by Mike Mullane
Donna was the other great dream-maker in my life. She never wavered in her support…ever…even though the journey had been difficult and terrifying. She assumed the role of single parent to our three children to give me the focus I needed for the journey. She waited for me through a war. She buried friends and consoled their widows and children. She came to accept my limitations as a husband—my sometimes blind selfishness for the prize. She endured the terror of nine space shuttle countdowns, six beach house good-byes, six walks to the LCC roof, an engine start abort, and three launches. Throughout my journey she was my shadow…always there next to me.
I thought of the NASA team upon whose shoulders I had been lifted into space. While I had serious issues with some of NASA’s management, I had only the greatest respect and admiration for the legions who formed the NASA/contractor/government team…the schedulers, trainers, MCC team members, the USAF and other government personnel associated with my two DOD missions, the Ellington Field flight ops personnel, the admin staff, the flight surgeons, the suit techs, the LCC teams, and thousands of others.
I considered how my NASA experience had changed me. I walked into JSC in 1978 as a cocky military aviator and combat veteran, secure in my superiority over the civilians. But watching Pinky Nelson steer his jet pack across the abyss of space toward the malfunctioning Solar Max satellite humbled me. Hearing Steve Hawley joke in the terrifying first moments of our STS-41D abort, “I thought we’d be higher when the engines quit,” was another lesson. I learned that the post-docs and other civilians had skill and courage in spades, and I admired and respected them all.
By far, the greatest personal change my NASA experience had wrought was in my perception of women. I learned that they are real people with dreams and ambitions and only need the opportunity to prove themselves. And the TFNG women did. Watching a nine-month-pregnant Rhea Seddon fly the SAIL simulator to multiple landings was a lesson in their competence. Watching video downlink of her attempting an unplanned and dangerous robot arm operation to activate a malfunctioning satellite was a lesson. Watching Judy perform her STS-41D duties was a lesson. Knowing Judy might have been the one to turn on Mike Smith’s PEAP in the hell that wasChallenger was a lesson. Through their frequent displays of professionalism, skill, and bravery, the TFNG females took Mike Mullane back to school and changed him.
It was impossible to sit on this beach and not think aboutChallenger. The ocean that churned at my feet was more of a grave for that crew than anything in Arlington Cemetery. Why them and not me? As January 28, 1986, receded into the past, that question loomed larger and larger in my consciousness. There had been twenty TFNGs with the identical title—mission specialist. One in seven of us had died. It could have been any of us aboardChallenger. Why wasn’t it the atoms of my body rolling in the beach house surf? It was the unanswerable question survivors everywhere asked…the soldier who sees the friend at his side take a bullet, the firefighter who watches the house collapse on his team, the passenger who missed her connection to the fatal flight. For some reason, known only to God, we had all been given a second life.
And where would I journey on the ticket of my second life? I still didn’t know. I had yet to do a job search. I just didn’t have a passion for anything in the civilian world. I was facing what every retiring astronaut faces—the reality we had reached the pinnacle of our lives. We groped above us searching for the next rung on the ladder of life and it just wasn’t there. What does a person do for an encore after riding a rocket? Whatever it was, we would have to climbdown that ladder to reach it. No matter how much money we made or what fame we acquired in our new lives, we would never again be Prime Crew. We would never again feel the rumble of engine start or the onset of Gs or watch the black of space race into our faces. We were forever earthlings now. It was a sobering thought, but I knew I would adjust. I would find a challenge somewhere. If there was one thing my mom and dad had taught me, there were plenty of horizons on the Earth I had yet to look over.
I swallowed the last of my beer and rose from the sand. As I turned, my eyes were seized byColumbia’s xenon halo. Over the black silhouettes of the palmettos, the salt-laden air glowed white with it. She awaited her Prime Crew. I envied the hell out of them.
Epilogue
In my post-MECO life I found an unlikely horizon to explore—I became a professional speaker. Given my early adventures at the podiums of America, that might seem like a disaster waiting to happen but I’ve learned to corral my Planet AD tendencies and fake normalcy. With a microphone in my hand I am a model of political correctness. Hoot would never recognize me. I deliver inspiring, motivational, and humorous programs on the subjects of teamwork and leadership. I learned the good, the bad, and the ugly about those topics while at NASA.
