How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  I made it for about ten parabolas before tossing my cookies. There’s a funny picture of me kissing the ground, surrounded by my classmates, after that flight.

  A few years later, HQ had the bright idea to privatize this program. It was contracted out to a commercial company that ended up costing more money than the in-house NASA aircraft, and our scientists got less valuable data. Shortly afterward the program was shut down entirely, and now NASA doesn’t have a zero-g capability. The Russian and European space agencies still have their own versions of the Vomit Comet, but NASA doesn’t. Although privatization is often a good thing, in this case it wasn’t. NASA’s flight operations were efficient and built upon synergies with other aspects of its aviation program, and it was a shame to lose such an important part of spaceflight training in the misguided name of privatization.

  My first zero-g flight was accompanied by great anticipation. I was a fighter pilot and test pilot, having flown more than forty different types of aircraft. But those parabolas, flying up and down and up and down in the steamy Houston humidity, in the back of a musty 1960s-era airplane, with the smells of thousands of prior Vomit Comet flights hanging in the air, concerned me. My ASCAN (Astronaut Candidate, the NASA acronym for new trainee) class was going to fly together, and we all decided that we would do this first flight with no motion-sickness medication; we would all experience weightlessness for the first time naturally, in solidarity. So, against the strong recommendations of our flight surgeons and other senior astronauts, I tried my first flight au naturel—no medication. Ugh. Those parabolas, up and down, floating and then getting smashed to the ground and floating and smashing some more, not being able to look out the window, the smells of decades of sick students and musty jet fuel, up and down—forty times. I made it for about ten parabolas before tossing my cookies. There’s a funny picture of me kissing the ground, surrounded by my classmates, after that flight. If you ever decide to take one of these zero-g flights, as either an astronaut or a paying customer, I have one recommendation for you: Take the meds. I only later found out that a lot of my friends had cheated and done exactly that. They were the smart ones, for sure.

  NASA’s KC-135 “Vomit Comet,” where astronauts learn the thrills of zero g (and sometimes barf).

  The experience of weightlessness was spectacular, though, unlike anything I had ever felt on Earth. I felt as though I were falling, with no pressure on any part of my body, nothing to stabilize me, and the slightest push on a wall or classmate would send me shooting in the opposite direction. It was also a battle dealing with the fifteen other people flailing around inside the cabin, everyone feeling an urge to kick their legs or wave their arms as they flailed about in a state of disorientation. I needed a football helmet and mouth guard to protect myself. After about thirty minutes I gained a level of confidence, having learned the basics of keeping my body under control.

  Perhaps the most important thing to know about the Vomit Comet is what to do when the weightlessness ends. At the end of the parabola, the pilot calls back to the passengers floating around that it’s time to pull out, and the loadmaster yells, “Feet down, pulling up!” When you heard that, it was time to get to the floor, with your body flat against the ground, because in about two seconds the plane would abruptly pull up at two g’s or more. If you were still on the roof, you would be slammed to the floor. And if you were standing on your feet or arms, you would suddenly have a whole lot of body weight pushing on them, possibly leading to an orthopedic injury. I also tried to keep my head stable and upright during the pullout. This was to help with nausea, because moving your head around during the pullout supposedly messed with the vestibular system in the inner ear. I’m not sure if this was true, but I always kept my head still and it worked for me.

  Getting astronauts used to floating was an invaluable mission of the zero-g program, though having them test scientific equipment in a weightless environment before sending it to space was even more important. One of the most memorable experiments I did on the Vomit Comet was testing a new intubation device, used to give a patient an artificial airway in the event of a medical emergency in space. Getting a tube down the trachea (and not the esophagus) is a very tricky thing for well-trained medical personnel to do on Earth, much less a fighter pilot like me in space. So they developed a new shoehorn device to help the tube go down the right hole behind the tongue, and I practiced the procedure on several zero-g flights. Another memorable experiment was performing ultrasound imaging of the carotid artery in my neck to investigate the effects of weightlessness on the cardiovascular system. I was stunned to see the artery narrow while under g-force and open up dramatically as soon as we got to zero g. I was thinking that I should be passing out when my major neck blood vessels were opening and closing so dramatically, but my brain kept on working just fine!

