It was a blazing afternoon in the Antelope Valley as the technicians rolled out the first Space Shuttle onto the concrete runway of Rockwell’s Plant 42 on September 17, 1976. Although towed by a tractor painted with a Stars and Stripes design and a curling 76, a part of the national celebrations to mark the bicentennial of the founding of the republic, the orbiter was no longer known as Constitution. Following a fervent write-in campaign from more than 100,000 Star Trek fans, the White House had buckled just the week before to their demands that the world’s first reusable spacecraft be christened in honor of their favorite TV show. So the name Enterprise now stood out in fresh, black sans serif letters along the vehicle’s fuselage. Among the crowd of almost one thousand people waiting to greet the shuttle stood many of the principal cast members of the science fiction drama, dressed in bell-bottom pantsuits and flashy turtlenecks, posing for pictures with NASA Administrator James Fletcher and Florida congressman Don Fuqua. The shuttle shone blinding white in the desert sun, its stubby delta wings and the twin doors of its boxcar-shaped payload bay tessellated with the pattern of the heat-insulating tiles intended to safeguard its return from orbit. An Air Force band played the Star Trek theme. “This day,” Fletcher announced, “we’re about to enter a new era.”
In reality, the Enterprise was no more capable of flying in space than its imaginary namesake: it had no rocket engines, no life support system, radar, or maneuvering thrusters; its wings were partly fiberglass; and most of the apparently heat-resistant tiles covering its skin were made from molded Styrofoam. A full-scale test vehicle destined to make only atmospheric glide trials, this first orbiter was a sophisticated mock-up. The shuttle vehicle intended to put the United States back into the business of manned spaceflight, Columbia, remained an incomplete hulk hidden in a hangar nearby. And although the first voyage of the new spacecraft was still officially scheduled for more than two years away, in the spring of 1979, even this target seemed increasingly out of reach.
When he had first announced the inception of the Space Transportation System from President Nixon’s Winter White House in San Clemente at the beginning of 1972, James Fletcher had reckoned on needing six years to get into orbit, with a launch date in 1978. But he soon learned that the financial guarantees of the Nixon administration were no more reliable than the word of the president himself. Inadequate at the outset, the budget promised to build the shuttle was struck by the first of a series of cuts: there wasn’t enough money to build the engines, or to fully maintain standards of quality control; the initial dream of a fleet of a dozen orbiters was scaled down to six, then five. The expected launch date slipped back a year. As funding threatened to run dry, the agency was forced first to extend its deadlines to match limited annual budgets, and then to bleed money from its scientific and unmanned programs to keep the shuttle going. At the same time, the development plans for each of the engineering challenges involved—which NASA managers had based on the appealing and financially expedient expectation that their work would proceed without a single failure or setback—had proved to be wildly overoptimistic.
The shuttle’s main engines were a problem almost from the beginning. The design called for three in total, powered by a volatile mix of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The orbiter’s reusable design meant that each engine had to fly into space, gimbal and throttle precisely under computer control during ascent, survive the stresses and shocks of launch and reentry, stop and start with 100 percent reliability, burn continuously for eight and a half minutes—and then be ready to do it all again just a few days later. NASA told the contractor, California-based specialists Rocketdyne, that each engine had to be good for at least one hundred missions—but also capable of taming some of the most destructive forces ever harnessed by mechanical engineering. Above all, they had to be small, yet so powerful that their power-to-weight ratio would exceed that of any engine in history; this combination of compact size and astonishing power presented the engine designers with challenges that often seemed insurmountable.
In order to fly in the oxygen-starved environment of the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere and in the vacuum of space, all rocket engines operate along a similar principle. The internal combustion engines used to drive cars and the first airplanes, or the jet engines that power modern aircraft, burn gasoline or kerosene in the oxygen sucked into the mechanism from air in the ordinary atmosphere. But as aircraft ascend higher, the air becomes thinner and, like the lungs of mountain climbers growing breathless at high altitudes, their engines become starved of oxygen in which to burn fuel; if they fly too high, combustion ceases altogether: the engine cuts out and the aircraft falls out of the sky. To reach space, a rocket engine must not only have fuel, but also bring along its own oxidizer, in order for combustion—and powered flight—to continue.
