Book Review: Riding Rockets

Three-time Shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane has produced a unique memoir of his time with NASA. The book offers more than any previous memoir (and frankly, more than most of us want to know) about the nasty problems associated with weightlessness and human waste disposal. Beyond that quirk, the book has a lot to offer. Mullane explains, in you-are-there prose, the experience of space flight and the physical and emotional strains of launch scrubs. He also does a nice job of introducing us to the personalities of his class of astronauts (the "Thirty-Five New Guys") and describing the interactions between people who were both loyal comrades and intense competitors. Indeed, some of the writing is so good that it makes me wonder what went wrong in Mullane's first book, the novel Red Sky, which was frankly a painful experience to read.
An interesting sidelight is Mullane's relationship to physicist Judith Resnik, who died on the Challenger. The married Mullane frankly admits to feeling an attraction to her and is glad he never acted on it, but the way he describes their interaction gives the impression that it was all up to him: there's a hint of the old fighter-pilot ego in his description of events. Speaking of fighter pilots, Mullane's description of what astronauts did with their supersonic T-38 trainers will curl the hair of readers who like to think of astronauts as sensible people. You may not always like Riding Rockets, but you won't be able to put it down.


Matt Bille