Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [226]
In all likelihood the craft that will replace the shuttle will be a capsule launched atop some type of booster rocket, possibly a reuseable shuttle SRB augmented with a liquid-fueled upper stage. It’s back to the future. The capsule will probably accommodate a four-person crew and be more sophisticated than those of the Apollo program, but with the same type of tractor escape rocket design to pull astronauts to safety in the event of a booster failure. Future astronauts will return to Earth under parachutes.
If all goes according to Griffin’s plan, on a day in late 2010, a reentering space shuttle will sonic-boom KSC for the last time. For the last time a pilot will take the stick of a winged spaceship and guide it to a runway landing. For the last time we will hear the call, “Houston, wheel stop.” The space shuttle will be history, retired at age thirty. I suspect every TFNG will be watching…and remembering. I certainly will.
Political correctness finally neutered the astronaut corps…or, perhaps, males from Planet AD have gone extinct. Several veteran NASA secretaries confided in me that contemporary astronaut parties are “boring.” I can believe it. When an astronaut applicant recently called me for insight into the interview process, I was shocked to hear her say that a resident astronaut had already warned her, “Drinking alcohol is frowned upon.” (No telling what the corps would say about imbibing in helium.) While I have never been one to believe alcohol is necessary to have fun, the comment hints that there is anew astronaut on the block, as good with a stick and throttle as any before but less flamboyant and more mainstream than the TFNGs. It doesn’t surprise me. The current civilian astronauts were born into an America that is politically correct in the extreme and the pilots now come from a military that is more sober and religious. So, besides the males from Planet AD, maybe the wild and wooly Right Stuff astronaut—that astronaut who lives life at the edge of the envelope, be it at happy hour or in a cockpit—has also gone the way of the dodo.
The last TFNG reunion occurred in 1998, our twentieth anniversary. Most of the men and all of the surviving women were present. The women seemed least changed, though I’m sure makeup and Clairol had a lot to do with that. The men, me included, were showing our age with expanding waistlines, receding hairlines, and liver-spotted foreheads. A few men sported new wives, though none of those seemed to be of the “trophy” variety. They were mature and pleasant. The rest of the wives were aging gracefully but their days of giving us men a “six nipples under glass” show were, sadly, gone.
Before dinner, Rick Hauck led us in a moment of silence to remember our fallen friends, then gave a short presentation that included a recap of some of the significant history written by our group. We each received TFNG T-shirts bearing thirty-five small caricatures of our individual likenesses. The shirts also featured the past-tense headline “We Delivered.” It was an update to the original 1979 TFNG T-shirt, which had displayed the same caricatures and the title “We Deliver.” The TFNG class had, indeed,delivered for NASA and America.
Before scattering to our hotels we posed for a class photo. I sensed a renewed closeness in the assembly. It wasn’t the Knights-of-the-Round-table closeness we had once shared—that level of camaraderie had forever ended when the first Abbey flight assignments had winnowed us. But the white-hot fierceness of our competition had been cooled by the years. We were all gold-pinned astronauts; most of us gold-plated several times over.