How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  As a space shuttle pilot, it took me some time to master these basic principles, but after a while they became second nature. During Endeavour’s rendezvous with the ISS, I was charged with performing a few small rocket burns during the final hours before docking. Those fine course corrections helped us approach the station on a precise, predetermined trajectory from behind and below, eventually ending up directly below the ISS. At that point, our commander, George Zamka, took over and manually flew the rest of the approach, eventually looping around to the front of the station, then slowly backing in, at the speed of paint drying, until we gently docked with the front of the ISS.

  Space Shuttle (at launch)

  Space Shuttle (in orbit)

  Ten days later, I finally got my chance to fly Endeavour for undocking. As she slowly moved away from our docking port, I had to make continuous down inputs to the control stick to keep her from climbing as we gradually accelerated in front of the station. Then, while flying a giant 400-foot-diameter loop around the station, I made a constant stream of small rocket firings to keep us on a circular path, constantly fighting Mr. Newton, who was trying to pull us away, or accelerate us or decelerate us, depending on whether we were above or behind or below the ISS. I’ll never forget one moment when we were directly above the ISS, flying over the Himalayas on a bright clear day, looking down at snow-capped Mount Everest. There was a sea of look-alike peaks below, and it was breathtaking. The entire crew was jammed onto the crowded shuttle aft flight deck, pressed against the windows, enjoying the spectacular view. I basically flew that whole maneuver with my arms and body wrapped around the controls to make sure nobody bumped them while clamoring for a photo. Luckily the whole maneuver went well, and we all made a lifetime of memories during that brief loop I flew around the station.

  The same orbital mechanics that were required to properly fly a rendezvous or undocking in space were also required to avoid other objects in orbit. The US Air Force (and now the US Space Force) tracks tens of thousands of man-made objects that are orbiting Earth. Some of them are big, operational satellites. Some of them are dead satellites that have lost their ability to maneuver after years in the harsh environment of space. Some are spent rocket boosters, drifting in highly elliptical orbits after lofting their payloads into orbit. And the most dangerous are small pieces of space junk, leftover parts of launch vehicles or clouds of debris from accidental satellite collisions.

  The worst kind of debris is that from military antisatellite weapons, where a satellite is intentionally destroyed by an interceptor. Those actions can create thousands of small pieces, all of which are potentially lethal to other satellites in orbit, or worse, humans on the ISS. In fact, during my tenure on the station, we had to maneuver to avoid an object from an anti-satellite demonstration that the Chinese had performed way back in 2007. That explosion created a cloud of debris that will be in orbit for many decades and causes the ISS to maneuver several times a year, at a cost of millions of dollars in propellant and lost crew time. Following that test, the United States launched an antisatellite weapon in a tit-for-tat maneuver to demonstrate that we had the same capability, but the target of the American test was in a much lower orbit and its debris burned up harmlessly in the atmosphere a few days later, posing no threat to other satellites or humans.

  Unfortunately, India joined the ASA (antisatellite) club in 2019 by destroying a target in low Earth orbit, which created yet another cloud of debris, like a shotgun shooting a clay pigeon. In and of itself this was an irresponsible event. In a larger context it reminded the world of the Kessler syndrome, a theoretical cascading effect in which one satellite explosion results in a cloud of debris that destroys other satellites, snowballing into a much larger cloud of debris that essentially ruins a significant block of orbital altitudes for any satellite. Such a disaster—many thousands of small parts of exploded satellites zooming around low Earth orbit at 5 miles per second in random directions—would remain for years if not centuries and would create a mess that we would not be able to clean. A reckless (or deliberate) actor could quite literally render low Earth orbit unusable. Imagine a world without GPS. Such a scenario is quite possible if we do not treat space responsibly, and it is a major reason for a renewed focus on the importance of space security. The community of spacefaring nations as well as spacefaring private companies needs to get its act together to ensure this space-debris Armageddon doesn’t happen. We need to take care of our environment on Earth, and also above Earth.

