_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [93]
To make himself useful on the journey, Garn volunteered to be a medical guinea pig. NASA needed to better understand space motion sickness. More than half of Shuttle fliers were experiencing the malady. Well, by crackey, Jake Garn turned out to be a perfect subject. It seems, because he’d used his senatorial clout to get his ride, the good senator’s proper meds to reduce space nausea were somehow misplaced. His crewmates returned to Earth hysterical with laughter. They told me Garn was sick the whole flight and, when he appeared just once before the television camera to speak to the voters back home, he was held upright and steady and stuck to Discovery’s cabin wall by Velcro. Since that day, Shuttles fly with the “Memorial Jake Garn Wall” for all those who need a barf bag, and sick astronaut upchucks are measured in one, two, or three Garns.
One might think flying nonessential astronauts in space would have ended there.
Well, it didn’t. NASA now had a congressional problem of its own making. The agency felt it simply could not fly the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversaw its budget without inviting his counterpart in the House of Representatives. Congressman Bill Nelson didn’t ask to go. The gentleman of our capital city would never impose on anyone, but when NASA insisted, he climbed aboard the shuttle Columbia and was given the proper meds. Nelson made it through his flight without once turning green.
And as the old saying goes, when it comes to climbing on the bandwagon, going all out to get what you want, we are all prostitutes. For years we reporters had been told the first citizen in space would be a journalist, and I found it easy to imagine myself an astronaut only temporarily earthbound. I had visions of broadcasting every second of the thundering and rattling ride into orbit no matter how scared out of my wits I was, but President Ronald Reagan was on the prowl for votes he didn’t need. His 1984 reelection campaign went after the large National Teachers’ Union with the promise “a teacher will be the first citizen in space.”
The people voted, and Reagan swept the country and kept his promise. No one could disagree. The teachers’ choice, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, was simply perfect. She was a thirty-seven-year-old social sciences teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who planned her assignments with all the enthusiasm of a senior going to her prom with permission to stay out all night. Smart and sharp, she won her ride into orbit over eleven thousand other applicants, and we reporters heaped on the deserving praise while the program to select one of us among 1,769 applications moved ahead.
The application to participate in the Journalist in Space Project was itself a trap. It was managed by the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication, and it was very specific and discouragingly long. It was filled with demanding essays and structured questions, and the impatient simply tossed it into the nearest waste can.
The selection committee wanted to weed out the “never finish anything you start” bunch from the opening bell. More traps came not only with the requirement of precise answers and essays, but with requests for references qualified to judge your work. The selection committee was not impressed with whom you knew, but with those references who had the expertise to judge your talents. While others put down governors, senators, astronauts, and movie stars, I gave the committee Dixon Gannett, John Chancellor, and Martin Caidin as references—each established and respected in my field. When the 1,769 were whittled down to national semifinalists, I was most pleased to learn I was among them.
As it’s been said, good news comes in bunches. The next morning the mailman brought me a higher-paying contract with NBC News, and wife Jo called the carpenter and had double doors put on the