Riding Rockets

EPILOGUE

In my post-MECO life I found an unlikely horizon to explore—I became a professional speaker. Given my early adventures at the podiums of America, that might seem like a disaster waiting to happen but I’ve learned to corral my Planet AD tendencies and fake normalcy. With a microphone in my hand I am a model of political correctness. Hoot would never recognize me. I deliver inspiring, motivational, and humorous programs on the subjects of teamwork and leadership. I learned the good, the bad, and the ugly about those topics while at NASA.

This book has been another horizon I had to sail over. There has always been a secret chamber in my soul where the flame of literary creation has flickered. In high school I loved it when teachers assigned term papers, a fact I kept quiet, knowing my classmates would have beaten me to death had they known. Sometimes my prose would be seriously misplaced, as when I devoted a paragraph in my science fair report to the beautiful sunset that had been a backdrop to one of my homemade rocket launches. I was teased by my fellow junior scientists for that. Of course, ego played its part in my literary quest—I wanted to tell my story. But I had noble objectives, too. I wanted the world to understand the joy and terror that astronauts and our spouses experience. I know other astronaut authors have attempted to convey the same thing and, no doubt, many will try in the future. This has been my best shot at it. Finally, I wanted to tell the world a little about my mom and dad. Heroes like them are rare and they deserve a measure of immortality between the covers of a book.

My mom would not live to see herself in these pages. On Memorial Day 2004, she was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and died on July 4 at age seventy-nine. I was the one who told her of the doctor’s prognosis—that she had just a few weeks to live. She took the news with her characteristic courage. She didn’t utter a word of dismay or shed a single tear. She merely shrugged her shoulders, as if I had just told her she had nothing more serious than a stomach virus, and said, “Well, I’ve had a great life.” This from a woman who endured the terror of her husband serving in WWII, who raised six children with that same man in a wheelchair, and who was further cheated when she was widowed at age sixty-four. It hardly sounded like a “great life.” But my mom always saw the glass as half full and smiled and laughed her way through life until her last conscious moment. As one of my brothers said, “Mom set the bar damned high on living and dying.” That she did. As I sat with her in the ebbing days of her life, random images from that life flashed in my brain. I saw her squatting next to a campfire, cooking pancakes and bacon. I saw her pouring my dad’s urine from a milk carton into a motel toilet. I saw her handing over the stainless-steel extension tube of her vacuum cleaner so I could fashion it into a rocket. I saw her “mooning” the camera during her wait for the launch of STS-36. She had sewn the mission number on the rear of her “good luck” green briefs and, at the beach house, had bent over to show the unique cheerleading sign on the billboard of her sixty-four-year-old backside.

With me and two of my brothers holding her hands she died at home and was laid to rest in the same grave as my father at the Veterans Cemetery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I placed another set of my shuttle mission decals on the new grave marker. They were Mom’s missions, too.

As I write these words, only five TFNGs remain on active duty with NASA: Fred Gregory, Steve Hawley, Shannon Lucid, Anna Fisher, and Steve Nagel. All of them are in administrative positions and will probably never fly in space again. The space history books are closed on the TFNGs. But our class wrote some remarkable entries in those books:

• First American woman in space: Sally Ride.

• First African American in space: Guy Bluford.

• First Asian American in space: El Onizuka.

• First American woman to do a spacewalk: Kathy Sullivan.

Most space-experienced woman in the world: Shannon Lucid, with a total of 223 days in space, including a six-month tour on the Russian Mir space station.

While flying the MMU, Bob Stewart, Pinky Nelson, Dale Gardner, and Jim van Hoften became some of the only astronauts to orbit completely free of their spacecraft.

On STS-41C, TFNGs were part of a crew that completed the world’s first retrieval, repair, and re-release into space of a malfunctioning satellite. On STS-51A, TFNGs played key roles in the first capture and return to Earth of a pair of crippled satellites.

Rick Hauck commanded the first post-Challenger mission. Hoot Gibson commanded the first shuttle–Mir space station docking mission. Norm Thagard became the first American to fly aboard a Russian rocket when he was launched to the Russian Mir space station. TFNG Dick Covey commanded the first repair mission to Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to correct its flawed vision. Dan Brandenstein commanded STS-49, a mission to capture and repair a massive communication satellite stuck in a useless orbit. The mission involved an emergency three-person spacewalk, the only such spacewalk ever conducted, and was one of the most difficult shuttle missions in history.

