by Terry Virts
I learned some painful lessons from this experience. If you see a problem, speak up. Even if you are junior, you need to make sure the bosses are aware if something is seriously awry. Also, just because things have been going well doesn’t mean that you have been making the right decision—you may have simply been getting lucky. NASA had launched shuttles with foam falling off for twenty years and never fully addressed the problem, because they had never lost a crew. As a leader, have a culture of debriefing where rank doesn’t matter. The list goes on, with many subjects for a different book.
The Columbia incident really hit home for me when it finally was time for my first ride into space, seven years later. My own family had experienced the STS-107 accident right along with me; they were there when I got home from work after a day of family-escort-related duties during the mission, and after attending yet another funeral or dedication ceremony in the weeks and months and years after the accident. My son and I went on a father/son camping trip with one of the Columbia crew’s sons years later. 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. This is something that is rarely discussed or even acknowledged publicly, but I can tell you firsthand, the stress is real and it takes a toll on all involved—least on the astronaut and most on the family. It did in my case, anyway.
With all of this in mind, I took some private time on the evening before my first launch and closed the door to my room at astronaut crew quarters, got out a pen and paper, and began to write. And weep. A final letter to my children and my wife, in case I died on Endeavour during STS-130. That was hard. Feeling those kinds of emotions wasn’t usual for me as a fighter pilot and I rarely verbalized them, a problem I still have to this day. It’s a bad trait when it comes to intimate human relations, but a good one when you are flying fighters into combat, or rockets into space. One of the harsh realities of my chosen profession. I knew this letter would be something treasured for the rest of their lives should the worst come to pass. Thank God it didn’t.
I recently heard a fellow astronaut, full of bravado, say that “we don’t ride into space with our fingers crossed.” His point was that astronauts are all so well prepared that we know everything that could possibly go wrong and are ready to deal with any contingency. Of course, I knew better. There were a thousand things that might have killed me during launch and they were all beyond my control: a leaky fuel line, a hole in a combustion chamber, a bad weld in a critical structural joint. Most of these hazards would probably spiral out of control in fractions of a second, with nothing that anyone could do. The reality was and is and will always be that when you strap on a rocket, there is a chance that something could go wrong and kill you. With absolutely nothing you could do about it.
It is a risk that astronauts choose to assume themselves, but their families bear the brunt. When the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 hit, it was labeled a “moral hazard,” where society had to assume the risk and therefore pay the cost of bad Wall Street decisions. In accounting you could call it an improper matching of revenue and expenses. When riding rockets, it meant that astronauts got all the fun while their families worried and wondered if they would ever see them again.
I sat there alone, weeping, letting all of my emotion out while I had this final chance, hours before my launch, to write what could become the last communication from me to those closest to me. After the envelopes were sealed and placed in an obvious place where my CACO (NASA acronym for the astronaut assigned to help your family in case you died) would find them. Then it was time to go down to the robotics simulator and do one final practice run, removing Node 3 from the payload bay of Endeavour and attaching it to the ISS, before I would be doing that for real in five days’ time. Such was spaceflight. Moments of intense emotion, followed quickly by a reality check and getting back to work.
Exploration is dangerous, and space is completely unforgiving. You need to do things right, you need to do things smartly, you need to be humble, and you need to be lucky if you are going to survive. At the end of the day, space travel is a very human endeavor. One that is full of real people with real families—spouses, kids, parents, siblings, friends. It is risky, and as an astronaut you need to do the cost-benefit analysis to be sure that it is worth it. Because you will be subjecting your loved ones to a very real and painful risk if things don’t go well.
We miss you, Columbia crew. The world is a worse place without you. I hope we learn the lessons that transcend borders from the lives you led. I hope that NASA remembers the lessons it learned from your loss. And I am thankful to God that my letters never had to be read.
No Bucks, No Buck Rogers
Meeting with Washington Politicians After a Spaceflight
There is a long-standing tradition of astronauts making the rounds in DC after their mission. John Glenn famously addressed a joint session of Congress after becoming the first American in orbit, and there is a great photo of the Apollo 11 crew in quarantine inside an Airstream trailer speaking with President Nixon. The connection between American politicians and astronauts is one that began in the early days of the space program and has continued to this day. For all of the political rancor and disagreement and divisiveness in DC, one constant remains true: Just like the timeless Axe commercial, nothing beats an astronaut.
Nowadays there are two flavors of postflight Washington visits that astronauts take after their spaceflight. The first kind is the White House visit, which depends on the president. Some presidents are really into space and invite nearly every space crew to visit, and others don’t. In 2010, President Obama invited our STS-130 crew to the Oval Office; it was one of several times I have been to the White House and a highlight of my time at NASA.
