Riding Rockets (18 page)

Spacelab was a cylindrical module that would be installed in the cargo bay of a shuttle and connected to the cockpit by a pressurized tunnel. Since Spacelab flights would be science missions, I had assumed the post-docs would fly those missions. But it was my name on the jobs list next to “Spacelab Support,” not theirs. Over lunch in the cafeteria I got to listen to Pinky Nelson and Sally Ride and the others excitedly discuss their work of validating robot arm malfunction procedures, developing spacewalk procedures in the WETF swimming pool, and getting down and dirty with STS-1 issues. I averted my eyes, praying nobody would ask me about my days of listening to science briefings on upper-atmospheric gases and the Earth’s magnosphere. I was crushed. I now had the scent of Spacelab on me. I had to believe I was at the end of the flight assignment line, and, most maddening, I had no idea how I had gotten there or how I might recover. But, as I had done throughout my career, I resolved to set aside my disappointment and do my best at my new job. I also resolved to do a better job at getting my nose up George Abbey’s behind.

My disappointment at my Spacelab job was mitigated when, in late 1980, I was assigned to be part of the STS-1 “chase” team. When
Columbia
came streaking to a landing, NASA wanted a T-38 chase crew on her wing to warn Young and Crippen if anything looked amiss, if there was evidence of leaking fluids or fire or damaged flight controls or the landing gear didn’t extend properly. Thermal protection engineers also wanted the backseater in the chase aircraft to photograph
Columbia
’s mosaic of ceramic belly heat tiles before she landed. There was some concern those tiles could be damaged by fragments of the Edwards AFB dry lakebed runway being hurled backward by the tires. Prelanding photos would enable engineers to determine whether a tile sustained damage during the mission or during landing. Several chase crews were formed and I was assigned to fellow TFNG Dave Walker’s backseat. During STS-1’s launch we were to be positioned at El Paso’s airport in case
Columbia
had a problem that necessitated an Abort Once Around the Earth (AOA) with a landing at the nearby White Sands Missile Range runway. If that happened we would scramble to do the rendezvous and I would take the photos.

Dave was known by his navy call sign, Red Flash, bestowed on him for his red hair. (Air force flyers of my era did not have personal call signs, as those in the navy did.) Over several months Red Flash and I, along with the other TFNG chase crews, practiced shuttle rendezvous with ground-based radar personnel. One T-38 would simulate the landing shuttle while the others would be vectored toward it by the radar controllers, as would be the case if
Columbia
made an emergency White Sands landing.

During this training, trajectory engineers in Houston asked us to examine other dry lakebeds in southern New Mexico and Texas as potential emergency landing sites for
Columbia.
They wanted to cover every contingency, including “low energy” trajectory errors that might prevent the shuttle from reaching the White Sands runway or “high energy” errors that would result in the shuttle overflying White Sands completely. Their fears were well founded. When
Columbia
came to Earth, it would do so as a powerless glider. It had no engines the pilots could use to fly around and search for a runway. If there wasn’t a suitable landing site within reach, Young and Crippen would have to eject and
Columbia
would crash.

Day after day, Red Flash and I would take off from El Paso and search the Chihuahuan desert for twelve thousand feet of straight, flat, firm earth. And day after day, I would return to El Paso with my butt cheeks fatigued from an hour of ass-clinching fear. It wasn’t that Dave was a bad pilot. Rather he was too cocky, the type of pilot who thinks he’s bulletproof even when he’s sober. (All fighter pilots think they’re bulletproof when they’re intoxicated.) He was the pilot that backseaters had in mind when they had coined this joke:

Question: “What are the last words a dead backseater ever hears from his pilot?”

Answer: “Watch this.”

I was living that grim joke in Dave’s backseat. When we spied a likely playa from altitude, Dave would say, “Watch this,” and dive for the sand. To my left or right I would see our plane’s shadow paralleling us at 300 knots. It would porpoise over hill and dale, quickly drawing closer and closer as Dave dropped lower and lower, until it finally disappeared underneath us. If our jet had had the curb-feelers of a ’59 Edsel, I would have heard them scratching a warning into the desert a foot underneath us. Our engine exhaust had to be frying lizards, snakes, prairie dogs, and other ground-hugging fauna. And while I was white with fear, Dave was jotting observations about the condition of the terrain on his knee board.

