Riding Rockets

When my console phone rang I was instantly alert. The MCC phone numbers were unpublished. If a phone was ringing it was official business. I was glad for the interruption…anythingto break the monotony. I snatched the receiver and answered in a crisp military manner, “CAPCOM, Mike Mullane speaking.”

What came into my ear was a soft, feminine voice. “Raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

I bolted upright. Was I hallucinating? “Pardon me” was the only rejoinder I could muster.

“Listen up, Mullane! I said, raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

It is in the DNA of men to respond to such a proposition in the affirmative, so my hand shot up like the space shuttle. The flight director and a couple of nearby MCC controllers looked at me like I had just had a seizure. No telling what the space geeks around the country watching me on TV thought had happened.

My brain quickly replayed the conversation and I identified the voice, a TFNG wife. It was a Saturday night. Somewhere there was an astronaut party. Someone had turned on the TV to check on the progress of the shuttle flight and found me bobbing toward unconsciousness. A crowd had gathered at the TV while this woman was given the CAPCOM phone number and made her call. I could imagine the roar of laughter when the party audience had seen my hand jerk skyward.

Now it was my turn to shock the caller. “You know this phone call is being recorded.” She just laughed me off. It was no more possible to embarrass this particular woman than it was to embarrass Madonna. But the callhad been recorded. All MCC telephone conversations are recorded for accident investigation purposes. Somewhere in the National Archives are audiotapes with historic quotes from the space program, like Alan Shepard’s “Let’s light this candle,” and Neil Armstrong’s “Houston, theEagle has landed,” and Gene Kranz’s “Failure is not an option,” and a TFNG wife’s “Raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

There were Monday meeting discussions that proved almost as attention-grabbing as this proposition. We received a status report on the subject of herpes-infected monkeys. STS-51B, a Spacelab mission, was to carry several primates as part of their life-science research and it was feared the virus, which was common in monkeys, could infect the crew. Needless to say this was a briefing that brought out the best in the Planet AD crowd.

“If you don’t screw the monkeys, you won’t catch herpes” came one call from the cheap seats.

“Good luck restraining the marines” came another.

“The ugliest one will come back pregnant by one of you air force perverts.”

As this inter-service banter continued, one of the post-docs was able to shoulder in a valid question. “Why don’t they just fly clean monkeys?”

The presenter replied, “It’s difficult and expensive to find herpes-free monkeys.” Then he added, “The scientists believe the herpes risks to astronauts are acceptable. They think there’s a greater chance of the shuttle exploding than the crew contracting herpes.” The scientists were right. Nobody on the 51B crew would be worried about catching herpes from a monkey while sitting on 4 million pounds of propellant.

Weeks later, during a STS-51B simulation, the Sim Sup introduced a simulated monkey “malfunction.” It wasn’t a herpes outbreak, but a monkey death. This was to help prepare the MCC PR people to deal with nightmare antivivisectionists scenarios. (A group of these people were protesting NASA’s Spacelab animal experiments.) Per Sim Sup’s instruction, the crew reported the simulated monkey was sick and bloated. A short while later they made the “monkey has died” call. At about the same time in the simulation, Sim Sup also introduced a human medical problem for the MCC flight surgeon to work—pilot Fred Gregory was ill with a fever and a urinary tract infection. The nearly simultaneous monkey illness and Fred’s simulated infection had Fred vigorously defending himself in the simulation debriefing: “I did not violate the monkey!”

The herpes-infected monkeys made the flight and, as far as anybody knew, none of the crew caught the virus, not even the marines. And neither did any of the monkeys later give birth to an air force pilot’s simian bastard. Nor did Fred come back with a urinary tract infection.

At another meeting one of the female physician astronauts presented some life-science findings derived from Spacelab animal experiments. “Newly born mice appear healthy but, in weightlessness, they are unable to stay on their mother’s teats to nurse.”

The comment elicited a Beavis and Butt-Head reaction from the Planet AD crowd. “Dude, she said teats.” A wave of giggles swept through our ranks. One USMC astronaut whispered, “Sucking tit in zero-G sounds like a job for a marine.”