  The Air Force tracking network gives NASA periodic updates on predicted collision risk. Several times per week the flight controllers in Houston are notified of potential threats, and those warnings almost always result in the conjunction (point of closest approach) resolving to a green status, with no action required. However, they occasionally end up as yellow or red. You can guess the meaning of each of those. If the debris is in a stable and well-known orbit, and we are given enough of a heads-up, we can plan what NASA calls a DAM (debris avoidance maneuver). The station’s orbit is adjusted, usually by climbing, to create enough miss-distance to make the conjunction status turn green. These maneuvers are performed by the Russian Service Module rocket engines in the back of the ISS. Imagine a Hollywood movie depicting such a maneuver; astronauts would be yelling in their spacesuits while being smashed against their seats by unimaginable shaking and acceleration and terror—with maybe a few aliens thrown in. Reality is slightly different. I have a great video of me during our DAM; I was in workout gear, slowly floating by, inch by inch. It’s a funny clip.

  A question that I’m often asked is, “Can you see other objects flying around in space?” The short answer is no—not usually. Those pieces of debris and other satellites are moving at many miles per second and are usually hundreds or thousands of miles away. However, at night you can actually see them in the distance, if they are high up in sunlight and the ISS is in darkness. You can also see them from Earth during the same conditions. Find a dark place, far from city lights, look up in the sky about an hour after sunset, and you’ll see small white points of light moving slowly, not blinking like aircraft do. I usually didn’t notice them until I was reviewing a time-lapse movie that I had shot, though I did occasionally see them in real time with my own eyes. I even saw a few meteors, always below the station, burning up in the atmosphere. You can also see those from the ground, especially during the annual Perseid or Leonid meteor showers. But when you’re on Earth you need to look up, and when on the ISS you need to look down!

  When I was picked to be a shuttle pilot, I knew that orbital mechanics were different than flying airplanes, but it wasn’t until I went through rendezvous training that I realized the extent of that difference. A few years later the concepts of orbital maneuvering had really clicked in my brain, and I could fly my spaceship intuitively, a transformation of me as a pilot that I had never anticipated, but which was very welcome. Sir Isaac would be proud.

  Just Add Water

  Space Station Cuisine

  As they say, “Keep the crew well fed and they can survive anything.” And I think they’re right. Any mission longer than a few hours should involve food, and if the food is good, the crew will be happy. If it’s not good, it’s going to be a long mission. This was true for both of my spaceflights, and I was a happy crewmember for my seven months in space.

  The days of astronauts eating food paste from a tube are long gone. Even though we don’t exactly have Michelin-star cuisine in space, I found it to be good and a highlight of my missions. For that matter, how often do you eat in a Michelin-star restaurant on Earth? The most important thing for me, and for most of my colleagues, was variety. The second most important thing was having enough to eat. Doing two and a half hours of exercise every day in addition to being extremely busy meant that I was hungry and needed to eat. Thankfully, there was plenty of food for the whole crew, though there have been several missions during the ISS program when food started to get scarce because of resupply vehicle
problems, and that led to some crew hunger.

  There are several categories of space food. The first is thermo-stabilized, which means it can last for months and is ready to eat without rehydration, like the MRE (military rations). This food came in green bags and included meat, vegetables, desserts, soups, etc. You simply opened the bag (reheated if desired), and it was ready to go. Another kind is rehydratable food. This type was lighter, smaller, hard, and crunchy and came in clear, see-through bags. You would plug it into a machine, select how many milliliters of water you wanted to add, press the blue (ambient temp) or red (hot water) button, unplug the food, spin it around like a centrifuge, mash the wet bag of food around for a minute, let it sit for ten minutes, and voilà, food—meats, vegetables, fruits, desserts, basically anything that can be dehydrated. This food also tasted good, and it seemed fresher than the green-bag food. These two types were the bulk of my diet while on the ISS.

  Our chocolate situation will likely go down in the annals of exploration history as a tale of stretching both rations and human endurance to their limits.

