Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (39 page)

The mission was the first to be partly directed from outside the United States. Germany had built its own control center in Oberphaffenhofen, southwest of Munich. Yet another of the interesting cultural differences came to light during a visit by the crew to the control center during mission preparations. “They had an integrated sim, the first one they’d run, and the whole payload crew was over there working in the simulator and doing this sim to get their controllers up to speed,” Hartsfield recalled.

Well, they were also filming a documentary on how Germany was preparing for this thing, and so there were camera crews walking around in their control
center taking pictures, and it got to be lunchtime. Things are different in Germany, you know, about drinking. To have wine and beer at lunch is a common thing. Well, in the basement of the control center, like in a lot of German businesses, they’ve got machines like Coke machines, but it’s a beer machine. The flight controllers had all gone down and got a beer, and here is this crew, all of them got a beer, sitting on the console, and eating lunch. I called Hansulrich Steimle, and I said, “Hansulrich, I know how things are here in Germany, but you’re filming for posterity here.” I said, “If this film goes outside of Germany, some people may not understand your flight controllers drinking on duty.” Then I became very unpopular, because some of them knew that I had said something, because he made them put their beer away.

The cultural differences were particularly an issue during mission preparations for Bonnie Dunbar, the only female member of the crew. As the two
NASA
mission specialists, she and Guy Bluford were sent over early to begin training in West Germany.

When I showed up there was a lot of discussion about both of us, but, with respect to me, they were very concerned that I had been assigned to the flight, because their medical experiment wasn’t intended to include female blood. They thought that would ruin their statistics. . . . I was actually told in front of my face—and I have to first of all qualify that I’ve become very good friends with all these people; but any time you’re at the point of the pathfinder, there’s going to be things happening—I was told that maybe
NASA
had done this intentionally to offend the Germans by assigning a woman.

As they started to work through that, it came to light that some of the experiments on the mission, such as the vestibular sled experiment, did not fit her, and the Germans began saying they were going to need for her to be replaced. This was Dunbar’s first flight assignment, and she began to worry that she would lose her seat. “At that time Dr. Joe Kerwin was head of Space and Life Sciences. . . . He actually wrote a memo for the record and to
DFVLR
[Deutsche Forschungs Versuchsanstat fur Luft und Raumfahrt, the German Aerospace Research Establishment] stating that all equipment should be designed to this percentile spread. So they stood by [me].”

However, Dunbar also had many positive experiences working with the West Germans in preparation for the mission and enjoyed their excitement
about it. She began working with the Germans during preparations for the first Spacelab flight, and she said it was fun to see the atmosphere there during their entry into working with human-rated vehicles.

When I went over there, it was a very exciting time for them. The Bundestag had become involved in this, which is their legislative government. At that time the seat of government in [West] Germany was in Bonn, and we’re training in Bonn/Cologne. So it wasn’t unusual for our two German astronauts, Ernst Messerschmid and Reinhard Furrer, to have lunch with what we’d call a senator. There was just a lot of interest. The mission manager at that time told me that they hoped to use this mission not only to advance their science and human spaceflight but to inspire a generation of young people in Germany that really hadn’t had inspiration since the war, and they lost the war. So this had very much a political flavor to it, not just a scientific flavor to it.

According to Dunbar, the German astronauts were great to work with, and it was very interesting being around them in West Germany, where they had a respected, heroic status.

Actually, it was fun to talk to them, because in Germany they very much occupied an Original [Mercury] Seven status, and so it was always interesting to hear from their perspective and see what they were doing, how the program was being received. It’s changing now, but there’s still a lot of dichotomy, even in Germany, about the value of human spaceflight, even though they’re a major partner in
ESA
[the European Space Agency] and in the Space Station, because there would be one or two ministers that would vocally try to kill the program, and so we were interested in working with them and helping them.

Hartsfield recalled several highlights of 61
A
once the preparations were complete and the flight was finally underway. “I would say it was probably the most diverse mission ever flown,” Hartsfield asserted.

We had a black, a woman, two Germans, a Dutchman, and a marine. I mean, how diverse can you get, you know? And there was some funny things happened. We launched on October 30, and of course, October 31 was Halloween. So I took a back off one of the ascent checklists we weren’t going to use anymore, and I drew a face on it, cut out eyeholes, got some string, and I made myself a mask. I took one of the stowage bags and went trick-or-treating back in the
lab. Of course, they don’t do Halloween in Germany, or Europe, so they didn’t know what I was up to. I decided not to pull any tricks on them, but I didn’t get much in my bag. But somebody took a picture. One of the guys took a picture of me with that mask on, holding that bag, and somehow that picture got released back in the U.S. About a month after the flight, I got a letter from
NASA
headquarters. Actually, the letter had come from a congressman who had a complaint from one of his constituents about her tax money being spent to buy toys for astronauts. She was very upset. So it was sent to me to answer, and I had to explain, hey, nothing was done, and it was made in flight from material we didn’t need anymore. It was just fun. I never heard any more, so I think maybe that satisfied her. She had the notion that we had bought this mask and bag and stuff just to do Halloween.

Another amusing anecdote Hartsfield recalled involved Bluford.

Steve [Nagel] and I were up on the flight deck. All of a sudden, we heard this bang, bang, bang! It sounded like somebody was tearing up the mid-deck. We peeked our heads down in the hole on the side where the bunks were. About that time we saw the bottom bunk come open, and the top one. Bonnie is sticking her head out looking up and Ernst is looking down, and all this banging is going [on] in this little bunk. So they slide Guy’s door open to his bunk, and he kind of looks around, “Oh,” and he pulls it back shut and goes back to sleep. . . . Apparently, he had awakened and didn’t know where he was. He had a little claustrophobia or something, and he was completely disoriented, you know. But when he finally saw where he was, he said, “Okay,” and he went back to sleep.

