Endurance

12

ONE HOT DAY in early July 1996, Leslie and I packed up our two cars and left Pax River for Houston. Samantha, almost two now, was a sprightly and adorable toddler. We found a house we liked quickly and moved in on August 1. Mark and his family moved to town after we did, since they were having a house built nearby.

In addition to getting my family settled and learning about the area, I was also working out a lot, running every day. I wanted to show up at NASA in good shape. There was part of me that felt like I was still trying out for the job, and in a sense I was—I hadn’t been assigned to a flight yet. I still thought of myself as a below-average guy stepping into an above-average role, and I knew I would have to impress some people if I was going to be among the first in my class to fly.

On the Friday night before our official Monday start date, we went to a party where we met all of my new classmates. We were ASCANs (pronounced “ass cans”), short for astronaut candidates (we would become full-fledged astronauts the first time we left the Earth’s atmosphere). The party was hosted by Pat Forrester, who was selected in our class but had already been stationed at NASA as an Army officer. Because he already knew his way around, he was our official class leader.

It wasn’t until that party that I learned our class would include international astronauts. There were thirty-five Americans and nine astronauts from other countries, which made us the largest astronaut class in NASA history. At the party, I was chatting with Mark and some other new classmates when I heard a man nearby I hadn’t met before, who was speaking with an accent. I figured he might be one of my foreign classmates, so I went up to him, stuck out my hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Scott Kelly.”

Before he could answer, a woman pushed him out of the way, stuck her hand out, and said, “I am your classmate. My name is Julie Payette.” The man she had pushed aside was her husband. They were both French Canadian, bilingual in French and English, and she had grown tired of people assuming her husband was the new ASCAN rather than her. She and I would go on to become great friends. I met so many people that night—not only my classmates, but their spouses and significant others, astronauts from previous classes, their partners, and other NASA people who worked in support of the Astronaut Office. It was exciting to know that we were going to be such a big part of one another’s lives, and maybe spend time in space together.

The first day on the job involved a lot of paperwork and learning the basic aspects of working for NASA. Jeff Ashby was the astronaut from the previous class in charge of getting us oriented. We were introduced to the rest of the Astronaut Office and shown where our desks would be. I was to share an office with my classmates Pat Forrester, Julie Payette, Peggy Whitson, and Stephanie Wilson.

Our training started out in classrooms, where all forty-four of us began to realize the magnitude of knowledge we were going to need. We heard lectures on geology, meteorology, physics, oceanography, and aerodynamics. We learned about the history of NASA. We learned about the T-38, the jets the astronauts fly.

Most of all, we learned about the space shuttle. We were given an overview of how the shuttle worked as a whole, and we got specific lectures on each of the many individual systems—their designs, their nominal operations, their possible malfunctions, and how we should respond to those. We worked through a number of different failures that could occur as we executed the procedures we would use on actual missions. We trained that way on the main engines, on the electrical system, on the environmental control and life support system. It was challenging to master all of it, but it became even harder when we moved on to the shuttle mission simulator, which integrated all these systems together during the mission phases: prelaunch, ascent, post-insertion, on-orbit operations, deorbit prep, entry, landing, and post-landing.

Our trainers hammered us with the malfunctions we could face during a real flight. A critical phase was post-insertion, the period of time just as the shuttle is getting into orbit. We have to convert a vehicle that has launched as a rocket into a working orbital spaceship—reconfiguring the computers, getting the enormous payload bay doors open so their radiators could cool the shuttle’s electrical systems, deploying the Ku-band antenna so we could communicate with the ground, deploying the robot arm, making sure everything was working properly, and getting ready for on-orbit operations.

By far the most challenging and complicated phase of shuttle training was ascent. On a real launch, when everything went right, the flight crew had very little to do besides monitoring the systems, but NASA had to prepare us for every eventuality. So this phase of flight revealed those who had learned their stuff and those who hadn’t. We trained for the orbit phase, since that was where we would spend the most time on a real mission. We practiced payload operations—for instance, deploying and then retrieving a satellite. We practiced rendezvous and docking with Mir (the International Space Station didn’t exist yet).

We trained to do deorbit prep, which is post-insertion in reverse: learning to take an orbiting spaceship and reconfigure it into something that could reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and land—a space plane. We worked on putting the antenna and robot arm away, closing the payload bay doors, getting the computers configured for the last phase of flight, then programming the deorbit burn to slow us down by just a few hundred miles an hour, which is enough to get us to reenter the atmosphere. As a pilot, I practiced reentry and landing thousands of times. We never stopped practicing. This is the moment in the mission when having something go wrong can be the most serious, so I had to be prepared to deal with anything. I remember the first reentry simulation I ever did: I was sitting in the pilot’s seat and an experienced astronaut was monitoring me. I felt a lot of pressure to perform well, since this was my first time trying to demonstrate my fledgling astronaut skills in front of a real astronaut. I messed up starting the auxiliary power units, which provided power for controlling the shuttle’s three engines and for moving the control surfaces on the shuttle, like the elevon, rudder, and body flap. The APUs lowered the landing gear and powered the brakes, so we couldn’t land without at least one. Because of the way I started them up, one of them probably would have exploded. Not a great start. I didn’t do particularly well at following procedures verbatim, either. I had been under the impression that the detailed procedures we were learning were more like guidelines; I was wrong. To top it all off, my landing was bad enough that it might have killed us all. The space shuttle is one of the hardest planes to land ever, so on that I got a bit of leeway. On all the other screwups, not so much.

