Riding Rockets

Others at the table were soon speaking of their disgust with our leadership. At that, Kathy, a very successful and hard-nosed businesswoman, began to mock our impotence. “I’ve listened to this shit for years. You guys are so gutless you deserve what you get” was her message. Of course she was right. But it all went back to that incontrovertible fact…there was no other place on the planet where we could fly a rocket. If Satan himself had been our boss and demanded we take a fiery pitchfork up the wazoo before we could climb into a shuttle cockpit, all of us would have long ago become acrobatic in our ability to bend over and spread our cheeks.

I grabbed another beer and then another. I didn’t want to hear any more of this. I was burned out. But it was impossible to escape. As the party was breaking up, Ron Grabe (class of 1980) took me aside. “Mike, you better watch your six o’clock.” It was fighter pilot lingo; I had an enemy on my tail. “This week I was waiting to see Young and I heard him on the phone. I don’t know who he was speaking with, but I assumed it was Abbey. He was saying, ‘Mike Mullane is one of the enemy. He’s a nice kid and all that, but he’s on the side of the Range Safety people.’”

A “nice kid”? I was forty years old. And what crime had I committed to earn the label “enemy”? I was guilty of doing my assigned job.

I thanked Grabe for the warning and added, “I guess I’ll talk to P.J.” P. J. Weitz was a Skylab-era astronaut working as Abbey’s deputy. He was well regarded, and I considered him the only manager I could trust within all of NASA.

Grabe added, “Don’t bother with P.J. I’ve already spoken to him about Young. I told him John has become unbearable. Nobody can make an objective presentation on any subject. He has made up his mind on everything. I used your Monday morning presentation on the RSS as an example. P.J. was sympathetic but said he couldn’t do anything.”

I reached a new nadir of depression. It was never clear how Young influenced flight assignments. Most of us believed he had nothing to do with them, which, if true, was absolutely amazing given the title on his office door: Chief of Astronauts. But none of us knew for sure. Maybe Abbey did listen to his input. I couldn’t just dismiss Grabe’s warning. I did need to watch my six.

The following week I made an appointment to see Abbey. I had been at NASA for eight years and had only met with George on a handful of occasions and always in the company of others. I had never had any real one-on-one time with him. I approached his desk with the same trepidation I imagine a departed soul experiences while being escorted by the seraphim to the judgment seat of God.

He motioned for me to take a seat and I began to explain my problems with Young. Abbey wouldn’t look me in the eye. As I spoke he continued to shuffle through papers on his desk as if my problem were the merest of trivia. I was only a couple sentences into my rehearsed speech when he saw where it was going and mumbled, “Don’t worry about that,” to his ink blotter. “John is just frustrated he can’t do more.” I kept talking. I needed resolution. I was still working the RSS and OMS burn issues and being savaged by Young in the process. I couldn’t go on like this. Abbey interrupted me with a dismissive wave. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be getting too busy with DOD affairs in the next six months.” I was silenced by that comment. What was he suggesting? Was he hinting I was in line for a Department of Defense shuttle mission? There were several DOD payloads ready to go on the shuttle—satellites so optimized for the shuttle cargo bay they could not be easily switched back to the air force’s unmanned boosters. Or was Abbey implying I would soon switch jobs from Range Safety to review the safety of DOD payloads? Or was this a polite warning that my career at NASA was being terminated and I would be going back to the USAF? There was no divining what George Abbey meant.