Riding Rockets

Donna’s friend nearly had a seizure. “Who’s Jane Pauley!? You don’t know? She’s the NBCToday show newswoman.”

I honestly didn’t know. I didn’t watch much TV. I certainly didn’t watch those chatty morning shows. If she wasn’t inAviation Week & Space Technology magazine, I wouldn’t know her.

With this new bit of knowledge, it slowly dawned on me why I had been stonewalled at Sally’s table. No doubt Ms. Pauley was talking to her about her recent flight selection. I could just imagine how my cookie recipe comment must have played with those two pioneering females. I made Hugh Hefner look like a beacon of enlightenment. I guess it’s no surprise I was never invited to theToday show.

On October 5, 1982, three more TFNGs were named to a flight, STS-10 (later to be designated STS-41B).^*I wasn’t among them.

I put on another happy face and congratulated the winners. A few weeks later Norm Thagard became the eleventh TFNG to draw an assignment when he was retroactively assigned to STS-7. NASA was growing concerned about the incidence of space sickness and wanted Thagard, a physician, to run some experiments on what was being officially labeled Space Adaptation Syndrome (SAS). SAS had impacted the recently landed STS-5 mission in a very big way. One of the two spacewalkers on that flight had been so stricken with vomiting the crew had asked MCC for permission to delay their EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity, i.e., a spacewalk) to give him time to recover. Vomiting inside a spacesuit could kill an astronaut. The emesis could smear the inside of the helmet visor and blind the spacewalker, making it impossible to respond to a suit emergency. Also, because there was no way to remove the fluid, the astronaut could inhale it and choke to death or it could clog the oxygen circulation system and suffocate the victim. The STS-5 space-walk, which was to have been the first from a shuttle, had just been a demonstration exercise (and was ultimately canceled for a suit malfunction), but in future missions spacewalks would be essential for mission success. Norm Thagard would be the first of many physicians sent into space to determine the cause of SAS. He, like all who would follow, would have their studies seriously hampered by astronaut paranoia. Spacewalking was the most sought-after prize for MSes. It filled a powerful need to be in ultimate control. The pilots had their shuttle landings to fulfill them. Their hands and eyes delivered a 200,000-pound orbiter to a runway. It was the same with a rendezvous mission. A pilot’s personal skill brought two 17,300-mile-per-hour objects together 200 miles above the earth. It was heroic work. On the other hand, much MS work was mundane—throwing a switch to release a satellite, drawing blood, changing a data tape on some scientist’s experiment. Spacewalks and, to a somewhat lesser degree, robot arm operations were the exception in MS jobs. Like a pilot feeling the kiss of the runway on the space shuttle wheels, MSes could enjoy a powerful sense of being in control as they assembled structures or repaired satellites or performed other hands-on spacewalking tasks.

So physicians studying SAS, like Thagard, were hamstrung. Astronauts didn’t want to admit to an episode of vomiting out of fear that it would eliminate them from consideration for future spacewalk missions. As a result many astronauts were less than truthful about their symptoms. Some blatantly lied. We would hear stories of crewmembers who were seriously sick, yet the data would never appear on the flight surgeon’s bar charts. SAS was considered an individual health issue and was therefore privileged information between the astronaut and flight surgeon. If an astronaut didn’t tell the flight surgeons the truth, the doctors were not going to hear it from anybody else.

To be SAS-free was considered so important, many astronauts attempted inoculations. When it was first assumed the problem was related to Earth-based motion sickness (later disproved), astronauts would perform stomach-churning acrobatics in T-38 jets in the days prior to a launch. I was flying in Story Musgrave’s backseat when he decided to prep his body for an upcoming mission. He asked ATC for a block of altitude and then went into a series of spiraling rolls and violent maneuvers that alternately had me slammed into my seat at 4-Gs and lifted from it in negative Gs. My head snapped back and forth like a palm tree in a hurricane. Within a minute I was ready to blow my last meal (and perhaps a few before that) and had to plead with him to stop.