Riding Rockets

Our various abort windows began to open and close. “Discovery,you’re two-engine TAL.” We had acquired enough altitude and speed to fly across the Atlantic and land in Senegal, Africa, if one engine failed, a maneuver known as a Transatlantic Landing abort (TAL). NASA had positioned an astronaut at the Dakar international airport to help air traffic control personnel if we declared an abort. He also had our passports and visas. I had a vision of standing in the customs line at the Dakar airport in our shuttle flight suits with our helmets in the crook of our arms while a fez-headed, accented bureaucrat asked, “Anything to declare?” It was something I hoped never to experience.

“Discovery,you’re negative return.” The Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort window closed. We were now too far from Florida and headed too fast to the east to be able to return to a landing at KSC. If an engine failed, we were committed to a “straight ahead” abort. That was okay by all of us. Nobody wanted to do a turnaround RTLS abort. It was an unnatural act of physics. If selected, it would pitch the shuttle around in an outside loop to point us toward Florida. But it would take minutes to cancel our several-thousand-miles-per-hour eastward velocity, so we would actually be traveling backward over the Atlantic. Ultimately we would end up as a million-pound helicopter, fifty miles high, with zero forward speed. Then, we would begin the slow acceleration toward our objective, Florida, only two hundred miles away. The experts swore it would work and Mike and Hank had practiced RTLS aborts in the sim about a thousand times, but nobody wanted to be the first to field-test the procedure.

Discoverycontinued a nominal ascent. Passing about thirty miles altitude, it occurred to me I could die without ever having seen the Earth from space. The shuttle’s nose was so high and I was sitting so far aft in the cockpit I couldn’t see anything of the planet. But there was a window above and just slightly behind my head and since the shuttle flies to orbit upside down, that window did provide a view of the Earth. It was a mighty temptation.

I looked furtively at Steve Hawley. His head was making small jerking motions like Data fromStar Trek as he moved his eyes to every display. There wasn’t an electron running inDiscovery ’s body that Hawley’s brain wasn’t also processing. With him at my side, I rationalized, I wouldn’t be missed for a moment of sightseeing. Under the mounting G-forces I craned my neck upward and backward until I thought it would break. The contortion worked. I could see the Earth receding below us. Scattered cumulus clouds had been reduced to points of white. The variations in sea depth were evident in different shades of blue. It wasn’t much of a view and I was condemning myself to one hell of a neck ache to capture it, but it was enough for the moment. If God took me now, at least I would have a story to tell while waiting in line for the down escalator to Bible/feminist/post-doc hell.

We were approaching fifty miles, the magic line that would officially make us astronauts. I had always thought this altitude requirement was bean-counter bullshit. Effectively it was a statement that riding a rocket didn’t really get dangerous until you hit fifty miles. In reality if you didn’t make it to fifty miles on the shuttle, it probably meant the machine had killed you, as was later to be the case with theChallenger crew. Mike Smith was a rookie killed on that mission and by the official definition he didn’t die as an astronaut since he only made it to ten miles altitude. (Note to NASA: When the hold-down bolts blow, you’ve earned your gold.)

Hank gave us a countdown. “Here it comes…forty-eight…forty-nine…fifty miles. Congratulations, rookies. You’re officially astronauts.” We cheered. I suspect Judy, Steve, Mike, and Charlie were relishing the moment as I was. I experienced a momentary calm not unlike what I expect someone summiting Mount Everest experiences. There were still a few thousand things that could kill me, but their threat couldn’t tug me away from the moment. I stared into the black and watched images of my childhood play in my mind’s eye. I saw my homemade rockets streaking upward from the Albuquerque deserts, my dad on his crutches cheering. I saw my mom helping me bake my fuels in her oven and cleaning out coffee cans for my capsules. I saw myself lying in the desert watching Sputnik and Echo streak across the twilight sky. I had achieved a dream of ten thousand nights. I was an astronaut.

My distraction was only a few heartbeats in duration, but it seemed an age since the cheers had ceased. I looked at Steve. He was still mind-melding withDiscovery, sucking in every byte. I got back on the instruments and listened for more of MCC’s abort boundary calls.

“Discovery,you’re single-engine TAL.”

“Discovery,you’re two-engine ATO.”