JOURNAL ARCHIVE: July 31, 2006
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I started thinking again about that time on the Wainwright when I was topside up on the superstructure helping Larry Johnson work on one of his WDS antennas. I pulled off the fiberglass, canopy-shaped cover, and it almost pulled me over the side when the wind caught it. I wonder if that represents falling out of the shuttle as the WDS contained a lot of parts that remind me of the heat tiles on the shuttle.
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If I did fall out of the Columbia when it was landing from STS-1, I doubt I would actually remember it because I would have been traveling about 200 mph. I have been wondering if I had taken the parachute out of the backpack and held it under my arm. It probably acted as a drag chute that slowed me down enough to survive the fall, although I still would have been moving very fast. I find myself thinking of that scene in Castaway where his inflated life raft is pulling him to the surface but it hangs on something as the sinking aircraft is pulling him down. There is also that scene in Rambo, the second one I think which was 1985, has him getting hanged up as he was jumping out of the aircraft to his mission. If I did hit the ground at 200 mph, I must have left a hell of a furrow in the dirt of that lake bed.
But even thought I wouldn't remember it and was probably knocked unconscious from the impact, I would probably have something symbolic in my memory about it. I think some of the details I have thought in the past few hours are representative of that event in April 1981, but I still can't help but feel there is something else to remember. Perhaps something about being near the wheel well of a moving vehicle, but I can't remember anything like that about me. I did remember something from high school with someone I went to high school with. His name was Roy Self and he fell off the side of a pickup and was killed when the rear wheel ran over him. I didn't know him, I think he was a couple years older than I, but I remember hearing about it.
Perhaps that is it. "Roy," "Ray." That woman in "Quigley" who was always calling him "Roy." "Roy" from "Die Hard." And the last name of "Self" is obvious. That may have been one of those constructs to keep my from identifying with such an event, but they kept it familar enough that I would come back to it as I stared to awake from hibernation.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/soliloquy
A dramatic or literary form of discourse in which a character talks to himself or herself or reveals his or her thoughts without addressing a listener.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolanus_(play)
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Coriolanus is perhaps the most opaque of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, rarely pausing to soliloquize or reveal the motives behind his prideful isolation from Roman society. In this way, he is less like effervescent, reflective Shakespearean heroes/heroines Hamlet, Lear and Cleopatra and more like ancients Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas, as well as the Marlovian conqueror Tamburlaine, whose militaristic pride finds a descendant in Coriolanus. Readers have often found him an unsympathetic character, although his caustic pride is strangely, almost delicately balanced at times by a reluctance to be praised by his compatriots and an unwillingness to exploit and slander for political gain.
"the hungry beach." That's where I got that. When did I say that about the waves on Alki Beach? Last year? This is probably something that is in the memory of Thomas Ray, but Kerry Burgess doesn't remember studying it. I remember studying Shakespeare, but not this one.
http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/coriolanus/27
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Then let the pebbles on the hungry beach
Fillip the stars; then let the mutinous winds
Strike the proud cedars 'gainst the fiery sun
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Thinking back to find something that would represent me working on the landing gear of STS-1, I remember something in my red Ford. I was driving up in the hills near the town of Ben Lomond, that is where we had those organized foxhunts. The state patrol had some kind of traffic stop going on at some intersection. One officer pointed out that I was missing a lug bolt on my rear wheel, I don't remember which one. I told him I knew about it because I had twisted it off with a lug wrench. For some reason, that makes me think of the uplock roller. I don't think that red Ford could have any association with the Columbia, so I'm not sure what that could mean.
