by Mike Mullane
Reveille came in the form of rock music. It was traditional for the CAPCOM to provide music for MCC to send up as a wake-up call. But the tune was unrecognizable. Apparently NASA’s budget was running low when it came time to procure speakers. Pop music from these Radio Shack rejects sounded like fingernails being drawn across a chalkboard.
To my surprise I did not wake up alone. My closest friend was alert and waiting. I had an erection so intense it was painful. I could have drilled through kryptonite. I would ultimately count fifteen space wake-ups in my three shuttle missions, and on most of these and many times during the sleep periods my wooden puppet friend would be there to greet me. Flight surgeons have attributed this phenomenon to the fluid shift that occurs in weightlessness. On the Earth, gravity holds more blood in our lower legs. In orbit that blood is equally distributed throughout our bodies. For men the result is a Viagra effect. There are beneficial effects for the female anatomy, too. The same fluid shift makes for skinnier calves and thighs and larger, nonsag breasts. If NASA wants to secure its financial future, it would be smart to advertise the rejuvenating effects of weightlessness. Taxpayers would demand that Congress quadruple NASA’s budget to finance the construction of orbiting spas where visitors from Earth could turn back time.
Fortunately for me, my brain was quickly flooded with thoughts of the workday and my body melted in response.
On day two we successfully launched our second satellite, Syncom, but not without mishap. As Hank was filming its release with the huge and unwieldy IMAX camera, a shank of Judy’s frizzed-out hair was snatched into the machine by the belt drive of the film magazine. It was as if her hair had been caught up in the fan belt of an automobile. She screamed and I grabbed at her tresses to prevent them from being ripped out of her scalp, but, with nothing to hold me in place, I tumbled out of control. Judy did the same. Through her increasingly urgent screams, I heard the camera labor to a grinding stop. The hair had clogged the motor, finally stalling it and popping a cockpit circuit breaker.
We cut Judy free with scissors. Strands of loose hair floated everywhere. They were in our eyes and mouths. Mike Coats, who was the principal operator of the IMAX, took the machine to the mid-deck and began work at restoring its operation. The hair was so thoroughly jammed into the motor gears we doubted the machine would ever pull another frame of film. IMAX was going to be severely disappointed. They had spent millions to fly their camera in space and we had only recorded a fraction of our film targets. Even if the camera could be cleaned of hair and made to work again, a quick glance at the flight plan showed the next several film opportunities were certainly going to be missed. IMAX would have to do some replanning. We all knew this was the type of trivial screwup that would become the focus of an otherwise successful mission. The press wouldn’t talk about how our crew had successfully takenDiscovery on its maiden flight or how we had successfully released thirty thousand pounds of satellites. Instead, they would zero in on our hair incident. But we had no alternative other than to come clean with MCC. The flight planners needed to assume the camera could be repaired and get started on rescheduling our targets.
But we males had been missing thereal issue. As Hank picked up the microphone to call MCC, Judy lashed out at him with something along the lines of, “If you so much as breathe a word to MCC about my hair jamming the camera, I’ll cut your heart out with a spoon.” Or perhaps she threatened a more vital area of his anatomy. There was a brief moment as we struggled to understand Judy’s rage. Then it dawned on us. She was only the second American woman to fly in space. The press had her under a magnifying glass, looking for the slightest flaw in her performance. The hair jam incident was just that: a mistake with her name on it. Not only that, it contained the worst possible sin against feminism. Judy had demonstrated, however innocently and however insignificantly, that women were indeed different from men.
Hank Hartsfield, a grizzled air force fighter pilot who had stared death in the eye on many a mission, now faced a man’s worst nightmare—areally pissed-off woman. No communist gunner had ever appeared as deadly as did Judy at that moment. Under her searing glare Hank did what we all would have done. He wanted to return with all of his appendages, so he called MCC and told them the IMAX had a film jam and Mike was working to clear it. He made no mention of the cause of the jam. Eventually Mike was able to breathe life back into the camera. With rescheduled targets, he and Hank continued their filming while Judy stayed far, far away.
