Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 21 Orbit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re about five minutes out.”

“Give me a countdown to Havana.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sun was intense and the cockpit grew uncomfortably hot. I pushed from my sleep restraint and hovered in my underwear a few inches from the glass. In my relaxed state my arms and legs folded inward as if trying to return to their fetal position. I had become a hairy 2001: A Space Odyssey embryo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reveille came in the form of rock music. It was traditional for the CAPCOM to provide music for MCC to send up as a wake-up call. But the tune was unrecognizable. Apparently NASA’s budget was running low when it came time to procure speakers. Pop music from these Radio Shack rejects sounded like fingernails being drawn across a chalkboard.

To my surprise I did not wake up alone. My closest friend was alert and waiting. I had an erection so intense it was painful. I could have drilled through kryptonite. I would ultimately count fifteen space wake-ups in my three shuttle missions, and on most of these and many times during the sleep periods my wooden puppet friend would be there to greet me. Flight surgeons have attributed this phenomenon to the fluid shift that occurs in weightlessness. On the Earth, gravity holds more blood in our lower legs. In orbit that blood is equally distributed throughout our bodies. For men the result is a Viagra effect. There are beneficial effects for the female anatomy, too. The same fluid shift makes for skinnier calves and thighs and larger, nonsag breasts. If NASA wants to secure its financial future, it would be smart to advertise the rejuvenating effects of weightlessness. Taxpayers would demand that Congress quadruple NASA’s budget to finance the construction of orbiting spas where visitors from Earth could turn back time.

Fortunately for me, my brain was quickly flooded with thoughts of the workday and my body melted in response.

On day two we successfully launched our second satellite, Syncom, but not without mishap. As Hank was filming its release with the huge and unwieldy IMAX camera, a shank of Judy’s frizzed-out hair was snatched into the machine by the belt drive of the film magazine. It was as if her hair had been caught up in the fan belt of an automobile. She screamed and I grabbed at her tresses to prevent them from being ripped out of her scalp, but, with nothing to hold me in place, I tumbled out of control. Judy did the same. Through her increasingly urgent screams, I heard the camera labor to a grinding stop. The hair had clogged the motor, finally stalling it and popping a cockpit circuit breaker.

We cut Judy free with scissors. Strands of loose hair floated everywhere. They were in our eyes and mouths. Mike Coats, who was the principal operator of the IMAX, took the machine to the mid-deck and began work at restoring its operation. The hair was so thoroughly jammed into the motor gears we doubted the machine would ever pull another frame of film. IMAX was going to be severely disappointed. They had spent millions to fly their camera in space and we had only recorded a fraction of our film targets. Even if the camera could be cleaned of hair and made to work again, a quick glance at the flight plan showed the next several film opportunities were certainly going to be missed. IMAX would have to do some replanning. We all knew this was the type of trivial screwup that would become the focus of an otherwise successful mission. The press wouldn’t talk about how our crew had successfully taken Discovery on its maiden flight or how we had successfully released thirty thousand pounds of satellites. Instead, they would zero in on our hair incident. But we had no alternative other than to come clean with MCC. The flight planners needed to assume the camera could be repaired and get started on rescheduling our targets.

But we males had been missing the real issue. As Hank picked up the microphone to call MCC, Judy lashed out at him with something along the lines of, “If you so much as breathe a word to MCC about my hair jamming the camera, I’ll cut your heart out with a spoon.” Or perhaps she threatened a more vital area of his anatomy. There was a brief moment as we struggled to understand Judy’s rage. Then it dawned on us. She was only the second American woman to fly in space. The press had her under a magnifying glass, looking for the slightest flaw in her performance. The hair jam incident was just that: a mistake with her name on it. Not only that, it contained the worst possible sin against feminism. Judy had demonstrated, however innocently and however insignificantly, that women were indeed different from men.

Hank Hartsfield, a grizzled air force fighter pilot who had stared death in the eye on many a mission, now faced a man’s worst nightmare—a really pissed-off woman. No communist gunner had ever appeared as deadly as did Judy at that moment. Under her searing glare Hank did what we all would have done. He wanted to return with all of his appendages, so he called MCC and told them the IMAX had a film jam and Mike was working to clear it. He made no mention of the cause of the jam. Eventually Mike was able to breathe life back into the camera. With rescheduled targets, he and Hank continued their filming while Judy stayed far, far away.

