I said, “No, just that I appreciate the opportunity. This has been the highlight of my life coming in here, and whatever happens happens.” We stood up and everyone shook my hand. Everybody was happy and smiling. I felt good about it. I felt like I belonged in that room. Those were my people. This was the team I was supposed to be on. But I knew that when I woke up the next morning it was going to be the worst day of my life.
On Friday, August 12, 1994—before I even got to the news waiting for me at NASA—Major League Baseball went on strike. They’d played the last game of the season the night before, and then that morning the players of every single team walked out in protest over the salary cap. The rest of the season wound up canceled, and there would be no World Series for the first time since 1904. The strike was bitter and it was ugly and the whole future of the sport looked grim, much like my chances of being an astronaut. It was the mother of all bad omens.
On the drive over to the space center I was actually hoping for something else to be wrong other than my eyes. I was praying for an aneurysm or a tumor, something so far out of my control that I could throw my hands up and say, “Well, that’s life. Nothing I can do.” No such luck. I was clean as a whistle. My organs were good. My rear end checked out. My hearing was pitch-perfect. My psych test came back with good results: 100 percent sane. They said I was off the charts for happiness. I was basically a happy person who got along well with almost anyone, good traits for an astronaut. I had met and surpassed all the medical criteria for the job—except one.
I sat down with Rainer Effenhauser and he gave me the news about my eyes. “Your unaided acuity is beyond our limit,” he said, “so we have to DQ you on that. We couldn’t correct you to 20/20, either, so we have to DQ you on that. And you’ve got a flat eyeball in your head. We’ve got to DQ you on that, too. I’m sorry, but we can’t take you. With these results, there isn’t a chance you can be considered. You’re medically disqualified.”
The words hung there in the air: medically disqualified. Not “underqualified” or “in need of more experience” but physically and genetically unfit for service. I was crushed. It’d been ten years. Ten years of my life I’d been working toward this goal. I didn’t know whether to feel angry or sad or frustrated or what. My whole body was numb.
After I got the news, I called up Duane Ross, the head of the Astronaut Selection Office, and asked if I could come by and talk to him. I wanted to know if there was anything—anything—that I could do. Duane had been head of the selection office since the shuttle program began. He was the warmest, most gracious guy, the kind of guy you wanted in your corner because you knew he’d do whatever he could for you. He told me to come by and we sat down and he couldn’t have been nicer. He said, “Mike, I want you to know we were all disappointed when those results came back. I can’t tell you we would have picked you, but I can tell you that you were one of the people we were talking about. Maybe you wouldn’t have gotten it this time, but you might have gotten it in a future selection.”
To hear him say that broke my heart: They wanted me. I was so close. It was right there in front of me. I called some of the astronauts on the selection committee and asked them if they minded giving me their feedback, too. They all took the time to speak with me and not one of them said, “Hey, this isn’t worth your while. Good luck.” If they had, I think I might have given up. But they didn’t. Every single one of them took me aside and told me, “You know, if you can do anything about your eyes, you should give it a try.”
At that point I decided if I was going to be told no, I wanted to be told no. I didn’t want to be told, “We wish we could have.” After everything I’d invested, for me to walk away the door had to be closed and closed forever. As long as it was open, even just a crack, I knew that I couldn’t bring myself to stop trying. I’d made it too far and come too close to give up, and I had nothing left to lose. There was only one thing I had to do to get back in the mix: I had to learn how to see.
8
YES OR NO
Monday morning I was back at work at McDonnell Douglas and I ran into Bob Overmyer in the hall. He said, “What happened?”
“I got medically DQ’d.”
“Your eyesight?” he said. “Yeah, that happens with everybody. I fought those tests for years.” As a former pilot, Bob knew all about the eye test. For as long as there have been planes in the sky, pilots and astronauts have been running scared from the eye exam—because you can be the best, most qualified pilot in the world and then get benched for this thing that’s 100 percent beyond your control.
Bob was actually encouraging. “This is only your first time,” he said. “Don’t give up. You’ll get another shot and you may get back into this thing.” He told me pilots do all kinds of wacky things to try to beat the test. “You know what I used to do?” Bob said. “I’d dehydrate myself. I’d schedule the exam for Monday morning, and over the weekend I wouldn’t drink anything. I’d run like crazy, get all the water out of my system. That way you dry out the eyeball and make it stiffer and it bends the light better.”
“Okay,” I said. “Makes sense. I’ll give it a shot.”
That same afternoon I was at the Johnson Space Center and I saw Kevin Kregel in the hallway. I told him what had happened. He said, “Those damn eye tests. They’ll kill you every time. But you know what you gotta do, right?”
“What’s that?”
“Drink lots of water. Drink as much water as you can, for days. The morning you go in, don’t even take a piss. It’ll make your eyeball more viscous and it’ll bend the light better.”
It actually made me feel better, knowing that I wasn’t the only guy who’d been through this and nobody else had a clue what to do, either. Bob and Kevin had both faced the same obstacle and they’d overcome it and both had become astronauts. That gave me hope.
