by Terry Virts
One of the most spectacular moments of my life happened unexpectedly. We were paddling in our group of eight kayaks, enjoying a mild, cloudy, rain-free day, surrounded by gorgeous mountains, when there was a disturbance, behind me and to the right. Out of the water popped the tremendous dorsal fin of an orca, curved over, smoothly gliding through the water parallel to our kayaks, maybe 10 meters away. 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. It was a moment that helped me understand that we are a part of nature and there are incredible creatures out there, too, sharing the same land and air and water with us. Beyond those lofty thoughts, I was glad that the killer whale didn’t eat me, because he certainly could have.
I also saw other wild creatures, like sea lions, otters, and seals, on those trips. There was one particular island on the south side of Prince William Sound that had hundreds of those loud, squawking pinnipeds. They were lying there on the rocks, yelling and screaming for us to go away, or maybe warning each other of impending human kayaker danger, or trying to entice a mate to join them for some afternoon action, or just trash-talking the seal tribe on the next rock over. Whatever the reason, those beasts definitely use their outdoor voice. I’d hate to have them as next-door neighbors. But they sure were cool to see in the open ocean.
Our wildlife experience wasn’t limited to sea and land. There were also birds, including interesting puffins that looked like flying penguins, garden-variety falcons and hawks, and most of all bald eagles—lots of them, with their majestic and powerful black bodies and distinctive white heads. We joked that they were as numerous as the mosquitoes. I remember as a kid that seeing a bald eagle was a really big deal; they were rare, and usually seen only in zoos. But in Alaska they were everywhere. They have a very distinctive, high-pitched, shrill hunting call, which doesn’t match their impressive appearance at all. The first time I saw one I was so excited, but after a few days the sightings became commonplace. I never took it for granted, though, and like a beautiful full Moon, or a sky so clear you can see the Milky Way, or a fiery red sunset, I tried to enjoy and appreciate each one.
Weather is an issue when you go sea kayaking in Prince William Sound. A big issue. My first trip there had very nice weather, which the instructors hate. 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. But I couldn’t complain about this trip; we had a few days of perfect, sunny weather. Then a few days of cool and cloudy. Then drizzle on the last few days, with only one nonstop-rain day. I counted myself very lucky, because the group that went after us that year had a miserable time, though I’m sure their instructors were happy.
However, when I went back a few years later with my Expedition 42/43 crew, the weather was much different. It rained every minute of our ten-day expedition, with the exception of one afternoon. The weather at our first camp was severe, with strong wind, rain, and rough seas, making kayaking out of the question. After we sat around and twiddled our thumbs for a few days, they sent the big boat back out to pick us up and move us up north to a more sheltered fjord. The sun came out for a few hours during that boat ride! But when we arrived at our new camp, back came the rain. We were able to do some paddling at the new location, in constant rain, until a few days later when a serious storm showed up. It was near the end of our planned trip and we had to decide—ride out the storm in place, leave for a new campground, or declare victory and end our expedition early, before the planned ending date.
My vote was to pack up and leave. The storm was predicted to be hurricane strength and we would essentially be hiding in our tents, a few hundred feet from the shore, hoping that a tree didn’t fall on us. Most of the group wanted to stick it out, proving that we could handle adversity, so that’s what we did. In the end it worked out, nobody was hurt, and we paddled back home after a few days. But this incident reinforced an important lesson I learned during my time at NASA about risk management: If you make a decision and everything works out, it doesn’t mean you made the right decision. To emphasize the point, the space shuttle program had lived with foam falling off our fuel tank during launch for years and it had always worked out, until the final flight of Columbia when it killed the crew. And just because we rode out a hurricane in the Alaskan wilderness and survived doesn’t mean it was the right call; it might just mean that we were lucky. Of course I’d rather be lucky than good, but there’s an important lesson here: Debrief and analyze your decision-making not based on the outcome, but to understand if the right decision was made, given all the facts known at the time.