This book has been another horizon I had to sail over. There has always been a secret chamber in my soul where the flame of literary creation has flickered. In high school I loved it when teachers assigned term papers, a fact I kept quiet, knowing my classmates would have beaten me to death had they known. Sometimes my prose would be seriously misplaced, as when I devoted a paragraph in my science fair report to the beautiful sunset that had been a backdrop to one of my homemade rocket launches. I was teased by my fellow junior scientists for that. Of course, ego played its part in my literary quest—I wanted to tellmy story. But I had noble objectives, too. I wanted the world to understand the joy and terror that astronauts and our spouses experience. I know other astronaut authors have attempted to convey the same thing and, no doubt, many will try in the future. This has been my best shot at it. Finally, I wanted to tell the world a little about my mom and dad. Heroes like them are rare and they deserve a measure of immortality between the covers of a book.
My mom would not live to see herself in these pages. On Memorial Day 2004, she was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and died on July 4 at age seventy-nine. I was the one who told her of the doctor’s prognosis—that she had just a few weeks to live. She took the news with her characteristic courage. She didn’t utter a word of dismay or shed a single tear. She merely shrugged her shoulders, as if I had just told her she had nothing more serious than a stomach virus, and said, “Well, I’ve had a great life.” This from a woman who endured the terror of her husband serving in WWII, who raised six children with that same man in a wheelchair, and who was further cheated when she was widowed at age sixty-four. It hardly sounded like a “great life.” But my mom always saw the glass as half full and smiled and laughed her way through life until her last conscious moment. As one of my brothers said, “Mom set the bar damned high on living and dying.” That she did. As I sat with her in the ebbing days of her life, random images from that life flashed in my brain. I saw her squatting next to a campfire, cooking pancakes and bacon. I saw her pouring my dad’s urine from a milk carton into a motel toilet. I saw her handing over the stainless-steel extension tube of her vacuum cleaner so I could fashion it into a rocket. I saw her “mooning” the camera during her wait for the launch of STS-36. She had sewn the mission number on the rear of her “good luck” green briefs and, at the beach house, had bent over to show the unique cheerleading sign on the billboard of her sixty-four-year-old backside.
With me and two of my brothers holding her hands she died at home and was laid to rest in the same grave as my father at the Veterans Cemetery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I placed another set of my shuttle mission decals on the new grave marker. They were Mom’s missions, too.
As I write these words, only five TFNGs remain on active duty with NASA: Fred Gregory, Steve Hawley, Shannon Lucid, Anna Fisher, and Steve Nagel. All of them are in administrative positions and will probably never fly in space again. The space history books are closed on the TFNGs. But our class wrote some remarkable entries in those books:
First American woman in space: Sally Ride.
First African American in space: Guy Bluford.
First Asian American in space: El Onizuka.
First American
woman to do a spacewalk: Kathy Sullivan.
Most space-experienced woman in the world: Shannon Lucid, with a total of 223 days in space, including a six-month tour on the Russian Mir space station.
While flying the MMU, Bob Stewart, Pinky Nelson, Dale Gardner, and Jim van Hoften became some of the only astronauts to orbit completely free of their spacecraft.
On STS-41C, TFNGs were part of a crew that completed the world’s first retrieval, repair, and re-release into space of a malfunctioning satellite. On STS-51A, TFNGs played key roles in the first capture and return to Earth of a pair of crippled satellites.
Rick Hauck commanded the first post-Challengermission. Hoot Gibson commanded the first shuttle–Mir space station docking mission. Norm Thagard became the first American to fly aboard a Russian rocket when he was launched to the Russian Mir space station. TFNG Dick Covey commanded the first repair mission to Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to correct its flawed vision. Dan Brandenstein commanded STS-49, a mission to capture and repair a massive communication satellite stuck in a useless orbit. The mission involved an emergency three-person spacewalk, the only such spacewalk ever conducted, and was one of the most difficult shuttle missions in history.
