Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [222]
TFNGs logged nearly a thousand man-days in space and sixteen spacewalks. Five became veterans of five space missions (Gibson, Hawley, Hoffman, Lucid, and Thagard). The first TFNGs entered space in 1983 aboard STS-7. Steve Hawley became the last TFNG in space sixteen years later, when he launched on his fifth mission, STS-93, in 1999. TFNGs were ultimately represented on the crews of fifty different shuttle missions and commanded twenty-eight of those. It is not an exaggeration to say TFNGs were the astronauts most responsible for taking NASA out of its post-Apollo hiatus and to the threshold of the International Space Station (ISS).
There are twenty-nine of the original thirty-five TFNGs still living. Besides the loss of theChallenger four and Dave Griggs’s death, Dave “Red Flash” Walker, a veteran of four shuttle flights, succumbed to natural causes at the age of fifty-seven. Dave was the pilot who scared the holy bejesus out of me during the 1981 STS-1 chase plane practices. He had teased death so often, I had come to believe he was bulletproof. I had failed to consider cancer.
We almost had to bury Hoot Gibson in 1990 when he was involved in a midair collision while racing his home-built plane. The other pilot died but Hoot was able to land his severely damaged machine and walk away. If ever there has been a pilot who has worn out a squadron of guardian angels, that would be Hoot. He and Rhea Seddon now live in Tennessee with their three children. Hoot flies for Southwest Airlines and Rhea is the assistant chief medical officer at Vanderbilt Medical Group at that Nashville university.
In my retirement I have noted the deaths of other astronauts whose life paths intersected mine. Sonny Carter’s death was particularly shocking. Sonny had been one of the STS-27 family escorts and Donna had relied on his calming presence during her LCC waits for that mission. He was never without a smile and a positive word. On April 5, 1991, while on the way to give a NASA speech, he died in the crash of a commercial airliner. The manner of his death was a gross violation of the natural order—it was expected that an astronaut dying in a plane would do so as a crewmember, not as a passenger. Sonny was twice cheated…in death at age forty-three and while belted into a passenger’s seat.
Bob Overmyer died in his retirement while flight-testing a small plane. I was one of the CAPCOMs for his STS-51B flight. During that mission, a communication glitch allowed the crew’s private Spacelab intercom to be momentarily broadcast to the world. It included a panicked call from Bob to his lab scientists: “There’s monkey feces floating free in the cockpit!” I later teased him that he was probably the first marine in the history of the corps to ever use the wordfeces. He laughed at that. Bob was dead at age fifty-nine.
Astronaut-scientist Karl Henize, whom I had worked with on my very first astronaut support job—the dreaded Spacelab—died in his retirement at age sixty-six of respiratory failure while attempting to climb Mount Everest. He is buried on the side of that mountain at 22,000-foot elevation.
Besides these astronaut deaths, I noted other passings. Don Puddy, who replaced George Abbey as chief of FCOD and who approved me for my STS-36 mission, died of cancer in 2004 at age sixty-seven. Jon and Brenda McBride’s son, Richard, died in a plane crash while undergoing navy flight training. Brewster and Kathy Shaw suffered a horrific loss, too. One of their college-age sons was murdered in a random carjacking. If it is possible for a soul to audibly scream, mine did at that news. No death, not even the ones sustained in theChallenger andColumbia tragedies, affected me as much. Every parent