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February 8 - February 11, 2022
Nothing you do on this planet can ever truly prepare you for what it means to leave it.
It takes eight and a half minutes to make it into orbit. Eight and a half minutes is a long time to sit and wonder if today is going to be the day you get it.
You’re moving at 17,500 miles per hour, but your inner ear is telling your brain that you’re perfectly still; your vestibular system works on gravity, and without any gravity signals coming in, the system thinks you’re not moving. So you have this sensation like you’re lurching forward but then you come to a stop when the engines cut. You feel like you’re sitting straight up in a dining room chair, except that you’re still strapped down flat on your back. It’s completely disorienting.
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. What motivates you then? The important thing is having a passion, something you love doing, and the greatest joy in the world is that you get to wake up every day and do it. For him it was flying. He said, “Yeah, I got to fly to the moon, but I also got to fly the X-15.” Just the fact that he got to go out and fly those planes every day, that’s what had made him the happiest.
Sally Ride had been chosen to be the first American woman in space,
He told me that whatever you do in life, it can’t just be about making money. It’s important that you work to make the world a better place, that you help improve the lives of the people around you.
It was something I needed to do in order to realize it wasn’t what I wanted to do.
I realized much later in life that the reason this decision between MIT and IBM was so agonizing was because it wasn’t really about choosing a career; it was about deciding who I was, which part of myself I wanted to be, and that’s the hardest decision any of us has to make.
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I knew right then that I wanted to be a part of something that meaningful. I wanted to have something I was so passionate about that I’d be willing to risk everything for it. I wanted to know that if I ever got killed, I got killed doing something worthwhile.
You only have one life. You have to spend it doing something that matters.
Life is funny. I’d applied to the wrong graduate program, but that eventually led me to the right grad program. I’d taken what I thought was the wrong undergraduate major, and that was the thing that set me apart and allowed me to find my niche. I don’t know if there are any lessons to take from that except to realize that the things you think are mistakes may turn out not to be mistakes. I realized that wherever you are, if you make the most of what you’ve got, you can find a way to keep moving forward.
It was strange, but I felt like everything was going to be okay. The end of my story was not yet written, and I still had the chance to make it extraordinary.
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.
I owe everything I’ve ever accomplished to the people around me—people who pushed me to be the best version of myself.
But if I failed this time, at least I’d know I went down swinging and giving it everything I had. If you’re going to fail, that’s how you want to do it.
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.
The diligence and the mind-set you need to fly high-performance aircraft—or to fly in space—is totally different from the way you live in real life. There’s no margin for error.
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.
The single most fun thing to do was to go cloud surfing. When you’re flying cross country in a commercial jet, you have to fly at the altitude allowed by Air Traffic Control. There might be clouds or there might not, and it’s hard to tell how fast you’re going without any physical points of reference. In the practice area you can do whatever you want. You find the cloud deck and dive down and nestle right in and glide along the surface, wisps of vapor whipping by your head, giving you the sensation that you’re really moving. The best was coming up on a big cumulus, a giant, puffy marshmallow
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All of NASA’s facilities are cool, but the coolest, hands down, is Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
If you get caught up worrying about things you can’t control, you’ll drive yourself nuts. It’s better to focus on the things right in front of you. Identify the places where you can have a positive impact. Concentrate there and let the rest take care of itself.
every astronaut had to get certified in the basics of EVA by doing four runs in the pool. Before we could get in the water in the space suit, we had to pass a high-grade scuba certification. I had a civilian scuba license, but this was a more difficult test. The hardest thing for me was the unassisted ditch and don. You had to swim down to fifteen feet, ditch your mask and flippers, go back to the surface, tread water, then dive back down, don the gear, clear your mask, and get back to the surface with no water inside your mask.
It hit me at that moment: I was having an extraordinary experience. I was out at the edge of civilization. Yeah, I was cold and, yeah, it was hard, but I was doing something amazing in spite of myself. I was learning new things about myself. I was being given the chance to step outside of my everyday life and look at the world in a completely different way.
The world that had seemed so small growing up in Franklin Square was now vast and wide-open and filled with incredible, beautiful things.
