Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [81]
There were no formal criteria for selection of family escorts. Crew spouses usually threw out a few names to consider and quickly settled on two. Our spouses picked TFNG Dick Covey and Bryan O’Connor (class of 1980) as their escorts. Unspoken in their deliberations was another duty for which the family escorts were being selected: IfDiscovery killed us, they would become casualty assistance officers. I suspected every wife knew this. Even if their husbands were negligent in not telling them, they probably heard from other wives. I had told Donna years earlier. NASA required her and the kids to watch my launches with the family escorts from the roof of the Launch Control Center. It wasn’t the view NASA had in mind: NASA wanted to isolate the families from the press in the event of disaster. In that case the family escorts, turned casualty assistance officers, would drive them to KSC flight operations, where a NASA jet would whisk them back to Houston.
That evening, on the ride back from the party, Donna turned to me and said, “This is a strange business when you have to preselect an escort into widowhood.” She was enduring a lot for my dream.
I was selfishly consumed by the flight, and it weighed on the entire family. Why Donna didn’t just walk away from me in the final weeks was a miracle. On one occasion I arrived home to news that Pat had strep throat. “The flight surgeon wants you to come in for a throat swab, too.” It was no surprise that Donna had sought medical help at the surgeon’s office. The doctors also served as astronaut family physicians. But I was furious with her. Though I was feeling fine, I had no idea what a throat culture would reveal. Visions ofApollo 13 and Ken Mattingly’s removal from that mission because of an exposure to German measles aroused my paranoia to insane levels. I raged at her, “Goddammit, Donna, I’m ten days from leaving for KSC! This could screw me!” I made no inquiry of Pat’s condition. Donna had never met the man who was now in her face. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I ordered her, “Until I launch, don’t go back to the surgeon’s office for anything! Nothing! Find a civilian doctor.” I would later apologize to her, but I will always carry the memory of this failure as a husband and father. There are some things you can’t take back. I ignored the flight surgeon’s request, but he badgered me at my office until I finally submitted. The swab results were negative.
At T-7 days to launch I moved into the temporary trailer complex that served as the JSC crew quarters. This was a requirement of flight medicine’s mandatory health quarantine, a program designed to minimize the chances of an ill family member infecting a Prime Crew astronaut in the homestretch to a mission—just what I had feared in the case of Pat’s strep throat. From this point onward, everybody, including our wives and all NASA employees whose duties put them in contact with us, would have to first be checked by the flight surgeon before they could be in our company. School-age children were forbidden any contact.
I said good-bye to the kids. Pat and Amy were now sixteen, Laura thirteen. I had always been open with them about the dangers of spaceflight, so they understood the significance of this parting, that it might be the last time they would ever see me. Pat and Laura were composed and quiet, while I detected a nervous intensity in Amy’s eyes and voice.
I invited Donna to every crew quarters’ supper and, after a quick exam by the surgeon, she was allowed to attend. On the last evening before our departure to Florida, we went to my room and slowly and quietly enjoyed ourselves under the sheets (veryslowly andvery quietly, for it was a trailer). In the dark I whispered in her ear, “The next time we do this, I’ll be radioactive.” Neither of us mentioned the other possibility…that there might not be a next time.
On June 22, 1984, “Zoo Crew” departed for Florida in a flight of four T-38s. In a routine