The shuttle was designed to carry 390,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen fuel and 145,000 gallons of supercooled liquid oxygen, held at temperatures approaching absolute zero inside its giant external tank. The largest of the three main parts of the shuttle—taller than the Statue of Liberty, and weighing almost as much at liftoff as four diesel locomotives put together—the pencil-shaped tank provided the system with its structural spine; attached to the orbiter and the solid rockets by bolts parted by explosive charges on the way to orbit, it contained the hydrogen and oxygen in two pressurized compartments. Separately, the frozen gases were each highly flammable—and if prematurely combined in the presence of the tiniest spark, the resulting explosion would not only destroy the shuttle and everything in it, but level the launchpad and all of its supporting equipment for hundreds of yards in every direction.
Drawing the fuel and oxidizer into each of the main engines was a pair of high-pressure turbopumps designed to force the two liquids together into a combustible mixture burning at 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit—hotter than the boiling point of iron. The engines consumed fuel so voraciously that the pumps were capable of draining the entire contents of a backyard swimming pool in less than half a minute. But size and weight limitations meant that each pump—driving turbines spinning at more than 500 revolutions a second, generating pressures of almost 450 atmospheres, enough to shoot a jet of liquid hydrogen thirty-six miles into the air—was no larger than a kitchen trash can. The parameters of other components were no less extreme: the shuttle would eventually have all three engines clustered together in its bulbous tail, and each one would require continuous cooling by its hydrogen fuel to avoid melting under the heat of its operating temperature.
Yet at the Rocketdyne plant in California and on the test stands of NASA’s Rocket Propulsion Test Complex in the swamps of southern Mississippi, one after another of the experimental engines caught fire, melted down, or exploded after only seconds of operation. To save money, the agency had opted to conduct “all-up testing,” which meant that instead of conducting trials of individual components, they all had to be tested together as part of a complete engine, by firing the entire system—with often catastrophic results. The rocket team destroyed one unit after another, and soon began to run short of engines to test. The process was not cheap; each one cost at least $40 million.
The highly sophisticated heat-insulating tiles had proved just as troublesome. Early in the shuttle design process Max Faget and his engineers in Houston had committed to building the airframe of the orbiter—its metal skeleton and skin—from aluminum. This was light, malleable, and cheap, but, unlike the titanium used in top secret spy aircraft and earlier spaceplane designs, it could not withstand the extreme temperatures of hypersonic flight. At just a few hundred degrees Fahrenheit it began to lose structural strength and, if exposed directly to the heat generated by the friction of reentering Earth’s atmosphere at more than twenty-five times the speed of sound, an aluminum airframe would melt like butter and catch fire; the orbiter would break up and disintegrate in flight.
The heat protection system the engineers devised to prevent this happening was even more untried and exotic than the engine technology. The areas of the shuttle expected to face the most extreme temperatures—the nose cone and the leading edges of the wings—would be covered by panels of reinforced carbon-carbon; but most of the protection would take the form of a covering of silica-fiber tiles made from purified Minnesota sand, glued to the surface of the spacecraft. Manufactured in a dedicated plant built by Lockheed, the tiles began life as silica mixed with water, pressed into rectangular blocks six inches thick, dried in a microwave oven, and then kiln-baked for two hours at more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, before being cut into cubes. Each cube was composed of more than 90 percent air, and—despite its solid appearance—felt unexpectedly light, like pumice or Styrofoam. Once it was coated with a thin, hard shell of borosilicate glass, this lack of density gave the material extraordinary properties of heat absorption and insulation: Lockheed technicians liked to demonstrate these by placing a sample in a furnace until it was white-hot, removing it with tongs and allowing the surface to cool for a few minutes. At that point, a volunteer could pick the sample up by its edges using their bare hands—even as the inside of the block remained searingly hot; in the same way, the insulation could absorb the high temperatures encountered by the orbiter on reentry, keeping the heat inside the tiles and protecting the aluminum airframe beneath. Yet, although the miracle substance was apparently rugged enough to survive at least one hundred trips into Earth orbit and back, the tiles proved delicate—and attaching them to the skin of the new spacecraft proved even more difficult than expected.
The shuttle designers had initially intended that the cubes be cut into identical rectangles, varying only in thickness, and trimmed to size for installation—but soon discovered that fitting flat tiles to the complex curves and aerodynamic contours of the orbiter’s fuselage was impossible. Lockheed was forced instead to embark on an ambitious plan to manufacture some 34,000 tiles, every one of them unique. Each one would have to be specifically shaped to fit a single place on the skin of the shuttle and milled by computer-controlled machines programmed with dimensions provided by the spacecraft designers at Rockwell. Depending on their location and how much heat they were expected to withstand, the resulting pieces might be thin white tiles six inches square, or black bricks as much as eight inches across and three and a half inches thick. But every one had to be measured and precision-fitted by hand, to tolerances measured in thousandths of an inch. “It is a horrendous job,” the project manager at Lockheed said after the decision was made. “The manufacturing people were appalled.”
