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

by Mike Massimino

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.