Sea kayaking was much more physically demanding than I had imagined. Paddling those kayaks miles across the open sea, from one island to another, was hard work. There were a few fjords that acted like wind tunnels, and one day was particularly brutal, paddling against the wind and waves. There was a mix of single- and dual-place kayaks, and I was paired with Leland Melvin for several days in a dual. It didn’t take long for me to realize my good fortune. He had been an NFL wide receiver before becoming an engineer and then NASA astronaut, and he was an awesome partner for the dual kayak! I have a great picture of me sitting back and relaxing while Leland paddles away, almost kicking up a rooster tail, leaving the other experienced (i.e., old) astronauts in the dust. As they say, “Work smarter, not harder,” and getting paired with Leland was the luckiest day of my brief kayaking career.
One beautiful day we were paddling down a fjord on the southwest area of our course. We noticed something big on a beach about a half mile away. After a quick poll, the group decided to go check it out. The closer we got, the more bizarre it appeared, looking like a cargo trailer from an 18-wheeler. When we got to the shore it became apparent what it was—a beached whale. That had been beached for a long time. As we climbed out of our kayaks and approached the beast, two things stood out. First, the smell. It was the worst smell I’d ever experienced in my life, just absolutely awful, a combination of death and rot and spoiled food and nasty, and you could smell it 100 yards away. Second, it was moving, kind of like a plate of jiggling Jell-O. As we got closer it became apparent why. Maggots. Millions of them, maybe billions. White blankets of maggots feeding on this immense carcass. The smell and overall disgustingness of the situation was overpowering, and we spent only a few minutes there, paying a brief tribute to this giant, formerly magnificent sea creature. I don’t know what species of whale it was—definitely not an orca, because it was too huge. And we didn’t know how long it had been there, but my guess was a year, because it was more than half decomposed, even though there were still many tons of biomass and bones there. The cycle of life in the wild—death, scavengers giving back to the food chain, and life—all in the overpowering beauty of Alaska. Yet another stark reminder of the harsh reality of survival.
Though we were sea kayaking, there was ice everywhere. On several occasions we camped next to glaciers that were emptying into the sea. The experience of being next to one of those glaciers is a bit intense: They are massive, and cold. Air is chilled by flowing across the ice, and being near a glacier often means that the air is 10 degrees cooler than it is just a few miles away. Most impressive is the noise of the glacier calving, dropping massive icebergs into the sea. That sound is haunting, a tortured ripping of tons of ice from the mother glacier, followed by a tremendous splashdown in the water and a prolonged, roaring thunder. This happened every few minutes. All day and night long. It was as if the glacier were alive and readying an army for battle. Of course, all of this ice falling into the ocean meant that there were icebergs everywhere. It was cool to paddle alongside a massive iceberg and tap it with my paddle; they felt as sturdy as a mountain. The ice was white on the outside but often had an intense blue on the inside. The edges of those icebergs were very sharp
, and if I were a boat captain I would stay far away. Besides the noise and icebergs, there were waves. The closer we got to a glacier, the more unstable the water got, especially for small kayaks. Like bears or rocket launches, they were nice to view from a distance, but I had no desire to paddle too close to those mountains of ice crashing into the sea.
Glaciers contain millions of tons of frozen water and are continuously flowing across the land in a never-ending march to the sea, creating a constantly changing mosaic of crevasses and canyons as the ice cracks and shifts. Because of climate change, the size and quantity of ice in the Arctic has undergone dramatic reduction, and I saw this firsthand on my NOLS trips. Our instructors had photos of where the glaciers had been ten years prior, or in the ’80s, or ’40s, or even a hundred years ago. We would compare the old photos to a modern-day glacier, and there was no doubt that the ice had significantly retreated. When land ice melts, that water flows down into the ocean, which is a primary cause of sea-level rise. For me, it was one thing to hear about climate change on the evening news, but it was another to see it with my own eyes.
