Riding Rockets

December 2, 1988, found me and the rest of the STS-27 crew strapped intoAtlantis waiting out a weather delay at T-31 seconds. We had already scrubbed the day before due to out-of-limits high-altitude winds. With the potential of a second scrub hanging over us, the mood in the cockpit was gloomy. I was beginning to think I was cursed. This was my sixth launchpad wait for only a second mission. The problem today was the weather at our transatlantic abort sites in Africa. They were below minimums. The launch director was on the phone with the astronaut observer in Morocco. With the APUs running, a decision had to be made quickly.

I heard the range safety officer speaking on the LCC voice net and used the opportunity to joke, “The RSO’s mother goes down like a Muslim at noon.” (The termgoing down was from Planet AD and referred to an act of oral sex.) I didn’t worry about the RSO hearing me. He didn’t have access to our intercom.

The crew cringed…and laughed. I was slandering the mother of the man who was just two switches away from killing us. Hoot shouted, “Mullane, don’t joke about the RSO’s mother! Pick on the pope’s mother. Hell, pick onChrist’s mother. Anybody but the RSO’s mother!”

The laughter faded and the intercom fell quiet. I thought of Donna on the roof of the LCC. I knew the delay was killing her. Every wife-mother said the same thing:Watching a husband being launched into space is like being in a never-ending difficult childbirth…without any pain medication. My mom certainly thought so. She greeted me after my first mission with a sign reading, “September 10, 1945 was easier.”

My fear was “off-scale high,” an astronaut expression meaning the needle of a cockpit instrument had soared past the highest reading and had pegged itself against a physical stop. The fear wasn’t any greater than it had been on my first launch.Challenger had changed nothing in that regard—I had known before STS-51L that flying the shuttle could kill me, and I knew this flight could kill me. On the drive to the pad I had passed the same rescue vehicles I had passed on my way toDiscovery and had, again, thought of the body bags they certainly contained. I thought of the full-mouth dental photos and clip of hair and the footprint the flight surgeon had archived in Houston. In another ten minutes would somebody be pulling those from my medical file to send to a Florida pathologist? If it was to be so, I prayed I would be brave in whatever form of deathAtlantis might serve me.Challenger had convinced me there would be no merciful, instantaneous deaths granted to any shuttle crews. The cockpit was a fortress; at least it was a fortress until it slammed into Earth. If it had kept the crew alive throughChallenger ’s destruction, it would keep me alive through any breakup ofAtlantis. The shuttle engineers had done what engineers always do…built their machine to spec and then added their own margins. The seat I was strapped to would survive twice the number of Gs my body could withstand. The windows (eachtriple -paned) and the walls around me would remain intact until the Earth crushed them. I was strapped into a fortress that would keep me alive long enough to watch Death’s approach. If fire was to kill me, I would have time to watch the flames. If a multimile fall was to kill me, I would watch the Earth rushing into my face. Even a cockpit decompression would no longer mercifully grant us unconsciousness, as it might have spared theChallenger crew. We now wore full-pressure suits that would keep us alive and conscious through any cockpit rupture.

As I stared at the countdown clock, still frozen at T-31 seconds, my prayers covered a spectrum of needs.Please, God, let the TAL weather clear so we can launch…Please, God, let us have a safe flight…Please, God, don’t let me screw up…Please, God, if I’m to die, let me die fighting, joking, helping the CDR and PLT with a checklist, reaching for a switch. Please, God, let me die as Judy and the others died…as working, functioning astronauts to the very end.