Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 29 Change

On January 9, 1987, Abbey made a rare and impromptu appearance before the astronaut office. Since his prior visits had almost always included flight assignment announcements, there was a buzz on the walk to the conference room. I couldn’t believe my name would be on any press release. I had significant doubts I would ever see my name on a crew list again. But hope springs eternal in the souls of astronauts. The fact that the meeting was unscheduled, on a Friday afternoon, no less, suggested something unusual was in the offing.

As always, Abbey spoke at low volume and everybody craned forward to listen. For ten minutes he discussed some changes in the management structure of HQ, a topic none of us believed was the reason for the meeting. We were right. He concluded his HQ remarks and then, almost offhandedly, mumbled, “The crew for STS-26 will be Rick Hauck as commander, Dick Covey as pilot, and Dave Hilmers, Pinky Nelson, and Mike Lounge as MSes.”

For a long moment the room was gripped in a stillness that rivaled deep space. We were hoping Abbey would continue with more crew assignments, or at least tell us when those might happen. But there was nothing. Except for the lucky five, who wore embarrassed smiles, the rest of us slumped in crushing disappointment. Why didn’t Abbey get it? If he was the power monger that many believed him to be, couldn’t he see the power to be gained with one hundred faithful-unto-death astronauts? With a little communication, that’s exactly what he would have had. But he didn’t offer a single hint regarding the timetable for other assignments. In the enduring silence, I noticed some of the faces around me hardening into glares of something beyond anger. If I were Abbey I would hire a food taster.

The meeting broke up and I drifted back to my office. Several other TFNGs came by for a losers’ commiseration session. The USAF contingent was angry that a navy astronaut, Rick Hauck, would be commanding the return-to-flight mission. Rick would be making his second flight as a commander while his PLT, fellow TFNG and air force colonel Dick Covey, had yet to command his first mission. Others were livid that Pinky Nelson had been assigned to the flight. While Pinky was well liked, he had taken a sabbatical to the University of Washington after Challenger. The rest of us had stuck around to do the dog work and be brutalized by Young in the process. In our minds Pinky hadn’t paid the dues to have received such a prize as the first post-Challenger mission. It was also a sore point that his last mission had been the flight prior to Challenger, so he had the additional plum of having back-to-back missions. Norm Thagard was certain Abbey had picked Nelson just to show the rest of us how unfair and capricious he could be. I recalled a line from McGuire’s astronaut leadership document, “Inconsistency, ambiguity, silence, evasion…all have their place in his studied unpredictability.”

There were other aspects of this crew selection that would have angered us even further had we known about them. Years later, at our TFNG twentieth-anniversary reunion, Rick Hauck would tell me that Abbey had allowed him to select Dick Covey as his pilot. No other TFNG commander I ever spoke with had been given that responsibility. Abbey had always named the mission crews, the CDRs, the PLTs, the MSes, everybody. Hauck also revealed he had been told six months prior to the press release that he would command the return-to-flight mission but had been sworn to secrecy by Abbey. I wondered how many times during those six months other hopeful commanders had been in Rick’s company wondering aloud who would command STS-26, and Rick had pretended to wonder with them. Deep secrecy. It was Abbey’s style and it was killing astronaut morale.

My winter of discontent continued. As we had anticipated, the lightweight SRB program was canceled and, along with it, all Vandenberg AFB shuttle operations were terminated. I would never see polar orbit.

Challenger’s wreckage—all of it—was sealed in a pair of abandoned Cape Canaveral missile silos. It was another head-shaking moment for me. Pieces of the wreckage should have been retained for permanent display in key NASA locations as reminders of the cost of leadership and team failure. At a minimum, displays of the wreckage should have been placed at NASA HQ and in every NASA field center’s headquarters’ building. The LCC and the MCC buildings needed a similar display. Even the astronaut office should have been the site of an exhibit. Other astronauts agreed. I heard Bob Crippen remark that every astronaut should be required to view the wreckage before it was sealed away, adding, “I don’t think some of the civilian astronauts yet appreciate the risks they are taking when they climb into a space shuttle.” But no such displays were established. Challenger’s broken body was sealed away as if the very sight of it was somehow obscene.