TFNGs logged nearly a thousand man-days in space and sixteen spacewalks. Five became veterans of five space missions (Gibson, Hawley, Hoffman, Lucid, and Thagard). The first TFNGs entered space in 1983 aboard STS-7. Steve Hawley became the last TFNG in space sixteen years later, when he launched on his fifth mission, STS-93, in 1999. TFNGs were ultimately represented on the crews of fifty different shuttle missions and commanded twenty-eight of those. It is not an exaggeration to say TFNGs were the astronauts most responsible for taking NASA out of its post-Apollo hiatus and to the threshold of the International Space Station (ISS).

There are twenty-nine of the original thirty-five TFNGs still living. Besides the loss of the Challenger four and Dave Griggs’s death, Dave “Red Flash” Walker, a veteran of four shuttle flights, succumbed to natural causes at the age of fifty-seven. Dave was the pilot who scared the holy bejesus out of me during the 1981 STS-1 chase plane practices. He had teased death so often, I had come to believe he was bulletproof. I had failed to consider cancer.

We almost had to bury Hoot Gibson in 1990 when he was involved in a midair collision while racing his home-built plane. The other pilot died but Hoot was able to land his severely damaged machine and walk away. If ever there has been a pilot who has worn out a squadron of guardian angels, that would be Hoot. He and Rhea Seddon now live in Tennessee with their three children. Hoot flies for Southwest Airlines and Rhea is the assistant chief medical officer at Vanderbilt Medical Group at that Nashville university.

In my retirement I have noted the deaths of other astronauts whose life paths intersected mine. Sonny Carter’s death was particularly shocking. Sonny had been one of the STS-27 family escorts and Donna had relied on his calming presence during her LCC waits for that mission. He was never without a smile and a positive word. On April 5, 1991, while on the way to give a NASA speech, he died in the crash of a commercial airliner. The manner of his death was a gross violation of the natural order—it was expected that an astronaut dying in a plane would do so as a crewmember, not as a passenger. Sonny was twice cheated…in death at age forty-three and while belted into a passenger’s seat.

Bob Overmyer died in his retirement while flight-testing a small plane. I was one of the CAPCOMs for his STS-51B flight. During that mission, a communication glitch allowed the crew’s private Spacelab intercom to be momentarily broadcast to the world. It included a panicked call from Bob to his lab scientists: “There’s monkey feces floating free in the cockpit!” I later teased him that he was probably the first marine in the history of the corps to ever use the word feces. He laughed at that. Bob was dead at age fifty-nine.

Astronaut-scientist Karl Henize, whom I had worked with on my very first astronaut support job—the dreaded Spacelab—died in his retirement at age sixty-six of respiratory failure while attempting to climb Mount Everest. He is buried on the side of that mountain at 22,000-foot elevation.

Besides these astronaut deaths, I noted other passings. Don Puddy, who replaced George Abbey as chief of FCOD and who approved me for my STS-36 mission, died of cancer in 2004 at age sixty-seven. Jon and Brenda McBride’s son, Richard, died in a plane crash while undergoing navy flight training. Brewster and Kathy Shaw suffered a horrific loss, too. One of their college-age sons was murdered in a random carjacking. If it is possible for a soul to audibly scream, mine did at that news. No death, not even the ones sustained in the Challenger and Columbia tragedies, affected me as much. Every parent understands.

Gene Ross, the ever-present and ever-amicable owner of the Outpost Tavern, died in 1995. He didn’t live to see his bar immortalized on the silver screen. Disney would use it as a backdrop for a scene in the 1997 movie RocketMan and a portion of the movie Space Cowboys would be filmed inside the cluttered, smoky cave.

Under its new management, the Outpost has seen a few minor changes. The shell-covered parking lot has been leveled. Gone are its bunker-buster craters. And a small red neon light proclaiming “The Outpost Tavern” now decorates a side of the building. But for that, the structure still appears abandoned and ready for demolition. The only improvement to the interior has been the addition of modern bathrooms. The old toilets—one-hole closets with tilting floors and rusted porcelain fixtures—had been intimidating enough to prompt Donna to once comment, “I would rather pee in the outside bushes than sit on an Outpost toilet seat.” The interior of the bar remains a time capsule from the halcyon days of the TFNGs: Photos and posters of smiling astronauts and mission crews still cover the walls and ceiling. My NASA genesis photo is still there. In a display of Texas pride, Gene Ross put up the photos of all the Texas-born astronauts in the entryway next to the bikini-girl-silhouette saloon doors. Epochs of cigarette smoke and grease have put a yellow film over those photos but I’m still visible as the thin, dark-haired, thirty-two-year-old astronaut candidate I was in 1978. Whenever a trip takes me to Houston, I always make it a point to visit the Outpost. I will sit at the bar, order a beer, and listen to the TFNG ghosts whisper the stories of joy and heartbreak that have been written there.

