Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 19 Abort

Back at the crew quarters I changed into my athletic gear and headed for the gym. If I died on tomorrow’s mission, I would die in perfect health. I weighed 145 pounds, ten pounds less than I had weighed twenty-one years earlier when I had graduated from high school. I doubt there was a pound of fat on my 5-foot-9½-inch frame. I could run five-and-a-half-minute miles…four of them back to back. I had a resting heartrate of 40. My ass was so tight I could have cracked walnuts between my butt cheeks.

As I pumped iron, I chuckled at the sight of the straw-filled archery bull’s-eye in one corner. What candy-ass astronaut had requested that addition to the gym? Whoever it was, I hoped they could fly a shuttle better than they could shoot a bow. The plaster wall around the target had been shotgunned by errant arrows.

I left the gym for an outdoor run and found Judy stretching before her jog. We fell in together. It was early evening and KSC had emptied of workers. Our only company were mosquitoes, and they were a real incentive to keep the pace fast. Sweat came quickly, which was the whole purpose of the run. I wanted to dehydrate myself to minimize bladder discomfort in tomorrow’s countdown. Other astronauts did the same. The few couch potatoes in our ranks tried to wring themselves dry by sitting in a whirlpool bath and drinking beer, counting on the diuretic effect of the alcohol and sweat to do the job.

Judy and I passed the black hulks of several alligators on the opposite banks of drainage ditches. I had once seen one of these creatures explode out of the water in a chase after an armadillo. Why they never chased jogging astronauts was a mystery to me. Even when we teased them, they did not react. I once watched Fred Gregory toss shells at a twelve-footer hoping to see it stir. As the missiles ricocheted from its scales, I warned Fred, “Those things can run twenty miles per hour when they’re riled and that’s a lot faster than you.” But Fred continued his reptile target practice while answering, “Yeah…but that’s on firm ground. If they’re chasing me, they’ll be slipping and sliding through shit and they can’t run nearly as fast.”

Judy and I discussed an issue we had heard about just before leaving the crew quarters. An engineer had found a potential flaw that could result in the failure of the burned-out SRBs to separate from the gas tank. Such a scenario would be fatal. The shuttle would never make it to orbit or achieve a successful abort dragging along nearly 300,000 pounds of useless steel. The good news was it would take several simultaneous failures in the circuitry for the SRB separation failure to occur. When the launch team asked Hank whether he was comfortable flying the mission with this failure mode in place, his answer was yes. That didn’t surprise me. They might as well have asked a three-year-old if he wanted to eat his candy now or wait until tomorrow. If the engineers said, “We forgot to install the center engine. Do you still want to launch?” Hank probably would have said, “No problem. We’ll just burn the two we have.” Nothing was going to get in our way.

Judy and I continued into the KSC wilderness. The only sound was the buzz of cicadas. The dusk was deepening and an occasional firefly flickered over the ditches. Judy voiced concern that we might trip over an alligator. I told her the Fred Gregory story and she laughed. But in a rare moment of prudence, we decided to turn back.

We gradually slowed into a cool-down walk. I had come a long way…and I don’t mean during the run. There was a fox of a woman at my side and I could actually think of her as a friend and equal. Those six years ago when we were standing together on the stage being introduced to the JSC workforce, I saw Judy with three strikes against her: She was civilian. She was a woman. She was beautiful. At the time I wondered how her beauty had played in her passage through the wickets of life to become an astronaut; wickets that, for the most part, had been male tended. Had she been waved through some of those gates because her smile had melted a professor or perhaps her dynamite body had influenced a male astronaut sitting on the selection committee? We males are suspicious of female beauty because we know ourselves too well.

But, over the years, Judy had proven she wasn’t an astronaut because of her sex appeal or because of an abuse of the affirmative action program. She was an astronaut because she was qualified to be one. I had watched her fly formation from the backseats of T-38s and lead instrument approaches in bad weather and do it as well as me (and my backseat fighter and T-38 time had made me a damned fine instrument pilot). I had seen her expertly operate the robot arm. I had watched her rappel off the side of the orbiter mock-up in our emergency training, parasail into the water in our survival training, work 20 feet underwater in a 300-pound spacesuit. In simulation after simulation, she had instantly and correctly reacted to countless emergencies. I think the best testimonial for Judy’s proficiency was the fact it was never a topic of astronaut scuttlebutt. In a strange way, that was the best compliment an astronaut could achieve, not being discussed behind his or her back. And I never heard Judy’s name attached to a “Who let that bozo in the door?” comment. Over a beer or in a jog with a TFNG, I would hear comments about the misadventures of other astronauts. When one TFNG MS was removed from being a robot arm operator, it took about ten milliseconds before the reason was being shared in whispers. He maneuvered the arm like a fifteen-year-old kid learning to use a stick shift. There was locker-room gossip about an MS jeopardizing the deployment of a satellite because of a failure to follow the checklist. One TFNG accidentally engaged the shuttle backup flight system during a prelaunchpad test and caused a delay in the countdown. Judy’s name was never in any of these conversations, the ultimate testimonial to her competency. She wasn’t the smartest or quickest TFNG—Steve Hawley held that position. Judy was like me. We weren’t stars. But we were solid, dependable. We could be counted on to get the job done.

