Live From Cape Canaveral : Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today

by Jay Barbree

  My worried wife waited anxiously outside. She turned to Sergeant Hinkley. She had to know. “You think he’s dead?” she asked flatly.

  The veteran police officer, who would within months be brought down by a suspect’s bullet and have his own battle to hold onto life, somberly looked into her worried face. “I’ll see what’s going on,” he said.

  Sergeant Hinkley moved to the door of the emergency room, looked in, and a smile crossed his face.

  He turned back and walked to where Jo was sitting. “Hell no, he’s not dead,” he laughed. “They’re having trouble holding him down on the table.”

  Jo leapt to her feet and threw her arms around the big police officer. “That’s my man,” she cried. “That’s my man!”

  Inside the room I twisted, turned, and fought, trying to make sense of my predicament.

  Where did all the fog come from?

  That’s not fog, you idiot!

  The hell it isn’t! It’s too cold not to be fog.

  Why don’t those people shut up?

  There. That’s better. The fog is moving away.

  Look at the stars. Aren’t they beautiful? Jo would love them. But, my God, they are so bright! Well, I’ll just look at the blackness. Now, that’s black. I’ve never seen night like this before. Never stars so bright.

  I turned toward the light.

  But it’s not night over there. Over there it is beautiful. If I could go over there I could get away from the noise.

  I struggled for a moment, struggled against the restraints before lying back. I was exhausted.

  I fell back into the dark pit, back into the sleep without dreams, only to be awakened again by the noise…

  To hell with those loud people! I turned to the beauty. The grass reached out, beckoning to me. The earth itself was alive, and it flowed to me, and the trees were living creatures, green-golden-silver, swaying into a canopy through which there shone a glorious golden light.

  Was I moving closer to…

  To what?

  I could feel life draining from me, but it was being replaced, and the thought whispered through my mind that nothing in life, nothing between heaven and earth, is really lost, and there was comfort in that when the light appeared as a tiny speck in the darkness, a light swelling in size and in brilliance, filling an endless globe of darkness, yet translucent and becoming a cross to fill the world and the universe beyond. A never-ending universe before me, shining from within, and I thought of God.

  But I was alone.

  Drifting in space.

  Alone?

  Where was God, I asked, and suddenly, out of the light, out of its magnificent brilliance there appeared a darker form, a bed—that’s what it was, a huge bed being pushed by two white shadowed forms, two nurses, and I heard the gallop of their feet, the high-pitched squeal of wheels needing oil…

  The brilliant light vanished. It was gone.

  There was only the huge bed, the nurses taking tremendous strides, crashing through the darkness, the squealing wheels…

  An invisible hand grasped me, swept me like a leaf in a high wind after the fleeing nurses.

  Instantly the bed and the nurses stopped, and I suddenly realized there was someone in the bed. A man. A familiar man, and he turned his head to face me.

  Me. Hell, it was my own body. I was in the bed, but I wasn’t. How could this be?

  Where are we going? I asked in my silent voice.

  “We’re going to CIC.”

  “What’s that?” another voice asked.

  “Cardiac Intensive Care.”

  I moved into the huge bed, into my body, into a body strapped to the railings with arms loaded with IVs, with a mouth filled with tubes.

  Suddenly we were moving down a long hall, moving by people, by equipment, and in step with disassociated sounds.

  Sleep—I drifted into sleep. Welcomed sleep…

  Sleep.

  I spent the first two days in the hospital, my body inhabited by tubes, fighting restraints, trying to remember. I kept waking up, writing on a pad one question: What happened?

  My wife would tell me, and I would promptly forget.

  My brain was literally swollen. The minutes it had been deprived of oxygen-rich blood had caused it to swell, and the doctors said I wouldn’t be fully conscious until the swelling went down.

  The question was how long would it take me to remember, and whether I would ever really recall any of the events surrounding my “sudden death.”

  The answer was yes; I was recalling them, but slowly. There was confusion between the real and the unreal. But after two days I’d come far enough back that they removed the restraints, removed the tubes from my throat. It left me more alert—and hungry.

