Issue #241 Why Some Astronauts Are Scared of Motorcycles | Space, Fabian, Col, Man, His

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Issue #241 Why Some Astronauts Are Scared of Motorcycles

Written by John Campbell
Thursday, 08 May 2008
“I was on a motorcycle once,” says Col. John Fabian, “it scared me to death.” The confession was especially ironic, coming from a man who was leaning against the fuselage of a Titan missile when I met him, during the height of Bike Week at Daytona Beach—where Pirelli had gathered press to introduce its Night Dragon rubber for performance cruisers. Though it’s parked in retirement in the Rocket Garden at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center near Daytona, the Titan seems still alive and steaming with all the wild, plasmatic, barely-harnessed energy of the Atomic Age. Flanked by Atlas and Redstone rockets, these are the Cold War warriors, the towering explosive silos, that first hurtled the American astronauts of the Mercury and Gemini programs into space and, like cutting torches, blew off the chains that once shackled man to earth. Col. Fabian is a former US air force pilot who flew 90 combat missions over southeast Asia. Selected as an astronaut candidate in 1978, he would go on to log some 316 off-earth hours, including two shuttle deployments, one with Sally Ride, who made history as the first American woman in space. A mission specialist, Col. Fabian was heavily involved with the development of the Canadian-built Remote Manipulator System—this is the Canadarm thing, of which many Canadians are openly proud because of the advances in robotic technology it represents. However, there may well be an equal number who are also secretly embarrassed because there’s a lingering feeling that the Canadarm is nothing more than a jumped-up cherry picker dragged into space with a Canadian flag painted on the side; a “good idea” that somehow caught on, cobbled together by a bunch of “The Boys” hunkered down over tubs of nuts and bolts, parts and tools, out there behind Possum Lodge. The Canadarm is a far cry from that, but you know how Canadians can be ... Like the Titan rocket, Col. Fabian is officially retired from NASA activities, but he manages to keep busy as the CEO of a Virginia-based company that consults to the aerospace industry. The retired astronaut was also making himself useful as STS-123, the Shuttle Endeavour, sat prepped on the pad at Kennedy Space Center, awaiting its Mar. 11, 2:30 a.m. launch toward a rendezvous with the International Space Station—an operation that had the luxury of a four-minute window, so I was told. A lanky, laconic native Texan, Col. Fabian said he had been scared off motorcycles at a tender age, when the champion of some dusty Texas backroad flat track circuit had taken him on a hair raising ride. It’s very difficult though, to reconcile the word “fear” with this man—once you’ve been strapped down to a 15-story tank carrying 530,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen, and pointed in the general direction of outer space with no scheduled stops, what’s left in life to fear? A bee sting? A bad haircut? A motorcycle ride? It all seems so unlikely. Especially given the near mythic dots connecting pilots to motorcycles. From the barnstormers touring the backroads of 1920s rural America as a flying circus; to the war-time flyboys who traded in their P-51 Mustangs for big Harleys and Indians when the fighting was done; to the Edwards Air Force base test pilots selected for the Mercury 7 program of the 1950s—a time and place dramatized in Tom Wolfe’s brilliant novel, The Right Stuff—there’s a common thread running through the history of aviation. Fliers have a long-storied ongoing love affair with motorcycles; the sensibilities of flight and motorized two-wheeled motion are linked spiritually and physically. But perhaps Col. Fabian’s initial conclusions about motorcycles were vindicated, his opinions deepened, in the summer of 1999. That was the year astronaut Pete Conrad was killed when he was ejected from the seat of his Harley-Davidson into a culvert on a winding stretch of road enroute to Monterey. Conrad was the third man on the moon, a 5’6” wild card who became infamous in NASA circles for letting out with an exuberant: “Whoopie! That may have been one small [step] for Neil, but that’s a long one for me,” when he set foot on the lunar surface in November of 1969. That a man who would willingly place all his faith in circuitry and the Mad Science of a hydrogen bomb, catch a ride into space with no way home in the event of system failure, faulty wiring or just plain bad luck, then stroll the surface of the moon like a squire in his garden 250,000 miles away, that this same man should die riding his motorcycle on a California highway has an eerie existential ring, I’ll grant John Fabian that. But I allowed the very warm and friendly old astronaut to just walk away without ever telling him what I thought about Possum Lodge, bee stings and barnstormers. And gee, that kind of sucks. I think he might have benefitted enormously. I actually do. Comments (0) Subscribe to this comment's feed Write comment You must be logged in to a comment. Please register if you do not have an account yet.