Nature finally caught up with me and I floated into the shuttle toilet to face what was truly the most difficult part of any spaceflight—a bowel movement. The toilet provided little privacy. It was situated in the rear corner of the mid-deck on the port side. There was no door, only a folding curtain that could be Velcroed across the mid-deck–facing entry. Another curtain was Velcroed to form a ceiling and isolate the toilet from the upstairs cockpit. The lack of privacy was intimidating. I felt like I was back on my honeymoon, preparing for my first married-life BM. We’ve all been there.

After I was inside the curtained box, I took the advice of shuttle veteran Bob Crippen and stripped naked. “It’s a lot easier to wipe feces off your skin than it is to get it off your clothes” had been one of his STS-1 mission debriefing comments.

I located my personal urine funnel and twisted it on the end of the urinal hose, then loaded a disposable vacuum cleaner–like bag in a can on the left side of the toilet. Used tissue had to be placed in this bag. It could not be put in the toilet since that would require the ass to be lifted, which, in turn, could result in feces being released into the cabin. Suction at the bottom of the can would hold used tissue inside the bag.

I floated over the throne, lifted up on the thigh restraints, and twisted them inward to clamp my body to the plastic seat. Recalling my bore-sight alignment from the camera view in the toilet trainer, I wiggled my body until some freckles on my thighs were properly positioned in relation to the toilet landmarks. I switched on the toilet fan and welcomed the noise it generated. At least some of my BM noises would be camouflaged. Finally I pushed my penis into proper aim at the urinal funnel, reached for the solid waste collector lever, and pulled it back. Directly beneath me the waste opening was uncovered and the feces-steering airflow was activated. Suddenly a very sensitive part of my body was hit with a blast of chilled air. Few things are less conducive to promoting a BM than having cold air jetting around the principal performer in that act. The natural tendency is to clamp shut. But I convinced the orifice in question to ignore the cold gale and let fly. Simultaneously, I held the urine funnel at my front to collect my liquid waste. The vacuum flow into the urinal hose was very effective at sucking away the fluid until my bladder pressure fell. Then the urine refused to separate from my skin and a ball of it grew on the end of my penis. NASA’s engineers had anticipated this aspect of fluid dynamics and had provided a “last drop” feature. By squeezing buttons at the sides of the hose, the suction was boosted and I was able to wet-vac myself of most of the fluid. As the slurping sounds of this operation came through the curtains, Hank hollered, “More than five seconds and you’re playing with it, Mullane!”

The toilet was a bountiful source of male juvenile humor. By far the best toilet joke was pulled by Bill Shepherd (class of 1984). On one of his missions he carried a piece of sausage from his breakfast into the toilet. After finishing a bowel movement, he set the sausage free to float upstairs. As panicked crewmembers ricocheted from wall to wall in a mad retreat from the offending planetoid, Bill chased after it with a piece of toilet tissue. He finally grabbed it and then, to the horror of all, he ate it.

For me, cleanup was next. I used a tissue to blot the remaining dampness from my penis. Wiping after urinating was such a feminine act I almost felt compelled to hack up a luggie to reestablish my sexual identity. I pulled the solid waste collector lever closed, lifted my thigh restraints, and floated from the seat. I was now free to wipe myself, putting the used tissue in the disposable vacuum bag.

Besides cleaning myself, I also had to clean the toilet. It would be a serious violation to leave any fecal smears on or around the slide cover for the next user to confront. And there were always some smears. Even after the camera-aim practice in the toilet trainer in Houston, it was difficult to get a direct hit during a BM. The feces almost invariably made some contact with the inner sides of the collector hole. As one astronaut had once lamented, “Turds come out curved. If only they were straight, we might have better luck in cleanly using the toilet.” I used a NASA-provided disinfectant to wipe away my smears and put the soiled tissue in the vacuum bag. I then sealed that bag and stowed it in a container at the back of the toilet. While the retention of solid waste and BM tissues suggested a bad odor problem could develop, the toilet designers had done an excellent job of routing airflow through the toilet and filtering it with activated charcoal filters. There were never any toilet smells in the cockpit.

