Riding Rockets

“Mike, at the most fundamental level we’re all motivated by things that occurred in our youth. Tell me about your childhood, your family.” A smiling Dr. McGuire awaited my answer. But I kept the shields up. I said nothing about Washing Machine Charlie or polio or near-death experiences in the wilds of the west or exploding rockets or violating FAA rules. What would those stories have said about Mike Mullane? That I had been emotionally scarred by my dad’s struggle with polio? That I was an out-of-control risk taker? That I scorned rules? There was no way I was going to reveal that history. So I lied.

“I was raised in a Beaver Cleaver family,” I said. “No divorces. No anxieties. No emotional baggage. My dad was an air force flyer and his influence excited me about flight. I was a child of the space race and that exposure excited me about spaceflight. As soon as there were astronauts, I wanted to be one.” End of story.

It was probably the same story he heard from every military flyer. No doubt some of the civilians, unaccustomed to the reality that doctors of any stripe can only hurt your flying career, broke down in tears as they revealed they were breast-fed by their mothers until they were six or were abandoned or beaten or molested or sucked their thumbs or wet their beds. But military flyers knew better. We would have lied about a wooden leg or a glass eye.You find it would have been our attitude. I had a one-in-seven chance of making the astronaut cut. I didn’t want anything to stand out in any report coming out of my medical exams. I wanted to be so normal that when somebody looked up that word in the dictionary, they would see my picture. So I lied. I didn’t mention pissing in radiators or exploding car engines or dodging mountains in a Cessna 150. I lied even when the truth might have helped my cause.

Chapter 5

Selection

On February 1, 1978, the first space shuttle–era astronauts, thirty-five in number, stood on the stage in the auditorium of Building 2 at Johnson Space Center (JSC) to be formally introduced to the world. I was one of them.

The actual press announcement had come two weeks earlier. At that time I had been on temporary duty from my Florida base to Mt. Home AFB, Idaho, testing the new EF-111 aircraft. Like the other 208 people who had gone through the astronaut selection process, I had had an ear tuned to the telephone for several months. Not that I expected to be picked. Far from it. I felt it had been a fluke I had made the interview cut in the first place. In their more studied deliberations the NASA committee would finally realize what they had in Mike Mullane: an above-average type of guy; nothing spectacular; a twelve-hundredand-something SAT guy; a 181st-in-his-West Point-class type of guy; a guy incapable of counting backward by 7s. There was no way I was going to twice fool an organization that had put men on the moon. But, like a lottery player who knows he is going to lose, I was still going to check the numbers.

On Monday morning, January 16, 1978, the numbers came up and I was a loser. I was certain of it. While dressing for work, I turned on the TV. I wasn’t on it. But Sally Ride and five other women were. NASA had announced the newest group of astronauts, including the first women astronauts. There was video of newshounds jostling for position in front of their homes. Vans with brightly colored TV call letters crowded the streets. Curious neighbors circled the houses. And these smiling, radiant, joyful young women answered questions shouted by the press, “What’s it like to know you are one of the first women astronauts? When did you want to be an astronaut? Did you cry when you heard the news? Will you be scared when you ride the shuttle?”

I went to my living room and drew back the curtain to see if there was a squadron of news vans parked in my driveway. Nope. No vans. No frothing press. No neighbors. Nothing. I was alone to dwell on my rejection. I tried to rationalize my loss:

It wasn’t meant to be.

I had given it my best shot.

Maybe I’ll get selected next time.

You never know unless you try.

I sought comfort in these and a hundred other motivational platitudes. But none helped. The winners were on TV. The losers were watching them. I thought of calling my wife, Donna, in Florida and telling her the bad news, but decided it could wait. I just didn’t feel like talking about it.

I drove to my Mt. Home AFB office to find Donna had tried to reach me there. She had left a message, “Mr. Abbey at NASA called this morning and wants you to call him back.” George Abbey was chief of Flight Crew Operations Directorate (FCOD), the NASA JSC division that included the astronaut office. He had chaired the astronaut candidate interview boards. I was certain this would be his “thanks for the effort” call.