Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 16 Pecking Order

April 19, 1982, effectively marked the end of the TFNG brotherhood. It was on that day George Abbey assembled us to announce, “We’ve made some crew assignments.” Like Hollywood stars hearing, “Can I have the envelope, please,” we held our breath at Abbey’s words. For four years, in hundreds of Outpost Tavern happy hours, on thousands of T-38 flights, around countless supper tables, we had asked the question of one another, of ourselves, of our spouses, of God: When would we be assigned to a shuttle mission? The room was space-silent as Abbey read the names. “The STS-7 crew will be Crippen, Hauck, Fabian, and Ride. STS-8 will have Truly, Brandenstein, Bluford, and Gardner. STS-9 will be Young, Shaw, Garriott, Parker, and two payload specialists. Hopefully we’ll get more people assigned soon.” That was it. God walked from the room.

Poof. With Abbey’s words TFNG camaraderie vaporized. I don’t believe there was ever again a social gathering of all TFNGs. As a group wallowing in a common uncertainty and united in a common distrust of our management, it had been easy to share a beer at the Outpost. Now we had been cleaved into haves and have-nots. There was a pecking order; some of us were better than others. I tried my best to be rational—somebody had to be first. We couldn’t all be. But I couldn’t accept that rationale and I doubted any of the others could either. We were too competitive. It was The Right Stuff syndrome as described by Tom Wolfe. The seven flight-assigned TFNGs had more of that stuff than the rest of us. We, the unassigned, had been left behind. I would later see first-flight assignments have the same effect on every astronaut class. Their all-for-one and one-for-all camaraderie would end just as abruptly as ours had. The effect could have been somewhat assuaged if Young and Abbey had been open about the flight assignment process, but all Abbey left us with was “Hopefully we’ll get more people assigned soon.” That wasn’t a lot to hang on to. Abbey’s and Young’s silence on the mechanics and calendar of flight assignments was earning them a growing enmity.

With George’s announcement still echoing in my brain, I wished for a hole in the earth to open and swallow me. I wanted to nurse my wounded ego in private, but that wasn’t an option. Like the also-rans at the Academy Awards, I had to don a fake smile and shake the hands of the winners. They were incandescent. You could feel the heat from their faces. Several of the blessed tried to mollify us with comments like, “You’ll be getting a flight soon” and “Your day is coming, too.” I was being pitied. I didn’t think I could feel lower. But I was wrong. I heard Sally comment, “George told us of the assignments a week ago, but he wanted us to keep it quiet until the press release.” I wondered how many times in the past week I had been eating lunch in the cafeteria with Rick Hauck or John Fabian and whining about the delay in flight assignments, and all the while he had been silently celebrating his mission appointment. God, I felt so pathetic.

As I drifted from the room, I heard Fred Gregory’s sotto voce growl, “This is bullshit!” His head and shoulders slumped in depression. Another casualty. Then it dawned on me. He had not just been passed over for an early flight assignment. He was black. He had just been passed over as the first African American in space. Guy Bluford would seize that title on STS-8. I was just a white guy. My name would never be on anybody’s Trivial Pursuit card regardless of when I flew. But Guy Bluford would be history. And Sally Ride, as the first American woman in space, would become an icon. Some had lost more than just a mission assignment with Abbey’s announcement. Some had lost history and the payday that came with celebrity. Sally Ride, in particular, had just been handed a free ticket through life. As the first American woman in space she could look forward to book deals, speech honorariums, corporate board seats, and consulting fees that could earn her millions.

