Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [102]
“Mike, let me get a photo of you standing next to your little cousins.”
“Mike, why don’t you sit here with Grandma and tell her what it’s like to be an astronaut.”
“Mike, can I get twenty autographed photos for my neighbors back home?”
I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. After a couple hours I finally escaped to the beach and collapsed. I had been so close, three freakin’ seconds, and now I might be at the back of a long, long line. I couldn’t get that dismal thought out of my head. I closed my eyes and prayed for blissful unconsciousness. It was a prayer immediately answered. The exhaustion of the past few days had finally caught up with me and I fell into a deep sleep. Minutes later I was awakened by a gentle kick in my side. I squinted upward to see my eighty-seven-year-old grandmother. “Mike, get inside. Bobby wants to take some more pictures. You’ll get sunburned out here.”
God, take me.My new prayer was that a meteor would hit and put me out of my misery.
Chapter 20
MECO
A few days later our crew was back in Houston and facing the grim possibility our mission was going to be canceled. Payloads were stacking up. Every day a communication satellite wasn’t in space meant the loss of millions of dollars of revenue to its operators. NASA HQ searched for a way to minimize the impact ofDiscovery ’s delay to their downstream customers. They focused on combining the payloads of two missions and deleting one from the schedule. Everyone in the astronaut office knew a deleted mission meant a deleted crew.
It was a miserable two weeks as HQ debated the best adjustment to the flight manifest. Every imaginable rumor twittered up and down the astronaut grapevine. Who was going to get screwed? There was a general feeling among the other mission-assigned crews that we had had our chance. It was just our tough luckDiscovery had misfired. It should be our crew who suffered the consequences. I couldn’t blame them. I would have felt the same way in their shoes.
To make matters worse, there were no firsts associated with our crew to give us some HQ PR cover. White males on a space shuttle were as newsworthy as white males on a hockey team, and there were five of us palefaces on the crew. Judy was merely Sally Ride’s runner-up. We had nothing in the way of a celebrity first to protect us from the ax, whereas other downstream missions included the first spacewalk by a woman and the first satellite retrieval mission. HQ was going to ensure those high-visibility missions flew as planned. I told Hank he should get a sex-change operation so we’d have the first transgender astronaut aboard to protect us. He declined.
Astronaut office politics were also a significant cause for worry. There wasn’t an air force astronaut who didn’t think George Abbey was navy-biased in his flight assignments. Nine of the first eleven shuttle missions had been commanded by active duty or retired navy astronauts. Hank Hartsfield was only the second astronaut with air force roots to command a mission. And a glance downstream showed crews commanded by Crippen, Hauck, and Mattingly—all navy. If anybody was going to get screwed because ofDiscovery ’s delay, it wasn’t going to be them. They had Godfather Abbey’s protection. I felt as if the entire STS-41D crew were walking around with a sign pinned to our backs: “Cancel This Mission.”
But it didn’t happen. Instead, the ax fell on STS-41F, Bo Bobko’s mission. His payload would be added to ours, while he and his crew would be cut adrift to find something else downstream. Bo was retired air force. The USAF astronaut contingent cursed Abbey…again. I felt bad for Bo and company, but not for long. We were Lazarus back from the dead or, in this case, back in the front of the line.
Our major payloads would now include three communication satellites and Judy’s solar panel experiment. We would also have a new center engine. Ground tests had been unable to duplicate the problem with the original SSME. Engineers could only assume there had been some minute contamination in the hydraulic system,