NASA Johnson Space Center
Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript
Robert
L. "Hoot" Gibson
Interviewed by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal
Houston, TX – 14 October 2020
Ross-Nazzal: Today is October 14th, 2020. This interview with Hoot
Gibson is being conducted for the JSC Oral History Project in Houston,
Texas. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal. Thanks again for flying
out and taking some time to meet with me this morning. Appreciate
it.
Gibson:
I’m glad we finally fit it all together. I’d been looking
for an opportunity when I’d be over here and wouldn’t
be tied up during the day, so instead of coming over late in the day
today I caught the first flight out. Yes, that was great.
Ross-Nazzal:
Great. We can catch up. I thought we’d start by talking today
about becoming chief of the Astronaut Office. How did that come about?
Gibson:
That happened right after STS-47, which was my fourth mission, third
time as mission commander. At that point, I was the most experienced
pilot astronaut in the corps. One of the astronauts, or maybe even
more than one, had told me even I guess right before STS-47, “Rumor
has it you’re going to be the next chief.” I think it
was Jim [James F.] Buchli that told me that. He was acting chief at
the time because Dan [Daniel C.] Brandenstein had left. We had had
a couple of successive acting chiefs, but not a permanent chief.
Ross-Nazzal:
Can I ask a question?
Gibson:
Sure.
Ross-Nazzal:
Does that mean the chief of FCOD [Flight Crew Operations Directorate]
selects you? This is not an open process? Or at the time it wasn’t?
Gibson:
I believe it’s chief of FCOD. I believe that’s where it
comes from. That was Dave [David C.] Leestma. I had worked very closely
with Dave Leestma, because STS-47, Spacelab-J, Spacelab Japan, had
been a complicated mission, so I had spent a lot of time discussing
with him things that we were contending with and all the things that
were going on. I think that probably had a role in him wanting to
make me chief astronaut. In addition, I was the most experienced pilot
astronaut at the time. We had never had a chief astronaut who was
other than a pilot astronaut, and that was a given, I suppose.
After STS-47 and we did all of our postflight travel and our postflight
appearances, I was tentatively going to pick up the job of Astronaut
Office Safety Branch chief. Tentatively. We were the first ones to
move into Building 4 South. That was just getting ready to happen.
I want to say it wasn’t very long after we got back that I was
notified by Dave Leestma. I don’t remember if he said, “Come
on over.” He probably did. He probably said, “Can you
swing by Building 1?” I went by Building 1, and he said, “Okay,
you’re going to be our new chief astronaut. The press release
is going out today.”
It was funny because that evening Max Q was playing I think at the—what’s
it called, the center?
Ross-Nazzal:
The Gilruth?
Gibson:
Yes, we were playing at the Gilruth Center. The announcement had been
made like at four o’clock in the afternoon or so, and the band
was playing that evening. All of my fellow astronauts on the band
were saying, “Golly, Hoot, you’ve never sounded better
than this, you really are excellent.” It’s time for me
to be their best friend, I can tell, because I’m going to be
chief astronaut.
When I got notified, I came back to Building 4 South and I said, “I
want to go down and see my new office.” I walked into my new
office, so I was the first chief astronaut to occupy that office in
Building 4 South. It had automatic lights in the room. I walked in
and the lights turned on, and I said, “Yes, I’m here,
thank you,” to nobody. But what a thrill that was to be appointed
chief astronaut.
Dave Leestma—I’m remembering a little bit more of it now—he
came over to Building 4 to make the announcement, so we called an
all-astronauts meeting. At that time we were still in Building 4 North.
We had not moved out of there yet. He came over to the big conference
room on the fourth floor and made the announcement, and I remember
I made a very short speech after he finished. There was a round of
applause, I didn’t hear too many boos, but there was a round
of applause.
Ross-Nazzal:
What did you say?
Gibson:
I stood up and I said, “Okay. I want all of you to know that
I am going to be looking after you. Taking care of you is what I see
as my job.” That was my philosophy. It dates back to the Navy,
because one of the things that the Navy really emphasized is that
as an officer your primary job is to look after the health and the
well-being and the welfare of your people, your men and women, that
are in your squadron, in your command. I took that philosophy right
from day one.
The first moment of jubilation when I was told, “Okay, you’re
chief astronaut,” [I] was really really happy. Then right after
that I had a moment of quiet almost terror saying, “I don’t
think I’m smart enough. I am not the smartest one in this astronaut
corps. My astronauts are a whole heck of a lot smarter than I am.
I don’t know that I’m smart enough. I’m going to
get them to tell me what to tell them to do.” I used that philosophy
from day one.
Something else was interesting. In my first two weeks in my new office,
I basically inherited all the branch chiefs that were there, which
was great, because they were excellent, excellent people. You could
probably flip a coin and pick branch chiefs in the astronaut corps,
because your average is so very good. Certainly we had a range of
people, but the branch chiefs were all excellent.
My first two weeks, I really had a lot of work to do. Dave Leestma
said, “Look. One of the things that you probably need to get
working on right away is crew assignments and job assignments in the
astronaut corps, because it’s about time for us to come out
with a new set of those.” I remember back when George [W.S.]
Abbey was FCOD, he did all that; he did all of it. Dan Brandenstein
had gotten it established that as the chief astronaut he’s going
to do the crew assignments, and that certainly made sense. Of course
I inherited that but also was doing all the job assignments, so I
had a ton of work to do.
I had to look up when did people last fly, when are they coming due,
what are their backgrounds. It was an immense job putting together
crew assignments. I was slammed for several weeks. The other thing
that was happening—I guess I can say, Jennifer, that’ll
be in the transcript—my branch chiefs were in my office constantly
going, “Hey, boss, we have this issue, or we have this concern
coming up, and we have this going on.”
My first question when somebody would do that when I was in a leadership
position was, “Okay, what do you recommend we do?”
They would all go, “Huh?”
I’d say, “What do you think we ought to do about it?”
People love that. People love to be asked for their opinion. They
love to be asked for what the solution might be.
This was unrelenting, because what happened before, the chief had
made all the decisions and didn’t really empower his branch
chiefs to be making the decisions. We would have staff meeting on
Monday morning after the all-astronaut meeting, with my branch chiefs
in my office. My office now was big enough that I could have branch
chief meetings in there. I had this big round table in there. We’d
all sit around the round table.
I said, “Okay, branch chiefs, henceforth from this moment on
I want you to make all the decisions in your branch.” That does
a whole bunch of marvelous things. One of them is it frees me up to
get my job done. The other thing is when their members of the branch
come to them for a decision, they make the decision. That increases
their stature in their branch, because I really am the branch chief
now. That pushes the decision to the lowest level.
I did say, “Okay, if you’ve got something really controversial
or something really unprecedented then come tell me what you decided.
Or come bounce it off of me if you want. But I want you to be in charge
of your branch.” That worked beautifully, because you’re
not dealing with dumb people; you’re dealing with very sharp
smart people.
In addition, when we’d be having some issue and we’d be
discussing it at the table, I’d want to hear from all my branch
chiefs, “What do you think we ought to do? I’m going to
make the decision as the chief, but I want to hear from all of you
what do you think we ought to do in this situation.” That’s
called synergy, and that really works. That way I didn’t have
to be the smartest one there, which I wasn’t. I could rely on
them to help me make the right choice.
It’s funny as well because just recently I was reading about
the pharaoh Akhenaton. I remember a quote of his, and I guess I believed
in it even though I had never heard it until a couple weeks ago. As
the chief astronaut, you could be an absolute ruler. Akhenaton, 3,400
years ago, said, “The danger of being an absolute ruler is that
no one dares tell you that what you have just decreed is not a good
idea.” I didn’t realize it, but I was a believer in what
Akhenaton said. I want to hear from everybody. Yes, I’m going
to make the decision, but I want to hear from everybody, and therefore
you get all the right inputs to do it.
I felt like okay, I can handle this job, I can be the chief astronaut,
because I’m going to have such good input from all of my astronauts.
What did I have? I think I must have had 20 PhDs, about 35 people
that had masters’ degrees—and I only have a bachelor’s
degree—and 32 highly experienced test pilots who were my pilot
astronauts.
I had another meeting, not every week, probably once a month, called
“Commanders Call,” where I would just get together with
all my mission commanders. That would be helpful for them too because
some of them, of course, are a mission commander for the very first
time. It helps us discuss the kinds of things that we’re all
contending with. That worked really well as well.
Ross-Nazzal:
Is that something you established or was that something John [W.]
Young had had and other folks had had?
Gibson:
John Young didn’t have it. Honestly I don’t remember now
whether Dan Brandenstein had done it. Maybe he did towards the end
of his time, so it was something that I continued.
One of the things I instituted—there was a common complaint
out there in the Astronaut Office. “Complaint? What do you got
to complain about? You’re in the best job in the world, what
do you mean complaint?” But there was. There was a common complaint,
and it was, “We never know where we stand. Nobody ever tells
us where we stand.” You assumed that okay, if you got assigned
to another mission you must be okay. But nobody ever told you where
you stand.
I talked to the schedule writer, Tom McClure, and I said, “Tom,
what I would like to do is in the space of a year I’d like to
have a one-on-one with every one of my astronauts.” I had 113
astronauts at the time I think.
Ross-Nazzal:
Boy, I didn’t count.
Gibson:
Yes, I think that was the number that I recall that I had. It was
really cute, Jennifer, the way it would go on the schedule is, “One-on-one
with number one.” That was cute. One of my smart astronauts
said, “It says one-on-one with no one.” But yes, he put
it on the schedule as, “One-on-one with number one.” He’d
block half an hour, and we’d go into my office, close the door.
If they had any complaints for me—and I encouraged them to talk
to me. If I had feedback for them good or bad, I would give it to
them, because it isn’t fair for you as a leader to be holding
something against somebody that they don’t know that you don’t
like about what they’re doing. You need to tell them about it
and give them a chance to fix it. It isn’t fair to continue
to hold something against somebody all their lives because you’ve
never told them. If you don’t have the gumption to tell them
then you’re not a good leader.
Is that tough? Oh yes, it’s tough. It’s tough on them,
and it’s tough on me too. But you owe it to them. I had some
really brilliant success stories. I had one astronaut that I said,
“When you talk to people, you are too rough on them. You’re
always right about what you’re pointing out, but I just wish
you could make it a little more gentle the way you tell them.”
You could tell that this was tough on him, but he said, “Okay.”
I got to tell him a year later, “You did just exactly what I
asked you to do. You are one of the best I’ve got. Keep it up.
You are just doing great.” There are some great successes.
I’ve also had some tears. When one of my astronauts would tear
up, it would make me fight not to; it would be tough. But you owe
them that. This dates back to my time in the Navy. I did well in the
Navy. Frequently in a squadron I was number one lieutenant, j.g. [junior
grade]. I was number one lieutenant in the squadron. The debrief that
I vividly remember was [when] my F-14 Tomcat squadron skipper, Denny
Strole, finished telling me how great I was, and then he said, “Now
let me tell you how to be even better.” He told me what was
wrong with me, and I knew what was wrong with me but I thought I was
just getting away with it. That’s the one debrief that I vividly
remember.
I think that’s a characteristic of a good leader, to be ready
to tell your people how they can improve. Now do it gently. I had
one astronaut that I said, “You are not usable to me as an astronaut
the way you are right now, and here’s why.” It was because
he would just do whatever he wanted in the simulator. He was erratic.
I said, “And here’s what you need to change.” You’ve
got to tell them what you want. I said, “And here’s what
I want you to change, here’s what I want you to do, and you’ve
got to do this. If you can’t do this, I’m going to send
you back to the branch of service.”
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s a wake-up call.
Gibson:
“And that’s not what I want. What I want is for you to
be completely successful.” Part of the story behind this one
too is that I had a number of astronauts that come to my office and
say, “Boss, I’ll do anything you want me to do but please
don’t make me fly with blank.” This person. He—there
we go. I gave away it was a he. He needed to hear it, and he needed
to be given an opportunity to fix it. I don’t remember counseling
him again. So either it all got fixed, or I rotated out of the job
before it was time for me to have another one with him.
But those are my philosophies about leadership and about what you
owe to your people. Again, it was openness. They use the word transparency
too much nowadays, but it was transparency.
