All my life I’ve had a fascination of sorts with NASA. Some 20 years ago I decided that I wanted to see a space shuttle launch in person, preferably as a member of the press. Reporters get to stand next to the huge countdown clock in a big field next to a large lagoon inside the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) complex when viewing launches from a surprisingly intimate three-mile distance. They also get to feel the ground shake at blast-off. It’s the reason I decided to become a writer: so I could attend launches at KSC. Needless to say, it was a thrill and privilege to be among a media throng estimated at 1,500 inside America’s spaceport on July 8 to witness the final space shuttle launch ever. Outside the facility, at least a million spectators lined the beaches and highways along what has been dubbed Florida’s “Space Coast.”

My interest in outer space began in 1961 when teachers wheeled televisions into classrooms at Edgewood Elementary in Selma so we could watch Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and a guy with the strange name “Gus Grissom” ride rockets into space. As a first grader, I concluded that there must be something special about astronauts and rockets since they had the power to make teachers bring TV sets to school. My favorite part of launch day was the countdown—a dramatic buildup that my classmates and I loudly recited in unison with the television broadcaster.

Photos courtesy of NASA/Bill Ingalls. (click for larger version)

 

 

I grew a little bored with NASA when TV sets no longer showed up at school. But on Christmas Eve, 1968, I stared in awe at a black and white television in our family den as we listened to the Apollo 8 astronauts—the first people to fly around the Moon—read from the book of Genesis while in lunar orbit 240,000 miles away: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth . . .” Less than a year later, I was even more mesmerized when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon on live television. My interest in NASA gradually diminished until one morning in 1986 when space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch. A routine ride into space was suddenly no longer routine. The seven astronauts killed that day were the first NASA crew to die in flight.

My First Trip
Twenty years after first coveting a front-row seat at a shuttle launch, my wish finally came true when I obtained a media badge for the July 2005 launch of Discovery, the first shuttle to fly since Columbia had blown apart over Texas on its return home in February 2003. NASA officially anointed the STS-114 [Space Transportation System] mission of Discovery as “Return to Flight.” I was extremely excited driving all night to KSC. Arriving at the press center, I was astounded by the wonderland before me: Television monitors showed NASA TV telecasts; miniature models of the shuttle and space station were on display, as were spacecraft designs of the future; pleasant NASA public relations employees usually smiled when explaining the mission or shuttle equipment to inquiring reporters; stacks of information detailing everything from space shuttle history to explanations of safety criteria that must be met before clearing a shuttle for launch were readily available.

That evening, several buses took the media contingent to the launch pad for photo opportunities but we were forced to stay on the buses for two hours as launch pad personnel addressed a structure that had fallen off the shuttle and damaged one of the heat shield tiles that protects the spacecraft as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Once that was resolved, we had to wait another hour after several busloads of astronaut families and assorted VIPs pulled up next to the press buses so that they could take pictures first.. Our NASA media escort warned, in no uncertain terms, that anyone who pointed a camera in the direction of the newly-arrived visitors would have their media badge taken away, then be tossed out of the KSC compound and banned forever. At midnight, we were finally freed from the buses to take pictures and gawk, a mere 100 yards from space shuttle Discovery, majestically illuminated by spotlights. After half an hour, our NASA escort ordered us to return to the buses, warning that lingering reporters who missed the ride back would not only have their media badges revoked, they would also be shot on sight. We all wondered if he was kidding.

Back at the KSC Media Center at sunrise, I walked outside to stare at Discovery bathed in spotlights on the launch pad three miles away as an orange glow creeped onto the horizon. Suddenly, a sexy female voice oozed from the outdoor audio system as NASA TV began its broadcast day: “At 4:45 this morning, space shuttle crew and managers met and gave a ‘go’ to proceed with the tanking operations for the launch attempt this afternoon for the STS-114 Return to Flight mission,” she purred with authority. She sounded like the woman announcing flight schedules on the circular space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Two hours before launch that afternoon, a faulty fuel sensor delayed the Discovery mission for a couple of weeks. I dejectedly drove straight back to Birmingham, though there was one bright spot: That morning I spent 10 minutes interviewing Apollo 13 flight director Gene Kranz face to face in a tiny room. His crew cut and enthusiasm were charming as hell. By the time I arrived in Birmingham, I had been awake for 46 hours.

Blast Off at Last
On July 4th, 2006, I saw my first shuttle launch. Once again, it was spaceship Discovery on the launch pad. The STS-121 crew included robotic arm specialist Lisa Nowak. Less than a year following this mission, Nowak would be arrested in Orlando after reportedly driving all night and day from Houston to Florida while wearing a diaper to avoid bathroom stops in an alleged attempt to kidnap the fiancée of an astronaut with whom Nowak was having an affair. The diaper tale was eventually determined to be a myth. She was fired by NASA a month later. The pilot of STS-121 was Mark Kelly, husband of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot three months before her husband’s May 2011 mission as commander of Endeavor’s farewell flight.