Until my STS-41D association with Judy, I had believed it impossible for a man to be the close friend of an attractive woman. It was a fact of testosterone as irrefutable as gravity was a fact of nature. Men see attractive women as sex objects and that destroys any hope of close friendship. But I had discovered an exception to that rule. When a man and woman are thrown together for several years of training for a journey that has the potential to kill them, the man learns to see through the woman’s youth and beauty and measure her proficiency. He learns to see her as somebody whose response in an emergency might mean his life or death. On that June evening, six years after we first met, I could now see and appreciate Judy’s skills as an astronaut. I could trust her with my life. Tomorrow, I would do exactly that.

Several years later I would learn this friendship had placed my name on the office grapevine. After Challenger, I was in Hank Hartsfield’s backseat on a T-38 flight. We had been sharing our thoughts on the disaster and the loss of so many friends when Hank had commented, “Judy’s death must have been particularly hard on you.” I was confused by the statement. The death of all the crew had been hard on me. I asked him, “Why do you say that?” To which Hank had replied, “Well…being that you two were sleeping together.” I was stunned. I proclaimed innocence but I knew he didn’t believe me. Maybe it is possible for a man to share a close relationship with a beautiful woman that does not include sex, but don’t expect other men to believe it.

At the crew quarters I showered and returned to the main conference room. Hank was my only company. He was reading the newspaper, mumbling about the idiocy of liberals and their destruction of the country. “Goddammit, I wish Ted Kennedy would find another bridge…with deeper and wider water under it.” I had long before learned not to respond. It would only elicit a filibuster on the topic. When Hank got wound up on politics, you could never escape.

Our satellite TV, for some fortuitous reason, received the Playboy Channel. I marveled at this fact as much as I marveled that alligators didn’t chase astronauts. How did the Playboy Channel end up on the TV in the astronaut crew quarters? I suspect it was just one of those government snafus. There was a KSC bean counter somewhere who had contracted with a company for satellite TV and this was what we got. It would probably have taken multiple forms in triplicate and ten thousand taxpayer dollars to turn it off. I wondered if the signal was coming from a satellite a shuttle had previously placed in orbit. That would be a unique claim to fame: “I was the guy who put the Playboy Channel in space.”

So, at T-12 hours and counting I was listening to Hank grumble, “Gloria Steinem should be in Ted Kennedy’s car when he finds that bridge,” while watching a topless model speaking about her turn-ons, “a six-pack belly and world peace,” and turnoffs, “pollution and rude people.”

I finally headed to my room for sleep. I knew that would be a struggle. I was bipolar with the frequency of a tuning fork, oscillating between fear and joy. The flight surgeon had given us sleeping pills but I had no intention of taking one. There was still a last physical exam ahead and I didn’t want an adverse reaction to the pills prompting a medical question. There were plenty of MSes who would gleefully step into my shoes on a moment’s notice. I wasn’t about to give any of those vultures that opportunity.

I lay in bed and studied the room’s only wall decoration, a framed photo of an exploding volcano. The photo was a time exposure so the glowing ejected lava was captured as arcing streaks against a black sky. Bloodred coils of molten rock snaked downward on the skirt of the mountain. I wondered what bureaucrat had been doing the interior decorating for the astronaut crew quarters and thought, If it was my last night before a mission into space, what wall art would I like to reflect upon to calm my uneasy soul? I know…an exploding volcano with lots of fire and sparks! It was like showing films of airplane crashes on an airliner as the in-flight movie. If you’re going to hang a picture of something exploding, why not hang a photo of a NASA rocket exploding on the launchpad? That would be rich.

The only sound was a muffled, unintelligible voice coming through the steel wall next to my ear. Mike Coats was talking on the phone to Diane and his children. I had made my final call to Donna and the kids a couple hours earlier and had performed as poorly in that good-bye as I had in person on the beach. Even though I now had time to make another call, I did not. One more good-bye wasn’t going to help me or Donna. Mike was a better man than I, God bless him.

At least I had done a good job of financially protecting my family in the event of my death. I had three insurance policies on my life. Months earlier I had written each insurance company explaining my pending shuttle launch and asking if there was any fine print on the policies that would negate the payout if I died on the shuttle. Each company had replied in writing that its policy would be unaffected by death by rocket. I had stapled each of those letters to the respective policies and put them with my will. Donna wouldn’t have to deal with any surprises there.

What were the chances there was a Gideon Bible in the nightstand drawer? I wondered. There was not, thank God. It would have scared the shit out of me if NASA thought we needed one. “We’re not sure this rocket will work, so here’s our ultimate emergency backup, a Bible.”

