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Astronaut Mike Massimino describes his experience of becoming a NASA astronaut.
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00:00I'm Mike Massimino, a former NASA astronaut.
00:02I was with NASA for 18 years.
00:04My primary job was to be a space walker on the Hubble Space Telescope.
00:08And this is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:12Everyone says, adios, and then they close the inner hatch and lock it.
00:16So now they're getting rid of all the air in the airlock until it goes down to vacuum.
00:20Even though I'd been in space for a couple days,
00:23I felt there was a really big difference between being inside of a spaceship
00:26and going outside of it.
00:28You know, like, that's space out there, man.
00:31The only thing that's protecting me is my space suit.
00:33And it was like this door, you know, that's the door to space.
00:41In the shuttle days, we had two categories of astronauts.
00:44We had astronaut pilots who were military test pilots,
00:48or former military test pilots.
00:49And their primary job was to operate and fly the vehicle, land it,
00:53because it landed like a glider, like an aircraft on a runway.
00:56I was a mission specialist.
00:58My job was to do all the other stuff, do the space walks, work the robot arm,
01:03do the experiments, help with the systems of the space shuttle.
01:06My primary responsibility on both of my flights, though, was to be a space walker.
01:11My first mission, we trained for a year and a half.
01:13My second year, we ended up training for two and a half years.
01:15It was only supposed to be a year and a half.
01:16You're training the whole time.
01:17As far as NASA's concerned, you're hired as an astronaut candidate,
01:21or as the experienced people like to call you, you're an ASCAN, or where are the ASCANs?
01:26We need something done around here.
01:27And you don't get that title astronaut until you complete the training program,
01:32and then you successfully graduate from that.
01:35It usually takes about two years, and you get a silver astronaut pin.
01:38And then when you fly in space, you get a gold astronaut pin.
01:41So after being at NASA for four years, I was assigned to my first flight,
01:46and then it was about another year and a half after that until I flew that flight.
01:50For Hubble, it was learning about systems and also learning more about how the shuttle was going to be used
01:56for the flight.
01:57And then the spacewalk, you're training specific spacewalks and specific robotic operations for your flight.
02:04There's different facilities to do that.
02:05There's an air-bearing floor where you're moving things around.
02:09It's kind of like an air hockey table, so the thing kind of floats, and you're moving around.
02:12But it all kind of comes together when you go to the pool.
02:15You would get into your space suit and be put in the pool, and they would weigh you out,
02:20meaning that they would get the right amount of flotation and weights for you to be neutrally buoyant,
02:26meaning the force of gravity and the buoyancy force of the water kind of evens out,
02:30and you're floating in the water column, similar to where you'll be floating in space.
02:34And then you run the spacewalk from start to finish.
02:36100 feet wide, it's 200 feet long, and it's 40 feet deep.
02:40It's a really big pool.
02:41So the Hubble missions, they used to call us the prima donna crew.
02:46And everyone in the office would call, oh, you prima donnas.
02:51And I liked that.
02:53That was cool because, yes, we are special.
02:56And the reason they called us that is because of the support we had.
02:59It was a huge team of people, not only at the Johnson Space Center, but also from the Goddard Space
03:05Flight Center.
03:05So we had a lot of support.
03:08So back in the day when we were doing lots of spacewalks, building the space station and going to Hubble,
03:12they would have what we called dual ops.
03:15So you would have two crews in there.
03:16The training in the pool was really good to get you ready to do your job.
03:22I felt very prepared when I got to space.
03:25At the end of my first spacewalk, I remember closing an equipment bay door
03:29and realizing that I felt like I had done that task a hundred times, even though I had never been
03:35in space.
03:35Toilet on the shuttle required some training to just get your aim correctly because it was a small hole on
03:42the commode.
03:43So you would pee into a hose, and that was pretty easy to do that.
03:46But the commode on the shuttle was a little bit complicated and a very small opening.
03:53So the deal was you had to practice your alignment.
03:56And the way that worked is we had, in our simulator area, we had a toilet that worked just like
04:01the shuttle toilet.
04:02And so you could practice on that one.
04:04You could poop into that thing.
04:05You made sure you called them to tell them, hey, it's time to come service that.
04:09Because it wasn't a flush toilet.
04:11It would contain the material.
04:12So to practice for that, there was another toilet right next to it that you did not poop in.
04:16But that was like an alignment trainer.
04:18And that had a camera looking up through the hole.
04:22And it had a closed-circuit TV right over here that they promised that that was not going anywhere else.
04:28And then memorize that position on the toilet.
04:32Like, you know, I'm riding a motorcycle.
04:34I felt like, all right, that was a feeling of kind of leaning back.
04:38And then you kind of memorize that.
04:39And then you could actually try it out and see how well you did on the real one that was
04:43next to you.
04:44They don't usually tell anybody about that.
04:45It's like a deep, dark secret that you have to align your butt correctly over the commode.
04:57The night before my first launch, I was pretty excited, anticipating everything.
05:03You're in crew quarters with your crew.
05:04You're in quarantine.
05:05You do get able to see your family.
05:07Whoever's cleared by the doctor.
05:08The night before, you get to eat whatever you want.
05:11I remember the lady, Dot was her name, who was head of kind of running the crew quarters down here
05:15at the Kennedy Space Center, said to me they were going to go shopping.
05:18And they asked me what I wanted for dinner.
05:20I was like, whatever you have, Dot.
05:21It's all good here.
