Endurance

14

AS MY LIFE was returning to normal following my first spaceflight, in early 2000, I also had a moment to take stock of where I was in my career. What would come next? I had been working for most of my life to become one of the few people who get to travel in space, and now I had done it. I had performed well, our mission had been a success, we had come back safely, and I couldn’t wait to go up again. But I didn’t know when that would be.

One of my crewmates on the mission I had just finished, Mike Foale, had flown a mission on Mir, so he spoke Russian and was well connected within the Russian space agency. He was also an associate administrator of the Johnson Space Center and was close with the center’s director, George Abbey, so he had influence with him. Soon after we came back from our mission, NASA was looking for a new director of operations (DOR)—an astronaut who lived in Star City, just outside Moscow, and served as a liaison between the two space agencies. The DOR dealt with the details of training American astronauts to fly on Russian spacecraft and served as the on-site leader for the U.S. astronauts training there. The International Space Station was still in the early stages of construction, and we were ramping up to train international crews in Houston and Star City, as well as in Europe and Japan. Mike said that Mr. Abbey wanted me to serve as DOR. I was flattered, but I was reluctant to take the job. I thought of myself as a shuttle astronaut, a pilot, not a space station guy. I remarked to my brother in private that I didn’t want to get that space station stink on me, thinking it would be hard to get off, resulting in fewer shuttle flights.

Still, when I was offered the job, I accepted it. My approach to an unwanted assignment had always been to express my misgivings and my preferences, but then if I was still asked to take the hard job, I did my best to make it a success. I was to start just a few months later.

Mike flew with me to Russia the first time to help me get acclimated. We were met at the airport by a Russian driver named Ephim, a squat, gruff bull of a man. I would later learn that Ephim would do anything to protect us and our families, even physically if required, and he cooked a great shashlik, Russian barbecue. Ephim loaded us into a Chevy Astro van, one of the few Western vehicles in Russia at the time, and I watched Moscow go by as we passed through the city. The snow was piled high, and the car exhaust and other pollutants had stained it dark. As we traveled northeast from Moscow, past old Russian cottage-style houses with their ornate trim and elaborately shingled roofs, the snow gradually turned white. Soon we were passing through the gates of Star City.

Down a narrow path lined with thick birch trees, past old Soviet-style cinder-block apartment buildings and the giant statue of Gagarin holding flowers behind his back and leaning forward welcomingly, we arrived at the awkward row of Western-style town houses built for NASA we called “the cottages.” It was Friday night, so after dropping our bags we went straight to Shep’s Bar, actually just the remodeled basement of Cottage 3. The place was named for Bill Shepherd, a NASA veteran of three space shuttle flights who was now in Star City training to become the first commander of the International Space Station. He was also a former Navy SEAL who was legendary for saying in his astronaut interview, when asked what he could do better than anyone else in the room, “Kill people with my knife.” Bill had a penchant for putting people under the table in a drinking game called liar’s dice, and my first night in Russia I was expected to participate. I wasn’t one to argue, and I even had a slight advantage over the others in that I had played the game in my fighter pilot days. Shep had no mercy on us newcomers, though, and I watched as some scientist astronauts who were in Russia for the first time fell out one by one. Shep didn’t need a knife to kill; he could also kill with dice.

Even though I held my own, the next morning was rough when I had to get up very early for a four-hour ride on a bumpy road in a bus smelling of burning engine oil. I lay down on the backseat and tried to sleep as we headed to Russa, the remote village where space flyers trained in case the Soyuz landed in cold weather. The plan was for me to first observe, then to participate in, the Russian winter survival training.

During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, Russa had been a thriving city, but now, having been largely destroyed in World War II, there wasn’t much there aside from a “sanatorium,” a quintessentially Russian combination of hospital and hotel that to Americans looked more like an old spa. The area is famous for spring-fed lakes that were supposed to have healing powers.

Unbeknownst to me, and against NASA’s objections, I was to go through the same psychological evaluations the cosmonauts did, and this was the first order of business on my first day. NASA had its own psychological evaluation process, of course, but the Russians’ was a bit different. The first test I did involved sitting across from a psychologist under a bare bulb, both of us sitting on hard wooden kitchen chairs. I felt as though I were going to be interrogated like Francis Gary Powers during the Cold War.

The psychologist, who looked like a well-fed version of Sigmund Freud, explained the test: I was to estimate various lengths of time by stopping a stopwatch without looking at it after what I thought was ten seconds, then thirty seconds, then one minute. I took the stopwatch from him and held it down by my side to begin the first test. I soon realized that I could see the doctor’s watch from where I was sitting, including the second hand. I “estimated” each of the intervals of time perfectly. The psychologist reacted with shock and congratulated me profusely on my time-estimation prowess.

Once the test was over, his watch was no longer visible to me, and I wondered whether that had actually been a test of my honesty, or perhaps a test of my ability to adapt. I decided not to worry about it much—to me, using any available tool I had to excel on the test was at least as important as following the rules blindly. I don’t condone cheating, but I’ve learned it’s important to be creative in solving problems. Now that I’ve gotten to know the Russian culture, I think my approach was the right one.

After spending a few days sharing a dank room with a NASA flight surgeon who was monitoring the training of the previous crew, I joined American astronaut Doug Wheelock and cosmonaut Dmitri Kondratyev as a three-man crew. I didn’t know yet that I would wind up flying in space with both of them much later in my career. Doug was an Army officer and helicopter pilot, even-tempered and easy to get along with. Dima was a fighter pilot who had flown the MiG-29, one of the people I might have wound up in air-to-air combat with at an earlier stage in our lives. In fact, years later we figured out that we were once stationed on opposite lines of the Soviet border in Scandinavia, him protecting the Russian Bear bombers and me in the F-14 Tomcat protecting the carrier battle group.

The survival training was grueling. We were sent out to a field with a used Soyuz capsule to simulate a remote landing, equipped with nothing but the emergency supplies carried in the spacecraft. Dima didn’t speak much English, and neither Doug nor I spoke great Russian, but the three of us communicated well enough to get through the training. We built shelters, made a fire, and tried to keep from freezing to death while we awaited “rescue.” It was so cold the first night we were unable to sleep, so we stood in front of the fire, slowly rotating in order to keep any side from getting too cold. In an uncharacteristic act for a Russian, Dima broke with protocol and at five a.m. announced we would build a teepee in order to stay warm. Cutting down trees with a machete in the freezing dark winter night was miserable, but by seven a.m. we had our shelter assembled out of birch limbs and the Soyuz parachute. We were now able to keep warm, though the teepee quickly filled with smoke. We kept our heads as low as possible so we could breathe as we slept.

On the last day, we hiked through the woods, a navigation exercise to simulate meeting up with rescue forces. The landscape was stunning, with stands of birch trees stark against the sky, everything covered with a fresh layer of fluffy snow, the new flakes sparkling in the morning light. We emerged from the forest onto a large frozen lake that was steaming in the subzero temperatures, dotted with old Russian men sitting on their pails, ice fishing. This image struck me as serene and quintessentially Russian. Seemingly frozen in time, like an epic scene from the film Dr. Zhivago, it was a moving sight that will be etched in my memory forever.

IN MAY I moved to Russia to start my position as DOR. It was a big transition. NASA and Roscosmos were in the process of figuring out how to train international crews together to work on an international space station, a huge undertaking with a lot of potential for power struggles, cultural conflicts, and temper tantrums from big egos on both sides. But I liked the job in Star City and found it easy to settle in. I lived on the eighth floor of one of the cinder-block Soviet apartment buildings, and each day I walked the path from my apartment, past Gagarin’s statue, past the town houses the U.S. astronauts lived in while training for flight, to the profilactorium (or “profi,” as we called it), the Star City cosmonaut quarantine facility where NASA had also been given offices.

