Each summer, we took the Empire State V to new ports, and immediately after I returned from each of those cruises I would then leave for my Navy cruise. I spent one summer doing a program called CORTRAMID (Career Orientation and Training for Midshipmen). We spent a week each in the surface, submarine, and aviation communities as well as a week with the Marine Corps. The idea was to give us some exposure to the different options for Navy service. With the Marine Corps, I observed explosives demonstrations and ran around in the woods with an M16 at night. With the aviators I flew in an E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, and with the Navy SEALs I got to do their grueling obstacle course. I spent three days on a submarine.
In my senior year I was named the battalion commander of my Navy ROTC unit, another leadership role. By that time, I was taking harder classes than ever, mostly electrical engineering. I now knew how to study and took pride in it, actually enjoyed it. I was learning circuit design, network analysis, and other advanced engineering courses. I would have liked to change my major to physics if that had been an option at Maritime. I’ve sometimes thought if I were ever to become a college professor, I would want to teach first-year physics or calculus. Those foundation classes are make-or-break for students, and I think it would be rewarding to give young people the keys to learning hard things that I had figured out for myself.
It was still my goal to become a Navy pilot, specifically to fly jets off an aircraft carrier. In college, I had been doing whatever I could to improve my chances, including caring for my vision. A lot of my friends who hoped to become pilots talked about how to maintain their vision, and we all became a bit obsessed. Every prospective pilot knew some poor bastard who had worked all his life toward becoming a Navy pilot only to be rejected for having vision slightly less than 20/20. I was concerned about eyestrain and made sure to always have a bright light to read by. In retrospect, there was probably nothing I could have done to have much effect.
Early in my senior year, I took a standardized test called the Aviation Qualification Test/Flight Aptitude Rating. The qualification test was something like an IQ test, and the flight aptitude part consisted of mechanically oriented puzzles and a visual logic section that showed illustrations of views of the horizon from a plane’s cockpit that we had to match with the correct airplane orientation.
I knew how important this test would be to my future, so I worked hard to prepare for it. There weren’t study guides, so I made my own, drawing pictures of airplanes and what the view would look like from the cockpit. The day of the exam, I left the classroom feeling like I had done as well as I possibly could. I wouldn’t know for weeks what my results were, and then it would be months after that before I would learn to what part of the Navy I would be assigned. Even if I did well, there was still no guarantee that I would be chosen for aviation, much less that I would go on to fly jets.
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ONE COLD DAY in January, my roommate George Lang and I were sitting in our room just after lunch, watching Star Trek on the tiny color box TV we kept next to the fish tank in our room. A news anchor broke into the show to report that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded seventy-three seconds after launch. We watched the shuttle blow up on the screen over and over, just after the ground gave the call “go at throttle up.” (At the time I had no idea what this phrase meant; much later I would learn to respond to it myself, confirming the communications between the ground and the shuttle.) It would be weeks after the accident before the theory emerged that the unusually cold weather in Florida had caused a rubber O-ring in one of the solid rocket boosters to fail.
“You still want to do it?” George asked me after a few hours of watching nonstop.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The shuttle,” George said. “You still want to fly on it?”
“Absolutely,” I said, and I meant it. My determination to fly difficult aircraft had only grown stronger as I had learned more about aviation, and the space shuttle was the most difficult aircraft (and spacecraft) of all. The Challenger disaster had made clear that spaceflight was dangerous, but I already knew that. I felt confident that NASA would find the cause of the explosion, that it would be fixed, and that the space shuttle would be a better vehicle as a result. It sounds strange, but seeing the risk involved only made the prospect of flying in space more appealing.
It wasn’t until years later that I understood that a management failure doomed Challenger as much as the O-ring failure. Engineers working on the solid rocket boosters had raised concerns multiple times about the performance of the O-rings in cold weather. In a teleconference the night before Challenger’s launch, they had desperately tried to talk NASA managers into delaying the mission until the weather got warmer. Those engineers’ recommendations were not only ignored, they were left out of reports sent to the higher-level managers who made the final decision about whether or not to launch. They knew nothing about the O-ring problems or the engineers’ warnings, and neither did the astronauts who were risking their lives. The presidential commission that investigated the disaster recommended fixes to the solid rocket boosters, but more important, they recommended broad changes to the decision-making process at NASA, recommendations that changed the culture at NASA—at least for a while.
Years later, one of the first briefings I got as a new astronaut was about the Challenger disaster. Hoot Gibson, who was in the same class as three of the Challenger crew, detailed exactly what had gone wrong that January day. He also told us what the crew likely experienced in the last minutes of their lives. He wanted us to understand the risks we would be running if we flew in space. We took his words seriously, but no one dropped out after that briefing.
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GRADUATING FROM MARITIME, in 1987, made me pause and reflect. My admission had been make-or-break for me. I would never forget that. What I had learned there—in the classroom, on the ship, from my peers, from my mentors—had been life changing. I was a completely different person from the confused kid who had entered through those gates four years earlier. I felt a debt of gratitude to the school for everything it had done for me, and I was nostalgic about leaving a place where I had so many fond memories. Over the years, I’ve tried to stay connected to the school, and in the time since I graduated their prestige has grown—when financial magazines rank colleges whose graduates have the highest salaries, SUNY Maritime is almost always up there with Harvard and MIT, sometimes at the very top.