by Terry Virts
Netflix, Hulu, and Baseball
In-Flight Entertainment
I rarely watch TV on Earth. I’ll occasionally watch a news program or ESPN, but in general I just don’t watch normal television shows. In fact, I just recently saw Friends and The Office for the first time. I didn’t even know the main characters until my kids explained them to me. So when I got to space, I wasn’t too terribly disappointed to not have normal cable TV. Little did I know that watching TV and movies and other programs would be one of my favorite and most relaxing activities to help maintain my sanity while off the planet.
One of the most important things to do before flight is to pick out music and video entertainment. The mechanics of getting that entertainment to astronauts in space are interesting. In years gone by, astronauts would bring up CDs or DVDs. I brought a collection of these on STS-130, but there was no time to use them. Beth Turner was my psychological support person for my long-duration mission and she facilitated this process. I gave her my Pandora password and she recorded my stations onto three-hour-long MP3 files, eventually uplinking seventy-six of them, from every genre—rock, pop, dance, Christian, country, chill, jazz, classical, alternative, etc. Those music files kept me sane; I would listen to them via a portable Bose speaker throughout the workday, hoping Houston wasn’t watching me lip-sync.
I also listened to other programs, my absolute favorite being Car Talk, which ran in various forms on NPR from 1977 to 2012. It was one of the most beloved radio talk show programs of all time, hosted by Tom and Ray Magliozzi, known also as “Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers.” The brothers liked to brag that they won NPR’s “most likely to be canceled” award for twenty-five years running. I listened while I worked out, and my crewmates would often float by and wonder why I was inexplicably laughing to myself. I suppose they thought I was crazy, but those Car Talk guys were funny and they made my spaceflight a little more fun.
Besides audio, we had quite a few video options. The ground would uplink NBC Nightly News every day, as well as occasionally livestream either CNN or ESPN. Beth also let me pick out TV programs and movies, which were amazingly wonderful to have while I was working out. I asked for the TV show 24. It was a decade old, but I had never seen it, and I made it through four seasons while in space. Go Jack Bauer! I also got caught up in The Americans, a KGB/FBI spy thriller series. Beth also sent up clips of my Orioles and Astros, starting with spring training. Spring of 2015 was a good time to be an Orioles and Astros fan—both teams were good and fun to watch. The Middle was another of my favorite TV programs. In fact, I did a video Skype one day with the cast of the show from space, which was a highlight for me and I think for them as well.
Movies were also a great way to relax. There is a digital library of movies in MP4 format on board the ISS, with maybe a few hundred titles. Beth sent up a few requests for me. Interstellar was one of my favorites, not because it was a space movie, but because it was about a father and daughter, and I was missing my daughter. A friend recommended some eclectic movies, including The Lives of Others, a German-language movie about the Stasi and 1984 East Berlin, which was quite good. In Bruges was another foreign film I enjoyed. Watching 2001, Gravity, and Avatar in space was a little surreal. I even watched Groundhog Day on Groundhog Day, with Samantha Cristoforetti, as a bit of American culture training. I think she got the point after that scene when Bill Murray died and then unexpectedly woke up yet again to “I Got You Babe” (we didn’t finish the film, in case you’re wondering). Interestingly, the Russian psychologists uplinked 50 Shades of Grey, in Russian. The first time I had watched Interstellar it was in Russian and I really didn’t understand much. However, with 50 Shades subtitles weren’t required.
The Russian psychologists did something else that was a huge hit with the whole crew. One day I was floating through Node 1 (the center of the ISS) and I heard a bird chirping in the Node 3 module, where Misha Kornienko was exercising. I asked him where the bird was and he let out a big, deep laugh. He explained that his support team had uplinked sounds from Earth—jungle birds, café noises, waves crashing on the shore, rain. Those sounds were amazing! I had been in space for about four months by that point and I had no idea how much I missed them. In fact, the whole crew loved them so much that we played the rain sound on all of the station’s laptops one weekend. It was great on Saturday morning, but by the time Sunday came around we were ready to jump out of the airlock, so we went around and turned the rain noise off. It impressed me how powerful the sounds of our home planet were, lifting our spirits. As I mentioned before, I often used these sounds to drift off to sleep at bedtime.
I never would have thought that music and TV and movies would be such an important aspect of spaceflight, but they really played a huge role in keeping my morale up. Thank goodness for digital uplinks. And most of all, thank goodness for Beth Turner!
Fighter Pilot Does Science
Experiments Are the Real Point of the Mission
The mission of the space station is science. That’s why a coalition of nations built this amazing castle in the sky. It is why the ISS program has been funded by congresses, dumas, and parliaments, for billions of dollars per year. It is why astronauts and cosmonauts have risked their lives since the first station construction mission back in 1998. And it is why the ISS has a bright and long future ahead of it. Science.
Because I came to NASA as a fighter pilot, science was not a proper part of my professional background. I had taken physics, biology, and chemistry in college, and was a bit of an amateur astronomer, avidly reading Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines as a kid. I especially enjoyed CMO (Crew Medical Officer) training.
