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

by Mike Massimino

In From the Earth to the Moon, a lot of what Verne predicted about space travel was accurate, from the type of metal they used to build the spaceship to the way they launched with the rotation of the planet to gain extra speed. And he was imagining all of it back in 1865!

Getting to space isn’t something you can do on your own, and I was on my own. I had lots of friends, but I didn’t have any space friends. I needed space friends.

We have this idea in America of the self-made man. We love to celebrate individual achievement. We have these icons like Steve Jobs and Henry Ford and Benjamin Franklin, and we talk about how amazing it is that they did these great things and built themselves up out of nothing. I think the self-made man is a myth. I’ve never believed in it. I can honestly say that I’ve never achieved anything on my own.

People sometimes think having a kid gets in the way of pursuing a dream. I think it’s the opposite. Having her made me want to pursue my dream even harder because I wanted her to be able to do the same. I didn’t want to tell her about how to live life—I wanted to show her.

this was no longer the days of astronauts racing Corvette convertibles across the California desert; I was rocking out in our Nissan Quest minivan.

Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition was a disaster. His ship was destroyed. He never reached the South Pole. Yet today he’s revered because he kept his men together through such a catastrophic situation. He kept them focused on what needed to be done. He kept their minds active. He kept morale up. Shackleton was a great leader, and in any remote, difficult situation, leadership is key.

I actually gained weight in space, which no one ever does. The doctors were confounded, but I just loved eating up there.

The space station is 250 miles above Earth. From that vantage you can’t fit the whole planet in your field of vision. From Hubble you can see the whole thing. You can see the curvature of the Earth. You can see this gigantic, bright blue marble set against the blackness of space, and it’s the most magnificent and incredible thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

In space, sunlight is nothing like sunlight as you know it. It’s pure whiteness. It’s perfect white light. It’s the whitest white you’ve ever seen. I felt like I had Superman vision.

“Digger,” I said, “you’re never going to believe it.” “What?” “The Earth is a planet.” “What?” He looked confused. “Mass, are you okay?” “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.”

while I waited for him I took a moment and turned and glanced over my shoulder at the Earth again. As I looked down, the thought that entered my head was This is something I’m not supposed to see. This is a secret. I’m not supposed to be up here.

It’s possible that Radiohead’s OK Computer was recorded specifically to be listened to in space, and that everyone who’s heard it on Earth is missing the full experience.

The way that NASA started telling the story of space after Apollo, we made the mistake of thinking that the public was invested in the mission, in the objectives of science and space travel.

The general public doesn’t care that much about space—they care about people in space because they can identify with them.

The Soviets actually landed on the moon before we did. They had unmanned probes up there years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin showed up. Does anyone remember? Does anyone care? No. America won the race to the moon because America put people on the moon.

O’Keefe said he was canceling the flight out of consideration for our safety, but nobody asked us. We were still willing to go.

All those skills, all that knowledge and institutional memory, it’s gone forever. If you lose the team, you lose everything.

The reason we run through these tasks so many times on the ground is not simply to learn how to do the job right but to find out everything that might go wrong. Depending on the complexity of the space walk, so many potential problems can occur. The last thing you want is to encounter a problem you didn’t think of or hadn’t prepared a solution for. But you inevitably do. Drew and I would talk about this in terms of cars. “There’s always something wrong with your car,” he’d say. “You just don’t know what it is yet.” Is there a belt that’s about to go bad? A weakness in the front left tire that’s about to cause a blowout? You don’t know, but the demons are out there, waiting for you. Hopefully they only come at you one at a time.

Because being the right person isn’t about being perfect; it’s about being able to handle whatever life throws at you.

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.

In the fall of 2014, I left NASA to become a full-time professor at Columbia. My main class, and my most popular one, is Introduction to Human Space Flight. The way I see it, I’m training my replacements.