How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  Fast-forward to the end of that third spacewalk. Things were going great. We were an hour and a half ahead of the timeline. My spacewalking partner had finished his tasks and was waiting inside the airlock for me to come in and close the hatch. The finish line was in sight when the call came from Houston: “Terry, we have a get-ahead task for you.” I had several thoughts—first was, “What the heck, hadn’t we agreed on no get-aheads?” That was really strange. On the other hand, I was feeling good and wasn’t in a hurry to go inside. Houston relayed that my task would be to go retrieve an equipment bag that had been left outside years before. How hard could that be? So I agreed to do it.

  I should have known better, but because I was feeling good and it wasn’t a difficult task I went ahead and did it.

  It turned out to be more difficult than I thought, and after about twenty minutes of minor struggle, I had the bag and was back at the airlock, ready to come inside. And whereas twenty minutes prior I had been feeling great, by this point I was tired. Also, because this was my first time as EV1 in the airlock, I would be closing the hatch for the first time, which turned out to be a much more tiring task than I had expected. Doing that task at the behest of Houston caused me to spend precious minutes at risk while solo in the vacuum of space and also dipped into my already depleted reservoir of strength. Not good.

  Which brings us to the lesson of this situation. Brief the flight and fly the brief. This was something that I had learned as a fighter pilot and was pretty much unwritten gospel at NASA and every other legitimate flying organization in the world. If you’re going to do a dangerous and complicated task, you plan it, brief it, and execute it. If something extraordinary happens you flex as required, but in general you don’t fly by the seat of your pants. That lesson has been learned time and again from lethal consequences. In this particular case, I had briefed the flight director that I would not do any get-aheads, but when Houston asked me to do one, I did it. That was bad on me. I was the flight lead, or EV1, the lead spacewalker. I should have known better, but because I was feeling good and it wasn’t a difficult task I went ahead and did it. And ended up more tired in the airlock than I should have been. The reality of a spacewalk is that you have to close that hatch manually. And I had just a little less gas in the tank than I would have had if I not done that get-ahead. I should not have agreed to do it when Houston asked.

  Fast-forward a few months. I’m back on Earth and doing my spacewalk debrief with the whole team. It was going well as we talked about how we got every task completed on those three EVAs. Then I remembered and asked the question, “Oh yeah, about that get-ahead, what was up with that? I thought we weren’t doing those?”

  Crickets. Nervous glances around the room, like the kids in A Christmas Story when the teacher was asking who made Flick stick his tongue to the frozen pole. So I walked over, shut the door, and then said, “OK, what really happened?” And I heard an unbelievable tale from several of the folks who had been in mission control that day. They described a conflict between the flight control team and the management person in the room, a representative of the FOD (Flight Operations Directorate), ostensibly there to provide guidance to the flight director if the situation called for it. That notwithstanding, the flight director is the boss, in charge of mission control and responsible for the safe execution of the mission.

  That day, March 1, 2015, FOD decided to tell the flight director to have the crew perform a get-ahead and go retrieve a storage bag. Flight informed him that we had agreed not to do any get-aheads, and what ensued was a full-blown conflict in mission control, while I was outside, oblivious to what was going down in Houston. When I heard this story, I was furious at the lack of professionalism on the part of FOD, which frankly put the safety of that EVA (i.e., my own pink butt) at risk, but there were no consequences for those who improperly used their management authority in the middle of critical, dynamic flight operations. At the end of the day, we finished the spacewalk well ahead of time with all tasks accomplished.

  There is a big lesson to learn from this experience. Brief the flight. Then fly the brief. And let the flight director direct the flight, not management. A lesson that applies to just about any industry.

