I crossed Africa in minutes and raced over Madagascar in seconds. The Indian Ocean was another vast, empty blue. The 3,000-mile brown continent of Australia came and went in ten minutes. Then
Discovery
was once again over Pacific skies. The view of that ocean always intimidated me—its blue seemed as infinite as space. How much greater its immensity must have seemed from a Polynesian outrigger or from the decks of Magellan’s ships. We astronauts are frequently characterized as heroes and heroines for sailing into a great unknown. In reality no astronaut has ever sailed into an unknown. We send robots and monkeys ahead to verify our safety. Magellan didn’t put a monkey on a ship and wait for it to safely return before going himself. He and those Polynesians set sail without maps, without weather prediction, without a mission control, without any idea of the immense emptiness that lay beyond their meager three-mile horizons. It is laughable to compare astronauts with those explorers. The next humans who fly into a great unknown will be those souls who set sail to Mars and watch our planet dim to a blue-white morning star.
I watched as city lights took on the form of glowing spiderwebs with bright, sodium-yellow interiors and major roads radiating outward and ring roads completing the web effect. I watched lightning begin at one end of a weather front and ripple like a sputtering fuse for hundreds of miles to the other end and then start again. And every ninety minutes I would watch the incomparable beauty of an orbit sunrise. I would watch as a thin indigo arc would grow to separate the black of nighttime Earth from the black of space. Quickly, concentric arcs of purple and blue would rise to push the black higher and higher. Then bands of orange and red would blossom from the horizon to complete the spectrum. But only for a moment. The Sun would finally breach the Earth’s limb and blast the colors away with its star-white brilliance. I wanted to scream to God to stop
Discovery,
to stop the Earth, to stop the Sun so I could more thoroughly enjoy the beauty of that color bow.
When sleep finally overtook me, I’m sure I slept with a grin.
Chapter 22
Coming to America
The next morning we prepared for reentry. We scrubbed
Discovery
’s walls and windows clean. An earlier crew had turned over a dirty vehicle to their ground team. Small bits of vomit, food, and drink had been found dried to the walls. This pigpen crew quickly became a joke on the astronaut grapevine. We weren’t about to let that happen to us. After nearly six days with six people locked inside,
Discovery
was soiled with the same flotsam but we polished her to a shine.
We followed the flight surgeon’s recommended protocol of consuming salt tablets and fluids. The excess liquid would increase our blood volume and help minimize the possibility of the reentry G-forces pulling blood from our brains and causing blackout. I also donned my anti-G suit as another defense against G-induced unconsciousness. The suit looked like cowboy chaps and was zipped over my legs and around my stomach. It contained air bladders that could be inflated to squeeze those body parts and restrict blood flow from the upper torso and head. I would later find out Judy did not put on her anti-G suit and suffered for the omission. After landing she was deathly pale, sweating profusely, and unable to stand from her seat for many minutes.
We closed our payload bay doors, strapped into our seats, and then flipped
Discovery
backward so the thrust from the firing of her OMS engines would slow us down. The deorbit burn only braked us by several thousand miles per hour but that was enough to dip the low point of our orbit into the atmosphere. After the burn was complete, Hank maneuvered
Discovery
into a nose-forward 40-degree upward tilt so that her belly heat shield was presented to the atmosphere.
Discovery
was now a 100-ton glider. She had no engines for atmospheric flight. We began the long fall toward Edwards AFB, California, twelve thousand miles distant. We were coming to America. On the way,
Discovery
would be enveloped in a 3,000-degree fireball and at the end of the glide Hank would get only one chance at landing. In spite of these daunting realities I didn’t fear reentry as I had feared ascent. There were no SSMEs or turbo-pumps to fail and endanger us, and reentry lacked the rock-and-roll violence of ascent. I shouldn’t have been so confident. There were still plenty of ways to die on reentry and landing. The STS-9 crew had almost found one with their hydrazine fire. In 1971, three cosmonauts were killed on reentry when their capsule sprang a leak. They had not been protected with pressure suits and their blood boiled inside their bodies. We were not wearing pressure suits, so a pressure leak would kill us in the same manner. Of course, none of us could see the future, but on February 1, 2003, the STS-107 crew would find death on reentry due to damage sustained to
Columbia
’s left-wing heat shield. Foam had shed from the ET during launch and punched a hole in it.