The very complexity of the space shuttle was why I wanted to fly it. But learning these systems and practicing in the simulators—learning how to respond to the myriad of interrelated malfunctions in the right way—showed me how much more complicated this spacecraft was than anything I could have imagined. There were more than two thousand switches and circuit breakers in the cockpit, more than a million parts, and almost as many ways for me to screw up.

The amount I learned in order to go from a new ASCAN to a pilot on my first mission was, from what I could observe, an education comparable to getting a PhD. Our days were packed with classes, simulations, and other training. In the evenings, I would have a quick dinner with Leslie and Samantha, then get back to work studying. I went over notes from lectures and made a training notebook for myself that I could continue to study and add to as my education progressed. I spent at least one full day each weekend going over all of this material.

We went on field trips to different NASA centers—Ames in California, Glenn in Ohio, Goddard in Maryland, Michoud in Louisiana, Marshall in Alabama, headquarters in D.C., Kennedy in Florida. We needed to learn about what happens at each of these sites and how all of NASA’s projects work together, even the ones that didn’t directly affect the shuttle. As astronauts, we were going to serve as the public face for NASA, and we needed to be able to talk about everything NASA does. At the same time, it was important that the workers at these sites knew us as human beings whose lives would depend on their work.

My class had earned a reputation by this point for asking a lot of technical questions whenever we got the chance. In an atmosphere where forty-four people are vying for a small number of flight assignments, one of the ways to make an impression on our management was to ask complex questions that made clear how hard we’d been studying and what a strong grasp we had on the technical issues. Just before we went to Ames, NASA’s center for aerodynamic research, we were in a lecture when C. J. Sturckow, an astronaut from the previous class and a Marine Corps officer, burst into the room wearing his Marine camouflage uniform.

“Listen up,” he said from the front of the room. He took a giant knife out of its sheath and slammed it down on the table. “Everyone is getting tired of all of your questions! You think you sound smart, but you’re just slowing things down. When you go to Ames in a few days, I only want to hear yes-or-no questions like ‘Is this the biggest wind tunnel you have here at Ames?’ ” With that, he picked up his knife and left the room without uttering another word. Some people in our class were offended or weirded out by his militaristic display, but I appreciated the directness.

Generally speaking, each of us would be actively training for a mission every few years. In between, we had specific responsibilities within the Astronaut Office. Most of us were put in charge of a system on the shuttle: we were to learn everything about that specific system, take part in redesigning it or improving it, and represent the astronaut’s point of view with the engineers. This practice has been ongoing since Gemini days, when the spacecraft first became so complicated that it was impossible for one astronaut to know everything.

I was put in charge of the caution and warning system on the space station, which sounds pretty important until you consider the fact that the space station didn’t yet exist. I was trying to learn as much as I could about the space shuttle, because it was the vehicle I was preparing to fly. For the pilot and commander, there are so many seemingly insignificant errors that could result in the loss of the vehicle and crew—it was the most important thing for me to learn not to make those mistakes. So the space station was going to take a backseat in my mind.

Some of us were also assigned to phases of flight to gain a special expertise—in my case, the rendezvous phase. I was pleased with that, because I knew there was a good chance I would fly a mission that would rendezvous with a space station or a satellite someday, and this way I would be well prepared. I would receive rendezvous training well ahead of my classmates, which would have ramifications going forward.

The Astronaut Office was a busy place in those days with such a large new class adding our numbers to the already existing corps. Some very experienced astronauts were still around, and it was an honor to serve along with them. John Young, the Gemini-era astronaut who had been on my selection committee, was always in the astronaut gym, putting everyone to shame just by showing up. Another spaceflight legend, John Glenn, was assigned to his space shuttle flight not long after I became an astronaut. One day I had four-year-old Samantha with me at work because Leslie had a dental appointment, and as I was walking her around I saw Glenn working diligently in his office. I introduced myself and Samantha.

He looked up and said, “Hi, young lady. What are you doing today?”

“I’m going to lunch with my dad,” Samantha answered.

“What’s your favorite food?” he asked her.

“Macaroni and cheese,” she said.

Senator Glenn gave her a look of pleased surprise. He held up the papers he had been working on.

“Look right here,” he said. “I was just selecting my space food for my mission and I just wrote, ‘Macaroni and cheese.’ That’s my favorite, too!”

Another time, I had Samantha with me at a party, and I encouraged her to talk to John Young about his experience walking on the moon. Samantha approached him and said, “My dad says you walked on the moon.”