TFNGs logged nearly a thousand man-days in space and sixteen spacewalks. Five became veterans of five space missions (Gibson, Hawley, Hoffman, Lucid, and Thagard). The first TFNGs entered space in 1983 aboard STS-7. Steve Hawley became the last TFNG in space sixteen years later, when he launched on his fifth mission, STS-93, in 1999. TFNGs were ultimately represented on the crews of fifty different shuttle missions and commanded twenty-eight of those. It is not an exaggeration to say TFNGs were the astronauts most responsible for taking NASA out of its post-Apollo hiatus and to the threshold of the International Space Station (ISS).
There are twenty-nine of the original thirty-five TFNGs still living. Besides the loss of theChallenger four and Dave Griggs’s death, Dave “Red Flash” Walker, a veteran of four shuttle flights, succumbed to natural causes at the age of fifty-seven. Dave was the pilot who scared the holy bejesus out of me during the 1981 STS-1 chase plane practices. He had teased death so often, I had come to believe he was bulletproof. I had failed to consider cancer.
We almost had to bury Hoot Gibson in 1990 when he was involved in a midair collision while racing his home-built plane. The other pilot died but Hoot was able to land his severely damaged machine and walk away. If ever there has been a pilot who has worn out a squadron of guardian angels, that would be Hoot. He and Rhea Seddon now live in Tennessee with their three children. Hoot flies for Southwest Airlines and Rhea is the assistant chief medical officer at Vanderbilt Medical Group at that Nashville university.
In my retirement I have noted the deaths of other astronauts whose life paths intersected mine. Sonny Carter’s death was particularly shocking. Sonny had been one of the STS-27 family escorts and Donna had relied on his calming presence during her LCC waits for that mission. He was never without a smile and a positive word. On April 5, 1991, while on the way to give a NASA speech, he died in the crash of a commercial airliner. The manner of his death was a gross violation of the natural order—it was expected that an astronaut dying in a plane would do so as a crewmember, not as a passenger. Sonny was twice cheated…in death at age forty-three and while belted into a passenger’s seat.
Bob Overmyer died in his retirement while flight-testing a small plane. I was one of the CAPCOMs for his STS-51B flight. During that mission, a communication glitch allowed the crew’s private Spacelab intercom to be momentarily broadcast to the world. It included a panicked call from Bob to his lab scientists: “There’s monkey feces floating free in the cockpit!” I later teased him that he was probably the first marine in the history of the corps to ever use the wordfeces. He laughed at that. Bob was dead at age fifty-nine.
Astronaut-scientist Karl Henize, whom I had worked with on my very first astronaut support job—the dreaded Spacelab—died in his retirement at age sixty-six of respiratory failure while attempting to climb Mount Everest. He is buried on the side of that mountain at 22,000-foot elevation.
Besides these astronaut deaths, I noted other passings. Don Puddy, who replaced George Abbey as chief of FCOD and who approved me for my STS-36 mission, died of cancer in 2004 at age sixty-seven. Jon and Brenda McBride’s son, Richard, died in a plane crash while undergoing navy flight training. Brewster and Kathy Shaw suffered a horrific loss, too. One of their college-age sons was murdered in a random carjacking. If it is possible for a soul to audibly scream, mine did at that news. No death, not even the ones sustained in theChallenger andColumbia tragedies, affected me as much. Every parent understands.
Gene Ross, the ever-present and ever-amicable owner of the Outpost Tavern, died in 1995. He didn’t live to see his bar immortalized on the silver screen. Disney would use it as a backdrop for a scene in the 1997 movieRocketMan and a portion of the movieSpace Cowboys would be filmed inside the cluttered, smoky cave.