John Young retired from NASA on December 31, 2004, after a forty-two-year career that included six space missions covering the Gemini, Apollo, and shuttle programs. He twice flew to the moon, landing on it on Apollo 16. In a NASA press release John was praised as an “astronaut without equal.” You will never hear me say otherwise.

George Abbey was appointed director of the Johnson Space Center by NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin on January 23, 1996 (no doubt putting the fear of God in those who had celebrated, too enthusiastically, his JSC departure in 1987). Five years later he was “reassigned” by Goldin from that position to NASA HQ to serve as Goldin’s senior assistant for international issues. The press noted that the announcement of Abbey’s JSC termination came after close of business on a Friday and with little description of the responsibilities of his new title, signatures that the change was actually a firing. Some speculated that cost overruns on the ISS program had prompted Goldin to remove George. He retired from NASA on January 3, 2003, after a nearly forty-year career with the agency.

I was last face-to-face with John and George in 1998 at the twentieth anniversary of the TFNG class. We traded empty hellos and then separated. I was no longer their hostage and would not pretend friendship.

As an outsider I watched the shuttle program fully recover from Challenger. Though the STS never recaptured its Golden Age, it did achieve an average of seven missions per year throughout most of the 1990s. Among its more significant post-Challenger missions were the launch of Hubble Space Telescope, nine missions to the Russian Mir space station, and multiple missions in support of the assembly and resupply of the International Space Station. The latter was being constructed in partnership with the Russians. The godless commies had become our friends. Even Bill Shepherd, who had penned the Suck on this, you commie dogs inscription on a photo of our STS-27 payload, would morph into Comrade Shepherd and fly a five-month ISS mission with two Ruskies.

The shuttle continued to experience near misses with disaster, providing more evidence that it would never be truly operational. One of the closest calls occurred on STS-93. During the early part of ascent a small repair pin in the combustion chamber of one SSME came loose and impacted the inside of the engine nozzle, puncturing its cooling jacket. Just as a hole in the radiator of an automobile will cause a leak of engine coolant, Columbia’s nozzle damage was doing the same thing. As she roared upward, she was bleeding coolant. But in Columbia’s case the coolant was also the engine fuel. The shuttle’s liquid hydrogen plumbing system circulates that supercold fluid around the engine nozzles before the hydrogen is burned.Columbia was headed into orbit in danger of running out of gas. Fortunately the damage and the resulting leak were small. The propellant loss resulted in an early engine shutdown, but Columbia still achieved a safe orbit only seven miles lower than planned.

The nozzle damage turned out to be just one of the near misses for the STS-93 crew. Five seconds into flight an electrical system short circuit resulted in the failure of several black boxes controlling two of the SSMEs. Backup engine controllers, powered by a different electrical system, took over the control of those engines and there was no impact to their performance. But for eight and a half minutes, two of Columbia’s engines were just one failure away from shutting down and forcing the crew into an ascent abort. The source of the short circuit was later isolated to an exposed wire.

Another shuttle near miss occurred on STS-112 when a circuit failure resulted in only one set of the hold-down bolt initiators firing at liftoff. In the launch sequence the hold-down bolts are exploded apart just milliseconds prior to SRB ignition so the rocket is completely free of the ground when the boosters ignite. Had the redundant initiators in the hold-down bolts not fired,Atlantis would have been still anchored to the pad at SRB ignition. The machine would have destroyed herself trying to rip free of the bolts.