In the early morning hours of April 12, 1981, Dave and I and the rest of the chase team were in the El Paso airport flight operations office, gathered around a TV watching the final moments of
Columbia
’s countdown. The previous night I had slept lightly and each time I awoke I would pray for Young and Crippen. I had a strong sense of dread about the mission. When
Columbia
’s hold-down bolts blew, her crew would be irrevocably committed to a flight that was more experimental than any manned flight in history. Forget Alan Shepard, John Glenn, or Neil Armstrong as astronauts who had taken unequaled gambles. Their Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn rockets had all been proven before they had ever climbed on board. Young and Crippen would be making history by riding a rocket on its very first launch. They weren’t doing so reluctantly. The astronaut office had no problems with this decision, even though it would have been relatively easy to modify the vehicle to fly a first test mission unmanned. (In 1988 the Russians successfully flew,
unmanned,
the first and only mission of their space shuttle. It made two orbits of the Earth then flew under autopilot control to a perfect touchdown.) While the manned/unmanned debate over
Columbia
’s maiden flight had occurred before TFNGs had arrived at NASA, I could easily guess how long astronauts had discussed the topic before concluding a manned flight was the way to go…about five seconds. Astronauts will always be ready to jump into a cockpit. Any cockpit. Any time. There wasn’t a single TFNG who wouldn’t have volunteered to be ballast aboard
Columbia.

But Young and Crippen would be taking an enormous risk and I feared for their lives. The only thing that had been positively demonstrated about the shuttle design was that it would glide from 25,000 feet to a landing. Four flight tests off the back of a 747 carrier aircraft had proven that. The solid rocket boosters and SSMEs had been ground-tested multiple times but had never actually flown in space. In fact, the SRBs had never even been tested vertically. In each of their firings, the rocket had been in a horizontal position, a fact that made many of us doubt the tests were really duplicating the stresses and strains of a vertical launch. The massive gas tank had never experienced the shake, rattle, and roll of a launch. There had been no full-scale flight tests of the 24,000-heat-tile mosaic that was glued to
Columbia
’s belly. How would it do in the 17,000-mile-per-hour, 3,000-degree wind of reentry? And no spacecraft had ever glided 12,000 miles to a “one-chance” landing—but that’s exactly what
Columbia
was going to have to do. And the unknowns weren’t just in the STS hardware. The shuttle’s computer system contained hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Billions of dollars and years of labor had been spent to validate that software but there were still thousands of permutations that had not been tested and that could contain fatal flaws. Would an engine failure at precisely T+1:13 in conjunction with an unexpected wind sheer at 65,000-feet altitude cause a software switch in some black box to flip to a different polarity and send
Columbia
out of control? To an extent never before seen in spaceflight, the space shuttle was certified to carry astronauts based upon the wizardry of computer modeling. For a decade, engineers conducted thousands of ground tests in every imaginable engineering specialty: aeronautical, electrical, chemical, mechanical, hypersonic flight dynamics, cryogenic fluid dynamics, propulsion, flutter dynamics, aeroelasticity, and a hundred others. They digitized data gleaned from wind tunnel tests, engine tests, hydraulic tests, heat tile tests, and flight control tests and dumped the results into computers humming with the equations of Max Planck, Bernoulli, and Fourier. When the thousands of answers were finally assembled and examined, the engineers cheered. Computer models said their new shuttle system would work, that its twin SRBs and three SSMEs burning 4 million pounds of propellant in
⁸¹
/
₂
minutes would propel a quarter-million-pound winged orbiter to a speed of nearly 5 miles per second and an altitude of 200 miles. These same models also assured their brainy authors the orbiter would be able to make a powerless hemispheric-long glide to a 15,000-foot-long strip of runway. Of course, many of these same engineers had done the same thing in the development of the Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn rockets of the past manned programs, but in those programs, after all their testing and modeling were complete and the answer was “This rocket will fly,” they had still walked cautiously. “We could be wrong in this model, or maybe in this model, or in this one,” they had said. “We better test this puppy unmanned a couple times before we strap astronauts to it. And when we do, we better give the crew a way of surviving a booster failure through
all
of ascent.” And they had. But not with the space shuttle. Its cherry flight was going to be manned. The engineers had foreseen the possibility of catastrophe and had included SR-71 Blackbird ejection seats for the two-man crew, but those were only usable during the first two minutes of launch; after that, the shuttle would be too high and too fast for an ejection seat bailout. The seats wouldn’t again be usable until the shuttle was below about 100,000 feet and Mach 3.0, about ten minutes prior to landing. During the rest of the ride Crippen and Young would have zero chance of escape. Actually, the two-minute launch envelope of the ejection seat was even suspect. Many felt there was a good chance an ejection during launch would send them through the 5,000-degree plume of the SRBs. They would be vaporized. There was no doubt about it. Young and Crippen were human guinea pigs like no other astronauts before. It was another manifestation of Apollo hubris. Mere mortals might not be able to certify a rocket as
man-ready
with computers, but the gods of Apollo could.

