Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

He continued, “For many years astronaut morale has been, I believe, considerably below its potential. Many of the fine men who have moved on from its ranks to other endeavors have told me of the negative role astronaut management has played in their decision to leave. As is so often true, the most capable men, those with more options and more confidence, are the most at risk to depart NASA for new challenges. Usually they elect to leave with as little surface disturbance as possible, out of deference to NASA as an organization. In my several decades of association with NASA, I have never seen a more propitious time to institute change, nor a time in which the morale-boosting effects of realistic positive change would be more welcome.”

I set aside the document completely befuddled. What did it all mean? Had someone in management commissioned McGuire to document astronaut frustrations and scientifically show how Abbey’s leadership style was the direct cause? If so, to what end—as justification to get rid of George? His comment “…never seen a more propitious time to institute change…” certainly sounded like a recommendation to somebody. It certainly wasn’t the type of statement you would expect to find in a technical paper written for publication in a medical journal. But I wasn’t about to go back to McGuire and question him. More than ever I felt like I was living in medieval times with plots swirling about. I had one objective…not to get burned by any castle intrigue. If somebody was attempting to assassinate John and/or George I wished them luck, but I didn’t want to be a participant. Like a serf in the field, I wanted to be invisible when the opposing armies swept past. I just wanted to hold on long enough to fly another space mission and then I would be gone from this madness.

*It did happen. Pre-MECO OMS burns are now regularly done during nominal ascents and are part of shuttle launch abort procedures.

Chapter 28

Falling

In mid-October 1986, astronaut medical doctors Jim Bagian and Sonny Carter presented the Challenger autopsy results. We expected to hear the answer to the question that had tormented all of us since the moment of Challenger ’s destruction. Had the crew been alive and conscious in their fall to the water? I had been certain they had not. I had said it a hundred times to Donna, “At least they died or were knocked out instantly.” That belief was my security blanket. It was too great a horror to think they may have been conscious in the two-and-a-half-minute fall to water impact. New revelations throughout the investigation had given me momentary doubts but I had always managed to build a new scenario to hide behind. My “cockpit-shredding explosion” theory had long been proven wrong. The fire leaking from the right-side SRB had weakened its bottom attachment to the ET. As the SRB pulled free it ruptured the external tank, and the aerodynamic forces and the G-loads of the moment caused the catastrophic breakup of the stack. There had been no high-power detonation. The enormous “explosion” seen in the sky was merely tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen vaporizing and burning. NASA cameras had picked out the cockpit module as a piece of the fragmentation. It trailed some wires and tubing but otherwise appeared intact, suggesting it was bearing a live, conscious crew. But I created a scenario in which the cockpit G-forces at the moment of breakup had pulled the crew seats from their floor attachments and hurled them against the interior of the cabin, killing the occupants instantly, or at least knocking them unconscious. When engineers later determined that the cockpit G-loads were not incapacitating, much less fatal, I created a scenario in which a window had broken or, in some other manner, the pressure integrity of the cockpit had been explosively compromised, causing crew unconsciousness within seconds.

The first fact that Bagian and Carter put on the table was that the time of death could not be determined from an examination of the crew remains. I was not surprised. High-performance-vehicle crashes typically leave little of the human body for pathologists to work with. In the case of Challenger, the weeks of immersion in salt water had resulted in additional deterioration of the remains. The story of crew survivability and consciousness would have to be told by the remains of the machine, not the crew. Bagian and Carter began that story.

There was proof, in the form of Mike Smith’s Personal Emergency Air Pack (PEAP), that the crew had survived vehicle breakup. PEAPs were portable canisters intended to provide emergency breathing air to a crewmember escaping through toxic fumes in a ground emergency. They were not intended for use in flight. But Mike Smith’s PEAP, stowed on the back of his seat and only accessible in flight by mission specialist 1 or 2, had been found in the on position. Either El Onizuka (MS1) or Judy (MS2) had to have thrown the switch and there would have been only one reason to do so—they were suffocating. Breakup had ripped away their only source of oxygen, the tanks under the cargo bay. Within a couple breaths, the residual oxygen remaining in their helmets and in the feed lines would have been consumed. The fierce urge to breathe would have immediately driven all of the crew either to turn on their PEAPs or raise the faceplates of their helmets. Judy or El had turned on Mike Smith’s PEAP knowing he could not reach the switch himself. (Onizuka, sitting directly behind Mike, had the easiest access to the switch, though Judy, sitting to El’s left, could have reached it with some difficulty.) Enough pieces of one other PEAP were recovered to determine it had also been in the on position, but crash damage made it impossible to establish the seat location of that canister. The fact that two PEAPS had been turned on was proof the crew had survived Challenger ’s breakup. I would later learn that some of the electrical system switches on Mike Smith’s right-hand panel had been moved out of their nominal positions. These switches were protected with lever locks that required them to be pulled outward against a spring force before they could be toggled to a new position. Tests proved the G-forces of the crash could not have moved them, meaning that Mike Smith made the switch changes, no doubt in an attempt to restore electrical power to the cockpit. This is additional proof the crew was conscious and functional immediately after the breakup. Mike Smith’s PEAP also provided proof the crew had been alive all the way to water impact. It had been depleted by approximately two and a half minutes of breathing, the time of the cockpit fall.

The question remaining was whether the crew had stayed conscious beyond the few seconds needed to activate their PEAPs and for Mike Smith to throw some switches on his panel. They could not have remained conscious if the cockpit had rapidly depressurized to ambient (outside) air pressure. Breakup occurred at 46,000 feet, an altitude 17,000 feet higher than Mount Everest, and the nearly Mach 2 upward velocity at breakup continued to carry the cockpit to an apogee of approximately 60,000 feet. To stay conscious in the low atmospheric pressure of these extreme heights, the crew would have needed pressurized pure oxygen in their lungs and the PEAPs only supplied sea level air, a mixture of about 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen. But had there been a cockpit depressurization?

An explosive depressurization—due to a window breaking, for example—would have been a blessing and I prayed fiercely that had been the case. But Challenger ’s wreckage said it didn’t happen. If it had, the cockpit floor would have buckled upward as the air in the lower cockpit rapidly expanded. The wreckage revealed no such buckling. That news was a dagger in my heart.