How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  The Americas have a very large desert region between the American Southwest and Mexico, but from space it never reminded me of a true desert, certainly not like the Sahara or Saudi peninsula. There were so many mountains that it seemed more like a rocky place than desert. But having lived in Arizona, I can say it really is a desert minus the sand dunes. Farther down that landmass you come to South America, and flying from west to east, the Pacific turns into the Andes turns into desert turns into green and the jungle of the Amazon very quickly. The Altiplano of Bolivia is home to some very spectacularly colored terrain, blues and reds dotting the compact beige that dominates the region. I don’t think anywhere else on the planet changes terrain types as drastically or quickly as that western corner of South America.

  Rivers are a fascinating part of our landscape, but you usually can’t see them, especially in forested areas. The Amazon jungle is one area where this is especially true; there are hundreds of rivers, some thousands of miles long, normally hidden from view. Unless the sun reflected off them, and then there were a seemingly infinite number of rivers down there. The Congo was similar; the jungle in that part of Africa is dark, and the green was so dark it almost looked black. Also no rivers—until the sun reflected the majesty and length of that great river system.

  Nowhere was this effect more prominent for me than over the South Pacific island of Papua New Guinea. That big island is covered in jungle, and one day I flew overhead at orbital noon, with the sun directly above me. The island went from a mountain jutting out of the Pacific, covered by a dark green jungle, to an explosion of hundreds of rivers in an instant, shining bright white in the reflected sunlight. I have never seen anything like that. As I looked down on that place, I had this thought: The people there are living in the jungles of the South Pacific, probably fishing for sustenance in those rivers, and there are probably a lot of people there who have never had any modern technology. What would they think if they knew an astronaut was floating overhead in outer space, looking down and taking a picture of them? It was a poignant moment for me.

  The color that stands out most on Earth is the blue of its oceans, but white was a close second. I was in space for several months of the Northern Hemisphere winter, and during that time Canada and Russia were white, their snow and ice going on and on for thousands of miles. In Canada there are vast, flat plains covered in snow, in the west the Rockies wrinkle the land, and as you move east the great forests make patterns of rivers and valleys, including the ancient Manicouagan impact crater in Quebec that is one of the most recognizable features on our planet from space. The Hudson Bay is huge, and it has a pattern of ice that to me often looked like clouds—there were many times that I couldn’t tell if I was looking at ice floes, clouds, or just snowy ground, all the way over to the Atlantic. Siberia, on the other hand, was even more vast than Canada. Russia’s time zones famously cover half the Earth, and when seen from space, it spreads out from one horizon to the other, nothing but white snow and ice and clouds. In the southern part of Siberia is the largest freshwater lake on Earth, Lake Baikal. Visiting this crescent-moon-shaped lake is definitely on my bucket list. Flying a little farther to the east, you come to the strangest place on Earth, in my opinion: Kamchatka. It reminded me of Venus. It was always covered in snow and is full of volcanoes. There always seemed to be at least one erupting, a black stream of smoke and ash clearly visible from the ISS. The islands near there, especially Sakhalin, are also very strangely shaped, with otherworldly sharp curved patterns that looked more like an ancient samurai sword than a body of land.

  Because the ISS orbits between 51.6 degrees north and south latitude, the extreme polar regions were only visible in the distance. I saw the Antarctic landmass a few times from space, small white peaks jutting up out of the terrible Southern Ocean weather, but the white of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands was much more visible. They were a string of volcanoes jutting up out of the North Pacific that went on and on for hundreds of miles, usually buffeted by those bizarre storms in the region.

  During the day, you can navigate by landmass patterns or colors. But at night it’s by light, the most obvious being city lights. One of the first night passes I saw was over the Middle East and I noticed two things very quickly. First, that place was small. Israel was right next to Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, all in a very small piece of terrain, and I wondered, “Why all the fuss? Why is there so much conflict in that very small area? You’d think we could get along better.” I’m a realist and I know there are reasons for conflict, but when you see Earth from space it doesn’t seem like there should be.

  The next thing I noticed was that most city lights are yellow, but some are pure white and others blue, with occasional red dots. There are different technologies that make those lights—mercury vapor, sodium, halogen, fluorescent, LED—and each of those emits a different color. In the Middle East, you could tell the country by the color of light. In some cities, however, you see different colors in different neighborhoods. It was so fascinating to see these details of daily life from my orbital perspective.

  Most surprising were fishing-boat lights at night. I could tell where I was by the color and pattern of fishing boats in Asia. There were several groups of boats that always seemed to be off the coast of Korea, making a swirl pattern, almost like a comma. There must have been hundreds of those squid boats, all with very powerful spotlights. Japan also had some consistent patterns of fishing boats off its coast. They moved and appeared and disappeared with the season, so you could tell not only where you were, but also when it was, based on the fishing-boat lights. Most fascinating of all were the green boats in the Gulf of Thailand. It was unique, a massive fleet of green-lighted boats there in the sea, plainly visible from space, night after night. It quickly became obvious where I was if I saw a green field of lights at night—southeast Asia, next to Thailand. Another bucket list item—going fishing at night in Asia to see this vast searchlight armada firsthand.