  Yet another experiment involved a series of MIT-developed satellites somewhat ironically called SPHERES because they were small cubes, not much bigger than a lunchbox. They were used for testing satellite station-keeping. When the plane went to zero g, we would release them and they would fly around in formation, communicating with one another, as their larger cousins would eventually do once they got to space. It was like being on a Star Wars soundstage. A decade later, it was a great pleasure to fly with SPHERES satellites actually on the space station. Seeing those small robots flying around the ISS for real was like being on a Star Wars spaceship, not just a soundstage. When we didn’t have formal NASA-sponsored experiments to test on the Vomit Comet, there were usually college students on board, flying their own university-sponsored engineering projects.

  The zero-g flight program was one of NASA’s most successful and useful projects for decades, giving thousands of astronauts, scientists, and students the chance to experience weightlessness and test out their hardware. It helped me mentally prepare for spaceflight and weightlessness as much as possible. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—if you do this, take the meds! Or you’ll be kissing the ramp after you land . . .

  Survival Training

  Preparation for Space Calamity

  I have to admit, one of my least favorite parts of being in the Air Force was going through survival training. After finishing my freshman year at the Air Force Academy at the age of eighteen, I had to do SERE (pronounced seeree) training: Survival Evasion Resistance Escape. It was a dreaded rite of passage that had come to prominence during the Vietnam War, during which America’s airmen were treated horribly, often for years, as prisoners of war in the Hanoi Hilton, the nickname for the infamous Ho’a Lò prison. The military devised the SERE program as a way to give flyers the skills they would need in future conflicts to survive, evade, and resist. In theory this made sense to me, but in practice I wasn’t a big fan of starving or freezing or being tortured, so I was less than enthusiastic as I went off to SERE training in July 1986. Little did I know that survival training would be an ongoing part of my professional life for the next thirty years.

  I was back in the woods with the French Army as part of my exchange to the French Air Force Academy in 1988. Before I could complete Air Force pilot training, I had to do water survival in the Florida Keys. Then it was off to the mountains of Maine with the US Navy when I was selected to be an astronaut. After all of those experiences, I figured I had learned all there was to learn: how to deal with cold and wet weather, to “conserve sweat not water” in the desert, that skin-to-skin contact was crucial for preventing hypothermia, to stay dry at all costs, that you needed clean water much more than food, etc. No need for more training, right? Wrong.

  NASA partners with the NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) on a program designed to prepare crews for the psychological rigors of extended spaceflight. There are several types of NOLS courses: hiking, sea kayaking, sailing, winter survival, etc. About five years into my astronaut career, I was assigned to the sea kayaking course in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Then seven years later, after being assigned to my second ISS flight,
I went on another NOLS trip, again to Alaska. These expeditions were chances to get to know possible future crewmates under trying conditions. Little did we know just how trying the conditions would be!

  The NOLS Alaska office is near the airport in Anchorage, and after a long flight followed by a short bus ride we were soon putting together bags of gear, learning the basics of sea kayaking, and getting to know our two instructors. The key to any camping trip is to pack lightly and keep everything waterproof, and kayaking was no exception. Clothes were first vacuum sealed in Ziplocs and then stuffed into thick, waterproof duffel bags. Minimizing bulk was important—both of my trips were for more than ten days, and everything had to fit in the kayak. Clothes (one spare shirt and pants), underwear (fresh pair every few days), socks (three pairs), one fleece layer, and one good Gore-Tex jacket. Food. Tents. Cooking gear. Fuel. A journal. There wasn’t a lot of space for the twelve of us to cram all of that gear into our eight kayaks.

