 |
| Resnik c, 1985 |
Four years later I was not the PAO responsible for sending
astronaut Judy Resnik to the Chili Cookoff slash Wet T-Shirt Contest for a
public appearance, by then I had already been fired*** but was still hanging
around the space center in Houston. Somehow I heard that the guy who got my job
had made this major screw up sending an astronaut to a wet t-shirt contest, so
I went that Saturday as a civilian just to ogle.
The PAO who set it up pulled out some hairs, then they quickly rearranged the
tables so that the astronauts and other civic leaders who were about to arrive
to taste and judge chili would be facing away from the wet t-shirt contest. The
PAO arranged it so Judy Resnik and the other judges would not have to watch as
a local deejay sprayed water on the breasts of young girls who then strode to
the edge of the stage and danced with everything beneath their wet t-shirts on
display for a cheering beer drinking crowd.
*
 |
| STS 51-L crew before launch |
As I was thinking about writing this blog post, I went to
YouTube and watched Ronald Reagan deliver the heart felt speech that he gave in
January 1985 creating the Teacher in Space program. You can tell from his tone
of voice, so passionate, so endearing, that Ronald Reagan really did believe he
could make space travel a regular experience for ordinary people by just
signing an Executive Order. He has the same lack of knowledge and experience as our current president who is blundering us into wars and economic catastrophe through lack of knowledge and experience.
In June 1985 Reagan spoke to the group of teachers who were
finalists for the Teacher in Space shuttle flight.
Reagan: Next January
one of you will be the emissary to the next generation of American Heroes. For the lucky one who does go up in the
Shuttle, I have only one assignment.
Take notes, there will be a quiz after you- [BURST OF LAUGHTER]
In my room on a mountain top in 2017, I watched Reagan deliver
that speech and it gave me the chills.
It's that same PR before reality that we're letting a
president do today in 2017, and we know how well that presidential act for PR turned out for the Challenger in 1986.
After that burst of laughter for President Reagan in that 1985 speech, you can see a satisfied grin on his face, because they like him, they
really like him. . . and he looks way too much like Donald Trump basking in the
adulation from a kneejerk press that came after he bombed Afghanistan.
*
 |
| Resnik in 1978 |
The reporter then leaned in and put the mic in front of
Judy’s face as I watched in my NASA Road One motel room, and in an intimate
voice she said to Resnik: “Here’s something I really gotta know, Judy. When you are
out at a night club with your friends and you meet a guy you want to date, what
do you tell him when he asks, what do you do for a living?”
For just a micro second Judy didn't have an answer, and I
think the interviewer may have even repeated the question with a laugh to cover
the awkward moment maybe adding extra insight such as: “I mean don’t men find it intimidating when
they meet you and want to date you then they find out you're an astronaut?”
In that micro second Judy recovered and knew how to respond
with the instincts of a test pilot facing an unexpected anomaly. She gave the
reporter a conciliatory grin and replied:
“I just tell them I'm an engineer”
*
That chili cookoff was around 1983. Judy Resnik had been assigned to a space
shuttle flight at least four years earlier and had now been simulating the same
task over and over again that she would carry out on that first flight, while
the first flight of the shuttle kept getting delayed.
She trained about five years past the original launch date
for her first assigned flight, dutifully entering the simulator and operating
the remote controlled orbiter arm, performing for as many news crews as showed
up, some of them with me as their guide. I’d stand off to the side and the news
crew from wherever would point cameras
at Judy Resnick so the world could ogle a female astronaut at work.
*
PR in the wrong Places
As I watched Reagan’s speech creating the Teacher in Space
program that contributed to the explosion of Challenger in 1986 from
my laptop on a mountain top in 2017, I was astonished by how much that
President sounded like Donald Trump today, making beautiful speeches based on
no real knowledge. Like Trump, Reagan
seems almost child like in his naivete and awe and hope, as if by a President
just saying something is so, it will make it so, but with no real knowledge to
back up his reveries.
PR played as much a part in the explosion of Challenger in
January 1986 as did the O-Rings on the solid rocket boosters. Today PR is playing as much a part in the
wars and other atrocities being waged by Donald Trump as does any real threat
to the nation.
