by Terry Virts
The council was discussing NASA’s plans to create Gateway, a mini space station in orbit around the Moon. I had been vocally opposed to this plan because it would make getting to the Moon more expensive and time-consuming and was fundamentally a self-licking ice cream cone, conceived to provide a raison d’être for some very large NASA programs. Coincidentally, the congressmen whose districts stood to gain billions of dollars for these projects were its biggest proponents. I had even written several op-eds opposing it before the NSC meeting. Nonetheless, the White House invited me, knowing that I did not approve of NASA’s plans. This really impressed me; in Washington you don’t often see government organizations or politicians willing to have, much less encourage, public dissent, but there I was, telling the vice president and much of the cabinet that I thought this was a bad idea.
After the meeting, I must have gotten a “thank you!” from a hundred folks in all corners of the aerospace industry: NASA insiders, corporate executives, DoD officials. Everyone seemed to agree that Gateway was a bad and expensive and inefficient plan, but nobody would say that publicly because their business or contract depended on it. The Gateway plan has become so large that nearly every contractor at NASA has a stake in it. So onward we go, pursuing a plan that is a bad idea but nobody can stop, because congressional representatives and senators need to bring home the bacon and contractors need to keep their contracts. Nonetheless, it was a fun trip to the White House, bird poop and faux pas notwithstanding.
As astronauts, we hold a special position in the eyes of many, not only with respect to space policy, but throughout the nation and even the world. Many people hold astronauts in high regard, and in a universe (pun intended) that is usually full of spiteful, partisan politics, space exploration and those of us who have been fortunate to go there can be a breath of fresh air. Most of my colleagues dreaded their postflight Hill visits, but I really enjoyed them. I have gotten to know some extremely smart, experienced, and dedicated staffers working on various committees or at the White House, underpaid and overworked. But DC is also populated by some folks who aren’t smart, experienced, or dedicated when it comes to space policy, and often they make capricious decisions based on bringing home that bacon. That’s no way to run a space agency. It needs to be about the rocket science, not about the political science.
Space Tourism
What You Need to Know Before Signing Up
The desire to travel into space, to visit the stars, probably predates Homo sapiens. I am sure that our Neanderthal ancestors looked to the heavens and wondered what it would be like to be a star voyager. An astronaut. In the near future, such travel is about to become much more accessible. Companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will be offering rocket flights into space, on suborbital missions that will give their passengers a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the curved arc of our planet and her thin blue atmosphere. A company called World View will be offering balloon flights to the upper reaches of our atmosphere, where you will see the blackness of space and the curve of our planet. These experiences will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars initially, though hopefully they will eventually drop to the five-figure range. Which means they will be accessible to millions of people across the globe, unlike the few tourists who have purchased rides to the ISS for tens of millions of dollars. A golden age of space tourism is about to unfold.
Many of you (maybe most, by this point in the book?) would love to take the giant leap of flying into space. And I’m sure that some of you will, if only for a few minutes. So here is my advice for you.
First, take the meds. You will only be in space for a short time, so the odds of getting sick are low, but don’t risk it. Take the medication that your flight surgeon recommends. This experience is so precious that you don’t want it ruined by feeling like you’re going to barf. I think that a very large percentage of average people without high-performance jet fighter experience would feel nauseous if exposed to weightlessness if only for a few minutes, so don’t think twice. Better living through chemistry. That’s my motto.
Second, don’t focus on photography. You will only have a few minutes to experience the sensation of weightlessness and take in the view of our planet in a way that you never have before. Soak it in. Make it stick in your mind. Take brain pictures. Let the onboard cameras film the view; I am sure that these companies will have an array of high-def cameras rolling the entire time. Get a good picture of you with the Earth in the background, properly exposed and in focus. This is mandatory. Get a few of those. And then enjoy the few minutes of being in space without worrying about other photos. It will all end much quicker than you think. You will be able to watch the footage that the onboard cameras capture for the rest of your life, but make sure you sear those images into your brain. Your psyche. Your soul.
Think about floating before you go. When I was in Air Force pilot training, we used to chair-fly the next day’s flight so that we would be ready for whatever our instructor would throw at us. We would sit in our office, a printout of the T-37 or T-38 cockpit in front of us, and think through every step and every procedure and every maneuver that we would fly, from engine start to acrobatics to engine shutdown. In the same way, chair-fly your spaceflight. Think of what takeoff will be like. Of what will happen during countdown. Of what it will be like to experience high g or zero g. Of what it will be like to float around. To exercise restraint and not flail your arms and legs around when it feels like you are falling. To do a few practice weightless maneuvers, gently touching the wall in front of you and feeling your body quickly move away. Of floating something to one of your fellow crewmates.
There are so many experiences that you will have in those precious few minutes—think about how you will experience them and do them all in your mind over and over before you fly, so that you can record them in your brain during those few precious minutes in space, capturing them to share with your friends and family. That is preparation that you will not regret.
