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By Root 607 0

return to the air force, but I knew I wouldn’t be happy there. The only thing awaiting me in the USAF was a desk. I would never see the inside of a cockpit again. I was too old and too senior in rank. I would end up buried in the bowels of the Pentagon. I didn’t want to leave NASA. I wanted to fly again. MyDiscovery flight couldn’t compare with what some of my peers had done on their missions. Pinky Nelson, “Ox” van Hoften, Dale Gardner, and Bob Stewart had all done tetherless spacewalks. They had donned MMUs and, like real-life Buck Rogerses, had jetted away from their shuttles into the abyss of space. Kathy Sullivan, Dale Gardner, Dave Griggs, and Jeff Hoffman had done traditional tethered spacewalks. Sally Ride had used the robot arm to deploy and retrieve a satellite. Rhea Seddon had used the robot arm in an attempt to activate a malfunctioning satellite. I wanted to do similar things that challenged my skills as a mission specialist. I wanted a spacewalk flight. I wanted to fly a mission with an RMS task. I wanted a high-inclination orbit so I could see my Albuquerque home from space. And there was only one place on Earth I could do these things…at NASA. As much as I wanted to walk into Young’s office and tell him, “Take this job and shove it!” I couldn’t. There was no place else to go and ride a rocket into space. I would have to endure.

On September 19, astronauts celebrated for the first time sinceChallenger with a party at a local club. I had been looking forward to it. After nine brutal months, it would be good to erase my brain with a few drinks and have some fun with my fellow TFNGs. Donna and I sat at a table with the Brandensteins, Coveys, and Boldens (class of 1980). After dinner, Bob Cabana, the class leader of the latest group of astronauts to arrive at JSC (class of 1985), walked to the stage and invited George Abbey to step forward and receive an autographed photo of their class. The image immediately brought to mind our TFNG efforts to brownnose Abbey back in 1978. Kathy Covey let out a “woo, woo, woo” catcall. We all understood her sarcasm. Every astronaut class prostituted itself to Abbey thinking it was going to help them. The class of 1985 would soon learn what we had all learned—shoving your nose up Abbey’s behind didn’t get you anywhere. In a year they would all be cursing him and Young like everybody else.

Others at the table were soon speaking of their disgust with our leadership. At that, Kathy, a very successful and hard-nosed businesswoman, began to mock our impotence. “I’ve listened to this shit for years. You guys are so gutless you deserve what you get” was her message. Of course she was right. But it all went back to that incontrovertible fact…there was no other place on the planet where we could fly a rocket. If Satan himself had been our boss and demanded we take a fiery pitchfork up the wazoo before we could climb into a shuttle cockpit, all of us would have long ago become acrobatic in our ability to bend over and spread our cheeks.

I grabbed another beer and then another. I didn’t want to hear any more of this. I was burned out. But it was impossible to escape. As the party was breaking up, Ron Grabe (class of 1980) took me aside. “Mike, you better watch your six o’clock.” It was fighter pilot lingo; I had an enemy on my tail. “This week I was waiting to see Young and I heard him on the phone. I don’t know who he was speaking with, but I assumed it was Abbey. He was saying, ‘Mike Mullane is one of the enemy. He’s a nice kid and all that, but he’s on the side of the Range Safety people.’”

A “nice kid”? I was forty years old. And what crime had I committed to earn the label “enemy”? I was guilty of doing my assigned job.

I thanked Grabe for the warning and added, “I guess I’ll talk to P.J.” P. J. Weitz was a Skylab-era astronaut working as Abbey’s deputy. He was well regarded, and I considered him the only manager I could trust within all of NASA.

Grabe added, “Don’t bother with P.J. I’ve already spoken to him about Young. I told him John has become unbearable. Nobody can make