Riding Rockets (26 page)

I graduated first in my class and took an assignment to the backseat of RF-4C Phantoms, the reconnaissance version of that fabled fighter. I had never finished first in anything in my life and it wouldn’t have happened without Donna.

Meanwhile, I continued to make calls to air force HQ begging for a pilot training position, but the requests were repeatedly denied. At my annual flight physical I hounded the surgeon about ways I might improve my eyesight. He said there were none. “Mike, your astigmatism is caused by a physical defect in the lens of your eye. There’s nothing that will correct that defect.” I refused to believe him and searched the library for a miracle…and thought I had found it in a book titled
Sight Without Glasses.
But after practicing the recommended eye exercises for months, my visual acuity did not change. I remained physically unqualified for pilot training. As I cursed my bad luck, Donna continued to preach patience. “God has a plan.”

From Mather AFB we were transferred to Mt. Home AFB, Idaho, for my transition training to F-4s. It was here I had my first aviation near-death experience, not from an engine fire or hydraulic failure, but from airsickness. I was dying in the cockpit. I couldn’t complete a flight without my head in a barf bag. I would come home and collapse in depression. The writing was on the wall: The squadron commander was going to eliminate me from training, if I didn’t barf up my duodenum and die first. But Donna was there for me. Her shrine blazed like a sunspot. She circled her rosary like a Tibetan monk on a prayer wheel. But my situation was so perilous she wasn’t going to leave it just to heaven to deliver a fix. Having suffered months of morning sickness while carrying the twins, she was an expert on puking and was convinced I could be cured with the right breakfast. The specifics of the meal she cooked for me have long left my memory, but it worked. No doubt it was just a placebo effect, but I didn’t care. I got through a flight without seeing that breakfast again. And then another. And another. My self-confidence roared back. My flying career was saved by Donna.

From Mt. Home I was directed to Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. I would be flying with the 16th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron from Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Donna and the babies would wait out my tour in a Kirtland AFB house in Albuquerque. During my Christmas leave before departure we were initiated into the reality of war. A sobbing Jackie Greenalch called to tell us her pilot husband, a close friend from Mt. Home, had been shot down and killed while flying his RF-4C. He had been in-country only a few weeks. With this grim news hanging over us Donna drove me to the airport. We stopped for coffee at a doughnut shop and she cried while a teenage server gawked. The good-bye was made even more painful by the strains of “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane” coming from a back room radio. But there were no ultimatums or threats or pleading that I abandon the air force upon my return. She would give her all for me and my career, wherever it took us.

I returned from Vietnam in November 1969, and was transferred to RAF Alconbury in England, where I crewed RF-4Cs, now as part of the NATO forces confronting the Soviet Union. I continued to press air force HQ for entry into pilot training, but my requests were denied. Not only were my eyes a problem, but now I was too old. “Give it up, Lieutenant Mullane. Pilot training is out. It’s not going to happen for you” had been the personnel officer’s unvarnished assessment. Except for a handful of civilian scientists selected for the Apollo program, every NASA astronaut had been a test pilot. They had never selected a GIB—or guy in back—in fighter jets. At age twenty-six my dream of spaceflight had ended. When I told Donna of this final rejection, she was unbowed in her faith. “It will all work out for the best.”

England was a bittersweet four years for us. Every several months there were training accidents, some of which were deadly. We attended memorial services for Jim Humphrey and Tom Carr, killed in their takeoff crash. Another crew disappeared over the sea on a night mission. A pilot died when his Phantom caught fire.

But there was also the fun of traveling through Europe on our vacations. We left the kids with a nanny and rented a sailboat with two other couples and sailed the Aegean Sea for two weeks. We sipped wine while watching the rays of a setting sun pierce colonnaded ruins, and we swam in water as clear as space. While anchored in deserted coves and cloaked in nights so black we couldn’t see each other even while kissing, Donna and I made love as quietly as a prayer. We walked the streets of Rome and Edinburgh and Florence. We played in the snow in the Austrian Alps and watched London stage plays. On a visit to the coast of Spain, Donna became pregnant with our third child, daughter Laura. On this same trip I volunteered to take up a cape and fight a one-ton bull at an organized tourist function. Alcohol was involved in both moments.

