Spaceman

by Mike Massimino

  Grunsfeld stuck his neck out for me, too. After I was assigned to Hubble, he and I were out for a jog in the blistering Houston heat. He told me that during an EVA branch meeting there was some second-guessing about whether or not I was the right guy for the mission, given how new I was. Grunsfeld was the person who calmed everyone down and said I would do okay. I told him I wouldn’t let him down.

  Jim Newman I knew from working together on computers and robotics; he was the astronaut responsible for flying and testing my robot-arm display when I was at Georgia Tech. We’d worked together for almost ten years, and now we were going to be spacewalking together. Newman had some idiosyncrasies. In a place like NASA, which is all about the team, he stood out as something of an individualist. His nickname was Pluto, not after the dog, but because he was in a whole different orbit. He’s one of those guys who’s so smart, he’s often marching to his own drummer. Which is a good thing: You need somebody who tackles problems from a different angle. Newman was a good person to be partnered with because he was very experienced and saw it as his responsibility to bring me along and help me out.

  Rick Linnehan was someone I didn’t know that well before being assigned. Rick had an interesting background for an astronaut: He was a large-animal veterinarian. He started out doing research at Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore Zoo before going on to do marine mammal research with the U.S. Navy. Very funny, loved dancing to Johnny Cash and doing old Three Stooges routines while floating in space.

  A few months later the flight deck crew was announced. Scott Altman—“Scooter”—became our commander. He and I were already old pals from five years of being neighbors and reenacting scenes from Top Gun on T-38 flights. Nancy Currie was named our flight engineer and robot-arm operator. She was and continued to be an ally and advocate for me. She was a real veteran, too. Both she and Newman had flown on the first station assembly flight, so she brought some good experience in dealing with a high-profile, high-pressure situation, which we were going to need.

  Duane Carey—“Digger”—became our pilot. Digger was the other rookie on the flight besides me. Like Linnehan, he was someone I didn’t know that well going in. He was your classic Edwards Air Force Base test pilot, loved riding motorcycles—a real Right Stuff kind of guy. He looked the part, too, with the crew cut and everything. The reason I didn’t know him that well was because he was never around much. If he wasn’t working he was home with his family, doing math homework with his kids. But once we were assigned together we bonded quickly as the only rookies.

  On a shuttle flight, the commander is in charge of the crew. What he says goes. This was Scooter’s first commander slot, but he took to it naturally. Every shuttle crew is assigned its own office for the months leading up to the mission, and our first task as a team was moving in and setting up. It was such a small thing, but even there I could see how the team dynamic was going to work. Scooter walked into the office on day one and looked at what we were doing and said, “No, this needs to go here, that should go there. . . .” He was calm, confident, and in charge. He fell right into his leadership role, and we fell in right behind him. That, to me, was a good sign.

  One of the first things we did as a crew was go out to dinner together. I could see the family dynamic already starting to form. Scooter was the dad, and I was the little brother. Linnehan and Digger were like the siblings I would goof around and have fun with. Nancy and Grunsfeld and Newman were like the older siblings I’d go to for advice. I was the rookie spacewalker and the only crew member still in his thirties. I was always in the position of asking questions and wanting to learn, and the others had this natural instinct to want to help me and support me.

  After 109 was over, Charlie Precourt told me why he chose me. I was good in the pool and proficient in the suit, but so were a lot of people. The thing that set me apart, to him, was my personality. No matter how stressful the situation, I try to keep things light and fun, like I’d done up in Cold Lake, like I’d done going back to my high school sports teams. I was always the glue. This was going to be a difficult mission in a high-pressure situation. There were all these very different, very strong personalities sitting around the family dinner table, and having a fun little brother sitting down at the end broke the tension and balanced everything out. I didn’t know that was my job at the time, but in hindsight it made perfect sense.

  Once the team was assembled, we threw ourselves into the mission. We had a full slate of tasks ahead of us. We would be replacing the telescope’s solar arrays with newer, more efficient ones; replacing the PCU—the power control unit, the central nervous system of the entire telescope; swapping out the older Faint Object Camera (FOC) for the exponentially more powerful ACS, the Advanced Camera for Surveys; and installing a new cryocooling system for the NICMOS, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, which had been dormant since its original cooling unit failed in January 1999, two years after being installed.

