Fire—Eject” rule, play the heroes, and attempt an emergency landing. “Crewmember death occurred when ejection was attempted out of the ejection seat envelope.” I had read that conclusion in accident reports a hundred times in my career. I could imagine the comments of our peers at the next Monday meeting: “If they had followed the checklist, they would be alive today.”

Eject? Stay? Eject? Stay? The runway lights were looming and I was in the agony of indecision. Finally I decided that I would stay. I put the checklist aside and resumed my death grip on the ejection handles. If the master caution light illuminated or there was any other indication of ongoing fire damage, I was gone. It might be too late by then, but that was my decision.

Throughout this period, which had been less than two minutes, I could hear Blaine’s breathing through the intercom. He had the respiration of a marathoner. He was stressed to the max.

We touched down and within seconds the right-side tire blew and the aircraft started a drift to the right. In correcting our trajectory Blaine blew the left tire. We were riding on shredded tires but at least we were skidding straight down the runway. Fire engines followed us.

It was soon a story for the ready room. We came to a safe stop. The firemen used handheld extinguishers to spray the smoking wheels. Blaine and I climbed from the cockpit and immediately walked to the back of the plane. Sure enough, we had been on fire. There was a hole burned in the bottom of the fuselage near the left engine nozzle. Later we learned a piece of the afterburner plumbing had failed and had served as a blowtorch when the throttle had been in AB. The problem was far enough aft to be out of the range of our fire sensors, which explained the lack of any firelights. When Blaine had pulled the left throttle from afterburner, the fuel source for the fire had been isolated. It was the remaining fuel in the engine compartment that had been burning as we made our landing. We had ignored the checklist and lived to tell the tale.

As we were being driven back to the operations office, I was thinking of what a great job Blaine had done. It wasn’t the stuff of legends, but it was a fine testament to his piloting abilities. He had handled a serious threat with confidence and poise. But then, that was to be expected. He was an astronaut and test pilot and he had merely been dueling with death. A far greater menace was about to leap from the shadows.

The radio scanner at a local TV station had picked up the words “NASA jet on fire” and a reporter had been dispatched to the scene. As we walked into operations, we were blindsided by the lights of a camera. A microphone was shoved in our faces. There was to be film at ten and we were to be the stars. Speaking into the lens of a camera was the most fearful form of public speaking. Fumbling for words in front of a Rotary Club didn’t compare with having your deer-in-the-headlights, fear-twisted face and bumbling dialogue transmitted into the living rooms of tens of thousands.

I quickly extricated myself. “I was the backseater,” I told the reporter. “Blaine was the pilot. He landed the plane. He’s the one to talk to.” The reporter fell on him like a hyena on a wildebeest carcass. I scuttled off camera.

With the reporter in his face Blaine became living proof that fear of public speaking far exceeds fear of death. In a span of twenty minutes he had faced both and it was the blazing camera spotlight that was killing him. His eyes dilated in fear. His nostrils flared open and closed like a bellows. Everything in his body language screamed, “Eject! Get me out of here!”

Blaine wasn’t unique. Most of us were equally terrified of TV cameras and public audiences. And NASA was no help. There was nothing in our TFNG training to prepare us for the great unknowns of the press and the public spotlight, an astounding oversight given the fact that astronauts were the most visible ambassadors of NASA. Apparently the agency thought our talents with machines extended to the lectern. They did not.

One of the most egregious examples of an astronaut abusing the microphone occurred when a pilot, who was renowned for a sense of humor even Howard Stern would have found offensive, attempted to hide his nervousness by opening his speech with a joke. With a hushed and expectant crowd of hundreds awaiting pearls of inspiration from one of American’s finest sons, he threw out the following:

The joke might have been appropriate for a group of golfers or military pilots or any similar crowd of crotch-scratching, crude, and coarse males. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the audience. The astronaut in question delivered this joke to open a high school commencement address! Only if it had been delivered at a NOW convention could it have generated more outrage. One can only imagine the horror on the faces of parents and faculty, the snickers of the students, and the subsequent crucifixion of the person who had suggested, “Let’s get one of America’s finest to speak at graduation. Let’s get an astronaut. It’ll be a commencement address to remember.” Indeed, it was.

NASA got what it was looking for in this astronaut’s presentation, a lot of visibility with the grassroots taxpayer. Unfortunately that visibility was, well, a little negative. Cards and letters rolled into NASA. The general message was something along the lines of, “Where did you get this bozo?” The answer was simple. NASA had plucked him from Planet AD.

Most of the military astronauts had no idea what constituted an appropriate sense of humor in a public setting. I once attended a dinner with a marine fighter pilot (not an astronaut) who rose from his seat with glass in hand and offered this toast to the ladies and gentlemen present: “Here’s to gunpowder and here’s to pussy. One I kill with, the other I’ll die for, but I love the smell of both.” You would think even the most AD-affected of the military TFNGs would probably have concluded such a toast would be inappropriate at a Shriners’ dinner, but I wouldn’t have put any money on it.

