Riding Rockets (17 page)

Steve Hawley and I were tapped to travel to Madrid, Spain, and the Seychelles Islands to deliver that message to the NASA and air force contingents who manned the shuttle tracking sites at those locations. NASA did not yet have its own communication relay satellites in orbit, so we depended upon an earth-girdling network of ground sites to communicate with orbiting astronauts. Other TFNGs were sent to Australia, England, Guam, Ascension Island, and the other overseas sites that completed this global tracking system.

To go to the Seychelles is to die and go to heaven. The nation is a collection of islands a thousand miles east of Africa just south of the equator in the bath-warm waters of the Indian Ocean. The beaches are white, the surf is turquoise, and both are filled with topless vacationing Scandinavian women. As if that isn’t enough of a temptation, many of the local island women are beautiful manhunters. Their preferred quarry are American men, as they represent a means of escape to the land of the Big BX (the USA). At a party hosted by the tracking site commander, Hawley and I learned just how aggressive they could be. A young and exceptionally beautiful woman came to us and requested our autographs. “Sure, we’d be happy to sign something for you,” I replied. I was expecting her to hand over one of the space shuttle photos we had previously distributed but, instead, she pulled up her skirt, thrust a cheek of her ass in my face, and asked me to sign her panties. I searched my memory but couldn’t remember “ass signing” being covered in our JSC training. I looked at Hawley and suggested, “To refuse could cause an international incident.” We had been cautioned by the resident state department official not to alienate the locals, as the United States was in sensitive negotiations with the island’s current Dictator for Life. Steve concurred: “It’s our NASA
duty
to fulfill her request.” That settled it. I turned my pen to the silky fabric, only to be struck by the limited real estate. Her petite posterior didn’t give me a lot to work with. But astronauts love a challenge. In a font so tiny I could have penned the Declaration of Independence on a grain of rice, I leisurely inscribed on the side of her underwear,
Richard Michael Mullane, Major, United States Air Force, Astronaut, National Aeronautical and Space Administration.
I was thinking of adding,
In the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty
and the date, but Hawley was getting impatient. If anybody’s hand should be on that heinie, it was his. He was the bachelor of our duo, a fact that had spread across the island on the coconut telegraph as fast as a trade wind. This young woman had probably set her sights on him when we stepped off the plane. I finally capped my pen and she immediately presented her other cheek for Steve and he began his treatise. The things we do for our country. There ought to be a medal awarded to men who return from the Seychelles. Bachelors, like Hawley, should get the Order of
I Walked Away from Heaven
with accouterments of oak leaf clusters, laurel wreaths, dangles, bobbles, flames, and shooting stars.

As if the local women weren’t enough, Hawley and I also discovered the vacationing Dereks…as in John and Bo Derek. Even among the hard-bodied, oil-smeared Danish pastries decorating the beach, Bo stood out. To say she was a “Ten” didn’t do her justice. She made a Step-ford Wife look like a hag. Unfortunately, she wasn’t topless. Nor was she jogging down the beach in slow motion. But, like Dudley Moore’s famous character, I had an active imagination.

Hawley and I debated whether or not to approach the star, a debate that lasted about as long as it takes a quark to decay. We were at her side in a flash, mumbling and stuttering like Dumb and Dumber. I think I blurted out, “I want to have your baby!”

We made sure to include the title “astronaut” in our introduction. John, at least, was impressed by that and asked us several questions about the upcoming launch of STS-1, including some technical questions about landing speeds and glide path angles. Bo didn’t ask us anything. In fact, she didn’t say much at all. Maybe it was the way Hawley leered at her. Surely it couldn’t have been me. We learned the couple was taking a break before the filming of that celluloid classic
Tarzan, the Ape Man.
I said to Bo, “Me Tarzan. You Jane.” John looked at my 145-pound frame and said, “I don’t think so.”

“How about Cheetah?” I certainly had the chimp ears to qualify. But, once again, I was rejected.

