How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  In addition to daily exercise, astronauts are evaluated with an annual fitness assessment. It includes everything from a 1.5-mile timed run or 800-meter swim to max-effort bench and leg presses, pushups, pull-ups, crunches, hand-strength and flexibility measurements, and everyone’s favorite, a shuttle run around a series of pylons.

  A critical part of our fitness program is rehabilitating once back on Earth. After landing in Kazakhstan, there were folks waiting for me next to the Soyuz to begin the torture (I mean rehab) program within minutes of landing. Following a twenty-four-hour, three-leg journey back to Houston, the very first thing I did was go to the astronaut gym for a grueling workout. It included trying to make my way around those pylons while being completely dizzy and standing on wobbly gel pads that forced me to seriously concentrate on balance, while my ASCR stood ten feet away, throwing a medicine ball at me. That’s hard enough to do under normal circumstances, much less after spending half a year floating in weightlessness. But those exercises, focusing on balance, coordination, and core strength, expedited my return to Earth form.

  I made it a point to visit the gym every day for several months after getting back to Earth, and it seemed to make a difference. I didn’t suffer the serious back pain that some of my colleagues had and I never had a serious orthopedic injury, even though Achilles tendon tears or muscle problems have been common injuries. Within a week of landing I was doing twenty pull-ups, and most of my weight-lifting strength was at 90 percent of my preflight numbers. Although I was at the gym every day, I didn’t push it; I knew too many colleagues who had done so and ended up with a torn muscle or ripped tendon. I resolved to work my body, but not push it too far. Better to work out every day at a decent level of effort than to push it to the max, get hurt, and end up missing a month of exercise while I healed. This technique worked well for me, and I was amazed how quickly I regained my strength with no injuries. Some of my friends who weren’t as diligent at the gym ended up having a much rougher time.

  The adverse effects of weightlessness on our bones are similar to those of osteoporosis, the disease that older women (and occasionally men) are at risk for, so whenever I do a talk for a large audience I promote the benefits of resistive exercise, even using small five-pound dumbbells, to keep bones healthy, especially for women. Waiting until old age, when you are hunched over from that terrible disease, is too late, and starting a habit of both aerobic and anaerobic exercise is good for everyone at any age. And though I was lucky enough to have the astronaut gym to prepare me for spaceflight, I recommend that you find a place near you to work out. You’ll be ready for spaceflight if need be, plus you’ll look great at the beach for spring break!

  Jet Lag

  (and Space Lag)

  Adapting Your Circadian Rhythm

  There are a lot of skills that you need to learn when you become an astronaut. Most are what you’d expect—flying, spacewalking, doing experiments, repairing equipment, etc. Others are surprising but make sense: learning Russian, training to perform medicine, learning how to make an IMAX movie. A few are downright unexpected. One of those skills is how to deal with time zone changes, both here on Earth and in space. There were so many instances when my body’s internal time clock felt like a tennis ball during a match, getting knocked back and forth, usually suddenly and painfully.

  I had traveled overseas ever since I was a high school exchange student in Finland, spending time in France during college and then being stationed all over the world while in the Air Force. I thought I knew the basics of dealing with changing time zones. It messes with your body clock for a few days and then you’re adjusted to the new time zone. Well, once I was assigned to my long-duration mission I learned a whole new meaning of jet lag. I was constantly flying to Europe, Japan, Canada, and most of all Russia for required training. These trips were often combined; for example, I might take a Europe-Russia trip over a four-week period. A few times I even did a “slow orbit,” flying to Russia, then Japan, and then back to Houston, undergoing twenty-four hours of sleep-shifting in one month-long, round-the-world business trip.

  This circadian ping-pong went on for about three and a half years, and it really took a toll on my body. NASA flight doctors gave us briefings about how to best manage our body clocks. For me, the most important factor was trip duration. If I went to Russia for three or four weeks of training, I would completely shift to their time zone. If it was just a one- or two-day quick trip, I wouldn’t bother; I’d simply sleep when I felt tired. There were several tricks to completely adjust to the new time zone. I thought going west was always easier than going east, because it’s basically like sleeping in late, or getting a few extra hours in the day, which is never a problem for me. Flying to the east was always harder because it was like losing those hours, or waking up early, which I’m not a big fan of. Of course, if you’re going to Japan or China, with a twelve-hour shift, it doesn’t matter if you fly west or east—you’re hosed either way!

  I learned a motto while at NASA—“better living through chemistry,” an inside joke about the importance of taking the right medication at the right time. For example, in our Vomit Comet, the zero-g training aircraft, it was very important to take the anti-motion-sickness medication. Likewise, when you’re shifting time zones there are some medications you can take to help you sleep. Sonata is a relatively gentle sleep medication that helps you get to sleep but doesn’t keep you asleep. Ambien is the most powerful sleep med, and I needed only one small pill, sometimes just half a pill, to put me out for hours. One time I really needed to fall asleep quickly because I was going to be waking up at midnight to work at mission control, so I took two Ambiens. Big mistake. Yes, I fell asleep quickly, moving from feeling dazed and out-of-body to falling asleep in minutes, and then having a lot of bad dreams. When the alarm went off I felt absolutely terrible, and I had an awful headache, like a bad hangover that lasted twenty-four hours. No more double-dose for me; in fact, I try to avoid Ambien altogether unless I absolutely need to get myself to sleep when my body thinks it’s wake time.