On that Independence Day five years ago, a half-dozen veteran reporters sat around the NASA press-briefing room killing time, swapping “Buzz Aldrin was an asshole” stories about personal encounters with the grumpiest man to ever walk on the Moon. Several minutes later, the large monitors that telecast NASA TV showed the Discovery crew walking out to the vehicle that would take them to the launch pad for that afternoon’s blast-off. It was quite nerve-racking watching the countdown clock tick away. Discovery did not disappoint. The launch was the most memorable spectacle I’ve ever seen. Just like on television, it appeared to be moving in slow motion the first several seconds after launch. The oddest thing was that I was watching a silent rocket blast off without a roar. Within 12 seconds, however, the noise slowly swept over me, growing louder as the ground began to tremble.

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In April 2011—the day after the most devastating rash of tornadoes in American history passed through Alabama—I set off for Kennedy Space Center once again to watch the final launch of space shuttle Endeavor. I left Birmingham at sunset the day before launch, arriving at sunrise to secure my media badge for the afternoon lift-off. By noon, NASA had scrubbed the launch due to technical problems. Weather cancellations can be turned around the next day, but technical issues can take weeks. I immediately left KSC and, after negotiating the hellacious traffic that packs highways on launch days, drove straight back home to save money on a motel room. I arrived in Birmingham 32 hours after I had left.

This Will Be the Last Time
Black & White publisher Chuck Geiss and I secured media credentials for STS-135, the final flight of space shuttle Atlantis, the last mission before retirement of the three-vehicle fleet permanently. I warned Chuck that due to technical and weather issues, a trip for a launch is about as reliable as throwing dice in a casino.

An hour before lift-off, NASA announced that weather conditions were favorable for launch, though there were concerns about rain showers at the flight runway that shuttles use to return in the event of an emergency. European Space Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel, a 60-year-old NASA veteran who had performed a spacewalk during a 1993 Columbia mission, and who was also on an Atlantis flight in 2008, chatted with me briefly. “I remember it was 80 percent ‘no go’ for Columbia,” Schlegel said in a thick German accent, recalling his first launch that flew without delay. When asked what will become of the astronaut corps with the retirement of the shuttle fleet, as the United States will be forced to pay the Russians $60 million per astronaut to go to the space station, he replied, “The change in astronaut corps is already going on. A lot of pilots have already left, a lot of other pilots decided they wanted to be long-duration crew members. The skill of pilots is still needed and will be even more needed when we develop new systems. It’s a milestone but it’s continuously developing and I hope we have many, many opportunities which we don’t think of yet.” As for his personal future, Schlegel said, “Next for me is I’m shortly before pension. I am passing on my experience, my knowledge, for use to make new European astronauts coming to Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston preparing for their missions. I help them, I advise them, and mentor them. I’m kind of the senior league for them.”

After waiting in line at the merchandise trailer to purchase souvenirs, Chuck and I roamed the field where media congregate to watch the launch. Across the lagoon, Atlantis stood in the distance as clouds continued to shuffle. My anxiety turned to excitement as the crowd began counting down loudly in unison at 10 seconds. Suddenly, vapor clouds quickly blasted up to surround the bottom of the launch pad as Atlantis rose from the ground in slow motion, the blinding flame of the two SRBs [solid rocket boosters] forcing me to put my sunglasses back on. As the spacecraft began to pick up speed, a plume of smoke and vapor was left in the shuttle’s wake, appearing to connect Atlantis to Earth. Then the rumble I had been waiting for five years to hear again began. Creeping up slowly from the distance, invading ears with loud crackles and shaking the ground, the noise rattled my bones. There’s no feeling quite like it. Forty two seconds after blast off, Atlantis disappeared into the overhead clouds.

The press crammed into the small auditorium at the KSC media center for a post-launch press conference 90 minutes after launch. The briefing began with a video message (more or less a pep talk) from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. I was amazed that the top dog at NASA did not attend the post-launch press gathering, considering that this was the final shuttle launch. But four NASA officials were there, where they revealed that after discussing weather concerns, NASA’s mission management team waived some of the criteria for launch, something it had avoided doing in the wake of the Columbia tragedy to the point of being perhaps overly cautious.

“It got a little dicey there a couple of times but we found our way through it,” said Bob Cabana, Kennedy Space Center Director. With regards to the loss of jobs as the shuttle program ends, Cabana commented, “Change is difficult, but you can’t do something else—you can’t do something better—unless you go through change. And all this talk about ‘NASA is adrift, we don’t have a plan’—we do have a plan. We’re enabling commercial space. We have the commercial crew program here at Kennedy supported by the Johnson Space Center in Houston. We have four folks under contract trying to build a vehicle that will take Americans to space supporting our International Space Station— that’s still up there until at least 2020 with Americans onboard—a human spaceflight program.”

“I choke up at every launch. This one, I choked up before launch,” confessed Mike Moses, who oversees the Mission Management Team. “As an engineer, as whatever, I can’t see how anybody who comes down here and sees a shuttle launch doesn’t choke up and just swell with pride at seeing that thing go. It does it to you every time.” He’s right; when that countdown commences, no one is immune. &

Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War

By Michael J. Neufeld

Dr. Wernher von Braun, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, points to a television screen in the Saturn blockhouse at Cape Kennedy on February 16, 1965. The screen showed the Saturn I vehicle carrying the Pegasus satellite into orbit. (click for larger version)

 

Knopf; 608 pages; $35.