I found it challenging at times navigating the issues between the Russians and Americans. We had different languages, different technology, and different ideas about the best way to fly in space. But I liked the Russians I met and took a real interest in their culture and history, building the foundation for our future collaboration on the ISS.

The first module of the International Space Station, the FGB, had been launched from Baikonur in November 1998, followed two weeks later by Node 1, the first U.S. module, which launched on space shuttle Endeavour. When the two were joined together, it was a major international accomplishment. The infant space station wasn’t ready to be permanently occupied, though, because it lacked necessary features like a life support system, a kitchen, and a toilet. It orbited empty for the next year and a half until the addition of the Russian service module, which made it habitable.

Leslie and Samantha came to join me in Russia for the summer. In late October 2000, I traveled to Baikonur for the launch of Expedition 1, the first long-duration mission to the ISS. Bill Shepherd would be launching on a Soyuz with two Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev. This would be only the second time an American was traveling on a Soyuz. Another three-person crew would be replacing them in March, and it was hard to believe that the station would be occupied nonstop from then on. Since I still thought of myself as a space shuttle guy, I didn’t assume I would fly a long-duration flight on station myself—I hoped to be assigned to another shuttle mission soon, as pilot again. Then if I was lucky I might fly two more space shuttle missions as commander, and that would probably be the end of my spaceflight career. Having spent a total of eight days in space, I found it impossible to imagine that I would live on the space station one day, let alone set records there.

The night before the Soyuz launch, there were celebrations and the traditional toasts and revelry. A NASA manager in town for the event had more than his limit—way more—and I spent the day taking care of him because he was too ill to be left alone. The next morning I saw Shep briefly when he was on his way to get suited up for launch.

“What the fuck was going on last night?” he asked me. “It was like a fucking frat house with people yelling and screaming and banging on my door. I barely got any sleep.”

“Sorry about that, man,” I said. “Good luck in space.”

The Soyuz launched safely that day, but I didn’t get to see it—I was busy helping my naked colleague vomit in the bathtub. I was sorry to miss the launch, but happy to be in Baikonur on this historic day. I was enjoying living and working in Russia more than I had expected. I watched on television in the old cosmonaut hotel as the spacecraft disappeared into a tiny point in the sky; I had no idea how much of a role the Soyuz, and this place, would play in my future.

SOON AFTER I came back from Russia the following year, Charlie Precourt, the head of the Astronaut Office, asked me to serve as backup to Peggy Whitson for Expedition 5 to ISS (the fifth expedition of overlapping crew members), to launch in June 2002. Normally, the backup crew would fly two expeditions later, so their service flows naturally from their backup training to their flight. Because of unusual circumstances, I wouldn’t be on the upcoming flight, so serving as backup would be a pretty shitty deal. My first reaction was to decline. A mission to the International Space Station was very different from what I had trained for and, to a certain extent, from what made me want to be an astronaut in the first place: test piloting a rocket ship.

“If I’m being honest, I’m not sure whether I ever want to spend six months on the space station. I’m a pilot,” I told Charlie. “I’m not a mission specialist. Science really isn’t my thing.”

Charlie understood; he was a pilot too. He explained that he hadn’t been able to get anyone to agree to serve as Peggy’s backup, having gone through most of the more experienced astronauts. He offered me a deal: if I would serve as Peggy’s backup, which would mean returning to Russia for a significant period of time to train on the Russian ISS systems and on the Soyuz, he would assign me as commander of the space shuttle on my next flight, and as the commander of the International Space Station after that. After giving it a lot of thought, I went into his office with a list of reasons why I still thought I was the wrong person for the job. Charlie listened patiently.

“All that said,” I told him, “I’ve never said no when someone asked me to do something hard. So if you ask me to do this, I won’t say no.”

“I’m not going to accept that,” Charlie answered. “You’re going to have to say yes.”

“Okay,” I said somewhat grudgingly. “Yes, I’ll do it.”

I had been given this assignment later than normal, so in addition to taking a job that didn’t feel natural to me, I was trying to play catch-up. I trained a great deal in Russia, learning their Soyuz and the Russian part of the ISS. I also worked to hone my skills in the Russian language, which I had always found excruciatingly difficult. In addition to this, I had to learn the U.S. segment of the space station, which is incredibly complex; how to fly the space station’s robotic arm; and how to do spacewalks.

I went through Russian water survival training with Dima Kondratyev, whom I had gone through winter survival training with, and cosmonaut Sasha Kaleri, my two new backup crewmates. We left early in the morning on September 11, 2001, on an old Russian Navy vessel from Sochi, a palm-tree-covered coastal town on the Black Sea at the base of the Caucasus Mountains. As we slowly motored out to sea, we were given a tour of the ship and shown how to use some of the equipment. Toilet paper was forbidden, as it clogged up the sanitation system. We were told instead to use a brush soaking in antiseptic next to the toilet. Community ass brush? I thought to myself. Shit!

The water survival training wasn’t much more pleasant than winter survival training—an old Soyuz was lowered into the water, and we had to climb into it wearing our Sokol launch and entry suits. The hatch was closed behind us, and we sat there in the stifling heat until we were directed to remove our Sokol suits and put on our winter survival gear, followed by a rubber anti-exposure suit. It was almost impossible to follow these directions in the tight confines of the Soyuz. Dima, Sasha, and I had to take turns one by one lying spread out across one another’s laps to struggle out of one suit and into the other. The capsule heaved up and down with the rolling swells of the Black Sea, and I thought about how impossible this would be if we were returning from space and already weakened from living in zero gravity. Once in my winter clothing—not pleasurable since the Soyuz was as hot as a sauna—I then had to put on the full rubber anti-exposure suit, including layers of hats and hoods. We were drenched in our own sweat and exhausted even before climbing out of the Soyuz and jumping into the sea. This wasn’t really about training on the hardware or learning techniques; like winter survival training, it was almost exclusively a psychological and team-building exercise in dealing with shared hardship. To me, it would have been more effective to just admit that fact.

Once we finished up our training, we headed back to the bridge of the ship, where the captain toasted our success with vodka. I reflected on how strange this scene would have looked even just a few years before—me, an officer in the United States Navy, drinking alcohol on the bridge of a Russian Navy ship with its captain and Dima, a Russian Air Force pilot.

As we got back on shore, we got a call from Star City telling us that two planes had just crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center. We were as shocked as the rest of the world, and for me it was a horrible feeling to be so far from my country when it was under attack. We found the nearest television, and like most people at home, I spent hours watching the coverage and trying to understand what was happening. The Russians rose to the occasion, doing everything they could to help us. They brought food, translated the Russian news so we could understand what was going on, and even canceled the remaining training to get us back home as soon as possible. We flew out of Sochi the next day, and I was startled by how much the security had increased at the airport, despite the fact that the terrorist attack had been in another country on the other side of the world. As we waited in Moscow for flights to the United States to resume, we saw flowers piled high outside the gate of the U.S. embassy in a show of solidarity that I will never forget.

While in Russia, I also got to spend time with the prime crew—Peggy Whitson, my classmate, as well as Sergei Treshchev and Valery Korzun. Valery, who would be the commander of Expedition 5, was an atypical Russian with a welcoming smile and an endearing personality.

