Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 32 Swine Flight

STS-27 was a classified DOD mission. I wouldn’t be able to share much with Donna. I had entered the “black” world of the Cold War, where I would be taking trips to locations I couldn’t discuss. I would study checklists in an underground vault. At parties Donna wouldn’t be able to ask our contractors and support team about their work. She wouldn’t even be able to ask in what city they worked. To complicate the spying efforts of Russian ships, the launch date wouldn’t be announced until twenty-four hours prior to the planned liftoff. That little detail would seriously complicate family travel arrangements. As Donna would later say, “It’s like making plans for a wedding where the date is kept secret.” The mission photography would be classified. There would be no photos of me with my payload. When asked what the mission was about, I would have to borrow a line from Top Gun: “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” (Four years after the mission some aspects of it were declassified. I can now say I used the robot arm to deploy a classified satellite into space. I am forbidden to describe the satellite or its intended function.)

I was thrilled with my crew. Hoot Gibson was a natural-born leader. He didn’t micromanage as some commanders did. (One was known to reach completely across the cockpit to make a switch change rather than allow the crewmember at that position to do it.) Hoot gave each of us our duties and set us free to be creative to get the job done. He was also a blood brother from Planet AD. The office secretaries quickly named STS-27 “Swine Flight,” and gave each of us strap-on novelty pig snouts because of our animal “snorting” sounds whenever an attractive woman came within eyeshot (as in, “I’d like to snort her flanks”).

Guy Gardner, Jerry Ross, and I had trained together on the canceled STS-62A mission so we were already teamed. Rookie Bill “Shep” Shepherd was a soft-spoken, powerfully built Navy SEAL who specialized in underwater demolition. Like Hoot and I, Bill was from Planet AD. He was also a bachelor astronaut, which meant he had achieved a higher state of earthly rapture than the Dalai Lama.

Everyone was excited to be doing something warriorlike on the mission, instead of commercial or scientific. It felt good to don a military uniform again and pose for our crew photo. We were going to stick it to the godless commies in space. There were no press releases on our mission preparations. The air force wanted us to remain as invisible as possible, which proved easy to do. Rick Hauck’s STS-26 mission, aka “The Return to Flight Mission,” was so hyped by NASA that it provided a very dark shadow in which we could hide. But the overarching importance attached to STS-26 grated on us and the rest of the astronaut office. We felt Rick and his crew were wearing their fame too conspicuously, which was a grievous violation of astronaut commandment number two, “Thou shalt not glory in public adoration.” While the press marveled that anyone could be so brave as to fly on the first mission after Challenger, every astronaut knew it would be the safest space mission ever flown. Not only had the SRBs been completely redesigned and retested, but every shuttle system had been put under a microscope, and appropriate changes had been made. Also, the STS-26 mission objective was relatively trivial, the release of a TDRS communications satellite, something that had been done several times in the past. Hoot called it “The Quiche Mission.” Another AD pilot observed, “We even let the girls release TDRSes.” But it was obvious the STS-26 crew thought their mission was the most important spaceflight since Angel Gabriel flew to the Virgin Mary. We all wearied of listening to their Monday morning pontifications on the criticality of STS-26 issues. When the limits of forbearance were finally exceeded, the glorious “Return to Flight” crew became a target of satire for the invisible “Swine Flight” crew.

The first public act of rebellion occurred at an astronaut reunion party. Shep and I were sitting at a bar when the helium balloons anchored as table decorations caught our eye. We grabbed a brace of these, ripped the nozzles open, and inhaled the gas. With squeaky falsetto voices we wandered through the audience introducing ourselves to legendary astronauts from the Apollo program. “Hi, I’m Rick Hauck, commander of the STS-26 crew. Would you like my autograph?” Meanwhile Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, and other celebrity astronauts looked at us with expressions reading, “The astronaut corps has sure gone to hell.” Again and again we would run back to the bar for a swallow of beer and a hit of helium, and then it was off to another moonwalker. During one of these refills Shep must have gotten some bad gas and experienced a flashback to some combat event. His eyes glazed over and he fell into a thousand-yard stare and then, without provocation, he grabbed the collars of my golf shirt and ripped it open. I glanced around to ensure there were no knives on the bar, then retaliated. I grabbed his shirt and ripped it apart. A handful of TFNGs gathered around to watch me die. The 145-pound weakling had just kicked sand in the face of a knife-skilled SEAL. Fortunately for me, Shep’s post-traumatic stress passed quickly and he merely laughed at the tatters of his shirt. We drained our beers, took another helium hit, and headed back into the audience. I found Jim Lovell and in a Donald Duck voice repeated my lie, “Hi, I’m Rick Hauck, commander of the STS-26 crew. Would you like my autograph?” Lovell looked at me as if I were a derelict.

