Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [110]
Afterward we relaxed around our supper of dehydrated shrimp cocktail, beef patties, and vegetables. The food was packaged in plastic dishes and rehydrated with water from our fuel cells. After nearly burning a hole in my esophagus by swallowing a blob of inadequately hydrated horseradish powder, I learned to mix the food and water a bit longer. Fuel cell water was also used for drinking. It was dispensed into plastic containers, some of which contained various flavored powders (yes, including Tang). Because nothing can be poured in weightlessness, the drinks had to be sucked from straws. I quickly learned never to drink plain water. Iodine was used as a disinfectant and the water was tinged yellow with it and tasted of the chemical. While we ate much better than the early astronauts, who had to squeeze their food out of tubes, I still longed for the day the NASA food engineers would come up with dehydrated beer and pizza.
After cleaning up and cycling through our toilet we prepared for sleep. This was not a “shift” mission so we all slept at the same time. We would depend uponDiscovery ’s caution-and-warning system to alert us if something bad happened. Each of us had a sleep restraint, a cloth bag we pinned to the walls and zipped into. There was no privacy. Like bats in a cave, we bunked cheek to jowl in the lower cockpit. We slept downstairs because the lack of windows made it darker and cooler than the upstairs cockpit.
As I floated inside my restraint I joined in the chorus of complaints about a fierce backache. In weightlessness the vertebrae of the spine spread apart, resulting in a height increase of an inch or two. The strain on the lower back muscles is significant and painful. All of us but Judy were bothered by it. Why she was immune I had no idea, but she grew weary of our complaints and exploited her advantage: “I’m probably the first woman in history to go to bed with five men and all of them have backaches.”
I couldn’t sleep…and it wasn’t because of any backache. I didn’twant to sleep. I wanted to celebrate. From MECO to this moment, I had been too busy with checklists to really consider the life-changing experience of the past twelve hours. I had done it! I was an astronaut in the cockpit of a spaceship orbiting the Earth. I was living what Willy Ley had written about inThe Conquest of Space. I wanted to scream and shout and punch my fists in the air. Fortunately for the rest of the crew, I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I floated my sleep restraint upstairs.Floated! God, I still couldn’t get my mind around the reality of it. I tied the bag under the overhead windows and slipped inside. I would celebrate by sightseeing. Since the autopilot was holding the shuttle with its top to the Earth, I now had the planet in my face.
Other than the breath of the cabin fans and the white-noise hiss of the UHF radio, the cockpit was midnight still. In the silence I felt as if we had stopped dead in space. In all my other life experiences speed meant noise…the howl of wind gripping a cockpit, the roar of an engine. Now I was traveling at nearly 5 miles per second and there was only silence. It was as if I were hovering in a balloon, and the Earth was silently turning beneath me.
I was also gripped with a powerful sense of detachment from the rest of humanity. There was nothing at the windows to suggest any other life in the universe. I was looking to a horizon more than a thousand miles distant and could see only the unrelieved blue of the Pacific. In each passing second that horizon was being pushed another five miles to the east but still nothing changed. There was no vapor trail of a jetliner, no wake of a ship, no cities, no glint of Sun from a piece of glass or metal. There was no signature of life on Earth. And the view into space was even more lonely. The brilliance