Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

Ironically, the flight assignment situation with the air force pilots turned in my favor. On February 6, 1985, Abbey phoned me (no office visit this time) to tell me I was being assigned to the first shuttle mission to fly from Vandenberg AFB in California. Abbey had finally drawn the air force’s attention when he assigned Bob Crippen, a navy captain, to command the most “air force” of all missions—the first Vandenberg flight. The air force was the lead service in DOD military space operations, and it was a fact of orbital mechanics that many of their satellites had to be launched into polar orbits. For a spy satellite to see all of America’s potential enemies, it has to have a view of all the Earth. A satellite orbiting around the Earth’s poles gets such a view as the Earth spins underneath it. But it is impossible to launch polar orbiting satellites from the Kennedy Space Center, because a north- or south-directed launch from KSC would endanger populations below the rocket flight path. Polar orbiting satellites have to be carried into orbit by rockets launched from Vandenberg AFB, located near Point Conception, California. A rocket launched on a southern trajectory from this point will achieve polar orbit while flying safely over the ocean. The air force had spent a decade and several billion dollars building a shuttle launchpad at Vandenberg AFB. It was their launchpad and the first mission to be flown from it would carry an air force payload. The air force had wanted it commanded by an air force pilot, but Abbey had other ideas and assigned Bob Crippen. In the ensuing discussions between the USAF and NASA, the air force had accepted Crippen, but with the caveat that the majority of the rest of the crew would be air force. (Or so the rumor mill had it. As always, there was nothing but rumors on the subject of flight assignments.) In a strange twist, I became a beneficiary of Crippen’s commandership of the first Vandenberg mission, a fact made clear to me when Crippen later commented, “You have the right color uniform for the flight.”

I was deliriously happy about my good fortune. The Vandenberg mission was going to be a true first. It would carry me and the rest of the crew into polar orbit, something no human had ever done. The poor schmucks flying out of KSC on the commercial communication satellite deployment missions only got to see a narrow strip of the Earth between 28 degrees north and 28 degrees south latitude (as I had done on STS-41D). How boring. In a polar orbit we would see all of the Earth. We would fly through the northern and southern lights. We would fly over the Greenland ice cap and the mountain ranges of Antarctica. We would pass over all of the Soviet Union. It was a mission Hank Hartsfield would have loved—he could have made the Kremlin a target for one of his BMs. I was back in my pre–STS-41D frame of mind. I was mad to get into space on this mission. But the liftoff date—originally scheduled for spring 1986—was slipping to the right. The new Vandenberg launchpad and launch control center had to be finished and checked out. The State Department had to complete its negotiations to secure shuttle abort landing rights on Easter Island’s runway, a task being made more difficult by a Soviet Union disinformation campaign that shuttle operations would destroy the island’s stone figures. The Soviets understood that most of the payloads carried out of Vandenberg would be spying on them and were doing their best to lay down obstacles.

STS-62A’s slippage provided time for me to pull other duties, including several missions as a CAPCOM. There were no Apollo 13 dramatics on any of these flights but, like everything else in the astronaut business, even the mundane can be unique. One Saturday night I was on CAPCOM duty and nearly comatose in boredom. The orbiting crew was engrossed in their experiments and the shuttle was performing flawlessly. On rev after rev all I did was make Acquisition of Signal (AOS) and Loss of Signal (LOS) calls as the shuttle passed in and out of the coverage of various tracking stations. I tried to maintain an appearance of busy professionalism, knowing the public affairs wall-mounted cameras were focused on me. When no video was being streamed from the shuttle, the NASA PR officer would switch to these MCC cameras. Cable companies broadcast “NASA Select” video to their subscribers, including most astronaut households. My image was being dumped into living rooms throughout Clear Lake City and across America. Aware of this, I resisted the impulse to pick ear hairs and instead opened a shuttle malfunction checklist and pretended to study it. My eyes glazed over and my head nodded.

When my console phone rang I was instantly alert. The MCC phone numbers were unpublished. If a phone was ringing it was official business. I was glad for the interruption… anything to break the monotony. I snatched the receiver and answered in a crisp military manner, “CAPCOM, Mike Mullane speaking.”

What came into my ear was a soft, feminine voice. “Raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

I bolted upright. Was I hallucinating? “Pardon me” was the only rejoinder I could muster.

“Listen up, Mullane! I said, raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

It is in the DNA of men to respond to such a proposition in the affirmative, so my hand shot up like the space shuttle. The flight director and a couple of nearby MCC controllers looked at me like I had just had a seizure. No telling what the space geeks around the country watching me on TV thought had happened.

My brain quickly replayed the conversation and I identified the voice, a TFNG wife. It was a Saturday night. Somewhere there was an astronaut party. Someone had turned on the TV to check on the progress of the shuttle flight and found me bobbing toward unconsciousness. A crowd had gathered at the TV while this woman was given the CAPCOM phone number and made her call. I could imagine the roar of laughter when the party audience had seen my hand jerk skyward.

Now it was my turn to shock the caller. “You know this phone call is being recorded.” She just laughed me off. It was no more possible to embarrass this particular woman than it was to embarrass Madonna. But the call had been recorded. All MCC telephone conversations are recorded for accident investigation purposes. Somewhere in the National Archives are audiotapes with historic quotes from the space program, like Alan Shepard’s “Let’s light this candle,” and Neil Armstrong’s “Houston, the Eagle has landed,” and Gene Kranz’s “Failure is not an option,” and a TFNG wife’s “Raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

There were Monday meeting discussions that proved almost as attention-grabbing as this proposition. We received a status report on the subject of herpes-infected monkeys. STS-51B, a Spacelab mission, was to carry several primates as part of their life-science research and it was feared the virus, which was common in monkeys, could infect the crew. Needless to say this was a briefing that brought out the best in the Planet AD crowd.

“If you don’t screw the monkeys, you won’t catch herpes” came one call from the cheap seats.

“Good luck restraining the marines” came another.

“The ugliest one will come back pregnant by one of you air force perverts.”

As this inter-service banter continued, one of the post-docs was able to shoulder in a valid question. “Why don’t they just fly clean monkeys?”

The presenter replied, “It’s difficult and expensive to find herpes-free monkeys.” Then he added, “The scientists believe the herpes risks to astronauts are acceptable. They think there’s a greater chance of the shuttle exploding than the crew contracting herpes.” The scientists were right. Nobody on the 51B crew would be worried about catching herpes from a monkey while sitting on 4 million pounds of propellant.