by Scott Kelly
Science takes up about a third of my time, human studies about three-quarters of that. I must take blood samples from myself and my crewmates for analysis back on Earth, and I keep a log of everything from what I eat to my mood. I test my reaction skills at various points throughout the day. I take ultrasounds of blood vessels, my heart, my eyes, and my muscles. Later in this mission, I will take part in an experiment called Fluid Shifts, using a device that sucks the blood down to the lower half of my body, where gravity normally keeps it. This will test a leading theory about why spaceflight causes damage to some astronauts’ vision.
In fact, there is much crossover between these categories of research. If we can learn how to counteract the devastating impact of bone loss in microgravity, the solutions may well be applied to osteoporosis and other bone diseases. If we can learn how to keep our hearts healthy in space, that knowledge will be useful for heart health on Earth. The effects of living in space look a lot like those of aging, which affect us all. The lettuce we will grow later in the year is a study for future space travel—astronauts on their way to Mars will have no fresh food but what they can grow—but it is also teaching us more about growing food efficiently on Earth. The closed water system developed for the ISS, where we process our urine into clean water, is crucial for getting to Mars, but it also has promising implications for treating water on Earth, especially in places where clean water is scarce. This overlapping of scientific goals isn’t new—when Captain Cook traveled the Pacific it was for the purpose of exploration, but the scientists traveling with him picked up plants along the way and revolutionized the field of botany. Was the purpose of Cook’s expedition scientific or exploratory? Does it matter, ultimately? It will be remembered for both, and I hope the same is true of my time on the space station.
By the end of the day working with the mice, I have a collection of sample bags the scientists on the ground are itching to get their hands on. They will have to wait until we send Dragon back to Earth, but they couldn’t be more pleased with how the dissection went. Terry puts the samples in the freezer. I’m exhausted from the extreme focus and from being locked in one position all day with my hands in the glove box. But it’s satisfying to know my work will be useful. I clean up, putting all the tools and instruments back where they belong, remembering that a tool in the wrong place is no better than a tool we don’t have. I head into Node 1 to find some dinner. We don’t go out of our way to eat together, except on Fridays, because our schedules are just too crazy to allow it. I warm some irradiated meat, douse it in hot sauce, and eat it on a tortilla, floating alone while watching an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. While I’m finishing up, Terry comes by.
“Hey, don’t forget we got ice cream on SpaceX,” he reminds me. He goes to the tiny freezer in the ceiling of the lab and brings back a Klondike bar for each of us. It’s real ice cream, not the freeze-dried stuff that’s marketed as astronaut ice cream, which we don’t actually have in space. I’ve never had ice cream in space before—we usually don’t get to eat anything cold. It tastes amazing.
Back in my CQ, I look through my care package that came up on Dragon again. There is a poem and some chocolates from Amiko (she knows I crave chocolate when I’m in space, though on Earth I don’t have much of a sweet tooth); a bottle of Frank’s hot sauce; a postcard from Mark showing twin redheaded little boys giving the finger to the camera; and a card from Charlotte and Samantha, their distinctive styles of handwriting gouged into the heavy paper by a black pen.
I eat a piece of the chocolate and put everything else away. I check my email again. I float in my sleeping bag for a while, thinking about my kids, wondering how they are doing with me being gone. Then I drift off to sleep.
6
AT FIVE in the morning, when it was still fully dark, I slipped into the B Company dorm. I quietly opened the door of a room on the third floor, where two eighteen-year-old boys, Maritime freshmen, were sleeping soundly. The room smelled of unwashed socks and sweat. I stood over the boy on the left side, the bed I had slept in myself only two years earlier. On the other side of the room, another indoctrination officer stood over the bed where Bob Kelman had slept. When I gave the signal, we both started banging the garbage pail lids together while screaming, “Wake up, MUGs! Wake up, you lazy bastards!” at the top of our lungs.
I had been appointed the chief indoctrination officer for the class, in charge of supervising all those running the grueling period of drills and training the incoming freshmen. It was a demanding job but a huge honor—it meant I had done exceptionally well and that my superiors saw leadership potential in me. I was determined to prove them right. This was my first real opportunity to be a leader.
I had 250 new MUGs (Midshipmen Under Guidance) to train. I was responsible for teaching them the traditions and expectations of Maritime, as well as helping them adjust to life away from home. As the final authority on discipline, I had decided that I wanted to be the kind of leader who was firm but fair. I wanted to hold everyone to the same high standard, but I also wanted to approach each situation with an open mind and a willingness to listen to others’ points of view.
I once received an anonymous note from a MUG warning me not to get too close to the ship’s railing at night on our next cruise—a threat to push me overboard. This was an early lesson that a leader can’t always please everyone. I can understand why this MUG and the others I dealt with found the rules burdensome. But I had come to believe that shined shoes and polished belt buckles, however insignificant they might seem, helped us to learn the attention to detail required to safely and effectively operate at sea.
