by Mike Mullane
Upon our return to the crew quarters we were offered the opportunity to go to the beach house and visit the wives. I called Donna and we both agreed we didn’t want another beach good-bye. I could sense her complete exhaustion…mental and physical. I called my mom, the iron woman who had birthed six children and raised them with an invalid husband, and she was similarly incapacitated. The only silver lining to the scrub was that it reinforced my retirement decision. If stress was the killer the docs were saying it was, I was killing Donna, the kids, my mom, and myself with these launch attempts.
When the crew returned from the beach house, they found me in the conference room watching a movie. Pepe tilted his chair onto its back on the floor and lay in it to watch TV. “What the hell are you doing?” I was certain he had lost his mind.
“I’ve got to acclimate myself to lying in the orbiter. I was ready to die out there.”
“Pepe, you’re crazy. That’s like practicing getting kicked in the balls. You’ll never acclimate yourself.”
But Pepe was not dissuaded. He remained in the reclined position throughoutLawrence of Arabia. I don’t know how he did it. Only a gun to my head would have made me practice for tomorrow. I barely had the strength to lift a beer to my lips.
The next morning we relived it: Olan’s Cajun face at my door, faking a smile for the photographers, having my nuts squeezed in the LES pressure test, confronting my fears on the drive to the pad, getting a kiss and a glowing light stick from Jeannie, laughing at Pepe’s complaints, worrying about death, praying for life, and finally hearing, “Atlantis,the RTLS weather is no-go. We’re going to have to pull you out.” I didn’t even have the strength to swear. This time the launch director decided to slip the mission by forty-eight hours to give everybody time to rest. Our next try would be on February 28.
Back in the crew quarters the techs stripped me out of the LES. After grabbing two beers from the kitchen, I walked to the bathroom, shed my long johns (reeking of sweat and faintly of urine), unfastened my diaper, and stood at the mirror. The craters under my eyes could have hidden a moon buggy. I wondered what a decent night of chemical-free REM sleep would feel like. It had been so long I couldn’t imagine the experience. My neck was ringed red from the chafing of the LES neck dam. There were other suit tattoos: ruptured capillaries on the insides of my arms and bruises on my biceps from trying to move while the LES was pressurized. There were still multiple shaved and sandpaper-roughened hickeys on my chest from the EKG attachments applied during a prequarantine medical test. My thighs and calves had similar shaved and roughened patches of skin marking the attachment locations of sensors for a muscle-response test. The end of my penis was cherry red with what I could only hope was temporary diaper rash. Whatever it was, I wasn’t about to bring it to the attention of the flight surgeons. If I had a urinary tract infection, it would come along for the ride. I had invested far too much in this mission to be pulled from it now. I entered the shower, stood under the cascading hot water, and drank my beer.
By the time we completed our debriefings the sun had risen and J.O. suggested we meet our wives at the beach house. I called Donna and this time we agreed it would be fun to get together.
The five of us entered the beach house living area to find it strewn with clothing: shirts, shoes, socks, panty hose, bras. There was even a bra swinging from the end of a ceiling fan. It was obvious we had entered a joke in progress. Sure enough, when we walked into the bedroom we found the family escorts, Hoot Gibson and Mario Runco, lying shirtless on the bed. Crowded next to them were all the wives, clothed but for their underthings, pretending to beshocked at our appearance. Everyone laughed, something we all needed as much as a good night’s sleep.
Hoot teased us with the obvious point of the joke. “You guys are taking so long to get this mission going, your wives are developing some realneed issues.”
I threw it back in his face. “I’m not worried. You and Mario are navy officers. You have to be heterosexual to know what a woman needs. I’m surprised you guys aren’t in a bedroom by yourselves.”
Hoot and I had a well-deserved reputation for a disgusting synergy. Our exchanges devolved into more offensive comebacks and counter-comebacks until Donna finally hollered, “Enough! Will you guys ever grow up?” I had now heard that outburst from so many women so many times in my life, I thought it should be in Latin on the official shield of Planet Arrested Development—umquam grow idiotum.
