Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [91]
As I pumped iron, I chuckled at the sight of the straw-filled archery bull’s-eye in one corner. What candy-ass astronaut had requested that addition to the gym? Whoever it was, I hoped they could fly a shuttle better than they could shoot a bow. The plaster wall around the target had been shotgunned by errant arrows.
I left the gym for an outdoor run and found Judy stretching before her jog. We fell in together. It was early evening and KSC had emptied of workers. Our only company were mosquitoes, and they were a real incentive to keep the pace fast. Sweat came quickly, which was the whole purpose of the run. I wanted to dehydrate myself to minimize bladder discomfort in tomorrow’s countdown. Other astronauts did the same. The few couch potatoes in our ranks tried to wring themselves dry by sitting in a whirlpool bath and drinking beer, counting on the diuretic effect of the alcohol and sweat to do the job.
Judy and I passed the black hulks of several alligators on the opposite banks of drainage ditches. I had once seen one of these creatures explode out of the water in a chase after an armadillo. Why they never chased jogging astronauts was a mystery to me. Even when we teased them, they did not react. I once watched Fred Gregory toss shells at a twelve-footer hoping to see it stir. As the missiles ricocheted from its scales, I warned Fred, “Those things can run twenty miles per hour when they’re riled and that’s a lot faster than you.” But Fred continued his reptile target practice while answering, “Yeah…but that’s on firm ground. If they’re chasing me, they’ll be slipping and sliding through shit and they can’t run nearly as fast.”
Judy and I discussed an issue we had heard about just before leaving the crew quarters. An engineer had found a potential flaw that could result in the failure of the burned-out SRBs to separate from the gas tank. Such a scenario would be fatal. The shuttle would never make it to orbit or achieve a successful abort dragging along nearly 300,000 pounds of useless steel. The good news was it would take several simultaneous failures in the circuitry for the SRB separation failure to occur. When the launch team asked Hank whether he was comfortable flying the mission with this failure mode in place, his answer was yes. That didn’t surprise me. They might as well have asked a three-year-old if he wanted to eat his candy now or wait until tomorrow. If the engineers said, “We forgot to install the center engine. Do you still want to launch?” Hank probably would have said, “No problem. We’ll just burn the two we have.” Nothing was going to get in our way.
Judy and I continued into the KSC wilderness. The only sound was the buzz of cicadas. The dusk was deepening and an occasional firefly flickered over the ditches. Judy voiced concern that we might trip over an alligator. I told her the Fred Gregory story and she laughed. But in a rare moment of prudence, we decided to turn back.
We gradually slowed into a cool-down walk. I had come a long way…and I don’t mean during the run. There was a fox of a woman at my side and I could actually think of her as a friend and equal. Those six years ago when we were standing together on the stage being introduced to the JSC workforce, I saw Judy with three strikes against her: She was civilian. She was a woman. She was beautiful. At the time I wondered how her beauty had played in her passage through the wickets of life to become an astronaut; wickets that, for the most part, had been male tended. Had she been waved through some of those gates because her smile had melted a professor or perhaps her dynamite body had influenced a male astronaut sitting on the selection committee? We males are suspicious of female beauty because we know ourselves too well.
But, over the years, Judy had proven she wasn’t an astronaut because of her sex appeal or because of an abuse of the affirmative action program. She was an astronaut because