An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth Read online

  And it did. We were forced to speak the language, and we had great evening get-togethers with our neighbors that featured music, dancing and communal shashlik, the delicious Russian version of barbecue. Memorably, one of NASA’s local drivers, Valodya, decided to initiate me into the semi-mystical process of selecting, cutting and preparing the meat for shashlik, which takes half a day, followed by just two days to recover. There was vodka to bless the meat, Moldovan cognac to toast the genealogy of the swine, Russian beer to sip while cutting cubes of semi-frozen pork, red wine to marinate the mixture and yourself, and, as the day went on, increasingly emotional speeches about the beauty of raw meat and the bond of kinship between men. Valodya and I chopped up 170 pounds of meat as well as whole bags of onions and tomatoes, then mixed in dusty pouches of herbs and spices as we drank every bottle of liquid in his home, all while watching grainy soccer on a 10-inch TV. By the end of the evening there were five great teeming buckets of fermenting pork to be thrown on the fire the next day, we were closer than family (a good thing, as I left my coat, hat, camera and keys at Valodya’s place) and I took great pride in not throwing up in the van that came to take me home. Best of all, the time-honored recipe we so carefully followed remains a complete secret, as I can’t really remember exactly what we did.

  However, it would be disingenuous to pretend that I viewed the job in Russia solely as an entertaining foreign adventure. The Shuttle was already slated for retirement and the Soyuz would, by the end of the decade, be the main mode of transportation to the ISS. Clearly, the partnership between the U.S. and Russia was going to become increasingly important. Learning the language and figuring out how Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, operates was all part of getting ready for the big changes everyone knew were coming, and being sure that I was still qualified to fly. Just in case.

  It’s never either-or, never enjoyment versus advancement, so long as you conceive of advancement in terms of learning rather than climbing to the next rung of the professional ladder. You are getting ahead if you learn, even if you wind up staying on the same rung. That’s why I asked if I could be trained to fly the Soyuz. I was interested in the vehicle itself—it’s so different from the Shuttle—though I knew my chances of actually getting to fly it were about the same as my chances of jamming on stage with Elton John. A North American would have to be in space with a completely incapacitated Russian commander in order to ever be allowed to fly the thing. And before that, you’d have to be assigned to a mission. A long line of dominoes would have to fall in a very unusual way, in other words.

  I thought that maybe it would pay off one day—but if not, hey, flying a Soyuz was an interesting thing to know how to do and maybe I’d pick up skills that would transfer to some other area. So I got qualified to be a flight engineer cosmonaut and to perform spacewalks in the Russian spacesuit. That extra training ate into my free time, obviously. But it also wound up giving me insight into the Russian system, which is significantly different from ours in terms of its greater emphasis on academic mastery before you ever start simulating. Understanding their perspective wound up helping me in my day job, especially when I was trying to negotiate conflicts between our space program and theirs. I’ve never been called on to command the Soyuz nor spacewalk for Russia, and I never will be. But I’m still glad I know how.

  Some astronaut training is very much like going to school: you sit in a classroom with an instructor, get tested and receive grades. But we also train on computers and in simulators that are full-scale mock-ups of actual spacecraft. At JSC, my favorite place to train is in the pool. Sometimes we’re in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab to develop hardware and test new procedures for future missions. Sometimes we’re trying to work out solutions to problems faced by astronauts who are currently on orbit; on Earth, where the stakes are low, we have a lot more latitude to experiment. But we also do a lot of training in the lab because floating in water is as close as we can get on Earth to floating in microgravity and it allows us to practice EVAs. I really feel like a full-fledged astronaut in the pool: I’m wearing a spacesuit, my breathing is assisted just as it is during a spacewalk—it’s realistically evocative. It is also physically exhausting, but I never tire of it—I spent about 50 full days practicing in the pool before my first spacewalk in 2001. After six hours in the water, I have no trouble falling asleep at night.

  A surprising amount of my training has been esoteric, once-in-a-lifetime kind of stuff it would be hard not to love. In the summer of 2010, for instance, I did some work with the international research team at Pavilion Lake in British Columbia. It’s a beautiful, clear freshwater lake, the bottom of which is studded with microbialites: rock structures of all different shapes and sizes that look a lot like coral. Microbialites were very common for about two billion years of Earth’s early history but are quite rare today. So the purpose of the Pavilion Lake Research Project is to try to figure out how they are forming in order to understand more about the origins of life on Earth. It’s kind of like exploring another planet, being down there at the bottom of the lake looking at these things, so the international research team decided it made sense to get astronauts involved. As a result, I got qualified as a DeepWorker pilot. The DeepWorker is an amazing little one-person vehicle, a bit like a personal submarine, that is so fun to operate that some (wealthy) people buy them as toys. You drive with your feet—one pedal moves you vertically, the other horizontally—and manipulate the vehicle’s robotic arm with your hands. It’s otherworldly, being in your own little waterproof bubble 200 feet underwater, filming and gathering samples of structures that are directly linked to the beginning of life on Earth.

