We were the crème de la crème. Then we got off the elevator. Just like that, we were nobodies. We weren’t even called astronauts but ASCANs (pronounced exactly as you might imagine), meaning “astronaut candidates.” Plebes. No hazing was required to knock us down a peg. Just looking around the office and seeing people we’d idolized for years did the trick. When I was assigned to a desk beside John Young—one of the original Gemini astronauts, one of only a dozen men to walk on the Moon and the commander of the very first Space Shuttle flight—I didn’t feel like I’d finally arrived. I felt like a
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