As the seismic wave of Abbey’s announcement was tearing apart the TFNGs, we were blissfully ignorant of another 9.0 wave moving through the system. Five months earlier, one of the eight O-rings on STS-2’s recovered right-side booster had shown heat damage. This discovery had shocked the SRB engineers. Since the boosters were twelve feet in diameter, had a hollow center, and burned from the inside toward the outside, the perimeter-installed O-rings were far from the 5,000-degree gas throughout most of the burn. The unburned propellant served as an insulator. (In the final seconds of the burn, other insulation material at the walls kept the heat from the O-rings.) The O-rings should never show heat damage. And in seven ground tests and one mission (STS-1), involving a total of sixty-four primary and sixty-four backup O-rings, no heat damage had ever been recorded. The fact that an O-ring inside STS-2’s right-side booster had been damaged was an indication that, at some point in flight, it had not held the nearly 1,000-pounds-per-square-inch pressure inside the tube and a finger of fire had worked between the segment facings to touch it. This suggested a serious problem with the joint design. But no consideration was given to stopping shuttle flights and conducting more ground tests. The NASA PR machine had promised Congress and the American public a rapid expansion of the shuttle flight rate with a vehicle turnaround time measured in a few weeks. Schedule had become the 800-pound gorilla in shuttle operations. Nobody wanted to wrestle with it. Instead, engineers at Thiokol and NASA searched for a way to continue operations in spite of the STS-2 anomaly. So they intentionally damaged an O-ring to a much greater degree than the damage they had observed on STS-2, put it in a laboratory test article, and pressurized it to three times the pressure developed by a burning SRB. The damaged O-ring held the pressure. Armed with these impressive results the Thiokol engineers endorsed their product as flight worthy. Lost in this process, however, was the fact something never expected and not completely understood had been accepted.

No astronaut was aware of the SRB O-ring problem. In fact, most of us were ignorant of the entire SRB design. There was only a single indication of SRB performance available in the cockpit of a launching shuttle. As the tube pressure fell to less than 50 pounds per square inch, a message flashed on the computer screens giving a warning that burnout and separation were near. Since we had little insight and no control over a burning SRB, we didn’t waste our time in studying its design. We had too many other things into which we did have insight and over which we did have control (the liquid-fueled engines, hydraulics, electrical system, etc.). We devoted our time to learning the design and operation of these systems. We were convinced the SRBs were just big, dumb skyrockets, as safe and reliable as a hobby store model rocket. It was the SSMEs, which periodically blew up in ground tests, that we feared most.

The Thiokol and NASA SRB engineers were buoyed when STS-3’s boosters returned with no O-rings damaged. It was full speed ahead with the shuttle program.

And the program shifted into overdrive on July 4, 1982. It was then that President Ronald Reagan and the First Lady celebrated Independence Day at Edwards AFB by personally welcoming Ken Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield back from space after their successful STS-4 mission. Reagan called attention to the latest orbiter to join the shuttle fleet, Challenger. Fresh from the nearby Rockwell factory, that vehicle was mounted atop its 747 carrier aircraft ready to take off for Florida as soon as the president finished his comments. It was an incredibly intoxicating sight. Columbia sat on the cracked dirt of the lakebed looking every bit the veteran of four spaceflights, with her nose and fuselage streaked with soot from four blazing reentries. Challenger sparkled in her virgin newness. It was the perfect backdrop as the president continued his speech and declared the space shuttle program “operational.”

That label had never really been defined, but it was easy to sense how most of NASA and all of the public interpreted it. Operational meant the shuttle was nothing more than a very high-flying airliner. I doubt there was a single military aviator astronaut who believed that. Fighter jets of far less complexity than the shuttle routinely suffered malfunctions resulting in crashes. We were certain one awaited the shuttle, too, and when it happened, it would mean death for her crew. While the operational label was nebulous, it did contain one certainty—all future shuttle missions would be flown in vehicles with no in-flight escape system. There were no ejection seats in Challenger’s cockpit and the two in Columbia would soon be removed. That had been the plan from the very beginning. President Reagan’s “operational” declaration was merely photo-op tensile. But contained in it was a shuttle design feature that would condemn some of us to death.

