I said “I am relaxing” and kept right on with the evil eye. Because that was how I’d trained myself to do it.
She said it again. “Sir, relax your eyes. We won’t get accurate data if you don’t. Sir? I need you to relax. Sir?”
She would not stop. She kept raising her voice. Inside my brain I was losing it. I wanted to punch something. I wanted to burst into tears. I wanted to yell, Lady! You have no idea what’s going on here! You have no idea how much time and heartbreak I’ve been through. This is my whole life at stake. This is my little-kid, playing-in-my-backyard-since-I-was-seven-years-old dream on the line—and you need to shut up!
Of course I didn’t say any of that. I nodded and said “Okay” and did my best to ignore her, and finally she started losing it. “Sir! Sir! Stop the test! Stop it! You cannot do this!” Finally, Bob Gibson heard us and came over and asked what was going on. “He’s not relaxing his eyes,” she complained. “He’s not complying with the test protocol.”
Bob stopped the test and took me into his office. He said, “Mike, what have you got the rest of the week? Why don’t you come by my office first thing Thursday morning and I’ll administer your test myself.” He could tell I was frazzled, and he wanted to give me the chance to take the test when I was fresh and my eyes were relaxed. I scheduled a new appointment for Thursday and walked out, feeling pretty upset about the whole thing.
Wednesday I had my second selection committee interview. John Young was back at the head of the table again, but there were several new faces as well. I did okay and I could tell they liked me, but there were still a million reasons why I wouldn’t get it: I was up against a completely different group of candidates than last time, they might have hired a better robotics guy the year before, and so on. Also, I could still fail the eye exam and none of it would matter.
Thursday morning came. I showed up at Bob Gibson’s office. Walking in, I felt surprisingly calm, at peace. I’d done everything in my power to make myself eligible for the job, and at that point there was nothing else left to do. Whether I passed the eye exam or not, I’d always be able to say that I gave it my best.
That said, I really wanted to pass.
Bob opened the door, asked me to come in, and said, “You know what, Mike? If you relax and think positive, I’m sure you’ll do just fine.” He sat me in the chair at the Landolt C machine and started to administer the test. I took a deep breath and went for it. When I finished Bob showed me the results. He said, “Congratulations, Mike. You did it.”
I sat there stunned. I couldn’t believe it. I looked up at Bob with tears in my myopic-but-now-qualified eyes and said, “I passed? I can call my wife and tell her I passed?”
He nodded. I think he thought I was going to kiss him.
It had seemed so impossible, so crazy, that I would pull this off, but it worked. It worked. It was a miracle. I felt a relief even greater than the relief I felt after passing my qualifying exam. Because passing a qualifying exam falls in the realm of what’s possible. Getting your eyes to see better than they normally see is close to impossible. It was proof that no obstacle in life is too great to overcome.
The next day I went by Rainer Effenhauser’s office for the results of my other tests. “Everything came back okay,” he said. “Now leave. Get out of here before anybody has a chance to find anything wrong with you.”
I went home to Atlanta and I waited. At that point there was nothing left to do but think positive thoughts, so I concentrated on getting settled in at Georgia Tech. Being a professor gave me the flexibility to spend more time with the kids. Gabby was starting preschool and I picked her up and dropped her off most days. I took Daniel for walks in his stroller. I made breakfast in the morning and read them stories at night. I missed Houston, but in some ways it was nice not to be in the thick of it while I was waiting. I could keep my expectations in check and not obsess over everything. It gave me a once-in-a-lifetime chance to bond with my kids, an experience I would not trade for anything.
By January I knew I’d made the second-to-last cut. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management started my background check. They call everybody: your family, your coworkers, your kindergarten teacher. No stone is left unturned.
During my interview week I’d gotten to know Mark Kelly. Mark was a Navy pilot, and while we were waiting he and the other Navy applicants had put together this e-mail list to share information about the selection process. Mark was kind enough to put me on it. It was gossip, rumors, speculation. We were all trying to read the tea leaves, desperate for every scrap of information we could get.
