How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  That first day of IMAX training was awesome. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have a chance to help film a movie in space. Some astronauts are really into photography, and others not so much. I was definitely in the former camp; I’m the type of dad whose kids are always saying, “Dad, no more pictures!”

  Toni laid out our plan: We would spend the next year training on the equipment, learning the basics of cinematography, and getting familiar with the story arc of the film. We would be making A Beautiful Planet, a movie about Earth’s environmental challenges as well as the cooperation among our international crew. The graduation exercise would be shooting a few scenes in the station simulator and then watching them on a giant IMAX screen. Toni was a great, if humbling, teacher. That I would have a chance to help film an IMAX film during my flight was the best news I’d heard since I was picked to be an astronaut!

  Canon partnered with IMAX to provide the equipment, and they gave us some of the best gear imaginable. For still images we used the 1DC professional camera, similar to what is commonly used for professional sporting events, and for video we used a C500. Our original plan was to shoot night shots with the 1DC as time-lapse sequences, because a still camera has much greater light sensitivity than a video camera. We would set the camera to take two frames per second and let it run for a few minutes, taking hundreds of still images. Then the IMAX team on the ground would stitch those still images together to make a video scene. The C500 was a proper Hollywood-quality video camera, complete with myriad accessories to hold it and the monitor and hard drives and brackets together. It was originally intended for daylight shots of Earth, as well as interior shots of astronauts floating. The final camera type was a GoPro Hero, which was lent to us by our Russian crewmates. This miniature camera allowed footage from inside the tiny Soyuz capsule and also from my spacewalks. Most importantly, we had a set of four Zeiss lenses that were absolutely spectacular, enabling many of our first-ever shots from space, such as the night ones.

  James, the director of photography, was also our expert instructor, and he set about trying to teach us all the intricacies of this complicated equipment. Setup. Exposure. ISO. Focus. Framing. Focus. Sound. Lighting. Did I mention Focus? One of the things we learned on that trial run on the big screen was that even the smallest error in focus led to a completely useless shot. Focus is digital, and either it’s good or it’s not, and that was a lesson that I learned time and again. We also had an amazing lesson in sound from the designer of many of the iconic Star Wars sounds, Mr. Ben Burtt. I never realized it, but sound is truly half of a movie, and his class motivated me to pay attention to details, like capturing the sound of fans whirring in the background noise of the station, or metal workout equipment banging together like wind chimes, or the sound of air rushing out into the vacuum of space through a hatch. On the space shuttle there was a unique and unforgettable ghost-like moan whenever someone talked on the radio. These sounds are forever etched in my brain, and I hope I captured a few to share with IMAX theatergoers.

  On the space shuttle there was a unique and unforgettable ghost-like moan whenever someone talked on the radio.

  Beyond the technical requirements of operating a camera were artistic skills that astronauts aren’t known for. But you can’t be an excellent filmmaker without artistic effort, so I really followed Toni’s guidance. Capture the human element above all else; a dry documentary about geography wasn’t our goal. Tell a story, using panning, framing, lighting, and sound. Don’t be shy about shooting something as it happens—be as spontaneous as possible, given the limited hard drive space and the fact that it took five minutes to power the camera up. And, of course, always remember to stabilize and focus—a shaky or blurry shot was more useless than a screen door on a space station.

  NASA administrators Mike Griffin and Charlie Bolden, as well as associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier, made all this possible, effectively overriding midlevel managers who didn’t want us wasting time filming a movie. In their minds, we had more important work to do. As far as I can remember, I was scheduled for a grand total of one hour of dedicated time for this project. Other than that, every other scene I shot was on my own time, and the same goes for the rest of my crew. Of course, we never skipped scheduled work to do IMAX; it was just such an important project to my crew and me that we were willing to use personal time to make it happen. In case you’re wondering, we didn’t get paid at all. Though I joke that I got paid twice what my crewmates got paid because I filmed a nude scene (of me showering, above the waist of course). Two times zero.

