Riding Rockets (43 page)

On September 19, astronauts celebrated for the first time since
Challenger
with a party at a local club. I had been looking forward to it. After nine brutal months, it would be good to erase my brain with a few drinks and have some fun with my fellow TFNGs. Donna and I sat at a table with the Brandensteins, Coveys, and Boldens (class of 1980). After dinner, Bob Cabana, the class leader of the latest group of astronauts to arrive at JSC (class of 1985), walked to the stage and invited George Abbey to step forward and receive an autographed photo of their class. The image immediately brought to mind our TFNG efforts to brownnose Abbey back in 1978. Kathy Covey let out a “woo, woo, woo” catcall. We all understood her sarcasm. Every astronaut class prostituted itself to Abbey thinking it was going to help them. The class of 1985 would soon learn what we had all learned—shoving your nose up Abbey’s behind didn’t get you anywhere. In a year they would all be cursing him and Young like everybody else.

Others at the table were soon speaking of their disgust with our leadership. At that, Kathy, a very successful and hard-nosed businesswoman, began to mock our impotence. “I’ve listened to this shit for years. You guys are so gutless you deserve what you get” was her message. Of course she was right. But it all went back to that incontrovertible fact…there was no other place on the planet where we could fly a rocket. If Satan himself had been our boss and demanded we take a fiery pitchfork up the wazoo before we could climb into a shuttle cockpit, all of us would have long ago become acrobatic in our ability to bend over and spread our cheeks.

I grabbed another beer and then another. I didn’t want to hear any more of this. I was burned out. But it was impossible to escape. As the party was breaking up, Ron Grabe (class of 1980) took me aside. “Mike, you better watch your six o’clock.” It was fighter pilot lingo; I had an enemy on my tail. “This week I was waiting to see Young and I heard him on the phone. I don’t know who he was speaking with, but I assumed it was Abbey. He was saying, ‘Mike Mullane is one of the enemy. He’s a nice kid and all that, but he’s on the side of the Range Safety people.’”

A “nice kid”? I was forty years old. And what crime had I committed to earn the label “enemy”? I was guilty of doing my assigned job.

I thanked Grabe for the warning and added, “I guess I’ll talk to P.J.” P. J. Weitz was a Skylab-era astronaut working as Abbey’s deputy. He was well regarded, and I considered him the only manager I could trust within all of NASA.

Grabe added, “Don’t bother with P.J. I’ve already spoken to him about Young. I told him John has become unbearable. Nobody can make an objective presentation on any subject. He has made up his mind on everything. I used your Monday morning presentation on the RSS as an example. P.J. was sympathetic but said he couldn’t do anything.”

I reached a new nadir of depression. It was never clear how Young influenced flight assignments. Most of us believed he had nothing to do with them, which, if true, was absolutely amazing given the title on his office door: Chief of Astronauts. But none of us knew for sure. Maybe Abbey did listen to his input. I couldn’t just dismiss Grabe’s warning. I did need to watch my six.

The following week I made an appointment to see Abbey. I had been at NASA for eight years and had only met with George on a handful of occasions and always in the company of others. I had never had any real one-on-one time with him. I approached his desk with the same trepidation I imagine a departed soul experiences while being escorted by the seraphim to the judgment seat of God.

He motioned for me to take a seat and I began to explain my problems with Young. Abbey wouldn’t look me in the eye. As I spoke he continued to shuffle through papers on his desk as if my problem were the merest of trivia. I was only a couple sentences into my rehearsed speech when he saw where it was going and mumbled, “Don’t worry about that,” to his ink blotter. “John is just frustrated he can’t do more.” I kept talking. I needed resolution. I was still working the RSS and OMS burn issues and being savaged by Young in the process. I couldn’t go on like this. Abbey interrupted me with a dismissive wave. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be getting too busy with DOD affairs in the next six months.” I was silenced by that comment. What was he suggesting? Was he hinting I was in line for a Department of Defense shuttle mission? There were several DOD payloads ready to go on the shuttle—satellites so optimized for the shuttle cargo bay they could not be easily switched back to the air force’s unmanned boosters. Or was Abbey implying I would soon switch jobs from Range Safety to review the safety of DOD payloads? Or was this a polite warning that my career at NASA was being terminated and I would be going back to the USAF? There was no divining what George Abbey meant.