05:22I don't care.
05:22She goes, I don't think you have anything you want tonight.
05:24And I go, well, whatever you have is fine with me.
05:26And she looks at me and grabs my hand.
05:28She goes, honey, you're going on a rocket ship tomorrow.
05:30You can have anything you want to eat tonight.
05:32And I was like, okay, Dot.
05:33How about a steak?
05:34So you wake up and you get dressed.
05:37Usually you have a crew shirt picked out because you're going to get your picture taken as a crew at
05:41breakfast.
05:42There's a cake there.
05:43It's a kind of a tradition to have a cake, whether or not you want a piece of cake or
05:46not.
05:46But they'll have a cake there for you.
05:48Every crew member has a technician helping them that you've trained with throughout your training flow whenever you have the
05:54suit on for your training events.
05:56And so they're there and you get the suit on and get your pockets stuffed with it ever.
06:01The commander plays a hand of poker with the head of the office, the head of the astronaut office, until
06:07the commander loses to leave all your bad luck on the planet.
06:10Charlie said, Mike, come over here and join us.
06:11And I played poker with Charlie and Scooter, our commander.
06:17And one of our crewmates, one of my crewmates, like, whoa, what's going on?
06:19This is bad luck.
06:20You can't have an extra guy in there.
06:22Scooter eventually lost and we headed to the launch pad.
06:25For me, the biggest moment of fear was before my first launch, looking at the spaceship in the night sky.
06:31It's fully fueled and making noises and water vapor is coming off of it.
06:36But, you know, it looks like there's smoke coming off of it and it looked a little intimidating.
06:40So I thought maybe this wasn't such a good idea.
06:42But by then it's too late and you have to go.
06:43So the shuttle had a flight deck with windows and instruments and stuff to look at.
06:48And there was four people up there.
06:49And then there were three of us on the mid deck, which really not much to look at except these
06:53lockers in front of us.
06:54And we did have an altimeter to tell us what the pressure was inside of our spaceships.
07:00And all the action was on the flight deck.
07:02So we played like tic-tac-toe and rock, paper, scissors sitting next to each other, that kind of thing.
07:07Then it's a couple minutes and then it's one minute and 30 seconds.
07:10And then, you know, the spaceship is starting to come alive at that point with a couple minutes to go.
07:14They start up the auxiliary power units.
07:16And then six seconds, the engines start and the whole stack leans forward and then comes back.
07:22You still haven't gone anywhere yet until the solid rocket boost.
07:25There's the two big white rockets on either side.
07:27And once they light, you're moving.
07:28Having yet cleared the tower, you're still going 100 miles an hour.
07:31As soon as you take off and you accelerate from zero to 17,500 miles an hour, about eight and
07:35a half minutes.
07:36You feel the acceleration.
07:38The G-forces start to build up.
07:40There's a lot of shaking going on.
07:41With the solid rockets still attached, they run for two and a half minutes and they run rough because they're
07:45solid material.
07:46The G-forces build up to about three Gs.
07:50So three times your body weight is what you're feeling.
07:53So I felt like there were like three big dudes sitting on me.
07:55And then at the end of eight and a half minutes, the main engine's cut and you're weightless.
08:02And then the feeling is just weightlessness where there's no more forces on you.
08:07My arms just floated up like this because that happens naturally.
08:10You're kind of glad that you made it.
08:12Your first day, I didn't feel good.
08:13I threw up my first day in space.
08:15You get stomach awareness because your inner ear is trying to, your brain is trying to figure out what's going
08:21on.
08:21Because your inner ear works on gravity and there's no gravity when you're in orbit affecting you.
08:27So your brain doesn't know what's going on.
08:29And so it's a conflict between the inner ear and the eyes, which leads to nausea sometimes, sea sickness or
08:34air sickness,
08:35that kind of thing you might get in a car, car sickness.
08:39It was fine by the second day.
08:40My second flight, I think my brain remembered it kicked right in and I was okay from the get-go.
08:44But on day three is when we rendezvoused.
08:47You had a laser, which you'd offer for distance and speed measurements and make sure all the computers are working.
08:53And we were getting closer.
08:55So you get it really close to the telescope.
08:57You see it like a star in the distance, you know, the beginning of the day.
09:00And you're getting closer and closer.
09:02The way we grabbed the telescope is we would get it with the robot arm.
09:07When you're docking with the International Space Station, it's like a docking port that docks with a, you know,
09:12one side of it on the spacecraft that's coming and then the other side on the space station.
09:18On Hubble, you had to grab it.
09:19And then we would go to a free drift, which means no more flying the spaceship.
09:23And that also means that you don't have that much time because if you wait too long, the orbital mechanics
09:26of the two vehicles will start to separate.
09:28So, you know, you have a couple minutes to go and get it.
09:31And then we place it on a big turntable we had at the back of the space shuttle.
09:35So it would then be brought down into those latches and we would latch it to the shuttle.
09:41And then we could remove the arm.
09:42And then we would apply power to it.
09:44We had an umbilical that would give it power.
09:46We could get data from it and so on.
09:48So that's what we would do.
09:50Then once it's attached, it's not going anywhere and it's powered so it's going to stay alive.
09:55And then we're going to go start our spacewalks on day four.
10:03Columbia was my first mission.
10:05It was in March of 2002.
10:08The next launch for Columbia was STS-107 flight.
10:11And that was in January of 2003.
10:15On launch, they took some damage that they didn't know about.
