Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

By this time “Zoo Crew” had been together for fourteen months and we’d be together a few more. Because of delays in earlier missions, Discovery ’s launch had slipped to June. In our thousands of hours of training Judy and I had become close friends and I would be a liar if I said I hadn’t thought about expanding our relationship beyond the study of payload checklists. That thought was certainly nibbling at me as our T-38s landed on a warm spring Sunday at the KSC shuttle landing strip. Judy and I were there, alone, to support some payload tests that would begin the following day. We jumped into a rental car for the drive to the KSC crew quarters. Wearing Prime Crew smiles, sitting in a convertible (top down, of course), dressed in our blue flight suits, the wind in our hair, the sun on our face, we were everybody’s image of the Right Stuff.

Judy parked the car and we grabbed our luggage and headed for the elevator. The crew quarters occupied a small portion of the third floor of a huge Apollo-era rocket checkout building. The facility included a fully equipped kitchen, a small gym with weights and stationary bicycles, some conference rooms, ten or so bedrooms, and a handful of unisex bathrooms. NASA must have consulted with Benedictine monks on the decor of the bedrooms: They were monastery spartan, containing a bed, desk, telephone, lamp, and chair. No TV. To ensure no outside noises would disturb a sleeping crew, the quarters were located on the interior of the floor. There were no windows.

Judy and I found the facility deserted. Come on, Satan, give me a break, I thought. I was going to be in sixteen hours of solitary confinement with a beautiful woman and idle hands, those instruments of the devil.

“Hey, JR,” I shouted down the hall, “let’s check out the old Cape Canaveral launch facilities.” On multiple trips to KSC I had tried to fit in such a tour but the schedule had not allowed it. Now was a propitious time. My brain was screaming, Don’t do something stupid. Get out of here!

“Sure, Tarzan,” she called back.

It was too warm for flight suits so we changed into our NASA gym wear. I grabbed the NASA phone book, which included a map, and jumped in the car, letting Judy drive while I navigated. The early launch pads had been preserved as part of the Air Force Space and Missile Museum. The centerpiece of the museum was the concrete blockhouse that had served as the control center for the 1958 launch of America’s first satellite. An outdoor display of a couple dozen rockets had been added to the area. The orange-painted latticed gantry of Launch Complex 26 speared the sky a mere four hundred feet east of the blockhouse.

It was late in the afternoon, long after tour hours. The facility was as deserted as the crew quarters. Judy looked at the rocket displays. “How many of these can you identify?”

I did a quick survey. “All of them.”

“Bullshit, Tarzan. I’ll bet you a six-pack you can’t identify all of these.”

“Judy, I lived and breathed rockets from the age of twelve. Photos of these things wallpapered my bedroom. You’re challenging a rocket geek. You’re going to lose that bet.”

Her smile said, “No way,” and she rushed ahead to look at a placard. “What’s this one?”

“The Navajo. It was the world’s first supersonic cruise missile. Range fifteen hundred miles.”

“Lucky guess.” She walked to the next display. “This one?”

“Bomarc. A ramjet-powered supersonic antiaircraft missile.”

I could see she was beginning to believe my rocket identification powers might not have been exaggerated.

“This one?”

“Easy. Firebird, an early air-to-air missile. By the way, make it a six-pack of Moosehead.”

“You haven’t won yet.”

But I did. After correctly answering several more of Judy’s challenges, she capitulated in front of a Skybolt missile.

“Tarzan, did you do anything as a kid besides memorize rockets, like go to rock concerts or dances?”

“I have one autograph in my high school yearbook. Does that answer the question?”

She laughed. “Yeah, I guess it does.”

I was worried an air force security officer would arrive at any moment to lock the blockhouse, so I suggested we take a quick tour of it. For me, stepping inside was a spiritually moving moment. I had never been to this place before, yet I was connected to it. As a child in Albuquerque, I had watched TV scenes of this building and the gantry beyond as the earliest satellites and monkey-nauts, Able and Baker, had ridden pillars of fire into the sky. Werner von Braun had stood where I now stood and directed America’s first steps in the space race. I touched a lifeless control panel and felt even closer to him and the history he and his team had written. My fingers brushed across the blockhouse periscope and archaic lights and switches and oscilloscopes. God, I thought, what I wouldn’t give to go back to January 31, 1958, and be standing at this very spot as the final seconds clicked off the countdown clock for Explorer I ’s launch.

“Be careful, Tarzan. You’ll launch one of those rockets.”

Judy interrupted my reverie. Her obvious indifference to the history of the site prompted a question that had been on my mind since I had first stood on the stage with her at our TFNG introduction. “JR, when did you first want to be an astronaut?”

“In 1977, when I saw the announcement on the company bulletin board.”

She answered as I had expected. I had already heard several of the other females say the same thing in various press interviews. Only Shannon Lucid had a different answer. She had a copy of a letter she wrote to Time magazine in 1960 challenging NASA’s male-only astronaut corps. She had dreamed of spaceflight as a child, as I had. Only recently had I matured enough to give Judy, Sally, and the others some slack for their lack of lifelong zeal for the astronaut title. If I had been raised in a society that told me I could never be an astronaut because of my gender (or color), would that dream have ever taken root in my soul? Probably not. How, I asked myself, could I hold it against this woman if she had not carried the dream from her childhood? I could not. Judy and the other women were teaching me the meaning and consequences of discrimination.

We returned to the car, Judy still behind the wheel. “Let’s go to the beach house,” she suggested. “I’ll buy you a beer there.” It was a destination certain to test the male animal in me. The beach house was as isolated as Mars, situated just behind the dune line only a couple miles from the shuttle launchpads. The house was a relic of the 1950s, before the days of the great space race. Then, the Cape Canaveral area was just one more place for snowbirders to build their winter retreats, and private homes had dotted the landscape. But the beep-beep of Sputnik had wrought a great change in this part of America. The newly formed space agency needed a place to launch its rockets and Cape Canaveral was ideal. Exercising its right of eminent domain, Uncle Sam acquired the land and began its spaceport renovations. Only one of the existing structures survived demolition, saved by some enlightened bureaucrat who had decided it would be the perfect retreat for the early press-hounded astronauts. The building selected was well into government property, so privacy was absolute. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses wouldn’t have been able to find this address. While the press no longer pursued astronauts as they had the Mercury Seven, the building was still used as an astronaut retreat.

On the drive I tried to keep my eyes forward but could not. They kept going to Judy’s smile, to her wind-flagged hair, to her golden legs. Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! There’s never a good robot around when you need one.