  Once on orbit I tried to work with Toni, James, and Marsha remotely. Toni had a long list of more than 300 shots she wanted: New Zealand, Australia, Beijing, the northern lights, the crew eating dinner together, a cargo ship approaching, etc. This was a good starting point, but frankly it overwhelmed my brain, so she came up with a top ten list. I focused on getting those done while keeping the other 300 in the back of my mind.

  Practicing photography in a Cupola simulator. Thankfully, the real Cupola in space had glass in its windows, not just a big hole.

  James was my technical advisor, but I felt sorry for him. In a normal movie, the director of photography (DP) is intimately involved in every detail of every scene, but for this film he had to trust us. I would call James periodically on our satphone to ask for advice on ISO or lenses or exposure settings. James modified the plan for Earth shots once we were in space; we were to use the 1DC for all Earth views, day or night, and save the C500 for people shots. I requested one exception to this rule. Night lightning was spectacular, but the 1DC could only capture it at two frames per second (fps), leading to a bit of a jerky view—the lightning was either on or off. Using the C500 at a much higher frame rate of twelve fps gave a subtler image of lightning flashing. There is a spectacular scene of a giant thunderstorm at night in A Beautiful Planet, and it was only possible because of James’s innovative DP work.

  Marsha helped me track the shots I had taken and manage the memory cards and hard drives that our images were stored on. It was a massive task, one for which we needed a full-time accountant. But alas, we didn’t have one, so Marsha and I spent a lot of time tracking those memory cards. Marsha also helped me with shot quality and ideas. During my shuttle flight, she had been the astronaut tasked to help our crew with photography. After a few days, she had reviewed all of our pictures and noticed something. There weren’t many pictures of me, because I was usually behind the camera, so she directed my crewmates to take more pics of me until she cried uncle and said, “Enough shots of Virts!” I also had a goofy head lamp constantly floating around my neck, along with a dorky fanny pack around my waist. These accessories were practical, but they made me look like a rookie, so I ditched them based on Marsha’s comments. When I got back to Earth and compared photos from those first tacky days in space with the shots after I removed the offending items, I was so thankful for Marsha’s timely feedback.

  Most of the shots that ended up in the film were coordinated with Toni. However, there were a few unanticipated ones, and those were some of my favorites. For example, on Christmas Eve, I was floating in my crew quarters and an idea struck me. I went down to the airlock (where we got into and out of the ISS during a spacewalk) and prepared the set. I put Santa hats on each of the two spacesuits, hung our Christmas tree from the ceiling, and gathered a bag of dehydrated milk and packaged cookies. I taped the cookie bag to the milk to keep them from flying apart from each other and slowly floated them in front of the camera, with “Santa” Sharpied in large letters on his milk bag. We were ready for the big guy to visit our lonely crew of astronauts. Hopefully, his reindeer had spacesuits. That scene was one of my favorites in ABP, and it always gets a laugh from the audience.

  On another occasion, I was looking out of the Japanese module window and realized just how quickly the outside of the station transitioned from black to white to blue to orange to red to pink as we flew into sunrise. I had an idea: Just before sun
rise, I would film the slowly brightening solar panels and exterior of the station with the camera pressed against the window. Then, when the moment of sunrise was imminent, I would push myself away from the window, floating down the center of the module, while it was still dark inside. When the sun abruptly rose, the interior of the station would suddenly be flooded with blinding light. I thought it would be a cool scene, so I gave it a shot. Unfortunately, it was really hard to time the exact moment of sunrise. If I pushed away from the window too soon it would just be a long scene of darkness, and if I pushed away too late the sun would rise before I had a chance to float into the blackened module. Most of all it was almost impossible to float down the middle of the module holding the camera steady in my hand. It was so easy to push slightly in the wrong direction and bounce off the walls, spinning around. Nonetheless, the first time Toni saw a sample shot via downlink she was so excited because it was an unplanned and unique scene! I never did shoot a perfect one, though, and after many attempts it didn’t make the final cut. But getting creative was fun nonetheless.