With flight crews named to all the planned missions through 1983, I knew I would not be getting a flight assignment for many months, perhaps even a year or more. But at least my purgatory of Spacelab support had ended. I was now assigned to shuttle software checkout in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL). My frequent partner in that facility was the now very pregnant Rhea Seddon. She and Hoot Gibson had married in 1981 and their first child was due in July. In the SAIL cockpit I would watch Rhea’s nine-month distended belly crowd the control stick as she flew simulations to perfect landings. It was a sight certain to have sent some of the old Mercury astronauts fumbling for their nitro pills. Rhea would ultimately give birth to a son, one of the rare boys born to astronauts. We had long noticed a propensity for astronauts to sire daughters and wondered if the G-forces of our jet-jockey training were pushing male sperm to the end of the line. As Hoot and Rhea were being congratulated at a Monday meeting, one pilot shouted, “This proves Hoot isn’t an astronaut.” I answered, “No. It proves Hoot isn’t the father.” Rhea had a good laugh at that.

I enjoyed Rhea immensely. Like Judy, she was a smart and capable beauty with a limitless tolerance for us AD males. She frequently parried our sexist BS with biting humor. I once saw Hoot, our AD King, skewered with it. One of the men chosen to sit on an upcoming astronaut interview board had ducked his head into our office and asked for inputs on the selection criteria for the new class of astronaut candidates. Hoot gave Rhea a body-appraising scan and answered, “Yeah, how about selecting some women with big breasts and small asses instead of the other way around.” Rhea smiled wickedly at her husband and replied, “Robert, some night while you’re asleep, I’m going to amputate your penis [she was a surgeon] and graft it to your forehead, and when you come to work people are going to think it’s a zit.” Hoot had married perhaps the only woman on the planet who was his equal. When they were together it was a laugh a minute. I loved them both.

By 1982, like the other AD men, I had learned my boundaries around the six females. Rhea’s and Judy’s were the widest. Sally’s were the tightest. Though I repeatedly warned myself to watch my mouth around Sally, I would have relapses, as when I once observed, “The female cosmonauts are sure ugly.” Sally snapped, “Have you ever thought they might be good at their job?!”

Alcohol always held the potential to wreck my resolve. One evening, as Donna and I walked from a local restaurant (after a dinner that included more than a few beers), a friend stopped Donna and they fell into conversation. As I dallied, I noted Sally and Steve Hawley at another table dining with an attractive woman I didn’t recognize. At the time, Steve was dating Sally so there was nothing surprising about seeing them together. With my wife engaged I walked over and said, “Hey, Stevie, are you getting cookie recipes from these girls?” Sally glared at me like I was something growing in her bathroom grout. Hawley cringed as if he had taken a bullet to the gut and shot Sally a glance that said, “I don’t know this guy.” There was an awkward silence during which the unidentified woman examined me as if I were whale shit, the lowest thing on the planet. Finally, I bid a good-bye and escaped back to my wife, my hands discreetly checking the zipper of my fly as I walked. The threesome’s rude reaction made me wonder if I had forgotten to zip up after my last visit to the urinal. Nope, everything was secure.

As I returned, Donna’s friend gushed, “You know her?!”

Of course, I assumed she was referring to Sally.

“Sure, that’s Sally Ride.”

“No, not her. The other woman.”

“No. I wasn’t introduced.” I was still puzzled by that table’s hostility toward me. Was it something I said?

“That’s Jane Pauley.”

I shrugged. The name was a mystery to me. “Who’s Jane Pauley?”

Donna’s friend nearly had a seizure. “Who’s Jane Pauley!? You don’t know? She’s the NBC Today show newswoman.”

I honestly didn’t know. I didn’t watch much TV. I certainly didn’t watch those chatty morning shows. If she wasn’t in Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, I wouldn’t know her.

With this new bit of knowledge, it slowly dawned on me why I had been stonewalled at Sally’s table. No doubt Ms. Pauley was talking to her about her recent flight selection. I could just imagine how my cookie recipe comment must have played with those two pioneering females. I made Hugh Hefner look like a beacon of enlightenment. I guess it’s no surprise I was never invited to the Today show.