  There was also off-the-shelf food: M&M’s (called “candy-coated chocolates” in NASA’s awkward alternative universe). Tuna fish in a bag. Spicy olives. Chocolate-covered blueberries. Reese’s peanut butter cups. Power bars. You get the idea. Any food that can be purchased at the local grocery store, stay fresh for a few months, and be shipped “as is” to space can probably find its way onto a cargo manifest. In terms of bread, we have only tortillas on the American segment, because they can last a long time without spoiling or making crumbs like a normal loaf of bread would. Fresh fruits and vegetables, like oranges, carrots, and apples, are a welcome treat on newly arrived cargo ships. Oranges tended to rot pretty quickly, but they sure did smell good. It was always amazing to have fresh food after eating packaged food for months.

  There were also drinks. Any type of drink that can be produced in powder form can become a space drink, including fruit juice (yes, it’s actually Tang), tea, coffee, milk, sports drinks, hot chocolate (in short supply and high demand), and even smoothies. There was a pretty good selection of everything other than carbonated drinks. I was a Diet Coke addict before my flight and was nervous about going without for half a year, so I requested tea, figuring that would be my caffeine drink. Unfortunately, after about three days of drinking tea I had had my fill. There were lots of varieties of tea: black tea, green tea, sweet tea, tea with lemon, etc. But the bitter taste was too much. It was great once every few days, but not every day.

  The vast majority of our food was organized in BOBs (NASA acronym for food bag) that each contained eight days of that particular category of food for the whole crew. They are fairly dense containers, the size of a backpack, and are organized by type of food—meat, vegetables, desserts, drinks, fruits/nuts, breakfast, etc. The contents are part of a standard menu of food, which is selected to appeal to most astronauts. We were supposed to go eight days between new BOBs for most categories, though we would usually last longer than that.

  Opening a new food container usually took about fifteen to twenty minutes by the time you went to find the new one and scanned it into the inventory management system, so it was always a bummer if you were the last person to finish off a BOB and had to go restock the cabinet. It was a job that we all shared, without formally being tasked; if we saw the need to open a new BOB, we would just do it. That attitude was very helpful for crew cohesion. If I saw a crewmate restocking food supplies and I had a minute, I would always stop and help out.

  Drinking a space milkshake: Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, powdered milk, and recycled water mixed in a Ziploc bag. Messy, but yummy!

  Beyond standard menu items that the whole crew shared, each of us was given nine personal bonus containers of food. These could be from the NASA, Russian, European, or Japanese menus or even items from the local grocery store. I picked mostly US, but also a few containers of Russian and European food. The key was variety. The Russians were particularly good at fish, mashed potatoes, and soup. Plus they had real bread—Borodinskiy khleb (бородинский xпеб, or Borodinsky bread), a dark rye sourdough that was basically the only bread I ate for 200 days. The only European food I was able to get was some leftovers from previous European astronauts. They had dishes made by real chefs, and those were always a treat.

  We would also get care packages from Earth with each visiting cargo ship, usually containing beef jerky and chocolate candy. It was kind of funny because we were overrun with jerky, but for me the chocolate was most important. So when the Cygnus cargo ship blew up just before my launch, and with it one of my care packages full of Reese’s peanut butter cups, I was a little alarmed. Then, halfway through my mission, a Russian Progress cargo ship blew up, and along with it more chocolate. Our mission duration was then extended indefinitely as a result of that accident, and I had to start rationing my chocolate. It was painful. Our 169-day mission became a 200-day mission, and I literally ate my last Reese’s on flight day 200, hours before leaving space. I had barely made it. Our chocolate situation will likely go down in the annals of exploration history as a tale of stretching both rations and human endurance to their limits.

  The food setup was a little different on the shuttle; there we chose every meal for the whole flight. It was a good system in that we ate what we wanted, but it made it less likely that you would try other food items. Like many astronauts my taste changed while in space, but the shuttle flight was so short and I was so busy that any lack of variety didn’t matter. At the end of STS-130, we left a huge bag of supplies on the station, including food, which was a morale booster for the ISS crew remaining behind.

