by Scott Kelly
The crew assignments for this flight were now finalized: Scorch, Rick Mastracchio, Barbara Morgan, Dave Williams, Tracy Caldwell, and, late in our training, Alvin Drew.
Barbara Morgan had been an elementary school teacher in Idaho when she was named a finalist for the Teacher in Space program in 1985. When Christa McAuliffe was chosen to teach lessons from space on Challenger, Barbara was designated her backup. She trained along with Christa and the Challenger crew for the entire year, preparing to complete the mission if for some reason Christa wasn’t able to. After the traumatic experience of seeing Challenger explode in the sky over Florida with seven good friends aboard, a lot of people would have distanced themselves from that tragedy. But to her credit, Barbara volunteered to go on the national tour that had been planned for Christa after the mission, visiting schools all over the country to talk about the space shuttle and the importance of education. Barbara wanted the schoolchildren to hear from someone who had shared Christa’s dream of flying in space and still had faith in the space program. Barbara officially joined the astronaut corps in 1998 and worked in a number of positions before being assigned to her first flight—this flight with me. When she flew in space, it would be twenty-one years after the Challenger disaster.
Barbara was also the only astronaut to have been chosen for the corps completely outside the process of the astronaut selection board. For this reason, some of our colleagues regarded her with skepticism. I decided to reserve judgment until I got to know her better, and I’m glad I did. Simply put, Barb worked her ass off. She mastered every facet of her job and became a valued member of my crew, exceeding my expectations.
Dave Williams was a Canadian astronaut who worked as an ER doctor in his previous life. He is proud of his Welsh heritage and was the first person to broadcast from space in the Welsh language on his first space shuttle mission. Dave was completely unflappable.
Tracy Caldwell was flying her first mission. NASA selected Tracy when she was twenty-nine, right out of her Ph.D. program in chemistry. She looked young for her age, so she was treated as a bit of a kid by many of our astronaut colleagues, but her performance was top-notch. She was conscientious, incredibly detail oriented, and serious, but also fun to be around. Tracy turned thirty-eight on the sixth day of our mission.
Alvin Drew was assigned to the mission just three months before the flight. He flew helicopters in combat for the Air Force in their Special Operations Command and then went on to become a helicopter test pilot. He was not easily fazed and didn’t seem thrown off by having been assigned to this flight so late, though it meant he would be constantly struggling to catch up.
For me, training to fly as commander was a completely new challenge. I had to learn my own role, as well as take responsibility for my crew—making sure everyone knew his or her job, recognizing each crew member’s strengths and weaknesses, pulling us together as a team, and mentoring the rookies. Because we would have three first-time space flyers on our crew (Barb, Tracy, and Alvin), we were one of the least-experienced crews in shuttle history, with only four previous flights among the seven of us.
We went into quarantine in Houston ten days before launch, then flew to Florida and continued our quarantine there for the last four days. There is a NASA tradition, which some crews follow more closely than others, of pulling pranks on rookies. When the Astrovan pulled up to the launchpad, I said offhandedly to Tracy, Barb, and Alvin, “Hey, you guys remembered to bring your boarding passes, right?” They looked at one another quizzically as the four of us veterans pulled preprinted boarding passes out of our pockets.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t bring your boarding passes! They won’t let you on the space shuttle without one!” I insisted. After an initial look of panic crossed their faces, the three rookies quickly caught on.
The closeout crew helped us get strapped into our seats, then climbed out of the shuttle and closed the hatch. Or tried to. The shuttle launch director announced that they couldn’t tell whether our hatch was properly closed or not.
The shuttle hatch had presented problems before. The closeout crew, who knew the equipment better than anyone, felt it was closing properly, but no one wanted to risk our lives on that hunch. They shut the hatch, opened it again, shut it again, opened it again. We were all strapped tightly into our seats and couldn’t see the hatch to give the closeout crew a visual confirmation. We were running out of time in our launch window.
