Riding Rockets (23 page)

It was late in the afternoon, long after tour hours. The facility was as deserted as the crew quarters. Judy looked at the rocket displays. “How many of these can you identify?”

I did a quick survey. “All of them.”

“Bullshit, Tarzan. I’ll bet you a six-pack you can’t identify all of these.”

“Judy, I lived and breathed rockets from the age of twelve. Photos of these things wallpapered my bedroom. You’re challenging a rocket geek. You’re going to lose that bet.”

Her smile said, “No way,” and she rushed ahead to look at a placard. “What’s this one?”

“The Navajo. It was the world’s first supersonic cruise missile. Range fifteen hundred miles.”

“Lucky guess.” She walked to the next display. “This one?”

“Bomarc. A ramjet-powered supersonic antiaircraft missile.”

I could see she was beginning to believe my rocket identification powers might not have been exaggerated.

“This one?”

“Easy. Firebird, an early air-to-air missile. By the way, make it a six-pack of Moosehead.”

“You haven’t won yet.”

But I did. After correctly answering several more of Judy’s challenges, she capitulated in front of a Skybolt missile.

“Tarzan, did you do anything as a kid besides memorize rockets, like go to rock concerts or dances?”

“I have one autograph in my high school yearbook. Does that answer the question?”

She laughed. “Yeah, I guess it does.”

I was worried an air force security officer would arrive at any moment to lock the blockhouse, so I suggested we take a quick tour of it. For me, stepping inside was a spiritually moving moment. I had never been to this place before, yet I was connected to it. As a child in Albuquerque, I had watched TV scenes of this building and the gantry beyond as the earliest satellites and monkey-nauts, Able and Baker, had ridden pillars of fire into the sky. Werner von Braun had stood where I now stood and directed America’s first steps in the space race. I touched a lifeless control panel and felt even closer to him and the history he and his team had written. My fingers brushed across the blockhouse periscope and archaic lights and switches and oscilloscopes.
God,
I thought,
what I wouldn’t give to go back to January 31, 1958, and be standing at this very spot as the final seconds clicked off the countdown clock for
Explorer I
’s launch.

“Be careful, Tarzan. You’ll launch one of those rockets.”

Judy interrupted my reverie. Her obvious indifference to the history of the site prompted a question that had been on my mind since I had first stood on the stage with her at our TFNG introduction. “JR, when did you first want to be an astronaut?”

“In 1977, when I saw the announcement on the company bulletin board.”

She answered as I had expected. I had already heard several of the other females say the same thing in various press interviews. Only Shannon Lucid had a different answer. She had a copy of a letter she wrote to
Time
magazine in 1960 challenging NASA’s male-only astronaut corps. She had dreamed of spaceflight as a child, as I had. Only recently had I matured enough to give Judy, Sally, and the others some slack for their lack of lifelong zeal for the astronaut title. If I had been raised in a society that told me I could never be an astronaut because of my gender (or color), would that dream have ever taken root in my soul? Probably not. How, I asked myself, could I hold it against this woman if she had not carried the dream from her childhood? I could not. Judy and the other women were teaching me the meaning and consequences of discrimination.

We returned to the car, Judy still behind the wheel. “Let’s go to the beach house,” she suggested. “I’ll buy you a beer there.” It was a destination certain to test the male animal in me. The beach house was as isolated as Mars, situated just behind the dune line only a couple miles from the shuttle launchpads. The house was a relic of the 1950s, before the days of the great space race. Then, the Cape Canaveral area was just one more place for snowbirders to build their winter retreats, and private homes had dotted the landscape. But the
beep-beep
of Sputnik had wrought a great change in this part of America. The newly formed space agency needed a place to launch its rockets and Cape Canaveral was ideal. Exercising its right of eminent domain, Uncle Sam acquired the land and began its spaceport renovations. Only one of the existing structures survived demolition, saved by some enlightened bureaucrat who had decided it would be the perfect retreat for the early press-hounded astronauts. The building selected was well into government property, so privacy was absolute. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses wouldn’t have been able to find this address. While the press no longer pursued astronauts as they had the Mercury Seven, the building was still used as an astronaut retreat.