The rest of the visit was relaxing. We had all been cured of the need to deliver a Bergman-Bogey good-bye at the water’s edge, so we just sat around, drank beer, and traded stories. Pepe told us of his agony during the wait on the pad. Dave Hilmers shot him a hypothetical question: “Pepe, if NASA needs someone to replace an MS on the next flight, would you volunteer?” Pepe instantly replied, “Absolutely.” His eagerness embodied the astronaut conundrum. Even as we waited on the pad, scared shitless and physically tortured, none of us could imagine not taking every offered mission.
When we returned to the crew quarters we were greeted by the local news showing a large, unmanned, French-built Ariane rocket blowing up shortly after liftoff from its South American pad. The story wouldn’t have been covered anywhere else in America, but, on Florida’s space coast, the competing French space program was news. The stations played the video again and again. There was no way Donna and the rest of the families could possibly miss it and I was certain the images of the flaming rocket falling into the sea would add to their anxiety. And that wasn’t the end of it. That evening one of the networks was airing a docudrama on theChallenger disaster. The advertisements for that show were in all the newspapers and magazines, and the network was constantly hyping it. The wives were going to have to be sedated to get them to the LCC roof. With J.O.’s illness, the two scrubs, the Ariane blowing up, and theChallenger movie, it was a good thing I didn’t believe in omens.
The evening of February 26 our crew flew to Houston for a refresher simulation. It had been so long since J.O. and John had practiced ascent emergencies, the mission trainers thought it would be a good idea to get them back in the JSC sim. I made the trip even though I had no duties associated with ascent. I just couldn’t face the thought of sitting around the crew quarters all night with nothing to do. I had already watched more movies in the past thirteen days of quarantine than I had watched in the past thirteen years. I couldn’t watch another. After landing at Ellington Field, I left the crew to their sim, drove home, watered the houseplants, and went running.
On the flight back to Florida I was stabbed with regret at my decision to leave NASA. The pain and fear that, yesterday, had provided validation for my retirement plans had been temporarily forgotten. Cocooned in the warm cockpit with the stars as a blanket, I wondered if I would ever find fulfillment outside of this business. There was an unknown scarier than space and I was fast approaching it…my post-MECO future.
This time I asked Jeannie to put light sticks over the single cue card Velcroed on the locker in front of me. The downstairs lighting was poor and I wanted the extra illumination to read the card. It outlined the procedures for a launchpad escape, for bailing out, and for a crash landing escape. I had every step committed to memory and didn’t need the card but it gave me something to read during the wait. I also asked her to put a light stick next to the altimeter in front of me. In a bailout scenario, after pulling the emergency cockpit depressurization handle, I would watch the altimeter until it indicated we were below fifty thousand feet. Then, I would blow the side hatch and deploy the bailout slide boom. I would be the first out…into the ink black of a North Atlantic winter night and all the perils that it embodied.
Jeannie’s face was beaded in sweat as she crawled over me to make my connections. Kevin Chilton, one of the ASPs, was the last to leave the cockpit. He pulled the pin that locked a safety cover over the cockpit depressurization and hatch jettison handles. Assuming we made orbit, I would reinsert the pin. He handed it to me. “Good luck, Mike.”
“Thanks, Chilly. See you at Edwards.”
I heard the hatch close, the mechanicalthunking noise carrying a note of finality. A few minutes later J.O. watched from his port-side window as the last pad workers hurried across the access arm and entered the elevator. “The close-out crew just left. We’re alone.” J.O.’s observation reminded us that we sat at ground zero. Everybody else was racing to get away from the shuttle kill zone.
For the ninth time in my life I waited for launch. I was certain there would be a tenth time, tomorrow. The KSC weather was bad. I could feel the vehicle shaking in the wind and J.O. and John reported heavy rains lashing their windows from passing squalls. And it wasn’t just the Florida weather that was a problem. Our two transatlantic abort sights—Zaragoza, Spain, and Morón, Spain (pronounced MORE-OWN)—also had weather issues. At T-9 the launch director held the count. God might have been punishing us for ignoring Dave’s request to turn off the Playboy Channel.
Pepe’s practice countdown in the briefing room chair had been useless in preparing him for another pad wait. It didn’t take more than thirty minutes before he was once again entertaining us with his complaints. He ended one session with “My organs are shoving my diaphragm into my throat.”
