Riding Rockets

The astronaut offices were on the top (third) floor of Building 4. They ringed the outer perimeter of that floor, leaving the interior offices for the coffee bar, bathrooms, mail room, photo archives, conference rooms, and other administrative functions. Like the exterior of the buildings, the offices had a low-bid, cookie-cutter sameness about them. Dilbert would have been right at home. The walls were movable steel panels. Magnetic picture hangers were needed for anySports Illustrated swimsuit calendars, of which there were a few. The office décor was straight out ofDesigning Bureaucrat : faux-wood desks and credenzas, cheap swivel chairs, battleship-gray steel filing cabinets, fluorescent lights. Clearly NASA was spending its money on rockets, not astronaut office frills. On the hallway walls hung magnetic nameplates, decorative space photos, and a bulletin board. The latter was intended to disseminate administrative information, but also served as a battlefield for gender wars. In one instance an article on bone loss in weightlessness appeared. The MD author concluded that female astronauts would be more vulnerable to such loss as they aged. One of the women had circled that point and handwritten a note,This is why women should be first in line to fly the shuttle . A resident of Planet AD had answered,This is why NASA should hire younger women .

On another occasion, someone had pinned up a magazine article on reproduction in zero-G. The author had hypothesized that it would require a threesome to copulate due to the repelling effect of Newton’s law, which dictated the first “action” would produce an equal and opposite “reaction.” One wit had written,No! This is why God gave us arms and legs . Another had tacked up a sign-up list next to the article requesting volunteers to “participate in 1-G simulations.” Someone, almost certainly one of the women, had scrawled across it,Grow up . I would come to love the B-board wit. It was frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

Pairs of TFNGs shared offices. I had no clue how the pairings were made, or who made them, or what they might imply for future flight assignments. My roommate was Mike Coats, an Annapolis graduate and navy pilot noted (by my teenage daughter) for looking like the Superman character played by Christopher Reeve. Mike quickly acquired the handle Superman. He was also legendary for his ability to continuously flip a pen (and always catch it) while talking or studying or standing at the urinal or just about doing anything. He never watched the pen and he never missed. Up and down the spinning pen would fly, always landing precisely in his fingers, to be immediately flipped upward again. I wondered how that had played with the psychiatrists. I couldn’t imagine Mike had stopped his flipping while talking to those doctors. He would have exploded.

The Monday morning all-hands meeting was our introduction to the essence of the astronaut business. Held in the main conference room of the astronaut office and chaired by Chief of Astronauts John Young, these weekly meetings were a venue to air important issues. I entered the room with the same trepidation a student feels on the first day of class. Where to sit was the first issue I had to address.

A large table dominated the room. On it sat some conference phones and an overhead projector. A screen hung on the wall at the front of the room. Chairs ringed the table, but I gave no thought to taking one. This was the sacred table of Apollo. Alan Shepard and Jim Lovell and Neil Armstrong had sat here. At the moment moonwalker John Young was sitting at its head. There was no way one-day-old Ascan Mike Mullane was going to sit at that table. Perhaps the chairs were assigned to the veteran astronauts and I would be embarrassingly evicted like a Cheers’ patron being asked to move from Norm’s bar stool. I looked elsewhere. Several rows of chairs had been placed at the back of the room and I aimed for these cheap seats. Most of my fellow TFNGs did likewise. Most, but not all. Rick Hauck, the senior ranking TFNG pilot and our class leader, took a seat atthe table.You didn’t get more alpha male than this, I thought. Rick was already lifting a leg to mark his territory. We hadn’t been on the job for fifteen minutes and the competition was already fierce. He was making a statement: I’m going to be the first TFNG in space. Every one of us glared at him and wondered if we shouldn’t have shown some balls (or ovaries) and parked our asses at that moon-dusted table.