Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (43 page)

Hartsfield decreed that the only female on the crew would continue to use the shuttle bathroom. “Judy, as you can imagine, had a hard time with the bag, so we had a little room in there. I said, ‘I don’t care what the ground says, you use the bathroom. The rest of us will do the bag trick.’”

The situation was messy, with all of the bags being stored in the waste storage tank under the floor. Hartsfield said there was at least one instance where a crew member was stuffing a urine bag into the tank and the bag ruptured.

Twice, Hartsfield said, Flight Director Randy Stone asked management if the crew could convert a water tank to a waste tank. It would have been an easy conversion, Hartsfield said, but at the time there was great concern about turning the orbiters around quickly for the next flights and the response was that using the water tank as a waste tank would add a week to the process of getting the orbiter ready to fly again.

“I sometimes think I made a mistake,” said Hartsfield.

I probably should have called for a private med conference and told Flight, “Hey, we’ve got a real problem up here.” . . . I talked to the guy that headed that room up when we got back, and he apologized. They later found that it wouldn’t have impacted the flow at all. I said, “Joe, you just don’t know what we’re going through up there.” “Well, you should have told somebody.” “I don’t want to put that on the loop.” I mean, in fact, Gerry Griffin, the center director, when we got back, he expressed his thanks for not putting that on the open. The media would have had a ball with that.

[Initially] we were hoping to stay another day on orbit, because we had enough fuel to do it, but this was not a very good situation. By the time day six came, we were ready to come home.

For the second time, on board the shuttle was an
IMAX
camera. Hawley recalled that the
IMAX
camera pulled film so fast that in zero g it would torque the user like a gyroscope. The camera had a belt drive with a belt guard, but for this flight, it was decided the belt guard wasn’t needed. “I don’t know if we were trying to save weight or what, but we decided we didn’t need this belt guard.” Hawley said. “I’m up there doing something, and all of a sudden I hear this blood-curdling scream. I go floating upstairs to see what had happened, and Judy had gotten her hair caught in this belt for this
IMAX
camera, and there was film and hair all over the orbiter. It jammed the camera and the camera blew the circuit breaker that it was plugged into.”

Mullane said he, Resnik, and Hawley were filming the
SYNCOM
launch when the incident happened. Mullane and Mike Coats cut Resnik’s hair to free her from the camera, and Coats then spent hours picking hair out of the camera gears in order to get the camera working again. The crew dealt with the problem on their own, without reporting it to the ground, concerned that if the public found out, the incident would provide fodder for those critical of
NASA
’s flying female astronauts.

29.
Judy Resnik with several cameras floating around her, including the
IMAX
camera in which her hair got tangled. Courtesy
NASA
.

Throughout the mission, each crew member went about his or her assigned tasks with very few coordinated crew activities, Hartsfield said. As a result, he made sure that they ate dinner together every night. “You get a quick breakfast snack, and the first thing you know, you’re off on your daily do list,” Hartsfield said, describing a typical day during the mission. “You eat lunch, normally, on the run where you’ve got a lull in your activities. But I had decreed that the evening meal we were all going to eat together. I want one time for the crew to just get together and just chat and have a little fun and say, ‘Okay, where are we? What have we got to do tomorrow?’ and talk about things.”

One night during dinner as a crew, a rather strange thing happened. “We’d prepared our meals, and we were all floating around, holding down on the mid-deck, and all of sudden we heard this knocking noise, like somebody wanted in,” Hartsfield recalled.

It sounded like knocking. Holy crap, what is that? And then we had a traffic jam trying to get through the bulkhead to get up to the flight deck, because it was coming from up that way somewhere. So we got up there, and we were on the night side of the Earth, it was pitch black out there. Steve flipped on the payload bay lights. You know those housings take like five minutes. And we said,
“God, what is that!?” We could hear it, whatever it was, was on the starboard side. Steve was the first one to see it. He looked at the gimbal angles on the Ku-Band antenna, and it was banging back and forth. It was something where it was oscillating back and forth. He hit the power switch and turned it off, and that did it. And we went, whew. And we told the ground later what had happened, and it never did it anymore, whatever it did. Apparently it got into a range where it kept trying to swap or do something. I never did find out exactly what caused it, but it sure got our attention. Some alien wants in.

The mission lasted six days, and then it was time to come home. Walker said the reentry and landing on 41
D
was an emotional experience, drawing to a close what he thought at the time was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

At that point I didn’t know I was going to have any further flights. I thought that was probably it, and it was such an extraordinary experience, and now it was, for sure, over with. I came to sense a real defining moment, a physically and emotionally defining moment. This experience, this great thing called spaceflight, . . . probably above everything else, it’s based upon velocity. It’s putting people and machinery at high speed at the right velocity, the right altitude, the right speed, around the Earth till you keep going, and you’re working in this high-velocity environment that we call orbital flight. When you want to come home, you just take out some of that velocity with some rocket energy again, and use the Earth’s atmosphere to slow you down the rest of the way until you come gliding in and lose the last part of the velocity by applying brakes on the runway until you come to a stop.

So I noted in my own mind two definitive points here that really, without debate, start and end this great experience. One is the high-energy event that we call launch, straight up when the rockets start; to the landing and wheels stop on the runway horizontal, and the brakes have taken hold, and the energy is gone, and the spaceship literally rolls to a stop.