Finally, I dressed. From start to finish, a task that might have taken me five minutes on Earth had consumed nearly thirty minutes in space (and covered about eight thousand miles). There are times in an astronaut’s life he or she would pay dearly to have a gravity vector. Using the toilet is one of those times.

Our third and last communication satellite was successfully deployed on flight day three. Compared with the missions of the early space program this was blue-collar work, completely devoid of glory. We weren’t beating the Russians to anything. We weren’t planting an American flag in alien soil. On Earth, there was no Walter Cronkite removing his dorky glasses, wiping his forehead, and shaking his head in relief while telling a waiting, breathless world, “They’ve done it! The Discovery crew has just released another communication satellite!” The space program had become a freight service, justifiably ignored by the press and public. But not one of us in that cockpit was complaining. Even Hank would have hauled Lenin’s taxidermied body into orbit and sung the “Internationale” for all the communists in the world, if that’s what it took to put him in space.

On flight day four Judy activated the controls of our final major payload, a solar energy panel. A collapsible motor-driven truss unfurled the 110-foot-long-by-10-foot-wide Mylar sail out of its payload bay container. There were no active solar cells on the sail. The experiment was only to gather data on the dynamics of the deployment and retraction system. When the panel was completely up and in tension, she radioed MCC, “Houston, it’s up and it’s big.” In numerous simulations Judy had joked that she was going to make that call. We had teased her about the obvious sexual innuendo. She made the call nevertheless. That was Judy. She could be extremely defensive of her status as a feminist standard bearer but could then turn around and yuck it up with us guys about a solar panel erection. I often wondered if that was the reason she was flying as the second American woman in space—NASA management knew she wasn’t a pure enough feminist to satisfy the NOW crowd.

After our major payload work, we gathered on the flight deck to accept a congratulatory call from President Reagan. Each of us was tense and nervous as we handed around the microphone to answer his questions. Thank God we were in space while a Republican president was in office. I shudder to think how Hank would have handled a call from a Democrat. He probably would have asked the president’s latitude and longitude coordinates in anticipation of his next BM. When it was his turn, Mike Coats was able to deliver the pro-navy observation that most of what he saw from the windows was water. That’s why the navy is so important, Mr. President was his implication. Hank Hartsfield defended the air force: “ALL of the Earth is covered by air, Mr. President.” There are no circumstances under which astronauts will not compete. Even having the president of the United States in the conversation wasn’t an inhibition.

While in the midst of this White House call, a cockpit alarm tone sounded. It was a “systems alert,” an indication of a minor malfunction. Still, we needed to respond. In a grand display of the thoroughness of NASA’s training we worked the malfunction while continuing to humor Mr. Reagan. Steve Hawley grabbed the massive shuttle malfunction book and began to move through the fault tree, pantomiming to Mike which computer displays to call up. When Hawley had the correct response identified, he passed the book to Judy, who was nearest the appropriate switch panel. She flipped a switch to activate a backup heater, the specified response to the alert. Meanwhile, the rest of us continued, “Thank you, Mr. President. Everything is just fine, Mr. President.”

After our payload activities were finished, we posed for our weightless crew photo. It was a tradition for each crew to take a self-portrait in orbit. We dressed in golf shirts and shorts, set up a camera on the mid-deck, and activated the self-timer. To squeeze everybody into the frame, we posed in three tiers with Hank and Mike lowest, then Steve, Charlie, and me floating above them. Judy floated highest. While we didn’t intend it, the pose suggested a cheerleader’s pyramid. Adding to the effect were Judy’s legs. They dominated the photo…tan, perfectly proportioned, beautiful. Judy would later receive hate mail from feminist activists who thought her pose was disgusting and degrading to women. Breaking barriers was a task fraught with all manner of perils.