I also had a philosophy that in our Monday morning meetings, in a
roomful of all of my astronauts, if I can’t tell them everything
that I’m doing on their behalf for them or to them, against
them, or whatever, then I probably shouldn’t be doing that.
If I can’t tell them to their face what it is, then that’s
something I should not be doing. I don’t think I had anything
like that.
Ross-Nazzal:
I just want to clarify, because I work with civil servants, I’m
a contractor. They do have a process where you have a yearly evaluation.
We hear about it a lot in the meetings. From the time you were an
astronaut until you became chief of the Astronaut Office, you actually
never had an evaluation? Or did you have an evaluation but you never
sat with the chief?
Gibson:
We had Navy evaluations. I didn’t do any of the civil service
reviews, other than my one-on-ones with no one that I was doing. I
didn’t do those with the civil service employees. I don’t
know why that was, now that I think about it.
We didn’t have one with the senior naval officer. The senior
naval officer in the astronaut corps had the task of writing fitness
reports. In the Navy they were fitness reports, the Air Force they
were OERs, officer efficiency report or something like that. Those
would get submitted. You’d never see them. I never saw them.
I think they would get them all typed up and filed and send them in
to the Navy and that was it.
I never had a review. For example when John Young [was chief]—he
might have been out of the Navy by then, he might have been retired
by that point. But anyway, never did have a review. Maybe it’s
because I was military, so that would make it different.
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s interesting. I’d never heard that before.
Gibson:
Oh yes. The senior marine would do the Marine Corps ones and so on.
The senior Air Force would do the Air Force ones. All I know is what
was done with the Navy. If the Air Force did it differently and they
did an in-person review, I don’t know about it.
Ross-Nazzal:
There was someone assigned to your office who specifically was over
each military branch?
Gibson:
One of the astronauts.
Ross-Nazzal:
Okay.
Gibson:
It would be whichever of the astronauts was senior grade in the military.
That’s the person who had the responsibility for that. I was
never the senior naval officer. There were always naval officers who
were older and more senior to me. I never had that particular job.
Ross-Nazzal:
You’ll have to ask Rhea [Seddon], because Rhea was a civil servant.
I’m curious. How did you handle—you were chief of the
Office. You also have a spouse who is in the Office.
Gibson:
This brings up one of the funny stories that I tell every time I do
a talk, or people will ask me. Usually the question is, “Did
you and Rhea ever go to space together?” The real answer is,
“No, we had our first child a year after we married, and you
wouldn’t put both of you on the same mission.” Of course
NASA wouldn’t put a husband and wife intentionally on a mission,
because there were too many questions the press would have and NASA
didn’t like anything controversial. The one husband-wife couple
that we did have, which we talked about, during STS-47 happened because
they became friendly and married in the course of their training.
When I was appointed chief, all of a sudden now I can’t be Rhea’s
supervisor of course. What Dave Leestma did was he wrote up a piece
of paper that said, “Effective today Rhea is to report directly
to the director of FCOD,” and not to me. The joke I like to
tell is that people will ask me, “Did you and your wife ever
fly together?”
And I say, “No, it just wouldn’t work, because I was mission
commander four times. How would this work? I’d say, ‘Rhea,
it’s time to open the sunshields.’ And she’d say,
‘You want the sunshields open, you can just go open them yourself.
Don’t try and pull this mission commander stuff on me.’”
That never happened.
But this did happen. We were eating dinner one night with the kids,
and she brought up some issue that she was working on. I said, “Okay,
well, you know what you need to do about that, you need to do this
and this.”
She said, “You can’t tell me what to do, I don’t
work for you.” I played along with it.
I said, “Yes, you do. I’m the chief astronaut; you’re
an astronaut, you work for me.”
She said, “No, I don’t, so don’t even try and tell
me what to do.” It makes a real funny story.
She technically reported directly to Dave, even though she kept her
same office over in 4 South. Anyway, that’s how we handled the
fact that Rhea was one of my astronauts.
Ross-Nazzal:
And she was already assigned to SLS [Spacelab Life Sciences]-2, right?
Gibson:
She was already assigned to SLS-2, so I didn’t have any part
in making that assignment. That launched the middle of ’93,
and I got back from STS-47 in September. September 12 to 20 [1992]
was that mission. I was probably assigned as chief by the end of September,
and she had already been training on that mission for a couple years.
I never did wind up assigning her to a mission.
Ross-Nazzal:
You got to avoid that sticky mess.
Gibson:
That was okay. Oh, and one of the things that we’ll be coming
to when we talk about the Mir docking, STS-71—immediately when
I was named as chief astronaut SpaceNews wanted to do an interview
with me. I remember they came to my office, and we did an interview.
The question came up. They said, “Okay, the first Shuttle docking
with Mir is coming up. Are you going to assign yourself to that mission?”
I launched off into a speech that was, “No, absolutely not,
that is not the job of a leader, to skim off the good deals for yourself.
The job of a leader is to take care of your people and give them all
the good deals. I will not assign myself to the Mir docking.”
I was quite adamant about that. That plays into maybe starting to
talk about STS-71.
Ross-Nazzal:
I did have some other questions for you.
Gibson:
Oh, good, yes, I figured you probably had some things for me.
Ross-Nazzal:
Loren [J.] Shriver was your deputy. Of course he was a classmate of
yours from ’78. What was his responsibility and role in working
with you as deputy?
Gibson:
As deputy he was only in that job for a while, because he was looking
to go down to the Cape to be the operations boss down there at Cape
Canaveral [Florida], take the job that Brewster [H.] Shaw had been
doing for several years. Loren was only my deputy, I bet it wasn’t
even six months. That’s a guess or an estimate. He helped out
somewhat with the job assignments in the Office and handling a lot
of the day-to-day things that were going on. Then beyond that, I’m
struggling to remember what the other things were that I had Loren
doing. But he wasn’t in it really that long. Then it was announced
that he was going to leave.
Oh, and Dave picked him for me. Dave appointed me to be chief, and
at the same time he said, “Okay, and I think Loren Shriver ought
to be your deputy.”
I said, “That’s great,” because I always got along
great with Loren. He was on my chase team for STS-2 when I was the
leader of the chase team. He is just rock-solid. He’s as solid
as they get, he’s as good as they get. That was great; I didn’t
need to pick one.
When he was leaving, it was time for me to pick a deputy. Once again,
Rhea and I were having a discussion at the dinner table, and she brought
up something along the lines of, “Yes, okay, well, the chief
and the deputy chief are both pilot astronauts. What kind of support
do I get up in the top?”
I said, “Oh, really?” We had previously had a deputy chief
who was a mission specialist, Steve [Steven A.] Hawley. Jim Buchli,
I think, also had been deputy chief. But I had already decided to
myself, “I want to make Linda [M.] Godwin deputy chief.”
Rhea had brought up the subject, and I said, “Oh yes, so you
have no sponsorship, no standing up at the head office.” I was
smiling inside because I had not yet announced that I wanted to make
Linda Godwin deputy. I have to admit she was a little bit unsure of
herself when I first talked to her about it. I could tell that she
was a little nervous, a little reluctant. Kind of like I was when
I first found out I’m going to be chief, and I said, “I
don’t think I’m smart enough.”
But she filled in, and she did fine. I’m trying to remember
what I had her doing too. I think she had already been assigned to
another mission, so she was deputy chief for a while, and then she
had to go off to train for her other mission.
At that time we weren’t going to have any more acting chief
astronauts, but I said, “We can have an acting deputy.”
So Jerry [L.] Ross came in as acting deputy. He’s virtually
a hyperactive child. He is just so busy and so productive and so hardworking
that he kept bugging me for more to do, and I said, “Okay, all
right, I got a deal for you. How about if you take over all the job
assignments in the astronaut corps? You can be in charge of making
the job assignments.” That was a big job as well, because again
we had I think it was 103 astronauts, and at any one time we’d
have six or seven or eight crews assigned, and so now subtract 42
or 45 people from that number. We always had more places where people
would like to have an astronaut working with them full-time than we
had astronauts to go around. We never had enough astronauts to go
around. I did hand that off to Jerry, and Jerry Ross managed it from
that point on for me.
The crew assignments, I really put a ton of time into those things,
because those are really important, and you had to balance personalities.
You had to look at personalities, because there were some that were
oil and water. For the most part, everybody was great. For the most
part, they were all easy to get along with, all hardworking people.
In fact, that was one of the things when I first got selected with
that class of 35 in 1978. I said, “You know what, everybody’s
different; they come from all different walks of life, all different
backgrounds, all different degrees. What do they have in common?”
It took me about six months or close to a year to figure it out, “You
know what, they’re all easy to get along with, they’re
all easy to work with.”
When I was chief astronaut and I’d brief the selection board,
I’d say, “Okay, what are we looking for? We are looking
for team players, that’s what we’re looking for. It’s
as simple as that, team players. We don’t need the kind of astronaut
that’s going to bang on the table and say, ‘No, it’s
got to be done my way; it’s got to be this way.’ We don’t
need that. We need people who can get along. As an astronaut you have
way too much influence over the other people that we work with, and
you can severely damage somebody in their career by being overbearing,
so we’re looking for that kind of person.”
But nevertheless, I had to look at what does this mission entail,
what are they going to do. I can’t just write down seven people
and say, “Okay, here’s a crew.” What are they actually
doing? What are the degrees? What’s their background? What’s
their college degree? What’s their PhD in? Where does it fit
the best?
What I would do is I would take all my paperwork down to the Cape
when it was time for launch. Of course we were launching six, seven
times a year, which was great, I loved it.
Ross-Nazzal:
You were pretty busy.
Gibson:
I got to fly the weathership for the launch. Actually two weatherships,
one of them being the STA, the Shuttle Training [Aircraft]. We would
take off something like 2 hours before launch, and we’d be in
the air through launch, or through scrub if that happened. I’d
fly approaches to the runways and verify that there weren’t
any sudden wind shears or gusts.
One of the other things that I would do was at about 2:00 in the morning
I’d take off in a T-38, usually by myself, because nobody else
was crazy enough to want to be up at two o’clock in the morning.
One of the things that the mission control team needed to know was,
“Okay, we’re seeing what looks like rain showers off the
coast out over the water. We need you to go fly under these things
and see if there’s rain coming up,” because we couldn’t
launch if there’s rain within 30 miles.
I’d be out there at 2:00 in the morning. My wife was really
annoyed at that, because I’m by myself normally in a T-38 in
the dark dropping down to about 2,000 feet and flying under where
they had radar returns to see if I picked up any rain on my windshield,
out over that black ocean. There’s nothing out there, there’s
no lights, there’s no nothing. Fortunately I was a pretty good
instrument pilot, and I never even crashed into the water. She had
said something like, “You know what, if you disappear in the
ocean out there I am going to be so mad at everybody over this.”
Sometimes one of the Cape Crusaders, one of the Cape astronauts, would
say, “Hey, can I go with you?”
I’d say, “Absolutely, absolutely, let’s go.”
So I sometimes had another astronaut with me. I said, “Okay,
the big thing I want you to do is watch altitude. I don’t want
to go below,” I don’t remember what the number was, probably
1,000 feet. I’d say, “If you see me at 1,000 feet I want
you to sing out.” That was a help.
But most of the time I was by myself, out at night, down close to
the water, flying under rain showers. They weren’t always rain
showers because we couldn’t launch if they were. Anything that
was inside of 30 miles, they needed me to go fly under. It was funny,
you can see just fine. You could see just fine. I’d have my
lights down low enough to where I wasn’t blinded by my cockpit
lights.
Mission control refused to believe that I could see well enough to
tell them, “No, this isn’t a rain shower,” so I
had to carry night vision goggles. I had a pair of early technology
night vision goggles, because I guess that’s all NASA could
afford. Later versions, if you’re looking outside and then you
come back inside to the lights on the gauges, they would adjust to
that. These didn’t; these just had one level. But it was binoculars,
so I had to just pick them up by hand while I’m flying the airplane.
One hand is on the throttle, one is on the stick, and then my third
hand has the binoculars.
Ross-Nazzal:
Now I can see why Rhea was concerned. That’s a lot [of juggling].
