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The Astronaut Maker
How One Mysterious Engineer Ran Human Spaceflight for a Generation
Michael Cassutt
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eBook - ePub
The Astronaut Maker
How One Mysterious Engineer Ran Human Spaceflight for a Generation
Michael Cassutt
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About This Book
One of the most elusive and controversial figures in NASA's history, George W. S. Abbey was called "the Dark Lord, " "the Godfather, " and "UNO"âshort for unidentified NASA official. He was said to be secretive, despotic, a Space Age Machiavelli. Yet Abbey had more influence on human spaceflight than almost anyone in history. His story has never been toldâuntil now.
The Astronaut Maker takes readers inside NASA to learn the real story of how Abbey rose to power, from young pilot and wannabe astronaut to engineer, bureaucrat, and finally director of the Johnson Space Center. During a thirty-seven-year career, mostly out of the spotlight, he oversaw the selection of every astronaut class from 1978 to 1987, deciding who got to fly and when. He was with the Apollo 1 astronauts the night before the fatal fire in January 1967. He was in mission control the night of the Apollo 13 accident and organized the recovery effort. Abbey also led NASA's recruitment of women and minorities as space shuttle astronauts and was responsible for hiring Sally Ride.
Written by Michael Cassutt, the coauthor of the acclaimed astronaut memoirs DEKE! and We Have Capture, and informed by countless hours of interviews with Abbey and his family, friends, adversaries, and former colleagues, The Astronaut Maker is the ultimate insider's account of ambition and power politics at NASA.
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Part I
âDonât Send
Me Thereâ
1
October Sky
OCTOBER CAN BE LONELY on the plains of Montana. Temperatures might reach sixty degrees Fahrenheit during the day, but they fall fast at sunset, to freezing and below. The wind can be biting. And US Route 12 on the long eastbound stretch between Missoula and Helena is not the place you want to pull to the side of the road. Even during daylight, thereâs not much to see, except scrub, clusters of pines, low rounded hills. Unless youâre looking at the sky.
It is Sunday, October 6, 1957, early evening. A 1955 Oldsmobile sits by the eastbound side of the highway. There are pockets of early snow on the darkened dirt to either side, but thereâs no traffic beyond the odd slow-moving semi or pickup truck. A young man leans against the driverâs side, staring to the west. He is short and slim with dark hair and is wearing blue slacks and a Windbreaker. The clothing is not suited to the weather. His name is George Abbey; he is a first lieutenant in the US Air Force, a helicopter instructor at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio. He is driving back to Texas from his hometown of Seattle, where he was visiting family. Itâs a trip heâs made from one starting point or another many times.
Just a few years earlier Abbey was a midshipman at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, coming off the summer cruise with thirty daysâ leave and three whole dollars a month spending money. In those days, his travel options were military transport (great if it was going where you wanted when you needed it) or family funds (not available). So Abbey and his roommate, Gordon Iver âGordyâ Dahl, another Seattle boy, found a third method: Knowing that car dealers in Detroit were eager to sell used vehicles in Seattle, the pair hitchhiked to Michigan, took a car, and headed out on US Route 12 to Chicago, then across Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, and Idaho into Washington State. Gas was covered; the trip was free, costing them only their time.
Now, three and a half years after graduating from Annapolis, Abbey is a married man with a car of his own. Between his basic officerâs salary plus flight pay, he is pulling down $400 a month. Life is better.
But Seattle remains a frequent destination. Abbeyâs parents still live there, and so do two of his three brothers and a sister. Abbey has grown to love the long drive from Texas north to Wyoming, then west across Montana, and back. A fan of Western movies, especially John Fordâs, Abbey likes the bleak scenery and the famous Big Sky. Especially on this particular evening. Tonight, Montanaâs Big Sky will allow Lieutenant Abbey a once-in-a-lifetime opportunityâto see the flight of an astronomical object by the name of Sputnik, the Earthâs first artificial orbiting satellite.
Abbey has always had an interest in space travel, the happy result of a youth spent reading Buck Rogers comics and watching Flash Gordon movie serials. He also knows that the United States is preparing to launch a small scientific satellite named Vanguard. But the news that broke the day before, as he was driving across western Washington State, has shocked him. The Soviet Union, the Red Communist enemy halfway around the world, fired a giant rocket from some mystery location in central Asia, putting Sputnik into orbit. As the miles passed, Abbey heard more details: Sputnik was a silvery sphere twenty-three inches in diameter and weighing 184 pounds, small enough to fit inside the trunk of his Oldsâthough the Soviet satellite is a giant compared to the planned three-pound Vanguard. Sputnik is circling the Earth every ninety-two minutes at an altitude ranging from a low point of 139 miles to a high of 900, flying as far north as Alaska and Greenland and as far south as Antarctica. It emits a beep that has been tracked all over the world.
