How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  Given the importance of the psychological aspect of spaceflight, NASA designated psychologists to monitor each crew throughout their mission. We also had a family support person for each spaceflight, who was absolutely indispensable. Mine was a wonderful lady named Beth Turner. Beth would help my family set up their weekly video teleconference sessions with me, stay in touch with them throughout the mission to make sure everything was going well, and organize care packages to come up on occasional resupply ships, including the most critical item in space—chocolate. I just can’t say enough good things about Beth; she was wonderful. For all of the formal psychological studies about astronauts’ well-being, having a good care package, knowing that your family member is taken care of on their birthday, or getting a video greeting from friends was infinitely more valuable. Thank you, Beth, for keeping me sane.

  I took part in an experiment called Journals, something that most ISS astronauts have done since the first crew launched in 2000. It is run by a gentleman named Dr. Jack Stuster, one of the top researchers in the world in the field of expeditionary behavior. He has written extensively about expeditions to the Arctic, as well as space. Most important, he’s a good guy. During my time in space I kept a weekly journal, in the form of an audio recording of what was happening—what was fun, amazing, angering, frustrating, lonely, wonderful. . . . Whatever emotions I was experiencing I would chronicle, in audio format, for him to analyze. He heard my unfiltered thoughts and feelings more than anyone else during my time in space. Doing an audio recording was more convenient than writing—I could talk faster than I could type, so that worked well.

  When I got back from space, I spent some time with Jack discussing the results of his analysis, and they were interesting. He was acutely aware of the frustrations I was facing, the joys I experienced, and the interactions with my crewmates. He knew what went well and what was frustrating. He knew these things because I was honest with my diary. I wrote, or more accurately narrated, exactly what was happening and how I felt about it.

  It was a much different story with the official NASA psychologists. If your flight surgeon or official psychologist was alerted to the fact that something was wrong, there was always a possibility that management would be brought into the loop and they would take action, removing you from a spacewalk, modifying your schedule, or some other kind of official action. For this reason, pilots in the Air Force and astronauts at NASA are all the same—life is good when they talk to the doc. We used to say that nothing good could come of a visit to the flight surgeon—the best you could hope for was no change in your flight status, so I was always happy with the official psychologists. As a fighter pilot, I was used to compartmentalizing. Whatever was happening at home in my personal life, I left at home. I went to work and focused on flying the jet. The F-16 was very demanding; any lapse of concentration could easily kill you, so whenever I was in the cockpit I was focused 100 percent on flying the jet.

  Hollywood pilots and astronauts are always yelling and emotional. In real life, we are very staid and stoic.

  That compartmentalization skill transferred very nicely to my career as an astronaut. Whatever was happening at home or at work, I was able to focus on my job. Cool. Calm. Collected. A prototypical test pilot. Flying jets, space shuttles, or space stations, I was always able to disconnect my immediate duties from what was happening in the rest of my life. When my wife was treated very badly by NASA management, I was able to remain professional and do my duties in space, leading my crew without hinting of problems on Earth. When there were real personal problems back home, I did my periodic PPCs (personal psychological conferences) with the NASA shrink without issue. Those brief meetings were actually enjoyable; we would joke and talk about sports and the weather, while fairly serious issues brewing in my life went undiscussed. This was entirely on me—I don’t blame them for not picking up on those things, because if a patient isn’t going to discuss something the doctor probably can’t know about it. And in the end, compartmentalizing issues wasn’t fair to my family either. But it was my way of dealing with problems—in the end, I didn’t deal with them.

  Hollywood pilots and astronauts are always yelling and emotional. In real life, we are very staid and stoic. When a flock of birds goes down the left engine of your jet and causes the compressor blades to explode on takeoff, and the fire light comes on and the engine seizes, you don’t want your pilot yelling and screaming. The Air Force would occasionally bring a psychologist to our F-16 squadron to give us a briefing about the importance of opening up and not compartmentalizing too much. You can imagine how that went over to a group of testosterone-filled, overachieving fighter pilots. We nodded and moved on, heading back to the squadron to talk about the latest dogfighting maneuvers or the next deployment we were going on. Leaving personal problems at home. Laughing and joking and being pretty much the best pilots on the planet, at least in our own minds.

