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By Root 645 0

as a CAPCOM. There were noApollo 13 dramatics on any of these flights but, like everything else in the astronaut business, even the mundane can be unique. One Saturday night I was on CAPCOM duty and nearly comatose in boredom. The orbiting crew was engrossed in their experiments and the shuttle was performing flawlessly. On rev after rev all I did was make Acquisition of Signal (AOS) and Loss of Signal (LOS) calls as the shuttle passed in and out of the coverage of various tracking stations. I tried to maintain an appearance of busy professionalism, knowing the public affairs wall-mounted cameras were focused on me. When no video was being streamed from the shuttle, the NASA PR officer would switch to these MCC cameras. Cable companies broadcast “NASA Select” video to their subscribers, including most astronaut households. My image was being dumped into living rooms throughout Clear Lake City and across America. Aware of this, I resisted the impulse to pick ear hairs and instead opened a shuttle malfunction checklist and pretended to study it. My eyes glazed over and my head nodded.

When my console phone rang I was instantly alert. The MCC phone numbers were unpublished. If a phone was ringing it was official business. I was glad for the interruption…anythingto break the monotony. I snatched the receiver and answered in a crisp military manner, “CAPCOM, Mike Mullane speaking.”

What came into my ear was a soft, feminine voice. “Raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

I bolted upright. Was I hallucinating? “Pardon me” was the only rejoinder I could muster.

“Listen up, Mullane! I said, raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

It is in the DNA of men to respond to such a proposition in the affirmative, so my hand shot up like the space shuttle. The flight director and a couple of nearby MCC controllers looked at me like I had just had a seizure. No telling what the space geeks around the country watching me on TV thought had happened.

My brain quickly replayed the conversation and I identified the voice, a TFNG wife. It was a Saturday night. Somewhere there was an astronaut party. Someone had turned on the TV to check on the progress of the shuttle flight and found me bobbing toward unconsciousness. A crowd had gathered at the TV while this woman was given the CAPCOM phone number and made her call. I could imagine the roar of laughter when the party audience had seen my hand jerk skyward.

Now it was my turn to shock the caller. “You know this phone call is being recorded.” She just laughed me off. It was no more possible to embarrass this particular woman than it was to embarrass Madonna. But the callhad been recorded. All MCC telephone conversations are recorded for accident investigation purposes. Somewhere in the National Archives are audiotapes with historic quotes from the space program, like Alan Shepard’s “Let’s light this candle,” and Neil Armstrong’s “Houston, theEagle has landed,” and Gene Kranz’s “Failure is not an option,” and a TFNG wife’s “Raise your hand if you want a blow job.”

There were Monday meeting discussions that proved almost as attention-grabbing as this proposition. We received a status report on the subject of herpes-infected monkeys. STS-51B, a Spacelab mission, was to carry several primates as part of their life-science research and it was feared the virus, which was common in monkeys, could infect the crew. Needless to say this was a briefing that brought out the best in the Planet AD crowd.

“If you don’t screw the monkeys, you won’t catch herpes” came one call from the cheap seats.

“Good luck restraining the marines” came another.

“The ugliest one will come back pregnant by one of you air force perverts.”

As this inter-service banter continued, one of the post-docs was able to shoulder in a valid question. “Why don’t they just fly clean monkeys?”

The presenter replied, “It’s difficult and expensive to find herpes-free monkeys.” Then he added, “The scientists believe the herpes risks to astronauts are acceptable. They think there’s a greater chance of the shuttle exploding than the