Spaceman

by Mike Massimino

  On January 14, 2004, President Bush announced what he called a “new vision” for America’s space program. That new vision was really a return to the old vision: finishing the space station, building a heavy-lift vehicle capable of taking us out of Earth orbit, back to the moon, and eventually to Mars. But this ambitious, long-term goal would require short-term sacrifice. The money to pay for it would come from retiring the shuttle in 2010 once the assembly of the space station was complete.

  In the end, the shuttle was a victim of the compromises that gave birth to it. The shuttle was sold as routine, everyday access to space, but in hindsight that was a bold overstatement. It was always a dangerous, expensive vehicle to fly. Before Columbia, we calculated the odds of a total loss of shuttle and crew at about 1 in 150. After Columbia, that was revised to about 1 in 75. By contrast, the risk of losing a fighter jet in Vietnam was around 1 in 1,500. The orbiters were getting old and the program was expensive to maintain, and if we kept flying them, another accident was seen as inevitable.

  At that point the United States had a huge amount of time, money, and national prestige invested in the International Space Station. We had obligations to our partner countries, which is one reason we stayed committed to its completion. But Bush’s speech didn’t say one word about Hubble. The rumor around the office was that Washington was going to kill the final servicing mission. Being able to fly the shuttle again was dependent on having a safe haven, which you only had if you went to station. But Hubble was 100 miles higher and on a different orbital path. The Hubble has a low orbital inclination. It flies 28.5 degrees from the equator. The ISS has a high orbital inclination. It flies 51.6 degrees from the equator. It’s easy to raise or lower the altitude of your orbit, but it takes an enormous amount of fuel and energy to change the inclination of your orbit in space. It’s actually easier to land and take off again at a different angle than to change directions in orbit, which means there’s no way to get from Hubble to station. And because it takes more fuel and energy to get up there, you have fewer resources to sustain you if something goes wrong.

  At the same time, it seemed inconceivable that we wouldn’t go back. First, we still had to address the issue of deorbiting the telescope. The Hubble is the size of a school bus, but it lacks the propulsion necessary to perform a guided entry, meaning it could shower a major city with debris instead of being guided to break up over an ocean. When the Hubble was launched, the idea was that once its mission was over the shuttle would go up and bring it back so we could put it in a museum. Without that, we needed to go back to add some kind of steering mechanism to deorbit it safely.

  Second, the amount of new science and research we’d lose without the final mission was staggering. We had two new instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3, which had already been built at a cost of $200 million. Like all of Hubble’s instruments, they were keys to unlocking more secrets of the universe, and we had them ready to go. Now we were going to shove them in a closet and say “Oh, well”? Abandoning the Hubble didn’t just mean forgoing future upgrades, either. The gyroscopes were starting to fail again and needed to be replaced or the telescope wouldn’t be able to point. Worse than that, the batteries were reaching the end of their life span. We estimated they had about three years left in them. Power is essential. None of the telescope’s instruments work without it. Power also keeps the telescope warm. Without heat, the instruments would freeze in the vacuum of space, and if they froze even once, that would be it. We’d be left with a useless hunk of metal orbiting 350 miles above Earth. If we canceled the final servicing mission, we were essentially saying, “It’s time to let Hubble die.”

  One week after Bush’s speech, NASA made the announcement: Hubble was off the books. It was too dangerous, too risky. It was a unilateral decision. There was no discussion, no review, no panel to study the pros and cons. The backlash was immediate, and it was big. Across the board, nearly everyone in the scientific and aerospace community said it was a mistake. Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, who represented the Goddard Space Flight Center, went to the press, denouncing the decision and saying she’d do everything she could to reverse it. In the House, Representative Mark Udall of Colorado introduced a bill calling for an independent panel of experts to review the cancellation.