I watched on TV as
Columbia
’s SSMEs came to life and a cloud of steam billowed from the flame bucket. When the SRBs ignited and
Columbia
was airborne, I almost pissed my pants. We jumped from our seats cheering. It was an act duplicated around televisions at Johnson Space Center and Marshall Spaceflight Center and on the floors of countless aerospace factories and in millions of living rooms around the country. The TV showed a man at the Kennedy Space Center jumping up and down and punching his fist into the sky like a Little Leaguer celebrating a home run flying over the centerfield fence. Another view showed a man standing on top of an RV wildly waving an American flag as he watched
Columbia
’s smoke trail arc to the east. Another camera caught a woman dabbing at her tearing eyes. Everywhere the cameras captured a frenzied public. It was Woodstock, a NASCAR race, and a Virgin Mary appearance all wrapped into one overpowering, soul-capturing Happening.

And it only got better. At T+2 minutes and 12 seconds a flash of fire and smoke signaled the separation of the boosters. It was another computer-modeled milestone successfully passed.
Columbia
rapidly diminished to just a blue-white star and then disappeared completely. But we didn’t need to see her to know how things were going. We could tell by the abort boundary calls coming from MCC: Negative return, Two Engine TAL, Single-Engine TAL, Press to MECO. It was gobbledygook to most of America, but for astronauts it was the sweet song of nominal flight. At Young’s call of “MECO!” we all cheered again.
Columbia
had given her crew a perfect ride. I knew our celebration was premature. There was still a lot that could go wrong before
Columbia
was safely back on Earth. But, like the Apostle Thomas, I had seen with my own eyes and now I believed. If those gods of Apollo could put her into orbit with their computer models, they could certainly bring her safely home on the wings of their computer models.

On the flight back to Houston I couldn’t relax the smile on my face. It was giving me a headache. But I didn’t care. It had been nearly three years since I had entered NASA and this was the first time I really felt I had a chance of becoming an astronaut in anything but name only. Until I heard Young’s MECO call, I hadn’t truly believed it could happen. I had been convinced
Columbia
was going to end up on the bottom of the Atlantic and the closest I would ever get to space would be in a T-38. And I wasn’t the only doubter. I would later hear that Pinky Nelson, upon the MECO call, had jumped from his seat and shouted, “Now I can put in a swimming pool!” Pinky had been a heretic, too. He hadn’t truly believed in the gods of Apollo, and he had put off a decision to build a swimming pool until he knew he had a real job. In
Columbia
’s 8½ minute ascent, his dream of spaceflight,
all
of our dreams of spaceflight, had taken a giant leap toward reality. Mine was no longer the diaphanous mirage I had been following for twenty-five years. The gods of Apollo had fashioned a machine that could turn my astronaut pin to gold.

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.