I loved all of the science experiments I did. On both my shuttle and station flights, they were a highlight of my astronaut career. I was always aware that for each experiment there was a PI (principal investigator) and a team of PhDs and technicians back on Earth who had spent years of their career working on it, while for me, most experiments took only thirty minutes to perform, and then I’d be off to my next task. So I always tried to take my time and pay each experiment the attention it was due.
There are many different types of experiments that are done in space, ranging from simple boxes containing scientific equipment that are left alone with no astronaut interaction to very intensive experiments that require detailed crew work for extended periods of time. During my 200-day mission there were more than 250 experiments conducted on the ISS, from just about every academic discipline you can imagine: physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, medicine, astronomy, psychology, materials science, etc. If you can take it as a class in college, there is probably an experiment on the space station in that field. Most NASA science is controlled from the payload operations center at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Alabama, as opposed to mission control in Houston, which is responsible for controlling the vehicle itself.
The most interesting were experiments that required my active participation. For example, CFE (Capillary Flow Experiment) was a canister with a silica-based gel in one end, and as a vane rotated within that canister, the fluid would suddenly flow up to the other end. Imagine rotating a spatula in a bowl of brownie batter, and as the spatula rotated 90 degrees in the bowl suddenly the batter would flow up to the top of the handle. Weird, but that’s what happens in space, by a mechanism called capillary flow. I had the opportunity to do this experiment several times; I set up a series of video cameras to capture the motion and precisely measured the angle of rotation of the vane within half-degree increments, noting the value when the fluid began motion. This was a potentially useful investigation, because capillary flow might eventually benefit satellite manufacturers as they try to get every drop of fuel out of their gas tanks. I most enjoyed it because I was actively involved.
A very different investigation was MICRO-5, a microbiology experiment that involved infecting C. elegans worms with salmonella and E. coli, with the hope of finding better vaccines for those diseases. I spent se
veral full days in the glovebox, a dryer-size piece of hardware that allowed us to put our hands in and work on just about anything, while keeping it contained behind glass walls. Besides disease-laden worms, we worked on 3D printers, fragile materials, mice, and myriad other things that you wouldn’t want floating loose in the cabin, filtering into your lungs, or getting stuck in your eyeball.
One Saturday I spent the whole day working on those poor worms. A week prior they had been active, wiggling around in zero g until I introduced salmonella and E. coli into their diet. By Saturday they were wiggling much more slowly because they were feeling under the weather. My task was to put them into the MELFI (NASA acronym for freezer), rapidly freezing them in bulky black metal bricks the size of ice cream sandwiches that had been prechilled to -95°C. Scientists on Earth would thaw them months later, after they returned to the planet. Getting all twenty samples frozen and stored in the MELFI at the same time was challenging, to say the least. It looked like a rock concert as ultra-cold smoke, or condensation, poured out of the MELFI. It seemed as though every time I put one black brick into the freezer, two would float out in a cloud of white fog and black metal containers. Nailing jelly to a wall would have been easier, though finally I managed to wrangle everything into its proper place, or so I thought.
The next day I was floating through the US lab when I noticed something move out of the corner of my eye. Sure enough, there was a black container of disease-infected worms floating up in the ceiling of the lab. I was mortified. One of those suckers had apparently floated away during the herding, and the science from that particular sample must have been lost. Worse than that, there was a vial of either E. coli or salmonella floating loose in the lab, by now comfortably warmed to room temperature. I had a quick meeting with my commander, explaining the mistake I had made. His advice was to just put it back in the freezer and not tell anyone. I didn’t want to do that because the scientists on Earth might then get false data and come to a false conclusion from this experiment. I’m no biologist, but I assumed having a worm thaw out and then refreeze might affect their data. So I called Huntsville and fessed up. They were understanding; they noted the serial number of the thawed worm container and had me put it back in the freezer. I was careful this time to make sure nothing else accidentally floated away.
A few months later, I had a chance to talk with those scientists during our debrief at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and they were very happy with the results they had gotten from the experiment. I learned an important lesson from the worm incident: If you make a mistake, fess up. It might prevent others from making the same mistake in the future, and in the case of science, it ensures accurate results.
One of the more unusual tasks I had in space was to launch satellites. There are several different flavors of micro satellites that are launched from the ISS, and the first one I launched was called SPINSAT. It was a large sphere, about twice the size of a basketball, and as you may have guessed, it spun. I always wondered what they would call a spherical satellite that didn’t spin—Wakefield-SAT? Once prepared for launch, it was attached to a movable tray inside a small airlock in the Japanese module. We shut the hatch between the airlock and the interior of the station, pumped the air back into the ISS, and opened the outer hatch that led to space. The tray then slowly moved outside, carrying the satellite with it. Next, the JEM-RMS (Japanese robotic arm) grabbed the satellite and moved it into position to hand off to the SSRMS, also called Canadarm2 (the big ISS robotic arm made in Canada, the first having flown on the space shuttle), which grabbed the satellite and slowly moved it into release position, below the station. A few hours later, we all crammed in the Cupola to watch and photograph the big event. We released it after a brief countdown and orbital mechanics took over, slowly pulling the SPINSAT below and then in front of the ISS.
