The Untouchables

Abstract

In spite of his desire to fly as often as possible, astronaut Mike Mullane considered himself fortunate to have been aboard none of Challenger’s 1985 missions, for all three carried a fate worse than death: a European-built research facility called Space-lab. “For Mission Specialists, the A-list astronauts were those who flew the Manned Manoeuvring Unit,” he recounted in his memoir, ‘Riding Rockets’. “At the bottom of the pile were those sorry souls doing actual science in the bowels of a Spacelab. While many scientists enjoyed Spacelab, most of the military Mission Specialists wanted nothing to do with it.