Discovery
was flying with the identical heat shield and Mike and Hank had seen foam shedding from the tank during our ascent. We could have been falling into the atmosphere with a hole in our wing and been blissfully unaware. No, I shouldn’t have been so confident in a safe trip home.
For the first half hour after the deorbit burn, there was no indication anything had changed. It felt as if we were still in orbit. We had fallen a hundred miles closer to the planet but the air was still so tenuous it had no observable effect. Then a lost M&M candy appeared from a corner and began a very slow fall. It was my first indication we were no longer weightless. The fringes of the atmosphere were finally slowing us.
At 400,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, atmospheric friction began to heat the air. The glow in the cockpit windows changed from orange to red to white hot. I twisted my head to look upward through the ceiling windows. A vortex of white-hot air streamed away, flickering like a ribbon in the wind. I was seeing
Discovery
’s wake. The superheated air on the belly was wrapping around the vehicle and combining above her to form a wake of plasma. It streamed off into infinity. In spite of the incredible light show, the cockpit was quiet. There was no wind noise, no vibration.
Discovery
completed several role-reversals to manage her energy. As thin as it was, there was still enough air to produce lift and the autopilot commanded the vehicle into alternating 75-degree banks to use this lift to pull her off centerline. She was standing on alternating wings, skidding into the Earth’s atmosphere like a snowboarder braking to a stop. She was flying a giant
S
across the Earth, lengthening the distance to the runway, to give her more time to lose altitude. If she had attempted to dive straight ahead we would have been incinerated.
Our computer displays showed
Discovery
as a bug tracking down the centerline of a fan of green energy lines. She was flying like a dream. In spite of the fire outside the windows and
Discovery
’s bizarre maneuvers on our instruments, I felt completely secure. The cockpit was as comfortable as a womb.
The Reaction Control System (RCS) thruster lights flashed intermittently to indicate they were firing to hold our attitude. Just a fraction of a degree in error and we would be tumbled out of control. If it happened, the Pacific would swallow our ashes. NASA wouldn’t find a trace of us.
Deeper into the atmosphere the G-forces increased to the maximum of 2. In any other circumstance this would have been a trivial force. A modern fighter can subject its pilot to 9 Gs. But for an astronaut returning from days of weightlessness, the feel of the G-forces was significantly amplified. It seemed as if an elephant were on my shoulders. I was being crushed into my seat. The weight of the helmet made it difficult for me to hold up my head. My vision began to tunnel, as if I were looking through a straw. I knew from my fighter jet experiences tunnel vision was an indication of approaching blackout. The vision area of my brain wasn’t getting enough oxygenated blood. I inflated my anti-G suit to the maximum setting and the air bladders squeezed my belly button nearly to my spine. I simultaneously bore down with my gut muscles, all in an effort to tourniquet my waist. It worked. My vision cleared.
Passing 200,000 feet we began to hear the faint rush of wind around the cockpit.
Discovery
was transforming herself from a spacecraft to an aircraft. Mike deployed the air data probes to give us better airspeed and altitude information. We flew into sunlight. It was still twilight below us but the Sun had dawned at 100,000 feet. As
Discovery
’s velocity fell below the speed of sound, her shock waves, which had been trailing her, now zoomed ahead. A buzzing vibration shook the vehicle at their passage.
At seventy thousand feet the steering rockets on
Discovery
’s tail stopped controlling her attitude. She was now fully an aircraft, a creature of the air. Hank took control from the autopilot. While he could have taken control at any point during the reentry, there had been no reason to do so. The runway wasn’t visible until the final ten minutes of flight.
The dry lakebed of Edwards AFB, which had welcomed countless machines from the edge of space, now welcomed
Discovery.