As part of our training, we had to learn to fly the Canadian robot arm, so Valery and I traveled together to Montreal in one of NASA’s T-38 jets. This was a rare opportunity to fly in a T-38 for a Russian cosmonaut, and it was fun for me as well to fly with a former Russian fighter pilot. After we completed our training in Montreal, I wanted to stop at my old Navy base, Pax River, for the annual test pilot school reunion. There I could catch up with old friends like Paul Conigliaro, and I thought Valery would enjoy meeting some Navy test pilots and they him. I made sure to get the appropriate permission before landing on a U.S. Navy base with an active-duty Russian Air Force colonel. I also had to make sure a U.S. customs official would meet our plane, since we would be flying directly from Canada.

When we landed and parked on the tarmac, right next to the Chesapeake Bay, the customs official wasn’t there yet. When I called, he said he hadn’t left his office—ninety minutes away in Baltimore. He told me sternly that we were not to leave the airplane until he arrived, but it was below freezing and windy, and Valery and I were wearing only our NASA blue flight suits and light flight jackets. I told the customs official we weren’t going to freeze to death waiting for him and would be in the Officers’ Club and hung up while he was still yelling at me to stay at the airplane. Had we had the proper supplies, perhaps we could have constructed a teepee.

We proceeded to the bar and spent the next couple of hours by the keg, sharing airplane stories. Valery told us about what it was like being a Russian fighter pilot and cosmonaut and charmed my former Navy colleagues. Eventually, the customs officer barreled into the O Club, telling everyone who would listen that he wanted to take Valery and me to jail for violating his orders. The base commanding officer knew me from my previous tour as a test pilot and had enjoyed Valery’s company, so he told the customs official to do his paperwork and then get off his base. Valery went on to become the deputy director of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City, and he’s had my back ever since.

Peggy’s launch went off without a hitch in June 2002, and soon after I was assigned to be the commander of my second space shuttle mission, STS-118, tasked with delivering new hardware to the International Space Station. The mission would be twelve days, and we were scheduled to fly on the space shuttle Columbia in October 2003. True to his word, Charlie Precourt had made sure I was assigned as commander, even though he was no longer the chief astronaut.

Since this was only my second shuttle flight, and I hadn’t yet been to the ISS, the new chief astronaut wanted my pilot to be someone who had spaceflight experience. That sounded simple enough, but all the pilots who had already flown at least once were my classmates, and generally classmates aren’t asked to command one another, especially when they have the same amount of experience. Kent Rominger, the new chief, and I discussed the options. The only pilots not currently assigned to a mission were Charlie Hobaugh, Mark Polansky, and my brother. Of these, I thought my brother was the best fit: we got along (at least since we stopped beating the crap out of each other at age fifteen), we understood each other, and we knew that being classmates wouldn’t cause any issues between us. NASA was all for it.

As we got closer to making the assignment official, I thought better of it. The story of identical twin brothers serving as commander and pilot of the same mission would bring an enormous amount of attention. In some ways this would be a good thing, of course—NASA was always looking for ways to engage the public’s imagination and get people interested in spaceflight. But I didn’t want this flight to be seen as a publicity stunt, and I didn’t want the story of twins in space to distract attention from our mission or my other crew members.

Another concern was more personal. Both Mark and I were always aware of the risks we took each time we went to space. For me, the possibility that my daughter might be left fatherless was always offset slightly by the fact that, even if the worst happened, she would still have her uncle Mark in her life as a stand-in father—one who would remind her of me. Each time Mark went to space, I was aware that I might have to play the same role for my nieces. If Mark and I were to fly in space together, we would have to accept the possibility that our children could lose both their dad and their uncle all at once. The more I thought about it, the less I thought it was a good idea.

That left just two candidates: Charlie Hobaugh and Mark Polansky. Polansky wasn’t interested in flying as my pilot, since he technically had more experience than I did, having flown to ISS before, which was understandable. That left “Scorch”—Charlie Hobaugh. Scorch had a reputation for being very direct—if he thinks you’re wrong, he won’t hesitate to let you know. He told me he didn’t mind flying with a classmate as his commander. He said he appreciated any opportunity to fly in space, and I knew he meant it.

So my crew was set: Scorch would be my pilot, and the rest of the crew would be rounded out by five mission specialists: Tracy Caldwell, Barbara Morgan, Lisa Nowak, Scott Parazynski, and Dave Williams.

I was most concerned about Lisa, whom I had known longer than most of my colleagues, about fifteen years, since we were in test pilot school together at Pax River. She was a technically brilliant flight engineer. But lately she had become obsessive about small details that didn’t seem to matter much, like what she was going to have for lunch that day. She could become hyperfocused and had trouble letting things go, even if they were irrelevant. On Earth this wasn’t a problem, but on a spaceflight, every member of the crew was crucial to its success, and these peculiarities of Lisa’s personality began to concern me.

ON THE MORNING of February 1, 2003, I was standing on my front lawn looking north. It was a Saturday, just before nine a.m., and a shuttle mission with seven of my colleagues, including three of my classmates, was returning to Earth. I thought I might be able to see the streak of fire as Columbia entered the atmosphere north of Houston on its way to land at the Kennedy Space Center. It was foggy, but as I watched the sky I saw a bright flash in a break in the fog. Columbia! I went back inside and ate a bowl of cereal. As it got closer to the planned landing time, I started paying more attention to the TV. The orbiter hadn’t landed yet, so NASA TV was switching between live shots inside mission control and the runway at Kennedy Space Center. I noticed Charlie Hobaugh in the control center—he was acting as capcom that day—and I saw he was slouching low in his chair. That was a strange sight, especially for him; he was generally a squared-away Marine, so slouching on the job was uncharacteristic. I emailed him, half joking, saying that he should sit up straight because he was on TV. Then I heard Charlie say, “Columbia, Houston, comm check.” A long pause went by. There wasn’t an answer. This wasn’t normal.

Charlie spoke again. “Columbia, Houston. Comm check. Columbia, Houston. UHF comm check.” He had switched to the backup comm system. Still no response from Columbia. My heart started beating faster. The countdown clock got down to zero and started to count up. Columbia was supposed to be on the ground by now, and, being a glider, it had little margin to arrive late. Charlie kept making the same call over and over again. I jumped in my car and headed to the space center, dialing my brother on my cell phone. My call woke him up. By then reports were coming in that pieces of the orbiter were falling about a hundred miles north of Houston. Mark and I talked about the parachutes, the possibility that the crew might have survived using escape procedures that were developed after the Challenger disaster. Every subsequent shuttle crew trained to extend an escape pole out the hatch, use it to slide out past the wing, then parachute down to safety. No one had actually tried this, of course. Mark and I hoped that it could work, though we weren’t optimistic.

It soon became clear what had gone wrong. The space shuttle’s external tank, which was sort of like an enormous orange thermos, was covered with foam to help insulate the cryogenic propellant inside and keep ice from forming on the surface. Almost from the start of the shuttle program, the vibration of launch and subsequent air pressure as the vehicle accelerated had been causing pieces of foam to fall off the tank. Engineers had been unable to completely resolve the issue. Usually the foam fell away from the orbiter, or fell in small enough bits that there was little damage. But the day Columbia launched, a noticeably large piece of foam, about the size of a briefcase, had fallen and struck the leading edge of the orbiter’s left wing, a particularly bad place for the heat shield to be damaged. There had been a brief discussion on the ground as to whether this foam strike would cause a problem, and the managers and engineers involved had quickly concluded that it would be fine. The crew of Columbia was never a part of these discussions, and though they were informed of the foam strike, they were told the impact had been analyzed and that there was “absolutely no concern for entry.”