10:18We didn't have a way to detect it.
10:20But they took a piece of debris off the external tank, the big fuel tank, put a hole in the
10:24wing, which they didn't know about.
10:25We didn't find this out until after with the post-flight analysis.
10:30And when they tried to reenter the atmosphere, there was a hole in the wing, heat came in the wing.
10:34We lost the vehicle and the crew.
10:36So that was a bad day.
10:38I knew them really well.
10:40Three of them were classmates of mine.
10:42The others I knew really well.
10:44Alon Ramon was an Israeli astronaut who my family and I became very close with, still close with his kids.
10:52And then the others, the other folks, Rick Husman was a very good friend of mine, one of my better
10:55friends, one of my best friends in the office.
10:57He was the commander.
10:58And there were two others from the class previous to mine.
11:01So I knew them all really well.
11:03I was actually taking my son to a Boy Scout event.
11:06And one of the parents kind of took me to the side and said they had heard something.
11:10And then I called one of my buddies who was at home and said, hey, turn on the TV and
11:15see what's going on.
11:16And he said, he's like, we got to go to work.
11:19You know, when I talked to my family about it, it was, you know, we knew it was a risky
11:24business and that this didn't add any new information, really.
11:28It was just, it wasn't like a surprise that this could happen.
11:31And in a weird way, it's kind of like, well, you know, this happened and it's probably not going to
11:38happen again for a while.
11:39We're going to have to be really careful and make sure it doesn't happen again.
11:43But I still wanted to go and I got the support I needed from my family to give it another
11:48try.
11:48And I still have great confidence in NASA.
11:51Things are going to happen every once in a while where the environment is going to win and you're going
11:56to have a bad day, unfortunately.
11:57I think that all of us tried to think of everything that could go wrong and try to have a
12:04solution for it.
12:05And everything that did go wrong, we had a solution for.
12:09But there's always those things that you can't even imagine happening.
12:12And everything kind of happens, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, on that day where, you know, there may be 10
12:16different things that happened that are unique, but they all happened at the same time together.
12:23And that's when you have a bad day.
12:26Things, things happen.
12:27You know, on the most recent mission, the Artemis II mission, there was talk about the heat shield.
12:31But they knew about that threat and they studied and tested and did everything they could.
12:37So I was pretty convinced that this is not going to be a problem, the heat shield.
12:41They were going to have a problem.
12:42It's going to be something no one thought of.
12:44I'd be like, ooh, we didn't know that going to happen.
12:45I have high confidence in the way they operate.
12:49I had the sense that on my first flight, maybe foolishly, that the major danger was over.
12:57And we made it to orbit, which was certainly in your face.
13:01You could get killed.
13:02And the spacewalks, we had to be really careful.
13:04We talked about it, that we thought the second most dangerous thing we were going to do was the spacewalks.
13:09And so not that we shouldn't have known that entry coming back could be dangerous.
13:15It just seemed like that was not, we weren't going to have a problem with it.
13:19I was convinced we were going to be okay.
13:21And so when we had the accident, the Columbia accident, it was a reminder that you're not safe again until
13:27you're back on Earth.
13:33The Hubble spacewalks were considered to be the most complex, meaning that there were so many things you had to
13:39do.
13:39So it wasn't just built to be a telescope and sent to space.
13:42It was built to be serviced.
13:46So just about everything could be taken out of there.
13:50The solar rays were in clamps and with connectors.
13:53So you could undo the clamp, undo the connectors, remove the solar ray, put a new one in.
13:57The Hubble Space Telescope is about the size of a school bus, a standard-sized school bus.
14:02It's that size because it was made to be as large as it could be and still fit in the
14:08payload bay of the space shuttles.
14:09All of the instruments, some of them are the size of a refrigerator, some of them the size of a
14:14baby grand piano.
14:15All of those things could be removed by undoing some latches and some connectors, removing it very carefully, putting a
14:23new one in and taking the old one home.
14:25And that was generally the drill.
14:26It was a dream of astronomers for years to get a telescope into space because even on the clearest night
14:33at a very high altitude where the atmosphere is thin, you're still looking through the atmosphere.
14:39When that starlight comes in, it's distorted.
14:42And that's why stars twinkle because it's distorting of the light.
14:45So twinkle, twinkle, little star is written by someone on Earth because when you're in space, you don't get that
14:50twinkling, that perfect points of light.
14:51Hubble is above our atmosphere, can look directly into the universe and is able to return these beautiful images.
14:58Telescope was launched back in 1990.
15:00We only go on a Hubble a few times.
15:01On space station, there's always a crew there.
15:04They could do a spacewalk if they needed, you know, tomorrow if something's going wrong, but there's no crew on
15:09Hubble.
15:10You only can go out for a certain amount of spacewalks.
15:13We did five on each one of my missions.
15:14We had two different teams trading off.
15:16We would get a lot of attention.
15:18Hey, we need a new tool to do this, and we would get it.
15:21And our pistol grip tool, this power tool we had, was developed for the Hubble missions, and it was used
15:25to also build the space station.
15:27Helmet cameras.
15:28See all these helmet camera views you get from these spacewalks?
15:30Well, that was a Hubble thing.
15:31They didn't have those things before because what they used to do on Hubble is when they would close the
15:36doors, when you would work inside and close the doors, you had to do these closeout photos,
15:39which you would physically have a camera looking around, and it took a long time.