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The lug bolt memory must be representative of the uplock rollers. The heat from reentry melted one or more of them and I had to use a crow bar or some metal rod to break them off so the landing cover could extract. But how could I have done that? From the two illustrations I have seen so far, that wing is a pretty cramped space. Maybe that submarine movie, "U-501" or whatever the name is, is representative of me crawling into the wing to break loose the roller. And there is that memory I wrote of yesterday when I was helping george Campbell fix the search radar on the Wainwright in that narrow space. Maybe I didn't fall out of the shuttle, but was still in the wing when we touched down. I wanted to write about this yesterday when I first saw a photo of that uplock roller, but it reminded me immediately of the spindle that was broken on my blue Chevrolet that caused the wheel to pop off the second time. I have been thinking that the blue Chevrolet, with its dual exhaust, represents an F-14 though.
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As soon as I read this paragraph, and envisioned the gear cycling up as described, I remember that connector I wrote about on the Taylor, the one that I made from the cable in the deck to the one from the helicopter hovering over my head. I wrote a while back that I was the first one to perform that exercise on the Taylor. It was tricky because we never got to practice it before the actually event.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/orbiter/lgear/overview.html
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For retraction, each gear is hydraulically rotated forward and up during ground operations until it engages an uplock hook for each gear in its respective wheel well. The uplock hook locks onto a roller on each strut. Mechanical linkage driven by each landing gear mechanically closes the respective landing gear doors. All three landing gear doors have high-temperature reusable surface insulation thermal protection system tiles bonded to their outer surface with thermal barriers to protect and prevent the landing gear and wheel well from the high-temperature thermal loads encountered during the shuttle's entry into the atmosphere.
This part suggests that, if I did do something to get the gear down, I had very little time to get the job done.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/orbiter/lgear/overview.html
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The landing gears are deployed only after the spacecraft has an indicated airspeed of less than 300 knots (345 mph) and an altitude of approximately 250 feet.
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I have this notion that I was on STS-87 and it is curious that they have this imagery of the country of Chad as I think something happened to me there.
http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-87/html/sts087-717-075.html
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STS087-717-075 (19 November – 5 December 1997) --- Featured in this view is the Tibesti Massif in northern Chad in central Saharan Africa is a very large mountain range of old, dark, hard rocks, which is surrounded by sand seas.
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AHA! The deck plating in Missile Plot. That has got to be it, something about the deck plating.
http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/sodb/2-4d.pdf
So if I am reading that schematic correctly, the area above and outside of the landing gear is one of the places where you could enter the shuttle, aside from the regular entrances, so denoted for emergency entry I guess.
I'm not sure what that means. But if that is what it means, then you would actually be able to enter the compartment with the landing gear in it from inside the shuttle. And my memories of pulling up the deck tiles in Missile Plot on Wainwright must be something relevant.
There was that comment Scotty made about the Enterprise deck plates, I think in that TNG episode where he is rescued from transporter limbo.
Yeah, that's what they are calling them:
Moldline penetrations/access panels
http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/sodb/2-5a.pdf
That suggests to me the locations where you could enter the vehicle aside from the regular, where ever that is.
Well, not necessarily. Some of them are penetration points for cables, other stuff, that I guess connect to the boosters and external tanks and other objects.
This schematic suggests that "penetration" refers to gaining access to the interior of the shuttle, I guess by people. The lower left corner reads:
Caution
Do not attempt penetration through lower fuelage.
http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/sodb/2-5d.pdf
Damn!! That brake valve on my red Ford. It was always screwing up. The master cylinder. I thought of that as I was looking at this image. The pressure would build up until the brakes would lock up. To fix it temporarily, I had to loosen a couple bolts on the side of the master cylinder and press the brake pedal all the way to the floor and hold it until the bolts were tightened. Eventually I figured out how to do it while in the cab of the pickup. The master cylinder (m.c.) was close enough that I could stand on the pedal with the drivers door open and the hood up and loosen and tighten the bolts. I wrote earlier about that shifting rod linkage sticking and I wonder if it is related to something on the shuttle.
http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/sodb/211.pdf
Seems to me that the wing is thickest right in the area of the landing gear, which means it is about 5 feet high. In my memory on the Wainwright where I was helping George Campbell it was only that entrance to the area we were working in that was the most narrow. The work area was enclosed and kind of tight but nothing like the entrance.
http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/structure/wing.html
Wing
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The wing is constructed of conventional aluminum alloy with a multirib and spar arrangement with skin-stringer-stiffened covers or honeycomb skin covers. Each wing is approximately 60 feet long at the fuselage intersection and has a maximum thickness of 5 feet.