STS-93 and STS-112 were saved by system redundancy, but there was another recurring problem on shuttle launches for which there was no redundancy to provide protection. Insulation foam was shedding from the gas tank and striking the orbiter. The phenomenon was first noted on STS-1 and was subsequently documented by photo imagery on sixty-four other shuttle missions. Hank Hartsfield and Mike Coats had observed it on our Zoo Crew flight in 1984. This foam-shedding anomaly was a violation of a design requirement, just as the pre-Challenger SRB O-ring erosion had been a design violation. Nothing was supposed to hit our glass rocket, not even something as seemingly innocuous as the foam from the ET. But as hit shuttles kept returning to the Earth safely, engineers became ever more comfortable with accepting the design violation as nothing more than a maintenance issue—the foam strikes were requiring a handful of damaged tiles to be replaced between missions. The “normalization of deviance” phenomenon that had doomed Challenger in 1986 had returned to infect NASA and blind management to the seriousness of the foam loss problem. On January 16, 2003, eighty-two seconds into the flight of Columbia, a briefcase-size piece of foam, weighing approximately one and a half pounds, shed from the ET and struck the Achilles’ heel of the shuttle heat shield, one of the wing leading-edge carbon panels. The impact blasted a hole of indeterminate size in that carbon. The damage had no effect on ascent and Columbia safely reached orbit. The site of the impact was not visible from the cockpit windows and the crew remained oblivious to the fact that their shuttle was mortally wounded. It could not survive reentry.

On the ground NASA engineers were aware of the foam strike—KSC cameras had recorded the incident. But these same engineers had no idea what, if any, damage had occurred and since Columbia was flying without a robot arm, they could not direct the crew to remotely survey the site (as we had been able to do on STS-27). A handful of engineers requested their management to ask the Department of Defense to use its photographic sources to acquire images of the impact site. Had these photos or a crew spacewalk determined Columbia could not survive reentry, there was a reasonable chance Atlantis could have been hurriedly readied for launch on a rescue mission. The Columbia crew would have then donned spacesuits and transferred to Atlantis, and Columbia would have been abandoned in orbit. But key managers dismissed the photo request and never ordered a spacewalk. On February 1, 2003,Columbia would burn up on reentry, killing her seven-person crew.

I was in northern New Mexico at the time of the disaster, visiting my daughter and her family. Had I known of the reentry trajectory, I could have stepped outside and watched Columbia pass nearly overhead. But I was not an eyewitness. I received the news from TV: “The space shuttle Columbia is overdue for landing at the Kennedy Space Center.” Images of Columbia’s fiery destruction soon followed. As I watched them I couldn’t help but visualize what the crew had experienced. I had no doubt their fortress cockpit had kept them alive during the out-of-control breakup of their machine. Just like the Challenger crew, they were trapped. Their backpack-parachute bailout system was useless at the extreme altitude and speed. And I couldn’t help but visualize the families. They would have been waiting at the KSC Shuttle Landing Facility, giddy in anticipation of having their loved ones safely on the ground and in their arms. They would have been chatting happily about the parties and postflight trips that were planned. Then an escort into widowhood would have come to their side to tell them the news. Their husbands and wife, fathers and mother would not be coming home.

I wasn’t affected by Columbia’s loss as deeply as Challenger’s. I had only a passing acquaintance with a few members of the crew. But I was still heartbroken. I stepped from my daughter’s house, walked into the adjacent desert hills, and began my prayers. Even as I was saying them, atoms of Columbia and her crew were quietly and invisibly settling to Earth around me.

The final report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) would read remarkably like the Challenger report issued seventeen years earlier. In fact, in some key paragraphs of their document, the CAIB could have plagiarized the Roger’s Commission report nearly word for word. The only edits required would have been to substitute “External Tank” for “Solid Rocket Booster” and “foam-shedding” for “O-ring erosion.” Workplace cultural issues, including overwhelming pressure to keep shuttle launches on schedule, had, again, resulted in NASA mishandling repeated evidence of a deadly design flaw.

I have been too long removed from NASA to make any firsthand comment on those cultural issues or the leadership failures they suggest. Nor can I predict whether the agency will be able to fix itself…though I see reason for hope. The shuttle team’s meticulous response to the heat-shield damage sustained by Discovery on the first post-Columbia shuttle mission (STS-114) and the agency’s intention to keep the shuttle grounded until the maddeningly persistent ET foam-shedding problem is fixed suggests NASA has made safety its top priority. The question is, “Can this reinvigorated safety consciousness persist through the remaining life of the space shuttle program?” It didn’t last after Challenger, as Columbia’s loss attests. Perhaps new NASA administrator, Dr. Michael Griffin, is a leader who can keep the agency focused on safety. I pray so. There have been enough families devastated in this business, not to mention the disastrous impact on America’s manned space program that another shuttle loss would precipitate.

