Riding Rockets (63 page)

We almost had to bury Hoot Gibson in 1990 when he was involved in a midair collision while racing his home-built plane. The other pilot died but Hoot was able to land his severely damaged machine and walk away. If ever there has been a pilot who has worn out a squadron of guardian angels, that would be Hoot. He and Rhea Seddon now live in Tennessee with their three children. Hoot flies for Southwest Airlines and Rhea is the assistant chief medical officer at Vanderbilt Medical Group at that Nashville university.

In my retirement I have noted the deaths of other astronauts whose life paths intersected mine. Sonny Carter’s death was particularly shocking. Sonny had been one of the STS-27 family escorts and Donna had relied on his calming presence during her LCC waits for that mission. He was never without a smile and a positive word. On April 5, 1991, while on the way to give a NASA speech, he died in the crash of a commercial airliner. The manner of his death was a gross violation of the natural order—it was expected that an astronaut dying in a plane would do so as a crewmember, not as a passenger. Sonny was twice cheated…in death at age forty-three and while belted into a passenger’s seat.

Bob Overmyer died in his retirement while flight-testing a small plane. I was one of the CAPCOMs for his STS-51B flight. During that mission, a communication glitch allowed the crew’s private Spacelab intercom to be momentarily broadcast to the world. It included a panicked call from Bob to his lab scientists: “There’s monkey feces floating free in the cockpit!” I later teased him that he was probably the first marine in the history of the corps to ever use the word
feces.
He laughed at that. Bob was dead at age fifty-nine.

Astronaut-scientist Karl Henize, whom I had worked with on my very first astronaut support job—the dreaded Spacelab—died in his retirement at age sixty-six of respiratory failure while attempting to climb Mount Everest. He is buried on the side of that mountain at 22,000-foot elevation.

Besides these astronaut deaths, I noted other passings. Don Puddy, who replaced George Abbey as chief of FCOD and who approved me for my STS-36 mission, died of cancer in 2004 at age sixty-seven. Jon and Brenda McBride’s son, Richard, died in a plane crash while undergoing navy flight training. Brewster and Kathy Shaw suffered a horrific loss, too. One of their college-age sons was murdered in a random carjacking. If it is possible for a soul to audibly scream, mine did at that news. No death, not even the ones sustained in the
Challenger
and
Columbia
tragedies, affected me as much. Every parent understands.

Gene Ross, the ever-present and ever-amicable owner of the Outpost Tavern, died in 1995. He didn’t live to see his bar immortalized on the silver screen. Disney would use it as a backdrop for a scene in the 1997 movie
RocketMan
and a portion of the movie
Space Cowboys
would be filmed inside the cluttered, smoky cave.

Under its new management, the Outpost has seen a few minor changes. The shell-covered parking lot has been leveled. Gone are its bunker-buster craters. And a small red neon light proclaiming “The Outpost Tavern” now decorates a side of the building. But for that, the structure still appears abandoned and ready for demolition. The only improvement to the interior has been the addition of modern bathrooms. The old toilets—one-hole closets with tilting floors and rusted porcelain fixtures—had been intimidating enough to prompt Donna to once comment, “I would rather pee in the outside bushes than sit on an Outpost toilet seat.” The interior of the bar remains a time capsule from the halcyon days of the TFNGs: Photos and posters of smiling astronauts and mission crews still cover the walls and ceiling. My NASA genesis photo is still there. In a display of Texas pride, Gene Ross put up the photos of all the Texas-born astronauts in the entryway next to the bikini-girl-silhouette saloon doors. Epochs of cigarette smoke and grease have put a yellow film over those photos but I’m still visible as the thin, dark-haired, thirty-two-year-old astronaut candidate I was in 1978. Whenever a trip takes me to Houston, I always make it a point to visit the Outpost. I will sit at the bar, order a beer, and listen to the TFNG ghosts whisper the stories of joy and heartbreak that have been written there.

John Young retired from NASA on December 31, 2004, after a forty-two-year career that included six space missions covering the Gemini, Apollo, and shuttle programs. He twice flew to the moon, landing on it on
Apollo 16.
In a NASA press release John was praised as an “astronaut without equal.” You will never hear me say otherwise.