Hawley and I posed with Bo for some photos and said our good-byes. (Or maybe John said he was going to call the island police if we didn’t leave. I can’t recall.) I couldn’t wait to get back and phone every male I had ever met in my entire life beginning with my high school classmates and scream, “Eat your hearts out! Guess who I met?”

Back in Houston, when Judy Resnik heard our story, she began to call me Tarzan. For the rest of her short life, she never again called me Mike. Always Tarzan.

By the second year of our TFNG careers the bloom had begun to fade on our management: George Abbey and John Young. George had chaired the dozen-man astronaut selection committee. If the office vets were to be believed, the “committee” title was a joke. George didn’t operate by committee any more than Josef Stalin had. His was the only vote that counted in the TFNG selection process. George was a pear-shaped man with silver-tinted buzz-cut hair, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and sleepy, basset hound eyes. The word
enigmatic
was coined to describe a man like George. His heavy face revealed nothing. His rare smiles were hardly more than grimaces. I never saw him in a teeth-showing laugh. I never heard him raise his voice in anger. I never saw him animated in any way. When he spoke, which wasn’t much, it was in low mumbles. He was as unreadable as a marble bust.

George’s parents had obviously expected great things from their son, christening him George Washington Sherman Abbey at his birth in 1932. It was a handle that earned him the acronym GWSA from us TFNGs. George met the challenge of his name. He graduated from Annapolis in 1954, took a commission in the USAF, and accumulated more than four thousand hours of flying time as an air force pilot. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. In 1967 he resigned from the air force and began his NASA career as an MCC engineer (he wasn’t an astronaut). For his work on the
Apollo 13
Mission Operations Team, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Every TFNG walked into NASA a slavishly loyal subject of King George, and we competed in pathetic attempts to brown-nose him. The nineteen new astronauts of the class of 1980 did the same, so there was real crowd around George’s backside. Two of the 1980 newbies made an exceptionally flamboyant attempt to put their names in front of George. On Abbey’s birthday Guy Gardner and Jim Bagian called the JSC security police pretending to be employees of a window-cleaning service needing access to the ninth-floor windows of the JSC HQ building. After the police unlocked the windows and departed, Bagian dressed in a Superman costume, dropped a rope to the ground, and repelled to Abbey’s eighth-floor office. There, he pounded on the glass to gain George’s attention and sang “Happy Birthday.” Mission complete, he continued to the ground. Gardner freed the rope of its anchor, closed the window, and disappeared.

It didn’t take long for word of the prank to reach the security police and for its chief to be pounding on Center Director Chris Kraft’s office door with an angry complaint about astronauts duping his people and conducting a dangerous stunt. In a classic demonstration of the old adage “Shit flows downhill,” it didn’t take long for the turds being shoveled onto Kraft’s ninth-floor office desk by the chief of security police to find their way to Abbey’s eighth-floor desk and thence to John Young’s third-floor desk in Building 4. In effect, Dr. Kraft’s message to John was “Johnson Space Center isn’t a private playground for your astronauts.” So Guy Gardner and Jim Bagian picked up some early, if not exactly
positive,
visibility with George.

But even as we TFNGs and the class of 1980 were doing our best to gain George’s favor we were also developing serious doubts about our leader. While he frequented our social functions, he rarely made appearances in the astronaut office. In particular he offered no insight into the one thing that mattered most to us, the shuttle flight assignment process. Initially, we believed that John Young would be making shuttle crew assignments. Since he bore the title
chief of astronauts,
how could it be otherwise? But the older astronauts were certain Abbey would be assigning crews independent of Young. In our rookie naïveté we found that hard to believe. Young was in a much better position to know our capabilities, limitations, and interpersonal compatibilities. Abbey’s office was in a separate building. How could he know what crew composition would be best for a particular mission? We could understand why Abbey wanted crew assignment authority, since it represented considerable power, but we could not understand why Young would have rolled over and allowed him to take it. While NASA’s management hierarchy did put Young under Abbey’s authority, it seemed to us Young could have easily insisted on having a big say in crew assignments without the slightest risk to his career. John was a living legend. He was a four-time veteran of spaceflights—two Gemini missions and two Apollo missions. He had walked on the moon. There was no way a midlevel bureaucrat like Abbey could have ever prevailed against him if Young had told Chris Kraft, “These are my astronauts. I know them. I want to have a hand in crew assignments. I’ll consider HQ’s inputs, your inputs, and Abbey’s inputs, but I want a significant say in the matter because I will have to bear the ultimate responsibility if there are any mistakes made by crews.” But the vets in the office were adamant in their opinion that Abbey was a rapacious power monger who had taken all flight assignment responsibility from Young. Why Young would have ever accepted such an office-neutering arrangement would remain a mystery throughout my astronaut life.

