How to Astronaut

by Terry Virts

  After a twenty-four-hour trip back to Houston on a NASA Gulfstream business jet, modified with special beds for deconditioned astronauts, I went straight to the astronaut gym to begin my rehabilitation program. There, Bruce Nieschwitz, my ASCR (the NASA acronym for strength and conditioning specialist), ran me ragged with all of the tasks I described in chapter 11. A week after I landed, I was nearly back to full strength, thanks to Bruce’s workouts. I went in and did rehab every day, even on weekends. I strongly believe that exercising every day while in space and then dutifully going to rehab every day once back on Earth is the key to minimizing bone and muscle loss. I only skipped four days of exercise while on the station—the three spacewalk days and the ammonia leak day we spent in the Russian segment thinking the station was going to die.

  In addition to physical strength, NASA also measured our balance. Before launch I had done a series of neuro-vestibular evaluations, standing in a movable box (think Halloween fun house), in a harness to prevent a fall, vision impaired so I could only see the moving wall in front of me. The researchers would abruptly jerk the box and measure the force pattern that my foot made as I attempted to remain standing and not fall. It was really annoying—like having someone pull a rug out from under you. If your foot was pressing erratically on the front and back and side, quickly changing its force distribution, it meant that your sense of balance wasn’t good. If the force pattern from your foot made a quick adjustment after the box shifted and quickly stabilized, it meant that your inner ear and brain and all of its balance software were working well. After each session, I was given a numerical score to evaluate my balance.

  It turns out that I have pretty good balance in general. But what absolutely shocked me was the test I did one week after landing. I scored better than I had before launch, nearly seven months earlier! The scientists had never seen that before, and I was personally shocked, but the data were there. My body readjusted to Earth extremely quickly. The first day was very painful, the next a little less, the next even less, and a week after coming home from a 200-day mission my balance score was better than it had been preflight. I was blessed with a body that was made to go to and from space.

  Beyond the physical is the psychological aspect of leaving and returning to Earth. This had me concerned. Would I miss my time in space? Would I feel out of place back home, in a predictable universe of meetings and kid activities and traffic and bills? Would I be depressed, as other astronauts had been? I looked at spaceflight like winning a Super Bowl or World Series or Academy Award. It’s an amazing thing, something that may happen only once or a few times if you’re really lucky, and then after it’s over, what do you do? The answer to my concern came to me on my second day on Earth. I had landed in Kazakhstan, made the twenty-four-hour trek back to Houston, and done my rehab workout and finally was set free. My son, who had turned sixteen and gotten his driver’s license while I was in space, said, “Dad, let’s go car shopping.” So I got in the car with him (he drove) and we went to the local Ford dealer. I vividly remember the first red light where we stopped, as I thought, “Well, I’m back on Earth. It’s like a switch in my brain just got moved from the ‘in space’ position to the ‘on Earth’ position, and it feels fine! Earth is 100 percent normal and I don’t miss space at all; I’m just back on the planet and it’s great.”

  Since that moment, I haven’t looked back. Flying in space was absolutely incredible, a blessing beyond belief. And now I’m back on Earth, and it’s awesome. We have a beautiful planet and some great people, along with plenty of problems, but it’s our planet. Now that I’m home I want to live my life with purpose, looking to the future, not stuck in the glory days of the past, and thankfully that’s exactly how my mental state has been since I came back down to Earth.

  Tragedy

  Being There for the Columbia Catastrophe

  This chapter is hard to write. The others have flowed onto the laptop; I didn’t even have to think as the words just moved from my brain to my computer. But this is one of the final chapters I’m writing for this book because it is the one I least wanted to write. It’s the one that hurts the most, but it is nonetheless a part of human spaceflight. Adventure comes at a cost, and sometimes adventurers do not make it home. This is my personal story of dealing with a space tragedy.

