Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

With the reporter in his face Blaine became living proof that fear of public speaking far exceeds fear of death. In a span of twenty minutes he had faced both and it was the blazing camera spotlight that was killing him. His eyes dilated in fear. His nostrils flared open and closed like a bellows. Everything in his body language screamed, “Eject! Get me out of here!”

Blaine wasn’t unique. Most of us were equally terrified of TV cameras and public audiences. And NASA was no help. There was nothing in our TFNG training to prepare us for the great unknowns of the press and the public spotlight, an astounding oversight given the fact that astronauts were the most visible ambassadors of NASA. Apparently the agency thought our talents with machines extended to the lectern. They did not.

One of the most egregious examples of an astronaut abusing the microphone occurred when a pilot, who was renowned for a sense of humor even Howard Stern would have found offensive, attempted to hide his nervousness by opening his speech with a joke. With a hushed and expectant crowd of hundreds awaiting pearls of inspiration from one of American’s finest sons, he threw out the following:

A golfer walks into the clubhouse with a severe injury to his neck. He can barely talk. His buddies rush to him: “Bill, what happened?” Bill goes on to explain. “I teed off on number eight and sliced my shot into the rough. As I was looking for it, I noticed this woman searching for her ball in the same area. When I couldn’t find mine, I walked up to a cow grazing nearby thinking the ball might have ended up between its legs. But again, it wasn’t there. Finally out of frustration, I lifted up the cow’s tail to see if maybe it had hit there. Sure enough, a golf ball was stuck in its rear end. I looked closely and noticed it was a Titleist. Since I was hitting a Top-Flite, I knew the ball wasn’t mine. So, with the tail of the cow upraised in one hand and my other hand pointing at the animal’s ass, I shouted at this woman, “Hey, lady, does this look like yours?” That’s when she hit me across the throat with a seven-iron.”

The joke might have been appropriate for a group of golfers or military pilots or any similar crowd of crotch-scratching, crude, and coarse males. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the audience. The astronaut in question delivered this joke to open a high school commencement address! Only if it had been delivered at a NOW convention could it have generated more outrage. One can only imagine the horror on the faces of parents and faculty, the snickers of the students, and the subsequent crucifixion of the person who had suggested, “Let’s get one of America’s finest to speak at graduation. Let’s get an astronaut. It’ll be a commencement address to remember.” Indeed, it was.

NASA got what it was looking for in this astronaut’s presentation, a lot of visibility with the grassroots taxpayer. Unfortunately that visibility was, well, a little negative. Cards and letters rolled into NASA. The general message was something along the lines of, “Where did you get this bozo?” The answer was simple. NASA had plucked him from Planet AD.

Most of the military astronauts had no idea what constituted an appropriate sense of humor in a public setting. I once attended a dinner with a marine fighter pilot (not an astronaut) who rose from his seat with glass in hand and offered this toast to the ladies and gentlemen present: “Here’s to gunpowder and here’s to pussy. One I kill with, the other I’ll die for, but I love the smell of both.” You would think even the most AD-affected of the military TFNGs would probably have concluded such a toast would be inappropriate at a Shriners’ dinner, but I wouldn’t have put any money on it.

Lacking any other real-life experience, military males just assumed everybody had our perverted sense of humor. I certainly did. At one of my very early public appearances, I showed a slide of the six TFNG females intending to make a statement about the diversity of the new NASA class. But instead my alcohol-lubricated words came out as “pigs in space,” a reference to a popular Jim Hensen Muppets’ skit of the same title. Actually, I didn’t say, “Pigs in space.” Rather, I mimicked the Muppet announcer’s overly enthusiastic call: “Piiiiiiiigs innnnnnnnnnn spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!” The only reason NASA didn’t get protests from my performance was that my audience was a U.S. Army “Dining Out,” a black-tie gathering of army officers and their spouses. Most of them had similar disturbed senses of humor. The audience loved my wit.

At another military formal dinner, Rhea Seddon and I were cospeakers. In my comments I used the word girls in reference to the female astronauts. I had done so without malice. It was just as natural as breathing for me to refer to the women as girls or gals. Afterward, a wife from the audience approached me with a smile that would have chilled Hannibal Lecter. She asked, “Do they call you a boy astronaut?” I was baffled by the comment…but not for long. She enlightened me while tearing me a new fundamental orifice. “How dare you refer to Dr. Seddon as a girl! Where is your PhD? Are you a surgeon? She has better credentials than you.” She stormed off. It was one of my earliest lessons in political correctness.

Besides contracting with Miss Manners, Toastmasters, and NOW for remedial training, NASA should have also reviewed with its astronauts the various songs they might be asked to sing during a public appearance. Many of the requests for astronaut speakers came from organizations planning patriotic-themed events. Nothing was bound to excite more pride in the American soul than a trim, square-jawed, shorthaired, steely-eyed war-veteran astronaut poised next to Old Glory leading the audience in the singing of a patriotic song. Every Rotary Club, VFA, and Elks Club in America wanted that Norman Rockwell scene on their stage. But that assumed the astronaut knew the song in question.

At one of my appearances I was blindsided by a request to lead the audience in the singing of “America the Beautiful.” I was prepared for my speech. I had it on my notecards. What I didn’t have on my cards was “America the Beautiful.” As the master of ceremonies beckoned me to the podium I could feel my bowels liquefying. I held on to his handshake just to keep from collapsing. My brain was logjammed with every patriotic lyric I had ever heard: for-purple-mountains-majesty-our-flag-was-still-

there-the-caissons-go-rolling-along. Retrieving “America the Beautiful” from that mess was going to take a miracle.

The MC handed me the microphone. I wished it had been a gun so I could have blown out my scrambled brains. They were all looking at me, hands on hearts. Hundreds of them. Only a lone cough disturbed the silence. It doesn’t get any worse than this, I thought. But I was wrong. As a courtesy to a group of hearing impaired who were sitting in the front row, there was a signer at the edge of the stage staring right at my lips. Her hands were poised to record my every utterance. How I didn’t wet myself (or worse), I’ll never know.

I placed my hand on my heart and turned to face the flag. I could feel my pulse through my suit pocket. The MC punched “play” on a boom box and the first strains of the melody flowed into the room. I sang the only words I was absolutely certain of, “Oh beautiful…”

Those words proved enough. Everybody joined in and my voice was lost. Actually, I lowered the microphone from my mouth so my incoherent babbling couldn’t be heard. I had pulled it off. Or so I thought. Then, the signer caught my eye. She was focused on my mumbling lips with the precision of a laser. Not a syllable was getting by her. If I could have read sign language, I knew what those flying fingers would have been saying. “Hey, everybody! This guy is a fraud. He doesn’t know ‘America the Beautiful.’”