I didn’t need a Bible to talk to God. I prayed for my family. I prayed for myself. I prayed I wouldn’t blow up and then I prayed harder that I wouldn’t screw up. Even my prayers reflected the astronaut credo, “Better dead than look bad.”

At some point in the night, exhaustion overpowered fear and excitement, and I fell into a shallow sleep. The smell of cooking bacon woke me. The dieticians had arrived and were making breakfast. My stomach turned in disgust. The thought of food was nauseating.

I could hear the wake-up knocks on the doors of the other crewmembers and wondered how many of them were actually asleep. I could believe Hank had slept well. Anybody who could read a newspaper and deliver political commentary on the eve of a shuttle launch must have their shit together. But I imagined the rest of the crew had spent much of the night as I had, counting holes in the ceiling tile.

The knock came on my door and I opened it to Olan Bertrand’s smiling face. Olan was one of the Vehicle Integration Test Team (VITT) members and would be a participant in our final prelaunch briefing. He was also a Louisiana Cajun with an accent as thick as a bowl of jambalaya. He mumbled something I interpreted as “The weather and the bird are looking good,” but could have been “It’s raining like hell and Discovery blew over.” Only his smile told me it was the former and not the latter.

I showered and shaved, then trimmed my fingernails. Some of the early spacewalkers had painfully torn their nails on the inside of the suit gloves and had suggested contingency spacewalkers cut them short, too. I did so and filed them to snag-free crescents.

For breakfast I dressed in a mission golf shirt. I had no appetite, but it was a mandatory photo opportunity. A NASA cameraman entered to film us sitting around the table. I faked a carefree smile and waved. Most of us ate nothing or very lightly. I had a piece of toast. As a teenager I had always heard the “voice of NASA” say the astronauts were enjoying a breakfast of steak and eggs before launch. One bite of that fare and I would have vomited. Nobody drank coffee. That would have been bladder suicide.

After the cameraman was gone, I gave Judy my emery board. “You can do your nails during ascent.” She laughed. It had been a running Zoo Crew joke that, as a Jewish American Princess (JAP), she would be giving herself a manicure during the countdown. With the nail file I included my latest JAP joke: “What does a JAP say when she inadvertently knocks over a priceless Ming dynasty vase, it shatters on the floor, and museum officials rush to the scene?”

Judy sighed in resignation. “What does she say, Tarzan?”

“She shouts, ‘I’m okay! I’m okay!’”

After the meal, we collected in the main briefing room for a teleconference to review the launch countdown status and the weather forecast. Everything looked good. The weather for Dakar, Senegal, Africa, was covered. It was our primary transatlantic abort site, just twenty-five harrowing minutes away from Florida via a wounded shuttle. I really didn’t want to make my first visit to Africa in a space shuttle.

Next, we visited flight surgeons Jim Logan and Don Stewart in the gym for a cursory last exam. They checked our ears, throat, temperature, and blood pressure. I put myself in a happy place to ensure the last was within limits. Both doctors were good friends of the Zoo Crew, but if they had raised any medical issues at this moment, others would have later found their arrow-riddled bodies spread-eagled to the archery hay bale. We wouldn’t have missed.

We then cycled through the bathroom for a next-to-last gravity-assisted waste collection. We’d have one more chance at the launchpad toilet. My self-imposed fast from liquids was working. I had no urges, but nevertheless I took advantage of the moment to squeeze out a few drops of urine.

I returned to my room and began to dress. While we had been at breakfast, the suit crew had arranged our wardrobe on the bed. The first item I donned was my urine collection device. I stepped through the leg openings and pulled the condom toward my penis. It looked incredibly small. Not the condom…my penis. I coached the recalcitrant appendage into the latex. It promptly slipped from my body. Apprehension had sucked every molecule of blood from my crotch. I doubted even a naked Bo Derek doing jumping jacks in front of me would have stirred life into this lizard.

I made a second attempt to get my sword into its sheath, this time taking the weight of the UCD bladder in my hand so I would stay attached. I Velcroed the device around my waist, accepting the results whatever they might be. I had no choice. There was a countdown clock ticking.

I finished dressing in my flight suit, then filled my pockets with spare prescription glasses, pencils, pressurized space pens, and barf bags…lots of barf bags. I put one in each of my chest pockets and a couple spares in other pockets. Would I be a victim of space sickness? I had been sick so many times in the backseats of various jets, I couldn’t believe I would be spared in space. I toyed with the idea of taking one of NASA’s antinausea pills, a mixture of scopolamine (a downer) and Dexedrine (an upper), but decided otherwise. I wanted to know my Space Adaptation Syndrome (SAS) susceptibility and drugs would camouflage it. Besides, I didn’t think the pill would work. Months earlier I had been on a deep-sea-fishing trip with a group of astronauts, several of whom had taken the capsule. Some had still gotten seasick. Another guest on the same trip, who had also swallowed a ScopeDex, had been so suddenly struck with nausea he had vomited before getting to the rail. The memory of NASA’s miracle SAS pill floating in a puddle of barf on the fantail of a fishing boat did nothing to inspire confidence that the pills would help me in space. I left them behind.

