Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (14 page)

9.
The first female astronaut candidates in the U.S. space program,
left to right
, are Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathryn Sullivan, and Rhea Seddon. Courtesy
NASA
.

Ride said there was a lot of media attention surrounding the
TFNG
announcement since it was the first astronaut selection in ten years and the first selection to include women. She said the attention didn’t affect her private life all that much, since the agency worked to keep the extra attention at a minimum so that it didn’t affect the astronauts’ abilities to train and work. “It wasn’t particularly burdensome after the initial flurry of interviews,” Ride said. “There was a fair amount of [attention], but it was still easy to have a normal life. . . . I think
JSC
worked hard to prepare for the arrival of women astronauts and female technical professionals. The technical staff at
JSC
—around four thousand engineers and scientists—was almost entirely male. There was just a very small handful of female scientists and engineers—I think only five or six out of the four thousand. The arrival of the female astronauts suddenly doubled the number of technical women at
JSC
.”

Joe Engle, who became an astronaut in 1966 as part of the “Needless Nineteen,” recalled that one dilemma with adding women to the corps was figuring out where to put the women’s locker room at the gym. “We just
had a guys’ locker room over there up to then,” Engle said. “So Deke [Slayton] had to figure it out. And of course, good old Deke, he said, ‘Well, hell, we’ll just put a curtain up and you can all use the same damn room,’ but he finally conceded that they would have a separate room.”

For some, this was their first time to ever work closely with women. “It was really all new to me, and I didn’t do it all right, either,” Fabian recalled. “That was a slightly different era. It was an era in which you would take the centerfold of
Playboy
magazine and post it up on the back of your office door, and that was thought to be totally acceptable as long as it was the back of the door instead of the front of the door. And people hadn’t yet thought of the word ‘harassment.’ We were all learning. We were all learning in those days.”

Mike Mullane said that working with his female classmates was a new experience for him as well. “I’d be a liar if I didn’t say it was difficult to learn how to work with women,” he said,

and not because of the women; because I had no life experience in working with women. I tell everybody, there were two things that at age thirty-two I did that I had never done in my life, when I woke up to go to work for my first morning as an official astronaut at
NASA
. . . dressed myself, and worked with women.

I went to twelve years of Catholic schools, wore a uniform every day. Woke up, put on a uniform. Went to school. Went to West Point. For four years I don’t think I ever saw an article of civilian clothes. Didn’t have it in the closet. Wore a uniform all the time. Went into the air force. Would wake up in the morning, go to work, put on a flight suit. Not one time in my life did I ever have to go to a closet, open it up, and pick a pair of slacks and shirt that matched. And that was a real struggle. In fact, a number of times that I walked out of the house or walked through the kitchen on my way to work, Donna, my wife, would look at me and say, “You’re not going to work dressed like that, are you?” In fact, she told me she was going to get Garanimals and put them on the clothes so that I could match the elephants with the elephants and the giraffe with the giraffe.

Mullane said that unfamiliarity with dealing with civilian clothes was a common struggle among the career-military astronauts. “I wasn’t the only one struggling in this regard, because I remember driving up one day to
NASA
with my kids in the car, . . . and there was one of the astronauts walking around in plaid pants,” he said. “Plaid pants. I mean, even I, with my
absolute zero fashion sense, thought that maybe that looked a little bit retro. In fact, to this day, my kids, they’re in their thirties now, if I’m with them and they see a golfer out in plaid pants, my kids will laugh and say, ‘Hey, Dad, check it out. There’s an astronaut.’”

Just as he’d never been in an environment where he didn’t wear a uniform, Mullane said, those environments also limited his contact with the female sex. “I had never in my life ever worked professionally with women,” he said.

In fact, my whole life, the Catholic schools I went to weren’t gender-segregated, but a lot of the classes were. . . . So I had very little interaction with females as a young person, and West Point had no females at the time I was there. In the air force, the flying community that I was in had no females when I was in there. So as a result, I was thirty-two years old when I was selected as an astronaut and I had never worked professionally with women, and I have to admit that I’m sure I was a jerk, in a word, because I just didn’t know how to act around them, telling jokes that probably were not appropriate to tell and just doing dumb things that were inappropriate and probably would have gotten me a prison sentence in this day and age now with sexual harassment and all that. The women had to endure a lot, because there was a lot of guys like myself in that regard, I think, that had never worked with women and were kind of struggling to come to grips on working professionally with women, but we all made it. That’s for sure.

The camaraderie among the thirty-five was interesting, too, because of the extreme diversity and the introduction of the new mission specialists. There was a difference even in the aspirations that led each new astronaut to the corps. The
TFNG
class was announced almost nineteen years after
NASA
hired its first astronauts, and several of the pilot candidates in Group 8 had spent much of their career with the idea in the back of their minds of someday joining their ranks.

One of those was Dan Brandenstein, who had been interested in becoming an astronaut for a long time and had set himself milestones to accomplish to get there. “But a number of the mission specialists, they weren’t pilots and they never had been pilots. I think Sally Ride is one that comes to mind. I mean, she was saying how she was just walking through the Student Union one day and saw a flyer that said
NASA
was looking for astronauts, and that’s really the first time she’d ever thought about it. A number of the mission specialists, that was their attitude.”

To Brandenstein, the new diversity his class brought to the astronaut corps was a good thing. Like others, he’d been in much more homogenous environments until then and was excited about having his horizons broadened. “The wide diversity of backgrounds that we had in that class was unique to
NASA
, and I personally loved it, because I’ve always been interested in a lot of things,” he said.