I performed this task several times, later on CUBESATs. You guessed it again, these were cube-shaped satellites, about the size of a small cooler. But the procedure was the same: Prep the satellites in their quad-launcher box, attach it to the JAL (Japanese airlock), close the first hatch, suck as much air back into the ISS as possible to prevent waste, open the outer hatch, grab it first with the Japanese robotic arm, hand over to the SSRMS, move into position, and cram into the Cupola to watch the show. I think it’s safe to say this is a favorite task for ISS astronauts.
Not all experiments worked. ROBONAUT (surprisingly enough, an astronaut-like robot) was popular from a PR point of view. It was cool to show this modern/retro robot, who looked like a cross between Robocop and a Terminator (the bad kind, from Terminator 2: Judgment Day). ROBONAUT had just gotten his legs and was about ten feet tall when fully extended, which was a little intimidating. Early in my mission, I was tasked with dragging him out of his refrigerator-size storage closet, unfolding and powering him up, and waiting while the ground engineers ran software tests. That was a mentally grueling day for me; I was very slow finding all of the connections and manually rotating all of his arm and leg joints to the proper configuration. Once everything was finally set up, it was time for the big moment. Power switch—on. Nothing. Recheck all the cables and cords. Power switch—on, once again. Again, nothing. I went through troubleshooting for a long time, but unfortunately, it just didn’t work.
I had a similar issue with CSLM (a materials science experiment), which was performed in the glovebox. I would set up the equipment and it didn’t work. No matter how much troubleshooting I did, it just wouldn’t power up. It turned out that particular experiment was past its planned life; they had already gotten all of the data they had planned and were just running additional bonus tests because there was some free time in my schedule. However, I didn’t know that, and I thought I was doing something wrong that was causing it to not work. In the same way, ROBONAUT had a known issue with the software and the ground wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t working, but I thought it was all my fault. Incidents like these taught me another lesson: If something doesn’t work, do some quick troubleshooting passes and then tell someone. There may be a known condition that is causing the problem, and it’s better to know that right up front rather than wasting a lot of time and emotional energy feeling badly about something that may not be your fault.
Later I learned that NASA had a new initiative to get experiments to the ISS faster and cheaper. This meant that they would fail at a higher rate, but that was OK in NASA’s eyes. They would rather have 100 experiments with a high failure rate and low cost than fifty expensive ones that mostly worked. I liked that philosophy; I just wish I had known that before beating my head against the rack (ISS term for wall) time and again when experiments didn’t work as planned.
There were many different experiments that I took part in. Some were memorable, some forgotten. Some interesting, some excruciating. Some valuable, many . . . less valuable. Most worked, some didn’t. But doing science was the raison d’être for the ISS, and it was why we risked our lives riding a rocket into the vacuum of space. It was an enjoyable and memorable part of my missions, and I’m thankful to have had the chance to be the hands, eyes, and ears for those scientists who entrusted me with a significant phase of their careers. I’m also thankful that the black brick didn’t leak salmonella into my eyeball.
Marooned
What to Do If You’re Stranded Up There
“Houston, Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed. . . .” It’s been more than fifty years since those words were uttered, and most everyone is familiar with the Apollo story and the brave crews who flew to the Moon and returned to the Earth. A lesser-known chapter of that story was a speech that was prepared for President Nixon, just in case Neil and Buzz had been stranded on the Moon. It was a beautiful text, thoughtful and well written by William Safire, presidential speechwriter. It began:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace . . .
Thankfully, Mr. Nixon never had to utter these
words, and the Apollo astronauts safely returned from the Moon. But spaceflight is an inherently risky business. There have been three fatal NASA accidents (Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia) as well as two fatal Soyuz accidents in the Soviet Union. This danger raises a question that we hope and pray will never need to be answered, but one that is worth asking: What do you do if you’re stuck in space?
When I was training to be an Air Force pilot, I had to learn about ejection seats and the basics of parachute landings. It turns out that a lot can go wrong with your parachute during an ejection: It can be stuck in the seat, once it deploys the lines can become tangled, parachute panels can blow out, causing a faster descent rate, or it can have a “Mae West,” with a riser line wrapped over the parachute, causing it to have two rounded bulges instead of the normal round parachute shape. These problems all have fixes—you can pull yourself up to the chute via the risers, then let them go and hope that they will pop open the chute properly. You can manually deploy the chute if your chute is stuck in the backpack. You can delay the four-line jettison procedure that allows you to steer the chute, but that also causes it to sink faster. There are lots of things you can do if you have a parachute malfunction. But I’ll never forget one important piece of advice an old and crusty sergeant gave me when I was going through pilot training at Williams AFB in Arizona, during the fall of 1989: “After an ejection, you have the rest of your life to get the parachute deployed.”