Riding Rockets

Judy and I passed the black hulks of several alligators on the opposite banks of drainage ditches. I had once seen one of these creatures explode out of the water in a chase after an armadillo. Why they never chased jogging astronauts was a mystery to me. Even when we teased them, they did not react. I once watched Fred Gregory toss shells at a twelve-footer hoping to see it stir. As the missiles ricocheted from its scales, I warned Fred, “Those things can run twenty miles per hour when they’re riled and that’s a lot faster than you.” But Fred continued his reptile target practice while answering, “Yeah…but that’s on firm ground. If they’re chasing me, they’ll be slipping and sliding through shit and they can’t run nearly as fast.”

Judy and I discussed an issue we had heard about just before leaving the crew quarters. An engineer had found a potential flaw that could result in the failure of the burned-out SRBs to separate from the gas tank. Such a scenario would be fatal. The shuttle would never make it to orbit or achieve a successful abort dragging along nearly 300,000 pounds of useless steel. The good news was it would take several simultaneous failures in the circuitry for the SRB separation failure to occur. When the launch team asked Hank whether he was comfortable flying the mission with this failure mode in place, his answer was yes. That didn’t surprise me. They might as well have asked a three-year-old if he wanted to eat his candy now or wait until tomorrow. If the engineers said, “We forgot to install the center engine. Do you still want to launch?” Hank probably would have said, “No problem. We’ll just burn the two we have.” Nothing was going to get in our way.

Judy and I continued into the KSC wilderness. The only sound was the buzz of cicadas. The dusk was deepening and an occasional firefly flickered over the ditches. Judy voiced concern that we might trip over an alligator. I told her the Fred Gregory story and she laughed. But in a rare moment of prudence, we decided to turn back.

We gradually slowed into a cool-down walk. I had come a long way…and I don’t mean during the run. There was a fox of a woman at my side and I could actually think of her as a friend and equal. Those six years ago when we were standing together on the stage being introduced to the JSC workforce, I saw Judy with three strikes against her: She was civilian. She was a woman. She was beautiful. At the time I wondered how her beauty had played in her passage through the wickets of life to become an astronaut; wickets that, for the most part, had been male tended. Had she been waved through some of those gates because her smile had melted a professor or perhaps her dynamite body had influenced a male astronaut sitting on the selection committee? We males are suspicious of female beauty because we know ourselves too well.

But, over the years, Judy had proven she wasn’t an astronaut because of her sex appeal or because of an abuse of the affirmative action program. She was an astronaut because she was qualified to be one. I had watched her fly formation from the backseats of T-38s and lead instrument approaches in bad weather and do it as well as me (and my backseat fighter and T-38 time had made me a damned fine instrument pilot). I had seen her expertly operate the robot arm. I had watched her rappel off the side of the orbiter mock-up in our emergency training, parasail into the water in our survival training, work 20 feet underwater in a 300-pound spacesuit. In simulation after simulation, she had instantly and correctly reacted to countless emergencies. I think the best testimonial for Judy’s proficiency was the fact it was never a topic of astronaut scuttlebutt. In a strange way, that was the best compliment an astronaut could achieve, not being discussed behind his or her back. And I never heard Judy’s name attached to a “Who let that bozo in the door?” comment. Over a beer or in a jog with a TFNG, I would hear comments about the misadventures of other astronauts. When one TFNG MS was removed from being a robot arm operator, it took about ten milliseconds before the reason was being shared in whispers. He maneuvered the arm like a fifteen-year-old kid learning to use a stick shift. There was locker-room gossip about an MS jeopardizing the deployment of a satellite because of a failure to follow the checklist. One TFNG accidentally engaged the shuttle backup flight system during a prelaunchpad test and caused a delay in the countdown. Judy’s name was never in any of these conversations, the ultimate testimonial to her competency. She wasn’t the smartest or quickest TFNG—Steve Hawley held that position. Judy was like me. We weren’t stars. But we were solid, dependable. We could be counted on to get the job done.