Early one morning in April 1982, three members of the Thirty-Five New Guys made their way to George Abbey’s office, a large, blue-carpeted eighth-floor corner suite in Building 1 of the Johnson Space Center. More than five years since they had been accepted by NASA, the Director of Flight Operations planned to personally anoint the first members of the class of rookie astronauts with their flight assignments on the Space Shuttle. Among them would be the first African American, and the first American woman, to make the journey to orbit. Summoning them one by one, Abbey gave the news first to the crew of the seventh Space Shuttle mission, STS-7, scheduled to fly in April of 1983. But then he pledged them to secrecy: they could say nothing of their selection before Abbey made the formal announcement of the assignments, a week later.
Until that moment, despite their individual differences in background and outlook—Vietnam veterans and former antiwar protesters, tightly wound academics, doctrinaire feminists, and unrepentantly macho test pilots—the TFNGs had shared an easy camaraderie. After almost four years of training and working together at NASA, and a rolling program of social events often orchestrated by Abbey himself—beer calls, softball games, and chili cook-offs—the new class of astronauts had become good colleagues, if not close friends. Those with military experience extended the social traditions developed at far-flung bases and airfields around the world by gathering at one another’s houses for drinks and barbecues. Their children studied together, at the local elementary school named for lost Apollo 1 astronaut Ed White, or at Clear Lake High or Seabrook Intermediate; one July 4, a dozen of the TFNG families packed their kids into station wagons for a weekend near Canyon Lake in the Texas Hill Country, sleeping in stone cabins, waterskiing, tubing, setting off fireworks—and partying late into the night. But competition was never far below the surface.
Many of the astronaut families were neighbors—Dick and June Scobee lived just a few streets away from the Onizukas on Brookpoint Drive, close to the back entrance to the Johnson Space Center and Ellington Field. Dick Scobee’s son, Rich, had a paper route with the son of fellow test pilot Fred Gregory, one of the three Black astronauts selected as part of the TFNG group, who lived down the street from the Scobees. When it rained, the two pilots drove the boys along their delivery route so they could stay dry, tossing newspapers from the car window onto tidy lawns and front porches on streets overhung with live oaks, Norway maple and ash trees. A few years after arriving in Houston, Scobee and another friend from the astronaut group, former Navy flier Jim “Ox” van Hoften, had bought a used open-cockpit biplane—so rudimentary that it lacked navigation aids, a radio, or even a reliable fuel gauge—from a farmer out in California and flew it back to Texas. Van Hoften had a private airstrip in his backyard, and the two pilots often hosted parties there at which they’d carry guests up for aerial joyrides, punctuated by loops and barrel rolls. Outfitted with leather helmets and goggles, Dick also gave June lessons in the plane, and their son took to flying with such enthusiasm he began taking acrobatic instruction: the day Rich turned sixteen, in April 1980, he applied for a driver’s license and flew solo cross-country to qualify as a pilot; one day, he hoped to join the Air Force himself. Meanwhile, June had begun teaching English at Clear Lake High, and enrolled at Texas A&M University to study for a PhD in education. At lunchtime, June sometimes drove over to the Johnson Space Center to join Dick for hamburgers in the NASA canteen, or go for a run together; often, Captain Scobee and his wife returned from a jog holding hands, like courting teenagers—to the amusement of some of his colleagues from the Astronaut Office.
At first, the handful of Black astronauts often stuck together—finding that race offered a stronger bond than professional background—and socialized with other Black families in the local community: Ron and Cheryl McNair befriended one of the few Black engineers at the Space Center and his family and, when a fourth African American astronaut, Charlie Bolden, joined the program in 1980, Cheryl and Bolden’s wife, Jackie, established a local chapter of the Jack and Jill club, the national organization founded to support Black children. Former Air Force pilot Guy Bluford, another African American in the TFNG class, rarely socialized with other astronauts at all, avoiding the happy hours and beer calls to clock off at the end of every day as regularly as if he worked in a bank, to go home to join his family for dinner. Bluford’s wife and children showed little interest in his training to go into space, and he scarcely discussed it with them. When he had joined NASA from the Air Force, other Black pilots in the US military were so rare that Bluford knew almost all of them personally; so when he began taking flights around the country with Ron McNair in the back seat of a T-38, he took special pleasure in the expressions on the faces of the ground crews when the canopies lifted to reveal two Black astronauts at the controls of the plane.