I'm sure, as Donald and Ronald made their presidential
pronouncements they had no intention of leading innocent Americans to their
deaths,
This is what happens when people in power have no
experience.
I watched Reagan deliver that speech announcing the Teacher
in Space program and he was so much SO MUCH like Donald Trump enthusing about
all the great things he's going to do as President. There was the same naïve hopefulness, the
same ambition and determination that does not have knowledge and experience to
make it genuine. I watched Reagan give
that speech and realized that just as the fortieth president led NASA into a
spacecraft exploding, now the forty fifth president is leading America to a
government that is about to explode, dropping bombs while at the same time under FBI investigation for counter terrorism.
You can watch Reagan's speech here
15 second sound byte where President Reagan sounds so
genuine, so sincere, so stupid, so clueless, as he ingenuously leads us all
into failure.
Just like Donald Trump.
Recently Dan Rather said, "War must never be considered a public relations
operation. It is not a way for an Administration to gain a narrative," read it here:
Just like Judy Resnik judging a Chili Cookoff, just like Resnik flying a PR mission instead of a mission for science and engineering purposes only, PR
in the wrong places can make space ships explode, nations explode, and a lady
astronaut end up as special guest at a wet t-shirt contest.
Trump actions remind me of Challenger explosion. PR in the
wrong places makes things blow up
It's like Reagan with the Teacher in Space pronouncement,
except Trump ignorance could result in the whole United States government
exploding
Not only do our rockets blow up, as Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right
Stuff, but our whole country can now blow up.
RESEARCH:
Morton Thiokol's Allan McDonald in an interview in the documentary WJXT Presents: "Challenger: A Rush to Launch"
Morton Thiokol's Allan McDonald in an interview in the documentary WJXT Presents: "Challenger: A Rush to Launch"
“The prior launch had more delays than any launch prior in
history, delayed something like seven times. They got chastised by the press
because the prior launch was delayed so many times, the Orlando Sentinel
article saying NASA claim they're going to launch two of these a month in next
couple years, and they couldn't even launch one in a month that was already
ready to go, which was true. So they had
to prove that they were capable of doing that.” I think the association with
Teacher in Space on this launch played a role from two points. One it created a
group of people watching this launch far greater than they’d seen for a long
time.
 |
| Resnik on Flight STS41-D |
From same documentary:
“We were Supposed to
be flying them one a week according to original design,” said astronaut Norman
Thagard. “But riding on a rocket is not a real smart thing to do, it's fraught
with risk, especially with a complicated ship like the shuttle. On my flight, the SRB jettisoned and I
thought oh my chances of survival just went way up.”
The mission commander’s wife quotes him in Challenger The Untold Story, another
documentary I watched before doing this post:
“It [the Space Shuttle] was not an airliner to fly
passengers in space and he knew full well that the Public Affairs Office for
NASA was involved in putting a smile on all of these space flight opportunities.”
(Hmm a year after they fired me).
Mrs. Scobee continued: “I saw Dick’s concern
He talked to the teachers who were finalists for the
Teachers in Space Program: 33:40 in documentary:
“He came in wearing his workaday flight outfit and he
regaled us with wonderful stories about what life was like in micro gravity.
“And then there was
a pause and he said, but remember that when you're strapped into the crew
cabin, you're sitting on a ton of fireworks.
“And the conversation got very silent at that point and he
didn't have to go any further, we knew what he was talking about.”
But it's the quote from Roger Boisjoly that gave me the
chills, talking about the night before the Challenger
fatal launch:
“The first thing my wife said when I got home
is what's wrong,” boisjoly says in the film. “Oh nothing honey, I had a great
day. It ended up in a meeting, now we're going to launch tomorrow and kill the
astronauts, but outside of that it was a great day.”
Roger B Around
01;03;40 into the film.
*
*
Today in 2017 as I
watch a federal
investigations try to catch up with the Trump / Russia collusion before this
president can do permanent damage, it is very-very similar,
way too similar
way too much like the Morton
Thiokol engineers trying to stop the launch of Challenger the night before
Our current senators and congressman are shouting about the
actions taken by Trump that are leading USA into oblivion and not being heard,
not being taken seriously fast enough, not getting across to the people who can
make a decision in time to stop the catastrophe.