I came away from George’s office only slightly unburdened. His manner suggested my career was intact. But in the same breath he also told me to basically ignore John Young—his chief deputy. That command was more proof NASA’s leadership structure was a joke. How could I do that? Young was my immediate boss. He signed my air force performance reports. If any generals ever called to discuss my promotion potential, they would be talking to Young. Besides, there were some serious range safety issues that needed to be addressed. Was I supposed to “not worry about those”? There was also the possibility that perhaps John hadn’t been talking to Abbey when Grabe overheard him. Maybe he had been bad-mouthing me to one of his champions, a champion far above Abbey’s level who held veto power over Abbey’s crew selections and was ready to redline me from any list based on Young’s input. I hated the position I was in. I couldn’t just ignore Young. My prayer was that Abbey would discuss the situation with Young and he would become rational on the OMS burn issue. But all hope in that regard was dashed a couple months later when I was warned a second time that there was somebody at my six o’clock. This time the messenger was Hank Hartsfield. “Mike, John has a real hard-on against you about the way the pre-MECO OMS burn issue has played out. I heard him mumbling that maybe you should be replaced. I hope your career hasn’t been damaged.”

I was blind with fury. At every meeting on the topic I had dutifully represented Young’s position that he disapproved of burning OMS fuel during powered flight. But Young never personally attended these meetings to defend his position. He never used his bully pulpit as a six-time astronaut, moon-walking hero, and chief of astronauts to formally make his case. When I suggested to him in writing that he attend a Flight Techniques Panel meeting at which Jay Greene was going to “press forward with implementation [of pre-MECO OMS burns],” John shot back his written answer: “NO! We are NOT going to a forum or voting on this issue!”

I thanked Hank for the warning, suppressing the urge to ask, “Who do I appeal to for justice? Who runs this asylum called Johnson Space Center?”

But Hank’s warning was the final straw. I broke. Mike Mullane, the man who prided himself on being able to hold it all inside, be it an enema in the colon or an agony of emotions in the soul, the man who had lived a life in abject fear of doctors, the man who thought psychiatry was for the feminine and weak…that iron man, Mike Mullane, called Dr. McGuire’s office and made an appointment. I was losing my mind.

On the day of the meeting I picked up the phone several times to cancel. I was certain that if I walked into McGuire’s office I would be recording a new astronaut first. I would become the first astronaut in the history of NASA to voluntarily see a shrink. I would be admitting failure. I would be violating the “Better dead than look bad” commandment. I could imagine how the office grapevine would carry the news if my dark secret was ever discovered. “John Young put Mullane in tears. He ran to the shrink like one of those weepy women on
Oprah.
” My finger hovered over the phone keypad as this image of personal failure filled my mind. I would cancel the appointment. But I would always come back to the question, “What choice did I have?” I was going freakin’ nuts. I would hang up the phone only to immediately snatch it back and begin to question myself all over again.

Somehow my resolve triumphed. I made it to zero hour. I told my secretary I was going to the gym and then took a circuitous route to McGuire’s temporary office. He merely consulted for NASA. His primary job was in San Antonio with the University of Texas. I found the unmarked room and walked by it several times, checking the hallways for any prying eyes. A Baptist preacher on a clandestine rendezvous with a prostitute could not have acted more suspiciously. The hallway was deserted. Finally I grabbed the door handle, took one more hurried glance in all directions, rushed into the room, and immediately closed the door. That entry alone was probably enough for McGuire to make a diagnosis: paranoid.

As he had ten years earlier, Dr. Terry McGuire met me with a broad smile and enthusiastic handshake. “Come on in, Mike. Have a seat. What can I do for you?” He was largely unchanged from how I remembered him—tall, trim, yielding to baldness, clean shaven. He had the perfect voice for his job—deep, melodious, and soothing.

While I didn’t think there was a damn thing he could do for me, I cut to the chase. “Young and Abbey are driving me fucking nuts.”

McGuire laughed at that. “I’ve heard that from a number of your fellow astronauts.”

I’m sure he noticed the shock on my face. “Are you saying I’m not the first astronaut to meet with you?”

“Not at all.”

