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space shuttle and NASA’s new mission would include. But it wouldn’t have mattered if we had known. If Dr. Kraft had explained exactly what we had just signed up to do—to be some of the first humans to ride uncontrollable solid-fueled rocket boosters, and to do so without the protection of an in-flight escape system, to launch satellites that didn’t really require a manned rocket, on a launch schedule that would stretch manpower and resources to their limits—it wouldn’t have diminished our enthusiasm one iota. For many of us, our life’s quest had been to hear our names read into history as astronauts. We wanted to fly into space. The sooner and the more often (and who gave a shit what was in the cargo bay), the better.

Chapter 7
    Arrested Development
    On my first official day as an astronaut candidate I faced two things I had never faced before: picking out clothes to wear for work and working with women. In my thirty-two years of life, beginning with diapers, there had always been a system to dress me. I had gone to Catholic schools for twelve years and worn the uniforms of that system. In four years at West Point I never had a piece of civilian clothing in my closet. The air force also told me what to wear. Not once on a school or work morning had I ever stood in front of my closet and pondered what I should wear that day. As a result, I was a fashion illiterate. And I wasn’t alone. I had already seen a handful of the veteran astronauts wearing plaid pants. Even I, completely clueless on the subject of style, sensed this might be a little too retro. When my children saw one of the plaid-panted victims, they hid their faces and giggled. To this day, whenever my adult children see a golfer wearing plaid, they’ll comment, “Hey, Dad, check it out…an astronaut.” A military astronaut might show up for a party dressed in a leisure suit or Sansabelt slacks and, most telling, no other military astronaut present would know there was anything even slightly amiss.
    Fortunately for my children, my limited wardrobe did not include plaid. Rather, my first attempt at workday attire required me to satisfactorily combine one of four solid-colored slacks with one of four solid-colored shirts. I failed. At the breakfast table my wife recoiled as if I had walked in with a nose ring. “You’re not going to work dressed like that, are you?” It was a question I would hear many times in the first few weeks of my NASA life. Donna even threatened to put Garanimals hang tags on my slacks and shirts. She would mock me: “The lions go with the lions and the giraffes go with the giraffes.” I had no problem with the suggestion. I thought it was an excellent idea.
    If I had no clue about how to dress myself, I was in another galaxy when it came to working with women. I saw women only as sex objects, an unintended consequence of twelve years of Catholic school education. The priests and nuns had pounded into me that females were equated with sex, and sex brought eternal damnation. Girls were never discussed in any other context. They were never discussed as real people who might harbor dreams. They were never discussed as doctors or scientists or astronauts. They were only discussed as “occasions of sin.” The shortcut to hell was through a woman’s crotch was all I learned about the female gender as a teenager. Their breasts would earn you an introduction to Beelzebub, too. In fact, just fantasizing about their breasts and their other parts (the soul-killing mortal sin of impure thoughts ) would also send you straight to hell. Only in marriage did the rules change. Then, sex was fine—productive sex. In marriage a woman achieved her highest state in life—getting on her back and producing children. “The primary purpose of marriage is procreation of children” was dogma in my wife’s 1963 “Marriage Course” curriculum guide from St. Mary’s High School.
    The same guide also includes a lesson on “Masculine and