Even then, shaping and fixing the tens of thousands of delicate tiles in place proved even more complex than the designers had imagined. If they were placed too close together, the tiles could rub against one another in flight and break up; too far apart, and hot plasma could find its way through to the skin of the orbiter during reentry. The hard outer coating of the insulation was brittle and only sixty-thousandths of an inch thick: an accidental blow from a wrench or a key chain was enough to crack the glass shell; when that happened, the damaged tile had to be removed and replaced with a newly manufactured one.
President Jimmy Carter arrived in office in January 1977 facing an energy crisis and a collapsing economy, and determined to rein in federal spending using similar methods to those he’d applied as Governor of Georgia. And although a supporter of space science—he had trained as a nuclear engineer in the US Navy, and had a good grasp of technical concepts—Carter saw no real need to keep sending astronauts into orbit; robotic spacecraft could explore the solar system more safely, and cheaply. He believed that the Space Shuttle was a boondoggle contrived simply to keep NASA alive—and was furious to discover that the project had been in a financial hole since its inception. And now the bills were all coming due at once.
Carter’s new NASA chief, Administrator Robert Frosch, was a gifted scientist with a background in Navy research and development and oceanography. But he had no experience in aerospace and—unlike his predecessors—was not bewitched by the heroic quest of human spaceflight. Center Director Chris Kraft and other senior figures at the Johnson Space Center regarded him with suspicion.
A blunt New Yorker born in the Bronx, Frosch had taken the NASA job almost by accident: he and his family spent their summers in a house on Cape Cod next door to Frank Press, Carter’s science adviser, who one day casually suggested that Frosch might like to join the government as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. But when Frosch arrived in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1977 as part of the group of new appointees meeting at the White House, Press took him aside and explained that the NOAA job was no longer available; he’d had to give it to Richard Frank, a major contributor to the new President’s election campaign. “He’s going to be running NOAA; end of story,” Press said. “Would you mind NASA?”
When Frosch accepted the job, the first question Press asked him was “Should we cancel the Space Shuttle?”
In 1978, as the shuttle program continued to be dogged by embarrassing delays and cost overruns, Frosch flew down to Houston for a meeting with Chris Kraft and all of the senior shuttle managers. Seated in the large conference room on the ninth floor of Building 1 at the Johnson Space Center, Kraft presented Frosch with a stark choice: either scale back the shuttle into a pure research project, as the X-15 rocket plane had been, and abandon the grand plans for flying into space on an airline schedule, or beg the President for the extra money necessary to finish the revolutionary spacecraft they had imagined.
Eventually Frosch would ask Carter for two separate bailouts, almost half a billion dollars in total, and only the intervention of Defense Secretary Harold Brown dissuaded the President from axing the shuttle altogether. Carter agreed to grant NASA the money, but as a result the shuttle emerged from the budget crisis cemented as a key asset in Pentagon plans for conducting spy missions from orbit. Later, when meeting granite-faced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to discuss the SALT arms reduction treaty in Vienna, Carter would explain that the new US spacecraft would be used to monitor the number of nuclear missiles deployed across the USSR. Nonetheless, the Office of Management and Budget cut down the size of the planned fleet of orbiters once again, to four. In the meantime, Brezhnev, convinced by his generals of the security threat represented by the new US technology, had signed off on a program to develop a Soviet space shuttle—known as Buran, or blizzard.
Even as the future of the shuttle program hung in the balance, the thirty-five members of The Fucking New Guys—or, more formally, NASA Astronaut Group 8—were arriving in Houston for the start of their training, due to commence not later than Monday, July 10, 1978. Judy Resnik was the first to begin: in May, she was already taking instructional flights in the back seat of a T-38 out at Ellington Field. Dick Scobee arrived the following month, at the end of a 1,500-mile journey across the country from California on Interstate 10, in a two-car convoy carrying his wife, their two teenage children, a cat, a dog, a motorcycle—and, in a trailer of his own design towed behind the family Pontiac, the half-finished carcass of a two-seat light airplane he and his son had built from scratch on the porch of their house in Edwards. The kids, who had already told their friends that their father was an astronaut, teased Scobee that their arrival looked more like that of The Beverly Hillbillies. “Well, I’m not really an astronaut yet,” he said: until his two years of training were complete, he would officially remain an astronaut candidate or, in the inelegant jargon of the acronym-fixated agency, an AsCan.
