Even at that age I remember thinking, This is the most important thing that’s happening right now—and not just now, ever. This is going to mark our time on the planet: the fact that we were the first people to leave it. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, they were space explorers. People were going to read about them five hundred years from now the same way we read about Christopher Columbus today. Those men became my heroes. They were the epitome of cool.
I turned seven in 1969, and there’s something about that age that makes it a formative year in one’s life. Two things happened for me that year: Apollo 11 landed on the moon and—even more improbable than that—the Mets won the 1969 World Series. Space and Major League Baseball became my two greatest passions. The Mets’ ace pitcher, Tom Seaver, was right behind my father and the Apollo 11 astronauts on my list of childhood heroes. But on that night of the moon landing, the World Series was still months away. On that night I said to myself, Nothing else matters. This is it. This is who I want to be. Being an astronaut wasn’t just the coolest thing ever, it was the most important thing you could choose to do with your life.
From that moment on, I became obsessed with space in the way that only a young boy can become obsessed. It was all I talked about. At my school’s summer recreation program, we had a space parade in honor of the moon landing. The kids were dressed up in space-related costumes. I wanted to go as an astronaut. My mother was a seamstress. She took a gray elephant costume she’d made for me when I was in the first-grade play, cut off the tail, and added some of my dad’s Army medals and an American flag on the left arm. We traded in the cardboard elephant ears for a plastic Steve Canyon jet helmet, added safety goggles, and we had my astronaut costume.
My brother, Joe, was working in downtown Manhattan that summer, and one day on his break he went to FAO Schwarz and got me this Astronaut Snoopy toy. It was about eight inches high, decked out in a full Apollo space suit: helmet, life support system, moon boots, the whole thing. I still remember watching Joe walking home from the bus stop with this Snoopy box in his hands. I opened it up right there in the driveway. That whole summer, all I did was play spaceman in the backyard, running around in my costume my mom had made with my Astronaut Snoopy. I played with that little guy until his enamel was cracked and worn and one of his legs broke off. (I still have him, only now he’s been to space for real.)
I was obsessed with learning more about astronauts. The public library was right around the corner on Lincoln Road, and I’d go over in the afternoons and read anything I could find about the space program. They didn’t have much, but whatever they had I probably checked out and read four or five times. They had a book about the original Mercury Seven astronauts called We Seven, and another about Gus Grissom, who’d died in the fire that killed the crew of Apollo 1 on the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center. I read Time magazine, Life magazine, whatever they had, whatever I could get my hands on.
That fall I started second grade, and all I talked about at school was space. I’d become this total space expert. My best friend back then—and still to this day—was Mike Quarequio, whom we called Q. He remembers me showing up for second grade and walking into class talking about spacewalking suits, the cooling systems they used, how the life support worked. I was known as “the boy in class who knows the most about space.” I knew who the astronauts were, which kinds of rockets were used on which flights. I knew everything about space that a seven-year-old kid on Long Island could possibly know.
Even though I was obsessed with space, I never got into Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers or any of that. Space colonies and multiple dimensions and flying around with rocket packs—it was too far-fetched. What I loved was the science fiction of Jules Verne novels, like Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and From the Earth to the Moon. The thing about Jules Verne’s stories was that he made them feel real. It was science fiction, but you felt like it was plausible, like it was set in the real world. In Journey to the Center of the Earth, they’re digging their way down with pickaxes and shovels. In From the Earth to the Moon, a lot of what Verne predicted about space travel was accurate, from the type of metal they used to build the spaceship to the way they launched with the rotation of the planet to gain extra speed. And he was imagining all of it back in 1865!
I wasn’t interested in the fantasy of space travel. I was interested in the reality of space travel. I was interested in how people got to space here and now, and at that point the only way to get to space was to join NASA, get an American flag on your left shoulder, and strap yourself into a Saturn V rocket. I only had one problem: Where I came from, kids didn’t grow up to be astronauts.
A lot of people, when they meet me, can’t believe I’ve been to space. They say I look like a guy who’d be working at a deli in Brooklyn, handing out cold cuts. My grandparents were Italian immigrants. My father’s father, Joseph Massimino, was from Linguaglossa, near Mount Etna in Sicily, and he came over in 1902 to New York City and ended up buying a farm upstate in a town called Warwick, which is where my father, Mario Massimino, grew up. When my dad left the farm he moved back to the city, to the Bronx, where he met my mom, Vincenza Gianferrara. Her family was from Palermo, also in Sicily, and they lived in Carroll Gardens, an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. She and my dad got married in 1951. He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-five, which was pretty late in those days.
Although my dad never went to college, while he was working he started taking fire safety courses at NYU and eventually became an inspector for the New York City Fire Department. His job was fire prevention. He would go into apartment buildings and businesses and make sure they had the right number of extinguishers and sprinkler systems and safety exits. He was a smart guy who did a good job and kept moving up to eventually become the chief of fire prevention for the entire New York City Fire Department. My mom stayed home with us kids, for which she deserves a medal.
