Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

I chose to drive the eight hundred miles to Albuquerque for his funeral so I would have some quiet time for reflection before being plunged into the administrative details of his death. Two of my brothers lived in Albuquerque so my mom had plenty of help to deal with the situation, though I knew she wouldn’t need it. Grief didn’t stand a chance with my mom. Two days later, when I entered the house, she pulled me aside and said, “Mike, I loved your dad very much, but you won’t see me cry. It’s not in a Pettigrew to cry.” And she didn’t.

Like many children who experience the sudden loss of a father, I regretted all the things I hadn’t said while he had been alive to hear them. I wished I had told him how much it had meant to me that he had stayed in our kid-games even after polio. My brothers and I would carry him to the mound and he would be our permanent pitcher in games of baseball. He would referee our driveway basketball games. He would play water polo with us, his shrunken legs trailing in his wake like two ribbons of flesh.

He had endowed me with an easy and spontaneous sense of humor and I wanted him back to hear me say, “Thanks, Dad.” I could recall him sitting in his wheelchair, fully clothed, smoking his pipe and deciding it would be fun to go swimming. He bellowed, “Banzai,” and raced his wheelchair straight into the pool. It sank to the bottom, where he sat for several seconds with his pipe still clamped in his teeth. My brothers and I laughed at his underwater pose. We begged him to do it again and, after hauling him and the wheelchair from the water, he did.

I wished for a chance to tell of the thrill I felt watching my rubber band–powered gliders soaring across the desert. Dad had shown me how to build them and I could still see his hands, made huge and calloused from the use of his crutches and wheelchair, guiding mine in the sanding of the balsa-wood propeller spinner.

I wanted him back to tell how much it had mattered that he had kept me home from school to watch Alan Shepard ride his candle into space. I wanted to tell him thanks for driving me to Kirtland AFB, where I watched the weather officer launch his radiosondes. Dad would then hurry me home so I could follow the helium balloon with my Sears telescope. I would hope against hope the instrument package hanging beneath it would parachute into my yard. Just the thought of touching something that had been in the stratosphere would turbo-boost my heart.

I remembered him buying me my first rocket—a plastic device powered by vinegar and baking soda. And then there were his gifts of Tinkertoys, chemistry sets, Erector Sets, a Heathkit crystal radio, and my Conquest of Space book. I ached to tell him how all of those had empowered my dream.

Dad’s death unleashed long-dormant memories of the minutiae of my childhood. By itself each memory seemed inconsequential but connected together they revealed my pathway into space. George Abbey may have selected me as an astronaut but my dad made me one.

Dressed in military uniform, with his medals and wings on his chest, Dad was laid to rest in the Veterans Cemetery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A rifle salute was fired and the honor guard lifted the American flag from the casket, folded it, and presented it to my mother. “Taps” sounded as I came to attention and rendered a salute to the greatest man I have ever known. Tears finally came to my eyes. There are some things that will make even a Pettigrew cry.

Later, I would return to his grave and place the mission decals of STS-41D, STS-27, and STS-36 on the marker. Each patch had the name “Mullane” on it. They were Dad’s missions, too.

Chapter 32

Swine Flight

STS-27 was a classified DOD mission. I wouldn’t be able to share much with Donna. I had entered the “black” world of the Cold War, where I would be taking trips to locations I couldn’t discuss. I would study checklists in an underground vault. At parties Donna wouldn’t be able to ask our contractors and support team about their work. She wouldn’t even be able to ask in what city they worked. To complicate the spying efforts of Russian ships, the launch date wouldn’t be announced until twenty-four hours prior to the planned liftoff. That little detail would seriously complicate family travel arrangements. As Donna would later say, “It’s like making plans for a wedding where the date is kept secret.” The mission photography would be classified. There would be no photos of me with my payload. When asked what the mission was about, I would have to borrow a line from Top Gun : “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” (Four years after the mission some aspects of it were declassified. I can now say I used the robot arm to deploy a classified satellite into space. I am forbidden to describe the satellite or its intended function.)