Eventually Rick Mastracchio, who could stretch himself to see the hatch from his center seat on the flight deck, announced that the hatch was closed but that we now had an eighth crew member. One of the closeout crew had come into the space shuttle with us to inspect all the dogs—the bolts that attach the hatch to the surrounding structure—while the hatch was closed. He was able to confirm that it was working properly, and then the hatch was opened again so he could jump out. An ingenious and practical solution, and one I hadn’t thought of myself.
—
THIS TIME I knew what to expect at launch, so I could enjoy it a little more, even looking out the window a bit. It had been nearly eight years since I last flew, and the sheer instantaneous power was still indescribable, the horizon pulling away faster than would seem possible. We reached orbit safely and, as on my previous mission, successfully got through the arduous job of turning the rocket ship into a spaceship.
Before I went to sleep, I got an email from the lead shuttle flight director telling me that nine pieces of foam had come off the external tank, three of which they thought had struck the thermal protection system on the bottom of the orbiter, similar to what had doomed Columbia—though in Columbia’s case, the damage was on the more critical reinforced carbon-carbon insulation on the leading edge of the wing. NASA didn’t think it was a big deal—foam strikes could frequently be harmless—but were just letting me know out of an abundance of caution.
The next day, we conducted an inspection of the underside of the shuttle using a camera and laser scanners on the end of a boom attached to the robotic arm in an effort to pinpoint the damage. The images didn’t reveal anything conclusive. We approached ISS the next day and flew the orbiter through a 360-pitch maneuver, a backflip to point the shuttle’s heat shield so the station crew could capture up-close pictures. The photos showed an area of interest on a critical part of the belly of the orbiter near the right landing gear door; it was sizable enough that NASA decided to do a more focused inspection with the boom laser system after we docked. That inspection revealed a hole, about three inches by three inches, that went all the way through the silica thermal protection tiles down to the underlying felt.
As we scanned the area with the laser and looked at the images with the adjacent camera, my initial thought was, Oh, shit! The hole looked as though it went all the way through to the aluminum alloy that makes up the airframe. Later that evening, the ground emailed me photos of the damage. I printed out the most interesting pictures and carried them around in my pocket for the next couple of days.
There was a flurry of discussion on the ground about how this damage would affect our reentry. We didn’t have a lot of options in this situation. We could try to fix the damage on a spacewalk by filling the hole with a special putty that had never been proven in flight, or take our chances and land as is. I talked over the options with my crew, mostly with Scorch, whose technical knowledge I held in particularly high regard. I also talked with our two spacewalkers, Rick and Dave, since they would have to do any repairs if we decided to go that route. We came to the conclusion that we could fix the damage if we had to, but we would trust the analysis done on the ground if they told us we could reenter safely. The press immediately wrote that the crew was in imminent danger.
Teams of experts on the ground were conducting analysis on the damage and how the heat of reentry would affect the tiles. They made a mock-up of the damaged tiles and put it in a testing facility where gases can be heated to very high temperatures and subjected to hypersonic speeds using a continuous e
lectrical arc to simulate the effects of reentry. As I learned about the analysis they were doing, I had more and more confidence that the damage would not present a risk and that we should leave it as it was. Some NASA experts disagreed and thought we should do the repair. My concern was that one small bump from a crew member’s tool or helmet could make the hole bigger, or create a new hole, and that the material and procedures for repairing tiles were still unproven. And, of course, any spacewalk presents inherent risks of its own.
—
THE DAY we were to return to Earth, we didn’t dwell on the risk. We readied the orbiter and its systems, got suited up and strapped ourselves into our seats, and began the reentry process. As we slammed into the atmosphere and built up heat, we watched the hot plasma streaming past our windows and imagined the battering of the shuttle’s heat shield. We all knew what could happen if our decision had been wrong.
“Passing through peak heating,” Scorch said calmly. This was the point when Columbia had started to break up.