  These were complicated, delicate upgrades to perform, and we only had eighteen months to prepare. Based on mission priorities and the amount of time each task was going to take, it was decided that on EVA #1, Grunsfeld and Linnehan would replace the starboard solar array. On EVA #2, Newman and I would replace the port solar array. EVA #3 would be the PCU replacement. EVA #4 would involve swapping the FOC for the Advanced Camera for Surveys. And on EVA #5, Grunsfeld and Linnehan would install the NICMOS cryocooling system. In addition to those main tasks, each day we’d also have a number of smaller, routine chores, like adding new insulation blankets and helping prep for the next day’s space walk.

  In terms of advancing the Hubble’s capabilities and its scientific mission, installing the Advanced Camera for Surveys was the most important aspect of the mission. It was going to improve the Hubble’s ability to capture images by a factor of ten. It was going to peer farther and deeper into space than any other instrument ever created. But from the point of view of preparing for the mission, swapping the ACS for the older instrument was the relatively simpler task. It wasn’t easy. Nothing in space is easy, but the job itself was straightforward. Both the FOC and the Advanced Camera for Surveys are about the size of a refrigerator; each one is a big metal box. Because the engineers at Goddard and Lockheed designed the Hubble to be serviced, all we had to do was demate the connectors, disengage the latches holding the FOC in place, pop it out, slide the ACS in, and hook it up.

  The part of my job that had me concerned—and by “concerned” I mean “petrified”—was replacing the solar array. Hubble’s solar arrays use photovoltaic cells to collect energy from the sun. That energy is channeled through diode boxes that convert it to electrical power, which is then stored in the telescope’s batteries. From the batteries, the power is distributed through the PCU, which acts like the electrical grid that parcels out energy to the different houses and buildings on a city block.

  The larger a solar array is, the more energy you can capture with it. The challenge NASA faced when Hubble launched was that photovoltaic technology wasn’t that advanced. They needed arrays with a large surface area, but those arrays needed to be small and lightweight for launch. The array that was used was made out of thin, flimsy metal that stored compactly and rolled out like a window shade. The problem with that design is that, as the telescope orbits from day to night and from night back to day, there’s a 400-degree swing in the temperature. It’s called the thermal cycle, day-night, hot-cold. These flimsy arrays started expanding and contracting with the thermal cycle. They were shaking the telescope and getting bent out of shape and becoming less efficient.

  By the time we launched Servicing Mission 3B, photovoltaic technology had improved dramatically, and the arrays we were bringing up were much smaller than the originals: one-third the size while producing 20 percent more power. They weren’t flimsy; they were rigid and made out of a strong aluminum-lithium alloy. They didn’t roll out like a window shade; they opened like a book, with two panels that hinged around a centr
al mast—the spine of the book. The mast held the connectors that attached the array to the diode box in the telescope.

  For launch, the arrays would be stored in their folded position inside a carrier in the payload bay. One of my jobs would be to remove the array from its carrier, after which I had to rotate it 180 degrees along its long axis in order for the mast to be in the right position to get plugged in to the telescope. I wouldn’t be lifting the array out of its carrier—I would be holding it while Nancy, using the robot arm from inside the shuttle, lifted me and it together out of the payload bay. Once I was clear of anything I might bump into, I would rotate the array to put the mast in the right position. Linnehan had to perform the same task with the starboard solar array on EVA #1.

  Here was my problem: This solar array weighed 640 pounds, and even though it wouldn’t have any weight in space, it would still have mass, which means it still had inertia. And because it had this bulky mast on one end, the center of the array’s mass was not in the center of the array; I couldn’t pivot it around the middle. And even though this array was smaller than the old one, it was still enormous. When folded in half, the way it would be when I rotated it, it was 8 feet by 12.375 feet—about one and a half times bigger than a king-size mattress. The center of mass would be far away from me, making the array difficult to control. On top of that, I couldn’t be tethered to it. This thing was big enough and had enough mass that NASA was worried if it got away from me, it might break my safety tether and take me with it or rip a hole in my suit, and they would rather lose a solar array than lose an astronaut.

