Riding Rockets

Answer: “On launch morning tell him they’ve found a cure to cancer, it’s raining a flood in Ethiopia, and the Berlin Wall is coming down! He’ll be crushed.”

Neither Garn nor Nelson should feel abused at being the butt of an office joke. If you’re going to get in the game, you can expect some hits. We’ve all been there.

The passenger program didn’t end with Nelson’s landing. Next in line was Christa McAuliffe’s initiation of the teacher-in-space program. And it wasn’t supposed to end with her. NASA HQ was dreaming of flying other passengers. There were rumors Walter Cronkite and John Denver were being considered for flights. TFNGs greeted these rumors with head-shaking despair. The part-timer program was not only taking seats from us and flying people who were scaring the dickens out of some crews, it was also an immoral program. Individuals who were clueless about the risks of spaceflight were being exploited for public relations purposes. The entire part-timer program was built on the lie that the shuttle was nothing more than an airliner, which just happened to fly higher and faster than a Boeing 747. The very act of assigning a schoolteacher and mother of two to a shuttle mission dramatically reinforced that lie. But every astronaut knew what the shuttle was—a very dangerous experimental rocket flying without a crew escape system. Christa McAuliffe’s death onChallenger would finally open HQ’s eyes to that fact and the agency ended the passenger program…with one notable exception—John Glenn.

I was a retired astronaut when I heard the news that seventy-seven-year-old Mr. Glenn had been assigned to fly on mission STS-95. Had NASA completely forgottenChallenger ? Glenn may have been a former astronaut and he may have been a national hero (he had beenmy hero when I was a child) and he certainly understood the risks, but he would still be flying the shuttle as a non–mission essential passenger for PR purposes. Forget all that claptrap about his geriatric studies. That was another NASA fig leaf to cover a powerful politician. If geriatric research in space was so important, why was NASA pushing older astronautsout of the cockpit? Story Musgrave was a six-time shuttle veteran and a card-carrying AARPer who had been moved out to pasture. No…when Mr. Glenn lifted off, he was just another politician using his power for personal gratification. In Glenn’s case he was also a part-timer whose advanced age added greater health risks to the mission than any part-timer before. It was insane. It was wrong. It was immoral. NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, who approved the mission, needed a time machine to go back and stand at Christa McAuliffe’s graveside ceremony. Maybe seeing her weeping family would have opened his eyes to the possibility he might have to hand Mrs. Glenn a folded American flag during an Arlington ceremony while facing this thought,I let this man die on a lark .

When I heard that Administrator Goldin had suggested to the press other geriatrics would fly on the shuttle after Glenn, it was too much for me. I emailed an astronaut friend who was consulting for NASA and who had contacts among HQ managers. I asked him if NASA had lost its mind in putting Glenn aboard a shuttle, and if there was any truth to the press reports that other geriatrics would also fly. He replied that NASA had no intention of flying any more geriatrics and that “most NASA folks will tell you that the whole thing [flying Glenn] is a dumb idea, but not too dumb to actually do. In other words NASA believes chances are excellent it will turn out okay, and why not suck up some badly needed PR.” I was astounded by his answer. NASA was pressing ahead with a “dumb idea” and relying on chance it wouldn’t end badly. Apparently nothing had been learned fromChallenger. Russian roulette with the O-rings had brought us to that tragedy and now NASA was back at the game with Glenn’s mission.

I emailed my reply: “…you remember whatChallenger was like. The team killed seven people. It wasn’t an accident. Afterward, we could all see how dumb we had been. This situation with Glenn sure takes me back to pre-Challengerthought processes…. These ‘little things’ add up. They embolden people to try other things that might be just a little dumb. This Glenn thing isn’t happening in a vacuum with no future ramifications.”

I wrote an editorial forAviation Week & Space Technology, a major aerospace publication, concerning Glenn’s mission. The piece was published in the September 21, 1998, issue. I closed it with these comments: “It bodes very poorly for any team when management needlessly accepts risk and then silently hopes for the best. It’s little things like this that ultimately pave the road to anotherChallenger …”