Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [189]
Though there was no job to force a retirement decision, there were other factors pointing me to the NASA exit sign. NASA management was still an issue. After Abbey’s departure, Don Puddy had been assigned to fill the FCOD position, an announcement that had been greeted in the astronaut office with stunned silence. Like Abbey, Don had gotten his start at NASA as an MCC controller in the Apollo program and ultimately served as a flight director forApollo 16. He also served as a flight director for all three Skylab missions and the Apollo-Soyuz mission, and he was the reentry flight director for STS-1. Don was an exceptionally talented engineer and manager. But he wasn’t a pilot. No matter how disliked Abbey may have been, we had all appreciated his four thousand hours of cockpit time. He had a personal appreciation of the issues of high-performance flight. We worried Puddy’s lack of flying experience would seriously hobble him in his ability to handle astronaut concerns about shuttle nose-wheel steering, brakes, runway barriers, drag chutes, auto-land, and the many other pilot-specific issues surrounding shuttle operations. If there was ever a position that needed to be filled by an astronaut, it was chief of flight crew operations. Don Puddy’s appointment made us suspicious that NASA’s senior leadership still didn’t want to deal directly with astronauts. Dick Covey told us a story that supported those suspicions. He had been in a meeting with Aaron Cohen, the JSC director, in which Cohen had polled his senior staff on whether or not the FCOD position should be filled by an astronaut, and the unanimous answer had been yes. The fact that an astronaut had not been assigned was proof to us that HQ had overruled Cohen. Our discontent with Puddy’s assignment was so widely known that a week after the announcement, Aaron Cohen took the unprecedented step of coming to the astronaut office to curtly tell us the decision had been entirely his, without any HQ input. Nobody believed it. He then went on to list Puddy’s attributes as a great manager, something that nobody was questioning. Puddy was exceptional. He just wasn’t the best man for the job. An astronaut was.
I was tired of the us versus them.Can’t we all just get along? The frustrations were a constant topic at the coffeepot and over ’38 intercoms. When a news article appeared on the B-board about NASA Administrator James Fletcher’s planned departure at the end of President Reagan’s second term, an astronaut graffitied it with the commentTwo years too late.
While Puddy’s selection was a disappointment to astronauts, he instituted one critically important change—empowerment of the position of chief of astronauts. Shortly into Puddy’s tenure, Dan Brandenstein unequivocally informed us that all flight assignments would originate with him and would then be successively approved or vetoed by Puddy, the JSC Director, Dick Truly, and the NASA administrator. Amazing! Someone in an astronaut leadership position was (gasp)…communicating with the astronaut corps! I was certain that the moon was in the Seventh House, Jupiter was aligned with Mars, and winged-swine were in the JSC treetops. If Abbey and Young had been present, they might have fainted. It had taken eleven freakin’ years to hear this career-essential information—something John and George should have given us on day one.
Regardless of Dan’s welcome leadership, there were other concerns. I could invest a couple years of my life working toward a third flight, only to have the rug pulled out from under me when a schedule change canceled my mission or another shuttle disaster interrupted the program or my health became an issue. In my last physical exam the cardiologist had seen an anomalous blip on the EKG traces. “It’s no big deal, Mike. I’m not going to require you to fly on a waiver.” But what if the blip became something serious enough