I just finished reading Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales Of A Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike "Tarzan" Mullane. An apt title, this book was a great read, with laugh-out-loud funny anecdotes on nearly every other page, plus sobering looks into the culture of NASA plus the aftermath of Challenger, and glorious descriptions of the Earth as viewed from space.
Mullane entered NASA as part of the first class of astronauts after Apollo-Soyuz, a group that included the first female and the first non-military astronauts. The culture clash is extreme between these "post-docs" and Mullane and his cohorts cut from the old-school military 'Right Stuff' jock mold. And by his own admission, his attitude towards Sally Ride, Judy Resnick and the other female astronauts starts out as condescending and sexist, but he gradually overcomes his biases. Ultimately he becomes a good friend of Resnick's and they share a flight prior to her death in the Challenger accident. His respect and admiration for her is evident, and an effective eulogy.
One thing that surprised me was how willing the astronauts were to accept extreme levels of risk, fueled by hyper-competitiveness and the desire to earn their astronaut wings. He says something like 'if God himself had told be there was a 90% chance I would die on my rookie flight, I would have taken it.' The way he describes the intense emotions leading up to launch makes the statement totally believable. He talks about how this attitude played into the Challenger disaster, with the secrecy regarding crew selection boosting the effect, so there was incredible pressure to not jeopardize your flight, if not your entire career, by not speaking up.
Of course, similar pressures were going on in NASA's bureaucracy, leading them to dismiss calls to scrub the Challenger launch (and not inform any of the astronauts of the discussions). His frank opinions include a relative lack of surprise that history basically repeated itself with Columbia. His own flights included a near burn-thru of an O-ring and the worst foam strike damage prior to Columbia's destruction. The latter story was recently summarized on spaceflightnow.com.
This autobiography is remarkably candid; he let's it all hang out. I think the word "penis" must appear a hundred times in the book. If you're curious about how the astronauts (of both sexes) go to bathroom in space, then this is the ultimate reference. He casually mentions things like how the pre-flight quarantine gets Playboy TV, and how waking up in zero-G gives guys the ultimate morning wood.
I loved his stories of staying awake in the shuttle cabin to float and watch landscapes, cities, sunrises, sunsets, storms and all manner of other phenomena. They are well written, conveying the grandeur without being overwrought.
There's a lot more too. What it's like for spouses and family to go through the ordeal of launches and scrubs. How it is that Navy commanders and pilots are favored over USAF veterans. Hijinks among the astronauts. I get the feeling that he really didn't leave anything out of his story. It's told matter-of-factly, completely openly and honestly (or so it seems) with good humor rather than being some kind of breathless tell-all. If you're at all interested in the space program, I highly recommend it!
