Riding Rockets

The ceremony ended and we walked into the crowd. Someone shoved another beer into my hand. I hugged my kids. Amy, my sensitive child, was full of tears. Pat and Laura were smiling. Only my death would have pulled tears from them. I worried the press might find me. I could see their vans and knew they were somewhere in the crowd. The last thing I wanted was to have a camera in my face. That would have been sure to dampen my fun. But I need not have worried—nobody was interested in male astronauts when Judy was around. She looked stunning. We had all showered at Edwards and donned fresh flight suits, and Judy had applied lipstick and a little makeup. She was holding the spray of roses given to her at Edwards. Unlike her predecessor, she had graciously accepted them. At that moment she was everything to everybody, the feminine feminist. The press was all over her. Fortunately, her hair was so big the shank she had lost in orbit wasn’t noticeable enough to generate questions.

Gradually the celebration dissolved and Donna and I drove home with the kids to get on with the rest of our lives. That night, as we lay in bed, I joked with Donna about the flight surgeon’s warning to purge my sperm.

She laughed. “That’s so romantic, Mike.”

“But the doc says it’s mutant, radioactive!” The doctors were serious about such purges for men still in the procreating mode, the fear being that some of our swimmers could have been damaged by space radiation. In one of the Monday meetings, after hearing the warning repeated, one TFNG had shouted, “Give me a break. I’m purging as fast as I can!” Our baby-making days were over, so Donna knew the flight surgeon’s comment didn’t apply to me. Nevertheless, we followed the doctor’s orders, celebrating as lovers do.

Afterward, we held each other and I was finally calm enough to describe some of the things I had seen. I told her of sunrises and sunsets that would make every future Earth rainbow I ever witnessed a disappointment. I told her of oceans that seemed infinite, of lightning and shooting stars, of a blue-and-white planet set in abysmal black. And I told her I wanted to do it all over again. There were other TFNGs already in line for a second flight. Some were doing spacewalks. Some were operating the robot arm. Some were flying high-inclination orbits where they would get to see all of the United States and most of the inhabited earth. Vandenberg AFB in California was being modified to launch shuttles into polar orbits. Some lucky TFNGs would be on those flights. My just completed mission of whirring around the Earth in a near equatorial orbit and throwing a few toggle switches to release a couple communication satellites seemed ho-hum compared with what was on the horizon. I was discovering what every other TFNG was learning: There were gradations in the title “astronaut” and we all wanted to be on top of the scale. As neophytes we had seen a flight into space,any flight into space, as total fulfillment of our life quests. But as we moved into the ranks of veterans, our hypercompetitive personalities created a TFNG hierarchy. For pilots, the command of a rendezvous mission was the most desired prize. For MSes, the A-list astronauts were those who flew the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) on tetherless spacewalks. Very close behind were MSes who did traditional tethered spacewalks. The next tier down were MSes who used the robot arm to grab free-flying satellites. At the bottom of the pile were those sorry souls doing actual science in the bowels of a Spacelab. While many of the scientist MSes really enjoyed Spacelab, most of the military MSes wanted nothing to do with it. Piloting an MMU or operating a robot arm had a lot more sex appeal and generated a lot more personal fulfillment than watching a volt meter on some university professor’s experiment. The Untouchables of our strange caste system were those MSes engaged in the Spacelab missions dedicated to life sciences. They collected blood and urine and butchered mice and changed shit filters for primates (and I don’t mean the marines). I lit candles at Donna’s home shrine to carry my prayer to heaven that I would never be assigned to a Spacelab mission.