Riding Rockets

Before dinner, Rick Hauck led us in a moment of silence to remember our fallen friends, then gave a short presentation that included a recap of some of the significant history written by our group. We each received TFNG T-shirts bearing thirty-five small caricatures of our individual likenesses. The shirts also featured the past-tense headline “We Delivered.” It was an update to the original 1979 TFNG T-shirt, which had displayed the same caricatures and the title “We Deliver.” The TFNG class had, indeed,delivered for NASA and America.

Before scattering to our hotels we posed for a class photo. I sensed a renewed closeness in the assembly. It wasn’t the Knights-of-the-Round-table closeness we had once shared—that level of camaraderie had forever ended when the first Abbey flight assignments had winnowed us. But the white-hot fierceness of our competition had been cooled by the years. We were all gold-pinned astronauts; most of us gold-plated several times over. We were all bound by an experience singularly unique in the history of man…spaceflight. As we stood for our reunion photo, fewer than four hundred earthlings had ever flown into space. Even the fraternity of those who had summited Mount Everest was more than twice as large. The exclusivity of the astronaut experience would forever be a force that would pull TFNGs together.

I occasionally run into a TFNG in my travels. I once crossed paths with Hoot Gibson in his capacity as a Southwest Airlines pilot and had cause to regret it. In the late 1990s I was a passenger on a flight he was piloting. As the jet reached cruise altitude, he announced over the intercom that “world-famous astronaut Mike Mullane was aboard and would be happy to sign autographs.” To ensure my distress, he added my seat number. A line formed and a few old ladies grabbed their cameras for photos. I wanted to leap from the plane to escape the severe embarrassment.Better dead than look bad.

The three TFNGChallenger widows have successfully moved on with their lives. As Lorna Onizuka shared with me, “We stubbed our emotional toes along the way, but I think we’ve all come through the tragedy as happy, content, and successful women and mothers.” Lorna thinks it was the mothering instinct that got everybody through the worst days—each of them had to place their children first and didn’t have time to be emotional cripples. “My children saved my life,” was Lorna’s assessment.

The “man repellent” factor of the astronaut-widow thankfully did not endure. June Scobee and Jane Smith remarried. Lorna and Cheryl McNair remain single but Lorna says they both have vibrant social lives. Lorna says, “I’ve shared my life with a special man for more than ten years.” She laughs as she recounts some of the problems of reentering the dating scene as a mother of two. “When I wasn’t home and a man would call, my oldest daughter would ask him if he was bald.” For some reason that daughter had a “bald men need not apply” attitude. Lorna’s youngest daughter would ask a male caller if he smoked cigars, which was her criterion for rejection. And both daughters would tell men they had to have Mom home by the ten o’clock news. If Lorna’s happy, upbeat attitude is representative of the otherChallenger survivors, as she believes it is, they are doing quite well.

Donna and I are approaching our sixtieth birthdays. We both weigh more, sag more, and forget more than we did in those euphoric, intoxicating early TFNG days. But life has been good…grand,really, because we have been blessed with six wonderful and healthy grandchildren. Pat and Wendy, Amy and Steve, and Laura and Dave have all given us two grandchildren each: Sean and Katie, Hanna and Meagan, and Noah and Gwyneth. While holding our first grandchild, I asked Donna, “Would you have ever thought we’d be telling our kids to have more sex?” As the saying goes…“If I had known grandkids were so much fun, I would have had them first.”

Donna and I also just passed our fortieth anniversary…not wedding, but rather the anniversary of that fateful first kiss of January 3, 1965. We celebrated with a glass of wine and were asleep by 9:30P.M . We each got married for the wrong reasons, but we somehow endured long enough to fall in love.

The astronaut beach house is still standing and I hope it is forever preserved for future generations of astronauts. It sits on sacred ground. The spouses of theChallenger andColumbia crews last held the love of their lives on its sands. No doubt some future crew spouses will hold dear the memory of their last beach house visit, too, for it will include a memory of the last time they embraced their lovers. It is the nature of spaceflight that more crews will perish. Even if NASA can fix its culture, the complexity of the machines and the unforgiving environment of space will claim more astronauts.