“Understand,” I replied.
About twenty seconds later, we had passed the point where if the orbiter heat shield was burning through, we would have known about it.
“Looks like we dodged that bullet,” I said. I couldn’t help reflecting on our friends lost on Columbia, and I’m sure the rest of my crew was doing the same.
We were now inside the Earth’s atmosphere, and as we slowed below the speed of sound, I took over the controls from the autopilot. I was flying the space shuttle for the very first time in Earth’s atmosphere, and knew I would have only one chance to land.
As we dove seven times steeper than an airliner and descended twenty times faster, I felt the effects of gravity, vertigo, and a visual symptom called nystagmus, where your eyes jerk up and down. As we approached an altitude of two thousand feet, I tried to put these physical impairments out of my mind.
“Two thousand feet, preflare next,” Scorch said.
“Roger preflare, arm the gear” was my response, acknowledging his call and asking him to arm the landing gear system. As we passed through two thousand feet, I started slowly and deliberately raising the orbiter’s nose as I transitioned to a much shallower inner glide slope and started to rely more on the optical landing aids on the side of the runway and less on the orbiter’s instruments.
At three hundred feet I told Scorch, “Gear down.”
In response, Scorch pushed the button to lower the landing gear.
“Gear’s down,” he said.
From the time the landing gear were lowered until we landed was only about fifteen seconds. In that short period of time, I was trying to control the shuttle precisely in order to cross over the end of the runway at the correct height (twenty-six feet) and touch down at the correct speed (two hundred knots) with a rate of descent of less than two feet per second. We had a pretty heavy crosswind that day, which made all of this more challenging. I didn’t touch down exactly on centerline, but by the time we came to a stop, I was perfectly in the center of the runway. I think most space shuttle commanders who were also carrier aviators—Navy pilots and Marines who have landed on a ship at night—would agree that landing the orbiter was easier, all things being equal, though still one of the hardest piloting tasks. What made it hard was doing a perfect landing when you’ve been in space and are tired, dizzy, and dehydrated. And of course, when the world was watching.
—
A FEW MONTHS AFTER I returned from STS-118, I was in D.C. to visit with members of Congress and went out to dinner with Mark’s fiancée, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. I’d first met Gabby in Arizona one afternoon a couple of years earlier when I went to pick up Mark at the airport. She was friendly, warm, and incredibly enthusiastic about her job as an Arizona state senator. I was impressed with her after our brief meeting, so much so that I joked to Mark that I wondered what she saw in him.
While we were eating, my phone rang, showing the number for Steve Lindsey, the chief of the Astronaut Office. As the fiancée of an astronaut, Gabby knew that when the chief astronaut calls at an unusual hour, you take the call.
“Scott, I’d like to assign you to a long-duration flight, Expedition Twenty-five and Twenty-six. You’d be the commander for Twenty-six.”
I hesitated before speaking. It’s always exciting to get a flight assignment, but spending five or six months on the International Space Station wasn’t exactly what I had been hoping for.
“Honestly, I’d rather fly as a shuttle commander again,” I said. “Is that possible?”
I knew the space shuttle inside and out, and I had only learned the basics about the Soyuz and the ISS. The Soyuz was a very different vehicle from the space shuttle, to say the least. I sometimes joked that Soyuz and the shuttle were similar in that they both carried people into space—and that was where the similarity ended. The Soyuz manuals and checklists were in Russian, for starters. And I would also need to learn more about the ISS, which had grown significantly in the last few years, inside and out.
I sighed. “When’s the launch date?” I asked.
“October 2010.”
“I understand. Let me talk to Leslie and my kids and I’ll get back to you.”
Five or six months away from home would be a long time, especially with Charlotte still so young. But I also knew I would take any flight assignment I was given. Leslie and the girls agreed this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, and I said I would take it.
