Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

Mrs. Bush would have fit perfectly into our TFNG gang. I could see her at the Outpost and Pete’s BBQ and on the LCC roof. There are some things the trappings of wealth and power and great political office can never dissolve. Among these are the bonds of the military family. As the wife of a WWII naval aviator, Barbara Bush had long ago experienced everything we had lived and were continuing to live…fear, the heartache of hearing “Taps” played over friends’ graves, and consoling grieving widows and fatherless children.

As we walked away, I thought of those dissident Wellesley women. They had been right about one thing—Mrs. Bush shouldn’t have been invited to speak at their commencement merely because she was the First Lady. Any woman could be one of those. Rather, she should have been invited because she was a member of the Greatest Generation, because she had kissed her man off to war and been left to wonder if she would ever see him again, because—as the loving and supportive wife of a WWII naval aviator—she had done her part to save the world. Those were commencement address qualifications for any college, even Wellesley.

Chapter 42

Journey’s End

In May 1990, I retired from the USAF and NASA in an astronaut office ceremony attended by thirty or so of my peers. The gathering was held in the main conference room where, twelve years earlier, I had first heard John Young welcome our TFNG class. Dressed in my air force uniform, with my ribbons and the astronaut wings I had flown in space pinned to my chest, I accepted the Air Force Legion of Merit from USAF Major General Nate Lindsay. Nate had become a close friend over the course of my two DOD missions and I was honored he and his wife, Shirley, had taken the time to fly to Houston to attend the ceremony. Donna, my mom, and my son, Pat, were also in attendance. Even my Pettigrew genes couldn’t completely subdue the emotions that stirred in my soul at the sight of Pat. I could feel my throat tightening and my eyes welling. I began my air force career at my commissioning on the Plain at West Point in 1967. At that time, Donna and my mom had each pinned on one of my second lieutenant butter bars. Now, my twenty-two-year-old son, dressed in his air force uniform and wearing the same virginal rank, was shaking my hand and hugging me.

I kept my comments brief knowing everybody had to get back to work. Somewhere there was a countdown clock urgently marking the weeks to the next launch. I thanked everybody for their years of support, making a special reference to Pat, Amy, Laura (the girls had been unable to attend), and my mom. I saved my greatest praise for Donna. Tears threatened to douse her cheeks. I then concluded with the observation that I was the third generation of my family to have seen combat. My maternal grandfather had served in France in WWI and my dad in WWII. I had done a tour in Vietnam. I offered the hope my children’s generation would never see a war. At that time it seemed like a sure bet. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist. How could there ever be another threat to America as great?

That night, the astronaut office hosted a going-away party for Donna and me at a local restaurant. Beth Turner, one of the office secretaries, obtained a life-size cardboard rendition of a studly bodybuilder and placed it at stage center. She covered the face with my astronaut photo and the crotch with a sequined jockstrap stuffed with something flattering. Against this backdrop Hoot Gibson roasted me with stories of my botched T-38 landing in Brewster Shaw’s backseat, my near death experiences while performing STS-1 chase duties with “Red Flash” Walker, and my intercom comment from STS-27—“The RSO’s mother goes down like a Muslim at noon.” He also recounted how a group of female DOD security secretaries, tasked with declassifying our STS-27 audiotapes, had been confused by my multiple references to the “Anaconda.” They had assumed it might be a secret code word for our payload. I had to explain to them it was a Swine Flight euphemism for penis. As the crowd laughed at Hoot’s stories (he was so damned good at everything ), I thought of how all astronauts long to leave a memorable and heroic legacy. Hoot had defined mine…screwing up a T-38 backseat landing, slandering the mother of the man who was two switches away from killing us on Swine Flight, and introducing some sweet young innocents to the disgusting humor of Planet AD. Oh well, I guess it could have been worse.

Hoot finally ended the roast by embracing me in a cheek-to-cheek hug, an act of physical affection that surprised me. But I understood. Like warriors back from the battle, we were intimately bound by our own unique duels with death, by the incommunicable experience of spaceflight.

The audience applauded, the youngest astronauts being the most enthusiastic. It had been the same way back in my freshmen days. Why don’t these old farts just leave or die or something? I was now the old fart and my departure was freeing up one more seat into space. For silver-pinned astronauts, that was something to applaud.

Back home Donna and I talked long into the night. I tried to convey to her my everlasting gratitude for the life she had given me, but how do you say thanks for a dream? I tried with “I’m glad you walked out of that party in 1965 to kiss me.” I don’t think I could have said it better than with those few words. But for that kiss, my life would have been different.

As sleep was approaching, I thought there was one other thing I had to do before I walked out of NASA. I needed to hitch a ride to KSC.

I stopped outside the launchpad perimeter fence, where the tourist buses parked, and stepped from the car. The visitors center was closed and tours had ended so I knew I wouldn’t be disturbed. Columbia was being prepared for her tenth mission and was almost completely hidden by the rotating service structure. Only her right wing and nose and the tips of the SRBs were visible. I had wanted to drive to the pad and take the elevator to the cockpit level, but I knew that would have been a bureaucratic hassle. Even astronauts weren’t free to move through security checkpoints. So my last view of Columbia would be as the tourists saw her: from a quarter mile away, wrapped in her steel cocoon, hardly looking like a spaceship at all.

The sun had recently set and the pad xenon lights were on. The wind brought muted loudspeaker calls to my ear and the techno-talk spun me back to the summer of 1984, which had been filled with so much fear, disappointment, and joy. But mostly it was the joy of August 30 that now sharpened in my mind’s eye. My heart accelerated at the memory of engine start. I could feel the rattle of max-q and see the fade-to-black as Discovery raced toward her orbit. Hank’s voice was as clear in my brain now as it had been six years earlier: “Congratulations, rookies. You’re officially astronauts.” I could hear the cheers of Judy, Mike, and Steve at the realization our silver pins had undergone the alchemy of fifty miles altitude and been transformed into gold.

I got back in the car and steered for the astronaut beach house. My last moments as an astronaut had to end on that beach. No other place conjured up more memories or more emotions than its sands. Its quiet solitude and proximity to the infinity of the sea and sky gave my soul a release unattainable anywhere else.

I pulled into the driveway, climbed the stairs, and opened the door. The house was deserted, as I knew it would be. Except for prelaunch picnics and spousal good-byes, few astronauts or NASA officials ever visited the facility.

Nothing had changed since my STS-36 visits. In fact, nothing had changed since my first beach house visit twelve years earlier. A framed abstract painting, which suggested a collision of multiple sailboats, hung on a wall. It had probably been selected by the same decorator who had chosen an exploding volcano for crew quarters wall art. (We were astronauts, for chrissake. What would be so wrong with some space and rocket photos?) The mantel of the fireplace was still crowded with various liquor and wine bottles. Some had probably been emptied by Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and other legendary astronauts. On the windowsills and end tables were shells, sand dollars, and other flotsam collected by generations of astronauts and their spouses. I was sure their beachcombing, like Donna’s and mine, had merely been a distraction from that impending final good-bye. The small den was still crowded with the same Ozzie and Harriet–era furniture: orange vinyl chairs, orange vinyl sofa, faux-wood coffee and lamp tables, and ceramic light fixtures decorated with splatters of, what else, orange paint. A small television, old enough to have captured the 1960s Gemini launches, sat on another imitation-wood piece.