I said, “Is there anything I can do?”
This was back before LASIK or any of these other fancy procedures they have nowadays. There was a surgical procedure called radial keratotomy that people did back then, but NASA still wouldn’t accept you with that; they didn’t trust it. “There is this thing you can try,” he told me. “It’s called orthokeratology. Check it out. Maybe you can give that a shot and resubmit another application if you can get your eyes better. But based on what we have now, I’ll have to reject you.”
Then, as we were getting off the phone, he said, “Look, if your application got to me, that means you’re in the highly qualified section of candidates. You’re in the top ten percent, and you should feel good about making it this far. If you can get your eyes fixed, you’ve got a real chance.”
When I hung up I was in shock: the top 10 percent! That was all the motivation I needed to keep going. I wasn’t even that bummed about the eye thing. It was another obstacle I had to deal with, but maybe I could fix it. I was ready to take on anything if I was that close to making my dream come true.
I did some research and I learned that orthokeratology is a process where they use contact lenses to reshape your eye. When doctors first started prescribing contacts to people back in the 1940s, the first lenses they invented weren’t the nice, soft ones we have today; they were pieces of hard glass or plastic. Doctors noticed that, after wearing these hard lenses for a while, people would wake up and see without any assistance.
The eyeball is a lens. Light comes in, hits the lens, and gets bent to hit the retina on the back of the eye. If it hits the retina at the correct angle, you see 20/20. If it doesn’t, you’re either nearsighted, farsighted, or astigmatic, and you get glasses or contacts to bend the light at the correct angle so you can see. What these hard lenses would do was reshape your cornea—they’d flatten your eyeball, basically—and you could see. The problem was that, once you took the lenses out, after a couple days your eyes would go back. The tissue pops back to its natural resting place. But supposedly, if you stuck with it, you could get your eyes to see better unaided for a while.
I decided to give it a shot. I hauled out my humongous Greater Boston Yellow Pages and found a doctor who specialized in orthokeratology. He prescribed me these hard lenses, and my vision started getting better. It would stay better for a couple of days after I took the lenses out. After a few months my vision fell within the standard for the astronaut program and I was ready to submit another application. Surely NASA would want me now. All I had to do was go back to MIT and do the impossible thing that had nearly killed me: pass my qualifying exam.
Classes started up again at the beginning of September. My next crack at the qualifier was scheduled for the end of November; Professor Sheridan was on sabbatical at Stanford that fall, but he’d be home for Thanksgiving and that was the only time he could do it. I had three months to turn everything around.
I took statistics that fall, and I made a buddy in that class, Roger Alexander from Trinidad. We bonded quickly because we both fell into the hardworking-regular-guy category and not the eccentric-supergenius category. Roger lived in one of the graduate dorms, which was like an apartment with four guys sharing a kitchen and a common area. We’d study there in the evenings. I’ll never forget one night when we had a problem set that was killing us. We couldn’t crack it, and then, around two in the morning, Roger’s roommate, Greg Chamitoff, wandered out into the common area in his underwear, eating this gigantic orange. Chamitoff was one freakishly smart dude. You could tell there was a lot of power in his brain. MIT’s mascot is the beaver, because the beaver is the engineer of nature. Not coincidentally, it also does most of its work at night. Chamitoff fit the description cold. I never saw him much during daylight hours. He walked over to us, looking like he’d just woken up, and said, “What are you guys doing?” We told him this problem had us stumped. He asked if he could see the textbook, and we showed it to him. He looked it over for about a minute or so and said, “Yeah. Do this and this and this, and you got it.” We’d been staring at this problem all night, and Greg solved the whole thing in his head in a few seconds, standing there in his underwear, slurping orange juice off his fingers.
Greg wanted to become an astronaut, too (and he eventually would, a couple years after me). At that point he’d already passed his qualifier. We started talking. He told me what he did to pass was that he pre-practiced the oral exam with his friends. They would grill each other like they were each other’s thesis committee, because passing the exam wasn’t just about knowing the information—it was being able to anticipate the questions and think on your feet without getting rattled. Greg offered to do the same for me: assemble a practice committee of guys who’d passed their qualifiers, who knew what the drill was. They’d put me through the paces and toughen me up.
