by Scott Kelly
The Astronaut Office was a busy place in those days with such a large new class adding our numbers to the already existing corps. Some very experienced astronauts were still around, and it was an honor to serve along with them. John Young, the Gemini-era astronaut who had been on my selection committee, was always in the astronaut gym, putting everyone to shame just by showing up. Another spaceflight legend, John Glenn, was assigned to his space shuttle flight not long after I became an astronaut. One day I had four-year-old Samantha with me at work because Leslie had a dental appointment, and as I was walking her around I saw Glenn working diligently in his office. I introduced myself and Samantha.
He looked up and said, “Hi, young lady. What are you doing today?”
“I’m going to lunch with my dad,” Samantha answered.
“What’s your favorite food?” he asked her.
“Macaroni and cheese,” she said.
Senator Glenn gave her a look of pleased surprise. He held up the papers he had been working on.
“Look right here,” he said. “I was just selecting my space food for my mission and I just wrote, ‘Macaroni and cheese.’ That’s my favorite, too!”
Another time, I had Samantha with me at a party, and I encouraged her to talk to John Young about his experience walking on the moon. Samantha approached him and said, “My dad says you walked on the moon.”
John responded, “I didn’t walk on the moon. I worked on the moon!”
More than a year later, we were watching a documentary about Apollo, and I pointed out John Young to Samantha. “You met him, remember? He walked on the moon.”
Samantha didn’t miss a beat: “Daddy, he didn’t walk on the moon, he worked on the moon.”
John Glenn completed his mission, in October 1998, after which I inherited his parking space and used it for the next eighteen years.
Leslie and Samantha took easily to life in Houston. Leslie was always good at making new friends, and she quickly became part of a tight circle of women in our neighborhood. I would often come home from work to find a group of five or six women clustered in the kitchen, drinking wine and eating cheese, talking and laughing. She also became the head of the astronaut spouses’ group, which was responsible for planning social events for the astronaut corps, especially the traditional parties in honor of the spouses of the crew that was flying next. They also helped out with meals, babysitting, and other favors for anyone in the group who had a special need, like a death in the family or a new baby. The role suited Leslie well.
—
AS PART OF my ASCAN training, I learned to fly the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA), a Gulfstream business jet that had been modified to re-create the approach profile and handling qualities of the space shuttle in the landing phase as closely as possible. Flight computers simulated the drag we would experience in the heavier, less agile orbiter by putting the engines in reverse while airborne. The left side cockpit and the controls had been designed to simulate the experience of landing the shuttle. The STA generally flew out of El Paso, Texas, so we would fly over there in a T-38, which took a little over an hour, get in the STA, then fly another thirty minutes to the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico. I did many practice approaches to the dry lake bed runways in that aircraft, stopping short of actually touching the wheels down. At first, we’d fly the STA every few weeks, learning to land the space shuttle. Eventually, we moved to flying every other month, then every quarter to maintain our proficiency, until we were assigned to a real mission.
I was in El Paso one day in March 1999, just having finished my ten practice landings and getting ready to fly back to Houston, when one of the senior shuttle commanders, Curt Brown, a tall guy with a receding hairline and a thick Tom Selleck 1980s mustache, came up to me. He had only spoken to me a couple of times before. He was known to be extremely technically competent, and his experience—five shuttle missions in six years—was nearly unequaled. But he also had the reputation of being arrogant and unfriendly to those not worthy of his attention. A high flight rate, training for missions one after another, practically without a break, can also bring burnout.
“Hey, come over here,” he said sternly. “I need to talk to you.”
I followed him into a private office, wondering what I had done to piss him off. He shut the door behind us, then turned and poked me in the chest three times while staring straight into my eyes.
“You better have your shit together,” he said to me, “because we’re flying in space in six months.”
I felt a couple of different things at once. One was: I’m fucking flying in space in six months!
Another was: Wow, what a shitty way to let someone know he’s got his first flight assignment.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ve got my shit together.”
Curt told me to keep this news a secret. I told my brother, of course.
A couple of days later, I was called in to see Charlie Precourt, the new chief of the Astronaut Office, along with Curt and French astronaut Jean-François Clervoy (we called him “Billy Bob” since “Jean-François” didn’t sound very Texan). Charlie looked very serious. He told Billy Bob and me that we were in trouble. A few months earlier, he said, we had screwed up on a T-38 flight and had drawn a flight violation from the FAA.
Because of my run-in with Curt earlier that week, and knowing that we were being assigned to a flight, I had a strong feeling that he and Charlie were just messing with us. Billy Bob didn’t know that, though, and all the color drained from his face. Once Curt and Charlie had had enough fun, Charlie said, “We’re just kidding, guys. You’ve both been assigned to STS-103 on Discovery. It’s going to be an emergency repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.”
