Riding Rockets (29 page)

T-5 minutes. “Go for APU start.” Mike acknowledged LCC’s call and flipped switches to start
Discovery
’s three hydraulic pumps. The meters showed good pressure.
Discovery
now had muscle. The pumps tickled our backs with their slight vibrations. The movement was the first indication the vehicle was anything but a fixed monument.

The computers ordered a test of the flight control system and
Discovery
shuddered as her SSME nozzles and elevons were moved through their limits.

T-2 minutes. We closed our helmet visors. Hank reached across the cockpit to shake Mike Coats’s hand. “Good luck, everybody. This is it. Let’s do it like we’ve trained. Eyes on the instruments.”

T-1 minute.
Please, God, if something bad is to happen on this flight, let it be above fifty miles.
My prayer was specific for a reason. By NASA’s definition you had to fly higher than fifty miles altitude to be awarded a gold astronaut pin. If I died below that altitude, Donna and the kids would only have my silver pin for a memorial shadowbox.

T-31 seconds. “Go for auto-sequence start.”
Discovery
’s computers assumed control of the countdown from LCC’s computers. She now commanded herself. The cockpit was a scene of intense, silent focus. Again, I was glad my vital signs weren’t on public display. My heart was now a low hum.

T-10 seconds. “Go for main engine start.” The engine manifold pressure gauges shot up as valves opened and fuel and oxidizer flooded into the pipes. The turbo-pumps came to life and began to ram 1,000 pounds of propellant per second into each of the three combustion chambers.

At T-6 seconds the cockpit shook violently. Engine start.
This is it,
I thought. In spite of my fear, I smiled. I was headed into space. It was really going to happen.

5…4…The vibrations intensified as the SSMEs sequentially came on line.

Then, the warble of the master caution system grabbed us. “We’ve had engine shutdown.” I don’t know who said it, but they were stating the obvious. The vibrations were gone. The cockpit was as quiet as a crypt. Shadows waved across our seats as
Discovery
rocked back and forth on her hold-down bolts.

We were all seized with a
What the hell?
wonderment. Something was seriously wrong. Hank punched off the master caution light and tone. The left and right SSME shutdown lights stabbed us with their red glare, meaning they were off. But the light for the center SSME remained dark. Surely it couldn’t still be running? There was no noise or vibration. But if it was still running, we wanted it off. Whatever was happening, we wanted everything off. Mike repeatedly jabbed his finger onto the shutdown button. But there was no change in the light status.

Paramount on everybody’s mind was the status of the SRBs. We had gotten to within a few seconds of their start. If they ignited now, we were dead. Generating more than 6 million pounds of thrust, they certainly had the muscle to rip out the hold-down bolts and destroy the vehicle in the process.

The diagnosis quickly came from LCC. “We’ve had an RSLS abort.”
Discovery
’s computers had detected something wrong and stopped the launch—a Redundant Set Launch Sequencer (RSLS) abort. But what had gone wrong? Had a turbo-pump disintegrated? Had an engine exploded? Had hot shrapnel been hurled around our engine compartment? We were strapped to 4 million pounds of explosives and didn’t have a clue what was happening a hundred feet below us.

And neither did the families. I would later learn how the abort had played out on the LCC roof. A thick summer haze had obscured the launchpad. When the engines had ignited, a bright flash had momentarily penetrated that haze, strongly suggesting an explosion. As that fear had been rising in the minds of the families, the engine start sound had finally hit…a brief roar. It had echoed off the sides of the Vertical Assembly Building (VAB) and then…silence. Donna had been convinced she was seeing and hearing an explosion. Fortunately the astronaut escorts had been there to ease her fear with an explanation of a shuttle-pad abort. No doubt they had done so with some private reservations. There had never been a shuttle engine-start abort.

Donna had crumpled into a chair and cried. Amy, our oldest daughter, had followed suit. They were crushed by the thought that it would all have to be repeated another day. Amy snapped, “Why don’t they just put more gas in it and launch it now!” The thought of having to climb the LCC roof and endure another countdown torture made her wild with anger.

