by Scott Kelly
11
ONE AFTERNOON in early 1995, I was in my cubicle at the test squadron, in a trailer adjacent to a row of World War II–era hangars and the flight line where F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets sat idle ready for flight, when I noticed that one of my colleagues had a big stack of papers on his desk. I asked him what he was doing.
“I’m filling out my astronaut application,” he said.
Of course, I had been aiming to fill out an astronaut application someday, but I’d assumed I wasn’t ready yet, that I wouldn’t be for another ten years or so. I was only a little more than a year out of test pilot school, just thirty-one years old, a bit on the young and inexperienced side for a pilot astronaut. I also didn’t have a master’s degree yet, which I thought was a requirement. But I asked my colleague whether I could take a look at his application. I was curious about what was involved, and I was especially curious about why his stack of papers was so thick. When I paged through it, I saw that NASA was looking for a lot of the kinds of information you would expect: transcripts, letters of recommendation, a detailed list of job responsibilities to date. I also noticed that he had included everything he had ever done in his life. This guy was one of the best qualified among us.
Looking over his application, I had an idea: Why not apply and be rejected? It would give me the opportunity to find out what the process was like, and rejection wouldn’t harm my chances in the future. I decided to take a different approach from what my colleague had done. I would include only what seemed really important. If my application was brief and concise, maybe the person reading it could take in all the information and be left with a clear sense of who I was. This minimalist approach was also appealing to me because the deadline was fast approaching.
I filled out the application for federal employment and submitted it on time. Months later, my colleague whose application I had first seen shared the news that he’d been called for an interview with NASA, in the first week of interviews. The conventional wisdom at the time was that NASA called their top choices first, and those interviewed in the first round had by far the best chance of being selected. I congratulated him and figured I would never hear anything.
A few weeks later, Mark and his wife were having dinner with Leslie and me at our house. Halfway through the meal, Mark announced that he had also been called for an astronaut interview.
“That’s awesome, congratulations,” I said. And I meant it. I felt he truly deserved it. He was clearly more qualified than I was, with his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. I decided not to mention that I had applied too, because I figured I wouldn’t get an interview anyway, and I didn’t want my not getting called to take attention away from his accomplishment.
“I do have a favor to ask you,” Mark said. “Do you have a suit I could borrow?”
I did—I had just bought a suit to attend a friend’s wedding—so I loaned it to him.
Months later, I came back to the office after flying a test flight and my secretary flagged me down. “Hey, Scott,” she said excitedly. “You missed a phone call from Teresa Gomez at NASA.” Teresa was the long-serving administrative assistant at the astronaut selection office. Her name was widely known throughout the flight-test community; if you got a call from her during the interview process, it was probably good news.
I called back right away, and Teresa asked whether I wanted to come down for an interview. “Yes! Of course,” I answered, trying not to shout. “I can come whenever you want.”
My interview was scheduled for a couple of weeks later. In the meantime, Mark came back from his own interview feeling that he had done well. He filled me in on exactly what to expect, which was hugely helpful. With Mark’s information, I could think about how I would deal with each stage of the daunting process and what answers I might give in the interview. Along with Dave Brown, a fellow Navy pilot who had also interviewed with NASA in the first group, we set up a camera in a conference room at the test pilot school in the evenings to videotape our sessions. Mark and Dave asked me the same questions the committee had asked them, I gave my answers, then we critiqued the video together. “Lean forward more,” Dave urged me. “Be more animated.” It not only helped me enormously, but it was a pretty nice thing for them to do, considering that we were in competition.
I reminded Mark that the astronaut selection board had already seen the only suit I owned.
“You have to buy me a new suit,” I told him. “It’s bad enough that we look exactly the same. We can’t wear the exact same thing too. They won’t be able to remember who said what and we’ll look funny.”
Mark, being the cheap young Navy lieutenant he was, refused to lay out the money for a new suit. I packed the same suit for my interview.
I was looking forward to heading down to Houston when the government suddenly shut down. This was in the fall of 1995, when President Clinton and the Republican Congress were in a standoff that left the government without a budget, causing shutdowns on and off from November until the following January. NASA was one of the many government agencies that had to temporarily close its doors.
During a window between shutdowns in December, I finally went for my interview. I checked into the hotel near the Johnson Space Center where all the applicants in my group would be staying, the Kings Inn, the same hotel that earlier astronauts stayed in while going through this same process. The interviews and tests would last an entire week, so the interview groups of twenty people got to know one another pretty well. Astronaut hopefuls have an acronym at NASA, just like everything else: ASHOs, pronounced “ass-hoes,” but as if an L had been conveniently placed between the O and the E. After checking in, I found some of the others milling around in the lobby and introduced myself to them. The candidates I didn’t meet that afternoon I met in the hotel bar that night. There was definitely a sense of sizing one another up as competition. At the same time, we knew we might also be future colleagues and spaceflight crewmates.
The interview and selection process is grueling—intentionally so, I think. We were interviewed, we took written tests, and we went through extensive medical testing. We had even more thorough eye exams than in the Navy, though in this case there was only one doctor in the room, not a team of four, and that doctor made no effort to try to intimidate us.