On October 5, 1982, three more TFNGs were named to a flight, STS-10 (later to be designated STS-41B).[1] I wasn’t among them.

I put on another happy face and congratulated the winners. A few weeks later Norm Thagard became the eleventh TFNG to draw an assignment when he was retroactively assigned to STS-7. NASA was growing concerned about the incidence of space sickness and wanted Thagard, a physician, to run some experiments on what was being officially labeled Space Adaptation Syndrome (SAS). SAS had impacted the recently landed STS-5 mission in a very big way. One of the two spacewalkers on that flight had been so stricken with vomiting the crew had asked MCC for permission to delay their EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity, i.e., a spacewalk) to give him time to recover. Vomiting inside a spacesuit could kill an astronaut. The emesis could smear the inside of the helmet visor and blind the spacewalker, making it impossible to respond to a suit emergency. Also, because there was no way to remove the fluid, the astronaut could inhale it and choke to death or it could clog the oxygen circulation system and suffocate the victim. The STS-5 space-walk, which was to have been the first from a shuttle, had just been a demonstration exercise (and was ultimately canceled for a suit malfunction), but in future missions spacewalks would be essential for mission success. Norm Thagard would be the first of many physicians sent into space to determine the cause of SAS. He, like all who would follow, would have their studies seriously hampered by astronaut paranoia. Spacewalking was the most sought-after prize for MSes. It filled a powerful need to be in ultimate control. The pilots had their shuttle landings to fulfill them. Their hands and eyes delivered a 200,000-pound orbiter to a runway. It was the same with a rendezvous mission. A pilot’s personal skill brought two 17,300-mile-per-hour objects together 200 miles above the earth. It was heroic work. On the other hand, much MS work was mundane—throwing a switch to release a satellite, drawing blood, changing a data tape on some scientist’s experiment. Spacewalks and, to a somewhat lesser degree, robot arm operations were the exception in MS jobs. Like a pilot feeling the kiss of the runway on the space shuttle wheels, MSes could enjoy a powerful sense of being in control as they assembled structures or repaired satellites or performed other hands-on spacewalking tasks.

So physicians studying SAS, like Thagard, were hamstrung. Astronauts didn’t want to admit to an episode of vomiting out of fear that it would eliminate them from consideration for future spacewalk missions. As a result many astronauts were less than truthful about their symptoms. Some blatantly lied. We would hear stories of crewmembers who were seriously sick, yet the data would never appear on the flight surgeon’s bar charts. SAS was considered an individual health issue and was therefore privileged information between the astronaut and flight surgeon. If an astronaut didn’t tell the flight surgeons the truth, the doctors were not going to hear it from anybody else.

To be SAS-free was considered so important, many astronauts attempted inoculations. When it was first assumed the problem was related to Earth-based motion sickness (later disproved), astronauts would perform stomach-churning acrobatics in T-38 jets in the days prior to a launch. I was flying in Story Musgrave’s backseat when he decided to prep his body for an upcoming mission. He asked ATC for a block of altitude and then went into a series of spiraling rolls and violent maneuvers that alternately had me slammed into my seat at 4-Gs and lifted from it in negative Gs. My head snapped back and forth like a palm tree in a hurricane. Within a minute I was ready to blow my last meal (and perhaps a few before that) and had to plead with him to stop.

Another equally ineffective attempt at SAS inoculation was to sleep on an incline with your head lower than your feet. This became popular when the flight surgeons hypothesized that the fluid shift of weightlessness might be causing the inner ear to be disturbed, inducing vomiting. All astronauts experience an uncomfortable eye-popping fullness in the head during weightlessness because of an equalization of body fluid. By sleeping in a bed with bricks under the foot posts to tilt the head down, it was thought the resulting fluid shift to the upper body would somehow prepare it for weightlessness and eliminate SAS. It didn’t. Some of those practicing head-down sleep still got sick in space, suggesting that those head-downers who didn’t vomit had probably been immune anyway. To this day doctors are baffled by the cause of SAS and it continues to affect nearly 50 percent of astronauts.

