Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [171]
The very next evening our crew had a party during which, no surprise, the favorite topic of conversation was Rick Hauck’s ascension into heaven. Shep plotted a “let’s get ’em” mission with the same intense focus a SEAL might plot to blow up an enemy fortification. Early Monday morning he and I smuggled two fire extinguishers into the astronaut conference room. We wrapped them in our jackets and placed them directly behind Hoot Gibson’s and Guy Gardner’s seats. Jerry Ross brought a tape player loaded with Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to Be an American.” Hoot and Guy secreted black bow-ties in their pockets.
After Rick covered his STS-26 issues, Brandenstein asked Hoot if he had any STS-27 items to discuss. That was Jerry Ross’s cue to trigger Greenwood’s tune. Shep and I fired off the fire extinguishers for the smoke effect and Hoot and Guy clipped on their ties and slowly rose from their chairs in a mimic of Hauck’s and Covey’s rise from the Wortham Center orchestra pit. The conference room exploded in laughter. There was thunderous applause. I looked at Rick. He had a smile on his face but his flexing jaw muscles said more about what he was really feeling. He had just been lampooned and was dying to issue a rebuttal, but he knew he couldn’t. To do so would be a violation of astronaut commandant number three, “Thou shalt not show a weakness.” A three-legged gazelle limping across the Serengeti would survive longer than an astronaut exhibiting a wounded ego among his peers.
As our STS-27 training progressed we were introduced to a new shuttle design feature, a bailout system. It wasn’t what we had hoped. The best design would have had the entire cockpit being blasted away to parachute into the water. But this option would have required a complete redesign of the orbiter and there was insufficient money for that. Our second preference had been ejection seats. The shuttle was originally designed to include two of these for the two astronauts flying the first test flights. But two ejection seats were all that would fit in the upstairs cockpit and none could be added to the mid-deck. While it would have been relatively easy to reinstall the two upstairs seats, such a modification was also rejected. No mission specialist was going to climb aboard a shuttle in which the two pilots had the only escape capability.
With the elimination of a cockpit pod and ejection seats as potential escape systems, the engineers gave us the only thing they could give us, a backpack parachute. We would jump out the side hatch just like B-17 crewmembers did in WWII. Good freakin’ luck! We’d be juiced against the wing like a grasshopper on an automobile windshield. But the engineers had a solution to get us clear of the wing—tractor rockets. A bundle of small rockets would be installed in the cockpit above the side hatch. After blowing the hatch, astronauts would lie on their backs on a table in the hatchway, attach their harness to a rocket, and then pull a lanyard, which would fire a mortar, hurling the rocket outward. A cable connecting the rocket to the astronaut would unreel for twenty or so feet before the rocket would ignite and then jerk the astronaut by the scruff of the collar out of the hatch and clear of the wing. When astronauts saw movies of this system being tested with anthropomorphic dummies there was grim laughter. It looked like something Wiley Coyote had ordered from Acme Rocket Company to catch that speedy Roadrunner. Fortunately, a more practical design was adopted from a suggestion by flight surgeon Joe Boyce—a slide pole. A banana-shaped, telescoping pole was installed on the ceiling of the mid-deck cockpit. After blowing the hatch, astronauts would throw a handle that would release springs to slam the pole outward