I was going up that day with Frank Marlow, one of the flight instructors. The backseater’s main job is to handle the radio and the navigation. You can’t land or take off, but you get to do nearly everything else: fly the route, do approaches, acrobatics. The pilot takes you up and shows you how. He flies and then you fly. He demonstrates and you execute and you get to know what you’re doing.
That day Frank was taking me out to the practice area over the Gulf of Mexico south of Houston. The way it works is, you go up and then radio air traffic control to let them know you’re activating the area. Once you do that, no commercial traffic is allowed in, and it’s yours to do whatever you want. It’s like reserving a tennis court in the sky. NASA’s practice area is called Warning Area 146-Charlie—about a thousand square miles that goes from 10,000 feet up to 26,000 feet. The Texas Air National Guard, with its F-16s, uses Warning Area 147-Delta for practice; it goes from the water up to 50,000 feet and covers an even larger footprint. There you really have room to have fun.
Of course, the one thing they drill into you is that, yeah, it’s a lot of fun, but you’re not there to have fun. Flying is serious business. People die. Two Gemini astronauts, Elliot See and Charles Bassett, crashed in a T-38 in St. Louis in 1966. They flew up to check out the Gemini 9 spaceship McDonnell Douglas was building for their upcoming flight. They got turned around in bad weather, couldn’t find the runway, and crashed into a hangar—the same hangar that their Gemini capsule was in. Both astronauts were killed, and they took out their own spaceship with them. That same year, C. C. Williams died in a T-38 crash over the Everglades before he had the chance to fly in space, and Alan Bean replaced him on Apollo 12.
I wasn’t worried so much about the flying. On that front, I felt good. The thing I was most scared about was that I didn’t want to FOD the jet. FOD is foreign object debris. It’s a big problem. The turbine blades on a fighter jet are razor-thin. Anything that’s loose on the runway can get sucked into the engine and cause trouble: a soda can, a piece of glass. A pen that falls out of your pocket can get you killed. Every day the crew walks the runway and picks up anything they can find. It has to be pristine. Same thing in the cockpit. Anything that gets loose can jam the controls: A paper clip drops on the floor, you have to find it and remove it before that plane can move an inch.
The diligence and the mind-set you need to fly high-performance aircraft—or to fly in space—is totally different from the way you live in real life. There’s no margin for error. At home I can be a bit of a klutz. So I was petrified I was going to FOD the jet. Frank and I were scheduled to go out at 4:30 in the afternoon. As we suited up I kept peppering him with nervous questions, so many that we were running late. The last thing I said to him walking out was “Hey, Frank, I don’t want to FOD the jet.”
He gave me this strange look. I said it again and he said, “Oh. I thought you said you didn’t want to fly the jet.” He thought I was chickening out at the last minute. “Relax,” he told me. “Everything will be fine.
I climbed up the ladder and into the cockpit. Bob Mullen followed me up and helped me with my parachute straps and my mask and my helmet and everything else, like a mother bird sending a baby chick out for the first time. Once I was strapped in I looked over at Bob for approval. He nodded, smiled, shook my hand, and said, “Have a good flight. See you in a bit.” Then he climbed down and pulled back the ladder and I was on my own, about to go punch a hole in the sky. I did the radio calls to get runway clearance, and we taxied to line up on the runway, powered up the engines to make sure all was well, and then lit the afterburner. Frank released the brakes and we started accelerating, quickly. We were going over one hundred and fifty miles an hour when Frank raised the nose and we shot up into the sky. I felt like I was riding a rocket ship.
There are a couple things you have to do on your first flight, kind of like your initiation. The first thing is to go weightless. You fly up and push over and plummet straight down. Going weightless is an incredible head trip. I was strapped in tight, but I could still feel myself floating up a bit. My pen was attached by a lanyard to my kneeboard and it floated up for a moment, slowly, like magic. Dust floated off the dashboard, too. The weightlessness only lasted for a few seconds, but it left me with an unmistakable feeling: I wanted more.
