Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

I could hear rumbling through Atlantis ’s structure. Again, I wished I had paid more attention on STS-41D. Was the rumbling normal wind noise?

We had glided 11,000 miles in the past 50 minutes but most of our deceleration was still ahead of us. Hoot’s dialogue came quicker. “Mach 20; 210,000 feet; 1,190 miles to go…Mach 18; 200,000 feet…one-G…185,000 feet; Mach 15.5…1.4 Gs.”

We had passed through the hottest part of reentry and Atlantis was flying just fine. Without a hiccup she was completing her transformation from spaceship to airship. My doubts about our assessment of the tile damage were growing and, again, I was happy to be alive to have those doubts.

Now there was significant wind noise accompanied with heavy vibrations.

“Speed brakes coming out.” We were ten minutes from landing.

At Mach 5 Guy activated the switches to deploy the air-data probes on the sides of the nose. The information they provided on airspeed and altitude would further refine Atlantis ’s guidance.

“Mach 3.7…100,000 feet…I’ve got the lakebed in sight.” Atlantis ’s computers had done their job. After a glide spanning half the Earth, they had put a runway within our reach.

The wind noise outside my little room had become a freight train roar.

“Mach 1.0…49,000 feet.” As Atlantis ’s velocity dropped below the speed of sound our shock waves raced ahead of us, lashing the vehicle with a buzzing vibration. No doubt they were also sonic-booming the high desert and heralding our arrival to the wives.

We had finally entered the useable envelope of our crude bailout system. We were at subsonic velocity and below fifty thousand feet. If an escape became necessary now, I would pull the emergency cabin depressurization handle, followed by the hatch jettison handle. Then, I would unstrap from my seat, deploy the ceiling-mounted slide pole, clip my harness to a ring, and roll out. Of course all of this presupposed Hoot or the autopilot would be able to keep Atlantis flying in a straight-ahead, controlled glide. If the vehicle was in a tumble, the G-loads would pin us in the cockpit like bugs on a display board.

Hoot took control from the autopilot and banked Atlantis into a left turn toward final approach. Guy’s calls of airspeed and altitude came like an auctioneer’s. “Two hundred ninety-five knots, 800 feet…290…500 feet…400 feet…290…gear’s coming.” I heard and felt the nose landing gear being lowered. “Gear’s down…50 feet…250 knots…40…240…30 feet…20…10…5…touchdown at 205 knots.” We were safely home. Our heat shield had held. I was anxious to look at it and see how much crow we’d have to eat.

After the standard postlanding cockpit visit by the flight surgeon, we changed into our blue coveralls and walked down the steps from the side hatch. NASA Administrator James Fletcher was present to greet us. We exchanged handshakes and then turned to inspect Atlantis. There was already a knot of engineers gathered at the right forward fuselage shaking their heads in disbelief. The damage was much worse than any of us had expected. Technicians would eventually count seven hundred damaged tiles extending along half of Atlantis ’s length. It was by far the greatest heat-shield damage recorded to date. Some of the more severely damaged tile had been melted deeper than the initial kinetic penetrations. The area around the missing tile had been particularly brutalized and the underlying aluminum looked as if it had been affected by the heat. But there had been no “zipper” effect, as the engineers had promised. If any of them had been present, I would have flung my arms around them and kissed them.

We had taken seven hundred bullets and lived to talk about it. The damage had been sustained in the only place where it could exist and still be survivable. It started a few yards back from the carbon-composite nose cap and stopped just a few feet short of the right wing’s leading-edge carbon panels. If any of those carbon-covered areas had been hit, we would have died as the Columbia crew would die fifteen years later, incinerated on reentry, except in our case the Pacific would have been our grave. Even the location of our missing tile proved fortuitous. By happenstance it covered an area where an antenna was mounted, and the underlying aluminum structure was thicker than in other locations. Had a different tile been blasted away, a skin burn-through might have occurred, allowing 2,000-degree plasma to run amuck inside Atlantis ’s guts. God had watched after us. As Hoot turned from his inspection I heard him grumbling, “I’m going to be really interested in what MCC has to say about this.”

A few days later we got to hear their story. The quality of the TV images in Mission Control had been very poor. The engineers had been convinced the damage was localized and minor. I wanted to say, “You should have listened to us,” but they knew that. There was no reason to rub their noses in it. And then there was the nasty little fact that it didn’t really matter. Even if MCC had determined the damage would positively result in vehicle destruction and our deaths, what could have been done? Nothing. The ticket home always entailed a flight through the blast furnace of reentry. We couldn’t magically fly over, under, or around it. We couldn’t have repaired any damage. There was no space station outpost for us to have escaped to. Our only hope would have been to have another shuttle come to our rescue and we wouldn’t have had enough oxygen to wait for that. All we could have done was pitched the robot arm overboard and dumped every ounce of water and excess propellant to get our weight to a minimum to reduce the heat load, but even these efforts would have been in vain. Stripping the shuttle would have made the reentry just fractionally cooler. Just as it was with our contingency abort cue cards, any MCC recommendations would have just given us “something to read while we died.”

MCC did have an explanation for the failure of the SRB nose cone. There had been a change in the manufacturing process, intended to improve the performance of the ablative material that protected the SRB from the aerodynamic heating it encountered during launch. At our debriefing of the incident at the Monday astronaut meeting, others wondered how many other slide rule jockeys were violating the prime directive of engineering: “ Better is the enemy of good enough. ” We all wanted to shout from the rooftops, “If it’s working, don’t fix it!”

At this same debriefing, Hoot reacquainted the post-docs with the sick humor of the fighter pilot. During our mission, there had been a horrific earthquake in the Soviet Eastern Bloc state of Armenia, killing 25,000 people. The TV news was still showing images of masked workers pulling bodies from the rubble. “I know many of you have been very curious about our classified payload.” Hoot paused until the room was hushed in expectation. “While I can’t go into its design features, I can say Armenia was our first target.” The military astronauts laughed. A handful of the post-docs cringed in disgust. Hoot tormented them further by adding, “And we only had the weapon set on stun !” The comment elicited more laughter and a few female darts of “Don’t you guys ever grow up?”

Chapter 36

Christie and Annette

It was a few days after landing that Rhea Seddon bestowed another handle on Swine Flight. We became “The Grissom Crew.” It was a play on a scene from the movie The Right Stuff . After Alan Shepard returned from his history-making flight as the first American in space, he and his wife had been hosted at the White House by JFK and Jackie. The movie dramatized how Gus Grissom and his wife had been expecting similar treatment when he returned as the second American in space. But it didn’t happen. Runner-ups never slept at the White House. Rhea’s “Grissom Crew” label of STS-27 was poking fun at the fact there was no White House invitation awaiting us in our in-boxes, whereas President and Nancy Reagan had received the STS-26 crew and their spouses. In a wonderful parody of the movie scene in which Mrs. Grissom laments her lockout, Rhea exaggerated her already severe Tennessee accent and swooned, “You mean, I won’t get to meet Nancy and Ronald?!”