  Meanwhile, the team at the Space Telescope Science Institute made their own case for Hubble in the best way they could. They rushed out the release of its latest images: the deepest photographs ever taken of the universe. These pictures showed the most distant galaxies ever recorded, nearly ten thousand of them, some nearly as old as the universe itself. If we wanted to continue to study them and learn more about them, there was only one option: save Hubble.

  Inside the astronaut office in Houston, watching these decisions being made up in DC, we were devastated. O’Keefe said he was canceling the flight out of consideration for our safety, but nobody asked us. We were still willing to go. As horrible as Columbia had been, the bottom line was that the accident didn’t add any new information. It’s not like anyone was surprised. We knew the risk was there.

  For me, with Challenger, the danger had been more of an abstraction. Now it was right in front of me and I wondered how I would react. The truth is, it didn’t change anything. Carola and I had exactly one conversation about it. It was maybe a week after the accident. I asked her, “What do you think, now that this has happened?”

  She said, “Well, we always knew it could. You’ve only flown once. Don’t you want to go again?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was the end of the discussion. Carola is a physical therapist. Every day she deals with people who headed out their front door and got in horrible car accidents and have to learn to walk again. She knows you can’t hide from bad things. You just have to keep doing what you’re doing. Astronauts go to space. That’s what we do. When Ernest Shackleton set off to cross Antarctica, I’m sure the odds were worse than 1 in 75. That didn’t stop him. In the shuttle era, NASA got caught up making nuts-and-bolts justifications about why we go to space when the real answer is just because. We go because we go. We do it because we do it. Because human beings have always done it. It’s the reason we first left the caves and poked our heads around the next corner to try to see what the world was about.

  Exploration is what we do. It’s a basic human need, the drive to know more merely for the sake of knowing it. Understanding what’s happening at the other end of the galaxy is a path to understanding ourselves—understanding who we are and why we’re here. Five thousand years ago the Earth was small and flat and ruled by angry gods who lived on Mount Olympus. Today the Earth is a giant blue spaceship hurtling through an ever-expanding universe that’s 13.8 billion years old.

  That’s why we go.

  The beauty of Hubble is that it is maybe the purest expression of that idea that exists today. Not only is it an instrument that can see farther and deeper into the history of the universe than any other machine ever built, the knowledge that it provides belongs to everyone. The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars on this instrument, and then every year we take the knowledge it provides and we give it away. For free. It’s all public domain, and not just for Americans but for everyone in the world. It’s done solely for the enrichment of our fellow man, and that’s an incredible thing. The need to explore, in its purest sense, is always driven by the desire for knowledge itself, and that principle is so important that people are willing to risk their lives for it. Which is why O’Keefe’s announcement about Hubble was such a blow to everyone who cares about the future of space exploration, and it’s why we weren’t going to let our telescope die without a fight.

  In April 2004, about four months after the final servicing mission was canceled, Grunsfeld called me up from DC. He said, “Mass, I’m talking to Goddard about a robot mission to save Hubble.” It was a bold idea. If it was too risky to send a crew, why not send a machine to perform the upgrades and repairs, one that cou
ld be operated from the ground? We still had the problem of deorbiting the telescope safely. We were going to have to send up a robot to resolve that issue anyway, so why not use that as a pretext to investigate and see if a robot could do more, like swap out batteries and instruments?

  Someone in the astronaut office would have to lead the effort, and Grunsfeld told me that person had to be me. He said, “I need someone who knows robotics. I need someone who knows Hubble. Most important, I need someone I can trust. You’re the only person who fits that bill.” Normally, to start any new program in the astronaut office, you would call the head of the office and he or she would assign someone who was available. Grunsfeld wasn’t going to take that chance. He was going outside the normal channels and having a specific request come from the NASA administrator that he wanted me on the project. “That’s what’s going to happen,” Grunsfeld said. “So be ready.”

  Sure enough, a few days later I ran into Kent Rominger in the hallway and he told me Grunsfeld was putting me on this robot mission. At the time, I was already CAPCOMing, working on contingency shuttle repairs, and doing EVA proficiency training. I asked which of my other duties this was going to replace. “None,” he said. “Just add this to your plate. Keep doing everything else, but this is a priority.”