  One of the best examples of how a crew’s psychology can be affected involved a series of incidents with our cargo resupply ships. Just before my Expedition 42/43 launch, an Orbital Cygnus vehicle exploded on liftoff, and with it tons of supplies. A few months later, a Russian Progress ship exploded. A few months after that, a SpaceX Dragon exploded. Three lost resupply vehicles in an eight-month window. It was a challenging time for the ISS program, to say the least. But it also had an impact on us, the crew. In addition to the fact that our care packages were lost with each mishap, when the Progress exploded the Russians delayed our replacement crew, because they would be launching on the same kind of rocket as the Progress. That meant that they needed to do their investigation before the next crew would launch, which therefore meant that our mission would be extended in order to keep six people on the station, and not drop down to only three people for an extended period of time.

  We were told only that we were extended, but not for how long—neither NASA nor the Russian space agency told us the duration. We were stranded in space for an undetermined period of time. Something like that could really stress out a crew psychologically, but I was proud of my crew, Samantha and Anton. They both handled this situation professionally and with a great attitude. I was the ISS commander at that time and held a daily crew meeting to talk about the delay—what rumors had anyone heard that day? Usually, there was nothing from the NASA side, because the Soyuz wasn’t an American vehicle and we didn’t have much to say. Although I received no updates from my boss in either the astronaut office or FOD (the Flight Operations Directorate, the next layer up in the NASA bureaucracy), the station program manager, Mike Suffredini, told me what he knew and tried to keep us in the loop with whatever information he had.

  The best and most interesting gossip came from the Russian side. There were all kinds of theories for the cause of the crash floating around out there, from simple mechanical problems to conspiracy theories to even aliens. We always got a laugh from those crazy ideas, and it was good for the whole crew to get together and share what they had heard to ensure there was no rumor or discontent brewing on board. The bottom line was that we were stuck in space for an undetermined amount of time, and I wanted everyone to feel like there was an open flow of information. I made it very clear to NASA management that our crew was in good spirits—we would be ready to return to Earth that week, or in a month, or even an extra six months. I was so thankful to Anton and Samantha for having such a great attitude. As a crew, we used humor to cope. I began a March Madness–style bracket for the whole crew to guess what the delay would be, the bet being a bottle of the winner’s choosing upon return to Earth. There were two axes in that bracket—the first was how long our return would be delayed, and the second was the delay of our replacement crew. The winner was paid in full during our debrief back on Earth, a few months later.

  Personally, the key to my sanity during that uncertain time was to have a good attitude. I simply thought, “I’ll have the rest of my life back on Earth, so enjoy it while you have some time in space.” I’m a photograp
her at heart, and I had a lot of photos I still wanted to take, so I took advantage of those additional weeks to get those shots. I got some great southern lights photos, as well as an amazing shot of the pyramids on the 199th day of our mission (nothing like waiting until the last minute). I also was able to shoot more of the IMAX film A Beautiful Planet during that bonus month.

  There have been other ISS incidents over the years that have delayed crews’ returns, and it was usually a real bummer for the astronauts stuck in space. For me and my crewmates, that wasn’t the case. The reason was our attitude. We were determined to make the most out of our time, focusing on the positive and realizing that the mission would come to an end soon enough, so we should enjoy the time in space while we could.

  I think that attitude is the key to many of our situations in life. Make the most out of your circumstances. Enjoy what you can. Learn from what you can. Suffer through what you must. And learn from it. What doesn’t kill you should make you better. If you go through life with that attitude, you will be happier and more successful than by complaining.

