Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [14]
Unfortunately, there was one major impediment to continuing my flying lessons. Money. I had a little saved from summer jobs but flying lessons were expensive. It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. For teenage boys, necessity is the mother of idiocy. At the time I had a teen friend who had also achieved solo status in his flying lessons and, like me, was struggling to find the funds to continue. We put our heads together and came up with a way to make our money go further. He would rent a plane from one of the Albuquerque airports and fly it to another city field. There, I would meet him and we would fly together, sharing expenses and flying time. There was just one small problem with our plan: It was felonious. As student pilots we could only fly solo or with our instructors. On every flight we would be violating FAA rules. But we quickly concluded that getting caught would be the only crime, and with him flying to a secondary airport to pick me up, we had reduced the chances of discovery.
We decided to see how high we could climb and nursed the Cessna to 13,000 feet, violating yet another FAA requirement that supplemental oxygen be used above 12,000 feet. On another day we wanted to feel the thrill of speed and skimmed just yards above the cholla cactus of the Albuquerque deserts. The spires of the nearby Sandia Mountains were a lure and we weaved through those, all the while buffeted by severe downdrafts.
And on every flight I dreamed of someday flying higher and faster, of doing what Willy Ley had described. I dreamed of feeling the crush of a rocket’s G-forces on my body and of seeing the great globe of Earth behind my ship. I dreamed of the day I would fly a rocket as part of the “Conquest of Space.”
“Mike, at the most fundamental level we’re all motivated by things that occurred in our youth. Tell me about your childhood, your family.” A smiling Dr. McGuire awaited my answer. But I kept the shields up. I said nothing about Washing Machine Charlie or polio or near-death experiences in the wilds of the west or exploding rockets or violating FAA rules. What would those stories have said about Mike Mullane? That I had been emotionally scarred by my dad’s struggle with polio? That I was an out-of-control risk taker? That I scorned rules? There was no way I was going to reveal that history. So I lied.
“I was raised in a Beaver Cleaver family,” I said. “No divorces. No anxieties. No emotional baggage. My dad was an air force flyer and his influence excited me about flight. I was a child of the space race and that exposure excited me about spaceflight. As soon as there were astronauts, I wanted to be one.” End of story.
It was probably the same story he heard from every military flyer. No doubt some of the civilians, unaccustomed to the reality that doctors of any stripe can only hurt your flying career, broke down in tears as they revealed they were breast-fed by their mothers until they were six or were abandoned or beaten or molested or sucked their thumbs or wet their beds. But military flyers knew better. We would have lied about a wooden leg or a glass eye.You find it would have been our attitude. I had a one-in-seven chance of making the astronaut cut. I didn’t want anything to stand out in any report coming out of my medical exams. I wanted to be so normal that when somebody looked up that word in the dictionary, they would see my picture. So I lied. I didn’t mention pissing in radiators or exploding car engines or dodging mountains in a Cessna 150. I lied even when the truth might have helped my cause.
Chapter 5
Selection
On February 1, 1978, the first space shuttle–era astronauts, thirty-five in number, stood on the stage in the auditorium of Building 2 at Johnson Space Center (JSC) to be formally introduced to the world. I was