Riding Rockets Read online

  We walked over to the dunes and sat in the sand. I extracted beers for both of us and for a moment we were silent, just enjoying a perfect beach evening. A thunderstorm lashed the distant ocean at our front, its anvil head glowing orange in the dying sun. There was just enough of a breeze in our faces to keep the bugs away.

  “Here’s to Prime Crew, Tarzan.” Judy held out her beer and I touched it with mine. Her face was illuminated by the reflections from the cloud and I could see her expansive smile. The Prime Crew title did that to astronauts. We’d all be wearing those smiles until Hank’s call of “Wheel stop.”

  We fell into conversation about our training and new issues on our communication satellite deployment procedures. I joined in halfheartedly. She was the only astronaut present on that beach. My mind was busy dealing with the scent of her shampoo, the feel of her body heat radiating across the gap between us, and the voices in my head. Those whispered that it would be different with Judy and me. Mortals had dirty, sinful, sordid affairs. But we weren’t mortals. We were astronauts. We were demigod and -goddess, alpha male and female. The rules didn’t apply to us. Not on this beach, they didn’t. This was a place separate from Earth where vows and social conventions and the Sixth Commandment didn’t apply. Of course, it was all testosteronic bullshit, but I listened to those voices with the same intensity I listened to MCC in our simulations.

  As I was popping another beer, Judy left the subject of communication satellites. “Tarzan, I want to thank you and Donna for including me in your family.” I was glad to hear Donna’s name. It was a reminder of what I was…married. My thumb folded onto my wedding band.

  “You’re welcome. We’re always glad to have you over.” Donna and I had extended numerous invitations to Judy for dinner or other social get-togethers.

  “Well, you guys are the only ones. Most of the wives hate me.” She was right. Many of the wives did not like Judy. They were threatened by her. Their husbands jetted across the country with her in private planes to train in factories and go jogging together and perhaps, as I was doing at that very moment, to sit on a beach together enjoying a sunset and a beer.And what happened then? the wives wondered. At one TFNG party I saw a visibly shaken JR leave early. Later I heard the reason. One of the child-widened wives had taken her aside and screamed at her, “Stay away from my husband!” Though I had not heard a single rumor connecting JR to the woman’s spouse and strongly suspected the accusation was completely groundless, I could understand where the woman was coming from. She understood what female youth and beauty did to men (and was doing tome on that beach) and she was dropping a preemptive nuke. Judy was feared by most of the wives. At one of our earliest TFNG get-togethers, she arrived wearing formfitting jeans and a white knit T-shirt. Every head, male and female, turned and the hubbub of the party diminished noticeably. A few of the wives looked into their man’s eyes to read his thoughts. Some stepped closer to their husbands. There was nothing trashy about Judy’s dress. I had seen many of the wives similarly dressed at various casual functions. It was just that Judy looked like one of those impossibly curvaceous mannequins in a boutique window. It was a fact of life that wives never looked like that.

  The last thing I wanted to talk about was Judy’s beauty and its effect on men and their wives. I mumbled some bullshit about her misreading the women and attempted to switch the conversation back to our training. A segue of “How ’bout them Astros?” would have been more sincere. Judy knew I was lying and I sensed she was hurt by the rejection of the wives. She ignored my training question and continued to talk about relationships, this time about her childhood relationship with her mother. I was shocked by this intimacy. I had never heard her talk about her past. She had been a TFNG for years before someone discovered she had been previously married and was divorced. Now she was opening her soul to me as if I were some harmless confidant. I could only assume she was trying to justify a heated telephone argument with her brother that she had recently conducted in my presence. The topic had been invitations for the Resnik family to attendDiscovery ’s launch. In that conversation it was obvious there was some tension in the family.

  I wasn’t trained for this. I ached to return to the subject of communication satellite deployment. But Judy continued. She revealed a deep bitterness with her family’s demands that she date only Jewish boys and other aspects of teen oppression in the name of religion. (Gee, and I thought only us Catholics were screwed up.) I had more in common with this woman than I had previously thought. But Judy’s coming-of-age trauma had been significantly greater than mine. It had led to an estrangement from her mother. I couldn’t imagine a daughter dealing with that.

