05-10-2009, 03:52 PM
The subtitle is Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut.
The book opens with Mike giving himself an enema, and he spares no details. He's a good writer, and he is amazingly candid about NASA, politicians, space tourists, fellow astronauts, and especially himself. If you ever wanted to know all the details about pissing and pooping in space, and how toilets were first tested on the Vomit Comet, this is the book for you. He describes how singleminded he and other astronauts are to get on the shuttle, and yet how terrified they are as the launch approaches, and especially when they're aboard, with the countdown in progress, and even more so when they "light the candle."
Mike relates many close calls, fatalities, pranks, more pranks, still more pranks, and how incredibly sexist he and others were in the early days, and how the women eventually proved themselves, and how he and others changed.
Mike is crazy. All the astronauts are crazy. They have to be to climb inside the shuttle for launch. It's a flawed design. He made three flights on the shuttle, on which there were at least 6 near-fatal incidents. It was like taking a gun with 20 cylinders, putting in one bullet, spinning the chambers, putting it to his head and pulling the trigger. And he did it three times. This analogy is mine. But that's how it struck me, reading his tale.
No one should think of a shuttle launch as routine. It's unbelievably dangerous. While the shuttle now has an ejection mechanism (after the public outcry over Challenger), it is of virtually no use. It can only be used at an altitude of 30,000 feet and above and assumes that the shuttle is in controlled flight. That is an insanely unrealistic scenario. Essentially, if anything happens during liftoff, they are dead. And so much can go wrong -- and almost has on countless prior launches.
Tomorrow (Monday) Atlantis blasts off, headed for the Hubble Space Telescope to do major repairs/upgrades/additions. I'll be thinking of them like never before.
The book opens with Mike giving himself an enema, and he spares no details. He's a good writer, and he is amazingly candid about NASA, politicians, space tourists, fellow astronauts, and especially himself. If you ever wanted to know all the details about pissing and pooping in space, and how toilets were first tested on the Vomit Comet, this is the book for you. He describes how singleminded he and other astronauts are to get on the shuttle, and yet how terrified they are as the launch approaches, and especially when they're aboard, with the countdown in progress, and even more so when they "light the candle."
Mike relates many close calls, fatalities, pranks, more pranks, still more pranks, and how incredibly sexist he and others were in the early days, and how the women eventually proved themselves, and how he and others changed.
Mike is crazy. All the astronauts are crazy. They have to be to climb inside the shuttle for launch. It's a flawed design. He made three flights on the shuttle, on which there were at least 6 near-fatal incidents. It was like taking a gun with 20 cylinders, putting in one bullet, spinning the chambers, putting it to his head and pulling the trigger. And he did it three times. This analogy is mine. But that's how it struck me, reading his tale.
No one should think of a shuttle launch as routine. It's unbelievably dangerous. While the shuttle now has an ejection mechanism (after the public outcry over Challenger), it is of virtually no use. It can only be used at an altitude of 30,000 feet and above and assumes that the shuttle is in controlled flight. That is an insanely unrealistic scenario. Essentially, if anything happens during liftoff, they are dead. And so much can go wrong -- and almost has on countless prior launches.
Tomorrow (Monday) Atlantis blasts off, headed for the Hubble Space Telescope to do major repairs/upgrades/additions. I'll be thinking of them like never before.
I'm nobody's pony.