Riding Rockets (64 page)

In Senate testimony, Dr. Griffin has said he intends to retire the shuttle by 2010, arguing, “The shuttle is an inherently flawed system.” He’s right. It is an outrageously expensive vehicle and lacks a viable crew escape system. A well-led and adequately funded team might still have been able to safely operate even this “flawed system,” but the old NASA lacked both leadership and money.

Griffin continued, “We all know that human perfection is unattainable. Sooner or later there will be another shuttle accident. I want to retire it before that can occur.” His plan is to fly the shuttle a maximum of nineteen times—eighteen for ISS support and one for Hubble Space Telescope repair. My sympathies go out to the most junior astronauts who have been warned by NASA that they may never earn their gold pin on the shuttle because of the limited number of missions remaining. They are living what had been my greatest fear…that I would remain an astronaut in name only.

In all likelihood the craft that will replace the shuttle will be a capsule launched atop some type of booster rocket, possibly a reuseable shuttle SRB augmented with a liquid-fueled upper stage. It’s back to the future. The capsule will probably accommodate a four-person crew and be more sophisticated than those of the Apollo program, but with the same type of tractor escape rocket design to pull astronauts to safety in the event of a booster failure. Future astronauts will return to Earth under parachutes.

If all goes according to Griffin’s plan, on a day in late 2010, a reentering space shuttle will sonic-boom KSC for the last time. For the last time a pilot will take the stick of a winged spaceship and guide it to a runway landing. For the last time we will hear the call, “Houston, wheel stop.” The space shuttle will be history, retired at age thirty. I suspect every TFNG will be watching…and remembering. I certainly will.

Political correctness finally neutered the astronaut corps…or, perhaps, males from Planet AD have gone extinct. Several veteran NASA secretaries confided in me that contemporary astronaut parties are “boring.” I can believe it. When an astronaut applicant recently called me for insight into the interview process, I was shocked to hear her say that a resident astronaut had already warned her, “Drinking alcohol is frowned upon.” (No telling what the corps would say about imbibing in helium.) While I have never been one to believe alcohol is necessary to have fun, the comment hints that there is a
new
astronaut on the block, as good with a stick and throttle as any before but less flamboyant and more mainstream than the TFNGs. It doesn’t surprise me. The current civilian astronauts were born into an America that is politically correct in the extreme and the pilots now come from a military that is more sober and religious. So, besides the males from Planet AD, maybe the wild and wooly Right Stuff astronaut—that astronaut who lives life at the edge of the envelope, be it at happy hour or in a cockpit—has also gone the way of the dodo.

The last TFNG reunion occurred in 1998, our twentieth anniversary. Most of the men and all of the surviving women were present. The women seemed least changed, though I’m sure makeup and Clairol had a lot to do with that. The men, me included, were showing our age with expanding waistlines, receding hairlines, and liver-spotted foreheads. A few men sported new wives, though none of those seemed to be of the “trophy” variety. They were mature and pleasant. The rest of the wives were aging gracefully but their days of giving us men a “six nipples under glass” show were, sadly, gone.

Before dinner, Rick Hauck led us in a moment of silence to remember our fallen friends, then gave a short presentation that included a recap of some of the significant history written by our group. We each received TFNG T-shirts bearing thirty-five small caricatures of our individual likenesses. The shirts also featured the past-tense headline “We Delivered.” It was an update to the original 1979 TFNG T-shirt, which had displayed the same caricatures and the title “We Deliver.” The TFNG class had, indeed,
delivered
for NASA and America.

Before scattering to our hotels we posed for a class photo. I sensed a renewed closeness in the assembly. It wasn’t the Knights-of-the-Round-table closeness we had once shared—that level of camaraderie had forever ended when the first Abbey flight assignments had winnowed us. But the white-hot fierceness of our competition had been cooled by the years. We were all gold-pinned astronauts; most of us gold-plated several times over. We were all bound by an experience singularly unique in the history of man…spaceflight. As we stood for our reunion photo, fewer than four hundred earthlings had ever flown into space. Even the fraternity of those who had summited Mount Everest was more than twice as large. The exclusivity of the astronaut experience would forever be a force that would pull TFNGs together.

