Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [69]
A moment later Dale Gardner, who had been absent on a toilet break, reentered the mid-deck. The vein on his head looked ready to burst. “Jesus Christ, what did you guys say on the intercom! Some woman working on the Sim Sup console heard you guys say something about a dehydrated pear and was totally grossed out. She stormed off to Kraft’s office to lodge a complaint.”
“Oh God,” I said. “She must have heard us through an open mic.”
This wasn’t going to look good…some young woman leaning over Dr. Kraft’s desk and screaming, “Some of your wonder-boy astronauts just saw a part of the female anatomy in a dried pear!” God, why couldn’t we have seen the Virgin Mary in a tortilla instead?
Dale again asked, “What did you say to piss her off?”
My compatriot hung his head like a six-year-old in front of an irate parent and mumbled, “I think I said——”
“You said THAT? Jesus…you’re toast. Kraft is going to crucify you.” Then he climbed to the flight deck shaking his head at our idiocy.
We threw our food in the garbage, including those offending pears. Our appetites were gone. Our careers would soon be in that garbage can, too, I thought. We climbed back to the flight deck and went through the motions of being an astronaut. We were hooded victims tied to a post waiting for the bullet to be fired from Kraft’s office: “Get your asses over here…and clean out your desks on the way!” But hours passed and no call came. In fact the sim proceeded to completion and still there was no call.
As we sulked back to our offices expecting to find messages on our desks, Dale came to our sides and said, “Hey, guys, that was pretty funny, wasn’t it?”
We looked at him. “What was funny?”
“That joke I pulled on you about the woman hearing your pear comment.”
“That was a joke?”
“Yeah, I was standing outside the mid-deck and heard you guys talking about it. I thought I’d rattle your cage.”
I was ready to rattle his cage with both hands on his throat. “You bastard!”
A few days later a note did appear on my desk requesting my presence in Building 1. It was from George Abbey.
*Initially the STS numbering system was straightforward, STS-1, -2, -3, etc. After STS-9, NASA instituted a new number/letter system to provide more information in the mission designator. But there was another reason for the change—superstition. Astronauts and engineers aren’t immune from it any more than the rest of the population. NASA did not want to have the bad luck number 13 hanging on a shuttle mission, particularly given the near disaster ofApollo 13. So Gerald Griffin, the JSC director, came up with a new STS mission designation system to shortstop an STS-13 label. The first number would designate the calendar year in which the mission was planned to launch. The second number would be a 1 or 2—1 designating a KSC launch and 2 indicating a launch from Vandenberg AFB in California. The letter designation would show the intended launch sequence in the calendar year, with A, B, C, D, etc., translating to the first, second, third, fourth, etc., calendar year launch. So the STS-41G label shows the mission was planned to be the seventh (G) mission of 1984 (4) and would be launched from KSC (1). It was hoped that this code would sufficiently blind the god of bad luck to the fact that STS-41G was actually the thirteenth shuttle