Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 30 Mission Assignment

With Brandenstein at the helm of the astronaut office, the summer of 1987 passed much more pleasantly. At the Monday meetings there were actual exchanges of ideas. Astronauts, me included, were able to get up and make a presentation without being blasted with criticism. Dan even addressed one of the criteria for crew assignments, a first in my nine years with NASA. “Crews will be picked not only on how they have performed in simulations and on past missions, but also on how well they perform their office duties.” To imagine…someone in a management position at NASA was actually revealing something about the crew selection process. It was enough to make me want to step outside and see if a squadron of pigs was flying over. Actually, what Dan gave us wasn’t much…and couldn’t be much because Abbey was still God. But he was doing his best to be a real chief.

The days weren’t all sunshine and roses. Along with the rest of the office, I remained in flight assignment limbo. Also, STS-26 was slipping into the summer of 1988, a year away. If and when I ever got another mission, it was moving in lockstep to the right, too.

During this period of recovery from Challenger, Abbey pressed ahead with a previously scheduled new astronaut class selection. Every astronaut, and probably every other thinking person in NASA, thought it was insane to be selecting another group of astronauts when it was obvious the future shuttle flight rate was going to be a fraction of what it had been. Why bring more superachievers into certain frustration? Astronauts speculated that Abbey wanted more people to expand his empire. Whatever Abbey’s motivations, the selection was made and another group of fifteen astronauts, the class of 1987, walked into NASA that summer.

At an Outpost Tavern welcoming party for this class, I ended up alone with George. I turned from getting a beer and he was approaching me with purpose. Uh-oh, I thought. I sure hope he doesn’t ask me about a document bearing Dr. Terry McGuire’s name. I was still terrified that Abbey had hidden cameras around JSC, or had somehow put a homing device on all of us so he could keep track of where we went and who we talked to. Maybe he had listening devices in every office, including the ones that McGuire used. I regretted ever having seen that astronaut leadership document. Whether I liked it or not, it made me a co-conspirator in any possible plots against him.

From his mumbles I thought I heard “How are you doing, Mike?”

“Fine, George.” My heartrate was at Go for main engine start–speed. That’s what happens when God is speaking to you and you’re hiding a mortal sin.

“Are you going to be around this week?”

Here it comes, I thought. He wanted to see me in his office…with McGuire’s treatise in hand. I was ready to blurt out, “I’m innocent! I didn’t have anything to do with it! McGuire wrote it before I ever spoke to him. The others are evil, not me. Kill them. Mercy, my liege, mercy!” But all I croaked was, “This week? Well, yeah…I’ll be here.” At the moment I was very glad George never made eye contact with his audience. If the conversation continued in the direction I thought it was going, I wouldn’t have to worry about him discovering any lies in my eyes. We were both talking to our shoes.

“That’s good. There are some things we need to discuss.”

Oh, God. I’m screwed.

Abbey continued. “The SRB testing is going well. More flight assignments will have to be made. We’ll need to talk about that.” I almost dropped my beer. The topic of conversation wasn’t McGuire! While I couldn’t be certain (nobody could be certain with Abbey about anything), I sensed he was teasing me about an imminent flight assignment. I looked at him and sure enough there was a coy smile on his face. He was actually relishing his godly role as the bearer of good news.

I immediately went to Donna to tell her about the exchange. I could see she was conflicted. She was happy that I might be on the verge of drawing a second space mission, but terrified I would die flying it. Several of the Challenger widows were at the party and every spouse, Donna included, was watching them and thinking, That could be me.

The next week I sat in my office, snatching up the phone on the first ring hoping to hear Abbey’s voice, but the call never came. My paranoia began to ratchet upward. Maybe I had read too much into Abbey’s words. Maybe the coy smile I thought I had detected had been nothing more than a gas pain grimace. Maybe George knew of my treasonous McGuire visit and was playing with me.

The week after also came and went with no call, and I was certain I had been toyed with. If a bomb went off under his car now, I would be alone at the top of the suspect list.

