Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [13]
My greatest treasure of this epoch was the bookConquest of Space by Willy Ley. Forget Homer and Shakespeare and Hemingway. They were hacks. For me Willy Ley was the greatest writer of all time. His descriptions of spaceflight supplemented by Chesley Bonestell’s magnificent space paintings launched me into orbit decades before a NASA rocket.
“…there will be zero hour, zero minute, and zero second, and then the roaring bellow from the exhaust nozzles of the ship…the ship will ride up on the roaring flames, disappearing in the sky in less than a minute…
“The earth will be a monstrous ball somewhere behind the ship, and the pilot will find himself surrounded by space. Black space, strewn all over with the countless jewels of distant suns, the stars. Stretching across the great blackness the pilot will see the Milky Way.”
To my twelve-year-old brain there was no more wonderful prose written in any language anywhere. I couldsee that great ball of Earth. I couldsee those stars. I couldsee the deep blackness. I read the book again and again. I read it until the pages came unhinged. I consumed Bonestell’s paintings like other boys ogled the breasts of African natives inNational Geographic. There were illustrations of astronauts watching a “canalled” Mars from one of its moons, Deimos. Other paintings showed spacesuited explorers walking among the mountains of our moon and on the gravel desert of Saturn’s moon, Mimas. The subtitle on Ley’s book said it all, “A preview of the greatest adventure awaiting mankind.”
As soon as there was a NASA, I became its number-one fan. I watched every launch on TV. I wrote for photos and stuck them on the walls of my bedroom. I knew at sight every missile in the U.S. arsenal…Redstone, Vanguard, Jupiter, Thor, Atlas, Titan. I could recite their height, thrust, and payload weight. I learned NASA’s vocabulary: apogee, perigee, payload, LOX, A-okay. I sent NASA drawings of my own rockets and gave them helpful suggestions on how they might build better missiles. I followed the trials and tribulations of NASA’s program with the same passion other kids followed their favorite ball team. When theMercury 7 astronauts were announced I memorized their biographies and pored overLife magazine’s photo-essays on them and their machines. I couldn’t wait to be one of them and constructed a fantasy in which I would actuallyreplace them. One of the points continually raised in the news was the anemic thrust of NASA’s rockets. The United States launched grapefruit-size satellites while the Russian payloads were measured in tons. I was convinced, when all was said and done, Alan Shepard and John Glenn and the other astronauts would be too heavy to be blasted into orbit. In my dream NASA would be unable to find any adult test pilot light enough for one of their rockets to lift. They would then search among the skinny kids of America to staff the astronaut corps. I wrote to NASA with that very suggestion, making sure my name and address were prominent.
The rockets and posters and sky watching weren’t enough. Astronauts were pilots. I had to fly. At age sixteen I began flying lessons. After a dozen hours my instructor deemed me safe enough to solo. There are some memories so seared into our synapses we carry them to our graves—our first sexual experience, the birth of our children, combat, the death of a loved one. I can include my first solo flight in those memories that will play in full Technicolor in my age-addled brain. Four decades later I can still feel the adrenaline-boosted flutter of my heart as I taxied onto the runway and glanced at that empty right seat. My left hand gripped the yoke so tightly I’m surprised I didn’t liquefy the plastic. My right hand was welded to the ball of the throttle. I lifted my feet from the brakes, slid the throttle to the firewall, and the machine slipped down the runway. I had never experienced a sound more sweet than the roar of that 100-horsepower engine. I eased the yoke back and watched the Earth fall