Spaceman

by Mike Massimino

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Drew trying to get my attention from the flight deck window, maybe ten feet away from me. I didn’t want to look up. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want anyone to see how upset and ashamed I was. Finally I looked up, and Drew had this huge smile, almost like he was laughing. I couldn’t say anything, because the ground crew would be able to hear it, so we had to communicate with gestures and facial expressions, like a game of charades. I shot him a look. “What’s with you?”

  “You’re doing great,” he mouthed back, giving me a big thumbs-up.

  I thought, What is he talking about? Is there some other space walk going on right now that I’m not aware of? Because the one I’m involved with is a total disaster. But Drew kept smiling. He started rocking his thumb and pinky finger back and forth, pointing between the two of us as if to say, “It’s me and you, buddy. We got this. You’re gonna be okay.”

  If there was ever a time when I needed a friend, that was it. And Drew was right there, just like I’d seen in The Right Stuff, the camaraderie of those guys sticking together. I’d been feeling stranded and all alone, but I’d forgotten that my team was right there with me—my crewmates and everyone at NASA on the ground. If this thing kept going south, no one was going to point the finger at me and say, “Massimino did it.” We would fail or succeed together, and that’s the way it should be. Now, I did not believe Drew for a minute that everything was going to be okay. I still thought all was lost. But I did think, Hey, if I’m going down, at least I’m going down with my best pals.

  It was at that moment that Burbank radioed in to tell me what was going on with the vise grips and the tape: They wanted me to rip the handrail off. The thought of doing something like that hadn’t occurred to me; it ran counter to everything I’d ever been taught about the telescope, which was to treat it as gingerly as possible. But while I was running back and forth like a crazy person trying to fix this thing, Jim Corbo, a Goddard systems manager working out of Houston that day, started wondering if it was possible to yank the thing off. He called Goddard and spoke with James Cooper, the mechanical systems manager for the telescope. It was a Sunday. Only a handful of people were working, but Cooper and Jeff Roddin and Bill Mitchell and the Hubble team up there started running around trying to rig up a test to see if this would work. In less than an hour they had the backup handrail from the clean room hooked up to a torque wrench and a digital fish scale to measure how many pounds of force it would take to break the handrail loose with one screw holding it in.

  They did it. Successfully. They called Corbo in Houston with the results. Now Ceccacci and his team had to decide whether or not to give this a shot. If we didn’t get the handrail off, the worst case was that the STIS stayed broken but everything else worked fine. But if we yanked this handrail off and debris got loose inside it might FOD the telescope, compromise the mirror. Also, in space, flying shrapnel is a bad idea generally. What if I yanked this thing off and it kicked back and punctured my space suit? Then this might become a matter of life and death.

  Ceccacci decided to go for it. It was a gutsy call. But like everything else with Hubble, it was worth the risk. Burbank radioed up and explained it to me. “This was just done,” he said, “just now, at Goddard on a flight equipment unit, and it took sixty pounds linear at the top of the handhold to fail the single bolt in the lower right position at the bottom.”

  Drew said, “Okay. Mass, you copy that? Sixty pounds linear at the top of the handrail to pop off that bottom bolt. I think you’ve got that in you.”

  I knew I had it in me. I was a big guy in the best shape of my life. I was nervous about damaging the telescope, but for the first time since the whole problem started, I felt this surge of confidence and hope.

  The reason for the tape, I now learned, was to tape up the bottom of the handrail to try to contain any debris that might go flying. I made my way back to the telescope, and Bueno and I taped that handrail up. The whole time Drew and Burbank and I were talking this through. We decided I should start by rocking it back and forth, give it a few tugs to yield the metal a bit, and then give it one clean yank once the metal started to give. If I tried to do it in one go, all that power would be in one motion and it would snap and debris might go flying everywhere.