Talking to Greg that night I realized I’d prepared for my oral exam completely wrong. I hadn’t asked anyone for help, so I hadn’t known what I was doing. Sitting alone in my study carrel, cramming my head with facts and information without learning how to do the actual thing itself, it was no wonder I’d failed.
We have this idea in America of the self-made man. We love to celebrate individual achievement. We have these icons like Steve Jobs and Henry Ford and Benjamin Franklin, and we talk about how amazing it is that they did these great things and built themselves up out of nothing. I think the self-made man is a myth. I’ve never believed in it. I can honestly say that I’ve never achieved anything on my own. Whether it was my parents encouraging me to follow my dreams, or mentors like Jim McDonald who saw something in me, or classmates like Greg Chamitoff who challenged me to do better, I owe everything I’ve ever accomplished to the people around me—people who pushed me to be the best version of myself.
That’s what I responded to when I saw The Right Stuff: the people, the camaraderie, the way that John Glenn and the other guys stood up for each other and looked out for each other. It wasn’t just that I wanted to go to space—I wanted to be a part of the team that went to space, because they seemed like a great team to be a part of. That’s why I fell in love with sports, too. Being a part of a club, having that fellowship, it’s where I feel at home. I think I liked the friendship and the camaraderie of sports more than the actual playing.
The mistake I made with my PhD was that I forgot to find a team. I thought I was running a marathon by myself, and that’s how I’d trained for it. I took Greg up on his offer to run the mock oral exams. Every week my fellow students would grill me. Nick Patrick, a British guy who ended up becoming an astronaut in the class after me, helped a great deal. So did two other guys, Cliff Federspiel and Mohammed Yahiaoui. They were merciless. Every week I’d stand up there alone at the blackboard with my little piece of chalk and they’d tear me to shreds. They made me rethink the weak assumptions I’d put into my work. They made me learn how to think on the fly and express my ideas clearly. They’d pound me and pound me and pound me. Then we’d head over to the Thirsty Ear for a drink.
What amazed me was that Greg and the other guys didn’t have to help me. They were carrying full doctoral course loads, too, and they’d already passed their qualifiers, so it’s not like I was doing anything to help them in return. But they did it anyway. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s how a team works. You help the people around you, and everybody’s better off for it. The crazy thing is that most of those guys wanted to be astronauts, too, but they never saw it as a competition. We were on the same team, where you want everyone around you to be as successful as possible, because in some way or another their success will become your success. It’s good karma—what goes around comes around.
When Thanksgiving week rolled around it was time for me to face the real firing squad again. On Wednesday morning I went back down to Sheridan’s office. It was the same setup as before, my advisors seated around the coffee table, me with my little piece of chalk standing in front of the chalkboard. They got s
ettled in and went to work on me.
They hit me with a ton of tough questions in a row. Bam, bam, bam, switching back and forth from control systems to spacecraft systems to neuroscience, jumping around to try and trip me up. Then they came after me on my research. The first time I went in my research wasn’t solid. Now, thanks to my weekly grilling from Greg and his crew, I’d thrown out my weak ideas and assumptions. My work stood up and I was able to defend it. The whole experience was every bit as brutal as before. I didn’t breeze through it by any means, but I wasn’t stumbling and stuttering through my answers. I stayed calm and focused and on my game for the whole two hours.
When it was over they asked me to leave the room so they could decide my fate. I stepped out and closed the door behind me. Then, quietly, I turned and put my ear to the door to try and hear what they were saying. I heard one of them say, “Well, he’s obviously got a lot of skills, but . . .”
When I heard that “but” I turned and walked away. I didn’t want to hear what came after that. I left the building and walked around campus and tried to ignore the questions racing through my mind. Did I pass? Did I fail? Am I staying? Am I going? Am I going to have a good Thanksgiving or a crappy Thanksgiving? Whatever happened in that room was going to alter the course of the rest of my life.