Swine Flight’s most outrageous assault on the sanctity of the STS-26 mission came after a fund-raiser for a Challenger—related charity. This was a black-tie affair and most astronauts and spouses were present. The venue was the downtown Houston performing arts center, the Wortham Center, and hundreds of local dignitaries and their spouses were in attendance. As the program drew to a close, the master of ceremonies brought a young girl on the stage to sing Lee Greenwood’s popular song, “I’m Proud to Be an American.” As she was belting out this arrangement at 150 decibels, the MC screamed into his microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the crew of STS-26, the Return to Flight Mission!” At this cue the orchestra pit platform began a slow rise. Artificial smoke swirled about it and spotlights flashed through the vapor. And there, to the astonishment of every astronaut, were Rick Hauck and Dick Covey. They stood like carvings on Mount Rushmore: chins jutted out, chests puffed up, arms rigidly at their sides, steely eyes straight ahead. The public crowd around us went wild with their cheers and applause. You would have thought the platform bore Jesus Christ, Himself. Meanwhile every astronaut and spouse wanted to vomit. Shep looked at me and made a finger-in-the-mouth gagging pantomime. What next, we wondered—the STS-26 crew driving to the launchpad in a convoy of pope mobiles, each man waving clinched hands over his head in self-congratulations? It was too much.

The very next evening our crew had a party during which, no surprise, the favorite topic of conversation was Rick Hauck’s ascension into heaven. Shep plotted a “let’s get ’em” mission with the same intense focus a SEAL might plot to blow up an enemy fortification. Early Monday morning he and I smuggled two fire extinguishers into the astronaut conference room. We wrapped them in our jackets and placed them directly behind Hoot Gibson’s and Guy Gardner’s seats. Jerry Ross brought a tape player loaded with Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to Be an American.” Hoot and Guy secreted black bow-ties in their pockets.

After Rick covered his STS-26 issues, Brandenstein asked Hoot if he had any STS-27 items to discuss. That was Jerry Ross’s cue to trigger Greenwood’s tune. Shep and I fired off the fire extinguishers for the smoke effect and Hoot and Guy clipped on their ties and slowly rose from their chairs in a mimic of Hauck’s and Covey’s rise from the Wortham Center orchestra pit. The conference room exploded in laughter. There was thunderous applause. I looked at Rick. He had a smile on his face but his flexing jaw muscles said more about what he was really feeling. He had just been lampooned and was dying to issue a rebuttal, but he knew he couldn’t. To do so would be a violation of astronaut commandant number three, “Thou shalt not show a weakness.” A three-legged gazelle limping across the Serengeti would survive longer than an astronaut exhibiting a wounded ego among his peers.

As our STS-27 training progressed we were introduced to a new shuttle design feature, a bailout system. It wasn’t what we had hoped. The best design would have had the entire cockpit being blasted away to parachute into the water. But this option would have required a complete redesign of the orbiter and there was insufficient money for that. Our second preference had been ejection seats. The shuttle was originally designed to include two of these for the two astronauts flying the first test flights. But two ejection seats were all that would fit in the upstairs cockpit and none could be added to the mid-deck. While it would have been relatively easy to reinstall the two upstairs seats, such a modification was also rejected. No mission specialist was going to climb aboard a shuttle in which the two pilots had the only escape capability.

With the elimination of a cockpit pod and ejection seats as potential escape systems, the engineers gave us the only thing they could give us, a backpack parachute. We would jump out the side hatch just like B-17 crewmembers did in WWII. Good freakin’ luck! We’d be juiced against the wing like a grasshopper on an automobile windshield. But the engineers had a solution to get us clear of the wing—tractor rockets. A bundle of small rockets would be installed in the cockpit above the side hatch. After blowing the hatch, astronauts would lie on their backs on a table in the hatchway, attach their harness to a rocket, and then pull a lanyard, which would fire a mortar, hurling the rocket outward. A cable connecting the rocket to the astronaut would unreel for twenty or so feet before the rocket would ignite and then jerk the astronaut by the scruff of the collar out of the hatch and clear of the wing. When astronauts saw movies of this system being tested with anthropomorphic dummies there was grim laughter. It looked like something Wiley Coyote had ordered from Acme Rocket Company to catch that speedy Roadrunner. Fortunately, a more practical design was adopted from a suggestion by flight surgeon Joe Boyce—a slide pole. A banana-shaped, telescoping pole was installed on the ceiling of the mid-deck cockpit. After blowing the hatch, astronauts would throw a handle that would release springs to slam the pole outward and downward. Astronauts would then clip their harnesses to rings on the pole and slide out. When they came free of the pole, they would be underneath the wing. But even this design was a joke. The very reason ejection seats were invented was because aircraft crewmembers were being pinned inside cockpits by wind pressures and the G-forces of an out-of-control craft. Ejection seats overcame these forces by blasting the crewmembers out of the cockpit. The idea of getting out of an upstairs shuttle seat wearing nearly ninety pounds of equipment and encumbered by an iron-hard pressurized Launch-Entry Suit (LES), then climbing down the narrow interdeck ladder and making it to the side hatch while the shuttle was in powered flight and/or tumbling out of control (the two most common conditions of aircraft ejections) was a fantasy. The only scenario in which a backpack parachute would save a crewmember would be in controlled, gliding flight at subsonic velocities, and below 50,000-feet altitude. It was difficult for astronauts to imagine a failure that would put us in those conditions. Astronauts were still living with the consequences of an operational shuttle design.[7]

Many of us placed the slide-pole bailout procedures in the same category as the pre-Challenger contingency-abort procedures—busywork while dying. But we all completed the training. A mock-up of the side hatch and pole were installed on a platform over the WETF pool, and we practiced sliding down the pole to smack into the water.

