Riding Rockets

by Mike Mullane

  “Are you guys astronauts?” We were all wearing our blue flight suits with patches reading “NASA” and other patches with renditions of space shuttles. Then there were our gold navy and silver air force wings, our Mach 25 patches, and American flag patches. We were either astronauts or Epcot Disney characters. It must have been the blonde in her asking the question.

  Under my breath I whispered to Hoot, “I’ll be anything she wants me to be.” Hoot, no doubt, was thinking the same lecherous things I was thinking, but he played the gentleman and answered, “Yes.”

  “Have you been to the moon?”

  I whispered fiercely to Hoot, “Tell heryes !” But he stuck to the truth, damn him. Maybe she would have taken us home if he had lied.

  She began to walk down our ranks, smiling and asking questions. At any moment I expected her to say, “You mean you aren’t the famous STS-26 crew? How disappointing.” But she didn’t. She seemed pleased to meet us runner-ups.

  To my amazement I noticed the rest of the crew were shaking her hand! Even Hoot. He must have stroked out when she walked into the room. There’s no other way to explain his restraint.What a bunch of weak dicks, I thought. You shake Billy Joel’s hand. You shake Commissioner Rozelle’s hand. But you don’t shake Christie Brinkley’s hand.

  When she came to me, I embraced her. Her arms came around my back and echoed the hug. Afterward she didn’t even signal her bodyguard to stand between us (and no restraining order arrived later in the mail). I might have a medal I couldn’t talk about, but I sure as hell was going to tell every male in the astronaut office what it was like to hug Christie Brinkley. The others could tell them what her handshake was like.

  She remained to ask more questions while the game raged on behind us. Periodically we would hear waves of screams coming from the audience to signify some spectacular play, but with Christie in our company, who gave a shit? Finally, with a breezy wave and a promise, “See you at halftime,” she left the box. Donna smiled at me. “I guess you don’t want me to ever wash that flight suit again.” I laughed and kissed her. Billy Joel had a dream of a woman, but so did I.

  A short time later, while I was stretching my legs in the corridor behind the skybox, Billy stepped out for a cigarette break. We fell into conversation. I was struck by how nervous he seemed in this one-on-one situation. His eyes never held mine. It was as if I were talking with John Young or George Abbey. I asked him questions about composing music and he asked me questions about flying in space. I’m sure I was his inspiration for “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but he had to go and use Sally Ride’s name in the lyrics instead of Mike Mullane. I knew I should have written it down for him. I never asked him the one question I was burning to ask: “What’s it like to sleep with Christie Brinkley?” I would bet he’s been asked before.

  As the game approached halftime, our crew was escorted down to the field to await our cue. While idling we met Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, who were on deck for their performance, a celebration of the 1950s teenybopper Florida beach movies. I marveled at Annette. At forty-six, the mother of several children, she had a shape a woman twenty years younger would have envied. Later, when she was performing the beach blanket dance routines that made her famous, she moved like she was back in bobby socks. I was impressed.

  Christy Brinkley held true to her promise and approached us, this time to pose for photos. If she had known what degenerates Hoot, Shep, and I were she probably would have maced us. All three of us were praying she would experience the first Super Bowl halftime show wardrobe malfunction. But, alas, that didn’t happen. I made certain to stand next to her for our group photo. She put her arm around my waist, her hand accidentally slipping across my ass as she did so. I’m certain my hard body and Mel Gibson good looks broke up her marriage to Billy, but somehow the paparazzi never picked up on that.

  We were finally signaled to step onto a platform that had been towed onto the field. A narrator briefly traced the history of the space program while various space scenes played on the Diamond Vision. Our part in the program concluded with our introduction as the most recent space shuttle crew. We waved to the audience and we were done. Then, to my amazement, nearby fans leaned over the railing to hand us paper for our autographs and gave us business cards to send photos. Others shook our hands, flashed thumbs-up, and shouted, “Go NASA!” These weren’t space geeks asking for autographs. And it wasn’t the white collar crowd, either. This was the proletariat cheering us on. It gladdened me to see such enthusiasm among average Joes and Janes. ApparentlyChallenger hadn’t diminished the public’s support of the space program, as many of us had feared it would.