After all of those survival experiences in the military, NASA, and NOLS, I hoped I was done with formal survival training. But as they say on TV, “Wait, there’s more!” My second spaceflight was on a Russian Soyuz, and part of that training was, you guessed it, survival training. Both winter and sea survival. The first one on my schedule was winter survival, which is a rite of passage for cosmonauts, but also something we knew might be needed. In 1965, the first man to do a spacewalk, Alexei Leonov, along with his commander, Pavel Belyayev, landed off course in the Ural Mountains and spent several nights in the freezing woods there. Then in 1975, a Soyuz crew aborted about five minutes into their flight and ended up landing in freezing Siberia, in the Altai Mountains. Legend has it that their capsule almost slid off a cliff until the parachute snagged on some trees, saving their lives. Then in 2018, another Soyuz rocket failed and the crew made an emergency landing, though this time they landed much closer to the launch pad—and farther from the grizzly bears. In addition to the possibility of landing in freezing Siberia, there was the possibility of unexpectedly ending up in the ocean, especially given the fact that most of Earth is covered by water. We all knew that an unplanned landing in a dangerous location was a possibility, so off we went for more survival training.
When I think back on these experiences, from my first SERE course at age eighteen to my NOLS trips and Soyuz winter and water survival training in my forties, what stands out most is being in nature. The smells of the Colorado forest. Seeing the Milky Way through the trees in Maine. The overpowering beauty of Alaska—the ocean, mountains, glaciers, orcas, eagles, salmon, bears. Wild and rugged terrain at each beach campsite while kayaking; fine sand, smooth stones, some with annoying little sand fleas, others surrounded by bald eagles. Tasting wild berries, cooking fresh salmon, setting up and breaking down campsites. Marching for hours and hours with crazy French Army sergeants yelling. Freezing in a homemade shalash, or shelter, in the Russian winter. Parachuting into the warm Caribbean by the Florida Keys, or floating in the canal where cooling water from the Turkey Point nuclear power plant empties into Biscayne Bay, and seeing bizarre two-headed fish and broccoli-like creatures floating along with me, thinking of Homer Simpson running the safety program for the water I was stuck in.
Spending intense time with my comrades, being pushed to our physical and mental limits, did more for my self-confidence than anything I’ve experienced. When I was eighteen years old, I was so immature and afraid of situations like these. I now realize how much of an impact these survival courses have had on my life.
Along the way, I learned some important life lessons. Smooth stones can be useful. Everything tastes better with bacon and butter. Be sure to ask Leland to join you if you’re going on a kayaking trip. If you’ve never experienced nature viscerally, do it. Take some time, get a tent and a sleeping bag and a suitable companion with whom to share body heat, and go see the stars or bears (black, and only from a distance) or orcas in person. iPhone off. Trust me, it will be worth it.
Space Shuttle Emergencies
The Special Hell Created by Simulation Supervisors
My friend and legendary space shuttle program manager and flight director, Wayne Hale, wrote a great article describing NASA’s simulator supervisors. Sim Sups (pronounced soups) are the people whose job it is to make astronauts’ and mission controllers’ lives miserable. He used words like “nexus of evil,” “diabolical,” and “insidious,” among other choice terms. And he was right on. During my decade as a shuttle pilot, I spent countless hours studying, training for, and debriefing on an endless litany of malfunctions that these people threw at me. Some realistic, many absurd, all intended to best prepare the crew and flight control team for whatever awaited them in space.
The process of becoming a shuttle pilot took years. When I first showed up at NASA, I had a somewhat smug attitude, thinking that the shuttle would be an easy vehicle to master. After all, I was a test pilot, and it couldn’t be that complicated. It didn’t go to the Moon like Apollo did, so how hard could it be? Boy, was I wrong. I’ve heard many old-timers, who worked both Apollo and shuttle, say unequivocally that the shuttle was the most complex flying machine ever invented. Having flown her, I must say that I agree.
