Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

But we males had been missing the real issue. As Hank picked up the microphone to call MCC, Judy lashed out at him with something along the lines of, “If you so much as breathe a word to MCC about my hair jamming the camera, I’ll cut your heart out with a spoon.” Or perhaps she threatened a more vital area of his anatomy. There was a brief moment as we struggled to understand Judy’s rage. Then it dawned on us. She was only the second American woman to fly in space. The press had her under a magnifying glass, looking for the slightest flaw in her performance. The hair jam incident was just that: a mistake with her name on it. Not only that, it contained the worst possible sin against feminism. Judy had demonstrated, however innocently and however insignificantly, that women were indeed different from men.

Hank Hartsfield, a grizzled air force fighter pilot who had stared death in the eye on many a mission, now faced a man’s worst nightmare—a really pissed-off woman. No communist gunner had ever appeared as deadly as did Judy at that moment. Under her searing glare Hank did what we all would have done. He wanted to return with all of his appendages, so he called MCC and told them the IMAX had a film jam and Mike was working to clear it. He made no mention of the cause of the jam. Eventually Mike was able to breathe life back into the camera. With rescheduled targets, he and Hank continued their filming while Judy stayed far, far away.

Nature finally caught up with me and I floated into the shuttle toilet to face what was truly the most difficult part of any spaceflight—a bowel movement. The toilet provided little privacy. It was situated in the rear corner of the mid-deck on the port side. There was no door, only a folding curtain that could be Velcroed across the mid-deck–facing entry. Another curtain was Velcroed to form a ceiling and isolate the toilet from the upstairs cockpit. The lack of privacy was intimidating. I felt like I was back on my honeymoon, preparing for my first married-life BM. We’ve all been there.

After I was inside the curtained box, I took the advice of shuttle veteran Bob Crippen and stripped naked. “It’s a lot easier to wipe feces off your skin than it is to get it off your clothes” had been one of his STS-1 mission debriefing comments.

I located my personal urine funnel and twisted it on the end of the urinal hose, then loaded a disposable vacuum cleaner–like bag in a can on the left side of the toilet. Used tissue had to be placed in this bag. It could not be put in the toilet since that would require the ass to be lifted, which, in turn, could result in feces being released into the cabin. Suction at the bottom of the can would hold used tissue inside the bag.

I floated over the throne, lifted up on the thigh restraints, and twisted them inward to clamp my body to the plastic seat. Recalling my bore-sight alignment from the camera view in the toilet trainer, I wiggled my body until some freckles on my thighs were properly positioned in relation to the toilet landmarks. I switched on the toilet fan and welcomed the noise it generated. At least some of my BM noises would be camouflaged. Finally I pushed my penis into proper aim at the urinal funnel, reached for the solid waste collector lever, and pulled it back. Directly beneath me the waste opening was uncovered and the feces-steering airflow was activated. Suddenly a very sensitive part of my body was hit with a blast of chilled air. Few things are less conducive to promoting a BM than having cold air jetting around the principal performer in that act. The natural tendency is to clamp shut. But I convinced the orifice in question to ignore the cold gale and let fly. Simultaneously, I held the urine funnel at my front to collect my liquid waste. The vacuum flow into the urinal hose was very effective at sucking away the fluid until my bladder pressure fell. Then the urine refused to separate from my skin and a ball of it grew on the end of my penis. NASA’s engineers had anticipated this aspect of fluid dynamics and had provided a “last drop” feature. By squeezing buttons at the sides of the hose, the suction was boosted and I was able to wet-vac myself of most of the fluid. As the slurping sounds of this operation came through the curtains, Hank hollered, “More than five seconds and you’re playing with it, Mullane!”

The toilet was a bountiful source of male juvenile humor. By far the best toilet joke was pulled by Bill Shepherd (class of 1984). On one of his missions he carried a piece of sausage from his breakfast into the toilet. After finishing a bowel movement, he set the sausage free to float upstairs. As panicked crewmembers ricocheted from wall to wall in a mad retreat from the offending planetoid, Bill chased after it with a piece of toilet tissue. He finally grabbed it and then, to the horror of all, he ate it.

For me, cleanup was next. I used a tissue to blot the remaining dampness from my penis. Wiping after urinating was such a feminine act I almost felt compelled to hack up a luggie to reestablish my sexual identity. I pulled the solid waste collector lever closed, lifted my thigh restraints, and floated from the seat. I was now free to wipe myself, putting the used tissue in the disposable vacuum bag.

Besides cleaning myself, I also had to clean the toilet. It would be a serious violation to leave any fecal smears on or around the slide cover for the next user to confront. And there were always some smears. Even after the camera-aim practice in the toilet trainer in Houston, it was difficult to get a direct hit during a BM. The feces almost invariably made some contact with the inner sides of the collector hole. As one astronaut had once lamented, “Turds come out curved. If only they were straight, we might have better luck in cleanly using the toilet.” I used a NASA-provided disinfectant to wipe away my smears and put the soiled tissue in the vacuum bag. I then sealed that bag and stowed it in a container at the back of the toilet. While the retention of solid waste and BM tissues suggested a bad odor problem could develop, the toilet designers had done an excellent job of routing airflow through the toilet and filtering it with activated charcoal filters. There were never any toilet smells in the cockpit.

Finally, I dressed. From start to finish, a task that might have taken me five minutes on Earth had consumed nearly thirty minutes in space (and covered about eight thousand miles). There are times in an astronaut’s life he or she would pay dearly to have a gravity vector. Using the toilet is one of those times.

Our third and last communication satellite was successfully deployed on flight day three. Compared with the missions of the early space program this was blue-collar work, completely devoid of glory. We weren’t beating the Russians to anything. We weren’t planting an American flag in alien soil. On Earth, there was no Walter Cronkite removing his dorky glasses, wiping his forehead, and shaking his head in relief while telling a waiting, breathless world, “They’ve done it! The Discovery crew has just released another communication satellite!” The space program had become a freight service, justifiably ignored by the press and public. But not one of us in that cockpit was complaining. Even Hank would have hauled Lenin’s taxidermied body into orbit and sung the “ Internationale” for all the communists in the world, if that’s what it took to put him in space.

On flight day four Judy activated the controls of our final major payload, a solar energy panel. A collapsible motor-driven truss unfurled the 110-foot-long-by-10-foot-wide Mylar sail out of its payload bay container. There were no active solar cells on the sail. The experiment was only to gather data on the dynamics of the deployment and retraction system. When the panel was completely up and in tension, she radioed MCC, “Houston, it’s up and it’s big.” In numerous simulations Judy had joked that she was going to make that call. We had teased her about the obvious sexual innuendo. She made the call nevertheless. That was Judy. She could be extremely defensive of her status as a feminist standard bearer but could then turn around and yuck it up with us guys about a solar panel erection. I often wondered if that was the reason she was flying as the second American woman in space—NASA management knew she wasn’t a pure enough feminist to satisfy the NOW crowd.