Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

by Mike Massimino

Nothing you do on this planet can ever truly prepare you for what it means to leave it.

The full realization of what we were about to do was starting to dawn on me. The veterans, the guys who’d flown before, they were in front of me, high-fiving each other, getting excited. I stared at them like Are they insane? Don’t they see we’re about to strap ourselves to a bomb that’s going to blow us hundreds of miles into the sky?

I always love the description of the space shuttle as being strapped to a bomb - because it is.

From the bottom of the launch tower, you take an elevator up to the launch platform at ninety feet. You make one last pit stop at a bathroom up there—the Last Toilet on Earth, they call it—and then you wait.

Right after we launched, I realized that all the training we’d had on what to do if something went wrong during launch—how to bail out, how to operate the parachutes, how to make an emergency landing—I realized that all those years of training were completely pointless. It was just filler to make us feel okay about climbing into this thing. Because if it’s going down, it’s going down. It’s either going to be a good day or it’s going to be a bad day, and there is no in-between. There are emergency placards and safety signs all over the interior of the shuttle, telling you what to do and where to go. That stuff is there to give you something to read before you die.

Morbid laughter?

Then, once I felt acclimated, it was time to go to work. I reached up and took my helmet off and—just like I’d watched Tom Hanks do in Apollo 13—I held it out and let it go and floated it in the air in front of me, weightless.

He talked to us for about fifteen minutes, and the whole time he didn’t say anything about walking on the moon, not one word about being an astronaut—nothing. Instead he talked about his days as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California, flying the X-15, the hypersonic rocket plane that set speed and altitude records in the 1960s by flying 50 miles above the Earth, the outer limit of the atmosphere, the edge of space. That was how Neil Armstrong thought of himself: as a pilot. Not as the first man to walk on the moon, but as a guy who loved to fly cool planes and was grateful for the opportunity to have done it. By focusing on his test pilot days and not on the moon landing, I think he was trying to tell us that life is not about achieving one great thing, because once that thing is over, life keeps going.

Franklin Square was blue-collar. Lots of guys worked for the city. A few guys you didn’t quite know what they did, but they drove a big Lincoln and would stick wads of money in your pocket at weddings.

lol

I got clobbered in Circuits and Systems, an electrical engineering course. The midterm counted for a quarter of the final grade. The average for the class was somewhere in the eighties. I got an eleven.

I sat there in that reception area, watching the crash footage play over and over again on the television, and that was when it hit home for me: You only have one life. You have to spend it doing something that matters.

My mother told me to plant a statue of St. Joseph in the ground; he’s the patron saint of getting your house sold, apparently.

lol what

Anytime you take a hard turn in the jet, the centripetal force will push the blood out of your head and down into your lower extremities. You’ll become light-headed and possibly pass out—it’s called a g-force–induced loss of consciousness, or GI-LOC. You have to grunt and tighten up the muscles in your body to constrict the blood flow so the blood stays in your head. It’s the craziest feeling. You go into the turn and you can feel the light-headedness start. Then your peripheral vision starts to fail—you get tunnel vision. You’re being pinned into your seat. Sweat’s pouring down your forehead. You grunt and you tighten up and the blood pushes back up and your eyes come back. You find your equilibrium. You’re training your body to endure the limits of what the human body is capable of.

wild

Flying the T-38s, running simulations, studying the systems—month by month, piece by piece, they’re building you up, transforming you into someone who’s ready to walk out onto that launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center and strap yourself to the top of a bomb.

Kregel pitched in with a few words from orbit, too. He sent me an e-mail from the shuttle: “How’s your dad doing? I’ve been praying for him up here. I’m closer to the Big Guy, and there’s less static, so I think it goes directly through.”

hahaha

Very few jerks have been to space.

The Hubble was built by Lockheed Martin in California, and several of its instruments were built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. (It’s part of the same company that makes the Ball mason jars you have in your kitchen.)

“Hubble guys are the Jedi. The coolest.”

There’s an old NASA saying that Newman taught me: “No matter how bad things appear,” he said, “remember, you can always make them worse.”

Eating in space was fun. All your food is pre-prepared. You don’t have to cook it. It’s dehydrated and you add water and heat it up. You select your own menu, too. Spaghetti and meatballs, macaroni and cheese, shrimp cocktail, steak, lasagna. The hot meals are in pouches, and you cut the pouch open and eat. You have to be careful, because everything floats, but that’s the fun part. Popping M&M’s in the air and going after them and chomping them like Pac-Man. I actually gained weight in space, which no one ever does. The doctors were confounded, but I just loved eating up there.

When people ask me what it feels like the first time you spacewalk, what I tell them is this: Imagine you’ve been tapped to be the starting pitcher in game seven of the World Series. Fifty thousand screaming fans in the seats, millions of people watching around the world, and you’re in the bullpen waiting to go out. But you’ve never actually played baseball before. You’ve never set foot on a baseball diamond before. You’ve spent time in the batting cages. You’ve run drills and exercises with mock-ups and replicas. You’ve spent months playing MLB on your Sony PlayStation, but you’ve never once set foot on that mound. And guess what? The Series is tied and the whole season is on the line and everyone is banking everything on you. Now go get ’em.

