Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  Then we entered the White Room one by one, a sterile space around the hatch. When it was my turn, I got into the harnesses for my parachute and fitted the comm cap on my head. Then I kneeled just inside the hatchway while the closeout crew removed the galoshes that kept us from tracking dirt into the spacecraft. Inside the cockpit, everything was pointing up at the sky, so I had to crawl across the ladder, rather than up, in order to get to the flight deck and my seat, which felt like it was hanging off the ceiling. I managed to haul my right leg over the stick, then pull myself up and shimmy into position on the parachute, an uncomfortable bulk under my back. The closeout crew guys, including my friend and astronaut classmate Dave Brown, strapped us into our seats as tightly as they could and helped us get all our connections hooked up—comm, cooling, and oxygen.

  We were positioned on our backs for launch, with our knees above our heads, looking straight up at the sky. We were happy to be in our spacecraft, but the position was uncomfortable, especially once we were tightly strapped in.

  The preparation for launch was one of the busiest times for the pilot. I was responsible for getting many of the systems ready prior to flight, which meant configuring switches and circuit breakers, starting motors and pumps, and connecting electrical circuits. I configured the reaction control system and the orbiter maneuvering system (the engines that allow the space shuttle to propel itself in orbit). There were many ways I could screw things up so we wouldn’t be able to go to space today, and there were many ways I could screw things up so we’d never go anywhere again. Of course, it was possible to throw the right switches but throw them in the wrong order. (People have even screwed up by failing to throw a switch decisively enough.) I learned to follow the checklists precisely, even when I felt I already knew them, because I needed to be so careful—but not so careful that I got behind the timeline, because if certain things weren’t in the right configuration by a given point in the countdown, the launch wouldn’t proceed. When we were busy, the countdown seemed to go very quickly, but in idle moments it slowed to a crawl.

  The countdown clock stopped for the T-minus nine hold. The space shuttle, fully fueled with cryogenic liquid, creaked and groaned. Soon this sixteen-story structure was going to lift off the Earth in a controlled explosion. For a moment I thought to myself, Boy, this is a really dumb thing to be doing.

  I had been told that astronauts flying in the space shuttle had a risk of death similar to that of Allied infantrymen on D-day. I knew how the crew of Challenger had died, and I understood that I was now taking the same risks. I wasn’t scared, but I felt aware of the dangers, all at once.

  We had been waiting several hours by this point, long enough for some of us to have to use the diaper we wore under our pressure suits. (When the first American to go to space, Alan Shepard, was waiting to launch, a number of technical delays forced him to wait so long that he needed to use the bathroom. He was told to simply go inside his pressure suit, so the first American to leave the Earth did so with wet pants. Ever since, most astronauts have worn diapers or a urine collection device.) Eventually the countdown clock reached the last minute. At thirty seconds, the space shuttle computers took over the launch count. At six seconds, the three main engines roared to life with a million pounds of thrust, but we didn’t go anywhere because the shuttle was bolted to the launchpad by eight giant bolts. At zero, the solid rocket boosters ignited and the bolts were exploded in half, setting the shuttle free. We leaped off the launchpad with an instantaneous 7 million pounds of thrust. I knew from watching videos and from seeing launches in person that the shuttle appeared to rise very slowly at first. Inside, though, there wasn’t a thing about it that felt slow. One second we were sitting on the launchpad, completely still, and the next we were being hurtled straight up faster than would have seemed possible. I was strapped into a freight train gone off the rails and accelerating out of control, being shaken violently in every direction. We went from a standstill to faster than the speed of sound in less than a minute.

  There wasn’t much for the commander and pilot to do at this stage other than monitor the systems to make sure everything was going as it should and be prepared to respond if it didn’t. People sometimes mistakenly imagined that we were “flying” the shuttle, that our hands were on the controls and that we could move Discovery around in the sky if we wanted to, like an airplane. In fact, as long as those solid rocket boosters were burning, we were all essentially just along for the ride. The boosters can’t be throttled or shut down.

  Once the solid rockets dropped off, two minutes after we left the launchpad, we were flying on the power of the three main engines, so there was more we could do to control our fates. We continued to monitor all the systems closely as we traveled higher and faster. For the first two minutes, we were prepared for the possibility that if something went seriously wrong—most likely a main engine failure—we could turn around and land at the runway at the Kennedy Space Center. We called this abort mode “return to launch site,” and it required the shuttle to fly Mach seven backwards. No one had ever tried this and no one wanted to. (John Young, when he was preparing to command the first shuttle launch, said he hoped never to attempt an RTLS because it “requires continuous miracles interspersed with acts of God.”) So we were all happy when we got to the point known as “negative return,” when RTLS was no longer a possibility and we had other, less risky abort options.

  As the shuttle burned through its propellants, it got lighter, increasing its acceleration. When the acceleration got to 3 g’s, it became difficult to breathe, the parachute and oxygen bottles I wore on my back in case of emergency pulling on the straps on my chest. The engines throttled back to keep from exceeding the structural integrity of the spacecraft.