Fully dressed and with pockets loaded, I stepped from my room and joined the rest of the crew in a walk to the elevator. Judy was in front of me and I could hear the whooshing sound of her diaper plastic rubbing against her coveralls. I teased her, “You’re getting a little broad in the beam, JR.”

“Screw you, Tarzan.”

How different from reality were all those science fiction movies of my youth. As Lloyd Bridges (Colonel Floyd Graham ) and Osa Massen (Dr. Lisa Van Horn) boarded their Rocketship X-M in the 1950 Hollywood classic of the same title, I don’t recall them commenting on the condoms and diapers they were wearing.

A group of NASA employees welcomed us with applause on our exit from the crew quarters. I wanted to embrace them and say, “Thank you for giving me this moment.” They were the best in the world.

We stepped into the elevator and two heavyset men wearing tool belts followed us. I was shocked. We were on our way to fly the space shuttle and two blue-collar workers had decided to hitch a ride with us. When the elevator opened and the photographers got this picture, it was going to be a hoot. A bewildered Hank had to ask, “What are you guys doing?”

“We’re elevator repairmen. There’ve been reports this elevator is giving you guys problems. We didn’t want you to get stuck on your way to your rocket.” We all laughed. NASA thinks of everything. A comforting thought at this moment.

But the workers were not needed. We creaked to ground level without a problem and exited the building to cheers and more applause from a larger group of the NASA team.

Outside, I immediately looked to the sky hoping to see stars, hoping for proof the weather was good. But the lights of the cameras filming our departure had ruined my night vision.

We climbed into the astro-van and began the drive to Pad 39A, the same pad from which Neil Armstrong had embarked on his historic journey to the moon fifteen years earlier. I wondered what his drive had been like. The van air-conditioning was making ours frigid. My skin was clammy and I was shivering. Nervous small talk occupied us. I hoped nobody could hear my heart. Each pulse seemed like a detonation.

We passed successive security checkpoints where the guards saluted or waved or flashed a thumbs-up. They had trucks parked nearby for their own evacuation to more remote points. Closer to the pad we passed several fire trucks and ambulances. Their crews were clad in silver firefighting suits and hovered near their vehicles. When the launchpad closeout crew departed, these men and women would remain in a nearby bunker, ready to race to our rescue if there was a problem. I couldn’t imagine any problem involving 4 million pounds of propellant leaving anything to rescue. There were certainly six body bags in those ambulances.

I was as scared as I had ever been in my life. But at that moment, if God had appeared and told me there was a 90 percent probability I wasn’t going to return from this mission alive and had given me an opportunity to jump from that crew van, I would have shouted, “No!” For this rookie flight, I would take a one in ten chance. I had dreamed of this moment since childhood. I had to go. Even if God had given me a vision of what the other nine chances meant, a vision of my charred remains being zipped into one of those body bags, I still would have declined His offer to exit the van. I had to make this flight.

I would later look back on my desperate need for this first mission and think how perverted it was. What type of a person puts their wife, their children, their own life second behind a need to ride a rocket? I believed that surely I was unique in this sick prioritization. But I discovered otherwise. In the weeks after STS-41D, Hank Hartsfield described to me his feelings before his first mission (STS-4). I was stunned to hear his admission of the exact feelings I was now experiencing. He recounted how he would rather have died on his first mission than never to have flown in space. We were like the Mount Everest climbers stepping over frozen corpses from prior climbing disasters in our quest for the summit. Like those climbers, we were motivated by a fear far greater than death—the fear of not reaching the top.

What a fraud astronauts practice on our fellow citizens. Most Americans see us as selfless heroes, laying our lives on the line for our country, the advancement of mankind, and other lofty ideals. In reality no astronaut has ever screamed, “For God and Country!” when the hold-down bolts blew…at least not on their rookie mission. We were all stepping into harm’s way because we knew otherwise we would die as incomplete humans. There was room in our souls for noble motivations only after our pins were gold.

As Discovery came into view we leaned into the aisle to watch. A crisscross of xenon lights bathed her. Against the backdrop of early morning blackness she appeared as a newly risen morning star. If my heart had been in overdrive before, it now accelerated to warp speed.

