The American astronaut Mike Mullane began his career in the United States Air
Force. In 1978 he was selected by Nasa as a mission specialist astronaut. He
flew on three space missions. His autobiography, Riding Rockets: The
Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut, gives a startlingly honest
account of his time as an astronaut; as a result, he has been described as
“the Bill Bryson of space”.
The early space projects were staffed exclusively by astronauts from a
military background. In the 1970s, however, Mullane enrolled into an
astronaut class – only to discover that “diversity” was a key thrust of the
programme. He writes: “The diversity of America was represented on that
stage. There was a mother of three (Shannon Lucid), two astronauts of the
Jewish faith (Jeff Hoffman and Judy Resnik), and one Buddhist (El Onizuka).
There were Catholics and Protestants, atheists and fundamentalists. Truth be
known there were probably gay astronauts among us. The group included three
African Americans, one Asian American, and six females. Every press camera
was focused on this rainbow coalition, particularly the females. I could
have mooned the press corps and I would not have been noticed. The white
TFNG [Thirty Five New Guys, the name for the 1978 class of astronauts] males
were invisible.
“Another first was the political diversity of the group. Military pilots, the
mainstay of prior astronaut selection, were almost always politically
conservative. They were highly educated, self-reliant, critical thinkers who
scorned the ‘everybody’s a victim’ ethos of liberalism. But the reign of the
right ended with the large number of civilian astronauts standing on that
stage. Among them were people who had probably protested against the Vietnam
war, who thought Ted Kennedy’s likeness should be on Mount Rushmore, who had
marched for gay rights, abortion rights, civil rights and animal rights. For
the first time in history, the astronaut title was being bestowed on
tree-huggers, dolphin-friendly fish eaters, vegetarians, and subscribers to
The New York Times.
“There was another uniqueness about the civilians – their aura of youthful
naiveté. While the average age difference between the military and civilian
astronauts wasn’t extreme (approximately five years), the life-experience
difference was enormous. Some of the civilians were “post-docs”, a title I
had first heard that inauguration day. Literally, they had been perpetual
students, continuing their studies at universities after earning their PhDs.
These were men and women who, until a few weeks ago, had been star-gazing in
mountain-top observatories and whose greatest fear had been an A-minus on a
research paper. Their lives were light years apart from those of the
military men of the group. We were Vietnam combat veterans.
“It wasn’t just this proximity to war and death that differentiated the
military flyers from the post-docs, it was also the civilians’ lack of
exposure to life – at least to the rawer side of life. On a stopover in the
Philippines on my way to Vietnam, I checked into a hotel and was handed a
San Miguel beer and a loose-leaf binder with photos of the available
prostitutes. It was just a wild guess on my part, but I doubted any of the
post-docs had similar experiences in the Berkeley student union building.
There was an innocence in their demeanour that suggested they had lived
cloistered lives. It was hard for me to look at some of them and not think
they were kids. Some might still have been virgins. Steve Hawley, George
(Pinky) Nelson and Anna Fisher were exceptionally young in the face. There
was no way they were going to get inside a bar without being carded. Jeff
Hoffman was the picture of academia. He had arrived at Nasa with a beard and
a collapsible bicycle suitable for the Boston subway. He didn’t even own a
car. He rode to work on his bike and carried a lunch box. All that was
missing were the suede elbow patches on his suit coat and a pipe in his
mouth to make the ‘professor’ picture complete.
“I felt a subtle hostility toward the civilian candidates. In our minds the
post-docs hadn’t paid their dues to be standing on that stage. We had. For
us, it had been a life quest. I couldn’t see that passion in the eyes of the
civilians. Instead, I had this image of Sally Ride and the other post-docs,
a few months earlier, bebopping through the student-union building in a
save-the-whales T-shirt and accidentally seeing the Nasa astronaut-selection
announcement on the bulletin board, and throwing in an application on a
lark. Now they were here. It wasn’t right.
