How to Astronaut Read online

  That, and sounding cool on the radio.

  Speaking Russian

  (ГОВОРИТЬ ПО РУССКИ)

  Learning the Language of Your Crewmates

  Most people who get selected to be an astronaut think they’re pretty good at something. The former fighter pilots were the hotshots of their base, the medical doctors were the top of their field (like Goose in ER), the engineers could code better than any of the other engineers in their cubicle farm. But when you get selected as an astronaut you learn a cold, hard truth: Whatever you thought you were good at, there’s someone better.

  One skill where I thought I could hold my own was foreign languages. I wasn’t that great, but I did live with a family in Finland as an exchange student in high school. And in college I had minored in French, spending a semester at the French Air Force Academy (l’Ecole de l’Air). Of all the fighter pilots I knew in the Air Force, I was the only one who had that kind of foreign language experience. We all tried to speak German while stationed at Spangdahlem Air Base, but it was absolutely terrible and no real German person could ever understand us; we made up our own words with a ghastly accent. Phrases like das ist so . . . (that is so) . . . or du bist ein . . . (you are a) . . . pretty much summed up the extent of our Deutsch vocabulary. It was so bad. Nonetheless, we did think we were funny and clever . . . and good-looking and humble too.

  Then I got to NASA and realized something: There were other astronauts who spoke foreign languages better than I did. At the top of this list and in sole possession of first place was my eventual crewmate on my Expedition 43 space station mission, Samantha Cristoforetti. She spoke English, French, German, Russian, and of course her native Italian, all fluently and with practically no accent. She was like the Pope. After our mission the European Space Agency sent her to China to learn how to fly their spaceship, and also learn Mandarin, only a year after our flight. When I asked her how learning the language was, she replied sheepishly, “Oh, it’s OK, you know, so-so.” Then I saw her give a TV interview in Mandarin on Chinese national television. Unbelievable. Samantha is probably the smartest person I know when it comes to languages. And there are astronauts like her in every field—science, flying, physical fitness, mechanical skills, you name it. Whatever you think you’re good at, there’s someone better.

  During our Soyuz rocket launch, Anton said, “Teppи дaй мнe блок yпpaблeния,” or “Terry, give me the control panel.” But блок (block) sounds like сок (sok, or juice). So I gave him a small box of juice from our food rations.

  When the space shuttle program ended, we were given two options: a) learn Russian so we could fly on their spaceship, or b) find another line of work. Thinking I was pretty decent when it came to languages, I thought, “How hard can this be?” The short answer is, pretty hard.

  Many people think Russian is difficult because of the Cyrillic alphabet, but honestly that really wasn’t a problem. My very first day of Russian-language training was with my instructor and lifelong friend, Waclaw Mucha (pronounced vatslov mooha). At the end of that four-hour class, I had the letters down. It was the next fifteen years of learning nouns and verbs and adjectives and cases that would be much more challenging.

  Very few words in Russian match words in English, otherwise known as cognates, though there are a few between Russian and French. For example, the word for beach is the same, plage in French, пляж in Russian. However, some Russian words can be ridiculously long and hard to pronounce. Hello is здравствуйте. That word literally took me five minutes to write out properly. There’s no way to get around the fact that Russian’s Slavic roots make it a tough language to learn because it has very few similarities to English, unlike other Romance or Anglo-Saxon languages.

  The first few years studying Russian were especially painful. I had a full-time job and never studied outside of class with Waclaw. My fellow astronaut classmates and I tortured poor Waclaw, asking him to repeat the same word over and over and over in every class. I am sure that I went many months, taking a few hours of lessons each week, learning only a few new words. He had the patience of a saint to put up with my slow learning and Teflon brain. Russian words just never seemed to stick. Finally, after a few years of torture, I had reached a decent level. I learned the six cases (don’t ask, just trust me, if you weren’t born and raised in Russia you’ll never quite get them), learned the twenty-one ways to say the word one, and got to a point where it was actually fun to speak Russian. Eventually, I could watch TV programs and movies— with Waclaw helping me understand each line, getting through five or ten minutes of a show during an hour-and-a-half lesson.

