Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [204]
The wait began. My heart was in afterburner. The seat was a torture. My bladder distended toward rupture even as I was mad with thirst from my prelaunch dehydration efforts. And this time I faced a new experience certain to tax my reserves even more—I was launching in the downstairs cockpit. My dislike of the position had not changed since I last sat here on STS-27’s reentry. I hated the tomblike isolation. I hated not having a window to look from or instruments to monitor. And I could never entirely expel from my mind the image of what it must have been like for Christa, Greg, and Ron inChallenger ’s lower cockpit. There are some things best forgotten, but locked in the same box, I couldn’t help but remember them.
God, let us gowas my prayer. The thought of having to do this tomorrow made me nauseous. Maybe the cards had been a sign. Maybe seven would be my lucky number. At least I had Pepe’s rookie complaints to entertain me. They came over the intercom in a nonstop flood: “Oh God, my back is killing me…My bladder is ready to explode…My stomach is being pushed out of my mouth…I got a cramp in my calf…I’m dying of thirst…I’m going to puke before I even get into space.” J.O. jokingly asked how he would throw up in the LES while strapped to his seat. Ever the engineer, Pepe gave the question a moment of serious thought and replied, “I’ll just roll my head around and puke in the back of my helmet.”
Maybe I was just punch-drunk with exhaustion and fear but I found Pepe’s constant dialogue hilarious. I was going to puke from laughing. J.O. warned, “Don’t make me laugh, Pepe. I’ll fall into another coughing fit.” J.O. could barely talk without inducing a phlegmy hack.
After several waves of complaints, Pepe prefaced his next chapter with “Guys, I know I’m not a wimp, but…” and then continued the litany. John Casper picked up on the preamble and began to use it every time he had a complaint. “Guys, I know I’m not a wimp, but…” Soon the entire upstairs cockpit was doing it. Pepe heard my laughing cackle and continued his comedy routine by mimicking it…an explosion of rapid and high-pitchedhee, hee, hee s. That got me giggling even more. If the launch director was listening he probably thought we had all gone insane.
Pepe’s complaints faded and we looked for other ways to occupy our time and take our minds off our misery. We resorted to the old standby—roasting the flight surgeon. He was a captive audience, required to monitor our intercom but forbidden to speak to us directly unless we requested a conversation, and none of us were about to do that.
“I hear the doc’s wife is having an affair with a chiropractor.”
“And his daughter is sleeping with a malpractice lawyer.”
“And his son is studying to be a malpractice lawyer.”
There was a fake “Shhhhh…He might hear us.”
“He’s not listening. He’s going over his stock portfolio.”
“He’s on the phone with his Hong Kong broker getting the fix on gold and the yen.”
“He’s probably phoning for a tee time.”
“Hell, it’s Sunday. He’s not even there. Docs don’t work on Sunday.”
“Well, they don’t worksober on Sundays.”
Then we began to enumerate the perks the flight surgeons enjoyed. “They get hired by NASA as GS Infinities,” a reference to the higher government service pay grade they were given.
“They get reserved parking