The second thing you do is break the sound barrier. Frank flew us up to a high altitude again, because you get more speed flying down. Then you light the burner to get as much thrust as you can. The plane starts to shake and you’re pinned to your seat and you watch the Mach meter inching up: 0.95, 0.96, 0.97 . . . When we reached 1.0, I said, “There’s Mach 1,” in my best Chuck Yeager impression, which was what I’d always dreamed of doing if this day ever came. There’s a boom in the sky as you pass Mach 1, but you don’t hear it. You don’t hear anything, because it’s behind you. You’re moving too fast—faster than the speed of sound. The engines, the roar of the wind, it’s all silent. The only noise is the sound of Air Traffic Control talking to you in your earpiece. And the view. Wow. Unlike in a commercial plane, with the T-38’s clear canopy I could see all around me, a big blue sky spread out in every direction. It gave me the sensation that I was zooming and swooping through the air like a bird.
After going weightless and breaking Mach 1, Frank took me through some loops and high-g turns to work on my physiological training. Anytime you take a hard turn in the jet, the centripetal force will push the blood out of your head and down into your lower extremities. You’ll become light-headed and possibly pass out—it’s called a g-force–induced loss of consciousness, or GI-LOC. You have to grunt and tighten up the muscles in your body to constrict the blood flow so the blood stays in your head. It’s the craziest feeling. You go into the turn and you can feel the light-headedness start. Then your peripheral vision starts to fail—you get tunnel vision. You’re being pinned into your seat. Sweat’s pouring down your forehead. You grunt and you tighten up and the blood pushes back up and your eyes come back. You find your equilibrium. You’re training your body to endure the limits of what the human body is capable of.
I loved flying. I could not get enough of it. Backseaters had to log a minimum of twenty-five training hours in the T-38 every quarter. I was always near the top of my class in hours. I had more hours than any other mission specialist in my group, especially out of the civilians. Some of them looked at flying like a chore. To me it was the ultimate. I used to love putting on my flight suit and my aviators, hopping in my car, and heading over to the airfield. I’d blast rock and roll really loud on the way over, usually something like Smash Mouth or Bachman-Turner Overdrive, whatever was the loudest thing I could find on the radio. Granted, this was no longer the days of astronauts racing Corvette convertibles across the California desert; I was rocking out in our Nissan Quest minivan. But I didn’t care. It was still awesome. I’d park in one of the reserved spots marked AIRCREW and then stroll through the hangar past the shiny, clean T-38s. I’d stop in the flight planning room and meet my pilot; then we’d map out our flight plan and file it with Air Traffic Control. Then it was down to the parachute room to pick up our harnesses and out to the flight line to get in our plane.
The best part was that you could do it pretty much whenever you wanted. It wasn’t like getting to space, where you were sitting around, waiting to be assigned. You could hop in a jet and go. The instructors were test pilots out of Pax River and Edwards Air Force Base. They loved having eager students because they loved to share the experience of flying, and they had the best stories, military exploits, launching off aircraft carriers, combat flights. Some of the older instructors had stories about showing legendary astronauts the ropes. These weren’t the stories I’d read about in Life magazine. These were inside stories from the people who’d lived it, and I hung on every word. What amazed me was that they accepted me right away. I was a part of their military flying culture now. I belonged there. They were Right Stuff guys and we were flying together in Right Stuff planes doing
Right Stuff stuff. They’d take me out and we’d do the craziest maneuvers: cloverleafs, aileron rolls, barrel rolls, Immelmann turns. It was unbelievable.
The single most fun thing to do was to go cloud surfing. When you’re flying cross country in a commercial jet, you have to fly at the altitude allowed by Air Traffic Control. There might be clouds or there might not, and it’s hard to tell how fast you’re going without any physical points of reference. In the practice area you can do whatever you want. You find the cloud deck and dive down and nestle right in and glide along the surface, wisps of vapor whipping by your head, giving you the sensation that you’re really moving.