I replied, “You’re wearing a diaphragm?” Everyone laughed so hard the engineers in MCC probably sawAtlantis ’s vibrations in their accelerometer data. J.O. fell into a gagging wet cough. He was still not well, a fact that had made theHouston Chronicle. An unnamed source was quoted in that newspaper suggesting that J.O. was actually suffering from viral influenza. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that was the case, but I was glad he was soldiering on. The longer our delay, the greater the chances I would become infected. (I would fall ill a day after landing.) I seriously doubted NASA HQ would hold the launch for my recovery, or the recovery of any infected MS, for that matter. As CDR and PLT, J.O. and John Casper were relatively irreplaceable. But with three MSes trained on the payload, any one of us was expendable. Given HQ’s attention to the flight rate, I suspected management had already instructed JSC to have some MS substitutes standing by just in case. I prayed for a weather miracle.
Pepe outlasted me as the cockpit clown. He joked and complained without pause. Now he was reviewing all the movies we had watched during the past two weeks: “Lawrence of Arabia, The Great Escape, How the West Was Won, The Terminator, Predator, Alien, Top Gun…” We had seen more blood and guts than a meat packer. I resolved that the next movie I watched would beHeidi.
The T-9 minute hold dragged on…thirty minutes…an hour. Pepe gave us another item to consider. “I was just calculating…Since we started this never-go mission we’ve logged more than thirteen hours of on-the-back time. J.O. has even more time because he’s first in and last out. In fact, J.O., you’ve been on your back for five hours just on this countdown.”
“Thanks for cheering me up, Pepe.”
I didn’t have a body part that wasn’t complaining. To ease the pain in my back, I loosened my harness and arched my hips upward. The restored circulation was heaven-sent but I couldn’t hold the position for more than a moment. As my butt collapsed into the seat, a tide of cold urine squeezed from the diaper, climbed up my ass crack, and washed over my testicles. This was particularly disgusting knowing that, if we ever launched, I wouldn’t see a shower for five days. If I did this tomorrow, which seemed certain, I was going to take my chances with the condom UCD.
As the groans and moans ricocheted among us, Dave Hilmers broke into song, “When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad.” That threw me into the punch-drunk giggles again.
Pepe suggested a new song for Max-q (the astronaut band): “Holding at Nine and Hurting.” It would have been a hit. At one time or another most astronauts have been there.
Rain continued to fall at KSC and the TAL weather looked grim, but observers at both places predicted a brief moment of acceptable launch conditions. The chances those moments would coincide were slim, but, with our launch window nearing a close, the launch director decided to give it a shot. He released the clock and we counted to T-5 minutes and held there. The wives were on the LCC roof. No doubt the rain made it even more miserable for them.
The wait extended. Even Pepe couldn’t find anything more to say. The only sounds were the steady breath ofAtlantis ’s cooling system and the irritating high-pitched whine of our pressure suit fans. The latter gave me a headache on top of my other pains. I refused to look at my watch, certain the digits were changing in quarter time. If there had been a glimmer of hope we would actually launch, the wait wouldn’t have been so interminable. But we were all certain our investment in pain and adrenaline was going to be for naught. We would hold for the weather until the close of the launch window and then scrub. We would have to do it all again tomorrow.
I listened to the urgent voices of the launch controllers. Like us, they were exhausted and wanted to put the flight behind them and escape the inhuman sleep-work cycle. We were all gripped with a dangerous “launch fever,” a headlong rush to getAtlantis flying. The sane one among us was our launch director, Bob Sieck. Nobody was going to stampede him into a wrongheaded decision. As he did a final poll of his LCC team he was calm, deliberate. Mr. Rogers singing “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood” sounded manic compared with Bob’s measured voice. Everybody listening wanted to jump in and finish his sentences. He was the perfect man for one of the most stressful jobs within NASA…and another person I would remember forever.
He polled the STA weather pilot and we heard Mike Coats reply, “Go.” Next he polled the TAL weather pilot in Zaragoza, Spain, and got another go. There had been a blessed nexus of satisfactory weather conditions on both sides of the Atlantic. We were cleared to fly.
“Atlantis,we’ll be coming out of the count in a few moments. It’s been a real pleasure working with you guys. Good luck and godspeed.”