John responded, “I didn’t walk on the moon. I worked on the moon!”

More than a year later, we were watching a documentary about Apollo, and I pointed out John Young to Samantha. “You met him, remember? He walked on the moon.”

Samantha didn’t miss a beat: “Daddy, he didn’t walk on the moon, he worked on the moon.”

John Glenn completed his mission, in October 1998, after which I inherited his parking space and used it for the next eighteen years.

Leslie and Samantha took easily to life in Houston. Leslie was always good at making new friends, and she quickly became part of a tight circle of women in our neighborhood. I would often come home from work to find a group of five or six women clustered in the kitchen, drinking wine and eating cheese, talking and laughing. She also became the head of the astronaut spouses’ group, which was responsible for planning social events for the astronaut corps, especially the traditional parties in honor of the spouses of the crew that was flying next. They also helped out with meals, babysitting, and other favors for anyone in the group who had a special need, like a death in the family or a new baby. The role suited Leslie well.

AS PART OF my ASCAN training, I learned to fly the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA), a Gulfstream business jet that had been modified to re-create the approach profile and handling qualities of the space shuttle in the landing phase as closely as possible. Flight computers simulated the drag we would experience in the heavier, less agile orbiter by putting the engines in reverse while airborne. The left side cockpit and the controls had been designed to simulate the experience of landing the shuttle. The STA generally flew out of El Paso, Texas, so we would fly over there in a T-38, which took a little over an hour, get in the STA, then fly another thirty minutes to the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico. I did many practice approaches to the dry lake bed runways in that aircraft, stopping short of actually touching the wheels down. At first, we’d fly the STA every few weeks, learning to land the space shuttle. Eventually, we moved to flying every other month, then every quarter to maintain our proficiency, until we were assigned to a real mission.

I was in El Paso one day in March 1999, just having finished my ten practice landings and getting ready to fly back to Houston, when one of the senior shuttle commanders, Curt Brown, a tall guy with a receding hairline and a thick Tom Selleck 1980s mustache, came up to me. He had only spoken to me a couple of times before. He was known to be extremely technically competent, and his experience—five shuttle missions in six years—was nearly unequaled. But he also had the reputation of being arrogant and unfriendly to those not worthy of his attention. A high flight rate, training for missions one after another, practically without a break, can also bring burnout.

“Hey, come over here,” he said sternly. “I need to talk to you.”

I followed him into a private office, wondering what I had done to piss him off. He shut the door behind us, then turned and poked me in the chest three times while staring straight into my eyes.

“You better have your shit together,” he said to me, “because we’re flying in space in six months.”

I felt a couple of different things at once. One was: I’m fucking flying in space in six months!

Another was: Wow, what a shitty way to let someone know he’s got his first flight assignment.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ve got my shit together.”

Curt told me to keep this news a secret. I told my brother, of course.

A couple of days later, I was called in to see Charlie Precourt, the new chief of the Astronaut Office, along with Curt and French astronaut Jean-François Clervoy (we called him “Billy Bob” since “Jean-François” didn’t sound very Texan). Charlie looked very serious. He told Billy Bob and me that we were in trouble. A few months earlier, he said, we had screwed up on a T-38 flight and had drawn a flight violation from the FAA.

Because of my run-in with Curt earlier that week, and knowing that we were being assigned to a flight, I had a strong feeling that he and Charlie were just messing with us. Billy Bob didn’t know that, though, and all the color drained from his face. Once Curt and Charlie had had enough fun, Charlie said, “We’re just kidding, guys. You’ve both been assigned to STS-103 on Discovery. It’s going to be an emergency repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.”

Billy Bob was visibly relieved. Curt would command the mission, and we would be joined by John Grunsfeld, Mike Foale, Steve Smith, and Claude Nicollier. I was to be the only rookie on the crew and the first American in my class to fly. The primary goal was to fix the failing gyroscopes on the Hubble Space Telescope on four spacewalks, each more than eight hours long. Hubble needs at least three of its six gyroscopes to be working in order to make precise observations, and three had already failed.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been making observations of the universe since 1990. Until then, astronomers could never get a truly clear view of the night sky because of the distorting effect of the atmosphere, the same effect that causes stars to appear to twinkle. Observing stars and galaxies through the filter of our atmosphere was like trying to read a book underwater. Putting a telescope in orbit outside the atmosphere and past the reach of light pollution has changed the field of astronomy. By observing distant stars, scientists have been able to make discoveries about how fast the universe is expanding, how old it is, and what it is made of. Hubble has helped us to discover new planets in new solar systems and confirmed the existence of dark energy and dark matter. This one scientific instrument has revolutionized what we know about our universe, and the task of repairing it—which always brings the risk of damaging or even destroying its sensitive components—is an enormous responsibility.

