The Fifth Risk(30)
It was an open question as to which was more mysterious to a male NASA engineer: outer space or the American female. They appeared to have better data on outer space. They had prepared makeup kits for their space shuttles, for instance, even though Kathy and a couple of the other women didn’t wear makeup. They set out to design flame-retardant one-size-fits-all bras and underpants, until the women explained that the one-size-fits-all approach used for men’s underwear wasn’t going to work with women’s underwear. In the end, the women won the right to buy their own flame-retardant underwear. And how would a woman urinate in space? The engineers worried about that one for a while. The male astronauts had been fitted with condom catheters, but these were always threatening to leak or even burst and obviously wouldn’t work for women. To everyone’s relief, a NASA engineer created an extra-absorbent polymer and worked it into a diaper that could be worn by all. (In the bargain he’d anticipated the baby diapers of the future.)
And of course, the male engineers were seriously worried about what might ensue if a woman had her period in space. “The idea that women might menstruate in orbit drove the whole place up a wall,” said Kathy. “The male world’s response was, Oh, that’s ok. We’ll just suppress their periods. We all looked at each other and said,‘You and what other army, buddy?’” The engineers finally agreed to pack tampons in the supply kits. The first time Kathy opened her kit she saw that each tampon had been removed from its paper wrapper and sealed in a plastic fireproof case. Heat-sealed tampons. Each plastic case was connected to another. She pulled on the top one and out pops this great long chain of little red plastic cases, like a string of firecrackers. Hundreds of tampons, for one woman to survive for a few days in space. “It was like a bad stage act,” she said. “There just seemed this endless unfurling of Lord only knows how many tampons.”
The engineers eventually sat down with the female astronauts to discuss the matter.
“Would one hundred be the right number?” they asked.
Kathy Sullivan worried that NASA might use the differences between their bodies as an excuse “to write different rules for males and females.” The male astronauts, on the other hand, adapted pretty quickly to the presence of women. The guy she’d been assigned to walk with in space was named Dave Leestma. They’d had a moment together that captured the spirit of their interaction. They had started training in their space suits. Step 1 was to remove their clothes and put on the first layer of the 225-pound suit—the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment. The test chamber was full of male engineers. “I have this fleeting sense that everyone has just realized that we’re about to go boldly where no man has gone before—there’s a woman in this mix,” said Kathy, in the NASA oral history. “So I looked over at Dave and said,” Dave, let me tell you my philosophy about modesty in circumstances like this.’ He shifts a bit and says,‘Okay.’ I said,‘I have none.’ He said,‘Fine.’ We start peeling off clothes.”
Kathy couldn’t have been less interested in the gender drama. She just wanted to go to space and “see it for myself, not in a magazine picture.” She wanted to get on with the mission. Which was why she never complained about her space suit. “It was a small, medium, large kind of thing—not a custom fit kind of thing,” she said. “My knee was never in the knee of the suit. The suits were stiff and took real muscle to move. Whenever I had to bend my legs I had to overcome this extra leverage.” By the time she realized that her suit was never going to fit, NASA had asked her to wear it. “I was not going to turn this into‘See, we told you she’d be all this extra trouble.’ I decided,‘We’re just sucking this up.’” But really, her space suit should have come with a warning label. In a test chamber, a NASA engineer had flipped the switch that enabled the space suit’s emergency oxygen tank, and the suit had exploded in a giant fireball. “If you’re doing some weird test that’s unlike anything that you normally do, it would still get your full attention,” Kathy said later, “but this was like saying that when you step on the gas of your car, it’s going to explode. Highly discomfiting.”
It was now October 11, 1984. The Challenger was in orbit, with her inside it, waiting to walk in space. The air was gone from the airlock. When they simulated this moment back on Earth they put a baking pan with water on the floor, to illustrate what might happen to your body’s fluids if something went wrong with your suit. As the pressure dropped, the water would bubble violently, as if it were boiling. But then a couple of seconds later it would flash-freeze into ice crystals. Poof. “Don’t open your visor!” they said.
On a mission this complicated, it was actually impossible to imagine everything that might kill you. The O-rings of the very spacecraft in whose airlock she now floated would soon become the most famous illustration of the point. Just fifteen months later, the failure of NASA to heed engineers’ warnings about how brittle the rings that sealed the solid rocket boosters could become in the cold would lead the boosters to leak and the Challenger to blow up, killing all the astronauts on board.
Later, when someone asked her why it never seemed to occur to her to be afraid, Kathy had an answer. In college she’d gone bushwhacking with a boyfriend around the Grand Canyon. They’d hacked a trail in a bad place, and they now had to jump onto a narrow ledge or go tumbling down a steep slope. The slightest misstep and she would fall to her death. “I mean, my knees are wobbling and shaking and I remember thinking: not now.” Then she was fine. She’d discovered an emotional talent: she had the ability to decide not to be afraid. All the astronauts had it, she noticed. “If you are scared, I don’t want you to be there,” she said. “Be here. Now. Here. Now. This is the game. Be scared before. Be scared later. Not during.”