I knew, walking around, that there was still a decent chance that I’d failed. Weird as it sounds, I was ready to fail this time. I’d failed the first go-round because I wasn’t prepared and had made a bunch of stupid mistakes. That I couldn’t live with. But if I failed this time, at least I’d know I went down swinging and giving it everything I had. If you’re going to fail, that’s how you want to do it.
After a half hour I went back to Sheridan’s office to get the news. They started off with this long list of things I needed to work on. You did well on this, but you need to work on that, all very vague. I was good in control systems, Sheridan said, but I needed help in basic engineering concepts. Then one of them said maybe I should be a TA, that teaching undergrads would help me work on the areas where I needed help. That set off this whole discussion. “Maybe he could TA such-and-such course.” “No, I think maybe he should TA this other course.” And on and on.
They kept going back and forth with each other in their absentminded-professor way, talking about me like I wasn’t even in the room. I thought they were saying I was still a student at MIT, but I couldn’t actually tell. None of them had actually said the words “You passed.” This dragged on for what seemed like forever. It was driving me crazy not knowing. Eventually I jumped in and said, “Um, can I ask a question? I’m going to go home for Thanksgiving tomorrow, and my mother is going to ask me if I passed my qualifying exam. What do I tell her?”
Sheridan stopped and gave me this look. He said, “Oh. No, no. Yeah, you passed. We’re just trying to figure out what you need to do next.”
That was all I needed to know. The rest of the conversation I nodded and smiled and said yes to everything. I told them I would teach whatever they wanted me to teach, I would take whatever they wanted me to take. I didn’t care: I’d passed.
The first thing I did was find a telephone. I called my wife. I called my parents. Everyone was thrilled, but I think they were more relieved than thrilled. They said “Thank you, God” and “Maybe now we can finally have some peace around here.” That night Carola and I drove down to New York to see our families for the holidays, and they had a champagne toast waiting for us. When I went to bed that night, I was actually afraid to go to sleep for fear that I’d wake up to realize I’d dreamed the whole thing.
If you work hard and get help from good friends, together you can overcome almost any challenge, no matter how great. More than aerospace systems or neuroscience or anything else I studied, that life lesson was the most valuable thing I learned at MIT. And as I pursued my dream, long after I became an astronaut and even when I was floating by myself 350 miles above the Earth, it was a lesson I would return to again and again and again.
7
DISQUALIFIED
At 10:00 p.m. on March 16, 1993, Carola gave birth to our beautiful baby girl, Gabby. We took her home and it was like this light had come into my life. Everything seemed better. The air smelled better. The trees seemed more beautiful. People sometimes think having a kid gets in the way of pursuing a dream. I think it’s the opposite. Having her made me want to pursue my dream even harder because I wanted her to be able to do the same. I didn’t want to tell her about how to live life—I wanted to show her.
Gabby was born in Houston. Eight months earlier, after finishing my PhD, I’d taken a huge gamble and moved to Texas for a job with McDonnell Douglas. The chance of my becoming an astronaut was still the longest of long shots; I’d applied to the program a second time in the summer of 1991 and been rejected again. But I believed that being a part of the aerospace community in Houston, where I could be close to the space program and get to know the people involved, was the best chance I had. I reached out to Bob Overmyer at McDonnell Douglas again, and the company made me an offer to head up their independent research and development team for robotics. With big government contracts, part of the budget is often earmarked for research. The whole purpose is to think big, generate new ideas, run experiments, get published in scientific journals. My job would be to think up new ways to use robots in space. On August 19, 1992—my thirtieth birthday, as it turned out—my newly pregnant wife and I packed up our apartment in Boston and started a new life. In Texas.
