Riding Rockets (16 page)

A golfer walks into the clubhouse with a severe injury to his neck. He can barely talk. His buddies rush to him: “Bill, what happened?” Bill goes on to explain. “I teed off on number eight and sliced my shot into the rough. As I was looking for it, I noticed this woman searching for her ball in the same area. When I couldn’t find mine, I walked up to a cow grazing nearby thinking the ball might have ended up between its legs. But again, it wasn’t there. Finally out of frustration, I lifted up the cow’s tail to see if maybe it had hit there. Sure enough, a golf ball was stuck in its rear end. I looked closely and noticed it was a Titleist. Since I was hitting a Top-Flite, I knew the ball wasn’t mine. So, with the tail of the cow upraised in one hand and my other hand pointing at the animal’s ass, I shouted at this woman, “Hey, lady, does this look like yours?” That’s when she hit me across the throat with a seven-iron.”

The joke might have been appropriate for a group of golfers or military pilots or any similar crowd of crotch-scratching, crude, and coarse males. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the audience. The astronaut in question delivered this joke to open a high school commencement address! Only if it had been delivered at a NOW convention could it have generated more outrage. One can only imagine the horror on the faces of parents and faculty, the snickers of the students, and the subsequent crucifixion of the person who had suggested, “Let’s get one of America’s finest to speak at graduation. Let’s get an astronaut. It’ll be a commencement address to remember.” Indeed, it was.

NASA got what it was looking for in this astronaut’s presentation, a lot of visibility with the grassroots taxpayer. Unfortunately that visibility was, well, a little negative. Cards and letters rolled into NASA. The general message was something along the lines of, “Where did you get this bozo?” The answer was simple. NASA had plucked him from Planet AD.

Most of the military astronauts had no idea what constituted an appropriate sense of humor in a public setting. I once attended a dinner with a marine fighter pilot (not an astronaut) who rose from his seat with glass in hand and offered this toast to the ladies and gentlemen present: “Here’s to gunpowder and here’s to pussy. One I kill with, the other I’ll die for, but I love the smell of both.” You would think even the most AD-affected of the military TFNGs would probably have concluded such a toast would be inappropriate at a Shriners’ dinner, but I wouldn’t have put any money on it.

Lacking any other real-life experience, military males just assumed everybody had our perverted sense of humor. I certainly did. At one of my very early public appearances, I showed a slide of the six TFNG females intending to make a statement about the diversity of the new NASA class. But instead my alcohol-lubricated words came out as “pigs in space,” a reference to a popular Jim Hensen Muppets’ skit of the same title. Actually, I didn’t say, “Pigs in space.” Rather, I mimicked the Muppet announcer’s overly enthusiastic call: “Piiiiiiiigs innnnnnnnnnn spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!” The only reason NASA didn’t get protests from my performance was that my audience was a U.S. Army “Dining Out,” a black-tie gathering of army officers and their spouses. Most of them had similar disturbed senses of humor. The audience loved my wit.

At another military formal dinner, Rhea Seddon and I were cospeakers. In my comments I used the word
girls
in reference to the female astronauts. I had done so without malice. It was just as natural as breathing for me to refer to the women as
girls
or
gals.
Afterward, a wife from the audience approached me with a smile that would have chilled Hannibal Lecter. She asked, “Do they call you a
boy
astronaut?” I was baffled by the comment…but not for long. She enlightened me while tearing me a new fundamental orifice. “How dare you refer to Dr. Seddon as a girl! Where is your PhD? Are you a surgeon? She has better credentials than you.” She stormed off. It was one of my earliest lessons in political correctness.

Besides contracting with Miss Manners, Toastmasters, and NOW for remedial training, NASA should have also reviewed with its astronauts the various songs they might be asked to sing during a public appearance. Many of the requests for astronaut speakers came from organizations planning patriotic-themed events. Nothing was bound to excite more pride in the American soul than a trim, square-jawed, shorthaired, steely-eyed war-veteran astronaut poised next to Old Glory leading the audience in the singing of a patriotic song. Every Rotary Club, VFA, and Elks Club in America wanted that Norman Rockwell scene on their stage. But that assumed the astronaut knew the song in question.

