Riding Rockets: Book Review

If you've ever felt the pull of the romance of space travel, Riding Rockets by R. Mike Mullane is a book I heartily recommend. Mullane was a West Point graduate and Air Force aviator with 134 combat missions in Vietnam when he applied to be an astronaut. He was a flight test engineer, not a pilot, and his astronaut class was the first to include mission specialists selected from flight engineers and civilian scientists.

Mullane's book is a darn good read for entertainment and an even better one for information. Military aviators aren't exactly famous for opening their brains for the world to view, but his book is strikingly candid and revealing. One of my favorite parts is his story of his childhood obsession with space and his devotion to Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestelle's Conquest of Space. I also fell under that spell and tried my hand at building rockets and making rocket fuel - as a hole burned into our basement ceiling once testified. Mullane, though, had the dedication, talent, and diligence to make it happen, despite a need for glasses that kept him out of pilot training.

The military astronauts, as portrayed by Mullane, are ferociously competitive, fun loving denizens of the planet he calls Arrested Development. The first hard decision he had to make as a NASA employee, he says, was what to wear to work. West Point and a military career meant never having had to make that decision before. Nor had he ever inhabited a workplace that included the female of our species. Political incorrectness came naturally to him and he quickly managed to offend the more hardline feminists in his class, notably Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

There are many amusing stories here, both Earthbound and orbiting, and some that are downright hilarious. There is also terror and tragedy, and anger. Much of the anger is directed at NASA mismanagement. That mismanagement, as he saw it, made the astronauts job incredibly frustrating and, at a higher level, led to the destruction of Challenger and Columbia.

Flight into orbit is not a dangerous job, and it's not a very dangerous job - it's an incredibly dangerous job. Even in an optimally designed rocket, the passengers put themselves on top of several million pounds of highly explosive fuel for a trip to a place where nature has a lot of ways of killing them. The space shuttle was not that optimal design. It was both underdesigned and overpromised, both circumstances the result of trying to do too much with too little money.

There were at least three grave design flaws in it. First, it lacked a robust escape module. This fact killed the Challenger crew and possibly killed the Columbia crew. Second, the solid fuel boosters and the external fuel tank were in positions where debris from them could destroy the orbiter. Such an accident killed the Columbia and very nearly killed the Discovery. Hot gases that penetrated the solid fuel booster O-rings blew up the Challenger.

As often happens, these severe design flaws were not enough by themselves to kill the Shuttles. That also required a reckless disregard of the evidence of problems by the NASA management.