Abbey knows what this accomplishment implies: the Soviets do indeed possess the giant rockets they bragged about earlier in the year, missiles capable of flinging H-bombs over the North Pole to blow up New York and Washington, DC. As a cold warrior, heâs troubled. But, as a pilot and Buck Rogers fan, heâs also fascinated. Hearing on the radio earlier this day that Sputnik might be visible to Montana residents this very night, Abbey has pulled off the road to see.
He glances at his watchâ
And thereâs Sputnik, moving swiftly from northwest to southeast, a small, bright dot. Abbey has seen shooting stars before, but this is different. Shooting stars vanish in a second or less . . . This light in the October sky remains steady. A satellite! He is stunned by the sight of itâand surprised by the depth of his reaction, feeling a bit like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. He has grown up with rockets, seen newsreel footage of German V-2s rising to incredible altitudes over New Mexico. He knows about the V-2âs descendant, the Redstone, and its rival cousin, the Atlas. But it isnât until this moment that he connects them allâsatellites, rockets, high-speed aircraft. The chance to see Earth from orbit, to walk on the Moon, to visit Mars. The Space Age is no longer that thing-to-comeâitâs here. If the navy and aviation are in George Abbeyâs blood, his bones are space and rocketry.
He gets back in his car. Texas is still many hours away.
2
The Abbeys
ABBEYâS PARENTS, Sam and Brenta, met on a London double-decker bus during World War I. Sam, recovering from wounds suffered while serving with the Canadian Army at the Battle of St. Eloi Craters in April 1916, was a passenger; Brenta was the ticket taker.
Of Scottish descent, Sam had been born in 1890 in London but spent his early years with his father, who was working in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Sam recalled watching one of the battles of the Second Boer War from a hillside there. His father fell ill and returned to London in 1902, where Sam completed secondary school. He then became a professional soccer player in Amsterdam. Eventually, he moved to the United States to work on an uncleâs farm near Boston. He followed the wheat harvest to western Canada, becoming, at one time or another, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a boxer, and a fireman.
In August 1914 Sam was working for the Canadian Pacific Railway in Kamloops, British Columbia. A train loaded with fellow workers from down track came through Kamloops. When asked where they were going, they said the war had started and they were bound for Vancouver to go fight the kaiser. Sam jumped on and, arriving in Vancouver, enlisted in the Canadian Army and was subsequently shipped to France.
Brenta, born Bridget Gibby in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales, was four years younger. Her mother had died when she was ten, and Brenta had been left to take care of a younger sister, Edith, for several years. She also worked as a servant for a family in Carmarthen until moving to London in 1912, where she went to work for the bus company.
The two married in England and soon had a son, James Robert David, born October 8, 1917, in Cardigan, Wales, while Brenta was visiting an older sister. (Sam had been given only one name; to make up for that lack, all of Brenta and Samâs children would carry three given names.)
After Sam served a year in the army of occupation in Europe, the couple moved to Canada in 1919, where Sam enrolled at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, working his way through college as a farmer and salmon fisherman. In 1922, at the urging of friends in Washington State, the Abbeys moved to Seattle, where Sam joined the Continental Can Company, eventually becoming the companyâs transportation manager for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
The family expanded: A second son, John Lloyd Richard âJack,â followed on March 28, 1922. Then came Vincent Hugh Donald on July 10, 1923, and a fourth son on August 21, 1932, George William Samuel, born in the house at 505 North Seventy-First Street. A fifth child, Phyllis Gwendolyn Brenta, was born there on March 28, 1934.
The Abbeys had the typical first-generation immigrant virtues: work hard, study hard, become part of the community, vote for Democrats. Brenta made dinner for the family every Sunday (a practice George himself would continue well into his eighties). Her dishes tended to be traditional, like Yorkshire pudding. There were jokes, a lot of teasing and pranking. Also music: Brenta made sure there was a piano in the house. Sam had a fine singing voice and appeared in local operas. He also had an entrepreneurial side, investing in several cottages in the town of White Rock, on Semiahmoo Bay, a few miles north of the US-Canadian border. When school was out for the summer, George and Phyllis and Brenta could be found in White Rock, where the children spent long days on the beach, swimming, rafting, crabbing, and fishingâor visiting a nearby dairy farm in Milner that belonged to one of Samâs friends.
Unusual for Americans in those days, Sam was not a member of any church. In fact, he was openly critical of organized religions. Family members ascribed this to his experiences in the trenches, where he had been surrounded by the sudden and daily death of friends and companions. Agnostic or not, Sam Abbey had all kinds of rules for proper behavior, most of them easily summed up by three words: do whatâs right.
