Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

These exaggerated Nelson mission objectives—cure cancer, end the famine in Ethiopia, and world peace—generated this joke among TFNGs:

Question: “Do you know how to ruin Nelson’s entire mission?”

Answer: “On launch morning tell him they’ve found a cure to cancer, it’s raining a flood in Ethiopia, and the Berlin Wall is coming down! He’ll be crushed.”

Neither Garn nor Nelson should feel abused at being the butt of an office joke. If you’re going to get in the game, you can expect some hits. We’ve all been there.

The passenger program didn’t end with Nelson’s landing. Next in line was Christa McAuliffe’s initiation of the teacher-in-space program. And it wasn’t supposed to end with her. NASA HQ was dreaming of flying other passengers. There were rumors Walter Cronkite and John Denver were being considered for flights. TFNGs greeted these rumors with head-shaking despair. The part-timer program was not only taking seats from us and flying people who were scaring the dickens out of some crews, it was also an immoral program. Individuals who were clueless about the risks of spaceflight were being exploited for public relations purposes. The entire part-timer program was built on the lie that the shuttle was nothing more than an airliner, which just happened to fly higher and faster than a Boeing 747. The very act of assigning a schoolteacher and mother of two to a shuttle mission dramatically reinforced that lie. But every astronaut knew what the shuttle was—a very dangerous experimental rocket flying without a crew escape system. Christa McAuliffe’s death on Challenger would finally open HQ’s eyes to that fact and the agency ended the passenger program…with one notable exception—John Glenn.

I was a retired astronaut when I heard the news that seventy-seven-year-old Mr. Glenn had been assigned to fly on mission STS-95. Had NASA completely forgotten Challenger ? Glenn may have been a former astronaut and he may have been a national hero (he had been my hero when I was a child) and he certainly understood the risks, but he would still be flying the shuttle as a non–mission essential passenger for PR purposes. Forget all that claptrap about his geriatric studies. That was another NASA fig leaf to cover a powerful politician. If geriatric research in space was so important, why was NASA pushing older astronauts out of the cockpit? Story Musgrave was a six-time shuttle veteran and a card-carrying AARPer who had been moved out to pasture. No…when Mr. Glenn lifted off, he was just another politician using his power for personal gratification. In Glenn’s case he was also a part-timer whose advanced age added greater health risks to the mission than any part-timer before. It was insane. It was wrong. It was immoral. NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, who approved the mission, needed a time machine to go back and stand at Christa McAuliffe’s graveside ceremony. Maybe seeing her weeping family would have opened his eyes to the possibility he might have to hand Mrs. Glenn a folded American flag during an Arlington ceremony while facing this thought, I let this man die on a lark .

When I heard that Administrator Goldin had suggested to the press other geriatrics would fly on the shuttle after Glenn, it was too much for me. I emailed an astronaut friend who was consulting for NASA and who had contacts among HQ managers. I asked him if NASA had lost its mind in putting Glenn aboard a shuttle, and if there was any truth to the press reports that other geriatrics would also fly. He replied that NASA had no intention of flying any more geriatrics and that “most NASA folks will tell you that the whole thing [flying Glenn] is a dumb idea, but not too dumb to actually do. In other words NASA believes chances are excellent it will turn out okay, and why not suck up some badly needed PR.” I was astounded by his answer. NASA was pressing ahead with a “dumb idea” and relying on chance it wouldn’t end badly. Apparently nothing had been learned from Challenger. Russian roulette with the O-rings had brought us to that tragedy and now NASA was back at the game with Glenn’s mission.

I emailed my reply: “…you remember what Challenger was like. The team killed seven people. It wasn’t an accident. Afterward, we could all see how dumb we had been. This situation with Glenn sure takes me back to pre- Challenger thought processes…. These ‘little things’ add up. They embolden people to try other things that might be just a little dumb. This Glenn thing isn’t happening in a vacuum with no future ramifications.”

I wrote an editorial for Aviation Week & Space Technology, a major aerospace publication, concerning Glenn’s mission. The piece was published in the September 21, 1998, issue. I closed it with these comments: “It bodes very poorly for any team when management needlessly accepts risk and then silently hopes for the best. It’s little things like this that ultimately pave the road to another Challenger …”

Five years later, in 2003, another commission would investigate the Columbia tragedy. Its conclusions would hauntingly mirror those of the Challenger Roger’s Commission—cultural issues within NASA had led to Columbia ’s loss. No one should have been surprised. The lessons of Challenger had been forgotten long before Columbia was dust falling through the Texas sky. Watching Mr. Glenn strap into the shuttle was proof of that.

*There were exceptions. Charlie Walker flew three missions and many of the Spacelab PSes flew multiple times too.

*Again, there were exceptions. Most astronauts felt the European Spacelab and Canadian astronauts, as well as McDonnell Douglas’s Charlie Walker and a handful of other part-timers, were valuable additions to crews.

Chapter 25

The Golden Age

If ever there was a Golden Age for the space shuttle program, that period was 1984 to Challenger . In those two years there were a total of fifteen successful shuttle missions, ten of those coming in the final twelve months. The shuttle would never again achieve that flight rate. In April 1985, Discovery and Challenger were launched only seventeen days apart, another STS record. (The seventeen-day record marks the interval between successful launches. Challenger ’s final mission was launched only sixteen days after a Columbia mission.) The missions were coming so fast that shuttles were simultaneously being readied for launch on pads 39-A and -B. KSC was looking like a spaceport out of science fiction.

The history recorded in this Golden Age was remarkable. It included the world’s first tetherless spacewalks by jet pack–wearing astronauts, the first on-orbit repair of a satellite by spacewalkers, and the first retrievals and return to earth of malfunctioning satellites. With its fifty-foot-long robot arm and spacewalking astronauts, the shuttle repeatedly demonstrated its unique ability to put man to work in space in ways never before possible. It was also during this period that the orbiters Discovery and Atlantis joined Columbia and Challenger to complete the four-shuttle fleet. And that fleet showed its muscle: Twenty-three satellites, totaling 142 tons of payload, were deployed from shuttle cargo bays. Just as NASA had promised, the shuttle was doing it all…launching commercial satellites, DOD satellites, and science satellites.

On the surface things looked glorious for NASA. But there was a problem: Getting to the twenty-plus missions per year that would give the shuttle a cost-competitive advantage over other launch systems was proving to be a much more formidable task than expected. The shuttle was a voracious consumer of man-hours. After every landing there were thousands of components that needed to be inspected, tested, drained, pressurized, or otherwise serviced. There were 28,000 heat tiles and thermal blankets on the vehicle. Each one had to be inspected. Mission-specific software had to be developed and validated. Payloads had to be installed and checked out. Severely hampering every turnaround was the lack of spare parts. Just-landed orbiters were being cannibalized of their main engines and other components to get the next shuttle ready. The necessary requirement to meticulously document all work was another drag on vehicle turnarounds: Just tightening a screw generated multiple pieces of paperwork. The joke within the astronaut corps was a space shuttle could not be launched until the stacked paper detailing the turnaround work equaled the height of the shuttle stack…two hundred feet.