Going to space doesn’t make you an astronaut. Being an astronaut means you’re ready to go to space.
The Hubble stands right up there with the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China as one of the great engineering triumphs in human history. It’s named for Edwin P. Hubble, the astronomer who discovered that galaxies like ours exist outside the Milky Way and first established that the universe is expanding—the scientific breakthrough that led to the big bang theory.
The Hubble was built by Lockheed Martin in California, and several of its instruments were built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado.
Newman floating above me, hanging out with this grin on his face like Check this out. Behind his head was Africa. According to my suit’s biometric sensors, I have a normal resting heart rate of 50 or 60 beats per minute. The moment I saw the Earth it spiked to 120.
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. One thing I was not prepared for was how blue it is, how much water there is. Rick Mastracchio, a veteran spacewalker, once described it to me by saying, “You’re always over the Pacific.”
And it’s true. The Earth is three-quarters water, and it feels like it. You’re up there and it’s water, water, water. Then there’s Africa and, poof, it’s gone in a few minutes and then it’s water, water, water again.
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.
The Hubble orbits around the Earth once every ninety-seven minutes.
When night comes in space, you feel it before you see it. The temperature swing from 200 degrees Fahrenheit to −200 degrees Fahrenheit occurs in an
You see the stars, of course. You can see the whole universe. At night, without the sun, space becomes this magical place. In space, stars don’t twinkle. Because there’s no atmosphere to fog your view, they’re like perfect pinpoints of light.
Stars are different colors, too, not just white. They’re blue, red, purple, green, yellow. And there are billions of them. The constellations look like constellations. You can make out the shapes and see what early astronomers were getting at with their descriptions. The Southern Cross was my favorite. And the moon feels like it’s right there. It’s not a two-dimensional white disc anymore. It looks like a ball, a gray planet. You can see the mountains and craters clearly. It feels closer than it is. You can see the gas clouds of the Milky Way. You’re in the greatest planetarium ever built.
The way we experience sunrise on Earth is so gradual. The black outside your window slowly turns to gray. You see a few glimmers of light reflecting off the buildings across the street. In space there is literally a line that bisects the Earth. On one side of it there is darkness. On the other side there is light. The line sweeps west, swiftly and steadily, coming across Europe, across the Atlantic, across Florida, across Texas. I watched this line coming toward me. Then I looked past it up toward the sun. Then I looked back at the line again and realized: The line isn’t moving. The sun isn’t
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“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.
In space I could see the Earth in relation to the stars and the sun and the moon. The Earth is a planet. It’s a spaceship.
We’re zipping around the universe, hurtling through the chaos of space with asteroids and black holes and everything else, and we think we’re safe but, boy, we are right out there in the middle of it.
The Earth is a spaceship, and we’re all space travelers.”
I know that sun is staying right where it is and it’s me and these buildings and this street and this planet that are spinning round and round and hurtling through the void. And the fact that that happens every day, the fact that we exist, is an astonishing thing.
I know that might sound strange. There are so many horrible problems here: war, hunger, killing, suffering. But heaven is supposed to be this beautiful, perfect place, and from up there I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful, more perfect than this planet. We might discover life in other solar systems someday, but for now there’s nothing but chaos and blackness and desolation for billions of light-years
years in every direction. Yet here in the middle of all that is this magnificent place, this brilliant blue planet, teeming with life. It really is a paradise. It’s fragile. It’s beautiful. It’s perfection. You have to stop and ask yourself: What in creation could possibly be better than this?
When I flew on that mission, Gabby was eight and Daniel was six. Looking down on the Earth from space, I started thinking about the planet as a father, as a parent. When you have kids, you want to give them everything. You try to find the best house in the best neighborhood. If you can afford to give your kids their own room, you try to fix it up as best you can. You get those blackout curtains so it’ll be dark when they need to nap. You put nice toys in there for them to play with. You give them a home. And my thought looking down at the Earth was Wow. How much God our Father must love us
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NASA flipped us in the flight order. We got their spot. They got ours. We came back. They didn’t.
The fact that something bad hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean the possibility of failure isn’t present,
the right person isn’t about being perfect; it’s about being able to handle whatever life throws at you.
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.