  Finally, there was a dark green patch of jungle on the horizon as we raced toward it at 17,500 mph, and we came up with an impromptu plan to time the shot.

  The most difficult shot I filmed is one that doesn’t really stand out in the film. Toni wanted to highlight the Cupola, the module where most astronaut photos are taken. To do this I wanted the camera to slowly float into the module, filming Samantha while she was taking pictures of Earth. There’s only one problem—it’s really hard to get the right exposure for both an astronaut and the Earth in the same scene, because our planet is so much brighter than the inside of the station. Getting both exposed properly for still photos is much easier because we have a flash, which works for a fraction of a second. But this video clip would be thirty seconds long, much too long for a flash, and the floodlights we had weren’t nearly bright enough. So, Samantha got herself awkwardly curled up in the window, camera in hand, gazing off into the distance. Next, we waited for a part of the Earth that was relatively dark. Clouds or water would be way too bright and ruin the exposure. The best place was South America, where the Amazon jungle is very dark and, I hoped, would allow the scene to be exposed properly.

  Camera ready, lights on, Samantha curled up in a ball on the window, and we waited. And waited. There was seemingly endless cloud cover! Finally, there was a dark green patch of jungle on the horizon as we raced toward it at 17,500 mph, and we came up with an impromptu plan to time the shot. She gave me a countdown as the jungle approached, and I pushed off and slowly floated up toward her, timing the jungle background just right so that both she and the dark green Earth background would be exposed. As soon as I had thirty seconds of good video, the jungle was again covered with überbright clouds, badly overexposing the camera. We had just barely squeezed that shot in. It made it into the final cut, and though you probably wouldn’t notice it when you see A Beautiful Planet, every time I see it I feel like a proud parent!

  Though there are a lot of important aspects to the space station—the engineering achievements, the science, and most of all the international cooperation—I still believe that the most important work that I did while in space was helping to make A Beautiful Planet. During the grand opening at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, its director told me that over the next decade more than a million people would see this movie. That was a shocking statement. What a far-reaching impact we had, inspiring people young and old and hopefully making them wonder what is possible in the future.

  Thanks to the lifelong dedication, creativity, and leadership of Toni Myers and James Neihouse and the whole IMAX team, this movie was possible. Most of all, thank you, Toni, for being such a wonderful person; you are loved and missed.

  Zzzzzzzzzz

  Sleeping While Floating Is Awesome

  There are a few things that everyone is apprehensive about before their first spaceflight. Oddly, death was not one of my concerns. My biggest worry was messing up. You’ve heard of the Lord’s Prayer; well, during Project Mercury, there was a prayer attributed to America’s first astronaut Alan Shepard, “Shepard’s Prayer.” Dear Lord, please don’t let me f . . . up. I’d be willing to bet that the fear of publicly making a mistake is high on the list of every astronaut’s concerns, rookie or veteran. For me there were other worries—how would I adapt to floating, would I get sick, how would I get along with my crewmates, could I get all of my work done? And would I be able to sleep in space?

  The short answer to this last question is a resounding yes! My first flight was a two-week shuttle mission to finish the construction phase of the space station, and boy, were we busy. Houston scheduled our lives in five-minute increments for each of our fifteen days in space. When I finally made it back to my house after landing, I was so exhausted that I slept for thirteen and a half hours straight, something I hadn’t done since I was six months old.

  My first night in space came at the end of a very long work day; we had woken up about ten hours before launch and then spent the whole day after launch converting the shuttle from rocket to spaceship. I had a headache and felt dizzy and had about a million things to do filling my brain, all while adapting to the alien environment of space. By bedtime I was wiped out, but also disoriented. The feeling of weightlessness with no up or down was a little overwhelming, I couldn’t keep track of stuff because everything was floating, and on top of it all there were six of us on the shuttle middeck. Imagine seeing zipped-up sleeping bags covering all the walls and ceiling and floor of a volume equivalent to a large bathroom or walk-in closet—it was cool and disorienting all at once, like a scene from Inception.