Lacking any other real-life experience, military males just assumed everybody had our perverted sense of humor. I certainly did. At one of my very early public appearances, I showed a slide of the six TFNG females intending to make a statement about the diversity of the new NASA class. But instead my alcohol-lubricated words came out as “pigs in space,” a reference to a popular Jim Hensen Muppets’ skit of the same title. Actually, I didn’t say, “Pigs in space.” Rather, I mimicked the Muppet announcer’s overly enthusiastic call: “Piiiiiiiigs innnnnnnnnnn spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!” The only reason NASA didn’t get protests from my performance was that my audience was a U.S. Army “Dining Out,” a black-tie gathering of army officers and their spouses. Most of them had similar disturbed senses of humor. The audience loved my wit.

At another military formal dinner, Rhea Seddon and I were cospeakers. In my comments I used the word girls in reference to the female astronauts. I had done so without malice. It was just as natural as breathing for me to refer to the women as girls or gals. Afterward, a wife from the audience approached me with a smile that would have chilled Hannibal Lecter. She asked, “Do they call you a boy astronaut?” I was baffled by the comment…but not for long. She enlightened me while tearing me a new fundamental orifice. “How dare you refer to Dr. Seddon as a girl! Where is your PhD? Are you a surgeon? She has better credentials than you.” She stormed off. It was one of my earliest lessons in political correctness.

Besides contracting with Miss Manners, Toastmasters, and NOW for remedial training, NASA should have also reviewed with its astronauts the various songs they might be asked to sing during a public appearance. Many of the requests for astronaut speakers came from organizations planning patriotic-themed events. Nothing was bound to excite more pride in the American soul than a trim, square-jawed, shorthaired, steely-eyed war-veteran astronaut poised next to Old Glory leading the audience in the singing of a patriotic song. Every Rotary Club, VFA, and Elks Club in America wanted that Norman Rockwell scene on their stage. But that assumed the astronaut knew the song in question.

At one of my appearances I was blindsided by a request to lead the audience in the singing of “America the Beautiful.” I was prepared for my speech. I had it on my notecards. What I didn’t have on my cards was “America the Beautiful.” As the master of ceremonies beckoned me to the podium I could feel my bowels liquefying. I held on to his handshake just to keep from collapsing. My brain was logjammed with every patriotic lyric I had ever heard: for-purple-mountains-majesty-our-flag-was-still-there-the-caissons-go-rolling-along. Retrieving “America the Beautiful” from that mess was going to take a miracle.

The MC handed me the microphone. I wished it had been a gun so I could have blown out my scrambled brains. They were all looking at me, hands on hearts. Hundreds of them. Only a lone cough disturbed the silence. It doesn’t get any worse than this, I thought. But I was wrong. As a courtesy to a group of hearing impaired who were sitting in the front row, there was a signer at the edge of the stage staring right at my lips. Her hands were poised to record my every utterance. How I didn’t wet myself (or worse), I’ll never know.

I placed my hand on my heart and turned to face the flag. I could feel my pulse through my suit pocket. The MC punched “play” on a boom box and the first strains of the melody flowed into the room. I sang the only words I was absolutely certain of, “Oh beautiful…”

Those words proved enough. Everybody joined in and my voice was lost. Actually, I lowered the microphone from my mouth so my incoherent babbling couldn’t be heard. I had pulled it off. Or so I thought. Then, the signer caught my eye. She was focused on my mumbling lips with the precision of a laser. Not a syllable was getting by her. If I could have read sign language, I knew what those flying fingers would have been saying. “Hey, everybody! This guy is a fraud. He doesn’t know ‘America the Beautiful.’”

I wasn’t the only astronaut to be surprised on the way to a stage. Hoot Gibson once served as a last-minute replacement speaker for Judy Resnik at a women’s event. The MC began the introduction by reading Judy’s entire biography. Hoot was dumbstruck. Judy wasn’t there. Everybody in the audience knew he was to be the substitute speaker, yet the MC droned on with Judy’s bio as if she were going to step out of the wings to give the program. Only after it was completely rendered did Hoot realize the MC’s purpose in reading it. It was to establish Judy’s irreplaceable importance to NASA. The MC went on with Hoot’s introduction in words that loosely translated, “Judy is so important to NASA there was no way she could be spared to come to speak at today’s event. But NASA could easily do without this useless dirt bag of a man so they sent him. We’ll just have to be disappointed and listen to his forgettable comments.” Then, after Hoot’s speech, the MC presented him with a plaque inscribed to Judy.

As my NASA career continued, I discovered new land mines to step on while in front of the public. In the Q&A that followed one of my speeches, a woman asked, “Have you seen any aliens?”

