Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [78]
“Be careful, Tarzan. You’ll launch one of those rockets.”
Judy interrupted my reverie. Her obvious indifference to the history of the site prompted a question that had been on my mind since I had first stood on the stage with her at our TFNG introduction. “JR, when did you first want to be an astronaut?”
“In 1977, when I saw the announcement on the company bulletin board.”
She answered as I had expected. I had already heard several of the other females say the same thing in various press interviews. Only Shannon Lucid had a different answer. She had a copy of a letter she wrote toTime magazine in 1960 challenging NASA’s male-only astronaut corps. She had dreamed of spaceflight as a child, as I had. Only recently had I matured enough to give Judy, Sally, and the others some slack for their lack of lifelong zeal for the astronaut title. If I had been raised in a society that told me I could never be an astronaut because of my gender (or color), would that dream have ever taken root in my soul? Probably not. How, I asked myself, could I hold it against this woman if she had not carried the dream from her childhood? I could not. Judy and the other women were teaching me the meaning and consequences of discrimination.
We returned to the car, Judy still behind the wheel. “Let’s go to the beach house,” she suggested. “I’ll buy you a beer there.” It was a destination certain to test the male animal in me. The beach house was as isolated as Mars, situated just behind the dune line only a couple miles from the shuttle launchpads. The house was a relic of the 1950s, before the days of the great space race. Then, the Cape Canaveral area was just one more place for snowbirders to build their winter retreats, and private homes had dotted the landscape. But thebeep-beep of Sputnik had wrought a great change in this part of America. The newly formed space agency needed a place to launch its rockets and Cape Canaveral was ideal. Exercising its right of eminent domain, Uncle Sam acquired the land and began its spaceport renovations. Only one of the existing structures survived demolition, saved by some enlightened bureaucrat who had decided it would be the perfect retreat for the early press-hounded astronauts. The building selected was well into government property, so privacy was absolute. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses wouldn’t have been able to find this address. While the press no longer pursued astronauts as they had the Mercury Seven, the building was still used as an astronaut retreat.
On the drive I tried to keep my eyes forward but could not. They kept going to Judy’s smile, to her wind-flagged hair, to her golden legs.Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! There’s never a good robot around when you need one.
Judy turned the car onto a shell-covered driveway and parked. The house wasn’t exactly Frank Lloyd Wright. It was something the Unabomber might have cobbled together: small, boxy, utilitarian. The downstairs was concrete and comprised a garage and storage area. The flat-roofed, wood-framed upper story contained a living area of two small bedrooms, a bath, and a kitchen/living area that opened onto an elevated wooden deck. NASA had done little to the structure over the decades. The exterior wood finish was sandblasted and warped, the weather stripping shredded, the concrete walkways uneven and crumbling. The interior