Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

We were approaching fifty miles, the magic line that would officially make us astronauts. I had always thought this altitude requirement was bean-counter bullshit. Effectively it was a statement that riding a rocket didn’t really get dangerous until you hit fifty miles. In reality if you didn’t make it to fifty miles on the shuttle, it probably meant the machine had killed you, as was later to be the case with the Challenger crew. Mike Smith was a rookie killed on that mission and by the official definition he didn’t die as an astronaut since he only made it to ten miles altitude. (Note to NASA: When the hold-down bolts blow, you’ve earned your gold.)

Hank gave us a countdown. “Here it comes…forty-eight…forty-nine…fifty miles. Congratulations, rookies. You’re officially astronauts.” We cheered. I suspect Judy, Steve, Mike, and Charlie were relishing the moment as I was. I experienced a momentary calm not unlike what I expect someone summiting Mount Everest experiences. There were still a few thousand things that could kill me, but their threat couldn’t tug me away from the moment. I stared into the black and watched images of my childhood play in my mind’s eye. I saw my homemade rockets streaking upward from the Albuquerque deserts, my dad on his crutches cheering. I saw my mom helping me bake my fuels in her oven and cleaning out coffee cans for my capsules. I saw myself lying in the desert watching Sputnik and Echo streak across the twilight sky. I had achieved a dream of ten thousand nights. I was an astronaut.

My distraction was only a few heartbeats in duration, but it seemed an age since the cheers had ceased. I looked at Steve. He was still mind-melding with Discovery, sucking in every byte. I got back on the instruments and listened for more of MCC’s abort boundary calls.

“ Discovery, you’re single-engine TAL.”

“ Discovery, you’re two-engine ATO.”

“ Discovery, you’re press to MECO.” This was the sweetest call of all. It meant we could still make it to orbit even if one SSME failed. As an astronaut had once joked, “Surely God couldn’t be so mad at us that He would fail two engines.”

At about eight minutes the G-forces hit three and the main engines throttled back to maintain that acceleration. This was necessary to prevent Discovery from rupturing herself. With a nearly empty gas tank the engines now had the muscle to overstress the machine. The reduction in power prevented that.

Hank’s velocity tape raced upward…20,000 feet per second…21,000…22,000. Every 15 seconds Discovery was adding another 1,000 miles per hour to her speed. We were giddy with excitement, our laughs distorted by the G-loads.

“Houston, MECO. Right on the money.” At Hank’s call another cheer swept the cockpit. Discovery had given us a perfect ride.

Chapter 21

Orbit

MECO was silent. The Gs just stopped. I had no sense of being hurled forward as some space movies depict. There was no thud, thunk, bang, or any other noise to indicate the end of powered flight. MECO could only be noted as the termination of acceleration. In a blink we went from a silent 3-Gs to a silent 0-G.

At this point Discovery was headed for an impact into the Pacific Ocean. We still were not in orbit. The ascent was intentionally designed so as not to drag the 50,000-pound gas tank into orbit, where it would become a threat to populations below. Better to keep it on a sub-orbital trajectory, where its impact could be predicted. There was a heavy thunk in the cockpit as the ET was exploded away to continue toward a Pacific grave. Hank moved his translational hand controller to the up position, and the thrusters in the nose and tail fired to clear us of the tumbling mass. The nose jets, merely a few yards forward of the windows, hammered the cockpit as if howitzers were firing next to us. Checklists strained at their Velcro anchors.

Now clear of the ET, Discovery ’s computers fired her Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engines, twin 6,000-pound trust rockets mounted at the tail. Compared with the SSMEs, these were mere popguns, giving us only a ¼-G acceleration. The engines burned for two minutes to finish the orbit insertion. Then our silent free-fall began. We were in orbit 200 miles above the planet traveling at a speed of nearly 5 miles per second. The entire ascent had taken just ten minutes. In all likelihood Donna and the kids had not even had time to walk from the LCC roof.

I watched Mike activate the switches to close the ET doors. These covered two large openings on Discovery ’s belly through which passed seventeen-inch-diameter fuel and oxidizer feed pipes from the gas tank. These pipes had been disconnected during the jettison of the ET. Now the doors had to close over the openings to complete the belly heat shield. If they failed to close, we were dead…but endowed with the power to choose the manner of our deaths: slow suffocation in orbit as our oxygen was depleted or incineration on deorbit. The open cavities would be pathways for frictional heat to melt the guts out of Discovery ’s belly on reentry. I didn’t lift my eyes from the ET door indicators until I saw them flip toCLOSED .

I was still strapped to my seat and didn’t yet feel weightless but the cockpit scene made it obvious we were. My checklist hovered in midair. A handful of small washers, screws, and nuts floated by our faces. An X-Acto blade tumbled by my right ear. Discovery had been ten years in the factory. During that time hundreds of workers had done some type of wrench-bending in her cockpit. While NASA employed strict procedures to keep debris from being lost in the vehicle, it was impossible to prevent some dropped items. Now weightlessness resurrected those from various nooks and crannies. A live mosquito also flew into view. It had entered through the side hatch during the many hours of prelaunch operations and had hitched a ride into space. I slapped it dead between my hands.

While I had trained for thousands of hours to immediately dive into the postinsertion checklist, I couldn’t overcome the temptation to look at our planet, now filling the forward windows. Blue, white, and black were the only colors. Swirls of lacey clouds patterned an otherwise limitless expanse of deep blue Atlantic Ocean. All of this was framed in a pre-Genesis black. There was no blackness on Earth to compare…not the blackest night, the blackest cave, or the abysmal depths of any sea. To say the view was overwhelmingly beautiful would be an insult to God. There are no human words to capture the magnificence of the Earth seen from orbit. And we astronauts, cursed with our dominant left brains, are woefully incapable of putting in words what the eyes see. But still we try.

I forced myself back to the checklist as we configured Discovery for orbit. Steve Hawley and I disassembled our seats, and he floated them downstairs for stowage. During the Houston simulations we had nearly popped hernias while moving these 100-pound monsters. Now we pushed them with our fingers.

We loaded the orbit software into Discovery ’s brain; her decade-old IBM computers didn’t have the memory capacity to hold ascent, orbit, and entry software simultaneously. Next we opened the payload bay doors. The inside of those doors contained radiators used to dump the heat generated by our electronics into space. If they failed to open, we’d have only a couple hours to get Discovery back on Earth before she fried her brains. But both doors swung open as planned, another milestone passed.

As I worked, I wondered if I would get sick. I questioned every gurgle, every swallow. Is that bile I taste? The rational part of my brain said I was okay, but my paranoia twisted every gastrointestinal sensation into something ominous. I checked and double-checked and then triple-checked that my numerous barf bags were ready for a quick draw. The veterans had warned us the sickness could come on very suddenly. They were right. The curse hit. Not me, but Mike Coats. He retched violently into his emesis bag. I felt something warm touch my cheek and reached up to wipe away yellow bile. Other tiny bits of the fluid floated in the cockpit. Mike was learning what we would all soon learn—it is impossible to completely contain fluids in weightlessness. Though he had his bag at the ready, some barf had escaped. The odor permeated the tight cockpit. Mike sealed his bag but, with work to do, he couldn’t leave his seat to stow it downstairs. I took it and floated to the wet-trash container. With somebody else’s emesis smearing my cheek, the smell in my nostrils, and a warm bag of the mess in my hand, I had every trigger in place to get sick myself but still I felt fine. I began to think maybe I had dodged the SAS bullet.