Taylor Wang was deeply despondent.
A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, orbiting Earth on board the Space Shuttle, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade as an American scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had come crashing down around him.
Wang was the principal investigator of an experiment called the Drop Dynamics Module, which aimed to uncover the fundamental physical behavior of liquid drops in microgravity. He had largely built the experiment, and he then effectively won a lottery ticket when NASA selected him to fly on the 17th flight of the Space Shuttle program, the STS-51-B mission. Wang, along with six other crew members, launched aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1985.
On the second day of the mission, Wang floated over to his experiment and sought to activate the Drop Dynamics Module. But it didn’t work. He asked the NASA flight controllers on the ground if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. Every crew member has a detailed timeline, with a long list of tasks during waking hours. The flight controllers were reluctant.
After initially being told no, Wang pressed a bit further. “Listen, I know my system very well,” he said. “Give me a shot.” Still, the flight controllers demurred. Wang grew desperate. So he said something that chilled the nerves of those in Houston watching over the safety of the crew and the Shuttle mission.
“Hey, if you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back,” Wang said.
Exactly what happened after that may never be known. But thanks to new reporting, we may finally have some answers. And though this is an old story, it still reverberates today, four decades on, with lasting consequences into the era of commercial spaceflight as more and more people fly into orbit.
Non-NASA astronauts
Space Shuttle missions fulfilled various tasks in the vehicle’s early years, such as deploying satellites, but one of its primary functions was conducting research in microgravity. Working with the European Space Agency, NASA developed and flew a pressurized module called Spacelab on some missions for this purpose.
The STS-51-B mission was the second time this Spacelab module flew, and it carried 15 different experiments ranging from astrophysics to the behavior of fluids in microgravity. Due to the nature of these specialized science experiments, NASA had started to fly “payload specialists” who were not designated to operate the Shuttle but rather complete the experiments on board.
With this mission, flying on board Challenger, the two highest priority experiments concerned materials science and fluid mechanics. Accordingly, the two payload specialists—Lodewijk van den Berg, a Dutch-born American chemical engineer, and Taylor Gun-Jin Wang, a Chinese-born American physicist—were chosen because of their expertise in these areas.
Wang was born in Shanghai in 1940 but moved to the United States in 1963 to study at the University of California, Los Angeles. He later earned a doctorate in low-temperature superfluid physics from UCLA and joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1972. He became a US citizen three years later. His research involved the behavior of droplets and other sphere-like objects in zero gravity, and he eventually flew on NASA’s zero-g flights. He developed the “Drop Dynamics Module” experiment to take this work to the next level in space.
Although he had never aspired to become an astronaut, when NASA began selecting a crew for the Spacelab mission in 1982, he applied. Wang was selected a year later and would become the first person of Chinese ethnicity to fly into space.
Payload specialists like van den Berg and Wang did not go through the same training as traditional NASA astronauts who underwent an ultra-competitive selection process.
“All received an abbreviated training program on basic Shuttle operations,” write the authors of the book on NASA’s payload specialist program, Come Fly With Us. “NASA performed medical and psychological evaluations on each candidate to ensure they were fit to fly into outer space, but nothing near the level of evaluation required by the NASA astronaut candidates.”
This could create something of a barrier between the mission crews and the payload specialists who were tacked on. Some of the traditional astronauts looked at the payload specialists as interlopers, not to be entirely trusted.
The Gold team
Space Shuttle Challenger launched for its weeklong mission on April 29, 1985. Because there was so much research to conduct inside Spacelab, the crew was broken into two groups, each operating a 12-hour shift. Wang was on the “Gold” team, led by the mission’s commander, Robert Overmyer, who was making his second and final flight. Mission specialists Don Lind and William Thornton joined him on the Gold team. Challenger’s pilot, Fred Gregory, led the “Silver” team along with mission specialist Norm Thagard and van den Berg.
Wang went to operate the Drop Dynamics Module on the second day, when the experiment failed. He later described his feelings at this moment for a Smithsonian book published in 2002 titled Space Shuttle, which featured lots of photos and snippets of interviews with astronauts from the first 20 years of the Shuttle program. Although Wang’s remarks in this book comprise only a few hundred words, they are by far his most extended public remarks on the incident.
“When I turned on my own instrument, it didn’t work,” Wang said. “You can imagine my panic. I had spent five years preparing for this one experiment. Not only that, I was the first person of Chinese descent to fly on the Shuttle, and the Chinese community had taken a great deal of interest. You have to understand the Asian culture. You don’t just represent yourself; you represent your family. The first thing you learn as a kid is to bring no shame to the family. So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, ‘What’s the matter with you? Can’t you even do an experiment right?’ I was really in a very desperate situation.”
It was at this point that Wang became severely depressed and started to haggle with flight controllers on the ground, making his comment about “not going back.”