The best was coming up on a big cumulus, a giant, puffy marshmallow cloud. You’d come up on the side of it and then roll into it and it’s pure white all around. Sometimes the sun would break through and you’d see rainbows. And it’s perfectly quiet. You keep the radio on low and only communicate when it’s absolutely necessary as you soar through the sky. It’s the closest thing to heaven you can experience on Earth.
We’d usually stay out until Bingo time. On some military jets, the fuel indicator has a warning sound that goes bing-o, bing-o, to let you know you’ve hit a certain fuel level. So you’d say “It’s Bingo time” and head in. The coolest thing to do on landing was a touch-and-go. You’d make your approach and come in and tell the tower, “Touch-and-go, request closed pattern.” They’d come back with “Touch-and-go, closed pattern approved.” You’d touch down, wheels down, nose down, then BOOM! you’d jam the throttle and WHOOSH! you’d take off again. Then you’d get your speed up and make a tight turn at high speed and go back into your pattern. Then you’d go back and do it again. Then you’d go back and do it again. It was like riding the world’s best roller coaster over and over without ever waiting in line.
In addition to spaceflight-readiness training, the added bonus was that we got to use the T-38s for transportation. NASA’s operations are spread out all over the country: the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland; the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena; Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Astronauts don’t fly commercial to those places if they don’t have to. If you’re a mission specialist who needs to visit Huntsville, you grab a pilot and you go. If you’re a pilot who needs to go to Ames, you grab a backseater and you go. We get our training hours and we save the taxpayers the cost of an airline ticket.
Right after my first flight, Scorch came by my desk and said, “Come on. I gotta go to Yuma, Arizona. Let’s get you some hours.” That’s how it worked. People were always heading out for one reason or another, and I purposefully tried to be the best backseater I could be so I’d be at the top of everybody’s list to fly with. Flying these training jets cross country, you’d usually have to refuel. The wind might favor you going down to Cape Canaveral, but then you couldn’t one-hop it home. You’d have to stop off someplace, and one of the best places was Acadiana Regional Airport in New Iberia, Louisiana. It was in the middle of nowhere and mostly serviced helicopters going out to oil rigs in the gulf. They had an FBO, a fixed-base operator, which had a contract to sell fuel to the government. It was run by a guy named Al Landry, and he catered to the military. He had a food concession at the airfield. Every day he had incredible Cajun food that he made right there. Crawfish étouffée, fried catfish, gumbo, jambalaya. He’d have tuna melts during Lent. Al was legendary. All the astronauts loved him. You’d go and sit around and eat while he fueled up your plane. Then you’d head home. This wasn’t just allowed; it was required. You needed the twenty-five hours. You only got in trouble if you didn’t fly enough.
Those first couple of months in the air were like a dream. I wasn’t commuting to work on the Long Island Rail Road anymore. I was commuting to work in a high-performance jet. I knew flying was a dangerous, serious business, and I gave it the respect it deserved. But at the same time there was never a minute in that plane where I didn’t feel like a kid, with that pure joy and exhilaration I used to get when I was playing make-believe in my backyard. Only it wasn’t make believe. It was real. It was my job.
Carola and I were part of a parents group in the neighborhood, and every year they had a Christmas cookie exchange, something fun to do with the kids. That first December, one afternoon I ran over straight from Ellington after a flight, and I still had my flight suit on. I picked up Gabby and Daniel, we got our cookies, and went home. It was a beautiful sunny day in December, which in Houston is still warm, and I can remember lying out on the front lawn with my kids in my custom-made superhero flight suit, eating blondies and looking up at the sky and thinking: I was just there. I just flew. I can fly.
I wanted to grow up to be Spider-Man—and I did.