Nature finally caught up with me and I floated into the shuttle toilet to face what was truly the most difficult part of any spaceflight—a bowel movement. The toilet provided little privacy. It was situated in the rear corner of the mid-deck on the port side. There was no door, only a folding curtain that could be Velcroed across the mid-deck–facing entry. Another curtain was Velcroed to form a ceiling and isolate the toilet from the upstairs cockpit. The lack of privacy was intimidating. I felt like I was back on my honeymoon, preparing for my first married-life BM. We’ve all been there.
After I was inside the curtained box, I took the advice of shuttle veteran Bob Crippen and stripped naked. “It’s a lot easier to wipe feces off your skin than it is to get it off your clothes” had been one of his STS-1 mission debriefing comments.
I located my personal urine funnel and twisted it on the end of the urinal hose, then loaded a disposable vacuum cleaner–like bag in a can on the left side of the toilet. Used tissue had to be placed in this bag. It could not be put in the toilet since that would require the ass to be lifted, which, in turn, could result in feces being released into the cabin. Suction at the bottom of the can would hold used tissue inside the bag.
I floated over the throne, lifted up on the thigh restraints, and twisted them inward to clamp my body to the plastic seat. Recalling my bore-sight alignment from the camera view in the toilet trainer, I wiggled my body until some freckles on my thighs were properly positioned in relation to the toilet landmarks. I switched on the toilet fan and welcomed the noise it generated. At least some of my BM noises would be camouflaged. Finally I pushed my penis into proper aim at the urinal funnel, reached for the solid waste collector lever, and pulled it back. Directly beneath me the waste opening was uncovered and the feces-steering airflow was activated. Suddenly a very sensitive part of my body was hit with a blast of chilled air. Few things are less conducive to promoting a BM than having cold air jetting around the principal performer in that act. The natural tendency is to clamp shut. But I convinced the orifice in question to ignore the cold gale and let fly. Simultaneously, I held the urine funnel at my front to collect my liquid waste. The vacuum flow into the urinal hose was very effective at sucking away the fluid until my bladder pressure fell. Then the urine refused to separate from my skin and a ball of it grew on the end of my penis. NASA’s engineers had anticipated this aspect of fluid dynamics and had provided a “last drop” feature. By squeezing buttons at the sides of the hose, the suction was boosted and I was able to wet-vac myself of most of the fluid. As the slurping sounds of this operation came through the curtains, Hank hollered, “More than five seconds and you’re playing with it, Mullane!”
The toilet was a bountiful source of male juvenile humor. By far the best toilet joke was pulled by Bill Shepherd (class of 1984). On one of his missions he carried a piece of sausage from his breakfast into the toilet. After finishing a bowel movement, he set the sausage free to float upstairs. As panicked crewmembers ricocheted from wall to wall in a mad retreat from the offending planetoid, Bill chased after it with a piece of toilet tissue. He finally grabbed it and then, to the horror of all, he ate it.
For me, cleanup was next. I used a tissue to blot the remaining dampness from my penis. Wiping after urinating was such a feminine act I almost felt compelled to hack up a luggie to reestablish my sexual identity. I pulled the solid waste collector lever closed, lifted my thigh restraints, and floated from the seat. I was now free to wipe myself, putting the used tissue in the disposable vacuum
bag.
Besides cleaning myself, I also had to clean the toilet. It would be a serious violation to leave any fecal smears on or around the slide cover for the next user to confront. And there were always some smears. Even after the camera-aim practice in the toilet trainer in Houston, it was difficult to get a direct hit during a BM. The feces almost invariably made some contact with the inner sides of the collector hole. As one astronaut had once lamented, “Turds come out curved. If only they were straight, we might have better luck in cleanly using the toilet.” I used a NASA-provided disinfectant to wipe away my smears and put the soiled tissue in the vacuum bag. I then sealed that bag and stowed it in a container at the back of the toilet. While the retention of solid waste and BM tissues suggested a bad odor problem could develop, the toilet designers had done an excellent job of routing airflow through the toilet and filtering it with activated charcoal filters. There were never any toilet smells in the cockpit.