Gibson:
Launches were so much fun. I always took my crew assignments paperwork
down there. I would spend hours—I’d go into one of the
offices there at the crew quarters, because the crew, they’d
be out at the beach house, they’d be doing things. Other than
when I needed to fly or when I needed to attend the last-minute FRRs
[flight readiness reviews], I’d be working on crew assignments,
because it was a huge job.
Things would change. One astronaut would say, “Hooter, I’m
going to be leaving.” I did these in pencil. All of a sudden
this whole chain that I’d have—because I had to be working
on these things two years out, because we would aim at assigning a
crew 12 months prior to launch, is what was always the template. I
really enjoyed the launches and the landings because it got me away
from the office, and I’d have more of an opportunity to work
on the stuff that took some diligence and took some real thinking
to put together.
Ross-Nazzal:
I did want to ask you. Rhea of course flew when you were chief of
the Astronaut [Office]. You’re a spouse. How did you handle
spouse duties being chief of the Astronaut, and you’ve got to
be there for launch. You’ve got all these other responsibilities?
[How] were you able to tackle those responsibilities?
Gibson:
I am devious because one of the things that happens right before a
mission is that Trudy Davis would come to brief me on what the family
support plan was. We’d go into my office. She had to know who
all the kids were, all the spouses, all the significant others that
might be coming along. She would brief me on the whole plan.
I remember for Rhea’s launch, SLS-2, she’s briefing me
on all this, and she said, “We will have drivers to pick you
up at the hotel and take you out to the beach house.”
I said, “Well, Trudy, I’ve got my own badge so I can just
get myself out there.”
She said, “Hooter, you’re going to be one of my worst
nightmares, aren’t you?” I was joking with her. When it’s
time for you to be the big boss and be the big hero, you can go do
that. When it’s time to be a spouse, it’s time to be a
spouse. I did all the things that were expected of me as a spouse
as well.
After her mission, her crew was the featured crew at the Fiesta Bowl,
so they were going to ride in the parade and they wanted me to ride
in the parade. I said, “Come on, I’m not part of the crew.”
“No. We want you.” I had to ride in the parade.
There was a governor’s reception the night before the Fiesta
Bowl, and they had name tags for everybody, and you can probably see
this coming. My nametag said Mr. Seddon, and I wore it, because you
got to be a good sport about all these things. I wore my nametag that
said Mr. Seddon. Rhea loved it, she just loved it dearly, that my
nametag said Mr. Seddon.
Ross-Nazzal:
Did you host a party? I know there’s usually a party.
Gibson:
Oh, sure, oh yes, we always did. We always had a party down at the
Cape before launch, and then we always hosted a party here after the
mission. To be honest, I think Rhea did all the legwork, because she
was the one who had been doing that the most, so I think I showed
up and enjoyed the party. She had done all the work, if I remember
right. Got to give her all the credit in the world.
I’m sure that I did not fly the weather plane for her launch,
because I would need to be up there on the roof of the LCC [Launch
Control Center] with the kids as well.
Ross-Nazzal:
I was curious about that.
Gibson:
I’m sure I was not doing the weathership for that mission. Yes,
it changed things a little bit. But that’s the only time that
happened. It was basically two years, from the end of ’92 to
about the end of ’94, that I was chief astronaut. You said you
had a couple questions on it as well.
Ross-Nazzal:
I had a couple more. Were there any really memorable missions for
you during that time? Any issues that you had to work as chief of
the Astronaut Office? Either when crews were in orbit or getting ready
to launch, landing?
Gibson:
They were all spectacular, always.
Ross-Nazzal:
I wrote down the Hubble Space Telescope repair. I wasn’t sure
what your involvement was as chief in that.
Gibson:
They had already been assigned to that, so I stayed out of their hair
for the most part and then flew the weathership. I was so proud of
that crew. They got the Collier Trophy for that, which is just huge,
and richly deserved. They innovated a lot of things. What’s
it called when you put the goggles on?
Ross-Nazzal:
Virtual reality?
Gibson:
Virtual reality, yes, they were using virtual reality for some of
their training, because for the EVAs [extravehicular activities] they
couldn’t have a mock-up like that in the water tank, because
we didn’t have the big water tank [Neutral Buoyancy Lab], so
they weren’t able to do that. I remember they had done a lot
of that. That was a really special mission, obviously. But all of
them were spectacular.
One of the really pleasing things was when I’d fly the weathership
for landing, the STA, the Shuttle would come back in and land at the
runway at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida], and then we would go
land the STA over at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station [Florida], because
we couldn’t land on the runway that the Shuttle is on. We’d
go over there. The NASA helicopter would be sitting there waiting
for me. They’d pick me up and fly me back over to the Orbiter,
so that I could be there to greet the crew when they came out of the
Shuttle as well.
I would ride back with them in either the crew van or the big portable
people mover that we got from Dulles [International] Airport [Chantilly,
Virginia]. It was so amusing to watch them, because they were like
a bunch of kids that had been eating chocolate. They were wired. They
were pinging off the ceiling. They were all so excited. “Wow,
during reentry did you see the fire at Mach 20? Did you see the way
it was wrapping around the windshields?” They were just pinging
off the walls. I got to just sit back and observe them doing that,
and I remember that excitement. That was always so enjoyable for me,
to watch how excited they were when they got back from a mission.
There was one really memorable [mission], as I was babbling [I remembered]
flying the weathership for. It was Charlie [Charles F.] Bolden’s
mission. He was the commander. It might have been his last mission
[STS-60], in fact I think it was. I think it was his last mission.
Ross-Nazzal:
Trying to remember which one that was.
Gibson:
I was flying the weather plane, and I remember [Jack A.] Triple Nickel
was the STA instructor pilot in the right seat with me. We have a
real issue, and that is that an hour before landing time we have to
give a go-no-go for the deorbit burn. The situation that we had was
that we had some clouds around the landing site, and the weather guy
on the loop said, “Okay, here’s what’s going to
happen. There’s a gravity wave coming through. It’s going
to move all that weather out.” So based on all that, we gave
a go for the deorbit burn, and they did the deorbit burn.
Now they’re on their way down, and of course Triple Nickel and
I are staying out of the way at that point but we’re still flying
around the place. It’s socked in at the SLF runway, Shuttle
Launch Facility runway. It got socked in. I remember Triple and I
looking at each other’s eyes with our eyes being about this
big around. [Demonstrates] And we’re like 10 minutes from landing
and the place is socked in.
Sure enough, it moved out in time for the landing, and Charlie Bolden
was able to come in and land it without issue. But man oh man, the
two of us were really nervous. We were really nervous for that landing,
and that was a KSC landing too.
Ross-Nazzal:
I bet.
Gibson:
That one was a little bit of a challenge. Of course there’s
nothing we can do at that point. We had given them the go for the
burn. We had agreed with it. I had agreed with it. That was one of
the other things I saw. John Young refused to give a go-no-go when
he’d fly the weathership, because he didn’t want to be
in that position of being either go or no-go.
I think the rest of the mission control team likes to hear what I’m
seeing; do I see the weather as go or no-go. So I made sure I always
said go. If it was no-go, then usually somebody else made that call
that it was no-go. I don’t think I ever had to say, “I
see it as no-go.” It was always so apparent that it was no-go.
I always made sure I came up on the loop and said, “Okay, I
see the weather—from what I’m observing and from what
we’ve done, the flying—as a solid go. So I’m go
for landing, go for deorbit burn.”
There was just that one time that I was, “Oh no, what did we
do? Charlie is going to make an instrument approach all the way to
touchdown.”
Ross-Nazzal:
Sweating bullets there.
Gibson:
Which could have been done. Because they would do that in training
in the STA. They’d put, basically, a screen in front of them,
but you still had the heads-up display, because they put this opaque
thing [in front of them]. At some altitudes sometimes that would be
well beyond preflare, and I want to say even into the final 1.5-degree
glide slope, that they would leave you without a clear view, and then
they’d finally pull it out for the actual touchdown.
I’m convinced you could have done it using the heads-up display.
It was so good that you could have landed, because it depicted a runway
in the heads-up display. You had sink rate, altitude, airspeed, all
that stuff, that yes. If you had ever had to, you could have done
it. I think he would have been okay. But yes, we were sweating a little
bit on that one.
Ross-Nazzal:
I can imagine. I wanted to ask. Deke [Donald K.] Slayton had passed
away while you were head of the Office. Was that a big deal? Did you
help organize the memorial? Obviously he’s one of the giants.
Gibson:
No. I missed it because I was down at the Cape. I remember watching
the ceremony that we held here in the auditorium for Deke, and I remember
one of the guys that I flew in air races with, a guy named Dusty [John]
Dowd—I just did a talk for him in January of this year before
the virus got started. He’s a crop duster, is what he does for
a living. But he flew in air races, which of course I did too, so
I knew Dusty from the air racing at Reno. Of course I knew Deke from
the air racing as well. He and I actually raced against each other
on some occasions.
I remember Dusty got up to speak at Deke’s ceremony. It was,
“Gosh, everybody, I’m just a crop duster.” He gave
a really impassioned talk about his friend Deke Slayton, but I had
to miss it, because I was at the Cape for a launch. But I remember
watching it on NASA TV.
Ross-Nazzal:
I was just curious if you had been involved in all that. One of the
things that I had noted is that you were on a consulting panel about
Russian involvement in the International Space Station at this time.
Wondered if you could talk about that.
Gibson:
When I was chief astronaut I got a phone call from George Abbey, who
was up in [NASA Headquarters] Washington, DC, then, sitting at the
right side of the father, Dan [Daniel S.] Goldin. George said, “Pack
your bags and get up here Friday. You’re going to be meeting
Saturday.”
I said, “Well, George, what am I going to be doing?”
He says, “You’ll find out when you get here.”
What it boiled down to was it was a Space Station Redesign Team, and
it was heresy, because Space Station Freedom was a juggernaut at the
time that had thousands of people and a gigantic budget, and they
had that whole big facility in Reston. We actually met. I went to
ask PJ [Paul J.] Weitz, who I think was deputy center director then.
I said, “PJ, do I have to go?”
He said, “Well, he who sits at the right side of the father
has decreed that you have to be up there so if I were you I guess
I’d go.”
We met at Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford’s office, and Dan Goldin
came in basically in a disguise. He had a hat on. He had a jacket
on with his collar turned up. The story was if the folks at Reston
and the Space Station Freedom folks find out that I’m doing
this it’ll be a really bad day for NASA. This was all going
on. We spent three or four days up there just coming up with concepts,
what could we do instead of Space Station Freedom. I’m sure
George Abbey probably was one of the big forces behind all that, because
you probably remember we had survived a vote in the House [of Representatives]
by one vote. Space Station Freedom had stayed alive by one vote. I
guess it was getting to be a little desperate.
That was where that started, and that became Space Station Redesign.
At some point the word got revealed or it got announced that we are
taking a hard look at the Space Station, and eventually Bryan [D.]
O’Connor got appointed to head it up from Headquarters, where
he was up there as head of SR&QA [Safety, Reliability, and Quality
Assurance], I believe. I was part of that, so I had gone to a number
of the meetings up there in DC on it.
When Rhea broke her foot in training for SLS-2 over in the FFT [full
fuselage trainer], they were doing emergency escape training on the
slide. She was one of the last ones to go down the slide, and it had
lost some of its air pressure. I don’t remember which foot it
was now, but one of her feet got tucked under by the end of the slide
and broke the four big bones in her foot. That had to really hurt.
I was sitting in a meeting in Washington, DC, and somebody came in
and tapped me on the shoulder and whispered to me, “Hoot, your
wife just broke her foot in training.” I gathered up my papers,
and I walked out of there. I checked out of the hotel, and I headed
for Dulles Airport, which was where I’d parked my T-38.
I was in a big rush to get home, and I was in such a big rush that
I took off. I’m climbing, and I had to level off at 2,000 or
3,000 feet or something like that. I leveled off, and something came
up in my field of view and I looked, and it was my boarding step.
I had neglected to stow it, and the ground crew there at the fixed-base
operator didn’t know whether that was something that automatically
retracted.
I had to pull the throttle back and slow way down because I didn’t
want that thing to break off and go down the left engine. It took
about 40 minutes for them to vector me around to come back and land
at Dulles again. So I messed up big-time. Here I am, I’m in
a hurry. I had to land, then I had to refuel, because I can’t
make it without refueling. I was in a big delay to get back.
