Mike Mullane

Mike Mullane: The Astronaut Who Refused to Sand the Edges Off

On 30 August 1984 the space shuttle Discovery left the pad for the first time, and one of the mission specialists strapped into it was an Air Force officer who had flown more than a hundred reconnaissance missions over Vietnam in the back seat of an RF-4C. Mike Mullane flew three times in all, logged 356 hours in orbit, and then did the thing almost no astronaut does. He wrote a memoir that described the astronaut corps as it actually was — the fear, the careerism, the locker-room culture, the friends who died — and let the reviews fall where they landed.

Albuquerque and West Point

Richard Michael Mullane was born on 10 September 1945 in Wichita Falls, Texas, but he counts Albuquerque as home; he graduated from St Pius X High School there in 1963. His father was an Air Force flight engineer, which is where the fascination started. In 1967 he took a Bachelor of Science in military engineering from West Point, and in 1975 a master's in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology.

The Back Seat

Mullane's Air Force career was that of a weapon systems officer — the man in the rear cockpit, running the sensors and the navigation, not flying the aircraft. Between January and November 1969 he flew combat missions in the RF-4C reconnaissance Phantom out of Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Vietnam; sources put the total at 134 or 150. There followed a four-year tour in England, the USAF Flight Test Engineer Course at Edwards Air Force Base in 1976, and work as a flight test weapons systems operator at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

This background mattered enormously to what came next. Mullane's eyesight ruled out a pilot's slot, and for most of the history of American spaceflight that would have ended the story. The shuttle changed the rules.

Class of 1978

NASA selected Mullane in January 1978 and he qualified as an astronaut in August 1979. The 1978 intake — the first class recruited specifically for the Space Shuttle — was the group that broke the fighter-pilot monopoly. It brought in scientists and engineers as mission specialists, and it brought in the first American women and the first Black and Asian-American astronauts. Mullane was one of the engineers: not flying the vehicle, but operating the payloads that were the reason for going.

He flew three times, all of them consequential:

STS-41-D, 30 August to 5 September 1984 — the maiden flight of Discovery, ninety-six orbits, deploying satellites and running experiments. A new orbiter's first flight carries risk that no amount of ground testing removes.

STS-27, 2 to 6 December 1988 — Atlantis, carrying classified Department of Defense payloads. This was only the second flight after the Challenger disaster, at a moment when the whole programme's survival was in question.

STS-36, 28 February to 4 March 1990 — Atlantis again, with classified DoD cargo.

He retired from NASA and the Air Force on 1 July 1990.

Riding Rockets

The book appeared in 2006 under the title *Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut*, and it is the reason Mullane is known beyond the roster. It covers his NASA years from 1978 to 1990, including his friendship with Judy Resnik, who died aboard Challenger. Kirkus Reviews described it as one astronaut's messy, exhilarating story with no edges sanded off — an accurate summary of a book that gives a critical view of the culture of NASA and the astronaut corps rather than the institutional version.

The candour cuts against him too. Publishers Weekly noted that Mullane holds female astronauts in special disregard, and the criticism is part of the record. The memoir is a document of an era's attitudes as well as an indictment of them.

Since retirement he has worked as a speaker on spaceflight and safety culture. The New Mexico Museum of Space History records that he has thrilled tens of thousands of adults and half a million children, and inducted him into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1993.

Why Mike Is Called a Genius

This claim rests on craft and nerve, not on intellect, and it should be said plainly. Mullane is not a scientist who reshaped a field; he made no discovery and formulated no theory. What he had was a specific and demanding competence: the ability to operate complex weapons and payload systems, in real time, under conditions that punish error with death. In the back seat of an RF-4C over Vietnam that meant running reconnaissance sensors while somebody else flew and somebody else shot. In the payload bay of a shuttle it meant executing deployment sequences with no possibility of a second attempt. Both jobs demand a rare combination of technical mastery, procedural discipline and physical composure — the capacity to keep thinking clearly while the body is telling you to stop.

There is a second, separate claim, and it is the stronger one: the honesty of the memoir. Astronauts operate under enormous pressure to be ambassadors, and almost all of them comply. Mullane broke that convention deliberately, describing the fear, the internal politics and the institutional failures that killed his colleagues. That was a moral choice with a professional cost, and it produced a more useful historical record than any authorised account.

The counter-case is straightforward. Selection to the astronaut corps is a competitive filter, not proof of exceptional intellect; hundreds of people have passed it. Mullane's flights were successful but not singular. And the memoir's frankness includes attitudes toward his female colleagues that reviewers found objectionable, which complicates any account of him as a truth-teller. Highly capable, unusually honest, not a genius in the ordinary sense of the word — and he would very likely say so himself.

Legacy

Mullane belongs to the cohort that turned spaceflight from a test-pilot proving ground into an operational job done by engineers, and his career traces exactly that transition: a man whose eyes disqualified him from the cockpit, who flew to orbit three times anyway. His more lasting contribution may be documentary. *Riding Rockets* is one of the very few insider accounts of the shuttle programme written without institutional supervision, and its willingness to record how a safety culture actually decays — rather than how the press releases said it worked — is the reason engineers and safety professionals still ask him to speak.

Achievements

• Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Educated at U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, United States Military Academy and St. Pius X High School
• Worked as military officer, astronaut and novelist