By Retired US Navy Medical Corps Commander, Jay Phelan
February 1, 2003 9AM EST:
It’s a beautiful morning at the Kennedy Space Center, and I’m standing next to an Air Force HH-60G Pave Hawk rescue helicopter listening for the sonic booms associated with the landing of Space Shuttle Columbia. Seconds pass, then a full minute, but no sonic booms. Shuttle landings are never late, certainly not by a full minute. What’s going on? My skin began to crawl.
After serving in the Navy as a flight surgeon, then as an otolaryngologist, I left active duty and spent 15 years in private practice. One day, I got a call from the Commanding Officer of the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute in Pensacola, who offered me the job of heading his ENT department. I decided pretty quickly that it could be my dream job. I wasn’t wrong.
As a Reservist for two years before returning to the Navy, I had completed my two-week annual training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. When my friends at NASA learned that I was to be an active duty again, they insisted I take the Space Operations Medical Support Training Course to support shuttle launches and landings as a helicopter rescue “Air Doc.” I took the course in the summer of 1993, and almost immediately, I was scheduled to support a launch.
Every year, NASA would hold a shuttle “contingency” exercise. In March of 1999, I took part in a rare exercise at Kennedy Space Center and Patrick Air Force Base that simulated a shuttle crash-landing. One of the volunteer patient-astronauts was Laurel Clark, a friend and flight surgeon colleague.
Because she was supposed to be unconscious, she couldn’t answer questions, so my Air Force Pararescue colleague and I proceeded through a physical exam. Laurel turned over flip cards periodically to communicate. The cards indicated that her blood pressure was slowly dropping. I had no idea why, as there were no simulated injuries. In just a few minutes, the final flip card stated that she had died. Ohhh damn.
We’d failed the exercise, but I needed to know what her injuries were, so I caught her in the hangar later on and asked what happened. She replied, “You let me die!” The “cause of death” was internal blood loss due to a severe pelvic fracture. After mulling that over for a few seconds, and cursing the flip cards, I finally said, “Don’t worry … if the real thing happens, I won’t let you die.”
In 2000, she and Dave Brown, another flight surgeon friend and colleague, were assigned their first mission, aboard Shuttle Columbia in early 2003. I told them that I would be Air Doc 1 for both their launch and landing, and I’d be watching out for them. The next time I saw them was January 16th, two miles from the launch pad. They were sitting in Columbia awaiting the countdown, and I was near my helicopter awaiting the launch.
The launch, always supremely dramatic, went off without a hitch, and after two weeks, I was once again at Kennedy Space Center, awaiting my colleagues. I was listening for the double sonic boom, like two rifle shots in quick succession. But no boom. It took me no time at all to feel alarm, but no one else seemed to sense that things might be amiss. One said, “Geez, doc, it’s only a little late … relax!”
I had my radio scanner tuned to a ham frequency that I knew should be broadcasting all shuttle-to-ground transmissions. It was ominously silent. I began scanning different Space Center frequencies, and suddenly I heard, “They’ve had no comm or tracking data FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES!” I didn’t need to hear more. Columbia would not be coming into view.
For the next two hours, the crews of all four helicopters sat silently in the back room of the Landing Aids Building watching CNN. Lumps in throats and tears on cheeks all around. The real thing had happened. I felt totally helpless and totally crushed. And unable to save Laurel as I had promised.
Jay Phelan is the brother of WestView’s Stephanie Phelan. He is now retired but is still a consultant to NASA. He also lectures on Aerospace Otolaryngology once a year to current and future aerospace medicine physicians at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He just can’t let it go!