April 19 rolled around. It was a Friday. An e-mail popped up from a naval test-flight engineer. She had called Houston to check on something and she’d been told that the calls, good or bad, were going out Monday morning. The second I read that e-mail, I shut down my computer, left my office, and went for a walk. I couldn’t sit still. I must have walked the whole afternoon, my mind racing.
It was all I could do to get through that weekend in one piece. I puttered around the house, tried to keep myself occupied, but mostly I obsessed over this call. I was thirty-three years old. For most of that time, the answer to the biggest question in my life had always been “Maybe.” On Monday morning it was either going to be “Yes” or it was going to be “No,” and either way my whole life would never be the same. Sunday night I went to put Daniel to bed. He’d just turned nine months old, and I can remember looking down at him and saying, “Tomorrow we’re going to find out if your daddy is an astronaut.”
I took Monday morning off from work. If it was bad news, I didn’t want to be crying at my desk at the office. I wanted to be home and ready for the call when it came. So naturally I was on the toilet when the phone rang. Carola came to the door and said, “Mike, it’s a guy from NASA.”
I ran out, and grabbed the phone. “Hello?”
“Mike? This is Dave Leestma from the Johnson Space Center. How are you doing today?”
I said, “Dave, I don’t know. You tell me.”
He laughed. “Well, I think you’re going to be pretty good because we want you to become an astronaut, and we hope you’re still interested in coming.”
I said, “Yes! And in case you didn’t hear me: Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”
I was screaming into the phone. Carola started screaming, too. Then Daniel started crying. I think Gabby was confused. When I hung up I still didn’t think it was real. I had this panic that maybe they’d called the wrong Mike Massimino. I picked up the phone and called them right back. Duane Ross answered.
“Yeah?”
“This is Mike Massimino again. I just wanted to double-check that you guys made the right call.”
“Yeah. Don’t worry. We did.”
9
THERE’S MACH 1
Life changes fast when you become an astronaut. On the day NASA called and offered me the job, I was a university professor who spent his days in front of a chalkboard lecturing a roomful of nineteen-year-old engineering students. Six months later I was breaking the sound barrier in the backseat of a twin-engine supersonic jet.
After getting the call and wrapping up my final semester of classes, at the end of July we packed up and drove home to our house in Texas, waiting for us right where we’d left it. When we pulled into the old neighborhood and up our street, Steve Smith, our astronaut neighbor, had decorated our yard with American flags and streamers and a bunch of signs, which was great. One week later, on August 12, 1996, I reported to the Johnson Space Center for work as an astronaut candidate, or ASCAN. I drove up to the north entrance and flashed my badge, and the guard waved me through. It was the best feeling in the world.
The first week or so was mostly orientation, getting an office, filling out paperwork. NASA put on a couple of social events and mixers for everybody to get to know everybody, which we needed: We were the largest astronaut class in the history of the space program, forty-four of us, thirty-five Americans and nine internationals. Every astrona
ut class gets a nickname. The original Mercury guys were “the Original Seven,” and the second group of nine were called, rather imaginatively, “the New Nine.” Once the shuttle era came, the names got more creative: the Maggots, the Hairballs, the Flying Escargot. The astronaut office takes up the entire sixth floor of Building 4 at the Johnson Space Center. The class before us had fifteen people, and space was already tight. Then they had to cram all of us in there. They called us “the Sardines.”
Once we arrived, NASA didn’t waste any time getting us in the air. Shuttle astronauts fall into two groups, pilots and mission specialists. I was a mission specialist. All mission specialists are trained to fly as backseaters, copilots. It’s spaceflight-readiness training. The different shuttle simulators are great, but they’re not real. Flying a high-performance jet is as real as it gets. You’re controlling a real airplane, working with a real pilot, experiencing real nausea and real turbulence and real gut-dropping, nerve-racking, panic-inducing situations. It trains your mind and your body to feel, react to, and deal with how physically and mentally demanding spaceflight is going to be.
