Riding Rockets

Time to celebrate. For all intents and purposes our mission was over. As orbiting astronauts were prone to say, “It’s all downhill from here.” We raided our pantry, ignoring the dehydrated broccoli the NASA dietician had included to grab some M&M candies and butter cookies. Soon a baseball game was in full swing. I would pitch an M&M to Guy and he would bat it across the mid-deck with a locker tool. Jerry and I would then field it with our mouths. (Astronauts never play with their food like this while other crewmembers are vomiting.) Hoot filmed the fun, something NASA was not going to be happy about. HQ had relayed to the astronaut office their growing displeasure with astronauts filming their weightless games. It was all the press would show and they felt it trivialized our missions. The press had ignored video of the STS-26 crew deploying their quarter-billion-dollar TDRS satellite and instead showed them dressed in Hawaiian shirts engaging in 0-G surfing.

Hoot next liberated a football from a locker. NASA was going to be honored during the January Super Bowl halftime show and HQ wanted a space-flown football to give to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle. The ball had been deflated to save space, but using a food rehydration needle, Hoot was able to blow enough air into it to give it a useable shape and we paired up for a hilarious weightless football game. As with the baseball game, we filmed our Super Bowl. NASA HQ would have to cut us some slack. The classified nature of our mission would prevent us from showing the public any of our payload activities. Our game films would be all that we could show.

We spent the rest of the day immersed in our Earth-observation experiment, taking photos for geologists, meteorologists, and oceanographers. For each of us, though, there was one very special Earth feature to photograph that wasn’t on any of the scientists’ lists…our hometowns. Even the other veterans on the flight, Jerry Ross and Hoot Gibson, had never seen their childhood homes from space. The orbits of our earlier missions had been too close to the equator. ButAtlantis was crossing over all of America.

Albuquerque was an easy target to locate. The dark, winter-dormant flora of the Rio Grande River Valley contrasted well with the adjoining deserts, and Albuquerque’s western border was formed by that river. I needed only to spot a few other landmarks to know I was approaching the city. There were the snowcapped peaks of the Sandia Mountains to the east and solitary Mount Taylor to the west. As it came into view, the city itself was a gray patch filling the terrain between the river and the mountains. It was impossible to see individual houses or even neighborhoods, but I could approximate the location of my childhood home. No longer was it on the edge of the city but rather deep in suburbia. Like other Sun belt cities, Albuquerque had grown up. But my mom still lived in the same house and I could imagine the thrill she would have felt if she could have looked up to seeAtlantis passing overhead. There was no chance of that, though. The sun was too high.

I snapped a few photos and then Velcroed the camera to the wall. This was another sacred moment in my life and I didn’t want to be distracted with setting an f-stop. I was looking into the cradle of my astronaut dream. There was no other place on the planet that held more memories for me. Two hundred and forty miles below were the deserts from which I had launched my rockets. Here was the Rocky Mountain West that had excited my imagination with its infinite horizons. Here was the sky I had navigated in a Cessna while making plans to be a test pilot and astronaut. Here was the place God had steered Donna and me together. And, now, I was speeding over all of it in a spaceship.

Later we gathered around the window to watch the evening lights of Houston pass under us. The last rays of the setting sun were onAtlantis, so she would be visible as a bright star to anybody in the city who cared to look up. I wondered if someone had bothered to call our wives to tell them to watch for us. I would later learn that family escort Dave Leestma had. At the very moment I was staring downward, Donna was standing in an open field near our home and looking upward at our streaking star. After my return, she would tell me how the sight had overwhelmed her. “Mike, do you have any idea how amazing that was?You were in that point of light. I had to pinch myself to make certain I wasn’t dreaming.” I could appreciate her wonder. Every moment of orbit flight seemed like a dream to me, too.