15:43So what they did is they had the idea to put cameras on your head so that as you're doing
15:49the spacewalk, you know, they could get all the information they needed about what it looked like inside of there.
15:53And that was then turned over as well to the other missions that were not going to Hubble.
15:58So we had just about everything we needed and wanted, and there were years in the making.
16:05You wake up, and the spacewalkers have first dibs on the toilet that day because there's only one toilet.
16:11So you always want to have a good breakfast because there's no food inside of the space suit.
16:15The only nourishment you had, you had a 32-ounce bag of water inside of there with you.
16:20So that was it.
16:21You put your diaper on first, then you put these polypropylene underwear on to absorb your sweat, and you put
16:26some socks on to keep your feet warm.
16:28And then you put a look with cooling garment on, which is like a fancy pair of long underwear with
16:33lots of tubes on it.
16:35And so that's to bring the cooling water over your body.
16:38You're typically more concerned about getting too hot because you're in an enclosed space suit that cannot leak or else
16:45you have trouble.
16:46So you have something to suck the air in to the life support system in your feet and on your
16:54arms, and that air will go in and get scrubbed for CO2 and other particles.
16:58And then the fresh air is going to come in over your head through the helmet.
17:01And then you start a pre-breathe.
17:02So we, in our missions, we had about 40 minutes of breathing 100% oxygen.
17:07You're going to go to a lower pressure in the suit.
17:10We lowered the pressure in the vehicle.
17:12We could do this on the shuttle where you could lower the pressure from 14.71 atmosphere, like sea level,
17:18down to 10.2, which is like being on a tall mountain.
17:21What that does is that helps rid the body of some of its nitrogen.
17:25So you don't want to get the bends.
17:27Decompression sickness.
17:28If you're in a higher pressure environment and then you immediately go to a lower pressure environment, it could lead
17:33to some neurological problems because the nitrogen in your system can cause trouble in the bloodstream, and that's not good.
17:41There's a hatch that leads to space, which is locked, or else you have a big hole in the spaceship.
17:45You don't want that.
17:46But there's the inner hatch that's open up to that point where, you know, you got in there and everything.
17:50And then, you know, everyone says, adios, and then they close the inner hatch and lock it.
17:54So now they're getting rid of all the air in the airlock until it goes down to vacuum.
17:59Those moments where you're in there with your spacewalking buddy, kind of looking at each other a little bit, just
18:04kind of waiting to go outside, thinking about what would be the first thing you're going to do, whatever.
18:08And I remember my first time looking at that hatch.
18:11And even though I'd been in space for a couple days, I felt there was a really big difference between
18:16being inside of a spaceship and going outside of it.
18:19You know, like, that's space out there, man.
18:22You know, I'm not—no thing that's protecting me is my space suit.
18:25And it was like this door, you know, that's the door to space.
18:29Typically, it's an experienced person and a new person.
18:31So on my first flight, it was a guy named Jim Newman who had spacewalked many times before in other
18:34missions.
18:35So he went out first and made sure the coast was clear, got our tether set up, and he got
18:39everything ready.
18:40The telescope is not that far away from you.
18:42It's out in the payload bay, you know, about maybe 50 or 60 feet away from you.
18:46So it's not that far away from the airlock.
18:48Once the airlock goes to vacuum, the only thing you're hearing is what's coming over your com cap.
18:54It's kind of peaceful.
18:55And you hear in the background, you hear, like, this hum.
18:57It's the air pump water separator, the thing that—it's like a little fan that goes, and it keeps the cooling
19:05pump going and the ventilation going.
19:07It's a miraculous small little pump.
19:09There's one space walker on the robot arm, and that means the robot arm operator is going to move the
19:14space walker around.
19:15The other person is what we call the free floater, and they're moving around with their hands, moving around this
19:20way, and they can climb all over the place.
19:21You have a safety tether attached to the arm in case you start floating away, but that's not going to
19:25happen.
19:25So the way to get out to the telescope is you go along the side of the space shuttle.
19:28There's handrails that get you out there.
19:30And then he said, all right, Mike, you clear to come out, and I stuck my head out of the
19:33airlock, and he's up on a handrail on the bulkhead, the forward bulkhead of the shuttle, looking down at me.
19:39He had his visor up so I could see his face, and it was—you know, he's got this big smile
19:44on his face.
19:44And above his head is Africa.
19:47So the thought that went through my mind was, whoa, how am I going to get anything done out here?
19:51In front of me, there was a handrail for the space shuttle and the curved handrail above the airlock, and
19:56there was a foot restraint here, just like there was in the training pool.
19:59There was a vent duct coming out on each side, and I was like, I know what I'm doing.
20:02I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to rely on my training here and start off that way.
20:07I mean, you're out in space.
20:08You know, you see the planet, and it's just unbelievable.
20:11I remember the first time, one of my first tasks, the first time I was out there, I got into
20:17the robot arm and went up high on the telescope.
20:19And so I was getting, you know, taken up on the telescope, just riding along.
20:24And I could see down then, as I got up high, I could see down over the wing of the
20:28shuttle, and I could see the NASA meatball and Space Shuttle Columbia name and the American flag.
20:34Looking at planets out in the distance.
20:36The first spacewalk I was on kind of went really well.
20:40Everything was working, and we were humming along and sticking to business, and everything was working, going according to plan.
20:46We actually got a little bit ahead.
20:48We finished everything we were supposed to a little early.
20:50You feel pretty drained.
20:52It's a mental exercise, too.