Because there really is no person to make a decision
They're all civil servants and contractors doing their job
as if the person in charge knows what they're doing, when he doesn't, but
there's no way to stop the Trump presidency right now just like there was no
way to stop the Challenger in January 1986 once it was set for launch
But there is hope, as a teacher did fly in space finally 30
years later
*
At the Chili Cookoff Slash Wet T-Shirt Contest that day in
Webster, Texas, Judy sat at the judges table next to Greg Flabbergast- an
executive at NASA whose name I can't remember and it's a good thing, because I
would publish it here and make people angry.
Judy had by then trained down to about a size two. Her beaming brown eyes surrounded by a mass
of black curling hair had become an iconic image for NASA in media all over the
world back then in the early 1980s.
 |
| Resnik in office at JSC |
Judy had this quality- the can do spirit of the quintessential
NASA astronaut, approaching her task of tasting and judging chili with the same
intensity we’d all seen in the photos release by PAO of Judy at work, Judy in
her office, Judy in the simulator, Judy in the T-38 jet getting her pilot
license.
She took hold of the next bowl of chili and studied its
contents and Greg Flabbergast leaned over her as if he were holding her down,
keeping her from finding a way to fly away.
*
You see pictures of that crew in the months before flight,
all in blue jumpsuits with the NASA worm logo from that era, wearing the
beaming smiles of people who’ve been trained in Positive Thinking.
When I got to NASA in 1978 for the job I wrangled for
myself straight out of college, I took my oath and then THEN sat at a desk and
started to learn about the space shuttle program. Back then the goal Was to Eventually send
ordinary people into space.
But when I saw the view from the cockpit of that massive
spacecraft on top of burning solid rocket boosters with 6.5 million pounds of
thrust at takeoff of flaming fuel, first thing I thought was, this is not a
space program that is ready for ordinary people to ride back and forth and
conduct civilian business. Not yet.
I stopped hoping they’d select me to be the first
journalist in space and began having a whole new respect for the people who fly
space craft for NASA.
It was as inappropriate for astronaut Judi Resnick to be
judging a chili cookoff with a wet t-shirt contest behind her as it was for a
school teacher project to force the shuttle to launch under unsafe conditions.
Both were the result of PR in the wrong places, a problem nationwide that continued long past the Reagan administration and got us where
we are today in 2017, with a reality TV show host as Commander in Chief, starting wars over dinner, while under investigation by both Congress and the Senate for counter intelligence against the United States.
I think Judy Resnik may have been wondering what the
heck have I gotten myself into herself, by the
time she was judging chili from tasting bowls in that Webster, Texas,
parking lot with a wet t-shirt contest going on behind her.
Wonder if she ever felt as out of place at NASA as I did.
Judy Resnik’s last words
could be heard upon ignition of the engines of STS-51-L on January 28, 1986.
"Aaaaaaaaaall
Riiight!!!!
*
*** Post Script:
As I've said before on this blog, I had a lot of strange
sexual compulsions in my life that resulted from being molested by a Catholic
priest when I was five years old, and even though I didn't know it at the time,
a lot of what drove me to get a job at NASA was that compulsion. In order to get a bachelor’s in journalism I
had mandatory science classes at University of Texas, and when a professor in
an Astronomy for Non Science Majors class mentioned that NASA often hires
people from UT, I went, Boooooiiiinnng and from that moment on, I Had To get a
job at NASA, because I Had To Be Around men in uniform who had an extra
connection to the sky. I didn't even
know why. I ended up getting hired then
fired a few years later by NASA because of my screwed up sexual behavior.
As I packed to go to Houston in 1978, friends and family were
questioning the move saying, Kay, you were on the Timothy Leary for Governor
campaign staff, you were once roommates with a Black Panther, you were one of
five people on paid staff of the Peace and Freedom Party in California, and those photo shoots in 1969, do you really think you're going to like
working at NASA around all uptight military guys? they'd ask.
What none of us knew was I was living Faster than theSpeed of Life, it was long term PTSD that took me to NASA. I didn't stop to ask
myself why I was compelled to go there, I just pursued the job with compulsion.
