Kindle Notes & Highlights
This is not a book about how to become an astronaut. It’s a book about how what I’ve learned as an astronaut can help anyone become whatever they want to be.
“But you’ll never get to do that, Mike. Becoming an astronaut is impossible.” So few people were picked to actually become astronauts that the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against me. “It’s absurd,” I thought. “It’s a one-in-a-million shot.”
Once you give up, you know the outcome with certainty. You have a 100 percent probability of not achieving your goal. That night I came very close to giving up, as I had on many other occasions.
“What was it that kept you trying? Why didn’t you give up?” My answer is that I could never imagine giving up my dream like others who applied once to NASA, got turned down, and decided that being told no was too painful to even try again. I tell people to remember that one in a million is not zero, that there is always a chance as long as you try. But once you give up, you know the outcome with certainty. It’s a rule
Successful people are not those who never failed. Successful people are those who never let failure stop them.
It’s also worth remembering that pursuing a dream can lead to a happy outcome, even if it doesn’t work out the way you originally planned. If I’d never been selected as an astronaut, I still would have all the benefits of what I did along the way.
The education and experiences I accumulated would have led me to a wonderful career and life, even if that life was not one of an astronaut. Furthermore, I would know that I tried to accomplish my dream, and the only reason I didn’t get it was because of forces far beyond my c...
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If I give up now, knowing that I won’t know what might have happened if I’d kept trying, how will I feel ten years from now? Twenty years from now? Fifty years from now? Even if I never succeed at my goal, will my efforts in trying to reach that goal get me to a better place than where I am now, regardless of the outcome? Am I wasting my talents and abilities by not continuing to try?
What example do I want to set for others: giving up or trying against all odds to succeed? Am I giving up for the right reasons, because I’m up against forces beyond my control, or am I simply afraid of failure? If I do let this dream go for the right reasons, what dream do I want to pursue instead?
And remember: as long as you try, there’s always the slightest opportunity for success, and you owe it to yourself to give your dream a chance to come true.
Then, finally, it came. Late one morning, I caught sight of the mailman, raced out to the street, opened the mailbox, and pulled out a large manila envelope from the Johnson Space Center. I tore it open right there on the sidewalk, thinking, “Oh,
Despite growing up on Long Island and being surrounded by the ocean my entire life, I hated swimming.
My first week at NASA was pretty much like your first week at any job: filling out lots of paperwork for Human Resources about health plans, retirement plans, child care, and all the rest of it. But we also got to meet Neil Armstrong, which was not like anyone’s first week at any other job on Earth.
had Heidi Piper, a Navy diver, giving me pointers that had helped her in her career. I had Piers Sellers, a PhD earth scientist from England, showing me how he learned an easy way to swim the breaststroke as a schoolboy across the pond.
We all got in the water and went through the different exercises. First the long-distance survival swim, then the rescue swim, the drownproofing, and, finally, after we were all good and tired from all of that: treading water.
Stop beating yourself up. America loves to celebrate the successful individual, the brilliant inventor, and the maverick entrepreneur. But the myth of the lone genius is just that, a myth. Very rarely is anything great ever accomplished by one person. It took thousands of men and
women working together to make Neil Armstrong the first man on the moon, and Neil always went to great lengths to remind people of that fact. (Notably, the reason the Apollo 11 mission patch is the only patch in NASA history not to have the crew members’ names on it is because Neil and his crew wanted the design to be representative of everyone who had worked toward the success of the mission.)
We all have shortcomings. Find a partner who makes up for yours. If you’re a weak swimmer, find a strong one, and don’t be ashamed to admit that you need them. Teams are stronger when we all acknowledge the ways in which we need one another.
Always give the credit to the team, because you don’t need it anyway. The main reason to do anything is to be of service to a larger purpose. You do it for the satisfaction of the job well done, for the feeling of accomplishment you get from achieving a major life goal or even just executing a task on your checklist.
When the team succeeds, you succeed. With the complex world we all live in, it is impossible to accomplish great things on your own. In both our professional and personal lives, none of us can go through the adventures of life alone. Find your team, gather them around you, and hold them close.
WHEN THE ASTROnaut Program expanded to include civilians who had no military flying experience, one of the fundamental questions NASA faced was “Should we train pilots to be scientists or train scientists to be operators and copilots?”
The idea was that if you learn to fly in a simulator, in the back of your mind you know you’re always going to walk away from it. Whereas when you fly in an actual plane, you encounter actual hazards, which gives you the opportunity to learn how to operate in life-and-death situations like the ones you’re going to be dealing with in space.
On these T-38 training flights, the gap in experience level between the person in the front and the person in the back can be enormous, and that was certainly the case on one of my very first flights. I was flying with my classmate Jim “Vegas” Kelly. Vegas was an Air Force fighter pilot and test pilot who’d logged more than 3,800 flight hours in more than thirty-five different aircraft.
Vegas was looking to log some night-flying time, so the plan was to leave at the end of the day and return after sunset.
We landed at Lackland, refueled, took a break, and got ready for the flight home.
By the time we’d prepared to taxi out to the runway, it was nighttime and flying always gets more difficult and more confusing in the dark. It’s similar to driving a car at night; you lose situational awareness with the reduced visibility.
At that point we were cleared to taxi to the runway but not yet cleared for takeoff. Then, just as the tower cleared us for takeoff, they gave us a new heading. “After takeoff,” they now told us, “turn to heading 170.”
Seconds after Vegas made the wrong turn, the tower controller came on the radio. “NASA 955. TURN RIGHT, NOW! IMMEDIATE RIGHT TURN TO HEADING 170!!” Vegas immediately spun us right and veered off to the correct heading. He instinctively realized what I had missed, that we were headed straight into a midair collision with another aircraft; the reason our heading had changed was because an inbound aircraft was using that trajectory to land.
“The number one thing you need to learn from tonight,” Vegas said very forceful and direct, “is that you have to speak up when you see something that could be wrong. It was my bad for missing the new heading, that’s on me and could have gotten us killed. But we also almost got killed tonight because you didn’t speak up.”
“Mass,” he said, “it doesn’t matter that I have thousands of hours in the air and you have only a couple, you need to speak up. If you’re wrong, that’s okay. I’ll look at the situation and if you’re wrong, I’ll tell you you’re wrong. But I’ll still thank you for speaking up. Got it?” “Got it.”
