An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth Read online

  At the launch pad, we ride the elevator up—this one moves at a good clip—and one by one we crawl into the vehicle on our hands and knees. Then the closeout crew helps strap me tightly into my tiny seat, and one of them hands me a note from Helene, telling me she loves me. I’m not exactly comfortable—the spacesuit is bulky and hot, the cabin is cramped, a distinctly un-cushion-like parachute and survival kit is wedged awkwardly behind my back—and I’m going to be stuck in this position for a few hours, minimum. But I can’t imagine any place else I’d rather be.

  After the ground crew checks the cockpit one last time, says goodbye and closes the hatch, it’s time for pressure checks of the cabin. Banter ebbs: everyone is hyper-focused. This is all about increasing our chances of staying alive. Yet there’s still a whiff of make-believe to the exercise because any number of things could still happen—a fault in the wiring, a problem with a fuel tank—to downgrade this to just another elaborate dress rehearsal.

  But as every second passes, the odds improve that we’re going to space today. As we work through huge checklists—reviewing and clearing all caution and warning alarms, making sure the multiple frequencies used to communicate with Launch Control and Mission Control are all functional—the vehicle rumbles to life: systems power up, the engine bells chime for launch. When the auxiliary power units fire up, the rocket’s vibration becomes more insistent. In my earpiece, I hear the final checks from the key console positions, and my crewmates’ breathing, then a heartfelt farewell from the Launch Director. I go through my checklist a quick hundred times or so to make sure I remember all the critical things that are about to happen, what my role will be and what I’ll do if things start going wrong.

  And now there are just 30 seconds left and the rocket stirs like a living thing with a will of its own and I permit myself to move past hoping to knowing: we are going to lift off. Even if we have to abort the mission after a few minutes in the air, leaving this launch pad is a sure thing.

  Six seconds to go. The engines start to light, and we sway forward as this huge new force bends the vehicle, which lurches sideways then twangs back to vertical. And at that moment there’s an enormous, violent vibration and rattle. It feels as though we’re being shaken in a huge dog’s jaws, then seized by its giant, unseen master and hurled straight up into the sky, away from Earth. It feels like magic, like winning, like a dream.

  It also feels as though a huge truck going at top speed just smashed into the side of us. Perfectly normal, apparently, and we’d been warned to expect it. So I just keep “hawking it,” flipping through my tables and checklists and staring at the buttons and lights over my head, scanning the computers for signs of trouble, trying not to blink. The launch tower is long gone and we’re roaring upward, pinned down increasingly emphatically in our seats as the vehicle burns fuel, gets lighter and, 45 seconds later, pushes past the speed of sound. Thirty seconds after that, we’re flying higher and faster than the Concorde ever did: Mach 2 and still revving up. It’s like being in a dragster, just flooring it. Two minutes after liftoff we’re hurtling along at six times the speed of sound when the solid rocket boosters explode off the vehicle and we surge forward again. I’m still completely focused on my checklist, but out of the corner of my eye, I register that the color of the sky has gone from light blue to dark blue to black.

  And then, suddenly, calm: we reach Mach 25, orbital speed, the engines wind down, and I notice little motes of dust floating lazily upward. Upward. Experimentally, I let go of my checklist for a few seconds and watch it hover, then drift off serenely, instead of thumping to the ground. I feel like a little kid, like a sorcerer, like the luckiest person alive. I am in space, weightless, and getting here only took 8 minutes and 42 seconds.

  Give or take a few thousand days of training.

  That was my first launch, on Space Shuttle Atlantis, years ago now: November 12, 1995. But the experience still feels so vivid and immediate that it seems inaccurate, somehow, to describe it in the past tense. Launch is overwhelming on a sensory level: all that speed and all that power, then abruptly, the violence of momentum gives way to the gentle dreaminess of floating on an invisible cushion of air.