I continued to be beaten up by John Young any time I had anything to say about range safety or pre-MECO OMS burns. Every Monday rumors of his and Abbey’s imminent removal swept through the office like blue northers out of the panhandle. But come Friday, nothing had changed. A good night’s sleep had long become a memory. I would get up at weird hours and take walks or go for a run. Donna and I talked ad nauseam about leaving NASA. I had my twenty years with the air force. I could retire from it and NASA, go back to Albuquerque, and get a job. But every time I thought of giving up the T-38, of never hearing, “Go for main engine start,” of never again seeing the Earth from space, I would get angry. I was doing my job. I was doing a good job. Why should I be driven away for that?

In the spring of 1987, I got a temporary reprieve from astronaut frustrations. With the shuttle grounded for at least another year, the USAF decided it would be a good time to reacquaint their astronauts with air force space operations. The navy planned to do the same for their astronauts. Both services referred to the program as a “re-bluing,” a reference to the fact we would be back in our blue military uniforms. We would travel to various United States and overseas bases to be briefed on how military space assets were being used to counter the Soviet threat.

When word of this program reached the civilians in the astronaut office, one particularly bookish scientist challenged the fairness of it. “If the air force and navy are sending its astronauts on a re-bluing, what is NASA going to do for us civilians?” Mark Lee, an air force fighter pilot, looked at the whiner and replied, “You guys are going to get re-nerded.”

West Berlin was the best place to get eyeball to eyeball with the enemy, so the air force flew us there. This was 1987 and the infamous Berlin Wall still had two years of life left in it. We attended various classified briefings and got a helicopter tour of the Iron Curtain, flying over death strips guarded from watchtowers and barricaded with razor wire.

One evening we donned our uniforms, passed through a border checkpoint, and walked into East Berlin for supper. The city was still considered occupied and the military personnel of the occupying countries could pass into one another’s zones, although it was a one-sided passage. The East didn’t allow their troops into the West, knowing they would never come back.

In our walk from West to East we traveled back to 1945. Color had yet to come to this part of the world. Everything was gray and drab, even the clothing of the women. Remote-control TV cameras mounted on buildings watched us and other pedestrians. The streets were heavily patrolled by Kalashnikov-toting East German and Soviet guards. They glared at us like we were the enemy, which, of course, we were. As we passed one pair of guards, I pointed to a medal on my chest and said to John Blaha (class of 1980) in an intentionally loud voice, “And I got this one for killing ten commies.” The hostile expressions of the guards didn’t change. Apparently they didn’t speak English, which was probably a good thing for me.

Our air force host led us to his favorite East Berlin restaurant. I was prepared to be disappointed, but the place was clean, brightly lit, and staffed with young and beautiful East German fräuleins. As we entered, the rest of the patrons, all East German and Soviet military officers, gave us their best game face. We ignored them. Several tables were shoved together to accommodate our entourage and we got down to the business of drinking. We were soon a rowdy spectacle for the rest of the crowd. They stared at us with disapproving expressions, as if laughing and smiling were forbidden in the workers’ paradise.

Later in the evening an intoxicated John Blaha grabbed a vase of daffodils and began to peer into each bloom with the focus of a horticulturist. I wondered if he had slipped into alcohol poisoning, but he whispered to me, “I’ll bet the KGB has bugged this vase. They’re probably in a back room listening to everything we’re saying. Well, I’ll give them something to think about.” He lifted the flowers to his mouth like a microphone and began to speak loudly into their blooms: “Mike, wasn’t that briefing about our new F-99 Mach 7 fighter really interesting?” Then he handed the vase to me.

I joined in the fun. “Yeah, and to think Mach 7 is its single-engine speed.”