Back in the cockpit, things took a turn for the worse. Launch Control reported a fire on the launchpad and activated the fire suppression system. Water began to spray across the cockpit windows. What was going on down there?

In the midst of these terrifying moments I looked at Steve Hawley. He stared at me with eyes as big as plates. I knew that was my face—I was staring into a mirror. Then he commented, “I thought we’d be higher when the engines quit.” I wanted to hit the SOB. I wanted to scream, “This isn’t funny, Hawley!” And to think, six years earlier I had harbored doubts about the post-docs’ mettle. Some of them, Hawley included, had steel balls.

Hank ordered all of us to unstrap from our seats and prepare for an emergency egress from the cockpit. If we chose to leave we’d have to run across the access arm to the other side of the gantry and jump in escape baskets. In just thirty seconds those would slide us a quarter mile away. We’d be able to wait out the problem in an underground bunker, assuming we could get there before the rocket exploded.

Judy crawled to the side hatch window and reported the access arm had been swung back into place and the fire suppression system was spraying water over it. She didn’t see any fire. “Henry, do you want me to open the hatch?”

Judy’s question elicited several exchanges of do we or don’t we make a run for it. How bad was the fire? LCC’s conversations seemed unpanicked and that gave us some reassurance that everything was under control. But LCC and MCC always seemed in control. That was their job, to calmly look at their computer screens of data and make robotic, emotionless decisions. Could they remain calm even as their creation was de-creating? I had no doubt. “We’ve had an RSLS abort” could well be engineer-speak for “Holy shit! Run for your lives! She’s gonna blow!” No, I was not comforted by the calm of the LCC.

“Negative on opening the hatch, Judy.” Hank decided we’d sit tight. It was a decision that might have saved our lives. The post-abort analysis determined the fire had been caused by some residual hydrogen escaping from the engines and igniting combustible material on the MLP. The gas flame may have been as high as the cockpit but since hydrogen burns clean we would not have seen it. We could have thrown open the hatch and run into a fire.

As time passed it became more evident we were in no immediate danger. We waited for the closeout crew to open the hatch. My thoughts turned as dark as space. My worst nightmare had been realized. I was still an astronaut in name only. For how long? It was obvious there would be no launch attempt any time soon. In my quiet hell I catastrophized. I built a scenario in which the engine problem was severe. The vehicle would be grounded for many months, maybe years, while the engines were redesigned and tested. Launch schedules would change. Our crew would be pushed backward in line, maybe even disbanded. I had gotten to within three seconds of a lifelong dream only to have it snatched away. For how long? Weeks? Months? Forever?

We exited the vehicle into the residual rain of the fire suppression system. It had soaked the gantry and now water was dripping from every platform, pipe, and cross brace. We were quickly drenched. Judy’s hair took a big hit. She looked like a sodden cat.

In the astro-van we sat in our soaked flight suits shivering from the chill of the air-conditioning. That system seemed to have only two positions, cold and freakin’ cold. Our physical misery was a perfect fit to the cloud of depression enveloping us. I wasn’t the only one doing mental gymnastics and wondering how badly screwed we were.

The wives and kids were waiting for us at the crew quarters and there were a lot of tearful hugs. “Dad, we thought you had blown up!” Pat was quick to fill me in on the momentary horror they had lived on the LCC roof.

At a press conference we all lied about the tension in the cockpit following the abort and fire. Hank took most of the questions and did the Right Stuff routine of, “Aaawh shucks, ma’am. T’weren’t nothing.” He explained how we train for these things, how confident we had been in the LCC’s reactions to the abort, how we had never doubted our safety. Meanwhile, I was wondering if I had shit in my flight suit.

We were released from our health quarantine to join our families. As expected, there would be no more launch attempts until the engine problem was identified and fixed. The shuttle program had just come to a screeching stop for an indefinite period.

Donna, the kids, and I returned to their condo to a boisterous party. While my aunts and uncles and cousins were bummed out the launch had been aborted, they were still having a great time. The sun was shining. The booze was flowing. It was a Florida family reunion. They were all on vacation and having a blast. And now my abort had made the reunion complete. If I had launched, the family would never have seen me. So they overwhelmed me with questions and requests for photos and autographs. Their enthusiasm was understandable. Most of them had not seen me since I had been selected as an astronaut.