  Alone in the Vacuum

  The Spacewalk Itself

  The best spacewalking advice I ever got was from a colleague of mine, Rick Mastracchio. He took me aside about four months before launch, while working out at the astronaut gym, and offered me this gem, from an experienced spacewalker to a rookie: “If you’re moving slow, you’re moving too fast.” Simple, witty, grammatically suspect, yet to the point. It captures one of the many nuggets of wisdom that every astronaut who goes outside must learn. Personally, I have always preferred to learn from others—let them make mistakes and learn the hard way, rather than me! This chapter is a hodgepodge of those lessons, things that you will need to know should you ever find yourself in a spacesuit attached to the ISS with a 140-foot tether pack, hatch open, hearing the words “go for EVA” from Houston.

  Let’s start with going outside for the first time. I had been in the airlock for close to an hour as we went through the depressurization procedure, we opened the hatch, and my crewmate went outside as I handed him his gear. Even though I was exposed to vacuum, it didn’t feel like it. Until I shimmied my body out, feet-first, inch by inch, barely fitting through the hatch diameter. And there I was, witnessing the most gorgeous, spectacular sunrise on the horizon a thousand miles away, a view that you honestly can’t imagine. It was still nighttime on the planet below, the blackest black I had ever seen. The first thing I wanted to do was verify that I wouldn’t have any vertigo, something that a few of my colleagues had reported. So I attached a tether to the handrail in front of me and let go. Hands free. Floating, watching the Earth floating by at 5 miles per second, 250 miles below, in the early morning twilight. It’s a moment that I’ll never forget, something that I’m sure is etched in the soul of every spacewalker. And as is the case for so many moments in space, it was immediately time to get back to work.

  Before that sublime moment, we had to get all of our equipment ready, so let’s start with tethers. Everything that you go outside with needs to be attached to something that is attached to something else, etc. When I watch the GoPro video I shot during my spacewalks, it is amazing just how cluttered the area immediately in front of my chest was. First is the bulk of the spacesuit. Then the bulk of the various tools that I carried outside. Then the large, larger, and largest equipment bags that were attached to me or carried by me. Don’t forget the camera that began life as an oversize professional camera and then grew to twice that dimension when contained within its special EVA protective covering. The list goes on. There is a lot of stuff you have to keep track of, each item connected by a thin tether that seems to be constantly trying to wrap itself around something else.

  There are several different types of tethers. Astronauts themselves use an ERCM (NASA acronym for safety tether), a large, lunchbox-size and peanut-shaped device that contains either 85 feet or 55 feet of braided metal cable. This cable is attached on one end to the spacesuit and on the other end to the ISS, and it is never removed from either end without first connecting a new tether. This make-before-break principle is the foundation of spacewalk tether management. A few years prior to my spacewalks, our EVA training team came up with a genius idea—as they are wont to do—to make a safety tether pack comprised of two safety tethers connected to each other in serial, giving the astronaut 170 feet of line. This was a huge improvement over the old system of just using one ERCM at a time, because we couldn’t go very far from the airlock before having to lay down a new tether, a time-consuming and painful process. The new safety tether pack allowed us to go from the airlock, the departure point for every spacewalk, to just about any point on the station. Genius.

  Having a safety tether is one thing, but keeping track of it is an entirely different ball game. As we crawl around on the surface of the station, hand over h
and, we have to route the tether, shepherding it with our hands, wrapping it around handrails or other stationary parts to keep it tucked away, close to the station surface. We call that a poor man’s fairlead, when you just run the cable behind a piece of equipment, like hanging a string of Christmas lights on an existing post. However, sometimes a more substantial way to keep the tether in place is called for, so we attach a smaller cloth tether to structure and wrap it around the safety tether, keeping it securely in place. That’s like nailing in a special hook to hold your Christmas lights securely fixed. The important thing was to know where your tether was at all times and not get it mixed up with your wingman’s or tangled with something else. Been there, done that. Even worse would be if your wingman installed a piece of equipment on top of your tether, in which case you’d be stuck outside until you removed the offending equipment.