Seventeen years earlier, the Challenger commission had blamed that disaster on a creeping complacency about safety in the shuttle program. The culture at NASA had changed a great deal as a result, but now it seemed maybe that complacency had crept back in again. It’s not as though no one had raised the alarm about this issue: Apollo veteran John Young, commander of the first space shuttle mission, and conscience of the Astronaut Office, was always standing up in our Monday morning meetings, trying to convince people of the danger posed by the foam. I remember him saying distinctly, “We have to do something about this or a crew is going to die.”

I thought about the people I knew who had been on Columbia. I had known Dave Brown longer than most of my classmates because he had been at Pax River when I was. He had a great gap-toothed smile and a casual attitude that belied his enormous accomplishments—he had been admitted to an elite program that allowed flight surgeons to become Navy pilots. He had helped Mark prepare for his NASA interview and then helped me when I was called. That was the type of guy he was.

Laurel Clark was a Navy doctor before she became an astronaut, and our families had become close soon after we moved to Houston. She had a son, Iain, the same age as Samantha. Laurel would often pick up Samantha and take her along with Iain to the zoo on Saturdays. Laurel and her husband, Jon, were part of an inner circle that met often for social evenings at Mark’s house. Laurel liked wine, and so did the rest of our group, and we spent many great evenings together. We gave her the nickname “Floral” for her flowery fashion sense and her love of gardening. She had a carpet of violets at her house, and in the weeks and months after the accident everyone in our class would be given a small pot full of them to care for and remember her by. Most of us kept them on the windowsills in our offices, and Lisa Nowak would often come by and take care of our violets for us if they weren’t doing well.

Willie McCool, a fellow Navy pilot, and I had crossed paths briefly at Pax River before we were both selected as astronauts. He had been finishing up his tour as a test pilot when I was just starting mine. I remember the first time I saw his name on a list of the new class and thought it had to be the best astronaut name ever. Willie was infectiously positive, extremely smart, and genuinely caring about the people around him.

I didn’t know the other crew members nearly as well because they hadn’t been in my class. Rick Husband, the commander, a dedicated family man and Air Force pilot; Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian American woman in space and an aerospace engineer; Mike Anderson, an Air Force pilot with a ready smile; and Ilan Ramon, an Israeli fighter pilot who had been chosen to represent his country on this shuttle mission. Ilan was considered a national hero, the youngest pilot to have taken part in a risky air strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. He subsequently became one of Israel’s first F-16 pilots. The crew left behind a total of twelve children.

In my experience, when colleagues have died in accidents, we find ourselves reflecting on what great people the deceased were. Still, it was a special blow to lose a group of seven people who were all so warm, generous, and kind. It was as though we had lost the seven most respected and well liked of all our colleagues.

That day, my brother and I decided on our own to get some astronauts up to the area where the debris was falling. This was a bit ballsy of us, as we weren’t very senior in the Astronaut Office. We called George Abbey, now the former director of the Johnson Space Center, who continued to hold a great deal of sway in Houston. He recommended we call the Harris County constable, who got us in touch with the Coast Guard at Ellington Field. Mark and one of our astronaut colleagues got into a helicopter and were soon searching through the East Texas terrain for debris and the bodies of our friends and colleagues.

I stayed back with a large group working on a recovery plan for the astronauts’ remains and the orbiter debris, so we could reconstruct what had happened. After the Challenger disaster, pieces of debris recovered from the ocean floor provided physical proof of what had gone wrong, and, as with Challenger, we would gather pieces of the shuttle in a hangar at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When I got home that evening, Leslie and I went to my brother’s house to be with Jon Clark, Laurel’s husband, and Iain, now eight. They had just returned from Florida after the horribly long, futile wait at the landing facility. It was heartbreaking to see them and try to comfort them. Our classmate Julie Payette was temporarily staying with Mark and his family at the time, and she and I tried to impress upon Jon and Iain that the crew’s deaths were likely painless. We had no way of knowing this for sure, of course, but we wanted to believe it for ourselves as much as for Laurel’s grieving family. Later we would learn the crew probably had less than ten seconds of useful consciousness after the orbiter’s pressure hull was breached. None of them had time to lower their helmet visors, so we knew depressurization must have taken place very quickly. After one of the control panels was recovered from a field, investigators deduced that Willie had tried to restart two of the auxiliary power units, so we knew they must have had at least a sense that something was going wrong.

The next day, I headed north in my car and helped out with the search for debris and human remains. I was teamed up with an FBI evidence-response team that had been involved in identifying remains at the World Trade Center. They worked with dogs that could distinguish human from animal remains. Standing in a wooded area where debris had fallen, I thought about other airplane crashes that had killed my friends and colleagues. The charred smell, the search for pieces of smashed aircraft, and the burned remainder of an elegant flying machine—all of it reminded me of the opening pages of The Right Stuff. In all my years of flying and scores of colleagues lost, this was my first time as part of the accident recovery team, like the pilots in Tom Wolfe’s book. I don’t think Tom ever saw such wreckage himself, but I could now confirm that he described it all perfectly.

Word had spread at JSC about the search, and a large number of NASA workers volunteered to help. But the area where debris had fallen covered so many thousands of square miles, from central Texas to Louisiana, that we needed more people. Emergency workers from all over the country, many of them Native American firefighters from the western states, descended on the area and quickly set up tent cities, complete with their own supplies. I was impressed by their dedication, organization, and skill at walking detailed search patterns in the thick woods of East Texas. They recovered thousands of fragments of Columbia, and every piece would help us figure out what had gone wrong.

At the Kennedy Space Center, workers started to assemble parts on an outline of the shuttle’s silhouette painted on the concrete floor of a hangar. The first time I walked into that space to see the debris laid out, I was struck by the sight. The fact that a spacecraft can hit the atmosphere and burn up, yet the pieces can still be identified and reassembled this way, was eerie. I had been assigned to the next flight of Columbia, and it was strange to see the orbiter that was supposed to have been mine to command mangled and burned on the concrete floor. I later learned that it had been a toss-up between Willie McCool and me as to who would serve as pilot of my Hubble Space Telescope repair mission and who would fly the ill-fated mission of Columbia.

Since the debris field was so large, the pieces of the orbiter couldn’t all be recovered on foot. A couple of weeks later, I was put in charge of directing an air search, using airplanes and helicopters to locate the larger pieces. You would think a piece of a spacecraft would be instantly recognizable, even from the air, but we wasted time investigating old cars, bathtubs, rusted-out appliances, and all kinds of garbage that, from a distance, looked like it could have come from the shuttle. There were rumors of remains of murder victims found during the search, and sites the searchers thought looked like methamphetamine labs, though I could never determine whether these rumors were true.

Of the debris we did find from Columbia, some of it was strangely undamaged. I found the space shuttle’s Canon printer lying in the woods without a scratch on it—the same model of printer that I would later struggle with while living on the space station. We found samples from science experiments the crew had worked on, still intact—so much so that scientists could complete some of the research goals of the mission. A petri dish full of worms even survived the disaster.

Every day I was out searching, the Salvation Army was out there too, providing food and coffee, offering any kind of help they could. Ever since, I never walk by their ringing bells at Christmastime without putting something in the red kettle.

