Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

From the look on Hank’s face you would have thought his earlier turd had reentered the atmosphere and nailed Castro right between the eyes. But I could appreciate his joy. Turning off one’s urine while having a BM was a real trick. The things they didn’t teach us at astronaut school.

As our washcloths were consumed we turned to using our socks. When I had exhausted my extras, I began to use my towels. On one occasion with my bladder near rupture, I threw a covetous glance at the clean socks Judy was wearing. I flew straight at her and began to rip them from her feet. She knew exactly what I was doing and jokingly screamed, “Help! I’m being socked!”

By the final day of the mission our wet-trash container was becoming seriously overburdened. Under us floated a volume of vomit, urine, and decomposing food containers. My earlier Star Wars prank about alien creatures living in the trash container didn’t seem so funny now. Nobody wanted to put their hands in the mess. We would jam our urine bags past the grommet, jerk away, and quickly rip into an alcohol hand wipe.

As we configured Discovery for our last sleep period, I repeated my day-one routine. I moved my sleep restraint upstairs and tied it beneath the overhead windows. I intended to stay awake as long as possible to stuff my brain with space memories. While I had every intention of making this trip again, I couldn’t be sure there would ever be a second opportunity. Discovery ’s engine problem had delayed the program by two months. What other problems were lurking? Could one result in a program delay of years, or even total program cancellation? Even if the shuttles continued to fly on schedule, office politics could end my career. It was impossible to know where you stood with Abbey. He might never assign me to another mission. I was going to assume these would be my last hours in space and I wasn’t going to waste them sleeping.

So I watched the Kalahari Desert pass beneath me and rammed its beauty into my overflowing memory banks. The Atlantic blue contrasted sharply with the ocher colors of Saharan Africa. Enormous sand dunes shouldered the beach and rippled inland like tan water. I watched clouds of every imaginable shape and texture: circular swirls of low pressure areas, wispy mare’s tails, cumulonimbus monsters with anvil heads stretching across the sky like the headdresses of Indian chiefs. In sunset and sunrise terminators, thunderstorms cast hundreds of mile-long shadows. Fair-weather cumulus clouds floated over oceans like popcorn scattered on blue carpet. Unseen jet streams rippled solid blankets of white like a stone dropped into heavy cream.

I crossed Africa in minutes and raced over Madagascar in seconds. The Indian Ocean was another vast, empty blue. The 3,000-mile brown continent of Australia came and went in ten minutes. Then Discovery was once again over Pacific skies. The view of that ocean always intimidated me—its blue seemed as infinite as space. How much greater its immensity must have seemed from a Polynesian outrigger or from the decks of Magellan’s ships. We astronauts are frequently characterized as heroes and heroines for sailing into a great unknown. In reality no astronaut has ever sailed into an unknown. We send robots and monkeys ahead to verify our safety. Magellan didn’t put a monkey on a ship and wait for it to safely return before going himself. He and those Polynesians set sail without maps, without weather prediction, without a mission control, without any idea of the immense emptiness that lay beyond their meager three-mile horizons. It is laughable to compare astronauts with those explorers. The next humans who fly into a great unknown will be those souls who set sail to Mars and watch our planet dim to a blue-white morning star.

I watched as city lights took on the form of glowing spiderwebs with bright, sodium-yellow interiors and major roads radiating outward and ring roads completing the web effect. I watched lightning begin at one end of a weather front and ripple like a sputtering fuse for hundreds of miles to the other end and then start again. And every ninety minutes I would watch the incomparable beauty of an orbit sunrise. I would watch as a thin indigo arc would grow to separate the black of nighttime Earth from the black of space. Quickly, concentric arcs of purple and blue would rise to push the black higher and higher. Then bands of orange and red would blossom from the horizon to complete the spectrum. But only for a moment. The Sun would finally breach the Earth’s limb and blast the colors away with its star-white brilliance. I wanted to scream to God to stop Discovery, to stop the Earth, to stop the Sun so I could more thoroughly enjoy the beauty of that color bow.

When sleep finally overtook me, I’m sure I slept with a grin.

Chapter 22

Coming to America

The next morning we prepared for reentry. We scrubbed Discovery ’s walls and windows clean. An earlier crew had turned over a dirty vehicle to their ground team. Small bits of vomit, food, and drink had been found dried to the walls. This pigpen crew quickly became a joke on the astronaut grapevine. We weren’t about to let that happen to us. After nearly six days with six people locked inside, Discovery was soiled with the same flotsam but we polished her to a shine.

We followed the flight surgeon’s recommended protocol of consuming salt tablets and fluids. The excess liquid would increase our blood volume and help minimize the possibility of the reentry G-forces pulling blood from our brains and causing blackout. I also donned my anti-G suit as another defense against G-induced unconsciousness. The suit looked like cowboy chaps and was zipped over my legs and around my stomach. It contained air bladders that could be inflated to squeeze those body parts and restrict blood flow from the upper torso and head. I would later find out Judy did not put on her anti-G suit and suffered for the omission. After landing she was deathly pale, sweating profusely, and unable to stand from her seat for many minutes.

We closed our payload bay doors, strapped into our seats, and then flipped Discovery backward so the thrust from the firing of her OMS engines would slow us down. The deorbit burn only braked us by several thousand miles per hour but that was enough to dip the low point of our orbit into the atmosphere. After the burn was complete, Hank maneuvered Discovery into a nose-forward 40-degree upward tilt so that her belly heat shield was presented to the atmosphere.

Discovery was now a 100-ton glider. She had no engines for atmospheric flight. We began the long fall toward Edwards AFB, California, twelve thousand miles distant. We were coming to America. On the way, Discovery would be enveloped in a 3,000-degree fireball and at the end of the glide Hank would get only one chance at landing. In spite of these daunting realities I didn’t fear reentry as I had feared ascent. There were no SSMEs or turbo-pumps to fail and endanger us, and reentry lacked the rock-and-roll violence of ascent. I shouldn’t have been so confident. There were still plenty of ways to die on reentry and landing. The STS-9 crew had almost found one with their hydrazine fire. In 1971, three cosmonauts were killed on reentry when their capsule sprang a leak. They had not been protected with pressure suits and their blood boiled inside their bodies. We were not wearing pressure suits, so a pressure leak would kill us in the same manner. Of course, none of us could see the future, but on February 1, 2003, the STS-107 crew would find death on reentry due to damage sustained to Columbia ’s left-wing heat shield. Foam had shed from the ET during launch and punched a hole in it. Discovery was flying with the identical heat shield and Mike and Hank had seen foam shedding from the tank during our ascent. We could have been falling into the atmosphere with a hole in our wing and been blissfully unaware. No, I shouldn’t have been so confident in a safe trip home.