And yet—whatever advances may have been made inside the walls of the Johnson Space Center—the world beyond the perimeter fence remained unmistakably part of the Deep South. Charlie Bolden, a US Marine and Navy test pilot, had grown up in Columbia, South Carolina, not far from McNair’s childhood home. He had been accustomed to working in a white-dominated environment from the moment he arrived at the Naval Academy; Bolden also knew that Clear Lake had been segregated when the Manned Spacecraft Center had first opened in the early sixties—Black engineers who worked there had been unable to buy homes in the neighborhood, and instead been forced to commute from Houston’s historically African American Third Ward. But he still wasn’t ready for what he saw when he and Jackie took the drive a few miles up the coast to Pasadena, one day in 1980, to put down the deposit on the electricity hookup for their new house. As they approached the city limits, Bolden caught sight of a billboard looming over the side of the highway and turned to his wife in disbelief.
“You’ve gotta be shittin’ me,” he said.
Twenty feet across and reaching two stories high, the sign depicted a robed man riding a white horse, his face concealed by a pointed hood. Beneath the figure was the legend:
WELCOME TO PASADENA, HOME OF THE KU KLUX KLAN
Elsewhere, other members of Astronaut Group 8 continued the hell-raising antics of their predecessors—although no longer threatened by the same fear of scandal that had forced the astronauts of the 1950s and ’60s to curb their appetites in the interests of preserving their careers at NASA. By the time the TFNG astronauts arrived in Houston on the cusp of the 1980s, the klieg light of celebrity—and the trembling needle of America’s moral compass—had shifted elsewhere. Twenty years before, the handful of heroes anointed by the Mercury and Apollo programs had been the subject of constant media scrutiny, good family men expected to embody the lily-white values of God-fearing patriots everywhere.
But the first astronaut group of the Me Generation was bound by few such conventions. Many were still in their twenties, and single, when they arrived in Houston—and the mixture of men and women injected a new frisson of sexual tension into an Astronaut Office in which previously the only female staff had been secretaries; the unmarried women astronauts—Ride, Resnik, and Rhea Seddon—all dated colleagues inside Building 4, and generated some fear and suspicion among the wives of their married male colleagues. And while John Glenn had once infamously admonished his fellow members of the Mercury Seven to “keep their hands clean and their peckers stowed” to maintain their places in the program, and the image of NASA in the eyes of the public, some of the TFNGs now regarded adultery and divorce as a threat closer to home.
On returning from one field trip on which some of the academic astronauts had been aghast to discover that married colleagues had spent the night entertaining space groupies, Red Team leader Rick Hauck lectured the nonmilitary astronauts on the importance of silence: “Everybody needs to understand their moral standards aren’t necessarily shared by others in the group,” Hauck told them. “If you see something on one of these trips that offends you, keep it to yourself. It’s none of your business. You could damage somebody’s marriage.”
Yet the singles scene at the Johnson Space Center had also led to two weddings within the new astronaut group. Following a divorce from his first wife—and after dating Sally Ride—former Top Gun pilot Robert “Hoot” Gibson married Rhea Seddon in May 1981; their first child was born in July the following year, and announced in the “Milestones” section of Time magazine as the arrival of “the first US astrotot.” That same month, Ride quietly married fellow TFNG astronomer Steve Hawley in the backyard of his parents’ home in Kansas; the couple had already been living together for months, in a small brick house in Clear Lake decorated with prints of the shuttle and T-38s and, on the wall of the bedroom, a photo of the moon landing.
By the time George Abbey came to make the first crew assignments within Astronaut Group 8, Judy Resnik had been transformed by her years at NASA. Unflappable, stoic, and schooled by a life excelling in male-dominated environments, Resnik embraced the values of the agency she had made her home. Intensely private, she had come to detest the public relations parts of the job: even more than the other women in the program, she wanted to be seen as just “one of the guys,” and her encounters with journalists grew increasingly terse, as she often parried personal questions with single-sentence answers and barely concealed exasperation. She relished the chance to disappear into the sprawling technocratic cult of NASA—where teamwork had become a hallowed rite, and where sloppy displays of feeling were not only deemed counterproductive, but regarded with disdain or horror.
