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NASA JOHNSON SPACE CENTER ORAL H ISTORY PROJECT
O RAL H ISTORY 2 TRANSCRIPT
J OHN E. BLAHA
H^ I^ NTERVIEWED BYOUSTON, TEXAS^ R– EBECCA 18 AUGUST^ WRIGHT 2006
WRIGHT : Today is August the 18th^ , 2006. This oral history session with John Blaha is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. Rebecca Wright is the interviewer, assisted by Sandra Johnson. This interview is a continuation of the oral history that began on December 3 rd^ , 2004. Thanks again for coming in and taking time to talk with us today. At the end of our last session, we had completed our discussion of STS-29, so we’d like to start today by you telling us about STS-33 that was prepared for launch just eight months after you returned with the STS- crew. So tell us how all that came about and how you were able to get ready so quick for your next mission.
BLAHA : Actually, that ended up being easy. So I returned from 29; was starting to train with another crew—that was STS-40—and there was a death in, I believe, June—so I could have it a little off—of Dave [S. David] Griggs, who was the pilot of STS-33. They were four months or so from launching, and so I think the bottom line is I was the current pilot who had just landed, and so I was available as somebody who could just jump in and get going, which is what happened. So I joined Fred [Frederick D.] Gregory and [F.] Story Musgrave and K. T.—Kathy [Kathryn C.] Thornton—and “Sonny” [Manley L.] Carter [Jr.], and it was really a neat crew. So that’s what happened. That’s how it occurred.
WRIGHT : This mission was different, because it was a classified mission with the Department of Defense [DOD].
BLAHA : That’s right. When you say “different,” in my view all missions really are 99 percent the same, and there’s 1 percent that’s different. So to me it wasn’t significantly different, even though it was classified and was Department of Defense. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but that’s true.
WRIGHT : Now, you mentioned that the training part was easy.
BLAHA : Oh yes. Oh, without a doubt. I’m trying to think of a good analogy. If every crew person could do that, they would get on a ramp, because you’ve just flown, and when you land from any Space Shuttle mission, there are no more trained astronauts than the people who have just landed. If they turned right around and flew, assigned to another mission with a different on-orbit task, I’ve always said I think you could have about a month and a half of training, and they could launch. Because the ascent and entry consume so much of the training that you’re way up on a stump, and so a few little proficiencies of ascent and entry, and that’s how you could do that. So, anyway, I thought maybe it’s a better, more efficient way to fly around here. Have about five crews, and you just keep turning them. [Laughter] But anyway, there’s obviously other purposes going on.
music, and then he’d always be talking about movies, too, and actors. Anyway, he was a good person to talk about those kind of things, as well as a very good crew person.
WRIGHT : You had a little bit of a delay in landing. They waved you off for a few hours.
BLAHA : Oh yes. That was funny. I could tell this story, and I guess Fred would be happy if I told it. Maybe he wouldn’t be, so I don’t know; it may be one of those things that I once said— well, after I got the written back, I decide to cross out. But Fred told me early on in training, “Hey, John, I’m going to tell you something. I like the launch, and I like the entry, but I don’t like being on orbit.” He said, “But I fly to do the launch and the entry. They’re fun.” And that was true. I saw that, because he was just someone who was affected on orbit by no gravity. Anyway, that means he doesn’t want to stay there any longer than he has to. That’s why it’s relevant to your question. So it was intended entry day, and we’re all suited up, and we’re getting ready to come in and everything. When they waved us off, it was terrible. I mean, Fred cursed a few words. We had three crew members who were doing somersaults in the middeck, slapping each other on the back and happy because we had all this spare time right now, waiting for tomorrow, and that’s reflected in the—that’s when I dictated that story.
WRIGHT : Great. Okay.
BLAHA : So from Fred’s perspective, staying on orbit another twenty-four hours is not a good idea. He would just as soon have landed. But anyway, so we were delayed, and then we had to wait for twenty-four hours, that’s true. [Laughs]
WRIGHT : You had talked about his strengths as a commander. Your next flight assignment placed you in that role. So tell us how—the training and how it all came about and what you thought about being in charge of this next crew for STS-43.
