Riding Rockets (60 page)

I could see the patina of the Earth’s oceans. The wind-rumpled water gave them the texture of an orange rind, but in colors that varied with the angle at which the Sun stuck them. At high sun, the open seas were Crayola blue. At grazing angles, they reflected tones of gray and silver and copper. In places of exceptional water clarity, like the Caribbean, the dunelike humps and valleys of the seafloor were clearly visible, their white sand diluting the ocean blue to yield a striking turquoise. In the sheen of the Sun I could see evidence of the dynamics of the sea. There were circular eddies similar to the low-pressure-cloud swirls in the atmosphere. Boundaries between currents appeared as dark lines. Currents past headlands would create noticeably different downstream wave patterns, exactly like the ones I could see in clouds downstream from mountain ranges. In Persian Gulf anchorages I could make out the “dots” of supertankers and occasionally, in the glint of the Sun, I would catch sight of the V-shaped wake of one of these monsters under way. Later, as
Atlantis
was on the descending portion of an orbit deep into the southern hemisphere, I watched the miles-long bluish-green ribbon of a bloom of plankton. We had been told to expect to see these in the fertile waters approaching Antarctica. Farther south, a flotilla of icebergs sailed on currents like so many ships of the line.

At the southern limit of her orbit,
Atlantis
’s nadir came within three hundred miles of the coast of the Antarctic continent, now in late summer. I pulled a pair of gyroscopically stabilized binoculars from their Velcro anchor and peered southward. The pole was nearly 1,800 miles distant, so I had no view of it. Instead, I focused on the rugged coastal mountain chains. The occasional black of a windswept cliff was the only color in an otherwise sheet-white topography.

Atlantis
curved northward and began her 12,000-mile fall toward the opposite end of the Earth. It was a remarkable physics that kept me on this godly merry-go-round. We were literally falling. Just as a thrown ball falls in a curve,
Atlantis
was on a curving trajectory to impact Earth. But impact never came because the Earth’s horizon was continually bending out of the way.
Atlantis
’s engines had thrown her onto a falling curve that matched the curvature of the Earth. In my upper-cockpit perch, I had no sense of that fall but in the windowless mid-deck I had experienced brief moments in which the sensation had been overwhelmingly powerful. The day before, I had been seized with an illusion that the mid-deck cockpit floor was steeply tilted and if I didn’t grasp something I would slide down it. Try as I might I could not convince myself that I would not fall. I actually seized the canvas loop of a foot restraint to keep from sliding off my imaginary cliff. The sensation was so distracting I finally abandoned the mid-deck and floated upstairs. The view of the Earth’s horizon immediately eradicated any sense of the fall.

The ocean under
Atlantis
was now the Pacific. The sun dropped and its terminator light painted a scattering of cumulus clouds in coral pink. In the darkness that followed I looked spaceward to the unfamiliar stars of the southern hemisphere. The Magellanic Clouds were visible as hazy smudges. A quarter moon rose. Seen through the thick part of the atmosphere, the orb was severely distorted, appearing boomerang in shape, an effect of the light-bending qualities of the air. The crescent tips were squeezed inward and the greater surface bulged outward. Only after rising above the atmosphere did the crescent appear normal. Then, it cast a spotlight of silver across the water. Except for its grand scale, the sight was identical to watching the moon rise over the sea from a Cape Canaveral beach.

Just twenty-two minutes after leaving Antarctica’s seas,
Atlantis
passed over the equator and I was treated to the never-ending light show of the intertropical convergence zone. Here, the trade winds of the northern and southern hemispheres mixed in equatorial heat and humidity to produce perpetual thunderstorms. The nimbus clouds took on the appearance of sputtering fluorescent lightbulbs, so continuous was the lightning within them.

Atlantis
crossed Central America in less than a minute and I looked ahead to America’s East Coast. In a six-minute passage, the city lights of the entire seaboard passed by my window: Key West, Miami, Jacksonville, the cities of the mid-Atlantic, then Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Portland. The lights sprawled over the darkened continent like so many yellow galaxies.