Once our training was in full swing, we spent a lot of time in simulators. Running simulated missions is the only way for astronauts to get hundreds of hours of experience doing something that in reality we would get to do only a few times. The simulations re-created the experience as closely as possible—same screens, switches, and buttons; same uncomfortable metal-framed seats, same headsets, and same thick procedure books. The simulation supervisors devised fiendish scenarios for us to work through, such as multiple interrelated systems failing while other systems continued working just fine, though their sensors might erroneously report they had failed too. We practiced solving problems quickly. Often the simulations were designed so that one of us would be barraged with problems to test how we worked together as a team.

About halfway through our training, we were in a simulator dealing with a complex failure—all the cooling systems had gone down at once. Those controls were all on the left side of the cockpit, where the commander, Curt, was sitting. He was hit with one malfunction after another, but because he was so talented and experienced, he was able to identify and focus on the most critical issue. Simultaneously, a computer failed. This would normally be his responsibility too, but because I wasn’t as busy and could reach his keyboard myself, I decided to fix it for him by switching out the backup for the primary system. I typed in the commands while Curt’s head was still buried in cooling system problems. Item 16, execute, I typed.

A few minutes later, Curt got through his work with the cooling system. He looked at the display and saw that the computer failure had disappeared. He looked confused.

“What happened to the port failure on FF One?”

“Oh, I port-moded it for you,” I answered. As I spoke, I sensed this was not the answer he wanted to hear.

“You did what?”

“I port-moded it.”

A second went by—and then Curt turned toward me, which was difficult to do wearing a pressure suit while strapped tightly into his seat. He punched me on the arm as hard as he could.

“Don’t ever do that again!” he shouted.

“Ah, okay,” I said. “I won’t ever do that again.”

He’d made his point, and though I didn’t agree with his method, I appreciated his directness. I never touched any buttons or switches on his side of the cockpit again without his explicit approval.

EILEEN COLLINS BECAME the first woman to command a space shuttle mission, on Columbia, in July 1999. Once that flight got off the ground, we would become the prime crew, our launch date set for October 14, 1999. But there was a problem on Columbia during ascent. An electrical short disabled the center engine’s digital control unit. The engine continued to operate on its backup—a case of NASA’s redundancy saving the crew from what would have been a very risky attempt at an abort—but something had gone seriously wrong, and NASA needed to find out what it was before flying again. The Columbia mission was cut short, and when the shuttle was safely back on the ground, an investigation ensued.

It was revealed that wiring in the payload bay had been chafing against an exposed screw, a good reminder to everyone of how little it can take to cause a disaster. Further inspections revealed deteriorating wiring throughout the space shuttle fleet that would need to be addressed before any of the shuttles could fly again. That caused a delay in our launch date to November 19. As inspections and repairs to the wiring dragged on, we were delayed further, to December 2, then to December 6.

These delays were frustrating for everyone. It was mentally draining to keep working toward a date that slipped away, then bring our full energy to the next announced date. The December 6 launch date didn’t change as November went by, and we grew hopeful. We celebrated Thanksgiving with our families, then the next day we said our good-byes and went into quarantine. NASA’s quarantines were a bit different from the Russians’—they were more stringent in some ways and less stringent in others—but the underlying concept was the same: to isolate space travelers from germs before a launch in order to decrease the chances of us getting sick in space.

There were crew quarters at both Houston and the Cape, very similar in style to each other, where quarantined astronauts live. In both places, the crew quarters were more like an office than a hotel—spartan accommodations. The time when the shuttle was to rendezvous with the telescope would be in the middle of the night Florida time, so we had to adjust our sleep schedule significantly. In order to help us make the adjustment, the crew quarters had few windows, and the lights were kept glaringly bright during our waking hours. There were cooks to make us food and a gym to work out in.

We didn’t have a great deal to do once we were in quarantine—we had our checklists (about five feet tall when stacked on one another) to review. We had some of the spacewalking hardware and photography equipment to familiarize ourselves with. We had to sign crew photos to hand out to people who worked on the mission, at least a thousand of them. At the end of our workday, which was actually in the morning, we watched movies together.

While we were in quarantine, our launch date changed again, from December 6 to December 11. It was mildly annoying to know I had spent four days in quarantine that I could have spent at home, but we all understood that delays were part of spaceflight. Then we were delayed again, to December 16. By the morning of the sixteenth, we had been in quarantine for twenty days and were getting tired of it. We were ready to go to space or go home. Then the launch was scrubbed. Inspectors had found a possible problem with a weld in the external tank. Workers needed a day to make sure the issue had been resolved, so we were delayed to December 17.

That morning, I woke up and looked at the weather forecast. There would be a low cloud ceiling, rain, and possibly even lightning. The prediction of weather favorable for launch was only 20 percent go, not very good odds, but the weather in Central Florida could change quickly, so the countdown continued. Workers began filling the external tank, a process that takes hours. We got suited up and headed out to the launchpad. The countdown still continued; it seemed we might finally be going to space. We got strapped into our seats and started preparing the space shuttle to launch, the countdown continuing toward our planned liftoff time of 8:47 p.m. There are a few “holds” built into the countdown—points where extra time has been allowed so we can stop the clock and make sure everything is being done right without being rushed. One of these holds is at T-minus nine minutes, and it’s the last chance to review all the factors that go into deciding whether we are “go” or not. We kept at the T-minus nine hold for a long time, up to our planned launch time and past it. At 8:52 p.m., the launch director made the decision to scrub due to weather. We would try again the next day.