BLAHA : Okay. Before I do that, I’ll tell you what happened then on real entry day with Fred, just to show you what type of guy he was. There we were sitting on the flight deck. We are fifteen minutes from the deorbit burn—that’s a pretty serious time frame—and we get the go for the burn, and I looked over, and I see Fred, and he has two socks streaming off his ears. You know that one comic character, kind of like Goofy? Well, that’s what he’s doing. I looked over there, and I said, “Boy, Fred, you have some long ears.” He said, “You don’t like my ears, John?” [Laughter] Anyway, it was just incredible. But his real purpose in doing that was to kind of just get everybody at ease. He always did little things like that, because he’s always just looking at the big picture, which I thought was interesting with me.
WRIGHT : That’s great.
don’t need to be mothered to death. You have to tell them what their responsibility is and then don’t look over their shoulder. So I think I followed that philosophy. I remember I was even more direct than Fred. Early on I told everybody, “Look, I don’t care how many mistakes you make during training. You can talk and ask all the questions you want in the debriefs. I’m not worried about us looking bad in training. I just want you to be ready when we launch.” I like that, and I learned that philosophy, I think, from Fred, and I liked that. It was good.
WRIGHT : When you got time for the launch, it was delayed by a day, and then the next day the launch was delayed again for another week, and then once again it was slipped a day. How did the slips in the schedule affect the crew?
BLAHA : My honest answer to that—and we all talked about it, too, so I think it’s generical; or maybe the other four are telling you something different—from a crew viewpoint and from your immediate family, it’s not an impact. My wife will tell you that. But we all felt sorry for friends who had to pay their own money to come down there, and we thought, “That isn’t fair to them. They’re the people who this isn’t fun for.” But for you, the government’s paying for everything, and it doesn’t matter whether it will launch today or in two weeks or a month. It’s not a big deal. Then you actually, I think, benefit from it, because when you go down to launch, you may be all kind of keyed up, so when you delay a day, I think you’re more ready the second day, and if you even delay the week, and you come back here and you do a few sims [simulations]. You go back down, and it’s like you just feel totally comfortable about everything. So I think you feel—it’s better from a crew viewpoint. Not that you want to plan to do it this way, but—so
it’s not a negative impact at all. I think it’s a horrible impact for the people who are your friends and family that had to pay to go down. …
WRIGHT : Did you have any thoughts during the slips, because some of the slips were based on technical or mechanical issues?
BLAHA : No. No, because I’m not real smart, anyway, and I always used to just believe in the team. They explain it to you, and you listen so that you understand what it is, but the real bottom line is you need real smart engineers across all of the disciplines, and you believe them, because they know it, really, better than anybody.
WRIGHT : Any special words that you shared with your crew when you finally launched and you were in orbit?
BLAHA : I don’t remember. I can’t say that. Let me try and remember; you say that. I don’t think any special words. I’d have to read—I brought this little 43 write-up that somebody put together. I guess we put it together after landing, this 43 crew. I’ll leave that with you.
WRIGHT : Thank you.
BLAHA : I don’t really—when you say that, I don’t remember. What I remember about STS- is—oh, well, there are two things I really remember about it, so I’ll go back. And I don’t know if Shannon [W. Lucid] told you the same thing, but it was my perception.
about a woman who was my age, growing up in America, who wanted to be a professional, how it was different than it was for me, which I thought was really enlightening. That’s something I learned that I thought was pretty neat from her. Anyway, now we’re on orbit, and I don’t know why, but many times, every now and then—Shannon does a whole lot of things, and she gets stuff done pretty quick, and I even noticed it in training. So it’s kind of like, “Well, what am I supposed to do, John? Is there something I can do?” What I finally started doing is little things that I was doing on orbit, I would say, “Hey, Shannon, why don’t we just do this together?” So we had a lot of fun doing that. We would do water dumps together. We would do [cryo reconfigurations] together. By together, I mean, literally, we made it a twosome. Somebody read the checklist; the other one [would] execute it. The two of us just really, we had a lot of fun doing that, working together, so we did a lot of working together on orbit. It was fun. She was a real strong crewperson. I mean, she would do anything. Janitorial tasks, whatever [had] to be done, she was like, “I’m ready to do it. Give me work to do.” Which was interesting, I thought.
WRIGHT : During the mission did you two have another check of each other as you did when you first went up, up in orbit, when you asked her about if you had changed or things were different?
BLAHA : You know, I don’t remember that, but if we had, I think she would have told me, because we had got where if it was something bad I had to tell you, I’ll just tell you. “Hey, John, you’re screwing up this.”
“Oh, okay.” I don’t remember her doing that.