  The longer I lay in the hospital bed connected to the heart monitors, the clearer my thoughts grew. I was coming to realize just how fortunate I was.

  I had being moving through life with the goal of pleasing everyone I met, most of all that beautiful woman sitting in my room’s corner chair.

  “You are in a good mood today,” Jo smiled. “It’s good to see you laugh.”

  I looked at Jo, watched as she rubbed a shoulder muscle, knew her neck must ache from sitting in the hospital chair for the past three days.

  Some spend their lives searching for a mate. Some are looking for love. Some are looking for devotion. Others are looking for a friend. Most are looking for beauty. Well, I grinned, I found them all July 4, 1958.

  That was seventeen days before I went to work for NBC, and I was working for local radio station WEZY. I had been assigned to cover the Miss Brevard County beauty pageant, an annual celebration with plenty of food, bands, speeches, and a bevy of beauties dressed in all-white bathing suits to accent their Florida tans, moving gracefully across a stage before the judges, and when the contest was over, I was having difficulty pronouncing the winner’s name, Jo Reisinger.

  She was a raven-haired beauty cut from the same bolt of cloth as Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner, and her first name was no problem.

  “It’s pronounced rye, like rye bread—rye-singer,” another reporter told me, and I went on the air without the slightest hint I had just filed a report on my future wife.

  The coming months would find me covering other beauty contests—Miss Space, Miss Orbit, Miss whatever—and Jo Reisinger kept winning, but not with just her looks and her figure. She was winning with personality and fairness to others, and when it came time for the senior class to elect a homecoming queen, Jo was elected.

  Jo and I dated for a couple of years, long enough to know we were a solid fit, and on September 3, 1960, she got me drunk, drove me across the state line to Georgia, and married me before I could sober up. Well, that’s the lie I tell. I’ve never gotten the first person to believe it.

  Three weeks passed and finally we were back home, on the road to recovery.

  Mrs. Jay Barbree, Mrs. Alan Shepard, and Mrs. Deke Slayton are seen here plotting against their husbands. (Barbree Collection).

  NASA was still in the middle of redesigning the space shuttles’ boosters, but a crew had been selected to fly the all-important “Return-to-Flight” mission.

  NASA managers were hitting on all cylinders. They had selected as commander of the first post-Challenger flight Frederick H. “Rick” Hauck, a Space Shuttle veteran who was not only a seasoned naval test pilot; his skills as a gentleman were on equal par.

  Years before as a naval test pilot, Hauck had flown a jet that blew up underneath him. The jet was an RA–5C Vigilante. The objective of the test flight on July 23, 1973, was simple: Verify the Vigilante’s response to commands sent by an automated carrier-landing system on the ground. Shortly after takeoff from the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, Hauck climbed to twelve hundred feet and turned downwind. He was ready. He set himself up for a hands-off approach. It was one of those lazy summer days with haze, with no definable horizon, and as you looked straight down, you could barely see the ripples on the
surface of the Chesapeake Bay. Shortly after lowering the landing gear and flaps, Hauck heard and felt an ominous shudder. Seconds later, he heard another shuddering sound. The Vigilante shook, and on his cockpit panel he saw a “RAMPS” warning light flash on, then off. This confused him. The light indicated that the engine inlets were somehow out of configuration, but at subsonic speed, the inlet ramps should not be moving at all. Then the left-engine rpm gauge started unwinding rapidly, signaling a flameout.

  Hauck looked up. The Vigilante’s nose had pitched down. The Chesapeake Bay waters were racing toward him, and the surface waves were in sharp focus. Hauck grabbed his seat’s ejection handle and pulled. His seat’s rocket blasted him away, free from the flames beneath his feet. Rick Hauck had just ejected from an exploding fireball and lived.

  Now he would command the most important flight in the Space Shuttles’ history—a flight that would result in either the space planes’ rebirth or their demise.

  I wasn’t the only one ready to get back to work.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  How High Is Up?

  September 29, 1988.