I was thrilled with my crew. Hoot Gibson was a natural-born leader. He didn’t micromanage as some commanders did. (One was known to reach completely across the cockpit to make a switch change rather than allow the crewmember at that position to do it.) Hoot gave each of us our duties and set us free to be creative to get the job done. He was also a blood brother from Planet AD. The office secretaries quickly named STS-27 “Swine Flight,” and gave each of us strap-on novelty pig snouts because of our animal “snorting” sounds whenever an attractive woman came within eyeshot (as in, “I’d like to snort her flanks”).

Guy Gardner, Jerry Ross, and I had trained together on the canceled STS-62A mission so we were already teamed. Rookie Bill “Shep” Shepherd was a soft-spoken, powerfully built Navy SEAL who specialized in underwater demolition. Like Hoot and I, Bill was from Planet AD. He was also a bachelor astronaut, which meant he had achieved a higher state of earthly rapture than the Dalai Lama.

Everyone was excited to be doing something warriorlike on the mission, instead of commercial or scientific. It felt good to don a military uniform again and pose for our crew photo. We were going to stick it to the godless commies in space. There were no press releases on our mission preparations. The air force wanted us to remain as invisible as possible, which proved easy to do. Rick Hauck’s STS-26 mission, aka “The Return to Flight Mission,” was so hyped by NASA that it provided a very dark shadow in which we could hide. But the overarching importance attached to STS-26 grated on us and the rest of the astronaut office. We felt Rick and his crew were wearing their fame too conspicuously, which was a grievous violation of astronaut commandment number two, “Thou shalt not glory in public adoration.” While the press marveled that anyone could be so brave as to fly on the first mission after Challenger, every astronaut knew it would be the safest space mission ever flown. Not only had the SRBs been completely redesigned and retested, but every shuttle system had been put under a microscope, and appropriate changes had been made. Also, the STS-26 mission objective was relatively trivial, the release of a TDRS communications satellite, something that had been done several times in the past. Hoot called it “The Quiche Mission.” Another AD pilot observed, “We even let the girls release TDRSes.” But it was obvious the STS-26 crew thought their mission was the most important spaceflight since Angel Gabriel flew to the Virgin Mary. We all wearied of listening to their Monday morning pontifications on the criticality of STS-26 issues. When the limits of forbearance were finally exceeded, the glorious “Return to Flight” crew became a target of satire for the invisible “Swine Flight” crew.

The first public act of rebellion occurred at an astronaut reunion party. Shep and I were sitting at a bar when the helium balloons anchored as table decorations caught our eye. We grabbed a brace of these, ripped the nozzles open, and inhaled the gas. With squeaky falsetto voices we wandered through the audience introducing ourselves to legendary astronauts from the Apollo program. “Hi, I’m Rick Hauck, commander of the STS-26 crew. Would you like my autograph?” Meanwhile Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, and other celebrity astronauts looked at us with expressions reading, “The astronaut corps has sure gone to hell.” Again and again we would run back to the bar for a swallow of beer and a hit of helium, and then it was off to another moonwalker. During one of these refills Shep must have gotten some bad gas and experienced a flashback to some combat event. His eyes glazed over and he fell into a thousand-yard stare and then, without provocation, he grabbed the collars of my golf shirt and ripped it open. I glanced around to ensure there were no knives on the bar, then retaliated. I grabbed his shirt and ripped it apart. A handful of TFNGs gathered around to watch me die. The 145-pound weakling had just kicked sand in the face of a knife-skilled SEAL. Fortunately for me, Shep’s post-traumatic stress passed quickly and he merely laughed at the tatters of his shirt. We drained our beers, took another helium hit, and headed back into the audience. I found Jim Lovell and in a Donald Duck voice repeated my lie, “Hi, I’m Rick Hauck, commander of the STS-26 crew. Would you like my autograph?” Lovell looked at me as if I were a derelict.