Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 15 Columbia

Columbia was less than a year from launch, and, when it flew, it would mark NASA’s first manned spaceflight in six years. That was a concern for the NASA safety office. A six-year hiatus in manned operations provided a fertile environment for complacency. In defense, the office sent astronauts to various factories and shuttle support facilities to refocus the workers. We wanted to put a face on manned spaceflight, to reacquaint people with the deadly consequences of making a mistake on the job. Teams of astronauts were dispatched around the country and around the globe to give speeches, shake hands, and pass out NASA safety posters. We astronauts referred to these appearances as “widows and orphans” visits. While we never said, “Don’t fuck up or you could kill us and make widows of our wives,” that was exactly the message we hoped to impart by just standing there in our blue flight suits.

Steve Hawley and I were tapped to travel to Madrid, Spain, and the Seychelles Islands to deliver that message to the NASA and air force contingents who manned the shuttle tracking sites at those locations. NASA did not yet have its own communication relay satellites in orbit, so we depended upon an earth-girdling network of ground sites to communicate with orbiting astronauts. Other TFNGs were sent to Australia, England, Guam, Ascension Island, and the other overseas sites that completed this global tracking system.

To go to the Seychelles is to die and go to heaven. The nation is a collection of islands a thousand miles east of Africa just south of the equator in the bath-warm waters of the Indian Ocean. The beaches are white, the surf is turquoise, and both are filled with topless vacationing Scandinavian women. As if that isn’t enough of a temptation, many of the local island women are beautiful manhunters. Their preferred quarry are American men, as they represent a means of escape to the land of the Big BX (the USA). At a party hosted by the tracking site commander, Hawley and I learned just how aggressive they could be. A young and exceptionally beautiful woman came to us and requested our autographs. “Sure, we’d be happy to sign something for you,” I replied. I was expecting her to hand over one of the space shuttle photos we had previously distributed but, instead, she pulled up her skirt, thrust a cheek of her ass in my face, and asked me to sign her panties. I searched my memory but couldn’t remember “ass signing” being covered in our JSC training. I looked at Hawley and suggested, “To refuse could cause an international incident.” We had been cautioned by the resident state department official not to alienate the locals, as the United States was in sensitive negotiations with the island’s current Dictator for Life. Steve concurred: “It’s our NASA duty to fulfill her request.” That settled it. I turned my pen to the silky fabric, only to be struck by the limited real estate. Her petite posterior didn’t give me a lot to work with. But astronauts love a challenge. In a font so tiny I could have penned the Declaration of Independence on a grain of rice, I leisurely inscribed on the side of her underwear, Richard Michael Mullane, Major, United States Air Force, Astronaut, National Aeronautical and Space Administration. I was thinking of adding, In the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty and the date, but Hawley was getting impatient. If anybody’s hand should be on that heinie, it was his. He was the bachelor of our duo, a fact that had spread across the island on the coconut telegraph as fast as a trade wind. This young woman had probably set her sights on him when we stepped off the plane. I finally capped my pen and she immediately presented her other cheek for Steve and he began his treatise. The things we do for our country. There ought to be a medal awarded to men who return from the Seychelles. Bachelors, like Hawley, should get the Order of I Walked Away from Heaven with accouterments of oak leaf clusters, laurel wreaths, dangles, bobbles, flames, and shooting stars.

As if the local women weren’t enough, Hawley and I also discovered the vacationing Dereks…as in John and Bo Derek. Even among the hard-bodied, oil-smeared Danish pastries decorating the beach, Bo stood out. To say she was a “Ten” didn’t do her justice. She made a Step-ford Wife look like a hag. Unfortunately, she wasn’t topless. Nor was she jogging down the beach in slow motion. But, like Dudley Moore’s famous character, I had an active imagination.

Hawley and I debated whether or not to approach the star, a debate that lasted about as long as it takes a quark to decay. We were at her side in a flash, mumbling and stuttering like Dumb and Dumber. I think I blurted out, “I want to have your baby!”