  Space Shuttle Discovery sat on its launch pad.

  Five seasoned astronauts waited.

  They had been hand picked to fly the rebuilt ship after seven of their number were lost in the Challenger fires.

  Two hundred-fifty thousand other souls had surrounded the spaceport to lend their support. Twenty-four hundred members of the news media had settled on the press site. They would witness NASA’s comeback from its worst disaster.

  At 11:37 A.M. Eastern time, Discovery’s main engines roared. Seconds later the twin solid rockets fired. The assembled thousands crossed fingers and gritted teeth. The two rebuilt solid rockets lifted the five astronauts skyward—boosting the space plane and rocket combination straight and true. Two minutes later the huge assemblage broke into wild cheers as the boosters, blamed for the Challenger accident, burned out and peeled harmlessly away from the Shuttle and its human cargo. Six minutes later, the main engines shut down, and the five seasoned astronauts sailed safely into Earth orbit. Cheers erupted from the Launch Control Center at the Cape and in the Mission Control Center near Houston.

  President Ronald Reagan opened an awards ceremony in the White House Rose Garden with the announcement, “America is back in space.”

  NASA had spent thirty-two months fixing the O-ring seal and other Shuttle problems, but to make sure they drove down the road of caution, Discovery’s mission was designed to be as benign as possible. Six hours into the “Return-to-Flight,” astronauts Mike Lounge and Dave Hilmers released from the Shuttle’s cargo bay a $100 million tracking and data relay satellite. The huge communications spacecraft was the replacement for the TDRS lost in the Challenger accident. The new satellite’s onboard rocket motor fired and the new tracking and data relay satellite raced to a stationary orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. There it could cover a third of the Earth as it joined the first TDRS, launched earlier.

  Discovery’s astronauts poignantly remembered the five men and two women, who died aboard Challenger, before gliding to a landing on a dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Four hundred thousand gratefuls were there to meet them.

  Discovery’s veteran crew sport Hawaiian shirts given to them by its Cape Canaveral launch team. Front left: Dick Covey, pilot, and Rick Hauck, commander, center. Front right: John “Mike” Lounge. Back left: George “Pinky” Nelson. Back right: Dave Hilmers. (NASA).

  The comeback continued two months later when the space shuttle Atlantis soared into orbit on a secret mission solely for the Defense Department, and then opened the door for science to dominate America’s space efforts. The crew of Atlantis deployed the Space Shuttle’s first planetary probe. A Magellan planetary ship was sent streaking away to Venus with radar to look through the thick Venusian clouds and map the planet’s steamy surface. A second Shuttle planetary mission began October 18, 1989, when astronauts launched a three-ton Galileo spacecraft on a six-year, 2.4 billion–mile journey for up-close photographs of Jupiter. Other major planetary craft that were sent racing from shuttle cargo bays included Ulysses, to orbit and study the sun, and the Gamma Ray Observatory, to measure space radiation.

  NASA entered the final decade of the twentieth century fully recovered from the worst accident in space flight history, and I entered the 1990s recovered from a coronary bypass operation at Emory University. My friends were amazed at how lucky I had been not only with my health, but with the Space Shuttle launch schedule itself. None of my health problems caused me to miss a single space flight, but living on the ocean in 1990s had become a serious problem.

  No longer was Cocoa Beach the quaint little seaside village with its main beachside drive lined with swaying Australian pines. No longer were the easygoing villagers enjoying the slow pace of Florida living. It had become what many had predicted, another Fort Lauderdale, lined with one condominium after the other. There were now twenty times the number of people stacked on every inch of its once pristine sand.

  Jo and I looked at each other and nodded. It was time, definitely time to move to Merritt Island—an island bordered on its east side by the Banana River lagoon and on its west side by the Indian River estuary, an island separating the beaches from Florida’s mainland where lowlying hills on its southern tip host Honeymoon Lake, a body of water dug by mound-building natives four thousand years ago, a tropical winter sanctuary today for geese and ducks from the north, and an equal sanctuary from greenback-laden tourists.