I don’t deal well with transition, and starting a new job in a new state on the day you turn thirty while your wife is expecting is a pretty mind-blowing transition. I was leaving the grad school bubble behind and entering the real world. Real job. Real family. This is it. There’s no going back. Throughout the move doubts were swirling around in my mind, and I couldn’t shut them up. I thought I was going to be an astronaut? Who was I kidding? At the time, the whole thing felt like a horrible mistake. Then Gabby was born, and having her brought life into focus and reminded me why I was doing what I was doing.
We bought a house in Clear Lake, the suburb southwest of Houston where the Johnson Space Center is located. After a lifetime in the Northeast it was a rough adjustment, but we’d stumbled into a wonderful community and we slowly got acclimated. Clear Lake is a company town. Nearly everyone is tied to NASA and the aerospace industry in some way or another. Our neighborhood was right off Space Center Boulevard, about five minutes from the entrance to the Johnson Space Center. It was like living in Astronautville. My whole life these guys were my heroes. Now they were my neighbors.
Steve Smith became an astronaut with the class of ’92 and was on his way to becoming one of the top spacewalkers in NASA history. Steve is one of those people who’s always in a good mood, has a huge smile, is friendly to everyone. He was so generous there were times I thought he wasn’t human. He was also tall and impossibly fit. Those barbells at the end of the rack that are covered with dust because nobody at the gym uses them? Steve would go right for them. He was an All-American water polo player at Stanford and captain of the 1980 NCAA Championship team. He’s one of those guys who’s phenomenal at everything—but you can’t hate him for it, because he’s also the nicest guy you’ve ever met. Steve lived right around the corner and had a daughter about Gabby’s age. He became a close friend, mentor, and confidant.
I started running into astronauts everywhere I went, even at our church, St. Clare of Assisi Catholic Church, which was so new it didn’t have a building yet. While that was being built they held Mass in a storefront in a strip mall next to a hardware store. I called it St. Clare of the Shopping Mall. Kevin Kregel and his family went to St. Clare with us. He was a fighter pilot out of the Air Force Academy who did an exchange with the Navy to attend the Navy Test Pilot School. Better than that: Kevin was from Long Island. The first time we met, he’d heard me speaking and walked up to me with a raised eyebrow. “You ever go to Solomon Grundy’s?” My eyes lit up. Solomon Gr
undy’s was a rock club on Long Island in the eighties; I loved the place.
“Yeah,” I said. “You from around there?”
“Yup,” he said. “I placed you right away with the accent.” Kevin was a bit older than me and already had four kids, but he could easily have been one of the guys on my old Police Boys Club baseball team. Knowing that someone who grew up minutes away from where I did had become an astronaut was a huge inspiration.
Working at McDonnell Douglas, I was back in the sea of beige cubicles again, back in a white shirt. It was everything I’d run screaming from at Sperry and IBM, only now I was in a different world. I was right down the road from the Johnson Space Center and Ellington Field. I can still remember my first Saturday living in Clear Lake. The Texas Air National Guard flies F-16s out of Ellington, and one of them came screaming overhead. Most homeowners wouldn’t care for that, but I thought it was awesome. I was that much closer to where I wanted to be, and that made everything worthwhile.
As for the job itself, I wasn’t sure I’d like it at first, but in the end, it turned out to be the perfect stepping-stone. For my R&D lab, I only needed one idea, like a thesis, something big to sink my teeth into that could get me published in scientific journals. I also wanted to design and build something that NASA needed, something that would make a real contribution to human spaceflight. I convinced the people up at the Johnson Space Center to let me go through some robotics training and work with some real astronauts who could help me understand how the shuttle’s robotic tools could be improved. One afternoon in the spring of ’93, right around the time Gabby was born, I was standing up on a simulator platform, where some astronauts were training to “fly” the shuttle’s robot arm. The arm’s official name was the remote manipulator system, or the RMS. Since it was made in Canada, we also called it the Canadarm. It was a giant crane used to move objects around outside the shuttle, like satellites or space station modules. It was also used to position spacewalkers to perform their tasks; they would ride on the front of the arm in a foot restraint. In the microgravity of space, the arm can manipulate something with the size and mass of a Greyhound bus.
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