The best advice I got came from my neighbor, Steve Smith. He told me, “You have to look at this like any other engineering problem. You have to collect all the information and data you can, figure it out.” He was right. I hadn’t been dealing with the problem in the right way. I hadn’t been to an eye doctor in two years. I’d lulled myself into believing this orthokeratology thing would be an easy fix, but that had been a way to avoid facing my fear head-on. I would have known more about NASA’s stance on orthokeratology if I’d been up-front and asked, but I’d been too scared to bring up the subject of my eyes. I thought I could tiptoe around the problem when what I needed to do was tackle it: admit that I needed help and get help. I went back to JSC and went to see Smith Johnston. “What do I have to do?”
Smith started talking, and I couldn’t tell for sure, but I got the impression that he’d spoken with Duane Ross and Duane had told him: “See if you can make this work with Mike. Let’s not throw him away over a bad eye exam.” The first thing Smith told me was to take the damn lenses out of my head. Not only were they not helping, but because I’d worn the same lenses for so long without getting them checked, they’d gotten old and scratched up and had damaged my eyeball, which was why Keith couldn’t correct me to 20/20. So no contact lenses for six months—only glasses, to give my eyeballs a chance to heal.
I also started looking into vision training. Overfocusing of the eye muscles is one of the causes of nearsightedness. Vision training is a program of exercises that teaches you how to relax your eye muscles in order to improve your unaided acuity. It’s not a miracle cure, but it can give you incremental improvements, which was what I needed. It just takes time. Smith told me to do that and keep getting checked by my eye doctor and send him the results. If I showed that I could pass, they’d consider admitting me in the next class after this one.
I said, “Okay, if that’s what I have to do, I’ll do it.”
Over the course of the next year, about a million things happened at once. Shortly after my flameout on the eye exam, we found out Carola was pregnant again. With two kids to support and the astronaut dream looking shaky, I had to think serious
ly about what I would do if it didn’t pan out.
I liked the job at McDonnell Douglas, and it had been a great way to work closely with the astronaut office; but if I wasn’t going to be an astronaut, I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. I had started teaching some classes on the side at Rice University, which has a great engineering school and a long relationship with the space program going back to the start: Rice’s stadium is where President Kennedy gave his big speech kicking off the Apollo program in 1962. Teaching brought in a little extra money, and in the back of my mind I always thought if the astronaut thing didn’t work out, academia might be my best fallback option. With the astronaut dream up in the air, I started sending out letters and résumés to different schools for full-time professorships. I got interviews with the University of Maine, the City College of New York, a few other places. Columbia, my own alma mater, sent me a nice letter telling me no thanks.
Then I got a call from Georgia Tech. Bill Rouse, a former student of Tom Sheridan’s at MIT from before my time, was in the industrial engineering school down there and he’d started a lab, the Center for Human-Machine Systems Research. They were doing work with human factors and control systems and were looking to do more space-related work as well. I flew down and interviewed with them and they offered me a job.
I agonized over the decision for months. Was it a good idea to leave the Johnson Space Center, the focal point for all human space flight? On the other hand, this was a full-time tenure-track position with one of the best engineering schools in the country, and I wasn’t being offered anything like that in Houston.
Finally, in December, I came to a decision: I would take the job. Georgia Tech wanted me to start right away, in January. I didn’t want Carola to have to move while she was pregnant; she had her doctors and everything in Houston, and we wanted the baby to be born there. Also, my robot-arm display was set to be flown in space on STS-69 in June, and I wanted to be in Houston for that. So I asked if they’d wait until the fall semester. They agreed and let me push my start date to August.
For the next seven months I only had one job: fix my eyes. I found an optometrist who specialized in vision training, a woman named Desiree Hopping. First she gave me a new pair of glasses with undercorrected lenses; they would take the strain off my focusing system and help my eyes to relax. Then she gave me some exercises. There was one where I had to stare at a bunch of marbles spaced out on a string at different intervals, shifting my focus to each one. I had to stare at different eye charts at different distances, the idea being that I would train my eye to relax and focus on an imaginary point beyond where the chart is, causing the letters on the chart to appear sharper. These exercises required deep, deep concentration. I had to do this dead stare for minutes at a stretch, no blinking. I looked like a serial killer giving you the evil eye. Some nights I’d go to bed and my eyes would be bloodshot from the strain of forcing them to relax, which sounds odd but it’s true.
I’d go to the office every day and work on my robot-arm display. Then I’d come home. We’d eat dinner, put Gabby to bed. Then I’d sit up at the kitchen table doing these vision exercises. My mother-in-law, who’d come down to help us while Carola was pregnant, would sit there with me, holding up these charts over and over again while I stared her down like a crazy person.
But it was working. I kept going back to Dr. Hopping every two weeks to get my eyes checked, and they were getting better, bit by bit. Then NASA threw me a curveball. After pushing the class of ’94 back to ’95, instead of waiting the normal two years to do the next selection they were going to move ahead and do two classes back-to-back. They’d be taking applications that summer for a class to be picked in the spring of 1996. I’d thought I was going to have a whole year to get settled in Atlanta and slowly work on my eyes. Now the whole interview and selection process would happen right when I was moving. I resubmitted my application and prayed I’d be ready in time.