At the pad we stepped from the van and looked up at our ship. In spite of my faith in physics, it didn’t seem possible anything so gargantuan could rise from the Earth, much less achieve a 17,300-miles-per-hour speed at 200 miles altitude. The stack towered 200 feet above the Mobile Launch Platform (MLP), which, itself, loomed several stories above us. The 4½-million-pound mass was held in place by eight hold-down bolts, four at each SRB skirt. The SRBs were separated by nearly 30 feet to accommodate the blimpish diameter of the ET. The gray acreage of the MLP’s underside formed a steel overcast. Three cavernous openings were cut through it to allow the flames from the two SRBs and the SSMEs to descend into the flame bucket and be diverted outward. During engine ignition a nearby water tower would be emptied into that bucket to protect it from heat damage. Giant plastic sausages of water were also slung in the two SRB cavities. That water would attenuate the acoustic shock waves the boosters developed, which could reflect upward to damage cargo in the payload bay.

The pad was eerily deserted. A vapor of oxygen swirled around the SSME nozzles. A flag of more vapor whipped from the top of the ET beanie cap. Shadows played upon that fog, creating a scene right out of a creepy science fiction movie. Loudspeakers boomed the prelaunch checklist milestones, a noise that competed with the deafening hiss of the engine purge. The few remaining workers, appearing Lilliputian next to the machine they serviced, performed their duties with quiet urgency. In the shadows the glowing yellow safety light-sticks Velcroed to their arms and legs made them appear skeletal.

We climbed into the pad elevator and shot to the 195-foot level. Hank and Mike walked immediately to the white room, a boxlike anteroom up against Discovery’s side hatch, where technicians waited to help us into the cockpit. Hank and Mike would be first inside. I had time to kill and walked to an edge to get a better view of the vehicle. Discovery’s belly of black heat tiles gave her a scaly, reptilian look. They contrasted sharply with the white thermal blankets glued on her top and sides.

I looked out at the Launch Control Center (LCC), three miles away. Donna and the kids would be inside. At T-9 minutes the family escorts would lead them to the roof to watch the launch. I wondered how Donna was handling the stress. I knew the kids would be okay, but she would be at her emotional limits.

“Hey, Tarzan, don’t fall.” Judy came to my side. The wind had whipped her hair into a black aura. She had an ear-to-ear grin.

I made the observation that it was scary looking over the railing from two hundred feet up. “I’ve got a fear of heights, JR. I can’t get any closer.”

She laughed. “Well, Tarzan, you’re screwed. We’re headed to two hundred miles.”

We continued with small talk, each of us trying to distract ourselves from our pounding hearts. Then the two-minute warning call came for my strap-in.

I embraced her. “Good luck, JR. I’ll see you in space.” Since she would be in a mid-deck seat, I wouldn’t see her until after MECO. It was the first time I had ever held her and I was struck by how petite she was.

“Roger that, Tarzan.” She returned my squeeze and we parted.

I detoured to the pad toilet for a last go at urinating. The bowl was a pond of unflushed filth and toilet paper. The plumbing had been turned off hours earlier as part of the checklist for launchpad closeout. The workers had no option but to use this facility. I added my urine to the mess, reattached my UCD, then walked to the white room.

The closeout crew quickly harnessed me. We shook hands and I dropped to my knees and crawled through the side hatch. The cockpit was as cold as a meat locker. It occurred to me the chill was going to shrink a critical part of my body even further. If my UCD condom stayed attached, it would be a miracle.

I stood on the temporary panels covering the back instrument panel and struggled to put myself in the chair behind Mike Coats. Once in, Jeannie Alexander, another of the closeout crew, helped me with the five-point harness. As she worked at my crotch to make the buckle connections, I teased, “I’ll give you all day to stop that.” She had probably heard the same joke a hundred times. She connected my communication cord and emergency breathing pack, then clipped my checklist to a tether. Everything had to be secured. Anything that dropped during launch would be slammed into the back instrument panel by the G-forces, irretrievable until MECO. Finally she gave me a big smile and a pat on the shoulder and turned to help Steve Hawley.

I looked around the cockpit. Everything appeared as it had in the countless simulations except for the sparkling newness. Discovery even smelled new. Every piece of glass gleamed. There were no wear marks on the floors or on the most frequently used computer keys. There were no vacant panels or panels with somebody else’s payload controls as we had frequently encountered in the JSC simulators. This was our bird. It was our mission software humming in her brain. We would be driving a brand-new vehicle from the showroom floor.

About ninety minutes to go. With each vanishing second my heart shifted into yet a higher gear. Thank God we weren’t wired for bio-data. That had ended back in the Apollo days. I would have been embarrassed for anybody to have seen my vital signs. I envisioned Dr. Jim Logan looking at them and saying, “It must be a bad sensor. Nobody’s heart can achieve those rates without exploding.”

Jeannie finished with Hawley’s strap-in. Judy and Charlie Walker were belted in downstairs. The closeout crew wished us good luck, unplugged from the intercom, and was gone. We heard the hatch close. A moment later our ears popped as the cockpit was pressurized. The wait began.