In order to learn such a complicated beast, our trainers broke the shuttle down into its various components. There was also an entire language of acronyms that we had to learn, along with vocabulary and grammar and idioms, just like learning Russian. There was the DPS (computer system), ECLSS (life support), APU (hydraulics), EPS (electrics), RCS and OMS (thrusters), MPS (rocket engines), PDRS (robotics), etc. Each of those subsystems was about as complicated as our whole T-38 jet trainer. Worse just than having to learn each one individually, we also had to learn how they all interacted with each other, and it was in those interactions that our Sim Sups could really get devious.
For example, if an electrical component failed, it would have implications for the shuttle’s main engines. As the pilot (equivalent to a copilot on an airliner; the commander was the equivalent to captain, or boss), my main job during launch was to make sure the three main engines were running, so electrical failures would definitely grab my attention. Except, after giving us an electrical malfunction, the Sim Sup would pile on ten additional malfunctions, each one having a unique interaction with another, gradually building up a doozy of a worst-case scenario. Then would come the coup de grâce—a second electrical malfunction that would require me to shut down a main engine manually, or else we would blow up. Of course, that shutdown would have to happen in the next thirty seconds, so the crew and mission control would have to communicate this need very quickly and succinctly. And oh, by the way, as soon as the main engines shut down and we were in simulated space, there would be another rocket burn required to stabilize our orbit, because those malfunctions had led to an underspeed. While we were busy getting to a safe orbit, I would also have to shut down the hydraulic pumps (did I mention that they also blow up if not shut down properly?), all while fixing the cooling system. Oh yeah—if the orbiter overheats you die, so you either get that fixed or do an emergency abort, returning to Earth before you even complete one orbit.
Although we all knew that such a combination of ridiculously well-planned malfunctions would never occur, we also knew that it was impossible to simulate the stress and “pucker factor” of an actual launch.
The shuttle was a complicated vehicle, to say the least. When these emergency simulations went well, it was truly a thing of beauty to see the intricate ballet of rocket science and The Right Stuff coming together to handle some of the incredibly difficult scenarios that those diabolical Sim Sups had devised. Although we all knew that such a combination of ridiculously well-planned malfunctions would never occur, we also knew that it was impossible to simulate the stress and “pucker factor” of an actual launch. Having launched on a rocket, twice, I can ver
ify this. There is a stress that comes from riding on millions of pounds of high explosives that can’t be simulated. So NASA decided to max out our brains with these uber-challenging scenarios as a way to prepare us for the tremendous stress of launch day. I think that was a good plan.
When I was an F-16 pilot, we had a system called LANTIRN (Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared at Night). It allowed us to fly close to the ground at night, avoiding enemy surface-to-air missiles and fighter jets, while dropping laser-guided bombs. The F-16 was a single-seat, single-engine jet, making the LANTIRN mission particularly challenging. I remember one night in Korea, I was on a checkride, or evaluation of my ability as a flight lead to get our simulated bombs on target. It was night, there was red air (simulated enemy fighter jets), and I was certain that I was as busy as a human could be—leading four F-16s, with enemy fighters trying to shoot us down, trying to hit our target with manually aimed laser-guided bombs, at low altitude and high speed, all while trying to avoid the one real-world threat that had a 100 percent chance of killing us if we messed up: the ground. I didn’t see how a human brain could process more information, more quickly, than what was called for on this particular night flight.
That is, until I got to NASA and flew space shuttle launch simulations, keeping track of main engines and comm and electrical and hydraulic and propellant systems—all while communicating with my crewmates, as well as mission control. I had found something busier than being an F-16 flight lead. A really good crew and flight control team working together was, in my humble opinion, the pinnacle of what humans are capable of. It was a thing of beauty that will never be matched again, because the new capsules coming on line are much simpler and more automated that the shuttle was.