Riding Rockets

During this training, trajectory engineers in Houston asked us to examine other dry lakebeds in southern New Mexico and Texas as potential emergency landing sites forColumbia. They wanted to cover every contingency, including “low energy” trajectory errors that might prevent the shuttle from reaching the White Sands runway or “high energy” errors that would result in the shuttle overflying White Sands completely. Their fears were well founded. WhenColumbia came to Earth, it would do so as a powerless glider. It had no engines the pilots could use to fly around and search for a runway. If there wasn’t a suitable landing site within reach, Young and Crippen would have to eject andColumbia would crash.

Day after day, Red Flash and I would take off from El Paso and search the Chihuahuan desert for twelve thousand feet of straight, flat, firm earth. And day after day, I would return to El Paso with my butt cheeks fatigued from an hour of ass-clinching fear. It wasn’t that Dave was a bad pilot. Rather he was too cocky, the type of pilot who thinks he’s bulletproof even when he’s sober. (All fighter pilots think they’re bulletproof when they’re intoxicated.) He was the pilot that backseaters had in mind when they had coined this joke:

Question: “What are the last words a dead backseater ever hears from his pilot?”

Answer: “Watch this.”

I was living that grim joke in Dave’s backseat. When we spied a likely playa from altitude, Dave would say, “Watch this,” and dive for the sand. To my left or right I would see our plane’s shadow paralleling us at 300 knots. It would porpoise over hill and dale, quickly drawing closer and closer as Dave dropped lower and lower, until it finally disappeared underneath us. If our jet had had the curb-feelers of a ’59 Edsel, I would have heard them scratching a warning into the desert a foot underneath us. Our engine exhaust had to be frying lizards, snakes, prairie dogs, and other ground-hugging fauna. And while I was white with fear, Dave was jotting observations about the condition of the terrain on his knee board.

In the early morning hours of April 12, 1981, Dave and I and the rest of the chase team were in the El Paso airport flight operations office, gathered around a TV watching the final moments ofColumbia ’s countdown. The previous night I had slept lightly and each time I awoke I would pray for Young and Crippen. I had a strong sense of dread about the mission. WhenColumbia ’s hold-down bolts blew, her crew would be irrevocably committed to a flight that was more experimental than any manned flight in history. Forget Alan Shepard, John Glenn, or Neil Armstrong as astronauts who had taken unequaled gambles. Their Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn rockets had all been proven before they had ever climbed on board. Young and Crippen would be making history by riding a rocket on its very first launch. They weren’t doing so reluctantly. The astronaut office had no problems with this decision, even though it would have been relatively easy to modify the vehicle to fly a first test mission unmanned. (In 1988 the Russians successfully flew,unmanned, the first and only mission of their space shuttle. It made two orbits of the Earth then flew under autopilot control to a perfect touchdown.) While the manned/unmanned debate overColumbia ’s maiden flight had occurred before TFNGs had arrived at NASA, I could easily guess how long astronauts had discussed the topic before concluding a manned flight was the way to go…about five seconds. Astronauts will always be ready to jump into a cockpit. Any cockpit. Any time. There wasn’t a single TFNG who wouldn’t have volunteered to be ballast aboardColumbia.