Before launch, take time to get to know your fellow crewmates. Have a special dinner the night before launch. Make a mission patch that you all share and give away to friends and family. Fly a bag of those patches in space; they will be precious gifts to give away for years to come. Set aside a special time the night before launch to make toasts and celebrate the amazing experience that you will have the next day.
If the space launch companies offer different locations, consider the time of year and the view that you will have. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will initially launch from Texas and New Mexico, but if they eventually offer other locations around the world, think of the view you want to have. Do you want to see the desert southwest of the United States, which is spectacularly beautiful? Or maybe the deserts of the Middle East? If they ever offer a night aurora view, I would highly recommend it. They may eventually launch from Norway or Finland in December or January, and on a night when the sun is active, the view of the northern lights would be spectacular. I’m not sure what the future holds for these companies, but this is something to consider. No matter where you launch from, I can promise you that the experience of seeing your home planet below you, while you float in space, will be spectacular.
This chapter could not have been written just a few years ago, but trips like these will be a very real possibility in the very near future. I hope that many people are able to enjoy the sublime experience of spaceflight, if only for a few minutes. However, before getting overly excited, there is one thing that everyone needs to be aware of, no matter if they are launching in a rocket, spaceplane, or balloon. And that is—space is hard. And dangerous. These tourist flights will not be without risk, and if you decide to do it, there is less than a 100 percent probability that you will return. If you can live with that possibility, and more important, if your family will support you, then go for it.
Flying in space is an experience that very few humans have ever enjoyed. I promise you that it will be unforgettable. Start saving up now. And r
emember one thing: Take the meds.
Are We Alone? Is There a God? and Other Minutiae
My Take on Some Minor Questions
There are a few questions that everyone has about space travel, beyond the “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” and “What is it like?” They are some of the deepest questions that humans have ever pondered, questions that have confounded and informed and guided and challenged philosophers for centuries: Is there a God? Are there intelligent beings out there? I’m not sure why many believe that astronauts are particularly qualified to answer these questions; I for one do not have a PhD in religion or biochemistry, or anything for that matter. However, I did spend a fair amount of time off our planet and was maybe somehow closer to God and/or aliens, so that qualifies me to a small extent. I’ll give it a shot.
First, the easy one. Is there a God? Maybe my insight will settle this matter once and for all and unite humans from all faiths around the globe! Or I can simply offer my own insights and perspective. I will address this from my own point of view, from my own experiences, and from what I’ve found to be true. I’ll be as scientific as possible and not speak of religious views but simply share my observations about life and the universe.
One of the most important things I did in space was perform science investigations on my own body. Ultrasound scans of my brain, heart, and eyes. Laser and infrared measurements of my eyes. Constant measurement of my cardiopulmonary function, my weight, changes in height and dimension, the list goes on. I performed experiments on plants, worms, tissue samples, and rodents, learning more about biology and the human body than I ever imagined. And what I learned was unequivocal. Every single experiment I did pointed to a creator.
Let’s take for example a wineglass. Imagine setting a pile of silicon on a rock in the mountains and waiting a billion years. In fact, let’s have a billion piles of silicon, all sitting there for a billion years. Let there be wind, lightning, rain, storms, radiation, snow, and ice. Anything you can imagine happening in nature. At the end of those billion years, there would not be a wineglass. The random processes of nature could never create something as simple as a wineglass. Now imagine how much more infinitely complex an organism such as a single-cell amoeba is than a wineglass. It can reproduce, has DNA, has a variety of cell organs that convert solar energy into chemical energy, etc. Some of these organisms can even move and respond to their environment.
If something as simple as a glass wouldn’t randomly create itself, how can a simple single-cell organism create itself? I was recently told that every living cell is comprised of between millions and trillions of molecules. As a scientifically minded individual, I just don’t see any plausible scenario where lightning and wind and cosmic radiation would suddenly organize that many molecules from the primordial soup of water and carbon-based molecules and amino acids into a single simple cell. A living being, capable of reproducing with unimaginably complex DNA. Again, I’m no PhD or biochemist or evolutionary biologist. But common sense and general scientific knowledge tell me that couldn’t happen without some help. Another thing I’ve noticed is that something as simple as cleaning my garage never happens on its own. Disorder in my daily life never turns to order without my effort. Things tend to degenerate to a more basic state, not a more organized one. It’s the nature of how the universe works.
Because of these basic observations, I don’t think that life would spontaneously happen without a creator. A wineglass wouldn’t. A watch wouldn’t. A clean garage wouldn’t. And something as remarkable and complex as life certainly wouldn’t. In my simple, fighter-pilot brain, the existence of life is de facto proof that there is a creator. Res ipsa loquitur. The thing speaks for itself. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t natural laws that regulate life and evolution; of course there are. I’m simply saying that science leads me to conclude that someone had to set things in motion, to implement the laws of nature, and to create life. It doesn’t make sense, from a scientific point of view, that life could happen without someone very smart behind it.
