Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

The toilet design was essentially complete by the time TFNGs were undergoing waste management training, but an Edwards AFB Vomit Comet pilot told me of some of the early development efforts. These included female nurse volunteers who flew hundreds of weightless parabolas. They drank gallons of iced tea and during the thirty-second weightless falls would void into various toilet designs. Volunteers for the solid waste collection tests included a USAF lieutenant. The Vomit Comet would be parked near a taxiway with all the ground support equipment attached and ready to go, just like a Cold War nuclear bomber. And just like those bomber crews, the Vomit Comet pilots made sure they were ready for the scramble call…not from the president of the United States but rather from the bowel-distressed lieutenant screaming, “I’ve got to go!” At that, everybody would run to the plane, fire up the engines, and roar skyward. The weightless parabolas would begin and the test subject would have multiple thirty-second intervals to try a bowel movement. Where do we get such men?

Urine collection for spacewalking females proved to be a particularly challenging engineering problem. Catheterization was quickly eliminated—too dangerous and uncomfortable. Diapers were messy. The most bizarre design was the brainchild of a gynecologist. He proposed that a mold of the inside of a woman’s vagina could be used as an alignment tool for urine collection. Before dressing in the spacesuit, the woman would insert her personal mold into her body, which would bring the exterior-mounted urine collector into a seal around the urethra. Urine could then be cleanly collected as it left the body. A test subject was needed to try the design and a call went out for volunteers. Kandy answered.

Kandy was a free-spirited Ellington Field flight operations secretary with a wonderful sense of humor. She easily tolerated the AD astronauts, as when she pulled up a chair to join a group of us waiting for the fog to lift so we could fly our ’38s. Several of the navy astronauts were telling “beat this” stories about bizarre tattoos they had seen. One pilot recalled a photograph of a man’s crotch in the window of a Filipino tattoo parlor. Tattooed on the thighs of both his legs were huge elephant ears that gave the man’s penis the appearance of the animal’s trunk. (Who says we men aren’t in touch with our inner feelings?) Kandy joined in our laughter.

It was later in my TFNG life when, at a party, she recounted being the volunteer for the vaginal-insert urine collection design. The gynecologist had made the mold and she had tried it, but with limited success. Eventually the design was rejected and diapers were adopted as the best solution. Kandy finished her story: “I’ve got the mold sitting on my coffee table at home.” Upon hearing that, I choked, shooting beer out my nose in the process. I had an instantaneous vision of a guest at Kandy’s home picking up the object and asking, “What’s this unique knickknack?” I told Kandy NASA should have given her a medal, or at least mounted the device on a plaque signed by the NASA administrator with an inscription, For service above and beyond the call of duty.

NASA is filled with thousands of men and women who have labored in anonymity to put astronauts in space and make our lives somewhat comfortable once we get there. As I once heard an astronaut say, “We stand on their shoulders to get into orbit.” In the case of Kandy and those other toilet testers, we stood on other parts of their bodies.

In our space-wardrobe fitting sessions, we encountered one other waste collection detail, which included a man’s worst nightmare. These sessions were conducted by white-smocked young ladies armed with tape measures, calipers, and clipboards. They measured our skulls, hands, limbs, and feet for helmets, gloves, and spacesuits. During my session I was as witty and charming as Burt Reynolds. I was a brand-new astronaut being fitted for a spacesuit. A bottle of tequila couldn’t have gotten me higher.

At the end of the session a particularly sweet little custard walked me to a corner of the room that was screened from the rest of the facility. “Step inside and tell me what size fits you.”

I pulled back the curtain and boldly walked forward, expecting to find a fitting room for underwear. But I was wrong. I had stepped into male hell. Forget about blowing up on a space shuttle. This was real fear. On a table, laid out like indictments, were four different-size condoms.

I would learn an open-ended condom was part of the male urine collection system worn under the pressure-suit cooling garment. One end of the latex slipped over the penis, the other end was connected to a waist-worn nylon bladder. Urine could pass through the condom, through a one-way valve, and into the nylon bladder. After a launch, landing, or spacewalk (the three times when the toilet was inaccessible) the bladder/condom combination, known as a Urine Collection Device (UCD), could be stripped from the body and thrown away. In a really cruel joke, God created different-size penises, so NASA provided different-size condoms. The cute little filly on the other side of the curtain needed my stud size on her clipboard so the correct condom could be loaded in my personal locker when I finally flew in space.

With all the enthusiasm of a prisoner walking to the gallows I dropped my pants. Until this moment in my life I had worn a condom only during brief periods in my marriage when my wife had stopped her birth control pills. On those occasions there had been a sense of urgency and enthusiasm about donning the one-size-fits-all latex scabbard. Not now. I looked down at an appendage that was in the process of renouncing circumcision and finding some heretofore unknown foreskin to hide behind.

I reached for the largest condom. Astronauts are the most competitive people in the world. From supplying an autograph to fitting a rubber, we’re out to be the best, the fastest, the smartest…the biggest. If there had been a hula hoop on that table, male astronauts would have seized it with hope in their souls.

I grabbed my cowering little friend and began work. “Don’t you have anything bigger?” I nervously joked to the cutie on the other side of the curtain. I’m sure she had never heard that one before.

Why didn’t they have a man collecting this information? I wondered. Then, I thought, That would be even worse .

Putting a flaccid penis in a condom is like shoving toothpaste back in the tube. I finally managed to corral the beast and did a few jiggles to see if the rubber would stay on. It fell to the floor. My testicles might as well have joined it. I had been emasculated. Clearly, I wasn’t going to place first in this competition. Of course I could have lied and said I needed the annihilator size, but to do so would have been to invite disaster during a spacewalk. If the condom didn’t fit, it would leak or even come off altogether, in which case the cooling garment would become a urine sponge. As uncomfortable as that sounds, it would be the least of the victim’s problems. An astronaut would never outlive the teasing.

I finally made a fit and gave the technician my size, wanting to add, “I’ll have you know I’ve fathered three children with this!”

Many years later astronauts were outraged when a pilot’s medical records were compromised to the press. Some in the media were questioning his suitability to command an important shuttle mission since he had been treated for kidney stones. Astronauts were livid that the flight surgeon’s office had somehow leaked this private medical information. As the brouhaha raged, I told a fellow TFNG, “I don’t care if they publish my medical records in the New York Times. I just hope the record of my condom size is locked up in a vault in Cheyenne Mountain.” He understood. There are worse things to read about in the paper than the fact that you have passed a kidney stone.