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 |  | Reality Check: A Flight Controller Talks 'Cowboys'
By Stephanie Osborn
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 02:13 pm ET
11 August 2000
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A Payload Flight Controller Views Space Cowboys
A word of warning: If you have not yet seen Space Cowboys, STOP READING HERE. Go see it first, then read this. Bar none, it’s the best movie I’ve seen in a very long time. I don’t want to spoil it for you.
Oh, and don’t get me wrong. This is only one person’s non-official opinion. It’s just that, heck, working space shuttle flights is what I do for a living.
To look at me, most folks'd think I could barely remember the first space shuttle launch. Nope. I remember Apollo 11 . . . the Apollo fire . . . Ed White's spacewalk . . . JFK's goal of "putting a man on the moon before this decade is out." And I remember, above all, what the dream was about.
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Anybody besides me noticed that science fiction has changed, in those intervening decades? The original Star Trek series was a contemporary of the Apollo program. Remember the excitement? The sense of discovery, of imagination, of "we can go wherever our dreams take us?"
Now the Star Trek universe has potholes in spacetime from going over the same tired parts of the galaxy again and again, and the public has gotten blase about space travel. "What, another shuttle launch? Ho hum." Everyone's forgotten what’s come out of the space program -- the things surrounding us every day that wouldn’t be there without space exploration.
And they've forgotten the dream.
The dream endures
Or at least I thought so, until I saw Space Cowboys. In Space Cowboys, the dream is not merely alive, but glowing, in the hearts of Team Daedalus. I like Team Daedalus. A lot. Mostly because I see myself in them – or them in me. They think, feel, about space the way I do -- the way many flight controllers and astronauts do -- but seldom admit: a deep longing, a yearning to see what’s out there, to soar among the stars, to know what it’s like to truly fly.
Daedalus – the mythic Greek who dreamed of flying among the stars, and set about to accomplish that feat. Appropriate.
This movie made me uncomfortable at times; as a scientist and flight controller, it was occasionally entirely too real. Once or twice I think I forgot I wasn’t at console, staring at the downlink video on the big screen. The sets, the effects, the acting, were authentic. Sometimes I caught myself to place the real, familiar NASA person that each character became. To the cast and crew, (and I hope you see this), my compliments to you on your work, because you did a wonderful job.
Now, I do have to admit that there was artistic license taken on this movie. Nobody can be brought up to speed on shuttle ops in 30 days. Yeah, these guys were on the afterburner track, but 30 days? Uh-uh. In context, though, it works. I’ll give ‘em that. The movie’s whole timeframe was exaggeratedly compressed, but that’s typical of action films.
And the appropriate passage of time was there; it was simply ignored in favor of cutting to the chase.
Mr. O’Neill [ Donald Sutherland], don’t worry. Glasses for astronauts have been acceptable within the space shuttle program for some years now. False teeth? Um, that’s really a flight surgeon call, but I guess as long as you can keep ‘em in, it's all right by me.
Thank you, Tank [ James Garner] for [Alan] Sheppard’s Prayer. A delightful touch much appreciated by us controllers who pray it every time an orbiter is prepped for launch.
A Russian Cold War relic? With Skylab tech? Perfectly plausible. The KGB was very active on such matters. In fact, the Russian space shuttle was a smaller replica of our own, in a more recent timeframe. Nor do I have a problem with the "classified payload" that was onboard IKON, given the era. The radar activation was good. An orbital warhead platform such as IKON probably would react to a radar ping as a hostile incoming.
Reality checks
But please, guys, hot shot rocket jockeys or not, use the danged tethers on an EVA, ok? I never saw a single tether in evidence during egress. You really wanna give me heart failure?
Some folks have commented that having 3 EVA crewmen is a no-go. In a nominal situation, yes. But a manual grapple of a tumbling satellite by EVA astronauts is a nominal no-go too, and I’ve seen that happen. Off-noms require different tactics, and this whole movie mission was an off-nom.