As the calendar turned to 1983, my fifth year as a TFNG, I was suffering from something far worse than SAS—the depression of being an unassigned astronaut. That status had me doubting everything about myself—my abilities, my personality, even my astronaut friends. Were they on Abbey’s shit list and, by association, was I too? I wondered if others had already been told of a mission assignment and were keeping it secret until the press release. Might an office mate already be assigned? Every few days a new rumor on flight assignments would sweep the office like a pandemic flu. Some of this scuttlebutt would have my name assigned to a mission. Before the press release for STS-10 appeared, one such rumor had me on that flight. But it was a lie. We all searched for any indication that another round of flight assignments was in the offing. We watched from our office windows for groups of our peers walking to Building 1, Abbey’s lair. Were they on their way to be told of a mission assignment? One astronaut kept a pair of binoculars on his desk to better observe that traffic (as well as hard-bodied, halter-topped female tourists). Unassigned TFNGs were ready to explode in frustration. At parties I could see the tension had infected our spouses.There is no rank among wives was an old military proverb. Yeah, and the Easter Bunny is an astronaut. Every wife of one of the unassigned, mine included, knew her position had changed. The wives of the assigned were working with the NASA PR people to schedule TV and magazine interviews while the spouses of the unassigned were wiping the baby’s ass. These Queens for a Day would soon be boarding NASA Gulfstream jets to zoom to Florida as VIPs. There was no doubt some marriages were suffering from the new reality of assigned and unassigned TFNGs. Mine certainly was. When Donna commented at a party, “George Abbey couldn’t lead a pack of Boy Scouts” (something I said every night), I pulled her aside and snapped, “Goddammit, don’t bad-mouth Abbey with others around! There’s no telling what gets back to him.” It wasn’t a fluke outburst. My frustration was a loose cannon and Donna was frequently in the line of fire. I was an asshole.

I continued my drab life. I would pull into the Building 4 parking lot by 7:30 A.M . so I could fight for a parking space (cringing at the sight of the assigned TFNGs pulling into their reserved parking places), attend some SAIL-related meetings, go to the mail room to sign autographs (wondering why anybody would want mine), go to the gym to exercise, eat lunch in the cafeteria (to catch up on the latest rumors), attend more meetings or study shuttle-training schematics, perhaps take a T-38 flight (if the assigned crews had left any), then go home. On my SAIL days I would pull one of the eight-hour shifts of its 24/7 operation. If I was lucky, I would be called to the SMS for some real shuttle training as a substitute crewmember. When Guy Bluford was absent for an STS-8 simulation I received such a call and eagerly jumped on it.

From my perspective the racial integration of the astronaut office with Bluford, Gregory, McNair (all African American), and El Onizuka (Asian American) had occurred seamlessly. The entire astronaut corps seemed color-blind. I certainly was. My family upbringing, so abysmally lacking when it had come to the topic of females, had been radically progressive on the subject of race. “When you’re in a foxhole and the damn Japs are shooting at you, you don’t care about the color of the American at your side,” was my dad’s version of an “I Have a Dream” speech. And my religion, so medieval in its attitude about women, was enlightened in its preaching on race. Jesus Christ had said, “Love your fellow man.” He hadn’t added any footnotes on color. Hell’s fire awaited the racist, just as it did for boys imagining the cheerleaders naked. I never gave a second thought to the skin color of the minority astronauts and I got the impression the other palefaces in the astronaut office didn’t either.

While there was no racism in the astronaut office, the topic of race, like that of gender, religion, sexual orientation, the pope, motherhood, apple pie, and just about anything else, was fair game for the office humorists. Nothing was sacred to them. While substituting for Guy Bluford in the SMS I had a ringside seat to some of this humor.

