Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [41]
I began work on the plaque while Donna and the kids played with a farmer’s dog that had followed them into the field. Moments later Donna screamed, “Mike, the dog has a hand in its mouth!”
I was sure I had misheard. “What?”
As she struggled to pry open the dog’s jaws she screamed more urgently, “Oh God! It has a hand!”
I rushed to her, certain she was imagining things. She wasn’t. Donna held a decomposed human hand. The presence of fingernails left no doubt about that. I was sure it was Tom Carr’s remains. When his body hit the earth, it had exploded into countless pieces. The hand had been thrown into some nearby hedges and not discovered until that very moment by the wandering dog.
We wrapped the remains in the cloth I had been using on the plaque and drove to the base to give it to the flight surgeon. On the drive I thought of the many times I had clasped that hand in life. Tom and I had been classmates together in navigator training in 1968. When Donna gave birth to twins, he and several others in the class had gone together to buy two strollers for us. He had been a close friend. Now Donna cradled a piece of him in her lap.
At the Texas campfire I pulled Donna closer and prayed God would watch over all of us.
Chapter 12
Speed
Our TFNG freshman year also included an introduction to the ultimate astronaut perk—flying the NASA T-38 jets. Even fireworks, flaming hookers, and tits under glass couldn’t put a smile on our faces like the ones we wore while flying the ’38, a two-place, twin-engine, after-burning supersonic jet. Even its title, “’38,” was the stuff of testosterone. It conjured up images of breasts and caliber. Originally designed in the late ’50s by the USAF to serve as an advanced pilot training aircraft, NASA had acquired a squadron of them as proficiency trainers for the astronauts.
The years had been kind to the ’38. Its sleek needle nose and exquisitely thin, card-table-size wings were timeless hallmarks of speed. In one hundred years people will look at the ’38 in museums and still say, “What a sweet jet!” It was a crotch rocket that looked as if it had been especially built for astronauts. NASA’s ’38s were painted a brilliant white with a streak of blue, like a racing stripe, running the length of the fuselage. The agency’s logo, a stylized script spelling “NASA,” was emblazoned in red on the tail. It was an airplane and a paint scheme certain to turn heads on any airport tarmac.
The ’38 served two functions: transportation to various meetings and proficiency training. NASA’s simulators were great at preparing astronauts to fly the space shuttle, but they had one critical shortcoming. They lacked a fear factor. No matter how badly you screwed up, simulators couldn’t kill you. But high-performance jet aircraft could. Flying the T-38s kept the pilots razor sharp in dealing with potentially deadly time-critical situations, something spaceflight had in abundance.
Before being cleared to fly the ’38 we first had to complete water-survival training at Eglin AFB in the panhandle of Florida. We parasailed to several hundred feet altitude and then were released from the towboat to float into the water in a simulation of an aircraft ejection. Once in the water we had to release the parachute, climb into a one-man raft, signal a helicopter, then don a harness to be winched aboard in a simulated rescue. We were also towed behind fast-moving boats in a simulation of landing in a gale. We were dumped into the water and covered with the canopy of a parachute and taught how to escape before the nylon sank and became an anchor to pull us to our deaths. For the military flyers this training was a review. We had all been through it several times in our careers. But it was a first for the civilians. I carefully watched them, wondering if any would balk at some of the scarier training or need remedial instruction. In particular