On the first day they measured us for our flight suits. Military pilots wear green flight suits. Astronauts wear blue. The suit comes with the American flag on the left shoulder and the NASA logo on the right breast. Most important, it’s got your astronaut’s wings. You can get white, silver, or gold. Most civilians get white. I ordered gold. They took a mold of my head for my helmet, traced an outline of my feet for my custom boots. Black or brown? Lace-ups or buckles? Everything is custom fit. They also give you custom leather/ Nomex gloves and a watch, a Casio Illuminator on a black rubber wristband with a small NASA insignia, informally called the meatball, on the dial. Then you top it off with the cool sunglasses, Randolph aviators, standard military issue, with straight-back frames with no hook so you can slide them on and off while wearing your helmet—the same ones worn by the pilots in The Right Stuff. You can get your call sign printed on your helmet if you want, like you see in Top Gun, with guys like “Maverick” and “Goose” and “Ice Man.” When I was a kid in school, a lot of kids didn’t even know my real name was Mike. Everyone called me “Mass.” Then, at grad school and McDonnell Douglas, nobody called me that anymore. The name just went away. But once I became an astronaut people started calling me Mass again. It fit. Soon it was the only thing people called me, and that became my call sign, MASS, printed on my helmet.
To get us ready to fly, NASA shipped us out to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, for water and land survival training. Then we were off to Vance Air Force Base for parachute training in Enid, Oklahoma, before heading back to Houston for three weeks of ground school, where we learned the aircraft systems, navigation, FAA regulations, how to deal with inclement weather, flight plans—everything we needed to know to assist the frontseater in flying the jet.
Flight operations for the Johnson Space Center were done out of Ellington Field, which is ten miles up the road going toward Houston. NASA has its own facilities there, a two-story office building attached to hangars for our planes: the WB-57 high-altitude research airplane, the shuttle training aircraft, the KC-135A zero-gravity airplane—the famous “Vomit Comet”—and our fleet of T-38s. Astronauts do our spaceflight-readiness training in the T-38, a two-seat, twin-engine supersonic jet. It can go faster than the speed of sound and cruise at altitude around 700 miles per hour. Just imagine a Ferrari as a fighter jet. They’re small and sleek, with razor-thin wings and a sharp needle nose, painted white with a blue racing stripe and NASA’s logo on the tail. It’s one of the coolest flying machines ever built.
There’s a great story about Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a leftie pitcher who started for the Red Sox back in the seventies. His first day at Fenway Park, he pulled up in his truck and some gruff clubhouse guy tossed a jersey at him and said, “Here’s your jersey.” Bill caught it and was like “That’s it? I’m officially a player for the Boston Red Sox. Shouldn’t there be some kind of ceremony or something?”
That’s what happened to me the first day I showed up at Ellington. The guys who work for NASA out there are mostly former enlisted guys with lots of tattoos. They pack your chute and check your oxygen and generally make sure you aren’t going to die from something going wrong with the plane or the equipment. One of these gruff, ex-military types was working the equipment room that day, a guy called Sarge. He had an enormous mustache, he wore a NASA ball cap, and his shirt was soaked through with sweat. He was chomping on an unlit cigar that looked like it had been in his mouth since Vietnam. I walked in and told him my name. He went through a pile, pulled out my flight suit, and chucked it at me like a used towel. Then he started going through his checklist, piling my arms up with the rest of my gear. I said, “Wait a minute. Let’s back up a second. This is my NASA flight suit. Shouldn’t there be some kind of ceremony or something? Maybe a handshake?”
He looked at me, walked over, reached out, and shook my hand. “There you go,” he said, and went back to his checklist.
After picking up my flight suit from Sarge, I went into the astronaut locker room to try it on. All around me I could read the names of my heroes on the front of the lockers. There was a locker for John Young. There were lockers for Jerry Ross and Story Musgrave, two of the greatest spacewalkers in the history of the shuttle program. I’ll never forget seeing my locker in there—my locker, right next to theirs, my name tag affixed to the front with Velcro. MIKE MASSIMINO, JSC, HOUSTON, with the NASA astronaut wings engraved on it.
