Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play with his head, so I seamlessly replied, “I flew a candy bomber.”

“A candy bomber? What was that?”

I had a fish on the line and began to reel it in. “In the villages the women and children would hide in their spider holes and trenches. You could never get them in the open. So I flew a plane loaded with canisters of candy and would swoop low over the villages and drop them nearby. This would bring the women and children out of their holes to scoop it up.” At this point in my story I pointed to Loren and Brewster. “And these guys would be thirty seconds behind me loaded wall to wall with napalm and would lay it down on those villagers. It got them every time.”

The scientist’s eyes widened in shock and outrage. I could just imagine the scene playing out in his brain: images of women and children dipped in jellied gasoline running around on fire. He snapped his head to Loren and Brewster, anticipating a denial. At this point I expected my twisted joke to come undone but Brewster and Loren picked up my lead. They assumed the steely eyes of professional killers and silently nodded in the affirmative. Every Vietnam atrocity this young scientist had ever heard of was now confirmed.

Hawley tried to calm him. “That’s bullshit. They make up these stories all the time. Don’t believe them. They didn’t kill any women and children.”

At that comment, Brewster shrugged. He didn’t say a word but his body language did: “You can believe what you want.” There was no doubt in any of our minds Steve’s friend walked away from dinner believing he had just socialized with war criminals.

On a trip to Los Angeles it was Jeff Hoffman who felt the sting. At breakfast he asked Brewster and me what we had done the night before. While we had actually been at a bar having a few beers, I immediately replied, “We visited that museum.”

“What museum?”

I made up an incredible story about a museum of “cultural art.” Loren Shriver picked up on my lead and added his own embellishments about famous paintings by Picasso and sculptures by Michelangelo. Dick Scobee joined in with more bullshit. Through it all Jeff expressed his disappointment at missing such a rare and wonderful opportunity. Finally he asked, “Where’s the museum?”

I replied, “It’s right next to the Christian Science Reading Room. We did some studying there before going to it.”

Even this over-the-top BS didn’t immediately register in Jeff’s brain. He continued to lament he had missed one of America’s greatest museums. A minute later he jerked up from his coffee. “You guys made all that up, didn’t you?” We laughed.

Jeff would prove to be the most enduring TFNG scientist. Over the years, many of the other civilians would become enamored with the military aviator mystique and would take on varying degrees of its form. But, to the very end, Jeff remained an unpolluted scientist—a fact that presented some great opportunities for us AD retards. I recall a Monday meeting in which he made an impassioned request for better attendance at an astronaut office science lecture series. Attendance was voluntary and few of the military TFNGs were showing up. Jeff begged, “Guys, we’re going to have coffee and doughnuts and the visiting professor really has some fascinating stuff to tell us. You really should be there.” He then expanded on the science that would be covered. I watched the pilots. Their faces were pictures of disinterest. The only thought running through their brains was I wonder where happy hour will be?

Jeff finally finished. “Do you have any questions?” He looked so hopefully at his tuned-out audience, it about broke my heart. He was desperate for any indication that we had paid the slightest attention to his pleas. “Any questions? Any questions at all?” But the room remained as silent as an OMS burn.

I slowly raised my hand and Jeff’s face lit up like a sunspot. “Yes, Mike.”

“I was just wondering…. What type of doughnuts are you going to have?” The walls of the room nearly blew apart with laughter. It was one of Jeff’s many lessons that the military aviator brain was a science wasteland.

Like Hoot with the flaming hookers, I wondered, Why do I do this? and smiled that I had. But I will ultimately pay the price. Besides Bible hell and feminist hell, I’ll also burn in post-doc hell.

Chapter 10

Temples of History

In our early TFNG months we were introduced to the Outpost Tavern, a temple of space history. The Outpost was the astronaut after-work hangout located a few blocks from JSC’s front gate. It was aptly named. To say the Outpost was “rustic” was like saying King Tut has a few wrinkles.

The building was a shack of weather-beaten boards, its parking lot as cratered as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Some of these water-filled holes could have swallowed a small sedan. After stepping around a minefield of fire-ant mounds, patrons entered the Outpost through two saloon-style swinging doors cut out in the shape of curvaceous bikini-clad girls. The bar ran around two walls. A griddle and deep-fryer served up burgers and fries certain to deposit a couple millimeters of plaque in every artery of the body. The low ceiling trapped a cloud of atomized grease and cigarette smoke like pollution in a temperature inversion. A dartboard, a shuffleboard table game, and a pool table offered entertainment. The interior décor consisted of space posters and astronaut photographs stapled to the walls and ceiling. The Outpost was the only bar in America where the pinups were smiling flight-suited women astronauts.

Why the Outpost was picked as the astronaut hangout has been lost to antiquity, but it is almost a tradition for flying units to have such a retreat. For Chuck Yeager and the rocket plane pilots of the ’50s and ’60s there was the Happy Bottom Riding Club near Edwards AFB; for the early astronauts, it was the Mouse Trap Lounge in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Most likely the Outpost became the unofficial watering hole for shuttle-era astronauts because of the sanctuary it offered. I never saw anybody approached for an autograph or interview in the Outpost. Perhaps outsiders were intimidated by the obstacle course of potholes or they assumed the building was condemned.

Every Friday happy hour, many TFNGs would be at the Outpost. The building would ultimately be the scene of our crew-selection parties, our landing parties, and our promotion parties. It would be the place where we traded gossip and bitched about our management. We would meet with our payload contractors and refine checklist procedures on the backs of napkins. And the Outpost would ultimately serve as a refuge, where we would grieve for our lost friends. The Outpost has been a witness to so much of the astronaut experience it should be moved in its entirety to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. It is as much a part of space history as the rocket planes hanging from the museum ceiling.

Our TFNG apprenticeship also introduced us to the loftiest temple of space history, the Mission Control Center (MCC). As we stepped into the deserted, silent room, I imagined we experienced the same sense of awe a rookie baseball player experiences when he jogs onto the field for his first Major League game. We were in the “Show,” stepping where legends had stepped before. Here was where cigars were smoked in celebration of the Apollo 11 landing. Here was where the words, “Houston, we have a problem” were first received when an explosion shattered the Apollo 13 service module.

Like pennant flags hanging in a stadium, large renditions of patches of the missions controlled from the facility decorated the walls. The front of the room was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling rear projection screen. This was where the sinusoidal orbit traces, spacecraft location, and other engineering data would be projected during an actual mission. From the floor in front of this screen to the back of the room were consecutive rows of computer consoles. Each row was terraced to be slightly higher than the one in front. On top of these consoles were signs with acronyms that labeled the function of the particular station. FDO referred to the Flight Dynamics Officer’s station, where a handful of men and women would monitor the trajectory of a launching and reentering spacecraft. INCO was the label for the Instrumentation and Communication Officer. PROP referred to the Propulsion systems controller. There were other labels: EVA, PAYLOADS, SURGEON, PAO, DPS, and more.