A few of the astronaut doctors worked in the local morgue, safeguarding the remains of our fallen colleagues as they awaited transport. Eventually I escorted Laurel’s body from the morgue to Barksdale Air Force Base in a Black Hawk helicopter. As I climbed out of the helicopter, I was surprised to see an Air Force general in full dress uniform saluting sharply, behind him a full formation of officers and airmen at attention. I was moved by their show of respect while the flag-draped casket was carried into the hangar. Later, Laurel’s remains were transferred to an aircraft to be flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the military’s mortuary, for a forensic autopsy.

As the search went on, a second tragedy occurred: a Forest Service helicopter crashed while searching for debris. Two people were killed and three more were injured. The ensuing investigation revealed that the pilot was flying outside the operating limits for the aircraft, maybe in an effort to get to a hard-to-reach area. No one talked about calling off the search for debris and remains, but this was another sobering reminder of the risks inherent in aviation.

Three of the crew were buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and other funerals were held in the crew members’ home states. NASA hired or borrowed airplanes to take those of us closest to the crew to Arlington and to the other funerals. On a blustery day that would have been Laurel’s forty-second birthday, she was laid to rest next to two of her Columbia crewmates. Seeing the pageantry of the full military honors, and the finality of her casket lowered into the ground, I absorbed fully the loss we had suffered and became more aware than ever of the risks we were taking traveling into space. I had lost friends and colleagues to airplane crashes many times before. I’d stopped keeping an exact count when the number got into the thirties; it is now in the forties—but I had never lost anyone as close to me as Laurel Blair Clark.

I can honestly say the Columbia accident never for a second made me think about quitting. But my colleagues’ deaths gave me a renewed sense that my daughter could have grown up without a parent, just as the Columbia crew’s kids have done. The shuttle program had been suspended until the accident investigation board could come to a conclusion about what had happened, so I didn’t have much to do for the next six months. Eventually I was named chief of the Space Station Integration Branch, heading up a group of astronauts and engineers making decisions about hardware and procedures for the International Space Station, which had now been inhabited nonstop for more than two years. (It was still small and rudimentary compared to the expanded station I would visit in the future.) I was learning everything I could about how to make the station work most efficiently and effectively.

In August 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board submitted its findings. It did not call for the shuttle program to shut down completely, as some had feared. But it would not be allowed to continue forever. The board recommended that after the assembly of the International Space Station was complete, planned for 2010, the shuttle orbiters should be recertified in order to keep flying. This process would require dismantling and rebuilding all three orbiters from the ground up. Recertification would be so complex and expensive there was no way NASA would be able to get Congress to pay for it, so we knew that most likely the shuttle would be scrapped. Besides, NASA wanted to focus on a new exploration vehicle (the project that has now become the Space Launch System and Orion) and wouldn’t be able to fund it properly while supporting both the space shuttle and the space station. The shuttle program would be the one to go. I agreed with that decision, though I knew I would miss it.

IN OCTOBER 2003, Leslie gave birth to our second child, Charlotte. The birth shaped up to be even more difficult than Samantha’s. When Charlotte was delivered by C-section, she had no heartbeat and wasn’t breathing. I still remember the sight of her tiny limp blue arm hanging out of the incision, while Leslie’s doctor was yelling for help. I’d had a great deal of training and experience dealing with emergencies, but the situation in the operating room was so disturbing I had to leave. My brother and Samantha were in the waiting room, and they told me that I looked as white as a sheet as I came out of the OR. I sat with them for what seemed like an eternity, until Leslie’s doctor came out to tell us that both Leslie and Charlotte were fine now, though it had been touch and go for a while. He warned me that because Charlotte had been deprived of oxygen for some period of time during birth, she might have health problems as she grew up, including the possibility she could have cerebral palsy. He had no way of knowing what her outcome might be, and it was his professional responsibility to warn me of the possibilities. But when I asked his personal opinion, he said, “I don’t think she’ll have cerebral palsy. I think she’ll be just fine.” He was right.

Our mission was put back on the schedule for September 2006. Not long after, it was postponed to June 2007. All this reshuffling gave me the opportunity to make changes to my crew. I suggested that Lisa Nowak should get to fly on an earlier flight for two reasons: her obsessiveness gave me pause, and if she had to wait to fly on STS-118, it would be nearly ten years after she had been accepted as an astronaut. I argued that she should be put on the second return-to-flight mission, which would fly well before ours. As luck would have it, that mission had my brother, Mark, on it.

At the same time Lisa was moved, Scott Parazynski was moved as well, to the mission just after mine, with Pam Melroy as commander. In exchange for Scott, we got Rick Mastracchio. Rick had worked as a flight controller in mission control before applying to become an astronaut, and in that role he had designed many of the contingency abort procedures we practiced in the simulator. I knew this would make him an invaluable crew member during ascent and entry, and he was extremely competent with everything technical.

Part of being an astronaut involves having your health monitored more closely than most people’s. Every year I had my annual flight physical in February, the month of my birthday, and February 2007 was no exception. After my physical, I was told that I had a slightly elevated level of prostate-specific antigen. All men have a certain amount of this enzyme in their blood, and levels can vary naturally, but an elevated level can be an indicator of prostate cancer. Because my levels weren’t very high, and because I would be unusually young to be diagnosed with this kind of cancer, I decided to wait until after my upcoming mission was over to investigate it further.

STS-118 was a mission to deliver a number of key components to the International Space Station: a small truss segment, an external stowage platform, and a new control moment gyroscope, a device that allows the station to control its attitude. We were also to carry a SPACEHAB logistics module, which was packed with supplies to bring up to the station. When it returned, it would carry science samples, broken hardware, and garbage back down. We would be flying the sixth mission after the loss of Columbia, and several of the subsequent missions had withstood damage to the heat tiles from debris falling during launch. Each time, engineers examined the damage and determined anew how to avoid it, but then it would happen again. I would have preferred that tiles not be damaged, of course, but I was glad the issue was being taken seriously now, and it seemed to me we were doing everything we could to mitigate the risk.

The crew assignments for this flight were now finalized: Scorch, Rick Mastracchio, Barbara Morgan, Dave Williams, Tracy Caldwell, and, late in our training, Alvin Drew.

Barbara Morgan had been an elementary school teacher in Idaho when she was named a finalist for the Teacher in Space program in 1985. When Christa McAuliffe was chosen to teach lessons from space on Challenger, Barbara was designated her backup. She trained along with Christa and the Challenger crew for the entire year, preparing to complete the mission if for some reason Christa wasn’t able to. After the traumatic experience of seeing Challenger explode in the sky over Florida with seven good friends aboard, a lot of people would have distanced themselves from that tragedy. But to her credit, Barbara volunteered to go on the national tour that had been planned for Christa after the mission, visiting schools all over the country to talk about the space shuttle and the importance of education. Barbara wanted the schoolchildren to hear from someone who had shared Christa’s dream of flying in space and still had faith in the space program. Barbara officially joined the astronaut corps in 1998 and worked in a number of positions before being assigned to her first flight—this flight with me. When she flew in space, it would be twenty-one years after the Challenger disaster.

Barbara was also the only astronaut to have been chosen for the corps completely outside the process of the astronaut selection board. For this reason, some of our colleagues regarded her with skepticism. I decided to reserve judgment until I got to know her better, and I’m glad I did. Simply put, Barb worked her ass off. She mastered every facet of her job and became a valued member of my crew, exceeding my expectations.

Dave Williams was a Canadian astronaut who worked as an ER doctor in his previous life. He is proud of his Welsh heritage and was the first person to broadcast from space in the Welsh language on his first space shuttle mission. Dave was completely unflappable.