20:54You're out there.
20:55You plan the spacewalk to be about six and a half hours.
20:58And the ones I had, I think, were all longer than that, like more like around seven and change.
21:03And it's pretty intense.
21:05Physically, I was in the best shape of my life before each one of my missions.
21:10So I was pretty well prepared physically to do these things.
21:15But still, it's pretty draining.
21:16I mean, you're pretty beat when you get back in from your spacewalk.
21:23And you get out of there, you know, you're ready to clean up and get something to eat.
21:35What's the protocol if an astronaut starts floating away from the space shuttle?
21:38There is a protocol if you start floating away.
21:40You always have to have your safety tether hooked up just in case somehow you came off the structure or
21:44came out of the robot arm or something like that.
21:46Then, you know, that safety tether will take care of you.
21:48It's a titanium piece of cord.
21:53If that came undone, then you're a free flyer.
21:55Then you're out of luck.
21:57And that's never happened.
21:59But if it did, on the space station, you have a little jet pack you could fly that you could
22:04fly back to the—because they can't come get you at space station.
22:07You know, you can't undock a vehicle to come get you.
22:10It's unlikely anyway.
22:11But if you came undone, you would fly yourself.
22:13You had a little jet pack.
22:14But we didn't have that on Hubble.
22:16But if that happened, you start floating away, you become a free flyer, and you can't get back, the commander
22:21would then come and get you.
22:22Since we were spacewalking on the shuttle, you could still fly the shuttle around.
22:27He would take over the controls of the shuttle and fly it to you, so you would grab it.
22:31We called it the lost crew person procedure.
22:35And we would brief it just to go through it because it's like an emergency.
22:38Lost crew person is what you do.
22:40But my friend Rick Lenahan on my first flight had a bit of a dark sense of humor, maybe.
22:44We're in space, and he's briefing it for the first time.
22:46All these things, you know, you tether this, blah, blah, blah.
22:48And he goes, lost crew person.
22:50Don't worry about it.
22:51We've got two more inside.
22:57So the second mission to Hubble ended up being the final mission.
23:02We knew it was going to be the final mission, and no one's been there since.
23:05And we were trying to do as much as we could.
23:08Second mission, STS-125, was in 2009, May of 2009.
23:13There were two instruments that had power failures.
23:18And they couldn't turn these things on, but they were great instruments.
23:22And we did not have replacements for them.
23:26One of these two is called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph
23:29that could do things like analyze the atmospheres for our planets.
23:34And they wanted to bring this capability back.
23:36Now, these things were put together over years in time,
23:38and by really conscientious engineers and technicians.
23:41Their goal was to make it so no one could ever take this apart again.
23:44It was buttoned up so that there would be no danger to it during launch.
23:50It would stand launch in the rigors of space,
23:52and no one was ever going to open these things again.
23:54This panel had 111 small screws, each of which had a washer.
23:58And just to make sure the screws never back out, they put glue on the threads.
24:01For that task alone, over 100 new tools were designed.
24:05So I was the lead space walker, and I had a fellow out there with me was a new guy,
24:10Mike Good,
24:10my good buddy and a great space walker.
24:13So we practiced and practiced, and we practiced working together
24:16of every little step of everything we were going to do to repair the instrument.
24:21You were doing this really delicate procedure with these gloves on,
24:26and the tools are designed to make it so the gloves will work with them.
24:31So if you had a regular tool that you might be familiar with, like a crescent wrench,
24:37that thing will have an extra added handle piece to it,
24:41some special space rubber stuff that will, hard material,
24:47that will allow you to use the tool without having to have the death grip on it,
24:51like you would on Earth.
24:52I felt like you're trying to work on your car, like change the oil in the car with boxing gloves.
24:57It was the most ambitious space walker you've ever tried.
25:00Capture plate on there just gets all these little screws,
25:02and to do that we had to remove four screws on the outer side of this.
25:07The easiest thing I was going to do that day was remove a handrail
25:10that was used to insert the instrument years earlier.
25:13That handrail had two big screws at the top,
25:16two big hex screws at the top, and two big hex screws at the bottom.
25:20So we weren't worried about those screws.
25:21They were beefy.
25:22And we even used the old power tool.
25:24We didn't even need any fancy stuff.
25:25And it was just going to take like 30 seconds.
25:27There's one line in the checklist.
25:28It was so simple we had no recourse for this.
25:31Like even I couldn't mess it up.
25:33The one at the bottom left comes loose.
25:35You know, I could feel that.
25:35The one at the bottom right is just spinning my tool.
25:39And I said, what's going on?
25:40And I removed the tool, and I look with my helmet light,
25:42and I bend down, and I look, and it's no longer a hex head.
25:46It's a gnarled up piece of metal.
25:48And I realized, holy cow, that screw's never coming out.
25:50Handrail's not coming off.
25:51111 screws aren't coming out.
25:53We'll never replace the power supply.
25:56We're not going to bring the instrument back to life.
25:58We'll never find out if there's life in the universe.
26:00And everyone's going to blame me.
26:03And that wasn't far from the situation at that moment.
26:05Before I said anything, I just kind of leaned out of the telescope
26:08because I was working in there.
26:09And I leaned out, and we were over at the Pacific Ocean.
26:12And I thought to myself, I can't even get to a hardware store if I wanted to.
26:16Like, I've really messed up this time.
26:17I don't know what we're going to do.
