Chasing Space Page 15
When we weren’t busy moving and installing payloads for the space station, we’d take in the light shows. For example, when we were over the Earth’s southern hemisphere we’d see this green glow of particles hitting the atmosphere. The colors were different over the northern hemisphere—purple, yellow, and blue. I had been told about the cosmic rays that would pass through the vehicle and hit my optic nerves, making me think I was seeing flashes of light, even though that was not really happening. The flashes were like sunbursts of different colors popping in my eyes and in my head.
Sleeping brought a different kind of light show. It was a pretty incredible experience because we didn’t have the sensation of lying down; we floated inside our sleeping bags as we dozed. We slept amid a whole din of pumps and motors, so many whirring around us; the noise made it seem like we were in a factory. On top of all that, my dreams were so vivid from the stimulus of the day. Behind my closed lids, I saw blues, greens, whites, whether they came from the ocean, whether they came from the sun, or whether they came from flashes in my head from these high-energy particles. The colors intertwined with my dream state and I sometimes saw alien forms and green clusters of light moving and dancing in a way that made me think of little green men on Mars. At one point in the mission, a huge, inside-out cheeseburger, dripping with grease, began to float through my dreams. I was just chomping on this burger, a juicy contrast to the irradiated food I had been consuming in real life.
There was no birthday cake on the shuttle either, but that didn’t stop me from celebrating my own big day. It happened when a surprise party organized by the Astronaut Family Support Office brought my parents, sister, and a host of friends to a conference room at NASA Langley. Through a video hookup I saw all their beaming faces, surrounded by blue balloons and noisemakers, as they gathered around a cake. My parents wore gray sweatshirts with “Atlantis” emblazoned across the front. I had just finished a long, challenging day operating the arm, and seeing their faces made me happier than they could have realized.
“A lot of prayers are going up to you,” my dad told me.
“A lot of prayers are coming down to you,” I replied.
The “party” ended with the whole group serenading me. Rudy King, a coworker at NASA Langley who often played basketball with me, blew out the candle.
“This is really special, guys,” I said. “If I cried, the tears would just float away. I’ll save those tears for when I get home.”
Five days later, our mission was completed. It was time to return to Earth. In the history of human spaceflight, there had only been a little more than five hundred people who had been given an opportunity to go off-planet, and I had been one of them.
We said our goodbyes to Peggy, Leo, and the station crew as Dan prepared to join us for the flight back. We did one last 360-degree fly-around of the station to take more photographic documentation before beginning a de-orbit burn, a small adjustment to our orbit that sent us skimming into the planet’s atmosphere. We started to bleed off the enormous speed we’d attained when the rocket boosters had sent us hurtling from the pad at liftoff. Our displays indicated a speed of Mach 25, twenty-five times the speed of sound. We could look out the overhead windows above us and see a 3,000-degrees-Fahrenheit hot pulsing plasma that was only about three feet from us as we entered the atmosphere. Fifty minutes later, twin sonic booms announced our imminent arrival to the families and friends awaiting us at Kennedy Space Center.
Our drag chute deployed and jettisoned our forward landing gear; we touched down on runway 15. We took off our pressure suits and, after completing our last few procedures, carefully disembarked from the shuttle. I took a last look around. I had spent ten years chasing space. And I had finally caught it.
The best part of coming home was seeing my family and friends and the immense joy and pride I felt while walking on terra firma again, not floating but feeling the Earth beneath me. It was a beautiful moment. The next morning, waking up in my own home, I had moments of disorientation in which I wondered, Where am I? Am I in space? Am I on the ground? How am I going to move? How am I going to eat? Will I have to throw food in the air and fly and get it? To walk on the beach was the most incredible thing. When you look at the horizon it helps regauge your gyros and your inner ear. It helps you know exactly what’s up and down and what’s right and left. Driving again required some adjustment because I’d been traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, an experience that changed how I thought about speed. I would get in my car and think, Hmm, I’m going sixty miles per hour, oh, I’m going one hundred miles per hour, oh, that’s nothing. I’d always been enthusiastic about food, but it tasted even better after my time in space. It was especially gratifying to come home to a wonderful meal and share it with loved ones without having to chase it when it bounced off of something in zero gravity. I could just pick it up with my fork and relax in the certainty that it would arrive straight to my mouth.
Going to space is transformative on so many different levels. I tell future explorers that when you work with others, make sure you work together as a team. Learn to see all people as potential space travelers together no matter what language they speak, no matter what they look like, no matter what food they eat, and know that we’re all in this together. Work hard and share the fun.
When you look at the Earth from the vantage point of space, our planet looks like a little blue marble. Seeing our world from that vantage point cognitively changes you. My orbital shift happened after breaking bread with my space station crewmates and my shuttle crewmates. It showed me how close we are as countries, as races, as a species. I marveled that on Earth we have all these distances and separations and geographic boundaries, but they vanish quickly in the weightless interior of the space station.
I’d always been low-key, relying on the strength of my upbringing and my faith. I could easily find solace and reassurance by walking the restful fields of my farm. Yet, I was even calmer when I returned from space. I realized that the things that I thought were a big deal were no longer so important.
The routine, day-to-day frustrations, like someone cutting you off in traffic, paled in comparison to the experience I’d just had. Space also inspired me to think about how we reach that next generation, how we prepare others to take our place and go off somewhere else and do much better things. It was a notion I would return to with increasing regularity in the years to come.