  Right as we got the handrail taped up and were ready to go, Mission Control called up to say they’d lost the downlink from my helmet camera and wouldn’t have any video for the next three minutes. I didn’t want to waste another second. And if they couldn’t see what I was doing, even better. Let’s have the party now while Mom and Dad aren’t home. “Drew,” I said, “I think we should do it now.”

  He said to go for it. “Just real easy, okay?”

  I took a breath, braced my left hand and my feet, and looked at this handrail in front of me. When I was growing up back in Franklin Square, there was one day when I was outside throwing my ball against the front steps, and my uncle Frank came over. This was my uncle who lived across the street. He was covered in oil and grease. My dad came out, they disappeared inside the house for a minute, and then they came back out. My dad had this giant three-foot-long screwdriver with him and he said, “Stop throwing that ball. Come across the street and maybe you’ll learn somethin’.”

  I got up and followed them. Uncle Frank had his car, a 1971 Ford Gran Torino, parked in the street out in front of his house with the hood open. Some mechanic had screwed the oil filter in wrong. Uncle Frank had practically destroyed the thing trying to get it out, and now it was stuck. It was a physics problem, the same problem currently staring me in the face 350 miles above Earth. The amount of torque you can generate is related to the amount of force you apply times the length of the lever; applying force at the end of a long lever gives you more torque than applying the same amount of force on a short lever. So my uncle jammed the end of this long screwdriver under the lip of the filter, wrapped a rag around the handle, and started yanking down on it as hard as he could, grunting and cursing under his breath with each tug: “Ungh! Ungh! Ungh!” He did that for nearly a minute and finally the filter broke torque and popped out.

  As I looked at that handrail attached to this $100 million instrument inside this $1 billion telescope, after fourteen years of highly specialized training from the most advanced minds in the history of space exploration, all I could picture was my uncle Frank, under the hood of his car, covered in grease, cursing and grunting and yanking on the end of that giant screwdriver. I grabbed the top of the handrail and I rocked it back a couple times and I said to myself, “This one’s for you, Uncle Frank.” I yanked it hard and bam! It came off. Clean. No debris. No punctured space suit.

  “Awesome job,” Burbank said. “We’re back in with the regularly scheduled programming.”

  Bueno took the handrail, put it in a disposal bag, and we were back in business. I felt like I’d been given a reprieve by God, like I was resurrected from the dead. I felt like this whole episode had been Him giving me a warning to be careful with the rest of the repair. I didn’t care what else happened, I was fixing that thing. Nothing in the world—nothing in the universe—could stop me.

  I dove straight in and went to work. There was no stopping to celebrate; we weren’t even close to being finished. I drove the guide stud anchors. One, two, three, four, they all went in flush. Perfect. I put the capture plate on. It fit, and I cinched it down. Perfect. I took the foil cutter and I sheared off the label exposing the screws underneath. Perfect.

  Now I’d reached the big moment: 111 tiny screws and washers to remove without making a single mistake. I grabbed my mini–power tool, I pulled the trigger, and . . . nothing happened. I pulled it again. Still nothing. It was dead. I said, “Aw, for Pete’s sake.” Bueno and I looked at each other. What else could go wrong? Fortunately this wasn’t a big deal. Either the battery had died or we’d charged the wrong one the night before, but the spare was in the airlock and I needed to get more oxygen anyway, so it was one more tri
p across the payload bay for me.

  As I was making my way back, two things happened. First, the sun came out. The cold and the darkness had passed and everything was warm and bright and clear again. Second, as I was moving along that edge and looking over the side of the shuttle, I realized that I wasn’t scared. I’d been back and forth so many times that this treacherous path wasn’t so treacherous anymore. I realized that my doubts and fears had been totally wrong. I was a spacewalker. I was the right guy for the job. They had picked the right person for this. Because being the right person isn’t about being perfect; it’s about being able to handle whatever life throws at you. I’d faced every astronaut’s worst nightmare, and with the help of my team I pulled myself out of it. And if that problem with the handrail had never happened, I never would have known I had that in me.

