God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(18)
A new generation of astronauts had arrived, and the tone of the space center changed. For one thing, they weren’t all white men. Franklin Chang-Diaz was a plasma physicist from MIT; he was born in Costa Rica and was part Chinese. He showed up on his first day at the Johnson Space Center driving a rusted-out Renault sedan, its doors held shut with ropes, and occupied the same spot where the legendary Wally Schirra, one of the original Mercury Seven, once parked his Maserati. There were still some dashing test pilots among the new group, drawn from the military ranks, like Charles Bolden, a cheerful Marine who would one day become the first black administrator of NASA. Sally Ride, a physicist, was the first American woman in space. Judith Resnik, the first American Jewish astronaut, was a classical pianist and an electrical engineer. Ronald McNair got his doctorate in laser physics from MIT; he had a black belt in karate and played the saxophone. What really impressed me was that he had integrated the library in Lake City, South Carolina, where he grew up, refusing to leave until he was allowed to check out books. His mother and the police were called, but he was finally allowed to become the first black child to borrow books. He was nine years old.
I was a little infatuated with the whole group. They were bright and fit; you could see them running around the track like ponies. There was an emergency-room surgeon from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Rhea Seddon, who took me to lunch in her Corvette. She was also a jet pilot and probably had other skills, such as speaking Mandarin or playing the xylophone. As we raced down NASA Road One, I looked over at Dr. Seddon, with her long blond tresses tossed about like an advertisement for Clairol, and an unfamiliar thought leaped into my mind: I want to have your baby.
I quickly pushed that aside.
I wrote a profile of one of the early women in the astronaut corps, Mary Cleave, a diminutive woman with an infectious cackle and gray-green eyes that were twice as sharp as normal—pilot’s eyes. But her specialty was sanitary engineering, one area that the geniuses at NASA had never really figured out. The first American in space, Alan Shepard, had to pee in his space suit. After that, there were diapers and a “fecal collection bag” that fit over the hips like a pair of Bermuda shorts. Most astronauts in the early days forced themselves to wait until they got home to defecate. The first true space potty featured a seat that the astronaut could strap himself into. A fan created differential air pressure to simulate gravity, and air jets directed the feces away from the anus. For urination, there was a funnel that fit over the penis. But the potty still needed to be modified to accommodate women. And that’s where Mary came in.
She joined the astronaut corps in May 1980; a year later, she got to see the first launch of Columbia, which went flawlessly, except for the fact that the potty broke. When my profile of her came out in Texas Monthly, Mary was on the cover, in her astronaut suit, with that giant globed space helmet in her hand. I blithely signed a form obligating me to pay for the helmet if it broke as I ferried it over to the photographer. Half a million dollars.
The astronauts represented the best of America, it seemed to me. They were marvelously accomplished but surprisingly modest; serious but upbeat; and of course their courage was unquestioned. Many of them had sacrificed high-paying positions at universities or in medical practice to take a government job at a fraction of their previous earnings. To a person they were motivated by grand visions of moving humanity into space.
My friend Steve had also covered the space program, so we decided to write a screenplay. It was called “Moonwalker,” about one of the old Apollo guys who gets back into the program and falls in love with a new woman astronaut. Like so many Hollywood scripts, it was always on the verge of getting made. We went to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of STS-9, along with our friend Gregory Curtis, then the editor of Texas Monthly. For each of us, it was one of the most thrilling sights we had ever witnessed, despite the fact that the stands were three miles away from the launch pad. “What had been the hazy blip on the horizon suddenly began spewing flames so intense that even at such a distance, you wondered if watching them would damage your eyes,” Greg later wrote. “Huge, roiling clouds of water vapor, pure white, billowed up from the base of the rocket, and then the sound arrived.”
The sonic shock made the ground tremble and knocked shorebirds out of the sky. The spacecraft finally tore itself free of the earth and climbed into the sky, executing a roll that I thought must be dangerous but was of course a natural part of the launch. “When it finally disappeared into the clouds,” Greg wrote, “you continued to watch, with all your nerves revving.”
To our dismay, Steve and I discovered that we had both applied to be the first “journalist in space,” a program that NASA had cooked up to generate public interest, which had plummeted once space flight became routine. I was jealous of Steve, who I was certain would be chosen, and he was jealous of me. We made a deal: whichever one of us actually did get picked would place the other’s latest book into orbit.
Before the journalist in space, however, there was a teacher in space. I had suggested to Roberta that she might want to apply, but she was nonplussed by the idea. Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, got the nod.
Steve and I were working on a rewrite of “Moonwalker” on January 28, 1986, when Roberta came down to my office. She had the flu and wasn’t teaching that day. “Did you hear about the Challenger?” she asked. The twenty-fifth space shuttle mission had exploded. The flight lasted seventy-three seconds, then it simply blew to pieces. Weirdly, the announcer continued to broadcast the velocity and distance, even as the capsule, containing those noble lives, fell into the Atlantic Ocean. At least some of the astronauts may have been alive until the capsule hit the water, at more than two hundred miles per hour.