Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [49]
NASA is filled with thousands of men and women who have labored in anonymity to put astronauts in space and make our lives somewhat comfortable once we get there. As I once heard an astronaut say, “We stand on their shoulders to get into orbit.” In the case of Kandy and those other toilet testers, we stood on other parts of their bodies.
In our space-wardrobe fitting sessions, we encountered one other waste collection detail, which included a man’s worst nightmare. These sessions were conducted by white-smocked young ladies armed with tape measures, calipers, and clipboards. They measured our skulls, hands, limbs, and feet for helmets, gloves, and spacesuits. During my session I was as witty and charming as Burt Reynolds. I was a brand-new astronaut being fitted for a spacesuit. A bottle of tequila couldn’t have gotten me higher.
At the end of the session a particularly sweet little custard walked me to a corner of the room that was screened from the rest of the facility. “Step inside and tell me what size fits you.”
I pulled back the curtain and boldly walked forward, expecting to find a fitting room for underwear. But I was wrong. I had stepped into male hell. Forget about blowing up on a space shuttle. This wasreal fear. On a table, laid out like indictments, were four different-size condoms.
I would learn an open-ended condom was part of the male urine collection system worn under the pressure-suit cooling garment. One end of the latex slipped over the penis, the other end was connected to a waist-worn nylon bladder. Urine could pass through the condom, through a one-way valve, and into the nylon bladder. After a launch, landing, or spacewalk (the three times when the toilet was inaccessible) the bladder/condom combination, known as a Urine Collection Device (UCD), could be stripped from the body and thrown away. In a really cruel joke, God created different-size penises, so NASA provided different-size condoms. The cute little filly on the other side of the curtain needed my stud size on her clipboard so the correct condom could be loaded in my personal locker when I finally flew in space.
With all the enthusiasm of a prisoner walking to the gallows I dropped my pants. Until this moment in my life I had worn a condom only during brief periods in my marriage when my wife had stopped her birth control pills. On those occasions there had been a sense of urgency and enthusiasm about donning the one-size-fits-all latex scabbard. Not now. I looked down at an appendage that was in the process of renouncing circumcision and finding some heretofore unknown foreskin to hide behind.
I reached for the largest condom. Astronauts are the most competitive people in the world. From supplying an autograph to fitting a rubber, we’re out to be the best, the fastest, the smartest…thebiggest. If there had been a hula hoop on that table, male astronauts would have seized it with hope in their souls.
I grabbed my cowering little friend and began work. “Don’t you have anything bigger?” I nervously joked to the cutie on the other side of the curtain. I’m sure she had never heard that one before.
Why didn’t they have a man collecting this information?I wondered. Then, I thought,That would be even worse .
Putting a flaccid penis in a condom is like shoving toothpaste back in the tube. I finally managed to corral the beast and did a few jiggles to see if the rubber would stay on. It fell to the floor. My testicles might as well have joined it. I had been emasculated. Clearly, I wasn’t going to place first in this competition. Of course I could have lied and said I needed theannihilator size, but to do so would have been to invite disaster during a spacewalk. If the condom didn’t fit, it would leak or even come off altogether, in which case the cooling garment would become a urine sponge. As uncomfortable as that sounds, it would be the least of the victim’s problems. An astronaut would never outlive the teasing.
I finally made a fit and gave the technician