By the time I arrived, Judy had already called the JSC security people and they had sent a car to patrol around her house through the night. They had also promised to call the man’s employer…again. But, again, whatever warnings were delivered didn’t take. A few weeks later the man walked into our office! I could only assume he was there on official contractor business because he wore the proper JSC badges. He went immediately to Judy’s desk and asked her to autograph one of his poems. She refused. He begged her to write him one letter a year. She refused. He begged her to come to dinner with him. She refused. As this was going on, I was moving to Judy’s side, watching the man like a secret service agent watching the crowd at a presidential event. He didn’t look violent, but if he reached into his briefcase I was going to tackle him. Grabbing JR by the arm I said, “We’ve got a meeting to attend,” and escorted her from the room. We called security and, this time, whatever they did apparently had the desired effect—the stalking ended. Beauty and celebrity had their downside, as Judy was learning.
Our crew soon acquired nicknames. Tarzan stuck on me. Judy christened Hawley, my Bo Derek salivating cohort, Cheetah. I’m sure Steve would have preferred the more macho handle Attack Astronomer, but Cheetah stuck. In keeping with the Ape Man theme, I branded JudyJane, asking her as I did so, “Would you like to swing on my vine?” She replied, “Sure, Tarzan. But first I’ll have to tie a knot in it so I have something to hold on to.” Judy always had a comeback for my AD bullshit. Mike Coats maintained his Superman call sign. Upon hearing these titles the office secretaries began to refer to STS-41D as the “Zoo Crew” and Hank Hartsfield naturally became the “Zookeeper.”
God apparently didn’t hear my prayers to watch over every mission in front of us. STS-6 returned home safely but the IUS booster rocket it deployed, identical to the one we would carry onDiscovery, malfunctioned. Its communication satellite was released into an unusable orbit. It was going to take as much as a year for the Boeing engineers to fix the IUS, meaning several IUS missions—including ours—had just lost their payloads. I was miserable. Any ripples in the flight schedule could generate changes in flight assignments. But after many tense weeks of worry, we acquired a new payload of two smaller communication satellites with different booster rockets. Best of all, we still retained the first flight ofDiscovery.
We set to work on our crew patch design. SinceDiscovery was named after one of Captain Cook’s eighteenth-century ships, we included a sailing vessel morphing into the space shuttleDiscovery. We also teased Judy about adding the symbol for the female gender to the patch . There was precedent for this: The STS-7 crew had included a da Vinci Vitruvian Man–like representation on their patch. Four “male” symbols, arrows radiating outward, formed the head, arms, and one leg, while a lone female symbol—obviously representing Sally Ride—formed the other leg. When the patch appeared, Mike Coats observed, “Sally wears her gender like a chip on her shoulder.” I jokingly suggested to Judy we add something similar to our STS-41D patch and penciled an idea. It had the + of the female symbol as thecenter of the creature and five male arrows pointed inward at it. It would have been interesting to see how HQ would have reacted to that design.
STS-7 and -8 flew into history and I prayed my hallelujahs.
In November our crew celebrated Hank’s fiftieth birthday at the Monday meeting. Because he wore his political leanings on his sleeve, he was an easy target to lampoon. We presented him outrageously satirical gifts, including a copy ofMs. magazine dedicated and autographed to him by Gloria Steinem, “In recognition of your support of the feminist movement.” (Sally Ride, a friend of Ms. Steinem, had secured the magazine and her autograph, a one-of-the-guys act that shocked me.) We read fake congratulatory messages from Hank’s supporters, including the ACLU, Jane Fonda, and the Nuclear Freeze Movement. There was also a congratulatory card from Yuri Andropov thanking Hank for “promoting global communism,” as well as a card from Senator Ted Kennedy thanking him for his recent donation to the Democratic party. A final gift, a box of Ayds diet candy, was from the gay rights political caucus acknowledging Hank’s support for their cause. The gift card read,Here are some AIDS for you. Nothing was out of bounds when it came to astronaut humor.