The others at the table picked up on our disinformation campaign and the vase of flowers went from hand to hand while the rest of our group made even more outrageous claims about secret weapon systems we had recently seen or flown. Meanwhile, the humorless commie diners stared at us as if we were mad. Since we were talking into daffodil blooms, I could understand their bewilderment.

When the vase finally made it back to Blaha, he closed the floor show by speaking into it in an exceptionally loud voice. “Why is it that visiting Soviet basketball teams never play the Celtics or Lakers? Whenever they come to the USA they always play some piss-poor university team. What are they…pussies?” We all wondered how that would translate back in the Kremlin.

Imagine my shock when, several months later, Blaha ran into my office with a newspaper article describing how the Soviets, for the first time in history, were going to allow their basketball team to play an exhibition game with an NBA team. “I told you that vase was bugged,” Blaha shouted. We laughed at the image of an army of KGB spies hunting for that F-99 fighter.

Our journey into the heart of the enemy camp wasn’t the highlight of that evening. Back at our hotel, four of us donned our bathing suits and headed for the sauna. There we encountered a middle-aged fräulein with a Mr. T physique who handed us towels and shower clogs and then pointed to our suits and said, “Nein.” The suits were not allowed. It was a nude spa. We exchanged a few self-conscious glances. But there were no other females present and only a saliva test would have confirmed our receptionist’s gender. We stripped. What a photo that would have made…four of America’s heroes marching to the sauna like we marched to our space shuttles, except we were marching completely bare-assed. We opened the door and entered a steamy room. When our eyes adjusted to the dim light we realized we were sitting with a half dozen naked women. The spa was coed. Oh well, when in Rome…

Later I was climbing out of a small pool when a very attractive and very naked German woman came to me. Someone in our group must have dropped the astronaut bomb because she wanted to ask a few questions about flying in space. I could barely understand what she was saying…not because her English was poor. On the contrary, it was excellent. Rather, it was because 99 percent of my meager mental powers were being used to force my eyes to look straight ahead. As she spoke, my brain was screaming, “Don’t look down! Don’t look down!” I felt it would be a serious breach of naked etiquette to talk to her breasts, something we denizens of Planet AD regularly did with clothed women. Given my struggles it was a wonder I could form a coherent sentence.

Meanwhile, as I did my best to be a naked gentleman, I noticed she had no qualms about looking at my body. As she spoke her eyes wandered up and down as if she were appraising a cut of beef. I felt so violated.

Even the naked ladies weren’t the most memorable part of our re-bluing trip. Events five thousand miles away trivialized everything we had encountered. We received word from Houston that John Young’s tenure as chief of astronauts had ended. He had been reassigned to the position of JSC deputy for engineering and safety, a technical rather than team-leadership position. The celebration was immediate. Most of us had been looking forward to this day for a long, long time. My celebration was probably the most unrestrained. For the past year, John had made my life miserable. While I had heard of only two incidents in which he had suggested I was lacking as an astronaut and should be replaced, God only knew how many other times he had said it and to whom he had said it. Despite Abbey’s “forget it” comment, I couldn’t believe my reputation hadn’t been damaged. Young had been my tormentor, and my joy at his departure was unalloyed. That’s not to say I couldn’t admire the man for his achievements in the cockpit. He had flown in space six times, including a moonwalk mission and the first space shuttle mission. The latter had probably been the most dangerous mission ever flown by any astronaut. While many of us questioned John’s leadership abilities, no one doubted his flying skills and guts.

On April 27, 1987, TFNG Dan Brandenstein was picked to replace Young. I knew he would do a superb job as chief of astronauts. But at the same time I was angry that Abbey had screwed the air force again. The grapevine had it that the selection criteria for the position had mandated a TFNG who had flown as a shuttle commander. There were three navy TFNGs who qualified: Brandenstein, Hauck, and Hoot Gibson. There was only a single USAF TFNG veteran commander: Brewster Shaw. And why did such a disparity exist? Because of Abbey’s longtime preferential treatment of the U.S. Navy astronauts. If a bomb went off under Abbey’s car, the air force TFNGs would be at the top of the suspect list.