26:19And for about an hour or so, we were troubleshooting,
26:22and I didn't have any good idea.
26:24I mean, I was trying to think, what else could we remove?
26:26What other tools could we try?
26:28And could we get it from the back?
26:29I mean, I knew it was bad because I knew the repair backwards and forwards,
26:33and I knew that there's no way to get around this.
26:37But we had a clever engineer named Jim Corbo.
26:40He thought to himself, what would he do if he was in the garage?
26:43What would he do at home?
26:45Sometimes brute force is the answer.
26:47He would just try to rip that thing off because it was loose at the top.
26:50You know, you just yank it and break it.
26:51And he called over to the Goddard Space Flight Center,
26:54and they're standing by, you know, watching this in horror that years of hours of training for this
27:03and all the aerial development of the tools have just gone up in smoke.
27:07They were watching, and Jim told them their idea.
27:10And what they came up with was the idea to pull an instrument out of a clean room,
27:14put it in the same configuration with the handrail,
27:16and they pulled on the top of the handrail with a fish scale
27:19to see how hard it would be to break that bolt at the bottom that was still there.
27:23And it broke that bolt at 60 pounds of force.
27:26Tony told me afterwards he was worried about breaking that and debris going flying
27:30and getting me or Mike to break stuff in space or asking for trouble,
27:34shrapnel or sharp edge or something like that.
27:37If you have a projectile coming flying because you just broke a piece of metal
27:40and it hit my spacesuit or Bueno's spacesuit, it could cause a real problem.
27:44The technique they wanted us to use, which was not to just yank it,
27:47but to kind of break, like kind of just not yank the whole thing off at one,
27:51but try to like weaken it, you know, kind of yield it a little bit,
27:54and then in a couple steps get it so it just needed a little tug at the end.
27:57It all went perfectly after that.
27:59So this spacewalk went pretty long. It was over eight hours.
28:02But we got it all done, and they brought the instrument back to life,
28:05and I was just so happy.
28:07I remember we went back to the airlock, and Scooter Scott Altman, my commander,
28:10who's my very good friend, comes over the communication line,
28:14and he says, Mass, what are you doing?
28:17And I was like, oh, I'm just, you know, cleaning up the airlock a little bit.
28:20And he goes, is there anything you're doing now that you can't do later?
28:25And he goes, well, why don't you just go outside and enjoy the view?
28:28After this, you know, this psychic trauma that I went through breaking that bolt,
28:34stripping that bolt, and it was just a, you know, so I was just able to really relax.
28:38And I just let go and took in the view, and it was a day pass.
28:43It was daytime.
28:44We were over the Pacific, kind of heading over Hawaii,
28:48and it was just magnificent seeing the ocean and the clouds.
28:51If we didn't get that handrail removed, we would have not brought that instrument back.
28:58And it's still working today.
29:05NASA approached me and said, we have this idea to send a tweet from space.
29:08And, you know, we clearly, they asked my commander about it, and he said, okay.
29:12And they thought I was the right guy to do it for whatever reason.
29:14I was like, okay.
29:15But I didn't have a Twitter account.
29:17I wasn't paying attention to anything, really, except the mission at that time.
29:19First tweet from space, I didn't think about it very much.
29:24I just kind of, whatever came to mind, which wasn't mine, I didn't know.
29:27I should have thought about it some more, maybe.
29:28But I wrote, launch was awesome.
29:31The adventure of a lifetime has begun.
29:33Something like that.
29:34And that was on a Monday.
29:35They made fun of me on Saturday Night Live.
29:37Seth Meyers was doing a weekend update, and he said, we have the first tweet from space,
29:40and here it is.
29:41Launch was awesome.
29:43In 40 years, we've gone from one giant leap for mankind to launch was awesome.
29:49And then he went on to say, if we ever encounter life in the universe, I assume this is how
29:54we'll be notified.
29:55And it shows my Twitter thing that says, geez, dude's aliens.
29:58So I got made fun of.
29:59My kids thought it was cool, though.
30:01The first one was a little, maybe not the best, but I think they got better.
30:04After my first mission, the space station developed the possibility, the capability of a phone call that you could make.
30:15There was an internet protocol phone.
30:17So you could call from, you can't call the space station, but the space station could call you.
30:23If you ever get a phone call, folks, and it's 281 with a 244 exchange, pick it up.
30:28It might be the space station calling.
30:30Because if you don't pick it up and they leave a message like, oh, man.
30:32Then you got, hey, email me.
30:34You go to email.
30:34Hey, call me again.
30:35Well, yeah, you know.
30:36I was like, I don't know if this is such a good idea.
30:37Because we're really busy.
30:38You know, the missions, we don't have a lot of free time.
30:40The space station, you get like some time off.
30:42Because you're up there, you're living up there.
30:44So our families knew we had this.
30:45So when I got, we never used it.
30:47We didn't even set the thing up.
30:48So then when we got back from my second flight, you know, our family was like, oh, you know, I'm
30:53glad you're back.
30:53But why didn't you call?
30:54And we set up the expectation.
30:56We had this.
30:56I knew that was a bad idea.
31:03The landing day is pretty exciting.
31:06It's kind of bittersweet because you know you're coming home and, you know, you had a good mission.
31:10But you're also excited about coming home.
31:12So that's a good part of it.
31:14And you get ready that day.
31:15It's all about, you know, preparing the space shuttle to come back and get your spacesuits on, get everything set
31:21up, and go over the briefings.
