Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

STS-51G, which included the Saudi prince and a Frenchman, provided another part-timer story. (Among TFNGs, STS-51G was known as the “Frog and the Prince” mission.) Prince Al-Saud brought a handful of experiments from Saudi universities to fly into space along with a request to observe the new moon, which would be visible at the end of the flight. NASA approved this request and included it in the Crew Activity Plan (CAP), giving it the label LCO, or Lunar Crescent Observation. The LCO was actually religious in nature. The mission was going to occur in the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, the fast of Ramadan. This period of fasting and spiritual contemplation ended at the sighting of the new crescent moon. Prince Al-Saud just wanted to be a space observer to the end of the fast of Ramadan. The new moon–observation request was apparently approved by HQ without knowledge of its religious importance. When the mission commander, Dan Brandenstein, later learned of its significance, he was concerned the prince might be planning to use the shuttle as a 200-mile-high minaret to make a religious announcement over the radio. If that happened, the American press would fillet NASA for allowing a U.S. spacecraft to be employed by a foreign national for religious purposes. Knowing he would be at the center of that shit-storm, Brandenstein confronted the prince and made him agree on the exact wording he would use if he discussed the moon observation on the air-to-ground link, wording devoid of anything religious. While this issue was merely a distraction for Brandenstein, it was one he didn’t need. Shuttle commanders had enough on their plate getting ready for a flight. They didn’t need to be worrying about what passengers might say over the radios.

It wasn’t just mission commanders who were bothered with part-timer issues. While I was a CAPCOM for the Frog and the Prince mission, Shannon Lucid’s bare legs were an issue that came to my desk. (Shannon was an MS on the crew.) Like most crews, the STS-51G astronauts had changed into shorts and golf shirts for their orbit operations. There had been several TV downlinks in which Shannon had been seen working in her shorts. Prior to the orbit news conference, the public affairs officer sent the flight director a note requesting that the crew “dress in pants for the press conference.” When the note came to me I understood its intent. Public affairs was concerned the Arab world might find it offensive for one of their princes to be seen hovering in midair with a woman’s naked legs prominently displayed next to him. I tossed the note in the garbage. HQ could fire me but I wasn’t going to tell an American woman to modify her dress to accommodate the values of a medieval, repressive society where women couldn’t drive cars, much less fly space shuttles. I wanted to call Shannon and tell her to wear a thong for the press conference. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was taking a stand for women’s rights! Feminist America owes Mike Mullane one. As it was, the framing of the camera for the press conference only captured the crew’s upper bodies. Shannon’s legs, covered or not, were not visible.

Other cultural issues with foreign nationals surfaced. One guest crewmember told his CAPCOM he wanted the national anthem of his country played every morning as the wake-up music…and he wasn’t joking. The request was denied. Another foreigner provided the name of the immediate family member he wanted on the LCC roof to watch his launch. NASA assumed the woman was his wife but it turned out to be his mistress. He had left his wife at home.

Another example of the negative impact of the part-timer program on mission operations occurred with the fatal Challenger flight. The primary objective of that mission was actually to launch a several-hundred-million-dollar communication satellite that was critical to NASA’s and the U.S. Air Force’s space operations. But an outsider would never have known that from the way HQ acted. In their eyes the mission was to put a teacher in space. If the satellite was deployed, well, that would be nice, too. But as long as Christa McAuliffe’s space lesson got beamed into every elementary school in America, the mission would be successful. Unfortunately, as the mission moved toward launch, a weather delay pushed the flight twenty-four hours to the right—and Christa’s space lesson to a Saturday. For NASA’s PR team this was a disaster. The space lesson would not be live. It would have to be recorded and rebroadcast. To the surprise of no astronauts, NASA went to work to revise the flight plan and move the space lesson to a school day. All who were aware of what was going on were outraged. Astronauts and MCC live by the motto “Plan the flight and fly the plan.” Tens of millions of dollars are spent in simulations to prepare crews for their missions. The Crew Activity Plan, the mission bible, is fixed early in the training flow for the very purpose of ensuring the crew and MCC are thoroughly prepared. Major CAP modifications, even months from a launch, are rarely done and then only when essential to the success of the primary mission objective. Significant flight plan changes close to a launch merely to accommodate a secondary mission objective were unheard of. For any other mission, if someone suggested a flight plan rewrite twenty-four hours prior to launch to facilitate a secondary objective they would have been staked out in the launchpad flame bucket. But STS-51L wasn’t any other mission: It was the “Teacher-in-Space” mission. The flight plan was rewritten.

After Challenger ’s loss, Commander Dick Scobee’s effects were cleaned from his desk. Among those was a list of notes he had been keeping for his postmission debriefing. One of those notes was critical of the impact a secondary mission objective—Christa’s space lesson—was having on his primary mission, the satellite deployment. Of course as a commander, he could have refused to allow the flight plan change, just as Brandenstein could have demanded the Ramadan lunar crescent observation be removed from his mission. But neither man made such demands, no doubt because they worried about the effect on their careers. Telling HQ no in any organization isn’t usually a good career move.

The part-timer program that many TFNGs found particularly offensive was the “Politician in Space” program. Even though astronaut-senator Jake Garn (R-Utah) and astronaut-congressman Bill Nelson (D-Florida) were huge NASA supporters, professed the political ideals of many astronauts (I would vote for them), and were very likeable men, they committed the grievous sin of using their lawmaking clout to jump to the front of our line. Garn and Nelson both tried to excuse their actions with the claim that a flight into space would give them a better understanding of NASA’s operations and make them more effective supporters of the agency, but many of us found that rationale seriously deficient. If I walked into Congress an hour before a critical vote and assumed Garn’s or Nelson’s seat to cast their ballot, would I then understand the intricacies of congressional lawmaking? Not in the least. To do that I would have to spend months, if not years, observing behind-the-scenes lobbying, the committee meetings, and political maneuvering leading to the vote. So it was with NASA. Anybody wishing to understand its operations needed to go behind the scenes: to KSC to understand the flow of hardware, to JSC to watch Mission Control in action, to MSFC to understand the difficulties associated with developing propulsion systems, to every NASA center director’s office to understand the conflicting pressures of budget, schedule, and safety they labored under. Riding a space shuttle was no more a window into NASA’s operations than casting a vote in Congress was a window into congressional operations. But riding a shuttle, like casting a critical senatorial vote, is a lot more glamorous.