Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

I watched on TV as Columbia ’s SSMEs came to life and a cloud of steam billowed from the flame bucket. When the SRBs ignited and Columbia was airborne, I almost pissed my pants. We jumped from our seats cheering. It was an act duplicated around televisions at Johnson Space Center and Marshall Spaceflight Center and on the floors of countless aerospace factories and in millions of living rooms around the country. The TV showed a man at the Kennedy Space Center jumping up and down and punching his fist into the sky like a Little Leaguer celebrating a home run flying over the centerfield fence. Another view showed a man standing on top of an RV wildly waving an American flag as he watched Columbia ’s smoke trail arc to the east. Another camera caught a woman dabbing at her tearing eyes. Everywhere the cameras captured a frenzied public. It was Woodstock, a NASCAR race, and a Virgin Mary appearance all wrapped into one overpowering, soul-capturing Happening.

And it only got better. At T+2 minutes and 12 seconds a flash of fire and smoke signaled the separation of the boosters. It was another computer-modeled milestone successfully passed. Columbia rapidly diminished to just a blue-white star and then disappeared completely. But we didn’t need to see her to know how things were going. We could tell by the abort boundary calls coming from MCC: Negative return, Two Engine TAL, Single-Engine TAL, Press to MECO. It was gobbledygook to most of America, but for astronauts it was the sweet song of nominal flight. At Young’s call of “MECO!” we all cheered again. Columbia had given her crew a perfect ride. I knew our celebration was premature. There was still a lot that could go wrong before Columbia was safely back on Earth. But, like the Apostle Thomas, I had seen with my own eyes and now I believed. If those gods of Apollo could put her into orbit with their computer models, they could certainly bring her safely home on the wings of their computer models.

On the flight back to Houston I couldn’t relax the smile on my face. It was giving me a headache. But I didn’t care. It had been nearly three years since I had entered NASA and this was the first time I really felt I had a chance of becoming an astronaut in anything but name only. Until I heard Young’s MECO call, I hadn’t truly believed it could happen. I had been convinced Columbia was going to end up on the bottom of the Atlantic and the closest I would ever get to space would be in a T-38. And I wasn’t the only doubter. I would later hear that Pinky Nelson, upon the MECO call, had jumped from his seat and shouted, “Now I can put in a swimming pool!” Pinky had been a heretic, too. He hadn’t truly believed in the gods of Apollo, and he had put off a decision to build a swimming pool until he knew he had a real job. In Columbia ’s 8½ minute ascent, his dream of spaceflight, all of our dreams of spaceflight, had taken a giant leap toward reality. Mine was no longer the diaphanous mirage I had been following for twenty-five years. The gods of Apollo had fashioned a machine that could turn my astronaut pin to gold.

Chapter 16

Pecking Order

April 19, 1982, effectively marked the end of the TFNG brotherhood. It was on that day George Abbey assembled us to announce, “We’ve made some crew assignments.” Like Hollywood stars hearing, “Can I have the envelope, please,” we held our breath at Abbey’s words. For four years, in hundreds of Outpost Tavern happy hours, on thousands of T-38 flights, around countless supper tables, we had asked the question of one another, of ourselves, of our spouses, of God: When would we be assigned to a shuttle mission? The room was space-silent as Abbey read the names. “The STS-7 crew will be Crippen, Hauck, Fabian, and Ride. STS-8 will have Truly, Brandenstein, Bluford, and Gardner. STS-9 will be Young, Shaw, Garriott, Parker, and two payload specialists. Hopefully we’ll get more people assigned soon.” That was it. God walked from the room.