  I don’t think it would be possible to grow accustomed to such an intense experience or be blasé about it. On that first mission, the most seasoned astronaut on board was Jerry Ross, a frequent flyer on the Shuttle. It was his fifth space flight (he subsequently flew twice more, and is one of only two astronauts who’ve ever launched to space seven times, the other being Franklin Ramón Chang Díaz). Jerry is quietly competent and immensely calm and controlled, the embodiment of the trustworthy, loyal, courteous and brave astronaut archetype. Throughout our training, whenever I was unsure what to do I’d look over to see what he was doing. On Atlantis, five minutes before liftoff I noticed he was doing something I’d never seen him do before: his right knee was bouncing up and down slightly. I remember thinking, “Wow, something really incredible must be about to happen if Jerry’s knee is bouncing!”

  I doubt he was conscious of his own physical reactions. I sure wasn’t. I was far too focused on the novelty of what was going on around me to be looking inward. In fact, during ascent, I was checking tables, doing my job, tracking everything I was supposed to track when I suddenly became aware that my face hurt. Then I realized: I’d been smiling so much, without even being aware of it, that my cheeks were cramping up.

  More than a quarter-century after I’d stood in a clearing on Stag Island and gazed up at the night sky, I was finally up there myself, orbiting Earth as a mission specialist on STS-74. Our main objective: to construct a docking module on the Russian space station Mir. The plan was use the Shuttle’s robot arm to move a newly built docking module up out of its nest in Atlantis’s payload bay; install the module on top of the Shuttle; then rendezvous and dock it and Atlantis with the station so that future Shuttle flights would have a safer, easier way to get on board Mir than we did.

  It was an enormously complicated challenge and we had no way of knowing whether the plan would even work. No one had ever tried to do such a thing before. As it happened, our eight-day mission didn’t come off without a hitch. In fact, key equipment failed at a critical moment and nothing proceeded exactly as planned. Yet we managed to construct that docking module anyway, and leaving the station I felt—the whole crew felt—a sense of satisfaction bordering on jubilation. We’d done something difficult and done it well. Mission accomplished. Dream realized.

  Only, it hadn’t been, not fully anyway. In one sense I felt at peace: I’d been to space at last and it had been even more fulfilling than I’d imagined. But I hadn’t been given a lot of responsibility up there—no one is on the first flight—nor had I contributed as much as I would have liked. The difference between Jerry Ross and me, in terms of what we could contribute, was huge. Training in Houston, I hadn’t been able to separate out the vital from the trivial, to differentiate between what was going to keep me alive in an emergency and what was esoteric and interesting but not crucial. There had been so much to learn, I’d just been trying to cram it all into my brain. During the mission, too, I was in receive mode: tell me everything, keep teaching me, I’m going to soak up every last drop.

  So despite having traveled 3.4 million miles, I didn’t feel I’d arrived at my destination. An astronaut was something I was still in the process of becoming.

  Space flight alone doesn’t do the trick. These days, anyone who has deep enough pockets and good enough health can go to space. Space flight participants, commonly known as space tourists, pay between $20 and $40 million each to leave Earth for 10 days or so and go to the International Space Station (ISS) via Soyuz, the compact Russian rocket that is now the only way for humans to get to the ISS. It’s not as simple as getting on a plane; they have to complete about six months of basic safety training. But being a space flight participant is not really the same as being an astronaut.

  An astronaut is someone who’s able to make good decisi
ons quickly, with incomplete information, when the consequences really matter. I didn’t miraculously become one either, after just eight days in space. But I did get in touch with the fact that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I still had a lot to learn, and I’d have to learn it the same place everyone learns to be an astronaut: right here on Earth.

  Sometimes when people find out I’m an astronaut, they ask, “So what do you do when you’re not flying in space?” They have the impression that between launches, we pretty much sit around in a waiting room in Houston trying to catch our breath before the next liftoff. Since you usually only hear about astronauts when they’re in space, or about to be, this is not an unreasonable assumption. I always feel I’m disappointing people when I tell them the truth: we are earthbound, training, most of our working lives.