On the drive I tried to keep my eyes forward but could not. They kept going to Judy’s smile, to her wind-flagged hair, to her golden legs.
Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!
There’s never a good robot around when you need one.

Judy turned the car onto a shell-covered driveway and parked. The house wasn’t exactly Frank Lloyd Wright. It was something the Unabomber might have cobbled together: small, boxy, utilitarian. The downstairs was concrete and comprised a garage and storage area. The flat-roofed, wood-framed upper story contained a living area of two small bedrooms, a bath, and a kitchen/living area that opened onto an elevated wooden deck. NASA had done little to the structure over the decades. The exterior wood finish was sandblasted and warped, the weather stripping shredded, the concrete walkways uneven and crumbling. The interior furnishings were similarly old and worn.

I stayed outside while Judy walked upstairs to the kitchen with a handful of bills for the honor cash box. While she had been a model of professionalism and had done nothing to suggest there was more to this beach visit than watching the waves and having a beer, every molecule of testosterone in my body was busy suggesting otherwise. I could no longer see her as a fellow astronaut and crewmember. I could only see her as the beautiful woman she was. She came out with a six-pack of Coors hooked on a finger, stood with her hip cocked to the side, and smiled. “It’s not Moosehead, Tarzan, but here’re your winnings.” She tossed the package to me.
God help me,
I prayed.

We walked over to the dunes and sat in the sand. I extracted beers for both of us and for a moment we were silent, just enjoying a perfect beach evening. A thunderstorm lashed the distant ocean at our front, its anvil head glowing orange in the dying sun. There was just enough of a breeze in our faces to keep the bugs away.

“Here’s to Prime Crew, Tarzan.” Judy held out her beer and I touched it with mine. Her face was illuminated by the reflections from the cloud and I could see her expansive smile. The Prime Crew title did that to astronauts. We’d all be wearing those smiles until Hank’s call of “Wheel stop.”

We fell into conversation about our training and new issues on our communication satellite deployment procedures. I joined in halfheartedly. She was the only astronaut present on that beach. My mind was busy dealing with the scent of her shampoo, the feel of her body heat radiating across the gap between us, and the voices in my head. Those whispered that it would be different with Judy and me. Mortals had dirty, sinful, sordid affairs. But we weren’t mortals. We were astronauts. We were demigod and -goddess, alpha male and female. The rules didn’t apply to us. Not on this beach, they didn’t. This was a place separate from Earth where vows and social conventions and the Sixth Commandment didn’t apply. Of course, it was all testosteronic bullshit, but I listened to those voices with the same intensity I listened to MCC in our simulations.

As I was popping another beer, Judy left the subject of communication satellites. “Tarzan, I want to thank you and Donna for including me in your family.” I was glad to hear Donna’s name. It was a reminder of what I was…married. My thumb folded onto my wedding band.

“You’re welcome. We’re always glad to have you over.” Donna and I had extended numerous invitations to Judy for dinner or other social get-togethers.

“Well, you guys are the only ones. Most of the wives hate me.” She was right. Many of the wives did not like Judy. They were threatened by her. Their husbands jetted across the country with her in private planes to train in factories and go jogging together and perhaps, as I was doing at that very moment, to sit on a beach together enjoying a sunset and a beer.
And what happened then?
the wives wondered. At one TFNG party I saw a visibly shaken JR leave early. Later I heard the reason. One of the child-widened wives had taken her aside and screamed at her, “Stay away from my husband!” Though I had not heard a single rumor connecting JR to the woman’s spouse and strongly suspected the accusation was completely groundless, I could understand where the woman was coming from. She understood what female youth and beauty did to men (and was doing to
me
on that beach) and she was dropping a preemptive nuke. Judy was feared by most of the wives. At one of our earliest TFNG get-togethers, she arrived wearing formfitting jeans and a white knit T-shirt. Every head, male and female, turned and the hubbub of the party diminished noticeably. A few of the wives looked into their man’s eyes to read his thoughts. Some stepped closer to their husbands. There was nothing trashy about Judy’s dress. I had seen many of the wives similarly dressed at various casual functions. It was just that Judy looked like one of those impossibly curvaceous mannequins in a boutique window. It was a fact of life that wives never looked like that.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was Judy’s beauty and its effect on men and their wives. I mumbled some bullshit about her misreading the women and attempted to switch the conversation back to our training. A segue of “How ’bout them Astros?” would have been more sincere. Judy knew I was lying and I sensed she was hurt by the rejection of the wives. She ignored my training question and continued to talk about relationships, this time about her childhood relationship with her mother. I was shocked by this intimacy. I had never heard her talk about her past. She had been a TFNG for years before someone discovered she had been previously married and was divorced. Now she was opening her soul to me as if I were some harmless confidant. I could only assume she was trying to justify a heated telephone argument with her brother that she had recently conducted in my presence. The topic had been invitations for the Resnik family to attend
Discovery
’s launch. In that conversation it was obvious there was some tension in the family.