10
IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM
When you watch The Right Stuff and see the training that the original Mercury Seven went through, you see those guys were basically treated like lab rats. They were being prepared to go to space, but nobody had ever been to space, so nobody actually knew what to prepare for. It was all a bit haphazard. That’s not the case anymore. NASA’s had forty years to work out the kinks. They know where you need to be, and they know exactly how to train you to get you there.
In addition to spaceflight-readiness training, one of the first things you do as an ASCAN is go on tours of the major NASA facilities. You meet everyone, the key players working across the country, but it’s not just a meet-and-greet. There’s a reason for it. Space is a daunting place. It can be terrifying, actually, and you need to know you’re not alone up there. You need to know that every last NASA employee stands behind you. They also need to meet you so they can put a face to a name and know who they’re protecting up there.
All of NASA’s facilities are cool, but the coolest, hands down, is Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida. It’s mind-boggling when you see it up close. The Vehicle Assembly Building, where they built the Saturn V rockets and assembled the shuttle in our day, is the largest building in the world. There’s a giant American flag down the side of the building. An eighteen-wheeler can fit inside each of the stripes on the flag. The interior of the building covers eight acres, and the volume of the space is 129,428,000 cubic feet—nearly four times the space inside the Empire State Building. The building has its own weather system. Clouds form. Birds nest up in the rafters. The crawler-transporter that takes the shuttle out to the launch site is the largest self-powered vehicle in the world. It’s over three stories high and weighs nearly 6 million pounds. NASA takes the ASCANs out there and shows us these things so we get a good sense of the scale of the task we’re about to undertake.
Back at the Johnson Space Center, for the first year, when you’re not up in a T-38 or at the gym, you’re probably in a classroom or a simulator. You learn everything about how the shuttle works, from top to bottom: the propulsion systems, the navigation systems, everything. Flying the T-38s, running simulations, studying the systems—month by month, piece by piece, they’re building you up, transforming you into someone who’s ready to walk out onto that launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center and strap yourself to the top of a bomb. It’s a slow, deliberate, and very thorough process.
I went on the same tours and sat in the same classrooms as the rest of the Sardines, but my education ended up being different from theirs. It came much faster and was way more intense. Just months after joining NASA, I suffered what was then and may still be the most difficult ordeal I’ve ever gone through. It taught me an awful lot about my new job in a very short period of time. It was an experience that had absolutely nothing to do with space and everything to do with being an astronaut.
When I went to work at NASA my father was seventy-three years old. He’d been having serious health problems for a while. He was always a bit overweight, and he’d had a triple bypass eleven years before. In January 1997, about five months after I started, he had to have another bypass and get a valve replaced. When I flew up to see him, he looked terrible. Hi
s recovery wasn’t going well. He’d developed a bad skin infection, and he was feeling worse and worse. Then his doctors started seeing problems with his blood work. They diagnosed him with myelodysplastic anemia, a condition where bone marrow fails to make the three types of blood cells: red blood cells, which carry oxygen; platelets, which help your blood clot; and white blood cells, which are a key part of the immune system. In the worst cases, myelodysplastic anemia can lead to acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive type of cancer. Which was exactly what happened. In July the doctors told us my father had leukemia and he had, at the outside, six months to live.
I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it. You get only a few people in life who love you truly and completely and unconditionally, people who will be there for you under any circumstances. My father was one of those people, and I couldn’t imagine my life without him in it. I started flying up to New York as often as I could. Sometimes I’d fly commercial and take Gabby and Daniel with me. Sometimes I’d catch a ride on a T-38 if someone was going that way. I started going with him to his appointments. My dad was being treated at Sloan Kettering, a world-famous cancer hospital, supposedly the best of the best. But his doctors had basically thrown up their hands and said, “There’s nothing we can do.” They said his skin rash and his heart problems made him ineligible for the intensive chemotherapy this type of leukemia required. I asked about experimental treatments, new drug studies, anything. He was ineligible for those, too. They refused to treat him. But my father wasn’t ready to give up, and I wasn’t ready to let him go.
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