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Becoming an astronaut, someone who reliably makes good decisions when the consequences really matter, takes more than a phone call.
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.
An astronaut is someone who’s able to make good decisions quickly, with incomplete information, when the consequences really matter.
But I did get in touch with the fact that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.
Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything.
Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying: it’s productive.
It’s not easy for hyper-competitive people to talk openly about screw-ups that make them look foolish or incompetent. Management has to create a climate where owning up to mistakes is permissible and colleagues have to agree, collectively, to cut each other some slack.
One reason we’re able to keep pushing the boundaries of human capability yet keep people safe is that Flight Rules protect against the temptation to take risks, which is strongest when momentum has been building to meet a launch date.
Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.
“How can I help us get where we need to go?” You don’t need to be a superhero. Empathy and a sense of humor are often more important, as I was reminded during the most arduous survival training I ever did, in central Quebec with five other astronauts.
On the ISS, however, the goals are fuzzier: keep the experiments going, maintain the Station.
The trick to working well with him was to understand that the problems were his, not mine, and they all seemed to stem from his insecurity. He was unable to view his colleagues as anything other than competitors out to destroy him, who therefore needed to be squashed like bugs.
Helping someone else look good doesn’t make me look worse.
In a crisis, the “why” is irrelevant.
“Boldface” is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life. We say that “boldface is written in blood” because often it’s created in response to an accident investigation.
don’t assume you know everything, and try to be ready for anything.
On Earth, it’s just a given that if you put a fork on the table, it will stay there. But remove that one variable, gravity, and everything changes.
When I closed my eyes, for instance, I occasionally saw very faint bursts of light: cosmic rays—high-energy particles from some distant sun racing across the universe and striking my optic nerve like a personal lightning bolt.
Loneliness, I think, has very little to do with location. It’s a state of mind. In the center of every big, bustling city are some of the loneliest people in the world. I’ve never felt that way in space. If anything, because our whole planet was on display just outside the window, I felt even more aware of and connected to the seven billion other people who call it home.
Throughout that five-and-a-half-hour spacewalk, I felt a bit like a choreographer probably does while watching dancers perform; there was a sense of involvement and responsibility, a feeling of shared risk and reward, but also a necessity to detach and trust them to do their jobs properly.
