Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 8 Welcome

On a hellish July day in 1978, properly dressed by my wife and handicapped with a brain from Planet AD, I drove through the gates of the Johnson Space Center to begin my TFNG life. If NASA ever needs to test a space probe designed to survive on the surface of Venus, a Houston parking lot in summertime would suffice. Air-conditioning isn’t a luxury in Houston. It’s a life support system. Until I arrived in Houston I would laugh at those supermarket tabloid reports of people walking down a sidewalk and spontaneously combusting. But after one day of a Houston summer, I no longer laughed. It could happen.

Besides a small rocket park featuring a Saturn V moon rocket horizontally displayed near the entrance, there was nothing to suggest JSC had anything to do with space. There were no towers or gantries or blockhouses. A passerby could easily think it was a university campus or a corporate headquarters. The architecture screamed “low bid.” Except for size, every building was identical, each featuring a façade of exposed aggregate concrete. The major buildings were positioned around a duck pond landscaped with pine and oak trees to relieve the otherwise flat, boring terrain of southeast coastal Texas.

Johnson Space Center was located in the far south of Houston’s urban sprawl. It was nearly as close to Galveston as it was to Houston’s city center. The community in which many NASA employees lived was the suburb of Clear Lake City—implying a lake nearby, and a clear one at that. Wrong. Clear Lake was neither clear nor a lake, but rather a chocolate-tinted, humidity-shrouded inlet from the nearby Gulf of Mexico that served as a time-share for a couple billion vacationing mosquitoes. Obviously Clear Lake City had been named by a real estate developer. If there was truth in advertising, Clear Lake City would have been named Fire Ant City. In its abundant grasses were legions of these insects, which should be on the UN’s list of weapons of mass destruction. Fire ants have been known to kill babies, the elderly, and newly born animals (I’m not kidding). To step in one of their mounds was to understand what it feels like to be napalmed.

If only the fire ants preyed on the Olympic-size roaches, which were equally ubiquitous, then at least one pest would have been eliminated. But the ants did not. In some kind of insect pact, the ants stayed outdoors, leaving the roaches free to turn homes into vast roach motels. Every morning brightly colored exterminator trucks poured into suburbia like tanks coming ashore at Normandy. Technicians donned moon suits and slung flamethrower-like tanks to their backs to enter the combat zones of kitchens and baths. But theirs was a lost cause. The roaches thrived on their powders and gases and liquids. Even the old standby, the shoe, proved ineffective because these roaches were masters of land and air. They flew. I recall an early incident at a TFNG party where the hostess chased a four-incher into a corner and chortled with glee as she aimed her toe at it. “Eat leather, you bastard!” But as her foot came down the monster spread its wings and launched itself straight at her face. She screamed and fled, flailing her arms as if her hair were on fire. Meanwhile, the victorious roach broke off its attack, made a clattering turn, and settled on the mantle, tucking its wings back into its body like a majestically perched eagle. For the rest of the party it remained on that mantle, its antenna waving back and forth like semaphores, daring anybody to attack. There were no takers.

Looking at the southeast Texas topography, weather, flora, and fauna, I doubt a single TFNG thought, Of all the places in America I would like to live and work, I would choose Houston, Texas. But nobody was complaining. We had just been blessed with the best job on Earth. If our offices had been in a landfill, we wouldn’t have cared.

The astronaut offices were on the top (third) floor of Building 4. They ringed the outer perimeter of that floor, leaving the interior offices for the coffee bar, bathrooms, mail room, photo archives, conference rooms, and other administrative functions. Like the exterior of the buildings, the offices had a low-bid, cookie-cutter sameness about them. Dilbert would have been right at home. The walls were movable steel panels. Magnetic picture hangers were needed for any Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendars, of which there were a few. The office décor was straight out of Designing Bureaucrat: faux-wood desks and credenzas, cheap swivel chairs, battleship-gray steel filing cabinets, fluorescent lights. Clearly NASA was spending its money on rockets, not astronaut office frills. On the hallway walls hung magnetic nameplates, decorative space photos, and a bulletin board. The latter was intended to disseminate administrative information, but also served as a battlefield for gender wars. In one instance an article on bone loss in weightlessness appeared. The MD author concluded that female astronauts would be more vulnerable to such loss as they aged. One of the women had circled that point and handwritten a note, This is why women should be first in line to fly the shuttle. A resident of Planet AD had answered, This is why NASA should hire younger women.

On another occasion, someone had pinned up a magazine article on reproduction in zero-G. The author had hypothesized that it would require a threesome to copulate due to the repelling effect of Newton’s law, which dictated the first “action” would produce an equal and opposite “reaction.” One wit had written, No! This is why God gave us arms and legs. Another had tacked up a sign-up list next to the article requesting volunteers to “participate in 1-G simulations.” Someone, almost certainly one of the women, had scrawled across it, Grow up. I would come to love the B-board wit. It was frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

Pairs of TFNGs shared offices. I had no clue how the pairings were made, or who made them, or what they might imply for future flight assignments. My roommate was Mike Coats, an Annapolis graduate and navy pilot noted (by my teenage daughter) for looking like the Superman character played by Christopher Reeve. Mike quickly acquired the handle Superman. He was also legendary for his ability to continuously flip a pen (and always catch it) while talking or studying or standing at the urinal or just about doing anything. He never watched the pen and he never missed. Up and down the spinning pen would fly, always landing precisely in his fingers, to be immediately flipped upward again. I wondered how that had played with the psychiatrists. I couldn’t imagine Mike had stopped his flipping while talking to those doctors. He would have exploded.

