Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

Chapter 24

Part-time Astronauts

The shuttle program introduced several new crewmember positions, besides mission specialists, to the business of spaceflight. There were payload specialists (PSes) like Charlie Walker, who operated his McDonnell Douglas Corporation experiment on STS-41D. There were also military space engineers (MSEs), officers the Department of Defense wanted to fly on some secret missions. There were European scientists assigned by the European Space Agency (ESA) to fly as PSes on Spacelab missions. The Canadian Space Agency was supplying the shuttle robot arm, so some of that agency’s astronauts were put aboard the shuttle. NASA was also promising seats to other nations as a marketing tool. Launch your satellite on the shuttle and we’ll throw in a ride for one of your citizens . An example of this program was when Prince Sultan Salman Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia flew as a passenger on a mission carrying a Saudi communication satellite. Another category included U.S. passengers, for example schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. And, finally, there were a handful of politicians who used their lawmaking positions to assign themselves to shuttle missions. What all of these people had in common was that they were not career NASA astronauts and usually flew only a single mission. They were part-time astronauts. *

Training for part-timers was limited to their experiments, shuttle emergency escape procedures, and habitability practices: how to eat, sleep, and use the toilet. Mission commanders provided their own additional training in the form of the admonishment “Don’t touch any shuttle switches!”

Another thing these people had in common was that, to a large degree, they were not welcomed by NASA astronauts, particularly by mission specialists. Before Challenger, twenty-two out of a total of seventy-five MS-available seats were filled by personnel who were not career NASA astronauts. That hurt. The line into space was long and these part-timers made it longer. No, they were not welcome. *

While it would be easy to discount MS complaints about stolen seats as nothing more than union-esque protectionism, there was a legitimate reason for us to want the part-timer programs to be canceled. There was potential for these astronauts to imperil us. Imagine being in an airliner and hearing this comment over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. We are cruising at 35,000 feet so sit back and enjoy the flight. Oh, by the way, we have Mr. Jones up here in the cockpit. He doesn’t have a clue what all these switches are for but I’ve told him not to touch any. I assume he won’t. And I don’t really know how this guy would respond in stressful situations since I’ve only known him for a short time. But my airline headquarters says he’ll be fine. Of course, they know him even less than I do, but what the heck, he seems like a nice guy. So don’t worry when you see me step out of the cockpit to use the toilet. Mr. Jones should be fine sitting up here by himself.”

Beginning in 1984, NASA HQ began putting a lot of Mr. Joneses in the shuttle in the form of part-time astronauts and we didn’t really know who they were. I mean really know. I doubt many of them really knew themselves, at least in the sense of how they might react in stressful, even life-threatening, situations.

Military aviation, the background of many astronauts, is a dangerous and stress-filled occupation, frequently complicated by long separations from spouse and family. It is quick to eliminate the slow and the weak, either through an early death or administrative action. It is for this reason most aviators have an intrinsic trust of other aviators who have survived this winnowing process and a deep suspicion of passengers who, for whatever reason, are given cockpit access. This was the reason most of the military TFNGs had harbored doubts about the post-docs and other civilians when we had first come together in 1978. Who were these people? What stress-filtering processes had they been through? How were they going to react in dangerous situations? They had a lot to prove, and they did. NASA’s astronaut training program made sure they had continuing chances to prove themselves in environments where mistakes could kill. They regularly flew in the backseat of T-38 jet trainers. They experienced sphincter contractions like the rest of us during various in-flight emergencies and bad weather instrument approaches. They went through sea-survival training. They dressed in spacesuits and trained in vacuum chambers where one mistake would give them a few seconds to feel their blood boil inside their body before death came. After several years of this stress exposure, the military TFNGs had come to trust our civilian counterparts. They had earned that trust. But the part-time-astronaut training program was measured in months and didn’t provide the sustained and comprehensive stress-testing needed to truly evaluate a person’s mettle. Part-timers got a ride or two in the Vomit Comet, a couple rides in the backseat of the T-38, and some sea-survival training. These were helpful evaluation venues, but hardly sufficient. So, it didn’t surprise any TFNG when disturbing stories about the behavior of some of these part-timers began to make their way to the Monday meetings.

One shuttle commander told of being very concerned about his part-timer’s interest in the side hatch opening mechanism. The shuttle side hatch is very easy to open, intentionally designed so because of the Apollo I tragedy. The initial Apollo capsules had a complex opening mechanism that is believed to have hindered that crew’s escape from their burning cockpit. Determined not to repeat that mistake with the shuttle, engineers designed its hatch to open with just one turn of a handle. And the hatch opens outward. Since the shuttle flies in the vacuum of space with the cockpit pressurized at 14.7 pounds per square inch, there are thousands of pounds of force acting to push the hatch open. If the handle was ever turned to the open position in space, the hatch would explode outward, immediately decompressing the cockpit and killing everybody aboard. Knowing this, how would you feel if a person you really didn’t know took an unusual interest in the hatch opening system? I daresay you would feel as that commander had…very concerned. It was after this mission that a padlock arrangement was placed on the hatch handle and only commanders were given the key.

Another part-timer story involved a PS on a mission from hell. First, he fell victim to space sickness. Then, his experiment failed. After years of peer reviews and shuttle delays, he was finally getting his one and only chance to operate the device in space. Its failure severely depressed him and he surrendered to episodes of crying. But this was just the beginning of his torture. He turned out to be a cleanliness freak. What he imagined life would be like aboard the space shuttle for two weeks with possible vomiting, no running water, and few changes of clothes was anybody’s guess. Living aboard the shuttle doesn’t leave its occupants feeling springtime fresh. If the toilet had functioned normally, the part-timer in question might have had a chance. But as luck would have it, the commode suffered a low-airflow malfunction. In his debriefing the commander had explained the situation: “We had to use our glove-wrapped fingers to separate the feces from our bodies.” The already stressed-out PS now faced another significant challenge. His solution was to refuse to allow himself a BM. Over several days he miserably constipated himself, which aggravated his depression. A doctor aboard eventually convinced him to take a laxative, but afterward he refused to eat any solid foods to avoid more BMs. This lack of nutrition further compromised his mental and physical health. In debriefing, the mission CDR summarized the situation he had faced: “I had a depressed, crying, constipated PS on my hands. I thought I was going to have to place him under a suicide watch.” It was only by the grace of God that some of these part-timers didn’t cause problems that would have jeopardized mission success or worse.