Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [69]
Our commander, Dom Gorie, spoke beautifully for all of us just before we launched. He saw a vital message in that ripped flag. “Just like our country, it’s a little bit bruised and battered and torn,” he said. “With a little repair, it’s going to fly as high and as beautiful as it ever did, and that’s just what our country is doing.”
I was able to mostly put the possibilities of terrorism out of my head. But because it would be my first flight, I couldn’t fully shake my feelings of anxious uncertainty about what was ahead. Most every sensation on my journey, from liftoff to long-term weightlessness to reentry, would be new to me. What would it really feel like once I was sitting atop 500,000 gallons of rocket fuel, waiting to go?
My brother had beaten me into space—his first mission was in 1999—and before my liftoff he warned me about the first two minutes of flight. He said there’s no real way to describe what it would be like. “You’ll feel like maybe something is going very wrong,” he warned. “You’ll feel every pound of thrust. It’s full power, instantaneously.”
On the day of the flight, when I was strapped into my seat on the space shuttle, at first I was just hyperfocused on my job. It takes three hours to turn everything on. Then, as the countdown clock approaches zero, things start to get really busy. At six seconds, the three shuttle main engines start producing about a half-million pounds of thrust each. At zero seconds, the solid rockets ignite, and with 7.5 million pounds of thrust you jump into the air. It is an amazing, wild ride that takes you from 0 to 17,500 miles per hour in just eight minutes and thirty seconds. The best way that I’ve been able to describe this experience to nonastronauts is to have them imagine being on a runaway train going down the tracks at 1,000 miles an hour. And it keeps getting faster.
That mission lasted twelve days and orbited the earth 186 times. After we landed safely back at Kennedy Space Center, Scott was waiting to greet me on the runway, and my first words to him were, “Boy, you were right about liftoff !”
My next flight was on July 4, 2006, the first time a crew had launched from this planet on Independence Day. It was the second “Return to Flight” mission after the loss of Columbia, so it was understandably nerve-wracking. Had NASA fully corrected the problems that led to Columbia’s destruction?
Our mission brought thousands of pounds of supplies and a German astronaut to the International Space Station, but its primary purpose was to test new safety and repair procedures instituted in response to the failures that brought down Columbia. We did lose small pieces of foam during our launch—we knew that during the mission—but there was no significant damage to the orbiter. We traveled 5.5 million miles and landed without incident. The mission was deemed a great success because it gave NASA confidence in a new set of inspection and repair procedures.
One fellow crew member on that mission was Lisa Nowak, who made news a year later because of her obsession with a fellow astronaut. Police said Lisa drove from Houston to Orlando, Florida, with a black wig, a BB pistol, pepper spray, rubber tubing, and a hooded trench coat to confront a woman the astronaut was dating. News reports said she had worn diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop on her long trip; she later denied that was true. Lisa was charged with attempted kidnapping, spent two days in jail, and later pled guilty to lesser charges. She received one year of probation, and NASA terminated its association with her.
It was an embarrassing occurrence that led to an independent panel reviewing the mental health of astronauts. Sometimes I wonder if I could have done something to help Lisa before she got herself into trouble. Those of us who knew her saw that she wasn’t doing well emotionally in the months leading up to the incident, and I wish I had talked to her about what was going on in her personal life. This episode reminded us that just as the machinery