So what happened after that?
Duct tape on the hatch
Unfortunately, since this mission flew four decades ago, a majority of the crew members have passed. The commander and leader of the Gold team, Overmyer, died in 1996. The other members of the Gold team, Thornton and Lind, died in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Only Wang, 83, remains alive. Ars tried to reach Wang in multiple ways to describe the incident, but all were unsuccessful.
Gregory, 83, did speak with Ars about it. After piloting the Shuttle in 1985, Gregory became the first African-American to command a spaceflight in 1989. Later, Gregory served as the deputy administrator and briefly administrator of NASA. He wanted me to know that Wang had been a “fantastic” person and a good crew member.
As a member of the Silver team, Gregory said he was asleep when Wang tried and failed to operate his experiment. However, he does have one distinct memory from the flight 39 years ago.
“I remember waking up at the beginning of a shift and seeing duct tape on the hatch,” Gregory told Ars. “I did not know what the origin of it was, and I didn’t pay any attention to it. I may have, but I don’t recall asking Overmyer about it.”
There were three flight directors during Challenger‘s time in orbit, each working an eight-hour shift. Only one of them, Bill Reeves, is still alive. In email correspondence, Reeves told me that he was not on console during the time that Wang grew deeply despondent.
“Overmyer told me about this after the flight in a personal conversation,” Reeves said. “All he said was how upset Wang was. Bob said he sat up most of the night trying to console Wang.”
What most likely happened
With Overmyer deceased and Wang unavailable, it’s impossible to know precisely what happened on board Challenger. But based on oblique comments from other Space Shuttle commanders in oral histories and other reporting I was able to do, we can make some reasonable inferences.
An important clue comes from the oral history of astronaut Henry Hartsfield, who commanded STS-61-A, another Spacelab mission that took flight just six months after Wang’s flight in 1985.
“Early on when we were flying payload specialists, we had one payload specialist that became obsessed with the hatch,” he said. “‘You mean all I got to do is turn that handle and the hatch opens and all the air goes out?’ It was kind of scary. Why did he keep asking about that?”
This almost certainly refers to Wang. In the depths of his depression, he told flight controllers he would not come back to Earth if he didn’t get a chance to fix his scientific instrument. He was awake for hours, incredibly upset, talking to Overmyer. After this, when Gregory and the Silver team came on their shift, there was duct tape on the Space Shuttle’s hatch.
As a result of Wang’s mental state, his questions about the hatch, and the general unease that some Shuttle commanders had toward payload specialists not being full members of a crew, it’s reasonable to conclude that Overmyer was concerned about Wang opening the hatch. This was relatively easy to do. After learning a hard lesson regarding cabin pressure and complicated locking mechanisms in the Apollo 1 fire, NASA had designed the Shuttle hatch to open outward. It was a relatively simple procedure, requiring little physical force, as the hatch opened into the vacuum of outer space. Overmyer was clearly concerned. So he put duct tape on the hatch as a stop-gap.
Even so, there would be fallout on the ground.
A commander’s lock
Overmyer’s experiences led to a lot of discussion in the astronaut office about what to do. They were not concerned about the career astronauts, but now they had some data to back up their unease with payload specialists. Wang’s situation had resolved itself, but what if something worse happened?
So in the immediate aftermath, someone at NASA, probably within the crew office, initiated the capability of a commander to lock the hatch if he or she felt uncomfortable about a crew member. It was used frequently in subsequent missions involving payload specialists.
John Fabian was a mission specialist on the very next flight after Wang’s flight, STS-51-G in June 1985. (Mission specialists, in contrast to payload specialists, are professional astronauts). The flight carried two payload specialists, a French fighter pilot, Patrick Baudry, and a Saudi prince, Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, the first Arab to fly into space.
“We put a lock on the door of the side hatch,” Fabian said. “It was installed when we got into orbit so that the door could not be opened from the inside and commit hara-kiri, kill the whole crew. That was not because of anybody we had on our flight but because of a concern about someone who had flown before 51-G.”
Hartsfield, who commanded a flight in October of that year, STS-61-A, said he also locked the hatch. And in November 1985, Brewster Shaw commanded STS-61-B, a mission that carried the first Mexican astronaut, payload specialist Rodolfo Neri Vela. The incident with Wang would have been fresh in Shaw’s mind.
“We didn’t know Rodolfo very well,” Shaw said in his oral history. He kind of showed up late in the process and wasn’t here all the time and stuff, so you didn’t really get to know him well. So I wasn’t too sure about his human reliability. I’m probably a paranoid kind of guy, but I didn’t know what he was going to do in orbit.”
So Shaw took the precautions available to him.