Resnik’s skill as an engineer and her perfectionism made her a natural as an astronaut, and she lost herself in the years of training necessary to excel in the complex routines of spaceflight, continuing to focus on operating the Remote Manipulator System that would become central to future shuttle missions. As she stood at the controls of the simulator in Houston, practicing again and again until the robot arm began to seem an extension of her own body, her face betrayed the ferocious concentration of someone determined to succeed at all costs.
Physically, too, Resnik had changed since her arrival in Houston in the early summer of 1978. Although there was no exercise requirement within the program, all the astronauts had to submit to an annual medical to remain qualified for flight—and the intense competitiveness within the corps meant that almost all became avid runners, despite the unforgiving South Texas climate; even at five o’clock on a summer morning, the temperature might already be eighty-five degrees, with an insufferable 95 percent humidity. Resnik began jogging regularly with her friend Sylvia Salinas, one of the secretaries from the Astronaut Office, and told her that she aimed to lose twenty or thirty pounds. Resnik switched to a high-protein diet, and when the women went out to dinner together at a steakhouse in nearby Webster, the astronaut would simply order a steak, with no sides—as rare as possible. “Bring it screaming,” she’d tell the waitress.
Four years after sitting for her first official NASA portrait at the Johnson Space Center, Resnik was barely recognizable as the full-faced young woman with the shoulder-length bouffant and a shy smile: lean and self-assured, Resnik now acquired a new nickname—J.R., like the suave villain of the TV soap Dallas, then near the peak of its popularity—and took any opportunities she could to vanish into professional anonymity. She regularly took day trips from Houston to Washington, DC, riding in the back seat of a T-38, taking a cab from Andrews Air Force Base to NASA headquarters at 600 Independence Avenue. At lunchtime, Resnik would duck out of the office to meet friends at a nearby restaurant, still wearing her blue flight suit, but pulling the Velcro-backed NASA insignia from her chest before she arrived. Other diners thought she was a mechanic.
Of all the female astronauts in the shuttle program at the start of 1982—a further intake of AsCans in 1980 had included two more women, bringing the total to eight—Resnik and Sally Ride were widely seen as the most likely to become the first American woman in space. Ride, a thirty-year-old physics PhD from Stanford, was also an outstanding athlete: as a nationally ranked junior tennis player, she had chosen to study astrophysics over pursuing a professional sports career. Unlike Resnik and other women in her astronaut class, Ride was an uncompromising feminist who refused to tolerate sexist jokes from her male colleagues with a dismissive eye roll, and campaigned against the slightest perception that men and women might be treated differently in space. Both Resnik and Ride had been chosen by George Abbey to specialize in the development and use of the robot arm, and both were equally determined to be taken seriously as professionals: Resnik designed bright pink bumper stickers, made up in a local print shop, reading A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE COCKPIT; Ride fixed one to the front of her desk in the Astronaut Office.
But for all her earnestness about the program and her apparent brittleness with reporters, among her peers Resnik was known for her sense of humor, admired as “a man’s kind of woman” by male colleagues at the Space Center, and regarded as one of Abbey’s close confidantes. She could be blunt to the point of rudeness—and curse with the conviction of a Marine drill instructor. While Sally Ride and her new husband liked to spend their evenings at home playing the fantasy-themed video game Zork on their Apple III computer, and would sit down after dinner to run through the shuttle’s ascent checklist, Resnik went out dancing in the nightclubs of central Houston, collected art, cooked Julia Child recipes for her friends, and played the baby grand piano she had installed on the ground floor of her two-story townhouse in Clear Lake. On her own desk in the Astronaut Office, alongside stacks of technical manuals and a volume of bathroom-themed cartoons called The Toilet Book, she displayed a sign that said A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND.
Officially, the final choice of flight assignments for the seventh, eighth, and ninth missions of the “operational” Space Shuttle—scheduled for 1983—would be the result of discussions between George Abbey, Chief Astronaut John Young, and the respective heads of department in Houston, and subject to the approval of Center Director Chris Kraft. But everyone in the Astronaut Office knew the decision would be made by the man referred to by his secretary as Don Jorge.