  As we accelerated, Curt and I, with Billy Bob’s assistance, monitored the performance of all the systems on our three cathode ray tube displays, keeping abreast of the procedures so we could be ready at a split-second’s notice if we needed to perform one of the actions available to us.

  When the shuttle reached its intended orbit, the main engines cut off—MECO—then the now-nearly-empty external tank separated to burn up in the atmosphere. MECO was a great moment because it meant we’d survived the launch phase, one of the riskiest of our entire mission. We had accelerated from zero to 17,500 miles per hour in just eight and a half minutes. Now we were floating in space. I looked out the window.

  I tapped Curt on the shoulder and pointed outside. “Hey, what the hell is that?” I asked him. (I was about to use even stronger language, but I didn’t know whether we were still being recorded.)

  “That’s the sunrise,” said Curt.

  An orbital sunrise, my first. I had no idea how many more of these I was going to see. I’ve now seen thousands, and their beauty has never waned.

  I had been so focused on what we were doing I hadn’t bothered looking out the window until now. Even if I had, we had launched in the dark, and up here it was still dark; the sun was behind the Earth. As we crossed over Europe, I saw a blue-and-orange line out the window that spanned the horizon as it grew larger. It looked to me like brilliantly colored paint brushed across a mirror right in front of my eyes, and I knew right then and there that Earth would be the most beautiful thing I would ever see.

  I unstrapped myself from my seat and floated headfirst through the passageway to the mid-deck, savoring the alien sensation of weightlessness. When I got there, I found two guys with their heads in puke bags. They were experienced astronauts, but some people have to reacclimate to space every time they go. I’m very lucky that I don’t suffer from the debilitating nausea and vertigo that some people do.

  On our second full day in space, we reached the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s in a much higher orbit than most satellites we might rendezvous with—150 miles higher than the space station. Hubble’s orbit is so high, in fact, that missions to rendezvous with it are riskier than flights to a lower orbit.

  For many stages of the flight
, Curt was in charge of the shuttle controls as commander, and I was there as his backup. But during the rendezvous with Hubble, at a certain point he moved to the back of the shuttle to start monitoring our approach from the aft piloting station and to prepare himself for the manual flying phase. He was to eyeball the closing distance and communicate with me about how we were doing, while I was to make sure we proceeded through the checklist and executed the remaining rendezvous burns properly.

  The two spacewalking teams and the robotic arm operator (Billy Bob) moved into high gear once we were safely in orbit. I helped them out when needed and took pictures of Hubble for study on the ground later. Billy Bob was always excited about what we were doing, always enthusiastic, and always had time to help me out or to just take the time to enjoy space. Not everyone who gets the chance to go to space does. He acted as a mentor to me on the mission and taught me all the little details about how to live and work in space that they can’t really teach you on the ground, like moving around in zero g, organizing your workspace when everything floats, and of course fun things like peeing while upside down—lessons I would pass on to others as I became more experienced.

  Billy Bob was also not above pranking me. I was still the rookie, after all. When I went into my clothing locker to get changed, I discovered that I had only one pair of underwear for the entire mission. Billy Bob had hidden the rest. I think he expected me to panic, but the joke was on him; I didn’t really care. He eventually told me about his prank. In retrospect, wearing the same underwear for days was good training for my year in space.

  Once we got to orbit, I had to adjust to living in such small quarters with six other people. There were two “floors” in the shuttle, the flight deck and the mid-deck, and each of them was smaller than the interior space of a minivan. We worked, ate, and slept on top of one another. At least our eight-day mission would be one of the shorter ones; the longest space shuttle mission was seventeen days.

  Rendering of the space shuttle cockpit Credit 7

  —

  ONE THING that surprised me about living in space was that it was hard to focus. There were many activities I had done over and over in the simulator, but when I got to space I found it much harder to concentrate on what I was doing. At one level I think it was just the experience of being in space for the first time—who could concentrate on a checklist of a procedure while floating with the beautiful Earth turning just outside the window? At another level, doing basic tasks was much more challenging in weightlessness, and I learned there was no way to compensate for that except to plan for the fact that everything was just going to take a bit more time.

  There were physical effects too. Feeling the fluid in my body redistribute itself to my head for the first time was odd and at times uncomfortable. All astronauts experience some level of difficulty concentrating on a short mission—what we call “space brain”—and I was no exception. After you’ve been in space for weeks or months, you adjust and are able to work through the symptoms, which can vary based on CO2 levels, vestibular symptoms, sleep quality, and probably other factors too. I couldn’t afford to let my work suffer, because there would be serious consequences if I screwed something up.

  One of the first things we did when we got to orbit was to open the shuttle’s huge payload bay doors. These needed to be open within the first few orbits, in order to keep the electrical systems cool. We needed to deploy and check out the robot arm, or we wouldn’t be able to grapple Hubble. If we failed to deploy or activate the Ku-band antenna, we wouldn’t be able to communicate as well with Earth or rendezvous easily with the telescope. Even tasks like using the toilet required our full attention—I was acutely aware that it was possible to damage it, potentially even permanently, which would mean a premature return.