We made sure to include the title “astronaut” in our introduction. John, at least, was impressed by that and asked us several questions about the upcoming launch of STS-1, including some technical questions about landing speeds and glide path angles. Bo didn’t ask us anything. In fact, she didn’t say much at all. Maybe it was the way Hawley leered at her. Surely it couldn’t have been me. We learned the couple was taking a break before the filming of that celluloid classic Tarzan, the Ape Man. I said to Bo, “Me Tarzan. You Jane.” John looked at my 145-pound frame and said, “I don’t think so.”

“How about Cheetah?” I certainly had the chimp ears to qualify. But, once again, I was rejected.

Hawley and I posed with Bo for some photos and said our good-byes. (Or maybe John said he was going to call the island police if we didn’t leave. I can’t recall.) I couldn’t wait to get back and phone every male I had ever met in my entire life beginning with my high school classmates and scream, “Eat your hearts out! Guess who I met?”

Back in Houston, when Judy Resnik heard our story, she began to call me Tarzan. For the rest of her short life, she never again called me Mike. Always Tarzan.

By the second year of our TFNG careers the bloom had begun to fade on our management: George Abbey and John Young. George had chaired the dozen-man astronaut selection committee. If the office vets were to be believed, the “committee” title was a joke. George didn’t operate by committee any more than Josef Stalin had. His was the only vote that counted in the TFNG selection process. George was a pear-shaped man with silver-tinted buzz-cut hair, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and sleepy, basset hound eyes. The word enigmatic was coined to describe a man like George. His heavy face revealed nothing. His rare smiles were hardly more than grimaces. I never saw him in a teeth-showing laugh. I never heard him raise his voice in anger. I never saw him animated in any way. When he spoke, which wasn’t much, it was in low mumbles. He was as unreadable as a marble bust.

George’s parents had obviously expected great things from their son, christening him George Washington Sherman Abbey at his birth in 1932. It was a handle that earned him the acronym GWSA from us TFNGs. George met the challenge of his name. He graduated from Annapolis in 1954, took a commission in the USAF, and accumulated more than four thousand hours of flying time as an air force pilot. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. In 1967 he resigned from the air force and began his NASA career as an MCC engineer (he wasn’t an astronaut). For his work on the Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Every TFNG walked into NASA a slavishly loyal subject of King George, and we competed in pathetic attempts to brown-nose him. The nineteen new astronauts of the class of 1980 did the same, so there was real crowd around George’s backside. Two of the 1980 newbies made an exceptionally flamboyant attempt to put their names in front of George. On Abbey’s birthday Guy Gardner and Jim Bagian called the JSC security police pretending to be employees of a window-cleaning service needing access to the ninth-floor windows of the JSC HQ building. After the police unlocked the windows and departed, Bagian dressed in a Superman costume, dropped a rope to the ground, and repelled to Abbey’s eighth-floor office. There, he pounded on the glass to gain George’s attention and sang “Happy Birthday.” Mission complete, he continued to the ground. Gardner freed the rope of its anchor, closed the window, and disappeared.

It didn’t take long for word of the prank to reach the security police and for its chief to be pounding on Center Director Chris Kraft’s office door with an angry complaint about astronauts duping his people and conducting a dangerous stunt. In a classic demonstration of the old adage “Shit flows downhill,” it didn’t take long for the turds being shoveled onto Kraft’s ninth-floor office desk by the chief of security police to find their way to Abbey’s eighth-floor desk and thence to John Young’s third-floor desk in Building 4. In effect, Dr. Kraft’s message to John was “Johnson Space Center isn’t a private playground for your astronauts.” So Guy Gardner and Jim Bagian picked up some early, if not exactly positive, visibility with George.