  There are many analogs between NOLS trips and actual spaceflights, and packing and keeping track of gear is the first. It’s also something I’ve struggled with my whole life. Where are the keys? Where is my wallet? Where is the camera? Where are my shoes? Losing things is a pain on Earth, and can make a camping trip miserable, but will absolutely ruin a space mission if you have to waste time looking for your stuff. Storing and managing gear in backpacks or jackets or Ziplocs is a skill I transferred from the Alaskan wild to the weightlessness of Endeavour and the ISS.

  Sea kayaking itself was a challenge. The job of group leader rotated from astronaut to astronaut each day. A typical day’s mission entailed paddling from one island to another, across a few miles of open ocean, to a new campsite. Those open-sea crossings were high-risk, because we were miles from the nearest shore, and the unpredictable weather could quickly make conditions extremely hazardous for small kayaks. The leader of the day would assemble the group, study the weather brief, select our next campsite, plot out the route, and take a go/no-go poll of the whole group. Once everyone agreed with the plan, we ate a quick breakfast, broke down camp, loaded our gear, and put out to sea in our kayaks.

  Getting the kayaks from the beach to the ocean was neither simple nor graceful. First, there were waves, which made things interesting. Second, kayaks are not exactly stable; they are easy to flip! It’s like riding a telephone pole in water. We would push the kayak halfway into the water, with a bit of the tail resting on the beach to stabilize it, and then push off into the waves, quickly attaching a rubber skirt from our waist to the kayak itself, creating a waterproof seal to keep our legs and butts reasonably dry. I was very lucky to never have flipped over, but not all of my crewmates can say the same thing.

  Kayaking itself was so tricky that our instructors conducted special training on our first day—egress drills. The goal was to be sure you could get out quickly in case the kayak rolled upside down. We started in the sea, at rest, bodies tightly sealed into the seat, rolled the kayak over 180 degrees so we were completely underwater, then yanked on the emergency tab to release the rubber skirt and shimmied out of the kayak. When my head finally popped out of the water, I tried to let out a scream but couldn’t because I was in shock from the balmy Alaskan water. There was actually an iceberg floating next to us! After the initial shock subsided, the next task was to get back on board the kayak, because if this happened for real, in the middle of a channel, miles from the coast, there would be no swimming to shore. The biggest challenge was flipping the telephone pole (aka kayak) upright, then mounting it from the side.

  I’m sure it wasn’t a big deal for the orca, but to be in the ocean, in the food chain, with this majestic, beautiful, powerful, intelligent (and hopefully not hungry) creature gliding alongside us was sublime.

  After being dunked in the arctic seawater, we made our way back to shore, and it was time to dry off and warm up. For this exercise we had worn “poopy suits,” unfortunately nicknamed rubber overalls designed to keep aircrew warm and dry in freezing water. Except they were ancient and therefore full of holes, so they just let the freezing water in. And kept it in. By the time we made it to shore, we were ready to dry off and get something warm to drink. Egress training was fun in a weird way, though, building camaraderie in our group and giving us some much-needed confidence that we would be able to handle those wobbly kayaks in the open Alaskan sea.

  The best part of those NOLS trips was the Alaskan scenery and wildlife. The first thing that anyone venturing into the Alaskan wild needs to know is the bear situation. Is it black bear, brown bear, or white bear country? Thankfully, we were in the south, which is black bear territory. Brown bears, or grizzly bears, are an entirely different ball game, with a different set of rules and a hugely elevated risk. Simply put, they eat people. Frequently. I was told that in the event of a black bear encounter I should try to scare it away, or if that didn’t work to play dead and maybe it would leave me alone. In the event of a grizzly bear attack I’d have to fight back, ’cause it wasn’t going to just leave. Of course, fighting back against a giant creature with those claws and teeth . . . well, the good news is I wouldn’t suffer for long.

  Polar bears are even worse. They are so large and powerful that the danger was absolute if you encountered one in the wild, unprepared. In fact, a Norwegian friend of mine told me that it was illegal to be in polar bear country in Norway unarmed. They require you to carry a gun. Ironically, they also make it illegal to shoot a polar bear. I guess it’s either die or go to jail. I assume Norwegian jails aren’t that bad, compared to being eaten alive, but I think the best course of action is to avoid getting in that situation to begin with!