  On day three, Steve Smith and John Grunsfeld conducted their first spacewalk, successfully replacing the gyroscopes. The following day, Mike Foale and Claude Nicollier performed their spacewalk, replacing Hubble’s central computer and a fine-guidance sensor. On day six, Steve and John went outside again, this time to install a transmitter and a solid-state recorder. There had been a fourth planned spacewalk, but it was canceled in order to get us back on Earth before Y2K.

  Day seven of the mission, the next-to-last day, marked the first time a space shuttle would be spending Christmas in orbit (and, it turns out, the last). We deployed Hubble, and after accepting congratulations from the ground for our success, Curt decided it was time to make his Christmas speech to mission control. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket, cleared his throat, and spoke in his most formal voice into the microphone:

  “The familiar Christmas story reminds us that for millennia, people of many faiths and cultures have looked to the skies and studied the stars and planets in their search for a deeper understanding of life and for greater wisdom…We hope and trust that the lessons the universe has to teach us will speak to the yearning that we know is in human hearts everywhere—the yearning for peace on Earth, good will among all the human family. As we stand at the threshold of a new millennium, we send you all our greetings.”

  Coming from someone else—from Billy Bob, say—this speech might have seemed heartfelt and even moving, but Curt wasn’t an emotional guy. As it was, we all sneaked looks at each other. If nothing else, Curt’s speech was remarkable for managing to completely avoid any religious content. Maybe Curt was thinking about the time the crew of Apollo 8 took turns reading from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve 1968. It was a beautiful moment enjoyed by many Christians and non-Christians alike, but an atheist group sued NASA for violating the separation of church and state. Nothing Curt had said would give First Amendment purists anything to get bent out of shape about.

  There was a long, awkward pause, both inside the cockpit and on the ground. Usually the capcom would thank the commander for his great speech and reiterate that the spirit of humankind was alive in the space shuttle program or something along those lines. Instead, we just heard nothing. Moments later, the capcom, Steve Robinson, came on and said simply, “Roger, PLT is go for compactor ops.”

  The schedule called for the pilot (me) to compact the toilet. In other words, someone needed to tamp down the shit.

  Later that night, everyone gathered for dinner on the mid-deck. Billy Bob showed me some special French gourmet food he had brought up with him: quail in red wine sauce, foie gras, tiny liqueur-infused chocolates. No one seemed interested in trying it except me. Billy Bob and I heated it up and took it up to the flight deck. We turned the lights off and played some Mozart, watching the beautiful Earth turning below us while we ate this fantastic food and reflected on how lucky we were to be celebrating Christmas as no one on the space shuttle had done before.

  —

  WHEN IT WAS time to go home, I decided to get Billy Bob back for pranking me by hiding the long underwear we layer under the pressure suits for reentry. He didn’t suspect anything when he started getting dressed, then he began tossing through his bag of gear again and again, a look of alarm on his face. Once he was thoroughly distressed, thinking he wouldn’t be able to get dressed in time for landing, I finally took pity on him.

  The landing phase was the most challenging for the commander and pilot. When the space shuttle hit the air molecules of the outer atmosphere at 17,500 miles per hour, the resulting friction created heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. We had to do everything right and trust that the insulating tiles on the space shuttle would protect us.

  We did the deorbit burn in the dark at four hundred miles above the Earth. As we moved into sunlight, we seemed troublingly low over Baja California. We had dropped from four hundred miles to just fifty miles entirely in darkness. Curt joked, “We are so low it looks like we won’t make it to Florida.”

  “But we have a lot of smack,” I responded. We were still going Mach 25, despite our low altitude.

  For about twelve minutes, hot ionized gases built up around the spacecraft. We he
ard an alarm: one of the air data probes, an instrument that measured air pressure and provided data for controlling the orbiter in the atmosphere, had failed to deploy. This was an emergency, but a minor one, as there were two probes and the other had deployed correctly. Curt and I, with the help of Billy Bob, responded just as we had to this kind of malfunction in the simulator, assessing what had gone wrong and deciding how to proceed safely. In some ways, it was a good thing to have to respond to an alarm like this one. It gave me confidence in the training we had received, that we would be able to handle anything that came our way.

  Once we got farther down into the atmosphere and the air became thicker, the space shuttle’s airplane design became crucial. Up to that point, it could have been shaped like a capsule, but now Curt was going to land this spaceship in the dark on a runway at the Kennedy Space Center. The space shuttle was a difficult aircraft to land, all the more so because it had no engines that would allow us to pull up and come in for a second attempt. While Curt was at the controls, I had a lot of responsibilities as pilot, a role similar to the copilot of an airplane—monitoring the shuttle’s systems, relaying information to Curt, and deploying the drag chute.

  I armed, then extended the landing gear at the right moment, and soon after we heard another alarm: a tire pressure sensor was warning us that we might have a blown tire. The space shuttle’s tires were specially designed to survive launch, a week or two orbiting in a vacuum, and supporting a heavy vehicle landing at incredibly high speed. If one of them had blown out, our landing could be a disaster. As the alarm kept sounding, I encouraged Curt to ignore the tire pressure—there was nothing we could do about it, and he needed to focus on the landing. I said, “I’ll tell you if the next alarm is something different.”