Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [52]
I quickly extricated myself. “I was the backseater,” I told the reporter. “Blaine was the pilot. He landed the plane. He’s the one to talk to.” The reporter fell on him like a hyena on a wildebeest carcass. I scuttled off camera.
With the reporter in his face Blaine became living proof that fear of public speaking far exceeds fear of death. In a span of twenty minutes he had faced both and it was the blazing camera spotlight that was killing him. His eyes dilated in fear. His nostrils flared open and closed like a bellows. Everything in his body language screamed, “Eject! Get me out of here!”
Blaine wasn’t unique. Most of us were equally terrified of TV cameras and public audiences. And NASA was no help. There was nothing in our TFNG training to prepare us for the great unknowns of the press and the public spotlight, an astounding oversight given the fact that astronauts were the most visible ambassadors of NASA. Apparently the agency thought our talents with machines extended to the lectern. They did not.
One of the most egregious examples of an astronaut abusing the microphone occurred when a pilot, who was renowned for a sense of humor even Howard Stern would have found offensive, attempted to hide his nervousness by opening his speech with a joke. With a hushed and expectant crowd of hundreds awaiting pearls of inspiration from one of American’s finest sons, he threw out the following:
A golfer walks into the clubhouse with a severe injury to his neck. He can barely talk. His buddies rush to him: “Bill, what happened?” Bill goes on to explain. “I teed off on number eight and sliced my shot into the rough. As I was looking for it, I noticed this woman searching for her ball in the same area. When I couldn’t find mine, I walked up to a cow grazing nearby thinking the ball might have ended up between its legs. But again, it wasn’t there. Finally out of frustration, I lifted up the cow’s tail to see if maybe it had hit there. Sure enough, a golf ball was stuck in its rear end. I looked closely and noticed it was a Titleist. Since I was hitting a Top-Flite, I knew the ball wasn’t mine. So, with the tail of the cow upraised in one hand and my other hand pointing at the animal’s ass, I shouted at this woman, “Hey, lady, does this look like yours?” That’s when she hit me across the throat with a seven-iron.”
The joke might have been appropriate for a group of golfers or military pilots or any similar crowd of crotch-scratching, crude, and coarse males. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the audience. The astronaut in question delivered this joke to open a high school commencement address! Only if it had been delivered at a NOW convention could it have generated more outrage. One can only imagine the horror on the faces of parents and faculty, the snickers of the students, and the subsequent crucifixion of the person who had suggested, “Let’s get one of America’s finest to speak at graduation. Let’s get an astronaut. It’ll be a commencement address to remember.” Indeed, it was.
NASA got what it was looking for in this astronaut’s presentation, a lot of visibility with the grassroots taxpayer. Unfortunately that visibility was, well, a little negative. Cards and letters rolled into NASA. The general message was something along the lines of, “Where did you get this bozo?” The answer was simple. NASA had plucked him from Planet AD.
Most of the military astronauts had no idea what constituted an appropriate sense of humor in a public setting. I once attended a dinner with a marine fighter pilot (not an astronaut) who rose from his seat with glass in hand and offered this toast to the ladies and gentlemen present: “Here’s to gunpowder and here’s to pussy. One I kill with, the other I’ll die for, but I love the smell of both.” You would think even the most AD-affected of the military TFNGs would probably have concluded such a toast would be inappropriate at a Shriners’ dinner, but I wouldn’t have put any