The same question arose at another social function, this one for a new group of astronaut interviewees. In their presence, I traveled through a time portal. A dozen years earlier I had been one of these eager young men, my eyes bright with the hope that I would miraculously make the cut, that I would be named an astronaut. They came to me, as I had gone to the vets in 1977, to ask what it was like to ride a rocket, what did the Earth look like from two hundred miles altitude? I could see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. They had been imprinted with a passion for spaceflight, just as I had been. How could I ever quiet that passion? How could I ever walk away from NASA?
I began the journey on December 18, 1989. After most astronauts had left for the day, I walked into Mike Coats’s office and told him I was going to retire from NASA and the air force after STS-36. It was the most difficult decision of my life. There wasn’t a eureka moment that had finally pushed me into it. Rather, it was a culmination of twelve years of “moments.” Donna’s telephone breakdown still weighed on me. My tour on the LCC roof with the STS-30 wives gave me a much better sense of what my launches were doing to her. And it wasn’t just Donna’s fear. My own fear had become a wearisome burden. How many times could I make the trip and survive?
The fear, the unknowns of the business, my doubts about NASA’s management…all of it had conspired to propel me down the hall to Mike. But, even as I stood in front of him, I knew my decision was perilously balanced. I was like the circus acrobat tottering in a chair on top of a pole on top of a ball. The weight of a dust mote falling on my shoulder would be enough to send me toppling. If Mike had questioned my decision in the slightest manner—had he just said, “Are you sure?”—I suspect I would have immediately retracted my statement and walked away. But he didn’t. As he continually flipped his pen, he confided to me that he had already made the same decision. He had told Puddy he would be leaving after his next flight. He probably heard me exhale. His decision endorsed my own. He didn’t ask for an explanation, but I provided one. When I admitted that fear had a lot to do with it, he replied that it had been a huge factor for him, too—his own fear as well as Diane’s. “That LCC roof wait is a torture.”
There should be a monument to astronaut wives,
I thought.
It should feature the LCC with the countdown clock at T-9 minutes.
I left Mike’s office and called home. “I did it, Donna. I just told Coats we would be leaving after the mission.” For a moment, Donna was silent. I had told her that morning of my retirement intentions, but I knew she didn’t believe me. I had changed my mind too many times before. She understood the agony I was going through. She had seen the videos of me as a young teen running toward a parachuting coffee-can capsule. She knew the significance of my finger-worn
Conquest of Space
book. She had boxes of space memorabilia from my youth. She finally spoke. “Mike, I’m so happy. Thank you. I know you’ll second-guess this decision to death, but it’ll be okay. It’ll all work out for the best. God has His plan.” As I hung up the phone, I knew exactly what she was doing…lighting a candle of thanksgiving at her home shrine.
Chapter 38
“I have no plans past MECO”
I made my last flight to Kennedy Space Center as a member of a Prime Crew on February 19, 1990. With our T-38 afterburners tagging us with twin streaks of blue fire, we roared down the Ellington Field runway and shot into the dark. At our cruise altitude of 41,000 feet, we skimmed across the tops of massive thunderstorms associated with a cold front pushing through Dixie. Lightning illuminated the nimbus heads in colors of white and gray and blue. Fantastic shapes of electricity jumped from cloud to cloud. The charged atmosphere produced a St. Elmo’s fire that painted the leading edge of our wings in a blue haze. As if that wasn’t enough, I looked upward into a star-misted deep black.
God, how I’ll miss this—the beauty and purity that is flight
.
At the KSC crew quarters, Olan Bertrand outlined the next three days of our lives. We were reminded to stay in health quarantine at all times, to not leave the quarters without telling Olan, to eat meals only cooked by the dieticians, to claim all meals on our travel voucher as “Government Furnished Meals.” As employees of Uncle Sam we traveled on official orders, the itinerary of which read,
FROM: Houston, TX. TO: Earth Orbit.
All of our meals, transportation, and lodging would be provided by NASA, so we would only receive a standard per diem of a few dollars a day. A typical spaceflight earned an astronaut an extra $30 to $50 total.
