Riding Rockets

Archival Summary & Scope

"Riding Rockets" by NASA astronaut Mike Mullane is a candid, humorous, and often raw memoir of life during the Space Shuttle era. Selected in the groundbreaking 1978 class—the first to include women—Mullane reveals the unfiltered reality behind NASA's heroic facade. He unflinchingly recounts bawdy antics, interactions with diverse colleagues, bureaucratic struggles, the emotional highs of orbit, and the heartbreak of the Challenger disaster. With brutal honesty, he critiques NASA's culture, including its sexism and managerial failures, making this a crucial cultural memoir of human spaceflight that explores the risks, camaraderie, mistakes, and awe that defined a generation of space explorers.