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August 1, 2006
When I started thinking about STS-1 again this morning, I was thinking that I may have had a static line attached to me and that deployed my parachute after I fell out the landing gear. I wonder about that trouble item titled "Lateral oscillation at about 1.6 Mach" and I wonder if that was near touchdown and the roll threw me out the opening in the deck. Something still makes me think I hit the ground pretty hard so we must have been close to the runway, if any of this even happened at all.
After I thought of that idea about the static line, I thought again about this memory of a black lab. retreiver we used to have. I've wanted to write about it several times over the past, I guess, few months. Not sure why I still don't feel like writing about it, nothing really unusal. But I started thinking this morning that, as with the "Roy Self" memory, it represents something that happened to me and may be about STS-1.
Then I started thinking that the landing with only one side of the main gear would probably have been a catastrophic crash. Probably something similar to that lifting body aircraft crash that really happened and was featured as the basis for the "6 Million Dollar Man" television series.
There is also this memory from the Taylor that may be relevant to STS-1 although the actual details may be borrowed from a time when I was an officer on one of the Burke-class destroyers. On the Taylor one winter day shortly before I left for FC school, when we had returned to the Maine shipyards, the USS Hawes was mooring outboard to us, also returning to the yards as it had been completed not long after the Taylor. I remember the forward part of the Hawes seemed to be covered in about 3 feet of ice but I don't think it was that thick. Several of us in deck department were on the foc'sle to handle the lines from the Hawes so they could tie up to us as we were tied to the pier. I was responsible for the bow line but it was too heavy for me. It was a rope that was a lot heavier than the others because it took the greatest load. And it was wet and maybe even frozen. The yard workers had covered the deck with plywood so it was covered with snow and ice and I couldn't get very good traction. I called the BM1 a couple times to help me as everyone else was pulling in their lines. He wouldn't come over so I kept trying to pull it in but all I could do was hold it and couldn't get more of it pulled in. Finally he came over and helped me get it onto the ballard or whatever it was I tied it to. Since I remember why he would not come over to help me at first, it makes me now think that I had observed something like that as an officer. The Boatswain Mate was supposed to be an observer of all the people working the lines so if he helped, he may miss another saftey problem, especially if he was injured while helping a person bring in the line. But since there was no one else to help and I wasn't making any progress, he stepped in and helped me pull it up. The lesson for the future would be to have two people assigned to that bow line.
