Riding Rockets

For a bookworm, there are few joys to exceed finding a book that is so interesting that it keeps you up late at night and you want to get into it at the first opportunity the next day. "Riding Rockets" by Mike Mullane was such a find for me. Mullane is a 3-time shuttle mission specialist, and the fact that he is "unknown" lets us know that he space program has changed a lot since the days of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

He was one of the first round of shuttle astronauts selected in '78. A West Point graduate that switched to the Air Force trying to get to space, but whose eyesight wasn't good enough to be a pilot, so he settled for flying over 100 missions in Vietnam as a "back-seater" on a Phantom. He picked up a masters in flight engineering after the war, and although he gave it at least his all, he was surprised to actually be picked to be an astronaut.

The book is loaded with a lot of ribald humor and practical jokes, as well as a lot of detail of how it "feels", sometimes in the physical sense of discomfort and pain even, to be an astronaut. He probably captures the end of one type of military culture, the "pre-women in everything" era, and of course takes part in a major part of the transition himself as one of the first astronauts to deal with women in that role and part of the missions to space.

It is hard to imagine someone being as open about his personal life and the lives of his loved ones, even telling about his wife's experience as an unwed mother as a young woman. There are plenty of parts of this book that some will say "that is more detail than I wanted to hear", and there are many things that it would seem could have been left out without detracting. However, this is clearly his book, and has the feel of "authenticity", it doesn't seem like any of the "sex and violence" is really gratuitous, this is just how he is, how he sees the world, and apparently part of how a fairly significant number of the astronauts of that period saw it.

Other than the "ethos", and 10's of great little stories about flights in T-38's, his 3 flights, training, the astronaut beach house, and many other details, the information about the Challenger was the most disturbing to me. It sounds like it is pretty clear that at least most of them were alive all the way down. A number of switches that would be related to trying to restore power and oxygen to the cockpit had been toggled in ways that made it clear that human hands had done it, and a set of auxiliary air source packs had been turned to the "on position". One of those packs was intact enough that it still contained air, but a little over 2 and 1/2 minutes of air was gone, the amount of time that it would take to fall from the point of the explosion to the water.

The point that he makes over and over is that these are a group of people that are so dedicated to spaceflight that the risks are really meaningless to them. Something like the explorers that sailed out on the unknown in small wooden boats, they are willing to take those risks to open the next frontier. At least many of them do know fear, although not all, his first shuttle commander was sleeping in the cockpit for a good nap during a pre-launch hold, so some are indeed cut from different cloth.

If you have a significant interest in the space program, this is an excellent book.