I occasionally run into a TFNG in my travels. I once crossed paths with Hoot Gibson in his capacity as a Southwest Airlines pilot and had cause to regret it. In the late 1990s I was a passenger on a flight he was piloting. As the jet reached cruise altitude, he announced over the intercom that “world-famous astronaut Mike Mullane was aboard and would be happy to sign autographs.” To ensure my distress, he added my seat number. A line formed and a few old ladies grabbed their cameras for photos. I wanted to leap from the plane to escape the severe embarrassment.
Better dead than look bad.

The three TFNG
Challenger
widows have successfully moved on with their lives. As Lorna Onizuka shared with me, “We stubbed our emotional toes along the way, but I think we’ve all come through the tragedy as happy, content, and successful women and mothers.” Lorna thinks it was the mothering instinct that got everybody through the worst days—each of them had to place their children first and didn’t have time to be emotional cripples. “My children saved my life,” was Lorna’s assessment.

The “man repellent” factor of the astronaut-widow thankfully did not endure. June Scobee and Jane Smith remarried. Lorna and Cheryl McNair remain single but Lorna says they both have vibrant social lives. Lorna says, “I’ve shared my life with a special man for more than ten years.” She laughs as she recounts some of the problems of reentering the dating scene as a mother of two. “When I wasn’t home and a man would call, my oldest daughter would ask him if he was bald.” For some reason that daughter had a “bald men need not apply” attitude. Lorna’s youngest daughter would ask a male caller if he smoked cigars, which was her criterion for rejection. And both daughters would tell men they had to have Mom home by the ten o’clock news. If Lorna’s happy, upbeat attitude is representative of the other
Challenger
survivors, as she believes it is, they are doing quite well.

Donna and I are approaching our sixtieth birthdays. We both weigh more, sag more, and forget more than we did in those euphoric, intoxicating early TFNG days. But life has been good…
grand,
really, because we have been blessed with six wonderful and healthy grandchildren. Pat and Wendy, Amy and Steve, and Laura and Dave have all given us two grandchildren each: Sean and Katie, Hanna and Meagan, and Noah and Gwyneth. While holding our first grandchild, I asked Donna, “Would you have ever thought we’d be telling our kids to have more sex?” As the saying goes…“If I had known grandkids were so much fun, I would have had them first.”

Donna and I also just passed our fortieth anniversary…not wedding, but rather the anniversary of that fateful first kiss of January 3, 1965. We celebrated with a glass of wine and were asleep by 9:30
P.M
. We each got married for the wrong reasons, but we somehow endured long enough to fall in love.

The astronaut beach house is still standing and I hope it is forever preserved for future generations of astronauts. It sits on sacred ground. The spouses of the
Challenger
and
Columbia
crews last held the love of their lives on its sands. No doubt some future crew spouses will hold dear the memory of their last beach house visit, too, for it will include a memory of the last time they embraced their lovers. It is the nature of spaceflight that more crews will perish. Even if NASA can fix its culture, the complexity of the machines and the unforgiving environment of space will claim more astronauts.

Another place sacred to astronauts was created after I retired. In 1991 the Astronaut Memorial, funded largely by the sale of Florida
Challenger
license plates, was dedicated at the KSC Visitors Center. Whenever I visit that center, I always make it a point to walk to the memorial. It consists of a large matrix of granite panels bearing the names of all astronauts who have died in the line of duty. Those names have been chiseled completely through the stone to allow mirrors set behind the panels to reflect the sunlight through the etchings. The entire panel assembly automatically rotates to follow the sun and continuously catch its light. There are now twenty-four names in the granite, the earliest being Theodore Freeman, killed in 1964 in the crash of his T-38 jet, and the latest being the
Columbia
Seven.

