Quotes by Mike Mullane

“Its the most dangerous manned spacecraft ever flown. It has no powered-flight escape system... Basically the bail-out system we have on the shuttle is the same bail-out system a B-17 bomber pilot had in World War II.”

“That was the true tragedy of Challenger. Nothing was learnt. Only janitors and cafeteria workers at NASA were blameless in the deaths of the Challenger seven. Columbia was a repeat of Challenger, where people had a known design problem and launched anyway.”

“Since the autopilot was holding the shuttle with its top to the Earth, I now had the planet in my face. In all my other life experiences speed meant noise. Now I was traveling at nearly 5 miles per second and there was only silence. It was as if I were hovering in a balloon.”

We were like the Mount Everest climbers stepping over frozen corpses from prior climbing disasters in our quest for the summit. Like those climbers, we were motivated by a fear far greater than death—the fear of not reaching the top.