Riding Rockets

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 fromChallenger. 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-Challengermissions 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 theSuck on this, you commie dogs

inscription on a photo of our STS-27 payload, would morph intoComrade 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, butColumbia

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 ofColumbia’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.