  Getting over that hump took years, but then Russian lessons became a lot more fun for both me and poor Waclaw. It was also very important for me to be able to communicate with all of my crewmates in their native language. The Russians cosmonauts I flew with all spoke English very well, better than my Russian, but I took it as a point of pride to be able to get along in their language.

  Beyond simply knowing technical language, I tried to learn cultural idioms and expressions and, more important, how to toast in Russian. This was a skill needed at the end of every major training milestone in Star City, our training base near Moscow. Being able to say a few sentences that everyone could understand went a long way in building our international friendship, especially during the very tense years of 2012–2015. I learned several very important skills when it came to toasting. First, when it’s time to drink, don’t completely empty your glass each time. This is especially important for vodka novices. Second, don’t go first. Your toast will be much funnier if you are the fifth person to toast rather than the first!

  There are still plenty of opportunities to mess up. During our Soyuz rocket launch, Anton said, “Teppи дaй мнe блок yпpaблeния,” or “Terry, give me the control panel.” But блок (block) sounds like сок (sok, or juice). So I gave him a small box of juice from our food rations. We almost died laughing! This story pretty much sums up my Russian-language skills. I can get along and have a conversation and make friends, but speaking for any length of time will quickly get to something I don’t understand. As long as I can clarify it, I’m fine. But sometimes when you ask for the controls of the spaceship you might get a box of juice instead.

  One of my favorite things to do on the space station was to float down to the Russian segment on Friday evenings and hang out with those guys, after the work week was done. We would eat dinner, watch TV, and laugh. We also began a tradition we called “cultural program.” My cosmonaut buddies would teach me expressions that I never learned in class, which provided hours of entertainment. I still remember Anton and Gennady and Misha and Sasha laughing while I learned words you don’t find in textbooks (or mixed company). When we had a good satellite connection, I would use the station’s limited telephone system to call Waclaw, who was usually driving home from the Johnson Space Center in Houston after work by then. “Waclaw, what does xxxxx mean?” He would always crack up, occasionally needing to pull over because he was laughing so hard at what my comrades had taught me. Those Friday evening “cultural programs” were a highlight of my time in space. One expression that my cosmonaut crewmates Anton and Gennady taught me became permanently memorialized on the bulkhead of one of the ISS modules with a Sharpie. We had a mini-ceremony as we penned this expression as motivation for future crews, laughing so hard that we would have fallen over had we not been floating. I can’t repeat it in mixed company, but it basically went something like “They’re hosing us, but we’re getting stronger.” I’ll let you modify the verb.

  If you are in an international environment at work or at home, making the effort to learn each other’s language and culture goes a long way, and can help form a lasting bond, even when there are very strong negative external factors threatening the relationship. I’m proud to say that the crew of Expedition 43 was an example of how people from different cultures can get along, work together, and become life
long friends, even in the face of adversity.

  Paper Bags

  Learning Not to Breathe Too Much CO2

  There are a lot of reasons to appreciate Earth. A lot. We have air to breathe and water to drink. Food in abundance. We are protected from cosmic radiation by our planet’s magnetic field. There are about a million laws of nature that are perfectly tuned to make life possible here. Everything about this planet is quite amazing when you think about it.

  One of those things is our atmosphere, and its cycle of O2 (oxygen) and CO2 (carbon dioxide). Simply put, animals use O2 and make CO2, and then trees and plants use that CO2 and make O2. What an amazing and perfectly designed life-support system. But when it comes to spaceships, meeting that need for a livable atmosphere requires a huge amount of effort by spacecraft designers, and managing CO2 is a crucial part of that system. Because astronauts make CO2 and there are no trees naturally on board a spaceship to remove it, a functional CO2 removal system is mandatory to prevent the crew from dying within hours.

