Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [129]
Garn was a rarity in Congress—he had actually done something in his life besides lawyering. In that, he should be cheered. He was a former navy pilot and brigadier general in the Utah Air Guard. When he reported to JSC for his eat/sleep/toilet training, he came across as easygoing and approachable. With his military aviation background he had no trouble fitting in. Nobody feared he would have a mental breakdown in space or do something dumb in the cockpit that might threaten a crew or the mission. He had a lot to recommend him to our ranks, except that he hadn’t paid the dues to get there—a lifetime of brutal work and fierce competition. Of course we treated him with respect, but our displeasure was evident in subtle rebellions. Before he arrived at JSC a sign-up sheet briefly appeared on the astronaut office bulletin board for people who wanted to take an eight-week course to become a senator. When his mission was delayed for several weeks, the office jokers spun this sarcastic entertainment:
Question from the press for Senator Garn: “Senator, how do you feel about your mission being delayed?”
Senator Garn: “I’m terribly disappointed since I’ve trained forhours for the flight.”
During his mission Garn suffered one of the more legendary cases of space sickness. There were whispers he was virtually incapacitated for several days. (A flight surgeon would later tell me they jokingly adopted the “Garn Unit” as a measure of quantifying nausea among astronauts.) But his illness pointed to another danger of flying non–mission essential passengers of any ilk aboard the shuttle: If they had a serious health problem, the mission might have to be terminated early. It could happen. While NASA’s prelaunch physicals were thorough, they could easily miss a ballooning aneurysm or a plaqued-up artery or a kidney stone. If a mission ended early due to a serious medical problem, it would mean the enormous risk the crew took to get in space, not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars of launch costs, would be for naught. Another crew might have to risk their lives to repeat the mission and NASA might have to burn another pile of money. While mission termination for health reasons was a possibility with any crewmember, it was anecessary risk for all mission-essential crewmembers. Not so with a passenger.
In the fall of 1985 it was announced that Congressman Bill Nelson would also fly a shuttle mission. Another groan arose from the astronaut office. No doubt the biggest groan came from another part-timer, Greg Jarvis. Greg was an employee of Hughes Space and Communications Company, a major supplier of communication satellites. He was flying in space to observe the deployment of one of his company’s products and to perform some in-cockpit experiments on the physics of deployments. Garn’s flight assignment had already pushed him to the right on the schedule and he had finally ended up on STS-61C. It was while he was on a trip to JSC to pose for an official crew photo that HQ announced Nelson would replace him. The justification was that the Hughes satellite, which had originally been scheduled to fly on STS-61C, was having technical problems and was going to have to be deleted from the cargo manifest. Since one of the major purposes of Jarvis’s shuttle mission was to observe a Hughes satellite deployment, it made sense, HQ intimated, to move him and give his seat to Nelson. This sounded reasonable—except for the fact NASA moved Jarvis to a mission that did not have a Hughes payload. That made it clear to TFNGs he was being removed for one reason only—to make room for Nelson. Now it