WRIGHT : Well, that’s interesting. I don’t think we’ve heard that before. While she was there, speaking of Shannon Lucid, she set a record for the greatest number of flights for an American woman in the hours in orbit. But you, also, too; you were the first time that an astronaut had flown three times since Challenger , so I guess that was a mark for that. As a commander you were also involved in at least one experiment that we were able to find, the Investigations into the Polymer Membrane Processing Experiment. Is that normal for commanders to be in an experiment?
BLAHA : I don’t know. I always was willing to volunteer if they needed additional subjects to do whatever they wanted to do. So, yes, I always did that, and especially the life science people. I came to like them and think they were trying to figure out things. So why shouldn’t I volunteer to be a lab rat for them, to give them additional data? Not that I knew anything. Usually when I did something like that, I’d have the crew member that knew all about it just hook me all up and start doing whatever they had to do, and I’d just be a lab rat for them, if that makes any sense.
WRIGHT : Yes. I’m sure they appreciated that, a willing subject, and one that was hostage, at that. [Laughter] You were up there for nine days, and then you landed the Atlantis on the runway at Kennedy [Space Center, Florida], which was different, because you had been landing [at] Edwards [Air Force Base, California].
BLAHA : Oh yes.
WRIGHT : It was different from other aircraft that you had [flown]?
BLAHA : My only comment I would make, and I don’t know [whether] other people agree or don’t agree. From my viewpoint, the Space Shuttle, when you are manually flying it, was one of the easiest airplanes I’ve ever flown. The reason is, is it had a rate command, attitude hold flight control system. What that means is you could take the Space Shuttle and stick it in an attitude, take your hand off that stick, [and] it would not move. It would stay right in the bank, the nose down, and it wouldn’t move a nit. It would just stay there. If you kept your hand on the stick, that’s not true. In fact, you don’t want to keep your hand on the stick. If you do, the vehicle’s slowly getting out of trim, and, of course, you have to continue to hold it. So it made it easy to fly [to not continue to hold the stick]. I used to think when I was flying at mainly on that portion of the entry that it was in automatic with me flying at manual, because you could take it, put it in a bank, put the nose down, and let go of the stick, and it would just sit there and purr around the corner. You could sit back and just watch it like it was in auto. If it looked like it needed a correction, why, you could just grab the stick, make that little correction, take your hand off the stick, and it would just sit there. When it needed to be rolled out level on final, you could just take the stick, roll it out, let go of the stick, and it would just sit there. It wouldn’t move.
So I always used to say, with the training we had, which was outstanding training, and I salute the engineers who built the STA and did all that hard work, and the Space Shuttle flight control system, which was a lot of people out of Rockwell, that, golly, that vehicle was, I’m going to say, easy to fly in that flight regime. Any airplane I’ve ever flown doesn’t fly like that. You can’t just put it somewhere and let loose of it. It will roll off one way or the other. …
WRIGHT : That is. That’s pretty interesting. Well, after you landed, you got some tasks that you were overseeing aspects of aviation, payload, Orbiter safety for the Astronaut Office. From that task you made a number of safety recommendations that extended the Duration Orbiter Program and earned you the Stephen D. Thorne “Top Fox” Award. Can you share with us what some of those recommendations were or why you felt they were necessary?
BLAHA : Yes, I remember that time frame, although I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. One of them was I was asked, so I did, I put together a team of people, of flight controllers and engineers, kind of small team, seven, eight people, and we went and did an assessment of 100 percent versus 104 percent for ascent power settings on the main engines. We went to Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] with our little team, and you always feel bad, because here they’re the experts, and you’re coming in as if you know anything. Anyway, but we tried real hard to lend some assessment to that. When I thought we came up with a pretty good result, we went and gave it to the Space Shuttle Program and presented the results of risk of going to 104 [versus 100 percent]. Anyway, that was one of them.
WRIGHT : That’s great. Well, within the year it was announced that you were going to command yet another mission, STS-58. Now, this one was, we could say, is maybe more than 1 percent different, because it was a Spacelab life science mission.
BLAHA : But see, again, to me—yes, to me, with everything that’s going on, 99 percent—maybe I ought to be saying 98—is really the same. There are some little differences between the missions, yes. But, anyway, that’s my way of looking at it.
WRIGHT : It was fourteen days long, and you had a lot of other crew members, but they were in the shape of rats, so you had some experiments.