“When we got on orbit, I went down to the hatch on the side of the orbiter, and I padlocked the hatch control so that you could not open the hatch,” Shaw said. “I mean, on the orbiter on orbit you can go down there and you just flip this little thing and you crank that handle once, the hatch opens and all the air goes out and everybody goes out with it, just like that. And I thought to myself, ‘Jeez, I don’t know this guy very well. He might flip out or something.’ So I padlocked the hatch shut right after we got on orbit, and I didn’t take the padlock off until we were in de-orbit prep.”
Neri, according to Shaw, turned out to be a “great guy,” and the crew had a lot of fun on the mission.
“No recollection of any of this”
The padlock program was very hush-hush. It’s unclear how well-known it was outside the astronaut office at the time.
One long-time flight director, who served as lead flight director for more than half a dozen Space Shuttle missions and is typically candid with me, said, “I have absolutely no recollection of any of this. My sense is that the astronaut office damn sure didn’t want it to get out of the office.”
After the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986, the focus of the Shuttle program shifted somewhat, and NASA started flying fewer payload specialists. Those who flew came to be considered more a part of the crew and were met with less suspicion. According to some Space Shuttle astronauts, the lock was used less and less often. The final payload specialist to fly on the Shuttle was Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut. He died, of course, in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, when the vehicle broke up in the atmosphere during its return to Earth.
Although much of the concern for Shuttle commanders had come from flying non-professional astronauts, there was another incident later in the program with an all-professional crew that revived interest in the padlock program. It occurred during a 1999 flight. Because I have not been able to confirm the details with multiple sources, I won’t name the astronaut or the mission. But essentially, a multiple-time flier had a bad reaction to some medicine he took after the launch. This seriously affected his mental state, and the astronaut had to be physically restrained from taking drastic action, including opening the hatch.
Over the years, there has been some limited coverage of the commander’s lock program. Perhaps most notably, in July 1995, CBS Evening News broadcast a segment about the lock, featuring the only image of the padlock in place on the hatch I’ve ever seen. It did not name Taylor Wang, but it referred to his mission. The official NASA response in the story was that the lock was there to prevent an astronaut from inadvertently bumping into the hatch and opening it.
However, CBS’s Scott Pelley said that sources told the network that the lock was added “after NASA became worried about what would happen if an astronaut had a mental breakdown in space. It came up early in the Shuttle program when a civilian scientist flying on a one-time basis became despondent when his experiment failed. The hatch was viewed as vulnerable.”
Despite this report, the lock has almost never been confirmed publicly. I was only able to have frank discussions about its existence and purpose with astronauts I have known for a long time and who trust my reporting. It’s not difficult to imagine why. If you were flying on the Shuttle and saw the lock, how would you feel? A good crew is a well-bonded crew. The commander locking a hatch essentially sends a message to the others: “I don’t trust you to not kill us all in flight.”
That’s not conducive to building the trust essential in a tight crew.
Relevance today
This all may seem like a bit of historical trivia, but the issue lives on today. The Space Shuttle has been retired for 13 years, but the padlock remains in the fabric of US spaceflight with Crew Dragon. A commander’s lock is an option for NASA’s crews flying to the International Space Station on Crew Dragon, as well as private missions.
This is not a particularly pleasant issue to talk about, so NASA, SpaceX, and the people who fly on the vehicles generally don’t. But it does seem like something the space community should probably have a discussion about as access to space broadens. With Crew Dragon, SpaceX regularly sends civilians to the International Space Station and on free-flying missions. Most of these people have not been subjected to the rigorous psychological tests that Shuttle astronauts receive. Boeing’s Starliner, SpaceX’s Starship, and other vehicles will, in the not-too-distant future, only deepen the pool of orbital fliers. Both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic already fly people almost entirely without training on brief, suborbital hops.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The whole point of lower-cost access to space is that we’re going to have more people in space, doing cool things, and pushing out the frontier. But space is a harsh, incredibly forbidding domain. It can play with the mind.
I asked George Nield about this issue. For a decade, he was the associate administrator for Commercial Space Transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration. Additionally, in 2022, he flew a suborbital flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft. He noted that the problem is not limited to spaceflight, citing an incident involving Joseph David Emerson last year, in which the off-duty pilot attempted to shut down the engines on an Alaska Airlines plane. Emerson, who was sitting on the flight deck jump seat in the cockpit, attempted to grab and pull two red fire handles that would have activated the plane’s emergency fire suppression system and cut off fuel to its engines. He claimed to be having a panic attack.
That such incidents don’t happen more often in commercial aviation may give us some comfort, but in reality, there have been many attempts by passengers to open an emergency exit door in flight. (Fortunately, it’s almost impossible at cruising altitudes). And given that it has happened with two people out of the approximately 650 who have gone to space, it suggests the odds are non-negligible.
Nield concluded his note to me with a request. “Let me know,” he said, “if you have any thoughts on how to mitigate the risks.”
I wish I did.