Riding Rockets (62 page)

I walked to the kitchen, ignored the desiccated carcass of a roach on the countertop, shoved a few dollars in the honor cash box, and liberated a Coors from the refrigerator. I sipped on that as I continued my tour in the back bedroom. It held another astronaut artifact, the convertible sofa bed Hoot and Mario had used for their high jinks with the STS-36 wives. I knew the bed had supported more than just that one prank—at a Houston party one tipsy TFNG wife had jokingly complained, “I hated doing it at the beach house on a bare mattress.” I looked in the closet. There was still no linen. If Hoot and the wives had thought about the multidecade
special
use of that particular piece of furniture, I doubt they would have climbed onto it. Even dressed in an LES, I wouldn’t have sat on it.

On the other side of the den was the dining/conference room and I entered it. A large table dominated the area. An easel holding a blackboard and chalk sat at one end. The board featured a hieroglyphics of engineering data from a premission briefing on a prior shuttle launch. It was easy for me to imagine the crew in the surrounding chairs hanging on every word of the VITT presenter, praying he wouldn’t use the D word…delay. I would never miss those worries.

Finally, I walked to the door and paused for one last moment to allow the memories to congeal and be sealed in my brain. As it was with every step of this journey, I was seeing a part of my life I would never see again. In a few more weeks I would be a civilian outsider with no more ability to access this beach house than one of the tourists on a KSC bus tour. With a lump in my throat I switched off the light, closed the door, and headed down the crumbling concrete walkway to the beach.

The breeze was cool and I zipped my jacket and took a seat in the sand. As far as I could tell, I was the only living being on the planet. Even the gulls had retired for the night to their hidden nests. The only sound was the respiration of the surf.

I had no agenda. I just wanted some time with my thoughts, wherever they might take me. And they immediately took me to the land of doubts. For the millionth time I wondered if I was doing the right thing leaving NASA. Even at this late hour, I knew my decision was reversible. I could walk back into the beach house and call Brandenstein and tell him I’d changed my mind and would like to stay at JSC as a civilian mission specialist. I knew he would make it happen. After my retirement ceremony, I had run into him at the bathroom urinals and he had said, “Mike, you should stay. I’m running out of MSes.” But I knew if I returned to Houston with the news I had changed my mind, it would kill Donna. My decision stood. Now was the time to leave. My astronaut career was over.

Joy was the next emotion to overcome me. I was a three-time astronaut. My pin was gold. Sputnik had set me on a life journey toward the prize of spaceflight, and I had gained that prize. It had not been easy. I started the journey without pilot wings, when only pilots were astronauts. I did it without the gift of genius. But God had blessed me through his earthly surrogates: my mom, my dad, and Donna. Every step of the way, they were at my side, physically and spiritually, giving me the things I needed to ultimately hear my name being read into history as an astronaut.

Mom and Dad gave me the gift of exploration. They tilted my head to the sky. They supported my childhood fascination with space and rockets. In dealing with my dad’s polio, they were living examples of tenacity in the face of great adversity. On countless occasions I had needed that example to persevere in my journey. I needed it to survive the rigors of West Point, to survive airsickness in the backseat of the F-4, to survive graduate school and flight test engineer school.

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 was
Challenger
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 about
Challenger.
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 aboard
Challenger.
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 climb
down
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 by
Columbia’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 tell
my
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-
Challenger
mission. 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 the
Challenger
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.