Tracy Caldwell was flying her first mission. NASA selected Tracy when she was twenty-nine, right out of her Ph.D. program in chemistry. She looked young for her age, so she was treated as a bit of a kid by many of our astronaut colleagues, but her performance was top-notch. She was conscientious, incredibly detail oriented, and serious, but also fun to be around. Tracy turned thirty-eight on the sixth day of our mission.

Alvin Drew was assigned to the mission just three months before the flight. He flew helicopters in combat for the Air Force in their Special Operations Command and then went on to become a helicopter test pilot. He was not easily fazed and didn’t seem thrown off by having been assigned to this flight so late, though it meant he would be constantly struggling to catch up.

For me, training to fly as commander was a completely new challenge. I had to learn my own role, as well as take responsibility for my crew—making sure everyone knew his or her job, recognizing each crew member’s strengths and weaknesses, pulling us together as a team, and mentoring the rookies. Because we would have three first-time space flyers on our crew (Barb, Tracy, and Alvin), we were one of the least-experienced crews in shuttle history, with only four previous flights among the seven of us.

We went into quarantine in Houston ten days before launch, then flew to Florida and continued our quarantine there for the last four days. There is a NASA tradition, which some crews follow more closely than others, of pulling pranks on rookies. When the Astrovan pulled up to the launchpad, I said offhandedly to Tracy, Barb, and Alvin, “Hey, you guys remembered to bring your boarding passes, right?” They looked at one another quizzically as the four of us veterans pulled preprinted boarding passes out of our pockets.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t bring your boarding passes! They won’t let you on the space shuttle without one!” I insisted. After an initial look of panic crossed their faces, the three rookies quickly caught on.

The closeout crew helped us get strapped into our seats, then climbed out of the shuttle and closed the hatch. Or tried to. The shuttle launch director announced that they couldn’t tell whether our hatch was properly closed or not.

The shuttle hatch had presented problems before. The closeout crew, who knew the equipment better than anyone, felt it was closing properly, but no one wanted to risk our lives on that hunch. They shut the hatch, opened it again, shut it again, opened it again. We were all strapped tightly into our seats and couldn’t see the hatch to give the closeout crew a visual confirmation. We were running out of time in our launch window.

Eventually Rick Mastracchio, who could stretch himself to see the hatch from his center seat on the flight deck, announced that the hatch was closed but that we now had an eighth crew member. One of the closeout crew had come into the space shuttle with us to inspect all the dogs—the bolts that attach the hatch to the surrounding structure—while the hatch was closed. He was able to confirm that it was working properly, and then the hatch was opened again so he could jump out. An ingenious and practical solution, and one I hadn’t thought of myself.

THIS TIME I knew what to expect at launch, so I could enjoy it a little more, even looking out the window a bit. It had been nearly eight years since I last flew, and the sheer instantaneous power was still indescribable, the horizon pulling away faster than would seem possible. We reached orbit safely and, as on my previous mission, successfully got through the arduous job of turning the rocket ship into a spaceship.

Before I went to sleep, I got an email from the lead shuttle flight director telling me that nine pieces of foam had come off the external tank, three of which they thought had struck the thermal protection system on the bottom of the orbiter, similar to what had doomed Columbia—though in Columbia’s case, the damage was on the more critical reinforced carbon-carbon insulation on the leading edge of the wing. NASA didn’t think it was a big deal—foam strikes could frequently be harmless—but were just letting me know out of an abundance of caution.

The next day, we conducted an inspection of the underside of the shuttle using a camera and laser scanners on the end of a boom attached to the robotic arm in an effort to pinpoint the damage. The images didn’t reveal anything conclusive. We approached ISS the next day and flew the orbiter through a 360-pitch maneuver, a backflip to point the shuttle’s heat shield so the station crew could capture up-close pictures. The photos showed an area of interest on a critical part of the belly of the orbiter near the right landing gear door; it was sizable enough that NASA decided to do a more focused inspection with the boom laser system after we docked. That inspection revealed a hole, about three inches by three inches, that went all the way through the silica thermal protection tiles down to the underlying felt.

As we scanned the area with the laser and looked at the images with the adjacent camera, my initial thought was, Oh, shit! The hole looked as though it went all the way through to the aluminum alloy that makes up the airframe. Later that evening, the ground emailed me photos of the damage. I printed out the most interesting pictures and carried them around in my pocket for the next couple of days.

There was a flurry of discussion on the ground about how this damage would affect our reentry. We didn’t have a lot of options in this situation. We could try to fix the damage on a spacewalk by filling the hole with a special putty that had never been proven in flight, or take our chances and land as is. I talked over the options with my crew, mostly with Scorch, whose technical knowledge I held in particularly high regard. I also talked with our two spacewalkers, Rick and Dave, since they would have to do any repairs if we decided to go that route. We came to the conclusion that we could fix the damage if we had to, but we would trust the analysis done on the ground if they told us we could reenter safely. The press immediately wrote that the crew was in imminent danger.

Teams of experts on the ground were conducting analysis on the damage and how the heat of reentry would affect the tiles. They made a mock-up of the damaged tiles and put it in a testing facility where gases can be heated to very high temperatures and subjected to hypersonic speeds using a continuous electrical arc to simulate the effects of reentry. As I learned about the analysis they were doing, I had more and more confidence that the damage would not present a risk and that we should leave it as it was. Some NASA experts disagreed and thought we should do the repair. My concern was that one small bump from a crew member’s tool or helmet could make the hole bigger, or create a new hole, and that the material and procedures for repairing tiles were still unproven. And, of course, any spacewalk presents inherent risks of its own.

THE DAY we were to return to Earth, we didn’t dwell on the risk. We readied the orbiter and its systems, got suited up and strapped ourselves into our seats, and began the reentry process. As we slammed into the atmosphere and built up heat, we watched the hot plasma streaming past our windows and imagined the battering of the shuttle’s heat shield. We all knew what could happen if our decision had been wrong.

“Passing through peak heating,” Scorch said calmly. This was the point when Columbia had started to break up.

“Understand,” I replied.

About twenty seconds later, we had passed the point where if the orbiter heat shield was burning through, we would have known about it.

“Looks like we dodged that bullet,” I said. I couldn’t help reflecting on our friends lost on Columbia, and I’m sure the rest of my crew was doing the same.

We were now inside the Earth’s atmosphere, and as we slowed below the speed of sound, I took over the controls from the autopilot. I was flying the space shuttle for the very first time in Earth’s atmosphere, and knew I would have only one chance to land.

As we dove seven times steeper than an airliner and descended twenty times faster, I felt the effects of gravity, vertigo, and a visual symptom called nystagmus, where your eyes jerk up and down. As we approached an altitude of two thousand feet, I tried to put these physical impairments out of my mind.

“Two thousand feet, preflare next,” Scorch said.

“Roger preflare, arm the gear” was my response, acknowledging his call and asking him to arm the landing gear system. As we passed through two thousand feet, I started slowly and deliberately raising the orbiter’s nose as I transitioned to a much shallower inner glide slope and started to rely more on the optical landing aids on the side of the runway and less on the orbiter’s instruments.

At three hundred feet I told Scorch, “Gear down.”

In response, Scorch pushed the button to lower the landing gear.

“Gear’s down,” he said.

