Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

But only six weeks later those reserves took another hit. We awoke on Father’s Day to news that TFNG Dave Griggs had died the day before in the crash of a WWII aircraft while practicing for an air show. While his death was unrelated to shuttle operations, it was another grim reminder of the business of flying. Dave had left a wife, Karen, and two teenage daughters. One more time Donna and I drove to the home of a woman widowed in the prime of her life. One more time I watched Donna enter a sobbing clinch with a grieving friend.

After a service at St. Paul’s Catholic Church, a group of us rendezvoused at the Outpost to continue Dave’s wake. Kathy Thornton, a fellow crewmember on what would have been Dave’s second shuttle mission, STS-33, brought one of the flower wreaths from the church and dropped it on the bar. With tears wetting her cheeks she sipped beer and remembered Dave with stories of their mission training. As I watched her, I wondered how many more tears would be shed for dead astronauts in this smoky dump of a bar. The sky was our Siren and no matter how we answered her call, in a plane or a rocket ship, she was always ready to kill us.

Though my assignment to STS-36 had buried all thoughts of immediate retirement, I continued to debate the course of my life after the mission was complete. Time and again I would resolve to tell Mike Coats (now the acting chief while Brandenstein was in mission training) that I would be resigning after STS-36, only to walk into something that would shatter that resolve. On one occasion it was an astronaut party at a local bar. Word spread through the crowd that the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), a large satellite launched before Challenger —which was to be retrieved and returned to Earth on STS-32—was seconds from being visible in the overhead twilight. We made a frantic dash for the doors. The bouncers and some redneck patrons interpreted this as the sign of a big fight moving into the parking lot. Imagine their surprise when they rushed outside to find thirty astronauts standing with their necks craned and fingers pointing at a bright point of light sailing overhead. I looked to my left at Bonnie Dunbar. In a month she would be the mission specialist at Columbia’s robot arm controls, grabbing LDEF from space. God, what an incredible business, I thought. How can I ever walk away from it?

The same question arose at another social function, this one for a new group of astronaut interviewees. In their presence, I traveled through a time portal. A dozen years earlier I had been one of these eager young men, my eyes bright with the hope that I would miraculously make the cut, that I would be named an astronaut. They came to me, as I had gone to the vets in 1977, to ask what it was like to ride a rocket, what did the Earth look like from two hundred miles altitude? I could see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. They had been imprinted with a passion for spaceflight, just as I had been. How could I ever quiet that passion? How could I ever walk away from NASA?

I began the journey on December 18, 1989. After most astronauts had left for the day, I walked into Mike Coats’s office and told him I was going to retire from NASA and the air force after STS-36. It was the most difficult decision of my life. There wasn’t a eureka moment that had finally pushed me into it. Rather, it was a culmination of twelve years of “moments.” Donna’s telephone breakdown still weighed on me. My tour on the LCC roof with the STS-30 wives gave me a much better sense of what my launches were doing to her. And it wasn’t just Donna’s fear. My own fear had become a wearisome burden. How many times could I make the trip and survive?

The fear, the unknowns of the business, my doubts about NASA’s management…all of it had conspired to propel me down the hall to Mike. But, even as I stood in front of him, I knew my decision was perilously balanced. I was like the circus acrobat tottering in a chair on top of a pole on top of a ball. The weight of a dust mote falling on my shoulder would be enough to send me toppling. If Mike had questioned my decision in the slightest manner—had he just said, “Are you sure?”—I suspect I would have immediately retracted my statement and walked away. But he didn’t. As he continually flipped his pen, he confided to me that he had already made the same decision. He had told Puddy he would be leaving after his next flight. He probably heard me exhale. His decision endorsed my own. He didn’t ask for an explanation, but I provided one. When I admitted that fear had a lot to do with it, he replied that it had been a huge factor for him, too—his own fear as well as Diane’s. “That LCC roof wait is a torture.” There should be a monument to astronaut wives, I thought. It should feature the LCC with the countdown clock at T-9 minutes.

I left Mike’s office and called home. “I did it, Donna. I just told Coats we would be leaving after the mission.” For a moment, Donna was silent. I had told her that morning of my retirement intentions, but I knew she didn’t believe me. I had changed my mind too many times before. She understood the agony I was going through. She had seen the videos of me as a young teen running toward a parachuting coffee-can capsule. She knew the significance of my finger-worn Conquest of Space book. She had boxes of space memorabilia from my youth. She finally spoke. “Mike, I’m so happy. Thank you. I know you’ll second-guess this decision to death, but it’ll be okay. It’ll all work out for the best. God has His plan.” As I hung up the phone, I knew exactly what she was doing…lighting a candle of thanksgiving at her home shrine.

Chapter 38

“I have no plans past MECO”

I made my last flight to Kennedy Space Center as a member of a Prime Crew on February 19, 1990. With our T-38 afterburners tagging us with twin streaks of blue fire, we roared down the Ellington Field runway and shot into the dark. At our cruise altitude of 41,000 feet, we skimmed across the tops of massive thunderstorms associated with a cold front pushing through Dixie. Lightning illuminated the nimbus heads in colors of white and gray and blue. Fantastic shapes of electricity jumped from cloud to cloud. The charged atmosphere produced a St. Elmo’s fire that painted the leading edge of our wings in a blue haze. As if that wasn’t enough, I looked upward into a star-misted deep black. God, how I’ll miss this—the beauty and purity that is flight .

At the KSC crew quarters, Olan Bertrand outlined the next three days of our lives. We were reminded to stay in health quarantine at all times, to not leave the quarters without telling Olan, to eat meals only cooked by the dieticians, to claim all meals on our travel voucher as “Government Furnished Meals.” As employees of Uncle Sam we traveled on official orders, the itinerary of which read, FROM: Houston, TX. TO: Earth Orbit. All of our meals, transportation, and lodging would be provided by NASA, so we would only receive a standard per diem of a few dollars a day. A typical spaceflight earned an astronaut an extra $30 to $50 total.

We were also reminded not to carry anything personal on board the orbiter. When we climbed into Atlantis, everything on our persons, from the condoms on our penises to the LES helmets on our heads, was the property of the U.S. taxpayer. Gone were the days of astronauts stuffing their pockets with rolls of coins, corn beef sandwiches, and golf balls before their trips into space. In the early days of the space program these colorful items of contraband added a human interest touch to missions. Now they were forbidden, due in large part to an Apollo-era incident in which astronauts carried philatelic items they later sold. NASA felt it was inappropriate for crews to profit from items transported aboard a taxpayer-funded vehicle and imposed tight control over shuttle-flown material. Shuttle astronauts were restricted to twenty items in a Personal Preference Kit (PPK), which, together, could not exceed 1.5 pounds in weight. Weeks before launch, the PPK items were submitted to NASA HQ for approval and packed in a shuttle locker. In the PPK for my STS-36 mission, I had included the crucifix from my dad’s casket, the wedding bands of my daughter Amy and her husband, Steve, a gold medallion that would be imprinted with the mission patch after landing, and some other small items of personal significance for the rest of the family.