Hank guided her over the runway and then banked into a wide, sweeping left turn toward final approach. With her short, stubby wings she was a poor glider and he kept her in a kamikaze-like dive at nearly 350 miles per hour. From the cockpit it appeared as if we were diving straight into Earth. At 1,800 feet above the ground he started his flare. At 300 feet Mike lowered the landing gear.
Discovery
touched the sand in a perfect landing, just as the dawn was breaking. Hollywood couldn’t have written a better ending.
“Houston, wheel stop.” Hank made the call.
“Roger,
Discovery.
Welcome home.”
Our cheers had hardly died before all of us were wondering,
When will I be able to do this again?
Chapter 23
Astronaut Wings
I was drunk on joy and beer. We were headed back to Houston on the NASA Gulfstream jet with our wives. A cooler of beer had been placed aboard and I was doing my best to ensure it was empty by the time we got to Ellington Field. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t stop talking. I was giddy and silly and, oh, so happy. I was the bride on her wedding day, the child on Christmas morning. Periodically I would sit with Donna and try to describe the things I had seen, but as soon as I would get started on one memory, another would pop up and I’d be off on its telling. I never finished a sentence. I would leap to my feet and pace the aisle. I was incoherent with joy. I was now a
real
astronaut. I was a
live
astronaut. The latter fact was something I had never really expected. Subconsciously, I don’t think I ever believed I would survive this mission and now that I had, I was wild to celebrate life. I was the soldier back from combat. I had walked the narrow precipice of death and had not fallen.
The others stared at me like I was nuts, which of course I was. In one insane moment I bet everybody I could drop a can of beer and catch it before it hit the floor. I was past the bulletproof stage of intoxication and had entered the weightless stage. The results were predictable. I ended on my hands and knees chasing the foaming, rolling can while the others laughed at my floor show. I didn’t care that I was making a fool of myself. There was nothing anybody could have done or said to diminish my celebration.
A crowd of family, friends, and NASA employees greeted us at Ellington Field. Some of the family members and office secretaries had fashioned welcome-home signs. I saw my three children in the front row wearing huge smiles of pride and relief. We wouldn’t get any NYC ticker-tape parades but this was better. The people behind the ropes were NASA family. They had put me into space. I loved them all and given a chance I would have kissed each and every one.
A microphone was provided so we could say a few words of thanks. Stepping forward for my turn, I tripped on my own feet. It wasn’t because of my intoxication…or at least, not entirely. My sense of equilibrium had been affected by weightlessness. It was a common, short-term aftereffect of spaceflight. I have no idea what I said, but it didn’t generate any groans of embarrassment from my compatriots behind me, so I guess I did okay.
The ceremony ended and we walked into the crowd. Someone shoved another beer into my hand. I hugged my kids. Amy, my sensitive child, was full of tears. Pat and Laura were smiling. Only my death would have pulled tears from them. I worried the press might find me. I could see their vans and knew they were somewhere in the crowd. The last thing I wanted was to have a camera in my face. That would have been sure to dampen my fun. But I need not have worried—nobody was interested in male astronauts when Judy was around. She looked stunning. We had all showered at Edwards and donned fresh flight suits, and Judy had applied lipstick and a little makeup. She was holding the spray of roses given to her at Edwards. Unlike her predecessor, she had graciously accepted them. At that moment she was everything to everybody, the feminine feminist. The press was all over her. Fortunately, her hair was so big the shank she had lost in orbit wasn’t noticeable enough to generate questions.
Gradually the celebration dissolved and Donna and I drove home with the kids to get on with the rest of our lives. That night, as we lay in bed, I joked with Donna about the flight surgeon’s warning to purge my sperm.
She laughed. “That’s so romantic, Mike.”
“But the doc says it’s mutant, radioactive!” The doctors were serious about such purges for men still in the procreating mode, the fear being that some of our swimmers could have been damaged by space radiation. In one of the Monday meetings, after hearing the warning repeated, one TFNG had shouted, “Give me a break. I’m purging as fast as I can!” Our baby-making days were over, so Donna knew the flight surgeon’s comment didn’t apply to me. Nevertheless, we followed the doctor’s orders, celebrating as lovers do.