Read Riding Rockets for Free Online Page A

supplemental oxygen be used above 12,000 feet. On another day we wanted to feel the thrill of speed and skimmed just yards above the cholla cactus of the Albuquerque deserts. The spires of the nearby Sandia Mountains were a lure and we weaved through those, all the while buffeted by severe downdrafts.
    And on every flight I dreamed of someday flying higher and faster, of doing what Willy Ley had described. I dreamed of feeling the crush of a rocket’s G-forces on my body and of seeing the great globe of Earth behind my ship. I dreamed of the day I would fly a rocket as part of the “Conquest of Space.”
     
    “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