As the photographers continued to flash-blind the females and minorities, I
watched Judy Resnik and Rhea Seddon. Between them, there would be one more
first represented in our group: the first “hotty” in space. Judy was a
raven-haired beauty, Rhea a striking Tennessee blonde. No TFNG male was
looking at them and fantasising about their PhDs.”
AWKWARD MOMENTS
Mullane writes graphic descriptions of the more unpleasant aspects of space
flight. He recounts the experience of being fitted for his “urinary
collection device”.
“Urine collection for space-walking females proved to be a particularly
challenging engineering problem. Catheterisation was quickly eliminated –
too dangerous and uncomfortable. Diapers were messy. The most bizarre design
was the brainchild of a gynaecologist. He proposed that a mould of the
inside of a woman’s vagina could be used as an alignment tool for urine
collection. Before dressing in the spacesuit, the woman could insert her
personal mould into her body, which would bring the exterior-mounted urine
collector into a seal around the urethra. Urine could then be cleanly
collected as it left the body. A test subject was needed to try the design,
and a call went out for volunteers. Kandy answered.
“Kandy was a free-spirited Ellington Field flight-operations secretary with a
wonderful sense of humour. She easily tolerated the AD astronauts, as when
she pulled up a chair to join a group of us waiting for the fog to lift so
that we could fly our ’38s. Several of the navy astronauts were telling
“beat this” stories about bizarre tattoos they had seen. One pilot recalled
a photograph of a man’s crotch in the window of a Filipino tattoo
parlour. Tattooed on the thighs of both the pilot’s legs were huge elephant
ears that gave the man’s penis the appearance of the animal’s trunk.
Kandy joined in our laughter.
“In our space-wardrobe fitting sessions, we encountered one other waste
collection detail, which included a man’s worst nightmare. These sessions
were conducted by white-smocked young ladies armed with tape measures,
callipers and clipboards who measured us up for helmets, gloves and
spacesuits.
“At the end of the session a particularly sweet little custard walked me to a
corner of the room that was screened from the rest of the facility. ‘Step
inside and tell me what size fits you.’ I pulled back the curtain and boldly
walked forward, expecting to find a fitting room for underwear. But I was
wrong. I had stepped into male hell. Forget about blowing up on a space
shuttle. This was real fear. On a table, laid out like indictments, were
four different-sized condoms.
“I would learn that an open-ended condom was part of the male-urine collection
system worn under the pressure-suit cooling garment. One end of the latex
slipped over the penis; the other end was connected to a waist-worn nylon
bladder. Urine could pass through the condom, through a one-way valve and
into the nylon bladder. After a launch, landing or spacewalk (the three
times when the toilet was inaccessible) the bladder/condom combination,
known as a urine collection device (UCD), could be stripped from the body
and thrown away. In a really cruel joke, God created different-sized
penises, so Nasa provided different-size condoms. The cute little filly on
the other side of the curtain needed my stud size so the correct condom
could be loaded in my locker when I finally flew in space.
“With all the enthusiasm of a prisoner walking to the gallows I dropped my
pants. Until this moment in my life I had worn a condom only during brief
periods in my marriage when my wife had stopped her birth-control pills. On
those occasions there had been a sense of urgency and enthusiasm about
donning the one-size-fits-all latex scabbard. Not now. I looked down at an
appendage that was in the process of renouncing circumcision and finding
some heretofore unknown foreskin to hide behind.
“I reached for the largest condom. Astronauts are the most competitive people
in the world. From supplying an autograph to fitting a rubber, we’re out to
be the best, the fastest, the smartest – the biggest. If there had been a
Hula Hoop on that table, male astronauts would have seized it with hope in
their souls. I grabbed my cowering little friend and began work. ‘Don’t you
have anything bigger?’ I nervously joked to the cutie on the other side of
the curtain. I’m sure she had never heard that one before.”
SEXISM IN SPACE
The astronaut Judy Resnik appears frequently in Mullane’s book. He professes
respect and affection for Judy, who flew with him on his first mission
aboard Discovery in 1984. He writes: “Judy opened my male, sexist-pig eyes
to the reality that women could do the astronaut job as well as any man.”