The Scobee family moved into a three-bedroom Texas-style ranch house in Oakbrook—a new subdivision a ten-minute drive from the Space Center built by developers keen to capitalize on the arrival of the latest generation of American heroes to settle in Clear Lake City. But the local realtors had been shocked to discover that the demographics of race and gender were not the only way in which the TFNGs were unlike the astronauts who had preceded them. The star power and public adulation that surrounded the Mercury Seven and the dozen men who walked on the moon had granted them perks unavailable to most test pilots—including brand-new sports cars on dollar-a-year leases, cut-price home loans, and a joint publishing deal on their life stories that provided each one with a generous annual income.
But the men and women of Astronaut Group 8 had to make do with regular civil service salaries, paid on a scale calculated according to their existing earnings and seniority; Anna Fisher, who had been working as an emergency room physician in Los Angeles, and who would arrive for her first day at work at the Johnson Space Center behind the wheel of a freshly purchased two-seat Porsche, chose to accept a 75 percent pay cut as the price of her opportunity to fly in space; the Scobees, after a decade of living in subsidized military housing, were relatively well-off because of Dick’s seniority, but took on an enormous mortgage to buy their new home. Driving them around a selection of new houses near the Space Center, one realtor had asked Mike Mullane and Dick Covey, two of the new group joining NASA directly from the Air Force, about their income. They explained to her that, as they had both recently been promoted to major, they each earned around $25,000 a year. The realtor stamped on the brakes. As the car jerked to a halt, she turned to them in astonishment.
“A welder makes more than that!” she said.
At the Johnson Space Center, the AsCans were divided into pairs and assigned their own offices, on the top floor of Building 4, adjacent to the main administration building occupied by George Abbey and the other senior NASA managers. With humming fluorescent lighting, linoleum floors, and government-issued wooden furniture, the rooms were bleakly utilitarian, with prefabricated steel walls that could be moved around to change the size of the spaces as necessary; the scent of floor polish, bad coffee, and ancient cigarette smoke lingered in the hallways. With the arrival of the thirty-five new candidates, the Astronaut Office more than doubled in size; they joined twenty-seven veterans of the Apollo and Skylab programs, the most-recently arrived of whom had been admitted to NASA back in 1969.
Among these men were two who had walked on the moon: Alan Bean, and Chief Astronaut John Young—who had made two lunar voyages and spent longer in space than any of his serving colleagues; but there were others who had trained for the Apollo program and seen their dreams snuffed out with the cancellation of the final moon missions. Many of the old guard could be forgiven for regarding the new intake of astronauts, and the competition they would soon represent, with suspicion and resentment. By the time their fresh-faced colleagues joined them in Houston, some—already in their late forties, still walking around the Space Center in plaid jackets and Sansabelt slacks, which had seemed at the apex of fashion during the first Nixon administration—had spent more than twelve years waiting for their first opportunity to fly in space.
At eight o’clock in the morning on July 10, John Young welcomed the AsCans to Room 3025, the large windowless conference space on the third floor of Building 4, for their first meeting of the Astronaut Office: the administrative ritual that from then on would take place every Monday throughout their time at NASA. Slight and dark-haired, the Chief Astronaut sat at the head of the large table and mumbled a greeting: for all his heroic achievements, first as a Navy test pilot and then in space, in some ways Young, at forty-seven, was the most extreme embodiment of the laconic astronaut archetype. He rarely used two words if one would do, was diffident to a fault, had difficulty maintaining eye contact in conversation, and displayed deep discomfort with almost any kind of public speaking; he was nobody’s idea of a natural leader.
But beneath Young’s remote demeanor was a rigorous technician with a merciless eye for detail—often revealed in his long and bluntly critical internal memos, already infamous within NASA—and an arid sense of humor. Though born in San Francisco, Young had been raised in Orlando, and spoke with the country twang and down-home idiom of Central Florida; he sometimes smoked a corncob pipe, and often referred to anyone from outside the Astronaut Office as “them boys.” When, after his second spaceflight, aboard Gemini X in 1966, the City of Orlando chose to name a new section of state highway John Young Parkway in his honor, the astronaut expressed his feelings with typical economy: “Them boys shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I ain’t dead yet.”