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When we lived on Hicks Road, this black labador showed up at our house one day, never did figure out where it came from. And man, could that dog jump. He could stand on the ground and jump clear over the closed tail gate of my pickup into the bed. Never had seen a dog that could do that. After a while though, we got tired of it. It was always getting into something or just always getting something messed up, just a nuisance. A very nice looking dog, but a lot of trouble. One evening, Denzil told Micheal and me to drive it off to the dump and leave it there. So we drove out to the landfill and was going to leave it there. Because it could jump so high, we weren't able to just drop it off and drive away because it would always jump back into the bed. So I had Micheal sit in the back of the truck and hold the dog while I got a running start with the truck. I had one of those dog carriers in the back that filled up my whole bed so he was sitting on top of it, even with the sides of the truck bed, and was going to push it off the back as soon as we were going fast enough. At some point, I was going fast enough that I thought Michael had pushed the dog out. I think I might have yelled back at him when to do it or I heard him yell something to me. I could still hear the dog barking so I figured it was running fast after us and I knew if it got close enough, it was going to jump in the back. So I sped up and was probably in third gear by the time I left the landfill and hit the gravel road to it. By the time I got out to the paved road, which I think was Highway 108, judging by the map and my memory of the landfill being down the road from Ambrus Chauncey's house, which the map indicates, and supports my memory, was an area, don't remember it being an actual town, was called Oak Grove. The landfill was near a big curve in the road that the map has what seems to be a dirt road intersecting with it labeled Little River 307. I think it was that county road 307 that had the land fill on it. So anyway, I got out to 108 and I could still hear the dog barking, which made no sense, that dog had to really be running because I was flying. After I swerved out onto the pavement, I looked back through the window and it was the damned dog that was standing on the dog carrier looking back the way we had come. Michael was no where to be seen to my complete shock! I stopped turned around and headed back as fast as I could. I got back into the landfill, it was pitch black that night, and eventually my headlights found Micheal walking along in the dark towards where I had left. He said that he tried to throw out the dog, but went over the end himself as the top of the dog box was slick. How that dog managed to keep its footing was beyond. I can't remember every detail of this story but I remember telling it many times because we laughed for a long time about it. I could never forget how shocking it was to see that dog still standing on the dog box in the dim glow of the tail lights. I laughed my butt off thinking about what Michael had told me about watching me speeding off and how it got quite for a minute and then the junkyard dogs started barking. I could just imagine that very well for some reason.
I was wondering the other day about something recently from Star Wars. Didn't Natalie Portman's character fall out of one of those transports into the sand?
They also had that guy fall out of the helo in Blackhawk Down when the pilot had to avoid that RPG, which reminds me again of that trouble report about the shuttle rolling at 1.6 Mach during landing. And that reminds me of something I was thinking a little while ago: when the shuttle commits to the landing, there's no turning back, it is going to land regardless of whether it is ready to land.
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On a work history document I got recently, it lists Cleveland as the address of the military source of the income for Kerry Burgess. I wonder if this is the reason it has Cleveland listed on that document:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_From_New_York
Release date July 10, 1981
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Elsewhere, Ellis Island is processing in a new prisoner; the one-eyed "Snake" Plissken (played by Kurt Russell), who has recently been convicted of attempted robbery of the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland. Plissken's impressive military record shows that he is a highly skilled Special Forces veteran who has received a prestigious award for his valor. He is shown to have been a very proficient combat pilot who flew a glider over the battle of Leningrad
Not sure if I wrote about this a while back when I was thinking about it. Why I would even think to note such inconsequential details is a mystery, but then....that is the mystery....those details deflect me from thinking of something else. As I reading the information below, I was reminded of that memory detail. It was one day soon after Randy Cole and I had built a second story to a building we had constructed as some kind of clubhouse. I was covering the roof with tar and I got some of it on the knee of a brand new pair of Levi's. Not sure why I would remember that, but something about this makes me wonder about it. One possible reason is that my initials seem to be T.A.R.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_From_New_York
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The President takes his position behind a podium ready to give his speech. The camera broadcasts to the world and the President apologizes for not being able to make the historic meeting in person. However, he has something to share with everyone, in hopes that the great nations of the world can work together toward peace. He turns on the tape, which plays not a political speech, but the Glenn Miller Orchestra's In the Mood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Mood
In the Mood, a song popularized by the American bandleader Glenn Miller, was one of the best-known arrangements of the big band era. Miller's rendition topped the charts in 1940.
The song was composed by Joe Garland (Joseph C. Garland) and Andy Razaf. The main theme previously appeared under the title of "Tar Paper Stomp",
Plissken was listed in the wikipedia article about that July 1981 as a glider pilot. The space shuttle is essentialy a glider when it returns from orbit. I doubt I was the pilot of STS-1 but who knows. If they did create Top Gun purposely on my 10th birthday, I was obviously very enthusiastic about Navy aviation and/or had demonstrated by that age that I was a natural pilot.