  That first week in Prince William Sound we saw constant evidence of bears—scat, scratch marks on trees, and lots of half-eaten salmon, which were in peak spawning season at the end of August. One day we saw a black bear lumbering down a trail a few hundred yards away as we paddled along. That was such a powerful moment for me, seeing a bear in the wild, doing its thing, no humans anywhere nearby. About a day later we landed at a new campsite. We had been seeing small schools of salmon flopping around in the shallows for days, but at this beach there were thousands, maybe millions of those fish that had reached their final destination. I’d never seen anything like it. They’d found the mouth of a river, their birthplace, and were thrashing and flailing with every last ounce of strength left in their bodies, pushing upstream, where they would lay their eggs and die. Those were some nasty fish; their skin was shedding and they looked awful and smelled worse, using their last drop of life to make it to their own burial ground, sowing the seeds of their next generation. This was an ancient rite of passage, repeated endlessly throughout the millennia. It was an otherworldly honor to see nature in its rawest form. Life, death, rebirth, all in one location.

  With all of that sushi lying helpless in a few inches of water, there were—you guessed it—bears. Lots of them. As evidenced by scratched trees and scat. We were on edge at that campsite, to say the least. When walking around alone I yelled, “Hey, bear bear bear!” to scare them away. At night, when it was time to get out of the tent at 0100 for a bathroom break, I turned several flashlights on and made a ton of noise. Our stress level lowered when we left that sacred salmon spawning ground the following day!

  Living by the leave-no-trace mantra was a big part of the NOLS experience. We brought most of our own food and brought all of our trash out of the woods with us. It amazed me to see how it was possible to live with so much less stuff than we do in modern America. We even went without toilet paper. Yup. It’s possible, actually even comfortable, to go (so to speak) without it. The good news is that in Alaska there are lots of smooth stones along the seashore. And thick, soft moss. So, no TP required. We packed basics—flour, eggs, sugar, butter, bacon, etc.—and we also got food from the wild. The blueberries were incredible, and the fish were amazing. One day my friend Leland Melvin and I were fishing while a school of salmon floated by, right next to the shore, fins sticking up like min
i-sharks. Throwing the fishing line into that school wasn’t fair, so I snagged the fish by their fins—they didn’t even have to swallow the hook. To this day we still laugh about that fishing trip. Needless to say, we ate well that night, having freshly caught salmon and wild blueberries, supplemented with butter and bacon. It felt like that’s what I was wired to do, living in the wild and catching my own food. Going to the neighborhood grocery store or chain restaurant to hunt and gather just doesn’t satisfy those deep-seated instincts.

  Cooking was a skill that I didn’t possess before NOLS—I never cooked at home, so going into the woods with a camp stove and bags of flour and sugar and butter was a new experience. Luckily, we were with an Italian astronaut, Paolo Nespoli, who showed us all how to make pizza one night. That was one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten! Food was a highlight on both of my NOLS trips, and I learned several important lessons. First and most important, more butter! Whatever you are cooking, it will taste better with more butter. Second, more bacon! Everything goes better with bacon, especially if you are freezing and wet in the Alaskan wilderness. Finally, finding food in nature is hard; it doesn’t just appear magically. It’s hard work hunting and gathering food, and survival isn’t guaranteed. In most of the world, we live such incredibly sheltered lives; it’s worth taking some time to live in the woods to appreciate the relative ease of our middle-class lifestyle, with grocery stores full of everything we could possibly want within minutes of our homes. Had we not brought those bags of food with us, we all would have lost twenty pounds during those short trips into Prince William Sound, even with the ample supply of blueberries and salmon. Nature can be brutal.

  The goal of those NOLS trips is to make us miserable, so that when we face difficult situations in space, we have the experience of surmounting similar situations and working with crewmates when everyone is crabby.