It quickly became an agony, physical and mental. I wiggled under my harness to restore some circulation to various pressure points. In spite of my dehydration efforts and earlier toilet visits my bladder quickly neared the rupture point. What were the chances my UCD condom was still attached? It had been on too long for my body to still feel it and I was convinced all the crawling and wiggling I had done, not to mention the effects of fear and cold, had caused my penis to disengage. If so, I would be urinating into my flight suit. And I was certain there would be a lot of urine. I could imagine it soaking my coveralls, dripping from the seat onto the back instruments, and shorting out an electrical circuit. My “accident” would be a gossip topic for decades. “Remember that Mullane guy? He pissed his pants on the launchpad. They had to delay the launch to dry out the instruments.” God, I’d rather blow up. I tried to hold on, but soon realized that would be impossible. Praying for a miracle that I was still safely ensconced in latex, I decided to give it a shot. But I quickly discovered it was impossible to urinate on my back. Even though the urge was overwhelming, painful, even, I strained but nothing happened. There are some things even the world’s best training program can’t prepare you for. In desperation I loosened my harness and struggled to roll slightly to my side. In that new position I was finally able to open the floodgates. After a moment I tried to put on the brakes to determine if I was leaking, but I would have had better luck damming the Atlantic. Urine poured from me like water into the flame bucket. I felt no spreading wetness so my miracle had been granted. The condom was still attached. I collapsed in glorious relief. You would have thought I had already reached MECO.

There was little to do in the cockpit. After some radio checks with the Launch Control Center, they moved on with their prelaunch activities. We were left alone. Others complained about the state of their bladders. Judy and Charlie joined in from downstairs. I didn’t envy them their position. They had no instrument displays or windows. They would be riding an elevator with no idea of what floor they were passing. Judy reminded us she did not want to hear any sentences ending in the word that, as in, “Did you see that!” or “What was that!” We all laughed. When you are blind to the that being referenced, it would be very disconcerting to hear any such exclamations.

We fell silent and just listened to the LCC dialogue. When the Range Safety Officer’s (RSO) call sign was heard there were some joking comments on the intercom to cover the fear his grim function generated. The RSO would blow Discovery from the sky if she strayed off course. If the RSO ever transmitted the Flight Termination System ARM command, a red light on Hank’s instrument panel would illuminate as a warning. I wondered what sick engineer had thought that would be helpful.

With each passing minute the mood in the cockpit grew more intense. Then we heard the dreaded word problem. At T-32 minutes a problem was noted with the Backup Flight System (BFS) computer. The launch director informed us he would stop the countdown at the planned T-20 minute hold point while the experts sorted it out. There was a communal groan on the intercom. The flight rules would never let us launch without the backup computer working properly. After all the emotional capital we had invested to this point, the thought of getting out of the cockpit and repeating that investment tomorrow was enough to make us physically ill. We all prayed that the offending circuit would fix itself. But God didn’t hear us. Following several minutes of troubleshooting, the LCC called, “Discovery, we’re going to have to pull you out and try again tomorrow.”

I was crushed, totally spent. We all were. Our nerves had been in constant tension for four hours and we had nothing to show for it. I looked forward to a repeat of this tomorrow like I looked forward to a root canal.

Within the hour we had been extracted from the cockpit and were on our way back to the crew quarters. The spouses were driven out for lunch. Donna put on a brave face but it couldn’t mask her exhaustion. The other spouses looked similarly beaten.

Then, the script was replayed. The tearful good-byes. Another review of checklists. Hank’s political commentary. A fitful sleep. The nauseating smell of cooking bacon. The wake-up knock on the door. Olan’s mumbles.

Once again we entered the elevator to be joined by the same two maintenance men. Another couple of launch scrubs and we’d be old friends. We exited the building into the same camera lights, heard the same enthusiastic applause from our friends, and boarded the same chilly astro-van. Even the extreme fear of death that had accompanied me yesterday was back again. The first launch attempt had done nothing to mitigate it. And so was the greater fear…that I would never make this flight, that at the last second something would happen to steal my chance. I would be forever damned as an astronaut in name only. My astronaut pin would remain silver.

As Jeannie Alexander worked at my crotch to fasten the seat harness I joked, “I’m getting tired of this foreplay.” She didn’t have time to do more than just smile.

The hatch was closed and we were back into the wait. After yesterday’s urinary challenges, I had been even more aggressive at dehydrating myself. But it didn’t help. With my legs elevated there was a whole lake of fluid heading downhill into my bladder. Within an hour I felt as if I were going to burst.

The intercom fell silent earlier than it had yesterday. We were all too exhausted to continue our lame jokes. The whooshing of the cabin fan was the only sound. I watched the sky grow lighter and seagulls soar past the windows. I could tell by the way Hank’s head lolled to the side that he had fallen asleep. How some astronauts could do that amazed me. I could no more have nodded off than could a man strapped to an electric chair. I was scared. But at that moment there was nothing in the world, including celebrity, wealth, power, and sex, that could have motivated me to give up that seat. Sitting in it, being an hour from orbit, I was the richest man on earth.

T-32 minutes came and went. Yesterday’s comment about a glitch in the BFS computer was not repeated.