There seems to be a perennial battle between astronauts and NASA HQ about what to wear for these visits. Astronauts inevitably want to wear business attire, but NASA wants us to wear the “blue suit,” the easily identifiable NASA-blue jumpsuit we wear when flying T-38s and also when doing public speaking. I was firmly on the side of business attire for events as important as the White House, but every crew had to fight its own battle when it was time to head to DC. There was a legendary story from a few years back, when NASA would routinely force astronauts to wear the blue flight suit. Soon after George W. Bush was elected, he invited the next shuttle crew for a visit, and HQ immediately beat them into submission by forcing them to wear the blue suit. When they showed up in the Oval Office wearing their jumpsuits the president immediately took note and expressed his disapproval, saying, “We normally wear a coat and tie in this office,” as the whole crew shrank in embarrassment, glaring at their NASA HQ escort. Personally, I have to agree with W on that one—a flight suit is too dressed down for the Oval Office.
I was very proud of Zambo, our STS-130 commander, when he held off the NASA HQ assault and got approval for our crew to wear suits and ties. The big day began at the White House security office, and when we showed up a very famous Army general was waiting in line. I was honestly not a fan of his, because of his public politics. We were whisked through security while he was stuck there being hassled and delayed, and I had a good chuckle over that. Next, we were given a very brief tour of the White House, where we saw a large table with a television set in one of the conference rooms and I immediately recognized it—it was the same room where we had done a Skype call to Mr. Obama a few weeks earlier, from space!
Finally, at the appointed time a guy in a suit wearing sunglasses (I wasn’t sure why, because it wasn’t that bright inside the White House) with earbuds and a bulge in his sport coat came out and called us into the Oval Office. I always chuckled at those Secret Service guys, because they all look just like their Men in Black counterparts, “Agent J, Agent K.” The meeting itself was exactly what you’d expect: Our crew stood, shook hands, and thanked the president for the visit, then he smiled and took some pho
tos and asked us questions. When he asked, “What was it like to come back to Earth?” Zambo said, “Terry, why don’t you answer that one?” I told him about being dizzy and feeling really heavy, the standard stuff. Afterward I kicked myself, because I meant to tell him the story of how a day after landing I was in the backyard playing basketball with my son, and I just felt so heavy; I would grunt and heave with all my effort but just couldn’t get the ball up to the rim. It was comical, and I think that as a basketball fan Mr. Obama would have appreciated that story. Oh well, next time.
Following the White House visit we took a trip to the Hill, where we met with twenty senators and congressmen. Before being cleared to meet with the big guys and gals, we reported to the Legislative Affairs office at NASA HQ to get our briefing. It was a very controversial time in human spaceflight because just a few weeks prior Charlie Bolden, the NASA administrator, had canceled the Constellation program, President Bush’s plan to go back to the Moon and eventually on to Mars. It had been clear since Inauguration Day in 2009 that there would be some big changes at NASA, but this had been a huge change, and frankly a serious setback. The space shuttle program was drawing to a close and now its follow-on program was also being canceled, leaving us entirely dependent on the Russian Soyuz to get to the ISS, and without a vision or plan to go beyond the ISS. It was as if I were watching a train speeding toward a bridge that was out, in slow motion, and couldn’t do anything about it. Sure enough, it took a decade before we once again launched astronauts from US soil, and though we are trying to jump-start a Moon program, it will be much less capable than Constellation would have been.
Given that backdrop, I knew I would be doing a lot of tongue-biting when visiting the Hill. Our Legislative Affairs escorts were nice enough, and they themselves understood the disaster that had befallen NASA, but they had to toe the party line and try to give us something coherent to say. Our crew decided it would be best to just talk about our mission to the space station and avoid the mess that NASA’s human spaceflight policy had become. Off to the Hill we marched, bouncing between senators and representatives, Republicans and Democrats, members with NASA centers in their districts and those who had no idea what NASA stood for. Despite the gigantic Constellation-cancellation elephant in the room, it was a great visit—with headquarters handlers looking over our shoulders. They were good guys, but it felt like having a Soviet political officer hovering there to ensure we remained ideologically pure. It was kind of funny. Kind of.
When we would visit a Republican who understood space policy, they would say, “Look, I know you can’t say what you’re thinking, but this whole Constellation debacle is a mess, we will be depending on the Russians, we don’t have a plan for the future, etc., etc., etc.” There was a lot of ranting and raving, and I silently agreed with them. I was not alone in my extreme disappointment. When we visited Democrats, they were less up front in expressing their frustration, but the ones who had NASA centers in their districts were clearly annoyed. There was a third category—the politicians who had no interest in NASA. There was no space bacon for them to bring home to get them reelected. These were friendly, polite meetings; we would smile, get our picture taken, give them our crew montage as a gift, and move on, scratching our heads. “Why did we just visit that person? Those are ten minutes of our lives that none of us will ever get back.”
