Riding Rockets

written on November 14, 2026, read 2017

You know that picture that keeps circulating on social media, showing the bullet holes in fighter planes that returned home during the Second World War? It’s meant to illustrate the fallacies that arise from survivorship bias. The story behind it is usually that the statistician Abraham Wald realised you shouldn’t armour the areas with holes, but those where no bullet holes were found after the flight – because planes hit there had evidently not come back. Then again: the picture was only created much later. Wald worked it out from dull numbers and formulas. I find that far more impressive: in a picture, it’s quickly obvious even to a casual observer; hidden in a jumble of numbers, not so much.

Actually, you don’t have to go any further than the nearest bookshop. There’s always a corner with biographies of people who achieved something in their lives. Becoming an astronaut, for example, or a Nobel laureate.

But Chuck Palahniuk is absolutely right: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t.”

And there are no books in the bookshop about those who don’t make it. I don’t think there’s a book about the first person who only just missed out on the Space Shuttle programme. Or a book called “How I Narrowly Failed to Win the Nobel Prize in Medicine”.

We like success stories, even though stories of failure might teach us far more. That’s what self-help books are for, but most of them are just full of fortune-cookie wisdom. And even those are basically survivorship bias on display. “Think positive and drink a glass of apple cider vinegar every morning” is written by people for whom the method worked. Nobody writes about how it simply made them feel sick and the positive thinking stopped at the first sip.

Maybe I should write a book: “Eat an Apple First Thing at Easter”. It won’t help everyone, but maybe it’ll make me a millionaire. Just to prove Chuck wrong.

I don’t know whether I should find the stories of people who tell you they almost didn’t make it better or worse. Mullane’s book is one such example. He writes about his fear of not making it into the programme. Better, because stories like that show you don’t have to be perfect. Worse, because … for heaven’s sake … you made it into space. Several times.

On the surface, it sounds a bit like: “Look at me, I’m full of bullet holes, and I still made it.”

Until it occurred to me that the book is actually about something else: the man was an engineer and flew in Vietnam as a weapon systems officer. And yet he was constantly afraid of not being good enough. Not without reason. He had to beat around 8,000 other candidates and then, on top of that, actually get a flight, which from his point of view was by no means certain.

I also have the impression that he struggled hard with the fact that Judy Resnik died in the Challenger disaster. Four of the seven people killed in that disaster came from his astronaut class. At this point, “Why am I actually here?” becomes “Why am I actually still here?”.

I think there’s a second story behind the picture of the bullet holes in the plane. Namely, the story of the people who came back in their planes, look at the holes and ask themselves why, of all people, they were the lucky ones. I also believe that some of them knew intuitively, even before Wald, where the planes needed armour. Mullane may be just the right person to speak to that. He came back from 134 missions over Vietnam. Many others didn’t. In his book about the technical and organisational background of the Challenger disaster, Allan McDonald reports that there had already been problems with the O-rings before. I fully understand anyone who ever flew on a shuttle and asks themselves afterwards: “Why didn’t the O-ring burn through on my flight?”

Incidentally, Mullane had “bullet holes” quite literally, too. On his flight with STS-27, a great many tiles of the thermal protection system were damaged. One tile was missing entirely. Between the successful landing and an outcome like Columbia’s last flight as STS-107, there was apparently nothing but a mounting plate.

The book was written after the Columbia disaster. Mullane writes about it in the epilogue – along with other “close calls”. Chapters 34 and 35, which deal with the damage and the landing, are hard to read once you know about the parallels.

Perhaps the book isn’t really about “How I made it from my father’s toolbox to the Space Shuttle”, but about: how do I cope with this nagging doubt?

Not a book for those just starting out, but for those who have achieved something in their field, are objectively good and still constantly think that others are better.

Perhaps the message of this book is: no matter how far you get, no matter how good you are, this doubt never goes away. But you can live with it. And make it into space. Three times. Even if fortune¹ may give things a hefty nudge in one direction or the other at times. Because that’s simply part of life, too.

And that’s an answer that holds even if you’re not an astronaut, but just an ordinary person asking themselves: why am I where I am, when so many others around me are no longer here?

PS: This was actually meant to be a piece for my Thoughts series. A rant against all those self-help books and biographies of people who made it. Somehow, though, I ended up drifting into a book review – and that’s why it’s here now.