  Before falling asleep, I gathered what I would need for the next day. I put tomorrow’s underwear and clothes in my sleeping bag. I also got my blindfold (the sun rises every ninety minutes in orbit, so you need to cover your eyes), ear plugs (yes, people snore in space), and iPod to listen to some music, and I also kept my flashlight available, in case a middle-of-the-night bathroom break was required. Next, I found a place to sleep, just like a camping trip, but in space the walls and ceiling are also available. I usually picked out the starboard wall of Endeavour during STS-130, or the ceiling of the Columbus module when we were docked to the ISS, clipping the top and bottom of my sleeping bag to the wall.

  The act of falling asleep was what I had been concerned about. My fatigue overcame my disorientation. I put on some music, closed my eyes, thought about the day’s amazing events and what was coming tomorrow, and wondered about Earth . . . zzzzz. . . . The next thing I knew, wake-up music from mission control was blaring on the speaker and it was time to wake up. I usually fell asleep very quickly and slept hard through the night.

  Wake-up music was a tradition for several decades during the shuttle program; crews were awakened every morning with a song chosen by their families or flight controllers. Some of those songs were pretty funny, some emotional, and some made you go “Huh?” But it was a nice tradition. I had three songs for me on STS-130: “Give Me Your Eyes” by Brandon Heath, “In Wonder” by the Newsboys, and “I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)” by Steven Curtis Chapman. On our seventh day in space, in the middle of installing and unpacking thousands of pounds of gear and equipment, my crewmate “Stevie-Ray” Robinson had the song “Too Much Stuff” by Delbert McClinton playing, and boy was that appropriate. Kay Hire had “Window on the World” by Jimmy Buffett, a song he wrote for our mission, because we installed the Cupola, the amazing seven-windowed module that is the coolest thing ever flown in space.

  My first few nights in space I took Phenergan, a motion-sickness medicine that also helps you sleep, but I didn’t need it for either reason. At bedtime I was out like a baby, though my shuttle and station flights had one thing in common: I didn’t get enough sleep. On the 200-day mission I would use Sundays to catch up, turning my alarm off and sometimes sleeping until noon. I figured if my body needed sleep, it would sleep, and that seemed to work. But the other six days per we
ek, my Omega X-33 watch would faithfully beep every morning. Station crews didn’t get wake-up music, thankfully.

  During my long-duration mission, we each had our own crew quarters, which was a private cabin about the size of a phone booth. Not only was having private space critical for our psychological well-being, it was also great for sleeping. I did not clip my sleeping bag to the wall; I simply free-floated in the small cabin. I’d put my entire body in the sleeping bag, head and arms and all. The airflow from the cabin vents would slowly spin me around so that every morning I awoke in the same corner. It was kind of funny, like being in trouble with the teacher when you’re seven years old and having to stand in the corner. The feeling of floating and being completely sensory deprived, eyes closed, no sound, is stunning and surreal. It really feels like you are in a void, with nothing else in the universe other than your being; everything simply fades to black. My mind has never been so free of clutter. A friend of mine described having the same sensation while cave diving in a giant black underwater room. I think it’s a similar experience, but floating in space in complete blackness was sublime.

  One of the best things to do at nighttime was to put on my Bose headset and listen to music as I drifted off to sleep. I spent a month listening to Hans Zimmer and his Interstellar soundtrack. After about four months in space, our Russian colleagues received some “sounds of Earth” MP3 files from their psychologist, and the whole crew absolutely loved them. Rain, waves, jungle sounds, crowded café. These sounds connected me to our planet more than I imagined, and I ended up drifting off to sleep to the sound of rain for a month.