The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

The next night, Curt, Steve Lindsey, and I did a live shot with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. Curt was a big Jay Leno fan – we all were, but he really shone. He spoofed me and California drivers, and even brought the comedian up short after Leno asked him what we could see from orbit. “Well, Jay,” Curt said, “sometimes, if the lighting is good we can see the Great Wall of China, but we just flew over the Hawaiian Islands and we saw that. And Baja California. You can see the pyramids from space, and sometimes rivers and big airports. And actually, Jay, every time we fly by California we can see your chin.”

Mission Control radioed that we had futures as comics if we got tired of space.

We communicated with Earth by radio, television, and E-mail. We did a televised news conference and a hookup with schoolkids from all over the country who asked better questions than the reporters. John Glenn High School in New Concord was one of the schools. Another was the Center of Science and Industry, a learning center in Columbus headed by Kathy Sullivan, a former astronaut and deep-sea explorer.

I found E-mail, which was still new to me, a fast and effective means of communicating. I E-mailed Annie and the family, who were staying in Houston during the flight, and then I decided to try for a different first. Steve Robinson was my tutor, and once while I was slowly pecking out a message he asked if I was sending another E-mail to Annie.

“Nope. To the president,” I said.

“What?”

“An E-mail’s probably never been sent to the president of the United States from space,” I said. “And he’d appreciate it, too.”

He did. He replied the next day, and described an eighty-three-year-old woman who had told him space was okay for a young fellow like me.

The importance of the cameras that waited at the ready on Velcro patches beside most of the shuttle’s windows came to the fore with Hurricane Mitch. It had made landfall in Honduras on the day before our launch, and hung over Honduras and Nicaragua for several days, dumping twenty-five inches of rain, causing mudslides that swept away entire villages, and killing over seven thousand people. A few days into our flight, mission control called for photographs of the devastated area.

One of the laptops on the flight deck was set up to track Discovery on its orbits around the world. By following the track on the screen, you could anticipate when you were approaching an area that needed to be photographed. You couldn’t wait until you recognized Honduras, for instance, because at 17,500 miles an hour – five miles per second – the photo angles you wanted would have slid by already. We got the shots we wanted.

In some cases, the higher orbit of Discovery meant more spectacular views than I had seen from Friendship 7. Coming over the Florida Keys at one point in the mission for example, I looked out toward the north and was startled that I could see Lake Erie. In fact, I could look beyond it right into Canada. The entire East Coast was visible – the hook of Cape Cod, Long Island, Cape Hatteras, down to the clear coral sands of the Bahamas and the Caribbean, south to Cuba, and beyond.

A night of thunderstorms over South Africa produced a view of a field of lightning flashes that must have stretched over eight hundred or a thousand miles, the flashes looking like bubbles of light breaking by the hundreds on the surface of a boiling pot.

All the while, our views of Earth were stolen from the time we gave the eighty-three experiments on board. Each member kept on his or her timeline, and as we neared the end of the mission all of the experiments were working and successful. This remained our primary mission, and we were confident that we were making real contributions to science.

As Discovery approached the end of the mission, the crew wrapped up the various experiments and began preparations for reentry. It was like spring cleaning in a house in which every wall and ceiling were just more floors on which things had been tossed. Although we had done a quite a good job of keeping the shuttle’s interior tidy as we went along, notes, copies of our timeline tasks, and flight-data files detailing our work on the experiments were stuck to Velcro and duct tape and behind bungeecords all around the mid-and flight decks, SpaceHab, and the tunnel leading back.

Once the cabins had been policed, Chiaki and I set up one of the seats for resuiting. We retrieved the helmets and suits, started with Curt, and then helped the rest of the crew get ready. Then we got the rest of the seats in place and suited up ourselves, while Curt and Steve Lindsey closed the pay-load bay doors and oriented Discovery for the de-orbit burn that would begin its descent into the atmosphere. We were all suited and strapped in before the burn.