  That evening, the NFL hosted another open-seating buffet supper for its multitude of guests. Having been burned once, I decided to be very selective in finding a tablemate. Luck was with me. I noticed Annette Funicello and her husband were sitting at an otherwise empty table and steered for their company. I introduced Donna and we sat down for a very pleasant dinner. Annette was delightful. I pried stories out of her about her Mouseketeer days, including how she had been forbidden by Disney to wear a two-piece swimsuit in the movies and how she had received thousands of engagement rings through the mail from “love-struck teenage boys.” I wanted to tell her none of those boys had been love-struck. Like me, they had all beenstruck by the topography of her sweater. But I knew if I offered that opinion I would have been struck by Donna.

  Later, as Donna and I walked back to our hotel, she asked me which of the two celebrity women I had met that day, Christie Brinkley or Annette Funicello, was most captivating. Without hesitation I replied, “Annette.”

  Donna was surprised. “I thought for sure you would say Christie Brinkley. She’s so much younger and so beautiful.”

  “Yeah, that she is. But at dinner tonight I kept thinking of all those times as a teenage boy I had watched Annette on the Mouseketeer TV program while fantasizing what was under the A and the E letters on her chest. And there she was, thirty years later, sitting right across the table from me and I was still fantasizing.”

  Donna laughed and offered up the familiar refrain, “Will you ever grow up?”

  Chapter 37

  Widows

  After returning from Miami I fell into the standard postflight depression every astronaut experiences. As Bob Overmyer once said, “Being an astronaut is a ride on the world’s biggest emotional roller-coaster. One day you’re in orbit and talking to presidents, the next day you don’t even have a reserved parking place.” I was way down in the don’t-have-a-parking-place dip. I felt certain it would be several years before I would have any shot at another flight. I was at the end of a long line. There were a hundred astronauts in the office. While I waited I would be assigned to one of the supporting roles of the business: working as a CAPCOM in MCC, evaluating software in SAIL, supporting payload development, or otherwise involved in another support function. While I appreciated the importance of the work, it was mundane compared with the exciting world in which mission-assigned crews lived. I had twice been a resident of that world and I knew. I didn’t want to fly a desk. The wordretirement was frequently on my mind. I knew Donna would welcome a decision to leave Houston. Every trip to the LCC roof was killing her. But, like the good Catholic wife she was, she would never put her feelings first. It would have to be my decision. Other TFNGs had already made theirs. Jim van Hoften, Pinky Nelson, Sally Ride, Dale Gardner, and Rick Hauck had all announced their intention to leave NASA, or had already done so. Unlike some of them, I didn’t have the offer of a high-paying civilian job setting a deadline. I had done no job search. I had no plans for a next life whenever it started, other than it would start in Albuquerque. Donna’s dad had passed away and left her the home in which she had grown up. That home and the Rocky Mountain West were magnets drawing us back.

  Though there was no job to force a retirement decision, there were other factors pointing me to the NASA exit sign. NASA management was still an issue. After Abbey’s depart
ure, Don Puddy had been assigned to fill the FCOD position, an announcement that had been greeted in the astronaut office with stunned silence. Like Abbey, Don had gotten his start at NASA as an MCC controller in the Apollo program and ultimately served as a flight director forApollo 16. He also served as a flight director for all three Skylab missions and the Apollo-Soyuz mission, and he was the reentry flight director for STS-1. Don was an exceptionally talented engineer and manager. But he wasn’t a pilot. No matter how disliked Abbey may have been, we had all appreciated his four thousand hours of cockpit time. He had a personal appreciation of the issues of high-performance flight. We worried Puddy’s lack of flying experience would seriously hobble him in his ability to handle astronaut concerns about shuttle nose-wheel steering, brakes, runway barriers, drag chutes, auto-land, and the many other pilot-specific issues surrounding shuttle operations. If there was ever a position that needed to be filled by an astronaut, it was chief of flight crew operations. Don Puddy’s appointment made us suspicious that NASA’s senior leadership still didn’t want to deal directly with astronauts. Dick Covey told us a story that supported those suspicions. He had been in a meeting with Aaron Cohen, the JSC director, in which Cohen had polled his senior staff on whether or not the FCOD position should be filled by an astronaut, and the unanimous answer had been yes. The fact that an astronaut had not been assigned was proof to us that HQ had overruled Cohen. Our discontent with Puddy’s assignment was so widely known that a week after the announcement, Aaron Cohen took the unprecedented step of coming to the astronaut office to curtly tell us the decision had been entirely his, without any HQ input. Nobody believed it. He then went on to list Puddy’s attributes as a great manager, something that nobody was questioning. Puddy was exceptional. He just wasn’t the best man for the job. An astronaut was.

