Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [71]
I was also happy to be crewed with Judy. It wasn’t just because she was so AD tolerant, although that was a big reason. She was smart, hardworking, and dependable, all the things you would want in a fellow crewmember. Of course the male in me also appreciated her beauty. The five years since our arrival at JSC had been kind to JR (her nickname). As most of us had done (under the hammer of astronaut competitiveness) she had taken to jogging and dropped her weight. Her ravishingly curly anthracite black hair now framed a leaner, bronze tan face.
Steve Hawley was a gift to all of us. More than any other post-doc, baby-faced Hawley was the source of my conversion from doubter to believer in the capabilities of the TFNG scientists. A Kansan with a PhD in astrophysics, Hawley was living proof an advanced civilization of aliens have visited Earth. He was one of them. No human had a comparable brain. In just a glance, Steve could commit the most complex shuttle schematics to permanent memory. Every checklist, including the two-volume malfunction massif, was in a virtual file drawer in his brain, ready for instant retrieval at the sound of a cockpit warning tone. He was a maestro in simulations, directing responses to ten different system failures simultaneously. John Creighton once commented that to have Hawley in the cockpit was to have a sixth GPC aboard, a play on the fact that the shuttle computer system consisted of only five IBM General Purpose Computers (GPC). Steve had so much brainpower, the space shuttle was hardly enough to occupy him. He found additional challenges. One was to attend professional baseball umpire camp over his vacation (he was a sports addict). It wouldn’t have surprised me to have learned he was also ghostwriting Stephen Hawking’s books. Hawley was held in such high regard by the military TFNGs that the pilots christened him “Attack Astronomer.” Since pilots were particular about their own titles—fighter pilot, attack pilot, gunship pilot—Hawley’s title was an honorific. Steve was recently married to Sally Ride and for the sake of that marriage he was trying to distance himself from us AD bottom feeders. But it was a struggle. Hoot kept pulling him back to the dark side.
There would also be a sixth crewmember aboard, a McDonnell Douglas employee, Charlie Walker, flying as a payload specialist (PS) to operate a company experiment.
That night, February 3, 1983, Donna and I celebrated over dinner and later in bed. As she slept beside me, I stared at the ceiling and thanked God for passage through one more gate on my journey to space. I finally had a mission. Space was looking closer than ever. But there were six other shuttle flights in front of me. A lot could yet go wrong. I prayed for the crews of those missions. I prayed for their safety and success. I prayed more fiercely than they were praying for themselves. I wanted them out of the way.
The official NASA press release followed within a couple days and we bought the beer at an Outpost happy hour. George had also named the STS-41C crew so there was a total of seven TFNGs who had jumped to the sunlit side of the unassigned/assigned fence. I was now the one being congratulated and I ached for the others who showed me their fake smiles.
During the party I heard one frustrated astronaut redefine TFNG—thanks for Nothing, George. I would never understand George Abbey. Some interpreted his dictatorial style as megalomania, but I never saw him seek a spotlight. In fact, a recent newspaper photo had appeared on the astronaut B-board showing Abbey shaking hands with a shuttle crew. It was captioned, “Unidentified NASA official welcomes astronauts.” We all laughed at that. It was as if a photo of the pope had appeared in a newspaper over the caption, “Unidentified