Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [117]
“The security guard let me in,” I said. “I wanted to let my wife have a look.”
“You were speeding on your way to the pad, too,” she said. The speed limit on the beach road behind the launchpad is thirty-five.
“Well, I always speed when I’m out there before a launch,” I said. “How fast was I going? A hundred?”
“You were clocked at seventy-five,” she said.
“Seventy-five?” I answered. “I was trying to go a hundred! I ran out of room.”
She didn’t like my attitude and I didn’t like her phone call. One hundred and thirty-three space shuttle crews before this one had sped all over the Kennedy Space Center and now it was an issue? My manager was making a point. “I want to make sure I made the right decision in assigning you to this flight,” she said.
I understood she had a job to do. But to me, it was classic NASA Astronaut Office management bullshit: Try to track down people’s little misdemeanors and then rag on them over them.
“OK,” I told my manager. “I’ll try not to speed in the space shuttle.”
The day before the scheduled launch, astronaut Dan Tani, who’d been a crew member on my first mission, had the job of giving more than a hundred people from our extended families a presentation about STS-134. They all gathered in an auditorium at the Kennedy Space Center. Dan was the man for the job. My crew and I weren’t there, but we heard he put together a great slide show.
“OK, let’s look at the key players tomorrow,” he said, and then he showed a slide of Prince William and Kate Middleton, with their ranks: prince and commoner. “Let me show you the vehicle which will be used tomorrow,” Dan said. Instead of a photo of the shuttle, he flashed a slide of the 1902 State Landau carriage, which would transport the bride and groom. “It’s a six-horsepower carriage. Top speed: 5.4 miles per hour. At NASA, we call that Mach 0.007105.”
When his royal-wedding jokes ended, Dan showed slides of me and my crew in training, and our loved ones cheered each photo. It was like a pep rally. He told them about our mission. “You have to bring every spare part with you,” he said. “You don’t have FedEx to bring more parts.” He talked about why we wear those bulky orange suits. “The suits have a pressurized environment, in case they have to bail out at a high altitude.” And he used the phrase PEU to describe how the shuttle stood on the launchpad. “That’s ‘Pointy End Up,’” he said, explaining that astronauts have to get their bearings when they enter it. “It’s like turning your house on its side. You wouldn’t recognize it.”
Dan said it was good that Gabby’s story had brought more media to the launch. “Because of all the attention this mission is getting,” he said, “we can show the world the capabilities of this magnificent machine and crew.”
When Dan was finished, buses were waiting to take our family members several miles away to the launchpad, where my crew and I would show up to meet them. It’s another NASA tradition—the extended family farewell.
Everyone stood behind a rope line, facing the launchpad. On my earlier flights, we stood with a ditch separating the crew from the guests, so the ritual came to be called “the wave across the ditch.” This time, the six of us drove up in our convertibles, got out, and stood together on the other side of the rope. Because we were still in quarantine, we couldn’t get too close to anyone. I always feel like a circus animal as everyone takes photos at the wave across the ditch.
Because the crew’s wives had been given physicals and deemed healthy, they were allowed to join us for photos. Gabby had been in these photos during my past missions, but since she was still not up to being seen publicly, she wasn’t there for this one. So it was just me, my five crew members, and their five wives. We were all lined up and everyone was clicking away. I smiled through it, but I was thinking of how the sixth wife belonged in those photos.
Twice in the history of the shuttle program—the final launches of Challenger and Columbia—the wave across the ditch was the last time astronauts