During the course of the sim, we received a call from the Sim Sup, “I want you guys to come up with a medical problem and call the surgeon about it.” We were used to such requests. There was a “surgeon” console in the MCC manned by a NASA physician and the Sim Sup wanted to ensure he had a crew health problem to work. In the cockpit we put our heads together and the suggestions flowed.

“Let’s tell him Dan has a sharp pain in his stomach. It might be appendicitis.”

“Let’s tell him Dick has flulike symptoms.”

“Let’s tell him Dale has a bad toothache.”

We were mulling over these and a few other ideas when Dale Gardner snapped his attention to me, the Guy Bluford substitute, and exclaimed, “No! I’ve got it. Let’s tell them that Guy has turned WHITE!” NASA HQ had been in orgasmic ecstasy over the impending flight of America’s first black astronaut. Knowing this, the suggestion was outrageously funny.

Somebody mimicked the call with an Apollo 13 header, “Houston, we’ve got a problem. Guy has turned white!” It would be a call certain to turn a few people in HQ white.

Dick Truly looked at us and said, “If you guys make that call, the closest you’ll get to space is the ninth floor of Building 1 while Kraft fires you.”

We all understood. Even color-blind astronauts couldn’t publicly joke about race. It was career suicide in America. We had to settle for Dan’s stomachache.

During another simulation in which I was a substitute crewmember, I thought my career had ended and the circumstances had nothing to do with race. During a break another crewmember and I climbed down to the mid-deck and made ourselves some lunch. Since every aspect of a real shuttle mission was being simulated, our food was space food—sandwich spreads and dehydrated food. Bread wasn’t on the menu. It crumbled tooeasily in weightlessness. Instead, tortillas were used. We made peanut butter sandwiches from these and then cut into a package of dried fruit. My lunch partner held up a dehydrated pear. “Mullane, check it out, it looks like a [part of the female anatomy].” Only this TFNG didn’t say “part of the female anatomy.” He used a popular planet AD euphemism. I laughed. “You’re right. It does look like a—” I repeated the word. The butterflied pears had dried into an X-rated art form.

A moment later Dale Gardner, who had been absent on a toilet break, reentered the mid-deck. The vein on his head looked ready to burst. “Jesus Christ, what did you guys say on the intercom! Some woman working on the Sim Sup console heard you guys say something about a dehydrated pear and was totally grossed out. She stormed off to Kraft’s office to lodge a complaint.”

“Oh God,” I said. “She must have heard us through an open mic.”

This wasn’t going to look good…some young woman leaning over Dr. Kraft’s desk and screaming, “Some of your wonder-boy astronauts just saw a part of the female anatomy in a dried pear!” God, why couldn’t we have seen the Virgin Mary in a tortilla instead?

Dale again asked, “What did you say to piss her off?”

My compatriot hung his head like a six-year-old in front of an irate parent and mumbled, “I think I said—”

“You said THAT? Jesus…you’re toast. Kraft is going to crucify you.” Then he climbed to the flight deck shaking his head at our idiocy.

We threw our food in the garbage, including those offending pears. Our appetites were gone. Our careers would soon be in that garbage can, too, I thought. We climbed back to the flight deck and went through the motions of being an astronaut. We were hooded victims tied to a post waiting for the bullet to be fired from Kraft’s office: “Get your asses over here…and clean out your desks on the way!” But hours passed and no call came. In fact the sim proceeded to completion and still there was no call.

As we sulked back to our offices expecting to find messages on our desks, Dale came to our sides and said, “Hey, guys, that was pretty funny, wasn’t it?”

We looked at him. “What was funny?”

“That joke I pulled on you about the woman hearing your pear comment.”

“That was a joke?”

“Yeah, I was standing outside the mid-deck and heard you guys talking about it. I thought I’d rattle your cage.”

I was ready to rattle his cage with both hands on his throat. “You bastard!”

A few days later a note did appear on my desk requesting my presence in Building 1. It was from George Abbey.