  Because those man-made machines sometimes break down, every astronaut must learn their own personal symptoms for what CO2 exposure feels like. If you were to breathe in too much carbon dioxide, you needed to be aware of it and act before it’s too late. Because of this need for training, NASA came up with a very high-tech, precise system for each new astronaut to learn their individual symptoms.

  They put bags over our faces and had us breathe in them until the CO2 built up and we felt dizzy. Yup, I’m not kidding, that’s how I learned what too much CO2 feels like. It worked very well for us, but please don’t try this at home. Under the supervision of our flight surgeon, my STS-130 crew and I all sat around a table, each breathing into a paper lunch bag, staring at each other with steely-eyed determination to outdo the guy next to us. The flight docs admonished, “Hey, this isn’t a competition; just breathe until you feel your symptoms and then be done. There’s no prize for going longest.” Except we’re all astronauts so of course it’s a competition. Between pilot and mission specialist, Air Force and Marines, commander and pilot, there’s always a competition whenever an outcome can be measured!

  There we sat staring at each other, eyes glinting, sweat beading on our foreheads, cheeks turning purple, lips blue, eyes darting from one to the next, just exactly like when Alan Shepard and John Glenn and Gordo Cooper calmly stared each other down during their lung capacity test in The Right Stuff. One by one my crewmates pulled the paper bags off their faces, taking a deep gulp of beautiful oxygen. Flight surgeons pleading. Until finally there was only one of us with his face in the bag. I won’t say who the last man standing was, but his initials are TV. Not that anyone was counting. . . .

  CO2 actually became an issue for me several times in space. On my shuttle flight, we had been docked to the International Space Station (ISS) for ten days, and when it was time to leave, our whole STS-130 crew crowded back onto Endeavour’s cramped flight deck all at once and closed the hatch between shuttle and station. Suddenly, six people were all breathing out CO2 in the relatively small volume of the shuttle, causing the CO2 level to rapidly rise, and within minutes we all felt our individual symptoms—increased heart and breathing rate, flushed face, tingling lips and fingertips, stuffiness, headache. We joked that it was like being at a NASA meeting at the Johnson Space Center. Houston directed us to install an extra CO2 scrubber (a can of lithium hydroxide that removes CO2 from the air), and almost immediately the symptoms subsided.

  During my long-duration flight, the problem of CO2 exposure was more insidious. Our crew size varied between three and six people, depending on the Soyuz rotation schedule, and you could notice the difference when there were three versus six people on board. The CO2 scrubbers did much better when there were fewer bodies making carbon dioxide. Those scrubbers, a combination of American and Russian machines, routinely kept CO2 levels around 3 mm Hg of partial pressure, a level more than ten times as high as it is on Earth. On the long-duration mission it was as though we were frogs slowly boiling in a pot of water, because the CO2 level never abruptly changed as it did on Endeavour—we were just continuously subjected to a slowly changing, yet very high, CO2 soup.

  One thing I do know: I kept my head in that bag longer than anyone else. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

  It’s safe to say that most crewmembers experience some kind of CO2 symptoms while on a long-duration mission—either headaches, stuffiness, irritability, or what we affectionately call “space brain,” a condition that impedes your ability to think as well as on Earth. Occasionally, when one of the scrubbers broke or a new crew of three astronauts showed up, increasing the CO2 concentration, some folks would experience their CO2 symptoms. One night, I was not able to sleep in my usual sleeping quarters because of a technical problem and had to find a place on the ISS to camp out. I picked the PMM, our storage module. After setting up my sleeping bag and closing my eyes, I began to feel my heart race and lips tingle—my CO2 symptoms. I realized the ventilation in that module wasn’t good enough, and after relocating my sleeping bag several times, I gave up and moved out into the main hallway, Node 1. It was a poignant lesson in the importance of ventilation, because in space there’s no atmospheric circulation without electric fans. Without ventilation an astronaut would create a cloud of CO2 as he breathed, and unless he moved, he would slowly die.