  Colors during the day and city lights at night were all things that I never imagined would help me learn my way around Earth. But they all gave me a newfound appreciation and knowledge of our one and only home in the universe, our beautiful planet, Earth.

  Bad Bosses

  Silly Rules and Bureaucratic SNAFUs

  One of the low points of my mission was having my butt chewed out by the deputy chief of the astronaut office, via email, for not paying attention to the exercise constraints on our daily schedule. These were times when we weren’t allowed to run on the treadmill because the robotic arm was scheduled to be in motion on the outside of the station. We assumed the ground controllers didn’t want vibrations from exercise to interfere with the arm’s movement. Getting yelled at for this reason was a bummer because I had actually made this a big emphasis item for my crew; it was something that we were aware of and tried to avoid.

  So, I gathered our crew together and reminded everyone once again: “Folks, remember to check the electronic schedule before exercising, and be sure there are no constraints, or Houston is about to get really mad and take away our freedom to exercise when we want to.” We brainstormed about ways to avoid such situations—call Houston before beginning every exercise situation (a real pain), putting a big tag or something on the machine that you had to remove before exercising that would remind you to check, etc.

  Then one of my crewmates asked a simple question: “Why do we even have this restriction to begin with?” We thought it was silly and an over-abundance of caution, but that was par for the course. After a few minutes of discussion, I grabbed the microphone and asked a very innocent question: “Houston, we have a quick question about exercise constraints. Can you please confirm the rationale behind the ‘no running on the treadmill during robotic ops’ constraint? Is there a concern that vibration from the treadmill may damage the robotic arm?”

  Awkward silence. Pregnant pause. I imagined that down in mission control, folks were doing rock, paper, scissors to see who would have t
o call us with the answer.

  The reply came up sheepishly. “Uh, station, no, actually the concern is that the motion of the arm would cause a problem for the treadmill.” I knew NASA was sometimes ridiculously overcautious in its safety rules, but come on!

  They were actually worried that the robotic arm, moving at a blistering pace of 1 cm/second, would cause so many vibrations as to damage the treadmill.

  It turns out that the space station program had not been willing to spend the money required to do the engineering analysis to see if arm motion would damage the treadmill. Well, I set up a video camera to film the treadmill one day while the arm was moving to demonstrate that the treadmill wouldn’t come flying off its hinges when that small arm moved. Of course there was absolutely no discernible motion from the fragile [sic] treadmill. No $$$ or engineering analysis required. I don’t think the bosses much appreciated my video, but I thought it was funny.

  This may have been the most absurd thing I heard during my tenure at NASA. They were actually worried that the robotic arm, moving at a blistering pace of 1 cm/second, would cause so many vibrations as to damage the treadmill. This was a device designed for 200-pound astronauts to run on, which of course would really bang it around, and, in any case, it was protected by a vibration isolation system, floating on springs. To spend more than ten seconds talking about such a threat defied common sense and logic, yet NASA had given the crew a constraint that required mission control to waste time tracking it on our schedule and also took the time of astronaut managers to write sternly worded emails to protect us from a problem that posed a 0.00 percent threat to anything or anybody.

  We got a good laugh out of the experience—but also shook our heads at a culture and decision-making process that would think it was OK to constrain the crew from an activity that was obviously not even a remote threat. And then chew them out for not following said constraint. We saluted smartly and moved on with our lives, making sure not to exercise when our schedule was flagged. But the whole episode brought up some important lessons for me.

  First, sometimes people are unreasonable, and there are rules you don’t agree with. Often you just have to deal with them and go about your life, because it’s not worth the trouble or stress to think about. Second, if something really needs to be changed, try to fix it through proper channels. Don’t just complain—give the boss a solution. During my postflight debrief I made this exercise constraint one of my top issues, and management agreed that it was silly and needed to be resolved. However, the last time I checked, two years after the fact, the restriction was still in place. Finally, if you’re in a position of authority and there are rules that make absolutely no sense, change them. Don’t add to the expense and frustration of your people unnecessarily; just make a command decision and do the right thing. If you have the power to get rid of waste, get rid of it. Everyone will respect you for it.

  In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

  An Ammonia Leak Threatens the Station’s—and the Crew’s—Existence

  For all the emergency training I went through as an astronaut, I never expected to be holed up in the Russian segment of the ISS, the hatch to the US segment sealed, with my crew waiting and wondering—would the space station be destroyed? Was this the end? As we floated there and pondered our predicament, I felt a bit like the guy in the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic,” who was going down in an airplane crash, thinking to himself, “Now isn’t this ironic?” This is how we ended up in that situation.

  Every space station crew trains for all types of emergencies—computer failures, electrical shorts, equipment malfunctions, and more serious fire and air leak scenarios. However, on the International Space Station, the most dangerous of all is an ammonia leak. In fact, our NASA trainers used to tell us, “If you smell ammonia, don’t worry about running the procedure, because you’re going to die anyway.” That sure instilled confidence.

