“These things we do, that others may live.”
If you have ever watched a rocket or space shuttle launch in person from Kennedy Space Center or Cape Canaveral, Florida, you probably noticed one or two United States Air Force helicopters patrolling before and after liftoff (or, as the case may be, the scrub). Based out of Patrick Air Force Base, their role patrolling the skies of Florida’s “Space Coast” and the Eastern Range is critical to successful launches of Department of Defense, NASA, and commercial payloads to space, providing safety and security surveillance for every mission.
The 920th Rescue Wing is, as an Air Force Reserve Command combat-search-and-rescue unit, responsible for a variety of demanding missions and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice to perform some of the most highly specialized operations in the Air Force. Their elite team of pararescuemen, or “PJs,” are among the most highly trained emergency trauma specialists in the U.S. military. Elite graduates of the so-called “Superman School,” they are capable of performing life-saving missions anywhere in the world, at any time.
When a covert four-man Navy SEAL team was ambushed and surrounded in a Taliban counter attack in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan in the summer of 2005, the 920th was who Special Ops Command called to perform the rescue.
The 920th also provides search-and-rescue support for civilians at sea who are lost or in distress, as well as providing worldwide humanitarian and relief operations supporting rescue efforts in the aftermath of disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes.
With such expertise, it’s no surprise that the 920th has always been the primary rescue force serving as NASA’s “guardians of the astronauts.” Their relationship with the U.S. Space Program began in 1961, and they have been providing contingency response for a variety of emergencies that could potentially arise during every crewed or uncrewed space launch (or shuttle landing) ever since.
America’s human spaceflight program is currently in transition since the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle fleet in 2011. SpaceX and Boeing both hold multi-billion dollar Commercial Crew Program contracts to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA, but their spacecraft, the Crew Dragon and CST-100 Starliner, will not be ready to fly those missions until 2017.
In the meantime, NASA is entirely dependent on Russia to fly American astronauts to and from the $100 billion orbiting science outpost.
So the PJs themselves will not be providing astronaut guardian-angel rescue support for at least another couple years, but astronaut rescue training is already underway again, with NASA, the Air Force, Air Force Reserve, and Air National Guard having recently held one of their first astronaut rescue exercises of the Commercial Crew era off of Florida’s coast in March 2016. The operation required several aircraft and numerous communications links between a network of pilots, controllers and stand-in astronauts spread miles apart from each other, as they would be in the unlikely event that their spacecraft had to make an emergency escape from a failing rocket and splash down in the ocean.
Training at other locations has had a much tighter scope, such as astronauts practicing exiting the capsule inside a Crew Dragon mock-up at SpaceX headquarters in California. At NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia, Boeing dropped a Starliner test article into a giant pool to test their contingency landing systems, followed by a test with NASA engineers and Air Force pararescuers to perfect the work needed to climb aboard the spacecraft and stabilize it so astronauts could be safely rescued.
They are also equipped with an automatic flight control system, night vision, and a forward looking infrared system that greatly enhances night low-level operations and allows them to fly in virtually any weather, day or night. With the ability to perform mid-air refueling, flight crews can fly nonstop for up to 14 hours.
Preparing for launch
Most space launches have small “windows” to fly during every 24-hour period, but some launches have windows spanning several hours, while others last for only a second.
“A lot of times the small boats are just fishing and not monitoring their radios,” added Macrander. “So sometimes we have to come down there and hover pretty close to get their attention and let them know with hand gestures to get on the radio.”
On a 2012 assignment with the unit, I saw myself just how close they get to those small fishing boats not paying attention to their radios, even hovering within less than 100 feet of a boater who was sound asleep, using rotor noise and flashing bright spotlights on his boat to wake him up. (I can only imagine his thoughts waking up to a military Pave Hawk circling him in the middle of the night.)
Haston’s unique experience supporting launches is, as he puts it, “not the sort of thing you pick up in Air Force regulations,” but rather tricks of the trade, as I saw when I tagged up with Haston and his crew in 2012.
Haston offered me a pair of $10,000 night vision goggles to use on our flight, which amplified available light by up to 5,000 times onto a green phosphorous screen. There was no moon this night, but even 60 miles out over the ocean in the darkest black I have ever seen, the goggles illuminated everything. I could even see the ripple of waves on the ocean’s surface.
We took to the skies two hours before launch, heading up the coast of Brevard County towards Launch Complex 40, where a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket and Dragon capsule stood fully fueled. We hovered a short distance from the rocket to shoot photos from our unique point of view before heading out to sea. Our orders were to clear an area about 20 miles wide and 60 miles long around the launch site.
Last year, a Falcon-9 exploded at high altitude following liftoff from the Cape, so the 920th providing a larger box for newer launch vehicles, like the Falcon-9, proved to be a legitimate concern.
The night was fairly quiet, but it was interesting to come within a couple hundred feet of a Carnival cruise ship racing into Port Canaveral before the launch. The Pave Hawk circling overhead must have been a surprising sight for the passengers on board.
Lights go off in the Pave Hawk during night ops. Small fluorescent tubes referenced emergency exits, but these and the cockpit controls and displays — as well as the LCD screens on our cameras and cell phones — were the only lights we had. The pitch-black view 60 miles out over the Atlantic allowed the Milky Way to shine brightly in the sky, and the sound of our rotors with no visual of anything was very strange, even eerie.
We positioned ourselves just north of the VAB and hovered with a great view of Falcon-9 as I sat at the edge of our Pave Hawk, listening to the launch commentary on our headsets as the bright booster roared away from the Cape, accelerating quickly through the atmosphere before vanishing as it climbed above the Pave Hawk’s rotors and out of view.
Haston “tilted” our helo up so I could get in a few more shots before circling to position us for another view, but by that time the rocket was already gone and on the edge of space en route to the ISS.
Landing at Patrick was the end of my day, or night, depending on how you look at it. But for the 920th it was just the beginning, as they were getting ready to perform a search-and-rescue operation for a ship 1,200 miles off the coast of Florida in the area of Bermuda.
America’s space launch efforts supporting national security, science, exploration, and the furthering of technological advancement and knowledge depends, in part, on the 920th providing a safe and secure launch site for every mission, as well as search-and-rescue peace of mind for astronauts leaving the world, same as they have for more than 50 years.
And likely, for the next 50 years as well.