On December 18, we scrubbed again, this time without suiting up. At this point we had been in quarantine twenty-two days. If we’d known from the start how many delays were in our future, we would have gone back to Houston to do some refresher training in the simulators and see our families. Because I was launching for the first time, I had invited practically everyone I knew to come to Florida, along with their friends, about eight hundred people in all, and with every delay the group got smaller as people changed their travel plans. The morning of each launch attempt, friends and family would call and ask, “What are the odds you’re going to launch today?” I understood their impatience, but I never knew what to tell them. Eventually, I started to just say, “Fifty-fifty. Either we’ll launch today or we won’t.”

Jim Wetherbee, an astronaut who was serving as the director of flight crew operations, came by to talk to us. We all sat around a conference table together, and Jim said, “We’re going to knock this thing off and try again in the new year.” It was now a week before Christmas, and NASA had decided to give the ground crew a chance to go home to their families for the holidays. We were also coming up against another type of conflict: NASA wanted us safely back on Earth before January 1, 2000, because there was so much anxiety about whether equipment would continue to work properly because of Y2K. We joked that NASA was concerned the space shuttle computers would divide by zero and we would travel through a wormhole and end up on the other side of the universe. But the truth was less exciting. Specifically, the concern had to do with the possibility that we would have to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The ground support equipment at Kennedy Space Center was all Y2K compliant, as was the orbiter itself, but the equipment at Edwards had not yet been certified. Personally, I thought the public would find it reassuring if NASA, the agency that had put a man on the moon and created a reusable space plane, was so little concerned about Y2K that they flew in space anyway.

“We haven’t made a definite decision yet,” Jim said. “But we’re ninety-nine percent sure this is what we’re going to do.”

He left, and we talked about what this delay would mean for each of us. All of my crewmates seemed pleased—they wanted to go home. I was the only one who didn’t want to see the launch postponed. I had come here with the expectation of going to space, and I didn’t want to give that up and wait weeks before we actually launched. We packed up our things. The guy who holds our wallets for us while we fly in space came around to hand them back out, which made the decision feel final. I prepared to head back to Houston.

Jim came back about an hour later and gathered us together. “Okay, guys,” he said. “We changed our minds. We’re going to launch tomorrow.”

This was tough on my crewmates, who had mentally checked out and started looking forward to going home. I was the only one who was happy, because I was the only one who had never been to space before.

The next day, December 19, as promised, we got suited up for launch. The weather was only 60 percent go, but the countdown continued throughout the day. Several hours before the scheduled launch time of 7:50 p.m., we left the Operations and Checkout Building and waved to the media as we walked to the Astrovan, an Airstream motor home that is used exclusively for carrying astronauts the nine miles to the launch site. The space shuttle, fully loaded with liquid oxygen and hydrogen, was essentially a giant bomb, so when it was fueled the area was cleared of nonessential personnel. As we approached the launchpad, which usually bustled with hundreds of workers, we saw that it was eerily abandoned, the emptiness juxtaposed with the noise of a fully fueled space shuttle—pumps and motors spinning and the creaking metals reacting to supercooled propellants.

We rode the elevator in the launch tower up to the 195-foot level, and Curt entered the orbiter first. The cryogenic fuel passing through the propellant lines created condensation that froze into snow, so even though the weather was warm, some of us had a brief snowball fight while others used the bathroom known affectionately as the Last Toilet on Earth.

Then we entered the White Room one by one, a sterile space around the hatch. When it was my turn, I got into the harnesses for my parachute and fitted the comm cap on my head. Then I kneeled just inside the hatchway while the closeout crew removed the galoshes that kept us from tracking dirt into the spacecraft. Inside the cockpit, everything was pointing up at the sky, so I had to crawl across the ladder, rather than up, in order to get to the flight deck and my seat, which felt like it was hanging off the ceiling. I managed to haul my right leg over the stick, then pull myself up and shimmy into position on the parachute, an uncomfortable bulk under my back. The closeout crew guys, including my friend and astronaut classmate Dave Brown, strapped us into our seats as tightly as they could and helped us get all our connections hooked up—comm, cooling, and oxygen.

We were positioned on our backs for launch, with our knees above our heads, looking straight up at the sky. We were happy to be in our spacecraft, but the position was uncomfortable, especially once we were tightly strapped in.