Brenta was Presbyterian and raised the children in that faith, though young George made his own religious conversion. In order to spend time with high school friends of Scandinavian descent, he began to attend their Lutheran church one block from the Abbey houseâand would remain a regular Lutheran churchgoer for the rest of his life. One lure was the churchâs slate of activitiesâGeorge joined the Boy Scout troop there, in order to go camping in the mountains. Another attraction was a youth choir âwith several pretty blonde singers.â
Sam lived a healthy life: no smoking, no drinking, no cursing. He was squarely built and remained fit into his eighties. He kept playing footballâmeaning soccer; he contemptuously referred to the American game as âcarry ball.â Immigrants from England, Wales, and Italyâfootball nationsâkept their sporting traditions alive by forming teams centered around Pacific Northwest mining communities like Black Diamond and Ravensdale. George remembered watching his father playing for the Maple Leafs at Woodland Park during the 1930s, spending many a Sunday afternoon on damp fields with the cold seeping through the thin soles of his shoes. Sam and his Maple Leafs were repeat winners of the Washington State Championship.
When Sam got too old to play right wing or even goalie, he would referee matches, especially those involving sailors from the British battleship HMS Warspite, which had been severely damaged in a battle off Crete in May 1941 and sent through the Suez Canal, then across the Indian and Pacific Oceans for repairs at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
It was while watching Sam and the Warspite sailors on a cold Sunday, December 7, 1941, that nine-year-old George learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
George was also an athlete, playing American football in spite of his slight stature, though he preferred basketball, hockey, andâwhen he could find Seattle boys who wanted to play the gameâsoccer. He was pretty much a straight arrow like his fatherânot that he had much opportunity for mischief. Large families have their own means of discipline. In the Abbey family, in addition to father Sam, two of Georgeâs older brothers, Vince and Jack, often provided day-to-day authority. After Sam joined the US Army for World War II service, and with his brothers also away serving in the military, George inherited the responsibility of helping Brenta and Phyllis.
During the 1940s, the skies of Seattle were filled with Boeing B-17 and B-29 bombersâas many as 350 rolled out of the plant each month during peak productionâinspiring a whole generation of fliers and engineers, including George Abbey.
But Seattle was also a navy town, home to the Pacific Fleet. George would remember Sam taking the family to Elliott Bay to see the big battleships anchored there. George was fond of Clear for Action!, a 1940 novel by Stephen Meader dealing with the adventures of a young midshipman aboard the USS Constitution in the War of 1812. He also read H. Irving Hancockâs two series about a cadet at West Point and a midshipman at Annapolis, and was a fan of C. S. Foresterâs Hornblower stories in the Saturday Evening Post.
When Sam volunteered for duty with the US Army in World War II, he shaved ten years off his actual age in order to enlist. (Years later, he would volunteer for Korea and Vietnam. âIf there was a war,â his granddaughter Suzanne said, âhe wanted to fight in it.â) After being commissioned a captain in the Transportation Corps, Sam arrived in Antwerp, Belgium, in October 1944, just as the Germans began shelling the port city with V-1 and V-2 rocketsâthe V-2s were in fact the brainchild of Georgeâs future NASA associate Wernher von Braun.
London was a famous target for the V-2, but Antwerp was hit by more missiles. Belgian fatalities numbered over thirty-seven hundred, with six thousand wounded, during the V-weapon blitz, which lasted into March 1945. There were over six hundred American casualties, too, and Sam Abbey came close to joining that list. His office was in the cityâs Kingâs Cross, which took at least two direct hits and suffered several near misses. While Sam was away searching for replacement windows, another V-2 struck. He returned to his office to find it destroyed.
His last assignment in Europe was overseeing freed Soviet prisoners of war who had been used as slave laborers by the Nazis. With the European war ending in May, Sam returned to the United States in late June with orders to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. The announcement of the Japanese surrender on August 14, 1945, found him on leave in Seattle before his departure for his Pacific assignment.
The entire family served in the military or in support of it. Georgeâs older brothers Jim and Jack had been in military service even before the start of World War IIâJim as a navy warrant officer, Jack as a lieutenant junior grade in the US Naval Reserve assigned to the merchant marine, seeing combat during most of the island landings in the Pacific, and at Kiska and Attu in the Aleutians. Vince had enlisted in the army when the United States entered the war in December 1941. And Brenta worked on a Boeing assembly line during the course of the war.
When George graduated from Lincoln High in 1950, it was only logical that he would want to follow the family traditionâin his case, to become a naval aviator. (The navy had âpilots,â but they guided surface ships, not aircraft.) This in spite of the fact that the closest he had come to flying was seeing a Ford Trimotor up close at Boeing Field when he was six. George was enrolled at the University of Washington as a US Naval Reserve Officersâ Training Corps (NROTC) student when Vince decided to âhelpâ him out.
The Abbeys lived within walking distance of UWâSam had moved them there from North Seventy-First while Jack and Vince were students at the university. George hoped to live at home and have an ...