by Lynn Sherr
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The first new astronaut class in nearly ten years—only the eighth since the US committed to human spaceflight—was huge news. NASA had selected fifteen pilots and twenty mission specialists—the largest group yet. But the real headline was the inclusion of six women and four minority men: three African Americans, one Asian American. After nearly two decades and seventy-three white men, the space agency looked like an affirmative action poster, eager to claim bragging rights. “We have selected an outstanding group of men and women who represent the most competent, talented and experienced people available to us today,” said a very pleased Administrator Frosch at the official announcement later that day in Washington. Chris Kraft added, “We had no problem finding minorities that were totally competitive.” When ABC’s Jules Bergman pressed him on why no females had been selected sooner, Kraft said, “It was difficult to choose women because of their lack of qualification. I think that in the last few years, because of the women’s movement frankly, women are much more qualified.” When asked about the rumor that the list had been trimmed from twenty pilots to fifteen “so that perhaps a woman or more women or ethnic minorities could fulfill that role,” Kraft answered firmly, “Negative.”
Two weeks later, Sally met the rest of her classmates when they were summoned back to Houston to be presented formally to the public. Thirty-five mostly young, largely ill-at-ease astronauts-to-be were called up to the stage, then introduced by name, military rank (if any), residence and current occupation or school. The men and women alike looked like actors in a high school pageant, dressed in a less-than chic range of plaid pants and three-piece polyester suits. There were lots of sideburns. No one smoked. Sally took her seat in a molded plastic chair, alphabetically, between another female mission specialist named Judy Resnik, and a pilot named Dick Scobee. They would become close friends.
After another round of press interviews, Sally flew back to California to finish her dissertation. Despite (or perhaps because of) her euphoria, she struggled with the friend’s computer on which she was writing it, deleting the entire first chapter when she pressed the wrong key. From then on, she kept five copies on a disk. On June 1, 1978, at 3:15 p.m., she defended her work at oral examinations. During a ten-minute break, she was interrupted by a phone call from a reporter who had somehow broken through the protective screen set up by her colleagues in the physics department. Sally explained that she was mid-exam, and that she only had ten minutes. “That’s okay,” he said, “ten minutes is all I need.”
Sally’s house was packed up and waiting for NASA’s designated movers; her cartons were piled in the living room, along with the boxes of books and clothes that Bill Colson had brought over from his own house. They were still a couple—it had been almost two years now—and he was moving with her, having taken the trouble to secure a research grant at Rice University so they could be together. The rest of the country may have been caught up in more global events—with Jimmy Carter in the White House, John Travolta taking over the role of Doody in Grease on Broadway, Proposition 13 starting to cut property taxes in California and the cartoon strip Garfield making its first appearance. Sally was focused on her own moment of change. She and Bill loaded their hand luggage into Sally’s green VW Rabbit and headed for Houston.
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THIRTY-FIVE NEW GUYS
JULY 1978–MARCH 1982
The TFNG logo.
I had no idea what to expect. I mean, what do you do when you’re an astronaut? Who knows? I don’t even remember having specific goals, other than to fly in space!
—Sally Ride
REPORTING FOR DUTY
There wasn’t even a spacecraft.
In July 1978, when Sally Ride drove down NASA Road 1 towards the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Columbia, the first orbiter, was still moving down the assembly line in Palmdale, California. Sally and her multicultural colleagues were about to train for a program that hadn’t gotten off the ground, so they could fly in a spacecraft that still wasn’t built, at an agency where testosterone and cigars were still essential gear for the white, male fighter jocks Sally and her classmates idolized.
They were the first generation of astronauts to grow up watching their predecessors on TV. The first to go through school studying space travel as both science fiction and career fact. Many had reaped the benefits of the surge to science after Sputnik; now they were part of it, whatever “it” was going to be. That was part of the thrill: to help model the program that would operate the shuttle that was still taking shape.