The focus of the morning’s meeting was the preparations for the maiden flight of Columbia—known as OFT-1, or Orbital Flight Test-1—which was still officially scheduled for June 1979. George Abbey had already chosen Young to command the mission, and the forty-year-old Navy commander Bob Crippen, who had joined NASA from the abandoned Manned Orbiting Laboratory program in 1969, but had yet to fly in space, as his copilot. Crippen, a dark-haired Texan with a vulpine grin who had worked on the shuttle project almost since its inception, was a member of Abbey’s inner circle of friends. After a fellow pilot was killed in a plane crash, George’s gang had helped the widow to move house, and subsequently named themselves “the Ace Moving Company”; their motto: “We move husbands out, and women anywhere.”
Although Young and Crippen had spent months in training for a flight that was ostensibly now less than a year away, neither of them expected NASA to meet the deadline. While the newly arrived astronaut candidates were still—briefly—naive enough to believe the agency’s most optimistic forecasts, the veterans in the office had long ago learned that NASA often told the public and Congress one thing, while it quietly made plans to do another. One old hand liked to joke that the letters of the agency’s acronym stood for Never A Straight Answer.
The next morning, the thirty-five prospective astronauts’ training began in earnest.
Standing on the deck of the landing craft in Biscayne Bay, Rhea Seddon glanced down the four hundred feet of towrope connecting her parachute harness to the motorboat idling in the water below, and prepared to run. The fierce Florida sun hammered on the white football-style helmet on her head; beside her stood an instructor from the US Air Force Water Survival School, stripped to the waist, in sunglasses and a peaked cap. As Seddon’s parachute flattened against the mesh wall behind her, the instructor rattled through a final briefing: When you see the boat start moving, sprint to the end of the bow and jump; stay on your feet, because if you don’t, the nonslip deck will tear up your hands and knees; the parachute should fill as you go over the edge. As the boat accelerates, you’ll ascend; when you see the flag wave, hit the release bar on the towrope; as you drift down, run through your checklist—check canopy, discard face mask, inflate life preservers, deploy life raft.
“But whatever you do, don’t release the parachute until you’re in the water,” the instructor said. “Got it?”
“Yep,” Seddon replied.
“Remember how to keep your face out of the water if you get dragged?”
“Yep.”
“Any last words for the folks back home?”
“What…?”
“Okay—get going.”
The instructor jerked his thumb in the air. The coxswain opened the throttles of the motorboat, and Seddon ran across the deck. The rope snapped taut. A petite five feet two, until recently working as a resident in a Tennessee hospital emergency room, Seddon had suffered from a fear of the water since her teens.
What if the chute doesn’t work? she thought; she hoped that she wouldn’t be killed.
The ocean yawned beneath her.
Not for the first time, she wondered if she wanted to be an astronaut, after all.
A key part of preparations to fly aboard NASA’s fleet of two-seat T-38 jets, the three days of water survival drills were among the first and most grueling parts of the new astronauts’ training. Unlike their predecessors, who—regardless of their background or role—were required to qualify as supersonic jet pilots, the new Mission Specialist astronauts were not expected to learn how to fly a T-38 themselves. But they would have to log at least fifteen hours of flying time a month, and their training as astronauts began with lessons on how to navigate and handle communications from the back seat of the aircraft. They made checkout flights to acclimatize them to the g-forces encountered during tight turns and aerobatics, breathing oxygen at altitude, and how to use the ejection seats in an emergency. Now they were being drilled on what to do if they were to bail out over water. Most of the candidates selected from the armed forces had already been through similar exercises during their military careers, so at the end of July just sixteen TFNGs—including all six women—were sent to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida to take the survival course. As well as parasailing into the open ocean weighed down with a full complement of survival gear, they were towed through the water at high speed in a harness to simulate being dragged by a billowing parachute and, in a climactic test, plucked from a drifting personal life raft by helicopter.
