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The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut
Scribner
January 2006
384 pages
ISBN: 0743276825
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
On February 1, 1978, the first group of space shuttle
astronauts, twenty-nine men and six women, were introduced
to the world. Among them would be history makers, including
the first American woman and the first African American in
space. This assembly of astronauts would carry NASA through
the most tumultuous years of the space shuttle program. Four
would die on Challenger. USAF Colonel
Mike Mullane was a member of this astronaut class, and
Riding Rockets is his story -- told with a candor
never before seen in an astronaut's memoir. Mullane strips
the heroic veneer from the astronaut corps and paints them
as they are -- human. His tales of arrested development
among military flyboys working with feminist pioneers and
post-doc scientists are sometimes bawdy, often hilarious,
and always entertaining. Mullane vividly
portrays every aspect of the astronaut experience -- from
telling a female technician which urine-collection condom
size is a fit; to walking along a Florida beach in a last,
tearful goodbye with a spouse; to a wild, intoxicating,
terrifying ride into space; to hearing "Taps" played over a
friend's grave. Mullane is brutally honest in his criticism
of a NASA leadership whose bungling would precipitate the
Challenger disaster. Riding
Rockets is a story of life in all its fateful
uncertainty, of the impact of a family tragedy on a
nine-year-old boy, of the revelatory effect of a machine
called Sputnik, and of the life-steering powers of lust,
love, and marriage. It is a story of the human experience
that will resonate long after the call of "Wheel stop."
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