Mr. I-Can-Do-It-Solo spacewalker [Loren Dean] ought to be one very dead astronaut, and deservedly so. A huge cable popping one’s space helmet at speed tends to cause a lot more grief than just a headache. With the amount of momentum it imparted to him, I don't know about that bungee bounce at the end of his tether, either. I’m thinking broken tether or suit rip, let alone whiplash.
So too, an umpty-zillion-pound satellite playing bumper cars with the orbiter tends to be a bad thing. She’s a tough bird, but we got open bay doors here, getting slammed by IKON – and they still closed, later in the movie? You warp those suckers, and they don’t close too well. If they don’t close completely, you have some seriously unstable aerodynamics on re-entry, and then the crew is literally in "the hot seat." I’d be kind of worried about stress on the windows, too. Popping a window in space is guaranteed to give you a bad day. But okay, I’ll suspend my disbelief to assume "my" orbiter can take whatever punishment IKON can dish out.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of landing the orbiter sans computers. It’s not supposed to be possible, but experienced test pilots are amazingly resourceful, even with a flying brick. (The X-15 had that description, too.)
What I have a problem with is this: they popped the hatch at altitude. (Yes, they followed proper bailout procedure.) So why didn’t the windows ice over? It’s a standard physical reaction to cabin depress. But of course CDR Corvin [ Clint Eastwood] has to be able to see the runway to land.
Death is a serious thing
Now for the hardest part of this commentary: PLT Hawkins’ [ Tommy Lee Jones] fate. In my job, loss of crew is about the single greatest catastrophe that can happen. And as a flight controller, the concept that we're going to lose someone horrifies me so much it's nearly unthinkable. Now add the fact that this mission has been set up so there is no other way to do the job but to sacrifice him -- a fact that would have made MSN MGR Gorman [James Cromwell] a very lonely man.
And Gorman wouldn't have waltzed out of the MCC (Mission Control Center), after espionage, compromising sensitive NASA code and deliberately jeopardizing crew safety. Walk out he may, but in the waiting arms of NASA security, FBI, Texas Rangers and any other law enforcement official onsite personnel could reach.
It didn’t help that I’ve met Mr. Jones a couple times -- that only made it more real to me, and not in the way you might think. These actors make you forget who they are in favor of the character, so to me, Hawk was a real astronaut. It was like losing a colleague. I cannot imagine what would be going through a commander’s mind just before pushing the ignite button on those engines, as Eastwood’s character did. I don’t want to. Wouldn’t want the job; wouldn’t want to live with the act.
Was that final quixotic maneuver doable? I suspect it could be, but it depends on the engines used for the boost and amount of fuel, which was glossed over. In any case, orbital mechanics would make it a bit more complex than "point and click and away Hawk goes to the moon."
But I’ll accept the concept, even though the execution was a bit subdued. I’d have liked to watch the nukes detonating, one by one, and that final air-to-ground call was a bit anticlimactic. Great job, Hawk.
I was physically sick by the time Daedalus landed (We lost one of the boys). But then, that final scene . . . debris, a discarded MMU, bootprints in the lunar soil; Hawk kicked back watching the Earth, in the same position we first saw him watching the Moon. He made it.
Still alive? I’d like to think so. Content at last, a real "space cowboy" leaning against his "saddle" staring into the starry heavens, watching the big bright orb above him. Choosing how to go out, in fulfillment of the dream. His dream. The modern Icarus, offspring of Daedalus.
Realistic? I don’t care. Romantic?
Well, even as I’m writing this, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Because, to a true space jock(ette), if your timeline’s up, there’s no better way to go.
Stephanie Osborn is a Payload Tactical Planner with Teledyne Brown Engineering, currently working on the International Space Station at Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL. She has worked in the space program in various capacities for over fifteen years, both as a payload flight controller and as a pre-mission analyst.
What do you think? Send your comments to the editor.
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