Riding Rockets

NASA sold Congress on the premise the space shuttle would make flying into space cheap and they had good reason to make such a claim. The most expensive pieces of the system, the boosters and manned orbiter, were reusable. On paper the shuttle looked very good to congressional bean counters. NASA convinced Congress to designate the space shuttle as the national Space Transportation System (STS). The legislation that followed virtually guaranteed that every satellite the country manufactured would be launched into space on the shuttle: every science satellite, every military satellite, and every communication satellite. The expendable rockets that NASA, the Department of Defense (DOD), and the telecommunications industry had been using to launch these satellites—the Deltas, Atlases, and Titans—were headed the way of the dinosaur. They would never be able to compete with the shuttle on a cost basis. NASA would be space’s United Parcel Service.

But this meant that, of all the planned shuttle missions, only a handful of science laboratory missions and satellite repair missions would actually require humans. The majority of missions would be to carry satellites into orbit, something unmanned rockets had been doing just fine for decades. Succinctly put, NASA’s new “launch everything” mission would unnecessarily expose astronauts to death to do the job of unmanned expendable rockets.

As we TFNGs were being introduced, NASA had to have been feeling good. They had a monopoly on the U.S. satellite launch market. They also intended to gain a significant share of the foreign satellite launch market. The four shuttles were going to be cash cows for the agency. But the business model depended on the rapid turnaround of the orbiters. Just as a terrestrial trucking company can’t be making money with vehicles in maintenance, the shuttles wouldn’t be profitable sitting in their hangars. The shuttle fleet had to fly and fly often. NASA intended to rapidly expand the STS flight rate to twenty-plus missions per year. And, even in the wake of post-Apollo cutbacks, rosy predictions said they had the manpower to do it.

The shift from the Apollo program to the shuttle program represented a sea-change for NASA.Everything was different. The agency’s new mission was largely to haul freight. The vehicle doing the trucking would be reusable, something NASA had no prior experience with. The flight rate would require the NASA team to plan dozens of missions simultaneously: building and validating software, training crews, checking out vehicles and payloads. And NASA would have to do this with far less manpower and fewer resources than had been available during Apollo.

I doubt any of the TFNGs standing on that stage fully comprehended the dangers the space shuttle and NASA’s new mission would include. But it wouldn’t have mattered if we had known. If Dr. Kraft had explained exactly what we had just signed up to do—to be some of the first humans to ride uncontrollable solid-fueled rocket boosters, and to do so without the protection of an in-flight escape system, to launch satellites that didn’t really require a manned rocket, on a launch schedule that would stretch manpower and resources to their limits—it wouldn’t have diminished our enthusiasm one iota. For many of us, our life’s quest had been to hear our names read into history as astronauts. We wanted to fly into space. The sooner and the more often (and who gave a shit what was in the cargo bay), the better.

Chapter 7

Arrested Development

On my first official day as an astronaut candidate I faced two things I had never faced before: picking out clothes to wear for work and working with women. In my thirty-two years of life, beginning with diapers, there had always been asystem to dress me. I had gone to Catholic schools for twelve years and worn the uniforms of that system. In four years at West Point I never had a piece of civilian clothing in my closet. The air force also told me what to wear. Not once on a school or work morning had I ever stood in front of my closet and pondered what I should wear that day. As a result, I was a fashion illiterate. And I wasn’t alone. I had already seen a handful of the veteran astronauts wearing plaid pants. Even I, completely clueless on the subject of style, sensed this might be a little too retro. When my children saw one of the plaid-panted victims, they hid their faces and giggled. To this day, whenever my adult children see a golfer wearing plaid, they’ll comment, “Hey, Dad, check it out…an astronaut.” A military astronaut might show up for a party dressed in a leisure suit or Sansabelt slacks and, most telling, no other military astronaut present would know there was anything even slightly amiss.