Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [130]
NASA bumped the oft-abused Jarvis one mission to the right. The next time he would pose for a crew photo would be for STS-51L, the mission that would kill him. He would die on a mission that had no Hughes satellite to deploy, the singular event that had been the original justification for his assignment to a shuttle flight.
When Congressman Nelson arrived at JSC he was eager to secure a part to play on his mission. NASA obliged him by rolling out the old standby: photography. The congressman, like Garn, would be taking photos of various geologic, meteorologic, and oceanographic phenomena. But Nelson didn’t want to be “Garn-ed.” He wanted to be a contributing crewmember and do something really important. There was just one problem. None of the principal investigators of any of the experiments manifested on the mission wanted Nelson anywhere near their equipment. They were getting one chance to fly their experiments, had been working with the astronauts for months on how to best operate the equipment, and had no desire to have a nontechnical politician step in at the last moment and screw things up. Nelson continued to press the issue, but Hoot Gibson, the mission commander, remained firm…his mission specialists would do the major experiments. The jokers in the office quickly latched on to Nelson’s enthusiasm to operate an “important experiment” and exaggerated it as his “quest to find the cure to cancer.”
With the manifested experiments off limits, Nelson hit on the idea of taking photos of Ethiopia in the hopes they could help humanitarian agencies dealing with the drought that was ravishing the country. This well-meaning intention was exaggerated in office gossip as Nelson’s second mission objective: “To end the famine in Ethiopia.”
Finally, he threw out a real bomb. He wanted NASA to work with the Soviets and arrange an in-orbit gabfest between him and the cosmonauts aboard the Salyut space station. At this moment in history, the Cold War was still very frosty. The complications, both technical and political, to pull off this spacecraft-to-spacecraft link would be difficult and time consuming. The crew wanted nothing to do with it. The MCC flight directors wanted nothing to do with it. To the astonishment of all, even Nelson’s appeals to NASA HQ fell on deaf ears. Nobody wanted to touch this turd. The office gossips had a field day. They created a third Nelson mission objective: “To bring about world peace by talking to the Russian cosmonauts.” The wits got more ammunition when the Salyut cosmonauts unexpectedly returned to earth, supposedly because one of them had become ill. Astronauts joked that the commies ended their mission as soon as they heard Nelson wanted to talk to them. Even they didn’t want to be part of that bullshit.
These exaggerated Nelson mission objectives—cure cancer, end the famine in Ethiopia, and world peace—generated this joke among TFNGs:
Question: “Do you know how to ruin Nelson’s entire mission?”
Answer: “On launch morning tell him they’ve found a cure to cancer, it’s raining a flood in Ethiopia, and the Berlin Wall is coming down! He’ll be crushed.”
Neither Garn nor Nelson should feel abused at being the butt of an office joke. If you’re going to get in the game, you can expect some hits. We’ve all been there.
The passenger program didn’t end with Nelson’s landing. Next in line was Christa McAuliffe’s initiation of the teacher-in-space program. And it wasn’t supposed