From that point on, I didn’t take part any more, because Rhea
really needed the help. She was on crutches for a couple months at
least. I wasn’t part of the redesign effort from that point
on. I remember I just had too much else to do.
I guess one of the things that the team had wanted was they had wanted
the buy-in from the astronaut corps. By me having been part of it,
we had a buy-in, is what we had. That led to the International Space
Station. One of the big things that saved the day was getting the
Russians involved in it.
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s something that I wanted to ask you about because there
was starting to be this push of astronauts working on Shuttle-Mir,
going and working and training over there. What were your thoughts
about that at the time, and what did the rest of the Office think
about that?
Gibson:
Man, that was a big challenge as chief. Glad you brought that up.
That was a big challenge, because I have to admit I didn’t want
to go train in Russia for 14 months to go do an increment on Mir.
Finding astronauts that wanted to do that was really tough. I remember
George one time saying, “Hey, wait a minute, you don’t
ask them, you tell them.” Number one, that’s not my style.
I didn’t believe in that. The other thing was this was really
disappointing to me because as a leader you lead by example.
Was I going to go train for 14 months in Russia? No. Was I going to
sit there and say, “Okay, all you guys get out there and train
for 14 months in Russia and do that.” This was a real quandary
for me, because I was trying to get people to do something that I
didn’t want to do. I have to admit I didn’t want to do
it. We had small kids, and we weren’t going to move them over
to Russia. It was tough.
It was tough finding people that were willing to be the DOR, director
of Operations, Russia over there. It was difficult getting astronauts
who were willing to do that. It was tough. We had a few crazy people
that stepped right up and said, “Hey, yes, I want to do that.”
I remember working to accommodate. Let’s see. Who was it that
wanted to do it? He was up there. Let’s see. Was it when the
fire happened or the collision?
Ross-Nazzal:
Was it Mike [Michael] Foale?
Gibson:
Mike Foale was one of the ones that wanted to go over there and do
that. No. Let’s see. Who was it? He hadn’t flown yet,
but he and his wife said, “We’d like to go there and do
that.” George said, “No. Can’t be somebody that
hasn’t flown yet because the Russians are very conscious of
stature and position.” Jerry [M.] Linenger is who it was. Jerry
Linenger and his wife, they didn’t have any kids, and they wanted
to do this, but he hadn’t flown yet.
I came up with a plan. I’m going to add him to STS-66. It was
somewhat late in the game. I don’t know that they gave him the
full amount of work to do on the mission because it was a late add-on.
But I added him. I remember I had to go to the PRCB [Program Requirements
Control Board] and pitch it before the PRCB. We had ascent performance;
we had room on the flight. I don’t remember how many there were.
But it was STS-66. Don [Donald R.] McMonagle was the commander and
Curt [Curtis L.] Brown was the pilot.
I got him added to STS-66 so that he could go fly that mission, come
back, do his postflight, and then almost immediately head for Russia.
But you had to do that. Here was somebody who wanted to do it. It
was challenging getting people who wanted to do that. Rhea made it
very clear, “No way Jose am I going to go to Russia to train.”
She was not interested in doing that.
Ross-Nazzal:
You can understand, given the state of affairs in Russia at that point
in time.
Gibson:
Yes, and I got to see that. When we get to STS-71, I got to see what
the place was like, and it was rugged.
Ross-Nazzal:
Tell us about being named commander. You talked about that SpaceNews
interview and how you weren’t going to take the best roles.
How did that come about?
Gibson:
It’s a really interesting story, because what happened was I
put together my crew for STS-71. This is really a challenging mission,
so it [needs] to be a really great crew, and it was. I put together
a really great crew. I’m going to tell who I picked as commander,
because he was a dear, dear friend of mine, and he’s not with
us anymore, Steve [Steven R.] Nagel.
Ross-Nazzal:
Oh yes, I really like him.
Gibson:
I picked Steve Nagel to be mission commander. I have always loved
Steve Nagel. I sent that crew forward to Dave Leestma, and he said,
“Okay, great, I’ll send it up the line.”
He called me, I don’t know, a week later. I’m pretty sure
it was just a phone call. He said, “Hoot, your STS-71 crew.”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “They really like it, with one exception.” I
have to admit instantly the hair on the back of my neck stood up because
in my two years of being chief not one of my crews had been messed
with. Because who knows them better than me? Nobody. The other thing
was I had put so much work in on this. He said, “With one exception.”
I was awestruck. I don’t think I said anything. He said, “They
want you to command it.” Once again, I was dumbstruck, I didn’t
know what to say. He said, “What’s your reaction to that?”
I said, “Dave, I don’t want to do that. I’ve been
telling people for two years now that I’m not going to do it.
I don’t want to do it. Steve will do a fine job. That is an
excellent crew. They will do just fine. I want that to be the crew.”
He said, “Okay, I’ll go back up the hill again.”
He did, and he called me. This time it was only about four days or
so. He called me, he said, “Hoot, they still want you to do
it.”
I said, “Dave, I still don’t want to do it.”
Ross-Nazzal:
Who is they? Is it the [NASA] Administrator?
Gibson:
Headquarters, and much of it was coming from George Abbey. He had
always been a big fan of mine. I wasn’t always in agreement
with him, but even so he was still a big fan of mine. I said, “Dave,
I still don’t want to do it.”
He said, “Okay, I’ll try once more.” Then he called
me a couple days later and he said, “Hoot, do me a favor.”
I said, “Sure, Dave, anything.”
He said, “Shut up and go command STS-71.” At that point
I’ve delayed the crew getting announced now for close to a month,
so it’s getting to be late, and I finally gave in.
I said, “Okay, Dave, I’ll do it under one condition.”
He said, “What’s that?”
I said, “Would you come over to Building 4 and tell my astronauts
why this is happening, that I didn’t want to do it?”
He said, “Sure.” He did, he came over to Building 4. I
wasn’t there. Maybe I was at a launch or something like that.
He came over, and he made the announcement that I had fought it. I
did. I fought it, because, again, that’s not the job of a leader.
What I didn’t know that I found out subsequently was that we
had an American-Russian docking previously called Apollo-Soyuz [Test
Project, ASTP], and they did two dockings. Deke did one and Tom did
the other one. I don’t know who did which one. On one of those
dockings we rammed them so hard, we almost broke the docking mechanism
is what they figured. It turns out that the Russians had never forgotten
that. They had never gotten over it for 20 years.
Now here we come with our quarter-million pound Space Shuttle, and
the Russians were really nervous, it turns out. What NASA wanted to
say to the Russians was, “Look, this is so important to us.”
This winds up being kind of self-serving from the sound of it, but
this is what actually happened. “This mission is so important
to us, we’re sending our chief astronaut to command it.”
That apparently reassured the cosmonauts and the Russians.
Having fought it like I did, I have to admit I’m really glad
I got to do that one. It went against everything that I wanted to
do as a leader, but it was fascinating. I finally gave in, and we
announced, and I got together with Dave Leestma to pick the next chief
astronaut. Because at that point it was, “No, you’re not
going to have an acting chief, you need to step down.” That
was a disappointment too, because I didn’t want to step down
from being chief. I really enjoyed being the leader of the astronauts,
and I didn’t want to leave it. But I didn’t have a choice,
I had to step down, so I helped pick Bob [Robert D.] Cabana.
Because again from the Navy, Marine Corps area, you learn you are
here to take care of your people, so we really wanted somebody that
we felt would stand up for and take care of the astronauts. I got
to help pick Bob Cabana for that. Then we launched right off into
training.
Ross-Nazzal:
Can I ask one question? I’m curious given what your wife told
you at the table that she didn’t have any representation. Had
you ever considered at that point maybe making a mission specialist
chief of the astronauts? Had that ever been discussed? Or was it always
going to be a pilot? I know Peggy [A. Whitson] was the first scientist.
Gibson:
It had never been my choice. It had never been my decision. I don’t
think it was even looked at. I think a large part of it might have
been the flying the weather aircraft for launch. It had not really
ever come up, to tell you the truth. Of course that would be a decision
for the director of FCOD, who to make the chief astronaut.
When I had picked Linda Godwin to be my deputy, man, there was no
arguing with that at all. Everybody just fell right in line and said,
“Great choice.”
Ross-Nazzal:
I was curious about it. Because I talked with Peggy about it and Peggy
said it was so unusual not her being a woman but her being a scientist.
People were like, “We’ve never had a scientist who’s
head of the Office before.” So I was curious if anyone had ever
thought to mix that up.
Gibson:
When you say the name Peggy Whitson, I can’t see anybody having
any arguments with it. How could anybody be better suited and better
qualified and more capable than Peggy Whitson? So it was going to
happen. It was bound to happen. And it sure did.
Ross-Nazzal:
It did. Yes. Tell me about that mission. One of the things I was curious
about, I noticed that Atlantis was out in California for a while,
for the Orbiter Maintenance Down Period. Were you following the vehicle
at that point?
Gibson:
Really was not. We weren’t involved with it much at all. I guess
it was getting modifications to have the docking mechanism onboard.
To back up a little bit, when it became obvious we were going to be
working with the Russians, there was a push that said, “You
know what, astronauts, we all need to start learning to speak Russian.”
They had hired a company from around here. I know TechTrans had done
some things with us in terms of providing us Russian interpreters.
I don’t remember the name of the instructor, but he was good,
and he came to train the astronauts. Once again I said, “Okay,
well, good, I need to show some leadership.” So I signed up
to take the Russian language courses as well.
Altogether, by the time we launched, I had about a year and a half
that I had been taking Russian language lessons. That’s what
I mean by you lead by example, you show the way. Even though I was
busy, I still made time to attend the Russian language lessons, so
I had some background to it.
Then when we were assigned as a crew, we got assigned Tatyana. I don’t
remember her last name. But she was really interesting because she
was older than us. When we launched I was 49 years old. She was older
than us; she was probably in her early sixties. She was not the slightest
bit impressed that we were the crew that were going to conduct the
very first docking by the Space Shuttle, that we were going to go
dock with the Russians on Mir. She wanted us to know our Russian language
lessons. She didn’t cut us any slack. She would look at me across
the table. She’d rattle off something in Russian, and I’d
stare at her with the deer in the headlights look. She’d go,
“Well?”
If I had no clue whatsoever I would just say, “Moya samaya lyubimaya
muchityel’nitsa,” which is a play on words. Moya samaya
lyubimaya is my most favorite. Uchityel’nitsa is teacher. But
if you take the word uchityel’nitsa and put m in front of it,
muchityel’nitsa is torturer. So I was saying my most favorite
torturer. She’d say, “Nyet, nye muchityel’nitsa,
uchityel’nitsa.”
But she was fun; she was fun. Ellen [S.] Baker was really fond of
the Russian language lessons, and I had to twist her arm a little
bit to get her to go on that mission. She had two daughters, and I
think she might have been a little bit focused on how fragile life
can be, so I had to basically twist her arm to get her to do that
mission. But I wanted a doctor. I wanted a medical doctor, because
we were going to be doing a lot of—previously they were going
to be doing, then it became we were going to be doing—but they
were going to be doing a lot of orbit testing on the cosmonauts who
had been up there for three months in the Spacelab laboratory, so
I wanted Ellen Baker on that mission.
She really enjoyed the Russian language things, so we had a session
every week. Early in the game we might have had one or two a week,
and then later on as we got more busy we had to scale back. It was
really fun because I almost have a second language now, that being
Russian. Not really, because I am really far away from fluent. The
joke I like to tell when I’m giving a talk is, “It was
hard for me to learn Russian because I are engineer, and engineers
ain’t talk good” in English, let alone in Russian. But
what little Russian I did pound into my brain all those years ago,
a lot of it is still there.
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s great.
Gibson:
I’ve had occasions where I’ve used it, where I can still
use it, and remember it a little bit. Sometimes when I fly on airliners
I’ll take my little Russian language book along and just review
it and read it over. Again, I’m not good at it, but I can still
do it. I was at a thing in California where there were two fighter
pilots. One of them was an Air Force fighter pilot who had shot down
a MiG in Vietnam. The other fighter pilot was the MiG pilot he had
shot down. We went to breakfast together and—I’ll make
this story quick—there was an interpreter from the University
of Washington [Seattle] that if we had something to say to Hong My—Nguyen
Hong My was his name—we’d say something to the interpreter,
he’d say it to Hong My, it would come back to the interpreter
and back to us. It was really unwieldy.