We put the house on the market, and 1995 turned out to be one of those years when nobody was buying houses. Our place sat on the market for months. No takers. We lowered the price. Nothing. Lowered it again. Still nothing. My mother told me to plant a statue of St. Joseph in the ground; he’s the patron saint of getting your house sold, apparently. So I did. That didn’t work, either. My display experiment got pushed back to a shuttle flight in September, which meant I was going to miss the last couple months of working on that. The Mets were 23–41. There was a lot going on.
In the middle of all this, on July 5, our son, Daniel, was born. Having a girl was great, and getting a boy rounded out the team. At that point our lives were up in the air and I was racked with doubt about the choices I was making. Daniel’s arrival was just what I needed. It was a perfect blessing. Having those kids opened up a new dimension of love for me that I couldn’t have dreamed existed. Whether I became an astronaut or not, nothing was more important than that.
Finally, our real estate agent came by and told us she’d found someone to rent our house short-term. Fine, we said, we’ll do that. In the back of my mind I was thinking that if I did get picked we’d be able to come right back, which was nice to contemplate. The movers came and started packing us up, and I flew to Atlanta for a long weekend to race around and try to find us a place to live. Our whole lives were up in the air.
Apollo 13 came out that summer, and since I was by myself in Atlanta, I went to see it. That was a mistake. It was the best space movie since The Right Stuff: the astronauts and their families having parties in Houston, the whole NASA team pulling together to save these guys and bring them home . . . it was everything I was leaving behind, and I had no idea if I’d ever make it back. I sat there in the theater, loving the movie and being completely depressed by it. I flew back to Houston, collected Carola and the kids, and the first week of August we loaded up and headed east on I-10 with our whole lives packed into this moving truck that followed behind us. The house I’d found for us to rent turned out to be horrible. It looked okay to walk through, but the foundation was cracked and leaked whenever it rained. There were bugs. Nothing felt right.
Then, around the first of September, we had barely moved in when I got a call from Teresa Gomez in the Astronaut Selection Office asking me to fly back to Houston. They were looking at applications again, she said. Mine was in the good pile, and the flight surgeon said my eyes had improved enough that they were willing to let me come back and try again. There was one catch: I had to fly back in a month at my own expense and do the eye exam. If I passed, I’d be back in the running. If I failed, I was out of luck.
It turned out that my luck that fall was pretty good. I called my optometrist to let her know what was happening and she had some news for me. At the time, there were only two Landolt C machines in use in the entire United States. One was at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The other one, she had learned, was at the Emory Eye Center in Atlanta. Of all the cities in North America I could have moved to, I’d picked the one with the machine that I needed. She suggested that maybe I call them up to see if I could go down there and use it. So I did. There were two very nice women who ran the Landolt C unit at Emory. I went down and talked to them and asked if they’d let me use their machine to practice. They said yes, and for the next few weeks I went there every chance I got.
The first week of October I flew back to Houston to sit with Keith Manuel and take the exam. He mapped my eyeball and it was healthy. He corrected me to 20/20, and that went fine. Then he had to test my unaided acuity on the Landolt C. With an eye exam they want you to relax. They want to test your eyes at their natural resting state. My problem was that I had to work hard to relax. I had to strain my face to do this evil-eye thing that forced my eyes to relax and focus properly. I was like a kid with a learning disability. I could pass the test; I just needed to work harder to do it.
And I did it. I passed. I passed!
Duane called me and told me I was back in the pool of eligible candidates
. I could come back and interview the last week of October. I flew back to Atlanta, taught for two weeks, then flew right back to Houston. The whole month I was going all out. I ran every day. I didn’t eat an ounce of fat. I watched my blood pressure. I kept my cholesterol down. I wasn’t taking any chances. Sunday morning I went in for an intro briefing and took the written psych test. Starting Monday I came back and did the ultrasounds, the camera up the rear end, everything I’d done the last time. On my way out I stopped off to talk to Rainer Effenhauser about something. As I was leaving he said, “We’ll see you tomorrow for the eye exam.”
I wasn’t sure I heard him right. I said, “The eye exam? I already passed the eye exam.”
He said, “Yeah, but that was three weeks ago. Something could have changed. It has to be done at the time of selection.”
“But I just did it.”
“No, no, no. That wasn’t official. I’m sorry, Mike. This is what we have to do.”
I couldn’t believe it. It was like a punch to the gut. But it was what it was. You do what you have to do. The following afternoon I went back to the optometrist’s office to take the test again, only now it was a different setup. Bob Gibson was working off to the side, and two optometry students from the University of Houston were there as well. Bob and his colleague Keith Manuel were adjunct professors at the school, and students would often work in their office prepping patients and performing tests to get workplace experience.
A young woman administered my eye exam. She had to be about twenty-four years old. My whole life had been leading up to that moment. Everything I’d done, day in, day out, for over a decade, was going to be decided in the next half hour. She mapped my eyeball and put me on the Landolt C to test my unaided acuity. I sat down at the machine and started the evil eye to try to relax and focus. She said, “Sir, you need to relax your eyes.” To her it looked like I was straining when in fact I was doing the opposite.
Spaceman Page 8