Here, he describes time he spent with her aboard the space shuttle:
“During a break in the work I went to my locker to change out of my coveralls
and take off my UCD. I had often wondered how the privacy issue would play
out when we finally got to orbit. In our training, Judy had certainly seemed
unflappable. She had not fled from the Eva simulation when Hawley and I had
been standing in front of her, rolling on condoms. Still, I wondered how the
tight living conditions would affect her behaviour. I waited until she had
some upstairs duties and then stripped from my clothes. A few moments later,
while I was completely nude and extracting underwear from my locker, Judy
returned. She looked at me and said, ‘Nice butt, Tarzan,’ then went back to
her work. For once, I was speechless.
“This wasn’t the only time that day Judy showed how comfortable she felt
around us men. While searching for something in her own locker she pulled
out a chain of tampons. Like a magician pulling out a seemingly endless rope
of scarves from a hat, she kept pulling and pulling. Each of the products
was shrink-wrapped in plastic, each precisely separated from the other. The
floating belt had all the appearance of a fully loaded bandolier of cotton
bullets. Judy smiled.
‘I can tell you that a man packed this locker.’
I laughed at the image of a crusty old Nasa engineer addressing the issue of
how many feminine-hygiene products should be loaded. He probably got a
number from his wife, and then applied a Nasa safety factor, then added a
few contingency days on top of that. And then, incanting Gene Kranz’s famous
Apollo 13 challenge ‘Failure is not an option,’ he added some more. As she
wrestled the belt back into its tray, Judy commented, ‘If a woman had to use
all of these, she would be dead from blood loss.’ ”
THE CHALLENGER TRAGEDY
In January 1986 the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after
lift-off, killing all seven crew, one of whom was Judy Resnik.
“A few days after the tragedy, Zoo Crew flew to Akron, Ohio, for a memorial
service for Judy. Sally Ride and Kathy Sullivan joined us. The rest of the
astronaut office remained in Houston to attend a memorial service at which
President Reagan was speaking. On the flight, Mike Coats astounded us with
news on the cause of the disaster. ‘It was a failure of the O-rings on the
bottom joint on the right-side SRB [solid rocket booster]. There’s video of
fire leaking from the booster.’ He had been appointed to the accident board
and had seen the films at KSC [Kennedy Space Center]. Just by happenstance
the video had been recorded by a camera whose signal was not being fed to
the networks. Nobody at the LCC [Launch Control Center] or MCC [Mission
Control Center] had been aware of the leak. We were all stunned. The SRBs
had never been a major concern to us. So much for being certain that an SSME
[space shuttle main engine] had failed, I thought.”
Mullane also recounted his disgust at how the families had been handled
immediately after the disaster. He had met them three hours after
Challenger’s destruction. They were clamouring to return to Houston, but
Nasa held them at KSC, supposedly to retrieve their luggage for the return
flight. But Mullane didn’t believe it.
“The women said they didn’t care about the luggage. They wanted to leave
immediately. They were being held so that Vice-President Bush could fly to
the Cape and offer the nation’s condolences… The wives had to cool their
heels so the VP could feel better. I didn’t blame Bush – his intentions had
been noble. But the incident was just another example of how useless Nasa
headquarters was when it came to standing up to politicians. They should
have explained the situation to the White House and immediately flown the
wives to Houston. The VP could have consoled them there.
“Judy’s home-town memorial service was held at Akron’s Temple Israel. A photo
of her replaced a casket. Death in the arena of high-performance flight
frequently left only that – a memory. Judy and the others had been
perpetually frozen in their vibrant youth. As I listened to Hebrew prayers
being said for my friends, guilt rose in my soul. Every astronaut shared in
the blame for this tragedy. We had gone along with things we knew were wrong
– flying without an escape system and carrying passengers. The fact that our
silence has been motivated by fear for our careers now seemed a flimsy
excuse. There were 11 children who would never again see a parent.”
Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut, by Mike
Mullane (Scribner,
£9.99), is available at the BooksFirst price of £9.49, including postage and
packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585
