Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut [Hardcover]

There are a good number of astronaut biographies available. Inevitably there is fair amount of repetition sometimes straying towards telling you what SHOULD have happened rather than what DID happen. But Mike's book is different. This is the story of what it's all about being an astronaut: nuts and bolts, human weaknesses, bureaucracy, chauvanism, fear, elation, reality. But above all the need to fly into space. If you were to read only one astronaut biography, then this should be it.

I've been waiting for this book since I was a kid watching the first landing on the Moon on TV. It is something completely different from what I read till now about the space program. To say that Mike Mullane is the Bill Bryson of space travel is to underestimate him. You will not only appreciate the story, the inside view on the US space program (including the permanent mismanagement). You will also learn about a real dream love: the one with his wife, Donna. What is really outstanding in Mike is the chase for the "ultimate honesty". He constantly refuse the "politically correct" approach and goes straigth to the core of our relations to space travels, dreams, technology, relation with... women, with his boss and with... the girl of his dream, in this case another Astronaut tragically dead in the Challenger accident. The last pages in particular are surprisingly good and poetic. I would never expect something like that from a funny book like this.

Thanks, Mike, for your honesty.

Mullane has written an engaging memoir detailing his time as a mission specialist in the first wave of Space Shuttle astronauts. It's a very partial account - Mullane retired from NASA in 1990 and two of his three missions remain classified - but the description of his training and first mission is gripping and gives a good insight into the post-Apollo US manned space program.

The book makes clear just how experimental the Shuttle program was, and the description of its continual near-misses is chilling. While there is no technical coverage of the Challenger accident, the human cost is addressed in depth and Challenger marks a divide between the lighter, optimistic first half of the book and a darker second half. The latter takes shape around a critique of NASA management and what Mullane presents as the consequent inevitability of disaster in the shuttle program. The Columbia accident is referenced only in passing, coming as it did over a decade after Mullane's retirement.

In general tone, if not in scope, the book is reminiscent of Andrew Chaikin's `A Man on the Moon', and Mullane writes well (or has help from someone who writes well). The single jarring caveat is his unashamed and often triumphant chauvinism. In Mullane's eyes, the only worthy career is military service and while he acknowledges a growing respect for the civilian astronauts, his heart isn't in it and his prejudices are never far from the surface. He even tempers his bitterness towards the `part-timers' - payload specialists and passengers - to cheer Senator Jake Garn, a passenger on STS-51-D, for having `actually done something in his life besides lawyering'. (The `something' being flying tankers for the Navy and the Utah Air National Guard.) He dismisses his own daughter's interest in theatre, meanwhile, as `a degree in waiting tables'.

Mullane's attitude to women holds no surprises and his incessant anecdotes of school-boy innuendo among the military astronauts quickly wear thin. On his own admission, he and his military colleagues are the product of a closeted and socially isolated culture - `planet Arrested Development', he calls it, and a better writer would have left it at that. But Mullane has an axe to grind and positively revels in his chauvinistic attitude while invoking the `political correctness' defence to make it our problem instead of his. His self-congratulatory account of restraining the urge to fondle Judy Resnik on the eve of their first launch is just one of many passages that seem to have been written for adolescent boys, and is as unconvincing as his various celebrity encounters (including the one where he is groped in a lift by the then First Lady, Barbara Bush). One wonders what this chapter might have recorded if Resnik had not died on Challenger two years later. I will let Mullane have the last word on women: `I learned that they are real people with dreams and ambitions and only need an opportunity to prove themselves'. I bet THAT line made Sally Ride spill her cornflakes!

In spite of all this, it is a worthy read. When he isn't grand-standing on the evils of political correctness Mullane proves to be a good writer. He understands narrative and suspense, and his eye for description conveys something of the beauty he witnessed in orbit. It is safe to assume there was no ghost writer, or at least that Mullane retained editorial control: in one memorable passage, reminiscent of John Glenn's `fireflies' experience on Friendship 7, he describes the unexpected and fleeting appearance of a perfect space shuttle-shaped shadow in the effluent of the attitude-control thrusters. Tom Wolfe would never have followed such a description with `it reminded me of Captain Kirk's Starship Enterprise going into warp speed'.

Populated as it is with wimpy-named Frenchmen, geriatrics and limp-wristed whiners, this book is politically incorrect to be sure. But it's also one of very few books on post-Apollo manned spaceflight. Mullane is a 60 year-old adolescent who had a dream to fly in space and who has done a pretty good job of telling us about it. If you can give him a little artistic licence, and ignore his frequent crass movie references, you will probably enjoy the ride.