At one of my appearances I was blindsided by a request to lead the audience in the singing of “America the Beautiful.” I was prepared for my speech. I had it on my notecards. What I didn’t have on my cards was “America the Beautiful.” As the master of ceremonies beckoned me to the podium I could feel my bowels liquefying. I held on to his handshake just to keep from collapsing. My brain was logjammed with every patriotic lyric I had ever heard:
for-purple-mountains-majesty-our-flag-was-still-
there-the-caissons-go-rolling-along.
Retrieving “America the Beautiful” from that mess was going to take a miracle.

The MC handed me the microphone. I wished it had been a gun so I could have blown out my scrambled brains. They were all looking at me, hands on hearts. Hundreds of them. Only a lone cough disturbed the silence.
It doesn’t get any worse than this,
I thought. But I was wrong. As a courtesy to a group of hearing impaired who were sitting in the front row, there was a signer at the edge of the stage staring right at my lips. Her hands were poised to record my every utterance. How I didn’t wet myself (or worse), I’ll never know.

I placed my hand on my heart and turned to face the flag. I could feel my pulse through my suit pocket. The MC punched “play” on a boom box and the first strains of the melody flowed into the room. I sang the only words I was absolutely certain of, “Oh beautiful…”

Those words proved enough. Everybody joined in and my voice was lost. Actually, I lowered the microphone from my mouth so my incoherent babbling couldn’t be heard. I had pulled it off. Or so I thought. Then, the signer caught my eye. She was focused on my mumbling lips with the precision of a laser. Not a syllable was getting by her. If I could have read sign language, I knew what those flying fingers would have been saying. “Hey, everybody! This guy is a fraud. He doesn’t know ‘America the Beautiful.’”

I wasn’t the only astronaut to be surprised on the way to a stage. Hoot Gibson once served as a last-minute replacement speaker for Judy Resnik at a women’s event. The MC began the introduction by reading Judy’s entire biography. Hoot was dumbstruck. Judy wasn’t there. Everybody in the audience knew he was to be the substitute speaker, yet the MC droned on with Judy’s bio as if she were going to step out of the wings to give the program. Only after it was completely rendered did Hoot realize the MC’s purpose in reading it. It was to establish Judy’s irreplaceable importance to NASA. The MC went on with Hoot’s introduction in words that loosely translated, “Judy is so important to NASA there was no way she could be spared to come to speak at today’s event. But NASA could easily do without this useless dirt bag of a man so they sent him. We’ll just have to be disappointed and listen to his forgettable comments.” Then, after Hoot’s speech, the MC presented him with a plaque inscribed to Judy.

As my NASA career continued, I discovered new land mines to step on while in front of the public. In the Q&A that followed one of my speeches, a woman asked, “Have you seen any aliens?”

I answered, “No, but I believe there is alien life elsewhere in the universe. There are so many trillions of stars it’s easy for me to believe there will be planets around some of those stars that harbor intelligent life.” I should have quit right there, but like a fool, I continued. “However, I don’t believe any UFOs have landed on earth. Why,” I rhetorically asked the audience, “would an advanced civilization go to the trouble of building an interstellar craft, fly to earth to find it teeming with life, and then only hover over lonely women and beer-drinking men?” The crowd laughed. The woman asking the question did not. If looks could kill, I was a dead man.

The next week I received an anonymous letter postmarked Salt Lake City, Utah, viciously attacking my position on aliens. It was clear the writer believed
the truth is out there
and that I was part of the cover-up. I suspect the letter was from the woman who had asked the alien question.

This question was just one of many that could turn a public appearance into a gut-wrenching torture. “What happens when you fart in a spacesuit?” or “Do women have periods in space?” were the easy ones to answer. But questions like “Are there gay and lesbian astronauts?” and “Has there been sex in space?” had the potential to put a TFNG’s name in a Johnny Carson monologue.

The prizewinner in the category of fielding the most difficult question was Don Peterson (class of 1969). After one of his speeches, several members of the audience came to him with their questions. One asked, “Is there privacy on the shuttle to masturbate?” Don was immediately thrown into a panic. It was like being asked, “Do you feel better since you’ve stopped beating your wife?” It was impossible to answer. He considered saying no, but that implied astronauts had searched for such privacy. He imagined his face on a supermarket tabloid under the headline “Astronaut Complains: No Privacy to Spank the Monkey.” A yes reply held equally embarrassing possibilities: “Astronaut Admits to Five-Knuckle Shuffle in Space.” He mumbled an incomprehensible answer, praying whatever it was it wouldn’t come back to haunt him in the
National Enquirer.