Hank woke up. “Did I miss anything?”

I thought of telling him he had slept for four years and Ted Kennedy was now president, but decided otherwise. If he had a stroke, it would surely delay the flight.

We entered the T-20 minute hold. This was as far as we had gotten yesterday. Please, dear God, let the count continue. Each of us had our ears hypertuned to the LCC dialogue, praying we would hear nothing about an off-nominal condition. We didn’t. Right on time, we came out of the hold.

At T-9 minutes we entered our last planned hold. Again, there were no discrepancies and the LCC released the clock. I thought of Donna and the kids. They would now be walking the stairs to the roof of the LCC. God help them, was my prayer.

T-5 minutes. “Go for APU start.” Mike acknowledged LCC’s call and flipped switches to start Discovery’s three hydraulic pumps. The meters showed good pressure. Discovery now had muscle. The pumps tickled our backs with their slight vibrations. The movement was the first indication the vehicle was anything but a fixed monument.

The computers ordered a test of the flight control system and Discovery shuddered as her SSME nozzles and elevons were moved through their limits.

T-2 minutes. We closed our helmet visors. Hank reached across the cockpit to shake Mike Coats’s hand. “Good luck, everybody. This is it. Let’s do it like we’ve trained. Eyes on the instruments.”

T-1 minute. Please, God, if something bad is to happen on this flight, let it be above fifty miles. My prayer was specific for a reason. By NASA’s definition you had to fly higher than fifty miles altitude to be awarded a gold astronaut pin. If I died below that altitude, Donna and the kids would only have my silver pin for a memorial shadowbox.

T-31 seconds. “Go for auto-sequence start.” Discovery’s computers assumed control of the countdown from LCC’s computers. She now commanded herself. The cockpit was a scene of intense, silent focus. Again, I was glad my vital signs weren’t on public display. My heart was now a low hum.

T-10 seconds. “Go for main engine start.” The engine manifold pressure gauges shot up as valves opened and fuel and oxidizer flooded into the pipes. The turbo-pumps came to life and began to ram 1,000 pounds of propellant per second into each of the three combustion chambers.

At T-6 seconds the cockpit shook violently. Engine start.This is it, I thought. In spite of my fear, I smiled. I was headed into space. It was really going to happen.

5…4…The vibrations intensified as the SSMEs sequentially came on line.

Then, the warble of the master caution system grabbed us. “We’ve had engine shutdown.” I don’t know who said it, but they were stating the obvious. The vibrations were gone. The cockpit was as quiet as a crypt. Shadows waved across our seats as Discovery rocked back and forth on her hold-down bolts.

We were all seized with a What the hell? wonderment. Something was seriously wrong. Hank punched off the master caution light and tone. The left and right SSME shutdown lights stabbed us with their red glare, meaning they were off. But the light for the center SSME remained dark. Surely it couldn’t still be running? There was no noise or vibration. But if it was still running, we wanted it off. Whatever was happening, we wanted everything off. Mike repeatedly jabbed his finger onto the shutdown button. But there was no change in the light status.

Paramount on everybody’s mind was the status of the SRBs. We had gotten to within a few seconds of their start. If they ignited now, we were dead. Generating more than 6 million pounds of thrust, they certainly had the muscle to rip out the hold-down bolts and destroy the vehicle in the process.

The diagnosis quickly came from LCC. “We’ve had an RSLS abort.” Discovery’s computers had detected something wrong and stopped the launch—a Redundant Set Launch Sequencer (RSLS) abort. But what had gone wrong? Had a turbo-pump disintegrated? Had an engine exploded? Had hot shrapnel been hurled around our engine compartment? We were strapped to 4 million pounds of explosives and didn’t have a clue what was happening a hundred feet below us.

And neither did the families. I would later learn how the abort had played out on the LCC roof. A thick summer haze had obscured the launchpad. When the engines had ignited, a bright flash had momentarily penetrated that haze, strongly suggesting an explosion. As that fear had been rising in the minds of the families, the engine start sound had finally hit…a brief roar. It had echoed off the sides of the Vertical Assembly Building (VAB) and then…silence. Donna had been convinced she was seeing and hearing an explosion. Fortunately the astronaut escorts had been there to ease her fear with an explanation of a shuttle-pad abort. No doubt they had done so with some private reservations. There had never been a shuttle engine-start abort.

Donna had crumpled into a chair and cried. Amy, our oldest daughter, had followed suit. They were crushed by the thought that it would all have to be repeated another day. Amy snapped, “Why don’t they just put more gas in it and launch it now!” The thought of having to climb the LCC roof and endure another countdown torture made her wild with anger.

Back in the cockpit, things took a turn for the worse. Launch Control reported a fire on the launchpad and activated the fire suppression system. Water began to spray across the cockpit windows. What was going on down there?