  No astronaut had ever done this before. The first person to attempt it would be Rick Linnehan, who had to perform the same task the day before me. I don’t know if Rick was as anxious as I was, but I was terrified I was going to lose control of this thing. If I gave it the slightest jerk or moved it too fast and it started to wobble and get away from me, it would be “Bye-bye, solar array.” And it’s not like you can say, “Oh, let me pop down to the payload bay and get the spare.” There’re no spares. I would have one chance to do it perfectly.

  In space, there are no small mistakes. Every mistake is a big mistake, and I’d seen astronauts make them. One robot arm operator, while trying to grapple a satellite, accidentally tipped it instead, sending it spinning out of orbit. The shuttle commander had to jump into action and maneuver the shuttle to chase the thing down. Another time a spacewalker—and this is a true story—accidentally put his right boot on his left foot and put his left boot on his right foot. Once he got outside, he couldn’t fit in a foot restraint. Another spacewalker accidentally went out with a used CO2 scrubber in his suit; he got a “high CO2” alert in a matter of minutes, and the whole EVA had to be called off.

  Mistakes cost time, and time is very expensive in space. The total budgeted cost of STS-109’s eleven-day mission was $172 million— about $650,000 an hour. The solar array that I was petrified I was going to send sailing off into space? It was worth nearly $10 million. The Advanced Camera for Surveys that Newman and I had to install? That instrument alone cost $76 million. And the Hubble itself is priceless. The decades of work that have gone into it, what it does for science and the advancement of human knowledge, you cannot begin to put a value on that. And NASA was entrusting it to me, the guy who’d never been to space.

  There’s an old NASA saying that Newman taught me: “No matter how bad things appear,” he said, “remember, you can always make them worse.” It’s true. Once a problem comes up, if you panic or act too fast, you will only exacerbate the problem. The same way I was scared I was going to FOD the jet when I first flew in the T-38, I was in a constant state of worry that I’d be the guy making things worse.

  Fortunately, if there’s one thing NASA knows how to do, it’s condition people to deal with fear. No training experience on Earth can ever re-create exactly how it feels to be in space. So what NASA does is, they break the experience of spaceflight and spacewalking down to their constituent parts. You work on each one individually and then piece them together. That’s the way it is for all the elements of the flight, whether it’s working the robot arm or working the shuttle systems or learning how to use the toilet.

  For spacewalking, we have the pool. That’s the major training tool because that’s where the experience is as close as it will be in orbit. The shuttle’s payload bay is sixty feet long and fifteen feet in diameter. In the pool there’s a replica of it in the exact same configuration you’ll have for the mission. For STS-109, the Hubble was going to be berthed on a rotating turntable, like a lazy Susan, at the far end of the payload bay. In between it and the airlock were the enclosures that housed our tools and equipment as well as the carriers that held the instruments we were about to install. That payload bay mock-up in the pool is a good simulation of the working environment we have in orbit, but many elements simply aren’t the same. Water creates drag. If you lose control of an object in the pool, it will eventually slow down and stop; if you lose control of an object in space, it will keep going and going and going and going.

  Another thing that’s different is the visual. The mock-up is not the same as the actual telescope, because it’s made for the pool. The actual equipment is so sensitive it can’t be put in the water, so it has to be a bit different. To work with the real equipment, we’d go to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. There they have what’s called a clean room, a room with a positive airflow so that no dust can ever form; it’s tested down to one part per billion. Just to get in I’d have to take an air shower to blow off the dirt and loose skin on my clothes. Then I’d have to put on a gown, a hood, a mask, gloves, and booties over my shoes. Then I’d walk through this airlock into a gigantic, warehouse-size room with guys in bunny suits walking around with clipboards and cranes moving equipment overhead. It felt like a scene out of a James Bond movie.