Around this time in the mission, MCC became suspicious of a temperature indication in our urinal plumbing. Urine is collected in a tank that is periodically emptied via an opening on the port side of the cockpit. Heaters on the exit nozzle are supposed to ensure the fluid separates cleanly from the vehicle and does not freeze to it. But MCC noticed that the temperature at the nozzle was anomalous and suspected some ice might have formed on it during our last urine dump. No windows provided a direct view of the nozzle, so Hank Hartsfield was instructed to use the camera on the end of the robot arm to take a look. We had TVs in the cockpit to monitor the camera view. When Hank positioned the arm, we saw we had grown a urine-sicle.

The image suddenly explained a mystery from STS-41B. After that mission landed, engineers were puzzled to find damage to several heat tiles on the port-side OMS pod at the rear of the fuselage. The damage had certainly occurred during reentry because the same heat tiles had been visible from the back windows during the orbit phase of the mission and the crew didn’t see any damage. A similar urine-sicle must have formed during the waste-water dumps on the STS-41B mission. During reentry, the ice had broken off and flown backward, hitting and damaging the OMS pod tile. MCC was now concerned Discovery could suffer the same or worse damage. Theoretically it was possible the heat tiles could be so damaged by the ice, Discovery’s tail could burn off. I had imagined many scenarios in which my life could be threatened as an astronaut—engine failures, turbo-pump explosions, decompression—but I had never imagined a threat from a frozen block of urine. I had an image of Peter Jennings reporting, “The astronauts were killed by their own urine.” It wasn’t a heroic-sounding epitaph.

Letting the Sun melt the ice wasn’t an option. In the vacuum of space, water doesn’t exist in liquid form. It goes from ice to vapor in a very slow process called sublimation. We wouldn’t be able to stay in space long enough for sublimation to get rid of our hitchhiker. So MCC directed Hank to tap the ice away using the robot arm.

Then came the bad news. We were told we could not use the urinal for the rest of the mission for fear another ice ball could jeopardize us. We would have to urinate in “Apollo bags.” These bags had been the toilet for the Apollo astronauts and were stowed aboard the shuttles for just this type of contingency. NASA wasn’t going to prematurely end a billion-dollar space mission because of a failed toilet. To our great relief we would still be able to use the solid waste collection feature of our commode. We wouldn’t have to use the bags for our BMs as did the Apollo astronauts (they were real men).

I looked at Judy. “I sure bet you have penis envy now.”

She tersely replied, “I’ll manage.”

The CAPCOM went on to explain there was enough remaining volume in the waste-water tank for about three man-days of urine. It was obvious to us what they were thinking: Judy would be able to use the urinal for the rest of the mission. We men could get by with the bags. All of us thought this was fair enough, but Judy saw a feminist trap. If she used the urinal while we men were stuck with the bags, word would eventually get around. It would be another damning sin against the feminist cause. In fact it would be a far more egregious sin than the hair-jam incident. Her use of the urinal would be a shout from the rooftops that a penis was necessary to deal with certain shuttle emergencies. Judy wasn’t going to fall into the trap. She elected to use the Apollo bags like the rest of us.

I have no idea how Judy managed with the bags but I’m sure she paid a messy price for her feminist stand. It was a mess even for us males. On my first attempt, I just held the bag around myself and let fly. Bad idea. The urine splashed into the bottom of the bag and bounced right back, soaking my crotch. Not only that, some fluid escaped and I became the proverbial one-armed paperhanger, trying to hold the bag at my crotch and blot the little yellow planets out of the sky with a tissue in my free hand. Others made similar rookie mistakes. But we quickly came up with a solution. We stuffed washcloths in the bottom of the bags. In weightlessness the “wicking” action of cloth was still effective. We could aim our stream onto the cloth and the fluid would be wicked away instead of splashing around. There was just one catch: If we urinated too fast, the wicking action couldn’t keep up with the stream and splashing would result. If we slowed our stream too much, the fluid wouldn’t separate from us and a large ball of urine would grow on our penises. We learned it was necessary to very precisely regulate our urine flow to achieve a stream of perfect balance. Even then, there would always be a significant “last drop” that had to be wiped away with a tissue.

Our greatest challenge occurred when we had bowel movements. It was virtually impossible to regulate urine flow while bearing down for a BM. On the second day of our toilet purgatory, I heard another Hank Hartsfield cheer rise from the toilet. “I did it! I did it!”