  This kind of work is a natural fit for astronauts. We’re trained to operate vehicles that require hand, eye and foot coordination in a hostile environment, without slamming into anything. And NASA and the CSA are interested in the project because the study of microbialites may provide tools that will help us identify ancient forms of life on other planets—and because the DeepWorker is an analogue for the kinds of vehicles we may use someday to collect samples on the Moon, an asteroid or Mars. The astronauts who wind up doing that work will need to know how to be the on-the-ground hands and eyes for scientists back on Earth who are counting on them to gather the right information and samples. So the goal is to learn lessons at Pavilion Lake about how to train astronauts to be geologists—not great geologists, just good enough ones—because that makes a lot more sense than trying to train leading geologists to be astronauts.

  These are long-range goals, obviously. I’m never going to the Moon or Mars. I may not even be alive when someone else does. A lot of our training is like this: we learn how to do things that contribute in a very small way to a much larger mission but do absolutely nothing for our own career prospects. We spend our days studying and simulating experiences we may never actually have. It’s all pretend, really, but we are learning. And that, I think, is the point: learning.

  My first space flight, to Mir was in 1995. At the time, it was a big deal because I was the first and only Canadian ever to go on board. No one even remembers that mission today, and Mir has long since been deorbited and burned up in the atmosphere. My first flight is irrelevant to everyone but me. I can let that crush me and spend the rest of my life looking back over my shoulder, or I can maintain attitude. Since that choice is mine, I’ll keep on getting ready to play “Rocket Man.”

  Just in case.

  3

  THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING

  “HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH YOUR FEAR?”

  It’s one of the questions I’m asked most often. When people think about space exploration, they don’t just picture Neil Armstrong stepping off the ladder of the Lunar Module and onto the Moon. They also remember the smoke plume etched in the sky after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch, and the startling, fiery bursts of light as Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, raining down metal and human remains. These spectacularly violent images of space flight h
ave been engraved on public consciousness as deeply as the joyfully triumphant ones.

  Naturally then, when people try to imagine what it feels like to sit in a rocket with the engines roaring and firing, they assume it must be terrifying. And it would be terrifying if you were plucked off the street, hustled into a rocket ship and told you were launching in four minutes—and oh, by the way, one wrong move and you’ll kill yourself and everybody else. But I’m not terrified, because I’ve been trained, for years, by multiple teams of experts who have helped me to think through how to handle just about every conceivable situation that could occur between launch and landing. Like all astronauts, I’ve taken part in so many highly realistic simulations of space flight that when the engines are finally roaring and firing for real, my main emotion is not fear. It’s relief.

  At last.

  In my experience, fear comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what’s about to happen. When you feel helpless, you’re far more afraid than you would be if you knew the facts. If you’re not sure what to be alarmed about, everything is alarming.

  I know exactly how that feels, because I’m afraid of heights. When I stand near the edge of a cliff or look over the railing of a balcony in a high-rise, my stomach starts tumbling, my palms sweat and my legs don’t want to move even though the rising panic in my body insists that I get back to safety. Right now. That physical response doesn’t bother me, though. I think everyone should be afraid of heights. Like fearing pythons and angry bulls, it’s a sensible self-preservation instinct. But I recognize it seems incongruous for a pilot/astronaut to be afraid of heights. How can I possibly do my job when just being up high triggers primal fear?

  The answer is that I’ve learned how to push past fear. Growing up on the farm, my brothers and sisters and I used to go out to our barn, where the grain corn was stored, and climb up to the rafters, then jump down into the corn, just to feel the way the dried kernels suddenly rushed up around our feet and legs, like deep, loose, rounded gravel. So long as we landed feet-first and balanced, we would come to a smooth stop. As we gained confidence, we leapt from higher and higher rafters, until we were jumping from two or three stories up, daring each other, daring ourselves. My fear was there always, strongly, but I wasn’t immobilized by it. I always managed to make myself jump. I think I was able to do it because of the gradual buildup in terms of height, the progressive sense of confidence rooted in actual experience and the simple fact that practice made me more skilled.

  But my fear of heights didn’t go away. When I was a teenager, my dad used to take me flying in his biplane. In the summertime it was warm enough to take the canopy off and fly open cockpit, with nothing at all between us and the sky—or the ground, when my dad flew upside-down and did aerobatics. Initially, suspended headfirst, thousands of feet above the ground, restrained from falling only by a seat belt, I was paralyzed by terror. My hands and arms reflexively braced against the sides of the cockpit, as if holding on would hold me in. Every muscle in my body was tensed, vibrating, and there was a rushing feeling, almost like a noise, going up and down the back of my skull.

  Yet I didn’t fall out of the plane. The seat belt attached in five places and kept me pinioned, rock-solid, in my seat. My eyes told me that nothing was keeping me from plummeting to my death, but with experience, I started to be able to override that sensation with reason: I was actually just fine, I wasn’t going to fall out of the plane. Eventually the fear that I might faded.