  Fundamentally, astronauts are in the service profession: we’re public servants, government employees who are tasked with doing something difficult on behalf of the people of our country. It’s a responsibility we can’t help but take seriously; millions of dollars are invested in our training, and we’re entrusted with equipment that’s worth billions. The job description is not to experience yee-haw personal thrills in space, but to help make space exploration safer and more scientifically productive—not for ourselves but for others. So although we learn the key skills we will need to know if we go to space, like spacewalking, we spend a lot of our time troubleshooting for other astronauts, helping to work through technical problems that colleagues are experiencing on orbit and also trying to develop new tools and procedures to be used in the future. Most days, we train and take classes—lots of them—and exams. In the evenings and on weekends, we study. On top of that we have ground jobs, supporting other astronauts’ missions, and these are crucially important for developing our own skills, too.

  Over the years I’ve had a lot of different roles, from sitting on committees to serving as Chief of International Space Station Operations in Houston. The ground job I held the longest and where I felt I contributed the most, though, was CAPCOM, or capsule communicator. The CAPCOM is the main conduit of information between Mission Control and astronauts on orbit, and the job is an endless challenge, like a crossword puzzle that expands as fast as you can fill it in.

  Mission Control Center (MCC) at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) has got to be one of the most formidable and intellectually stimulating classrooms in the world. Everyone in the room has hard-won expertise in a particular technical area, and they are like spiders, exquisitely sensitive to any vibration in their webs, ready to pounce on problems and efficiently dispose of them. The CAPCOM never has anything close to the same depth of technical knowledge but, rather, is the voice of operational reason. I started in 1996 and quickly discovered that having flown even once gave me insight into what it made sense to ask a crew to do in space, and equally important, when. If one of the experts at Mission Control suggested the crew do X, I would be aware of some of the logistical difficulties that someone who’d never been up there might not consider; similarly, the crew knew I could empathize with and understand their needs and challenges because I’d been to space myself. The CAPCOM is less a middleman, though, than an interpreter who is constantly analyzing all changing inputs and factors, making countless quick small judgments and decisions, then passing them on to the crew and the ground team in Houston. It’s like being coach, quarterback, water boy and cheerleader, all in one.

  Within about a year, I was Chief CAPCOM, and in total worked 25 Shuttle flights. The job had only one drawback: when a launch was delayed, as they often were at Cape Canaveral because of the weather, it could wreak havoc with family vacation plans. Sadly, CAPCOMS cannot telecommute. Other than that, however, I viewed it as a plum assignment, one learning opportunity after another. I learned how to summarize and distill the acronym-charged, technical discussions that were going on over the internal voice loops in Mission Control in order to relay the essential information to the crew with clarity and, I hoped, good humor. When not on console at JSC, I trained with crews to see firsthand how the astronauts interacted and what their individual strengths and weaknesses were, which helped ensure that I could advocate effectively for them when they were in space—and also that I stayed up-to-date in terms of both training and using complex equipment and hardware. I loved the job, not least because I could feel, see and remember my direct contribution to every mission. After each landing, as that crew’s plaque was hung on the wall at MCC, I could look up and see not just a colorful symbol of collective accomplishment, but a personal symbol of challenges overcome, complexity mastered, the near-impossible achieved.

  When I went to space again on STS-100 in April 2001, it was with a much deeper understanding of the whole puzzle of space flight, not just my own small piece of it. I’m not going to pretend that I wouldn’t have welcomed the chance to go to space earlier (American astronauts were, understandably, at the front of the line for Shuttle assignments—the vehicle was made in the U.S.A. and owned by the U.S. government). But without question, being on the ground for six years between my first and second flights made me a much better astronaut and one who had more to contribute both on Earth and off it.