Since Cuba wasn’t at our nadir, I couldn’t imagine the source of Hank’s glee. “What did you do, Hank?”

“I took a shit without pissing!”

From the look on Hank’s face you would have thought his earlier turd had reentered the atmosphere and nailed Castro right between the eyes. But I could appreciate his joy. Turning off one’s urine while having a BM was a real trick. The things they didn’t teach us at astronaut school.

As our washcloths were consumed we turned to using our socks. When I had exhausted my extras, I began to use my towels. On one occasion with my bladder near rupture, I threw a covetous glance at the clean socks Judy was wearing. I flew straight at her and began to rip them from her feet. She knew exactly what I was doing and jokingly screamed, “Help! I’m being socked!”

By the final day of the mission our wet-trash container was becoming seriously overburdened. Under us floated a volume of vomit, urine, and decomposing food containers. My earlier Star Wars prank about alien creatures living in the trash container didn’t seem so funny now. Nobody wanted to put their hands in the mess. We would jam our urine bags past the grommet, jerk away, and quickly rip into an alcohol hand wipe.

As we configured Discovery for our last sleep period, I repeated my day-one routine. I moved my sleep restraint upstairs and tied it beneath the overhead windows. I intended to stay awake as long as possible to stuff my brain with space memories. While I had every intention of making this trip again, I couldn’t be sure there would ever be a second opportunity.Discovery ’s engine problem had delayed the program by two months. What other problems were lurking? Could one result in a program delay of years, or even total program cancellation? Even if the shuttles continued to fly on schedule, office politics could end my career. It was impossible to know where you stood with Abbey. He might never assign me to another mission. I was going to assume these would be my last hours in space and I wasn’t going to waste them sleeping.

So I watched the Kalahari Desert pass beneath me and rammed its beauty into my overflowing memory banks. The Atlantic blue contrasted sharply with the ocher colors of Saharan Africa. Enormous sand dunes shouldered the beach and rippled inland like tan water. I watched clouds of every imaginable shape and texture: circular swirls of low pressure areas, wispy mare’s tails, cumulonimbus monsters with anvil heads stretching across the sky like the headdresses of Indian chiefs. In sunset and sunrise terminators, thunderstorms cast hundreds of mile-long shadows. Fair-weather cumulus clouds floated over oceans like popcorn scattered on blue carpet. Unseen jet streams rippled solid blankets of white like a stone dropped into heavy cream.

I crossed Africa in minutes and raced over Madagascar in seconds. The Indian Ocean was another vast, empty blue. The 3,000-mile brown continent of Australia came and went in ten minutes. Then Discovery was once again over Pacific skies. The view of that ocean always intimidated me—its blue seemed as infinite as space. How much greater its immensity must have seemed from a Polynesian outrigger or from the decks of Magellan’s ships. We astronauts are frequently characterized as heroes and heroines for sailing into a great unknown. In reality no astronaut has ever sailed into an unknown. We send robots and monkeys ahead to verify our safety. Magellan didn’t put a monkey on a ship and wait for it to safely return before going himself. He and those Polynesians set sail without maps, without weather prediction, without a mission control, without any idea of the immense emptiness that lay beyond their meager three-mile horizons. It is laughable to compare astronauts with those explorers. The next humans who fly into a great unknown will be those souls who set sail to Mars and watch our planet dim to a blue-white morning star.

I watched as city lights took on the form of glowing spiderwebs with bright, sodium-yellow interiors and major roads radiating outward and ring roads completing the web effect. I watched lightning begin at one end of a weather front and ripple like a sputtering fuse for hundreds of miles to the other end and then start again. And every ninety minutes I would watch the incomparable beauty of an orbit sunrise. I would watch as a thin indigo arc would grow to separate the black of nighttime Earth from the black of space. Quickly, concentric arcs of purple and blue would rise to push the black higher and higher. Then bands of orange and red would blossom from the horizon to complete the spectrum. But only for a moment. The Sun would finally breach the Earth’s limb and blast the colors away with its star-white brilliance. I wanted to scream to God to stop Discovery, to stop the Earth, to stop the Sun so I could more thoroughly enjoy the beauty of that color bow.

When sleep finally overtook me, I’m sure I slept with a grin.