Riding Rockets

I have been too long removed from NASA to make any firsthand comment on those cultural issues or the leadership failures they suggest. Nor can I predict whether the agency will be able to fix itself…though I see reason for hope. The shuttle team’s meticulous response to the heat-shield damage sustained byDiscovery on the first post-Columbiashuttle mission (STS-114) and the agency’s intention to keep the shuttle grounded until the maddeningly persistent ET foam-shedding problem is fixed suggests NASA has made safety its top priority. The question is, “Can this reinvigorated safety consciousness persist through the remaining life of the space shuttle program?” It didn’t last afterChallenger, asColumbia ’s loss attests. Perhaps new NASA administrator, Dr. Michael Griffin, is a leader who can keep the agency focused on safety. I pray so. There have been enough families devastated in this business, not to mention the disastrous impact on America’s manned space program that another shuttle loss would precipitate.

In Senate testimony, Dr. Griffin has said he intends to retire the shuttle by 2010, arguing, “The shuttle is an inherently flawed system.” He’s right. It is an outrageously expensive vehicle and lacks a viable crew escape system. A well-led and adequately funded team might still have been able to safely operate even this “flawed system,” but the old NASA lacked both leadership and money.

Griffin continued, “We all know that human perfection is unattainable. Sooner or later there will be another shuttle accident. I want to retire it before that can occur.” His plan is to fly the shuttle a maximum of nineteen times—eighteen for ISS support and one for Hubble Space Telescope repair. My sympathies go out to the most junior astronauts who have been warned by NASA that they may never earn their gold pin on the shuttle because of the limited number of missions remaining. They are living what had been my greatest fear…that I would remain an astronaut in name only.

In all likelihood the craft that will replace the shuttle will be a capsule launched atop some type of booster rocket, possibly a reuseable shuttle SRB augmented with a liquid-fueled upper stage. It’s back to the future. The capsule will probably accommodate a four-person crew and be more sophisticated than those of the Apollo program, but with the same type of tractor escape rocket design to pull astronauts to safety in the event of a booster failure. Future astronauts will return to Earth under parachutes.

If all goes according to Griffin’s plan, on a day in late 2010, a reentering space shuttle will sonic-boom KSC for the last time. For the last time a pilot will take the stick of a winged spaceship and guide it to a runway landing. For the last time we will hear the call, “Houston, wheel stop.” The space shuttle will be history, retired at age thirty. I suspect every TFNG will be watching…and remembering. I certainly will.

Political correctness finally neutered the astronaut corps…or, perhaps, males from Planet AD have gone extinct. Several veteran NASA secretaries confided in me that contemporary astronaut parties are “boring.” I can believe it. When an astronaut applicant recently called me for insight into the interview process, I was shocked to hear her say that a resident astronaut had already warned her, “Drinking alcohol is frowned upon.” (No telling what the corps would say about imbibing in helium.) While I have never been one to believe alcohol is necessary to have fun, the comment hints that there is anew astronaut on the block, as good with a stick and throttle as any before but less flamboyant and more mainstream than the TFNGs. It doesn’t surprise me. The current civilian astronauts were born into an America that is politically correct in the extreme and the pilots now come from a military that is more sober and religious. So, besides the males from Planet AD, maybe the wild and wooly Right Stuff astronaut—that astronaut who lives life at the edge of the envelope, be it at happy hour or in a cockpit—has also gone the way of the dodo.

The last TFNG reunion occurred in 1998, our twentieth anniversary. Most of the men and all of the surviving women were present. The women seemed least changed, though I’m sure makeup and Clairol had a lot to do with that. The men, me included, were showing our age with expanding waistlines, receding hairlines, and liver-spotted foreheads. A few men sported new wives, though none of those seemed to be of the “trophy” variety. They were mature and pleasant. The rest of the wives were aging gracefully but their days of giving us men a “six nipples under glass” show were, sadly, gone.