In Senate testimony, Dr. Griffin has said he intends to retire the shuttle by 2010, arguing, “The shuttle is an inherently flawed system.” He’s right. It is an outrageously expensive vehicle and lacks a viable crew escape system. A well-led and adequately funded team might still have been able to safely operate even this “flawed system,” but the old NASA lacked both leadership and money.

Griffin continued, “We all know that human perfection is unattainable. Sooner or later there will be another shuttle accident. I want to retire it before that can occur.” His plan is to fly the shuttle a maximum of nineteen times—eighteen for ISS support and one for Hubble Space Telescope repair. My sympathies go out to the most junior astronauts who have been warned by NASA that they may never earn their gold pin on the shuttle because of the limited number of missions remaining. They are living what had been my greatest fear…that I would remain an astronaut in name only.

In all likelihood the craft that will replace the shuttle will be a capsule launched atop some type of booster rocket, possibly a reuseable shuttle SRB augmented with a liquid-fueled upper stage. It’s back to the future. The capsule will probably accommodate a four-person crew and be more sophisticated than those of the Apollo program, but with the same type of tractor escape rocket design to pull astronauts to safety in the event of a booster failure. Future astronauts will return to Earth under parachutes.

If all goes according to Griffin’s plan, on a day in late 2010, a reentering space shuttle will sonic-boom KSC for the last time. For the last time a pilot will take the stick of a winged spaceship and guide it to a runway landing. For the last time we will hear the call, “Houston, wheel stop.” The space shuttle will be history, retired at age thirty. I suspect every TFNG will be watching…and remembering. I certainly will.

Political correctness finally neutered the astronaut corps…or, perhaps, males from Planet AD have gone extinct. Several veteran NASA secretaries confided in me that contemporary astronaut parties are “boring.” I can believe it. When an astronaut applicant recently called me for insight into the interview process, I was shocked to hear her say that a resident astronaut had already warned her, “Drinking alcohol is frowned upon.” (No telling what the corps would say about imbibing in helium.) While I have never been one to believe alcohol is necessary to have fun, the comment hints that there is anew astronaut on the block, as good with a stick and throttle as any before but less flamboyant and more mainstream than the TFNGs. It doesn’t surprise me. The current civilian astronauts were born into an America that is politically correct in the extreme and the pilots now come from a military that is more sober and religious. So, besides the males from Planet AD, maybe the wild and wooly Right Stuff astronaut—that astronaut who lives life at the edge of the envelope, be it at happy hour or in a cockpit—has also gone the way of the dodo.

The last TFNG reunion occurred in 1998, our twentieth anniversary. Most of the men and all of the surviving women were present. The women seemed least changed, though I’m sure makeup and Clairol had a lot to do with that. The men, me included, were showing our age with expanding waistlines, receding hairlines, and liver-spotted foreheads. A few men sported new wives, though none of those seemed to be of the “trophy” variety. They were mature and pleasant. The rest of the wives were aging gracefully but their days of giving us men a “six nipples under glass” show were, sadly, gone.

Before dinner, Rick Hauck led us in a moment of silence to remember our fallen friends, then gave a short presentation that included a recap of some of the significant history written by our group. We each received TFNG T-shirts bearing thirty-five small caricatures of our individual likenesses. The shirts also featured the past-tense headline “We Delivered.” It was an update to the original 1979 TFNG T-shirt, which had displayed the same caricatures and the title “We Deliver.” The TFNG class had, indeed,delivered for NASA and America.

Before scattering to our hotels we posed for a class photo. I sensed a renewed closeness in the assembly. It wasn’t the Knights-of-the-Round-table closeness we had once shared—that level of camaraderie had forever ended when the first Abbey flight assignments had winnowed us. But the white-hot fierceness of our competition had been cooled by the years. We were all gold-pinned astronauts; most of us gold-plated several times over. We were all bound by an experience singularly unique in the history of man…spaceflight. As we stood for our reunion photo, fewer than four hundred earthlings had ever flown into space. Even the fraternity of those who had summited Mount Everest was more than twice as large. The exclusivity of the astronaut experience would forever be a force that would pull TFNGs together.

I occasionally run into a TFNG in my travels. I once crossed paths with Hoot Gibson in his capacity as a Southwest Airlines pilot and had cause to regret it. In the late 1990s I was a passenger on a flight he was piloting. As the jet reached cruise altitude, he announced over the intercom that “world-famous astronaut Mike Mullane was aboard and would be happy to sign autographs.” To ensure my distress, he added my seat number. A line formed and a few old ladies grabbed their cameras for photos. I wanted to leap from the plane to escape the severe embarrassment. Better dead than look bad.