A lot of the medical tests were ones you would expect to get in a normal physical—blood tests, urine tests, reflex tests, questions about our family histories, that sort of thing. Some of the tests went into more depth than we had experienced before. We had all known to expect this. Obviously, astronauts have to be in exceptionally good physical condition and to have as low a risk of developing health problems as possible. Minor issues could disqualify astronaut hopefuls—for example, one occurrence of kidney stones could disqualify you from flying in space. NASA can’t risk a recurrence that would incapacitate an astronaut or require a costly early return. Anyone who had ever slipped a disc, had a heart murmur, or had been diagnosed with any of a number of otherwise generally inconsequential illnesses or injuries was possibly ineligible. Interestingly, a history of gallstones would disqualify an applicant, but not having a gallbladder was fine.
The medical tests could be anxiety inducing. There was nothing we could do to prepare for them or to maximize our chances, other than getting into the best physical condition we could beforehand. I had been running every day at lunchtime since I got the call for the interview. Since the government shutdown had stretched on for months, I ran so much that my heart had started skipping a beat every minute or so. I talked to Dave Brown about it in confidence. Aside from being a pilot, he was also a medical doctor. He speculated that my resting heart rate was getting so low that the backup mechanism for making sure my heart didn’t stop altogether was kicking in. Then my heart compensated by skipping the next beat, resulting in something called a premature atrial contraction (PAC). If that was what it was, it wouldn’t pose a threat to my health but might still be enough to disqualify me. With so many ap
plicants, NASA can afford to set aside candidates with even the tiniest chance of developing a health problem.
As part of the process we went through in Houston, we each had to wear a Holter monitor, a device that records the heart’s activity, for twenty-four hours. While I was wearing it, I was aware of every time my heart skipped a beat, wondering if it was going to ruin my chances of becoming an astronaut. The NASA flight surgeon assigned to me for the interview process was Smith Johnston. He communicated with me as much as he could without breaking any rules (he wasn’t allowed to tell astronaut hopefuls whether or not we were medically qualified). Smith let me know that while my PACs could be an issue, he would do his best to convince the medical review board not to let them hold me back. He also mentioned that my cholesterol was unusually low—who knew cholesterol could be too low?—which I attributed to the rabbit diet I had been on for the last few months. As with the running, I had been so determined not to leave anything to chance that I had almost overdone it.
The week’s most memorable test was the proctosigmoidoscopy. It’s like a colonoscopy that doesn’t go up as far, and without any sedatives or anesthetics. It’s painful and humbling, and as with so many other things we went through that week, we wondered how much we were being tested for toughness as well as for medical issues. I remember lying on my side on the examination table when the gastroenterologist came in and greeted me; I noticed there was a TV screen behind him, and on the screen was the image of a pair of shoes. It took me a moment to figure out that I was looking at the tops of the doctor’s shoes, and that the monitor was showing the view from the camera at the end of a long, flexible scope in his hand. A split second later, the view changed: now I was looking at my own asshole. It was not a view I had ever seen before (and hope never to see again), and I didn’t have much time to contemplate it before the image became an interior view.
Besides being incredibly painful, what made this procedure more unpleasant was that the doctor needed to pump air into me in order to be able to see, and at the end of the procedure when I was allowed to get up and get dressed, that air remained. I was scheduled for a tour of Space Center Houston right afterward, so I walked over there trying not to expel all that air (and other matter) in an attention-getting way. As with everything else, I wondered whether the challenge not to shit my pants in public was part of the test, to see how we would deal with this kind of discomfort and embarrassment. It’s true that life as an astronaut, especially on the space station, has more than its share of physical humiliations.
Finally, it was time for my interview with the selection board. I stood in the hallway outside a conference room as Duane Ross, who ran the astronaut selection office, was inside reading an essay I had been asked to write about why I wanted to be an astronaut. As I waited, I remembered the paragraphs I had written and rewritten as if my life depended on them.
The main reason I want to be an astronaut is that it is the most challenging and exciting job I can imagine. I want to play an integral part of humankind’s boldest endeavor ever, and truly feel that I would be an asset to the human space program.
In today’s society, our children are in desperate need of role models to inspire and motivate them to excel in sciences and math. The inspiration to explore and achieve the human space program provides to our children today will result in countless intangible benefits for future generations. I want to be a part of this future and feel the human space program would provide the best forum to serve as a role model for our children.
America has always had lofty goals to inspire achievement in all aspects of our lives. In this century we have used human flight, in our quest to fly faster and farther than anyone has ever done before, as a benchmark for technological achievement. The Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, and the Bell X-1 are all examples of great achievements that have inspired previous generations. The human space program is now and forever will be this country’s inspiration, and I want to play an integral part in it.
The entire world needs spaceflight to advance scientific discoveries in medicine, engineering, science, and technology. Just as the Apollo program resulted in countless tangible benefits that improved the daily lives of all individuals, the human space program is necessary if we are to continue our great history of technological achievement. It would be an honor to be a part of any discovery made as a result of the human space program.