Our European assignment was the first time Donna and I had enough long-term stability in our lives to really get to know each other. And two more different people have rarely been pledged in the banns of matrimony. Donna was a lady. She was polite, sober, and soft-spoken. I, on the other hand, was as coarse as a convict. The all-male experiences of West Point, the air force, and Vietnam made it impossible for me to form a sentence without the F word in it. I was loud, frequently obnoxious, and an out-of-control joker. On our sixth anniversary, at a squadron party, I presented Donna with a gift-wrapped painting. She was certain of the contents. For a year she had been hinting at how much she wanted an oil portrait done of her in her wedding dress. Not one to disappoint, I found an English artist, gave him a photo from our wedding, and asked him to capture Donna. But I also included a Polaroid photo of a topless Donna I had taken in our bedroom. I requested a watercolor of that shot too. It was the latter painting I first presented her at our anniversary party. She ripped into the wrapping, breathless to see herself in bridal splendor. When she peeled away the last paper and found two nipples staring her in the face, she nearly fainted. She clutched the painting to her body while the bewildered audience asked, “What did Mike give you?”

We had vastly different senses of humor and decorum. But these were merely the veneer of our personalities. At the most fundamental levels we were also light-years apart. Donna was rule-oriented, risk-adverse, inflexible, and easily stressed. When I tore the warning label from a new mattress, she was certain a SWAT team would come bursting through the door. Just missing an exit on a freeway would virtually paralyze her. Any time the gas gauge on the car dropped below one-half she became as nervous as a fighter pilot sweating out a midocean aerial refueling. She was obsessive-compulsive to an extreme even I couldn’t touch. All in all she had a personality ill suited for a woman married into the nomadic and dangerous world of military aviation. It had to have been torture for her to kiss me off to work, particularly after the plane crash that claimed our neighbor, but I never heard a complaint. My career had become her career.

In 1974 we transferred to Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, where I entered the Air Force Institute of Technology in pursuit of a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. We had barely unpacked before we were once again on the move to Edwards AFB, California, where I entered the Flight Test Engineer School. In both places, Donna became sole parent as my studies consumed me.

In 1976, while I was finishing my Edwards assignment, NASA announced it would begin accepting applications for the first group of space shuttle astronauts. For the first time in the agency’s history there would be an astronaut position, mission specialist, that did not require pilot wings. It was astounding news. I was now eligible to apply to be an astronaut. Not only was I eligible but my flying background, master’s degree, and flight test engineering credentials made me a strong candidate. When I rushed home to tell Donna the news she smiled and said, “I told you. Everything works out for the best. God has His plan,” and then she went to her shrine and lit another bonfire, this one of thanksgiving.

How much of my curriculum vitae did I owe to Donna? All of it. Every step in my career set me up to meet the challenges of the next step. If I had stumbled at any point, there would have been a hole in my life that would have put my astronaut application in the “nice try” pile. But I hadn’t stumbled. Donna had provided me with the one thing I needed more than anything else…the opportunity to focus. Unlike many of my air force peers and nearly all of the TFNGs, I wasn’t a gifted person. I couldn’t get ahead on innate brainpower. I was more like the Forrest Gump of MS astronaut applicants. For me to have passed through the wickets of navigator training, combat flying, graduate school, and flight test engineer training required the intense focus of a dung beetle. And it was Donna who provided me the freedom to focus—to pour my heart and soul into the task at hand, to volunteer for extra flights, to take on additional squadron duties, to stay late in the grad school labs. I was spared the major distractions of married-with-children life.

Countless twists and turns in my life had put me on a Florida beach on June 24, 1984, only hours from my first space mission—but none as significant as the night a teenage girl stepped out from a party to kiss me.

*NASA uses the term L–(pronounced “L minus”) to indicate the days remaining to launch. Within twenty-four hours of launch, the term T–(pronounced “T minus”) is used to indicate the hours, minutes, and seconds to launch.

Chapter 19

Abort

Back at the crew quarters I changed into my athletic gear and headed for the gym. If I died on tomorrow’s mission, I would die in perfect health. I weighed 145 pounds, ten pounds less than I had weighed twenty-one years earlier when I had graduated from high school. I doubt there was a pound of fat on my 5-foot-9½-inch frame. I could run five-and-a-half-

minute miles…four of them back to back. I had a resting heartrate of 40. My ass was so tight I could have cracked walnuts between my butt cheeks.

As I pumped iron, I chuckled at the sight of the straw-filled archery bull’s-eye in one corner. What candy-ass astronaut had requested that addition to the gym? Whoever it was, I hoped they could fly a shuttle better than they could shoot a bow. The plaster wall around the target had been shotgunned by errant arrows.

