Riding Rockets

For me, cleanup was next. I used a tissue to blot the remaining dampness from my penis. Wiping after urinating was such a feminine act I almost felt compelled to hack up a luggie to reestablish my sexual identity. I pulled the solid waste collector lever closed, lifted my thigh restraints, and floated from the seat. I was now free to wipe myself, putting the used tissue in the disposable vacuum bag.

Besides cleaning myself, I also had to clean the toilet. It would be a serious violation to leave any fecal smears on or around the slide cover for the next user to confront. And there were always some smears. Even after the camera-aim practice in the toilet trainer in Houston, it was difficult to get a direct hit during a BM. The feces almost invariably made some contact with the inner sides of the collector hole. As one astronaut had once lamented, “Turds come out curved. If only they were straight, we might have better luck in cleanly using the toilet.” I used a NASA-provided disinfectant to wipe away my smears and put the soiled tissue in the vacuum bag. I then sealed that bag and stowed it in a container at the back of the toilet. While the retention of solid waste and BM tissues suggested a bad odor problem could develop, the toilet designers had done an excellent job of routing airflow through the toilet and filtering it with activated charcoal filters. There were never any toilet smells in the cockpit.

Finally, I dressed. From start to finish, a task that might have taken me five minutes on Earth had consumed nearly thirty minutes in space (and covered about eight thousand miles). There are times in an astronaut’s life he or she would pay dearly to have a gravity vector. Using the toilet is one of those times.

Our third and last communication satellite was successfully deployed on flight day three. Compared with the missions of the early space program this was blue-collar work, completely devoid of glory. We weren’t beating the Russians to anything. We weren’t planting an American flag in alien soil. On Earth, there was no Walter Cronkite removing his dorky glasses, wiping his forehead, and shaking his head in relief while telling a waiting, breathless world, “They’ve done it! TheDiscovery crew has just released another communication satellite!” The space program had become a freight service, justifiably ignored by the press and public. But not one of us in that cockpit was complaining. Even Hank would have hauled Lenin’s taxidermied body into orbit and sung the “Internationale”for all the communists in the world, if that’s what it took to put him in space.

On flight day four Judy activated the controls of our final major payload, a solar energy panel. A collapsible motor-driven truss unfurled the 110-foot-long-by-10-foot-wide Mylar sail out of its payload bay container. There were no active solar cells on the sail. The experiment was only to gather data on the dynamics of the deployment and retraction system. When the panel was completely up and in tension, she radioed MCC, “Houston, it’s up and it’s big.” In numerous simulations Judy had joked that she was going to make that call. We had teased her about the obvious sexual innuendo. She made the call nevertheless. That was Judy. She could be extremely defensive of her status as a feminist standard bearer but could then turn around and yuck it up with us guys about a solar panel erection. I often wondered if that was the reason she was flying as thesecond American woman in space—NASA management knew she wasn’t a pure enough feminist to satisfy the NOW crowd.

After our major payload work, we gathered on the flight deck to accept a congratulatory call from President Reagan. Each of us was tense and nervous as we handed around the microphone to answer his questions. Thank God we were in space while a Republican president was in office. I shudder to think how Hank would have handled a call from a Democrat. He probably would have asked the president’s latitude and longitude coordinates in anticipation of his next BM. When it was his turn, Mike Coats was able to deliver the pro-navy observation that most of what he saw from the windows was water.That’s why the navy is so important, Mr. President was his implication. Hank Hartsfield defended the air force: “ALL of the Earth is covered by air, Mr. President.” There are no circumstances under which astronauts will not compete. Even having the president of the United States in the conversation wasn’t an inhibition.