I was shocked. For hours I had been convinced we would scrub. Now Casper was going through the APU start procedures. The clock was running. God had smiled on us. It had to have been Dave Hilmers’s work. The rest of us reprobates didn’t warrant any breaks from the Almighty.
I cinched my harness. My fear, which had ebbed with my certain belief the launch would be canceled, now roared over me like an avalanche. My mouth was metallic with it. My heart ran away with it. My hands shook with it. The palsy was a first for me. It had to be the combined effects of being downstairs and suffering from last-mission syndrome. Now, I was glad to be out of sight. Everybody knew everybody else was terrified, but nobody wanted tosee their neighbor’s fear, and trembling hands were a sure sign of it.
At T-2 minutes I closed my visor and turned on my oxygen. Again, I could hear J.O. and Casper snorting Afrin before they dropped their faceplates.
J.O. gave me a count. “One minute, Mike.”
I squeaked out a “Roger.”
“Thirty seconds, go for auto-sequence start.”
“Fifteen seconds.”
“Ten seconds…go for main engine start.”
There was a heavy rumble followed by a 2-G slap. We were off. The rest of my life was just 510 seconds away.
Chapter 40
Last Orbits
At MECO I silently celebrated life. For the first time in what seemed an age, it occurred to me that I might live long enough to die a natural death.
We went to work on our mission activities, most of which I’m forbidden to describe. But the classified nature of both my DOD missions produced a mighty temptation for me. Riches and fame beyond anything any astronaut has ever achieved could be mine if I just told the world thetruth …that on these hush-hush missions we actually rendezvoused with aliens. Given the vast population of conspiracy theorists, my claims would not be questioned. “Of course the government is hiding contact with aliens under the guise of military space shuttle operations,” they would shout. I would be their hero for revealing what
they have long suspected. Book and movie deals would net me millions. I would just need a convincing sperm-extraction and anal-probe story for my Barbara Walters interview…and to be able to look pained and violated as I told it.
On one occasion since leaving NASA, I did publicly make the “alien rendezvous” claim. I did it at Pepe’s retirement ceremony. “Yes, we linked up with aliens,” I told that audience, “and then had sex with them. It wasn’t too bad after we got by the tentacles. Of course, Pepe, being a navy guy, picked the ugliest one.”
One unclassified experiment aboardAtlantis proved immensely entertaining—a human skull loaded with radiation dosimeters. After returning to Earth those dosimeters would yield an exact measure of how much radiation was penetrating the brains of astronauts.
To reduce the creepiness factor of the experiment, the investigators had used a plastic filling to give the head an approximation of a face. The result was far more menacing than plain bone would have been. The face was narrow, cadaverous, with two bolts at the back of the skull looking like horns. Satan himself was riding with us. During a break in our payload work, I floated into a sleep restraint and extended my arms through the armholes, then ducked my head into the bag. Pepe and Dave taped the skull on top of the restraint so it appeared our friend had a body. (Your tax dollars at work.) They silently floated the bag to the flight deck and maneuvered me behind John Casper, who was engaged at an instrument panel. When he turned to find the creature in his face with arms waving, it scared the bejesus out of him. Later, we clamped Satan on the toilet. No doubt my desecration of the poor anonymous soul who had volunteered his body (and skull) to science has earned me a few more millennia in hell’s fires.
With STS-36 I dodged the SAS bullet for the third time. Maybe, I thought, God had given me a free pass in space because I had vomited enough for ten men in the backseat of the F-4 during my early flying career. Whatever the reason, I was happy to stow my unused barf bag. John Casper looked as if he might need it, but maybe not for SAS. It could have been his meal of eggplant and tomatoes. Gag. The NASA dietician included it because John’s other meal choices (heavy on butter cookies, M&Ms, and chocolate pudding) would leave him short of magnesium. I would have rather chewed on a magnesium flare. John hadn’t eaten the entrails-looking dish, but just rehydrating it would have made me sick. Regardless of the cause, John was feeling poorly and called on Dave Hilmers to inject him with the antinausea drug Phenergan. NASA had all but given up on patches and pills to treat SAS and had converted to industrial-strength injectable drugs. I reminded John of the warning the potion carried, “Do not operate an automobile under the influence of this drug.” He replied, “Lucky for me it doesn’t say anything about operating a space shuttle.”