My parents lived in the Bronx, which is where my older brother and sister were born, but soon after that my parents decided to leave the city. They bought a house at 32 Commonwealth Street in Franklin Square, Long Island, which is where I came along. I was born on August 19, 1962. My brother was ten years older than me and three years older than our sister. I was the mistake—or, as my mother would say more lovingly, “the surprise.” She used to tell me that I must have come for a reason because she thought she was done having kids after my brother and sister.
Franklin Square is right outside Queens on Hempstead Turnpike. When I was growing up, the neighborhood was filled with Italian-Americans—the Lobaccaros, the Milanas, the Adamos, the Brunos. Ours was a big, extended Italian family. My mom only had one sister, Connie, who stayed in Brooklyn, but my dad had five sisters, who all settled somewhere in Queens or Long Island. My uncle Frank and aunt Ange lived right across the street from us, and my uncle Tony and aunt Marie were around the corner. My uncle Romeo and aunt Ann were nearby in College Point, Queens. I had aunts and uncles and cousins around all the time.
Franklin Square was blue-collar. Lots of guys worked for the city. A few guys you didn’t quite know what they did, but they drove a big Lincoln and would stick wads of money in your pocket at weddings. Some kids went away to college, but most of them enrolled at the local school while living at home. A lot of guys became policemen. Your dad was a cop, so you became a cop. That was the mentality people had. My cousin Peter is crazy smart, and when he got into Princeton my aunt Sally burst into tears and cried and wailed and begged him not to go because she didn’t want him leaving the family to go to school . . . in New Jersey.
My world was very small. People didn’t think about leaving Long Island, let alone going to space. My buddy Q’s dad was a pharmacist and his mom was a schoolteacher; he was one of the few friends I had whose parents had been to college. My parents always encouraged me to do whatever I wanted, but—being a fire inspector and a seamstress—there wasn’t much they could do to help me become an astronaut.
I wanted to go to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History more than anything; it was a big deal when my mom and dad finally took me. I brought home pictures of the planets and books on astronomy. But that was my only exposure to the world of space. How you got to join NASA or what college you should go to in order to get there—I didn’t know anyone who could answer those questions. There was no science club at school where we could build and launch rockets. None of my friends were into space; it was something I did on my own. I had my spaceman costume, my Astronaut Snoopy, and my library books, and that was it. I didn’t even know anyone who had a telescope.
Even if I had, I wasn’t the most obvious candidate to become a guy who gets launched into orbit. I’d never been on an airplane. Part of the reason I idolized astronauts was because they were everything I wasn’t. They were fearless adventurers, and I was an awkward kid. By the time I hit junior high, my vision was bad. I wore glasses. I was so tall and so skinny I could have been my own science experiment: If you wanted to know where the bones are on the human body, all I had to do was take off my shirt and I could show you.
Astronauts coming back from space had to splash down in the water, and I hated the water. I didn’t know how to swim that well. Because there was no fat on my body, whenever my parents took us to the beach or to the local pool, it was like getting into an ice bath. I was scared of heights, too. Still am. Standing on a balcony four or five stories up and looking over? No, thank you. I didn’t like roller coasters, either. They’re scary. Hanging upside down? It makes you sick. Who wants to do that? I wasn’t any kind of thrill seeker at all.
I had this fantasy about going to the moon, but that’s all it was: a fantasy. The whole idea of actually joining NASA and going to space was so far-fetched and so far removed from my life that it was hard for me to stay interested in it. None of my friends seemed interested, and I wanted to be hanging out with my friends. What they cared about was baseball. Back then there were two leagues you could join in Franklin Square: Little League, which cost $15, or the Police Boys Club, which cost $5. In Little League you got the nice jersey and played on the nice field. In the Police Boys Club you got a T-shirt, and you played on the field that was mostly weeds and dirt. The kids with money played Little League. Me and my friends played in the Police Boys Club.
Soon I was as deep into baseball as I’d ever been into space. I was always throwing a ball. If I didn’t have anyone to play with, I’d throw it against the stoop for hours, pretending I was pitching in a big game. The moon was 238,900 miles from Earth, but Shea Stadium was only twenty minutes away down the Long Island Expressway. My dad and I went to a lot of games, usually with my uncle Romeo and my cousin Paul.
As I got older the whole astronaut fantasy went away. It burned bright and burned out, like many childhood dreams do. It was the same for the rest of the country. The Apollo program stopped in 1972. By then the thrill of the space race was over. America had won and people moved on. I did, too. The astronomy books went back to the library, my Astronaut Snoopy went on a shelf, and by fifth grade I’d mostly forgotten about space. For a kid like me, being who I was, coming from where I came from, saying “I want to grow up to be an astronaut” was like saying “I want to grow up to be Spider-Man.”
How the heck do you do that?
2
MOST ALL-AROUND
In my senior year of high school I applied to the engineering school at Columbia University on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. That November I went there for an interview, and the minute I arrived, I felt like I understood what college was. Before that, to me, college was a thing people did to get a job; but walking on that campus on this beautiful fall day, seeing the students hustling around and going to class, standing between Low Library and Butler Library, which look like something out of ancient Rome, I had a revelation: This is where people learn. This is where you become someone. I’d never had that feeling before.
