Riding Rockets

“Yeah, that she is. But at dinner tonight I kept thinking of all those times as a teenage boy I had watched Annette on the Mouseketeer TV program while fantasizing what was under the A and the E letters on her chest. And there she was, thirty years later, sitting right across the table from me and I was still fantasizing.”

Donna laughed and offered up the familiar refrain, “Will you ever grow up?”

Chapter 37

Widows

After returning from Miami I fell into the standard postflight depression every astronaut experiences. As Bob Overmyer once said, “Being an astronaut is a ride on the world’s biggest emotional roller-coaster. One day you’re in orbit and talking to presidents, the next day you don’t even have a reserved parking place.” I was way down in the don’t-have-a-parking-place dip. I felt certain it would be several years before I would have any shot at another flight. I was at the end of a long line. There were a hundred astronauts in the office. While I waited I would be assigned to one of the supporting roles of the business: working as a CAPCOM in MCC, evaluating software in SAIL, supporting payload development, or otherwise involved in another support function. While I appreciated the importance of the work, it was mundane compared with the exciting world in which mission-assigned crews lived. I had twice been a resident of that world and I knew. I didn’t want to fly a desk. The wordretirement was frequently on my mind. I knew Donna would welcome a decision to leave Houston. Every trip to the LCC roof was killing her. But, like the good Catholic wife she was, she would never put her feelings first. It would have to be my decision. Other TFNGs had already made theirs. Jim van Hoften, Pinky Nelson, Sally Ride, Dale Gardner, and Rick Hauck had all announced their intention to leave NASA, or had already done so. Unlike some of them, I didn’t have the offer of a high-paying civilian job setting a deadline. I had done no job search. I had no plans for a next life whenever it started, other than it would start in Albuquerque. Donna’s dad had passed away and left her the home in which she had grown up. That home and the Rocky Mountain West were magnets drawing us back.

Though there was no job to force a retirement decision, there were other factors pointing me to the NASA exit sign. NASA management was still an issue. After Abbey’s departure, Don Puddy had been assigned to fill the FCOD position, an announcement that had been greeted in the astronaut office with stunned silence. Like Abbey, Don had gotten his start at NASA as an MCC controller in the Apollo program and ultimately served as a flight director forApollo 16. He also served as a flight director for all three Skylab missions and the Apollo-Soyuz mission, and he was the reentry flight director for STS-1. Don was an exceptionally talented engineer and manager. But he wasn’t a pilot. No matter how disliked Abbey may have been, we had all appreciated his four thousand hours of cockpit time. He had a personal appreciation of the issues of high-performance flight. We worried Puddy’s lack of flying experience would seriously hobble him in his ability to handle astronaut concerns about shuttle nose-wheel steering, brakes, runway barriers, drag chutes, auto-land, and the many other pilot-specific issues surrounding shuttle operations. If there was ever a position that needed to be filled by an astronaut, it was chief of flight crew operations. Don Puddy’s appointment made us suspicious that NASA’s senior leadership still didn’t want to deal directly with astronauts. Dick Covey told us a story that supported those suspicions. He had been in a meeting with Aaron Cohen, the JSC director, in which Cohen had polled his senior staff on whether or not the FCOD position should be filled by an astronaut, and the unanimous answer had been yes. The fact that an astronaut had not been assigned was proof to us that HQ had overruled Cohen. Our discontent with Puddy’s assignment was so widely known that a week after the announcement, Aaron Cohen took the unprecedented step of coming to the astronaut office to curtly tell us the decision had been entirely his, without any HQ input. Nobody believed it. He then went on to list Puddy’s attributes as a great manager, something that nobody was questioning. Puddy was exceptional. He just wasn’t the best man for the job. An astronaut was.

I was tired of the us versus them.Can’t we all just get along? The frustrations were a constant topic at the coffeepot and over ’38 intercoms. When a news article appeared on the B-board about NASA Administrator James Fletcher’s planned departure at the end of President Reagan’s second term, an astronaut graffitied it with the commentTwo years too late.