Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [15]
The actual press announcement had come two weeks earlier. At that time I had been on temporary duty from my Florida base to Mt. Home AFB, Idaho, testing the new EF-111 aircraft. Like the other 208 people who had gone through the astronaut selection process, I had had an ear tuned to the telephone for several months. Not that I expected to be picked. Far from it. I felt it had been a fluke I had made the interview cut in the first place. In their more studied deliberations the NASA committee would finally realize what they had in Mike Mullane: an above-average type of guy; nothing spectacular; a twelve-hundredand-something SAT guy; a 181st-in-his-West Point-class type of guy; a guy incapable of counting backward by 7s. There was no way I was going to twice fool an organization that had put men on the moon. But, like a lottery player who knows he is going to lose, I was still going to check the numbers.
On Monday morning, January 16, 1978, the numbers came up and I was a loser. I was certain of it. While dressing for work, I turned on the TV. I wasn’t on it. But Sally Ride and five other women were. NASA had announced the newest group of astronauts, including the first women astronauts. There was video of newshounds jostling for position in front of their homes. Vans with brightly colored TV call letters crowded the streets. Curious neighbors circled the houses. And these smiling, radiant, joyful young women answered questions shouted by the press, “What’s it like to know you are one of the first women astronauts? When did you want to be an astronaut? Did you cry when you heard the news? Will you be scared when you ride the shuttle?”
I went to my living room and drew back the curtain to see if there was a squadron of news vans parked in my driveway. Nope. No vans. No frothing press. No neighbors. Nothing. I was alone to dwell on my rejection. I tried to rationalize my loss:
It wasn’t meant to be.
I had given it my best shot.
Maybe I’ll get selected next time.
You never know unless you try.
I sought comfort in these and a hundred other motivational platitudes. But none helped. The winners were on TV. The losers were watching them. I thought of calling my wife, Donna, in Florida and telling her the bad news, but decided it could wait. I just didn’t feel like talking about it.
I drove to my Mt. Home AFB office to find Donna had tried to reach me there. She had left a message, “Mr. Abbey at NASA called this morning and wants you to call him back.” George Abbey was chief of Flight Crew Operations Directorate (FCOD), the NASA JSC division that included the astronaut office. He had chaired the astronaut candidate interview boards. I was certain this would be his “thanks for the effort” call.
I dialed the number and got Abbey’s secretary. After a moment of holding (more proof of rejection) he came on the line. “Mike, are you still interested in coming to JSC as an astronaut?”
In the moments that followed I proved it is possible to live with a stopped heart. Over the previous hour I had built a precise rejection scenario. The women on TV were proof NASA had notified the lucky winners. (Actually, the women had been notified first so there would be thorough news coverage of their novelty.) Now, NASA was just following up with courtesy calls to the rest of us. But George’s lead-in question certainly didn’t sound like a prelude to a rejection.
There wasn’t enough spit in my mouth to wet a stamp but somehow I managed to croak a reply, “Yes, sir. I would definitely be interested in coming to JSC.”
Interested?!What the hell was I saying?! I wasinterested in having Hugh Hefner’s job. I wouldkill to be an astronaut.
Abbey continued, “Well, we’d like you to report here in July as a new astronaut candidate.”
I don’t recall anything else from that conversation. I was blind, deaf, and dumb with joy. NASA had selected Mike Mullane as an astronaut.
I immediately called Donna with the news. “I told you! I told you, Mike! Didn’t I always say everything would work out for the best? I told you!” And she had. Again and again