The story of Wernher von Braun (pronounced “brown”) is the curious adventure of a German-turned-American hero who transformed fantasies of outer-space voyage into realities. However, that story is framed by the often blurred boundaries of good and evil. Despised by some as the Nazi engineer primarily responsible for the V-2 rockets that killed 7,000—mostly in London and Antwerp near the end of World War II—von Braun followed whatever route was available to fulfill his childhood aspirations of space flight. He had dreamed of men one day flying to the Moon and finally realized his ambitions with the development of the Saturn V rocket that launched astronauts into lunar orbit in 1968.

Searching for von Braun’s soul, which is embedded in a history haunted by the Third Reich, author Michael Neufeld has penned a brutally honest, in-depth biography. It chronicles the life of a pioneering rocketeer and one-time Nazi SS officer who became an icon by seducing the American public (thanks to Walt Disney) with notions of space exploration.

Von Braun’s harshest critics insist that he was guilty of war crimes, not only for his primary role in creating the V-2 ballistic missile that intimidated Europe but also because he used prisoners of war laboring in deplorable conditions to build the weapons. More than 20,000 POWs enslaved indirectly under von Braun died at the Mittelwerk rocket facility and its Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. The underground rocket factory where prisoners lived and worked was a maze of cold, damp, and poorly lit tunnels infested with excrement, lice, and fleas. Prisoners wore rags, and toilets were large metal oil drums cut in half and never cleaned. Disease and malnourishment were rampant, and POWs dropped dead at a rate of 20 per day.

To his defenders, von Braun is a victim of Adolf Hitler’s oppressive authority, a serf of sorts who had no options other than to bow to the Führer’s commands. According to Neufeld, von Braun’s own words in a 1950 New Yorker profile reveal the engineer’s mercenary nature. One afternoon, during a gathering of his amateur rocket club in the early 1930s, a black sedan drove up carrying three German military personnel who made von Braun’s group an offer they could not refuse. Von Braun recalls: “They were in mufti [civilian clothes], but mufti or not, it was the Army . . . That was the beginning. The Versailles Treaty [which disarmed Germany after World War I] hadn’t placed any restrictions on rockets, and the Army was desperate to get back on its feet. We didn’t care much about that, one way or the other, but we needed money, and the Army seemed willing to help us. In 1932, the idea of war seemed to us an absurdity. The Nazis weren’t yet in power. We felt no moral scruples about the possible future use of our brainchild. We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.”

Von Braun claimed no knowledge of the Nazi extermination of Jews. In the 1960s, he told his good friend, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey), “I never knew what was happening in the concentration camps. But I suspected it, and in my position I could have found out. I didn’t and I despise myself for it.” Commenting on the confession to Clarke, Neufeld is skeptical about von Braun’s defense: “Knowing what we know now about his direct encounter with SS prisoners starting in mid-1943, the first sentence of his statement could be interpreted as a bald-faced lie.” Quoting historian Ian Kershaw, Neufeld adds, “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but was paved with indifference.”

In his sworn affidavit to the U.S. Army in 1947, von Braun said that he was forced to join the National Socialist Party in 1939. In actuality, he had joined the Nazi Party in 1937, though he was no doubt pressured to do so.

Later in life, von Braun often bolstered his claim that he was not a true Nazi by telling of his and a few associates’ arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. The rocket engineer was a “heavy social drinker.” One night he and his intoxicated comrades had talked loudly at a party about the war not going well, wishing that their rocket development could be used to build spaceships instead of weapons. They were arrested within days. Problems that delayed final production of the V-2 had prompted speculation that perhaps von Braun had actually been arrested for suspected sabotage. There was even some talk that he and the others might be executed. They were freed after a couple of weeks, because Hitler desperately needed them to finish the V-2. Von Braun knew he had to produce a successful rocket quickly or else, which forced him to place an order for more POW slave labor at the Mittelwerk. (Peenemünde had been the first principal rocket factory before it was bombed by the British in 1943.)

During his surrender to U.S. Allies in 1945, von Braun exhibited the same charisma, self-confidence, and luminary quality that would later charm the American public. He and his fellow engineers were hiding out in a ski resort in the mountains on the German-Austrian border at war’s end, trying to decide what to do. Two days after Hitler’s suicide, they drove to an Allied-occupied Austrian town to turn themselves in, where von Braun boasted to his captors that he was the “founder and guiding spirit” of the Peenemünde rocket facility, all the while acting like a dignitary.

“One member of the 44th [Infantry Division, to which von Braun surrendered] later said that ‘[von Braun] treated our soldiers with the affable condescension of a visiting congressman,’” writes Neufeld, adding that von Braun posed “for endless pictures with individual GIs, in which he beamed, shook hands, pointed inquiringly at [American soldiers’] medals and otherwise conducted himself as a celebrity rather than a prisoner.” Von Braun even bragged to a reporter for the Beachhead News “that if he had been given two more years, the V-2 bomb he invented could have won the war for Germany.”

The publication of space exploration articles in the early 1950s by von Braun for Collier’s magazine (illustrated with futuristic renderings of rockets) caught the public’s attention. This led Walt Disney to ask von Braun in 1954 to appear on Disney’s ABC network television show “Man in Space.” The rocketeer’s narration of a segment in 1955 was the first time that America heard his voice. Von Braun and a couple of German rocket engineers were prominently featured in the series, but the show’s producers questioned if it was wise for the program to be dominated by German accents. “The Disney crew had in fact discussed whether it was a problem that all three experts were German. But their very accents fit an American cliché of scientific gravity, and as for the Nazi issue, Walt Disney was the quintessential conservative, Midwestern middle American and seems to have given it little thought.”