The Monday morning all-hands meeting was our introduction to the essence of the astronaut business. Held in the main conference room of the astronaut office and chaired by Chief of Astronauts John Young, these weekly meetings were a venue to air important issues. I entered the room with the same trepidation a student feels on the first day of class. Where to sit was the first issue I had to address.

A large table dominated the room. On it sat some conference phones and an overhead projector. A screen hung on the wall at the front of the room. Chairs ringed the table, but I gave no thought to taking one. This was the sacred table of Apollo. Alan Shepard and Jim Lovell and Neil Armstrong had sat here. At the moment moonwalker John Young was sitting at its head. There was no way one-day-old Ascan Mike Mullane was going to sit at that table. Perhaps the chairs were assigned to the veteran astronauts and I would be embarrassingly evicted like a Cheers’ patron being asked to move from Norm’s bar stool. I looked elsewhere. Several rows of chairs had been placed at the back of the room and I aimed for these cheap seats. Most of my fellow TFNGs did likewise. Most, but not all. Rick Hauck, the senior ranking TFNG pilot and our class leader, took a seat at the table. You didn’t get more alpha male than this, I thought. Rick was already lifting a leg to mark his territory. We hadn’t been on the job for fifteen minutes and the competition was already fierce. He was making a statement: I’m going to be the first TFNG in space. Every one of us glared at him and wondered if we shouldn’t have shown some balls (or ovaries) and parked our asses at that moon-dusted table.

Also seated around the table were other spaceflight veterans, the big men on campus, who every freshman longed to be. Besides John Young, there was Alan Bean, the only other moonwalker remaining in the office. There were also some astronauts from the Skylab program: Owen Garriott, Jack Lousma, Ed Gibson, Paul Weitz, and Joe Kerwin. One astronaut remained from the Apollo-Soyuz program, Vance Brand. One of the Apollo 13 crew was still aboard, Fred Haise. Ken Mattingly, the original Apollo 13 astronaut who was exposed to German measles and replaced at the last moment, was still with NASA and at the table. He had later earned his wings on Apollo 16.

The rest of the office included seventeen astronauts who were still waiting for their first spaceflight. Seven had been dumped on NASA in 1969 by the USAF after their Manned Orbiting Laboratory program was canceled. The others had been selected in the late years of the moon program and had been in line to fly on Apollo 18 through 20. But Congress had pulled the plug after Apollo 17. Most of these unlucky seventeen had been at NASA for more than seven years and hadn’t been any closer to space than I had. And they were still many years away from earning their wings. Please, God, spare me that fate, was my prayer.

Though we were brand-new, TFNGs understood the coin of the realm. Spaceflight. Those who had ridden rockets were rich beyond measure. Those who hadn’t were paupers. There was no astronaut “middle class.” We had assumed a job in which rank, wealth, awards, degrees, and all other measures of success were absolutely meaningless. In that regard the unflown older astronauts in the room were as proletariat as us wet-behind-the-ears Ascans. Forget their near decade of service at NASA. It didn’t count. A lifetime of flying a desk, even a NASA astronaut desk, couldn’t put a gold astronaut pin on your lapel. Every one of us rookies in that room, regardless of age or title, were classless peons and we would remain so until that glorious day when the hold-down bolts were blown and our ride began. In that split second we would become kings.

As I looked at the crowded table, I knew every TFNG was thinking the same thing: Why don’t these old farts just leave or die or something? We were the brash teenagers in the company of seniors who were slowing us down. We couldn’t fly until they did. How many missions would they consume? How many years would I have to wait before they were up and out? Though we would soon form tight friendships with these vets, no rookie astronaut ever shed a tear when a member of the older generation decided to move on. At their retirement parties we were the happiest ones there, knowing that one more cockpit seat had just opened up. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass, was our attitude.

Later, I would learn how these seniors feared us. We had been selected by George Abbey, director of Flight Crew Operations (FCOD), John Young’s boss. They hadn’t been. They were astronauts long before George assumed his position. If rumor was true, George would be making shuttle flight assignments. The older astronauts wondered if they would ever fly. George might just skip right to us, his protégés, and flush those also-rans onto the street. There was no astronaut contract guaranteeing a spaceflight. So the seniors in that room saw us as threats to their place in line. It wasn’t just the TFNGs who were sniffing one another and lifting a leg. Everyone was. We all were in a lather to find our place in line for a ride into space and guard it with fang and claw.