“Mike, let me get a photo of you standing next to your little cousins.”

“Mike, why don’t you sit here with Grandma and tell her what it’s like to be an astronaut.”

“Mike, can I get twenty autographed photos for my neighbors back home?”

I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. After a couple hours I finally escaped to the beach and collapsed. I had been so close, three freakin’ seconds, and now I might be at the back of a long, long line. I couldn’t get that dismal thought out of my head. I closed my eyes and prayed for blissful unconsciousness. It was a prayer immediately answered. The exhaustion of the past few days had finally caught up with me and I fell into a deep sleep. Minutes later I was awakened by a gentle kick in my side. I squinted upward to see my eighty-seven-year-old grandmother. “Mike, get inside. Bobby wants to take some more pictures. You’ll get sunburned out here.”

God, take me.
My new prayer was that a meteor would hit and put me out of my misery.

Chapter 20

MECO

A few days later our crew was back in Houston and facing the grim possibility our mission was going to be canceled. Payloads were stacking up. Every day a communication satellite wasn’t in space meant the loss of millions of dollars of revenue to its operators. NASA HQ searched for a way to minimize the impact of
Discovery
’s delay to their downstream customers. They focused on combining the payloads of two missions and deleting one from the schedule. Everyone in the astronaut office knew a deleted mission meant a deleted crew.

It was a miserable two weeks as HQ debated the best adjustment to the flight manifest. Every imaginable rumor twittered up and down the astronaut grapevine. Who was going to get screwed? There was a general feeling among the other mission-assigned crews that we had had our chance. It was just our tough luck
Discovery
had misfired. It should be our crew who suffered the consequences. I couldn’t blame them. I would have felt the same way in their shoes.

To make matters worse, there were no firsts associated with our crew to give us some HQ PR cover. White males on a space shuttle were as newsworthy as white males on a hockey team, and there were five of us palefaces on the crew. Judy was merely Sally Ride’s runner-up. We had nothing in the way of a celebrity first to protect us from the ax, whereas other downstream missions included the first spacewalk by a woman and the first satellite retrieval mission. HQ was going to ensure those high-visibility missions flew as planned. I told Hank he should get a sex-change operation so we’d have the first transgender astronaut aboard to protect us. He declined.

Astronaut office politics were also a significant cause for worry. There wasn’t an air force astronaut who didn’t think George Abbey was navy-biased in his flight assignments. Nine of the first eleven shuttle missions had been commanded by active duty or retired navy astronauts. Hank Hartsfield was only the second astronaut with air force roots to command a mission. And a glance downstream showed crews commanded by Crippen, Hauck, and Mattingly—all navy. If anybody was going to get screwed because of
Discovery
’s delay, it wasn’t going to be them. They had Godfather Abbey’s protection. I felt as if the entire STS-41D crew were walking around with a sign pinned to our backs: “Cancel This Mission.”

But it didn’t happen. Instead, the ax fell on STS-41F, Bo Bobko’s mission. His payload would be added to ours, while he and his crew would be cut adrift to find something else downstream. Bo was retired air force. The USAF astronaut contingent cursed Abbey…again. I felt bad for Bo and company, but not for long. We were Lazarus back from the dead or, in this case, back in the front of the line.

Our major payloads would now include three communication satellites and Judy’s solar panel experiment. We would also have a new center engine. Ground tests had been unable to duplicate the problem with the original SSME. Engineers could only assume there had been some minute contamination in the hydraulic system, which had caused a fuel value to malfunction. As a precaution, the engine was replaced.

August 29, 1984, found us once again in the cockpit of
Discovery.
By now we were old hands at strapping in and waiting. But it didn’t get any easier. My bladder continued to torture me. My heart continued to race away in fear. And it didn’t get any easier for
Discovery.
At T-9 minutes our third launch attempt was scrubbed for a Master Events Controller (MEC) malfunction. I was going to vomit before I got into space.