The revelation was like a giant weight being lifted from my shoulders. Misery loves company and now I was being told I was part of a miserable crowd. Suddenly, I wanted to interview him, to find what others were saying, but he quickly steered me back to topic. “So, tell me what’s happening with Young and Abbey.”

For the next hour the demons of anger and disgust flew from my soul like bats from a cave. Emboldened by the thought that others had sat in this same seat, I didn’t hold anything back. I told of my ongoing head-butting with Young on range safety and OMS burn issues and the warnings other astronauts had given me that my career was in peril for doing my job. “We’re all afraid to speak up for fear it will jeopardize our place in line. There’s no communication. Nobody understands how crews are chosen or even who chooses them or who has veto power over them—and that’s all that matters to us, flight assignments. Fear dominates the office.”

I recounted how astronauts had recently attempted to forecast flight assignments based upon where people would be parking. “Hank Hartsfield put out an updated parking lot map. Some astronauts jumped on it as if it were the Rosetta Stone, which could decipher their place in the flight line. They assumed those with the closest parking spaces to the simulators were to be on the next missions. It’s sick. It just shows our desperation for some insight into the flight assignment process.”

I told him of something Hartsfield had related. “Hank is working as Abbey’s deputy and told me that George is resisting bringing computer links into the astronaut office. It’s Hank’s opinion that Abbey doesn’t want us to have a communication path he can’t control.”

I told him of a revealing incident in which one astronaut suggested, “There will be one hundred suspects, all astronauts, if Abbey was ever to die from foul play.” Another astronaut offered, “No, there won’t be one hundred suspects. There will be one hundred astronauts clamoring to take responsibility…‘I’m the hero…I did it.’” A hundred astronauts were on the verge of going postal.

I explained the profound us-versus-them attitude that had come to dominate our relationship with Young and Abbey. I told of astronauts who were perceived as spies for the duo. “Whenever they enter a conversation, everybody watches what they say for fear it will come back to haunt them. It’s like being in a prison yard and worrying about the warden’s stoolies overhearing an escape plan.”

I told him how we had all hoped the
Challenger
disaster would be the catalyst for change in management, but nine months had passed and nothing had changed and, with each passing day, it became more evident nothing ever would change. I offered my opinion that “Nobody runs NASA. Young and Abbey don’t answer to anybody. They’re bulletproof.”

Throughout my diatribe, I couldn’t get it out of my head that I was engaged in an exercise of futility. What was McGuire going to do? He wasn’t even a NASA employee: He was a consultant. I was wasting my breath.

I finally stopped and thanked him for listening. “I know there’s nothing you can do on this, but it’s been helpful to get it off my chest. Knowing others have been driven to you in their frustration is definitely helpful.”

McGuire said nothing to dissuade my belief that he was powerless to effect any management changes. He would have been lying if he had, was my certain opinion. He encouraged me to stick it out. Changes might be in the works, brighter days might be ahead, blah, blah, blah. It was what I had expected. He was as impotent as the rest of us. He was a good listener but he had no cure for what ailed me. I wanted to fly in space again and my immediate boss had twice indicated, if he had anything to do with it, that was never going to happen. I had long exhausted myself wondering if Young’s opinion mattered at all.

As I rose to leave, McGuire handed me a ten-page, single-spaced document. “You might want to read this sometime. It’ll help explain the situation you’re in.”

I wanted to say, “I don’t need to read anything to know the situation I’m in…It’s called deep shit,” but held my tongue. I glanced at the cover page,
Leadership as Related to Astronaut Corps, by Terence F. McGuire, M.D., Consultant in Psychiatry.
It was undated. My curiosity was piqued by the title. Why was McGuire writing about astronaut leadership? I could only assume it was a self-initiated private work. “Publish or perish” was the order of the day for university professors. I rolled the document into my hand, thanked McGuire for listening, and departed.

I wasn’t about to be found at my desk reading anything with McGuire’s name on it, so I put the document in my briefcase and took it home. That evening I popped a beer and began reading. “One of the more operationally practical ways of viewing personality subdivides the population into six basic clusters of characteristics that define distinct personality types….” Yawn. I felt like I was back in high school reading
Moby-Dick
(a book I’m convinced nobody has ever completed). But as I read further I realized McGuire did have an extensive knowledge of what was happening in the astronaut corps.