Riding Rockets

Another example of the negative impact of the part-timer program on mission operations occurred with the fatalChallenger flight. The primary objective of that mission was actually to launch a several-hundred-million-dollar communication satellite that was critical to NASA’s and the U.S. Air Force’s space operations. But an outsider would never have known that from the way HQ acted. In their eyes the mission was to put a teacher in space. If the satellite was deployed, well, that would be nice, too. But as long as Christa McAuliffe’s space lesson got beamed into every elementary school in America, the mission would be successful. Unfortunately, as the mission moved toward launch, a weather delay pushed the flight twenty-four hours to the right—and Christa’s space lesson to a Saturday. For NASA’s PR team this was a disaster. The space lesson would not be live. It would have to be recorded and rebroadcast. To the surprise of no astronauts, NASA went to work to revise the flight plan and move the space lesson to a school day. All who were aware of what was going on were outraged. Astronauts and MCC live by the motto “Plan the flight and fly the plan.” Tens of millions of dollars are spent in simulations to prepare crews for their missions. The Crew Activity Plan, the mission bible, is fixed early in the training flow for the very purpose of ensuring the crew and MCC are thoroughly prepared. Major CAP modifications, even months from a launch, are rarely done and then only when essential to the success of the primary mission objective. Significant flight plan changes close to a launch merely to accommodate a secondary mission objective were unheard of. For any other mission, if someone suggested a flight plan rewritetwenty-four hours prior to launch to facilitate a secondary objective they would have been staked out in the launchpad flame bucket. But STS-51L wasn’t any other mission: It was the “Teacher-in-Space” mission. The flight plan was rewritten.

AfterChallenger ’s loss, Commander Dick Scobee’s effects were cleaned from his desk. Among those was a list of notes he had been keeping for his postmission debriefing. One of those notes was critical of the impact a secondary mission objective—Christa’s space lesson—was having on his primary mission, the satellite deployment. Of course as a commander, he could have refused to allow the flight plan change, just as Brandenstein could have demanded the Ramadan lunar crescent observation be removed from his mission. But neither man made such demands, no doubt because they worried about the effect on their careers. Telling HQ no in any organization isn’t usually a good career move.

The part-timer program that many TFNGs found particularly offensive was the “Politician in Space” program. Even though astronaut-senator Jake Garn (R-Utah) and astronaut-congressman Bill Nelson (D-Florida) were huge NASA supporters, professed the political ideals of many astronauts (I would vote for them), and were very likeable men, they committed the grievous sin of using their lawmaking clout to jump to the front of our line. Garn and Nelson both tried to excuse their actions with the claim that a flight into space would give them a better understanding of NASA’s operations and make them more effective supporters of the agency, but many of us found that rationale seriously deficient. If I walked into Congress an hour before a critical vote and assumed Garn’s or Nelson’s seat to cast their ballot, would I then understand the intricacies of congressional lawmaking? Not in the least. To do that I would have to spend months, if not years, observing behind-the-scenes lobbying, the committee meetings, and political maneuvering leading to the vote. So it was with NASA. Anybody wishing to understand its operations needed to go behind the scenes: to KSC to understand the flow of hardware, to JSC to watch Mission Control in action, to MSFC to understand the difficulties associated with developing propulsion systems, to every NASA center director’s office to understand the conflicting pressures of budget, schedule, and safety they labored under. Riding a space shuttle was no more a window into NASA’s operations than casting a vote in Congress was a window into congressional operations. But riding a shuttle, like casting a critical senatorial vote, is a lot more glamorous.