Then it dawned on me, he flew Russian MiG-21s in Vietnam. He must
have trained in Russia. When you train in Russia, they don’t
learn your language, you learn their language. He must speak Russian.
So I looked across the table at him and I said, “Ya tozhye MiG-21
lyotchik,” which is, “I am also a MiG-21 pilot.”
And he said, “Oh, konyechno, of course.” He and I started
speaking a little bit of Russian across the table. There was a videographer
and a photographer, and they thought this was just the coolest thing
ever, so they started videotaping Hong My and me speaking in Russian
across the table. I probably understood 10 percent of what he told
me, but I pretended like I understood it all. So it’s been fun.
It’s been fun to have a little bit of a second language.
Ross-Nazzal:
You said you were a MiG pilot. Did you get a chance to fly while you
were over there?
Gibson:
Not in the military. A friend of mine who inherited a ton of money
started buying jet fighters, and he wound up having nine jet fighters
that he kept here at [William P.] Hobby Airport [Houston, Texas].
Eight of them kept at Hobby Airport, one of them, the F-104 Starfighter,
had to fly out of [George Bush] Intercontinental [Airport, Houston,
Texas] because it needed much longer runways. Anyway, he got a MiG-15
in about 1988, and I said, “Jim, what do I have to do to fly
your MiG-15?”
He said, “You know what, I need somebody to fly the MiG-15,”
because he would have us do air shows. So I started flying the MiG-15,
which was the airplane that we were fighting against in Korea. He
also owned two F-86s, so we would do the F-86 and MiG-15 Korean War
dogfight enactment for air shows.
I flew that for about a year, and I said, “Jim, the MiG-15 is
a lot of fun, but you need to buy me a MiG-21, because it’s
much cooler.”
He said, “Oh, sure.” Then he called me about six months
later and he says, “Okay, I just bought you your MiG-21.”
And I really love that airplane, it is such a cool-looking airplane.
Most people that see it use the word sexy. It’s a sexy-looking
jet. I got to fly air shows in that. People ask me nowadays, “Hey,
what’s your favorite airplane?” Usually I will say the
MiG-21. It was really a cool airplane, really a fun airplane. Lightweight
fighter.
The ones I flew, the F-14 Tomcat and the F-4 Phantom, those are Cadillacs.
The MiG-21 was a Porsche. A little lightweight hot rod is what it
is.
Ross-Nazzal:
I would never have thought that about a Soviet plane. It’s not
probably how I would have ever thought to describe a plane.
Gibson:
It wasn’t very sophisticated, and it didn’t have any fuel.
It was really short-range. It was designed to be an interceptor and
shoot down the American bombers coming to bomb Russia. I think the
longest flight I ever had in one was like an hour and 5 minutes, hour
and 10 minutes. That was the longest I ever kept one in the air. I
would do an air show routine where they said, “You got 6 minutes.”
I would take off, it would be an afterburner takeoff, go straight
up, pull the power back, zoom back down, come down the runway at 500
knots. I would do this 6-minute routine that involved a lot of Gs,
a lot of afterburner, and clear the runway, and I would have burned
two-thirds of the fuel that airplane carried in 6 minutes. They’re
very short-legged and very short-range. But man, what a fun 6 minutes
it would be.
Ross-Nazzal:
Talk about the training if you would, because you had the new docking
system, and from what I understand from Lisa [M.] Reed, who was working
on your training, that was a challenge.
Gibson:
Oh, golly, yes. It really was. We got to see it over in Russia when
we went over there. Yes, we started training on doing dockings. Of
course the Shuttle mission simulator, SMS, had the software load I
think virtually right away when we started, because they’d been
working on it. We knew the Mir docking was coming up, so they were
working to implement it.
We also would go over to I think the SES, the Shuttle engineering
simulator, and we could do practice dockings over there. I’m
trying to think if there was someplace else as well. I remember we
were very very thoroughly trained by the time it was time to go to
space. The number that I use—I think we did at least 98 practice
dockings in various simulators before we flew. We were thoroughly
ready for it.
The thing about rendezvous and docking is it’s easier in real
life than it is in the simulator, because as good as your visual depiction
is in the screens, it’s not as good as what you can see in real
life. Range rate, closure rate, things like that, exact positioning
is a whole lot easier to see in real life. We were so well trained.
I need to do a shout-out at that crew, because I had picked a really
really sharp crew. Charlie [Charles J.] Precourt was the pilot, and
it was interesting after having worked with him and trained with him
on that mission I never told him this but I said—I don’t
remember who I was talking to, maybe Ellen Baker—I said, “I
won’t be surprised if he isn’t the first Air Force chief
astronaut.” Sure enough, Charlie was chief astronaut a couple
years later. He was that good. Greg [Gregory J.] Harbaugh was that
good as well. He was just really sharp.
We had such great tools as well. We had the laptop computer that had
the RPOP Program, Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Program. That
thing was so effective because it was tied in to the Shuttle’s
computers, so it knew where we were. It knew where the Mir was. It
had RelNav, which was relative navigation, which is what we use on
the Orbiter to do all this. It had all that information. But what
was really great, you actually got a little depiction that said, “Here’s
where you are right now, and if you don’t do any thrusting here’s
where you’re going to be in 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds.”
It would show us rising up, dropping back, dropping down, and then
being at a lower altitude and scooting out in front of the Mir. You
could see where you’re going to be in 10 seconds if you don’t
do something, where you’re going to be in 20 seconds. Every
time that I would make a thruster input, I could look at what the
effect of that was predicted on the RPOP Program. It just made it
so excellent to use.
We wanted to be very efficient on the docking. You want to minimize
your fuel usage. You can get up there and just bang the thrusters
and run yourself out of fuel. If you did it badly enough they’d
say, “Okay, we don’t have enough fuel for you to finish
up the docking, so come back and land.” It could make a difference.
What we wanted to do was not have to do any braking, because braking
is really expensive. We had two possibilities. Initially we were going
to fly up in front of the Mir Space Station, and level with the Mir
Space Station, and then back in along the velocity vector, in other
words where we’re going. Back in along the velocity vector to
docking.
About halfway through our training it was decided that it would be
better to fly up along the radius vector from the center of the Earth,
the Rbar. The other one is called the Vbar, and this was called the
Rbar. To fly up on the rendezvous, get on the radius vector, and stop,
and then fly up along the radius vector. Now we had two different
attitudes that we could be in. One of them was called SNIP, Shuttle
Nose In Plane. Which means our orbit plane, the direction that we’re
going, the nose is forward, so we’re flying like an airplane.
The other one was really cool because it was Shuttle Nose Out Of Plane
in Yaw, Shuttle Nose Out Of Plane in Yaw, SNOOPY was the other methodology
it could have been, in which case we would have been 90 degrees to
the direction that we were going. That was SNOOPY. It was decided,
pretty quickly, “Let’s do it SNIP,” because that
worked out better for the fuel.
The advantage of coming up from below was if you do it right, you
can coast to a stop at any point and not have to fire any thrusters
for braking. Because once we got inside of I think 1,000 feet, we
had to go to what’s called Low-Z, where normally your braking
thrusters just fire straight up. If we fired those inside of 1,000
feet, we stripped all the solar panels off the Mir and they’d
probably be mad at us.
Ross-Nazzal:
Probably.
Gibson:
So at 1,000 feet we had to go to Low-Z. Low-Z uses the nose thrusters,
the forward-firing thrusters, and the aft-firing thrusters, which
cancels the fore and aft, and it gives you a little component of braking.
If you had to brake using Low-Z you used something like 12 times as
much fuel for braking. The advantage of coming up along the Rbar was
that we could just coast to a stop.
We came up with a rule of thumb, and I’m trying to remember
what it was. It’s been a few years, that was 1995, so a quarter
of a century ago we did this. It was something along the lines of
if we took our closure rate and multiplied it by 1.5 and divide by
1,000, that was how many feet from the Mir we’d come to a stop.
It was something like that. That worked great. That worked great,
because we had two built-in holds. We had one at 160 feet, and we
had another built-in hold at 30 feet.
You wanted to be able to coast up to the 160-foot point and not have
to hit the brakes to stop there. Here we go, we got all these computers
and all this technology and the RPOP Program, but our primary calculation
for stopping at 160 feet was range times 1.5 divided by 1,000 would
be rule of thumb for how to coast to a stop. You came up with things
like that in the training, and all that training really paid off.
We had built-in laser range finders that just projected up there and
gave us a reading. I guess that came out on one of the laptop computers
as well. It told us our range and a range rate, what our closure rate
was. Then Greg Harbaugh also had a handheld laser range finder that
he’d be shooting at the Mir and backing up the ones that were
being displayed on the computer. Of course it displayed right on the
laser.
I had some really really excellent people keeping me from messing
it up as we were coming in for the docking. The parameters were pretty
stringent. We had to stay within a 10-degree cone outside of 500 feet.
We could be within a 10-degree cone of the docking port. That was
where mission control had verified that any of our thruster plumes
wouldn’t damage the Mir. I think it was inside of 500 feet,
or inside of 1,000 feet, we had to stay inside of a 5-degree cone
off the docking port. With RPOP and with us looking out the window
and seeing it, it wound up being fairly easy.
However, this wasn’t like a probe and drogue where it’ll
center you. I had to line up the centers of the docking rings. They
said, “Okay, the tolerance is plus or minus 3 inches. You’ve
got to line up the exact center of this.” It’s about a
4-foot diameter ring. “You have to line the centers up within
3 inches or else you’ll bounce off. You won’t capture.
And the attitudes have to be matched between the Shuttle and the Mir
within 2 degrees.” So pitch, roll, and yaw had to be exactly
the same as Mir within 2 degrees or you’ll bounce off.
The closure rate had to be one-tenth of a foot per second. That’s
1.4 inches per second. So that’s pretty slow. That’s about
this fast [demonstrates], 1.4 inches per second. They said, “Hoot,
if you hit them at two-tenths of a foot per second with your quarter
million-pound Orbiter, you’ll destroy the docking mechanism.
Your contact velocity is to be 0.1 feet per second plus or minus 0.03.
Oh, and also, the Russians want us to dock over their favorite ground
station, which is their most reliable ground station, so you’ve
got a plus and minus 2-minute window.” So we had a time constraint
as well.
Ross-Nazzal:
No pressure, right?
Gibson:
Yes, no pressure. And that’s funny you mention that, because
Dan Goldin, the morning before we launched, we had a telecon with
him. It might have been a video telecon. We might have actually had
that in those days, video telecon. One of the last things he said
as we were getting ready to say goodbye, he said, “Hoot, no
pressure, but I want you to know there are going to be 5 billion people
watching you on television.” So no pressure.
Ross-Nazzal:
What a way to send you off.
Gibson:
Yes. That was our send-off. Fortunately we had trained very extensively,
and fortunately the likes of Charlie Precourt and Greg Harbaugh just
made all the difference in the world. I think we were 2 seconds off.
Our parameter was 0.1 feet per second plus or minus 0.03. We actually
wound up—0.107 feet per second was our contact velocity. Mission
control had already determined that by the time we landed. We had
used something like 24 percent less fuel than they had budgeted for
it. All the training and the rules of thumb and the excellent crew
really made a big difference, Charlie and Greg.
We had a graph, so Charlie would be plotting our range against this
graph. He’d say, “Okay, Hoot, you’re probably about
4 seconds fast right now,” or something to that effect. I don’t
know how, I wasn’t supposed to keep that, but I got that. I
should scan it and send you that just for fun, just in case you want
it.
Ross-Nazzal:
Yes.
Gibson:
Because I wound up with that graph. I think I told you my first two
flights they let us keep all of our checklists and things that they
weren’t going to reuse. Now after that they let us keep our
notebook, just our little book that we had where we could make notes
as we went, but nothing else. Somehow I think I wound up with a ground
copy of the rendezvous checklist, which didn’t fly, so it’s
not a flown checklist.
Ross-Nazzal:
Maybe that’s why.
