Riding Rockets

We almost had to bury Hoot Gibson in 1990 when he was involved in a midair collision while racing his home-built plane. The other pilot died but Hoot was able to land his severely damaged machine and walk away. If ever there has been a pilot who has worn out a squadron of guardian angels, that would be Hoot. He and Rhea Seddon now live in Tennessee with their three children. Hoot flies for Southwest Airlines and Rhea is the assistant chief medical officer at Vanderbilt Medical Group at that Nashville university.

In my retirement I have noted the deaths of other astronauts whose life paths intersected mine. Sonny Carter’s death was particularly shocking. Sonny had been one of the STS-27 family escorts and Donna had relied on his calming presence during her LCC waits for that mission. He was never without a smile and a positive word. On April 5, 1991, while on the way to give a NASA speech, he died in the crash of a commercial airliner. The manner of his death was a gross violation of the natural order—it was expected that an astronaut dying in a plane would do so as a crewmember, not as a passenger. Sonny was twice cheated…in death at age forty-three and while belted into a passenger’s seat.

Bob Overmyer died in his retirement while flight-testing a small plane. I was one of the CAPCOMs for his STS-51B flight. During that mission, a communication glitch allowed the crew’s private Spacelab intercom to be momentarily broadcast to the world. It included a panicked call from Bob to his lab scientists: “There’s monkey feces floating free in the cockpit!” I later teased him that he was probably the first marine in the history of the corps to ever use the wordfeces. He laughed at that. Bob was dead at age fifty-nine.

Astronaut-scientist Karl Henize, whom I had worked with on my very first astronaut support job—the dreaded Spacelab—died in his retirement at age sixty-six of respiratory failure while attempting to climb Mount Everest. He is buried on the side of that mountain at 22,000-foot elevation.

Besides these astronaut deaths, I noted other passings. Don Puddy, who replaced George Abbey as chief of FCOD and who approved me for my STS-36 mission, died of cancer in 2004 at age sixty-seven. Jon and Brenda McBride’s son, Richard, died in a plane crash while undergoing navy flight training. Brewster and Kathy Shaw suffered a horrific loss, too. One of their college-age sons was murdered in a random carjacking. If it is possible for a soul to audibly scream, mine did at that news. No death, not even the ones sustained in theChallenger andColumbia tragedies, affected me as much. Every parent understands.

Gene Ross, the ever-present and ever-amicable owner of the Outpost Tavern, died in 1995. He didn’t live to see his bar immortalized on the silver screen. Disney would use it as a backdrop for a scene in the 1997 movieRocketMan and a portion of the movieSpace Cowboys would be filmed inside the cluttered, smoky cave.

Under its new management, the Outpost has seen a few minor changes. The shell-covered parking lot has been leveled. Gone are its bunker-buster craters. And a small red neon light proclaiming “The Outpost Tavern” now decorates a side of the building. But for that, the structure still appears abandoned and ready for demolition. The only improvement to the interior has been the addition of modern bathrooms. The old toilets—one-hole closets with tilting floors and rusted porcelain fixtures—had been intimidating enough to prompt Donna to once comment, “I would rather pee in the outside bushes than sit on an Outpost toilet seat.” The interior of the bar remains a time capsule from the halcyon days of the TFNGs: Photos and posters of smiling astronauts and mission crews still cover the walls and ceiling. My NASA genesis photo is still there. In a display of Texas pride, Gene Ross put up the photos of all the Texas-born astronauts in the entryway next to the bikini-girl-silhouette saloon doors. Epochs of cigarette smoke and grease have put a yellow film over those photos but I’m still visible as the thin, dark-haired, thirty-two-year-old astronaut candidate I was in 1978. Whenever a trip takes me to Houston, I always make it a point to visit the Outpost. I will sit at the bar, order a beer, and listen to the TFNG ghosts whisper the stories of joy and heartbreak that have been written there.

John Young retired from NASA on December 31, 2004, after a forty-two-year career that included six space missions covering the Gemini, Apollo, and shuttle programs. He twice flew to the moon, landing on it onApollo 16. In a NASA press release John was praised as an “astronaut without equal.” You will never hear me say otherwise.