Riding Rockets

In the fall of 1985 it was announced that Congressman Bill Nelson would also fly a shuttle mission. Another groan arose from the astronaut office. No doubt the biggest groan came from another part-timer, Greg Jarvis. Greg was an employee of Hughes Space and Communications Company, a major supplier of communication satellites. He was flying in space to observe the deployment of one of his company’s products and to perform some in-cockpit experiments on the physics of deployments. Garn’s flight assignment had already pushed him to the right on the schedule and he had finally ended up on STS-61C. It was while he was on a trip to JSC to pose for an official crew photo that HQ announced Nelson would replace him. The justification was that the Hughes satellite, which had originally been scheduled to fly on STS-61C, was having technical problems and was going to have to be deleted from the cargo manifest. Since one of the major purposes of Jarvis’s shuttle mission was to observe a Hughes satellite deployment, it made sense, HQ intimated, to move him and give his seat to Nelson. This sounded reasonable—except for the fact NASA moved Jarvis to a mission that did not have a Hughes payload. That made it clear to TFNGs he was being removed for one reason only—to make room for Nelson. Now it was apparent to every astronaut that our management was useless when it came to confronting politicians. Anybody could be bumped off any flight at any time to accommodate the whims of a congressman or senator. While it was just part-timer Jarvis getting the giant screw now, no TFNG MS felt immune. Next time it might be one of us airbrushed out of a crew photo like some disgraced Politburo member so a politician could be painted in. It was just one more threat to our place in line and we knew we could forget about protection from our JSC management. They were facilitators. The politicians could have their way with us.

NASA bumped the oft-abused Jarvis one mission to the right. The next time he would pose for a crew photo would be for STS-51L, the mission that would kill him. He would die on a mission that had no Hughes satellite to deploy, the singular event that had been the original justification for his assignment to a shuttle flight.

When Congressman Nelson arrived at JSC he was eager to secure a part to play on his mission. NASA obliged him by rolling out the old standby: photography. The congressman, like Garn, would be taking photos of various geologic, meteorologic, and oceanographic phenomena. But Nelson didn’t want to be “Garn-ed.” He wanted to be a contributing crewmember and do something really important. There was just one problem. None of the principal investigators of any of the experiments manifested on the mission wanted Nelson anywhere near their equipment. They were getting one chance to fly their experiments, had been working with the astronauts for months on how to best operate the equipment, and had no desire to have a nontechnical politician step in at the last moment and screw things up. Nelson continued to press the issue, but Hoot Gibson, the mission commander, remained firm…his mission specialists would do the major experiments. The jokers in the office quickly latched on to Nelson’s enthusiasm to operate an “important experiment” and exaggerated it as his “quest to find the cure to cancer.”

With the manifested experiments off limits, Nelson hit on the idea of taking photos of Ethiopia in the hopes they could help humanitarian agencies dealing with the drought that was ravishing the country. This well-meaning intention was exaggerated in office gossip as Nelson’s second mission objective: “To end the famine in Ethiopia.”

Finally, he threw out a real bomb. He wanted NASA to work with the Soviets and arrange an in-orbit gabfest between him and the cosmonauts aboard the Salyut space station. At this moment in history, the Cold War was still very frosty. The complications, both technical and political, to pull off this spacecraft-to-spacecraft link would be difficult and time consuming. The crew wanted nothing to do with it. The MCC flight directors wanted nothing to do with it. To the astonishment of all, even Nelson’s appeals to NASA HQ fell on deaf ears. Nobody wanted to touch this turd. The office gossips had a field day. They created a third Nelson mission objective: “To bring about world peace by talking to the Russian cosmonauts.” The wits got more ammunition when the Salyut cosmonauts unexpectedly returned to earth, supposedly because one of them had become ill. Astronauts joked that the commies ended their mission as soon as they heard Nelson wanted to talk to them. Even they didn’t want to be part of that bullshit.

These exaggerated Nelson mission objectives—cure cancer, end the famine in Ethiopia, and world peace—generated this joke among TFNGs:

Question: “Do you know how to ruin Nelson’s entire mission?”