Get "Riding Rockets." Get it now.

I can't claim to have read all the astronaut memoirs, but that doesn't
keep me from saying this is the best yet. Mullane kept growing in the
15 years between leaving the corps and writing the book, and what ties
it all together is the perspective that brought -- on the byzantine
mission-assignment politics under Young and Abbey (and how and why
astronauts put up with it)... on Challenger and especially Judy
Resnik... on interminable pad delays and scrubs... on the Boyz &
Their Hijinx culture of military fliers ("we were from planet Arrested
Development").

Some of the memoirs leave you with the feeling that the author's life
since the last mission has been a static epilogue; this leaves just
the opposite feeling -- that he has come to understand much more than
he did at the time.

I especially liked the chapter on STS-27, the crew's concern about
tile damage (from an SRB nose cap) and Houston's underestimation: was
MCC really as confident as it sounded, or pulling a Glenn on them?
Watching the stray plasma plumes during re-entry -- brighter this
time? aluminum in them? The narration is very skillfully tied back to
that Mercury flight and forward to Columbia 2003.

Highly recommended.
.