To me, the most exciting development was the new astronaut corps, which was full of interesting people: thirty-five in the first class, as opposed to seven for Mercury. And astronauts weren’t just military test pilots anymore. The candidate pool had grown far wider. It included women and people of color. There were new faces at NASA, a new story to tell. Sally Ride had been chosen to be the first American woman in space, and her flight was scheduled to happen that summer. The anticipation surrounding her flight was huge. She was on every magazine cover and every news show. We were entering a new space age, and America was excited again.
Even with these new people joining the astronaut corps, I still wasn’t thinking I’d ever be an astronaut; that dream was dead and gone. But one of the instructors in my mechanical engineering lab, Professor Kline, started talking to us about how private aerospace contractors—companies like Lockheed, Grumman, McDonnell Douglas, Martin Marietta—were getting big government contracts to work on the space shuttle systems. I thought maybe I could work as an engineer for those contractors, supporting the astronauts as a part of the bigger dream.
Back when the Apollo 11 guys landed on the moon, I believed what they were doing was the most important work of our time: exploring space, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge about the universe. I never stopped believing that. If there’s one thing I got from my father and his job, it was understanding the importance of public service. He instilled that in me. Schlepping an hour into the city on a bus to go around to gas stations and warehouses and inspect fire extinguishers and safety exits may seem like a menial job, but my father took great pride in it. He knew that people’s lives depended on him doing his job well. He knew that firefighters were counting on him to make their jobs safer by preventing fires before they started.
The camaraderie that firefighters have, that brotherhood that forms among them—my father was a part of that, and it came from having a shared sense of purpose. He told me that whatever you do in life, it can’t just be about making money. It’s important that you work to make the world a better place, that you help improve the lives of the people around you. That’s what I thought about when Professor Kline started telling us about the opportunities coming up with the space program. Everybody knows that firefighters are heroes, but they rely on guys like my dad to help them do their job. I thought maybe I could do the same thing with NASA.
Near the end of my junior year, I submitted applications to every engineering company on Long Island, and I got a summer job at Sperry, located in Lake Success, not far from Franklin Square. Sperry made everything from military hardware to office typewriters to electric razors. It was perfect. I could live at home, save some money, and still get some actual, hands-on experience.
That summer, everything was moving in the right direction. I was feeling good about myself. All I was missing was a girlfriend. I hadn’t had much luck in that department, but that had a lot to do with my not having my life together. Now I felt like I was finally in a position where I was ready to meet someone.
My friend Mike Lobaccaro was working as a lifeguard at a pool in nearby New Hyde Park. I went over to pick him up one afternoon, and as I was waiting for him by the indoor pool, this girl, another lifeguard, was in the water giving swimming lessons to a bunch of kids. I thought she was really cute. Mike told me her name was Carola Pardo. A couple weeks later, she showed up at Mike’s twenty-first birthday party at a bar in Mineola. At some point during the night Carola and I started talking. She was the same age as I was, about to start her senior year at Fordham, in the Bronx, where she was studying to be a physical therapist. We were both Sicilian-American, but she was of a more recent vintage. My grandparents had come over at the turn of the century. Her parents had come over in the late 1950s. I remember we were standing by the Ms. Pac-Man machine. She had these red cap shoes on, a jean skirt, and a rainbow-striped sweater with short sleeves. We started talking probably around 9:30 and that was it. By a quarter to midnight we both looked up and the place was empty. The bartender was falling asleep behind the bar, waiting for us to finish. A few weeks later we were officially a couple.
Around the same time, at Sperry I met another important person in my life: Jim McDonald, an engineer who worked a few desks over in the bullpen. I walked up to his desk to ask a work question and ended up hanging out there for over an hour; I don’t think we even got to the work question. Jim had a big crop of straight hair parted to the side and a friendly, whimsical smile. We hit it off immediately, and he became something of a mentor. More than a mentor, really—a guardian angel. He started watching over me, checking in on me when I was back at school, always making sure I was on the right path.
Sperry was my first experience with being an adult. My official job title that summer was “engineering aide,” what you’d call an internship now, except I actually got paid. My team designed inventory systems and conveyor belts for military warehouses. It wasn’t exactly exciting. I had to dress like a grown-up, put on a white shirt and tie, and drive to work. Every morning me and a bunch of guys in white shirts and ties would file into this big building, work at a desk, go home, and come back the next day and do the same thing. Over and over and over again. Lunch was the high point of the day.
Some people want that. They like the routine, the safety of a paycheck every two weeks. But it wasn’t for me. It didn’t give me the sense of purpose I was looking for. As I got to know Jim McDonald better, I realized he didn’t care for it, either. Jim was not a typical engineer. He was very philosophical, more interested in the person he was talking to than the work that needed talking about. He’d just gotten married and had his first kid. At the time I thought he was so old, way older than me: He was probably thirty-six or something, but when you’re in college, that might as well be a hundred. One day he said to me, “You’re not enjoying this, are you?”
“No, not really,” I said.