George Abbey was appointed director of the Johnson Space Center by NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin on January 23, 1996 (no doubt putting the fear of God in those who had celebrated, too enthusiastically, his JSC departure in 1987). Five years later he was “reassigned” by Goldin from that position to NASA HQ to serve as Goldin’s senior assistant for international issues. The press noted that the announcement of Abbey’s JSC termination came after close of business on a Friday and with little description of the responsibilities of his new title, signatures that the change was actually a firing. Some speculated that cost overruns on the ISS program had prompted Goldin to remove George. He retired from NASA on January 3, 2003, after a nearly forty-year career with the agency.

I was last face-to-face with John and George in 1998 at the twentieth anniversary of the TFNG class. We traded empty hellos and then separated. I was no longer their hostage and would not pretend friendship.

As an outsider I watched the shuttle program fully recover from
Challenger.
Though the STS never recaptured its Golden Age, it did achieve an average of seven missions per year throughout most of the 1990s. Among its more significant post-
Challenger
missions were the launch of Hubble Space Telescope, nine missions to the Russian Mir space station, and multiple missions in support of the assembly and resupply of the International Space Station. The latter was being constructed in partnership with the Russians. The godless commies had become our friends. Even Bill Shepherd, who had penned the
Suck on this, you commie dogs
inscription on a photo of our STS-27 payload, would morph into
Comrade
Shepherd and fly a five-month ISS mission with two Ruskies.

The shuttle continued to experience near misses with disaster, providing more evidence that it would never be truly operational. One of the closest calls occurred on STS-93. During the early part of ascent a small repair pin in the combustion chamber of one SSME came loose and impacted the inside of the engine nozzle, puncturing its cooling jacket. Just as a hole in the radiator of an automobile will cause a leak of engine coolant,
Columbia’s
nozzle damage was doing the same thing. As she roared upward, she was bleeding coolant. But in
Columbia’s
case the coolant was also the engine fuel. The shuttle’s liquid hydrogen plumbing system circulates that supercold fluid around the engine nozzles before the hydrogen is burned.
Columbia
was headed into orbit in danger of running out of gas. Fortunately the damage and the resulting leak were small. The propellant loss resulted in an early engine shutdown, but
Columbia
still achieved a safe orbit only seven miles lower than planned.

The nozzle damage turned out to be just one of the near misses for the STS-93 crew. Five seconds into flight an electrical system short circuit resulted in the failure of several black boxes controlling two of the SSMEs. Backup engine controllers, powered by a different electrical system, took over the control of those engines and there was no impact to their performance. But for eight and a half minutes, two of
Columbia’s
engines were just one failure away from shutting down and forcing the crew into an ascent abort. The source of the short circuit was later isolated to an exposed wire.

Another shuttle near miss occurred on STS-112 when a circuit failure resulted in only one set of the hold-down bolt initiators firing at liftoff. In the launch sequence the hold-down bolts are exploded apart just milliseconds prior to SRB ignition so the rocket is completely free of the ground when the boosters ignite. Had the redundant initiators in the hold-down bolts not fired,
Atlantis
would have been still anchored to the pad at SRB ignition. The machine would have destroyed herself trying to rip free of the bolts.

STS-93 and STS-112 were saved by system redundancy, but there was another recurring problem on shuttle launches for which there was no redundancy to provide protection. Insulation foam was shedding from the gas tank and striking the orbiter. The phenomenon was first noted on STS-1 and was subsequently documented by photo imagery on sixty-four other shuttle missions. Hank Hartsfield and Mike Coats had observed it on our Zoo Crew flight in 1984. This foam-shedding anomaly was a violation of a design requirement, just as the pre-
Challenger
SRB O-ring erosion had been a design violation. Nothing was supposed to hit our glass rocket, not even something as seemingly innocuous as the foam from the ET. But as hit shuttles kept returning to the Earth safely, engineers became ever more comfortable with accepting the design violation as nothing more than a maintenance issue—the foam strikes were requiring a handful of damaged tiles to be replaced between missions. The “normalization of deviance” phenomenon that had doomed
Challenger
in 1986 had returned to infect NASA and blind management to the seriousness of the foam loss problem. On January 16, 2003, eighty-two seconds into the flight of
Columbia,
a briefcase-size piece of foam, weighing approximately one and a half pounds, shed from the ET and struck the Achilles’ heel of the shuttle heat shield, one of the wing leading-edge carbon panels. The impact blasted a hole of indeterminate size in that carbon. The damage had no effect on ascent and
Columbia
safely reached orbit. The site of the impact was not visible from the cockpit windows and the crew remained oblivious to the fact that their shuttle was mortally wounded. It could not survive reentry.

