Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

I threw it back in his face. “I’m not worried. You and Mario are navy officers. You have to be heterosexual to know what a woman needs. I’m surprised you guys aren’t in a bedroom by yourselves.”

Hoot and I had a well-deserved reputation for a disgusting synergy. Our exchanges devolved into more offensive comebacks and counter-comebacks until Donna finally hollered, “Enough! Will you guys ever grow up?” I had now heard that outburst from so many women so many times in my life, I thought it should be in Latin on the official shield of Planet Arrested Development— umquam grow idiotum.

The rest of the visit was relaxing. We had all been cured of the need to deliver a Bergman-Bogey good-bye at the water’s edge, so we just sat around, drank beer, and traded stories. Pepe told us of his agony during the wait on the pad. Dave Hilmers shot him a hypothetical question: “Pepe, if NASA needs someone to replace an MS on the next flight, would you volunteer?” Pepe instantly replied, “Absolutely.” His eagerness embodied the astronaut conundrum. Even as we waited on the pad, scared shitless and physically tortured, none of us could imagine not taking every offered mission.

When we returned to the crew quarters we were greeted by the local news showing a large, unmanned, French-built Ariane rocket blowing up shortly after liftoff from its South American pad. The story wouldn’t have been covered anywhere else in America, but, on Florida’s space coast, the competing French space program was news. The stations played the video again and again. There was no way Donna and the rest of the families could possibly miss it and I was certain the images of the flaming rocket falling into the sea would add to their anxiety. And that wasn’t the end of it. That evening one of the networks was airing a docudrama on the Challenger disaster. The advertisements for that show were in all the newspapers and magazines, and the network was constantly hyping it. The wives were going to have to be sedated to get them to the LCC roof. With J.O.’s illness, the two scrubs, the Ariane blowing up, and the Challenger movie, it was a good thing I didn’t believe in omens.

The evening of February 26 our crew flew to Houston for a refresher simulation. It had been so long since J.O. and John had practiced ascent emergencies, the mission trainers thought it would be a good idea to get them back in the JSC sim. I made the trip even though I had no duties associated with ascent. I just couldn’t face the thought of sitting around the crew quarters all night with nothing to do. I had already watched more movies in the past thirteen days of quarantine than I had watched in the past thirteen years. I couldn’t watch another. After landing at Ellington Field, I left the crew to their sim, drove home, watered the houseplants, and went running.

On the flight back to Florida I was stabbed with regret at my decision to leave NASA. The pain and fear that, yesterday, had provided validation for my retirement plans had been temporarily forgotten. Cocooned in the warm cockpit with the stars as a blanket, I wondered if I would ever find fulfillment outside of this business. There was an unknown scarier than space and I was fast approaching it…my post-MECO future.

This time I asked Jeannie to put light sticks over the single cue card Velcroed on the locker in front of me. The downstairs lighting was poor and I wanted the extra illumination to read the card. It outlined the procedures for a launchpad escape, for bailing out, and for a crash landing escape. I had every step committed to memory and didn’t need the card but it gave me something to read during the wait. I also asked her to put a light stick next to the altimeter in front of me. In a bailout scenario, after pulling the emergency cockpit depressurization handle, I would watch the altimeter until it indicated we were below fifty thousand feet. Then, I would blow the side hatch and deploy the bailout slide boom. I would be the first out…into the ink black of a North Atlantic winter night and all the perils that it embodied.

Jeannie’s face was beaded in sweat as she crawled over me to make my connections. Kevin Chilton, one of the ASPs, was the last to leave the cockpit. He pulled the pin that locked a safety cover over the cockpit depressurization and hatch jettison handles. Assuming we made orbit, I would reinsert the pin. He handed it to me. “Good luck, Mike.”

“Thanks, Chilly. See you at Edwards.”

I heard the hatch close, the mechanical thunking noise carrying a note of finality. A few minutes later J.O. watched from his port-side window as the last pad workers hurried across the access arm and entered the elevator. “The close-out crew just left. We’re alone.” J.O.’s observation reminded us that we sat at ground zero. Everybody else was racing to get away from the shuttle kill zone.

For the ninth time in my life I waited for launch. I was certain there would be a tenth time, tomorrow. The KSC weather was bad. I could feel the vehicle shaking in the wind and J.O. and John reported heavy rains lashing their windows from passing squalls. And it wasn’t just the Florida weather that was a problem. Our two transatlantic abort sights—Zaragoza, Spain, and Morón, Spain (pronounced MORE-OWN)—also had weather issues. At T-9 the launch director held the count. God might have been punishing us for ignoring Dave’s request to turn off the Playboy Channel.

Pepe’s practice countdown in the briefing room chair had been useless in preparing him for another pad wait. It didn’t take more than thirty minutes before he was once again entertaining us with his complaints. He ended one session with “My organs are shoving my diaphragm into my throat.”

I replied, “You’re wearing a diaphragm?” Everyone laughed so hard the engineers in MCC probably saw Atlantis ’s vibrations in their accelerometer data. J.O. fell into a gagging wet cough. He was still not well, a fact that had made the Houston Chronicle. An unnamed source was quoted in that newspaper suggesting that J.O. was actually suffering from viral influenza. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that was the case, but I was glad he was soldiering on. The longer our delay, the greater the chances I would become infected. (I would fall ill a day after landing.) I seriously doubted NASA HQ would hold the launch for my recovery, or the recovery of any infected MS, for that matter. As CDR and PLT, J.O. and John Casper were relatively irreplaceable. But with three MSes trained on the payload, any one of us was expendable. Given HQ’s attention to the flight rate, I suspected management had already instructed JSC to have some MS substitutes standing by just in case. I prayed for a weather miracle.

Pepe outlasted me as the cockpit clown. He joked and complained without pause. Now he was reviewing all the movies we had watched during the past two weeks: “ Lawrence of Arabia, The Great Escape, How the West Was Won, The Terminator, Predator, Alien, Top Gun …” We had seen more blood and guts than a meat packer. I resolved that the next movie I watched would be Heidi.

The T-9 minute hold dragged on…thirty minutes…an hour. Pepe gave us another item to consider. “I was just calculating…Since we started this never-go mission we’ve logged more than thirteen hours of on-the-back time. J.O. has even more time because he’s first in and last out. In fact, J.O., you’ve been on your back for five hours just on this countdown.”

“Thanks for cheering me up, Pepe.”

I didn’t have a body part that wasn’t complaining. To ease the pain in my back, I loosened my harness and arched my hips upward. The restored circulation was heaven-sent but I couldn’t hold the position for more than a moment. As my butt collapsed into the seat, a tide of cold urine squeezed from the diaper, climbed up my ass crack, and washed over my testicles. This was particularly disgusting knowing that, if we ever launched, I wouldn’t see a shower for five days. If I did this tomorrow, which seemed certain, I was going to take my chances with the condom UCD.