One month after the first broadcast of “Man in Space,” von Braun legally became an American citizen in Birmingham, along with a hundred of his German colleagues and their spouses. Von Braun told the press gathered for the occasion, “This is the happiest and most significant day of my life . . . Somehow we sensed that the secret of rocketry should only get into the hands of people who read the Bible.” However, to his parents he reported, “It was a terrible circus, with film crews, television, press people and the usual misquotations.”

Profiles in Time and the West German equivalent Der Spiegel did not mention von Braun’s Nazi party membership. Reporters did not have a clue. Instead, a film about his life that von Braun agreed to participate in began the unraveling of his past. I Aim at the Stars began filming in 1959. Von Braun was paid $24,000, and Columbia Pictures kicked in another $25,000 plus 7% of the net profits. With his newfound wealth, he traded in his American car for a Mercedes-Benz. The movie was initially predicated on the image of von Braun as “a space dreamer persecuted by the Nazis and given a second chance by the United States,” though the script was later changed to portray him more accurately as striking a Faustian bargain to go into space. Still, the film was considered a whitewash job. Ironically, the screenwriter was a 1933 refugee from the Nazis who introduced fiction into the script to make the story palatable for an American audience.

At the Munich premier of the film, three unarmed tactical nuclear missiles were on display in front of the theater. U.S. military brass attended in full uniform. Ban-the-bomb demonstrators were also on hand. At a press conference, von Braun answered British critics of his American success: “I have very deep and sincere regret for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides . . . A war is a war, and when my country is at war, my duty is to help win that war.” The film was panned and poorly attended. Antwerp, which suffered more V-2 rocket hits than London, banned the movie. Comic Mort Sahl coined the greatest putdown of von Braun’s career when he quipped that I Aim at the Stars should have been subtitled But Sometimes I Hit London.

A year after NASA was created, in 1958, von Braun was appointed chief of the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, and was no longer working for the army. Pressure was applied by NASA on von Braun to hire more black engineers and technicians, but many were reluctant to move to Alabama at that time. Von Braun did not appear eager to get involved when Governor George Wallace stood in a schoolhouse door to prevent a black student from registering at the University of Alabama, yet he publicly condemned segregation when a black MSFC employee enrolled without incident at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Not long afterward, Governor Wallace visited MSFC and witnessed a rocket test. Von Braun addressed an audience that included the governor, and stressed that it was imperative that Alabama move on from its segregationist past. After the speech, he chatted with Wallace and asked the governor if he wanted to be the first person on the Moon. Wallace replied, “Well, better not. You fellows might not bring me back.” &

In 1961, NASA launched the first American into space aboard the Freedom 7 Mercury spacecraft. I watched on a black-and-white television in my first-grade classroom as astronaut Alan Shepard blasted off into history in a 15-minute flight. Televisions perched on teachers’ desks for NASA launches soon became a schoolhouse tradition as the two-man Gemini spacecraft replaced the Mercury series, which was subsequently replaced by the three-man Apollo missions that eventually put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969.

The advent of the space shuttle as a reusable spacecraft capable of landing on a runway made space travel routine. Complacency soon replaced curiosity and awe in the public mind. The explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 briefly jolted that indifference. Over the next 17 years, however, shuttle missions again became commonplace and predictable. That is, until February 1, 2003, when Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas as it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere at 17,000 mph. A couple of weeks earlier during the liftoff of Columbia, a suitcase-size chunk of foam insulation that weighed a pound and a half fell from the bright orange external tank that provides liquid oxygen and hydrogen to fuel the spacecraft as it leaves Earth. The foam insulation prevents ice formation and helps keep the liquid oxygen in the upper section of the tank chilled at minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit and the liquid hydrogen at minus 423 degrees in the lower section. Foam has always fallen off the external tank during liftoff to harmlessly strike the craft, but on this particular launch, the debris hit the left wing of the orbiter Columbia. The foam ripped a hole that allowed hot air and gases to penetrate Columbia when it returned to Earth [the hole was not a threat while Columbia was in the vacuum of space], tearing the spacecraft apart in seconds and burning to death all seven crew members as they plunged to the ground.

After a two-and-a-half-year delay, NASA has decided that it’s time to fly again. The mission has been dubbed Return to Flight. The initial launch period targeted for fall 2004 was rejected, and May 2005 was chosen instead. Heightened concern about falling ice damaging the orbiter (just as foam had done to Columbia during liftoff in 2003) prompted more testing, pushing the launch date back to mid-July.

Two days before the launch of Discovery, the Kennedy Space Center was bustling with activity. Satellite news trucks and television crews secured ideal spots to telecast the July 13 launch. Inside the press room, stacks of information were available, as was a video and photo library. Scale models of the shuttle were displayed so NASA officials could better explain the intricacies of the spacecraft to reporters. An afternoon bus tour took a media contingent out to the launch pad, but the shuttle was obscured by the gray servicing structure that functions as scaffolding to allow continued work on Discovery.