Gibson:
That actual chart, it was a cue card that Charlie was making x’s
on as we were approaching. Somehow I wound up with that. I didn’t
intentionally steal it from NASA, but somehow it’s in my stuff,
I’m pretty sure. I don’t think it’s a copy, I think
it’s the actual one.
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s great.
Gibson:
I’ll scan that and send you what that looked like.
Ross-Nazzal:
That would be good to put with the interview.
Gibson:
It makes it really apparent. It shows where the holds are. You’ve
got range versus time where you can actually plot it and see. So I’ve
actually got that still.
Ross-Nazzal:
I wonder if you would talk about that moment of official docking and
then getting ready to go into the Mir. What are your memories of that?
Were you planning to take that photo? We’ve got that great photo
from ASTP with the commanders shaking hands.
Gibson:
Oh yes. We knew. In fact PAO [Public Affairs Office] had talked to
us. “Look, this is going to be something that is going to be
memorable, and it’s going to be something we want to make sure
we do it right.” The problem with the handshake in the tunnel
there is that the people doing the handshaking block the whole view.
We actually practiced I think over in the full fuselage trainer, over
in the FFT. What I needed to make sure I did was get my back over
against the side, so that I’m not in the middle blocking it.
We actually had made sure we strategized it before we actually did
it, to where we’d made sure that I was off to the side, so that
we could see Vladimir [Dezhurov] as well.
Did I send you that newspaper article where the president said that
this ends the Cold War?
Ross-Nazzal:
No, you haven’t, so you’ll have to send it to me for this
one.
Gibson:
I’ve actually got it on my cell phone.
Ross-Nazzal:
Oh, do you?
Gibson:
Because I was hanging pictures.
Ross-Nazzal:
You must have been going through things, because you’ve been
sending me stuff.
Gibson:
You might be able to stretch this and see it. This I just hung up
in the stairway in the man cave.
Ross-Nazzal:
I was going to say, “Do I have my reading glasses?”
Gibson:
These are readers.
Ross-Nazzal:
Oh, it’s okay. That’s the nice thing about the iPhone.
Gibson:
Yes, you can stretch it out.
Ross-Nazzal:
Yes, you can stretch it, which is nice.
Gibson:
Now Bill [William J.] Clinton didn’t say, “Well, Hoot
ended the Cold War.” I’ve interpreted it that way. But
that’s where it shows that Bill Clinton said—
Ross-Nazzal:
“Guess this really means the Cold War is over.”
Gibson:
Yes, the President of the United States said, “This handshake
marks the end of the Cold War.”
Ross-Nazzal:
You look like you’re having a great time with that smile.
Gibson:
Yes. We were fairly jubilant as this was happening. The docking itself,
it was a little bit tense, because we had some really tight constraints.
We had the potential to really mess things up, mess up the Mir Space
Station, mess up the Shuttle. Could have been catastrophic actually,
which makes you wonder why they wanted me doing it. But anyway, we
close on in, and we contacted. I’m at the aft station, and we
would get a capture light. I don’t remember exactly where that
was.
I’m out the window because we’re maneuvering on in. Out
the window and also on the CCTV, the closed-circuit TV, because that’s
how I’m getting the alignment. We had a camera looking through
the center of our docking port where there’s a window. It’s
looking at the standoff cross that’s on the docking port on
Mir. I’m flying all of those things. When we hit, let’s
see. Did I hit the switch, or did Charlie hit it? There was a post-contact
thrusting, PCT, that we had to command, because we’re hitting
it slowly enough that there’s springs in this thing, and there’s
a possibility you would tend to bounce off.
Now that we’re in contact, now we want a little bit of push
to push the springs. There was a sequence of about 10 thrusters that
fired to make sure that we went over the hooks, to capture the hooks
that are off to the side on the docking mechanism. We get a contact
light. I remember right away I keyed the mike, and I said, “Houston,
Atlantis. We have capture.” Once we had gone over the capture
hooks I guess we saw contact, and then we’d fire the thrusters.
Then we’d get a capture light. Charlie said, “Okay, capture
light,” and I keyed the mike and I said, “Houston, Atlantis.
We have capture.”
I wasn’t there, but I’ve seen the video. Apparently Dan
Goldin jumped up and grabbed the head of the Russian Space Agency
and gave him a big hug right there in Mission Control. Rhea and the
kids were in Mission Control, and she said everybody yelled and cheered.
And everybody on the crew yelled and cheered as well, except for Greg.
Greg was a little bit mad at us because there was still a lot of work
to do, and it was all his work. It was bringing the docking mechanisms,
retracting them together, and operating the 12 big structural hooks
that grabbed and held the two things together. So he was a little
miffed at us. He said, “Come on, the whole docking isn’t
over with yet.” And he’s right.
It was a momentary hooray and a momentary celebration, because that
was the hard part. The hard part was getting there and getting it
lined up and getting it properly captured. Then the rest of it was,
“Yes, okay, we’re pretty sure this is all going to work.”
But it was doing all the final latching. So Greg was a little bit
miffed at everybody cheering.
Ross-Nazzal:
It’s hard not to be excited at that kind of moment.
Gibson:
Oh yes, it was really exciting.
Ross-Nazzal:
You mentioned Rhea, and I did want to ask. Rhea was pregnant while
you were training for this mission, and then she had the baby. Did
that present any complications during the training and launch?
Gibson:
Good point. Yes, it was, because initially we were due to dock when
she was ready to hatch, when the baby was due to be born. The only
reason that didn’t happen was that the Russians were delayed.
The Spektr module—pretty sure it was Spektr—was actually
delayed by about a month. We slipped, if I remember right, a month.
Initially she was going to have Emilee born while I was in space,
so she was really happy that we slid long enough. Emilee was born
on the ninth, and we launched on the twenty-seventh and docked on
the twenty-ninth. Emilee was not three weeks old yet, she was two
and a half weeks old.
What was kind of precious was because she was less than six months
old, she was able to come with Rhea to the beach house. You had to
be over 15 or under six months to be able to come near the crew, because
six-month-old babies don’t carry any bugs I guess.
Ross-Nazzal:
Oh, good news.
Gibson:
So I got to enjoy her out at the beach house and cuddle her some.
We’ve got some really precious pictures of Rhea sitting on one
of the couches out at the beach house looking really worn-out and
weary, with this little precious baby about this big [demonstrates]
asleep on the couch next to her. Emilee missed all that. Emilee was
the only one of the kids that didn’t get to see one of our launches.
The other kids certainly did.
But we got her to the last launch. We didn’t want to wait for
the last launch, so we tried that launch that was in October or November
of 2010, went down there, and it didn’t go. So then we said,
“Okay, well, we’re going to have to make this work on
the last launch.” Fortunately she got to see the last launch.
That was lucky. Then she would have been 16. She was 16 years old,
got to see a Shuttle launch.
But yes, that was fun. Rhea took her to Mission Control when she went
there in the viewing room with the other kids as well.
Ross-Nazzal:
I think I’ve seen some photos of her with the baby and the boys
in the viewing room. That’s very cool. Did she ever get a chance
to go to Russia with you when you were training? Or was she at home
with the boys?
Gibson:
She was home with the boys, of course, and she wouldn’t have
really wanted to. We went there twice, and that was fascinating; it
was really fascinating. We went there first time to train in September
of ’94, and that was about a 9- or 10-day trip if I remember
right. The second one was in March of ’95, and I don’t
completely remember why we had to go twice, because you would think
you could get all that training done the first time. We trained on
the Soyuz simulator. You don’t really do much in the Soyuz.
You sit there, and it does it all. Not like our machine, where it
really needs a whole lot of crew input.
It was interesting too. In the Soyuz you didn’t have a countdown
clock. I guess you’d look at your watch, and you’d know
when you were going to launch. But it didn’t have that. When
it was time for the Soyuz to do burns, it just did them. You didn’t
have to consent to it. On the Shuttle any time we did an OMS [orbital
maneuvering system] burn, the vehicle couldn’t do any burns
without the crew doing them or consenting for them to be done. But
in the Soyuz, the way you’d know—you launched, and you
separated from the booster rocket, and you got up there, and when
it was time for a burn it would start a maneuver, and maneuver to
an attitude. You didn’t have to let it or tell it to do it,
it was just going to do it. When it did that you knew there was a
burn coming up, and sure enough, okay, off you went on a burn.
Of course in the Shuttle we had to tell it to do burns, and we had
to consent to let it do burns, or we had to do them ourselves with
the thruster controllers. So that was interesting to see that.
Soyuz is like a small Apollo capsule, three seats. We had trouble
with some of our astronauts that were going to go over there and train.
They were too tall. It was a tiny little rocket, but we got to train
on that.
Then of course we got to train in their Mir simulator. They called
it a simulator. It’s the equivalent of the full fuselage trainer.
It didn’t have a computer hooked up to it as far as I can see.
It didn’t do any dynamics. It didn’t do any maneuvers
or anything like that. It was more of a mock-up.
Like I said, the total trip was 9 or 10 days. We would have been at
Star City. The first time we went there, though, we stayed at the
Penta Hotel in Moscow, which was run by the Germans, run by Lufthansa.
It had quite a bit of German efficiency to it. You still couldn’t
drink their water in that hotel; you had to make sure everything was
bottled water. One of my crewmembers forgot about that and brushed
his teeth with tap water and got sick. It was that serious. I don’t
know how it is now, but back then it was a third world country.
Economically they were pretty devastated, and that was why we had
to learn to speak Russian, because they could not afford to hire English
teachers or buy English textbooks is what we were told. We had to
attempt to learn their Russian. Underline the word attempt. Because
I had Anatoly [Soloyev] and Nikolai [Budarin] on board with me, aboard
Atlantis, to take over the Mir Space Station, and we needed to be
able to talk to them. They couldn’t speak much English. They
tried, but they weren’t taking lessons like we could. That was
something that we had to make sure we did.
Going over to Russia, we had to use Russian, because it isn’t
like all the other countries in the world where everybody speaks English.
No, they don’t. They don’t speak English at all. We actually
tried going out to restaurants there in Moscow. I never saw anything
in a restaurant that I liked, that was really good at all. You couldn’t
just order a steak. They had some kind of mystery meat that I remember
I ordered one time. But we were training out at Star City.
The drive from Moscow to Star City was 40 miles, but it took 2 hours
to do it because the roads were so bad. They were full of potholes.
The traffic in Moscow was crazy. We were not allowed to drive, and
we wouldn’t have wanted to either, once you see the place. We
had a driver that drove us out to Star City, Zvyozdnyy Gorodok, to
train each day, and then brought us back to the Penta.
The second time we went over there to train, we stayed at Star City
in a building. They call it the Prophylactorium, [that] is what it’s
called. It’s for I guess visiting dignitaries and visiting astronauts.
That’s where Norm [Norman E.] Thagard—wasn’t that
where they stayed? I’m not even sure that Norm Thagard and Bonnie
[J.] Dunbar stayed in that building, or if they stayed in another
building that was cosmonaut housing. But anyway, that’s where
we stayed the second time we were out there.
Once again, I didn’t find any food that I really enjoyed very
much. And I’m easy about food, I will eat anything. When I trained
in Japan, I found things that I liked over there. But I didn’t
find very much in Russia that I liked, so the food was a little bit
of a challenge as well.
But it was so fascinating. One of the places we went on our first
trip over there was called Monino. It was their equivalent of our
[National] Air and Space Museum [Washington, DC], only most of it
is airplanes sitting outdoors. They had a couple of old rickety wooden
hangars where they had some of their World War I aircraft and some
of their World War II aircraft, but most of their jet airplanes were
sitting outside under the trees and out in the Russian winters. Just
sitting outside. It was fascinating. I must have shot six or eight
rolls of film in that place, because here were all these airplanes
that as a fighter pilot I had trained to fight against. Only we didn’t
have very many good photos of them. We had these grainy photos shot
through the trees by some air attache from the embassy that had managed
to capture a picture of a MiG-25 or a MiG-29, and they’d be
these not very good photos. Here we are walking around a MiG-31, MiG-25s,
Sukhoi 27s. It was just fascinating, the day that we got to go to
Monino.
We saw the Russian BOR-4, which we believed that they had built to
be a Space Shuttle killer, to launch and attack a Space Shuttle. It
was a lifting body. It’s the shape that later on wound up being
the X-38. It was basically the same shape as the X-38. BOR stood for
byespilotnyy orbital’nyy rakyetoplan, pilotless orbital rocket
plane, number four. The fourth one in sequence, so it was called BOR-4.
