Riding Rockets

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle; Mike Mullane (Scribner, ISBN 978-0-7432-7682-5).

The latest in a series of biographies and autobiographies by various astronauts (a cottage industry in of itself), this one is markedly different from most that I've read in its brutal honesty about the manned space program.

Mullane was in the initial class of shuttle astronauts. Too late for Apollo, he was part of the TFNG, which sometimes means the Thirty-Five New Guys. Mullane was from the Air Force and claims that he was also from Planet AD, or Arrested Development.

Chapters describe his life in and out of NASA, focus on his three shuttle missions (two of which were military missions, so he is somewhat scarce with details), detail the Challenger accident and aftermath. There is quite a bit on NASA's broken culture, problems with the shuttle and more.

The book would be worth buying for any of these things:

Priceless gems such as details on the development and testing of vital shuttle systems...like the zero-gravity toilet. Would you like some of the development or test details in your personnel file?

A description of all the aspects of NASA's broken culture, management problems, leadership problems, communications problems and more. It is amazing that we did not lose more shuttles than we have so far. Dan Goldin, John Young, George Abbey and others are all outlined in gory detail.

Great character sketches of various astronauts that Mullane worked with.

Wonderful descriptions of what the Earth looked like in space and what being in microgravity was like. We may not have had any poets in space yet, but Mullance does a fine job at times.

There's a lot of humor here, running from coarse to high levels of farce. For example, for both of his military missions, Mullane received awards from the "black community" (and I'm not talking about race, but secrecy). Then he goes on to say that he could not take the medals out of the vaults and had to have the celebration dinner in those vaults. (The existence of the medals was declassified, hence his ability to write about it eventually.) There is lot of old boy/frat house/military humor, but it is clear that many of the targets (female astronauts, astronauts from scientific backgrounds) could give as much as they got.

Good stuff. Recommended. You probably won't see another insider view of NASA as brutally honest as this one for quite a while.

Addendum: A review by NASA Watch's Keith Cowing that appeared earlier this year.