Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:43:49 -0400 From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us> To: WSFA Official List <wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com>, WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net> Subject: [WSFA] [Fwd: What a Stupid Lousy, Crappy Last Flight] Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net> This is my recent ex. Her writing was what brought us as friends, originally, when we were both in TAPS. And yes, she *did* work as an engineer at the Cape, on Shuttle and Station, for 17 years. And yes, she told me the same things about her lousy managers, the one who "bragged" his degree was in typing, and the ones serving time until their pension, who wouldn't *let* them innovate, like leaving the external tanks up there and building with them (they had to loft *extra* weight to de-orbit the damn things). mark -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [WSFA] What a Stupid Lousy, Crappy Last Flight Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 17:51:58 -0400 From: DH I could almost wish the damn shuttle, that long ago ceased to earn its name, would ram the damn useless station, and blow all of it to orbiting trash until it all burns up falling back into the atmosphere in a thousand years. What an awful, boring, pathetic final launch. The media hype was so desperate you would think nothing else had ever launched. Or was going on in the world at all. "Weather! Electrical problems! A hundred thousand people! Traffic! Five seconds about the history of the space program! Interviews with anyone who ever climbed into the orbiter! Politicians! Unemployment! Insects on the windows!" Pitiful. Embarrassing. Even NASA management crawled off with their tail between their legs. They tried to invent a problem at the last minute (the last three minutes, actually, where the Major Fuckup Points come fast and furious), and you could actually hear someone in the background in the Launch Control Center saying "bullshit." So they fired the duct-taped hangar queen into a completely overcast sky, so as not to disappoint all the tourists in their mobile homes parked all along what passes for roads around here, rather than pull the plug a week ago and finish changing out the payload into something useful, instead of trash bags. A high-powered launch rattles windows. This lightweight didn't even wake up the cats, who usually demand a treat for witnessing a launch. No blinding blaze of blue-white, orange-gold fire, riding ahead of a controlled explosion. No rolling sustained thunder. No climbing trail of steam-smoke, reflecting the sun and casting a mile-long shadow. They could have faked it with a boom box and a.ten-LED flashlight. Exit Atlantis, my own orbiter, that I worked hands-on, start to finish, from the day when we first walked in awe around her indescribably overwhelming presence, and near-solid aura of potential, in 1984 ... to this limping ignominy, a testimony to everything that has been wrong with the space program for more than a decade. Atlantis' maiden launch, in 1985, was one of those idiotic super-secret military missions, where we had to radio the Russian "fishing boats" a mile offshore to get the launch status, and fortunately they spoke better English than any of us did Russian. (Parusski comes in dialects too. One radio operator cursed out another over the radio for his Georgia accent. Their Georgia, not ours.) When I translated the five words of it that I understood, two of which were profanity, the team spent DAYS inventing puns and trying to figure out what the rest of the words might have been. And of course, for a maiden launch, the odds of going up within even the first month of an initial try are pretty much zero. (Discovery holds -- held -- THAT record for last-minute F^#k-ups.) So this was entertainment value, more than anything else. We were in a three-story field engineering warehouse building. So we trudged up the fire escape stairs to peer at the launch pad. Nope, no motion over there. We trudged back down into the air conditioning. An hour or so later, a babble of Parusski with a word I think meant "Go." So we trudged up three flights and stood on the roof for awhile. Nope, no motion over there. So we trudged back down. There was another trip in there, I forget why, but the clanging of fire escape stairs got to be REALLY annoying. Another hour or so later, an excited babble from the "fishing boat" that included something like "down," which of course we immediately decided was "countdown." Back up to the roof. Yep! Stuff being moved back from the stack over there. We chose sitting in the fall Florida sun over another trip on the stairs. We could see the "sparklers," that burn off stray hydrogen leakage. Then the mains ignited, one-two-three, clean as fire can get. T-minus Two. One. The SRBs hit the water-filled flame trench, and the explosion of smoke-steam made twin small nuclear mushrooms. Whatever she was carrying, it was heavy enough to need full firepower. She lifted from the tower, blazing a white rainbow in the sapphire October sky, turning the wispy clouds to multi-colored wild pearl. Everyone said awed obscenities, including some in Russian. "They did it," said my boss. "They really did it!" Acceleration, from the slow ponderous graceful lift to the rocket speeds you only think you know, flexing millions of pounds of muscles towards thousands and increasing thousands of miles an hour, throwing away fire in exultation. Shrugging away the solids. Still reaching for more speed. Wings like a falcon diving, only diving upward. Free. The point of light finally faded, cut out. It's only eight minutes to MECO. Couldn't prove it by us. We stood there, following a path visible only to instruments and imagination, for a lot longer than that. Her first mission patch was a stolid gray, which pissed me off -- I wanted ATLANTIS. Her last mission patch is a pretentious piece of bullshit, and I don't even want the t-shirt. May all NASA managers, and all the kiss-ups who sided with them instead of hollering for new engineering, rot in hell. Goodbye, my lady, my own. You served well and honorably, and it is not your fault that you have no heir, physical or spiritual. Your legacy will remain, written in fire and knowledge. We will remember when you first took up the gauntlet, and left the sky behind. I only wish you could have gotten the final sendoff of the beauty and wonder that you deserve.