I wasn’t trained for this. I ached to return to the subject of communication satellite deployment. But Judy continued. She revealed a deep bitterness with her family’s demands that she date only Jewish boys and other aspects of teen oppression in the name of religion. (Gee, and I thought only us Catholics were screwed up.) I had more in common with this woman than I had previously thought. But Judy’s coming-of-age trauma had been significantly greater than mine. It had led to an estrangement from her mother. I couldn’t imagine a daughter dealing with that.

This was the only time Judy ever gave me a glimpse into her past. And, while I’m no Dr. Phil, I sensed she was a deeply wounded and lonely woman. Of course I also considered her vulnerability at this moment. She wasn’t crying, but I had never seen her more emotional. It would have been so easy to reach across and offer a consolation hug. I had a couple beers in me. My inhibitions were as feeble as the starlight. But I didn’t. I didn’t make any physical contact. Not a hand squeeze. Not a pat on the back. Not a hug. Nothing. My resistance to temptation was nothing short of miraculous. Those moments on that sand had been my Garden of Gethsemane. I offered Judy only conciliatory words about how things might change in the future for her and her mom. It was a prophetic comment. Things did change. Twenty-one months later Judy would die a few miles from where we now sat.

I rose from the sand. “We better get back to the crew quarters. Things are going to start early tomorrow.”

Chapter 18

Donna

A month prior to our June 25, 1984, launch date another milestone was passed. It wasn’t noted in any press release but it was significant all the same. At a crew dinner the wives selected two astronauts to be their family escorts. The expanded training hours in the homestretch to launch made all prime crewmembers absentee spouses and parents, so the astronaut office had created the family escort role to take some of the load off the families. They helped spouses deal with the logistics of traveling to KSC and the landing site. They helped with airline, rental car, and condo reservations and, in general, served as 24/7 contacts for spouses seeking help on any mission issue. Some of NASA’s rules on family travel necessitated this escort help. While NASA carried the spouses to launch and landing at government expense aboard the agency’s Gulfstream jets, children were not allowed on those aircraft. Their travel arrangements (and expenses) were the responsibility of the families. So, as they departed for the most stressful week of their lives, spouses had to pass their children to grandparents or other family members serving as travel escorts and deal with the coordination of getting them from the Orlando airport to their condos. The spouses were also required to arrange their own lodging. This could be a big headache if the mission slipped, particularly during the prime Florida tourist season. Some spouses of earlier missions had found themselves begging with condo reservationists not to be evicted. The escorts could be an enormous help.

There were no formal criteria for selection of family escorts. Crew spouses usually threw out a few names to consider and quickly settled on two. Our spouses picked TFNG Dick Covey and Bryan O’Connor (class of 1980) as their escorts. Unspoken in their deliberations was another duty for which the family escorts were being selected: If
Discovery
killed us, they would become casualty assistance officers. I suspected every wife knew this. Even if their husbands were negligent in not telling them, they probably heard from other wives. I had told Donna years earlier. NASA required her and the kids to watch my launches with the family escorts from the roof of the Launch Control Center. It wasn’t the view NASA had in mind: NASA wanted to isolate the families from the press in the event of disaster. In that case the family escorts, turned casualty assistance officers, would drive them to KSC flight operations, where a NASA jet would whisk them back to Houston.