Twenty-two minutes north of the equator,
Atlantis
brushed the Arctic Circle. The deep night of winter in the northern hemisphere made it ideal for viewing the lights of the aurora borealis. I watched them grow and collapse in their ephemeral, spiritlike dance. Streamers of emerald green and fuchsia waved as if rippled by the wind. The lower end of one curtain took on an intense glow, like the head of a comet, its attached streamer trailing away like a sun-blown tail. The lights were so captivating I watched them until they were just a haze on the receding horizon, and I was happy to know I had tickets for the next show starting in ninety minutes.

I moved to the back cockpit to enjoy a different light show…the atomic oxygen glow engulfing
Atlantis
’s payload bay. The low-orbit space through which
Atlantis
plunged was not empty. We were in the outer reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere, which contained billions of atoms of UV-altered molecular oxygen known as atomic oxygen. The wind they produced was vanishingly thin, but it was enough to react with the shuttle’s windward surfaces to cause a Saint Elmo’s–like fire. The glow was so intense it appeared we had flown into a hazy alien fog. Every affected surface was covered to a depth of several feet. If we had not been warned of the phenomenon, I would have worried we had passed into the Twilight Zone and our spaceship had been transformed into a ghost ship. We had been damned by the curse of the skull man.

Atlantis
curved over northern Europe toward another forty-five minute day. If ever there was a music composition perfect for watching the beauty of an orbit sunrise, that composition would be Pachelbel’s Canon. As the violin melody played on my Walkman, the rising sun painted the horizon in twenty shades of indigo, blue, orange, and red. God, how I wanted to stop and just hover.

I took off my headset and watched the Earth in silence. I also wanted to
hear
spaceflight and seal that memory in my mind. The cabin fans stirred the air with their constant soft whoosh. From downstairs I could hear the muted clatter of the teleprinter printing out checklist changes and weather reports for tomorrow’s reentry. Someone coughed. The UHF radio captured the gibberish of a foreign pilot talking to his controller somewhere below.

I inhaled the smell of
Atlantis.
There was no evidence of the humanity that inhabited her, no odor of our bodies, our food, our waste, our emesis. The engineers had done a remarkable job of filtering the air. The only “smell” was that of unnatural sterility. I missed the scents of rain, desert, and sea…and I had only been away from the Earth for four days. I wondered if engineers would ever be able to package smells of our home planet so that Martian pioneers could remember their roots. For their sakes, I hoped so.

I took a moment to look around
Atlantis
’s cockpit and capture that memory, knowing that when I crawled from her side hatch tomorrow it would be for the last time. The windows and floor were the only surfaces not covered with switches, controls, circuit breakers, computer monitors, or TV screens. Cue cards dotted the panels. Bound checklists were similarly scattered on Velcro pads. Twelve years ago, I had been overwhelmed with the machine’s complexity. Now, the cockpit was as familiar and comforting as my living room.

I turned and looked forward. The PLT’s seat belt hovered like a charmed snake. The three computer screens were off. No reason to waste power during a sleep period. My eyes touched on the life-and-death switches I had so often feared might play a part on one of my missions: the abort selection switch, the SSME shutdown buttons, the BFS engage buttons. I would never need any of them and I thanked God for it.

I floated back to the forward windows. The orbits continued…25,000 miles, 90 minutes, one sunrise, one sunset, a brush with the Arctic Circle, a brush with the Antarctic Circle. At each equatorial crossing
Atlantis
passed 1,500 miles west of its prior transit, an effect of the Earth’s eastward spin underneath our orbit. In circuit after circuit, I was seeing a different sea, a different land, a different sky. I watched North African deserts stretch to the horizon in dunes as perfectly spaced as ripples in a pond. I passed over snowy Siberian forests as virgin as the Garden of Eden. I saw the green vein of the Nile and the white-tipped chaos of the Himalayas and the Andes. I saw perfect fans of alluvial debris debouching onto desert floors, each a signature of millions of years of mountain erosion. I thrilled to shooting stars and the stellar mist of space and twinkling satellites and the jewel that was Jupiter. I saw the Baikonur Cosmodrome,
Sputnik I
’s launch site, with the nearby Aral Sea appearing oil black against the winter white of the Kazakh Steppes. A few turns later the desert-lonely lights of Albuquerque came into view and I marveled at how those two places, so geographically distant from each other, had been inexorably linked in my life. I passed over every unimproved road my parents had ever dared, every mountain I had ever climbed, every sky I had ever flown. With the music of Vangelis and Bach and Albinoni as a sound track, I watched the movie of my life.