On my visits to the memorial I will take a seat on a bench and stare at the four TFNG names the panels bear…Francis “Dick” Scobee, Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, and Ronald E. McNair…and remember the last moment I saw them.
^*
They were walking to a sim wearing Prime Crew smiles. It is how I will always remember them…young, happy,
soaring
with the knowledge they were next up. I will remember each of them in my prayers. I will also include prayers for their spouses and Judy’s family. The life those spouses and parents knew also ended on January 28, 1986, but nobody ever etched their names on a monument.

From the memorial I will walk to a nearby full-scale space shuttle mock-up. Metal platforms have been installed around the display so tourists can climb up and walk through the cockpit. I will anonymously join a group of families and watch them take photos and listen to them marvel at the complexity of the switch panels and the cramped volume. Invariably my attention will be drawn to a child among them. In his or her amazed young face I will be transported back to 1957. I am standing in my front lawn with the identical expression, watching
Sputnik I
twinkle through the terminator.

September 7, 2005

Albuquerque, New Mexico

www.mikemullane.com

*The panel only bears the names of astronauts who died in the line of duty. For that reason Dave Griggs and Dave Walker are not memorialized on the panel.

Glossary

AB
—Afterburner. The throttle position that increases the thrust of a jet engine by burning additional fuel at the back of the engine.

AD
—Arrested Development. The state of many military aviators, the author included.

ADI
—Attitude Director Indicator. An instrument that shows aircraft or spacecraft attitude relative to the Earth’s horizon.

AFB
—Air Force Base.

AOA
—Abort Once Around. A launch abort in which the shuttle makes one orbit of the Earth and lands in the United States.

AOS
—Acquisition of Signal. A call to the crew that indicates the shuttle data stream is being received at Mission Control.

APU
—Auxiliary Power Unit. A hydraulic pump on the space shuttle. There are three APUs powering three hydraulic systems on the orbiter. There is nothing “auxiliary” about the shuttle’s APUs. They are the primary power source for the hydraulic systems. The “auxiliary” is a holdover aviation term. It refers to similar units that back up the primary engine-driven hydraulic pumps on jet aircraft.

ASP
—Astronaut Support Personnel. Astronauts who help the mission crew strap into the space shuttle and who assume control of the shuttle cockpit from a just landed astronaut crew.

ATC
—Air Traffic Control. Facilities on the ground that monitor aircraft in the air.

ATO
—Abort to Orbit. A launch abort in which the shuttle flies into a safe orbit after an engine failure.

BFS
—Backup Flight System. A backup computer that will take over control of a space shuttle. The BFS is engaged by the depression of a button on the top of the commander’s or pilot’s control sticks.

CAIB
—
Columbia
Accident Investigation Board. The board appointed to investigate the loss of the space shuttle
Columbia
.

CAP
—Crew Activity Plan. The checklist that specifies which crew activities are to be performed at what point in the mission.

CAPCOM
—Capsule Communicator. The astronaut in Mission Control who talks to astronauts in space.

CDR
—Commander. The astronaut who occupies the front left seat of a launching/landing space shuttle and who has overall responsibility for the mission.

CNO
—Chief of Naval Operations. A four-star admiral who has overall responsibility for the United States Navy.

DEFCON
—Defense Condition. The status of American military forces, from peacetime (DEFCON 5) to fully prepared for war (DEFCON 1).

DOD
—Department of Defense.

DPS
—Data Processing System. The computer heart of a space shuttle.

EMU
—Extra-vehicular Mobility Unit, i.e., a spacesuit.

EOM
—End of Mission. Used in reference to the end of a space shuttle mission.

ESA
—European Space Agency. The European equivalent of NASA.

ET
—External Tank. The orange fuel tank attached to the belly of a launching space shuttle. It carries 1.3 million pounds of liquid oxygen and 227,000 pounds of liquid hydrogen for the three liquid-fueled engines at the back of the orbiter.

EVA
—Extra-Vehicular Activity. A spacewalk.