  Most smaller pieces of equipment or tools were attached with RETs, which is the NASA acronym for small tether. These devices were about the size of a flip phone and contained a few feet of cloth string. They were used to hold on to just about everything we brought outside, and we normally used between ten and twenty of them per spacewalk, and sometimes more. RET is not only a noun but also a verb—“RET to that CLB before releasing it from the BRT to transfer to EV2” is a sentence that makes perfect sense to about 400 people at the Johnson Space Center, and precisely nobody else on Earth. It can also be a verb—“the LEE is RET’d to the ball stack.” I’ve never heard it used as an adjective, but it’s not inconceivable, especially since I was a math major and wouldn’t know the difference.

  Another common tether is an AET, which stands for adjustable tether. These are fabric tethers designed to withstand the extreme temperatures and vacuum of space; they’re the size of a small belt and can be used to hold things in place. You clip an “adjustable” to structure, pull it tight, and whatever it was attached to is now attached to the station. A large piece of equipment weighing several hundred pounds may be attached to a temporary stowage location using AETs, because there’s basically no slack in them. It should also be noted that “adjustable” is a noun only; it sounds very amateurish to use that term as a verb or modifier. For the grammar majors out there . . .

  There are a few other exotic tethers, first among them the MWS EE, otherwise known as the grabber daddy, or the mini workstation end effector. It is a big metal claw, the size of a ski glove, on a retractable cloth string directly in front of your chest. Once at your work site you attach it to a handrail, and it keeps you from floating way. I found it to be an extremely useful piece of equipment, though it wasn’t a true safety tether. In fact, a friend of mine was using it one day and the clamp mechanism broke apart. If that had been his only method of tethering himself to structure, he would have floated away. Luckily it wasn’t. I always used it as a secondary method of tethering, mostly as a way to keep myself in place, like having a piece of string tied from your chest to a structure in front of you.

  A similar device isn’t really a tether at all, though its official NASA acronym is BRT (body restraint tether). It is a large, 2-foot-long metal hose attached to the left side of the spacesuit. The end is a large, obnoxious metal clamp that requires a pretty good squeeze with your gloved hands to open and is designed to clamp onto a handrail. Once the end is clamped in place and the BRT is oriented in the desired direction, you rotate the end of it, like tightening a hose onto a faucet, and the whole mechanism stiffens up. It’s an ingenious system that must have been a mechanical engineer’s dream to design. Though it takes a bit of muscle to manipulate, once it is tightly clamped and stiffened you are held in place fairly well, allowing you to use both hands for work. It’s not as strong as having your feet in an APFR (NASA acronym for foot restraint), but it’s very handy and only takes about thirty seconds to get it set up, whereas the APFR might take thirty minutes or more to retrieve, set up, and stow when you’re finished.

  Besides managing tethers and equipment, you have to be able to find your way around while outside. This may not seem like a big deal, and when the sun is out, it’s a fairly simple task to look around and see where you are. However, at night it’s an entirely different task. It is dark outside in space at night. I mean dark. And though your headlamp is on, it’s a narrow-beam flashlight that shows only what’s directly in front of you, like the spacesuits in most space movies. There are usually a few station floodlights on at various locations, but they aren’t intuitive and definitely don’t give you the big picture of which way is up or down. It’s like having a porch floodlight on in a very big backyard on a very dark night. So you really need to keep track of where you are. We call this having SA, or situational awareness. It’s a skill useful in all aspects of being an astronaut, or fighter pilot, or life in general. There are some pretty funny stories of guys getting lost. They basically had to crawl around until they came to something they recognized, which can be embarrassing and time-consuming. Thankfully, it never happened to me, but who am I to judge? There are those who have and those who will.

  Only a millimeter of plastic between my face and the deadly vacuum of space.

  It’s also interesting to go through a day/night cycle while outside. Mission control gives spacewalkers a heads-up that the sun is about to come up or go down. If you ever listen to the audio of a NASA spacewalk, you will hear the occasional, “Two minutes to sunrise/sunset.” That lets the crew know that they will have to raise or lower their sun visor shortly. There is also a set of lights on the helmet that you could theoretically turn off and on every forty-five minutes, but I just left mine on the whole time. Raising my hand up to the top of my helmet and pushing buttons to turn on lights required time and muscle energy that I wasn’t willing to expend, so on they stayed.