  This was the only time Judy ever gave me a glimpse into her past. And, while I’m no Dr. Phil, I sensed she was a deeply wounded and lonely woman. Of course I also considered her vulnerability at this moment. She wasn’t crying, but I had never seen her more emotional. It would have been so easy to reach across and offer a consolation hug. I had a couple beers in me. My inhibitions were as feeble as the starlight. But I didn’t. I didn’t make any physical contact. Not a hand squeeze. Not a pat on the back. Not a hug. Nothing. My resistance to temptation was nothing short of miraculous. Those moments on that sand had been my Garden of Gethsemane. I offered Judy only conciliatory words about how things might change in the future for her and her mom. It was a prophetic comment. Things did change. Twenty-one months later Judy would die a few miles from where we now sat.

  I rose from the sand. “We better get back to the crew quarters. Things are going to start early tomorrow.”

  Chapter 18

  Donna

  A month prior to our June 25, 1984, launch date another milestone was passed. It wasn’t noted in any press release but it was significant all the same. At a crew dinner the wives selected two astronauts to be their family escorts. The expanded training hours in the homestretch to launch made all prime crewmembers absentee spouses and parents, so the astronaut office had created the family escort role to take some of the load off the families. They helped spouses deal with the logistics of traveling to KSC and the landing site. They helped with airline, rental car, and condo reservations and, in general, served as 24/7 contacts for spouses seeking help on any mission issue. Some of NASA’s rules on family travel necessitated this escort help. While NASA carried the spouses to launch and landing at government expense aboard the agency’s Gulfstream jets, children were not allowed on those aircraft. Their travel arrangements (and expenses) were the responsibility of the families. So, as they departed for the most stressful week of their lives, spouses had to pass their children to grandparents or other family members serving as travel escorts and deal with the coordination of getting them from the Orlando airport to their condos. The spouses were also required to arrange their own lodging. This could be a big headache if the mission slipped, particularly during the prime Florida tourist season. Some spouses of earlier missions had found themselves begging with condo reservationists not to be evicted. The escorts could be an enormous help.

  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 sa
id, “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 that had long been perfected by NASA PR, our wives had preceded us. The press liked this human touch of the women waiting to greet their men and NASA was happy to oblige them. As we entered KSC airspace we took a turn aroundDiscovery, then slipped into a fingertip formation and entered the “break” over the shuttle landing facility. Hank waited until every plane was landed and we taxied to the apron together. We cut the engines, popped our canopies, and climbed from our jets. Our spousal embraces were captured by a clutch of news photographers. It was aLife magazine moment. We were the heroic knights, come to joust with the forces of death…fire and speed and altitude…and our fair maidens were there to bid us adieu.

  The final two days before a launch were designed to be relaxing. There were no simulations. We studied our checklists, flew in T-38s, and enjoyed suppers with our wives. But relaxed? Not a chance. I was hours from achieving a lifelong dream. Pure adrenaline was surging in my veins. Sleep was a struggle. The night terrors were ready to awaken me at the instant of unconsciousness.

  We said the final good-bye to our wives at an L–1 luncheon at the astronaut beach house.*The last time I had been there was with Judy. As Donna stepped from the van, I was glad I had no regrets about that night. The NASA-catered lunch was attended by our wives, the family escorts, and key launch personnel. The gathering was informal. There were no speeches, no toasts. Everyone helped themselves from a table set with sandwich fixings and chips. We filled our plates, found a place to park a beer, and enjoyed ourselves.

  After lunch, all but our significant others departed and we were left alone to say farewell. Diane Coats took it hard. She was a naval aviator’s wife. She knew the danger. Hank’s wife, Fran, seemed composed. This was her second time through the drama and that probably helped. Or maybe she was dying inside but hid it for the benefit of the younger wives. After all, she was the commander’s spouse and had to set the example. Our payload specialist, Charlie Walker, and his wife were struggling. Judy was spared the spouse separation issue. If Sally Ride, Steve Hawley’s wife, was experiencing any fear, it wasn’t on display.

  Donna and I walked to the beach and turned north. The day was a furnace and the surf splashing on our legs was welcome. Just a few miles away was Pad 39A andDiscovery. In our stroll we joined the end of a line of astronauts and their spouses, stretching two decades into the past, who had made this same walk in the shadow of their machines: Redstones, Atlases, Titans, and Saturns. A river of tears had been shed on these sands as couples struggled to come to grips with their tomorrows and the potential for glory or death. Now it was our turn.