While most of my time was spent in STS-27 classified training, I was occasionally required to perform other short-term duties. One proved enlightening. Pinky Nelson and I were given the task of polling the spouses for suggestions regarding the family escort policy. One wife responded that she wanted to sleep with her husband on the night before launch. Pinky and I short-stopped that recommendation. We could not imagine any astronaut wanting to be with their spouse in those hours. I certainly didn’t want Donna in my bed. The beach house good-bye was agony enough—I couldn’t imagine enduring an all-night good-bye. If the wife making the recommendation was alluding to having prelaunch sex, then her husband was a better man than me. Even a doughnut-size Viagra pill wouldn’t help me at T-12 hours.

Many of the wives were extremely critical of what had happened to the Challenger spouses after the disaster. June Scobee and the other widows had been held at KSC so Vice President Bush could fly down and meet them. The wives were of one voice—in the event of a disaster they wanted to immediately return to Houston with their children. Screw the politicians. Pinky and I couldn’t have agreed more and said so in our recommendations.

The spouses also complained that the part-timer politicians and Abbey’s “buddies” were exempt from the rules; for example, the number of family guests allowed on the NASA buses. One wife wrote, “Senator Garn had no problem getting anybody he wanted to attend any of the dinners, ride on the family buses, etc.” It was just another example of how NASA management had allowed the politicians to have their way with us. We recommended there be no exceptions to family escort policy for any crewmembers regardless of their pedigree. Theoretically this recommendation was irrelevant since Challenger had ended the passenger program. But neither Pinky nor I believed NASA HQ would ever say no to any politician who still wanted to fly (and we were proven right when, years later, Senator Glenn asked for a flight).

Another major source of irritation was the fact that wives could fly to the launch aboard NASA’s Gulfstream jets at government expense, but their children could not. Since NASA required the spouses and children to be on the LCC roof for the launch, many of the wives felt Uncle Sam should pick up the transportation tab for the children, too. They also wanted their lodging needs handled by NASA. In prime tourist seasons and around holidays—where no-vacancy signs were the rule—a mission slip could make reservation extensions problematic and a terrible additional strain on the family. The spouses wanted NASA to take on that burden. Pinky and I agreed and added that to the recommendations.

These modifications to the family escort policy were adopted and, beginning with STS-26, NASA transported crew children to KSC via its Gulfstream jets. The agency also assumed control over all lodging issues. As for any wife who wanted to have KSC sex with her husband, she would just have to be satisfied with a quickie at the beach house or behind closed doors during a visit to the crew quarters. And she better not be a screamer—the rooms weren’t that soundproof.

As the summer of 1988 was drawing to a close, John Denver came to the astronaut office to brief us on his plans to fly with the Soviets. Before Challenger, we had frequently heard Denver’s name mentioned as a potential participant in NASA’s passenger program. That program had been terminated by the disaster, so now the singer was pursuing a trip into space via a Russian rocket. On a visit to Houston, he made contact with JSC and was invited to the astronaut office to discuss his mission plans. He received a chilly reception. Most military astronauts harbored a severe dislike for all things associated with the commies. Russian bullets had been aimed at our planes in Vietnam. Our friends had been killed or imprisoned by their surrogates, the North Vietnamese. The idea that anybody would cozy up with those assholes for any purpose was an outrage to many of us. Denver was peppered with criticism. One Vietnam vet told him that his Russian plans “sucked.” Denver argued that he wasn’t being any more cooperative with the Russians than others in the past had been. “Like Jane Fonda” came a rejoinder from the back. Several astronauts applauded at that. Denver continued to defend himself, explaining that he had always been a big supporter of the space program and it had been a lifetime dream to fly in space. In fact, he said, “I was the one who first suggested to NASA they have a passenger program on the shuttle.” That comment didn’t win him any friends—many in the office were still silver-pinned astronauts because of the passenger program and the seats into space it had consumed. New tracers of criticism shot his way. One astronaut made the observation that when Denver returned from his mission, the press and public would elevate him to the status of “expert” on the space program just because of his celebrity. He would end up on every blue ribbon panel and space policy committee for the next decade, while the real experts, astronauts and others at NASA, would be forgotten. The meeting definitely didn’t give Denver a Rocky Mountain High. He later dropped his Russian flight plans because of the cost, rumored to be $20 million…or maybe he was afraid of what an astronaut would do to him if he made the trip.

On September 29, 1988, STS-26 put America back in space. Four days later Discovery streaked out of the Pacific sky to touch down at Edwards AFB. The mission was virtually flawless. At Rick Hauck’s call, “Wheel stop,” I was once again part of a Prime Crew. With the title came a reserved parking place, euphoric joy, and intestine-knotting fear.