NASA’s public affairs officers—the agency’s press liaisons—had told the sixteen AsCans that the media would be excluded from this part of the training. As it turned out, the exercises were conducted under the gaze of dozens of reporters and cameramen, who filled a small flotilla of boats shadowing the astronauts across the bay, doing their best to capture a telling quote, or a photograph of any action—but especially of the six female trainees. By now, each of the women understood that the novelty of being America’s first female astronauts made them a focus of attention, but their patience was already fraying. “I just want to be one of the guys, and not hassled by the press,” Rhea Seddon told one reporter; when, as she was being winched aloft by a helicopter, a photographer asked Sally Ride to make a “happy face” for the cameras, she simply yelled, “No!”
Although none of the women discussed it, they all knew they were being watched for signs of weakness. And they were determined to disappoint those who expected them to fail.
Back in Houston, much of the training was a grind: day after day of lectures, on the history of spaceflight, the methods and procedures of the Astronaut Office, spacecraft engineering, flight operations, orbital mechanics, space navigation, and the myriad subsystems of the Space Shuttle itself; as many of these systems were still in development when the classes began, they were often taught by the same engineers responsible for designing and building them. Because the astronauts would be expected to observe Earth from orbit, there were also lectures on geology, volcanology, oceanography, and meteorology from space; they were instructed in astronomy, and in the life and material sciences that would be the subject of experimentation aboard the shuttle. The new intake of astronauts was so large that lecturing them as a single group was impractical, and so Abbey had them divided into two teams, headed by the two senior military officers in the class: Red, led by former Navy test pilot Rick Hauck, and Blue, led by Dick Scobee.
For months, the classes and orientation took place up to six hours a day, five days a week; at the end of each day, the astronauts went home with briefcases filled with printed handouts to study. The volume of information was overwhelming: the candidates’ astronomy instructor, a professor from Texas A&M University, told them that he would cover four years of undergraduate and two years of graduate study in just twelve hours of classes. Continuing a practice from the earliest days of the astronaut corps, they never received a single written test—but had to do their best to retain whatever they could from the deluge of knowledge. “Your test,” they were told, “will be when you fly.”
The candidates’ classroom instruction was broken up by frequent T-38 training flights, and by field trips to other NASA facilities and contractors employed by the shuttle program across the country. The thirty-five AsCans toured the pads at Cape Canaveral, where they witnessed the launch of an expendable rocket, and visited the Mousetrap, the Cocoa Beach steakhouse once favored by astronauts and engineers during the glory days of Apollo—now haunted by middle-aged men and women still pining for a glimpse of their 1960s heroes. They flew to the Ames Research Center outside San Francisco, where NASA engineers were conducting aerodynamic testing and wind tunnel analysis to better understand how the shuttle would travel through Earth’s atmosphere; and to the Rockwell plant in Downey, California, where the shuttle orbiter had been built. By the time they arrived, Columbia had finally been sent for the next stage of its construction, at the Rockwell facility ninety miles away in Palmdale, so the AsCans had to make do with a briefing on its manufacture. At night, the candidates partied together in restaurants and hotel bars: those from the Navy and Air Force were long accustomed to bonding with their fellow officers at often remote bases with booze and pranks, and many of their new civilian colleagues were happy to join in: on the long-distance field trips, it became a tradition to wait until late in the evening, and then one inebriated AsCan would be nominated to telephone George Abbey back in Houston. Abbey, when he picked up the phone in the middle of the night, seemed to be flattered by the attention; his wife, Joyce, was less amused.
The cockpit of the Space Shuttle orbiter had more than 2,200 switches, readouts, controls and circuit-breakers—lining the walls and ceilings of the flight deck, encased in metal cages and often spring-locked to prevent accidental operation—and every astronaut had to learn what each one of them was for. But they also had to become accustomed to the new and potentially deadly environment of space. So—slowly at first, and then with increasing intensity and confidence—the astronauts began work inside the windowless concrete hulk directly behind Building 4, entered through a secure door overlooked from John Young’s office window.
Inside the harshly lit, hushed spaces of Building 5, run by a team of six hundred staff and banks of state-of-the-art UNIVAC and IBM computers reading data from punch cards and reel-to-reel tape, were the Shuttle Mission Simulators. Alongside individual devices dedicated to training on each one of the spacecraft’s subsystems—computers, electrical, propulsion, life support—was a pair of massive machines designed to reproduce every part of a shuttle mission simultaneously. One, the Motion Base Simulator, was built around a mock-up of the orbiter flight deck, mounted on hydraulically powered legs, which could pitch, roll, yaw, and shudder to mimic the vibrations of launch and ascent; rudimentary computer-generated projections depicted the gantry sliding past the windows as the orbiter cleared the tower, the flare of the explosive charges releasing the solid rocket boosters as they flamed out on the brink of space, or the approach of the runway as the shuttle came in to land. The other, a static mock-up of the entire crew compartment, familiarized the astronaut candidates with what would happen in orbit: in the Fixed-Base Simulator, shuttle crews faced marathon rehearsal flights in which they were linked to the same console operators in Mission Control who would work with them while they were in space.