  I was tired of the us versus them.Can’t we all just get along? The frustrations were a constant topic at the coffeepot and over ’38 intercoms. When a news article appeared on the B-board about NASA Administrator James Fletcher’s planned departure at the end of President Reagan’s second term, an astronaut graffitied it with the commentTwo years too late.

  While Puddy’s selection was a disappointment to astronauts, he instituted one critically important change—empowerment of the position of chief of astronauts. Shortly into Puddy’s tenure, Dan Brandenstein unequivocally informed us that all flight assignments would originate with him and would then be successively approved or vetoed by Puddy, the JSC Director, Dick Truly, and the NASA administrator. Amazing! Someone in an astronaut leadership position was (gasp)…communicating with the astronaut corps! I was certain that the moon was in the Seventh House, Jupiter was aligned with Mars, and winged-swine were in the JSC treetops. If Abbey and Young had been present, they might have fainted. It had taken eleven freakin’ years to hear this career-essential information—something John and George should have given us on day one.

  Regardless of Dan’s welcome leadership, there were other concerns. I could invest a couple years of my life working toward a third flight, only to have the rug pulled out from under me when a schedule change canceled my mission or another shuttle disaster interrupted the program or my health became an issue. In my last physical exam the cardiologist had seen an anomalous blip on the EKG traces. “It’s no big deal, Mike. I’m not going to require you to fly on a waiver.” But what if the blip became something serious enough to ground me?

  I also considered what type of mission I might draw. I craved a spacewalk, but so did every other MS. Instead of an EVA, I might find myself on a Spacelab mission butchering mice and cleaning shit from monkey cages. The thought of waiting around a couple years only to end up as a space zoo janitor wasn’t appealing.

  And then there was the toll my career was taking on Donna. Though she wasn’t about to use it against me, I was enough of a husband to at least think about it. And I was still learning about that burden. At a party I overheard a TFNG wife comment about the unaccompanied status of theChallenger widows. “There aren’t a lot of men who would feel comfortable stepping into a dead astronaut’s shoes.” The observation hit me like a fist. I had never considered just how different the burdens of anastronaut widow were. I knew men. There weren’t a lot of us capable of stepping into the shadow of a national hero—sure to wilt more than just an ego. Years later, at an astronaut reunion party, a TFNG widow told me, “I’ve dated, but nothing ever really develops.” Men just couldn’t deal with her deceased husband’s astronaut title, she explained.

  The unknowns, the fear, the burden on the family…they were all pointing to the NASA JSC front gate—time to drive out of it forever. I was within days of telling Brandenstein of my decision when the phone rang. It was Don Puddy. I was being assigned to another DOD mission, STS-36, only a year away. My sentence as an unassigned astronaut had lasted a month.

  Puddy’s call put me on a 6-G pullout from the bottom loop of the astronaut roller coaster. I now soared skyward. Every doubt, every fear about staying at NASA was gone. Within a year, I would once again be Prime Crew. When I told Donna the news, she smiled, but her eyes said volumes more. My announcement gut-shot her. I knew she wanted out. But she took it like a loyal soldier. She would be there for me no matter what.

  Only a single aspect of STS-36 would ultimately be declassified, our orbit inclination.Atlantis would carry us into an orbit tilted 62 degrees to the equator, the highest inclined orbit ever flown by humans (it still remains the record). This wasn’t the polar orbit planned for STS-62A (that would have been nearly a 90-degree inclination), but it meant we would get a view of more of the Earth’s surface than any astronauts in history. Our orbit would almost reach the Arctic and Antarctic circles.