Formally, they were the class of 1978, thirty-five would-be spacefarers from twenty-six states and twenty-seven different undergraduate institutions holding three MDs, eleven PhDs and infinite dreams of discovery. Twenty-one were military officers, of whom nineteen had served in Vietnam, a war ended only three years earlier. Most of them were the pilots. Sally, who had linked arms with antiwar activists at the Moratorium nearly a decade before, would now risk her life with men who had flown combat missions against the Viet Cong. Richard “Mike” Mullane, an Air Force captain, was unapologetically skeptical of scientists like her: “These were men and women who, until a few weeks ago, had been star-gazing on mountaintop observatories and whose greatest fear had been an A– on a research paper. Their lives were light-years apart from those of the military men of the group… . In our work a mistake wasn’t noted by a professor in the margin of a thesis, but instead brought instant death.”
What they would all learn in the next few years was that preparing for space travel was a great leveler; that just as career soldiers who had spent their lives in uniformed, all-male societies could reenter a world where civilians of both genders were their equals, so too could left-leaning demonstrators learn to accept pilots—not, in the words of Sally’s classmate Robert “Hoot” Gibson, as “air pirates and baby killers, but people who had a job to do and did it.” It would just take time. As one candidate said during the interview process, when asked how he’d feel about flying with a woman, “I’d fly with little green men if it meant getting a chance in space.”
That’s the drive I discovered several years later, when I arrived at JSC as a rookie space reporter. Covering NASA was like a trip through a brainy amusement park: on the one hand, an instant education, with layers of brilliant engineers and technicians eager to share their latest gadgetry or theories, to be sure you got the circuitry of the satellite or the composition of the medical kit just right. The gadgets were splendid. On the other hand, if you pushed too hard, or tried to get beyond the hardware to the personalities, they circled the wagons to prevent any hint of uncertainty, or even mortality, from marring the image of its stars. Or cutting their Congressional funding.
The stars themselves—the astronauts—were an equally mixed bag: exceptional human beings in most cases, with the curiosity and concern that make you proud that they are our representatives to worlds beyond. Several became and remain my close friends. Many more were harder to know—enclosed in an airspace that only fellow fliers could penetrate. Sally’s class contained examples of them all.
Their first order of business was to bond. Following tradition, they selected a class nickname, a contemporary version of Mercury Seven that would define their newly diverse roles at NASA. They settled on Thirty-five New Guys (gender neutral by agreement), or TFNG, illustrated by a merry rendering of thirty-five spacesuited upstarts, floating in, out and around the orbiting shuttle like clowns emerging from a circus car. I always thought TFNG sounded like the name of a rock group, perfectly describing the new age music this gang would make. Then I learned that in military parlance, TFNG is how old hands indelicately put down the greenhorns, as in, “those (freaking) new guys.” Either way, NASA’s newest employees were ready for their tough new jobs. And that meant learning the lingo.
“The hardest part was reading my schedule!” says Anna Fisher, a physician from California accustomed to medical, not aerospace jargon. On her first day at wor
k, she walked into her office on the third floor of Building 4 “and I looked at the schedule and I looked at Dan [Brandenstein, her TFNG officemate] and I said, ‘I don’t know what any of that means, do you? I can read the times and I know I’m supposed to be doing something and that’s about it!’ ” Fisher was baffled by the acronyms, an alphabet soup addiction so deeply ingrained, they’d been compiled into a thick little book. I snagged a copy soon after I arrived and did a little feature on my favorites. But it wasn’t just civilian astronauts and reporters who were clueless.
“I remember a guy who stood up in the front of the class and talked completely in acronyms,” recalled another rookie, a test pilot. “Prepositions and verbs were the only words I understood. Even NASA’s an acronym.”