Each summer, we took the Empire State V to new ports, and immediately after I returned from each of those cruises I would then leave for my Navy cruise. I spent one summer doing a program called CORTRAMID (Career Orientation and Training for Midshipmen). We spent a week each in the surface, submarine, and aviation communities as well as a week with the Marine Corps. The idea was to give us some exposure to the different options for Navy service. With the Marine Corps, I observed explosives demonstrations and ran around in the woods with an M16 at night. With the aviators I flew in an E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, and with the Navy SEALs I got to do their grueling obstacle course. I spent three days on a submarine.
In my senior year I was named the battalion commander of my Navy ROTC unit, another leadership role. By that time, I was taking harder classes than ever, mostly electrical engineering. I now knew how to study and took pride in it, actually enjoyed it. I was learning circuit design, network analysis, and other advanced engineering courses. I would have liked to change my major to physics if that had been an option at Maritime. I’ve sometimes thought if I were ever to become a college professor, I would want to teach first-year physics or calculus. Those foundation classes are make-or-break for students, and I think it would be rewarding to give young people the keys to learning hard things that I had figured out for myself.
It was still my goal to become a Navy pilot, specifically to fly jets off an aircraft carrier. In college, I had been doing whatever I could to improve my chances, including caring for my vision. A lot of my friends who hoped to become pilots talked about how to maintain their vision, and we all became a bit obsessed. Every prospective pilot knew some poor bastard who had worked all his life toward becoming a Navy pilot only to be rejected for having vision slightly less than 20/20. I was concerned about eyestrain and made sure to always have a bright light to read by. In retrospect, there was probably nothing I could have done to have much effect.
Early in my senior year, I took a standardized test called the Aviation Qualification Test/Flight Aptitude Rating. The qualification test was something like an IQ test, and the flight aptitude part consisted of mechanically oriented puzzles and a visual logic section that showed illustrations of views of the horizon from a plane’s cockpit that we had to match with the correct airplane orientation.
I knew how important this test would be to my future,
so I worked hard to prepare for it. There weren’t study guides, so I made my own, drawing pictures of airplanes and what the view would look like from the cockpit. The day of the exam, I left the classroom feeling like I had done as well as I possibly could. I wouldn’t know for weeks what my results were, and then it would be months after that before I would learn to what part of the Navy I would be assigned. Even if I did well, there was still no guarantee that I would be chosen for aviation, much less that I would go on to fly jets.
—
ONE COLD DAY in January, my roommate George Lang and I were sitting in our room just after lunch, watching Star Trek on the tiny color box TV we kept next to the fish tank in our room. A news anchor broke into the show to report that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded seventy-three seconds after launch. We watched the shuttle blow up on the screen over and over, just after the ground gave the call “go at throttle up.” (At the time I had no idea what this phrase meant; much later I would learn to respond to it myself, confirming the communications between the ground and the shuttle.) It would be weeks after the accident before the theory emerged that the unusually cold weather in Florida had caused a rubber O-ring in one of the solid rocket boosters to fail.
“You still want to do it?” George asked me after a few hours of watching nonstop.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The shuttle,” George said. “You still want to fly on it?”
“Absolutely,” I said, and I meant it. My determination to fly difficult aircraft had only grown stronger as I had learned more about aviation, and the space shuttle was the most difficult aircraft (and spacecraft) of all. The Challenger disaster had made clear that spaceflight was dangerous, but I already knew that. I felt confident that NASA would find the cause of the explosion, that it would be fixed, and that the space shuttle would be a better vehicle as a result. It sounds strange, but seeing the risk involved only made the prospect of flying in space more appealing.
It wasn’t until years later that I understood that a management failure doomed Challenger as much as the O-ring failure. Engineers working on the solid rocket boosters had raised concerns multiple times about the performance of the O-rings in cold weather. In a teleconference the night before Challenger’s launch, they had desperately tried to talk NASA managers into delaying the mission until the weather got warmer. Those engineers’ recommendations were not only ignored, they were left out of reports sent to the higher-level managers who made the final decision about whether or not to launch. They knew nothing about the O-ring problems or the engineers’ warnings, and neither did the astronauts who were risking their lives. The presidential commission that investigated the disaster recommended fixes to the solid rocket boosters, but more important, they recommended broad changes to the decision-making process at NASA, recommendations that changed the culture at NASA—at least for a while.
Years later, one of the first briefings I got as a new astronaut was about the Challenger disaster. Hoot Gibson, who was in the same class as three of the Challenger crew, detailed exactly what had gone wrong that January day. He also told us what the crew likely experienced in the last minutes of their lives. He wanted us to understand the risks we would be running if we flew in space. We took his words seriously, but no one dropped out after that briefing.
—
GRADUATING FROM MARITIME, in 1987, made me pause and reflect. My admission had been make-or-break for me. I would never forget that. What I had learned there—in the classroom, on the ship, from my peers, from my mentors—had been life changing. I was a completely different person from the confused kid who had entered through those gates four years earlier. I felt a debt of gratitude to the school for everything it had done for me, and I was nostalgic about leaving a place where I had so many fond memories. Over the years, I’ve tried to stay connected to the school, and in the time since I graduated their prestige has grown—when financial magazines rank colleges whose graduates have the highest salaries, SUNY Maritime is almost always up there with Harvard and MIT, sometimes at the very top.
