Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

After our major payload work, we gathered on the flight deck to accept a congratulatory call from President Reagan. Each of us was tense and nervous as we handed around the microphone to answer his questions. Thank God we were in space while a Republican president was in office. I shudder to think how Hank would have handled a call from a Democrat. He probably would have asked the president’s latitude and longitude coordinates in anticipation of his next BM. When it was his turn, Mike Coats was able to deliver the pro-navy observation that most of what he saw from the windows was water. That’s why the navy is so important, Mr. President was his implication. Hank Hartsfield defended the air force: “ALL of the Earth is covered by air, Mr. President.” There are no circumstances under which astronauts will not compete. Even having the president of the United States in the conversation wasn’t an inhibition.

While in the midst of this White House call, a cockpit alarm tone sounded. It was a “systems alert,” an indication of a minor malfunction. Still, we needed to respond. In a grand display of the thoroughness of NASA’s training we worked the malfunction while continuing to humor Mr. Reagan. Steve Hawley grabbed the massive shuttle malfunction book and began to move through the fault tree, pantomiming to Mike which computer displays to call up. When Hawley had the correct response identified, he passed the book to Judy, who was nearest the appropriate switch panel. She flipped a switch to activate a backup heater, the specified response to the alert. Meanwhile, the rest of us continued, “Thank you, Mr. President. Everything is just fine, Mr. President.”

After our payload activities were finished, we posed for our weightless crew photo. It was a tradition for each crew to take a self-portrait in orbit. We dressed in golf shirts and shorts, set up a camera on the mid-deck, and activated the self-timer. To squeeze everybody into the frame, we posed in three tiers with Hank and Mike lowest, then Steve, Charlie, and me floating above them. Judy floated highest. While we didn’t intend it, the pose suggested a cheerleader’s pyramid. Adding to the effect were Judy’s legs. They dominated the photo…tan, perfectly proportioned, beautiful. Judy would later receive hate mail from feminist activists who thought her pose was disgusting and degrading to women. Breaking barriers was a task fraught with all manner of perils.

Around this time in the mission, MCC became suspicious of a temperature indication in our urinal plumbing. Urine is collected in a tank that is periodically emptied via an opening on the port side of the cockpit. Heaters on the exit nozzle are supposed to ensure the fluid separates cleanly from the vehicle and does not freeze to it. But MCC noticed that the temperature at the nozzle was anomalous and suspected some ice might have formed on it during our last urine dump. No windows provided a direct view of the nozzle, so Hank Hartsfield was instructed to use the camera on the end of the robot arm to take a look. We had TVs in the cockpit to monitor the camera view. When Hank positioned the arm, we saw we had grown a urine-sicle.

The image suddenly explained a mystery from STS-41B. After that mission landed, engineers were puzzled to find damage to several heat tiles on the port-side OMS pod at the rear of the fuselage. The damage had certainly occurred during reentry because the same heat tiles had been visible from the back windows during the orbit phase of the mission and the crew didn’t see any damage. A similar urine-sicle must have formed during the waste-water dumps on the STS-41B mission. During reentry, the ice had broken off and flown backward, hitting and damaging the OMS pod tile. MCC was now concerned Discovery could suffer the same or worse damage. Theoretically it was possible the heat tiles could be so damaged by the ice, Discovery ’s tail could burn off. I had imagined many scenarios in which my life could be threatened as an astronaut—engine failures, turbo-pump explosions, decompression—but I had never imagined a threat from a frozen block of urine. I had an image of Peter Jennings reporting, “The astronauts were killed by their own urine.” It wasn’t a heroic-sounding epitaph.

Letting the Sun melt the ice wasn’t an option. In the vacuum of space, water doesn’t exist in liquid form. It goes from ice to vapor in a very slow process called sublimation. We wouldn’t be able to stay in space long enough for sublimation to get rid of our hitchhiker. So MCC directed Hank to tap the ice away using the robot arm.

Then came the bad news. We were told we could not use the urinal for the rest of the mission for fear another ice ball could jeopardize us. We would have to urinate in “Apollo bags.” These bags had been the toilet for the Apollo astronauts and were stowed aboard the shuttles for just this type of contingency. NASA wasn’t going to prematurely end a billion-dollar space mission because of a failed toilet. To our great relief we would still be able to use the solid waste collection feature of our commode. We wouldn’t have to use the bags for our BMs as did the Apollo astronauts (they were real men).

I looked at Judy. “I sure bet you have penis envy now.”

She tersely replied, “I’ll manage.”

The CAPCOM went on to explain there was enough remaining volume in the waste-water tank for about three man-days of urine. It was obvious to us what they were thinking: Judy would be able to use the urinal for the rest of the mission. We men could get by with the bags. All of us thought this was fair enough, but Judy saw a feminist trap. If she used the urinal while we men were stuck with the bags, word would eventually get around. It would be another damning sin against the feminist cause. In fact it would be a far more egregious sin than the hair-jam incident. Her use of the urinal would be a shout from the rooftops that a penis was necessary to deal with certain shuttle emergencies. Judy wasn’t going to fall into the trap. She elected to use the Apollo bags like the rest of us.

I have no idea how Judy managed with the bags but I’m sure she paid a messy price for her feminist stand. It was a mess even for us males. On my first attempt, I just held the bag around myself and let fly. Bad idea. The urine splashed into the bottom of the bag and bounced right back, soaking my crotch. Not only that, some fluid escaped and I became the proverbial one-armed paperhanger, trying to hold the bag at my crotch and blot the little yellow planets out of the sky with a tissue in my free hand. Others made similar rookie mistakes. But we quickly came up with a solution. We stuffed washcloths in the bottom of the bags. In weightlessness the “wicking” action of cloth was still effective. We could aim our stream onto the cloth and the fluid would be wicked away instead of splashing around. There was just one catch: If we urinated too fast, the wicking action couldn’t keep up with the stream and splashing would result. If we slowed our stream too much, the fluid wouldn’t separate from us and a large ball of urine would grow on our penises. We learned it was necessary to very precisely regulate our urine flow to achieve a stream of perfect balance. Even then, there would always be a significant “last drop” that had to be wiped away with a tissue.

Our greatest challenge occurred when we had bowel movements. It was virtually impossible to regulate urine flow while bearing down for a BM. On the second day of our toilet purgatory, I heard another Hank Hartsfield cheer rise from the toilet. “I did it! I did it!”

Since Cuba wasn’t at our nadir, I couldn’t imagine the source of Hank’s glee. “What did you do, Hank?”

“I took a shit without pissing!”