31:22My first mission, this was before the Columbia accident.
31:25There was, I know we were moving along and going through the checklist, but there wasn't the same sense of
31:31urgency or intensity.
31:34After we had the accident on entry with Columbia, then my second flight, which was after, there was a little
31:39more intense feeling, I think,
31:41about what we were facing.
31:42And we should have had that same intensity on the first flight, but for me, it wasn't there.
31:46We were coming in on kind of a sloping kind of path across the planet to come in.
31:53So it was pretty smooth.
31:54And you're landing on a runway.
31:56So that was pretty smooth as well.
31:58My first flight, we landed at the Kennedy Space Center, which is the preferred place, because that's where you're going
32:02to take off, where you're going to leave from the next time.
32:04My second flight, though, we had bad weather at the Kennedy Space Center.
32:07So we got a couple extra days in orbit, which was fun.
32:09But then they eventually had to bring us home, and it was still bad weather at the Kennedy Space Center.
32:13So that second flight, we landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
32:17Weather's always good there.
32:18There were really only three approved runways.
32:20We had some emergency landing sites coming up the East Coast and over in other places.
32:26If you couldn't make it to space and you couldn't make it across the Atlantic in Southern Europe and in
32:31Northern Africa, there were landing sites as well.
32:34But the primary landing sites, the primary one was the Kennedy Space Center.
32:38The second one was Edwards Air Force Base.
32:41The third one was White Sands Missile Range.
32:44You're going to feel a little off balance because now your vestibular system is kicking in again after being silent
32:49for the past two weeks or so.
32:51So you're just feeling a little off balance.
32:53You kind of walk around with your legs like Frankenstein, sort of, kind of walking around there with legs spread
33:01apart to keep your balance as best you can.
33:03And just kind of getting used to being back on the planet again.
33:06You've got to be careful waking up your first day back on the planet that you don't just float out
33:11of bed or try to float out of bed.
33:13I dropped a bag of groceries on the second day back in the driveway.
33:17I kind of purposely put it up here behind me and forgot where I was.
33:21Yeah.
33:27I dreamt about being an astronaut when I was six years old and I saw Neil Armstrong on the moon.
33:31I wanted to grow up to be just like him.
33:33He was my hero.
33:34But then I found out I was afraid of heights and trying to grow up to be like your hero.
33:39How do you do that?
33:40That's impossible.
33:41So when I was a senior in college, I went to the movies and saw this movie, The Right Stuff,
33:45which is about the original seven astronauts and the test pilots that came before them.
33:48And it made me want to grow up to be an astronaut again.
33:51The hardest thing about being an astronaut is getting the opportunity.
33:54There's so many qualified people trying to get it.
33:57And it's not easy and it's kind of out of your control to a certain extent.
34:02I applied for the class of 1990 and got rejected outright for the class of 92 and got rejected outright.
34:08The class of 94, which ended up being the class of 95, I got an interview for that class.
34:13When you get to the interview, there are thousands of people that apply and they typically would interview about 120
34:19people over the course of a few months.
34:22That's a pretty big cut, you know, to be and you'd get in for the come in for the for
34:26the physical.
34:27And a lot of people were getting dequeued because of the because of the eye test.
34:31And so that's what happened to me.
34:34And they said, well, there's no way to get around this.
34:36And then I was pretty disappointed.
34:38But then I started asking questions.
34:39Bob Overmeyer was a Marine Corps pilot who was my boss at McDonnell Douglas.
34:44He said, how'd it go?
34:45And I said, I got dequeued.
34:46And he goes, with your eyes?
34:47And I said, yeah.
34:47And he goes, you know what you got to do?
34:48I said, no.
34:49He said, because you got to dehydrate yourself before you take that test.
34:52I was like, really?
34:53He said, yeah.
34:54I go, why is that?
34:54He goes, well, you know, you get all the water out of the eye and it flattens the eye and
34:57it focuses differently.
34:59And he goes, that's what I do.
35:00He's a Marine Corps pilot.
35:01He goes, you know, you should try that.
35:02And they go, oh, maybe there's something there.
35:05Next couple hours, that afternoon, at the Johnson Space Center, I'm walking through the hallway.
35:10My friend Kevin Kriegel is there.
35:12And he's an Air Force test pilot who's an astronaut.
35:14And he goes, how'd it go?
35:15I got dequeued.
35:16He goes, your eyesight?
35:17I go, yeah.
35:17He goes, oh, you know, that's really.
35:19He goes, you know what you got to do, don't you?
35:20And I go, what's that?
35:21He goes, you got to drink a lot of water.
35:22Can you imagine?
35:23I mean, you know, this is the same.
35:24You can't make this up.
35:25I'm like, what?
35:26And he says, oh, it makes the eye more viscous and it bends the light.
35:29And I'm like, well, no one knows what they're doing here.
35:32So maybe there's some way to get around this.
35:35And they didn't accept, I don't know if LASIK existed, but probably not even then.
35:40But there were like procedures you could have done.
35:42And that was lifetime banning.
35:45So that wasn't a good idea.
35:47When I saw the astronaut job, that was to me the opportunity of a lifetime.
35:52And I was not going to stop.
35:54I was going to, even if I couldn't get the medical issue solved, I would keep trying to
36:03get it solved.
36:03I wasn't going to give up.
36:05I found out about this training and NASA flight docs, you know, the doctors were like, well,
36:11we think it's hocus pocus because it's just, you know, you just can't really train your
36:15eyes to do that.