On the ground NASA engineers were aware of the foam strike—KSC cameras had recorded the incident. But these same engineers had no idea what, if any, damage had occurred and since
Columbia
was flying without a robot arm, they could not direct the crew to remotely survey the site (as we had been able to do on STS-27). A handful of engineers requested their management to ask the Department of Defense to use its photographic sources to acquire images of the impact site. Had these photos or a crew spacewalk determined
Columbia
could not survive reentry, there was a reasonable chance
Atlantis
could have been hurriedly readied for launch on a rescue mission. The
Columbia
crew would have then donned spacesuits and transferred to
Atlantis,
and
Columbia
would have been abandoned in orbit. But key managers dismissed the photo request and never ordered a spacewalk. On February 1, 2003,
Columbia
would burn up on reentry, killing her seven-person crew.

I was in northern New Mexico at the time of the disaster, visiting my daughter and her family. Had I known of the reentry trajectory, I could have stepped outside and watched
Columbia
pass nearly overhead. But I was not an eyewitness. I received the news from TV: “The space shuttle
Columbia
is overdue for landing at the Kennedy Space Center.” Images of
Columbia
’s fiery destruction soon followed. As I watched them I couldn’t help but visualize what the crew had experienced. I had no doubt their fortress cockpit had kept them alive during the out-of-control breakup of their machine. Just like the
Challenger
crew, they were trapped. Their backpack-parachute bailout system was useless at the extreme altitude and speed. And I couldn’t help but visualize the families. They would have been waiting at the KSC Shuttle Landing Facility, giddy in anticipation of having their loved ones safely on the ground and in their arms. They would have been chatting happily about the parties and postflight trips that were planned. Then an escort into widowhood would have come to their side to tell them the news. Their husbands and wife, fathers and mother would not be coming home.

I wasn’t affected by
Columbia
’s loss as deeply as
Challenger
’s. I had only a passing acquaintance with a few members of the crew. But I was still heartbroken. I stepped from my daughter’s house, walked into the adjacent desert hills, and began my prayers. Even as I was saying them, atoms of
Columbia
and her crew were quietly and invisibly settling to Earth around me.

The final report of the
Columbia
Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) would read remarkably like the
Challenger
report issued seventeen years earlier. In fact, in some key paragraphs of their document, the CAIB could have plagiarized the Roger’s Commission report nearly word for word. The only edits required would have been to substitute “External Tank” for “Solid Rocket Booster” and “foam-shedding” for “O-ring erosion.” Workplace cultural issues, including overwhelming pressure to keep shuttle launches on schedule, had, again, resulted in NASA mishandling repeated evidence of a deadly design flaw.

I have been too long removed from NASA to make any firsthand comment on those cultural issues or the leadership failures they suggest. Nor can I predict whether the agency will be able to fix itself…though I see reason for hope. The shuttle team’s meticulous response to the heat-shield damage sustained by
Discovery
on the first post-
Columbia
shuttle mission (STS-114) and the agency’s intention to keep the shuttle grounded until the maddeningly persistent ET foam-shedding problem is fixed suggests NASA has made safety its top priority. The question is, “Can this reinvigorated safety consciousness persist through the remaining life of the space shuttle program?” It didn’t last after
Challenger,
as
Columbia
’s loss attests. Perhaps new NASA administrator, Dr. Michael Griffin, is a leader who can keep the agency focused on safety. I pray so. There have been enough families devastated in this business, not to mention the disastrous impact on America’s manned space program that another shuttle loss would precipitate.