  I had a hunch what was happening: They were propping open a back door for us to get a manned servicing mission back on the books. I didn’t say that out loud, but that’s what I thought from the start. The plan in the meantime was to send up a robot arm equipped with special manipulators that could dock to the telescope and perform the repairs. I started putting together a team. My old ice cream–eating friend, Claude Nicollier, the Swiss James Bond, was a veteran Hubble spacewalker and a specialist in robotics. Ten years after he brought my display project into NASA, I called him up and told him I had a project for him. He signed on right away, and we were working together again. We started doing simulations in Houston, running tests up at Goddard. Some of Claude’s European sophistication started to rub off on me. I started drinking a lot of caffè latte.

  The robot mission was an interesting exercise, and we learned a great deal from it, but the expense eventually killed the project. With all the different contingencies you’d have to plan and design for, it would have cost a bazillion dollars and you still wouldn’t get the same quality of repair. Replacing the gyros was too intricate a task for a robot to tackle. Even opening and closing the aft shroud doors was tricky. Ultimately, what the robot mission ended up proving was the value of astronauts. Astronauts can think on the spot, improvise solutions, communicate abstract thoughts. Robots can’t. If you design a robot to do A, B, and C, and then you get to space and it turns out the robot needs to do X or Y or Z, you’re out of luck. If you have a person with a human brain operating hands with opposable thumbs, you can shift gears on the fly, work the problem, devise a solution. As incredible as the shuttle and the station and the Mars rovers are, the most valuable piece of equipment you can have in space is a person.

  In the end, the robot mission did one vital and critical thing: It kept the Hubble servicing team together and moving forward. Gene Kranz told me once that after Apollo was over, to keep his people in one place, he put them at Ellington Field until the shuttle program started. When a project gets dismantled, people disappear. They need jobs. They go work for other companies. They go somewhere and teach. If you let them scatter, you’re never going to get everybody back. All those skills, all that knowledge and institutional memory, it’s gone forever. If you lose the team, you lose everything. With Hubble, the day after the last flight was canceled, people were already sending out résumés, looking for new jobs. We made sure that as many of us as possible stayed put.

  The robot servicing mission brought me back to life. After Columbia, for a while the job felt like nothing but death and misery. It took me a year to enjoy being an astronaut again, and the robot mission is what made that happen. My mood changed. I had a challenge, a purpose. I wasn’t going through the motions anymore. I started going to meetings at Goddard with the Hubble team. I was doing hands-on testing. I was having fun. Once it turned into a robot mission, the astronauts who wanted the last shot at Hubble and had been jockeying for position dropped out. They didn’t want to control a robot from the ground. They wanted to walk in space, so they left to go work on station flights. I was left working as a robot guy, and I was thrilled. It was right up my alley. I knew that telescope backward and forward. I liked working with the team at Goddard solving complex engineering problems. The robot mission also gave me the chance to be a leader in the office, to learn how to manage people. I realized my career wouldn’t move forward if I didn’t.

  A few months into leading that team, what I realized was that, over and above my loyalty to NASA and to the astronaut office, my real loyalty was to Hubble. To Grunsfeld and Nicollier and the other Hubble Jedi in Houston. To Frank Cepollina and Ed Rezac at Goddard. To Ron Sheffield at Lockheed Martin. To Barbara Mikulski and Mark Udall in Congress. They were dedicated people. They shared a passion. They were a team. With each servicing mission the astronauts came in and became a part of the family for a year or two and then moved on, but the team would still be there. I wanted to stay with the team. Even when Hubble was canceled and grounded and off the books, I didn’t want to leave. Maybe that’s something I learned from forty years of being a New York Mets fan: No matter how bad it gets, you stick with your team and you never give up. We had this extraordinary group of people working together, and we weren’t going to let Hubble die. Losing seven close friends on Columbia had been a brutal reminder to everyone: You only have one life. You have to spend it doing something that matters. Even if I never flew in space again, if my work on that robot mission in any way helped bring back the Hubble, that would be my thing that mattered. That would be my chapter in the story of space.