The preparation for launch was one of the busiest times for the pilot. I was responsible for getting many of the systems ready prior to flight, which meant configuring switches and circuit breakers, starting motors and pumps, and connecting electrical circuits. I configured the reaction control system and the orbiter maneuvering system (the engines that allow the space shuttle to propel itself in orbit). There were many ways I could screw things up so we wouldn’t be able to go to space today, and there were many ways I could screw things up so we’d never go anywhere again. Of course, it was possible to throw the right switches but throw them in the wrong order. (People have even screwed up by failing to throw a switch decisively enough.) I learned to follow the checklists precisely, even when I felt I already knew them, because I needed to be so careful—but not so careful that I got behind the timeline, because if certain things weren’t in the right configuration by a given point in the countdown, the launch wouldn’t proceed. When we were busy, the countdown seemed to go very quickly, but in idle moments it slowed to a crawl.

The countdown clock stopped for the T-minus nine hold. The space shuttle, fully fueled with cryogenic liquid, creaked and groaned. Soon this sixteen-story structure was going to lift off the Earth in a controlled explosion. For a moment I thought to myself, Boy, this is a really dumb thing to be doing.

I had been told that astronauts flying in the space shuttle had a risk of death similar to that of Allied infantrymen on D-day. I knew how the crew of Challenger had died, and I understood that I was now taking the same risks. I wasn’t scared, but I felt aware of the dangers, all at once.

We had been waiting several hours by this point, long enough for some of us to have to use the diaper we wore under our pressure suits. (When the first American to go to space, Alan Shepard, was waiting to launch, a number of technical delays forced him to wait so long that he needed to use the bathroom. He was told to simply go inside his pressure suit, so the first American to leave the Earth did so with wet pants. Ever since, most astronauts have worn diapers or a urine collection device.) Eventually the countdown clock reached the last minute. At thirty seconds, the space shuttle computers took over the launch count. At six seconds, the three main engines roared to life with a million pounds of thrust, but we didn’t go anywhere because the shuttle was bolted to the launchpad by eight giant bolts. At zero, the solid rocket boosters ignited and the bolts were exploded in half, setting the shuttle free. We leaped off the launchpad with an instantaneous 7 million pounds of thrust. I knew from watching videos and from seeing launches in person that the shuttle appeared to rise very slowly at first. Inside, though, there wasn’t a thing about it that felt slow. One second we were sitting on the launchpad, completely still, and the next we were being hurtled straight up faster than would have seemed possible. I was strapped into a freight train gone off the rails and accelerating out of control, being shaken violently in every direction. We went from a standstill to faster than the speed of sound in less than a minute.

There wasn’t much for the commander and pilot to do at this stage other than monitor the systems to make sure everything was going as it should and be prepared to respond if it didn’t. People sometimes mistakenly imagined that we were “flying” the shuttle, that our hands were on the controls and that we could move Discovery around in the sky if we wanted to, like an airplane. In fact, as long as those solid rocket boosters were burning, we were all essentially just along for the ride. The boosters can’t be throttled or shut down.

Once the solid rockets dropped off, two minutes after we left the launchpad, we were flying on the power of the three main engines, so there was more we could do to control our fates. We continued to monitor all the systems closely as we traveled higher and faster. For the first two minutes, we were prepared for the possibility that if something went seriously wrong—most likely a main engine failure—we could turn around and land at the runway at the Kennedy Space Center. We called this abort mode “return to launch site,” and it required the shuttle to fly Mach seven backwards. No one had ever tried this and no one wanted to. (John Young, when he was preparing to command the first shuttle launch, said he hoped never to attempt an RTLS because it “requires continuous miracles interspersed with acts of God.”) So we were all happy when we got to the point known as “negative return,” when RTLS was no longer a possibility and we had other, less risky abort options.

As the shuttle burned through its propellants, it got lighter, increasing its acceleration. When the acceleration got to 3 g’s, it became difficult to breathe, the parachute and oxygen bottles I wore on my back in case of emergency pulling on the straps on my chest. The engines throttled back to keep from exceeding the structural integrity of the spacecraft.

As we accelerated, Curt and I, with Billy Bob’s assistance, monitored the performance of all the systems on our three cathode ray tube displays, keeping abreast of the procedures so we could be ready at a split-second’s notice if we needed to perform one of the actions available to us.

When the shuttle reached its intended orbit, the main engines cut off—MECO—then the now-nearly-empty external tank separated to burn up in the atmosphere. MECO was a great moment because it meant we’d survived the launch phase, one of the riskiest of our entire mission. We had accelerated from zero to 17,500 miles per hour in just eight and a half minutes. Now we were floating in space. I looked out the window.

I tapped Curt on the shoulder and pointed outside. “Hey, what the hell is that?” I asked him. (I was about to use even stronger language, but I didn’t know whether we were still being recorded.)

“That’s the sunrise,” said Curt.

An orbital sunrise, my first. I had no idea how many more of these I was going to see. I’ve now seen thousands, and their beauty has never waned.

I had been so focused on what we were doing I hadn’t bothered looking out the window until now. Even if I had, we had launched in the dark, and up here it was still dark; the sun was behind the Earth. As we crossed over Europe, I saw a blue-and-orange line out the window that spanned the horizon as it grew larger. It looked to me like brilliantly colored paint brushed across a mirror right in front of my eyes, and I knew right then and there that Earth would be the most beautiful thing I would ever see.

