Riding Rockets

The meeting broke up and I drifted back to my office. Several other TFNGs came by for a losers’ commiseration session. The USAF contingent was angry that a navy astronaut, Rick Hauck, would be commanding the return-to-flight mission. Rick would be making his second flight as a commander while his PLT, fellow TFNG and air force colonel Dick Covey, had yet to command his first mission. Others were livid that Pinky Nelson had been assigned to the flight. While Pinky was well liked, he had taken a sabbatical to the University of Washington afterChallenger . The rest of us had stuck around to do the dog work and be brutalized by Young in the process. In our minds Pinky hadn’t paid the dues to have received such a prize as the first post-Challengermission. It was also a sore point that his last mission had been the flight prior toChallenger, so he had the additional plum of having back-to-back missions. Norm Thagard was certain Abbey had picked Nelson just to show the rest of us how unfair and capricious he could be. I recalled a line from McGuire’s astronaut leadership document, “Inconsistency, ambiguity, silence, evasion…all have their place in his studied unpredictability.”

There were other aspects of this crew selection that would have angered us even further had we known about them. Years later, at our TFNG twentieth-anniversary reunion, Rick Hauck would tell me that Abbey had allowed him to select Dick Covey as his pilot. No other TFNG commander I ever spoke with had been given that responsibility. Abbey had always named the mission crews, the CDRs, the PLTs, the MSes, everybody. Hauck also revealed he had been told six months prior to the press release that he would command the return-to-flight mission but had been sworn to secrecy by Abbey. I wondered how many times during those six months other hopeful commanders had been in Rick’s company wondering aloud who would command STS-26, and Rick had pretended to wonder with them. Deep secrecy. It was Abbey’s style and it was killing astronaut morale.

My winter of discontent continued. As we had anticipated, the lightweight SRB program was canceled and, along with it, all Vandenberg AFB shuttle operations were terminated. I would never see polar orbit.

Challenger’s wreckage—all of it—was sealed in a pair of abandoned Cape Canaveral missile silos. It was another head-shaking moment for me. Pieces of the wreckage should have been retained for permanent display in key NASA locations as reminders of the cost of leadership and team failure. At a minimum, displays of the wreckage should have been placed at NASA HQ and in every NASA field center’s headquarters’ building. The LCC and the MCC buildings needed a similar display. Even the astronaut office should have been the site of an exhibit. Other astronauts agreed. I heard Bob Crippen remark that every astronaut should berequired to view the wreckage before it was sealed away, adding, “I don’t think some of the civilian astronauts yet appreciate the risks they are taking when they climb into a space shuttle.” But no such displays were established.Challenger ’s broken body was sealed away as if the very sight of it was somehow obscene.

I continued to be beaten up by John Young any time I had anything to say about range safety or pre-MECO OMS burns. Every Monday rumors of his and Abbey’s imminent removal swept through the office like blue northers out of the panhandle. But come Friday, nothing had changed. A good night’s sleep had long become a memory. I would get up at weird hours and take walks or go for a run. Donna and I talked ad nauseam about leaving NASA. I had my twenty years with the air force. I could retire from it and NASA, go back to Albuquerque, and get a job. But every time I thought of giving up the T-38, of never hearing, “Go for main engine start,” of never again seeing the Earth from space, I would get angry. I was doing my job. I was doing a good job. Why should I be driven away for that?

In the spring of 1987, I got a temporary reprieve from astronaut frustrations. With the shuttle grounded for at least another year, the USAF decided it would be a good time to reacquaint their astronauts with air force space operations. The navy planned to do the same for their astronauts. Both services referred to the program as a “re-bluing,” a reference to the fact we would be back in our blue military uniforms. We would travel to various United States and overseas bases to be briefed on how military space assets were being used to counter the Soviet threat.

When word of this program reached the civilians in the astronaut office, one particularly bookish scientist challenged the fairness of it. “If the air force and navy are sending its astronauts on a re-bluing, what is NASA going to do for us civilians?” Mark Lee, an air force fighter pilot, looked at the whiner and replied, “You guys are going to get re-nerded.”