  The whole time I was working, in the back of my mind I never lost hope that we would get a manned mission back on the books. The status reports I filed on the robot mission, I would always end them by saying, “There is an undercurrent of hope that this will eventually be turned back into a space shuttle mission, but there is not a guarantee.” Then, on April 13, 2005, propping open the back door with the robot mission finally paid off. On that day Michael Griffin replaced Sean O’Keefe as NASA administrator. I liked O’Keefe, but he was the first to admit he wasn’t a space guy. He was a career politician, a presidential appointee. It wasn’t his style to take big gambles. Griffin was a space guy to his core. He was a former chief engineer at NASA, had been the head of the space department at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, and had done serious work at different aerospace contractors. He and Grunsfeld had been friends for years, and they both shared a love for Hubble.

  Griffin was an outspoken, no-nonsense type of leader. From the second he showed up, it was clear there was a new sheriff in town. On the question of whether NASA should be focused on doing science experiments or exploring space, he didn’t leave any doubts about where he stood. In one of his earliest speeches to the troops, I remember him saying, “We’re not the National Science Foundation. We’re NASA. We go places.”

  Griffin’s long-term goal was to get NASA back on the path of exploration, but he also knew that he was likely to have just three years on the job. A new president was going to be elected in 2008, and a new administrator would be appointed. Griffin wanted something important that could be accomplished during his tenure, something he could point to as his legacy. At that point the space station was close to finished, the shuttle program was already winding down, and the new program Bush had announced was still years away from being operational. So Griffin decided there was one thing he could do to leave a lasting mark. A few weeks after Griffin’s swearing in, Grunsfeld was down in Houston and he stopped by my office. “I talked to Griffin,” he said. “He wants Hubble. He wants us to find a way to go back.”

  21

  FROM THE ASHES

  The
first time I met Drew Feustel, I thought, This guy’s gonna be a pain in the ass. Drew was class of 2000, the Bugs. Shortly after Columbia, he was scheduled to go through space walk training, and as part of my new role in the EVA branch I was paired up with him for his first runs in the pool, the same way Steve Smith had been paired up with me. I knew how difficult the training was and I wanted to help the new guy as much as I could. A few days before his first run, I called him up and said, “Hey, you want to go out to the pool and go over some things?”

  He kind of blew me off. “Nah, I think I’ve got it.”

  Then, the night before the run, I bumped into him in the parking lot at the grocery store. He was sitting in his car, this classic BMW roadster, listening to music with his two boys. I said, “You want to hit the pool early?”

  He shrugged. “Eh, okay. Whatever you wanna do.”

  I said, “Look, this is important. This is your run. I’m only trying to help.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay. I’ll be there.”

  He wasn’t there. I went in early the next morning and sat around waiting. Drew showed up late. We rushed through the briefing, and the whole time I was thinking, This guy’s gonna screw everything up. He’s gonna be terrible. Then we got in the water. He was unbelievable. My first time in the water I struggled just to get around. Drew did everything perfectly, and the whole time he was loose and confident—a natural.

  Drew Feustel wasn’t your typical astronaut. He wasn’t a military guy. He grew up outside Detroit and didn’t have the grades to get into college, so he went to work as an auto mechanic. It turned out that while he wasn’t great at sitting in a classroom, he was a genius with anything mechanical. Give him a lamp or an alarm clock or the engine to an F-16, and he could take it apart and fix it and put it back together better than before. He was a real treadhead. His BMW roadster? He’d rebuilt it himself. While working as a mechanic Drew graduated from community college and then went to Purdue, where he met his wife, Indi, and from there went to Queen’s University in Canada, where he got a doctorate in geological sciences.