Among the things I had to do before I could turn my attention to this new assignment was follow up about my high PSA count. It wasn’t alarmingly high, but it had jumped from its previous level, and the rate of change could be indicative of a problem. I visited a urologist, Dr. Brian Miles, at Houston’s Methodist Hospital, who gave me two options: we could wait six months and see whether my PSA continued to increase, which would give us more information about whether I did have prostate cancer, and if so, how aggressive it might be. Or he could do a biopsy right then. I asked what the risk of a biopsy was.
“There’s a low risk of infection at the biopsy site—that’s really the only risk. People sometimes put it off as long as they can, though, because the procedure is uncomfortable.”
“How uncomfortable?” I asked.
Dr. Miles paused while he thought about how to explain it. “Like small electric shocks through the wall of your rectum,” he said.
“That sounds more than uncomfortable,” I said, “but let’s do it.”
The procedure was as unpleasant as he said, but I didn’t want to spend the next six months waiting to find out if I had cancer. If I did have it, I wanted to take care of it as soon as possible. Waiting could jeopardize my chances to fly my next mission or put the ISS schedule at risk.
A few days later, I learned I had a relatively aggressive strain of prostate cancer. Some types are so slow growing that men can live with them for decades and not be affected. The type I had would not create any adverse effects for a while, but if left untreated it would likely kill me in twenty years or so (I was forty-three).
When you are told you have cancer, especially an aggressive one, your mind immediately runs wild. Is this pain in my arm a metastasized tumor? Is the cancer spreading to my brain? I think this is a normal reaction to have, even for people who have access to top-notch care. I was immediately sent for a full-body CAT scan, and there was no indication the cancer had spread, which did a lot to set my mind at ease.
One of the first people I spoke to was my crewmate Dave Williams, who had had surgery for prostate cancer himself. As a doctor, he was able to offer good advice. He went to several meetings with me to talk to the surgeon about treatment options, along with the NASA flight surgeons.
Meanwhile, I called my brother and told him to get himself checked out. Since we were identical twins, we had a nearly identical genetic blueprint and therefore similar risks. When Mark got checked, it turned out he had the same type of prostate cancer.
I decided on a robotic radical retro
pubic prostatectomy, a surgery that would remove the entire prostate and leave me with a daunting recovery. It also brought with it a risk of bad outcomes like impotence or incontinence. There were less aggressive options—radiation therapy or a combination of less drastic surgery and radiation. It could take up to two years to determine whether radiation had successfully eliminated the cancer, though, and I didn’t want to have to wait that long to fly again. More important, because astronauts are exposed to radiation in space, our flight surgeons keep track of a lifetime radiation limit for each of us. I didn’t want to run up my lifetime limit if I could possibly avoid it. The robotic surgery was the option most likely to wipe out the cancer for good and minimize the risks to my career.
I underwent surgery in November 2007. My recovery took a long time, just as my surgeon had said it would, and it wasn’t fun. I had a urinary catheter for a week and a drain for lymphatic fluid in my side for weeks. One of the flight surgeons stopped by my home to check on my recovery one evening, and he decided the drain catheter was ready to come out. Standing in my living room, he simply yanked it out with all his might, and without much warning. I had no idea the thing was three feet long until I saw, and felt, it being ripped out of my body. I felt like I was William Wallace getting eviscerated in the movie Braveheart.
Despite the long recovery overall, I was aggressive in getting my NASA qualifications back, and I was able to start flying again in January. Getting back into the pool where we do spacewalk training, however, took much longer, as there was concern that the crotch of the spacesuit would put pressure on the area that was still healing. Due to the skill of Dr. Miles and the NASA flight surgeons, I returned to near normal in due time. The following year, I was in the operating room while Dr. Miles performed Mark’s operation, and I got to hold Mark’s prostate in my gloved hand before it was sent to pathology. The tumor was on the opposite side from mine, a mirror image, just like the opposite birthmarks on our foreheads.