 

Space Shuttle Discovery is carried back to the launch pad aboard the shuttle crawler transporter. (click for larger version)

Dr. Michael Griffin, a former NASA engineer, is NASA’s eleventh administrator. A relaxed, confident man, he’s been in charge of America’s space program since April of this year after a management shake-up. NASA officials readily admit that the agency had grown lax concerning safety in a deadly enterprise. “It’s a dangerous business, and it will be for the foreseeable future,” he explained at a Tuesday afternoon briefing to update the media on the status of the next day’s launch. “We work every time to make it less dangerous than the time before.” Referring to the current state of NASA as “the most difficult period in the history of American space flight,” Griffin emphasized the importance of outer-space exploration: “I believe that it is important for America to be the preemininent space-faring nation in the 21st century. . . . I think the proper purpose of the United States civil space program is to explore, develop, understand, and discover the solar system, and extend the range of places where human beings live and work. We’re at the very beginning of that right now. Technology is primitive compared to what we would like it and need it to be. The expense is great; the risk is very significant. But we will never be where we want to be if we don’t take these first steps.”

The mission of STS-114 Discovery (STS stands for “space transport system,” and it is the 114th flight of a space shuttle) is to bring supplies to the International Space Station, return experiments and garbage from the space station to Earth, and test repair techniques during scheduled EVAs (extra vehicular activities, or “spacewalk”) developed to address any debris damage to the orbiter Discovery. This shuttle mission has no “substantive” repair capabilities, as only repair experiments will be conducted. Should Discovery be too damaged to return to Earth, the seven-member crew would share the space station with its current two-member crew until Space Shuttle Atlantis arrives as a rescue ship six weeks later.

 

	Lingering reporters were warned that they would be left behind and no doubt shot if discovered by security guards. It’s hard to tell if our escort was kidding.

Following Michael Griffin’s briefing, the media gathered outside for the bus ride to view the rollback of the rotating service structure. The trip is a NASA ritual that gives photographers the opportunity to take photos of Discovery at sunset, with the scaffolding rolled away to reveal the orbiter, rocket boosters, and external tank. Suddenly, the drama that had slowly been building that day erupted without warning as word began to spread among the media throng that an accident had occurred at the launch pad. Reporters returned to the press building as NASA press liaisons explained what they knew of the problem. A plastic window covering the roof of the orbiter Discovery had inexplicably fallen off, plunging 65 feet, where it damaged a fragile heat shield tile covering one of the engines near the tail of the spacecraft. One surprised NASA official admitted he’d never seen such a freak occurrence at the launch pad.

It was the first glitch in an otherwise smooth preparation for the next day’s launch. Up until that point, the main worry had been the weather. On Tuesday, Space Shuttle Discovery had a 60-percent chance of favorable conditions to launch. Favorable conditions include no thunderclouds within 20 miles of either the launch pad or the 15,000-foot landing runway five miles away. Lightning is the major concern, though on this particular mission a heavy cloud cover would obscure the many cameras being used by airplanes tailing Discovery’s ascent to check for any debris damage, forcing the launch to be possibly canceled. Apprehension grew among the media that the launch would be scrubbed.

At 6:30 Tuesday evening, NASA announced a 7 p.m. briefing regarding the falling window cover and spacecraft damage assessment. Fifteen minutes later, the briefing was pushed back to 7:30. Suddenly a photographer dashed into the press briefing area to announce that the problem had been solved and the buses were leaving for the launch pad. The press conference room emptied as the media ran for the buses. The contingent of about 150 photographers and reporters gathered 100 yards from the launch pad at 7:30, waiting for the half-hour rollback of the service scaffolding to begin in anticipation of the 8:30 sunset. Two hours went by without any movement of the service structure as more work was performed on Discovery.

The mosquitoes at the launch pad are vicious monsters that bite through clothing. Kennedy Space Center is a veritable jungle of menacing beasts; a day earlier, alligators were spied in the marshy wilderness within the space center acerage. Buzzards sit in trees, adding an ominous reminder of the danger of returning to outer space. To combat the mosquitoes, members of the media lined up to be sprayed from a single can of insect repellent wielded by one of the NASA escort officials. The can was emptied within an hour, so everyone retreated to the buses to wait in the air conditioning. At 10 p.m. six buses abruptly pulled up next to the press buses. A NASA official boarded each press bus and warned in no uncertain terms that anyone who pointed a camera in the direction of the newly arrived buses would have their media badge taken away. We later learned that these buses were carrying family and friends of the Discovery crew and NASA VIPs.

Within half an hour of the VIP arrival, the service structure rollback began. By 11 p.m., Space Shuttle Discovery was revealed in its entirety a mere football field away, illluminated by spotlights. After half an hour of taking photos, our NASA escort urged the media to return to the buses for the ride back to the softball fields five miles from the Kennedy Space Center. The softball park functioned as a parking lot. Lingering reporters were warned that they would be left behind and no doubt shot if discovered by security guards. It’s hard to tell if our escort was kidding.

 

 

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At midnight I arrived back at my car. Since I planned to be at Kennedy Space Center at 4 a.m., there was little point in driving to Orlando where I was staying. Napping in my automobile in the sweltering Florida heat was impossible, so I drove half an hour to Titusville to a 24-hour drugstore to replace the sunglasses I’d lost at the launch pad earlier that evening. Another hour was spent in a Cocoa Beach Waffle House, where the toothless cook told me his brother had been a student in Miami of Christa McAuliffe, the school teacher killed in the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger. I didn’t tell him that McAuliffe was teaching in Connecticut when she got the opportunity to fly on Challenger.