I left the gym for an outdoor run and found Judy stretching before her jog. We fell in together. It was early evening and KSC had emptied of workers. Our only company were mosquitoes, and they were a real incentive to keep the pace fast. Sweat came quickly, which was the whole purpose of the run. I wanted to dehydrate myself to minimize bladder discomfort in tomorrow’s countdown. Other astronauts did the same. The few couch potatoes in our ranks tried to wring themselves dry by sitting in a whirlpool bath and drinking beer, counting on the diuretic effect of the alcohol and sweat to do the job.

Judy and I passed the black hulks of several alligators on the opposite banks of drainage ditches. I had once seen one of these creatures explode out of the water in a chase after an armadillo. Why they never chased jogging astronauts was a mystery to me. Even when we teased them, they did not react. I once watched Fred Gregory toss shells at a twelve-footer hoping to see it stir. As the missiles ricocheted from its scales, I warned Fred, “Those things can run twenty miles per hour when they’re riled and that’s a lot faster than you.” But Fred continued his reptile target practice while answering, “Yeah…but that’s on firm ground. If they’re chasing me, they’ll be slipping and sliding through shit and they can’t run nearly as fast.”

Judy and I discussed an issue we had heard about just before leaving the crew quarters. An engineer had found a potential flaw that could result in the failure of the burned-out SRBs to separate from the gas tank. Such a scenario would be fatal. The shuttle would never make it to orbit or achieve a successful abort dragging along nearly 300,000 pounds of useless steel. The good news was it would take several simultaneous failures in the circuitry for the SRB separation failure to occur. When the launch team asked Hank whether he was comfortable flying the mission with this failure mode in place, his answer was yes. That didn’t surprise me. They might as well have asked a three-year-old if he wanted to eat his candy now or wait until tomorrow. If the engineers said, “We forgot to install the center engine. Do you still want to launch?” Hank probably would have said, “No problem. We’ll just burn the two we have.” Nothing was going to get in our way.

Judy and I continued into the KSC wilderness. The only sound was the buzz of cicadas. The dusk was deepening and an occasional firefly flickered over the ditches. Judy voiced concern that we might trip over an alligator. I told her the Fred Gregory story and she laughed. But in a rare moment of prudence, we decided to turn back.

We gradually slowed into a cool-down walk. I had come a long way…and I don’t mean during the run. There was a fox of a woman at my side and I could actually think of her as a friend and equal. Those six years ago when we were standing together on the stage being introduced to the JSC workforce, I saw Judy with three strikes against her: She was civilian. She was a woman. She was beautiful. At the time I wondered how her beauty had played in her passage through the wickets of life to become an astronaut; wickets that, for the most part, had been male tended. Had she been waved through some of those gates because her smile had melted a professor or perhaps her dynamite body had influenced a male astronaut sitting on the selection committee? We males are suspicious of female beauty because we know ourselves too well.

But, over the years, Judy had proven she wasn’t an astronaut because of her sex appeal or because of an abuse of the affirmative action program. She was an astronaut because she was qualified to be one. I had watched her fly formation from the backseats of T-38s and lead instrument approaches in bad weather and do it as well as me (and my backseat fighter and T-38 time had made me a damned fine instrument pilot). I had seen her expertly operate the robot arm. I had watched her rappel off the side of the orbiter mock-up in our emergency training, parasail into the water in our survival training, work 20 feet underwater in a 300-pound spacesuit. In simulation after simulation, she had instantly and correctly reacted to countless emergencies. I think the best testimonial for Judy’s proficiency was the fact it was never a topic of astronaut scuttlebutt. In a strange way, that was the best compliment an astronaut could achieve, not being discussed behind his or her back. And I never heard Judy’s name attached to a “Who let that bozo in the door?” comment. Over a beer or in a jog with a TFNG, I would hear comments about the misadventures of other astronauts. When one TFNG MS was removed from being a robot arm operator, it took about ten milliseconds before the reason was being shared in whispers. He maneuvered the arm like a fifteen-year-old kid learning to use a stick shift. There was locker-room gossip about an MS jeopardizing the deployment of a satellite because of a failure to follow the checklist. One TFNG accidentally engaged the shuttle backup flight system during a prelaunchpad test and caused a delay in the countdown. Judy’s name was never in any of these conversations, the ultimate testimonial to her competency. She wasn’t the smartest or quickest TFNG—Steve Hawley held that position. Judy was like me. We weren’t stars. But we were solid, dependable. We could be counted on to get the job done.