I earned a high score on the aviation qualification test, and soon after I was assigned to flight school in Pensacola, Florida. I packed all my belongings into my old white BMW and drove south that summer of 1987. Pensacola is on the panhandle, commonly known as the Redneck Riviera, so in a lot of ways it’s more like Alabama than most people’s idea of Florida. It’s a small city, dominated by the naval air station, and tourism is the main industry aside from training Navy fliers. Pensacola is very much a typical military town with trailer parks, pawn shops, and liquor stores, but in this case set against a background of beautiful beaches.
When I reported for my eye exam on the first day of flight school, there were four uniformed officers facing me. I’d expected to find one busy flight surgeon who would make me read a chart and then (I hoped) send me on my way, but the wall of high-ranking officers scrutinized me, stern and unsmiling throughout the exam. Their presence was distracting, and I continually questioned my responses—perhaps this was their intention. I got through the eye exam with a clean bill of ophthalmic health. Years later, I met a Navy flight surgeon who was in that room the day of my eye exam. He admitted that it was an intentional tactic of intimidation.
Naval aviation indoctrination got started with several weeks of tough physical, swim, and survival training. There was a cross-country course we had to navigate in a certain amount of time, an obstacle course with hurdles to jump over, barriers to shimmy under, sand to crawl through, a wall to climb. The film An Officer and a Gentleman gives a pretty accurate representation of what aviation indoctrination training was like, and just as in the film, we student naval aviators had to conquer the Dilbert Dunker a few weeks in. The dunker is designed to simulate the unpleasant experience of a water landing or ditching in an airplane. Dressed in full flight gear and helmet, we were strapped into a mock-up cockpit that was then sent down a steep rail into the deep end of a swimming pool. We were warned that the impact with the water could be hard enough to knock the wind out of us, and that once submerged we’d have only a few seconds to get our bearings before the cockpit turned upside down. I would have to detach the comm wire from my helmet, release myself from the restraints from which I’d be hanging, find my way out of the cockpit, and then dive deeper in order to escape the fuel that might be burning on the ocean surface in a real water landing. A few people who went through this before me couldn’t find their way out and had to be pulled out of the cockpit by rescue divers. This made the risks much more vivid to those of us still standing in line, but when I hit the water I managed to find my way out on the first try.
We also had to go through a similar dunker that simulated a helicopter crash in water. We were strapped into a mock-up helicopter, which was dropped into a pool, flipped over, and sent to the bottom. As with the Dilbert Dunker, I had to be able to get unstrapped and swim to safety. The helo dunker was much harder, though, because several of us, blindfolded, had to get out a single door. People have drowned in the helo dunker, and I heard that some even went into cardiac arrest. We sat strapped in and watched the water slowly climb, grabbing a last breath as it reached our noses. We had to wait to unstrap ourselves until after we were upside down and the motion stopped. I’d try to find a railing or structure on the inside of the cockpit to serve as a reference point to reach for once blindfolded. Once I was upside down, though, everything seemed to move around, and I’d inevitably get kicked in the face by someone flailing for the door, or get kicked in the stomach and have the wind knocked out of me. I’m sure I also kicked the guys behind me. I couldn’t have been happier when I passed the test, though I knew I would have to requalify every four years (NASA has its own water survival training, but it’s much easier). As it happens, I would never need to use any of the emergency training, either the Navy’s or NASA’s.
The swim requirements were even harder. We had to be able to swim a mile and tread water for fifteen minutes, in full flight suit
and boots. I got through the mile easily, but I found treading water murderously difficult. Other guys seemed to be naturally buoyant; I seem to have the buoyancy of a brick. I practiced and practiced and was finally able to pass the requirement, though just barely.
I also learned various survival techniques in water, like taking off my pants and making a flotation device out of them by tying the legs closed and filling them with air. I learned drownproofing, a technique for staying alive in water for long periods of time by calmly floating facedown in the water and bringing my mouth slowly up to the surface only when I needed to take a breath. I learned how to disentangle myself from the strings of a parachute collapsed on me in the water. I practiced being rescued from the water by a helicopter, hooking a sling called a horse collar around myself to be hoisted up into the air. The hardest part of this was all the water the helo would kick up into my face, making it feel as though I was drowning.
One day we were taken in groups to experience the altitude chamber, a sealed room in which the air pressure is slowly lowered to simulate an altitude of 25,000 feet. At this level the oxygen deprivation isn’t life threatening, but it gave us a chance to observe our symptoms of hypoxia, which can include tingling in the extremities, nails and lips turning blue, trouble speaking clearly, and confusion. After a number of sessions in the chamber, I tried to push my limits to see how bad my symptoms could get. At first I started to feel a bit drunk and stupid, a vaguely pleasant sensation that turned quickly into euphoria. Euphoria became confusion, followed closely by tunnel vision, and the next thing I knew, the safety monitor was putting my oxygen mask back on for me—I had waited too long and become unable to do it myself. The lesson of the low- pressure chamber was that you go over the cliff quickly. I would continue to do periodic recertification in the altitude chamber, but I always avoided the cliff.