Excerpt…

The two men were veterans of military aviation programs and both had seen action in the Gulf.  Kenai wasn’t military but she had spent the last five years in rigorous training, including flying in the backseats of T-38s, training in vacuum chambers and sea survival, and she’d been CAPCOM on the last shuttle flight.  They’d all stood up under severe stress and performed, and performed well.  Rick, Mike, Kenai, Bill and Laurel had worked together, played together, partied together, and on occasion, mourned the loss of a comrade together.  They knew each other and they trusted each other not to screw the pooch in an emergency situation, of which there had to be six or eight on offer every second of any mission.

Now they were being asked to accommodate a stranger, an unknown, unschooled, untrained, three hundred and thirty miles up, for over two point one million miles, for seven days, one hour, six minutes and sixteen seconds, with nothing between them and vacuum but a thin metal shell.  It was an awfully long time, during which one error could put all their names on the Astronaut Memorial at the KSC Visitor Center.  A type A competitor like any other astronaut, it was not one of the honors to which Kenai had ever aspired.

“This is basically your NASA sales incentive,” Bill said.  “We’ll give you a seat on the shuttle if you hire us to launch your satellite.”

“Pretty much,” Rick said.  It wasn’t anything that hadn’t been done before, but no one liked it, least of all the astronauts.  It burned mission specialists in particular, because the line to get into space was already long enough, and to have someone unqualified, inexperienced, a joy rider for crissake to jump in ahead of them was almost unbearable.  A few couldn’t bear it and quit.  Everyone else stuck it out but none of them were happy about it.

And it was a mission commander’s nightmare.  “We’ll run him through shuttle emergency escape procedures, how to eat, sleep, use the toilet.”  Rick fixed them with a beady eye.  “But mostly we make it very, very clear that he doesn’t touch anything.  If he can be trained to take a shit without his ass touching the seat, do it.”

They finished their drinks and went home, not as light of heart as a newly-named Prime Crew ought to have been.

The next week Kenai and Bill were scheduled for one of the unending meet-and-greets that astronauts were assigned to around the country, to show the NASA flag to the various services and contractors that designed, built, maintained and manned the infrastructure that made shuttle operations possible, and to remind them of the real men and women flying the craft and operating the equipment the contractors built.  They strapped into a T-38, Bill on the stick, Kenai in the backseat, and took off for Miami and the US Coast Guard base there.

The Coast Guard was a substantial presence offshore during shuttle launches, deflecting clueless sailors, gaping rubberneckers and on occasion even alligator poachers from taking their boats in too close to the Cape during countdown and launch.  Rick’s first launch had been put on hold at T-minus thirty when a charter boat skipper in a thirty-five-foot Carolina Classic pretended to have lost power and was drifting ashore with the current, all the better for his four drunken clients to snap photos of themselves in front of the shuttle standing white and gleaming against the gantry.  At eight hundred dollars a day each they were probably expecting something other than being boarded by a Zodiac full of irritated Coasties, their skipper arrested and their boat commandeered, but that was what they got, and the shuttle raised ship after only a sixty-minute delay, which had to be some kind of record.  Rick told them that the astronauts on that mission had been of one mind when informed of the reason for the hold, to limber up the big gun on the foredeck of the cutter and blow the offending boat out of the water.

Dana sez–

I did my second ridealong with the US Coast Guard in 2007, on an Eastern Pacific (EPAC) patrol, seven weeks offshore of Central and South America doing drug interdiction and migrant mitigation. It was a Munro crew member who alerted me to the fact that the USCG ran offshore security for shuttle launches.

As with my 2004 Bering Sea ridealong, the price of passage was a daily blog for friends and families back on the beach. I have collected blog posts from both ridealongs in an ebook, On Patrol with the US Coast Guard.

Chatter On Patrol with the US Coast Guard Prepared for Rage us coast guard