Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

Back in Houston, over an Outpost beer, we laughed off the incident as a one-time case of extreme infatuation. It wasn’t. It proved to be Jody Foster–John Hinckley creepy. Judy began to receive letters, poems (“your raven hair and eyes”), and gifts. JSC security was notified and they promised to call the wacko’s employer and have them discipline the man. I thought that was the end of it until one night I received a panicked call from Judy. “Tarzan, can you come over right away? I just got home and there was a package at my door from that engineer. It doesn’t have any postage on it.” The implication was obvious: It had been hand delivered. He was in town. The guy was a stalker and Judy his prey.

By the time I arrived, Judy had already called the JSC security people and they had sent a car to patrol around her house through the night. They had also promised to call the man’s employer…again. But, again, whatever warnings were delivered didn’t take. A few weeks later the man walked into our office! I could only assume he was there on official contractor business because he wore the proper JSC badges. He went immediately to Judy’s desk and asked her to autograph one of his poems. She refused. He begged her to write him one letter a year. She refused. He begged her to come to dinner with him. She refused. As this was going on, I was moving to Judy’s side, watching the man like a secret service agent watching the crowd at a presidential event. He didn’t look violent, but if he reached into his briefcase I was going to tackle him. Grabbing JR by the arm I said, “We’ve got a meeting to attend,” and escorted her from the room. We called security and, this time, whatever they did apparently had the desired effect—the stalking ended. Beauty and celebrity had their downside, as Judy was learning.

Our crew soon acquired nicknames. Tarzan stuck on me. Judy christened Hawley, my Bo Derek salivating cohort, Cheetah. I’m sure Steve would have preferred the more macho handle Attack Astronomer, but Cheetah stuck. In keeping with the Ape Man theme, I branded Judy Jane, asking her as I did so, “Would you like to swing on my vine?” She replied, “Sure, Tarzan. But first I’ll have to tie a knot in it so I have something to hold on to.” Judy always had a comeback for my AD bullshit. Mike Coats maintained his Superman call sign. Upon hearing these titles the office secretaries began to refer to STS-41D as the “Zoo Crew” and Hank Hartsfield naturally became the “Zookeeper.”

God apparently didn’t hear my prayers to watch over every mission in front of us. STS-6 returned home safely but the IUS booster rocket it deployed, identical to the one we would carry on Discovery, malfunctioned. Its communication satellite was released into an unusable orbit. It was going to take as much as a year for the Boeing engineers to fix the IUS, meaning several IUS missions—including ours—had just lost their payloads. I was miserable. Any ripples in the flight schedule could generate changes in flight assignments. But after many tense weeks of worry, we acquired a new payload of two smaller communication satellites with different booster rockets. Best of all, we still retained the first flight of Discovery.

We set to work on our crew patch design. Since Discovery was named after one of Captain Cook’s eighteenth-century ships, we included a sailing vessel morphing into the space shuttle Discovery. We also teased Judy about adding the symbol for the female gender to the patch . There was precedent for this: The STS-7 crew had included a da Vinci Vitruvian Man–like representation on their patch. Four “male” symbols, arrows radiating outward, formed the head, arms, and one leg, while a lone female symbol—obviously representing Sally Ride—formed the other leg. When the patch appeared, Mike Coats observed, “Sally wears her gender like a chip on her shoulder.” I jokingly suggested to Judy we add something similar to our STS-41D patch and penciled an idea. It had the + of the female symbol as the center of the creature and five male arrows pointed inward at it. It would have been interesting to see how HQ would have reacted to that design.

STS-7 and -8 flew into history and I prayed my hallelujahs.

In November our crew celebrated Hank’s fiftieth birthday at the Monday meeting. Because he wore his political leanings on his sleeve, he was an easy target to lampoon. We presented him outrageously satirical gifts, including a copy of Ms. magazine dedicated and autographed to him by Gloria Steinem, “In recognition of your support of the feminist movement.” (Sally Ride, a friend of Ms. Steinem, had secured the magazine and her autograph, a one-of-the-guys act that shocked me.) We read fake congratulatory messages from Hank’s supporters, including the ACLU, Jane Fonda, and the Nuclear Freeze Movement. There was also a congratulatory card from Yuri Andropov thanking Hank for “promoting global communism,” as well as a card from Senator Ted Kennedy thanking him for his recent donation to the Democratic party. A final gift, a box of Ayds diet candy, was from the gay rights political caucus acknowledging Hank’s support for their cause. The gift card read, Here are some AIDS for you. Nothing was out of bounds when it came to astronaut humor.

On December 8, 1983, my dream of spaceflight, not to mention the entire shuttle program, almost ended when STS-9 landed on fire. During the final moments of Columbia ’s approach, one of its hydraulic pumps experienced a propellant leak that dumped hydrazine, a particularly wicked fuel, into the aft engine compartment. The resulting fire quickly spread to a second hydraulic system and both systems failed shortly after touchdown. Had the fire started a moment earlier, it probably would have caused all three hydraulic systems to fail while Columbia was still airborne. Like a car losing power steering, the controls would have frozen. Columbia would have rolled out of control and crashed into the desert. John Young and his crew missed death by a handful of seconds. As I later examined photos of the fire damage, I thought of John’s earlier pronouncement, “God watches out for babies, drunks, and astronauts.”

The failure mode that caused the hydrazine leak was quickly identified and corrected. The shuttle program rolled on and my spirits soared…and then, just as quickly, came crashing back to Earth. On the very next mission, STS-41B, both of its deployed satellites failed to reach their intended orbit due to booster rocket malfunctions. I was thrown back into hell. We had the identical booster rocket attached to one of our two communication satellites. It was unlikely NASA would launch Discovery with only a single satellite as freight. For weeks we fretted and sweated while NASA HQ shuffled payloads and, for a second time, we survived with Discovery. One mission to go.

We were now practically living in the simulators—one session was fifty-six hours in duration. Hank and Mike were spending most of their time practicing launch aborts and landings. Steve, Judy, and I were consumed with payload training. There was also spacewalk training. None was planned for our mission but every shuttle crew included two astronauts who were prepared for an emergency spacewalk. This was to provide one more line of defense against things that could kill a crew, like not being able to close the Payload Bay Doors (PLBD). To attempt reentry with those open would be certain death. This was why every component associated with the door closing and locking systems was redundant. Redundant motors were powered by redundant electrical systems through a myriad of redundant black boxes and redundant wiring. One failure of anything would not prevent an astronaut crew from closing and locking the doors. But that wasn’t good enough for NASA. They wanted to back up even this redundancy with astronaut spacewalkers who could manually string a lanyard to a door edge and winch it closed, then hand-install and manually tighten locks. Other contingencies also had to be considered. The shuttle’s high-gain antenna and the robot arm were both mechanisms that could become stuck outside the PLBD envelope and interfere with door closure. The two-man contingency spacewalkers were trained to muscle these devices inside the bay and tie them down. Hank designated Hawley and me as the EVA (spacewalk) crewmembers and Judy as our Intra-Vehicular Activity (IVA) crewmember. It would be her job to help us dress in the 300-pound Extra-vehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), i.e., a spacesuit, assist us in the suit checkout, and follow us in the EVA checklists to ensure we didn’t make a mistake. A spacewalking crewmember entered a whole new arena of risks. When pressurized, the suits became as hard as a steel-belted radial, severely impairing movement and tactile feel. In this condition a mistake was possible, perhaps a deadly one. If Hawley and I had to do a spacewalk, Judy would be our omnipresent guardian angel, watching us from inside Discovery and making certain we followed every procedure exactly.