Finally, I dressed. From start to finish, a task that might have taken me five minutes on Earth had consumed nearly thirty minutes in space (and covered about eight thousand miles). There are times in an astronaut’s life he or she would pay dearly to have a gravity vector. Using the toilet is one of those times.
Our third and last communication satellite was successfully deployed on flight day three. Compared with the missions of the early space program this was blue-collar work, completely devoid of glory. We weren’t beating the Russians to anything. We weren’t planting an American flag in alien soil. On Earth, there was no Walter Cronkite removing his dorky glasses, wiping his forehead, and shaking his head in relief while telling a waiting, breathless world, “They’ve done it! TheDiscovery crew has just released another communication satellite!” The space program had become a freight service, justifiably ignored by the press and public. But not one of us in that cockpit was complaining. Even Hank would have hauled Lenin’s taxidermied body into orbit and sung the “Internationale”for all the communists in the world, if that’s what it took to put him in space.
On flight day four Judy activated the controls of our final major payload, a solar energy panel. A collapsible motor-driven truss unfurled the 110-foot-long-by-10-foot-wide Mylar sail out of its payload bay container. There were no active solar cells on the sail. The experiment was only to gather data on the dynamics of the deployment and retraction system. When the panel was completely up and in tension, she radioed MCC, “Houston, it’s up and it’s big.” In numerous simulations Judy had joked that she was going to make that call. We had teased her about the obvious sexual innuendo. She made the call nevertheless. That was Judy. She could be extremely defensive of her status as a feminist standard bearer but could then turn around and yuck it up with us guys about a solar panel erection. I often wondered if that was the reason she was flying as thesecond American woman in space—NASA management knew she wasn’t a pure enough feminist to satisfy the NOW crowd.
After our major payload work, we gathered on the flight deck to accept a congratulatory call from President Reagan. Each of us was tense and nervous as we handed around the microphone to answer his questions. Thank God we were in space while a Republican president was in office. I shudder to think how Hank would have handled a call from a Democrat. He probably would have asked the president’s latitude and longitude coordinates in anticipation of his next BM. When it was his turn, Mike Coats was able to deliver the pro-navy observation that most of what he saw from the windows was water.That’s why the navy is so important, Mr. President was his implication. Hank Hartsfield defended the air force: “ALL of the Earth is covered by air, Mr. President.” There are no circumstances under which astronauts will not compete. Even having the president of the United States in the conversation wasn’t an inhibition.
While in the midst of this White House call, a cockpit alarm tone sounded. It was a “systems alert,” an indication of a minor malfunction. Still, we needed to respond. In a grand display of the thoroughness of NASA’s training we worked the malfunction while continuing to humor Mr. Reagan. Steve Hawley grabbed the massive shuttle malfunction book and began to move through the fault tree, pantomiming to Mike which computer displays to call up. When Hawley had the correct response identified, he passed the book to Judy, who was nearest the appropriate switch panel. She flipped a switch to activate a backup heater, the specified response to the alert. Meanwhile, the rest of us continued, “Thank you, Mr. President. Everything is just fine, Mr. President.”
After our payload activities were finished, we posed for our weightless crew photo. It was a tradition for each crew to take a self-portrait in orbit. We dressed in golf shirts and shorts, set up a camera on the mid-deck, and activated the self-timer. To squeeze everybody into the frame, we posed in three tiers with Hank and Mike lowest, then Steve, Charlie, and me floating above them. Judy floated highest. While we didn’t intend it, the pose suggested a cheerleader’s pyramid. Adding to the effect were Judy’s legs. They dominated the photo…tan, perfectly proportioned, beautiful. Judy would later receive hate mail from feminist activists who thought her pose was disgusting and degrading to women. Breaking barriers was a task fraught with all manner of perils.