  We were waiting by the side of NASA’s Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at the Kennedy Space Center, where Columbia was supposed to land on Runway 33, on the morning of February 1, 2003. It was a bright, sunny Florida winter day, and everyone was exhausted. This mission had been planned for years, slipping time after time as the space shuttle program experienced technical problem after technical problem. Because STS-107 was purely a science mission, its priority was lower than that of the politically sensitive, space station assembly flights. This was to be the final shuttle flight not dedicated to the space station or Hubble Space Telescope, and her crew of one Israeli and six American astronauts had done a remarkable job performing that science during their mission. Today was the seventeenth day since launch on January 16, and everyone was ready for them to come home. The families were tired after so much stress and excitement and lost sleep, NASA’s flight control team was ready to bring them home after several weeks of nonstop work at mission control, and I’m sure the crew was ready as well.

  There we waited in the February morning sun, a group of about fifty family members, astronauts, and NASA support personnel, shielded from the prying eyes of the press. NASA had learned from the Challenger accident in 1986, when the shuttle exploded shortly after liftoff and family members, who were colocated with the press, were photographed in that moment of horror. There was now a detailed contingency action plan to keep families carefully sequestered during launch and landing, with specific steps to take in the event of disaster. As an official family escort, I knew I would be an integral part of any such plan. I had run across countless checklists and procedures during my time at NASA that were required reading: how to evacuate the building in the event of tornado, what to do if a hurricane hit Houston, etc. But this contingency action plan was one I took seriously.

  We were chatting with each other, small talk about the kids having to get back to school on Monday (it was a Saturday), what plumbing or computers had broken at home during the mission, gossip about who in the astronaut office was getting assigned to the next shuttle flights, who was sick, etc. Normal adult conversation while waiting for a space shuttle to land. NASA had piped in audio from mission control to a loudspeaker, and the normal chatter of crew-to-ground conversations, as well as the NASA TV description of landing, filled the air. About fifteen minutes before landing, Columbia’s crew stopped talking, and the CAPCOM, astronaut Charlie Hobaugh, made several “Columbia, Houston, comm check . . .” radio calls. No reply. I didn’t notice immediately because we were busy with small talk, but one of the family members came over to me and asked, “Hey Terry, what’s going on, there’s no comm?” I absently said that this was normal, the extreme temperatures during re-entry could block the radio signal to the shuttle, especially as it went through a series of S-turns, banking left and right to fly toward the landing site. I assured him it was OK, and we’d hear from them soon and went back to my chitchat.

  For a few moments. About two minutes later a hush came over the whole crowd, as the oppressive sound of silence on the loudspeaker dominated everything. I very quickly ran through some possible scenarios in my head. This could be a true communication system failure. But I knew how much redundancy there was—Columbia had radio links to communication satellites as well as antennae on the ground. Two UHF radios, just like in military jets, to talk to the ground. An extensive telemetry system that would provide mission control with data, even if there were no voice comm. I knew something really bad had happened by L-12 (twelve minutes before landing). We had no television or radio or news of any kind, and thank God these were the days before iPhones and Twitter. So we sat there, in the blind, waiting.

  By the time the g
iant clock had counted down to L-3 minutes, we all knew we should have heard the twin sonic booms from the orbiter flying overhead, still supersonic 50,000 feet up. But there was nothing but deafening silence. I knew the ground tracking radars and cameras would have zoomed in on Columbia by now. And I knew she wasn’t coming back to the SLF that day. Jerry Ross, one of our most senior astronauts, directed us to get the families into our rental vehicles and drive them to crew quarters, the astronaut hotel at KSC where we slept before and after missions, got suited up before launch, and were reunited with our families after a mission. We would all wait there for news. As the clock approached L-00:00:00 I knew what had happened. I had an overwhelming sense of sympathy for the people who had said there was nothing to worry about when a large piece of foam had hit Columbia’s wing eighty-one seconds after liftoff, seventeen days ago. My brain had processed that event, and I immediately, intuitively, knew that was the cause of a grave accident, long before I knew any of the actual details or had seen the tragic images of Columbia’s debris streaking high in the Texas sky.