At 4 a.m. I boarded one of the Bluebird schoolbuses NASA uses to ferry the media to the space center. Individual vehicles were allowed onto Kennedy Space Center only if there were at least three passengers. Single drivers and foreign media were required to take the buses.

I shared my bus with three members of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a pair of French reporters. Our bags were checked before we boarded, but the inspector failed to give the driver a “search placard,” indicating that passengers had already been through security. This meant that at the checkpoint a mile from the entrance to Kennedy, our bus was told to return to get the search placard. When the Canadian television broadcaster asked the security guard if we could simply be searched again, as he had a 5:30 a.m. live remote broadcast to do, the guard said he was just following NASA orders, and that all incoming buses must show a search placard on launch day. “That’s an idiot decision!” the Canadian thundered. Apologizing, the guard politely told the television reporter that there was nothing he could do. The Canadian responded, “The next time you talk to NASA, tell them I think you’re the biggest asshole I’ve ever met!”

At 5 a.m. I walked into the quiet press building. There was little activity as a half dozen reporters and a handful of NASA officials prepared for a busy day. Outside, the 20-by-10-foot countdown clock glowed in the dark as the minutes ticked away. Behind it lay a lagoon, with Space Shuttle Discovery in the distance bathed in floodlights that reached several hundred feet into the sky. Suddenly, a soothing female voice came over the space center’s outdoor audio system. “At 4:45 this morning, space shuttle crew and managers met and gave a ‘go’ to proceed with the tanking operations [filling the tank with liquid hydrogen and oxygen] for the launch attempt this afternoon for the STS-114 Return to Flight mission.” The voice came from the audio broadcast of NASA Television, which has monitors throughout the space center facilities detailing updates on the planned launch. As I walked around the empty field in front of the countdown clock, the sun began to turn the lower sky a neon orange. The broadcaster continued to reel off details of the mission over the speakers when it hit me that her voice was eerily similar to the woman’s public-address voice in the spaceport in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A malfunctioning heater associated with one section of the orange external tank forced a 90-minute delay in beginning the tanking process. Again, worries mounted that the launch would not happen that day. By 7 a.m., the heater had been repaired and the three-hour fueling began. Unfortunately, NASA’s weather monitors had downgraded launch probability to 40 percent from an earlier 60 percent. Most of the morning was spent monitoring NASA TV and the sky overhead. July weather on Florida’s Atlantic coast is unpredictable, and the dark thunderclouds rolling by were an aggravation. A 10 a.m. interview with famed Apollo flight director Gene Kranz (he coined the famous phrase, “Failure is not an option!”) briefly took my mind off the rolling clouds. As the astronauts rode to the launch pad at noon to enter orbiter Discovery, a thunderstorm began in earnest. An anxious mood flooded the press building as pessimists and naysayers speculated that there would be no launch.

An hour later, the rain stopped and a gorgeous blue sky lit up the Kennedy Space Center. Menacing thunderheads hovered near the outskirts. It was 2 hours and 50 minutes until blastoff and the air was charged with excitement, which grew with each 15-minute weather update. The dark clouds appeared to be blowing inland. With the countdown clock ticking at 2 hours and 33 minutes, the audio on NASA TV suddenly warned that a fuel sensor had malfunctioned. Two minutes later, NASA officially scrubbed the launch. I felt like a four-year-old who had been told that Santa was not coming this Christmas. As of press time, the intermittent failure of the fuel sensor had yet to be resolved. This was not the first time the device had malfunctioned during the past few months.

Space Shuttle Discovery was rescheduled for launch on Tuesday, July 26, but I won’t be there. I’ll be watching a telecast, as I did 44 years ago on a little black-and-white television set. Only this time, I’ll be watching in color. &

 

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The Real Man in the Moon

Of all the people who fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, Gene Kranz is probably the most integral. Kranz was the crusty, determined flight director of the Apollo 13 lunar-landing mission in 1970 that had to be aborted after a series of system failures in midflight. He was portrayed in the Apollo 13 movie by actor Ed Harris, and immortalized the famous line, “Failure is not a option.” That statement summed up NASA’s tenacity as Kranz, and the the flight team he led, saved the Apollo 13 crew from almost certain death. —Ed Reynolds

Black & White: I know you’ve been told this a million times, but the Apollo 13 mission is the most exciting true story I’ve ever heard.

Gene Kranz: “[Laughing] Apollo 13 was just one of the stories, so I was surprised when the movie came out. But America is not familiar with the many close calls we had during the lunar program. To put it bluntly, risk is the price of progress. Risk is the nature of exploration. And I thank God that we have risk-takers and the astronauts and the people in launch control and the people in mission control who are willing to control the risks to allow us to see solutions to problems in the majority of the very difficult and complex missions we fly. On Apollo 11 we almost ran out of fuel, down to 17 seconds. Very dicey land/abort position. On Apollo 12 we were hit by lightning. Apollo 13, you know the story . . . Apollo 16, in order to get into lunar orbit we had to solve a problem with the steering engines. So this business of risk and risk management, and basically controlling risk, making the level of risk acceptable, is the nature of the beast.”