  Another medication was melatonin, a natural chemical in our bodies that regulates our daily circadian rhythm. Taking melatonin near bedtime wouldn’t make you fall sleep, but it would let your body know it was nighttime; i.e., it didn’t help with the sleep but it did help with the shift. On the other side of this equation is waking up. The military uses several types of strong “go pills,” designed to give you energy and wake you up, and Provigil is the one that NASA uses. It is the nuclear option of staying awake, the yang to Ambien’s yin.

  Before my first flight, NASA gave me a bag of medicine to test at home in order to make sure I didn’t have any adverse reactions to some possible medications that might be needed in-flight: sleep meds, wake meds, anti­nausea meds, digestion meds, etc. I went to the pharmacy to pick up my test bag of pills early that afternoon. The pharmacist was handing me the goods, including a little brown vial with just one Provigil pill in it. I told her, “Don’t bother with the vial, I’ll just take it now.” She looked at me as though I had two heads and pushed, “Are you sure you want to take that now? It’s after 1 p.m.!” I smugly replied, “I’ll be fine, these things never affect me.” Well, fast-forward thirteen hours and I was lying in my bed at home on my back. Eyes wide open. Thumbs twiddling. Thinking to myself, “Well, now I know if I need to be wide awake for an entire day, take Provigil!” The lady at the pharmacy was right; it’s a bad idea to take one of those pills in the afternoon. Luckily, that was the one and only time I took that medication.

  Having learned that Provigil was so extreme, I wanted a less severe measure to help shift my body clock for my first launch, at 0400, which meant going to bed at 10 a.m. the prior morning and waking up at 6 p.m. Because we were shifting our body clocks by twelve hours, NASA had us begin the process of waking up a little earlier each day about a week before the mission. To help with sleep, we moved into crew quarters at the Johnson Space Center, a modern facility where we could sl
eep, eat, and have offices for training. There were about a million super-bright fluorescent lights in that building, so when it was dark outside our bodies were tricked into thinking that it was daytime. And vice versa; when it was bright outside we sealed off all outside light to make us think it was nighttime. Interestingly, in the Russian winter, there’s not enough ambient sunlight because it’s so dark, so our flight docs had a special portable blue light in our rooms to make our brains think that it was time to be awake.

  This process worked well, but I was still groggy when my body thought it was time to sleep, so I used energy supplements. I was skeptical at first, but my flight surgeon recommended them because they help you feel awake while not being nearly as drastic as Provigil. The ones I used were basically vitamin B shots, with minimum caffeine, and they worked for me. I felt awake without any adverse side effects. In fact, they worked so well that I continued to use them for my next mission; they were particularly helpful in the first few days after arriving in Russia or Japan or Europe, because a five-hour energy shot would wake me up just enough to get over a hump in my circadian rhythm. I even used them before spacewalks or other significant events in orbit that I needed to be wide awake for.

  There is another important piece in the sleep-shifting puzzle. For international travel, a business-class plane ticket would get the trip started on the right foot, because it was possible to sleep while lying flat. I just can’t sleep well while sitting upright in a normal airline seat. Add in the manspread from the offensive lineman next to you in seat 34F, plus having folks crawl over you to go to the bathroom for twelve hours, and you get the picture—a long flight with no sleep. My ability to stay awake during critical training events a day or two after arriving in Russia/Europe/Japan was directly affected by the quantity and quality of sleep I’d gotten in the preceding days. Getting six hours of lying-flat sleep on those flights made a huge difference in my mental capacity in the following days. I still crashed in the afternoon for several days after arriving, but it was much better after a good night’s sleep on the flight over.

  Those are my secrets to dealing with jet lag and large sleep shifts. Get a decent quantity of sleep whenever you can, preferably lying flat. Meds like Ambien help get you to sleep when required, though they should be used sparingly. Energy supplements help you wake up, if only a little, when Diet Coke can’t do the trick. Seeing bright, blue light when it’s wake time, and no light when it’s sleep time, is very important to keeping that internal body clock on schedule.

  Launch

  My first launch into space, Feb. 8, 2010, on board the space shuttle Endeavour.

  Dressing for Success (and Launch)

  A Very Complicated Spacesuit

  Whenever you see astronauts on the news, they are in some kind of spacesuit. During the shuttle days, they were in the orange “pumpkin suits,” as we called them. When launching on a Russian Soyuz, they’re wearing the off-white Sokol suit. And then of course there’s the giant white spacesuit for going outside on a spacewalk. But how exactly do we put those bulky things on, how do they work, and what do we do if there’s an emergency?

  The process for getting suited up is quite involved; it’s not like in most Hollywood movies, where it only takes a minute. Or like in Iron Man, where you press a button and a suit magically forms itself around your body. (Someone needs to invent that.) Before my first launch, we got suited up at the Astronaut Crew Quarters facility at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.

