Riding Rockets

Another equally ineffective attempt at SAS inoculation was to sleep on an incline with your head lower than your feet. This became popular when the flight surgeons hypothesized that the fluid shift of weightlessness might be causing the inner ear to be disturbed, inducing vomiting. All astronauts experience an uncomfortable eye-popping fullness in the head during weightlessness because of an equalization of body fluid. By sleeping in a bed with bricks under the foot posts to tilt the head down, it was thought the resulting fluid shift to the upper body would somehow prepare it for weightlessness and eliminate SAS. It didn’t. Some of those practicing head-down sleep still got sick in space, suggesting that those head-downers who didn’t vomit had probably been immune anyway. To this day doctors are baffled by the cause of SAS and it continues to affect nearly 50 percent of astronauts.

As the calendar turned to 1983, my fifth year as a TFNG, I was suffering from something far worse than SAS—the depression of being an unassigned astronaut. That status had me doubting everything about myself—my abilities, my personality, even my astronaut friends.Were they on Abbey’s shit list and, by association, was I too? I wondered if others had already been told of a mission assignment and were keeping it secret until the press release. Might an office mate already be assigned? Every few days a new rumor on flight assignments would sweep the office like a pandemic flu. Some of this scuttlebutt would have my name assigned to a mission. Before the press release for STS-10 appeared, one such rumor had me on that flight. But it was a lie. We all searched for any indication that another round of flight assignments was in the offing. We watched from our office windows for groups of our peers walking to Building 1, Abbey’s lair. Were they on their way to be told of a mission assignment? One astronaut kept a pair of binoculars on his desk to better observe that traffic (as well as hard-bodied, halter-topped female tourists). Unassigned TFNGs were ready to explode in frustration. At parties I could see the tension had infected our spouses.There is no rank among wives was an old military proverb. Yeah, and the Easter Bunny is an astronaut. Every wife of one of the unassigned, mine included, knew her position had changed. The wives of the assigned were working with the NASA PR people to schedule TV and magazine interviews while the spouses of the unassigned were wiping the baby’s ass. These Queens for a Day would soon be boarding NASA Gulfstream jets to zoom to Florida as VIPs. There was no doubt some marriages were suffering from the new reality of assigned and unassigned TFNGs. Mine certainly was. When Donna commented at a party, “George Abbey couldn’t lead a pack of Boy Scouts” (something I said every night), I pulled her aside and snapped, “Goddammit, don’t bad-mouth Abbey with others around! There’s no telling what gets back to him.” It wasn’t a fluke outburst. My frustration was a loose cannon and Donna was frequently in the line of fire. I was an asshole.

I continued my drab life. I would pull into the Building 4 parking lot by 7:30A.M . so I could fight for a parking space (cringing at the sight of the assigned TFNGs pulling into their reserved parking places), attend some SAIL-related meetings, go to the mail room to sign autographs (wondering why anybody would want mine), go to the gym to exercise, eat lunch in the cafeteria (to catch up on the latest rumors), attend more meetings or study shuttle-training schematics, perhaps take a T-38 flight (if the assigned crews had left any), then go home. On my SAIL days I would pull one of the eight-hour shifts of its 24/7 operation. If I was lucky, I would be called to the SMS for some real shuttle training as a substitute crewmember. When Guy Bluford was absent for an STS-8 simulation I received such a call and eagerly jumped on it.