Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  Other tests were more unusual. Because an astronaut cannot be claustrophobic, we all underwent a simple test: we were each outfitted with a heart monitor, zipped into a thick rubber bag not much bigger than a curled-up adult, shut into a closet, and left without any idea of how long we would be in there. For me it was about twenty minutes, and I enjoyed a brief nap. Another requirement was that we go over to the Astronaut Office at some point during the week and chat with some of the astronauts. I dutifully went over one afternoon, introduced myself to the first person I met, and then got out of there fast. I figured there was not much upside to this exercise: in a brief conversation I wouldn’t be able to make a good enough impression to help me, but I could easily rub someone the wrong way and wind up hurting my chances.

  One of the events on our schedule was a dinner at Pe-Te’s Barbecue, a popular destination for off-duty astronauts and other NASA employees. This dinner was one of the more informal events, and in some ways that only made it more stressful. I figured the selection board didn’t want someone who was sloppy or unpresentable when off the clock, but I also didn’t want to look like an uptight square who didn’t know how to have a good time. I thought longer and harder about what to wear that night than I did for any other part of the selection process. I actually looked up photos of astronauts at casual events to see what they wore. Based on my investigation, I chose khaki pants and a Ralph Lauren striped polo shirt. At the restaurant, I was faced with more daunting choices: Should I drink only water, to show how health-conscious I was? Should I drink one beer to show I could stop at one, or drink two to show I could stop at two? The social terrain was tricky as well. Should I talk to astronauts as equals and risk sounding disrespectful, or treat them as superiors and risk sounding like a suck-up? Should I avoid talking to them and risk having them not remember me at all? I could see all the other candidates around me making the same calculations.

  —

  AT THE END of the week, we said our good-byes and went back to our respective homes. NASA was to interview six groups in all, and I had been in the third group, so patience would be required. For me, the wait was made harder by the fact that I thought I had done well. If I’d known that I’d blown some part of the process, or that one of the doctors I’d encountered had betrayed that something was wrong with me physically, I would have had a pretty good idea that I wasn’t going to make it, and the wait would have been easier.

  As the weeks went by, I received a new Navy assignment: to join a fighter squadron at a naval air station in Japan. This was a move I would have been excited about under any other circumstances, and Leslie was prepared for the adventure, but I still hadn’t heard from NASA. I didn’t want to move my family there until I had to.

  The moving company that contracted with the Navy called me to set up a date to come and pack up our stuff.

  “Can you hold off for a couple of weeks?” I asked. The movers reluctantly agreed.

  Soon, they called again. This time they had chosen a date they wanted to come and they were less interested in renegotiating it. I managed to put them off again. And again. Over the next few weeks, I started to hear from some of the people I had listed as references that they had been contacted as part of my background investigation. So I knew I had made it to the next level. That gave me hope, though I was still concerned about the fact that I was interviewed in the third group rather than the first. I asked people I had met at the interview if they had heard anything about when NASA would make their calls. No one did.

  A few days before Memorial Day weekend, I got a call at home.

  “Scott,” the voice said. “This is Dave Leestma.” Dave was one of the astronauts I had met in Houston and was the flight crew operations director—the direct supervisor of the chief astronaut.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “Would you like to come fly for us?” he asked. I paused, because it wasn’t entirely clear to me that this was the call I had been waiting for. I knew that NASA employed a lot of pilots who weren’t astronauts—maybe Dave was asking me to be a pilot, not an astronaut.

  “Uh, maybe,” I said. “Fly what?”

  He answered with a laugh. “The space shuttle, of course.”

  It’s hard to describe what I felt then. I wasn’t entirely shocked, because I thought I had done well, and I had started to think I might be chosen. But I did feel an awareness of everything it had taken for me to get here, from reading The Right Stuff and setting a goal that seemed impossible, to this moment. And I felt humbled by the role I was going to be asked to step into.

  “I’d love to,” I said. “Have you called my brother yet?”

  Later, when I related this conversation to people, they thought it was funny that I didn’t even take a breath to process my own accomplishment before asking about my brother. But to me, waiting to find out what would happen with his application was almost as suspenseful as waiting to hear about my own.

  “I just got off the phone with him,” Dave answered. “Yeah, he got selected too.”

  This was the first time NASA had selected relatives. We’d been concerned they might not want to select brothers, especially twins, and in the back of my mind I had been anticipating that they might choose one of us and not the other.

  “Mark actually asked me about you, too, and I told him I was about to call you,” Dave said. So my brother knew that I was to become an astronaut before I did. That was fine with me.

  I hung up the phone after talking to Dave and I told Leslie: “I’m going to be an astronaut.” She was thrilled for me. Next I called my brother, and we spent a few minutes on the phone congratulating each other and talking about our moving plans. I got on the phone with my parents and they were overwhelmed by the news. Word spread quickly within our small family—the next time we saw our maternal grandmother, she had had a custom bumper sticker made for her car that read, MY TWIN GRANDSONS ARE ASTRONAUTS. I would imagine people thought she was crazy.

  The next day, I told my colleagues that I had been chosen to be an astronaut. I particularly enjoyed telling Paul, my friend and flight test engineer, because I knew he would be excited for me. When I told him, he jumped up and, with a huge smile, exclaimed, “You’ve gotta be frigging shitting me!” A few seconds later he followed up with “Will you invite me to come down to Florida and see a launch?” I promised I would. I was surprised and touched by how pleased everyone was for me. They were all so thrilled, their excitement actually helped it to sink in for me what I had achieved. My life had just changed. I was going to have the chance to fly in space.

  When the press found out that NASA had selected the two of us, they called the astronaut selection office to ask about it. A reporter asked Duane Ross, “Did you know you picked two brothers?”

  His answer: “No, we picked two very accomplished test pilots who happen to be twins.”

  12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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