  The history of launch spacesuits at NASA is both interesting and tragic. Astronauts wore pressure suits for the first few shuttle flights, but they soon transitioned to simply wearing a flight suit and a motorcycle helmet for launch, as though they were flying jets. After the Challenger accident, NASA realized that some launch and landing accidents could be survivable as long as the crew had pressure suits that would keep them alive in the event of a massive air leak. So astronauts went back to wearing pressure suits, modeled after the U-2 spy plane suit. The first version was called the LES, and the next was the ACES (NASA acronyms for spacesuit and advanced spacesuit).

  The first step to suiting up in an ACES was to put on a MAG (NASA acronym for diaper). Yup, a diaper. More on that later. Next, it was time to put on some long underwear, which protected your body from the rough surface of the spacesuit. Then there was a special blue undergarment with a series of plastic tubes woven into it, designed to carry cool water all across your body to prevent overheating. Finally, it was time to get into the suit, stepping into it from behind. There was a giant zipper covered with a big rubber gasket that needed to be zipped, from your neck all the way down your spine to your crotch. This was very hard to do by yourself, and it was nice to have someone help. There was a skull cap and separate headset, or “comm cap,” that were basically the same technology from Apollo, with earcups as well as two microphones. I always used the thinnest skull caps available to give a little more room in the helmet, because my head is so giant. The comm cap connected to the suit via a pigtail cord, and then the suit itself was plugged into the shuttle’s communication system. Next was putting on the helmet, which needed to seal properly to the suit to keep us airtight in the event of a cabin leak. The helmet had a clear visor that you could move up and down by grabbing the bailer bar, which was locked down with a little tab on the outside of the helmet in front of your chin. There was also a dark visor that could be raised or lowered in case of bright sunlight.

  The inside of the suit had a neck ring, designed to keep most of the air pressure down in the lower part of the suit. It did this by squeezing your neck just shy of the point of suffocation. There were two tabs that pulled that rubber neck ring off your throat, and they were velcroed to the outside of the suit. This made it much more comfortable, but in order to close and lock the visor you had to release the tabs; otherwise the visor would close on top of two cords, which would lead to a bad seal and air leak.

  The last step was putting on the gloves, which sealed to the suit using a metal ring and could be removed with the help of a lever to pry them off the suit. ACES gloves are much less bulky and offer a lot more dexterity than the EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit) spacewalking suit, but they’re also designed to inflate only for emergencies. The suit also had a big strap that went from the front of the neck ring down to your crotch, which pulled your neck toward your knees in a constant partial-sit-up position. Under normal circumstances it wasn’t really necessary, but if there was an air leak and depressurization, your suit would try to inflate into a standing-up position. That’s not very convenient for a pilot sitting in a cockpit, so that cord would keep us hunched over in a sitting position in the event of an air leak.

  Shuttle Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU)

  Under normal circumstance there was a constant trickle of air into the suit that was vented into the cabin, but you could rotate a knob on your chest to close the vent valve. If the visor was down and locked, the suit would gradually inflate, because that trickle of air would be trapped in the suit, causing you to puff up in a giant orange balloon. We did this to verify the pressure integrity of the suit, though an added benefit of that procedure was that we’d get an idea of what the ACES suit would be like in the event of an air leak.

  After suiting up in crew quarters, we walked out to an Airstream trailer affectionately known as the Astrovan, waving to a few hundred NASA employees gathered to wish us well. Then we took a twenty-minute drive to the launch pad, our suits plugged into a cooling unit that circulated cold water through that cooling garment with the plastic tubes. We arrived at the launch pad, took the elevator up to the 195-foot level, made one final bathroom stop in order to avoid using the diaper, walked across the gantry walkway into the white room, put on our parachutes and LPUs (NASA acronym for life preserver), and waited for the closeout crew to give us the thumbs-up to get into Endeavour. When it was my time I crawled through the hatch in that bulky suit, disoriented from the shuttle being in a vertical position, 90 degrees diffe
rent from what I was used to from training in Houston. A fellow astronaut, known as a Caped Crusader or C-squared, was in the cockpit to help us strap in.

  The actual strap-in was painful. You had to wedge yourself into the seat, feet on the rudder pedals, trying not to step on or smash any critical switches or the control stick, all while overheating in a forty-pound spacesuit, with a parachute on your back. I had a kneeboard velcroed around my leg that held a few large index cards along with a pencil and Maglite; it was a convenient place to take notes during ascent or once in orbit. I also had a large crew notebook that was full of my personal notes and diagrams collected over years of shuttle training stuffed into a saddle bag full of checklists next to my seat.

  The final step was connecting the cooling loop—and ahhhhh, it felt so good. By then I had worked up a sweat, and it was a real relief to have cooling. The entire strap-in process took an hour. Finally, the C-squared and closeout crew shook our hands, said good luck, and thunk, the hatch was closed. The six of us left behind in Endeavour counted down the minutes and seconds until we left Earth, each person contemplating the fact that we would be imminently leaving the planet in a trail of flames atop a four-million-pound bomb in the shape of a space shuttle.