As were they. Officially, Sally was an astronaut-candidate, or AsCan, facing two years of training before being promoted to full-fledged astronaut. That title was held by “the old guys,” as the twenty-seven active astronauts from previous selections were affectionately known. Some, like moonwalker John Young, had flown already—in Young’s case, on both Gemini and Apollo. Others had been waiting more than twelve years to fly in space and eyed the newbies warily, unwilling to be elbowed out of line by relative youngsters, most of whom didn’t even look like them. But most of the “grizzled veterans,” another term of relative endearment, welcomed the rookies, grateful for the new brain-and pilot-power to get the shuttle up and running. They would also help instruct the new guys in the ways of NASA, in their new home.
The Johnson Space Center lies some forty-five minutes south of Houston, a 1,600-acre campus of low, boxy buildings identified only by numbers, which author Norman Mailer described as “a number of white cartons set out at occasional right angles on a warehouse floor.” Rocket engine parts, real and recreated, are laid out like a giant’s lawn ornaments. Cattle once grazed on the flat fields here, amidst miserable humidity. Today, rocket scientists and robot engineers create the next generation of space systems in the high-tech industrial park here, amidst miserable humidity. And the cattle are back—a small herd of Longhorns like the originals, providing a bovine link to the past. Outdoors, it’s like living in a Laundromat. Indoors, it’s like an icebox, thanks to overcompensating air conditioners. You don’t go to JSC for the climate, particularly not in July, which is when Sally arrived from California.
“Hot!” was her terse summation.
She didn’t need to look further than JSC’s name to understand why Texas was the site of what used to be called the Manned Spacecraft Center. Lyndon Johnson had died in 1973, but his fierce support of the US program kept the dollars flowing when it counted. To accommodate the original Mercury astronauts and the influx of engineers and technicians and managers, developers carved instant suburbs from the Texas scrub, a thriving community of single-family houses and garden apartments on quiet, winding streets named Saturn Lane and Gemini Avenue. Tour buses once showed sightseers where the astronauts lived, back when hotshot fliers, according to legend, traded in their Corvettes if the ashtrays overflowed. Now the new guys were moving in. It was even affordable on Sally’s new GS-12 salary—$21,883 per year, five times what she’d earned as a grad student moonlighting as a TA. Sight unseen, she’d signed the lease on a two-bedroom unit in the area called Nassau Bay. Unfortunately, it sat directly on top of the building’s laundry room, making things even warmer. But she settled in with Bill, the only astronaut live-in with spousal status. And while NASA had no objection to their relationship, Sally said. “My grandmother probably does.”
They put a mattress on the floor and topped off the furniture they’d shipped down with a redwood bookcase purchased en route. From Stanford, Sally and Bill had detoured north to hike amidst the titanic trees in Muir Woods, then picked out the shelves “to take a piece of California with us,” Colson recalls. “We were going to a place we didn’t know and Sally said something like, we were going to be hanging out with people with crew cuts and flattops. It was very different from being a graduate student.”
Her days now started before eight and often ended long after dark, with lectures on scientific subjects (oceanography, material science, geology, among others) and on the structure and systems of the shuttle (avionics, how fuel cells work, how engines work). There were field trips to other space centers and to various contractors to see payloads or parts of the spacecraft in progress. They trained “more than forty hours a week but less than twenty-four hours a day,” in the coy explanation from the fellow who put all those acronyms onto the AsCans’s weekly schedules, plotted with bright squares of color on a big bulletin board. “Before the candidates arrived, we spent nearly two years developing a new program that touches on everything from what makes the shuttle tick to how they should make public appearances.” The object was to level the knowledge field, to bring everyone up to speed in all disciplines. Both mission specialists and pilots attended everything. “We took aerodynamic classes, which [the pilots] slept through,” Sally said, “and they took science classes, which we slept through.” Or escaped.