  Package Deliveries

  Receiving, Unpacking, and Repacking Cargo Ships

  Space is a harsh place. That may be the understatement of the century. Although we have explored quite a bit of our solar system and are just now learning of the vast number of planets out there orbiting other stars, we have not found anywhere else in the universe where humans could live without artificial help. Earth is plan A, and there is no plan B.

  The ISS is a stark illustration of this. The only thing homemade in space is electricity, from the solar panels. Other than that, everything must come from Earth: Food. Water. Underwear. Spare equipment. Uplinked Game of Thrones seasons. Life in space is entirely dependent on our home planet.

  The mechanics of this resupply effort is a complicated affair. It begins at the home ports of our various cargo ships: America, Russia, and Japan all currently send vehicles to the ISS. Europe previously did, but they sent their final cargo resupply ship in 2015. Each of the partner space agencies tracks what supplies are needed, how much spare margin is required for food, clothing, etc., and when to schedule launches. This work is particularly vexing because there is so much to deconflict. First, you have to have a free docking port, because there are only so many hatches on the station and they are often taken up by visiting capsules. Cargo ships also cannot arrive or depart on spacewalk days, or on days when crews are arriving from or departing for Earth. Finally, there is an obscure orbital mechanics parameter called Beta that disqualifies a few weeks per year because during that time the station is overheated by the sun angle.

  Once a good launch window is found, the vehicle needs to be loaded with supplies. Typical manifests include water (normally on the Russian Progress cargo vehicle), clothes, science experiments (sometimes even live critters), food, spare parts, and care packages for the crews. As for those critters, flying live plants or animals into space poses some serious challenges. You can put your underwear in the capsule a year in advance, and when it gets to space everything will be fine. But mice, or even plants, have a very limited window in which they can be loaded, and once they are loaded the clock is ticking. If launch slips, which happens all the time, they have to be unloaded, and a new “crew” loaded days later. I was shocked to learn that a typical crew of forty mice bound for space requires more than 1,000 to be ready on the ground. This allows a spare crew of mice to launch if there was a delay and also maintains a control group that scientists study simultaneously on Earth. A good friend and longtime NASA scientist assures me that flying animals into space is much more difficult than flying people, and based on all that she’s told me about this process, I believe it.

  Launch scheduled. Manifest determined. Supplies loaded. Plants and animals ready to go. Now it’s time to light the candle and get the vehicle on the way to the station. Each cargo ship flies a different profile; the Russian Progress can dock within a few hours of launch, though other vehicles may take many days to get to the ISS. In all cases they fly autonomously by onboard computers, with their respective control centers watching over them. They all launch in the same orbital plane as the station, which means both the station and the visiting vehicle fly the same ground track over the surface of the Earth, and the cargo ships launch below and behind the station. Because they are in a lower orbit, they fly faster than the station, slowly closing on their target, orbit by orbit.

  The big difference between vehicles occurs upon arrival at the ISS. The Russian Progress vehicle flies itself all the way to docking. There is a possibility of the crew taking over manually in the event that something goes wrong, but normally everything is 100 percent automated until the Progress is firmly attached to one of the Russian docking hatches.

  The Japanese HTV, SpaceX Dragon, and Northrop Grumman Cygnus all fly up to a point about 30 feet below the station, where they hover, flying 17,500 mph in close formation with the ISS. At this point, the crew manually flies the station’s robotic arm to reach out and grab the floating cargo ship. This is done from the Cupola, the seven-windowed observation module that is awesome not only for taking pictures of the universe, but also for grappling visiting cargo vehicles. The view of another spaceship flying alongside your spaceship, with the Earth and universe in the background, is beyond words. After the crew captures the free-floating vehicle, Houston takes over control of the robotic arm and moves the ship to one of the station’s docking ports, where it is berthed and firmly attached to the ISS using electrically driven bolts.

  You can’t just start unloading the 5,000 pounds or more of stuff without a plan.