Poof. With Abbey’s words TFNG camaraderie vaporized. I don’t believe there was ever again a social gathering of all TFNGs. As a group wallowing in a common uncertainty and united in a common distrust of our management, it had been easy to share a beer at the Outpost. Now we had been cleaved into haves and have-nots. There was a pecking order; some of us were better than others. I tried my best to be rational—somebody had to be first. We couldn’t all be. But I couldn’t accept that rationale and I doubted any of the others could either. We were too competitive. It was The Right Stuff syndrome as described by Tom Wolfe. The seven flight-assigned TFNGs had more of that stuff than the rest of us. We, the unassigned, had been left behind. I would later see first-flight assignments have the same effect on every astronaut class. Their all-for-one and one-for-all camaraderie would end just as abruptly as ours had. The effect could have been somewhat assuaged if Young and Abbey had been open about the flight assignment process, but all Abbey left us with was “Hopefully we’ll get more people assigned soon.” That wasn’t a lot to hang on to. Abbey’s and Young’s silence on the mechanics and calendar of flight assignments was earning them a growing enmity.

With George’s announcement still echoing in my brain, I wished for a hole in the earth to open and swallow me. I wanted to nurse my wounded ego in private, but that wasn’t an option. Like the also-rans at the Academy Awards, I had to don a fake smile and shake the hands of the winners. They were incandescent. You could feel the heat from their faces. Several of the blessed tried to mollify us with comments like, “You’ll be getting a flight soon” and “Your day is coming, too.” I was being pitied. I didn’t think I could feel lower. But I was wrong. I heard Sally comment, “George told us of the assignments a week ago, but he wanted us to keep it quiet until the press release.” I wondered how many times in the past week I had been eating lunch in the cafeteria with Rick Hauck or John Fabian and whining about the delay in flight assignments, and all the while he had been silently celebrating his mission appointment. God, I felt so pathetic.

As I drifted from the room, I heard Fred Gregory’s sotto voce growl, “This is bullshit!” His head and shoulders slumped in depression. Another casualty. Then it dawned on me. He had not just been passed over for an early flight assignment. He was black. He had just been passed over as the first African American in space. Guy Bluford would seize that title on STS-8. I was just a white guy. My name would never be on anybody’s Trivial Pursuit card regardless of when I flew. But Guy Bluford would be history. And Sally Ride, as the first American woman in space, would become an icon. Some had lost more than just a mission assignment with Abbey’s announcement. Some had lost history and the payday that came with celebrity. Sally Ride, in particular, had just been handed a free ticket through life. As the first American woman in space she could look forward to book deals, speech honorariums, corporate board seats, and consulting fees that could earn her millions.

As the seismic wave of Abbey’s announcement was tearing apart the TFNGs, we were blissfully ignorant of another 9.0 wave moving through the system. Five months earlier, one of the eight O-rings on STS-2’s recovered right-side booster had shown heat damage. This discovery had shocked the SRB engineers. Since the boosters were twelve feet in diameter, had a hollow center, and burned from the inside toward the outside, the perimeter-installed O-rings were far from the 5,000-degree gas throughout most of the burn. The unburned propellant served as an insulator. (In the final seconds of the burn, other insulation material at the walls kept the heat from the O-rings.) The O-rings should never show heat damage. And in seven ground tests and one mission (STS-1), involving a total of sixty-four primary and sixty-four backup O-rings, no heat damage had ever been recorded. The fact that an O-ring inside STS-2’s right-side booster had been damaged was an indication that, at some point in flight, it had not held the nearly 1,000-pounds-per-square-inch pressure inside the tube and a finger of fire had worked between the segment facings to touch it. This suggested a serious problem with the joint design. But no consideration was given to stopping shuttle flights and conducting more ground tests. The NASA PR machine had promised Congress and the American public a rapid expansion of the shuttle flight rate with a vehicle turnaround time measured in a few weeks. Schedule had become the 800-pound gorilla in shuttle operations. Nobody wanted to wrestle with it. Instead, engineers at Thiokol and NASA searched for a way to continue operations in spite of the STS-2 anomaly. So they intentionally damaged an O-ring to a much greater degree than the damage they had observed on STS-2, put it in a laboratory test article, and pressurized it to three times the pressure developed by a burning SRB. The damaged O-ring held the pressure. Armed with these impressive results the Thiokol engineers endorsed their product as flight worthy. Lost in this process, however, was the fact something never expected and not completely understood had been accepted.