I put on my flight suit and slid on the boots. Then the gloves and the watch, finally, in front of a mirror, the super-cool aviators. Putting it all on for the first time felt like putting on a superhero costume. I packed everything up and took it home with me and tried it on again and showed it off for Gabby and Daniel. I must have walked around the house like that for a couple of hours. Fortunately my kids were too young to think I was crazy.
I was crazy, though. A little bit. In a good way. I think you have to be to have the drive it takes to get this job in the first place. The more I got to know my fellow astronauts, I found that they were all characters, every last one of them utterly and amazingly unique. We had guys like Don Pettit, who got the nickname “GQ” during a field trip to NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. A bunch of us decided to go for a run before dinner, but Don didn’t have any running shoes. So he showed up wearing shorts and black dress shoes with the calf-length socks to match—and he was exactly the type of eccentric genius who could pull that off. Don was a PhD in chemical engineering, a bit of a mad scientist. While serving on the International Space Station, he started growing his own vegetables and even invented a coffee cup that works in zero gravity.
Then you had a guy like Charlie Camarda. When I got back to Houston, one of my neighbors said, “Another new astronaut moved in around the corner. I heard he’s from New York, too.” I went over and knocked on the door and my life was forever changed when Charlie walked out. Charlie was from Ozone Park, Queens, the son of a butcher, a guy from the neighborhood like me. Charlie had a thick Italian mustache and a swoop of jet-black hair. He answered the door in flip-flops, a pair of shorts, a white tank top, and a gold chain. Charlie was like Saturday Night Fever Goes to Space, probably the only astronaut in the NASA gym locker room who wore cologne. But he was a brilliant engineer. Absolutely brilliant. Holds seven patents last I checked. Proof that you can take the boy out of New York but you can’t take New York out of the boy. We hit it off immediately. Neither of us could swim that well and we flailed our way through water survival training together. To this day he’s one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met.
I loved my fellow civilian egghead PhDs, but thanks to my love of The Right Stuff, I also gravitated immediately toward the pilots in my class, guys like Charlie Hobaugh, a Marine pilot nicknamed “Scorch” who served in Desert Storm and flew Harrier jets, the kind that can take off vertically and hover like a flying saucer. One day I was with him and we heard th
e deafening roar of a fighter jet overhead. Scorch pointed to the sky and looked at me. “Do you know what that is?” he said. “That’s the sound of freedom.” Yeah, he’s that guy. Scorch was also huge, completely jacked, the guy at the gym who can do endless, effortless chin-ups while you’re struggling just to do two. Scorch was also the nicest person on the planet. You had to be careful what you asked him for, because whatever you asked for he’d give it to you; I was convinced if I asked for his right arm he’d lop it off and hand it over.
Scott Altman, whose call sign was “Scooter,” was another pilot who immediately became a fast friend. We also called him the WLA, the “World’s Largest Astronaut.” Too tall to fly for the Air Force, he became a Navy pilot instead. Scooter had been selected in the class before me but lived four houses down the street, and we were already close. I spent hours of training time in the backseat of his T-38. Scooter was cut from the Right Stuff test pilot mold, too. He flew missions as a strike leader in Iraq, had been awarded just about every naval aviation honor or medal you can name, and he drove a badass blue 1969 Camaro convertible. Scooter was actually Tom Cruise’s flying double in Top Gun. That scene where Maverick flips his plane upside down and flips the bird at the Russian MiG? That’s Scooter. One of my favorite things to do was get in the backseat of his T-38 and pretend to be Goose and act out scenes from the movie.
My first T-38 flight was on October 30, 1996. It was a beautiful, clear autumn day. Carola and Gabby and Daniel came with me to the airfield. Most of the flight instructors out at Ellington were older, flying well into their sixties. They had flown with the Apollo guys, trained Neil Armstrong how to land on the moon. Bob Mullen, the crew chief, had strapped the original Mercury Seven into their training jets. Bob Naughton, the head of flight operations, was shot down over Vietnam, captured, and held in the Hanoi Hilton POW camp for six years. These guys were the real deal. They weren’t messing around.
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