  I’m still scared to stand at the edge of a cliff. But in airplanes and spaceships, while I know I’m up high, I’m also sure I can’t fall. The wings and structure and engines and speed all succeed in keeping me up, just as the surface of the Earth holds me up when I’m on the ground. Knowledge and experience have made it possible for me to be relatively comfortable with heights, whether I’m flying a biplane or doing a spacewalk or jumping into a mountain of corn. In each case, I fully understand the challenge, the physics, the mechanics, and I know from personal experience that I’m not helpless. I do have some control.

  People tend to think astronauts have the courage of a superhero—or maybe the emotional range of a robot. But in order to stay calm in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, all you really need is knowledge. Sure, you might still feel a little nervous or stressed or hyper-alert. But what you won’t feel is terrified.

  Feeling ready to do something doesn’t mean feeling certain you’ll succeed, though of course that’s what you’re hoping to do. Truly being ready means understanding what could go wrong—and having a plan to deal with it. You could learn to scuba dive in a resort pool, for instance, and go on to have a wonderful first dive in the ocean even if you had no clue how to buddy breathe or what to do if you lost a flipper. But if conditions were less than ideal, you could find yourself in serious danger. In the ocean, things can go wrong in one breath, and the stakes are life or death. That’s why in order to get a scuba license you have to do a bunch of practice dives and learn how to deal with a whole set of problems and emergencies so that you’re really ready, not just ready in calm seas.

  For the same sort of reasons, trainers in the space program specialize in devising bad-news scenarios for us to act out, over and over again, in increasingly elaborate simulations. We practice what we’ll do if there’s engine trouble, a computer meltdown, an explosion. Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on—to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences—really works. After a few years of doing that pretty much daily, you’ve forged the strongest possible armor to defend against fear: hard-won competence.

  Our training pushes us to develop a new set of instincts: instead of reacting to danger with a fight-or-flight adrenaline rush, we’re trained to respond unemotionally by immediately prioritizing threats and methodically seeking to defuse them. We go from wanting to bolt for the exit to wanting to engage and understand what’s going wrong, then fix it.

  Early on during my last stay on the ISS, I was jolted to consciousness in the middle of the night: a loud horn was blaring. For a couple of seconds I was in a fog, trying to figure out what that unpleasant noise was. There were four of us in the American segment of the Station then, and like prairie dogs, we all poked our heads up out of our sleep pods at the same time to look at the panel of emergency lights on the wall that tell us whether we should be concerned about depressurization, toxicity or some other potentially fatal disaster. Suddenly all of us were wide awake. That deafening noise was the fire alarm.

  A fire is one of the most dangerous things that can happen in a spaceship because there’s nowhere to go; also, flames behave less predictably in weightlessness and are harder to extinguish. In my first year as an astronaut, I think my response to hearing that alarm would have been to grab an extinguisher and start fighting for my life, but over the past 21 years that instinct has been trained out of me and another set of responses has been trained in, represented by three words: warn, gather, work. “Working the problem” is NASA-speak for descending one decision tree after another, methodically looking for a solution until you run out of oxygen. We practice the “warn, gather, work” protocol for responding to fire alarms so frequently that it doesn’t just become second nature; it actually supplants our natural instincts. So when we heard the alarm on Station, instead of rushing to don masks and arm ourselves with extinguishers, one astronaut calmly got on the intercom to warn that a fire alarm was going off—maybe the Russians couldn’t hear it in their module—while another went to the computer to see which smoke detector was going off. No one was moving in a leisurely fashion, but the response was one of focused curiosity, as though we were dealing with an abstract puzzle rather than an imminent threat to our survival. To an observer it might have looked a little bizarre, actually: no agitation, no barked commands, no haste.

  The next step is to gather, so we joined the Russians in their part of the Station to start working the problem. How serious was the threat?
So far, all the signs were reassuring. We couldn’t smell smoke or see flames. Maybe one little wire had melted somewhere, or the detector was responding to dust. We talked to Mission Control in Houston and in Moscow, but as we investigated, checking the module where the detector had been triggered, it seemed more and more likely that we were dealing with a simple malfunction. Finally everyone agreed that it had been a false alarm, and we headed back to our sleep stations. An hour later, when the fire alarm sounded again, we repeated the warn, gather, work protocol just as before. The response was similarly calm, though not perfunctory—possibly something had been slowly smoldering for the past hour. As it turned out, nothing had. The detector was a lemon, that’s all. I remember thinking, “That was just like a sim, only better, because now I get to go to sleep.”

  I doubt anyone’s heart rate increased by more than a beat or two while we were dealing with those fire alarms, even during the first minutes when the threat of a raging inferno seemed most real. We felt competent to deal with whatever happened—a sense of confidence that comes directly from solid preparation. Nothing boosts confidence quite like simulating a disaster, engaging with it fully, both physically and intellectually, and realizing you have the ability to work the problem. Each time you manage to do that your comfort zone expands a little, so if you ever face that particular problem in real life, you’re able to think clearly.