36:16But go ahead.
36:17You know, we don't care.
36:18It doesn't do anything to your eye.
36:19And the doctor had told me that, that it was the eye doctor, that it was only going
36:24to work with kids.
36:25So she didn't think it was going to work.
36:27But I told her I could be really immature.
36:28And she said, OK.
36:30You know, she helped me.
36:30And I was able to pick up a couple lines just so I could try again.
36:33The eye exercise was kind of, it was kind of like trying to learn how to focus beyond
36:38what you were looking at.
36:39You're kind of training your eyes to relax and almost focus beyond what they're looking
36:44at and then the letter or the number or whatever it is that you're trying to see off a chart
36:49will come into view.
36:51And it's also other things you can do like wearing undercorrected lenses so your eyes
36:57are working a little bit more.
36:58It's like training their brain to just relax and kind of look beyond what it's looking at
37:02to try to have things that normally wouldn't be in focus come into focus.
37:11I'm really excited about the moon.
37:14I've been hoping we've sent people there for, since I became an astronaut, even before
37:18that.
37:18I was down at the launch for the Artemis II flight and the Kennedy Space Center is unbelievable
37:25right now.
37:26And I think to realize that you would need to have been there before, like years ago.
37:30What's happened in the last few years is now you have these launches of satellites.
37:35Sometimes you have two launches in one day.
37:37You know, they had over 100 launches last year.
37:40With all the communications satellites and some space probes, mainly communication satellites
37:46are going up and then crews are going up.
37:48Not all that often, but a couple times a year.
37:50They are building things.
37:52Blue Origin has a humongous building down there.
37:55And they're building a vehicle assembly building, SpaceX's for their giant starship.
37:59It's huge.
38:00It looks futuristic, all the new buildings that are coming online.
38:03And the launch pads that they're using, and they're using them.
38:09I mean, it's like there's launches almost every day down there.
38:12So it's almost like a futuristic spaceport down there.
38:15And it's just growing.
38:16It's going to get more and more active.
38:18So I think there's a lot there.
38:22We might hear about the Artemis missions because those are very interesting to people.
38:27People going to the moon.
38:28But there's a lot of launches going on.
38:30Solar launch is going to the International Space Station with crews.
38:34And I think the future is going to be the International Space Station, low Earth orbit.
38:39The hope is that it'll get turned over to commercial space stations to utilize.
38:45When I started teaching 13 years ago, it was starting to get started.
38:50But we weren't sending people to space on commercial rockets, and now we are.
38:56Commercial space flight really didn't exist that much.
38:59A lot has changed.
39:00They were talking about all these things they were going to do.
39:02The commercial companies are bringing the booster back and using it again and landing it.
39:07And I was like, oh, we'll see what happens.
39:09When they saw the first one of those landing back at the launch pad and then landing it on a
39:15barge out in the ocean at night, that is incredible.
39:19So I was really impressed with that.
39:20The reusability of it is what's going to make it affordable.
39:24The commercial space sector that has grown immensely over the past 12 years or so,
39:29and I think that's probably the biggest difference between what was going on and what I'm talking about in the
39:34classroom compared to all those years ago.
39:37The NASA program itself, we've kind of cut back.
39:41There was more astronauts when I was there.
39:42Now there are fewer astronauts who are on flight status because there's not as many of them going to space.
39:48Hopefully that cadence will pick up a bit now that we're going to the moon and we're still going to
39:54the space station right now.
39:55Some of the research that's been done in space on the space station has really come around.
39:59They've been able to use the microgravity environment for some great research and commercial activities.
40:04But it's a bit dangerous sending humans to these places.
40:07So whenever you can use a robotic device, I think that's a good idea.
40:12I think there's still a practical reason for people to go to space.
40:16That is that we're able to do things that still we're able to do things that robots can't do or
40:21even with AI, we can make decisions based on experience.
40:25For example, on a planetary surface, especially the rovers on Mars, they don't go very fast and don't carry a
40:31lot of ground.
40:32Over like a period of 10 years, you can get with maybe, I don't know what the exact correlation would
40:37be,
40:37but much less than that time, if you had a person walking around, you could cover that same ground.
40:48I'm a professor at Columbia in mechanical engineering, and I teach classes that are related to space flight,
40:54introduction to human space flight, aerospace, human factors.
40:57I teach art of engineering, which is for new students, and for the mechanical engineering section, we build rockets.
41:04We just launched them last weekend.
41:05That was kind of fun.
41:07So I teach those classes.
41:09I advise the space club, which is quite active.
41:11We have 500 students, about 250 or so are active, doing different projects from rockets to space flight experiments to
41:19high-altitude balloons to all kinds of things.
41:22So that's pretty enjoyable.
41:23We're starting an aerospace program there.
41:26We have a minor, and we're starting a major in aerospace engineering, so it's taking the first steps for that.
41:31I've got my first book, Spaceman, is more of a memoir, and then it is a memoir.
41:35New York Times bestseller, did well.
41:37I also have a junior, like a young reader version of that, and then I have another book, Moonshot, which
41:44came out more recently.
41:46It's kind of like my top 10 lessons learned as an astronaut.
41:49It's more in the self-help space.
41:51If NASA calls me tomorrow to go to the moon, my answer is yes, but I can guarantee you they
41:56won't be calling.
41:57So I'm going to be staying here, I think, on the planet.
42:02Hi, I'm a producer and authorised account.
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