Riding Rockets

Our days in Florida with the families were pleasant. Unlike some spouses who had earned reputations for treating the family escorts as personal butlers, the STS-30 wives were easy to work with. Because the mission CDR, Dave Walker, and one of the MSes, Mary Cleave, were single, there were only three spouses in our care: Kirby Thagard, Mary Jo Grabe, and Dee Lee. They adopted Dave and me into their extended families and we were guests at their numerous parties and other functions.

The crew was also a pleasure to work with. Mary Cleave was great fun. Now forty-two years old, she had a name tag on her flight suit reading,Mary Cleave—PMS Princess. She was another woman who wore the feminist mantle very lightly. When NASA HQ received a complaint from the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus about photos of Mary preparing a shuttle meal during her first flight (while the men were photographed doing technical work), Mary had laughed it off, saying, “I do shuttle windows and toilets, too.” When the STS-30 mission slipped six days and the crew grew bored with TV, she requested a list of movies from a Cocoa Beach video-rental business and asked an astronaut to pick up her selections. As gags for the men on the crew, her choices includedHollywood Chain Saw Hookers andAll Star Topless Arm Wrestling.

On the morning of STS-30’s second launch attempt, May 4, 1989, Dave and I met with astronauts Bryan O’Connor and Greg Harbaugh. Bryan and Greg were at KSC supporting the mission and would also be on the LCC roof during the launch and available to help with the families ifAtlantis was lost. Over breakfast the four of us reviewed NASA’s contingency procedures: who would stand next to which family on the LCC roof, where the families would be temporarily gathered in the event of disaster, who would drive them to the KSC landing strip for their plane rides back to Houston. The wives had already been told to have their bags packed and ready to go before they were picked up for the trip to the LCC. This arrangement ensured they would not have to return to their condos and into a press feeding frenzy if disaster struck. A NASA official could retrieve the packed bags and bring them to the families at the KSC landing strip. But the procedure also meant the wives would have to unpack if the launch was scrubbed, and many wives had gone through the pack/unpack cycle multiple times for that reason. It was a pain but everybody understood the need.

Our breakfast table talk was devoid of emotion. Though we were planning our response to the death of friends and the widowing of their wives, our conversation was clinical and detached. We could have been talking about the logistics of a fishing trip. A review of the family escort procedures was just one more thing among thousands that had to be done as part of a shuttle launch. As I sipped my coffee, I thought of Donna’s pre–STS-41D observation. It is, indeed, a strange business that plans so thoroughly for helping a woman into widowhood.

AsAtlantis came out of the T-9 minute hold, Dave and I escorted the families from an LCC office to the roof. In the hallway we passed drawings done by the children of astronauts from prior missions. To keep the youngest kids of the families entertained during the interminable wait of a countdown, the LCC team provided poster board on which the children were encouraged to draw. After each mission that poster board was framed and hung in the hallway. The drawings served as another “widows and orphans” message for the team, a reminder of what was at stake.

On the walk to the roof the wives were talkative and it would have been easy to believe they were relaxed, but a glance into their eyes revealed otherwise. They were too large and darted too quickly. I had no doubt that the STS-41D and STS-27 escorts had seen the same look in Donna’s eyes.

Steel folding chairs were set out on the roof but everybody was too nervous to sit. Portable speakers had also been deployed so the countdown could be monitored. Behind us, the 500-foot-high Vertical Assembly Building rose like a white cliff. In front of us was the route used by the 8-million-pound tracked crawlers to carry the stacked shuttles to their launch sites. The gravel road stretched eastward, its tan color bisecting the otherwise uniform green of the Florida lowlands. Three miles away the soaring lightning rod of Pad 39B, designed to protect space shuttles from lightning strikes, provided a sight line toAtlantis.