  I was ill-equipped to deal with this moment. When it came to emotions, I was my mother’s son. I once teased Mom about her seeming lack of emotion and she replied, “You’ll never know what a Pettigrew [her maiden name] is feeling. It’s just the way God made us. We keep it all inside.” At the DNA exchange of my conception I had been stamped a Pettigrew. It’s not that I don’t deeply feel things or that I’m afraid of unmanly labels if I reveal them. It’s that I can’t. What I feel in my soul and how those feelings are verbalized are two entirely different things.

  The good-bye could not be delayed and Donna finally brought it to the surface. I could hear her sniffling. She stopped and embraced me. “Mike, hold me.” As I had always done in poignant moments in my life, I now tried to hide behind humor. “We could go back to the beach house bedroom and do more than hold each other.” Always the joker, that was me.

  “Just shut up, Mike, and hold me. It’s not funny.”

  She sobbed into my neck and I felt like shit. I tried to calm her with comments about the shuttle’s critical component redundancy, but that went over about as well as my “Let’s make whoopee” comment. I wasn’t going to talk her out of her fear. This was a woman who knew the cost of high-performance flight. She had held the decomposed hand of a friend at an aircraft crash site. She had seen the squadron commander and chaplain step from a car and walk to the door of a neighbor to deliver the “Your husband is dead” message. She had comforted the widows and children of how many friends? I could not guess. She was the woman who had seen through the NASA euphemisms to identify the astronaut family escorts as “escorts into widowhood.” Nothing I could say was going to bury Donna’s fears.

  We sat for a while and just listened to the waves and watched pelicans kamikazeing after their meals. Donna broke the silence. “It’s been a lot of water under the bridge to get here.”

  “Yes, it has.”

  “I can see you right now as a teenager launching your rockets from the desert. It’s amazing where it led.”

  “I’ve got a rocket right here you can launch.” There it was again, my shield of crude humor.

  “Mike, can’t you be serious?”

  I forced myself to be the man she wanted at this moment. “Okay. I’m sorry. I will be serious. Whatever happens tomorrow,” I felt her tense at the implication of the wordwhatever, “I’ll be living a dream. It wouldn’t have happened without you.” It sounded corny but it was the truth.

  We embraced and kissed. It wasn’tFrom Here to Eternity passion but it was sufficient for the moment. It was easier for me to convey my feelings in this physical contact than it was through words. I could taste the salt on her cheeks…tears,
not ocean.

  I thought of how many random, seemingly inconsequential events steered me through life. If my mom and dad hadn’t ignored those “Danger, Unimproved Road” signs, where would life have taken me? If they hadn’t settled in Albuquerque, where the sky had captured me, what path would I have journeyed? If I had married a different woman seventeen years before, would I now be sitting on this beach?

  In a remarkable coincidence, Donna was born on the identical day and year of my own birth, September 10, 1945, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was just a few hours older than me. (In her childhood, my youngest daughter was convinced that men and women had to marry someone who shared their birth date.) Donna’s mom and dad, Amy Franchini and Joseph Sei, were first-generation Americans, born of Italian immigrants. Both spoke fluent Italian, argued incessantly, and smoked like forest fires. When Donna was born, the couple already had one child, a boy, ten years old. They had been trying to have a second child for nearly a decade, praying to a pantheon of saints for a daughter. Amy Sei was thirty-five years old when she finally conceived. In their minds Donna was a miracle and she quickly became the center of the couple’s existence.

  Donna’s life was the polar opposite of mine, root-bound. She never moved. Throughout her youth she lived in the same home, only a few blocks from one of the major pathways of adventure for the Mullane clan, fabled Route 66. As a little boy, I had passed within a few hundred yards of the little girl I would one day marry.

  We were high school students when we first met. She attended the downtown Catholic high school, St. Mary’s, while I was a student at the uptown school, St. Pius X. Her cousin was my classmate, and through this family connection, Donna and I were introduced in 1961 in our sophomore year. This was a horribly insecure time in my life. My blemished face would have repulsed the Elephant Man. It looked as if I had lost a paint ball game in which the other side had been using Clearasil bullets. And, of course, there were my radar-dish ears to horrify the ladies. I could not imagine any girl finding anything attractive about me. When Donna was introduced I said “hi” and ran to hang with the guys. Destiny would have to wait for another four years.