It’s also possible to drown in a suit. If the water and cooling systems malfunction, fluid can leak into the suit, which has actually happened. Luckily the spacewalker got back inside in time.

Chris Hadfield!

When you’re orbiting the Earth on an EVA, you’re in your space suit flying at 17,500 miles per hour. You’re moving fast, but it doesn’t feel like you’re moving at all. You’re falling, really. That’s what orbiting is: You’re falling toward the Earth but you’re also moving so fast parallel to the planet that the edge of the Earth keeps rotating away from you as you fall, so you keep going round and round.

Yes! Learning this made space travel and orbiting make so much more sense to me.

It was a night pass. We were over the Pacific, and everything was totally black but for the city lights on Hawaii and a few other islands below. As we came up on California I felt a slight warmth and I knew the next day pass was coming. I looked across the country to see Atlanta all bright and lit up with everyone getting coffee and going to work, but right below me Phoenix and Los Angeles and San Diego were still in complete darkness. I could imagine the tourists at the Grand Canyon, patiently waiting for sunrise to get their perfect golden shot.

At that moment I realized that, for my entire life, my perception of reality had been wrong. Every morning you wake up and sit and have your cup of coffee and you watch the sun rise. You don’t have any sensation of the Earth moving beneath you. You think you’re sitting still as the sun rises in the east and crosses above and sets in the west. But the sun isn’t moving. Yes, the sun and the solar system are flying through the galaxy at 45,000 miles per hour. But relative to you and me and the Earth, the sun isn’t going anywhere. The whole way we talk about our place in the universe is wrong. “Sunrise” and “sunset” are words that don’t make any sense. It’s like the song from Annie: “The sun’ll come out / Tomorrow.” No it won’t. The Earth will rotate toward the sun tomorrow. That may not be as poetic, but it’s reality.

“It’s a planet,” I said. “It’s not what we thought it was back home. It’s not this safe cocoon, man. We’re out here spinning in all this chaos. The Earth is a planet. The Earth is a spaceship, and we’re all space travelers.”

Returning from space, the shuttle normally hits the Earth’s atmosphere at Mach 25, producing enormous amounts of heat and friction. Coming back from Hubble, because we were higher, we actually hit Mach 26, which means that the Hubble astronauts have flown the highest and fastest of any astronauts in the shuttle era.

Mach 26! Holy shit

Out on the tarmac, the ground crew was already hard at work, taking the Columbia orbiter through its postflight inspection. Soon our spaceship would go back into the Orbiter Processing Facility to be readied for its next flight, STS-107. Shuttle missions are numbered in the order they’re assigned, not in the order they fly, which is why we went first despite having the higher flight number, 109. What had happened was this: The crew for 107 was assigned about six months before we were. Theirs was a routine science mission, doing experiments in the Spacehab research module in the shuttle payload bay. Columbia needed to be overhauled, and there were some issues that forced 107 to delay. After that initial bump, they kept getting pushed. The experiments they were doing weren’t time critical, but the station assembly flights were. So those missions kept taking precedence, pushing 107 further and further back until eventually they ran up against us, the next crew assigned to fly on Columbia. Since Hubble was the higher priority, management looked at the flights and said, “Okay, let’s swap ’em,” and 107 got bumped again. NASA flipped us in the flight order. We got their spot. They got ours. We came back. They didn’t.

I could see what they would be saying in the science books of the future. This would be my legacy. My children and my grandchildren would read in their classrooms: We might have known if there was life on other planets, but Gabby and Daniel’s dad broke the Hubble.

Hahahaha (I know it turned out okay so I can laugh)

When you’re in space and you want to set something down, like a spoon or a Sharpie, you don’t actually put it down. There is no down. You set it out at arm’s length and let go and float it there where it’ll be handy if you need it again. On my second day home I was unloading the groceries from the store. I grabbed a bag from the back of the car, took it out, stood up, set it out about shoulder high, and let go. It didn’t float.

My whole life I’d been restless. I always had to do more, reach for the next challenge, the next opportunity. Now I could stop and take a breath. I’d done everything I’d set out to do. Which is a wonderful feeling but also a terrifying one.

People always ask me if I miss being in space. “Only when I’m mowing the lawn,” I say.

Whenever I’m asked, I say the greatest thing the shuttle did was that it put a lot of people in space—fifty, sometimes sixty people a year when the program was at its peak. Every person who goes to space, every person who gets to peek around the next corner, is someone with the potential to help change our perspective, change our relationship to the planet, change our understanding of our place in the universe. Which is why we go to space to begin with.

My childhood dream came true, but now I have a new one. I dream that some of these young people, while they’re out there clicking around, maybe they’ll find out about this book and find a way to get their hands on it—and when they do, they’ll know that even if you’re a skinny kid from Long Island who’s scared of heights, if you dream of walking among the stars you can do it. They’ll know that finding a purpose, being dedicated to the service of others and to a calling higher than yourself, that is what’s truly important in life. They’ll be able to close their eyes and imagine what it’s like in space, and when they open them again, they’ll look up at the sun and the moon and the Milky Way and see them with the sense of awe and wonder that they deserve.