Riding Rockets

It was in the Golden Age that Judy Resnik was assigned to her second mission, STS-51L. She would join TFNGs Dick Scobee, El Onizuka, and Ron McNair as well as pilot Mike Smith (class of 1980) for a flight aboardChallenger. Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire schoolteacher, would later join the crew. Her assignment to 51L was linked to Judy’s. NASA logically wanted Christa to fly with a veteran female astronaut. Greg Jarvis, another part-timer, would ultimately draw aChallenger slot when Congressman Bill Nelson bumped him from STS-61C.

I don’t blame Nelson or Abbey or anybody else for how the chips fell on theChallenger crew composition. Only God can explain the how and why of that. In fact, many months prior toChallenger, Mike Smith was named as a backup to a mission pilot who was suffering a potentially career-ending health problem. That pilot recovered and Smith wasn’t needed. But had the sick pilot’s convalescence taken just a few more weeks, Mike would have flown on the earlier mission and another pilot would have died onChallenger.

I congratulated Judy and the others at their Outpost celebration. With a gold pin in my bureau drawer it was easy to be sincere. No more fake smiles. Still, I felt a touch of envy. The 51L crew would be deploying an IUS fitted with a NASA communication satellite. The Boeing engineers had finally fixed that booster rocket so Judy had a proven payload. It was one less thing to get in the way of her launch date. She would have a second flight long before I would and that was something to envy.

In spite of the record number of missions in 1985 and flight opportunities for astronauts, morale continued to suffer under the leadership of John Young and George Abbey, particularly the morale of the USAF pilots. Air force pilot Fred Gregory filled my ear on a T-38 mission. “Of the twenty-eight CDR and PLT seats available on the first fourteen missions, only six have been filled with air force pilots. Fifteen went to navy pilots.” Fred went on to complain that of the six CDR and PLT seats available on the first three Spacelab missions, four were being filled by air force pilots. (He was one of those four.) He didn’t have to explain the meaning of the latter statistic: If any space missions could be considered routine, they were the Spacelab missions, and the USAF astronauts were getting more than their fair share of those. The navy pilots were getting the challenging and historic missions that included hands-on-the-stick rendezvous time and interviews on national TV. The most egregious example of an air force TFNG being screwed was when pilot Steve Nagel was assigned to fly his first mission—not as a PLT, but as a mission specialist! Even some navy astronauts were outraged by this travesty. Steve was known to be a far superior pilot and to have much better judgment than several of the USN pilots who had drawn front-seat assignments. And Abbey’s preferential treatment of the navy didn’t just stop with shuttle crew assignments. He also picked navy astronauts (Walker, Gibson, and Richards) to serve as directors of NASA’s flying operations at Ellington Field, and navy pilot Don Williams was assigned a position in the JSC Shuttle Program Office.