  At this point, the crew gets involved again. There is a tedious but important series of leak checks that are performed to make sure there is a tight seal around the hatch. We use an elaborate set of vacuum hoses, pressure probes, and the old-fashioned stopwatch function on our Omega watches to help us verify pressure integrity.

  Finally, it’s time to open the hatch. I had several opportunities to open hatches on new vehicles, and there is definitely a unique smell of space. It’s hard to describe. But after all, what does a strawberry smell like? Or a new car? Or a wet dog? The best I can do is this: It’s a bit like an electrical smell, ozone or sparks, kind of like my grandfather’s old electric train sets. It’s a little musty, but very mechanical. The bottom line is that it’s a unique smell. I assume it’s from the harsh vacuum and temperatures that the equipment has just experienced. It’s tough to describe, but if I smelled it again I would recognize it immediately.

  Next it’s time to get to the cargo. This is where every crew would love to have an accountant on board, because unpacking and then packing a cargo ship is a very tedious and detail-oriented process. You can’t just start unloading the 5,000 pounds or more of stuff without a plan. Each unpack plan had an overview of the order to move equipment as well as a detailed, line-by-line spreadsheet of every single item on the vehicle, a location to find it, and its final storage location on the ISS. We kept a printed copy of the unpack plan velcroed to the ceiling above the cargo ship’s docking port, and whoever was doing the unpacking that day would be responsible for reading through the plan and carefully checking off each item unpacked. At the end of every workday, we would tag up with a storage specialist back on the ground and update them on our progress. A typical call would be, “We’re complete through line 43, with the exception of line 22, and in line 33 the serial number was 1007.”

  Most cargo ships remain docked to the ISS for a month or two and then are loaded up with trash or other items for return to Earth. The process is essentially the same, only in reverse. Most of the vehicles burn up when they reenter the atmosphere in a fiery trail of station trash—we often joked of poor earthlings seeing a poop meteor streaking high above. In reality, though, these vehicles deorbit to a remote location in the Pacific Ocean, so there are rarely any humans on Earth who actually witness the last fiery gasps of our cargo vehicles. But the SpaceX Dragon has parachutes and a
heat shield and is able to safely return cargo to Earth, so it is usually filled with science experiments, mice, equipment that could be refurbished and reused, and miscellaneous crew personal items that they wanted to return to Earth. We would often use our old T-shirts and clothes as packing material, and occasionally get a bag of those souvenirs on our desks a few months after they got back to Earth.

  Attention to tedious detail has never been my strength. To illustrate this, one day I was unpacking some maintenance equipment from a SpaceX Dragon, and I unloaded all the items and put them where I thought they should go on the ISS. Except a few hours later, when my crewmates picked up where I had left off, one piece was missing. I realized I had mistakenly put an item in the wrong place, and on the ISS that basically meant it was lost forever. This was bad, because we had a spacewalk coming up and we would need the missing hardware. The whole crew got involved, and after several hours the missing part was found, and boy did I learn my lesson. Don’t lose stuff—do everything necessary, pay attention to detail, be OCD when tracking it, but just don’t lose stuff!

  Before my spaceflights I never thought much about the business of resupply, and I assumed that it might take a day or two to unpack a load of cargo. But this cadence—reading the plan, finding the item, moving it to its location, checking it off the list, and then repeating—defined the rhythm of life on the station for several weeks or more every time a vehicle showed up. This made me think of how in the Air Force all the glory went to the fighter pilots, but having a refueling tanker was absolutely essential for us fighter pilots to do our mission. Those tanker guys had a saying, “Nobody kicks ass until the tanker passes gas.” In the same vein, launch and rendezvous and spacewalks are where the glory is, but at the end of the day, if the cargo ships don’t show up with gear and if the crew doesn’t properly unpack and stow this precious cargo, spaceflight wouldn’t be possible. And while fighter pilots may rule in the Air Force, maybe on the space station accountants should rule!