As Blaine Hammond learned in the El Paso flight operations office, the most dreaded form of public speaking was a TV interview. A streak of antiaircraft fire passing your wing doesn’t get your heart rate up like looking into a black camera lens and hearing, “Three…two…one…you’re live.” For me, it was a cadence that always brought on nausea. Once, as I was listening to this on-the-air countdown, the anchor leaned in to me and said, “It’s just like a shuttle launch. When you hit zero, there’s no going back.” He was right. Hearing, “You’re live,” was just like hearing the rumble of SRB ignition. You were flying. The camera was scattering your image and words into the living rooms of America and there would be no do-overs. I was sure my Adam’s apple was dancing like a bobblehead on a dashboard and my fear-widened eyes were darting like minnows. I imagined people at their breakfast tables laughing as I choked, trying to respond to a simple question like, “What’s your name?”

Live interviews could be made even more torturous by the AD antics of other astronauts. Several of us were in a Houston bar one evening when the TV caught our eye. A local station was airing a call-in interview with Ed Gibson (class of 1965) and TFNG Kathy Sullivan. One of our group immediately asked the bartender to borrow the phone and called in his questions: for Kathy, “How do girls pee in the toilet?” and for Ed, “What does Mrs. Gibson think of Mr. Gibson flying single women around the country in a NASA jet on overnight business trips?” We all hooted and hollered as the victims struggled with their answers.

Interviews with the print press were much more relaxing but still held the potential to screw an astronaut. During one interview I explained to the reporter my feelings of boundless joy and visceral fear while being driven to the pad for my first launch. I said, “To see the xenon-lighted
Discovery
and know it was my shuttle, that I was only hours from the culmination of a lifetime dream come true, nearly had me crying with joy.” But I was quoted as having said, “Astronauts cry from
fear
as they are driven to the launchpad.” The story was picked up by Paul Harvey and repeated to a huge national audience on his radio show. I was outraged and excruciatingly embarrassed.

Experiences like this explained why the astronaut office bulletin board occasionally displayed news articles in which an offending quote was circled with “I didn’t say this” written next to it by a pissed-off astronaut.

On August 31, 1979, Chris Kraft came to the astronaut office to tell us NASA was dropping the
candidate
suffix from our titles. Apparently we had impressed the agency enough for them to designate us
astronauts
nearly a year earlier than originally planned. We were no longer Ascans. I was happy to hear it. Even though I wouldn’t consider myself an astronaut until I got into space, I was tired of having to explain the title on PR trips and watching the crestfallen faces of event planners as they realized I wasn’t the
real
astronaut they had been expecting. At our next office party we were each given silver astronaut pins to go with our new title. These were lapel pins fashioned in the shape of the official astronaut symbol, a three-rayed shooting star passing through an ellipse. When we finally flew in space, we would be given gold pins. Actually, we would then be allowed to purchase, at a cost of $400, a gold astronaut pin. (The silver pins were paid for out of the office coffee fund.)

After returning from the party, I took my pin off, put it in a drawer, and never wore it again. To me it was a meaningless token, like the plastic pilot wings that stewardesses give to children. Those Delta Airline wings weren’t going to make a child a pilot and a silver pin and title weren’t going to make me an astronaut. Only a ride into space could do that.

Chapter 15

Columbia

Columbia
was less than a year from launch, and, when it flew, it would mark NASA’s first manned spaceflight in six years. That was a concern for the NASA safety office. A six-year hiatus in manned operations provided a fertile environment for complacency. In defense, the office sent astronauts to various factories and shuttle support facilities to refocus the workers. We wanted to put a face on manned spaceflight, to reacquaint people with the deadly consequences of making a mistake on the job. Teams of astronauts were dispatched around the country and around the globe to give speeches, shake hands, and pass out NASA safety posters. We astronauts referred to these appearances as “widows and orphans” visits. While we never said, “Don’t fuck up or you could kill us and make widows of our wives,” that was exactly the message we hoped to impart by just standing there in our blue flight suits.