I wondered whether I had used the phrase “human space program” too many times. I wanted to show that I understood that human spaceflight is not the only thing that NASA does, and also that I knew the phrase “manned spaceflight” was outdated. I had found this essay fiendishly difficult to write, because I knew my answer to the question “Why do you want to be an astronaut?” would be more or less the same for everyone else. We all wanted to do something difficult and exciting and important. We all wanted to be involved with something that would be in the history books for hundreds of years to come. What more was there to say about it? How could one applicant differentiate himself or herself from the others? Now that I have served on the astronaut selection board, I know that the essay doesn’t do much to help or hurt an applicant unless it is extreme in some way. But at the time, every detail seemed important.
In an earlier draft, I had tried, just as an experiment, to be more honest and see how it sounded.
“Actually the real reason I want to be an astronaut is that when I was in the tenth grade and visiting Kennedy Space Center on a family trip I wanted to see the film about the manned space program. My parents said the line was so long we would only go if Mark and I were in it.”
I had looked the new paragraph over with a stern eye, then decided it was too big a risk to try to be funny or cute. I stuck with the original message. It might be a cliché, but it was true.
I knew from Mark and Dave that an intimidating group of twenty people would be interviewing me. Some of them I recognized. John Young was one of them, the only astronaut to have launched on three different spacecraft: Gemini, Apollo, and the space shuttle. He had orbited the moon alone on Apollo 10, then walked on its surface during Apollo 16. He was chosen to command the first flight of the space shuttle, making him and his pilot, Bob Crippen, the only two people to launch into space on a rocket that hadn’t been previously tested on unmanned flights. He was what you might call an astronaut’s astronaut, a living legend. I wanted to be just like him. I also recognized Bob Cabana, the chief of the Astronaut Office (he had greeted us a few days earlier), and astronauts Jim Wetherbee and Ellen Baker.
I got settled into a chair at a T-shaped table surrounded by the committee and tried to sound calm and confident as I greeted them.
“I’m afraid this might all look pretty familiar to you guys,” I said, pausing for a laugh. “You’ve seen this suit before.” Then I explained how I had loaned it to my brother, who had been too cheap to buy me a new one. But he did lend me his shoes.
It’s risky to try to make a joke in a job interview, but everyone laughed, which made me feel a bit more at ease. They might have been wondering how Mark and I would deal with being twins applying at the same time, and I wanted them to feel they could treat us like any other candidates.
John Young took the lead. He said, simply, “Tell us about your life.”
My mind raced. What aspects of my life did he want to hear about? How far back should I go?
“Well, when I graduated from college in 1987—,” I began.
“No,” Young interrupted. “Go back further. Go back to junior high school.”
In retrospect, I wonder whether they cut off everyone’s response and made them start in a different place, to see how they would respond to being interrupted. In my case, junior high was not a great place to start. I wasn’t about to tell them about staring out the window and earning C’s. So instead, I told them about fixing up boats with my father, about learning to be an EMT and the experiences I had had working on the ambulance, about becoming licensed as a Merchant Marine officer in
college, about learning how to work in an operational environment, and about the challenges I faced along the way. As I spoke, I was trying to put my experiences in a context that would differentiate me from the other candidates they were seeing. Being a test pilot, as tough as that had been to achieve, wasn’t going to set me apart from the other test pilots. But repairing a clunker boat in the open waters of the Atlantic might, or delivering a baby in a roach-infested slum in Jersey City.
“What’s the frequency response of the longitudinal flight control system in the Tomcat?” John Young asked.
I had mentioned in my application that I was working on a new digital flight control system in the F-14. I had also been tipped off by an F-16 pilot who interviewed the same week as my brother that Captain Young liked to ask about longitudinal frequency response, so I was prepared.
“Fifty hertz,” I answered.
Young nodded approvingly. It would make sense that the selection board would want to see whether or not I knew my stuff technically, but I also think he was just fascinated by planes and never stopped wanting to learn about them.
The official interview lasted around fifty minutes, with Captain Young and Bob Cabana leading the conversation. In general, I felt that I was doing well, though at one point I noticed that Ellen Baker looked like she might be falling asleep. My interview was the first one after lunch, and I hoped that it was something she had eaten that was making her eyes droop and not my boring stories.
—
PART OF the selection process involved psychological tests, which I found interesting but stressful, since so much was riding on them. I was tempted to try to figure out what the “right” answer for each question was. The answer to “Do you ever hear voices telling you to do things?” wasn’t hard to guess, but I figured the test was designed to reveal people choosing to lie. One question I remember specifically was “Would you rather steal something from a store or kick a dog?” I had to choose one, so I said I would rather steal something. With that type of question, I suspected there was no right or wrong answer, but rather that our responses would be cross-checked against other responses to similarly worded questions to detect someone trying to game the test. Years later, one of the psychiatrists told me I’d almost failed the test for that reason—my answers reflected that I was trying to tell them what they wanted to hear.