Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [12]
Not only did my mom give up her vacuum extension (and henceforth had to vacuum like a scoliosis victim), she also let me use her iron to heat plastic to form parachutes for my capsule payloads of ants and lizards. That work destroyed her iron. She let me use her oven to bake recipes of foul-smelling, fertilizer-based rocket fuel. My dad’s extensive tools were at my disposal, as was his time. He would drive me to machine shops to have nozzles turned on lathes, and to chemical supply companies to purchase rocket fuel ingredients. He would drive me and my bombs into the desert. There he would rise onto his braces and crutches and hold a Super-8 movie camera on the action. I would set up the rocket and lay wire to the car battery. Dad would offer an irreverent prayer that the rocket would land on Khrushchev’s head, then he would recite a short countdown. At zero I would touch the wires to the battery and hope for the best. Sometimes that best was a perfect streak of smoke leading a thousand feet into the azure blue. A white puff would mark the firing of the parachute extraction rocket and we would be treated to the glorious sight of my Maxwell House coffee can capsule descending on a parachute of dry-cleaning plastic and kite string.
More frequently, however, my launches closely mirrored NASA’s. At the count of zero an explosion would rend the air and a sulfurous cloud would be all that remained of my creation. My dad, ever the optimist, would opine that the rocket had gone into orbit or possibly hit the moon. We would remain silent and listen for any sound of a whine or thud of an impact, but there would be none. That was proof enough for my father that the rocket was on its way to the Kremlin.
During one launch my dad was nearly a casualty. He was whooping and hollering at what appeared to be a perfect ascent until the missile arced into a dive straight for us. “Jesus Christ, Mike! It’s coming right at us!” He was ten feet from the car and did his best to sprint for its cover. With the clatter of steel braces and aluminum crutches he sounded like a machine gone wild. I was powerless to help and abandoned him like a dropped Popsicle. I dove under the car and turned to look up, certain I was going to witness my dad getting shish-kebabed by a five-foot smoking skewer. I made one final, not so helpful cry, “Watch out, Dad!”
“Balls!” he roared. As a whistling sound gained in decibels, Dad suddenly stopped and jerked himself into a ramrod-straight pose, holding his crutches as close to his body as possible, trying to minimize his target footprint. His face was scrunched up, eyes squeezed to slits, teeth bared. There was a brief whooshing sound followed by a loudwhoomph. The rocket embedded itself in the sandy soil no more than ten feet away. A thin curl of smoke corkscrewed from its nozzle.
“Christ on a crutch, that was close, Mike.”
Dad christened that rocket the “Kamikaze,” which set him off on another story about how a damn Jap kamikaze had almost rammed his plane. “I emptied my twin 50s at the bastard and never landed a hit. But he missed us anyway, just like that rocket.”
As 1957 drew to a close, I was filled with anticipation. Not because of any party to celebrate the New Year, but rather because 1958 was to be the IGY, the International Geophysical Year. If there was ever a measure of how consumed I was by space, this was it…that I was as impatient for the IGY to arrive as most kids were for the end of school. I had read about it in several science magazines. A host of countries were to cooperatively investigate space with sounding rockets and instrumented balloons, and the