From the time the landing gear were lowered until we landed was only about fifteen seconds. In that short period of time, I was trying to control the shuttle precisely in order to cross over the end of the runway at the correct height (twenty-six feet) and touch down at the correct speed (two hundred knots) with a rate of descent of less than two feet per second. We had a pretty heavy crosswind that day, which made all of this more challenging. I didn’t touch down exactly on centerline, but by the time we came to a stop, I was perfectly in the center of the runway. I think most space shuttle commanders who were also carrier aviators—Navy pilots and Marines who have landed on a ship at night—would agree that landing the orbiter was easier, all things being equal, though still one of the hardest piloting tasks. What made it hard was doing a perfect landing when you’ve been in space and are tired, dizzy, and dehydrated. And of course, when the world was watching.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER I returned from STS-118, I was in D.C. to visit with members of Congress and went out to dinner with Mark’s fiancée, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. I’d first met Gabby in Arizona one afternoon a couple of years earlier when I went to pick up Mark at the airport. She was friendly, warm, and incredibly enthusiastic about her job as an Arizona state senator. I was impressed with her after our brief meeting, so much so that I joked to Mark that I wondered what she saw in him.

While we were eating, my phone rang, showing the number for Steve Lindsey, the chief of the Astronaut Office. As the fiancée of an astronaut, Gabby knew that when the chief astronaut calls at an unusual hour, you take the call.

“Scott, I’d like to assign you to a long-duration flight, Expedition Twenty-five and Twenty-six. You’d be the commander for Twenty-six.”

I hesitated before speaking. It’s always exciting to get a flight assignment, but spending five or six months on the International Space Station wasn’t exactly what I had been hoping for.

“Honestly, I’d rather fly as a shuttle commander again,” I said. “Is that possible?”

I knew the space shuttle inside and out, and I had only learned the basics about the Soyuz and the ISS. The Soyuz was a very different vehicle from the space shuttle, to say the least. I sometimes joked that Soyuz and the shuttle were similar in that they both carried people into space—and that was where the similarity ended. The Soyuz manuals and checklists were in Russian, for starters. And I would also need to learn more about the ISS, which had grown significantly in the last few years, inside and out.

I sighed. “When’s the launch date?” I asked.

“October 2010.”

“I understand. Let me talk to Leslie and my kids and I’ll get back to you.”

Five or six months away from home would be a long time, especially with Charlotte still so young. But I also knew I would take any flight assignment I was given. Leslie and the girls agreed this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, and I said I would take it.

Among the things I had to do before I could turn my attention to this new assignment was follow up about my high PSA count. It wasn’t alarmingly high, but it had jumped from its previous level, and the rate of change could be indicative of a problem. I visited a urologist, Dr. Brian Miles, at Houston’s Methodist Hospital, who gave me two options: we could wait six months and see whether my PSA continued to increase, which would give us more information about whether I did have prostate cancer, and if so, how aggressive it might be. Or he could do a biopsy right then. I asked what the risk of a biopsy was.

“There’s a low risk of infection at the biopsy site—that’s really the only risk. People sometimes put it off as long as they can, though, because the procedure is uncomfortable.”

“How uncomfortable?” I asked.

Dr. Miles paused while he thought about how to explain it. “Like small electric shocks through the wall of your rectum,” he said.

“That sounds more than uncomfortable,” I said, “but let’s do it.”

The procedure was as unpleasant as he said, but I didn’t want to spend the next six months waiting to find out if I had cancer. If I did have it, I wanted to take care of it as soon as possible. Waiting could jeopardize my chances to fly my next mission or put the ISS schedule at risk.

A few days later, I learned I had a relatively aggressive strain of prostate cancer. Some types are so slow growing that men can live with them for decades and not be affected. The type I had would not create any adverse effects for a while, but if left untreated it would likely kill me in twenty years or so (I was forty-three).

When you are told you have cancer, especially an aggressive one, your mind immediately runs wild. Is this pain in my arm a metastasized tumor? Is the cancer spreading to my brain? I think this is a normal reaction to have, even for people who have access to top-notch care. I was immediately sent for a full-body CAT scan, and there was no indication the cancer had spread, which did a lot to set my mind at ease.

One of the first people I spoke to was my crewmate Dave Williams, who had had surgery for prostate cancer himself. As a doctor, he was able to offer good advice. He went to several meetings with me to talk to the surgeon about treatment options, along with the NASA flight surgeons.

Meanwhile, I called my brother and told him to get himself checked out. Since we were identical twins, we had a nearly identical genetic blueprint and therefore similar risks. When Mark got checked, it turned out he had the same type of prostate cancer.

I decided on a robotic radical retropubic prostatectomy, a surgery that would remove the entire prostate and leave me with a daunting recovery. It also brought with it a risk of bad outcomes like impotence or incontinence. There were less aggressive options—radiation therapy or a combination of less drastic surgery and radiation. It could take up to two years to determine whether radiation had successfully eliminated the cancer, though, and I didn’t want to have to wait that long to fly again. More important, because astronauts are exposed to radiation in space, our flight surgeons keep track of a lifetime radiation limit for each of us. I didn’t want to run up my lifetime limit if I could possibly avoid it. The robotic surgery was the option most likely to wipe out the cancer for good and minimize the risks to my career.

I underwent surgery in November 2007. My recovery took a long time, just as my surgeon had said it would, and it wasn’t fun. I had a urinary catheter for a week and a drain for lymphatic fluid in my side for weeks. One of the flight surgeons stopped by my home to check on my recovery one evening, and he decided the drain catheter was ready to come out. Standing in my living room, he simply yanked it out with all his might, and without much warning. I had no idea the thing was three feet long until I saw, and felt, it being ripped out of my body. I felt like I was William Wallace getting eviscerated in the movie Braveheart.

Despite the long recovery overall, I was aggressive in getting my NASA qualifications back, and I was able to start flying again in January. Getting back into the pool where we do spacewalk training, however, took much longer, as there was concern that the crotch of the spacesuit would put pressure on the area that was still healing. Due to the skill of Dr. Miles and the NASA flight surgeons, I returned to near normal in due time. The following year, I was in the operating room while Dr. Miles performed Mark’s operation, and I got to hold Mark’s prostate in my gloved hand before it was sent to pathology. The tumor was on the opposite side from mine, a mirror image, just like the opposite birthmarks on our foreheads.

IN EARLY 2008, I started training for my mission to the space station in earnest. I would be launching with two Russians, Sasha Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka, and when we got to orbit we’d be joining Shannon Walker, Doug Wheelock, and Fyodor Yurchikhin. Three months into my mission, Shannon, Doug, and Fyodor would return home and be replaced by Cady Coleman, Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, and Dima Kondratyev. I traveled often to Russia, Japan, and Germany to train with their respective space agencies.

I had a lot of experience working with the Russians in Star City by this point, which was good, because it would lighten my training load some, but I would still spend a significant amount of my time there. I’d learned a great deal about the differences between our cultures—that Russian people’s behavior toward strangers is indifferent to the point of seeming cold, which to Americans can feel rude, but that once I got to know individual Russians well, their behavior toward me was warm and affable. My friendships with people there reached a depth that would take many Americans years to reach.

The instructors we had at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, came from countries throughout Europe. I found it enriching to work with such a diverse group of people, but the training culture itself was purely German—precise almost to a fault. This could be a bit maddening at times to someone like me, who doesn’t care how the sausage is made. I prefer to be told what needs to be done and how to do it, leaving the nuanced details for the ground to worry about. I spent four weeks training in Cologne. I was enamored of the architecture, particularly the High Cathedral of Saint Peter, a thirteenth-century colossus that stands proudly on the banks of the Rhine.

