Riding Rockets

We had taken seven hundred bullets and lived to talk about it. The damage had been sustained in the only place where it could exist and still be survivable. It started a few yards back from the carbon-composite nose cap and stopped just a few feet short of the right wing’s leading-edge carbon panels. If any of those carbon-covered areas had been hit, we would have died as theColumbia crew would die fifteen years later, incinerated on reentry, except in our case the Pacific would have been our grave. Even the location of our missing tile proved fortuitous. By happenstance it covered an area where an antenna was mounted, and the underlying aluminum structure was thicker than in other locations. Had a different tile been blasted away, a skin burn-through might have occurred, allowing 2,000-degree plasma to run amuck insideAtlantis ’s guts. God had watched after us. As Hoot turned from his inspection I heard him grumbling, “I’m going to be really interested in what MCC has to say about this.”

A few days later we got to hear their story. The quality of the TV images in Mission Control had been very poor. The engineers had been convinced the damage was localized and minor. I wanted to say, “You should have listened to us,” but they knew that. There was no reason to rub their noses in it. And then there was the nasty little fact that it didn’t really matter. Even if MCC had determined the damage would positively result in vehicle destruction and our deaths, what could have been done? Nothing. The ticket home always entailed a flight through the blast furnace of reentry. We couldn’t magically fly over, under, or around it. We couldn’t have repaired any damage. There was no space station outpost for us to have escaped to. Our only hope would have been to have another shuttle come to our rescue and we wouldn’t have had enough oxygen to wait for that. All we could have done was pitched the robot arm overboard and dumped every ounce of water and excess propellant to get our weight to a minimum to reduce the heat load, but even these efforts would have been in vain. Stripping the shuttle would have made the reentry just fractionally cooler. Just as it was with our contingency abort cue cards, any MCC recommendations would have just given us “something to read while we died.”

MCC did have an explanation for the failure of the SRB nose cone. There had been a change in the manufacturing process, intended to improve the performance of the ablative material that protected the SRB from the aerodynamic heating it encountered during launch. At our debriefing of the incident at the Monday astronaut meeting, others wondered how many other slide rule jockeys were violating the prime directive of engineering: “Betteris the enemy ofgood enough. ” We all wanted to shout from the rooftops, “If it’s working, don’t fix it!”

At this same debriefing, Hoot reacquainted the post-docs with the sick humor of the fighter pilot. During our mission, there had been a horrific earthquake in the Soviet Eastern Bloc state of Armenia, killing 25,000 people. The TV news was still showing images of masked workers pulling bodies from the rubble. “I know many of you have been very curious about our classified payload.” Hoot paused until the room was hushed in expectation. “While I can’t go into its design features, I can say Armenia was our first target.” The military astronauts laughed. A handful of the post-docs cringed in disgust. Hoot tormented them further by adding, “And we only had the weapon set onstun !” The comment elicited more laughter and a few female darts of “Don’t you guys ever grow up?”

Chapter 36

Christie and Annette

It was a few days after landing that Rhea Seddon bestowed another handle on Swine Flight. We became “The Grissom Crew.” It was a play on a scene from the movieThe Right Stuff . After Alan Shepard returned from his history-making flight as the first American in space, he and his wife had been hosted at the White House by JFK and Jackie. The movie dramatized how Gus Grissom and his wife had been expecting similar treatment when he returned as the second American in space. But it didn’t happen. Runner-ups never slept at the White House. Rhea’s “Grissom Crew” label of STS-27 was poking fun at the fact there was no White House invitation awaiting us in our in-boxes, whereas President and Nancy Reagan had received the STS-26 crew and their spouses. In a wonderful parody of the movie scene in which Mrs. Grissom laments her lockout, Rhea exaggerated her already severe Tennessee accent and swooned, “You mean, I won’t get to meet Nancy and Ronald?!”