The three TFNG Challenger widows have successfully moved on with their lives. As Lorna Onizuka shared with me, “We stubbed our emotional toes along the way, but I think we’ve all come through the tragedy as happy, content, and successful women and mothers.” Lorna thinks it was the mothering instinct that got everybody through the worst days—each of them had to place their children first and didn’t have time to be emotional cripples. “My children saved my life,” was Lorna’s assessment.

The “man repellent” factor of the astronaut-widow thankfully did not endure. June Scobee and Jane Smith remarried. Lorna and Cheryl McNair remain single but Lorna says they both have vibrant social lives. Lorna says, “I’ve shared my life with a special man for more than ten years.” She laughs as she recounts some of the problems of reentering the dating scene as a mother of two. “When I wasn’t home and a man would call, my oldest daughter would ask him if he was bald.” For some reason that daughter had a “bald men need not apply” attitude. Lorna’s youngest daughter would ask a male caller if he smoked cigars, which was her criterion for rejection. And both daughters would tell men they had to have Mom home by the ten o’clock news. If Lorna’s happy, upbeat attitude is representative of the other Challenger survivors, as she believes it is, they are doing quite well.

Donna and I are approaching our sixtieth birthdays. We both weigh more, sag more, and forget more than we did in those euphoric, intoxicating early TFNG days. But life has been good…grand, really, because we have been blessed with six wonderful and healthy grandchildren. Pat and Wendy, Amy and Steve, and Laura and Dave have all given us two grandchildren each: Sean and Katie, Hanna and Meagan, and Noah and Gwyneth. While holding our first grandchild, I asked Donna, “Would you have ever thought we’d be telling our kids to have more sex?” As the saying goes…“If I had known grandkids were so much fun, I would have had them first.”

Donna and I also just passed our fortieth anniversary…not wedding, but rather the anniversary of that fateful first kiss of January 3, 1965. We celebrated with a glass of wine and were asleep by 9:30 P.M. We each got married for the wrong reasons, but we somehow endured long enough to fall in love.

The astronaut beach house is still standing and I hope it is forever preserved for future generations of astronauts. It sits on sacred ground. The spouses of the Challenger and Columbia crews last held the love of their lives on its sands. No doubt some future crew spouses will hold dear the memory of their last beach house visit, too, for it will include a memory of the last time they embraced their lovers. It is the nature of spaceflight that more crews will perish. Even if NASA can fix its culture, the complexity of the machines and the unforgiving environment of space will claim more astronauts.

Another place sacred to astronauts was created after I retired. In 1991 the Astronaut Memorial, funded largely by the sale of Florida Challenger license plates, was dedicated at the KSC Visitors Center. Whenever I visit that center, I always make it a point to walk to the memorial. It consists of a large matrix of granite panels bearing the names of all astronauts who have died in the line of duty. Those names have been chiseled completely through the stone to allow mirrors set behind the panels to reflect the sunlight through the etchings. The entire panel assembly automatically rotates to follow the sun and continuously catch its light. There are now twenty-four names in the granite, the earliest being Theodore Freeman, killed in 1964 in the crash of his T-38 jet, and the latest being the Columbia Seven.

On my visits to the memorial I will take a seat on a bench and stare at the four TFNG names the panels bear…Francis “Dick” Scobee, Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, and Ronald E. McNair…and remember the last moment I saw them.[8] They were walking to a sim wearing Prime Crew smiles. It is how I will always remember them…young, happy, soaring with the knowledge they were next up. I will remember each of them in my prayers. I will also include prayers for their spouses and Judy’s family. The life those spouses and parents knew also ended on January 28, 1986, but nobody ever etched their names on a monument.

From the memorial I will walk to a nearby full-scale space shuttle mock-up. Metal platforms have been installed around the display so tourists can climb up and walk through the cockpit. I will anonymously join a group of families and watch them take photos and listen to them marvel at the complexity of the switch panels and the cramped volume. Invariably my attention will be drawn to a child among them. In his or her amazed young face I will be transported back to 1957. I am standing in my front lawn with the identical expression, watching Sputnik I twinkle through the terminator.

September 7, 2005

Albuquerque, New Mexico

www.mikemullane.com