I answered, “No, but I believe there is alien life elsewhere in the universe. There are so many trillions of stars it’s easy for me to believe there will be planets around some of those stars that harbor intelligent life.” I should have quit right there, but like a fool, I continued. “However, I don’t believe any UFOs have landed on earth. Why,” I rhetorically asked the audience, “would an advanced civilization go to the trouble of building an interstellar craft, fly to earth to find it teeming with life, and then only hover over lonely women and beer-drinking men?” The crowd laughed. The woman asking the question did not. If looks could kill, I was a dead man.

The next week I received an anonymous letter postmarked Salt Lake City, Utah, viciously attacking my position on aliens. It was clear the writer believed the truth is out there and that I was part of the cover-up. I suspect the letter was from the woman who had asked the alien question.

This question was just one of many that could turn a public appearance into a gut-wrenching torture. “What happens when you fart in a spacesuit?” or “Do women have periods in space?” were the easy ones to answer. But questions like “Are there gay and lesbian astronauts?” and “Has there been sex in space?” had the potential to put a TFNG’s name in a Johnny Carson monologue.

The prizewinner in the category of fielding the most difficult question was Don Peterson (class of 1969). After one of his speeches, several members of the audience came to him with their questions. One asked, “Is there privacy on the shuttle to masturbate?” Don was immediately thrown into a panic. It was like being asked, “Do you feel better since you’ve stopped beating your wife?” It was impossible to answer. He considered saying no, but that implied astronauts had searched for such privacy. He imagined his face on a supermarket tabloid under the headline “Astronaut Complains: No Privacy to Spank the Monkey.” A yes reply held equally embarrassing possibilities: “Astronaut Admits to Five-Knuckle Shuffle in Space.” He mumbled an incomprehensible answer, praying whatever it was it wouldn’t come back to haunt him in the National Enquirer.

As Blaine Hammond learned in the El Paso flight operations office, the most dreaded form of public speaking was a TV interview. A streak of antiaircraft fire passing your wing doesn’t get your heart rate up like looking into a black camera lens and hearing, “Three…two…one…you’re live.” For me, it was a cadence that always brought on nausea. Once, as I was listening to this on-the-air countdown, the anchor leaned in to me and said, “It’s just like a shuttle launch. When you hit zero, there’s no going back.” He was right. Hearing, “You’re live,” was just like hearing the rumble of SRB ignition. You were flying. The camera was scattering your image and words into the living rooms of America and there would be no do-overs. I was sure my Adam’s apple was dancing like a bobblehead on a dashboard and my fear-widened eyes were darting like minnows. I imagined people at their breakfast tables laughing as I choked, trying to respond to a simple question like, “What’s your name?”

Live interviews could be made even more torturous by the AD antics of other astronauts. Several of us were in a Houston bar one evening when the TV caught our eye. A local station was airing a call-in interview with Ed Gibson (class of 1965) and TFNG Kathy Sullivan. One of our group immediately asked the bartender to borrow the phone and called in his questions: for Kathy, “How do girls pee in the toilet?” and for Ed, “What does Mrs. Gibson think of Mr. Gibson flying single women around the country in a NASA jet on overnight business trips?” We all hooted and hollered as the victims struggled with their answers.

Interviews with the print press were much more relaxing but still held the potential to screw an astronaut. During one interview I explained to the reporter my feelings of boundless joy and visceral fear while being driven to the pad for my first launch. I said, “To see the xenon-lighted Discovery and know it was my shuttle, that I was only hours from the culmination of a lifetime dream come true, nearly had me crying with joy.” But I was quoted as having said, “Astronauts cry from fear as they are driven to the launchpad.” The story was picked up by Paul Harvey and repeated to a huge national audience on his radio show. I was outraged and excruciatingly embarrassed.

Experiences like this explained why the astronaut office bulletin board occasionally displayed news articles in which an offending quote was circled with “I didn’t say this” written next to it by a pissed-off astronaut.

On August 31, 1979, Chris Kraft came to the astronaut office to tell us NASA was dropping the candidate suffix from our titles. Apparently we had impressed the agency enough for them to designate us astronauts nearly a year earlier than originally planned. We were no longer Ascans. I was happy to hear it. Even though I wouldn’t consider myself an astronaut until I got into space, I was tired of having to explain the title on PR trips and watching the crestfallen faces of event planners as they realized I wasn’t the real astronaut they had been expecting. At our next office party we were each given silver astronaut pins to go with our new title. These were lapel pins fashioned in the shape of the official astronaut symbol, a three-rayed shooting star passing through an ellipse. When we finally flew in space, we would be given gold pins. Actually, we would then be allowed to purchase, at a cost of $400, a gold astronaut pin. (The silver pins were paid for out of the office coffee fund.)

After returning from the party, I took my pin off, put it in a drawer, and never wore it again. To me it was a meaningless token, like the plastic pilot wings that stewardesses give to children. Those Delta Airline wings weren’t going to make a child a pilot and a silver pin and title weren’t going to make me an astronaut. Only a ride into space could do that.