  In the clean room they have a high-fidelity, life-size mock-up of the telescope, a perfect replica: the exact same instruments, how they feel, what they look like. It’s especially accurate on the inside, down to the intricate switches and the latches and the connector pins. The tools we used there were the exact same as the tools we would be using in space. In the clean room, we’d work with this replica, mating the new solar array to the telescope, aligning and installing the ACS. We’d memorize what everything looked like, how the pins and connectors lined up, how they fit together. We’d practice over and over and over again until we could do it blindfolded.

  The downside at Goddard is that we were in regular gravity. The EVA suit weighs over 200 pounds. The solar array weighs 640 pounds. We couldn’t actually move any of this equipment around the way we would need to in space. To practice mass handling, we went to a virtual-reality lab. There, we had a machine we called Charlotte because it looked like an enormous spider in a web. It was a box with different handrails and wires coming off it. I’d put on the virtual-reality helmet and move the handrails around; they were programmed to behave as if I were manipulating a 640-pound king-size mattress in the vacuum of space, where the tiniest misstep could send the thing wobbling out of control.

  Of course, handling something in virtual reality isn’t exactly the same as handling an actual physical object. For that we had what’s called the air-bearing floor, which works like an air-hockey table in reverse. It’s a floor that’s polished to be perfectly flat and smooth. Instead of the floor shooting air up, it has objects that glide on the surface like a magic carpet by pushing air down, creating a frictionless, weightless environment. I could take an object like the solar array, put it on the air-bearing floor, and move it around in two dimensions, X and Y, and feel how easily I could lose control of it.

  Not one of these training exercises comes close to the real thing. Each one mimics a certain aspect of being in space. I’d work with the real equipment in the clean room at Goddard and get a sense of what it was going to look like. Then I’d file that memory away. I’d play out the scenario in virtual reality and get a s
ense of how the mass handling was going to feel. Then I’d file that memory away. I’d do it again on the air-bearing floor and file that memory away. Then, piece by piece, I was synthesizing that information together into a mental model of what the experience was going to be like once I was in space.

  So that’s what I did. I would get in the virtual-reality lab first thing in the morning and slowly, slowly, rotate that array: Right hand moves an inch. Left hand moves an inch. Right hand moves an inch. Left hand moves an inch. Then I’d rotate it on the airbearing floor: Right hand moves an inch. Left hand moves an inch. Right hand moves an inch. Left hand moves an inch. I’d rotate it in the pool: Right hand moves an inch. Left hand moves an inch. Right hand moves an inch. Left hand moves an inch. For months and months and months. Over and over and over.

  Grunsfeld used to say that the Hubble knows when it’s about to get fixed, and it breaks something else so you can come fix that, too. Sure enough, on November 10, three months before we were set to launch, one of the telescope’s reaction wheels conked out. It was decided that Newman and I would handle swapping out the old reaction wheel for a new one after replacing the solar array. Our launch date was pushed back one week, from February 21 to February 28, to give us time to train on the new task.

  With each passing day the size and the scope of the mission grew bigger. The two EVA teams trained together for months. Then Nancy joined us on the robot arm to practice flying us around in the pool. Then Scooter and Digger joined in, and we had the whole crew do stand-alone sims for ascent, entry, and orbit. We practiced different aborts and failures and contingencies. Over and over and over again.

  In the early going, during our sims, we usually had an instructor in a chair with a binder, acting like Mission Control. Then, a few months out, we were assigned our flight director and flight control teams; there’s an ascent and entry team and three orbit teams that handle the three eight-hour shifts of the twenty-four-hour day. We selected our family escorts. We were assigned CAPCOMs, the person in the control room who speaks directly to the crew, the liaison between the astronauts and Mission Control. With our extended team in place, we started running integrated sims. Finally, the entire Johnson Space Center is working together: The flight control team is in the Mission Control Center, the flight deck crew is in the shuttle simulator, the EVA team is in the pool at the NBL a couple of miles down the road, and everyone is linked up via radio to execute the sim. Everyone comes together and forms this cohesive, coordinated unit.