Finally, on September 10—my forty-second birthday—I landed from a T-38 mission and found a note on the crew lounge door asking me to call Abbey…at home. I was sure this was the call in which I would learn of my assignment to a second mission. Why else would Abbey want me to disturb him at 10:15 P.M.? What a birthday present this was going to be! I dialed the number.

But it was another disappointment. George acted as if there had been no reason to call him at home. All he wanted to know was if I had seen a letter written by a New Mexico congressman on the shuttle program. I was certain, now, that Abbey was the cat and I was the crippled mouse. He was playing with me. There was no pending flight assignment.

On Saturday night I was able to momentarily forget about mission assignments. The class of 1987 hosted its first party and provided some great escapism entertainment in the form of a skit modeled after the TV show The Dating Game. Dan Brandenstein played the eligible bachelor. He was onstage and screened from several women…or rather class of 1987 men in drag, who were vying for his affection. The only real female participant in the skit was Mae Jemison, the first black woman astronaut. She was introduced as “celebrity host Vanna White.” I’m sure Johnny Cochran could have found a lawsuit in that. One of the men in drag was new astronaut Mario Runco. Imagine a tall, muscular Klinger from M*A*S*H and you have an image of Mario. He had a classic Roman nose, a perpetual five o’clock shadow, and a regional New York accent—Mario spoke Bronx. For the skit he squeezed into black fishnet stockings, a low-cut dress, and high heels. It was an ensemble that revealed enough hair to have generated a Sasquatch sighting. He was, without question, the ugliest drag queen to have ever put on lipstick.

The class of 1987 gave Dan the list of questions he was required to ask of the prospective dates. Since the military personnel from the new class were also from Planet AD, many of the questions were sexually suggestive. One was an obvious play on the psych questions being asked in the astronaut interview. Apparently those hadn’t changed in the past decade. “If you died and could come back as any animal, what would it be?”

Mario appeared to fall into deep thought on such a complex question. Finally he answered, “I would like to come back as…a beaver.” As if the double entendre needed emphasis, he casually spread his legs. It was a move Sharon Stone would make famous years later in the movie Basic Instinct, but Mario did it first. It was also a move that is irrevocably burned into the synapses of my brain, where memories of my Most Terrifying Sights are stored. Even today, when I look at a blank white wall, I see that hair-way up his skirt and shiver in terror.

The remaining questions and answers were scripted to ensure Dan selected Mario’s character as his date. When Mario came from behind the screen, he went to Dan, grabbed him, twirled so that his back was to the audience, and planted a kiss on Dan’s lips…or so it appeared. Actually he clamped his hand over Dan’s mouth and kissed the back of it. Mario was a hell of a thespian.

The skit continued with a “word from our sponsor.” Two members of the 1987 class came onstage dressed as the hayseed spokesmen for Bartle & James wine coolers. The real B&J television advertisements were laugh-out-loud funny. They featured one character with a boring, monotone voice explaining some bizarre use of the product beyond its intended purpose as a beverage. As he did so, his doofus-looking silent partner, Ed, would give a demonstration in the background.

The B&J advertisement the class of 1987 presented was definitely not ready for prime time. One astronaut adopted the deadpan voice and mannerisms of the B&J protagonist and explained how the wine coolers could be used to prevent the spread of STDs. Silent Ed rolled a condom onto a B&J bottle and vigorously shook it. The carbonation in the drink inflated the latex into its hotdog shape. Ed peered closely at the phallus, searching for leaks. As if that weren’t suggestive enough, the advertisement spokesman continued, “The alcohol in Bartle & James wine coolers can also be used to disinfect body parts that might be exposed during intimate relations.” Ed used that as his cue to pour some of the B&J into his palm and splash it on his face like aftershave. Political correctness might have subdued the office parties of the rest of the country, but it had yet to wet-blanket astronaut parties.