“Look, Mike. You don’t want to end up here. I’ve been here ten years. I’ve got a mortgage, a kid. It’s too late for me. I love my family. I do things on the side to keep life interesting, but you’ve still got a chance. You need to find something that you’re passionate about.”
He pointed to a guy a few desks away who was sitting there, bored, reading some science fiction novel. “You see that guy?” Jim said. “That guy just got his master’s from Cornell. Do you know how smart he is? And look at what he’s doing. You don’t want that to happen to you.”
For some reason, like Mr. Stern, Jim McDonald saw something in me, some kind of potential. I hadn’t thought seriously about being an astronaut since I was seven years old. At that point the dream was dead. Jim opened the door for it to come back to life. That whole summer, right up to the last day I left and headed back to Columbia, he kept pushing me. “Go and do something different,” he’d say. “Go to grad school. Find something meaningful. Find something important. Whatever you do, don’t come back here.”
3
WHO YOU GONNA GET?
When my final semester at Columbia came around, my boyhood astronaut dream was still dormant. Then, on one Saturday evening in January 1984, my whole world changed. I was home in Franklin Square for the weekend, and Carola and I decided to go to the movies to see The Right Stuff. From the balcony of a theater in Floral Park we watched the story of the original Mercury Seven astronauts: Alan Shepard, the first American in space. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. These fearless test pilots pushing the envelope, risking their lives to help America win the space race against the Soviets.
It was awesome. These astronauts weren’t just doing this big, important thing for their country, they were also having a blast. They were flying fighter jets through the clouds, racing convertibles across the California desert, wearing leather jackets, smiling behind their cool aviator sunglasses. They were risking their lives every single day on the job. They were the baddest guys I’d ever seen. I didn’t take my eyes off the screen for one second.
One scene i
n particular blew me away. John Glenn is all set to be the first American to orbit the Earth, but his launch is aborted. Vice President Lyndon Johnson is waiting outside Glenn’s house, demanding to bring in TV crews to talk to Glenn’s wife, Annie, on national television. But Annie has a stuttering problem; she doesn’t want to be on TV. So John gets on the phone with her and basically tells her it’s okay if she wants to tell the vice president of the United States to get lost. Some suit from NASA jumps down Glenn’s throat, telling him he can’t blow off the vice president like that. Glenn won’t back down. So the NASA guy threatens to yank him out of the flight rotation and replace him if he won’t toe the line. Then the other Mercury guys step up and get in the guy’s face, and Deke Slayton says, “Oh, yeah? Who you gonna get?”
Finally Alan Shepard tells the suit, “Step aside, pal.” They’ve got Glenn’s back.
That moment, to me, summed it up. That’s how you treat your buddies. You stand up for each other. You stand up for what’s right. I saw that and I said, “I want to be one of those guys.” I wanted to go to space, but more than that, I wanted to be part of that team, to have that camaraderie, that shared sense of purpose that comes from doing something big and important. That’s what was really cool about that movie—that and the view from space. When John Glenn is in his capsule looking down on Earth, the expression of wonder on his face, that floored me. The second I walked out of the theater, I knew: I wanted the whole enchilada. I wanted to be an astronaut.
My next thought was: How the heck am I going to make that happen? I was on the verge of graduating from college, but because my astronaut dream had been dormant for so long, I hadn’t mapped out my education with space travel in mind. Columbia is a great school and it gave me a great education and a solid foundation, but back then it wasn’t a traditional pipeline to the astronaut program. I was also an industrial engineering major, which didn’t seem like the right major for becoming an astronaut at all; I felt like I should have done mechanical engineering or aerospace engineering.
I had made one good decision. Back when I was working at Sperry, Jim McDonald had told me about the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. It concentrates on how scientific progress affects and interacts with other aspects of life, like public policy and how people live; it’s a degree for people who want to contribute to more than just the technical side of things. That sounded interesting. I sent off my application to this program and I waited. I didn’t do it with any thought of being an astronaut; at that point I hadn’t seen The Right Stuff yet, and being an astronaut was still the last thing on my mind. But if you do want to be a part of the space program, MIT is one of the best schools to attend. By total coincidence, I’d taken at least one step down the right road.
While I waited to hear about grad school, I started looking for work. I still wanted to follow my father’s example and work in public service. One week IBM came to campus to recruit students from the engineering school, and I talked to one of the interviewers about their public sector office, which worked with nonprofit institutions to set up and service their computer systems. I felt like that might be interesting and rewarding at the same time.
IBM asked me to come in for an interview, but the day before I was scheduled to go I got a letter from MIT. When I opened it (I wasn’t on the toilet this time) I was shocked: They actually let me in.
The next morning I went for the interview with IBM and it went well; the job was mine if I wanted it. I told the interviewer about the MIT offer, and he said IBM employees took leave to go to school all the time. I could defer school, work for IBM for a couple of years, then take a leave to go to MIT and they would save my job for me. I just had to figure out what worked better: MIT now and work later, or work now and MIT later.
