Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

Twenty-two minutes north of the equator, Atlantis brushed the Arctic Circle. The deep night of winter in the northern hemisphere made it ideal for viewing the lights of the aurora borealis. I watched them grow and collapse in their ephemeral, spiritlike dance. Streamers of emerald green and fuchsia waved as if rippled by the wind. The lower end of one curtain took on an intense glow, like the head of a comet, its attached streamer trailing away like a sun-blown tail. The lights were so captivating I watched them until they were just a haze on the receding horizon, and I was happy to know I had tickets for the next show starting in ninety minutes.

I moved to the back cockpit to enjoy a different light show…the atomic oxygen glow engulfing Atlantis ’s payload bay. The low-orbit space through which Atlantis plunged was not empty. We were in the outer reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere, which contained billions of atoms of UV-altered molecular oxygen known as atomic oxygen. The wind they produced was vanishingly thin, but it was enough to react with the shuttle’s windward surfaces to cause a Saint Elmo’s–like fire. The glow was so intense it appeared we had flown into a hazy alien fog. Every affected surface was covered to a depth of several feet. If we had not been warned of the phenomenon, I would have worried we had passed into the Twilight Zone and our spaceship had been transformed into a ghost ship. We had been damned by the curse of the skull man.

Atlantis curved over northern Europe toward another forty-five minute day. If ever there was a music composition perfect for watching the beauty of an orbit sunrise, that composition would be Pachelbel’s Canon. As the violin melody played on my Walkman, the rising sun painted the horizon in twenty shades of indigo, blue, orange, and red. God, how I wanted to stop and just hover.

I took off my headset and watched the Earth in silence. I also wanted to hear spaceflight and seal that memory in my mind. The cabin fans stirred the air with their constant soft whoosh. From downstairs I could hear the muted clatter of the teleprinter printing out checklist changes and weather reports for tomorrow’s reentry. Someone coughed. The UHF radio captured the gibberish of a foreign pilot talking to his controller somewhere below.

I inhaled the smell of Atlantis. There was no evidence of the humanity that inhabited her, no odor of our bodies, our food, our waste, our emesis. The engineers had done a remarkable job of filtering the air. The only “smell” was that of unnatural sterility. I missed the scents of rain, desert, and sea…and I had only been away from the Earth for four days. I wondered if engineers would ever be able to package smells of our home planet so that Martian pioneers could remember their roots. For their sakes, I hoped so.

I took a moment to look around Atlantis ’s cockpit and capture that memory, knowing that when I crawled from her side hatch tomorrow it would be for the last time. The windows and floor were the only surfaces not covered with switches, controls, circuit breakers, computer monitors, or TV screens. Cue cards dotted the panels. Bound checklists were similarly scattered on Velcro pads. Twelve years ago, I had been overwhelmed with the machine’s complexity. Now, the cockpit was as familiar and comforting as my living room.

I turned and looked forward. The PLT’s seat belt hovered like a charmed snake. The three computer screens were off. No reason to waste power during a sleep period. My eyes touched on the life-and-death switches I had so often feared might play a part on one of my missions: the abort selection switch, the SSME shutdown buttons, the BFS engage buttons. I would never need any of them and I thanked God for it.

I floated back to the forward windows. The orbits continued…25,000 miles, 90 minutes, one sunrise, one sunset, a brush with the Arctic Circle, a brush with the Antarctic Circle. At each equatorial crossing Atlantis passed 1,500 miles west of its prior transit, an effect of the Earth’s eastward spin underneath our orbit. In circuit after circuit, I was seeing a different sea, a different land, a different sky. I watched North African deserts stretch to the horizon in dunes as perfectly spaced as ripples in a pond. I passed over snowy Siberian forests as virgin as the Garden of Eden. I saw the green vein of the Nile and the white-tipped chaos of the Himalayas and the Andes. I saw perfect fans of alluvial debris debouching onto desert floors, each a signature of millions of years of mountain erosion. I thrilled to shooting stars and the stellar mist of space and twinkling satellites and the jewel that was Jupiter. I saw the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Sputnik I ’s launch site, with the nearby Aral Sea appearing oil black against the winter white of the Kazakh Steppes. A few turns later the desert-lonely lights of Albuquerque came into view and I marveled at how those two places, so geographically distant from each other, had been inexorably linked in my life. I passed over every unimproved road my parents had ever dared, every mountain I had ever climbed, every sky I had ever flown. With the music of Vangelis and Bach and Albinoni as a sound track, I watched the movie of my life.

Chapter 41

The White House

Our first order of postlanding business was to review our mission film and edit two separate movies, one intended for security-cleared eyes only, the other for the public. Because of the secrecy surrounding our orbit activities, the latter had little in it. We wanted to include the fun video we had taken of our satanic crewmember in hilarious poses, but Dan Brandenstein squelched that. “If we keep showing on-orbit pranks, headquarters is going to assume control of editing our postflight movies. They’re getting pissed the press only shows us screwing off in space.” We thought it was bullshit, but understood Dan’s position and honored it. The world would never see Beelzebub clamped on a shuttle toilet.

Our postflight travel was similar to that of STS-27. I journeyed to places I can’t mention to be congratulated by people whose office titles are similarly unmentionable. I received another National Intelligence Medal of Achievement from another “black world” Wizard of Oz that I could only wear in a vault. This citation (declassified years later) reads:

…Colonel Mullane’s superior performance led to the safe deployment and successful activation of a system vital to our national security. The singularly superior performance of Colonel Mullane reflects great credit upon himself, the United States Air Force, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Intelligence Community.

At one of our stops some spooks hosted us to a candlelit dinner in their black-world building. The office secretaries acted as servers since no caterers could enter. We showed our mission movie and, lubricated by wine, I added my own editorial comments. As space video of the Boston–Cape Cod area was shown, I injected, “Moscow doesn’t have as many communists as are living in this picture.” There was a peal of laughter. Hank Hartsfield would have been proud.

The highlight of our meager postflight PR tour was a visit to George Bush, Senior’s White House. We were shocked by the invitation. STS-36 had been virtually ignored in the press. There were no women on the crew, no minorities, no firsts of any kind that might have turned out the press to cover a presidential handshake. Whatever the reason, the invitation was sincerely appreciated.

We met the president in the Oval Office, taking seats in sofas set around a coffee table. Mr. Bush sat in a nearby chair. The questions he asked indicated that he was well briefed on our mission. But it was hard to carry on a conversation. A steady stream of aides and secretaries were constantly coming to his side to get answers to questions and his signature on documents. I wondered if the man was ever alone, even on the toilet.