Riding Rockets

By the second year of our TFNG careers the bloom had begun to fade on our management: George Abbey and John Young. George had chaired the dozen-man astronaut selection committee. If the office vets were to be believed, the “committee” title was a joke. George didn’t operate by committee any more than Josef Stalin had. His was the only vote that counted in the TFNG selection process. George was a pear-shaped man with silver-tinted buzz-cut hair, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and sleepy, basset hound eyes. The wordenigmatic was coined to describe a man like George. His heavy face revealed nothing. His rare smiles were hardly more than grimaces. I never saw him in a teeth-showing laugh. I never heard him raise his voice in anger. I never saw him animated in any way. When he spoke, which wasn’t much, it was in low mumbles. He was as unreadable as a marble bust.

George’s parents had obviously expected great things from their son, christening him George Washington Sherman Abbey at his birth in 1932. It was a handle that earned him the acronym GWSA from us TFNGs. George met the challenge of his name. He graduated from Annapolis in 1954, took a commission in the USAF, and accumulated more than four thousand hours of flying time as an air force pilot. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. In 1967 he resigned from the air force and began his NASA career as an MCC engineer (he wasn’t an astronaut). For his work on theApollo 13 Mission Operations Team, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Every TFNG walked into NASA a slavishly loyal subject of King George, and we competed in pathetic attempts to brown-nose him. The nineteen new astronauts of the class of 1980 did the same, so there was real crowd around George’s backside. Two of the 1980 newbies made an exceptionally flamboyant attempt to put their names in front of George. On Abbey’s birthday Guy Gardner and Jim Bagian called the JSC security police pretending to be employees of a window-cleaning service needing access to the ninth-floor windows of the JSC HQ building. After the police unlocked the windows and departed, Bagian dressed in a Superman costume, dropped a rope to the ground, and repelled to Abbey’s eighth-floor office. There, he pounded on the glass to gain George’s attention and sang “Happy Birthday.” Mission complete, he continued to the ground. Gardner freed the rope of its anchor, closed the window, and disappeared.

It didn’t take long for word of the prank to reach the security police and for its chief to be pounding on Center Director Chris Kraft’s office door with an angry complaint about astronauts duping his people and conducting a dangerous stunt. In a classic demonstration of the old adage “Shit flows downhill,” it didn’t take long for the turds being shoveled onto Kraft’s ninth-floor office desk by the chief of security police to find their way to Abbey’s eighth-floor desk and thence to John Young’s third-floor desk in Building 4. In effect, Dr. Kraft’s message to John was “Johnson Space Center isn’t a private playground for your astronauts.” So Guy Gardner and Jim Bagian picked up some early, if not exactlypositive, visibility with George.