  I would be one of two TFNGs on the mission. The other, J. O. Creighton (owner of theSin Ship ski boat and Corvette my children found so alluring) would be the mission CDR. Like Hoot, J.O. was an exceptional pilot and leader. John Casper (class of 1984) would be the PLT. The other two MSes on the mission would be Dave Hilmers (class of 1980) and Pierre Thuot (class of 1985). In spite of his wimpy-sounding French name, Pierre was all-American. His astronaut nickname was Pepe.

  Because our crew was at the back of the training line, Dave Hilmers and I had time to serve as the family escorts for STS-30. For the first time in my career, I was now the potential “escort into widowhood.” The assignment allowed me another glimpse into the world of the astronaut spouse. At one of the beach house gatherings, Kirby Thagard broke into tears as she told the others that June Scobee had called to wish them all good luck. Just the name of aChallenger widow was enough to sheen the eyes of many of the women…at least when their own husbands were hours from launch.

  Our days in Florida with the families were pleasant. Unlike some spouses who had earned reputations for treating the family escorts as personal butlers, the STS-30 wives were easy to work with. Because the mission CDR, Dave Walker, and one of the MSes, Mary Cleave, were single, there were only three spouses in our care: Kirby Thagard, Mary Jo Grabe, and Dee Lee. They adopted Dave and me into their extended families and we were guests at their numerous parties and other functions.

  The crew was also a pleasure to work with. Mary Cleave was great fun. Now forty-two years old, she had a name tag on her flight suit reading,Mary Cleave—PMS Princess. She was another woman who wore the feminist mantle very lightly. When NASA HQ received a complaint from the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus about photos of Mary preparing a shuttle meal during her first flight (while the men were photographed doing technical work), Mary had laughed it off, saying, “I do shuttle windows and toilets, too.” When the STS-30 mission slipped six days and the crew grew bored with TV, she requested a list of movies from a Cocoa Beach video-rental business and asked an astronaut to pick up her selections. As gags for the men on the crew, her choices includedHollywood Chain Saw Hookers andAll Star Topless Arm Wrestling.

  On the morning of STS-30’s second launch attempt, May 4, 1989, Dave and I met with astronauts Br
yan O’Connor and Greg Harbaugh. Bryan and Greg were at KSC supporting the mission and would also be on the LCC roof during the launch and available to help with the families ifAtlantis was lost. Over breakfast the four of us reviewed NASA’s contingency procedures: who would stand next to which family on the LCC roof, where the families would be temporarily gathered in the event of disaster, who would drive them to the KSC landing strip for their plane rides back to Houston. The wives had already been told to have their bags packed and ready to go before they were picked up for the trip to the LCC. This arrangement ensured they would not have to return to their condos and into a press feeding frenzy if disaster struck. A NASA official could retrieve the packed bags and bring them to the families at the KSC landing strip. But the procedure also meant the wives would have to unpack if the launch was scrubbed, and many wives had gone through the pack/unpack cycle multiple times for that reason. It was a pain but everybody understood the need.

  Our breakfast table talk was devoid of emotion. Though we were planning our response to the death of friends and the widowing of their wives, our conversation was clinical and detached. We could have been talking about the logistics of a fishing trip. A review of the family escort procedures was just one more thing among thousands that had to be done as part of a shuttle launch. As I sipped my coffee, I thought of Donna’s pre–STS-41D observation. It is, indeed, a strange business that plans so thoroughly for helping a woman into widowhood.

  AsAtlantis came out of the T-9 minute hold, Dave and I escorted the families from an LCC office to the roof. In the hallway we passed drawings done by the children of astronauts from prior missions. To keep the youngest kids of the families entertained during the interminable wait of a countdown, the LCC team provided poster board on which the children were encouraged to draw. After each mission that poster board was framed and hung in the hallway. The drawings served as another “widows and orphans” message for the team, a reminder of what was at stake.