  One of my favorite food stories involves an experiment I did called Astro Palate. It was a psychology experiment designed to measure how food affects our mood. They had me eat bland food and then do certain mundane or unpopular tasks, like Saturday cleaning or repairing the toilet. Next week I would eat some of my favorite dishes and do the same tasks. Some weeks I would eat the food after doing the tasks. Then I took a survey of my mood both before and after the tasks. Sure enough, I was a lot happier after eating the good stuff. Samantha gave me endless grief about this experiment because while she was busy giving blood or doing other invasive medical tests, I was eating chocolate brownies after vacuuming filters. We laughed a lot about that, but I never felt badly about it. Unless I had to do the cleaning after eating cheese grits.

  As you might imagine, there were some food items that weren’t favorites. I was lucky because my crew had pretty diverse tastes, and it would be a bummer if everyone wanted to eat the same food. However, a few things were always in demand—brisket, shrimp cocktail, chocolate brownies, scrambled eggs, sausage, hot chocolate, and, ironically, veggies. Nobody on my crew liked cheese grits or curried vegetables or most of the thousands of packets of tea. So I started a bag of uneaten food, a large bag of food items that the US segment crew (Americans and Samantha) didn’t want. Every few weeks the Russian cosmonauts would come down and raid that bag; they really enjoyed the food that we didn’t want. Conversely, we loved the extra items that they were tired of, especially canned fish. This system of sharing food worked great; everyone had good variety, nothing went to waste, and I don’t remember throwing away any food during my mission.

  I was very thankful to the NASA, Russian, and European food labs for making some very good food for us. Between exercising two and a half hours a day and no fried fast food, I came back to Earth trim and in great shape. I still remember the first meal I ate back on the planet—one of my doctors went to the airport kiosk and got a chicken sandwich for me. The fresh bread and mayonnaise were absolutely amazing.

  Even though our space food doesn’t compare to a freshly prepared meal here on Earth, some of my best memories in space occurred around the dining room table, food velcroed and duct-taped to the table, drinking from sealed metal bags, enjoying rehydrated vegetables and irradiated meat (2012 was a particularly good year for beef, apparen
tly—they stamped the year on our meat bags, like a fine wine). I wouldn’t trade in my fine dining here on Earth, but I wouldn’t mind an occasional space food meal every now and then.

  Making Movies

  An Entire IMAX Movie Shot in Orbit

  Of all the things I did in space—science, rendezvous, spacewalks, etc.—I think the most impactful and lasting was to film the movie A Beautiful Planet. It all began one day more than a year before launch, when I checked my iPhone calendar to see where my next class was, and it said Building 9—IMAX. I was intrigued and excited because I’d been watching IMAX movies since I was a kid. In fact, seeing To Fly! at the National Air and Space Museum as a nine-year-old was largely responsible for motivating me to become a pilot, and I’ve seen all the space IMAX movies ever since—The Dream Is Alive, Blue Planet, Space Station 3D, Hubble 3D, etc. So when I showed up for my class and found Toni Myers, James Neihouse, and Marsha Ivins waiting for me, I was pumped!

  Toni is legendary among documentary directors. If you’ve ever seen a space IMAX movie, you’ve seen her work. She’s also the recipient of the Order of Canada as well as NASA’s Exceptional Public Achievement Medal, two of the highest honors possible. She has simply set the standard for making movies in space; nobody has even come close, and nobody ever will. Sadly, she passed away in 2019 after a brave fight with cancer, and I was honored to have been involved in her final work.

  James was Toni’s director of photography for her extraordinary run of films, and he, too, is the best. The two of them have trained more than 150 astronauts to be filmmakers, dating back to the 1980s, and their work has inspired hundreds of millions of people around the world. Marsha is a former astronaut and Toni/James protégée herself. She has starred in and helped film several of these IMAX documentaries dating back to the 1990s, and she was a consultant for us on A Beautiful Planet, helping to translate between Hollywood-speak and NASA-speak. It’s harder than you can imagine.