Humans have been studying the natural world for millennia, and we have barely scratched the surface of ultimate scientific knowledge.
Beyond biology, consider the physical universe. From the ultrasmall to the ultrahuge, it is absolutely amazing. On the small end of the scale, physicists are constantly trying to find smaller and smaller subatomic particles. String theory is a popular idea in modern physics that describes the smallest of small things. This theory posits that there is a limit to how small matter can be, and it is 10^-33 m. That’s small. A 1 with 33 zeros to the left of it, before you get to the decimal point. Let’s write that out: 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001 meter. That’s the smallest possible size particle, according to this well-accepted theory. Particles on that scale are made of strings, which when combined make larger particles, then even bigger ones, ultimately forming the protons and neutrons and electrons that we all studied in high school. Those make atoms, which make molecules, which make the things that physicists call matter. On larger scales, matter forms planets, then stars and solar systems, then star clusters, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and then, well, the universe. Which is 4.4 × 10^26 m big. 4,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters. That’s big.
So, the physical universe ranges from the nearly infinitely small (10^-33 m) to the nearly infinitely large (4.4 × 10^26 m). That’s an astonishing range of sizes. And there are physical laws that determine precisely how everything works, on all scales. At the subatomic level, the weak and strong nuclear forces determine how atoms and molecules are held together. The electromagnetic force drives the ways stars are formed and burn their fuel over lifetimes that span billions of years. Magnetic fields shape solar systems and entire galaxies, funneling massive amounts of energy from the nuclear fusion of stars and the unimaginable violence and destruction from black holes. Earth’s own magnetic field traps billions of tons of charged particles, violently ejected from our own sun, to form a “force field” around our planet, protecting life like you and me from deadly radiation, both from the sun as well as from ultrahigh energy particles from across the galaxy. It also funnels those charged particles down to our north and south magnetic poles, where electrons collide with the highest and most tenuous reaches of our atmosphere, creating an astonishingly beautiful and otherworldly river of green and red plasma flowing by the Earth’s poles, the auroras—one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.
And then there is gravity, which holds it all together. Imagine that gravity was a little stronger. Not only would we humans be shorter, but our Earth would be zipping around the sun faster. Suns would burn their nuclear fuel at a faster rate, resulting in a vastly reduced life span, potentially precluding the possibility of life. Galaxies themselves might be smaller, rotating faster, producing more intense X-ray and gamma-ray bursts that would also make life impossible. All of this extra fuel-burning and orbital racing around would potentially drastically shorten the life of the universe—there might have been a Big Bang, then a brief period when stars and galaxies formed and burned brightly, followed by them quickly extinguishing and vanishing into eternal darkness, the universe populated by the ashes and cinders of dead, burned-out stars and flat-pancake galaxies. All because the gravitational constant was a little stronger than it is today.
It is fascinating to “what if” these questions. What if the weak nuclear force was a little weaker; would we even have molecules? What if the speed of light wasn’t constant; would time travel be possible? What if the H2O molecule did not expand in solid form, like nearly every other form of matter, and ice sank rather than floated? Life as we know it wouldn’t be possible. What if the life span of stars, and the rate at which they burned their fuel, converting hydrogen into helium, carbon, iron, etc., was slightly different? What if the periodic table had only ten types of atoms on Earth, instead of more than 100? It would be a pretty boring and uninhabitable planet.
These “what if” questions are endlessly fasci
nating. You see, the universe is precisely balanced in ways that we haven’t yet imagined. Humans have been studying the natural world for millennia, and we have barely scratched the surface of ultimate scientific knowledge. It seems that most of the universe is made of something called dark matter and dark energy, and we are just recently learning of its existence, much less what it is or what it is made of. In fact, one of the most important experiments on the ISS is called AMS-2, which is trying to help understand how much dark matter and dark energy is out there.
You see, folks, from my commonsense point of view, the physical as well as the biological worlds are so precisely tuned as to require a creator. In my humble, fighter-pilot opinion, there must be a very smart being out there who designed it all, who set it all in motion, with the precise laws of nature set in place to allow this amazingly beautiful and wondrous universe to exist and evolve as it does.
All of this begs the question: Are we alone? A question that has a few straightforward answers. It’s also the question asked of astronauts more than any other, with the possible exception of “How do you go to the bathroom in space?”
My first answer is, “There are billions of planets out there, which would seem to imply that there is other life in the universe.” NASA has recently launched several planet-hunting telescopes, including Kepler and TESS, which have found thousands of planets around other stars relatively near our own sun. When you extrapolate that number to the rest of our galaxy, you can safely assume that there are billions of planets in the Milky Way. Then extrapolate that to the billions of galaxies in the universe, and you can safely assume that there are a lot of planets out there. It would therefore seem to follow that if there is life on one planet, there must be life on many others.