I lobbied and lobbied and created strategies
and got people to write letters for me and became Science Editor on the college
paper and hyped myself until the Newsroom at NASA almost had no choice but to
hire me.
Decades later when writing a blog about the pedophilepriests, I tried and tried to make this line funny:
I was molested by a Catholic priest at age five and as a
result later in life I went after astronauts and pilots with an out of control sexual compulsion.
I'm still working on the line.
Post Script 2:
 |
| Resnik on Flight 41-D |
Everywhere Judy went in those last years she was at JSC,
Greg Flabbergast was by her side. He was
a top top level executive at NASA, the kind of guy we in PAO would send the
A-list reporters to interview, ones from national networks and major
magazines.
Within months after the As-Cans arrived in 1978, Greg
Flabbergast took his place next to Judy in what may have been a father-daughter
relationship, maybe his role was to hold her down, keep her from getting away.
Now in 1982 or 83, Greg Flabbergast sat next to Judy as
they tasted chili with the wet t-shirt contest going on in the background. She saw me off to the side ogling, as I
always did, ogling off to the side and she stared at me a moment, querulous.
Judy sampled her chili with determination to do the best
job she could and always represent NASA to the best of her abilities.
Post Script 3:
Wikipedia actually has an entry in you need a definition of
a wet t-shirt contest with encyclopedic explanations of its place in American
culture:
“Contestants
generally wear white or light-colored T-shirts without bras, bikini tops, or
other garments beneath. Water (often ice water) is then sprayed or poured onto
the participants' chests, causing their T-shirts to turn translucent and cling
to their breasts. Contestants may take turns dancing or posing before the
audience, with the outcome decided either by crowd reaction or by the opinions
of judges”
The idea of the wet T-shirt
contest originated in Spain in the
1940s, around the same time as the introduction of the Spanish festival La Tomatina.[1] La
Tomatina is a large public tomato fight where participants become soaked with
juice from tomatoes.
In the United States, skiing
filmmaker Dick Barrymore
claims in his memoir Breaking
Even to have held the first
wet T-shirt contest at Sun
Valley, Idaho's Boiler Room Bar in January 1971, as
part of a promotion for K2 skis.[2] He
held another promotional contest for K2 on 10 March 1971 at Aspen, Colorado’s The
Red Onion restaurant and bar, and the contests were
featured in a pictorial in the March 1972 issue of Playboy.[4]Later, wet T-shirt contests made an
appearance in Palm
Beach, Florida and Fort
Lauderdale, Florida in the mid-1970s. Contests were becoming frequently hosted in
local bars and restaurants.[5] Many
sources claim that the popularity of wet T-shirt contests can be traced back to Jacqueline
Bisset’s appearance in the 1977 film The
Deep, where she
swam underwater in several scenes wearing only a white T-shirt.[1]
Omg
That is so funny. I
was going to find a funny encyclopedia way to define a wet t-shirt contest and
it exists at Wikipedia. Wow.
Post Script 4
The more people at JSC found out about Judy Resnik, the
more beloved and popular she was. The more people at JSC found out about me,
more time I spent at the lunch table alone.
Post Script 5
By the time she was tasting her ten or twelfth bite as a
judge at the Chili Cookoff Slash Wet T-Shirt Contest that day in Webster,
Texas, that day, Judy Resnik was demonstrating the level of endurance she’d
developed in ger training as an astronaut.
That Saturday she had probably come from a week of
practicing the maneuver of the orbiter arm for the gazillionth time, as she
trained for her first Space Shuttle mission that kept being postponed. She ended up training for years past the
original launch date on her flight, this elegant lady, this classical pianist,
this woman of elegance and taste, repeating the maneuver in flight simulators.
Eventually the executives at NASA accomplished their goal
and got me to leave in a way that made it impossible for me to ever come
back. I wasn’t in PAO when Reagan
announced the Teacher in Space program and I'm kind of glad I didn't have
anything to do with promoting it as a good idea.
The last images we have of Judy Resnik with the other
beaming crew members as they walk out to that fateful flight and the last decades where I've reviewed the wreckage
of my life make me wonder
what could have been.
for both of us.
for both of us.
