Riding Rockets

This was the only time Judy ever gave me a glimpse into her past. And, while I’m no Dr. Phil, I sensed she was a deeply wounded and lonely woman. Of course I also considered her vulnerability at this moment. She wasn’t crying, but I had never seen her more emotional. It would have been so easy to reach across and offer a consolation hug. I had a couple beers in me. My inhibitions were as feeble as the starlight. But I didn’t. I didn’t make any physical contact. Not a hand squeeze. Not a pat on the back. Not a hug. Nothing. My resistance to temptation was nothing short of miraculous. Those moments on that sand had been my Garden of Gethsemane. I offered Judy only conciliatory words about how things might change in the future for her and her mom. It was a prophetic comment. Things did change. Twenty-one months later Judy would die a few miles from where we now sat.

I rose from the sand. “We better get back to the crew quarters. Things are going to start early tomorrow.”

Chapter 18

Donna

A month prior to our June 25, 1984, launch date another milestone was passed. It wasn’t noted in any press release but it was significant all the same. At a crew dinner the wives selected two astronauts to be their family escorts. The expanded training hours in the homestretch to launch made all prime crewmembers absentee spouses and parents, so the astronaut office had created the family escort role to take some of the load off the families. They helped spouses deal with the logistics of traveling to KSC and the landing site. They helped with airline, rental car, and condo reservations and, in general, served as 24/7 contacts for spouses seeking help on any mission issue. Some of NASA’s rules on family travel necessitated this escort help. While NASA carried the spouses to launch and landing at government expense aboard the agency’s Gulfstream jets, children were not allowed on those aircraft. Their travel arrangements (and expenses) were the responsibility of the families. So, as they departed for the most stressful week of their lives, spouses had to pass their children to grandparents or other family members serving as travel escorts and deal with the coordination of getting them from the Orlando airport to their condos. The spouses were also required to arrange their own lodging. This could be a big headache if the mission slipped, particularly during the prime Florida tourist season. Some spouses of earlier missions had found themselves begging with condo reservationists not to be evicted. The escorts could be an enormous help.

There were no formal criteria for selection of family escorts. Crew spouses usually threw out a few names to consider and quickly settled on two. Our spouses picked TFNG Dick Covey and Bryan O’Connor (class of 1980) as their escorts. Unspoken in their deliberations was another duty for which the family escorts were being selected: IfDiscovery killed us, they would become casualty assistance officers. I suspected every wife knew this. Even if their husbands were negligent in not telling them, they probably heard from other wives. I had told Donna years earlier. NASA required her and the kids to watch my launches with the family escorts from the roof of the Launch Control Center. It wasn’t the view NASA had in mind: NASA wanted to isolate the families from the press in the event of disaster. In that case the family escorts, turned casualty assistance officers, would drive them to KSC flight operations, where a NASA jet would whisk them back to Houston.

That evening, on the ride back from the party, Donna turned to me and said, “This is a strange business when you have to preselect an escort into widowhood.” She was enduring a lot for my dream.