Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Because everything floated, Velcro, duct tape, and bungee cords were invaluable. Things had to be held down, and those were about the only devices to do it.

Floating around took a little getting used to. When I moved across the mid-deck or through the twenty-five-foot tunnel leading to SpaceHab back in the payload bay, just a tiny amount of pressure was enough to start the process. Pushing off without the right alignment could send me spinning. The tunnel to SpaceHab was only three feet wide, and I learned to adjust my course as I floated through it. Reaching for items that were hovering nearby, sometimes I bumped them and then had to chase them down. I learned right away not to push too hard off the wall or to reach for things too fast. And all the switch plates had guards that prevented us from turning something on or off inadvertently when we bounced off the walls.

One of my main concerns was whether I was going to be sick. Space sickness affects about a fifth of astronauts initially. While I had felt fine during my Mercury flight, I didn’t know how I would react in the shuttle. I had Phenergan, which many astronauts use before going up, and I adapted rapidly. I couldn’t have felt better, and three hours into the flight I reprised an old line in my first transmission from orbit: “Zero G and I feel fine.”

For the first hour of the flight Chiaki and I worked hard down on the mid-deck, so we weren’t able to see out of a window. Everyone except Curt had come down from the flight deck. He had to perform the orbital maneuvering system (OMS) burn that put us from an elliptical orbit into a circular one. He established the shuttle in a tail-down attitude, with radiator surfaces of the payload bay doors open to dissipate heat, and by then he was ready to take his suit off and get into other clothes. When he went back up, I followed to look out. By that time, we had made a full circuit and were coming back into daylight again over the Pacific.

Discovery was at an orbital height of 300 nautical miles, or about 348 statute miles, the highest continuous orbit for a shuttle mission. It gave us a rare view for a shuttle flight. We were more than twice as high as I’d been in Friendship 7, and I could see entire weather patterns beneath me even better. Once again I looked out at the curve of the horizon and the bright blue band that is our atmosphere – the thin film of air that makes life on Earth possible – and I realized how much I’d missed being in space all those years.

Curt described it when he radioed to Houston, “Let the record show that John has a smile on his face and it goes from one ear to the other and we haven’t been able to remove it yet.”

I wanted to do a good job. We were at the start of a nine-day mission and had come through the first phase with things well organized, but there wasn’t any time to waste. The timeline called for starting a number of experiments immediately after we entered orbit.

Scott and I floated back through the tube to SpaceHab to activate several experiments that held the potential to improve medical treatments on a wide range of fronts. The BioDyn payload was a commercial bioreactor that contained work in several areas: protein research that could aid in ending transplant rejection; an investigation into cell aging, seeking tools to fight various geriatric diseases that cause immune-system breakdown; improved ways of making microscopic capsules to deliver drugs directly to the site of a disease; tissue engineering aimed at making synthetic bone to improve dental implants, hip replacements, and bone grafts; and heart patches to replace damaged heart muscles.

Then I moved on to ADSEP, part of a series of experiments in separating and purifying biological materials in microgravity with aims such as producing genetically engineered hemoglobin that may eventually replace human blood. Starting ADSEP meant moving its various modules from storage into active bays and setting switches and turning dials according to detailed instructions in our flight-data files. These experiments were only a fraction of the science we would do during our nine days on board.

By the time we returned to the mid-deck, I was hungry. It was then five and a half hours into the flight, longer than the total flight of Friendship 7. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and hadn’t had time to grab a snack from the pantry, a shallow drawer near the mid-deck ceiling that was loaded from the bottom, like a kitchen drawer at home but upside-down, with the contents secured with netting.

Eating involved first injecting hot or cold water into rehydratable packets, then waiting three to five minutes. As it absorbs the water, the food thickens and won’t float out of the packet. We all carried scissors for cutting the packets open as part of our regular equipment. The packets had small Velcro patches on their surfaces, so you could eat anywhere and stick your meal onto one of the orbiter’s hundreds of Velcro strips if you wanted to put it down.

I ate a full meal, starting with a shrimp cocktail and moving on through macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly in a tortilla, dried apricots, banana pudding, and apple cider. After eating, it was time to prepare for sleep. We had been up since six that morning, and working in space since mid afternoon. The schedule called for a two-hour presleep period that gave us time to wash up, send E-mails, review the next day’s work, or gaze back at Earth from one of the windows. A few of the crew put on headphones and listened to music. We all had the opportunity to bring a selection of compact discs along. My choices included music by Henry Mancini, Peter Nero, and Andy Williams. Peter and Andy are good friends, and Annie and I had been especially close to Hank and Ginny Mancini, visiting and vacationing with them on many occasions before Hank died in 1994. I also took along a disc of barbershop chorus harmonies by the champion Alexandria Harmonizers, a taste I inherited from my dad. After that, the entire crew slept. Space days and nights lasted the same forty-five minutes I had experienced in Friendship 7, and since the shuttle orbited through five of these days and nights during an eight-hour sleep period, its windows and portholes were shaded while we slept. Chiak and I bedded down in our sleeping bags in two of the sleep stations. Steve Robinson took another, and we reserved the fourth in the tier for storage. It was like being tucked into a long pine box with a sliding panel for a door.

The rest of the crew hooked their sleeping bags to the walls or ceilings wherever they pleased. Curt slept on the deck, Steve Lindsey in the mid-deck, and Scott and Pedro found space back in SpaceHab or the tunnel.

I used a block of foam for a pillow, even though my head and the rest of me, for that matter, needed no support in weightlessness. It was just a way of making sleep in space familiar, even though it meant bringing the pillow to my head instead of putting my head down on the pillow.

When we awoke, in the so-called postsleep period during which we washed with foamless soap and brushed our teeth with foamless toothpaste, I noticed that we all had fat faces. This resulted from the fluid shift that weightlessness causes. The body senses it no longer needs the same fluid volume it has in a gravity environment, and you eliminate the excess through urination. The fluid that’s left moves from the abdomen and legs into the upper body and face. We all looked comical, Steve Robinson even more so because his hair was standing up like Dagwood Bumstead’s. But the facial effect isn’t permanent; it would recede in another day or two. Steve’s hair, however, would keep floating.

At breakfast, I put into my mouth the largest, fattest, longest jelly bean anybody ever tried to eat – and I wasn’t allowed to chew it up. It was the thermometer pill that transmitted core body temperature readings to an external monitor. The readings would constantly chart fluctuations in my body temperature.