Chapter 41

The White House

Our first order of postlanding business was to review our mission film and edit two separate movies, one intended for security-cleared eyes only, the other for the public. Because of the secrecy surrounding our orbit activities, the latter had little in it. We wanted to include the fun video we had taken of our satanic crewmember in hilarious poses, but Dan Brandenstein squelched that. “If we keep showing on-orbit pranks, headquarters is going to assume control of editing our postflight movies. They’re getting pissed the press only shows us screwing off in space.” We thought it was bullshit, but understood Dan’s position and honored it. The world would never see Beelzebub clamped on a shuttle toilet.

Our postflight travel was similar to that of STS-27. I journeyed to places I can’t mention to be congratulated by people whose office titles are similarly unmentionable. I received another National Intelligence Medal of Achievement from another “black world” Wizard of Oz that I could only wear in a vault. This citation (declassified years later) reads:

…Colonel Mullane’s superior performance led to the safe deployment and successful activation of a system vital to our national security. The singularly superior performance of Colonel Mullane reflects great credit upon himself, the United States Air Force, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Intelligence Community.

At one of our stops some spooks hosted us to a candlelit dinner in their black-world building. The office secretaries acted as servers since no caterers could enter. We showed our mission movie and, lubricated by wine, I added my own editorial comments. As space video of the Boston–Cape Cod area was shown, I injected, “Moscow doesn’t have as many communists as are living in this picture.” There was a peal of laughter. Hank Hartsfield would have been proud.

The highlight of our meager postflight PR tour was a visit to George Bush, Senior’s White House. We were shocked by the invitation. STS-36 had been virtually ignored in the press. There were no women on the crew, no minorities, no firsts of any kind that might have turned out the press to cover a presidential handshake. Whatever the reason, the invitation was sincerely appreciated.

We met the president in the Oval Office, taking seats in sofas set around a coffee table. Mr. Bush sat in a nearby chair. The questions he asked indicated that he was well briefed on our mission. But it was hard to carry on a conversation. A steady stream of aides and secretaries were constantly coming to his side to get answers to questions and his signature on documents. I wondered if the man was ever alone, even on the toilet.

I knew my air force master sergeant dad was watching from heaven, his chest puffed up with button-busting pride. It was a proud moment for me, too. What my crewmates and I had done on STS-27 and STS-36 would probably remain classified for decades. We were the most invisible of astronauts. Nobody would sing “I’m Proud to Be an American” while we were raised on a platform before the cheering masses. Our names would never be in the lyrics of a Billy Joel song. But this was infinitely better. I was standing in the Oval Office of the White House while the president of the United States shook my hand and thanked me for my contribution to America’s security.

Later, we gathered behind the president’s desk to have a crew photo taken. The desktop was littered with documents bearing red-striped “Top Secret” covers. John Casper whispered, “Mike, look at his notepad.” I did. On it was written “Gorb dinner?”—obviously the president’s self-reminder about something associated with the upcoming visit to Washington by the Gorbachevs. I whispered back to John, “Maybe he’s looking for a joke to loosen up things at a state dinner. Why don’t you suggest a golfing joke with a cow’s ass in the punch line?”

“No” was John’s terse reply.

After we finished the classified discussions, Mrs. Bush ushered in our wives to meet her husband. We all posed for photos with the First Family. The president gave each of the crew a pair of cuff links embossed with the presidential seal and the wives received a stick pin with the same logo.

It was a beautiful May day and the doors to the Rose Garden were open. At one point during the photo session a bumblebee joined us and hovered around the president’s brightly colored tie. An aide shooed it away, and it found another target…a secretary who obviously had a phobia of buzzing insects. She screamed, threw a sheaf of papers in the air, and began to run in circles, flailing at her hair and trying to escape the insect. This was hardly a scene I expected to witness in the presidential Oval Office. I whispered to Pepe, “I sure hope she doesn’t fall on the button labeled ‘DEFCON 1.’”