  Several of the family members got in my SUV and we drove in silence, the longest fifteen minutes of my life, car radio off. I didn’t want them to hear a news report. My cell phone rang after a few minutes—it was my wife, who was crying, having seen the news on TV. I calmly said, “Hi, yes, we heard there is no comm with Columbia, and we are all driving to crew quarters. We don’t know any details yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as we do.” And quickly hung up, acting as though it was still a mystery. But from that brief call, I knew there was no mystery. Within minutes of arriving, Bob Cabana, another senior astronaut, came in to crew quarters and broke the news to the families and their astronaut escorts. Columbia was lost along with her crew. There were no survivors.

  My time as a family escort for STS-107 had begun several months before, when I heard that Rick Husband wanted to talk to me. I was a rookie, one of the new guys, and Rick was our senior Air Force astronaut and a shuttle commander. He was a big deal, and I was a nobody. So I immediately assumed I was in trouble when I heard I was to go talk with him. Much to my relief, he greeted me with his ever-present big Texas smile and was glad to see me. He wanted me to be one of his crew’s four family escorts. Most shuttle crews had only two, but because STS-107 had the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, their crew would have extra support to help with the added international scrutiny. I was blown away by this huge honor, one normally reserved for more senior astronauts. I immediately said yes and excitedly went home to share the big news. I felt this was one of the most important jobs of my life. I had no idea just how true that would be.

  And though it was never verbalized, everyone close to me was painfully aware of the dark side of spaceflight. The risk was real, and the consequences of failure were even more real to my family than most.

  I spent the next few months getting to know the families of the astronauts. My job would be to help them through all the major milestones of a shuttle flight: going to launch, escorting them into mission control for family video conferences (think space-Skype), keeping them up-to-date with the progress of the mission, and finally going back to Florida for landing. Not to mention helping kids go about their routines of school and activities, organizing launch and landing parties, and other mundane daily life things. I looked at this as a way to do whatever they needed while their astronaut was in space. I knew my family would appreciate the same support when it was my time to fly.

  The Columbia crew was special. Really special. First of all, they were all very good at their jobs. I sat in as an observer during one of their ascent simulations, the hardest and most challenging part of being an astronaut. I had thought that flying single-seat F-16s on night attack missions was the busiest a human being could be, until I trained as a shuttle pilot during ascent simulations. Watching Rick in the left seat as commander and Willie McCool in the right seat as pilot, along with Dave Brown and Kalpana Chawla as mission specialists, all working together during a constant stream of diabolical malfunctions dreamed up by the simulation supervisor, blew me away. As a pilot, or right seater, it seemed that I had no hope of ever being as good as Willie. He handled every emergency situation perfectly, communicated with Rick and mission control clearly, and seemed to be a robot, incapable of making a mistake. Seeing such a great crew was intimidating to say the least, and it set a bar for me to strive toward.

  As Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon was a true national hero. In a country marred by continuous strife, Ilan was a rare source of hope and unifying force within Israel. He had an air about him that made me think that he was capable of anything; in a room of a thousand people, he was the one who would rise above the crowd and everyone would trust and look to as leader. A decorated F-16 pilot, Ilan had been number 8 in the formation of eight F-16s that had bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor back in 1981. Being the last guy is always the most dangerous position in a formation, because by the time you flew over the target, all enemy antiaircraft guns would be awake and trained on you. Our World War II bomber pilots called this dubious distinction “tail-end Charlie.” He survived that mission over Iraq, sparking a legend that would only grow in his home country. More important than any Air Force or space success was his family. His beautiful and wonderful wife, Rona, meant the world to Ilan, and his four children were all special. I could tell, even at their young age, that they would all grow up to be impressive adults and leave a mark on the world, as their father already had. It was an honor and pleasure to serve him and his family.

