![]() “That got our attention – we were sitting on a rocket containing four million pounds of propellant.” “I don’t know how many seconds later it was, but you could hear, that there was a fire at the base of the vehicle,” Mullane says. But what about the solid rockets? If they light now, the spacecraft will be torn apart. In the cockpit, the vibrations stop as the engines fall silent. There is a bright flash as the pad appears to be consumed by flames. The astronauts’ families are watching anxiously from the roof of the launch control centre some five kilometres away. “You’ve got that fear factor of being on a rocket with no viable escape system, but you also have the confidence that there are a lot of people that have done everything humanly possible to make sure the machine is safe.” The astronauts are well aware that if anything goes wrong, the Shuttle has no ejector seats or other means of escape to fling the crew clear of an inferno. At six, the engines roar into life Discovery is straining at the bolts holding it to the launchpad.Īll that remains are the two solid rocket boosters – giant fireworks strapped to the side of the rocket. Mullane’s heart is racing as the countdown reaches 10 seconds and a thousand pounds of propellent a second flood into the rocket combustion chambers. In his revealing and sometimes hilariously honest autobiography, Mullane writes that if the Shuttle exploded, he wanted it to be when they were higher than 50 miles so he’d die an official astronaut. “One was fear – you do fear for your life – but the other was boundless joy because it’s a lifetime quest for astronauts to fly to space.” “Two emotions gripped me in that cockpit,” Mullane tells me. The rest – including Judy Resnik, preparing to become the second American woman in space – have yet to earn their gold astronaut pins. Only one of the six astronauts, commander Hank Hartsfield, has flown before. With the previous day’s launch attempt scrubbed during the last 20 minutes of countdown because of a computer glitch, all the crew are on edge as the seconds tick by. He has also taken the precaution of buying three separate life insurance policies. But he has barely slept or eaten any breakfast. He has trained for six years for this mission. Mullane, the veteran of 134 US Air Force combat missions in Vietnam, has been selected as a member of the first group of Shuttle recruits. The upgraded spacecraft is showroom fresh – the surfaces shiny, free of scratches and scuff marks, the displays polished and controls untouched. This will be the 12th flight in the Space Shuttle programme but Discovery’s and Mullane’s first. Mission Specialist Mike Mullane lies in his couch in the cockpit of Space Shuttle Discovery.
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