Under its new management, the Outpost has seen a few minor changes. The shell-covered parking lot has been leveled. Gone are its bunker-buster craters. And a small red neon light proclaiming “The Outpost Tavern” now decorates a side of the building. But for that, the structure still appears abandoned and ready for demolition. The only improvement to the interior has been the addition of modern bathrooms. The old toilets—one-hole closets with tilting floors and rusted porcelain fixtures—had been intimidating enough to prompt Donna to once comment, “I would rather pee in the outside bushes than sit on an Outpost toilet seat.” The interior of the bar remains a time capsule from the halcyon days of the TFNGs: Photos and posters of smiling astronauts and mission crews still cover the walls and ceiling. My NASA genesis photo is still there. In a display of Texas pride, Gene Ross put up the photos of all the Texas-born astronauts in the entryway next to the bikini-girl-silhouette saloon doors. Epochs of cigarette smoke and grease have put a yellow film over those photos but I’m still visible as the thin, dark-haired, thirty-two-year-old astronaut candidate I was in 1978. Whenever a trip takes me to Houston, I always make it a point to visit the Outpost. I will sit at the bar, order a beer, and listen to the TFNG ghosts whisper the stories of joy and heartbreak that have been written there.
John Young retired from NASA on December 31, 2004, after a forty-two-year career that included six space missions covering the Gemini, Apollo, and shuttle programs. He twice flew to the moon, landing on it onApollo 16. In a NASA press release John was praised as an “astronaut without equal.” You will never hear me say otherwise.
George Abbey was appointed director of the Johnson Space Center by NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin on January 23, 1996 (no doubt putting the fear of God in those who had celebrated, too enthusiastically, his JSC departure in 1987). Five years later he was “reassigned” by Goldin from that position to NASA HQ to serve as Goldin’s senior assistant for international issues. The press noted that the announcement of Abbey’s JSC termination came after close of business on a Friday and with little description of the responsibilities of his new title, signatures that the change was actually a firing. Some speculated that cost overruns on the ISS program had prompted Goldin to remove George. He retired from NASA on January 3, 2003, after a nearly forty-year career with the agency.
I was last face-to-face with John and George in 1998 at the twentieth anniversary of the TFNG class. We traded empty hellos and then separated. I was no longer their hostage and would not pretend friendship.
As an outsider I watched the shuttle program fully recover fromChallenger. Though the STS never recaptured its Golden Age, it did achieve an average of seven missions per year throughout most of the 1990s. Among its more significant post-Challengermissions were the launch of Hubble Space Telescope, nine missions to the Russian Mir space station, and multiple missions in support of the assembly and resupply of the International Space Station. The latter was being constructed in partnership with the Russians. The godless commies had become our friends. Even B
ill Shepherd, who had penned theSuck on this, you commie dogs inscription on a photo of our STS-27 payload, would morph intoComrade Shepherd and fly a five-month ISS mission with two Ruskies.
The shuttle continued to experience near misses with disaster, providing more evidence that it would never be truly operational. One of the closest calls occurred on STS-93. During the early part of ascent a small repair pin in the combustion chamber of one SSME came loose and impacted the inside of the engine nozzle, puncturing its cooling jacket. Just as a hole in the radiator of an automobile will cause a leak of engine coolant,Columbia’s nozzle damage was doing the same thing. As she roared upward, she was bleeding coolant. But inColumbia’s case the coolant was also the engine fuel. The shuttle’s liquid hydrogen plumbing system circulates that supercold fluid around the engine nozzles before the hydrogen is burned.Columbia was headed into orbit in danger of running out of gas. Fortunately the damage and the resulting leak were small. The propellant loss resulted in an early engine shutdown, butColumbia still achieved a safe orbit only seven miles lower than planned.
The nozzle damage turned out to be just one of the near misses for the STS-93 crew. Five seconds into flight an electrical system short circuit resulted in the failure of several black boxes controlling two of the SSMEs. Backup engine controllers, powered by a different electrical system, took over the control of those engines and there was no impact to their performance. But for eight and a half minutes, two ofColumbia’s engines were just one failure away from shutting down and forcing the crew into an ascent abort. The source of the short circuit was later isolated to an exposed wire.
Another shuttle near miss occurred on STS-112 when a circuit failure resulted in only one set of the hold-down bolt initiators firing at liftoff. In the launch sequence the hold-down bolts are exploded apart just milliseconds prior to SRB ignition so the rocket is completely free of the ground when the boosters ignite. Had the redundant initiators in the hold-down bolts not fired,Atlantis would have been still anchored to the pad at SRB ignition. The machine would have destroyed herself trying to rip free of the bolts.