Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [94]
The knock came on my door and I opened it to Olan Bertrand’s smiling face. Olan was one of the Vehicle Integration Test Team (VITT) members and would be a participant in our final prelaunch briefing. He was also a Louisiana Cajun with an accent as thick as a bowl of jambalaya. He mumbled something I interpreted as “The weather and the bird are looking good,” but could have been “It’s raining like hell andDiscovery blew over.” Only his smile told me it was the former and not the latter.
I showered and shaved, then trimmed my fingernails. Some of the early spacewalkers had painfully torn their nails on the inside of the suit gloves and had suggested contingency spacewalkers cut them short, too. I did so and filed them to snag-free crescents.
For breakfast I dressed in a mission golf shirt. I had no appetite, but it was a mandatory photo opportunity. A NASA cameraman entered to film us sitting around the table. I faked a carefree smile and waved. Most of us ate nothing or very lightly. I had a piece of toast. As a teenager I had always heard the “voice of NASA” say the astronauts were enjoying a breakfast of steak and eggs before launch. One bite of that fare and I would have vomited. Nobody drank coffee. That would have been bladder suicide.
After the cameraman was gone, I gave Judy my emery board. “You can do your nails during ascent.” She laughed. It had been a running Zoo Crew joke that, as a Jewish American Princess (JAP), she would be giving herself a manicure during the countdown. With the nail file I included my latest JAP joke: “What does a JAP say when she inadvertently knocks over a priceless Ming dynasty vase, it shatters on the floor, and museum officials rush to the scene?”
Judy sighed in resignation. “What does she say, Tarzan?”
“She shouts, ‘I’m okay! I’m okay!’”
After the meal, we collected in the main briefing room for a teleconference to review the launch countdown status and the weather forecast. Everything looked good. The weather for Dakar, Senegal, Africa, was covered. It was our primary transatlantic abort site, just twenty-five harrowing minutes away from Florida via a wounded shuttle. I really didn’t want to make my first visit to Africa in a space shuttle.
Next, we visited flight surgeons Jim Logan and Don Stewart in the gym for a cursory last exam. They checked our ears, throat, temperature, and blood pressure. I put myself in a happy place to ensure the last was within limits. Both doctors were good friends of the Zoo Crew, but if they had raised any medical issues at this moment, others would have later found their arrow-riddled bodies spread-eagled to the archery hay bale. We wouldn’t have missed.
We then cycled through the bathroom for a next-to-last gravity-assisted waste collection. We’d have one more chance at the launchpad toilet. My self-imposed fast from liquids was working. I had no urges, but nevertheless I took advantage of the moment to squeeze out a few drops of urine.
I returned to my room and began to dress. While we had been at breakfast, the suit crew had arranged our wardrobe on the bed. The first item I donned was my urine collection device. I stepped through the leg openings and pulled the condom toward my penis. It looked incredibly small. Not the condom…my penis. I coached the recalcitrant appendage into the latex. It promptly slipped from my body. Apprehension had sucked every molecule of blood from my crotch. I doubted even a naked Bo Derek doing jumping jacks in front of me would have stirred life into this lizard.
I made a second attempt to get my sword into its sheath, this time taking the weight of the UCD bladder in my hand so I would stay attached. I Velcroed the device around my waist, accepting the results whatever they might be. I had no choice. There was a countdown clock ticking.
I finished dressing in my flight suit, then filled my pockets with spare prescription glasses, pencils, pressurized space pens, and barf bags…lots of barf bags. I put one