Around this time in the mission, MCC became suspicious of a temperature indication in our urinal plumbing. Urine is collected in a tank that is periodically emptied via an opening on the port side of the cockpit. Heaters on the exit nozzle are supposed to ensure the fluid separates cleanly from the vehicle and does not freeze to it. But MCC noticed that the temperature at the nozzle was anomalous and suspected some ice might have formed on it during our last urine dump. No windows provided a direct view of the nozzle, so Hank Hartsfield was instructed to use the camera on the end of the robot arm to take a look. We had TVs in the cockpit to monitor the camera view. When Hank positioned the arm, we saw we had grown a urine-sicle.
The image suddenly explained a mystery from STS-41B. After that mission landed, engineers were puzzled to find damage to several heat tiles on the port-side OMS pod at the rear of the fuselage. The damage had certainly occurred during reentry because the same heat tiles had been visible from the back windows during the orbit phase of the mission and the crew didn’t see any damage. A similar urine-sicle must have formed during the waste-water dumps on the STS-41B mission. During reentry, the ice had broken off and flown backward, hitting and damaging the OMS pod tile. MCC was now concernedDiscovery could suffer the same or worse damage. Theoretically it was possible the heat tiles could be so damaged by the ice,Discovery ’s tail could burn off. I had imagined many scenarios in which my life could be threatened as an astronaut—engine failures, turbo-pump explosions, decompression—but I had never imagined a threat from a frozen block of urine. I had an image of Peter Jennings reporting, “The astronauts were killed by their own urine.” It wasn’t a heroic-sounding epitaph.
Letting the Sun melt the ice wasn’t an option. In the vacuum of space, water doesn’t exist in liquid form. It goes from ice to vapor in a very slow process called sublimation. We wouldn’t be able to stay in space long enough for sublimation to get rid of our hitchhiker. So MCC directed Hank to tap the ice away using the robot arm.
Then came the bad news. We were told we could not use the urinal for the rest of the mission for fear another ice ball could jeopardize us. We would have to urinate in “Apollo bags.” These bags had beenthe toilet for the Apollo astronauts and were stowed aboard the shuttles for just this type of contingency. NASA wasn’t going to prematurely end a billion-dollar space mission because of a failed toilet. To our great relief we would still be able to use the solid waste collection feature of our commode. We wouldn’t have to use the bags for our BMs as did the Apollo astronauts (they werereal men).
I looked at Judy. “I sure bet you have penis envy now.”
She tersely replied, “I’ll manage.”
The CAPCOM went on to explain there was enough remaining volume in the waste-water tank for about three man-days of urine. It was obvious to us what they we
re thinking: Judy would be able to use the urinal for the rest of the mission. We men could get by with the bags. All of us thought this was fair enough, but Judy saw a feminist trap. If she used the urinal while we men were stuck with the bags, word would eventually get around. It would be another damning sin against the feminist cause. In fact it would be a far more egregious sin than the hair-jam incident. Her use of the urinal would be a shout from the rooftops that a peniswas necessary to deal with certain shuttle emergencies. Judy wasn’t going to fall into the trap. She elected to use the Apollo bags like the rest of us.
I have no idea how Judy managed with the bags but I’m sure she paid a messy price for her feminist stand. It was a mess even for us males. On my first attempt, I just held the bag around myself and let fly. Bad idea. The urine splashed into the bottom of the bag and bounced right back, soaking my crotch. Not only that, some fluid escaped and I became the proverbial one-armed paperhanger, trying to hold the bag at my crotch and blot the little yellow planets out of the sky with a tissue in my free hand. Others made similar rookie mistakes. But we quickly came up with a solution. We stuffed washcloths in the bottom of the bags. In weightlessness the “wicking” action of cloth was still effective. We could aim our stream onto the cloth and the fluid would be wicked away instead of splashing around. There was just one catch: If we urinated too fast, the wicking action couldn’t keep up with the stream and splashing would result. If we slowed our stream too much, the fluid wouldn’t separate from us and a large ball of urine would grow on our penises. We learned it was necessary to very precisely regulate our urine flow to achieve a stream of perfect balance. Even then, there would always be a significant “last drop” that had to be wiped away with a tissue.