Riding Rockets

As time passed it became more evident we were in no immediate danger. We waited for the closeout crew to open the hatch. My thoughts turned as dark as space. My worst nightmare had been realized. I was still an astronaut in name only. For how long? It was obvious there would be no launch attempt any time soon. In my quiet hell I catastrophized. I built a scenario in which the engine problem was severe. The vehicle would be grounded for many months, maybe years, while the engines were redesigned and tested. Launch schedules would change. Our crew would be pushed backward in line, maybe even disbanded. I had gotten to within three seconds of a lifelong dream only to have it snatched away. For how long? Weeks? Months? Forever?

We exited the vehicle into the residual rain of the fire suppression system. It had soaked the gantry and now water was dripping from every platform, pipe, and cross brace. We were quickly drenched. Judy’s hair took a big hit. She looked like a sodden cat.

In the astro-van we sat in our soaked flight suits shivering from the chill of the air-conditioning. That system seemed to have only two positions, cold and freakin’ cold. Our physical misery was a perfect fit to the cloud of depression enveloping us. I wasn’t the only one doing mental gymnastics and wondering how badly screwed we were.

The wives and kids were waiting for us at the crew quarters and there were a lot of tearful hugs. “Dad, we thought you had blown up!” Pat was quick to fill me in on the momentary horror they had lived on the LCC roof.

At a press conference we all lied about the tension in the cockpit following the abort and fire. Hank took most of the questions and did the Right Stuff routine of, “Aaawh shucks, ma’am. T’weren’t nothing.” He explained how we train for these things, how confident we had been in the LCC’s reactions to the abort, how we had never doubted our safety. Meanwhile, I was wondering if I had shit in my flight suit.

We were released from our health quarantine to join our families. As expected, there would be no more launch attempts until the engine problem was identified and fixed. The shuttle program had just come to a screeching stop for an indefinite period.

Donna, the kids, and I returned to their condo to a boisterous party. While my aunts and uncles and cousins were bummed out the launch had been aborted, they were still having a great time. The sun was shining. The booze was flowing. It was a Florida family reunion. They were all on vacation and having a blast. And now my abort had made the reunion complete. If I had launched, the family would never have seen me. So they overwhelmed me with questions and requests for photos and autographs. Their enthusiasm was understandable. Most of them had not seen me since I had been selected as an astronaut.

“Mike, let me get a photo of you standing next to your little cousins.”

“Mike, why don’t you sit here with Grandma and tell her what it’s like to be an astronaut.”

“Mike, can I get twenty autographed photos for my neighbors back home?”

I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. After a couple hours I finally escaped to the beach and collapsed. I had been so close, three freakin’ seconds, and now I might be at the back of a long, long line. I couldn’t get that dismal thought out of my head. I closed my eyes and prayed for blissful unconsciousness. It was a prayer immediately answered. The exhaustion of the past few days had finally caught up with me and I fell into a deep sleep. Minutes later I was awakened by a gentle kick in my side. I squinted upward to see my eighty-seven-year-old grandmother. “Mike, get inside. Bobby wants to take some more pictures. You’ll get sunburned out here.”

God, take me.My new prayer was that a meteor would hit and put me out of my misery.

Chapter 20

MECO

A few days later our crew was back in Houston and facing the grim possibility our mission was going to be canceled. Payloads were stacking up. Every day a communication satellite wasn’t in space meant the loss of millions of dollars of revenue to its operators. NASA HQ searched for a way to minimize the impact ofDiscovery ’s delay to their downstream customers. They focused on combining the payloads of two missions and deleting one from the schedule. Everyone in the astronaut office knew a deleted mission meant a deleted crew.

It was a miserable two weeks as HQ debated the best adjustment to the flight manifest. Every imaginable rumor twittered up and down the astronaut grapevine. Who was going to get screwed? There was a general feeling among the other mission-assigned crews that we had had our chance. It was just our tough luckDiscovery had misfired. It should be our crew who suffered the consequences. I couldn’t blame them. I would have felt the same way in their shoes.