  The rest of the crew was equally impressive. Laurel Clark was a Navy doctor who always had a smile on her face. Dave Brown was a bit of an underachiever—Navy fighter pilot, medical doctor, aircraft owner, he made me wonder why I had wasted my life away! Mike Anderson was a spaceflight veteran, fellow Air Force pilot, and payload commander, in charge of all science experiments on this NASA mission devoted entirely to science. His lovely wife would become a lifelong friend of mine. Kalpana Chawla had been born in India, emigrating to the USA when she was twelve. She was an amazing engineer and the kindest human I have ever known. Rick was a natural-born leader, full of West Texas wisdom and anecdotes (“You can’t swing a dead cat in here without hitting . . .” was one of my favorites), and his family became an extended family for me over the decade following the accident. Finally, Willie McCool, one of the smartest and most capable humans I have known. His wife, Lani, and I have become lifelong friends; she is an artist at heart and an incredible photographer, and a mentor to me. She has given me wisdom and helped me to see things in a new light as life has taken twists and turns that neither of us could have imagined back in the winter of 2003.

  The astronaut office is full of smart people. But the STS-107 crew was special—more than just smart, they were genuinely decent and remarkable humans, the kind of people I wanted to grow up to be like. It was an honor to serve them and a tragedy to lose them.

  Which is part of the reason why it hurt so badly. In the ensuing weeks and months and years, I never heard of any NASA manager or engineer who was deliberately at fault in this accident. The shuttle program was full of dedicated and smart people, and frankly this disaster hurt those who were directly responsible. Which is why I immediately felt bad for whoever had approved moving ahead after the “foam strike” that would ultimately kill the crew.

  In fact, I was to blame as much as anyone else at NASA. As family escort, I was getting a steady stream of mission updates, and a few days after launch an email came to me with a short video clip of the foam popping off the shuttle’s fuel tank into the 500-knot windstream and getting blasted back into Columbia’s wing, causing a split-second explosion as the shuttle continued its climb into orbit. I was immediately concerned and walked down the hall to a more senior astronaut, asking him if we could take some pictures of Columbia’s wing to see if there were any damage. I was no rocket scientist, but I knew that heating during re-entry was critical and that the leading edge of the wing was a particularl
y critical area, having a special heat shield to withstand the fiery plasma. I was told that they had looked at it and deemed it not to be a safety-of-flight issue. Besides, what could be done if there was damage? There were no repair kits on board, and the next shuttle wouldn’t be ready for at least a month even if they decided to launch a rescue mission. The crew would be OK, and besides, NASA didn’t want to bother the Air Force to ask them to take photos of any potential damage. I was actually told that by a senior astronaut. It didn’t make sense to me; I thought it would be much more prudent to get imagery of any damage, and if a serious problem were found at least we could try something, but I was a rookie at the bottom of the totem pole. I figured that those in charge must have known more than I did, since after all they had been flying shuttles for more than twenty years.

  I said OK and did nothing. Life went on for the next two weeks as I was bringing family members to mission control, taking kids out for pizza, forwarding mission update emails, and planning for landing. But that foam strike lingered in the back of my mind. I didn’t tell anyone about it because I didn’t want to raise concerns unnecessarily. But it was there, gnawing at my conscience. And as I stood on the tarmac watching that landing clock count down to 0, with no shuttle in sight, I knew exactly what had happened.

  At the end of the day, the problems that killed both the Columbia and Challenger crews were managerial, not technical. Yes, you could trace the accident to very specific problems: O-ring temperature limits on STS-51L or cryo-pumping foam insulation on STS-107. But at the heart of both issues was a management culture that was arrogant, that thought they knew things when they didn’t, that didn’t listen to those at the bottom of the chain of command, and that was more worried about external factors like keeping Congress happy with flight rates or not bothering the Air Force with crew safety. In the years immediately following both accidents, NASA had a rebirth of sorts, with a lot of soul-searching and a very healthy focus on safety. Unfortunately, as the years and decades go on, those lessons tend to be lost. I pray that this does not happen in the future.