  We managed to secure a piece of the lake’s north shore, and my wife began drawing up plans. By the time it was time for the most important Space Shuttle mission of the 1990s, the launch of the massive Hubble space telescope, we had moved into our new island home.

  Hubble was set free in Earth orbit by the crew aboard Discovery and was hailed as the most advanced telescope ever built for astronomy.

  The massive observatory, the size of a city bus, was a dream started in 1946 by Princeton astronomer Lyman Spitzer. Spitzer had urged our government to build an orbiting space platform with revolutionary instruments to probe the universe. No matter how powerful the astronomical telescopes on Earth were, they would never see clearly through the planet’s thick and pollution-muddied atmosphere. A telescope orbiting above Earth’s atmosphere could survey the heavens with unmatched clarity.

  But once in orbit, Hubble was sidetracked by flawed vision. Two months after its fiery ascent from Cape Canaveral in April 1990, embarrassed astronomers admitted Hubble’s goals were seriously compromised. Some systems worked well, but not the telescope’s ability to see deep into the universe—back to near the beginning of time.

  The most celebrated telescope since Galileo assembled his first optical instrument was sending Earth blurred images. Hubble’s primary mirror worked dismally; the observatory electronics sent back pictures that were fuzzier than snapshots taken by the unsteady hands of a child. The precious eight-foot primary mirror, which it had taken five years to grind and polish to supposed perfection, was flawed.

  The mirror was ten-thousandths of an inch too flat.

  That sounds insignificant. It is only one-fiftieth of the diameter of a human hair, which means it’s invisible to the human eye. But in the optical world of mirrors and lenses built to see twelve billion light years across the universe, that amount of error was enormous. So Hubble became instant grist for late-night television comedians and a butt of ridicule for American science.

  In Arizona State University’s astronomy program, scientists were hard at work to come up with a fix for the myopic observatory. The result was COSTAR (corrective optics space telescope axial replacement), a box the size of a telephone booth. On Earth, it weighed 650 pounds, and it contained ten mortised mirrors. It was about as close to technical magic as astronomers and engineers could get. Each of its ten mirrors was no larger than a man’s thumbnail!

  The plan was for spacewalking astronauts to fly a Space Shuttle to an
orbiting rendezvous with the massive telescope, grasp Hubble tightly with the Shuttle’s robotic arm, and move the large observatory to within their reach in the Shuttle’s cargo bay. There the spacewalkers would begin their “save the Hubble” week in space.

  Among their repairs, the spacewalkers would slide COSTAR in place within the main structure, where the mirrors would shorten the beam of light images captured by the flawed edges of the primary mirror. By shortening the beam of light exactly two-millionths of a meter, Hubble would be able to focus accurately. Once the ten mirrors were in place, astronomers in ground control would transmit instructions for focusing COSTAR’s mirrors by tipping them into thousands of different positions.

  But more than COSTAR was necessary to bring Hubble back to pristine performance. New forty-foot solar panels would replace those that shook when the ship passed between day and night, through temperature changes of 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Two magnetometers that had lost their precision attitude control would be removed to make way for new ones. A series of critical gyroscopes that pointed Hubble on command had either failed or were failing; new gyros would be installed. COSTAR would be eased by the spacewalkers into its housing. A new computer would be added to Hubble to eliminate “electronic memory lapses” and increase the space telescope’s reliability. And finally, the spacewalkers would repair flawed relays in the spectrograph that scanned the radiations of the universe.

  Space Shuttle Endeavour departed Earth at 4:27 A.M. Eastern time on December 2, 1993, with astronauts and fifteen thousand pounds of precious tools, equipment, and supplies. No sooner than Endeavour had settled into orbit with its veteran crew, I was in the air headed for Mission Control in Houston. The Hubble repair mission had captured the public’s imagination like no space mission since the days of Apollo moon landings, and Tom Brokaw, along with master producers Phil Griffin and Jeff Gralnick, wanted my experience reporting Hubble’s repair on the NBC Nightly News.