With the end of the mission came the completion of the first flight of a commercial payload specialist and an opportunity to evaluate how the idea actually worked in reality. Hawley commented on how well the crew worked together and how well the crew got along with Walker. “It’s more important who you fly with than what your mission is, and we really had a good time,” Hawley said. “We all got along well. I thought we all had respect
for each other’s capabilities, and it was just a good mix. . . . Charlie was a good guy. He fit in very well. We enjoyed having him as part of the crew.”

The flight marked the beginning of the process, over time, of the softening of hard lines between the career astronauts and the payload specialists. A major milestone, Walker said, was the decision to move the payload specialists into office space with the career astronauts. “Even while I was training for 61
B
, I had office space. It was, oh, by the way, catch it as you can, but you got office space over on the fourth floor, Building 4. You need a place to sit and work when you’re in town, come on over. Finally they moved the
PS
Office out of Building 39 over to Building 4 in that time period just before
Challenger
was lost.”

The integration of noncareer astronauts became even more complicated as
NASA
implemented plans to fly even more types of people on the Space Shuttle—academic and industrial payload specialists, U.S. politicians, international payload specialists, and the first “Teacher in Space” and “Journalist in Space.”

“I think the clearest example as an indicator of how things transformed was to follow the Teacher in Space activity, because originally the Teacher in Space was to be a spaceflight participant/payload specialist, and I witnessed a lot of slicing and dicing of just what do you call Christa McAuliffe,” Walker recalled. “Is she an astronaut? Well, most people at the time at
JSC
and certainly in the Astronaut Office were, ‘No, she is not an astronaut. We were selected by
NASA
to be astronauts. We’re the astronauts. She’s a payload specialist.’”

STS
-51
D

Crew: Commander Bo Bobko, Pilot Don Williams, Mission Specialists Rhea Seddon, Jeffrey Hoffman, and David Griggs, Payload Specialists Charlie Walker and Senator Jake Garn

Orbiter:
Discovery

Launched: 12 April 1985

Landed: 19 April 1985

Mission: Deployment of two satellites

Despite feeling like his first flight would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, eight months later Charlie Walker was back in space, this time on 51
D
. The mission deployed two satellites and carried into space several science experi
ments and yet another payload specialist. This time, in addition to Walker, on the crew was Jake Garn, a U.S. senator from Utah and the first elected official to fly aboard the Space Shuttle.

Garn was added to the crew about two to three months before launch, recalled Commander Bo Bobko. “George Abbey said to me one day, he said, ‘What sort of training program would you have if you had a new passenger that was only going to have eight or twelve weeks?’” Bobko recalled. “I said, ‘Why are you asking me that question?’ He said, ‘Because you’ve got a new passenger, and you’ve only got—,’ I don’t know, ten or twelve weeks to flight.”

Walker said Garn had been lobbying for some time with the
NASA
administrator to get a chance to make a flight on the Space Shuttle. Garn was chairman of a
NASA
oversight body within the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. Senate. “Just part of his job; he needed to do it,” Walker said.

Of course, you look at Senator Garn’s history, and at that point he had some ten thousand hours logged in I don’t know how many different kinds of aircraft, having learned to fly as a naval aviator, and had gone to the air force when the navy tried to take his ticket away from him and wouldn’t let him fly again. . . . Jake was very aviation oriented and certainly enamored with the agency’s activities and just wanted to take the opportunity if one could be found. So his lobbying paid off, and he got the chance to fly. He was still in the Senate and would take the opportunity on weekends to come train down here; would take congressional recesses, and instead of going back to his home state, to Utah, he’d come down here to
JSC
. So he worked his training in and around Senate schedules.

Walker recalled hearing some negative talk around the Astronaut Office after Garn was added to the crew. “I do remember that there was at least hall talk around the Astronaut Office of, ‘Oh, my gosh, now what’s happening here to us? What have we got to put up with now?’” Walker said.

But Jake, from my experience, and here is an outsider talking about another outsider, but I think Jake accommodated himself extraordinarily well in the circumstances. . . . What I saw was a Jake Garn that literally opened himself up to, “Hey, I know my place. I’m just a participant. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll be there when I need to be there, and I’ll do what I’ll [need to] do, and I’ll shut up when I need to shut up,” And he did, so I think he worked out ex
traordinarily well, and quite frankly, I think the U.S. space program,
NASA
, has benefited a lot from both his experience and his firsthand relation of
NASA
and the program back on Capitol Hill. As a firsthand participant in the program, he brought tremendous credibility back to Capitol Hill, and that’s helped a lot. He’s always been a friend of the agency and its programs.

Bobko lauded Garn for knowing what it meant to be part of a crew. “I’d call him up and I’d say, ‘Jake, we need you down here.’ And he’d say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and he’d be down the next day for the sim,” Bobko said.

Garn’s only problem, added Bobko, was that he got very sick on orbit.

He was doing some of these medical experiments, and they find that one of the things that happens is that on orbit, if you get sick, your alimentary canal, your digestive system, seems to close down. So what they had were little microphones on a belt that Jake had strapped to him to see if they could detect the bowel sounds. So the story is—and I haven’t heard it myself—they had me on the microphone saying to Jake, “Jake, you’ve got to get upstairs and let them see you on
TV
. Otherwise, they’ll think you died and I threw you overboard.”