The following Monday I walked into my office still thinking about the skit. It had been a great party and I intended to tell the new arrivals how much I enjoyed their antics. But those thoughts evaporated when I arrived at my desk. A note from my secretary read, Please meet Dan Brandenstein at 8:15 A.M. My office mate, Guy Gardner, had the same note on his desk and I quickly discovered three other astronauts were also notified of the meeting: Hoot Gibson, Jerry Ross, and Bill Shepherd. With two pilots and three MSes, the notification certainly suggested a flight assignment announcement. But I wasn’t about to cheer yet. John Young had never announced flight assignments. That had always been exclusively Abbey’s job. The fact that Dan Brandenstein’s office, and not Abbey’s, had called put a lid on my simmering anticipation. There were certainly other things Dan might want to see us about. Again, I prayed it wasn’t anything associated with Dr. McGuire, as in, “Which one of you idiots has been talking to the shrink?”

We walked into Dan’s office. It was still strange to see a TFNG in the big-time. As a navy pilot, Dan had been firmly in the grip of Planet AD’s gravity. No more. His new management position had blasted him to escape velocity. We would all miss him.

Dan welcomed us with a smile, which I immediately interpreted as a good sign. “Abbey wants to see you guys. I’ll walk over with you.” There it was, the Abbey connection. More and more it was looking as if September 14, 1987, would be a special day for me. As we walked to the JSC HQ building my heart was a-flutter. It had been three years since I had stepped from Discovery. By far, the last twenty months had been the worst in my life. I had buried four TFNG friends killed in a preventable tragedy and had endured John Young’s abuse. I couldn’t wait to get back in space. Please, God, I prayed, let this be what I think it is.

Abbey, too, was ready for us with a smile. After a moment of small talk he relieved our suspense. “I was wondering if you guys would like to fly STS-27?”

Is a crab’s ass watertight? was one rejoinder that came to my mind. Hell, yes answered both questions.

Our group immediately broke into jokes and giddy laughter. No one really answered Abbey’s question, but, of course, we didn’t have to. He was offering us gold and nobody ever turned that down. I was now officially a crewmember for the second post-Challenger mission. It was a classified Department of Defense mission so nobody yet knew exactly what we would be doing, but it didn’t matter. We were an assigned crew. That was all that mattered.

As I floated in weightless joy back to my office, I considered for the billionth time that strange man known as George Washington Sherman Abbey. He defied analysis. To borrow a quote from Winston Churchill, George was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” It seemed he went out of his way to drive astronauts to loathe him. Even in this STS-27 crew assignment some would be rightly embittered. Bill Shepherd was class of 1984 and would be flying his first mission before two mission specialists from the class of 1980, Bob Springer and Jim Bagian, would fly their rookie flights. And STS-27 would mean Hoot Gibson would be flying his second mission as a commander before eight other TFNG pilots had yet to command their first mission. The STS-27 crew assignment press release was going to be a bitter pill for many in the office to swallow.

Hoot would later tell me Abbey had informed him several weeks before the official announcement that he would be the CDR of STS-27. Hoot had replied, “George, it’s not my turn.” Abbey had said, “Turns have nothing to do with it.” He might as well have said, “I don’t give a shit about astronaut morale.” The statements were identical.

While sitting in Abbey’s office, though, I had never seen him as jolly as he had been while telling us of our new mission assignment. It was as if he was high on our happiness. Why couldn’t he understand it could be like that 24/7/365? All he had to do was understand that turns did matter, that visibility into flight assignments mattered a hell of a lot, that open communication mattered, that being positively stroked once in a while mattered…hell, being negatively stroked once in a while, getting ANY performance feedback once in a while, mattered. During those ten minutes in his office I loved George Abbey, but the moment passed. Now, if there were conspirators somewhere in NASA’s hierarchy preparing to strike, I wished them all the luck in the world.

That evening, as I told the kids about the flight, my sixteen-year-old daughter, Laura, said, “You’re not going to die on me, are you?” She said it with a smile, trying to make a joke out of it—a chip off the old block—but I knew she was worried. So were Donna, Pat, and Amy. And I knew, as soon as STS-26 was on the ground, I would be worried. Just as it had been with STS-41D, I knew Prime Crew night terrors awaited me for STS-27. But I had to do this. I couldn’t stop or turn away from a flight into space any more than a migratory bird could ignore the change of seasons. It was in my DNA, beyond rational understanding.