I unstrapped myself from my seat and floated headfirst through the passageway to the mid-deck, savoring the alien sensation of weightlessness. When I got there, I found two guys with their heads in puke bags. They were experienced astronauts, but some people have to reacclimate to space every time they go. I’m very lucky that I don’t suffer from the debilitating nausea and vertigo that some people do.

On our second full day in space, we reached the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s in a much higher orbit than most satellites we might rendezvous with—150 miles higher than the space station. Hubble’s orbit is so high, in fact, that missions to rendezvous with it are riskier than flights to a lower orbit.

For many stages of the flight, Curt was in charge of the shuttle controls as commander, and I was there as his backup. But during the rendezvous with Hubble, at a certain point he moved to the back of the shuttle to start monitoring our approach from the aft piloting station and to prepare himself for the manual flying phase. He was to eyeball the closing distance and communicate with me about how we were doing, while I was to make sure we proceeded through the checklist and executed the remaining rendezvous burns properly.

The two spacewalking teams and the robotic arm operator (Billy Bob) moved into high gear once we were safely in orbit. I helped them out when needed and took pictures of Hubble for study on the ground later. Billy Bob was always excited about what we were doing, always enthusiastic, and always had time to help me out or to just take the time to enjoy space. Not everyone who gets the chance to go to space does. He acted as a mentor to me on the mission and taught me all the little details about how to live and work in space that they can’t really teach you on the ground, like moving around in zero g, organizing your workspace when everything floats, and of course fun things like peeing while upside down—lessons I would pass on to others as I became more experienced.

Billy Bob was also not above pranking me. I was still the rookie, after all. When I went into my clothing locker to get changed, I discovered that I had only one pair of underwear for the entire mission. Billy Bob had hidden the rest. I think he expected me to panic, but the joke was on him; I didn’t really care. He eventually told me about his prank. In retrospect, wearing the same underwear for days was good training for my year in space.

Once we got to orbit, I had to adjust to living in such small quarters with six other people. There were two “floors” in the shuttle, the flight deck and the mid-deck, and each of them was smaller than the interior space of a minivan. We worked, ate, and slept on top of one another. At least our eight-day mission would be one of the shorter ones; the longest space shuttle mission was seventeen days.

ONE THING that surprised me about living in space was that it was hard to focus. There were many activities I had done over and over in the simulator, but when I got to space I found it much harder to concentrate on what I was doing. At one level I think it was just the experience of being in space for the first time—who could concentrate on a checklist of a procedure while floating with the beautiful Earth turning just outside the window? At another level, doing basic tasks was much more challenging in weightlessness, and I learned there was no way to compensate for that except to plan for the fact that everything was just going to take a bit more time.

There were physical effects too. Feeling the fluid in my body redistribute itself to my head for the first time was odd and at times uncomfortable. All astronauts experience some level of difficulty concentrating on a short mission—what we call “space brain”—and I was no exception. After you’ve been in space for weeks or months, you adjust and are able to work through the symptoms, which can vary based on CO₂ levels, vestibular symptoms, sleep quality, and probably other factors too. I couldn’t afford to let my work suffer, because there would be serious consequences if I screwed something up.

One of the first things we did when we got to orbit was to open the shuttle’s huge payload bay doors. These needed to be open within the first few orbits, in order to keep the electrical systems cool. We needed to deploy and check out the robot arm, or we wouldn’t be able to grapple Hubble. If we failed to deploy or activate the Ku-band antenna, we wouldn’t be able to communicate as well with Earth or rendezvous easily with the telescope. Even tasks like using the toilet required our full attention—I was acutely aware that it was possible to damage it, potentially even permanently, which would mean a premature return.

On day three, Steve Smith and John Grunsfeld conducted their first spacewalk, successfully replacing the gyroscopes. The following day, Mike Foale and Claude Nicollier performed their spacewalk, replacing Hubble’s central computer and a fine-guidance sensor. On day six, Steve and John went outside again, this time to install a transmitter and a solid-state recorder. There had been a fourth planned spacewalk, but it was canceled in order to get us back on Earth before Y2K.

Day seven of the mission, the next-to-last day, marked the first time a space shuttle would be spending Christmas in orbit (and, it turns out, the last). We deployed Hubble, and after accepting congratulations from the ground for our success, Curt decided it was time to make his Christmas speech to mission control. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket, cleared his throat, and spoke in his most formal voice into the microphone:

“The familiar Christmas story reminds us that for millennia, people of many faiths and cultures have looked to the skies and studied the stars and planets in their search for a deeper understanding of life and for greater wisdom…We hope and trust that the lessons the universe has to teach us will speak to the yearning that we know is in human hearts everywhere—the yearning for peace on Earth, good will among all the human family. As we stand at the threshold of a new millennium, we send you all our greetings.”