  When the sun is up, it is hot, +250 degrees they say. I assumed Fahrenheit, though nobody ever specified. And when the sun was down, it was cold, -250, which must have been Fahrenheit because -250°C would be basically absolute zero. One of the impacts of the cold night is that your fingers could get very cold, like when skiing, so NASA added some battery-powered glove heaters. They turn on with a cloth tab on the back of your gloves, but this required a fair amount of effort to grab and yank. Plus my fingers never really got cold, so I never bothered with the heaters. Except one time.

  Before each of my spacewalks, we had a briefing from our ground engineers about when they predicted that we would be cold or hot. For nearly all of my three spacewalks, more than nineteen-plus hours outside, I was predicted to be comfortable, with the exception of one cold and one hot moment. I distinctly remember the first moment; I suddenly got very cold and recalled that my EVA engineers had predicted that precise time and location. Impressive! I was about to reach for the glove heaters when I noticed the sun about to rise, so I waited a few seconds. Sure enough, as soon as that blinding light popped above the horizon my chills instantly vanished. It was impressive. Millions of tons per second of nuclear fusion does a pretty good job of keeping the solar system warm! It made me realize just how cold most of the universe must be, far from the warmth of a sun.

  I felt like an ant getting melted by a twelve-year-old with a magnifying glass, only in this case it was God melting me.

  On a different occasion, I was on the very front of the station, at the forward end of Node 2; it’s where PMA-2, the module where my space shuttle had docked, is attached, and where future human capsules will dock. Suddenly, I felt a heat unlike anything I had ever felt; it was like pins and needles. My body intuitively knew it was heat, though it was a different sensation, like infrared energy as opposed to a normal sensation from hot air. It was at the exact time and location the engineers had predicted. I moved a few feet, away from the infrared energy that was pouring off the jet-black surface of PMA-2 and being reflected by the shiny aluminum of Node-2, and was immediately comfortable again. It was fascinating to viscerally feel this extreme thermal environment in my body, if only for a few moments. I felt like an ant getting melted by a twelve
-year-old with a magnifying glass, only in this case it was God melting me.

  There were two basic tasks that I needed to get done on my three spacewalks. First was laying cable, just like Larry the Cable Guy. Our job was to route power and data cables from the station’s central hub out to the docking ports and radio antennae that future capsules will use. We eventually installed more than 400 feet of cables, the most ever done in one project. This low-tech task involved bringing out large bags full of cables that were prelabeled and stored in the precise order and orientation in which they would need to be removed, and then attaching the bag near the start point. The first step was to plug one end of the cable to its electronic box. After that the cable was secure—no need to tether it, alleviating a huge pain. Next, we rolled it out of the storage bag, fixing it to the station every 10 feet or so using wire ties, roughly 2-foot-long pieces of stiff wire that wrap around fixed structures like a twist tie on a loaf of bread. Except they work in the extreme environment of space and cost a few hundred dollars each. A low-tech solution to a high-tech problem—the epitome of innovation.

  My other task was lubricating the station’s robotic arm, which had been outside in the extreme space environment for over a decade and had some joints that were getting creaky. This task involved close coordination between myself and Samantha Cristoforetti, who was inside flying the arm. I was stabilized in an APFR next to the airlock, grease gun and lube tool ready to go, while Samantha maneuvered the arm right in front of me. I would put grease on the arm’s sticky bolt or mechanism, and then she would quickly rotate the joint to the next position. Because she was so fast and efficient at flying the arm, we were able to get all of its key parts lubricated in our allotted two and a half hours. I was told that this was the first time a crew had gotten through each of the required tasks, and it was all because of Samantha.