Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

Steve Hawley and I were tapped to travel to Madrid, Spain, and the Seychelles Islands to deliver that message to the NASA and air force contingents who manned the shuttle tracking sites at those locations. NASA did not yet have its own communication relay satellites in orbit, so we depended upon an earth-girdling network of ground sites to communicate with orbiting astronauts. Other TFNGs were sent to Australia, England, Guam, Ascension Island, and the other overseas sites that completed this global tracking system.

To go to the Seychelles is to die and go to heaven. The nation is a collection of islands a thousand miles east of Africa just south of the equator in the bath-warm waters of the Indian Ocean. The beaches are white, the surf is turquoise, and both are filled with topless vacationing Scandinavian women. As if that isn’t enough of a temptation, many of the local island women are beautiful manhunters. Their preferred quarry are American men, as they represent a means of escape to the land of the Big BX (the USA). At a party hosted by the tracking site commander, Hawley and I learned just how aggressive they could be. A young and exceptionally beautiful woman came to us and requested our autographs. “Sure, we’d be happy to sign something for you,” I replied. I was expecting her to hand over one of the space shuttle photos we had previously distributed but, instead, she pulled up her skirt, thrust a cheek of her ass in my face, and asked me to sign her panties. I searched my memory but couldn’t remember “ass signing” being covered in our JSC training. I looked at Hawley and suggested, “To refuse could cause an international incident.” We had been cautioned by the resident state department official not to alienate the locals, as the United States was in sensitive negotiations with the island’s current Dictator for Life. Steve concurred: “It’s our NASA duty to fulfill her request.” That settled it. I turned my pen to the silky fabric, only to be struck by the limited real estate. Her petite posterior didn’t give me a lot to work with. But astronauts love a challenge. In a font so tiny I could have penned the Declaration of Independence on a grain of rice, I leisurely inscribed on the side of her underwear, Richard Michael Mullane, Major, United States Air Force, Astronaut, National Aeronautical and Space Administration. I was thinking of adding, In the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty and the date, but Hawley was getting impatient. If anybody’s hand should be on that heinie, it was his. He was the bachelor of our duo, a fact that had spread across the island on the coconut telegraph as fast as a trade wind. This young woman had probably set her sights on him when we stepped off the plane. I finally capped my pen and she immediately presented her other cheek for Steve and he began his treatise. The things we do for our country. There ought to be a medal awarded to men who return from the Seychelles. Bachelors, like Hawley, should get the Order of I Walked Away from Heaven with accouterments of oak leaf clusters, laurel wreaths, dangles, bobbles, flames, and shooting stars.

As if the local women weren’t enough, Hawley and I also discovered the vacationing Dereks…as in John and Bo Derek. Even among the hard-bodied, oil-smeared Danish pastries decorating the beach, Bo stood out. To say she was a “Ten” didn’t do her justice. She made a Step-ford Wife look like a hag. Unfortunately, she wasn’t topless. Nor was she jogging down the beach in slow motion. But, like Dudley Moore’s famous character, I had an active imagination.

Hawley and I debated whether or not to approach the star, a debate that lasted about as long as it takes a quark to decay. We were at her side in a flash, mumbling and stuttering like Dumb and Dumber. I think I blurted out, “I want to have your baby!”

We made sure to include the title “astronaut” in our introduction. John, at least, was impressed by that and asked us several questions about the upcoming launch of STS-1, including some technical questions about landing speeds and glide path angles. Bo didn’t ask us anything. In fact, she didn’t say much at all. Maybe it was the way Hawley leered at her. Surely it couldn’t have been me. We learned the couple was taking a break before the filming of that celluloid classic Tarzan, the Ape Man. I said to Bo, “Me Tarzan. You Jane.” John looked at my 145-pound frame and said, “I don’t think so.”

“How about Cheetah?” I certainly had the chimp ears to qualify. But, once again, I was rejected.

Hawley and I posed with Bo for some photos and said our good-byes. (Or maybe John said he was going to call the island police if we didn’t leave. I can’t recall.) I couldn’t wait to get back and phone every male I had ever met in my entire life beginning with my high school classmates and scream, “Eat your hearts out! Guess who I met?”

Back in Houston, when Judy Resnik heard our story, she began to call me Tarzan. For the rest of her short life, she never again called me Mike. Always Tarzan.

By the second year of our TFNG careers the bloom had begun to fade on our management: George Abbey and John Young. George had chaired the dozen-man astronaut selection committee. If the office vets were to be believed, the “committee” title was a joke. George didn’t operate by committee any more than Josef Stalin had. His was the only vote that counted in the TFNG selection process. George was a pear-shaped man with silver-tinted buzz-cut hair, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and sleepy, basset hound eyes. The word enigmatic was coined to describe a man like George. His heavy face revealed nothing. His rare smiles were hardly more than grimaces. I never saw him in a teeth-showing laugh. I never heard him raise his voice in anger. I never saw him animated in any way. When he spoke, which wasn’t much, it was in low mumbles. He was as unreadable as a marble bust.

George’s parents had obviously expected great things from their son, christening him George Washington Sherman Abbey at his birth in 1932. It was a handle that earned him the acronym GWSA from us TFNGs. George met the challenge of his name. He graduated from Annapolis in 1954, took a commission in the USAF, and accumulated more than four thousand hours of flying time as an air force pilot. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. In 1967 he resigned from the air force and began his NASA career as an MCC engineer (he wasn’t an astronaut). For his work on the Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Every TFNG walked into NASA a slavishly loyal subject of King George, and we competed in pathetic attempts to brown-nose him. The nineteen new astronauts of the class of 1980 did the same, so there was real crowd around George’s backside. Two of the 1980 newbies made an exceptionally flamboyant attempt to put their names in front of George. On Abbey’s birthday Guy Gardner and Jim Bagian called the JSC security police pretending to be employees of a window-cleaning service needing access to the ninth-floor windows of the JSC HQ building. After the police unlocked the windows and departed, Bagian dressed in a Superman costume, dropped a rope to the ground, and repelled to Abbey’s eighth-floor office. There, he pounded on the glass to gain George’s attention and sang “Happy Birthday.” Mission complete, he continued to the ground. Gardner freed the rope of its anchor, closed the window, and disappeared.

It didn’t take long for word of the prank to reach the security police and for its chief to be pounding on Center Director Chris Kraft’s office door with an angry complaint about astronauts duping his people and conducting a dangerous stunt. In a classic demonstration of the old adage “Shit flows downhill,” it didn’t take long for the turds being shoveled onto Kraft’s ninth-floor office desk by the chief of security police to find their way to Abbey’s eighth-floor desk and thence to John Young’s third-floor desk in Building 4. In effect, Dr. Kraft’s message to John was “Johnson Space Center isn’t a private playground for your astronauts.” So Guy Gardner and Jim Bagian picked up some early, if not exactly positive, visibility with George.