  A few months after arriving in space, we were having a typical day. My crewmate Samantha Cristoforetti and I were each in our own crew quarters, going through email and catching up with administrative work, when the alarm went off. The sound of the ISS alarm is exactly what you would think a proper space alarm should sound like—a cross between a Star Trek alarm and a sci-fi B-movie klaxon. When it goes off, there is no doubt that something significant is happening. Sam and I both popped our heads out of our respective quarters and glanced at the alarm panel.

  When I saw the ATM alarm lit up, my first thought was, “Atmosphere—there must be an atmosphere leak.” The ISS had occasionally had an air leak false alarm over its fifteen-year history, and I thought it must be one of those. However, that is not what ATM means—it stands for toxic atmosphere, most probably from an ammonia leak. Significantly, this alarm was going off for the first time in ISS history. My brain couldn’t believe it, so I said to Samantha, “This is an air leak, right?” To which she immediately responded “NO—ammonia leak!”

  Jolted back to reality, we jumped into action. Gas masks on. Account for everyone; we didn’t want anyone left behind. Float down to the Russian segment ASAP and close the hatch between the US and Russian segments. The US segment uses ammonia as a coolant, but the Russian segment doesn’t, so the air should be safe there. Remove all clothes in case they’re contaminated. Nobody smelled ammonia, so we skipped this step! Close a second hatch to keep any residual ammonia vapors on the American segment. Get out the ammonia “sniffer” device to make sure there isn’t any of that deadly chemical in the atmosphere on the Russian segment. All clear. Then, await word from Houston. . . .

  Fifteen long, suspense-filled minutes later, we got the news—it was a false alarm. We let out a collective sigh of relief; the station wouldn’t be dying today! Whew. Similar to frequent fire alarms and rare air leaks, ammonia leak was just added to the collection of ISS false alarms. We put away the ammonia detector, floated back to the US segment, and started to clean up the mess that we had left floating in midair when that alarm went off.

  Then we received an urgent call. “Station, Houston, execute ammonia leak emergency response, I say again, execute emergency response, ammonia leak, this is not a drill!” Pretty unambiguous. Only this time the warning had come via a radio call, not via electronic alarm. After the false alarm I knew that an army of NASA engineers were in mission control, poring over every piece of data they had, trying to determine if this had been a false alarm or the real thing. Now that mission control had confirmed that it was an actual leak, there was no doubt in my mind that this thing was real. No way all those NASA engineers got this call wrong. Having worked in mission control for nearly a decade myself, I had complete confidence in our flight director and flight control team. When they said, “Execute ammonia response,” I put the mask on, shut the hatch, and asked questions later.

  It was like a scene out of European Vacation—“Look kids! Big Ben!”—or maybe Groundhog Day. Oxygen masks activated—check. US segment evacuated with nobody left behind—check. Hatch between US and Russian segments closed and sealed—check. Get naked—nope. No ammonia in the Russian atmosphere—check.

  By this point, we had run the ISS ammonia leak procedures twice within an hour of each other. We had a quick debrief as a crew to discuss how we handled the emergency, what checklist steps were missed, what could have been done better, and what we needed to report to Houston. By this point, it was very obvious that there would be a lot of meetings happening in Houston and Moscow and that everybody in the NASA chain of command would be aware of our predicament.

  Very quickly the gravity (pun intended) of the situation hit us. Using ammonia as the coolant for the American half of the ISS had worked well for decades, but we were acutely aware of its danger. Thankfully, the engineers who designed the station did a great job making a leak extremely unlikely, but the possibility was always there. On the other hand, the Russian glycol-based coolant is not dangerous, which is why the whole station crew would safe-haven there in the event of an ammonia leak.


  Besides the danger of the crew breathing in toxic fumes, there was a risk to equipment. The ISS has two ammonia loops, a series of tanks and pipes that carry heat from the station’s internal water loops to the external radiators. If one leaked out to space, there would still be a second available to cool equipment. It would be a serious loss of redundancy for the station, especially given that there is no longer a space shuttle to restock the station with the massive ammonia tanks needed to fill a loop. It would be ugly, but survivable.

  What is not survivable, however, is having that ammonia leak to the inside of the American segment. First of all, if the entire contents of an ammonia loop came inside the station, it would probably overpressurize and pop the aluminum structure of one or more of the modules, like a balloon being overfilled with air. Mission control could avert this problem by venting the ammonia to space—we would lose the cooling loop, but it would prevent the station from popping. Months after returning to Earth, I learned that Houston had been seriously considering that option during our emergency, and it was only averted because of a tough—and ultimately correct—call by our flight director. That’s why those guys get paid the big bucks—they are some of the smartest and most competent people I have ever worked with. However, even if you averted a catastrophic “popping” of structure, there would still be the problem of ammonia in the US segment.