One engineer recalls attending a weeklong aerodynamics course on Advanced Stability and Control, to sharpen his understanding of the shuttle’s landing profile. “Just before the start of the class,” he recalls, “Sally walked in and sat down in the back row. Okay, that’s cool; there’s an AsCan in the class. Then the class starts and, rather than being ‘Advanced’ Stability and Control, it’s Stability and Control 101, the same course every undergraduate aeronautical engineering student has to take as a freshman. After a couple hours of this, the class was getting pretty restless, but NASA employees have it drilled into them that, if you sign up for a course, you have to attend as long as you are still breathing because NASA paid good money for that course. So we all sat there for the full five days, even though most of us felt we weren’t getting anything out of it. Except Sally. Shortly before lunch of the first day, Sally stood up, picked up her books and quietly departed, never to return. Our takeaway from that was that (1) It’s good to be an astronaut (which we already knew) and (2) Sally Ride doesn’t like having her time wasted.”
“She was so young when she came to NASA, but she was already stubborn,” says Carolyn Huntoon. “She was always very well mannered, although when she didn’t want to do something, you weren’t going to push her around.”
No one took attendance; no one was graded. But every TFNG knew there was only one test: your first flight. And the only grade that counted was getting named to a crew for that flight. Sally downplayed the anxiety some years later, recounting her years of training this way: “I got in line for my turn to fly in space.”
FLYING
Suddenly, she was flying, in the sleek jet trainers called T-38s used by astronauts as their taxis. Sally wouldn’t be piloting the space shuttle—no mission specialist would—but she was expected to spend fifteen hours a month aloft in the backseat of a T-38, to learn how to coordinate as a flight crew, how to use navigation equipment and communications procedures, and to get conditioned to high-performance flight. Or, as Sally put it, “getting your stomach turned around and your ears jumbled up.”
Before, she had flown only in big commercial airliners. Now she was blissfully climbing the ladder into the iPod-white, needle-nosed jets, parachute slung over her shoulder, fastening her helmet, hooking up the oxygen mask and snapping her four seat belts to slide through the skies supersonically. “Only when I pulled the canopy down and heard it click shut did I get a little apprehensive,” Sally confided about her first time in a T-38. “I thought, ‘My God, I can’t get this off,’ but then the pilot said, ‘All set?’ and I said, ‘Sure,’ and off we went. Since that first flight I’ve never been scared.”
Gut-churning rolls over the Gulf of Mexico and steep-angled approaches to Ellington Air Force Base were catnip to the former Disneyland ace. In a surprisingly short time, she was handling the controls herself.
“She was the best student I ever had,” says fellow AsCan Jon McBride, a Navy tes
t pilot who, like many military colleagues, taught Sally and other first-timers to fly. NASA saved millions of dollars by keeping the training in house, rather than sending non-pilots to Air Force school. It also helped pilots maintain their proficiency. Whether it was off to lunch in El Paso, or dinner in San Diego, Sally got a first-class education, zipping along at 300 to 600 miles an hour, 39,000 feet high (higher than she’d ever flown as a passenger), with the joystick under her command. “She amazed me!” McBride tells me, recalling the time he put her “under the bag”—meaning all of her windows were blacked out—and she maintained total instrument control.
Officially, mission specialists weren’t allowed to fly the plane below 5,000 feet in those days—too dangerous, with too much to coordinate in the face of too many distractions. But some of the TFNG pilots either didn’t know, or ignored the rules. “Sally could land a T-38 from the backseat as well as I could,” says her shuttle-mate, Air Force instructor pilot John Fabian. “She had a feel for the plane.” Marine pilot Norm Thagard, who also launched with Sally, says, “She just flew a good airplane. I had my hands close by to the stick, but I didn’t touch it.”
Rick Hauck, who flew combat missions for the Navy and commanded two shuttle flights, so trusted Sally’s ability, he stood by on a trip to Seattle as she did a touch-and-go landing (where you bring the plane down and then take off without stopping) of a Boeing 747 prototype that was empty except for the flight crew. “We were all standing in the cockpit,” he recalls. And when the Boeing crew found out that Sally wasn’t exactly an experienced jet pilot, “the chief test pilot almost fainted. I’ve always thought it was partly a testimony to the good flying quality of the plane.”