In the midst of these terrifying moments I looked at Steve Hawley. He stared at me with eyes as big as plates. I knew that was my face—I was staring into a mirror. Then he commented, “I thought we’d be higher when the engines quit.” I wanted to hit the SOB. I wanted to scream, “This isn’t funny, Hawley!” And to think, six years earlier I had harbored doubts about the post-docs’ mettle. Some of them, Hawley included, had steel balls.

Hank ordered all of us to unstrap from our seats and prepare for an emergency egress from the cockpit. If we chose to leave we’d have to run across the access arm to the other side of the gantry and jump in escape baskets. In just thirty seconds those would slide us a quarter mile away. We’d be able to wait out the problem in an underground bunker, assuming we could get there before the rocket exploded.

Judy crawled to the side hatch window and reported the access arm had been swung back into place and the fire suppression system was spraying water over it. She didn’t see any fire. “Henry, do you want me to open the hatch?”

Judy’s question elicited several exchanges of do we or don’t we make a run for it. How bad was the fire? LCC’s conversations seemed unpanicked and that gave us some reassurance that everything was under control. But LCC and MCC always seemed in control. That was their job, to calmly look at their computer screens of data and make robotic, emotionless decisions. Could they remain calm even as their creation was de-creating? I had no doubt. “We’ve had an RSLS abort” could well be engineer-speak for “Holy shit! Run for your lives! She’s gonna blow!” No, I was not comforted by the calm of the LCC.

“Negative on opening the hatch, Judy.” Hank decided we’d sit tight. It was a decision that might have saved our lives. The post-abort analysis determined the fire had been caused by some residual hydrogen escaping from the engines and igniting combustible material on the MLP. The gas flame may have been as high as the cockpit but since hydrogen burns clean we would not have seen it. We could have thrown open the hatch and run into a fire.

As time passed it became more evident we were in no immediate danger. We waited for the closeout crew to open the hatch. My thoughts turned as dark as space. My worst nightmare had been realized. I was still an astronaut in name only. For how long? It was obvious there would be no launch attempt any time soon. In my quiet hell I catastrophized. I built a scenario in which the engine problem was severe. The vehicle would be grounded for many months, maybe years, while the engines were redesigned and tested. Launch schedules would change. Our crew would be pushed backward in line, maybe even disbanded. I had gotten to within three seconds of a lifelong dream only to have it snatched away. For how long? Weeks? Months? Forever?

We exited the vehicle into the residual rain of the fire suppression system. It had soaked the gantry and now water was dripping from every platform, pipe, and cross brace. We were quickly drenched. Judy’s hair took a big hit. She looked like a sodden cat.

In the astro-van we sat in our soaked flight suits shivering from the chill of the air-conditioning. That system seemed to have only two positions, cold and freakin’ cold. Our physical misery was a perfect fit to the cloud of depression enveloping us. I wasn’t the only one doing mental gymnastics and wondering how badly screwed we were.

The wives and kids were waiting for us at the crew quarters and there were a lot of tearful hugs. “Dad, we thought you had blown up!” Pat was quick to fill me in on the momentary horror they had lived on the LCC roof.

At a press conference we all lied about the tension in the cockpit following the abort and fire. Hank took most of the questions and did the Right Stuff routine of, “Aaawh shucks, ma’am. T’weren’t nothing.” He explained how we train for these things, how confident we had been in the LCC’s reactions to the abort, how we had never doubted our safety. Meanwhile, I was wondering if I had shit in my flight suit.

We were released from our health quarantine to join our families. As expected, there would be no more launch attempts until the engine problem was identified and fixed. The shuttle program had just come to a screeching stop for an indefinite period.

Donna, the kids, and I returned to their condo to a boisterous party. While my aunts and uncles and cousins were bummed out the launch had been aborted, they were still having a great time. The sun was shining. The booze was flowing. It was a Florida family reunion. They were all on vacation and having a blast. And now my abort had made the reunion complete. If I had launched, the family would never have seen me. So they overwhelmed me with questions and requests for photos and autographs. Their enthusiasm was understandable. Most of them had not seen me since I had been selected as an astronaut.

“Mike, let me get a photo of you standing next to your little cousins.”

“Mike, why don’t you sit here with Grandma and tell her what it’s like to be an astronaut.”

“Mike, can I get twenty autographed photos for my neighbors back home?”

I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. After a couple hours I finally escaped to the beach and collapsed. I had been so close, three freakin’ seconds, and now I might be at the back of a long, long line. I couldn’t get that dismal thought out of my head. I closed my eyes and prayed for blissful unconsciousness. It was a prayer immediately answered. The exhaustion of the past few days had finally caught up with me and I fell into a deep sleep. Minutes later I was awakened by a gentle kick in my side. I squinted upward to see my eighty-seven-year-old grandmother. “Mike, get inside. Bobby wants to take some more pictures. You’ll get sunburned out here.”

God, take me. My new prayer was that a meteor would hit and put me out of my misery.