  I zipped down the side of the shuttle, put a new battery in the mini–power tool, pumped up my oxygen tank, and went back out like a superhero to fix that telescope. And we did it. We hit a couple of bumps, but the rest of the day just went. The screws came out, the panel came off, the old power supply came out, the new power supply went in, and we closed it up.

  Once we were done, the team at Goddard performed an aliveness test to see if the STIS was operating again. It was. Everybody started cheering and high-fiving each other, saying “Great job” and “Way to go.” I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. Then, while the big celebration was going on, I glanced down at my glove and noticed something: There was a tiny rip in my space suit glove. It was only in the outer fabric. It hadn’t gone through the other layers yet, but if we’d seen that rip earlier, that would have been it. Ceccacci would have aborted the EVA and brought us in immediately. The whole space walk would have been over before it started. I suppose that rip was the other demon out there waiting for me. But it didn’t get me that day.

  After we closed the telescope doors, Bueno was at the back of the payload bay finishing up, and I went back into the airlock to do an inventory and stow things away. Scooter came over the comm.

  “Mass, what are you doing?”

  “I’m getting the airlock ready.”

  “Is there anything you’re doing now that can’t wait?”

  “No.”

  “Well, why don’t you go outside and enjoy the view?”

  This was the commander ordering me, so I figured I’d better do as I was told.

  “Okay.”

  I went back out, up to the top of the payload bay, clipped my safety tether to a handrail, and I just . . . let go. I stretched out and relaxed, the same way you’d float on your back in the ocean on a warm summer day, and looked at the Earth below. We were coming over Hawaii, a few tiny islands alone in this brilliant expanse of blue. It was beautiful again. Magnificent. I wasn’t stealing a glance at the planet while I was supposed to be working, and I wasn’t inside, craning my neck to look through a window. I could turn my head in every direction and drink it all in.

  We hit Southern California and San Diego, then Las Vegas and Phoenix started whipping by. When I was twenty-one years old, I watched The Right Stuff from the balcony of the Floral Park theater on Long Island and saw a sliver of the Earth through the tiny window in John Glenn’s capsule. I decided I wouldn’t be happy until I saw it for myself, and here I was, except that the view was a thousand times more spectacular than anything he witnessed on that flight. Life doesn’t give you many perfect moments. This was one of them. This was my reward, my gift, a few precious minutes to lie back and look at the most perfect, most beautiful thing in the universe. Then, as we came up on the East Coast, I felt that chill in my bones telling me that night was on its way. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark line creeping toward me westward across the Atlantic, and I knew it was time to go back in.

  It was time to come home.

  24

  GROUNDED

  When you’re in space and you want to set something down, like a spoon or a Sharpie, you don’t actually put it down. There is no down. You set it out at arm’s length and let go and float it there where it’ll be handy if you need it again. On my second day home I was unloading the groceries from the store. I grabbed a bag from the back of the car, took it out, stood up, set it out about shoulder high, and let go. It didn’t float.

  Coming back to Earth is hard. It’s an adjustment. After Bueno and I finished the STIS repair, Grunsfeld and Drew had a successful final space walk. The next day we said good-bye to the Hubble, sending it off on its way to unlock the secrets of the universe. We had our normal day off and went through our final inspections. Whenever I could I’d steal a few minutes to go up to the flight deck and look out the window. Outside the window I could see the Ku-band antenna, covered in gold foil, moving and reconfiguring itself. That’s how it works: It locks onto the signal from a communications satellite and tracks it to keep us connected to the ground. Anytime it loses the signal, it pivots and swivels around until it finds the signal again.

  Watching the antenna swivel around, with the Earth passing below, I had a feeling I don’t think I’d ever had before: satisfaction. I could relax. I was finished. For five years, the Hubble had consumed my every waking moment, and now all that stress and responsibility had floated away. It was a huge relief not to have to think about it anymore. It was done, and I could feel good about it. And I wasn’t only satisfied with the mission. My whole life I’d been restless. I always had to do more, reach for the next challenge, the next opportunity. Now I could stop and take a breath. I’d done everything I’d set out to do. Which is a wonderful feeling but also a terrifying one. The signal that I’d been locked onto, the thing that had been guiding me all these years, I was about to lose it, and soon I’d be the one spinning around, searching for the next thing.