That was on display there at Monino. It landed on skids. It didn’t
have any wheels. It landed on skids. They had flown them to space
and back or maybe subscale models of it. But anyway some of the things
we got to see were just absolutely fascinating.
That was a really eye-opening tour for us. We trained at all the manufacturers
there in the Moscow area. NPO Energia, Kaliningrad is where they’re
based out of. They toured us there and showed us all their facilities.
The Russians had actually built about five shuttles, I think, was
how many they had built. Buran, of course, was destroyed when the
building it was in out at Baikonur collapsed in the snow. But they
had another. We saw one at Kaliningrad in their high bay. Then of
course there was one that they had moved into Gorky Park to make a
restaurant out of, a bar and a restaurant. We didn’t stop and
see it, but we had driven by, and saw it sitting there in Gorky Park.
Then of course Buran was down at Baikonur. So there’s at least
three, and I think they had one or two more that they had built, intending
to do big things with them. But when the Soviet Union crumbled apart
they couldn’t afford to keep doing it, so they didn’t.
They had to quit. But like I say, it was really fascinating.
One of the interesting things about Russia was they told us, “Hey,
make sure you bring little packets of tissues. If you do wind up having
to go to a public restroom there’s probably no toilet paper.”
We’re getting right down into some really gritty stuff here.
Even in Star City in the cosmonaut training facilities the bathrooms
didn’t have toilet paper in them. Somebody would take a paperback
book and stick it in there, and people would tear pages out of it
to use that as toilet paper. It was an experience; it was a real experience.
Ross-Nazzal:
Did I read correctly that you met Valentina [V.] Tereshkova when you
were over there?
Gibson:
Yes. After the mission, after STS-71, the Association of Space Explorers
was having a symposium and a get-together and a meeting in Warsaw,
so we were invited. They really wanted us to attend. I guess it turned
out that only Charlie Precourt and I wound up going. I guess it was
because of travel funding. He and I were the only two that went. There
was a little bit of a funny story. We were going to go back to Russia
and debrief, so we were scheduled to go back to Moscow, and that was
the approval for the travel funds, that we were going to go debrief
the Russians.
You can probably see this coming, but about a month and a half ahead
of time we put in a request for visas from the Russians. Since we
were going over there anyway they said, “Okay, well, then you
can go to the ASE convention since it’s just a little bit more
expense for you to go to that.” Therefore, we actually wound
up flying from the U.S. over to Warsaw. But we took a day of leave
en route in Germany because we had met the folks at Porsche on our
first trip over there, and got to know Klaus Bischof, who runs the
Porsche museum, and so we just got a VIP [very important person] tour
of the museum.
When we went back, I got ahold of him again and said, “Hey,
we’re on our way over there. Is it convenient for us to come
see you?” So we rented a car. We switched planes in Frankfurt.
So we drove to Stuttgart, which is where Porsche is, only this time
they had us go to their test track. They had five Porsches pulled
out there with their factory drivers. They don’t allow amateurs
like us to drive on their factory [track], but they had factory drivers.
I’ve seen 160 miles an hour on the straightaway coming into
a hairpin curve with the factory drivers driving us around.
But anyway, what happened was we never got a visa, so the Russian
portion of the trip got canceled, but we still got to go do the first
part, which was go into Warsaw, and go into Stuttgart again. That’s
where we got to meet Valentina Tereshkova. I have pictures of me shaking
hands with her. I should send you those too. I should be making notes.
Ross-Nazzal:
We’ve also got it in the transcript. When I send you the transcript,
I’ll just highlight. Please send, please attach.
Gibson:
Yes. We got to meet her there at the ASE, Association of Space Explorers,
symposium. That was a thrill. That was a thrill, getting to meet her.
Oh, golly, who else was there? I got photos from it, and I can go
back. Oh, shucks, their general that flew in space, did the world’s
first spacewalk ever, [Alexei Leonov]. He was there as well. I had
met him before. He came over here, and I think I showed him the full
fuselage trainer when he was over. He was there at that. That’s
where I got to meet Valentina Tereshkova. That was a thrill.
Ross-Nazzal:
I wonder if you would talk about building this crew. Very different
from all your other crews. You’ve got some folks who are cosmonauts.
How did you build that crew?
Gibson:
We got Bonnie to go over there to be Norm’s backup. That’s
right. The Russians wanted a backup for Norm Thagard. I had gone out
to the astronaut corps. Norm really wanted to do this, and he had
been studying Russian. He, on his own time, had learned to speak Russian
fluently. We had a hard time finding a backup. Nobody wanted to do
it. I don’t remember who it was, maybe Dave Leestma, or maybe
it was George Abbey himself, that called.
I had offered, “Whoever goes over there to be the backup for
Norm,” they’re going to launch, I think they launched
March 14th of ’95, “will be put on STS-71. You’ll
get to fly STS-71 and go there even if you’re not the one to
do the launch aboard Soyuz.” But even with that, oh, golly,
it took some arm-twisting to get anybody to go be Norm’s backup.
Bill [William F.] Readdy was the director of Operations in Russia,
and he did a fine job over there, he had things really organized for
us. Like the trip to Monino and all of that, he had that all preplanned
for us to do.
It was the five of us training together. Five of us would be Charlie
Precourt, Greg Harbaugh, Ellen Baker. I guess just four of us. Yes,
just four of us training until Bonnie came back. That was probably
the end of March. Then we launched in June. Bonnie was only with us
for a while. We didn’t really have a big role for her in the
rendezvous and the docking. But what she did was she’d be on
the radio talking to the Russians and telling them our range and our
closure rate, because she had learned enough Russian to where of course
she could handle all that.
She was always busy doing something. She wasn’t part of the
launch team on 71 or the reentry and landing team, but she was busy
all the time. Trying to think of what all we had her assigned to.
She had to be familiar enough with all the docking and all the rendezvous
and all of that. She did attend certainly launch simulations and reentry
simulations and also the rendezvous and docking simulations, but it
was late in the game to really give her a big role on the crew.
The other four of us had trained together since September, pretty
sure it was September, which was late per the template, because I
dragged my feet so long. We should have been assigned before that.
Then the cosmonauts, five weeks before launch is when they showed
up. We had a lot of training sessions for them, and there were three
sets of the cosmonauts. There was Anatoly Solovyov and Nikolai Budarin,
who were the ones that were slated to go with us. And then their backups,
and then the backups’ backups. So if I’m remembering it
right we had three crews of the cosmonauts that came over and started
training with us.
Some of the sessions, they were off by themselves training. TechTrans
was hired to go along with them because they had the really high-powered
interpreters and the really technical interpreters that could help
tell them about squatcheloids and quaternions and put that into Russian
somehow.
We then started driving. Anatoly would come with me in my car when
it was time for us to drive from Building 4 over to another building.
Like I say, the final five weeks we’d be speaking Russian to
them and they’d be speaking a little bit of English to us as
well. Anatoly and Nikolai really had no function on the crew, other
than to ride along. We didn’t have any assignments for them.
For that final five weeks, really it was to train them so that they
wouldn’t be a hazard to us or to themselves on the Orbiter.
They learned not to open the side hatch. We could open our side hatch
in orbit, and that would be instantly fatal to everybody.
That’s when I think we got a whole lot more conversational in
Russian, because I remember one day I picked up Anatoly in my car.
I’m driving, and he looks over at me and goes, “Nye slushayu
dvigatyel’,” which is, “Not hear engine.”
That’s how Russian is. We would say, “I don’t hear
the engine.” But in Russian slushayu is the first person singular
form of hear, nye is not, and slushayu is I don’t hear or no.
Nye is don’t. And slushayu is I hear. But with nye it becomes
I don’t hear. And then dvigatyel’. So they don’t
have to say, “The engine.” They can just say, “Not
hear engine.” That was why Russian could be challenging to learn.
Ross-Nazzal:
I know we’ve e-mailed back and forth about the model, but I
thought it would be interesting to talk about those models [of Mir
and the Space Shuttle] that you decided to build here at the Space
Center and take up with you in space for this mission.
Gibson:
That was actually my idea, because we were trying to think of what
could we do that would be memorable and what could we bring back from
space that we could give to the president of the United States and
the president of Russia. I had seen that on Apollo-Soyuz they flew—let’s
see. What did they fly? I think they flew their mission emblem in
pewter. Golly, I’m struggling a little bit. I have a book on
it.
Ross-Nazzal:
Yes, there’s a pewter medallion I thought.
Gibson:
Okay, that’s what it was. Yes, I wanted to say it’s a
pewter medallion. I think the Russians had half of it and we had the
other half, and we joined them up in orbit, I’m pretty sure.
I got to thinking, “Okay, well, we could do something boring
like that too and just do a medallion.” I don’t really
mean boring. I mean we could just copy them. Then I thought wait a
minute, why don’t we have the model shop make us a model of
the Mir and a model of the Shuttle, and we can join them in orbit.
We can do that with two of them, we can have two of them, and we’ll
give one to the president of the United States and we can give one
to the Russian president as well.
So we did. We carried both of them up with us, both pairs, the Mir
models and the Shuttle models. We carried those up with us. What we
did for that little ceremony that we had—it was in the Spacelab
where we actually did this particular ceremony—we handed Vladimir
the model of the Mir. I handled the model of the Shuttle. Then we
put them together and let it float there in orbit.
Then we took one to President Clinton after the mission. The meeting
with him in the Oval Office could have been a little, oh, I don’t
know, a little more extensive than it was. I think he must have felt
like he was really constrained on time. I thought this was pretty
special because I had my whole crew and the Russians. I had Vladimir
[N.] Dezhurov and Gennady [M.] Strekalov. All eight of us went up
to the Oval Office. I made a little speech about [how] we joined these
models in space.
We had signed two certificates. The certificate wound up being laminated
to a wooden base as the stand for the model. Yes, I think that was
in the photo, of the ones that you’ve sent me the photo of,
the one that’s in the Clinton [Presidential] Library [and Museum,
Little Rock, Arkansas]. It had in Russian and in English, “On
this day spacecraft of the,” and we filled in the date ourselves,
and then all 10 of us signed it; both copies were signed in space.
I presented that to the president. He took a quick look at it, and
he said, “Oh, okay, yes, well, that’s nice.” And
he handed it to his assistant standing next to him, and then he just
stood there looking at me like, “Okay, isn’t it time for
you guys to leave?” And it was. So it was a quick meeting.
My interpretation was that Vice President Al [Albert A.] Gore felt
like we had been shuttled out of the Oval Office kind of quickly,
and so he said, “Hey, you all don’t have to leave right
away, do you? Why don’t you come down to my office, and we can
chat about space and the International Space Station.” I thought
that was really nice of him and really outgoing of him to say, “Yes,
come on down to my office.”
His office is downstairs somewhere in the White House, so we went
down there, and then we chatted with him, must have been 30, 45 minutes
after that meeting. I think he might have felt like these guys came
all this way. We only had a few minutes in the Oval Office, and we
were out the door. It was a little bit memorable, but Al Gore made
it a very nice event.
Ross-Nazzal:
At least it’s memorable.
Gibson:
Yes.
Ross-Nazzal:
I did also want to ask. I don’t know—this might be a question
better suited for Public Affairs—but I still thought it was
interesting. Your crew was the guinea pig for using the web to promote
the mission. PAO had created this website called On Board STS-71.
Do you remember that? Like I said, this might be more of a Public
Affairs [question]. It was a new way to promote the mission, that
way people could follow along on the web and see how things were going.
I was curious if you were included in all those decisions.
Gibson:
I don’t think we were, because I don’t remember it offhand.
Ross-Nazzal:
I wasn’t sure. I find little tidbits. So I always want to ask,
because I think well, there could be an interesting story.
Gibson:
Oh yes, good for you.
Ross-Nazzal:
Did you think at this point that this was going to be your final mission?
Had you and Rhea discussed [the issue]?
Gibson:
I wasn’t planning on doing a fifth one. The fourth one went
so well, I made one of the best landings that’s ever been made,
and that sounds like bragging, but what I’m talking about was
the parameters. We’re supposed to touch down at 205 knots. I
was 204.7 knots. I was supposed to touch down 2,500 feet down the
runway, and I think I was 2,495 feet down the runway, something like
that.