Even so, to help Abbey justify the list of names he presented to Kraft, the Director of Flight Operations cooked up a study comparing the attributes of the chief candidates to become the first American woman and African American in space. In this evaluation, Resnik, Ride, and Anna Fisher—Kraft’s favored choice—were the top contenders, with both Ride and Fisher recommended for their “outstanding public presence.” But Fisher had only recently been sent for last-minute training on the robot arm, which would be central to the planned missions—while Resnik and Ride already excelled in its operation. Resnik was let down by her hostility to public affairs duties, and Abbey felt that Ride had a technical edge; she had already twice acted as CapCom, the astronaut contact in Mission Control, and was better trained on the shuttle’s orbital systems. Abbey’s appraisal of the candidates to become the first African American in space was also a closely run competition, between Ron McNair and the softly spoken Air Force fighter pilot Guy Bluford. Abbey’s analysis recommended McNair for his engaging public persona. But Bluford won out because of his technical skill and flight experience: a decorated combat veteran, Bluford had flown 144 missions in an F-4 Phantom over Vietnam and Laos before going on to earn a doctorate in aerospace engineering.
On April 19, 1982, Abbey convened a meeting of the Astronaut Office in Building 4. The windowless conference room was packed—not only with the thirty-five TFNGs, but also members of the recently selected Astronaut Group 9. “We’ve made some new assignments,” Abbey announced in his lugubrious drawl. The room fell silent as he read from his list of names:
“The STS-7 crew will be Crippen, Hauck, Fabian, and Ride. STS-8 will have Truly, Brandenstein, Bluford, and Gardner. STS-9 will be Young, Shaw, Garriot, Parker, and two payload specialists. Hopefully we’ll get more people assigned soon.”
With that, Abbey left the room. Those who had been chosen were ecstatic—but some of those who had not could only plaster hollow smiles across their faces as they pumped their colleagues’ hands in congratulation. Fred Gregory wandered despondently from the room, his head and shoulders sagging. Gregory was one of the three astronauts who had just discovered that they would not become the first Black American in space; like him, seven women in the room had also been forced to watch quietly as Abbey consigned their names to the footnotes of history. But the disappointment they felt was almost universal.
“This is bullshit!” Gregory muttered.
Publicly, those astronauts who didn’t make the cut gamely maintained that the order of assignments was insignificant: “Firsts are only the means to the end of full equality, not the end itself,” Judy Resnik later told a reporter. But others believed the meeting marked an irreversible rupture within the Astronaut Office; never again would every member of the TFNG group unite for a social occasion. Once divided into the assigned and the unassigned, mission selection seeded an undercurrent of jealousy among the new astronauts, just as it had with their predecessors. Almost from the beginning of the space program, there had been more crew than missions for them to fill, and there was little that most astronauts would not have done to win one of the coveted slots in orbit. Competition was intensified by the absence of formal testing in the corps—and by the inscrutability of George Abbey and John Young.
Abbey’s refusal to explain his decision-making generated an atmosphere of fear and second-guessing among astronauts constantly uncertain about how their behavior, performance—or attendance at any one of Don Jorge’s barbecues, beer calls, or baseball games—might affect their chances of reaching space. Rumor and misinformation now swept through the offices at the Johnson Space Center as anxious, unassigned astronauts sought to win the favor of the sphinx-like Director of Flight Operations. One began keeping a pair of binoculars on his desk to better spot colleagues walking toward Abbey’s office; at the end of August 1981, on the day Abbey turned forty-nine, astronaut Jim Bagian talked his way onto the roof of Building 1 by pretending to be a window washer and rappelled down the concrete facade dressed in a Superman costume. When he reached the eighth floor, Bagian knocked on Abbey’s office window and serenaded him with a muffled chorus of “Happy Birthday.”
The seething competition made Abbey a more polarizing figure than ever. Those he favored—often Navy pilots—received prime assignments within the Astronaut Office and were guided into positions where they might further his plans. These astronauts—including the select group of male acolytes nicknamed the “Bubbas”—grew grateful for his patronage, and respected his wisdom and artfulness. But those who failed to earn Abbey’s approval could find themselves not only passed over for flight assignments, but isolated or handled like errant children. On one occasion, Abbey terminated a meeting with an astronaut who had displeased him by simply behaving as if the man was no longer in the room, returning silently to his work and ignoring any further questions. Eventually, the astronaut shuffled from Abbey’s office like a whipped dog, his confidence shattered. Those Abbey treated this way came, understandably, to detest him.