Billy Bob was visibly relieved. Curt would command the mission, and we would be joined by John Grunsfeld, Mike Foale, Steve Smith, and Claude Nicollier. I was to be the only rookie on the crew and the first American in my class to fly. The primary goal was to fix the failing gyroscopes on the Hubble Space Telescope on four spacewalks, each more than eight hours long. Hubble needs at least three of its six gyroscopes to be working in order to make precise observations, and three had already failed.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been making observations of the universe since 1990. Until then, astronomers could never get a truly clear view of the night sky because of the distorting effect of the atmosphere, the same effect that causes stars to appear to twinkle. Observing stars and galaxies through the filter of our atmosphere was like trying to read a book underwater. Putting a telescope in orbit outside the atmosphere and past the reach of light pollution has changed the field of astronomy. By observing distant stars, scientists have been able to make discoveries about how fast the universe is expanding, how old it is, and what it is made of. Hubble has helped us to discover new planets in new solar systems and confirmed the existence of dark energy and dark matter. This one scientific instrument has revolutionized what we know about our universe, and the task of repairing it—which always brings the risk of damaging or even destroying its sensitive components—is an enormous responsibility.
Once our training was in full swing, we spent a lot of time in simulators. Running simulated missions is the only way for astronauts to get hundreds of hours of experience doing something that in reality we would get to do only a few times. The simulations re-created the experience as closely as possible—same screens, switches, and buttons; same uncomfortable metal-framed seats, same headsets, and same thick procedure books. The simulation supervisors devised fiendish scenarios for us to work through, such as multiple interrelated systems failing while other systems continued working just fine, though their sensors might erroneously report they had failed too. We practiced solving problems quickly. Often the simulations were designed so that one of us would be barraged with problems to test how we worked together as a team.
About halfway through our training, we were in a simulator dealing with a complex failure—all the cooling systems had gone down
at once. Those controls were all on the left side of the cockpit, where the commander, Curt, was sitting. He was hit with one malfunction after another, but because he was so talented and experienced, he was able to identify and focus on the most critical issue. Simultaneously, a computer failed. This would normally be his responsibility too, but because I wasn’t as busy and could reach his keyboard myself, I decided to fix it for him by switching out the backup for the primary system. I typed in the commands while Curt’s head was still buried in cooling system problems. Item 16, execute, I typed.
A few minutes later, Curt got through his work with the cooling system. He looked at the display and saw that the computer failure had disappeared. He looked confused.
“What happened to the port failure on FF One?”
“Oh, I port-moded it for you,” I answered. As I spoke, I sensed this was not the answer he wanted to hear.
“You did what?”
“I port-moded it.”
A second went by—and then Curt turned toward me, which was difficult to do wearing a pressure suit while strapped tightly into his seat. He punched me on the arm as hard as he could.
“Don’t ever do that again!” he shouted.
“Ah, okay,” I said. “I won’t ever do that again.”
He’d made his point, and though I didn’t agree with his method, I appreciated his directness. I never touched any buttons or switches on his side of the cockpit again without his explicit approval.
—
EILEEN COLLINS BECAME the first woman to command a space shuttle mission, on Columbia, in July 1999. Once that flight got off the ground, we would become the prime crew, our launch date set for October 14, 1999. But there was a problem on Columbia during ascent. An electrical short disabled the center engine’s digital control unit. The engine continued to operate on its backup—a case of NASA’s redundancy saving the crew from what would have been a very risky attempt at an abort—but something had gone seriously wrong, and NASA needed to find out what it was before flying again. The Columbia mission was cut short, and when the shuttle was safely back on the ground, an investigation ensued.
It was revealed that wiring in the payload bay had been chafing against an exposed screw, a good reminder to everyone of how little it can take to cause a disaster. Further inspections revealed deteriorating wiring throughout the space shuttle fleet that would need to be addressed before any of the shuttles could fly again. That caused a delay in our launch date to November 19. As inspections and repairs to the wiring dragged on, we were delayed further, to December 2, then to December 6.
These delays were frustrating for everyone. It was mentally draining to keep working toward a date that slipped away, then bring our full energy to the next announced date. The December 6 launch date didn’t change as November went by, and we grew hopeful. We celebrated Thanksgiving with our families, then the next day we said our good-byes and went into quarantine. NASA’s quarantines were a bit different from the Russians’—they were more stringent in some ways and less stringent in others—but the underlying concept was the same: to isolate space travelers from germs before a launch in order to decrease the chances of us getting sick in space.
There were crew quarters at both Houston and the Cape, very similar in style to each other, where quarantined astronauts live. In both places, the crew quarters were more like an office than a hotel—spartan accommodations. The time when the shuttle was to rendezvous with the telescope would be in the middle of the night Florida time, so we had to adjust our sleep schedule significantly. In order to help us make the adjustment, the crew quarters had few windows, and the lights were kept glaringly bright during our waking hours. There were cooks to make us food and a gym to work out in.
We didn’t have a great deal to do once we were in quarantine—we had our checklists (about five feet tall when stacked on one another) to review. We had some of the spacewalking hardware and photography equipment to familiarize ourselves with. We had to sign crew photos to hand out to people who worked on the mission, at least a thousand of them. At the end of our workday, which was actually in the morning, we watched movies together.
