Riding Rockets

Ironically, the flight assignment situation with the air force pilots turned in my favor. On February 6, 1985, Abbey phoned me (no office visit this time) to tell me I was being assigned to the first shuttle mission to fly from Vandenberg AFB in California. Abbey had finally drawn the air force’s attention when he assigned Bob Crippen, a navy captain, to command the most “air force” of all missions—the first Vandenberg flight. The air force was the lead service in DOD military space operations, and it was a fact of orbital mechanics that many of their satellites had to be launched into polar orbits. For a spy satellite to see all of America’s potential enemies, it has to have a view of all the Earth. A satellite orbiting around the Earth’s poles gets such a view as the Earth spins underneath it. But it is impossible to launch polar orbiting satellites from the Kennedy Space Center, because a north- or south-directed launch from KSC would endanger populations below the rocket flight path. Polar orbiting satellites have to be carried into orbit by rockets launched from Vandenberg AFB, located near Point Conception, California. A rocket launched on a southern trajectory from this point will achieve polar orbit while flying safely over the ocean. The air force had spent a decade and several billion dollars building a shuttle launchpad at Vandenberg AFB. It was their launchpad and the first mission to be flown from it would carry an air force payload. The air force had wanted it commanded by an air force pilot, but Abbey had other ideas and assigned Bob Crippen. In the ensuing discussions between the USAF and NASA, the air force had accepted Crippen, but with the caveat that the majority of the rest of the crew would be air force. (Or so the rumor mill had it. As always, there was nothing but rumors on the subject of flight assignments.) In a strange twist, I became a beneficiary of Crippen’s commandership of the first Vandenberg mission, a fact made clear to me when Crippen later commented, “You have the right color uniform for the flight.”

I was deliriously happy about my good fortune. The Vandenberg mission was going to be a true first. It would carry me and the rest of the crew into polar orbit, something no human had ever done. The poor schmucks flying out of KSC on the commercial communication satellite deployment missions only got to see a narrow strip of the Earth between 28 degrees north and 28 degrees south latitude (as I had done on STS-41D). How boring. In a polar orbit we would see all of the Earth. We would flythrough the northern and southern lights. We would fly over the Greenland ice cap and the mountain ranges of Antarctica. We would pass over all of the Soviet Union. It was a mission Hank Hartsfield would have loved—he could have made the Kremlin a target for one of his BMs. I was back in my pre–STS-41D frame of mind. I was mad to get into space on this mission. But the liftoff date—originally scheduled for spring 1986—was slipping to the right. The new Vandenberg launchpad and launch control center had to be finished and checked out. The State Department had to complete its negotiations to secure shuttle abort landing rights on Easter Island’s runway, a task being made more difficult by a Soviet Union disinformation campaign that shuttle operations would destroy the island’s stone figures. The Soviets understood that most of the payloads carried out of Vandenberg would be spying on them and were doing their best to lay down obstacles.

STS-62A’s slippage provided time for me to pull other duties, including several missions as a CAPCOM. There were noApollo 13 dramatics on any of these flights but, like everything else in the astronaut business, even the mundane can be unique. One Saturday night I was on CAPCOM duty and nearly comatose in boredom. The orbiting crew was engrossed in their experiments and the shuttle was performing flawlessly. On rev after rev all I did was make Acquisition of Signal (AOS) and Loss of Signal (LOS) calls as the shuttle passed in and out of the coverage of various tracking stations. I tried to maintain an appearance of busy professionalism, knowing the public affairs wall-mounted cameras were focused on me. When no video was being streamed from the shuttle, the NASA PR officer would switch to these MCC cameras. Cable companies broadcast “NASA Select” video to their subscribers, including most astronaut households. My image was being dumped into living rooms throughout Clear Lake City and across America. Aware of this, I resisted the impulse to pick ear hairs and instead opened a shuttle malfunction checklist and pretended to study it. My eyes glazed over and my head nodded.