But even as we TFNGs and the class of 1980 were doing our best to gain George’s favor we were also developing serious doubts about our leader. While he frequented our social functions, he rarely made appearances in the astronaut office. In particular he offered no insight into the one thing that mattered most to us, the shuttle flight assignment process. Initially, we believed that John Young would be making shuttle crew assignments. Since he bore the title chief of astronauts, how could it be otherwise? But the older astronauts were certain Abbey would be assigning crews independent of Young. In our rookie naïveté we found that hard to believe. Young was in a much better position to know our capabilities, limitations, and interpersonal compatibilities. Abbey’s office was in a separate building. How could he know what crew composition would be best for a particular mission? We could understand why Abbey wanted crew assignment authority, since it represented considerable power, but we could not understand why Young would have rolled over and allowed him to take it. While NASA’s management hierarchy did put Young under Abbey’s authority, it seemed to us Young could have easily insisted on having a big say in crew assignments without the slightest risk to his career. John was a living legend. He was a four-time veteran of spaceflights—two Gemini missions and two Apollo missions. He had walked on the moon. There was no way a midlevel bureaucrat like Abbey could have ever prevailed against him if Young had told Chris Kraft, “These are my astronauts. I know them. I want to have a hand in crew assignments. I’ll consider HQ’s inputs, your inputs, and Abbey’s inputs, but I want a significant say in the matter because I will have to bear the ultimate responsibility if there are any mistakes made by crews.” But the vets in the office were adamant in their opinion that Abbey was a rapacious power monger who had taken all flight assignment responsibility from Young. Why Young would have ever accepted such an office-neutering arrangement would remain a mystery throughout my astronaut life.

There were occasional hints that Abbey’s rule over astronauts was absolute, as when Jerry Ross (class of 1980) returned from Chris Kraft’s welcome for his class. Jerry told us he had been shocked when Kraft had implied he didn’t understand why their class had even been selected. He thought there were enough astronauts as it was. (As Jerry said, it was a strange way of welcoming them.) Jerry’s story implied Abbey had selected a new class over Kraft’s objections. Did even Dr. Kraft answer to Abbey on the subject of astronauts? Nobody knew. Kraft, Abbey, and Young never said a word about their responsibilities. Everything about the most important aspect of our career—flight assignments—was as unknown to us as the dark matter of space was to astrophysicists. Who made assignments? Who approved them? Who had veto power over them? Would there be a rotation system? Would our preferences for a mission be considered? Would military astronauts fly only military missions? Abbey said nothing. Nor did he ever provide the slightest performance feedback—positive or negative. If he had an agenda, that was never revealed either. I have never worked in any organization where there was such a complete lack of communication from above. The result of this information vacuum was predictable. FEAR. The line into space was long and nobody wanted to be at its end, or worse, be banished from it altogether. We were all terrified of doing something that might cross our king. We lived by rumor and innuendo because that was all there was. An early instance was a warning to Steve Nagel from Don Peterson (class of 1969) to stop work on a shuttle autopilot improvement project, “because rumor has it Abbey hates that project.” Nagel was stunned. He had been assigned the work by another office vet. It wasn’t something he had initiated. Yet he was being told he was jeopardizing his career by doing his assigned job. Shannon Lucid and I had a similar experience. Moon walker Al Bean directed us to prepare a report justifying why nonpilot MS astronauts should be trained as pilots. Later we heard from another office vet that Abbey was vehemently opposed to such a program. Shannon and I dropped the work as if it were radioactive waste. Everybody was constantly second-guessing their actions. It was a poisonous situation.

If John Young had been more involved in our professional lives, things might have been better, but he was also an absentee leader. He was consumed with training for STS-1. His interaction with the rank and file was mostly limited to the weekly one-hour Monday meetings, and at those he had an irritating and morale-eroding habit of publicly rebuking us when we failed to win battles on shuttle issues at the various NASA review panels. I recall one meeting in which Bill Fisher (class of 1980) leaned over to me and sarcastically whispered, “That’s it, John, yell atus. ” Fisher’s implication was obvious to all within earshot: John should have been at the panel meeting in question using his vast experience as a veteran spaceman to defend his position instead of expecting one of us rookies to carry the day.

Many TFNGs would grow to loathe the Abbey-Young duopoly and its black hole of communication.

