Riding Rockets

After a service at St. Paul’s Catholic Church, a group of us rendezvoused at the Outpost to continue Dave’s wake. Kathy Thornton, a fellow crewmember on what would have been Dave’s second shuttle mission, STS-33, brought one of the flower wreaths from the church and dropped it on the bar. With tears wetting her cheeks she sipped beer and remembered Dave with stories of their mission training. As I watched her, I wondered how many more tears would be shed for dead astronauts in this smoky dump of a bar. The sky was our Siren and no matter how we answered her call, in a plane or a rocket ship, she was always ready to kill us.

Though my assignment to STS-36 had buried all thoughts of immediate retirement, I continued to debate the course of my life after the mission was complete. Time and again I would resolve to tell Mike Coats (now the acting chief while Brandenstein was in mission training) that I would be resigning after STS-36, only to walk into something that would shatter that resolve. On one occasion it was an astronaut party at a local bar. Word spread through the crowd that the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), a large satellite launched beforeChallenger —which was to be retrieved and returned to Earth on STS-32—was seconds from being visible in the overhead twilight. We made a frantic dash for the doors. The bouncers and some redneck patrons interpreted this as the sign of a big fight moving into the parking lot. Imagine their surprise when they rushed outside to find thirty astronauts standing with their necks craned and fingers pointing at a bright point of light sailing overhead. I looked to my left at Bonnie Dunbar. In a month she would be the mission specialist atColumbia’s robot arm controls, grabbing LDEF from space.God, what an incredible business, I thought.How can I ever walk away from it?

The same question arose at another social function, this one for a new group of astronaut interviewees. In their presence, I traveled through a time portal. A dozen years earlier I had been one of these eager young men, my eyes bright with the hope that I would miraculously make the cut, that I would be named an astronaut. They came to me, as I had gone to the vets in 1977, to ask what it was like to ride a rocket, what did the Earth look like from two hundred miles altitude? I could see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. They had been imprinted with a passion for spaceflight, just as I had been. How could I ever quiet that passion? How could I ever walk away from NASA?

I began the journey on December 18, 1989. After most astronauts had left for the day, I walked into Mike Coats’s office and told him I was going to retire from NASA and the air force after STS-36. It was the most difficult decision of my life. There wasn’t a eureka moment that had finally pushed me into it. Rather, it was a culmination of twelve years of “moments.” Donna’s telephone breakdown still weighed on me. My tour on the LCC roof with the STS-30 wives gave me a much better sense of what my launches were doing to her. And it wasn’t just Donna’s fear. My own fear had become a wearisome burden. How many times could I make the trip and survive?

The fear, the unknowns of the business, my doubts about NASA’s management…all of it had conspired to propel me down the hall to Mike. But, even as I stood in front of him, I knew my decision was perilously balanced. I was like the circus acrobat tottering in a chair on top of a pole on top of a ball. The weight of a dust mote falling on my shoulder would be enough to send me toppling. If Mike had questioned my decision in the slightest manner—had he just said, “Are you sure?”—I suspect I would have immediately retracted my statement and walked away. But he didn’t. As he continually flipped his pen, he confided to me that he had already made the same decision. He had told Puddy he would be leaving after his next flight. He probably heard me exhale. His decision endorsed my own. He didn’t ask for an explanation, but I provided one. When I admitted that fear had a lot to do with it, he replied that it had been a huge factor for him, too—his own fear as well as Diane’s. “That LCC roof wait is a torture.”There should be a monument to astronaut wives, I thought.It should feature the LCC with the countdown clock at T-9 minutes.