  The morning we were supposed to fly home, there was bad weather over Florida and we got waved off a day. At that point everything was put away. There was no e-mail. There was literally nothing to do. I grabbed some snacks and my iPod and went right back to the window and I stayed there pretty much all day, listening to Sting and U2 and Radiohead and Coldplay and my Thomas Newman movie soundtracks. The next day we woke up and when we passed over the southeastern United States, the storm clouds were so bad we couldn’t see Florida. Sure enough, we were waved off again, and I was back at that window, drinking in the view and savoring every second of it.

  Some of the other crew, they were getting bored and started watching movies, ones we had on DVD or that we’d downloaded to our laptops. I skipped the movies. I couldn’t imagine tearing myself away from that window for one second to watch something I could see on the ground. At one point Drew called up from the mid-deck, “Hey! Come down!”

  “Why?”

  “We’re going to watch Nacho Libre!”

  “I’ll see it when we land!”

  The next morning Florida was still clouded over, but we couldn’t stay any longer. We were diverted to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Our families would meet us in Houston. This time I was on the flight deck for the trip home, so I got to see everything: the Earth getting bigger and bigger as we flew lower and lower, the shuttle’s nose and tail glowing red-orange hot. There had been an ever-present worry about entry ever since Columbia, but as soon as we came out of the darkness over the Pacific and I could see the California coast lit up in the daylight, I knew Scooter was going to get us home safe.

  Two days later I was in my driveway, dropping grocery bags and feeling out of sorts. During your first week back, your hand-eye coordination is completely messed up. Your sense of balance is thrown. Your spine is still settling back together, and that can be uncomfortable. You’re not supposed to drive or work heavy equipment for three days. Part of it is great, of course: seeing your family, having this wonderful feeling of accomplishment. But then you drive up to the house and real life is there waiting for you: Some shingles over the garage need to be fixed, the pool needs to be cleaned. People always ask me if I miss being in space. “Only when I’m
mowing the lawn,” I say.

  Fortunately for me, even though the flight had ended, the mission was far from over. When we landed at Edwards, one of the administrator’s assistants was waiting for us with a copy of the Washington Post. There was a big photo, above the fold, of me in my space suit with a big smile in front of the telescope in the payload bay; Megan or John or Scooter had taken it during my last space walk. Hubble was a big story. People wanted to hear about it, learn about it. Because of my experiences and thanks to Twitter, I wound up handling many of the media appearances.

  Back in Houston, once my postflight duties were wrapped up, I was offered two different positions. I could be the leader for the incoming class of ASCANs or the astronaut office liaison to the public affairs department. I picked public affairs. I knew my time at NASA would come to a close, and working with media—telling the story of space and documenting the end of the shuttle era—was something I wanted to do. I also knew that, with social media, I could start communicating directly with people all over the world. I checked a camera out from the public affairs office and started taping behind-the-scenes videos with my friends around the office. I knew I could talk to them better than reporters could, get them to relax and have fun. I shadowed them in the NBL, in the shuttle simulator. Together we showed people what the lives of astronauts are really like. Then our public affairs team would edit the interviews and post them to YouTube.

  More and more people started following me on Twitter, too. I was lucky to be the first one to use social media, but soon more and more astronauts on the space station were signing on and taking it to new levels. They started making time-lapse videos of the Earth from orbit that, to this day, have been seen millions of times. My buddy Chris Hadfield grabbed a guitar and made a music video, a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that went viral around the world. Before social media, even when people cared about what astronauts were doing, it was hard to follow along. The Internet’s changed everything. We’ve made the experience of being in space more real for people. They feel connected to what’s going on.