In our second year at JSC we received our first real astronaut job assignments. Because we lacked any other information on the flight assignment process, we quickly constructed a belief system in which these early jobs portended our place in the line into space. To draw an “STS-1 Support” job was thought to be indicative of a position at the head of the TFNG line because of the overarching importance of that first shuttle flight. My name wasn’t under “STS-1 Support.” Next were jobs supporting STS-2, -3, and -4. Again, it was assumed TFNGs assigned to support those missions must be impressing Abbey and be in line for an early space mission. My name was absent from those assignments. And neither was my name typed next to jobs supporting spacewalk, robot arm, and payload development. I finally found “Mullane” next to “Spacelab Support.” This was at the rock bottom of TFNG job preferences. I felt as if I were back in high school after baseball tryouts seeing my name penciled next to B-squad backup right fielder.

Spacelab was a cylindrical module that would be installed in the cargo bay of a shuttle and connected to the cockpit by a pressurized tunnel. Since Spacelab flights would be science missions, I had assumed the post-docs would fly those missions. But it was my name on the jobs list next to “Spacelab Support,” not theirs. Over lunch in the cafeteria I got to listen to Pinky Nelson and Sally Ride and the others excitedly discuss their work of validating robot arm malfunction procedures, developing spacewalk procedures in the WETF swimming pool, and getting down and dirty with STS-1 issues. I averted my eyes, praying nobody would ask me about my days of listening to science briefings on upper-atmospheric gases and the Earth’s magnosphere. I was crushed. I now had the scent of Spacelab on me. I had to believe I was at the end of the flight assignment line, and, most maddening, I had no idea how I had gotten there or how I might recover. But, as I had done throughout my career, I resolved to set aside my disappointment and do my best at my new job. I also resolved to do a better job at getting my nose up George Abbey’s behind.

My disappointment at my Spacelab job was mitigated when, in late 1980, I was assigned to be part of the STS-1 “chase” team. When Columbia came streaking to a landing, NASA wanted a T-38 chase crew on her wing to warn Young and Crippen if anything looked amiss, if there was evidence of leaking fluids or fire or damaged flight controls or the landing gear didn’t extend properly. Thermal protection engineers also wanted the backseater in the chase aircraft to photograph Columbia’s mosaic of ceramic belly heat tiles before she landed. There was some concern those tiles could be damaged by fragments of the Edwards AFB dry lakebed runway being hurled backward by the tires. Prelanding photos would enable engineers to determine whether a tile sustained damage during the mission or during landing. Several chase crews were formed and I was assigned to fellow TFNG Dave Walker’s backseat. During STS-1’s launch we were to be positioned at El Paso’s airport in case Columbia had a problem that necessitated an Abort Once Around the Earth (AOA) with a landing at the nearby White Sands Missile Range runway. If that happened we would scramble to do the rendezvous and I would take the photos.

Dave was known by his navy call sign, Red Flash, bestowed on him for his red hair. (Air force flyers of my era did not have personal call signs, as those in the navy did.) Over several months Red Flash and I, along with the other TFNG chase crews, practiced shuttle rendezvous with ground-based radar personnel. One T-38 would simulate the landing shuttle while the others would be vectored toward it by the radar controllers, as would be the case if Columbia made an emergency White Sands landing.

During this training, trajectory engineers in Houston asked us to examine other dry lakebeds in southern New Mexico and Texas as potential emergency landing sites for Columbia. They wanted to cover every contingency, including “low energy” trajectory errors that might prevent the shuttle from reaching the White Sands runway or “high energy” errors that would result in the shuttle overflying White Sands completely. Their fears were well founded. When Columbia came to Earth, it would do so as a powerless glider. It had no engines the pilots could use to fly around and search for a runway. If there wasn’t a suitable landing site within reach, Young and Crippen would have to eject and Columbia would crash.

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:

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 of Columbia’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. When Columbia’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 over Columbia’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 aboard Columbia.

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 to Columbia’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 what Columbia 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 send Columbia 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 in 8½minutes 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 through all 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 as man-ready with computers, but the gods of Apollo could.

I watched on TV as Columbia’s SSMEs came to life and a cloud of steam billowed from the flame bucket. When the SRBs ignited and Columbia 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 watched Columbia’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, Single-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 before Columbia 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 convinced Columbia 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. In Columbia’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.