The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Once we hit orbit and had main engine cutoff, we got busy right away. Chiaki and I were responsible for getting people out of their suits and stowing the suits and all the equipment on them into net bags, color-coded for each crew member. That was more complicated than it sounds. Each item had to wind up in the bags in the order in which it would be removed as we resuited for reentry at the end of the flight.

I took my helmet off and put it down, and it came floating right up past my face. It moved much more than I anticipated. I had to stick its communications cord under my legs to hold it down until I could get a bag to put it in. Stray gloves and equipment were floating around. Even releasing my seat harness, I found I had to be careful because I had a tendency to take off. Foot loops kept my feet on the floor and bungee cords against the front of the lockers helped me corral stuff floating by. I kept my suit on while Chiaki and I helped the others out of theirs, wrapping my legs around the seats for leverage. By the time I finally got out of my suit, I had worked up a pretty good sweat.

We stowed the bagged suits and equipment temporarily in the sleep stations until we could transfer them later to the airlock that led to the SpaceHab. Then we folded and detached the seats, including the two rear seats from the flight deck and got them out of the way. It was a lot easier than on the ground, where they weighed seventy pounds. Now the flick of a fingertip would move them where they had to go.

Because everything floated, Velcro, duct tape, and bungee cords were invaluable. Things had to be held down, and those were about the only devices to do it.

Floating around took a little getting used to. When I moved across the mid-deck or through the twenty-five-foot tunnel leading to SpaceHab back in the payload bay, just a tiny amount of pressure was enough to start the process. Pushing off without the right alignment could send me spinning. The tunnel to SpaceHab was only three feet wide, and I learned to adjust my course as I floated through it. Reaching for items that were hovering nearby, sometimes I bumped them and then had to chase them down. I learned right away not to push too hard off the wall or to reach for things too fast. And all the switch plates had guards that prevented us from turning something on or off inadvertently when we bounced off the walls.

One of my main concerns was whether I was going to be sick. Space sickness affects about a fifth of astronauts initially. While I had felt fine during my Mercury flight, I didn’t know how I would react in the shuttle. I had Phenergan, which many astronauts use before going up, and I adapted rapidly. I couldn’t have felt better, and three hours into the flight I reprised an old line in my first transmission from orbit: “Zero G and I feel fine.”

For the first hour of the flight Chiaki and I worked hard down on the mid-deck, so we weren’t able to see out of a window. Everyone except Curt had come down from the flight deck. He had to perform the orbital maneuvering system (OMS) burn that put us from an elliptical orbit into a circular one. He established the shuttle in a tail-down attitude, with radiator surfaces of the payload bay doors open to dissipate heat, and by then he was ready to take his suit off and get into other clothes. When he went back up, I followed to look out. By that time, we had made a full circuit and were coming back into daylight again over the Pacific.

Discovery was at an orbital height of 300 nautical miles, or about 348 statute miles, the highest continuous orbit for a shuttle mission. It gave us a rare view for a shuttle flight. We were more than twice as high as I’d been in Friendship 7, and I could see entire weather patterns beneath me even better. Once again I looked out at the curve of the horizon and the bright blue band that is our atmosphere – the thin film of air that makes life on Earth possible – and I realized how much I’d missed being in space all those years.

Curt described it when he radioed to Houston, “Let the record show that John has a smile on his face and it goes from one ear to the other and we haven’t been able to remove it yet.”

I wanted to do a good job. We were at the start of a nine-day mission and had come through the first phase with things well organized, but there wasn’t any time to waste. The timeline called for starting a number of experiments immediately after we entered orbit.