  I began training for STS-100 a full four years before we were scheduled to blast off. Our destination, the International Space Station, did not even exist yet; the first pieces of the Station were sent up in 1998. Our main objective was to take up and install Canadarm2, a huge, external robotic arm for capturing satellites and spaceships, moving supplies and people around and, most important, assembling the rest of the ISS. The Shuttle would continue to bring up modules and labs, and Canadarm2 would help place them where they were supposed to go. It was the world’s most expensive and sophisticated construction tool, and getting it up and working would require not one EVA (extra vehicular activity, or spacewalk) but two—and I was EV1, lead spacewalker, though I’d never been outside a spaceship in my life.

  Spacewalking is like rock climbing, weightlifting, repairing a small engine and performing an intricate pas de deux—simultaneously, while encased in a bulky suit that’s scraping your knuckles, fingertips and collarbone raw. In zero gravity, many easy tasks become incredibly difficult. Just turning a wrench to loosen a bolt can be like trying to change a tire while wearing ice skates and goalie mitts. Each spacewalk, therefore, is a highly choreographed multi-year effort involving hundreds of people and a lot of unrecognized, dogged work to ensure that all the details—and all the contingencies—have been thought through. Hyper-planning is necessary because any EVA is dangerous. You’re venturing out into a vacuum that is entirely hostile to life. If you get into trouble, you can’t just hightail it back inside the spaceship.

  I practiced spacewalking in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, which is essentially a giant pool at JSC, for years. Literally. My experience both during my first flight and at Mission Control had taught me how to prioritize better, how to figure out what was actually important as opposed to just nice-to-know. The key things to understand were what the outside of the ISS would be like, how to move around out there without damaging anything and how to make repairs and adjustments in real time. My goal in the pool was to practice each step and action I would take until it became second nature.

  I’m glad I did that, because I ran into some unanticipated problems during the spacewalk, ones I probably couldn’t have worked through if my preparation had been slapdash. Ultimately, STS-100 was a complete success: we returned home on Space Shuttle Endeavour tired but proud of what we’d accomplished. Helping to install Canadarm2 and playing a part in building this permanent human habitat off our planet—which is all the more remarkable because it has required the participation and cooperation of 15 nations—made me feel like a contributing, competent astronaut.

  That feeling didn’t diminish even slightly when I proceeded to spend the next 11 years on Earth. I hoped to go back to space, yes, but I wasn’t sitting around in space explorers’ purgatory, doing nothing. In Star City, where
Yuri Gagarin trained, I worked as NASA’s Director of Operations in Russia from 2001 to 2003, and I learned to live the local life, really embrace it, in order to understand the people I worked with and be more effective in the role. That experience came in handy when, a decade later, I wound up living and working closely with Russian cosmonauts. Not only did I speak their language, but I knew something about myself: it takes me longer to understand when the culture is not my own, so I have to consciously resist the urge to hurry things along and push my own expectations on others.

  From Star City I moved back to Houston to become Chief of Robotics for the NASA Astronaut Office during one of the lowest points in NASA’s history. It was 2003, right after the Columbia disaster; the Shuttle was grounded, construction on the ISS had therefore ceased, and many Americans were grimly questioning why tax dollars were being spent on such a dangerous endeavor as space exploration in the first place. It seemed possible that while we might overcome the technical hurdles and make the Shuttle a much safer vehicle, we might not be able to roll back the tide of public opinion. Yet we managed to do both, a good reminder of how important it is to retain a strong sense of purpose and optimism even when a goal seems impossible to achieve.

  Impossible was, frankly, what a third space flight was starting to look like for me. But just as I had back in college, I decided it made sense to be as ready as I could be, just in case. And so from 2006 to 2008, I was Chief of International Space Station Operations in the NASA Astronaut Office, responsible for everything to do with selection, training, certification, support, recovery, rehab and reintegration of all ISS crew members. Interacting with space agencies in other countries and focusing so intensively on the ISS turned out to be good preparation. I got the nod for another mission: this time, a long-duration expedition.