Coming from someone else—from Billy Bob, say—this speech might have seemed heartfelt and even moving, but Curt wasn’t an emotional guy. As it was, we all sneaked looks at each other. If nothing else, Curt’s speech was remarkable for managing to completely avoid any religious content. Maybe Curt was thinking about the time the crew of Apollo 8 took turns reading from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve 1968. It was a beautiful moment enjoyed by many Christians and non-Christians alike, but an atheist group sued NASA for violating the separation of church and state. Nothing Curt had said would give First Amendment purists anything to get bent out of shape about.

There was a long, awkward pause, both inside the cockpit and on the ground. Usually the capcom would thank the commander for his great speech and reiterate that the spirit of humankind was alive in the space shuttle program or something along those lines. Instead, we just heard nothing. Moments later, the capcom, Steve Robinson, came on and said simply, “Roger, PLT is go for compactor ops.”

The schedule called for the pilot (me) to compact the toilet. In other words, someone needed to tamp down the shit.

Later that night, everyone gathered for dinner on the mid-deck. Billy Bob showed me some special French gourmet food he had brought up with him: quail in red wine sauce, foie gras, tiny liqueur-infused chocolates. No one seemed interested in trying it except me. Billy Bob and I heated it up and took it up to the flight deck. We turned the lights off and played some Mozart, watching the beautiful Earth turning below us while we ate this fantastic food and reflected on how lucky we were to be celebrating Christmas as no one on the space shuttle had done before.

WHEN IT WAS time to go home, I decided to get Billy Bob back for pranking me by hiding the long underwear we layer under the pressure suits for reentry. He didn’t suspect anything when he started getting dressed, then he began tossing through his bag of gear again and again, a look of alarm on his face. Once he was thoroughly distressed, thinking he wouldn’t be able to get dressed in time for landing, I finally took pity on him.

The landing phase was the most challenging for the commander and pilot. When the space shuttle hit the air molecules of the outer atmosphere at 17,500 miles per hour, the resulting friction created heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. We had to do everything right and trust that the insulating tiles on the space shuttle would protect us.

We did the deorbit burn in the dark at four hundred miles above the Earth. As we moved into sunlight, we seemed troublingly low over Baja California. We had dropped from four hundred miles to just fifty miles entirely in darkness. Curt joked, “We are so low it looks like we won’t make it to Florida.”

“But we have a lot of smack,” I responded. We were still going Mach 25, despite our low altitude.

For about twelve minutes, hot ionized gases built up around the spacecraft. We heard an alarm: one of the air data probes, an instrument that measured air pressure and provided data for controlling the orbiter in the atmosphere, had failed to deploy. This was an emergency, but a minor one, as there were two probes and the other had deployed correctly. Curt and I, with the help of Billy Bob, responded just as we had to this kind of malfunction in the simulator, assessing what had gone wrong and deciding how to proceed safely. In some ways, it was a good thing to have to respond to an alarm like this one. It gave me confidence in the training we had received, that we would be able to handle anything that came our way.

Once we got farther down into the atmosphere and the air became thicker, the space shuttle’s airplane design became crucial. Up to that point, it could have been shaped like a capsule, but now Curt was going to land this spaceship in the dark on a runway at the Kennedy Space Center. The space shuttle was a difficult aircraft to land, all the more so because it had no engines that would allow us to pull up and come in for a second attempt. While Curt was at the controls, I had a lot of responsibilities as pilot, a role similar to the copilot of an airplane—monitoring the shuttle’s systems, relaying information to Curt, and deploying the drag chute.

I armed, then extended the landing gear at the right moment, and soon after we heard another alarm: a tire pressure sensor was warning us that we might have a blown tire. The space shuttle’s tires were specially designed to survive launch, a week or two orbiting in a vacuum, and supporting a heavy vehicle landing at incredibly high speed. If one of them had blown out, our landing could be a disaster. As the alarm kept sounding, I encouraged Curt to ignore the tire pressure—there was nothing we could do about it, and he needed to focus on the landing. I said, “I’ll tell you if the next alarm is something different.”

He nailed the landing, the tires held under us, and we rolled to a stop. “Nice landing!” I told him, completing one of my most important responsibilities of the whole mission. Our mission was over.

I was surprised by how dizzy I felt being back in Earth’s gravity. When I tried to unstrap myself from my seat and get up, I found I nearly couldn’t move. I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds. We climbed from the space shuttle to a converted motor home where we could change out of our launch-and-entry suits and get a brief medical examination. Trying to get out of the suit worsened my dizziness, and the world spun up like a carnival ride.

Some of my crewmates were worse off than others, their faces pale and clammy. We were taken back to the crew quarters at Kennedy, where we were able to shower before meeting up with our families and friends. I went out that night to Fishlips, a seafood restaurant in Port Canaveral, with everyone who had come for my landing, and it was a bit surreal, sitting at a long table drinking beer and enjoying fish tacos, when just a few hours earlier I had been hurtling toward the Earth at a blistering speed in a 3,000-degree fireball. We threw a party for our Houston friends when we returned home the next night, and a couple of days later I was back in the office, a real astronaut.