Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

The shift from the Apollo program to the shuttle program represented a sea-change for NASA. Everything was different. The agency’s new mission was largely to haul freight. The vehicle doing the trucking would be reusable, something NASA had no prior experience with. The flight rate would require the NASA team to plan dozens of missions simultaneously: building and validating software, training crews, checking out vehicles and payloads. And NASA would have to do this with far less manpower and fewer resources than had been available during Apollo.

I doubt any of the TFNGs standing on that stage fully comprehended the dangers the space shuttle and NASA’s new mission would include. But it wouldn’t have mattered if we had known. If Dr. Kraft had explained exactly what we had just signed up to do—to be some of the first humans to ride uncontrollable solid-fueled rocket boosters, and to do so without the protection of an in-flight escape system, to launch satellites that didn’t really require a manned rocket, on a launch schedule that would stretch manpower and resources to their limits—it wouldn’t have diminished our enthusiasm one iota. For many of us, our life’s quest had been to hear our names read into history as astronauts. We wanted to fly into space. The sooner and the more often (and who gave a shit what was in the cargo bay), the better.

Chapter 7

Arrested Development

On my first official day as an astronaut candidate I faced two things I had never faced before: picking out clothes to wear for work and working with women. In my thirty-two years of life, beginning with diapers, there had always been a system to dress me. I had gone to Catholic schools for twelve years and worn the uniforms of that system. In four years at West Point I never had a piece of civilian clothing in my closet. The air force also told me what to wear. Not once on a school or work morning had I ever stood in front of my closet and pondered what I should wear that day. As a result, I was a fashion illiterate. And I wasn’t alone. I had already seen a handful of the veteran astronauts wearing plaid pants. Even I, completely clueless on the subject of style, sensed this might be a little too retro. When my children saw one of the plaid-panted victims, they hid their faces and giggled. To this day, whenever my adult children see a golfer wearing plaid, they’ll comment, “Hey, Dad, check it out…an astronaut.” A military astronaut might show up for a party dressed in a leisure suit or Sansabelt slacks and, most telling, no other military astronaut present would know there was anything even slightly amiss.

Fortunately for my children, my limited wardrobe did not include plaid. Rather, my first attempt at workday attire required me to satisfactorily combine one of four solid-colored slacks with one of four solid-colored shirts. I failed. At the breakfast table my wife recoiled as if I had walked in with a nose ring. “You’re not going to work dressed like that, are you?” It was a question I would hear many times in the first few weeks of my NASA life. Donna even threatened to put Garanimals hang tags on my slacks and shirts. She would mock me: “The lions go with the lions and the giraffes go with the giraffes.” I had no problem with the suggestion. I thought it was an excellent idea.

If I had no clue about how to dress myself, I was in another galaxy when it came to working with women. I saw women only as sex objects, an unintended consequence of twelve years of Catholic school education. The priests and nuns had pounded into me that females were equated with sex, and sex brought eternal damnation. Girls were never discussed in any other context. They were never discussed as real people who might harbor dreams. They were never discussed as doctors or scientists or astronauts. They were only discussed as “occasions of sin.” The shortcut to hell was through a woman’s crotch was all I learned about the female gender as a teenager. Their breasts would earn you an introduction to Beelzebub, too. In fact, just fantasizing about their breasts and their other parts (the soul-killing mortal sin of impure thoughts ) would also send you straight to hell. Only in marriage did the rules change. Then, sex was fine—productive sex. In marriage a woman achieved her highest state in life—getting on her back and producing children. “The primary purpose of marriage is procreation of children” was dogma in my wife’s 1963 “Marriage Course” curriculum guide from St. Mary’s High School.

The same guide also includes a lesson on “Masculine and Feminine Psychology” with a table of “characteristics.” Males are more realistic, females more idealistic. Men are more emotionally stable, women are more emotionally liable. Man loves his work, woman loves her man. And, my favorite, Men are more likely to be right, women more likely to be wrong.

I accepted these twisted sexist messages of Catholicism so completely that in my senior year of high school I wrote a term paper on why women should not be allowed to attend college. After all, I eloquently reasoned, they never did anything with an education. They only attended college to find a husband. They were needlessly filling classes and taking seats from males who would require the education to get jobs…real jobs. I received an A on the paper. I had learned my lesson well.

The Hollywood movies of my childhood did nothing to dispel what I was learning in school. The men were always depicted as the action gender, be they cowboys in action against the Indians, a soldier in action against the Japanese, or an astronaut saving humanity. The women were always the passive gender, waiting at home, cooking, and caring for the children. They were only active when the letters and telegrams came that their heroic men had taken an arrow, bullet, or meteor. Then they cried. After all, they were more emotionally liable.

To further guarantee my ignorance of females, I had lived and worked in environments awash in testosterone my entire life. I was raised in a family of one girl, five boys. My sister was nine years younger than me. This was no Brady Bunch house filled with teen girls to give me a clue about how to act and what to say around females. I recall one of my wildlife-enthusiast brothers had a basketball on which he had written, I hate girls. Bighorn sheep, I like. That about summarized the Mullane boys’ attitude toward females. We were more comfortable around four-legged animals than a human carrying an X chromosome.

I didn’t go to either my junior or senior prom. At the few dances I did attend I stood against the gym wall with the other nerds, dweebs, and losers attempting to fight off impure thoughts. When there would be a girl-ask-boy dance, I would be left against that wall. The girls at St. Pius X High School weren’t stupid. In my entire four years of high school I doubt I accumulated more than a couple hours talking to girls. My senior yearbook doesn’t have a single entry from a girl. In fact, it bears only one dedication. It’s from a fellow dweeb that reads, You missed Korea, but here’s hoping you make Vietnam . It probably comes as no surprise that when I graduated I was as virginal as Mary the Mother of God.

The West Point of my era was another all-male bastion. Cadets joked that the mortar in the granite walls was actually semen. My Company K-1 marching song included the lyrics “We make the cum fly.” West Pointers of my era looked at women with the same leering eye as a convicted felon doing thirty to life. Flirtation Walk, so romantically depicted in the movies, was littered with more used rubber than a Firestone test track. My West Point experience reinforced what Catholicism had taught me—women were nothing more than sex objects.