Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

I returned to my room and began to dress. While we had been at breakfast, the suit crew had arranged our wardrobe on the bed. The first item I donned was my urine collection device. I stepped through the leg openings and pulled the condom toward my penis. It looked incredibly small. Not the condom…my penis. I coached the recalcitrant appendage into the latex. It promptly slipped from my body. Apprehension had sucked every molecule of blood from my crotch. I doubted even a naked Bo Derek doing jumping jacks in front of me would have stirred life into this lizard.

I made a second attempt to get my sword into its sheath, this time taking the weight of the UCD bladder in my hand so I would stay attached. I Velcroed the device around my waist, accepting the results whatever they might be. I had no choice. There was a countdown clock ticking.

I finished dressing in my flight suit, then filled my pockets with spare prescription glasses, pencils, pressurized space pens, and barf bags…lots of barf bags. I put one in each of my chest pockets and a couple spares in other pockets. Would I be a victim of space sickness? I had been sick so many times in the backseats of various jets, I couldn’t believe I would be spared in space. I toyed with the idea of taking one of NASA’s antinausea pills, a mixture of scopolamine (a downer) and Dexedrine (an upper), but decided otherwise. I wanted to know my Space Adaptation Syndrome (SAS) susceptibility and drugs would camouflage it. Besides, I didn’t think the pill would work. Months earlier I had been on a deep-sea-fishing trip with a group of astronauts, several of whom had taken the capsule. Some had still gotten seasick. Another guest on the same trip, who had also swallowed a ScopeDex, had been so suddenly struck with nausea he had vomited before getting to the rail. The memory of NASA’s miracle SAS pill floating in a puddle of barf on the fantail of a fishing boat did nothing to inspire confidence that the pills would help me in space. I left them behind.

Fully dressed and with pockets loaded, I stepped from my room and joined the rest of the crew in a walk to the elevator. Judy was in front of me and I could hear the whooshing sound of her diaper plastic rubbing against her coveralls. I teased her, “You’re getting a little broad in the beam, JR.”

“Screw you, Tarzan.”

How different from reality were all those science fiction movies of my youth. As Lloyd Bridges (Colonel Floyd Graham ) and Osa Massen (Dr. Lisa Van Horn) boarded their Rocketship X-M in the 1950 Hollywood classic of the same title, I don’t recall them commenting on the condoms and diapers they were wearing.

A group of NASA employees welcomed us with applause on our exit from the crew quarters. I wanted to embrace them and say, “Thank you for giving me this moment.” They were the best in the world.

We stepped into the elevator and two heavyset men wearing tool belts followed us. I was shocked. We were on our way to fly the space shuttle and two blue-collar workers had decided to hitch a ride with us. When the elevator opened and the photographers got this picture, it was going to be a hoot. A bewildered Hank had to ask, “What are you guys doing?”

“We’re elevator repairmen. There’ve been reports this elevator is giving you guys problems. We didn’t want you to get stuck on your way to your rocket.” We all laughed. NASA thinks of everything. A comforting thought at this moment.

But the workers were not needed. We creaked to ground level without a problem and exited the building to cheers and more applause from a larger group of the NASA team.

Outside, I immediately looked to the sky hoping to see stars, hoping for proof the weather was good. But the lights of the cameras filming our departure had ruined my night vision.

We climbed into the astro-van and began the drive to Pad 39A, the same pad from which Neil Armstrong had embarked on his historic journey to the moon fifteen years earlier. I wondered what his drive had been like. The van air-conditioning was making ours frigid. My skin was clammy and I was shivering. Nervous small talk occupied us. I hoped nobody could hear my heart. Each pulse seemed like a detonation.

We passed successive security checkpoints where the guards saluted or waved or flashed a thumbs-up. They had trucks parked nearby for their own evacuation to more remote points. Closer to the pad we passed several fire trucks and ambulances. Their crews were clad in silver firefighting suits and hovered near their vehicles. When the launchpad closeout crew departed, these men and women would remain in a nearby bunker, ready to race to our rescue if there was a problem. I couldn’t imagine any problem involving 4 million pounds of propellant leaving anything to rescue. There were certainly six body bags in those ambulances.

I was as scared as I had ever been in my life. But at that moment, if God had appeared and told me there was a 90 percent probability I wasn’t going to return from this mission alive and had given me an opportunity to jump from that crew van, I would have shouted, “No!” For this rookie flight, I would take a one in ten chance. I had dreamed of this moment since childhood. I had to go. Even if God had given me a vision of what the other nine chances meant, a vision of my charred remains being zipped into one of those body bags, I still would have declined His offer to exit the van. I had to make this flight.

I would later look back on my desperate need for this first mission and think how perverted it was. What type of a person puts their wife, their children, their own life second behind a need to ride a rocket? I believed that surely I was unique in this sick prioritization. But I discovered otherwise. In the weeks after STS-41D, Hank Hartsfield described to me his feelings before his first mission (STS-4). I was stunned to hear his admission of the exact feelings I was now experiencing. He recounted how he would rather have died on his first mission than never to have flown in space. We were like the Mount Everest climbers stepping over frozen corpses from prior climbing disasters in our quest for the summit. Like those climbers, we were motivated by a fear far greater than death—the fear of not reaching the top.

What a fraud astronauts practice on our fellow citizens. Most Americans see us as selfless heroes, laying our lives on the line for our country, the advancement of mankind, and other lofty ideals. In reality no astronaut has ever screamed, “For God and Country!” when the hold-down bolts blew…at least not on their rookie mission. We were all stepping into harm’s way because we knew otherwise we would die as incomplete humans. There was room in our souls for noble motivations only after our pins were gold.

As Discovery came into view we leaned into the aisle to watch. A crisscross of xenon lights bathed her. Against the backdrop of early morning blackness she appeared as a newly risen morning star. If my heart had been in overdrive before, it now accelerated to warp speed.

At the pad we stepped from the van and looked up at our ship. In spite of my faith in physics, it didn’t seem possible anything so gargantuan could rise from the Earth, much less achieve a 17,300-miles-per-hour speed at 200 miles altitude. The stack towered 200 feet above the Mobile Launch Platform (MLP), which, itself, loomed several stories above us. The 4½-million-pound mass was held in place by eight hold-down bolts, four at each SRB skirt. The SRBs were separated by nearly 30 feet to accommodate the blimpish diameter of the ET. The gray acreage of the MLP’s underside formed a steel overcast. Three cavernous openings were cut through it to allow the flames from the two SRBs and the SSMEs to descend into the flame bucket and be diverted outward. During engine ignition a nearby water tower would be emptied into that bucket to protect it from heat damage. Giant plastic sausages of water were also slung in the two SRB cavities. That water would attenuate the acoustic shock waves the boosters developed, which could reflect upward to damage cargo in the payload bay.