Hartsfield also recalled the crew flying through a mysterious cloud of particles during orbit. “Steve was up on the flight deck with Buckley, and they yelled back at me, ‘Hey, Hank, get up on the flight deck.’ And I got up there and looked out the window, and there was these little light things, bouncing off the windscreen. At first I couldn’t tell how fast they were going. Zoom! Zoom! They looked like they were going real fast. And I said, well, it can’t be that fast, and couldn’t be massive, because they aren’t breaking the window or anything. We were down close to Antarctica, at the southernmost point of our orbit.”

For the duration of the mission, the crew had no idea what was causing the phenomenon. In fact, according to Hartsfield, answers didn’t come un
til after the landing, when engineers looked at the orbiter’s front windows. “When the solids [separated during launch], it would coat the windscreen. When those little things hit it, it was cleaning the windscreen. Those spots just took the grease right off of it. When we got back, we found out it was water. We had done a water dump on the previous rev. And we didn’t realize it, but all of that turned into ice particles. And then we flew through it. It was weird. We were looking at the window, zoom zoom zoom. It would hit the windows and bounce off, and you’re wondering what the hell it was.”

10.

Secret Missions

From its payload-carrying capacity to the wings that provided its substantial cross-range, the Space Shuttle was heavily shaped by the role the U.S. Department of Defense played in its origins. After Congress essentially pitted
NASA
’s Skylab program and the air force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory against each other for funding in the late 1960s,
NASA
decided to try to avoid such problems with its next vehicle by soliciting DoD involvement from the beginning. In several ways, the shuttle’s design and capabilities were influenced by uses the military had in mind for the vehicle.

Until early 1985, however, the military played only a limited role in the shuttle’s use. Beginning as early as
STS
-4, there had been flights with classified military components, but there had yet to be a dedicated military classified flight. That would change with 51
C
, in January 1985.

STS
-51
C

Crew: Commander T. K. Mattingly, Pilot Loren Shriver, Mission Specialists Ellison Onizuka and James Buchli, Payload Specialist Gary Payton

Orbiter:
Challenger

Launched: 24 January 1985

Landed: 27 January 1985

Mission: Launch of classified military intelligence satellite

T. K. Mattingly had dealt with classified elements previously, as commander of
STS
-4. After he returned from that mission, Deke Slayton asked him if he would be interested in staying in the astronaut corps and commanding the first fully DoD-dedicated classified mission. Slayton told Mattingly that the mission should require only six months of training, which would be a very short turnaround compared to many flights. Mattingly recalled, “With all the training and all of the years we put into the program, the idea of turning around and going right away was very ap
pealing, to get my money back for all that time . . . and so I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’”

The pilot of 51
C
, Loren Shriver, said the rest of the crew was chosen to bridge the two worlds involved in the mission. Rounding out the crew were air force colonel Ellison Onizuka, marine corps colonel James Buchli, and air force major Gary Payton. “We knew that
STS
-10 [as it was originally called] was going to be DoD,” Shriver noted, “and when the crew was formed, it was all military guys that formed the crew. I think
NASA
believed that it didn’t have to do that, but I think it also believed that things would probably go a lot smoother if they did. So they named an all-active-duty military crew.”

Although the promised quick turnaround had been the drawing card for the mission for Mattingly, problems with a solid-fuel engine used to deploy a payload on one of the shuttle’s first operational missions caused a delay for the mission, since the plan was for 51
C
to also use a solid-fuel booster to deploy its classified payload. The flight was grounded for more than a year.

During the delay, Shriver learned that being assigned to a crew could have a downside. Traditionally, being named to a crew had been one of the best things that could happen to astronauts—they knew they were going to fly, they knew what their mission was going to be, and they had some idea of roughly when they would fly. With
STS
-10, which was renamed 51
C
during the delay, the crew discovered that sometimes being part of a crew could actually keep you from flying. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe I never will fly.’” Shriver said. “It was the kind of situation where once you were identified as the crew for that mission, then especially this one being a DoD mission, you were kind of linked to it, as long as there was some thought that it was going to happen. And it never did completely go away. It just went kind of inactive for a while and then came back as 51
C
.”

The classified payload for the mission was reportedly the Magnum satellite, a National Security Agency satellite used to monitor military transmissions from the Soviet Union and China. While the mission was officially classified, according to news reports at the time, information about the payload and its purpose is available in congressional testimony and technical journals.

Everything about the mission was classified, not just the payload. This included all details about training, astronaut travel, and even the launch date. “I couldn’t go home and tell my wife what we were doing, anything
about the mission,” Mattingly said. “Everybody else’s mission, everybody in the world knew exactly what was going on;
NASA
’s system is so wide open. They could tell their wives about it, their family knew, everybody else in the world knew what was on those missions. We couldn’t talk about anything. We couldn’t say what we were doing, what we had, what we were not doing, anything that would imply the launch date, the launch time, the trajectory, the inclination, the altitude, anything about what we were doing in training. All that was classified. Couldn’t talk about anything.”

People ask questions all the time, Mattingly said, and they ask even more questions when they know that they can’t know the answer.

Then they just get even more adamant that you should tell them and try to dream up of more tricky ways to get you to say something—the media, of course, being number one in that game. . . . Everybody had an opinion as to what it was, and you’d just say, “Cannot confirm or deny,” and that’s all that was necessary. . . . It was humorous, I guess, to listen to people out there trying to guess as to what it might be. You’d say, “Okay. Well, just let that churn around out there. I’m going to go do my training and not worry about it.” And eventually you don’t think much about it. But it does require you, then, when you do go meet the press or you do go do public presentations, that you have to think a little bit harder about what you can say and not say.