I cried and drank and self destructed for a good ten years
after leaving NASA wondering what went wrong, what was wrong with me, then
after finally being clean and sober for two years and having a child turn age
five, the age I was at the time of molestation by Father Horny, I realized the
source of the sexual dysfunction and it stopped. I almost turned into a different person once
I realized it was that early age felony child sexual assault I lived through that
affected my strange behavior, and the strange behavior stopped.
Unfortunately the damage had already been done to everybody
I met along the way.
Post Script 6
When I first got to NASA I jumped right onto the idea of
the Shuttle flying ordinary people. But
after I’d been at NASA a few weeks and realized how frigking dangerous that
space ship was, how duct taped together it was with the lowest bidder making
design and manufacturing choices, how if it were to be for humans going back
and forth in space it would have been much smaller, but instead in the middle
of the design and development process, we added tons of payload capacity, so
the humans were now on top of huge commercial satellite payloads along with a
gazillion pounds of combustible fuel.
But by 1980 or 1981 there was almost nothing to the space
program but public appearances. When we
all signed on for the beginning of the space shuttle in 1978, it was supposed
to happen a few months later. Now it got
to be two, three years later, and it hadn’t had its first launch yet. I had perfected the art of finding new ways
to write a headline saying the launch of first Space Shuttle flight was delayed
again.
Out of control conflagration of public relations and space
exploration, amplified by there being almost nothing but PR in the space
program for two to three years.
Only the bravest of the brave, such as test pilots and
astronauts, should have been flying on the shuttle, and it's likely they would
have put off the launch, because as the commission found in its investigation
of the tragedy, it was the cold temperatures on the O-Rings that caused
Challenger to explode
Post Script 7
I’d get such a rush when I’d drive my Kharmann Ghia onto
the LBJ Space Center grounds every morning.
And almost every morning I’d see Judy Resnik jogging on the long road
that comes in from Clear Lake City. Every week she was getting thinner, so I
soon found running shoes and started jogging too, never looking as good as Judy
though.
After I’d been at NASA about two years, you still saw Judy
out there jogging almost every morning but a kind of pall was over the space
center in Houston. Back in 1978, when the shuttle astronauts and I and a whole
lot of new hires arrived, the Shuttle was supposed to be launched the following
year. Then one after there was another
design problem and the tiles, and reasons to delay launch that put it off for
months, years, one after another. So
everyone who came onboard in 1978 was still doing exactly the same thing they
were doing in 1978, now it was 1981, 1982, and I had been finding new ways to
write headlines and articles about the upcoming first launch that was coming at
such and such a date “barring delays.”
I had perfected the art of finding new ways to write that
headline and using the expression “Barring Delays” and had written it so many
times it became a joke in the News Room.
Some problem would come up, then they’d see me and in unison say,
“barring delays.” I’d write, Shuttle set for August launch, barring delays,
then February launch Barring delays, then June Launch Barring delays
“The shuttle is a difficult aircraft to fly, said Lt. Col.
Eileen M. Collins, astronaut a decade later in a documentary. “It has a very
high wing loading, I guess you could say it's a low lift to drag ratio, it
sinks like a brick."
You want a U.S. Space Ship to be beautiful and graceful but the Space Shuttle is ugly and
clumsy and looks like it's duct taped together, with black paint applied at the
last minute where more advanced technology would be too expensive
“Members of aeronautical community called it the ‘Flying
Brickyard,’ ” said Alex Roland Prof history of Technology in that same
documentary. “It was designed to go back and forth to a space station before we
had a space station.”
*
Many documentaries are out there about the Challenger disaster, I like
this one best:
WJXT Presents: "Challenger: A Rush to Launch"
Graham Media Group Jan 19, 2016
The one hour WJXT documentary marks the 30th anniversary of the
historical shuttle disaster.
*
Interesting forum I found while researching this blog post:
where I read this quote about Resnik:
“It was she who turned on her own PEAP, then
crept forward in the falling cabin and turned on those of Mike Smith and Frank
Scobee.” 08/24/2013 02:13 AM
Resnik was heroic sharp and on point right up to the
last moment of her life.
*
Posted by
Posted by
Rushing to get it all down before I leave the planet for good I hope this time
I just realized April 5 would have been Judy Resnik's birthday and that's about the time I got the urge to write this post. She would have been my age. Hmm.
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