We were also reminded not to carry anything personal on board the orbiter. When we climbed into
Atlantis,
everything on our persons, from the condoms on our penises to the LES helmets on our heads, was the property of the U.S. taxpayer. Gone were the days of astronauts stuffing their pockets with rolls of coins, corn beef sandwiches, and golf balls before their trips into space. In the early days of the space program these colorful items of contraband added a human interest touch to missions. Now they were forbidden, due in large part to an Apollo-era incident in which astronauts carried philatelic items they later sold. NASA felt it was inappropriate for crews to profit from items transported aboard a taxpayer-funded vehicle and imposed tight control over shuttle-flown material. Shuttle astronauts were restricted to twenty items in a Personal Preference Kit (PPK), which, together, could not exceed 1.5 pounds in weight. Weeks before launch, the PPK items were submitted to NASA HQ for approval and packed in a shuttle locker. In the PPK for my STS-36 mission, I had included the crucifix from my dad’s casket, the wedding bands of my daughter Amy and her husband, Steve, a gold medallion that would be imprinted with the mission patch after landing, and some other small items of personal significance for the rest of the family.
Olan also reminded us to pack our clothes and wallets and mark the bag EOM (End of Mission) before leaving for launch. The items would be delivered to us at Edwards AFB after landing. “Also, include some civilian clothes in case of an abort.” This was a standard request, but I knew some astronauts refused to pack their civvies out of a superstitious dread that to do so would
cause
an abort. I was one. If an abort occurred, I would just have to walk around Zaragoza, Spain, in my underwear.
As the VITT briefing ended, the family escorts arrived with our wives. They would be joining us for our midnight lunch. Unlike STS-41D and STS-27, both of which had banker’s hours for launch windows, STS-36’s window was from midnight to 4
A.M
. This necessitated a killer sleep/awake schedule. We were going to bed at 11
A.M
. and waking at 7
P.M
. Breakfast was at 8
P.M
., lunch at midnight, and supper at 6
A.M
. A vampire kept better hours.
The wives were exhausted. Besides being Prime Crew spouses and wanting to see their men in the few opportunities remaining, they were also family entertainers for the week. Relatives and friends who were on a normal sleep schedule sought them out for KSC tour information, weather forecasts, and information on launch-day bus schedules. Cheryl Thuot and Chris Casper also had young children to deal with. If our wives were getting three hours of sleep a night, I would have been surprised.
They certainly didn’t get much sleep this night. We met them again at the beach house for an L-2 barbecue dinner…at 8
A.M
. Each of us was allowed an additional four health-screened guests, so this was a real crowd. In fact the gathering was too much. Introductions consumed a significant part of our time. The guests were also frantic to use this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get photos in every imaginable permutation: the STS-36 crew alone, the crew with wives, the crew with parents. All of this was being done on the outside deck so a billion no-see-um bugs also wanted to be in the picture. Photos were delayed while we slapped and danced and scratched them away. Inevitably we would pose for one shot and be into the next permutation when some old lady would scream, “I forgot to take off my lens cap. We’ll have to pose that one again.” Or, “I need to change film, so hold on.” Or, “I left Aunt Betty’s camera inside. Wait while I get it.” Meanwhile I was thinking,
This is bullshit!
I had no patience for the extended families of the others and, no doubt, the other crewmembers were thinking the same thing as my mom jumped into firing position and started fiddling with her camera. I just wanted to be alone with my mom and children and Donna. I didn’t want to share this time making small talk with people I had never met before.
During our first break from the Kodak moments I pulled my family to the beach. I would see Donna again, so I devoted my time to my mom and children. The kids were now old enough to make the beach house visit after being cleared by the flight surgeon. As I had been in previous launch good-byes, I was honest with them now about the risks. I didn’t talk up the danger, but neither did I paint a Potemkin village for them. Since
Challenger
’s loss I was even more determined to keep them informed. I had heard that one of the older children watching
Challenger
’s destruction from the LCC roof had screamed, “Daddy, you said this could never happen!” I wanted my children and mom to know it could happen and to be prepared as much as possible.