NASA’s public announcement of the crews of Space Transportation System flights STS-7 and STS-8 was rewarded with a media frenzy of a kind not seen since the zenith of the moon program more than a dozen years earlier. The news of the selection of Guy Bluford and Sally Ride dominated the headlines—but it was the first American woman in space that most of the press wanted to talk to. The agency received five hundred requests to interview Ride on that first day alone; her gender proved to be bigger news than Bluford’s race—and besides, he was regarded as just another pilot, like so many of his predecessors. As training intensified and the launch date grew closer, the attention Ride received only increased, approaching that once afforded Neil Armstrong.
At the same time, with the four test flights over and the shuttle officially operational, NASA pressed forward with its plans to steeply accelerate its flight schedule—now expected to include one mission every month in 1985. With each launch carrying as many as eight astronauts, Abbey feared that he might begin to run short of crew to fly the new vehicle, and had begun to recruit yet more candidates: the agency would soon announce that a new intake would begin arriving at the Johnson Space Center every year, “depending upon mission requirements and the rate of attrition in the existing astronaut corps.”
Yet Abbey—who prided himself on closely following the path of all the astronauts he had selected and who always accompanied each crew toward the launchpad at the beginning of every mission, and met them when they landed—had long harbored reservations about the safety of the shuttle. Both he and John Young were especially concerned about the lack of a crew escape system. They had argued vehemently to have the ejection seats installed on Columbia before the four test flights. But these could only ever save two astronauts seated on the flight deck—the commander and the pilot—and, with any larger crew, in the event of disaster could leave as many as six people behind to die. Once the orbiter was declared operational, they were deactivated.
But even as the shuttle fleet expanded, senior NASA officials continued to argue that—for technical and moral reasons—the spacecraft should be redesigned to include an escape system like those of the Mercury and Apollo programs. One after another, these efforts foundered in the shallows of cost or bureaucratic inertia. Eventually, a serious initiative to study the issue at the agency’s flight research arm in Langley, Virginia, was delayed, and then shelved—not on account of any engineering obstacles, but because of how such an effort would play with the public. NASA managers apparently feared that, if the American people learned that it now required an emergency escape system, they might realize that the Space Shuttle was more dangerous than they had been led to believe. The astronauts themselves, however, had few illusions about the perils of their new spacecraft.
The reliability of the shuttle’s main engines concerned many of them from the start. Both they and the senior engineers in Houston believed that if there was to be a catastrophe, the complex high-performance engines, and especially the furiously spinning high-pressure turbopumps inside them, would be the cause. Although the astronauts had worked with NASA technicians to devise a series of abort plans intended to return the shuttle to Earth if one of the three engines failed during the ascent to space, these were viable only within a narrow and hazardous envelope of circumstances. Perhaps most important, not one of the plans could begin during the first two minutes of flight, while the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters were still burning.
But once the boosters had burned out and fallen safely away from the spacecraft, the mission commander could turn a rotating selector switch on the console in front of him to initiate one of three preprogrammed abort modes, instructing the shuttle’s onboard computers to take an abrupt course change.
In the first two of these scenarios, the astronauts were trained to drop the massive external fuel tank and then turn back for either a glide landing at Cape Canaveral or at a handful of sites scattered around the globe where there were airstrips long enough to accommodate the orbiter’s high-speed touchdown; for the projected military launches over the Pacific, the only available emergency runway was on Easter Island. John Young believed that one plan was so perilous that for the crew to survive would require “ten consecutive miracles followed by an act of God.”
If, for some reason, no landing strip was available, the procedures called for a water landing; it was recognized by both astronauts and engineers alike that this option—known as a “contingency abort”—would result in the immediate disintegration of the shuttle. The astronauts joked among themselves that the cockpit cue cards laying out the procedures for this eventuality were there not to help save them and their spacecraft, but to give them something to do during their final moments awaiting death.
Finally, if a single engine failed when the shuttle was already at too high an altitude and moving too fast to return safely to Earth, there was a further option—Abort to Orbit, or ATO—in which the crew would continue into space, trying to reach a lower orbit than planned, and then end the mission early with a premature reentry. But if at any point two or more of the main engines failed, or one simply caught fire or blew up during the ascent, the entire orbiter was almost certainly doomed.
The solid rockets were another story.