The first thing to do was to visit MIT. I called my dad, who took a day off from work, and we drove up to Cambridge to meet with the director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He was a weird-looking academic type with crazy hair. We started talking and he seemed confused as to how I had ended up in his office. Apparently I hadn’t read closely enough when I was researching the program. It wasn’t a part of the engineering school. It was a political science degree. We were in the political science department. My father looked at me and said, “What are you doing in the political science department?”
I’d applied to the wrong grad school.
I didn’t even know MIT had a political science department. Science, Technology, and Society, it turned out, was a program for people who wanted to write papers on how science is affecting society. The similar-sounding but totally different program in the engineering school was called Technology and Policy. It was also about how technology impacts society, but it was for engineers and scientists who actually want to design and build things. MIT allowed me to resubmit my application to the engineering school, and luckily I got in there, too.
Even with that sorted out, I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d only applied to MIT because Jim McDonald had told me it might be a good idea. I never expected to actually get in. I had no idea what I would study there, what my research would be. I hadn’t thought about any of that. I didn’t have any way to pay for it, either. I didn’t have any scholarship or fellowship, and I knew my parents couldn’t foot the bill. IBM had a great training program, and working there would keep me in New York near home. Plus I knew I could take the job and earn money to go to grad school later. MIT felt like this huge unknown, a stretch, a risk. IBM felt like the safe choice.
I made the safe choice.
After graduation, I moved back in with my parents and commuted every morning on the train to IBM’s building at Fifty-Seventh and Madison in Manhattan. The job seemed to suit my personality well. I was the technical side of the sales team assigned to the Port Authority account. Once or twice a week I’d go down to the World Trade Center, work with their information technology guys, take people to lunch. The sales team was also responsible for the entertainment at IBM’s monthly branch meetings. We’d put on little skits about the slow elevators and the bad food in the cafeteria. I was making a decent salary and people were treating me like a grown-up. And IBM was a great company: They took care of people. But something was missing. I didn’t have that sense of purpose I was looking for.
Then, on the Fourth of July 1985, The Right Stuff came out on HBO. My parents didn’t have HBO, but my friend Mike Q did. He let me make a VHS tape of the movie off his TV. Every night I’d come home on the train, pop the tape in the VCR, and watch it—and I mean literally every night. I’m not exaggerating. I’d stay up all the way to the end, watching Chuck Yeager push his Lockheed NF-104A up and up and up to the edge of space only to come crashing back down to Earth—and still walk out alive, chewing a stick of Beemans gum. Then the next morning I’d wake up, put on another white shirt, get on the train, and go back and sit at my desk.
Going to IBM wasn’t a mistake. It was something I needed to do in order to realize it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Carola and I were getting serious, and I figured we were going to get married. If I stayed where I was, we’d end up living in New York somewhere, taking the train every day, and that would be it. I was only twenty-two years old, still living at home with my parents, and I could already see my whole life being over, mapped out and done.
That summer, the last week of July, I decided to drop in and see Jim McDonald, my old mentor from Sperry, on the way to a Mets game. We went out and played catch in the street for a few minutes. We were tossing the ball back and forth, and he asked, “What’s going on with you?” I told him about IBM, making the sales calls at Port Authority, doing skits for the branch meetings. He stood there and gave me this look.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Imagine the conversations we’d be having right now if you’d decided to go to graduate school. You’d be telling me about hearing lectures from Nobel Prize winners. You’d be telling me about the exciting new research you’re working on. MIT is the opportunity of a
lifetime. Instead you’re telling me about what, doing skits in some office in Manhattan?” He whipped the ball at me and it landed in my glove with a pop. “You need to wake up,” he said. “Don’t blow this.”
Talking to Jim, I realized part of my problem was that I didn’t have anyone to talk to. He could give me pep talks, but I didn’t know anybody who was involved in the space program. I didn’t even know anyone who knew anyone who was involved in the space program. I figured I should go to grad school, but what should I study there? What did I need to learn?
Part of what I loved about The Right Stuff was the camaraderie. Getting to space isn’t something you can do on your own, and I was on my own. I had lots of friends, but I didn’t have any space friends. I needed space friends.
Out in Garden City, Long Island, not far from Franklin Square, they have the Cradle of Aviation Museum. It’s built on Roosevelt Field, where Charles Lindbergh took off for his flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The weekend after I talked to Jim, they were putting on a fair to celebrate space flight. My mom clipped an article from Newsday about it and saved it for me. I decided to go and see if I might meet anybody.
One of the booths at the fair was for the Civil Air Patrol, the civilian auxiliary of the Air Force. There was this kid working there, this little Italian guy named Mario, all dressed up in a Civil Air Patrol uniform. We got to talking and it turned out he wanted to be an astronaut, too. Only he wasn’t just dressed like a pilot. He was a pilot. He was only sixteen years old and he already had his private pilot’s license. When I was his age I could barely drive a car, and he was already flying airplanes. I started pestering him with questions, and he had his whole plan laid out: his application to the Air Force Academy, what kind of jets he wanted to train on, the whole nine. The twenty-two-year-old Ivy League graduate was desperately hoping to learn something, anything, from a sixteen-year-old kid. I felt like an idiot.
Spaceman Page 3