I was filled with a father’s pride as I watched my children. Pat was in the final weeks of his senior year at Notre Dame. He had attended the school on an ROTC scholarship and upon graduation was to be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the air force. He had matured into a real leader. He had also developed a wonderful wit. Friends who knew Pat and me would frequently joke, “The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.” They were right. In many ways Pat was my clone—the most notable exception being his very good looks. But we did share the same crappy eyesight. As it had for me, his less than 20/20 vision was keeping him from air force pilot training. I had made calls to some general officer friends hoping they might know of a way for Pat to gain a medical waiver, but the Berlin Wall had come down, the Cold War was over, peace was going to reign forever, the air force had too many pilots, blah, blah, blah. All I heard were excuses. But I hadn’t left it there. The
Challenger
disaster had shown me that dead astronauts had more cachet than live ones. Astronaut widows were consoled by presidents who told them to call if they needed anything. If I died on this mission I intended to posthumously use my celebrity status to get Pat into pilot training. Before leaving Houston, I had written a letter to fellow TFNG and USAF colonel Dick Covey on that topic. “…I’d like to thank you for taking care of Donna and the kids. I’ve always hated paperwork and I imagine dying generates more of it than anything else. At least I don’t have to worry about it…I’ve told Donna to tell the president himself of Pat’s desire to serve his country as a pilot. You might tell General Welch he’s going to be getting the order from above, so he might just want to get ahead of the game by approving Pat’s application right now…” Donna was holding the letter with my instructions to give it to Covey in the event of my death. (Visual acuity defects that are correctable have no flight safety impact—many military pilots wear glasses—and waivers have been given in the past for officers with glasses to enter pilot training.) There was also one other favor I had already asked of Covey: “If I die on this mission and there’s anything left of my body, I don’t want any of the female docs in the office doing an autopsy on me. I worry they’ll get back at my sexist bullshit by telling everybody in the office I had a little dick.” (A damnable lie!) Covey had a great laugh at that, but he promised to make my wishes known.
Amy, Pat’s twin, was now married and living in Huntsville, Alabama. I didn’t need to write any letters on her behalf. She was completely fulfilled as a wife and looking forward to the day she would be a stay-at-home mom. I had only recently come to accept her as she was. As obsessive-compulsive-West Point-engineer-astronaut fathers are apt to do, I attempted to fashion her into my own image and was frustrated by my repeated failures. I wanted her to graduate from college, but she dropped out after just one semester. I wanted her to have skills that would make her financially independent, if ever that was required, but she acquired none. Donna set me straight. “She’s a sweet, good-hearted young woman. She doesn’t want what you want. You just have to accept that.” I finally had and was happy for her.
Laura was now nineteen and a freshman at DePaul University in Chicago majoring in the single degree field most guaranteed to drive an obsessive-
compulsive-West Point-engineer-astronaut father into madness…theater. Laura wanted to be an actress. At least I had the experience of my older daughter to learn from—I accepted Laura’s dream and enthusiastically supported her. I knew most theater degrees ended up being degrees in waiting tables, but it was her dream, and—as a man who had made a similar journey toward a long-odds prize—I wasn’t about to discourage it.
As I walked the beach with my children beside me I was struck by the swiftness of life. The
Fiddler on the Roof
song “Sunrise, Sunset” came to mind. “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play?” It seemed like just yesterday I was running alongside bikes as the kids made their first no-training-wheels rides. Now, I walked with adults who would be doing the same thing with their children in the not-too-distant future. How swiftly fly the years.
I had missed a lot in those years, all in the name of career. How many times had I left for work with the kids asleep and returned after they were in bed for the night? How many evenings had there been no time to read to them or play with them because I had graduate school homework? How many birthdays had I missed? I didn’t want to count. I had been a good father but not a great one. I had missed a lot that was irretrievable. The thought bolstered my confidence in the decision to retire from NASA. I didn’t have many years left to build memories with my children and future grandchildren. I was forty-five years old—I was entering middle age. One glance in the mirror told me that. A proto-spare tire was faintly visible at my waist, and either my sink was going through puberty or my hair was thinning. I suspected the latter. I was only twenty-one years from the age of my dad’s death. I had only thirty years left in an average life span. Of course, with a shuttle launch pending, all of those years were hypothetical. L-2 days to launch might mean two days until my death. So I gathered in this memory of my children as young adults…strong, healthy, attractive, their eyes and hearts set on the distant horizons of their lives.