John E. Blaha

John E. Blaha: The Pilot Who Changed Texas Law from Orbit

In November 1996 an American citizen was denied a vote in a presidential election on a technicality of scheduling: his mission had begun before the ballot was finalised and would not end until long after polling day. He was aboard the Russian space station Mir at the time. The following year the Texas legislature amended its election statutes so that it could never happen again — which is why, eight years later, Leroy Chiao was able to vote from the International Space Station. John Blaha did not get his ballot, but he got the law changed.

Norfolk to Purdue

He was born in San Antonio, Texas, on 26 August 1942 and graduated from Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1960. From there he went to the United States Air Force Academy, taking a bachelor's degree in engineering science in 1965, and then straight into an elite Air Force cooperative graduate programme at Purdue University, where he took a master's in astronautical engineering in 1966. Purdue notes that seven participants in that programme became astronauts — one of them Blaha's roommate, Roy Bridges Jr.

Three Hundred and Sixty-One Missions

He won his pilot's wings at Williams Air Force Base, Arizona, in 1967, and then flew 361 combat missions in Vietnam, in the F-4, the F-102, the F-106 and the A-37. The number is worth reading twice. It represents years of a young man being shot at, in four different types of aircraft, and it earned him two Distinguished Flying Crosses, eighteen Air Medals and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.

Survivors of that kind of tour who also happen to be aeronautical engineers tend to end up in one place, and he did. In 1971 he graduated from the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, where he flew the rocket-boosted NF-104 to an altitude of 104,400 feet — nearly twenty miles up, at the ragged edge where aerodynamics stops working and a wing becomes decorative. He stayed on as an instructor on the F-104 Starfighter.

Boscombe Down and the Pentagon

Between 1973 and 1976 he was seconded to Britain's Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment at Boscombe Down, flying the SEPECAT Jaguar, the Blackburn Buccaneer, the BAE Hawk and the Jet Provost — and collecting a British Air Force Cross for it.

Then came the least glamorous and possibly most consequential posting of his career: the Pentagon, as Assistant Chief of Staff for Studies and Analyses, where he presented the results of studies on the F-15 and F-16 to the Defense Department, the State Department and congressional staffs. By the end he had logged over 7,000 hours in thirty-four different aircraft types.

The Substitute

NASA selected him in May 1980. His first flight, as pilot of Discovery on STS-29 in March 1989, deployed a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite.

His second, eight months later, came to him for the saddest reason in the astronaut corps. S. David Griggs died in June 1989, and Blaha was moved onto the crew of STS-33 in his place — the first substitution into a flight crew since Apollo 13. Discovery launched on 23 November and landed at Edwards five days later.

Commander

STS-43, in August 1991, gave him Atlantis and his first command, deploying another relay satellite alongside a set of secondary experiments. Then, in October 1993, he commanded Columbia on STS-58, carrying Spacelab Life Sciences-2: fourteen days of biomedical research into what prolonged spaceflight does to bodies, conducted by a crew experimenting on themselves and on forty-eight rats. At 14 days and 12 minutes it was the longest Shuttle mission flown to that point, and NASA called it the most successful and efficient Spacelab flight ever flown.

Four Months on Mir

The last assignment was the strangest. In August 1994 Blaha went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey to learn Russian, and in January 1995 to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City. He launched on STS-79 on 16 September 1996 and transferred to Mir as Board Engineer 2, living and working with the Mir 22 crew for roughly four months on material science, fluid science and life science investigations. He came home aboard STS-81 on 22 January 1997.

From orbit that December he sent a satellite message to Purdue's graduating class, which included his daughter Carolyn. His five flights — six, if you count the Shuttle rides up and down separately, as Purdue does — total 161 days in space.

Why John Is Called a Genius

The claim here rests on craft, not on discovery, and the craft needs describing precisely. Blaha flew thirty-four types of aircraft for more than seven thousand hours, including 361 combat sorties and a rocket-assisted climb to 104,400 feet in an NF-104, then commanded spacecraft, then learned Russian in middle age and lived four months aboard a foreign space station. That is not a talent for one machine; it is an unusually elastic capacity to build accurate mental models of unfamiliar systems, fast, with the penalty for error being death.

The less visible half is engineering. Blaha led the design, development and integration of the Orbiter's head-up display, and he developed the contingency abort procedures meant to keep a crew alive if multiple main engines failed during ascent — sitting down with the worst case and working out what a pilot could actually do about it. He chaired NASA's Space Flight Safety Panel and sat on the Space Shuttle Improvement Panel. That is systems thinking done in advance, for people who will never know they were saved by it.

The counter-case is clear. He published no research and holds a master's rather than a doctorate; his scientific role on Mir and Spacelab was to execute investigations designed by others. Nothing carries his name except a minor planet, 22442 Blaha. No source consulted here calls him a genius, and the word his own institutions use is "pilot." If genius applies at all, it applies to a practical intelligence that operates at speed and under load — real, rare, and undervalued because it produces no papers.

San Antonio Again

He retired in September 1997 and went home to San Antonio to join the executive management team of USAA. In May 2008 he was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame.

The decorations run long: the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Meritorious Service Medals, eighteen Air Medals, the British Air Force Cross, Russia's Order of Friendship, two NASA Distinguished Service Medals, the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal and five Space Flight Medals. Purdue named him an Outstanding Aerospace Engineer, and *Countdown* magazine made him its Outstanding Astronaut of 1991. He has been grand marshal of two San Antonio parades — a fair summary of a life spent between the extreme edge of engineering and the ordinary town he came from.

Achievements

• Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Educated at U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, United States Air Force Academy and Purdue University
• Worked as military officer, astronaut and aircraft pilot