Riding Rockets

There was another uniqueness about the civilians…their aura of youthful naïveté. While the average age difference between the military and civilian astronauts wasn’t extreme (approximately five years), the life-experience difference was enormous. Some of the civilians were “post-docs,” a title I had first heard that inauguration day. Literally, they had been perpetual students, continuing their studies at universities after earning their PhDs. These were men and women who, until a few weeks ago, had been star gazing in mountaintop observatories and whose greatest fear had been an A- on a research paper. Their lives were light-years apart from those of the military men of the group. We were Vietnam combat veterans. One helicopter pilot, told of making low-level rocket attacks and having exploded body parts hit the windshield of his gunship and smear it with blood. We were test pilots and test engineers. In our work a mistake wasn’t noted by a professor in the margin of a thesis, but instead brought instant death. Rick Hauck, a navy pilot, had barely escaped death in an ejection from a crashing fighter. I had my own fighter-jet ejection experience.

It wasn’t just this proximity to war and death that differentiated the military flyers from the post-docs, it was also the civilians’ lack of exposure to life…at least their exposure to the rawer side of life. On a stopover in the Philippines on my way to Vietnam I checked into a hotel and was handed a San Miguel beer and a loose-leaf binder with photos of the available prostitutes. It was room service. Place your order now. As they say, one of the first casualties of war is innocence. To sit at a Vietnamese bar was to have a woman immediately at your side stroking your crotch, trying to make a sale. Everybody had a favorite number at the Happy Ending Massage Parlor (to simplify identification, available girls wore numbered placards around their necks) and I knew many aviators in Vietnam who had their PCOD circled on their calendar. This was their Pussy Cutoff Date, the date at which they would have to stop their whoring to allow the incubation period for STDs to pass (and for a cure to be achieved) before going home. One navy TFNG told of sitting in a dirt-floored Southeast Asia bar while a naked GI got it on with a prostitute on an adjacent table. It was just a wild guess on my part, but I doubted any of the post-docs had similar experiences in the Berkeley SUB. There was a softness, an innocence in their demeanor that suggested they had lived cloistered lives. It was hard for me to look at some of them and not think they were kids. Some might still have been virgins. Steve Hawley, George (Pinky) Nelson, and Anna Fisher were exceptionally young in the face. There was no way they were going to get inside a bar without being carded. Jeff Hoffman was the picture of academia. He had arrived at NASA with a beard and a collapsible bicycle suitable for the Boston subway. He didn’t even own a car. He rode to work on his bike and carried a lunch pail. All that was missing were suede elbow patches on his suit coat and a pipe in his mouth to make the “professor” picture complete.

I felt a subtle hostility toward the civilian candidates. I know many of the military astronauts shared my feelings. In our minds the post-docs hadn’t paid their dues to be standing on that stage. We had. For us, it had been a life quest. If someone had told us our chances of being selected as an astronaut would improve if we sacrificed our left testicle, we would have grabbed a rusty razor and begun cutting. I couldn’t see that passion in the eyes of the civilians. Instead, I had this image of Sally Ride and the other post-docs, just a few months earlier, bebopping through the student union building in a save-the-whales T-shirt andaccidentally seeing the NASA astronaut selection announcement on the bulletin board and throwing in an application on a lark. Now they were here. It wasn’t right.

As the photographers continued to flash-blind the females and minorities, I watched Judy Resnik and Rhea Seddon (pronounced “Ray”). Between them, there would be one more first represented in our group: the first “hotty” in space. Judy was a raven-haired beauty, Rhea a striking Tennessee blonde. No TFNG male was looking at them and fantasizing about their PhDs.

Chapter 6

The Space Shuttle

As we TFNGs gloried in our introduction, we were woefully ignorant of the machine we were going to fly. We knew the space shuttle would be different from NASA’s previous manned rockets, but we had no clue just how different or how the differences would affect the risks to our lives.