Riding Rockets

The manner in which I had been treated cleared up one source of wonder for me. Over the years, I could not understand why the air force hadn’t done something about Abbey’s preferential treatment of the navy astronauts. The next three missions to follow STS-41D were all to be commanded by navy pilots. On one of those, navy captain Bob Crippen would be flying his third mission as a shuttle commander before his peer, USAF colonel Karol Bobko, would fly his first. Why didn’t the USAF see this as I and the other air force astronauts did—a slap in the face of the air force? Now I had my answer. The shuttle program and its air force astronaut corps were invisible to the top leadership in the U.S. Air Force. We were interruptions to more pressing business. When I got back to JSC, I spread the depressing word to others within the air force community. “Don’t expect help from the Pentagon. We’re on our own,” was my message. Abbey could do whatever he wanted with us and there would be no outrage from our leaders. We were a forgotten squadron.

Chapter 24

Part-time Astronauts

The shuttle program introduced several new crewmember positions, besides mission specialists, to the business of spaceflight. There were payload specialists (PSes) like Charlie Walker, who operated his McDonnell Douglas Corporation experiment on STS-41D. There were also military space engineers (MSEs), officers the Department of Defense wanted to fly on some secret missions. There were European scientists assigned by the European Space Agency (ESA) to fly as PSes on Spacelab missions. The Canadian Space Agency was supplying the shuttle robot arm, so some of that agency’s astronauts were put aboard the shuttle. NASA was also promising seats to other nations as a marketing tool.Launch your satellite on the shuttle and we’ll throw in a ride for one of your citizens . An example of this program was when Prince Sultan Salman Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia flew as a passenger on a mission carrying a Saudi communication satellite. Another category included U.S. passengers, for example schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. And, finally, there were a handful of politicians who used their lawmaking positions to assign themselves to shuttle missions. What all of these people had in common was that they were not career NASA astronauts and usually flew only a single mission. They were part-time astronauts.^*

Training for part-timers was limited to their experiments, shuttle emergency escape procedures, and habitability practices: how to eat, sleep, and use the toilet. Mission commanders provided their own additional training in the form of the admonishment “Don’t touch any shuttle switches!”

Another thing these people had in common was that, to a large degree, they were not welcomed by NASA astronauts, particularly by mission specialists. BeforeChallenger, twenty-two out of a total of seventy-five MS-available seats were filled by personnel who were not career NASA astronauts. That hurt. The line into space was long and these part-timers made it longer. No, they were not welcome.^*

While it would be easy to discount MS complaints about stolen seats as nothing more than union-esque protectionism, there was a legitimate reason for us to want the part-timer programs to be canceled. There was potential for these astronauts to imperil us. Imagine being in an airliner and hearing this comment over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. We are cruising at 35,000 feet so sit back and enjoy the flight. Oh, by the way, we have Mr. Jones up here in the cockpit. He doesn’t have a clue what all these switches are for but I’ve told him not to touch any. I assume he won’t. And I don’t really know how this guy would respond in stressful situations since I’ve only known him for a short time. But my airline headquarters says he’ll be fine. Of course, they know him even less than I do, but what the heck, he seems like a nice guy. So don’t worry when you see me step out of the cockpit to use the toilet. Mr. Jones should be fine sitting up here by himself.”

Beginning in 1984, NASA HQ began putting a lot of Mr. Joneses in the shuttle in the form of part-time astronauts and we didn’t really know who they were. I meanreally know. I doubt many of them really knew themselves, at least in the sense of how they might react in stressful, even life-threatening, situations.