Mullane: Riding Rockets
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Astronaut Mike Mullane, Riding Rockets : The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut. New York : Scribner, 2006. ix + 368 pages, with glossary (no index).
If you'd ever wanted to be a Space-Shuttle astronaut but you missed your chance, here's the book to read. It reveals everything you missed from flight training to toilet training in full detail, capturing the fulfillment of childhood dreams, with perhaps a little too much detail at times. Personally, I'm just as happy that I didn't become one, but I'm quite happy to read all about it.
Mullane was one of the original batch of 34 people recruited for shuttle training, and he accounts for each one of them ("where are they now?") in his narrative. Mullane has written a very thorough account of his experience, including a discussion of his relationship with fellow shuttle astronaut Judith Resnick and how he dealt with her death in the Challenger disaster in 1986.
Reading the unvarnished truth has probably convinced me to give up my childhood dream of being an astronaut, but it let me down gently without making the dream sour. It was a very enjoyable vicarious experience.
This was a really good book!
-- Notes by RRT