B&W: Though technology during the Apollo program was less sophisticated than what NASA has today with the space shuttle, Apollo only lost one crew whereas the shuttle program has lost two crews. How do you explain the discrepancy with advanced technology?

Kranz: We’ve flown a lot more shuttle missions. Apollo was a relatively tight system, a relatively small system. We had a space system that was designed for a single objective: go from Earth to the moon and then return back to Earth—a difficult mission. But if you think about the shuttle, it deploys satellites, it retrieves satellites, it carries scientific modules in there, it does repair work in orbit, it brings things back from space, it carries stuff up to the space station. The shuttle is a much more complex system than that which we flew during the Apollo programs. I really consider it quite remarkable that during all of the missions that we have flown with the shuttle we’ve only had two accidents.

 

	Gene Kranz

B&W: Is returning to the moon still important?

Kranz: Oh, heck yes! I think that if we intend to remain a great nation, if we intend to keep the economics of our engine churning out, we have to do difficult things. Going to the moon and Mars is a difficult thing, energy independence is a difficult thing. There are many things that will focus American know-how to develop new technologies, and new technology is the only way we are going to compete with the rest of the word. We can’t out-mass produce them anymore . . . President Kennedy said we choose to go to the moon and other things not because they are easy but because they are hard. Because he recognized that his nation had to do difficult things in order to remain a leader in the world.

B&W: In the Apollo days, did you have any notions or visions that the present shuttle spacecraft would look as it does today?

Kranz: Back in the Apollo day, frankly, the shuttle was the last thing on my mind [laughs]. My job and my organization’s job was, once we had landed on the moon, fly the remaining missions, bring the crew back safely and successfully, move into more difficult landing sites with a diminishing team—because I had to move team members, flight directors, and instructors over to the Skylab program. So once we had finished Skylab, now we could start focusing on the shuttle. We were intimately involved in the design of the shuttle, but it was in the post-’73 time frame . . . Basically, my job during the Apollo era was to really make sure we finished Apollo safely and successfully. We were landing in sites that had mountains that were higher than the Grand Canyon is deep. So we had our hands full.

B&W: Did you ever wish the early astronauts, who had reputations for wild living, were more tame like today’s shuttle astronauts?

Kranz: No, I think the nature of explorers changes. Sort of like mission control. In the early days most of us came in from aircraft flight testing because that was our background right on down the line. We were working with very rudimentary system; technology was very primitive. So we relied upon extremely intense preparation, innovation to a greater extent. The generation today has to be a hell of a lot smarter than we are. On Apollo, we had a computer on board each spacecraft. On board the shuttle now, you’ve got five computers, four of them working in what they call the redundant set, you’ve got a backup system . . . God, when I was deputy director of flight operations, I used to go crazy with these guys bringing me all these problems, and I’d have to go home and study all night long in order to participate in the meetings the next day. So the nature of the technology we are working with and the nature of exploration continues to demand a different kind of people. You think about Lewis and Clark going across the United States—that was the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo generation. &

Astronaut Jim Kelly escaped the confines of gravity for a couple of weeks in March as he embarked on a two week voyage that included the first crew transfer for space station Alpha. Kelly has been an astronaut since 1996, fulfilling a dream that began after his five-year-old imagination was captured by Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon in 1969. Kelly was the first University of Alabama graduate to fly in space.

B&W: Was flying in space everything you expected?

Kelly: Everything and more. Like a trip you can’t imagine.

B&W: At what point did you realize that you had completely left Earth’s atmosphere?

Kelly: The first place you realize it is when you have main engine cut-off. As soon as that happens, you just start floating out of your seat, everything starts floating up from where it is. And you realize you’re some place you’ve never been before. Of course, the ride up is pretty impressive, too. Something that you’ve never felt before; the different forces on your body, the shaking, and the visuals out the window.

B&W: Describe what you saw.

Kelly: Well, when you’re going up, the first thing you see is the main engines of the solid rocket boosters. You see the light out the window in your peripheral vision. And as you go off the launch pad, the first thing we do is a roll program to get us pointed in the right direction, headed basically east, northeast. If you glance out the window, you can see the Earth rolling around as you go up. We launched right after sunrise and headed towards the east. It got brighter and brighter through the first part of ascent as we went towards the sun. But then you get this big blast of light when the solid rocket boosters come off. There are explosive charges that cut the connections between it and the external tank. And you can see the flash pretty much out your front window. As you keep going up, it slowly starts getting darker and darker until you’re in the black of space.

B&W: Is your brain or thought process affected at all by zero gravity?

Kelly: Yeah, it is. It’s kind of funny. As you get more and more used to it, it becomes the natural way of things. If you need to grab something with both hands, and you’ve got something in one hand, say you’ve got a drink or pencil in one hand. Instead of trying to find some place to set it down, you just let go of it. It gives you a chance to do what you want, and you just come back and pick it up. When I got back on Earth, I dropped a fork. It’s one of those things you unconsciously start doing when you get back on the ground if you’re not thinking or if you’re tired because you’ve been up [in space] for a couple of weeks. You just forget, and you have the same habit patterns. That must be a stronger thing for the space station Alpha crew after being up there for four months. You go, “Hey, I don’t need this pencil right now,” and just let go of it and it falls to the ground. And you’re like, “Huh, why did that happen?”