There were occasional hints that Abbey’s rule over astronauts
was
absolute, as when Jerry Ross (class of 1980) returned from Chris Kraft’s welcome for his class. Jerry told us he had been shocked when Kraft had implied he didn’t understand why their class had even been selected. He thought there were enough astronauts as it was. (As Jerry said, it was a strange way of welcoming them.) Jerry’s story implied Abbey had selected a new class over Kraft’s objections. Did even Dr. Kraft answer to Abbey on the subject of astronauts? Nobody knew. Kraft, Abbey, and Young never said a word about their responsibilities. Everything about the most important aspect of our career—flight assignments—was as unknown to us as the dark matter of space was to astrophysicists. Who made assignments? Who approved them? Who had veto power over them? Would there be a rotation system? Would our preferences for a mission be considered? Would military astronauts fly only military missions? Abbey said nothing. Nor did he ever provide the slightest performance feedback—positive or negative. If he had an agenda, that was never revealed either. I have never worked in any organization where there was such a complete lack of communication from above. The result of this information vacuum was predictable. FEAR. The line into space was long and nobody wanted to be at its end, or worse, be banished from it altogether. We were all terrified of doing something that might cross our king. We lived by rumor and innuendo because that was all there was. An early instance was a warning to Steve Nagel from Don Peterson (class of 1969) to stop work on a shuttle autopilot improvement project, “because rumor has it Abbey hates that project.” Nagel was stunned. He had been
assigned
the work by another office vet. It wasn’t something he had initiated. Yet he was being told he was jeopardizing his career by doing his assigned job. Shannon Lucid and I had a similar experience. Moon walker Al Bean directed us to prepare a report justifying why nonpilot MS astronauts should be trained as pilots. Later we heard from another office vet that Abbey was vehemently opposed to such a program. Shannon and I dropped the work as if it were radioactive waste. Everybody was constantly second-guessing their actions. It was a poisonous situation.

If John Young had been more involved in our professional lives, things might have been better, but he was also an absentee leader. He was consumed with training for STS-1. His interaction with the rank and file was mostly limited to the weekly one-hour Monday meetings, and at those he had an irritating and morale-eroding habit of publicly rebuking us when we failed to win battles on shuttle issues at the various NASA review panels. I recall one meeting in which Bill Fisher (class of 1980) leaned over to me and sarcastically whispered, “That’s it, John, yell at
us.
” Fisher’s implication was obvious to all within earshot: John should have been at the panel meeting in question using his vast experience as a veteran spaceman to defend his position instead of expecting one of us rookies to carry the day.

Many TFNGs would grow to loathe the Abbey-Young duopoly and its black hole of communication.

In our second year at JSC we received our first real astronaut job assignments. Because we lacked any other information on the flight assignment process, we quickly constructed a belief system in which these early jobs portended our place in the line into space. To draw an “STS-1 Support” job was thought to be indicative of a position at the head of the TFNG line because of the overarching importance of that first shuttle flight. My name wasn’t under “STS-1 Support.” Next were jobs supporting STS-2, -3, and -4. Again, it was assumed TFNGs assigned to support those missions must be impressing Abbey and be in line for an early space mission. My name was absent from those assignments. And neither was my name typed next to jobs supporting spacewalk, robot arm, and payload development. I finally found “Mullane” next to “Spacelab Support.” This was at the rock bottom of TFNG job preferences. I felt as if I were back in high school after baseball tryouts seeing my name penciled next to
B-squad backup right fielder.