BLAHA : Yes, we had seven people and forty-eight rats. That’s right. I had some funny things that I’ll tell you about the history of that flight, because they are funny. I guess they are what is more history than the normal technical thing. Let’s see. The first thing is I’ll always remember when I went up to Washington, D.C., at the start of that mission, and I was in this big room, some big boardroom. Everyone in the room was Dr. somebody, and so I thought, “Gees, all these people are smarter, and I’m not real smart.” They were all people who were very involved with the experiments on this mission. I don’t know why we even had this meeting, but the purpose of it, I guess, was to do a little kickoff with the crew and these people. Of course, on the crew we had [M.] Rhea Seddon, whose background was a doctor, and we had Dave [David A.] Wolf, whose background was a doctor, and we had Shannon, which was good. When Shannon and I were assigned together—we thought that was great. I mean, that
was good. Of course, she was a chemistry doctor. We had Marty [Martin] Fettman, who was a veterinarian. We also had another guy, Larry [Laurence R.] Young, who was from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts], was a real smart guy and knew all about the vestibular experiments. They were all his. He was the primary PI [Principal Investigator]. And there was another guy—[Jay C. Buckey Jr., a cardiologist].
WRIGHT : I had Bill [William S.] McArthur [Jr.] and—
BLAHA : Yes. Oh yes, Bill and Rick [Richard A.] Searfoss, but they were normal people like me.
WRIGHT : Okay, normal people, okay. [Laughs]
BLAHA : They were normal people. They were Service Academy grads [graduates] and pilot kind of people. That was what I meant, normal people. [Laughter] … What we ended up doing as a crew—first, a couple things helped here. Rhea had flown SLS [Spacelab Life Sciences]-1, STS-40, and this was SLS-2. So, to me, her as a payload commander was really good, and we immediately split some tasks. “Rhea, you’re in charge on orbit of the science, period. You’re in charge of that lab, and you do everything you need to do there, even with the people and how we’re going to do the experiments. I’ll worry about the Orbiter side.” So that was good. Of course, Rhea did a great job through all the planning. What we ended up doing that I really liked, and I liked all this, was we made the two payload specialists who weren’t selected to fly, Larry Young and Jay Buckey. We made them part of the crew, and when we made a crew picture, we had nine people in our crew picture.
But the keys were Rhea really knew what she was doing from a planning viewpoint ahead of time, and Jay and Larry knew everybody as if they were on board, so even though they were on the ground, they just were—it made it all in sync. Really good.
WRIGHT : A good plan.
BLAHA : Yes, and it all worked out really good.
WRIGHT : You mentioned the involvement with Huntsville at Marshall Space Flight Center. I know that Ames Research Center [Moffett Field, California] had a lot to do with this flight as well, preparing. Did you have a lot of communication—
BLAHA : Yes. Yes. Okay, it was Rhea who really worked with them. Rhea and Shannon and Marty and Dave, they worked with them. I totally deferred that subject and didn’t even get involved with it. On orbit, I’d float over and watch what they were doing every now and then, because I thought it was pretty interesting. One thing, as a guy knowing nothing about anything, that I observed that I’ll never forget is when they cut open one of those rats. I couldn’t believe what I saw. On the ground, humans, any animal, blood runs all over the place, and it looks kind of messy. It didn’t happen up there. You made that cut, and the blood just stayed all right there, let’s say, next to the spine or the bone, and it didn’t run all over the place. So it wasn’t messy. Me, I’m not a medical person, but it was clean. I thought, “Good Lord, that’s amazing.” Because fluids don’t run, it’s gravity
that’s making them run here. Of course, up there, they’re just adhering to a surface. It’s coming out and adhering and just staying stuck to it. Crazy.
WRIGHT : Well, this was the first time that the spaceflight experiments were done to assess the changes in tissues while they were in space.
BLAHA : That’s right. That’s right. And they really, again, in your debrief on this mission, Rhea and Marty were the ones who were doing most of that, and they really knew what they were doing, and I won’t try to act like I knew anything about it. [Laughs]
WRIGHT : Well, one of the other types of experiments that you worked with, we understand that you did some SAREX [Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment]. You wanted to see if you could contact the schoolchildren.
BLAHA : Oh yes, that was good. Rick Searfoss really was the one who put all that together. He put together a tremendous plan that involved working with people on the ground who wanted to do that. Then he would get where each crew member would have a couple different groups of schools. Anyway, Rick worked out a very good SAREX plan so we could do communicating with schoolkids on the ground, yes.
WRIGHT : How long were you talking to them from space?
