Riding Rockets

With the elimination of a cockpit pod and ejection seats as potential escape systems, the engineers gave us the only thing they could give us, a backpack parachute. We would jump out the side hatch just like B-17 crewmembers did in WWII. Good freakin’ luck! We’d be juiced against the wing like a grasshopper on an automobile windshield. But the engineers had a solution to get us clear of the wing—tractor rockets. A bundle of small rockets would be installed in the cockpit above the side hatch. After blowing the hatch, astronauts would lie on their backs on a table in the hatchway, attach their harness to a rocket, and then pull a lanyard, which would fire a mortar, hurling the rocket outward. A cable connecting the rocket to the astronaut would unreel for twenty or so feet before the rocket would ignite and then jerk the astronaut by the scruff of the collar out of the hatch and clear of the wing. When astronauts saw movies of this system being tested with anthropomorphic dummies there was grim laughter. It looked like something Wiley Coyote had ordered from Acme Rocket Company to catch that speedy Roadrunner. Fortunately, a more practical design was adopted from a suggestion by flight surgeon Joe Boyce—a slide pole. A banana-shaped, telescoping pole was installed on the ceiling of the mid-deck cockpit. After blowing the hatch, astronauts would throw a handle that would release springs to slam the pole outward and downward. Astronauts would then clip their harnesses to rings on the pole and slide out. When they came free of the pole, they would be underneath the wing. But even this design was a joke. The very reason ejection seats were invented was because aircraft crewmembers were being pinned inside cockpits by wind pressures and the G-forces of an out-of-control craft. Ejection seats overcame these forces by blasting the crewmembers out of the cockpit. The idea of getting out of an upstairs shuttle seat wearing nearly ninety pounds of equipment and encumbered by an iron-hard pressurized Launch-Entry Suit (LES), then climbing down the narrow interdeck ladder and making it to the side hatch while the shuttle was in powered flight and/or tumbling out of control (the two most common conditions of aircraft ejections) was a fantasy. The only scenario in which a backpack parachute would save a crewmember would be in controlled, gliding flight at subsonic velocities, and below 50,000-feet altitude. It was difficult for astronauts to imagine a failure that would put us in those conditions. Astronauts were still living with the consequences of anoperational shuttle design.^*

Many of us placed the slide-pole bailout procedures in the same category as the pre-Challengercontingency-abort procedures—busywork while dying. But we all completed the training. A mock-up of the side hatch and pole were installed on a platform over the WETF pool, and we practiced sliding down the pole to smack into the water.

While most of my time was spent in STS-27 classified training, I was occasionally required to perform other short-term duties. One proved enlightening. Pinky Nelson and I were given the task of polling the spouses for suggestions regarding the family escort policy. One wife responded that she wanted to sleep with her husband on the night before launch. Pinky and I short-stopped that recommendation. We could not imagine any astronaut wanting to be with their spouse in those hours. I certainly didn’t want Donna in my bed. The beach house good-bye was agony enough—I couldn’t imagine enduring an all-night good-bye. If the wife making the recommendation was alluding to having prelaunch sex, then her husband was a better man than me. Even a doughnut-size Viagra pill wouldn’t help me at T-12 hours.

Many of the wives were extremely critical of what had happened to theChallenger spouses after the disaster. June Scobee and the other widows had been held at KSC so Vice President Bush could fly down and meet them. The wives were of one voice—in the event of a disaster they wanted to immediately return to Houston with their children. Screw the politicians. Pinky and I couldn’t have agreed more and said so in our recommendations.