Riding Rockets полностью

I made the observation that it was scary looking over the railing from two hundred feet up. “I’ve got a fear of heights, JR. I can’t get any closer.”

She laughed. “Well, Tarzan, you’re screwed. We’re headed to two hundred miles.”

We continued with small talk, each of us trying to distract ourselves from our pounding hearts. Then the two-minute warning call came for my strap-in.

I embraced her. “Good luck, JR. I’ll see you in space.” Since she would be in a mid-deck seat, I wouldn’t see her until after MECO. It was the first time I had ever held her and I was struck by how petite she was.

“Roger that, Tarzan.” She returned my squeeze and we parted.

I detoured to the pad toilet for a last go at urinating. The bowl was a pond of unflushed filth and toilet paper. The plumbing had been turned off hours earlier as part of the checklist for launchpad closeout. The workers had no option but to use this facility. I added my urine to the mess, reattached my UCD, then walked to the white room.

The closeout crew quickly harnessed me. We shook hands and I dropped to my knees and crawled through the side hatch. The cockpit was as cold as a meat locker. It occurred to me the chill was going to shrink a critical part of my body even further. If my UCD condom stayed attached, it would be a miracle.

I stood on the temporary panels covering the back instrument panel and struggled to put myself in the chair behind Mike Coats. Once in, Jeannie Alexander, another of the closeout crew, helped me with the five-point harness. As she worked at my crotch to make the buckle connections, I teased, “I’ll give you all day to stop that.” She had probably heard the same joke a hundred times. She connected my communication cord and emergency breathing pack, then clipped my checklist to a tether. Everything had to be secured. Anything that dropped during launch would be slammed into the back instrument panel by the G-forces, irretrievable until MECO. Finally she gave me a big smile and a pat on the shoulder and turned to help Steve Hawley.

I looked around the cockpit. Everything appeared as it had in the countless simulations except for the sparkling newness.Discovery even smelled new. Every piece of glass gleamed. There were no wear marks on the floors or on the most frequently used computer keys. There were no vacant panels or panels with somebody else’s payload controls as we had frequently encountered in the JSC simulators. This was our bird. It was our mission software humming in her brain. We would be driving a brand-new vehicle from the showroom floor.

About ninety minutes to go. With each vanishing second my heart shifted into yet a higher gear. Thank God we weren’t wired for bio-data. That had ended back in the Apollo days. I would have been embarrassed for anybody to have seen my vital signs. I envisioned Dr. Jim Logan looking at them and saying, “It must be a bad sensor. Nobody’s heart can achieve those rates without exploding.”

Jeannie finished with Hawley’s strap-in. Judy and Charlie Walker were belted in downstairs. The closeout crew wished us good luck, unplugged from the intercom, and was gone. We heard the hatch close. A moment later our ears popped as the cockpit was pressurized. The wait began.