These simulations, which would run for as long as thirty-six hours, were intended to subject both astronauts and their flight controllers to the worst stresses the simulation supervisors could imagine: compounding computer glitches; shorting electrical systems; leaks; or engine failure. The supervisors, who sat in a nearby control room, triggering malfunctions by sweeping light pens across the screens of their computers, took pride in presenting the astronauts with the most bewildering combinations of failures they could conjure up, and often delighted in catching them out. They aimed to make sure that, by the time each of the astronauts finally left the ground on their first mission, they had rehearsed for almost every conceivable eventuality—except one. Although the simulations often created circumstances in which the shuttle crews’ missteps or miscalculations might result in a crash, the supervisors never devised scenarios from which they knew there was no escape, or would inevitably end in what NASA engineers referred to as “loss of vehicle, mission and crew”: certain death.
Nearby, in Building 9, there were separate simulators of the new technologies developed for use aboard the shuttle. These included the Remote Manipulator System—the giant robotic crane designed for tasks including satellite deployment and in-orbit repairs, which would be installed in the cargo bay of the orbiter and operated by a specially trained member of the crew from inside the cockpit; and a device resembling an oversize air hockey table, which allowed astronauts frictionless movement—helping them get the feel of the Manned Maneuvering Unit, an experimental jetpack they could fly around in space. To accustom the astronauts to living and working in zero gravity, they also drove out to Ellington Field for trips aboard the “Vomit Comet,” a KC-135 refueling tanker plane refitted with a padded floor and walls: as it flew through long parabolic arcs over the Gulf of Mexico, its occupants experienced a few seconds of floating free of gravity, as if cresting an incline on a roller coaster, and often the nausea and heaving that gave the aircraft its name. Inside the drum-shaped hulk of Building 29, there was also a twenty-five-foot-deep pool—the Weightless Environment Training Facility—at the bottom of which lay a full-size mock-up of the shuttle fuselage. Here, the AsCans could don cumbersome pressure suits and submerge underwater to simulate weightlessness, and practice tasks they might have to perform during space walks.
On Friday evenings, the most gregarious of the new astronauts gathered for happy hour drinks, wherever the Building 4 secretaries could find a spot: at Pe-Te’s Cajun BBQ House, the restaurant just outside the main gates of Ellington Field, where the walls were soon plastered with space memorabilia; Maribelle’s, a Day-Glo pink bar frequented by local shrimp fishermen and infamous for its mud-wrestling competitions and “Naughty Nighties” parties, at which the waitresses served beer wearing lingerie; and, later, at the Outpost Tavern. Entered through a pair of Western saloon-style doors shaped into the silhouettes of bikini-clad women, the Outpost was a dimly lit nicotine-stained dive bar in an old military barracks building that had been moved wholesale from its original location to a potholed lot on the corner of Egret Bay Boulevard and NASA Road 1, a five-minute drive from the Johnson Space Center. George Abbey became a happy hour regular there, and often lingered long into the night among the new recruits he called “the kids.” Nursing one long-necked beer or glass of white wine after another, Abbey said little, but soaked up information from those around him until, often, he fell asleep right there at the bar.
At the end of summer 1978, the TFNG class threw a party in Clear Lake for the entire astronaut corps. The candidates laid on entertainment including an elaborate skit that satirized the selection process that had brought them all to Houston: Judy Resnik and Ron McNair, accompanied by one of their white, male colleagues, gathered behind a sheet hung from the ceiling with three holes cut in it. Resnik placed her head through the central hole, while McNair and the second man each poked an arm through those on either side. Clothes pinned to the front of the sheet completed the effect: a single astronaut candidate with a female face, and two male arms, one Black, one white. As other AsCans playing the part of the selection panel posed their questions, the absurd entity waved and nodded its extremities in a ridiculous, ill-coordinated pantomime, until the final question: What makes you qualified to be an astronaut? With both hands wagging in the air for comic effect, Resnik delivered her punch line flawlessly: “I have some rather unique qualities.”