  During my mission, we had an emergency that required the crew to use oxygen masks, and when the emergency was resolved we stored the half-empty oxygen bottles, awaiting instructions from Houston for their disposal. We were all elated when they told us to just release the oxygen into the atmosphere; the whole crew lined up to each take a hit from the O2 bottle! You see, that oxygen was an immediate relief from our daily overdose of CO2, and I felt a wave of relief in my brain, while also noticing my vision get a little brighter. Similarly, the spacesuit used for spacewalking has a 100 percent O2 atmosphere. So when you go outside you get a few hours in a much cleaner atmosphere. Though there are many physical demands related to spacewalking, I really enjoyed breathing pure oxygen, if only for a few hours.

  No NASA doctor really understands the long-term effects of this level of carbon dioxide exposure because people on Earth are not exposed to anything like it for the length of time that astronauts are, and there isn’t a valid, comprehensive, long-term assessment of astronaut health. There are hypotheses that it could affect vision, cardiovascular health, brain function (early-onset Alzheimer’s?), or who knows what else. In any case, the number of astronauts who fly is so small that most medical studies lack statistical significance.

  One thing I do know: I kept my head in that bag longer than anyone else. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

  The Vomit Comet

  The First Taste of Weightlessness

  I love airplanes. And I love airplane names: Falcon, Viper, Eagle, Hornet, Mustang, Lightning, Thud, Phantom. The list goes on. As Proverbs 22:1 says, “A good name is more desirable than great riches.” So, when I got to NASA and was told that I would be flying in the “Vomit Comet,” I was a little skeptical.

  The tradition of zero-g flights goes back to the beginning of the space program, when NASA wanted to find a way to give astronauts a taste of what weightlessness would feel like. You can of course experience weightlessness for a second if you jump off your roof, but it will be a painful landing. If you have a diving board (we used to have those before we had lawyers), you will also get a second of free fall before splashing down. If you fly in a light aircraft, the pilot can push forward on the stick and get a few seconds of zero g. But to really get a significant amount of time, you need to be going fast, and it turns out that an airliner makes a perfect way to get more than twenty seconds of floating.

  The mechanics of how this works are pretty straightforward. The Vomit Comet flew out to a 100-mile-long, restricted operating area over the Gulf of Mexico with plenty of airspace in which to maneuver. It would climb up to 20,000 feet and nose over, accelerating
to 350 knots. At the designated speed, the pilot would pull back on the yoke, smashing all of the passengers down on the floor at two g’s, or twice their normal body weight. When the nose had pitched up to 45 degrees above the horizon, he pushed forward on the yoke until the plane was at zero g’s. This is a bit like being at the top of a roller coaster as it pauses at the peak of the tracks. Except it’s way more dramatic and lasts a lot longer. It took about twenty-five seconds for the plane to float over the top of this parabolic arc, until the nose was pushed down to about 30 degrees below the horizon. At that point, the pilot firmly pulled back on the yoke, once again smashing the poor occupants of the plane against the floor at two g’s. If you were a physics major, the trajectory of the airplane described a parabola.

  This porpoising motion—nose down, pull back, smash everyone against the floor, push forward, make everyone float for twenty-five seconds, repeat—continued for ten parabolas. At that point, the plane reached the end of the restricted airspace, so we had to turn around and do it all again. Most of these flights involved forty parabolas during a two-to-three-hour sortie.

  When I first arrived at NASA, they were still flying the KC-135 Vomit Comet, the workhorse of American zero-g flights for many decades. That plane was awesome, with a big open cabin, padded walls, lots of room for the poor occupants to float around and practice weightlessness or operate experiments that scientists were testing out before sending them to space. A few years later, in a cost-cutting move, NASA transitioned to the C-9, a smaller, two-engine aircraft, which meant lower fuel costs compared to the four-engine KC-135. This plane was actually pretty good, because it had about 90 percent of the usable volume and was cheaper than the KC-135.