The other thing it changes is your view of the world, in that down here on the ground it’s real easy to figure out what’s up and what’s down. Up in orbit the first couple of days, you have in your mind the Earth version of up and down, which isn’t necessarily the orbit version of up and down. So it takes a little while. You find your brain adjusting to what the new up and down is. And sometimes you’ll be looking at it, and you’ll be one way and three other people will be different ways. All of a sudden you’ll feel your brain shift to a new version of what’s up. And it’s kind of an interesting feeling.

B&W: When we spoke before your flight, you mentioned that the “fly around” (a shuttle maneuver allowing astronauts to eyeball the space station on all sides to check for any problems before returning to Earth) was a particularly big challenge for you as the pilot. Can you elaborate?

Kelly: We undocked and did one and a quarter laps around the space station. We were on the “V-Bar,” which means we were on the front end as the space station flies through space. And we went from the front end to above it, so that the space station was directly between the Earth and us. We could see the space station and the whole Earth beneath it. And from there we did one complete revolution–we went all the way down until we were between the station and Earth, and then all the way back to the top. We did our separation burn from directly above the station.

B&W: How difficult is flying and landing the shuttle?

Kelly: It’s different than any airplane [Kelly is a jet fighter pilot]. Most commercial airliners will come down on a flight path where it’s about a three degree angle off the ground. But for most of the final landing phase, the shuttle is coming down at an 18 degree glide path towards the ground. It’s six times as steep as what you’ll see in a commercial airliner, so obviously you’re coming towards the ground a lot quicker. Plus you’ve just spent two weeks in space. So you’ve gone two weeks at apparent zero G, and we pulled as much as 1.6 Gs coming back in. You’re readjusting to gravity at the same time as you’re flying a vehicle that–to use [shuttle commander] Jim Weatherbee’s words–is a “runaway freight train.” Your body is trying to catch up with gravity, your mind’s trying to catch up, ’cause all of a sudden your inner ear can sense gravity again, which it hasn’t done for two weeks. At the same time you’re flying this vehicle that’s slamming into the atmosphere and heading towards the ground at an 18 degree flight path. You have to stay ahead of it.

B&W: Would it be accurate to say that the landing is as disorienting as the launch?

Kelly: Oh, yeah. But a big difference is that on the launch up, when we go into orbit, if all goes well, between the two of us we each throw one switch. And on our ascent we were fortunate that we didn’t have any anomalies at all. The launch phase is set up where the computer controls everything, and we pretty much just sit on our hands unless something goes wrong. Luckily nothing went wrong, so we basically sat on our hands for the first eight and a half minutes. We were cycling through displays and checking systems and ensuring that everything was going right, and except for one, we didn’t have to throw any switches or make any critical decisions. On entry, that’s not the case. Once you get below Mach 1, it’s a hand-flown vehicle and the commander flies it. The flight engineer is throwing some switches, and it’s a lot more of a hands-on experience coming in for entry than it is on ascent.

B&W: I guess you were aware that Discovery was the name of the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kelly: Yeah, we sure were. It’s kinda funny. We took DVDs and CDs for our spare time–which, it turns out, you have almost none of. Although we use the CD player and listen to music up there in space. I took some music that some friends gave me to take along. I think, amongst the whole crew, we flew eight or nine copies of 2001. We listened to a bunch of stuff–popular music, things from high school. A couple of others had CDs that friends had made of space-related tunes. We waived off for 90 minutes, which means we were supposed to come down on entry, but the weather wasn’t good enough for us [to land]. So we fired up the CD player with classical music and relaxed for a little while before getting ready to come down on the second landing revolution.

B&W: Shuttle missions include different nationalities, as well as both military personnel and civilians. Is there any type of military protocol, saluting, traditional things, followed on space missions?

Kelly: Not the typical military protocol of “yes sir” and “no sir,” saluting and those kind of things. However, there’s a lot of military tradition that’s been put into the space station. The first change of command ceremony [on the space station] from the Expedition One crew to the Expedition Two crew involved reading out of the ship’s log book and words spoken by all three of the commanders. There was a bell-ringing ceremony, which is a long naval tradition, that is done. So there’s been several really nice military traditions, primarily naval traditions, that have been incorporated into the special events that happen onboard the space station. But as far as day-to-day protocol, there’s not any of that.

B&W: Is there any Russian protocol recognized?

Kelly: Yeah, in Russian culture they’re really big on toasting, and that’s part of the ceremonies–toasting each other, toasting the ground. In this case, it wasn’t literally, obviously, with glasses or anything [laughs]. But they’re very gracious at doing that type of thing.

B&W: Any communication problems between the Russians and Americans?

Kelly: No, as a shuttle crew member it wasn’t required that I know Russian. The three cosmonauts we flew with were all fluent to different degrees in English, and I had no problem communicating with any of them. But our Expedition crew members that go up there [to the space station] to live and work are also fluent in different levels of Russian.

B&W: Are you ready to go to Mars?

Kelly: Oh, I’m ready [laughs]. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re ready yet. But hopefully sometime during my astronaut lifetime we’ll start heading back to the Moon and Mars. &