Riding Rockets

While in the midst of this White House call, a cockpit alarm tone sounded. It was a “systems alert,” an indication of a minor malfunction. Still, we needed to respond. In a grand display of the thoroughness of NASA’s training we worked the malfunction while continuing to humor Mr. Reagan. Steve Hawley grabbed the massive shuttle malfunction book and began to move through the fault tree, pantomiming to Mike which computer displays to call up. When Hawley had the correct response identified, he passed the book to Judy, who was nearest the appropriate switch panel. She flipped a switch to activate a backup heater, the specified response to the alert. Meanwhile, the rest of us continued, “Thank you, Mr. President. Everything is just fine, Mr. President.”

After our payload activities were finished, we posed for our weightless crew photo. It was a tradition for each crew to take a self-portrait in orbit. We dressed in golf shirts and shorts, set up a camera on the mid-deck, and activated the self-timer. To squeeze everybody into the frame, we posed in three tiers with Hank and Mike lowest, then Steve, Charlie, and me floating above them. Judy floated highest. While we didn’t intend it, the pose suggested a cheerleader’s pyramid. Adding to the effect were Judy’s legs. They dominated the photo…tan, perfectly proportioned, beautiful. Judy would later receive hate mail from feminist activists who thought her pose was disgusting and degrading to women. Breaking barriers was a task fraught with all manner of perils.

Around this time in the mission, MCC became suspicious of a temperature indication in our urinal plumbing. Urine is collected in a tank that is periodically emptied via an opening on the port side of the cockpit. Heaters on the exit nozzle are supposed to ensure the fluid separates cleanly from the vehicle and does not freeze to it. But MCC noticed that the temperature at the nozzle was anomalous and suspected some ice might have formed on it during our last urine dump. No windows provided a direct view of the nozzle, so Hank Hartsfield was instructed to use the camera on the end of the robot arm to take a look. We had TVs in the cockpit to monitor the camera view. When Hank positioned the arm, we saw we had grown a urine-sicle.

The image suddenly explained a mystery from STS-41B. After that mission landed, engineers were puzzled to find damage to several heat tiles on the port-side OMS pod at the rear of the fuselage. The damage had certainly occurred during reentry because the same heat tiles had been visible from the back windows during the orbit phase of the mission and the crew didn’t see any damage. A similar urine-sicle must have formed during the waste-water dumps on the STS-41B mission. During reentry, the ice had broken off and flown backward, hitting and damaging the OMS pod tile. MCC was now concernedDiscovery could suffer the same or worse damage. Theoretically it was possible the heat tiles could be so damaged by the ice,Discovery ’s tail could burn off. I had imagined many scenarios in which my life could be threatened as an astronaut—engine failures, turbo-pump explosions, decompression—but I had never imagined a threat from a frozen block of urine. I had an image of Peter Jennings reporting, “The astronauts were killed by their own urine.” It wasn’t a heroic-sounding epitaph.

Letting the Sun melt the ice wasn’t an option. In the vacuum of space, water doesn’t exist in liquid form. It goes from ice to vapor in a very slow process called sublimation. We wouldn’t be able to stay in space long enough for sublimation to get rid of our hitchhiker. So MCC directed Hank to tap the ice away using the robot arm.

Then came the bad news. We were told we could not use the urinal for the rest of the mission for fear another ice ball could jeopardize us. We would have to urinate in “Apollo bags.” These bags had beenthe toilet for the Apollo astronauts and were stowed aboard the shuttles for just this type of contingency. NASA wasn’t going to prematurely end a billion-dollar space mission because of a failed toilet. To our great relief we would still be able to use the solid waste collection feature of our commode. We wouldn’t have to use the bags for our BMs as did the Apollo astronauts (they werereal men).

I looked at Judy. “I sure bet you have penis envy now.”

She tersely replied, “I’ll manage.”