I’m fascinated going into a factory where they make bubble gum or you name it, just to see how different machines and different things work. In my lifetime, I took up skiing and I didn’t take lessons; I learned to do it through the school of hard knocks. I bought a sailboat and I made some sails because I thought it would be kind of fun to make a sail. So I was always interested in not just what I did, but kind of a wide variety of things. So being now in a group with people that were doctors and scientists and all, this was really fascinating to me.

Mattingly said the new mission specialist category of astronaut required major adjustments that the Astronaut Office pretty much made up as they went along. For example, he said, he was involved in some discussion about who should command the Space Shuttle missions. Up to that point, only four
NASA
missions had included nonpilot astronauts—four scientist-astronauts had flown over the course of the last moon landing and the three Skylab missions. On those flights, the commander was still chosen from the pilot astronauts in the corps. Mattingly, who said that his experience on aircraft with larger, more diverse crews gave him a different perspective, wondered whether that tradition should change with the new mission specialists.

We came up with these crazy ideas that since we’re going to be flying this “airplane,” but the mission of the airplane is whatever is in the payload bay, maybe the mission commander should be a mission specialist, or maybe the mission commander is a separate position where both pilots and mission specialists aspire to that being the senior position. The skipper of a ship doesn’t put his hands on a steering wheel; he directs the mission. I thought that was really good, and some of my navy buddies, “Yeah, that makes sense.” Boy, that did not float at all, and there was a bigger division between mission specialists and pilots than I had ever guessed there would be.

Mattingly intermixed pilots and mission specialists on the teams developing the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (
SAIL
), thinking the designations wouldn’t matter much. “I just mixed them up,” Mattingly recalled.

I said, you know, “Bright people work hard. I don’t care where you go.” So we sent mission specialists and pilots both to the
SAIL
, and the job that you had to do over there didn’t require any aeronautic skills at all; it was checking out the software and just going through procedures. Anybody who was willing to take the time to learn the procedures and has some understanding of how this computer system works is going to be fine.

We ended up having to put out all kinds of brush fires, you know, “He can’t do that. He’s a mission specialist.” . . . We had a
SAIL
group around the table when they were having a debriefing. We did this every week to go over all the things we’d done and what was open. Steve [Hawley] started it off with, “Did you hear about the pilot that was so dumb the others noticed?” I’ve told that to a lot of people, and I thought that was great. And at that point I think that Steve finally broke the ice, and everyone kind of said, “This is dumb, isn’t it.” After that, at least it never came to my attention again if they had any problems, but from then on, they really came together.

Brewster Shaw recalled that early on Kathy Sullivan commented to him that the pilots were going to be just like taxi drivers and that it was the mission specialists who were going to do all the significant work on the Space Shuttle program. “Turns out, by golly, she was pretty much right,” Shaw said. “But at the time, being a macho test pilot, I was a little appalled at her statement.” Shaw saw just how true Sullivan’s statement was as pilot of
STS
-9, his first mission. “Our role was very minimal, John [Young’s] and mine, because we didn’t have to maneuver the vehicle very much, but we had to monitor the systems a lot. So we didn’t get to participate to a great length in the science that was going on. So, yes, pretty much, we got it up there and we got it back. In the meantime, the other guys did all the work.”

For training the
TFNG
group was split into two sections—the Red Team and the Blue Team, Brandenstein explained. Teams took turns in the classroom and flying, spending a half day on each activity and then switching off with the other team. “We broke in two parts because the classroom didn’t hold the thirty-five people,” John Fabian recalled, “and so you got to know the people that were in your class much better, in reality, than you got to
know the people that were in the other class, particularly in the first three or four months. But what we found out very quickly was that all of these people, whether they were the youngest in the group or the oldest in the group, they were all extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily capable, and very, very eager to succeed in what it was that they were doing.”

The new AsCans brought a variety of interesting backgrounds to the table, according to Brandenstein.

There were a lot of neat people . . . that knew a lot about things I didn’t have a clue about, so you could learn a lot more. And that was kind of the flavor of the training. The first year of training, they try and give everybody some baseline of knowledge that they needed to operate in that office, so we had aerodynamics courses, which, for somebody who had been through a test-pilot school, was kind of a “ho-hum, been there, done that,” but for a medical doctor, I mean, that was something totally new and different. But then the astronomy courses and the geology courses and the medical-type courses we got, all that was focused on stuff we’d have to know to operate in the office and at least understand and be reasonably cognizant of some of the importance of the various experiments that we would be doing on the various missions and stuff. So I found that real fascinating.

For example, he said, the astronomy course was a real standout for him in the training. “He’s passed away now, but the astronomy course was Professor Smith out of University of Texas, and he was kind of your almost stereotypical crazy professor,” Brandenstein said.

I mean, he was just a cloud of chalk dust back and forth across the blackboard as he went on. We had twelve hours of astronomy; he claimed that he gave us four years of undergraduate and two years of graduate astronomy in twelve hours. And it gave you a good appreciation of what it was all about. It didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, make me an astronomer, but the intent of it was to give you an appreciation and give you an understanding. And then also because of the very special instructors they brought in, it gave you a point of contact, so if somewhere later in your career you had a mission that needed that expertise, you had somebody to go up to and get the level of detailed information you needed.