To be honest, I didn’t know if I belonged at an Ivy League school like Columbia. Growing up, I was never the smartest kid in class. I was a good student, but I wasn’t exactly a genius. I liked science and math. I played sports, but I was just okay. My greatest talent was for people. I wasn’t one of the popular kids, but I got along with everybody. I was enough of an athlete to hang with the jocks and the cheerleaders. I played the trumpet in band, which got me in with the band kids. I was in advanced math, so I could eat lunch with the smart kids. I moved in a lot of circles, had pockets of friends in every group, and learned how to mix with anyone.
I’ve always been curious about other people’s lives. I find them interesting. I meet people and I want to know their story, what makes them tick. And the fact that I could hang out with different kinds of people helped make me a well-rounded person. I wasn’t the smartest or the most athletic. I was the most all-around. If anything, it was my talent for getting along that made me stand out in school. At a parent-teacher conference, Mr. Stern, my eleventh-grade social studies teacher, said to my mom and dad, “Mike should think about applying to an Ivy League school. I think he’d do well.” My parents came home and told me what he’d said, and that was the first time it had ever occurred to me to think of going to Columbia.
I submitted my application, but I didn’t think I’d get in. I’d applied to a couple of schools on Long Island and I was convinced that’s where I’d end up. Then one day a few months later I was at home, sitting on the toilet, when my mom came and knocked on the door. “You got a letter from Columbia.” She slid it under the door and I opened it up. When I read the word “Congratulations,” I started screaming. I was going to Columbia as a freshman that fall.
Columbia opened up a new world for me. I was only a few miles from home, but it was as if I’d landed on Mars. There were students from other countries, from fancy prep schools. Even Barack Obama was on campus at the same time I was. (Unfortunately, I never got to meet him, as I imagine being best pals with the future president of the United States would have some advantages.) As exciting as this new world was, I didn’t fully embrace it right away. Whatever potential Mr. Stern saw in me, I hadn’t found it in myself. I didn’t take advantage of everything I was being offered. The summer after my freshman year, when the other kids took internships or went to study abroad, all I wanted to do was go back home. I moved back with my parents and got a job as a laborer in Rath Park, which is the park in Franklin Square where we used to play ball. I picked up trash, mowed the grass, cleaned toilets.
Change doesn’t come easy for me. I liked my hometown. I was comfortable there. It was hard for me to leave, and I think deep down I knew that doing well at Columbia would mean leaving. Being an A student at an Ivy League school would put me on a new path. I was afraid it was going to pull me away from my hometown and my friends whether I wanted it to or not.
For my major I’d picked industrial engineering, which is about optimizing systems and organizations. It’s called the most humanistic of the engineering disciplines. I liked the fact that it had a mix of hard science and traditional engineering courses along with courses in economics and business. Industrial engineering also included something I found interesting: human factors, which focuses on designing machines and systems with human operators in mind.
I did fine my freshman and sophomore years, but junior year the course work got harder and I hit a wall. It was bad. I got clobbered in Circuits and Systems, an electrical engineering course. The midterm counted for a quarter of the final grade. The average for the class was somewhere in the eighties. I got an eleven. On another midterm I got a fifteen.
Failing those tests turned out to be a good thing. It was a wake-up call. I was forced to decide what I wanted. At first I honestly thought about giving up. I contemplated changing my major out of engineering to something less technical; I didn’t think I could hack it. But then I started thinking about my father, working as hard as he did for the city to give me the chance to go to college. We couldn’t afford for my dad
to take the Long Island Rail Road in to work. It was too expensive. He took the bus and the subway in to the city every day, over an hour each way, which was miserable. Up before dawn, never getting home before dark. I didn’t want him to have done it all these years just for me to give up. I also didn’t want to end up doing that myself.
So I went back to class and buckled down, studying as hard as I could. I went to a completely different level. My TAs were great. They spent extra time with me going over everything. My friends let me share their notes and spent hours helping me out. On the second midterm for Circuits and Systems, I got an 80. On the third, I got a 100. I went from the lowest score in the class to the highest. That semester I turned everything around. I made the Dean’s List for the first time.
I also started thinking about the space program again. For most of the 1970s, like me, America had lost interest. We’d put up our first space station, Skylab, but it never captured people’s imagination like Apollo had. Now we were entering the shuttle era. NASA had started doing drop-test flights out at Edwards Air Force Base in 1977 and had been flying operational space missions for over a year. The shuttle itself was very cool. It wasn’t some tin can being launched into orbit. It was a real, honest-to-God spaceship. It took off like a rocket with up to seven astronauts, orbited the Earth, and gave the astronauts a place to live and work for a few weeks. We would use it to launch huge pieces of equipment and satellites, conduct experiments, and bring the results back to Earth. It was a sign that the space program was taking its next giant leap.
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