Compared to my Russian and European colleagues, the Japanese people I met were much more outwardly polite and deferential to strangers, but it took much longer to get past that polite stage and get to something more familiar. Because my Japanese colleagues were polite to everyone, I found it hard to tell whether I had established good working relationships with them. This concerned me because I knew my directness could often be taken the wrong way and for some be off-putting.

To train with the Japanese space agency, I traveled to Tsukuba, a city of about 200,000 located about fifty miles northeast of Tokyo. I was joined there by my future crewmate Doug Wheelock and by Tracy Caldwell from my STS-118 crew, whom I was now backing up prior to my own expedition. One evening as we walked to one of the nearby restaurants, we passed a dessert truck with an English inscription on one side. In large letters, the truck was labeled “Marchen & Happy for You,” under which was printed an odd sort of prose poem:

The first time we saw this truck, we stopped and read the “poem” out loud, fascinated by its almost-sensical approximation of colloquial English. The Marchen & Happy for You truck became a landmark for English speakers visiting Tsukuba, and we always made sure to point it out to newcomers, watching while they read it and tried to make sense of it. I took a picture of it with my phone one day and showed it to one of the instructors at the Tsukuba Space Center who had strong English skills. I read him the text and asked him, “Does this make any sense to you?”

“Of course,” he answered. “What don’t you understand?”

This only increased our fascination with the ice cream truck and the linguistic and cultural differences it symbolized. To this day, many years later, when my former colleagues and I get together and talk about old times, especially training in other countries, sooner or later someone will bring up a picture on his or her phone and start reading out loud from it: “Beginning was from only one car….” Laughter inevitably ensues, sometimes followed by crying from laughing so hard. The dessert truck poem reminds us of the “lost in translation” aspect of being Americans in Japan, but it also reminds us of that intense period of training for an ISS expedition, and the way these shared experiences brought us together.

AS WITH most marriages that begin with the groom thinking about how to get out of the ceremony, my marriage to Leslie was not a happy one. Leslie was a good mother, and she continued to take care of things on the home front so I was free to work demanding hours at NASA, including frequent travel. After Samantha was born, I periodically tried to initiate conversations about our relationship and the possibility of ending our marriage. These conversations never went well. Our talks always ended with Leslie saying that if I ever tried to leave her, she would destroy my career and I would never see my child again. I was shocked and saddened that she would threaten me this way, but I also understood that emotions were running high and we all had a lot at stake.

We decided to try counseling. I was reluctant at first because I thought it might affect my chances to fly in space. I had been asked in the process of interviewing with NASA whether I had ever sought counseling or psychiatric help, and, having truthfully said no, I didn’t want that to change. Astronauts never knew exactly why we got flight assignments or what kept us from getting them, so the instinct to avoid negative attention or controversy was deeply ingrained. But I agreed because I thought it might help, and Leslie wanted to try. The day of our first appointment, we were waiting in the reception area when the door to the counselor’s office opened and out came a senior management astronaut and his wife, both of them wearing the stony expressions of people who have been through an emotional wringer. He and I silently acknowledged each other, and although I wondered whether having been seen there would have consequences, I at least knew it wasn’t unheard of for an astronaut to seek help for a troubled marriage.

The counselor wasn’t able to help us much, and our marriage continued to deteriorate. Meanwhile, I dropped the subject of our marriage each time Leslie threatened me. After Charlotte was born, and “child” changed to “children,” the stakes were even higher. So we settled into a semi-friendly arrangement in which she took care of our children and home and I pursued my career. I was gone a lot, which minimized the opportunities for tension and fighting, and we both liked entertaining and having people around, so even when I was home there wasn’t much chance for serious drama. We continued this way for years.

In the spring of 2009, I was back in Japan. I’d been looking forward to the trip, but once I was there, I felt crappy and the weather was gray and dull. I had a bad cold, was exhausted from jet lag, and was in a foul mood the whole time. I dragged myself through classes and training sessions all day and then collapsed in my tiny economy hotel room at night. It was then that I realized that despite being unhappy in Tsukuba, I didn’t want to go home to Leslie. I would rather be on a business trip feeling miserable than in my own home.

I visited my grandmother the day after I returned to the States. My father’s mother, Helen, whose home had been such a sanctuary for Mark and me when we were boys, was now in her nineties and living in a nursing home in Houston. She had taken a turn for the worse, and while I sat with her, holding her fragile hand, I thought about what a comforting presence she had been when we were little, when she took us to the botanical gardens and sang us to sleep. That had been forty years ago, and now age had robbed her of her vitality. Where would I be when I was her age, decades in the future? If I was lucky enough to be alive still, what sort of life would I have to look back on? How was I going to spend the rest of my time on Earth?

The very next day, I called Leslie from work and let her know I would be coming home early and that I needed to talk to her alone when I got there. At home, I told her I would always respect her as the mother of our children, and I would always take care of my daughters, but I wanted a divorce.

As I had anticipated, she repeated her threats and reminded me she had evidence that I had been unfaithful.

“I can understand that you’re angry,” I said, “but this is what I’ve decided. I hope you can move on. But do what you need to do.”

I’d hoped to have an amicable split, for the benefit of our daughters. Samantha was now fourteen, an especially vulnerable age to deal with this kind of family upheaval, and Charlotte was five. I thought it was important to show the girls that adults could work through their problems calmly, cooperatively, with generosity of spirit, and with an emphasis on the well-being of the children. This was not to be.

When Samantha and Charlotte got home from school, I gathered myself and spoke to them as calmly as I could, trying to make things seem cordial and positive, though they could tell from their mother’s face that this was nothing of the sort. Samantha was more upset than Charlotte—she was old enough to understand what a big change this was going to be. I tried to assure her that I would do everything I could to keep her life stable. Charlotte didn’t seem very interested in the conversation and spent the whole time playing with a rubber band—wrapping it around her wrist, unwrapping it from her wrist, her bangs hiding her eyes. After a while, Leslie asked her if she had any questions.

Charlotte’s round little face tipped up at me. She met my eyes, and I tried to read her expression. Then she held out the rubber band to me and asked, simply, “Is this your rubber band?”

This gesture was typical of Charlotte. She was trying to change the subject away from the topic that was causing everyone so much pain, and at a moment when I was so concerned about my daughters and how their world was about to be blown apart, she was trying to give me something.

When I put my head on the pillow that night, I felt more at peace than I had in months, maybe years. Maybe I would never fly in space again, but I was going to try to live a life I wouldn’t regret when I was old.

Leslie carried out one of her threats by moving away with the children, but in the end our divorce didn’t affect my career as I’d feared it might. She is still angry at me for ending our marriage. Yet when I started seeing Amiko, Leslie was surprisingly warm toward her. Whatever animosity she continued to feel toward me, she didn’t extend to Amiko, which a lot of people might have done in her situation.

Not long ago, Leslie and Amiko were consulting on the phone about some travel arrangements for Charlotte, when Leslie said to her, “I want you to know that you have always been great to co-parent with. My girls just love you, and that makes me love you too.” Amiko hung up the phone with tears in her eyes. She has been through a lot with my family, and these kind words meant the world to her. I know some people who, after going through a difficult divorce, say they wish they had never married their spouse or had never even met him or her. I can honestly say I have never felt this way. Leslie has been an important part of my life, and though I wish we could be on better terms, I have never regretted my decision to marry her, and I am eternally grateful for Samantha and Charlotte.