Even though the six females couldn’t metaphorically lift a leg, they were certainly looking at their five peers and measuring the competition. It was a no-brainer one of them would be aboard the first shuttle carrying any TFNG crewmember. The NASA PR machine was chomping at the bit to get a woman in space. While I doubted it would come to hair pulling and face scratching, there was bound to be as much competition among the fair sex as there was among the males.

John Young welcomed us with a few forgettable words, all delivered while he looked at his shoes. Dealing with life-and-death situations as a test pilot and astronaut hadn’t endowed Young with any public speaking skills. He seemed nervous and hesitant to make eye contact with his audience. It was a personality trait we would learn wasn’t just associated with welcoming speeches. (The things Life never mentioned.) His stature and voice made him even less compelling. Like all the earliest astronauts, he was short and small framed. He was a Florida boy, and he had the accent and vocabulary of one. He frequently used the expression “them boys” in reference to anybody outside the astronaut office. He wasn’t warm or approachable. Reclusive wouldn’t be far from the mark. But he did have a great understated humor. When Florida named one of Orlando’s main thoroughfares the John Young Parkway, John said, “Them boys shouldn’t have done that. I ain’t dead yet.”

He didn’t leave his wit behind when he flew in space. On STS-9, when two of Columbia’s computers failed in orbit, causing a major and potentially life-threatening problem, John looked at his pilot, Brewster Shaw, and said, “This is what they pay us the big bucks for.” He was probably making $70,000 a year at the time.

The meeting proceeded with Young and Crippen, the crew for the first shuttle flight, discussing their mission preparations. We TFNGs were still naïve enough to believe the NASA press releases proclaiming the first shuttle mission would fly in 1979. NASA HQ was loathe to admit to Congress that the machine was well behind schedule, and so they published wildly optimistic timelines about as likely to be achieved as the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. (STS-1 would ultimately launch on April 12, 1981.) One of the veterans would tell us what the acronym NASA actually stood for: Never a Straight Answer. We learned to add years to any dates provided in a NASA press release about the shuttle schedule.

There was little we newbies could understand in the discussions that swirled around the table. The language of NASA was so laden with acronyms that it took many months to become fluent. The commander of a mission wasn’t called the “commander.” He was the CDR, pronounced as the individual letters…C, D, R. And a pilot wasn’t called a “pilot.” He was a PLT, again pronounced as the individual letters. A pulse code modulation master unit wasn’t called such; it was a “puck-a-moo.” I have heard entire conversations between astronauts without a single recognizable noun in them. “I was doing a TAL and Sim Sup dropped the center SSME along with the number-two APU. Then MS2 saw an OMS leak, we got a GPC split…”

So we just listened in silence to the technobabble. At the close of the meeting, when Young asked if any TFNGs had anything to say, we all sat on our hands. All except Rick Hauck. There was a stir among us as he raised his hand. Surely he wasn’t going to make a technical contribution? was our collective thought. Could he be that far ahead of us? Our competitive paranoia roared to life.

But Rick’s comment wasn’t technical. He just asked if all the TFNGs would remain in the room to cover some administrative items. A secretary entered and passed around copies of our official NASA photos for our review. We had posed for these as part of our in-processing. Now the mail room was filled with thousands of lithographs in which we had been perpetually frozen as smiling, thirtyish, flight-suited youths. Decades later, when there was little resemblance to the actual living person, these first photos were still being sent out. No doubt they have been a source of great confusion when used by American Legionnaires and city officials and others waiting to identify their astronaut luncheon speaker exiting an airport jet way.

Next, the secretary placed a few paper tablets on the table and asked us to give a sample signature for the auto-pen machine. Autographs! Apparently the world would be clamoring for our autographs in such quantities that NASA had a machine to automatically pen them. If there was ever an indication of the new world we had entered, it was this. Except on checks, I had never been asked for an autograph in my life.

I took a page and penned Mike Mullane. It didn’t look right. Too small, too tight, too anal, I thought. My “Ms” in particular looked like they had been made with a nun standing over me. They were too legible. Each was composed of symmetrical double humps that would have fit perfectly into the capital line guides of my third-grade Red Chief tablet. Such a signature would never do. It seemed to me famous people always had illegible signatures. I took another page and tried a radical swipe and imagined how it would look on a photo on some collector’s wall. It appeared as fake as it was. Another page bit the dust. I tried signing faster, slower, with more slant, less slant…I wanted an autograph that would dazzle. Then it dawned on me. Everybody was doing the same thing. An act that had been as casual as, well, signing your name had suddenly become a quest, a personal challenge. I looked around and saw several TFNGs intensely studying their pages. A few tongues worked around the corners of mouths. To produce the perfect autograph was hard labor. I was witnessing the definition of astronauts…competitive to the nth degree. They even beat the shit out of their own muses. Why can’t you come up with a memorable autograph, goddamn you! I could hear the buzz of pages disappearing from the tablet, ammunition being expended in thirty-five private wars to produce the perfect signature. By the time the secretary had her autographs for the auto-pen machine, a small forest had been wasted.