Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

All went well. The Canadian-built arm handled like a dream. Within an hour I had lifted the payload clear of the cargo bay and had flown it to its release attitude. I called to Hoot, “We’re there.” He was all smiles and I knew that the rest of the payload team watching from the ground was wearing the same smiles. I had delivered for them. No Super Bowl–winning quarterback has ever felt more satisfied.

Hoot double-checked that his orbiter hand controllers were on and got a “Go for payload release” from MCC. On his cue I squeezed the grapple release trigger and pulled the arm off the payload. The satellite was now flying free in a 17,300-mile-per hour formation with Atlantis. Hoot quickly executed the fly-away maneuvers and we watched the satellite slowly recede in the distance until it was the brightest star in our windows. I parked the robot arm in its cradle thinking this would be the last time in the mission it would be needed. I would be wrong.

Time to celebrate. For all intents and purposes our mission was over. As orbiting astronauts were prone to say, “It’s all downhill from here.” We raided our pantry, ignoring the dehydrated broccoli the NASA dietician had included to grab some M&M candies and butter cookies. Soon a baseball game was in full swing. I would pitch an M&M to Guy and he would bat it across the mid-deck with a locker tool. Jerry and I would then field it with our mouths. (Astronauts never play with their food like this while other crewmembers are vomiting.) Hoot filmed the fun, something NASA was not going to be happy about. HQ had relayed to the astronaut office their growing displeasure with astronauts filming their weightless games. It was all the press would show and they felt it trivialized our missions. The press had ignored video of the STS-26 crew deploying their quarter-billion-dollar TDRS satellite and instead showed them dressed in Hawaiian shirts engaging in 0-G surfing.

Hoot next liberated a football from a locker. NASA was going to be honored during the January Super Bowl halftime show and HQ wanted a space-flown football to give to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle. The ball had been deflated to save space, but using a food rehydration needle, Hoot was able to blow enough air into it to give it a useable shape and we paired up for a hilarious weightless football game. As with the baseball game, we filmed our Super Bowl. NASA HQ would have to cut us some slack. The classified nature of our mission would prevent us from showing the public any of our payload activities. Our game films would be all that we could show.

We spent the rest of the day immersed in our Earth-observation experiment, taking photos for geologists, meteorologists, and oceanographers. For each of us, though, there was one very special Earth feature to photograph that wasn’t on any of the scientists’ lists…our hometowns. Even the other veterans on the flight, Jerry Ross and Hoot Gibson, had never seen their childhood homes from space. The orbits of our earlier missions had been too close to the equator. But Atlantis was crossing over all of America.

Albuquerque was an easy target to locate. The dark, winter-dormant flora of the Rio Grande River Valley contrasted well with the adjoining deserts, and Albuquerque’s western border was formed by that river. I needed only to spot a few other landmarks to know I was approaching the city. There were the snowcapped peaks of the Sandia Mountains to the east and solitary Mount Taylor to the west. As it came into view, the city itself was a gray patch filling the terrain between the river and the mountains. It was impossible to see individual houses or even neighborhoods, but I could approximate the location of my childhood home. No longer was it on the edge of the city but rather deep in suburbia. Like other Sun belt cities, Albuquerque had grown up. But my mom still lived in the same house and I could imagine the thrill she would have felt if she could have looked up to see Atlantis passing overhead. There was no chance of that, though. The sun was too high.

I snapped a few photos and then Velcroed the camera to the wall. This was another sacred moment in my life and I didn’t want to be distracted with setting an f-stop. I was looking into the cradle of my astronaut dream. There was no other place on the planet that held more memories for me. Two hundred and forty miles below were the deserts from which I had launched my rockets. Here was the Rocky Mountain West that had excited my imagination with its infinite horizons. Here was the sky I had navigated in a Cessna while making plans to be a test pilot and astronaut. Here was the place God had steered Donna and me together. And, now, I was speeding over all of it in a spaceship.

Later we gathered around the window to watch the evening lights of Houston pass under us. The last rays of the setting sun were on Atlantis, so she would be visible as a bright star to anybody in the city who cared to look up. I wondered if someone had bothered to call our wives to tell them to watch for us. I would later learn that family escort Dave Leestma had. At the very moment I was staring downward, Donna was standing in an open field near our home and looking upward at our streaking star. After my return, she would tell me how the sight had overwhelmed her. “Mike, do you have any idea how amazing that was? You were in that point of light. I had to pinch myself to make certain I wasn’t dreaming.” I could appreciate her wonder. Every moment of orbit flight seemed like a dream to me, too.

Swine Flight went to bed without a care in the world…or off the world, for that matter. The dangers of ascent were behind us. We had already scored our mission success. Our only problem was a slow leak in Atlantis ’s left inboard tire and that wasn’t a big deal. MCC had noted it in their data and had directed us to program the autopilot to keep Atlantis ’s belly pointed at the Sun. The heat was keeping the tire warm and its pressure up. We hoped the higher pressure would reseal the leak point. But, even if the tire went flat, we were scheduled to land on the Edwards AFB dry lakebed and would have its infinite runway to handle any type of steering problems after touchdown.

I fell asleep secure in the machine that surrounded me. This would be the last time on the mission any of us would feel safe.

Chapter 34

“No reason to die all tensed up”

The call from MCC was disturbing. During a review of launch video, engineers at KSC had seen something break off the nose of the right-side SRB and strike Atlantis . The concern was whether the object had damaged our heat shield, a mosaic of thousands of silica tile, a design feature that earned the shuttle its nickname, “Glass Rocket.” The CAPCOM asked if anybody had seen any strikes during ascent or had noted any damage looking out the windows. “No” was our collective answer, but we did have a tool that would extend our vision to the shuttle’s belly—the camera at the tip of the robot arm. Within several hours MCC validated a heat-shield survey procedure in the Houston sims and teleprintered it to me. I was going to get some unplanned arm time.

My heart was back in overdrive. Not only was I concerned about the possibility of heat-shield damage, I was also worried about the arm maneuver I was about to perform. It would put the RMS in very close proximity to the inboard portions of Atlantis ’s right wing and fuselage, and I wouldn’t win any friends if I caused damage while determining there had been none to begin with.

I swung the upper boom of the arm across the forward cargo bay and then tilted the lower boom over the right forward side of Atlantis ’s nose. I swept the camera in a survey of that area, listening to Hoot’s cursing as I did so. The exterior cameras on the shuttle had long been a source of frustration with astronauts. They easily bloomed and washed out while imaging areas in full sunlight. The glare from the black heat tiles was particularly troublesome to the camera optics, and Hoot fought with the aperture controls trying to get a decent view. He was finally successful and our TV revealed a checkerboard of black tiles. It was exactly what a pristine heat shield should look like. But as I moved the arm lower the camera picked up streaks of white. There was no mistaking what they were. The surface of every belly tile was jet black in color. Any white would be an indication of damage, an indication that the surface had been ripped away by a kinetic impact. As I continued to drop the arm lower we could see that at least one tile had been completely blasted from the fuselage. The white streaking grew thicker and faded aft beyond the view of the camera. It appeared that hundreds of tiles had been damaged and the scars extended outboard toward the carbon-composite panels on the leading edge of the wing. Had one of those been penetrated? If so, we were dead men floating. Damaged black tiles might still protect the vehicle. Even a missing tile should be survivable. But a hole in the leading edge of the wing would positively be fatal and we had no way to survey the entire wing edge. The arm wasn’t long enough. (It was impact damage to a carbon panel on the left wing that would doom Columbia and her crew on February 1, 2003.)