| RIDING ROCKETS The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut Mike Mullane New York: Scribner, 2006 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-7432-7682-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-7432-7682-5 | 368pp. | HC/BWI | $26.00 | |
Mike Mullane's Riding Rockets is like no other astronaut memoir I have read. It may be the most honest astronaut memoir in print since Buzz Aldrin wrote Men from Earth. Replete with crude language, male-chauvinist attitudes and tales of schoolboy-level pranks, it spares no one — least of all Mullane himself. But this is no confession. Look beneath the surface: you'll see a dedicated family man and a competent astronaut who endured all the setbacks the program threw at him and always got the job done. His record speaks for itself, in both respects,1 and I suspect his unapologetic focus in the book on what some others considered his obnoxious behavior is merely a result of the mature perspective he has now attained. This is who he was back then.
Chapter 1 is a hilarious account of his testing to become a member of the astronaut class of 1978 — the group that came to be known as TFNG: Thirty-Five New Guys (twenty-nine men and six women.) It ends with him being asked by a NASA psychiatrist to describe his family and his childhood. His comment to himself was, "God, how I hated essay questions."2 The story then proceeds in linear fashion through his birth in Texas, his travels as an "Air Force brat", and his childhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His parents delighted in taking the family (ultimately six children) on road trips throughout the West, and these frequently turned into real adventures.
Mullane's commentary on NASA matches what I've read and heard from other sources. To summarize, he says Apollo-era hubris led its management to ignore known shuttle failure modes, thinking they could always recover. Even the loss of Challenger did not shatter that illusion.
"The news of NASA's and Thiokol's bungling of the O-ring problem quickly reached the astronaut office and had a predictable effect. We were bitterly angry and disgusted with our management. How could they have ignored the warnings? In our criticisms we conveniently forgot our own mad thirst for flight." – Pages 227-8 |
Here I think Mullane is too hard on himself and his colleagues. The O-ring problem could have been foreseen, tested for, and corrected during SRB development. But, correctable flaws aside, the shuttle was unsafe by design, because it had no crew escape systems.
Regarding selection of crews, he states that the criteria and procedures were kept hidden, depressing morale, and that the astronaut office never stepped up to defend its crews against political meddling — did not even listen to their technical concerns in many cases.
"In preparation for these trips we would pile the accouterments on the roof of our car: a couple of Coleman coolers, a white gas stove, lanterns, tents, fishing poles, aluminum lawn chairs, and bags of charcoal. There were axes, shovels, thermos jugs, cooking utensils, and sleeping bags all cinched into place and covered with tarpaulin. We were carrying a canvas iceberg. The car interior, containing a brood of kids and two dogs, was no less cluttered. Okies right out of The Grapes of Wrath would have felt sorry for us." – Page 9 |
At home in the fall of 1958, he watched with the rest of the nation as Sputnik soared overhead. He soon became an ardent experimenter with rockets — an activity his parents encouraged to an amazing degree. He dreamed of space flight, and avidly devoured Willy Ley's The Conquest of Space and similar books. He followed every NASA mission on TV and soon began taking flying lessons, earning his pilot's license at age 16.
There is then a large chronological gap. Almost completely skipping his Air Force career, Chapter 5 returns to the astronaut selection process and his reactions to it. The emotional seesaw he rides comes through clearly: one minute he's sure he's washed out; the next, elation takes over as he realizes that's not the case. That pattern repeats throughout the book. Remember, this is an honest account, not one to pretend that he conformed to either the military or the academic version of the astronaut myth NASA was trying to maintain.
Neither does he pull any punches when the subject of NASA deficiencies comes up, as it does frequently. But, as he acknowledges, a distinction must be drawn between NASA management and the astronaut corps. Another complication is that he is by nature a team player, not an iconoclast; and, as he says at the end of the book, NASA — management included — was what enabled him to realize his lifelong dream.
What we have here, then, is an unsparing but even-handed assessment of NASA during the first third of the shuttle era (1981-1990). It discusses the loss of Challenger and Columbia, and touches on the Apollo 1 fire. But the focus is on his three missions, and the chapters describing these are the longest and best. When recounting the pinnacle of your life, you naturally produce great prose if you have the talent, and Mullane does. He brings the missions alive for us, and some of his passages are sheer poetry.
"I watched as city lights took on the forms of glowing spiderwebs with bright, sodium-yellow interiors and major roads radiating outward and ring roads completing the web effect. I watched lightning begin at one end of a weather front and ripple like a sputtering fuse for hundreds of miles to the other end and then start again. And every ninety minutes I would watch the incomparable beauty of an orbit sunrise. I would watch as a thin indigo arc would grow to separate the black of nighttime Earth from the black of space. Quickly, concentric arcs of purple and blue would rise to push the black higher and higher. Then bands of orange and red would blossom from the horizon to complete the spectrum. But only for a moment. The Sun would finally breach the Earth's limb and blast the colors away with its star-white brilliance. I wanted to scream to God to stop Discovery, to stop the Earth, to stop the Sun so I could more thoroughly enjoy the beauty of that color bow." – Page 9 |
He had three flights as a mission specialist: STS-41D3 and two classified military missions. He obviously can't say much about those latter two flights; even the boilerplate citations he got for them were secret until years later. His account of the first more than makes up for that; it is complete and very enjoyable — and more than a little envy-making. Considered in its entirety, however, Mullane's narrative has a bittersweet quality to it. And how could it not? He watched friends die aboard Challenger in a preventable disaster. But Mullane has no regrets about his career choice. Like every other astronaut, he understood the risks every time he climbed into the vehicle. And if he is harshly critical of NASA in places, that criticism is well deserved.
The text is supplemented by twenty-two black and white photographs, and there is a glossary of terms (mostly acronyms) at the end. The book has a relatively small number of grammatical errors. Its greatest shortcoming is that it lacks an index. Partially compensating for this are the chronological flow of the 42 chapters and the fact that they are generally short: from four to ten pages in length. I give it full marks. Is it a keeper? For astronaut wannabees and amateur spaceflight history buffs, most definitely. For others, probably not. But it is a remarkable testament, proving that whether they start as highbrow PhD or crude, randy fighter jock,4 the crucible of the experience turns astronauts into very special people.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.