While we were in quarantine, our launch date changed again, from December 6 to December 11. It was mildly annoying to know I had spent four days in quarantine that I could have spent at home, but we all understood that delays were part of spaceflight. Then we were delayed again, to December 16. By the morning of the sixteenth, we had been in quarantine for twenty days and were getting tired of it. We were ready to go to space or go home. Then the launch was scrubbed. Inspectors had found a possible problem with a weld in the external tank. Workers needed a day to make sure the issue had been resolved, so we were delayed to December 17.
That morning, I woke up and looked at the weather forecast. There would be a low cloud ceiling, rain, and possibly even lightning. The prediction of weather favorable for launch was only 20 percent go, not very good odds, but the weather in Central Florida could change quickly, so the countdown continued. Workers began filling the external tank, a process that takes hours. We got suited up and headed out to the launchpad. The countdown still continued; it seemed we might finally be going to space. We got strapped into our seats and started preparing the space shuttle to launch, the countdown continuing toward our planned liftoff time of 8:47 p.m. There are a few “holds” built into the countdown—points where extra time has been allowed so we can stop the clock and make sure everything is being done right without being rushed. One of these holds is at T-minus nine minutes, and it’s the last chance to review all the factors that go into deciding whether we are “go” or not. We kept at the T-minus nine hold for a long time, up to our planned launch time and past it. At 8:52 p.m., the launch director made the decision to scrub due to weather. We would try again the next day.
On December 18, we scrubbed again, this time without suiting up. At this point we had been in quarantine twenty-two days. If we’d known from the start how many delays were in our future, we would have gone back to Houston to do some refresher training in the simulators and see our families. Because I was launching for the first time, I had invited practically everyone I knew to come to Florida, along with their friends, about eight hundred people in all, and with every delay the group got smaller as people changed their travel plans. The morning of each launch attempt, friends and family would call and ask, “What are the odds you’re going to launch today?” I understood their impatience, but I never knew what to tell them. Eventually, I started to just say, “Fifty-fifty. Either we’ll launch today or we won’t.”
Jim Wetherbee, an astronaut who was serving as the director of flight crew operations, came by to talk to us. We all sat around a conference table together, and Jim said, “We’re going to knock this thing off and try again in the new year.” It was now a week before Christmas, and NASA had decided to give the ground crew a chance to go home to their families for the holidays. We were also coming up against another type of conflict: NASA wanted us safely back on Earth before January 1, 2000, because there was so much anxiety about whether equipment would continue to work properly because of Y2K. We joked that NASA was concerned the space shuttle computers would divide by zero and we would travel through a wormhole and end up on the other side of the universe. But the truth was less exciting. Specifically, the concern had to do with the possibility that we would have to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The ground support equipment at Kennedy Space Center was all Y2K compliant, as was the orbiter itself, but the equipment at Edwards had not yet been certified. Personally, I thought the public would find it reassuring if NASA, the agency that had put a man on the moon and created a reusable space plane, was so little concerned about Y2K that they flew in space anyway.
“We haven’t made a definite decision yet,” Jim said. “But we’re ninety-nine percent sure this is what we’re going to do.”
He left, and we talked about what this delay would mean for each of us. All of my crewmates seemed pleased�
��they wanted to go home. I was the only one who didn’t want to see the launch postponed. I had come here with the expectation of going to space, and I didn’t want to give that up and wait weeks before we actually launched. We packed up our things. The guy who holds our wallets for us while we fly in space came around to hand them back out, which made the decision feel final. I prepared to head back to Houston.
Jim came back about an hour later and gathered us together. “Okay, guys,” he said. “We changed our minds. We’re going to launch tomorrow.”
This was tough on my crewmates, who had mentally checked out and started looking forward to going home. I was the only one who was happy, because I was the only one who had never been to space before.
The next day, December 19, as promised, we got suited up for launch. The weather was only 60 percent go, but the countdown continued throughout the day. Several hours before the scheduled launch time of 7:50 p.m., we left the Operations and Checkout Building and waved to the media as we walked to the Astrovan, an Airstream motor home that is used exclusively for carrying astronauts the nine miles to the launch site. The space shuttle, fully loaded with liquid oxygen and hydrogen, was essentially a giant bomb, so when it was fueled the area was cleared of nonessential personnel. As we approached the launchpad, which usually bustled with hundreds of workers, we saw that it was eerily abandoned, the emptiness juxtaposed with the noise of a fully fueled space shuttle—pumps and motors spinning and the creaking metals reacting to supercooled propellants.
We rode the elevator in the launch tower up to the 195-foot level, and Curt entered the orbiter first. The cryogenic fuel passing through the propellant lines created condensation that froze into snow, so even though the weather was warm, some of us had a brief snowball fight while others used the bathroom known affectionately as the Last Toilet on Earth.