Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

The chaplain conducted a brief graveside service. Then an honor guard fired a rapid three-shot rifle salute, each shot punctuated by the metallic tinkle of the ejected brass. The young children and some of the adults startled visibly at the loudness of the firings. Other soldiers lifted the flag from the casket and folded it with machinelike precision. It was handed to George Abbey, who, in turn, presented it to June Scobee. A flight of four NASA T-38s zoomed into view in fingertip formation. Over the grave the number-two pilot jerked his plane upward and disappeared into the clouds leaving the missing man gap. Then the play of “Taps” drew out a new wave of sobs.

My grief wasn’t refreshed in any way by the scene. It couldn’t be. I had reached my limits of that emotion. But as the notes of “Taps” floated in the air I was stirred anew in my anger at NASA management. This should have never happened. It was completely preventable. There had been four years of warnings.

I wondered if any of them at that grave felt culpable. I suspected those who knew nothing of the O-ring problem, and most at JSC and HQ had not, felt they were off the responsibility hook. In my book they were not. It wasn’t an O-ring failure that brought us to this Arlington service. That was merely a symptom. The real failure was in the leadership of NASA. Over many years it had allowed the agency to degenerate into a loose confederation of independent fiefdoms. As proof of that, the Roger’s Commission was finding that many at MSFC had been aware of the O-ring issue, but the problem had not been communicated to the appropriate offices at HQ and JSC, including Young’s and Abbey’s offices. Neither did the Thiokol engineers’ eleventh-hour worries about launching in cold temperature get to the launch director at KSC. And astronaut concerns about the lack of an escape system and the passenger program were unknown to NASA’s senior management, of that I was certain. NASA was filled with incredibly talented people, some of the world’s best. But the agency lacked the leadership necessary to bind everyone together into an effective and safe team. The NASA administrators were largely budget lobbyists beholden to the White House and Congress. They didn’t lead NASA. They certainly didn’t lead me. I couldn’t recall any administrator ever visiting the astronaut office to solicit our opinions. I had heard one TFNG grumble, “We should fly every new NASA administrator on a shuttle mission. Maybe if they had the shit scared out of them they’d be more beholden to us.” That was a part-timer program I would endorse.

“Who led NASA?” was the question. Nobody. That’s why we were standing in Arlington listening to “Taps” for Dick Scobee. It was even a mystery to me who led my fiefdom. Who was in charge at JSC? George Abbey seemed to be absolute ruler of his own little duchy. Even now, a previously planned new astronaut selection was still rolling along. The shuttle wouldn’t fly again for years. Why bring in more astronauts now? We couldn’t understand why the JSC director or NASA HQ didn’t order a stop to it. It was more proof to us that when it came to anything associated with astronauts, everybody, including the JSC director and NASA administrator, worked for Abbey. He didn’t answer to anybody. How many other similarly independent fiefdoms existed within NASA? What were their kings like? What frustrations burdened their serfs? I could only speak of my own. Lack of leadership at JSC and in Washington, D.C., had allowed the astronaut office to become dominated by fear. Even outsiders had become aware of it. In a vitriolic March 12, 1986, memo addressed to John Young, Colonel Larry Griffin, commander of the air force detachment to NASA (he was not an astronaut), wrote, “…my personal experience in working with the astronaut office is that nearly everyone there is absolutely afraid to voice any opinion that does not agree with yours. You criticizing anyone for ‘pressure’ is ludicrous when the primary axiom in the astronaut office is, ‘Don’t cross John if you ever want to fly.’ That’s pressure!” Colonel Griffin had it slightly wrong. We were afraid to voice any opinion that did not agree with that of Young or Abbey. Did the JSC director or the NASA administrator have any idea how fearful we were of our management? If they had been involved in our lives, they would have known and could have fixed the problem. That’s what good leaders do.

I couldn’t point to any single individual and say, “He did it!” but, collectively, NASA management put Scobee and the other six in their graves. I wanted them all gone. So did most of the astronaut corps. But we were so jaded by our NASA experiences, we doubted it would happen. Already it was more than three months since Challenger and there had been no firings. I saw the future and it looked remarkably like the past. Of course there would be new “oversight committees” and a new “safety emphasis,” but to a significant degree the same people would remain in leadership positions and that meant nothing would really change. I would later hear a TFNG describe it perfectly. “You can paint a different tail number on the squadron dog [referring to the most malfunction-prone jet] but it’s still the same dog.”

I walked away from the Arlington ceremony angry, bitter, depressed, and guilt-ridden…making a mental note to tell Donna that if I died on a shuttle mission I didn’t want Abbey or Young or anybody from NASA HQ anywhere near my grave. I certainly didn’t want any of them handing her the flag from my coffin. (Upon my return to Houston, I did make that request of Donna.)

The only positive thought I could muster was that at least there would be no more scab pulling. The crew was buried. Now the healing could begin.

But God granted us only the briefest of reprieves. A week after Scobee’s funeral, astronaut Steve Thorne, class of 1985, died in an off-duty recreational plane crash. It was another body blow to the astronaut corps.

* Enterprise, the first orbiter, was never designed for spaceflight. It was used in pre–STS-1 glide tests off the back of NASA’s 747 carrier aircraft.

Chapter 27

Castle Intrigue

Several weeks after Challenger I was finally given a job: to review the design of the Range Safety System (RSS). NASA wasn’t just focusing on the SRB O-ring design. It wanted to be certain there were no other deadly failure modes lurking in other shuttle components. Astronauts were assigned to work with experts from every subsystem to root out any safety issues. I was assigned the RSS, the system designed to terminate the flight of an errant shuttle. It would prove to be an assignment that would nearly terminate my career.

Most astronauts grudgingly accepted that the RSS was needed to protect civilian population centers. But there was no denying we hated it because it directly threatened our lives. Over several months I traveled to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to meet with the RSS personnel—they were not NASA employees. By congressional law the protection of the civilian population from rocket mishaps was the responsibility of the Department of Defense, and DOD had given the job to the USAF. And the only way the air force could guarantee that protection was to place explosives on everybody’s rockets, NASA’s as well as all military and commercial missiles. (On the shuttle, the explosives were placed on each SRB and the gas tank. While there was none on the orbiter, detonation of the other explosives would also destroy the orbiter and kill the crew.) During every missile launch, USAF officers, who served as RSOs, monitored the machine’s trajectory. If a rocket strayed off course, it would be remotely blown up to prevent it from falling on a city.