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It’s not difficult to make yourself work hard when you want something the way I wanted to be an astronaut, but it sure helps to grow up on a corn farm.
Both of them had grown up on farms and viewed the downtime in a pilot’s schedule as a wonderful opportunity to work themselves to the bone while carrying on the family tradition.
They simply expected that if we really wanted something, we’d push ourselves accordingly—after we’d finished our chores.
At 15 I got my glider license, and at 16, I started learning to fly powered planes.
one reason our marriage has flourished is that
Helene enthusiastically endorses the concept of going all out in the pursuit of a goal.
As I have discovered again and again, things are never as bad (or as good) as they seem at the time.
It probably didn’t hurt my case that I was the top graduate that year at TPS and had led the team whose research project got top honors.
No one at the paper could think of a title for the article, though, so they called out to the test center, and whoever answered the phone said, “Just call it ‘Canadian Wins Top Test Pilot’ or something to that effect.” A friend mailed me a copy of the article, which was a nice keepsake as well as a reality check for my ego. The headline that ran? “Canadian Wins Top Test Pilot or Something to that Effect.”
I opted for the chair and answered some questions that were fairly obviously intended to reveal little more than severe psychoses. If I remember correctly, he asked whether I’d ever wanted to kill my mother.
everyone was trying to project casual magnificence.
You need to learn to think like an astronaut. I was just getting started.
In the van, we can see the rocket in the distance, lit up and shining, an obelisk. In reality, of course, it’s a 4.5-megaton bomb loaded with explosive fuel, which is why everyone else is driving away from 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.
am in space, weightless, and getting here only took 8 minutes and 42 seconds.
Give or take a few thousand days of training.
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.
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.
Today, NASA looks for people who can be locked in a tin can for six months
Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.
“Be ready. Work. Hard. Enjoy it!” It fits every situation.
Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying: it’s productive.
In any field, it’s a plus if you view criticism as potentially helpful advice rather than as a personal attack.
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.
good leadership means leading the way, not hectoring other people to do things your way. Bullying, bickering and competing for dominance are, even in a low-risk situation, excellent ways to destroy morale and diminish productivity.
you can also kill one another without too much effort.
We also signed endless stacks of crew photos, enough for each citizen of Russia, it seemed.
treating other people as walking disease vectors),
The desire to explore is in our DNA. It’s what humans have been doing since the first dissatisfied teenager left the family cave to see what was over the next hill.
(for some reason, there is no sim at JSC where you learn to corral a bunch of small, weightless objects while also holding a hose and attempting to relieve yourself).
Imagine an instructor waxing lyrical about shutter speeds while a bunch of fighter pilots are saying, “Just tell me which button to push again,” and you have a fair idea what was going on in the classroom.
When I got to the ISS in 2012, I could point and shoot, but that was about it.
He’d helped me do events on sites like Reddit, where people could and did ask me anything, ranging from technical questions about engines to general questions like whether astronauts are religious (they run the gamut from devout to atheist, but whatever the personal belief system, space flight tends to reinforce it)
Kristin, who is a genius at statistical analysis, was helping him by analyzing, say, the correlation between retweets and new followers (there wasn’t one).
If you start thinking that only your biggest and shiniest moments count, you’re setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time.