The sink rate, once they took out the bias of the gyros, was 0.0 feet
per second. When I touched down the wheels basically went asymptotic
to the Earth, according to the sink rate. It was a great landing,
and I wasn’t planning on flying a fifth time. I was planning,
“Okay, I will spend the rest of my time with NASA as the chief
astronaut.” Rhea was actually ready to leave after STS-47, because
she really missed Tennessee, and she was ready for us to leave.
And then what happened? I got appointed to be chief astronaut. You
can’t walk away from something like that, so we stayed. Then
it worked out that I needed to go do STS-71. So we wound up staying
even longer. After the mission and all the postflight, it was too
late to leave that year because of the kids in school, and so the
plan became okay, well, then we’ll stay to let the kids finish
this school year, and then plan to leave summer of ’96. That
became the plan.
They weren’t going to let me pick up chief astronaut right away
again. I think I asked Dave Leestma. I said, “Dave, you suppose
I could come over and be your deputy?” I think I asked him if
I could come be his deputy.
He said, “Oh, I’d love for that.” That’s what
I did. I wound up being deputy director of FCOD. Of course we had
all the postflight stuff that we had to do, so I didn’t step
into that till—I’m not sure when exactly. We landed on
July 7th [1995], and by the time we finished everything it was probably
September. From September until the next year I worked as Dave’s
deputy.
Ross-Nazzal:
Were there any hot issues that you handled? Any changes?
Gibson:
There was one, yes. I sabotaged a launch, one of the last things that
I did before Rhea and I left NASA. Rhea and the kids moved in August
of ’96. They moved to Tennessee. We had a place to live there
because her dad had a guesthouse. So we didn’t have to buy a
house there, which was good, because it took us a year and a half
to sell our house in Nassau Bay. We bought when oil was way up here,
and then when it was time for us to sell it it was way down here [demonstrates],
so we lost money on that house. It took a year and a half to sell
it at that. They had a place that they could move into.
I was going to go fly as a pilot for Southwest Airlines. Supposedly
that was going to happen in August, but then that got delayed, and
it didn’t happen until November. I wound up here by myself from
August through November, when I finally started training with Southwest
Airlines.
Rhea had actually stayed several years longer than she wanted to.
She probably would have been ready, like I say, after my fourth mission.
But getting offered the position of chief astronaut, you’re
not going to walk away.
Ross-Nazzal:
Right, absolutely. You said before you left that you had an impact
on one of the launches.
Gibson:
Oh, I sabotaged the launch. Which one was it? This was part of the
reason that Shannon [W. Lucid] wound up staying on the Mir Space Station
much longer than expected. One of the launches came back, and we had
changed the layup process in the booster rockets. When we’d
assemble the booster segments together, we would clean the rubber
insulation and then glue them together. They would clean the rubber
with something they call trike, which I think was trichlorofluoroethane
or something like that. The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]
decided that that wasn’t nice to the snail darter. So we had
to quit using it.
The new cleaner that we had didn’t work. We launched, and we
got the two booster rockets back and all of the joints, the rubber
had leaked, so we had soot and hot gas in between all the segments
of the booster rockets. There was a function or a design that was
implemented in those booster rockets that was called a pressure relief
flap. What that was was an intentional opening up above where the
rubber got bonded together, so pressure would get into that flap and
help push the rubber segments together. That held tightly enough that
we didn’t burn through. We should have burned through every
one of those joints.
I want to say STS-79 with Bill Readdy as the commander was on the
launchpad, and they really wanted to launch it the way it was. Tommy
[W.] Holloway had asked all the elements to take a good hard look
at it. We were going to have a big telecon to decide whether we had
to roll back and destack and start over again with all the booster
rockets.
I was actually on a trip somewhere, so I tied in by telecon to the
big FRR process that they were having. Basically some of the groups
were lining up. Engineering was saying, “Well, yes, we’d
be okay to launch like this, because the pressure relief flap saved
us before and it’ll save us again.” They didn’t
say those exact words, but they said, “We believe we’ve
got enough margin that we’re okay.” A couple other things
were falling in line.
Tommy Holloway came up and said, “Hoot, you’ve been silent;
I need to hear from you.”
I launched off into a little speech. “We got lucky last time.
We shouldn’t count on being able to get lucky again.”
The thing is if you ask the crew, they’re on their way to Disney
World, “Are you guys okay with this?”
“Yes, we’re okay with it, we’re willing to launch
it like this.” They want to go as soon as they possibly can.
I learned over the years you don’t even bother to ask them.
Of course they’re going to be go, because I was always go. I
don’t want to wait a day longer. I said, “We got lucky
on that one. We should not tempt fate and try to do it again. We know
how to fix this and we should do it.”
After my little speech then the other ones said, “Yes, okay,
we agree with Hoot.” So I sabotaged that launch, but that might
have been a disaster. We knew it wasn’t right. Wait a minute,
what does this sound like? This sounds like Challenger [STS-51L].
“So we know how to fix this, and we need to fix it,” I
said.
That was one of my last things before I left. My last day at NASA
was November 13th of 1996. I only had a half day, and I was checking
out. I don’t know if I had any government property to turn in
or anything like that, but you had to go through the process of signing
out, getting a washed-up has-been no longer badge. I was so depressed.
That was a half day because that afternoon, November 13th, I had to
fly up to Dallas to start training the next day with Southwest Airlines.
I was so depressed after 18 years, and I just couldn’t believe
I was leaving. I’ll never forget it. I was so sad that day.
You would think okay, excitement, “We’re heading for Dallas,
we’re going to start training to fly airliners.” Uh-uh.
I was depressed, thoroughly depressed after 18 years. We’ve
been back for some of the reunions. They’d be showing videos
and slides of what the guys have been doing since we left, and I would
be saying to myself, “How could we ever leave this? How could
we ever stand to leave this?” But I guess we needed to.
There was another philosophy as well that I had said to myself a number
of times, “Okay, you’ve hogged five flights. Haven’t
you been greedy enough?”
“Do you always talk to yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Haven’t you been greedy enough?” Yes, I had been
greedy enough, because I’d get to be commander every time I
go after this. It’s time I got out of the way and let the younger
guys and gals have a turn. So there was that aspect of it as well.
Ross-Nazzal:
You had some great missions.
Gibson:
Oh, golly, yes. Sure did.
Ross-Nazzal:
We always like to end by asking folks what do you think was your biggest
challenge while you worked here at NASA, if you had to pick one.
Gibson:
If you had to pick one. Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I can pick
one.
Ross-Nazzal:
If you can’t pick one you can list multiple.
Gibson:
There’s been lots and lots of them. I joke around about one
of the biggest challenges was trying to learn Russian, because I are
a engineer. Science and math and calculus, I’m good at that
stuff, but [not] languages.
I vividly remember coming in when I first got here, and I was a highly
experienced jet fighter pilot and test pilot. I flew combat in Vietnam.
I had all kinds of experience. I got here, and all of a sudden I don’t
know anything. I don’t know how I get hydraulic power. It was
on a jet engine, and the jet engine is spinning so it turns a pump.
How do I get hydraulic power on a Shuttle? How do I do temperature
control on a Shuttle? We were mostly air-cooled in jet fighters. I
don’t know how we navigate. I don’t know how we communicate.
Yes, we had radios. You key the mike.
It was a huge challenge walking in the door having been a very experienced
jet pilot, and all of a sudden you don’t know anything. Some
of your self-esteem suffers a little bit when you’re sitting
there saying, “Boy, I’m dumb. How am I ever going to learn
all this?” I think from day one it was a huge challenge.
As you went along the trainers were so good, and all the study materials
and everything that we had to learn everything from made it flow so
well, that all of a sudden you got to the end of a training cycle
and said, “Yes, I’m ready to launch.” It’s
a tribute to what we’ve put together here at the Space Center.
Ross-Nazzal:
What do you think was your greatest accomplishment, if you had to
pick one? I know you were involved in so many.
Gibson:
Certainly all the missions went well. One of the things that I always
would say to my crews when I was commander, when we would get formed
up and we’d have our first meeting as a crew, was, “Okay,
look, you guys, this is going to be challenging. Anybody can go do
this and make it look difficult. We’re going to go make it look
easy. It isn’t easy, but we’re going to make it look easy
because we’re going to do it that well. We’re not going
to whine about what the challenge is, we’re just going to go
do it and make it look easy.”
I think for the most part we did that on the missions that I was commander
of. We didn’t whine about things, we didn’t complain that
this is too hard, this is too difficult. “It is challenging,
and it’s not easy. But you guys, we’re going to make this
look easy.”
The other thing I also would say is, “And at any point if we’re
not having fun, we’re doing something wrong. This is the most
exciting thing in the world that we’re getting to do. It ought
to be fun, and if it isn’t fun we’re not doing it right.”
I do feel though that one of my biggest achievements when I was chief
astronaut—because I got feedback. I wasn’t looking for
feedback, because my job is to support you guys, is what my job is.
But one of my astronauts, who wasn’t really known for handing
out compliments, said to me, “You were liked as chief.”
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s nice. That really is. One of the things that I appreciate
when I talk to so many of the people that you work with is that everyone
is so humble.
Gibson:
Astronauts are humble?
Ross-Nazzal:
Especially the test pilots, especially the test pilots that I talk
to.
Gibson:
Test pilots are humble? Oh my gosh.
Ross-Nazzal:
Yes I don’t know where Tom Wolfe came up with that stereotype,
but I’ve certainly not experienced it on my side of the table.
Gibson:
It was funny. Before I was coming here to interview, one of the other
test pilots back at the flight test center—I said, “I
understand I got to talk to a psychiatrist.”
He said, “Okay, one of the things that you don’t ever
do is you don’t ever fill in the words for a psychiatrist. If
the psychiatrist is asking you, ‘Well, so would you say that
test pilots are—’ ‘Arrogant?’ Don’t
fill it in for them.” Humble? Shoot.
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s my perspective. Maybe somebody else would say something
else.
Gibson:
That’s complimentary, so thank you.
Ross-Nazzal:
I’ve enjoyed this. I don’t know if there’s other
anecdotes you would like to talk about or other stories you’d
like to share.
Gibson:
I guess they’re not kicking us out of this room, it looks like.
Somebody started to open the door.
Ross-Nazzal:
I don’t think so. I saw somebody stick their head in, so I wasn’t
sure. The secretary told me I had it for four hours. I blocked it
first thing this morning.
Gibson:
Let me think about it for a moment. Of course when we leave I’ll
think of about a dozen of them.
Ross-Nazzal:
If you come back to Houston we can always do a follow-up.
Gibson:
We can do a follow-up, sure.
Ross-Nazzal:
Absolutely, we’re always open.
Gibson:
We probably haven’t covered everything.
Ross-Nazzal:
I’m sure that we haven’t. There’s probably a lot
that you have knowledge of that I don’t. We have limited resources.
The further we get into the Shuttle Program, the less documentation
that we have. That’s why these interviews are so important and
so vital, because we just don’t have those records.
Gibson:
Yes. I wind up remembering things as we’re sitting here talking
about it too.
Ross-Nazzal:
If you do come back, like I said, our door is always open. Don’t
feel like this is the last opportunity. We’d be happy to see
you. If at some point you and Rhea want to do a joint interview, I
think that might be fun.
Gibson:
Oh, that’d be fun too. Yes, maybe one of these times when we’re
back for reunions. They would schedule reunions about every two years.
I think we missed—I don’t remember what our problem was.
We might have been out of the country. She really likes cruise ships.
We’re into these deals where we can go for free as speakers
on a cruise ship.
I’m always telling her, “No, not another cruise. I made
three cruises in the Navy.” For a total of what, how much time,
well over two years. “No, I don’t want to make another
cruise.” She’d sign us up for two or three a year if I’d
let her. We’ve been doing those. Although the virus saved me
from one this year.
Ross-Nazzal:
There you go. No one wants to be on a cruise ship right now.
Gibson:
That’s for sure.
Ross-Nazzal:
Thank you so much for taking time, Hoot. I appreciate it.
Gibson:
It’s always fun. Yes, it’s always fun.
Ross-Nazzal:
Yes.
[End
of interview]