The strangest moments in space launch history

By Tariq Malik

updated 8:05 p.m. ET Oct. 27, 2009

At times, NASA's attempts to launch a new Ares I-X rocket Tuesday seemed surreal — with bad weather, a stuck sensor sock and a wayward cargo ship offshore appearing to conspire to prevent the booster's liftoff. But believe it or not, there have been stranger things to pop up in NASA's launch history.

There was an astronaut who peed in his spacesuit before liftoff — a seemingly inauspicious start to what became the first American manned spaceflight. Bats and vultures have besieged space shuttles at the launch pad, not to mention lightning, which tried and failed to tackle NASA's mightiest rocket.

NASA is hoping for better weather — and luck — on Wednesday morning, when it has another four-hour window to try and launch the $445 million Ares I-X rocket. The rocket launch is NASA's first suborbital test of the new Ares I booster to launch astronauts to space aboard its shuttle successor, the Orion craft.

The launch was delayed several times due to weather and some unexpected oddities like a stubborn sock-like cover that forced engineers into a tug-of-war battle with the Ares I-X until it finally came free. At one point, when weather finally cleared, an errant cargo ship strayed into the danger zone on the Eastern Range, a patch of restricted waters on the Atlantic Ocean over which rocket launches fly.

The Ares I-X delays were frustrating to say the least. But here's a look at some of the weirder moments, many from recent missions, in NASA's manned launch history:

No potty breaks
The pinnacle of manned space oddities may be one of the first. On May 5, 1962, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard — one of the original seven Mercury spaceflyers — was ready to become the first American in space. Clad in a bright silver spacesuit, he climbed into his capsule Freedom 7 and engineers bolted the hatch shut behind him. The launch was delayed over and over, and then he had to pee.

Shepard, who died in 1998 at age 74, related the experience in the book "Moonshot," which he wrote with fellow Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton.

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'I've got to pee. I've been in here forever," Shepard radioed launch control. "The gantry is still right here, so why don't you guys let me out of here for a quick stretch?''

But the answer was no. Shepard ultimately opted to urinate in his shiny spacesuit, but asked launch control to switch the power off to his medical sensors first. Astronauts can now add adult diapers to their spacesuits to avoid similar embarrassing situations. There is a Russian tradition among cosmonauts, however, to intentionally pee on the bus taking them to the Soyuz launch pad that dates back to the first-ever human space launch by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who launched a month earlier than Shepard.

A doomed, stowaway bat
More recently, a small bat seemingly tried to stow away on the space shuttle Discovery when it launched into space last March.

Cameras and an inspection team spotted the bat clinging to the side of Discovery's 15-story external tank as it was being fueled with propellant — super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Some experts thought the bat may have been frozen in place because of the cryogenic temperatures, but it changed position every now and then.

The bat was still hanging on for dear life when Discovery blasted off on March 15 of this year, and likely met its doom.

"Based on images and video, a wildlife expert who provides support to the center said the small creature was a free tail bat that likely had a broken left wing and some problem with its right shoulder or wrist," NASA officials said after the launch. "The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery's climb into orbit."

More bat weirdness: Riding aboard Discovery during the March launch was Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata on his second spaceflight. Another bat tried to stow away on his first shuttle launch in 1996, but flew away just before liftoff.

Lightning vs. Saturn V
There's good reasoning behind NASA's weather rules for launching spacecraft. No one wants to get hit by lightning, but that's what happened to the massive Saturn V rocket launching the Apollo 12 mission — the second manned moon landing — on Nov. 14, 1969. A bolt hit the rocket 36 seconds after liftoff, causing some tense moments.

"I don't know what happened here, we had everything in the world drop out," Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad radioed Mission Control. "I'm not sure we didn't get hit by lightning."

The bolt did not cause serious damage and Apollo 12 went on to make a successful, pinpoint landing on the moon near an old unmanned Surveyor probe.

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