Speaking of photos—Zambo had worked out a genius compromise regarding the blue suits. After being pummeled with requests to wear the full flight suit, he negotiated that we would bring a blue jacket to put over our business shirts for photos. This allowed the congressional members to get a photo op with all-American-hero astronauts in blue NASA attire, and we were able to take the flight jackets off and get back to suit-and-tie as soon as we were done. Win-win. Zambo should be in Congress, in my opinion. That was surely one of the only compromises that has happened in Washington in recent decades.
Fast-forward five years to my next mission, Expedition 42/43. I once again traveled to Washington for a Hill postflight visit, along with my European Space Agency/Italian crewmate Samantha Cristoforetti. For some reason, NASA did not invite our third crewmember, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, which was a bit rude. We also were not invited to the White House on this trip; those visits had mostly dried up with the end of the shuttle program unless there was something unique about the crew. So off to the Hill we tromped, Samantha and myself, into an environment where the 2016 election was front and center.
This time I was the commander, and we were a much smaller group. I was actually alone for some of the visits, so I was much more open and forthright with my opinions about space policy, opinions grounded in reality and not ideology. I spoke my mind, which the senators and congressmen seemed to appreciate and NASA did not balk at. One of the key points I made was that space policy was primarily limited not by rocket science, but rather by political science. By that I meant that we can’t massively change space policy every four or eight years because the next president hates the last president and wants to pursue a different ideology. Space is hard and it doesn’t care about political ideology, it only cares that F = m × a. Every time I used the “rocket science vs. political science” line, I heard resounding agreement. One member lit up and turned to his aide and said, “Write that down,” and I was actually quoted in his committee hearing the following week.
Every single member, without exception, agreed with me, saying, “You are so right, and if it wasn’t for the folks on the other side of the aisle we could be getting this or that done.” I would have chuckled to myself had this not been such a tragic commentary on our twenty-first-century political system. I have since concluded that our two-party system is broken and badly in need of a third, centrist party, one that represents the views of most Americans. The issues affected by partisan dysfunction are incredibly serious and dwarf space policy. We need to make some fundamental changes to our politics, and soon. The subject of another book.
I have had several other opportunities to visit the White House in my capacity as an astronaut. After the Columbia accident in 2003, President Bush invited the families of the STS-107 crew to visit him in Washington, and I traveled with them as one of their family escorts. We had all been briefed to expect a very quick visit; the families would take their pictures with the president, they would exchange a few words, and that would be it. When we arrived, both President and Mrs. Bush were there to meet us, and they invited everyone into the Oval Office for a group photo. There must have been thirty people, between family members, astronaut escorts, and NASA HQ folks. Next, they led us all on a tour of the entire White House. I think we saw every room, with the president sharing the history of every detail. I was really impressed.
After the tour, we gathered back in the Oval Office. One of the children asked, “Don’t you have a dog?” The president smiled and said yes and abruptly called out, “Barney!” A wall opened and a big man in a bulging suit and sunglasses with ear buds ran in a few seconds later, holding a Scottish terrier in his arms. He deposited the hound on the rug and the kids were full of joy, chasing the little guy onto the South Lawn, Secret Service agent jogging in trail. They ran that dog as far as we could see, and then back again, disapproving Barney followed by kids followed by agents J and K. By this point, the dog was breathing so hard I thought it would die, and another agent appeared, scooped him up, and whisked poor Barney away through a different door in a different wall. Our visit was over shortly after that, and the entire group, regardless of political affiliation, was astounded by how much personal time and attention the president had spent with us. He genuinely cared about the space program and was personally engaged in trying to give whatever comfort he could to the families who were suffering so badly. It was a lesson in leadership for me.
Opportunities to visit the White House have continued after my time at NASA ended. I was invited to speak at a meeting of the National Space Council (NSC) in 2018, where they were discussing human exploration policy. Iro
nically, it was the same meeting where President Trump announced that there would be a Space Force. Even more ironically, before that meeting, as our group of attendees was walking through the security gate to enter the White House, a lobbyist friend of mine tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “Terry, a bird just crapped on your head.” Great, who actually has this happen to them? My buddy assured me that this was a sign of good luck. I was walking next to an Air Force three-star general, who was also a former F-16 pilot, and I grabbed him and said, “Sir, I need a wingman.” We found a restroom, and he grabbed some wet paper towels and cleaned up my noggin.
I was immensely thankful and walked out into the waiting room where some of the cabinet and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were mingling. While talking with the chairman, the most senior uniformed officer in the military, I called him “Mr. Secretary,” because I thought he was Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense. When he corrected me and said, “I’m not the Secretary, I’m the CJCS,” I about died from embarrassment. I told him it was the biggest faux pas of my career, but it was his fault because he didn’t have a nametag on (generals don’t have to wear nametags because everyone is supposed to know their name). He had a good laugh, and we went on to have a great conversation. What a beginning to my big day, when I was about to speak at the White House!