• • •
Each member of a shuttle crew is allowed to carry mementos into space. We packed some into our personal preference kits, one for each crewmember. Others were stored inside the Official Flight Kit, a two-cubic-foot container. My personal items included two NFL jerseys (the Lions and the Cowboys, of course), a beloved Curious George book from my childhood, jazz bassist Christian McBride’s Live at Tonic album, and some songs I had composed myself in my little home studio. Among my most meaningful mementos was a work of art created by youngsters at Project Row Houses (PRH). Based in the Third Ward, one of the oldest African American neighborhoods in Houston, PRH aims to use art to transform the social environment. In the spring of 2007, Melissa Noble, a friend and longtime fixture in Houston’s cultural scene, introduced me to Rick Lowe, the project’s award-winning cofounder. His vision of community renewal resonated with me, and I subsequently visited the group’s Arts/Education Program. After I spoke with the children about my upcoming shuttle mission, PRH worked with Houston artist Jenna Jacobs to help nearly fifty neighborhood youngsters, all between the ages of five and fourteen, create a three-by-five-foot quilt reflecting what space meant to them. They worked all that summer to complete it before my flight, and I was able to take it with me when the mission launched in February. In April 2008, nearly two months after my return from space, I went back to PRH to talk to them about my trip. As usual, I felt a special connection with my youthful audience as I recalled bearing witness to the wonders of the cosmos. Perhaps best of all, I was able to present them with their quilt. It had traveled nearly 5.3
million miles and circled the Earth 203 times.
In June, I joined the SST-122 crew on a much shorter journey than our previous expedition. We headed to Germany to celebrate our successful installation of the European Columbus Laboratory and Leo Eyharts’s historic accomplishment as the first European astronaut to live on the space station for an extended stay. We also paid tribute to Hans Schlegel, the German astronaut whose spacewalk with Rex had secured Columbus to the space station. We arrived in Berlin and visited historic sites such as Checkpoint Charlie, the name western Allies gave to the Berlin Wall crossing point during the Cold War. Our diverse international crew provided a contemporary contrast to the historic enmity such landmarks recalled. I remember our crew taking a picture with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She had invited us to meet with her at the Federal Chancellery in Berlin to brief her on the technical and scientific results of our mission. Such briefings often require translating difficult research concepts into language more readily understood by the masses. Chancellor Merkel, a trained physicist, required no such translation.
A month later I was in Israel to participate in a pro-am tennis tournament. My appearance was part of an event promoting the Israel Tennis Center’s (ITC) first annual Israel Open in memory of Ilan Ramon, who perished in the Columbia disaster. The first Israeli astronaut, Ilan had been my classmate and friend. The ITC is the largest children’s tennis program in the world and helps children develop socially, psychologically, and physically in a multicultural environment. The ITC’s fourteen centers are located primarily in disadvantaged neighborhoods where they serve a variety of youngsters, from those with special needs to gifted athletes. Among the most talented was Anna Smashnova, the professional with whom I was partnered in the tournament. Born to a Jewish family in the Soviet Union, Anna won that country’s youth championship in 1989, when she was just fourteen. A year later, her family moved to Israel at the invitation of Freddie Krivine, one of the founders of the ITC.
I did more than play tennis while I was there. Accompanied by Ilan’s widow, Rona, I met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. On another day I went to Jaffa to visit the “Sky is the Limit” ITC coexistence project, a program designed to promote bonds between the various ethnic communities in Israel. I also attended a gala to benefit the center, with many of the country’s best professional tennis players on hand. I went to Masada, one of Israel’s most popular tourist attractions, and even floated in the Dead Sea, which I had seen and photographed from space.
Because of my experience with the Educator Astronaut Program, I was also called on to speak to groups of children. It gave me great pleasure to share my stories of space travel at the Sderot and Ashkelon Tennis Centers, where I met with Ethiopian children and others who lived in cities that had been repeatedly hit by rocket fire from Gaza.
“No matter what happens in our lives, we have to keep moving forward,” I told them. “We have to keep doing our best, no matter what the circumstances. It is about your heart, dedication, and spirit.” Wherever I went, I told my young audiences that few people I knew possessed as much of those qualities as Ilan, Israel’s fallen astronaut. People readily embraced me because of my ties to him. In 2003, the Israeli government named seven hills in the Ramon Crater in honor of Ilan and the six U.S. astronauts who died on the Columbia. Five years later, the memory of his heroism was as strong as ever.
• • •
Back in Houston by August, I resumed training as a Cape Crusader. It sounds like Batman’s job in Gotham City but it’s actually a position created to support the Astronaut Office at Cape Canaveral during missions. The tasks are related to operations, and include helping as part of the close-out crew, getting astronauts in their respective seats in the shuttle, and doing communication checks with Mission Control Command. Also, in the event of a terrorist strike, Cape Crusaders may need to help the SWAT team. As a result, we trained in firearm shooting, developed familiarity with flying a helicopter, and otherwise prepared to step in and save the day where required. Tracy Caldwell and Paolo Nespoli trained with me, along with Barry “Butch” Wilmore, with whom I would soon be working closely.
By soon, I mean right away. Kent Rominger, the chief of the Astronaut Office at the time, called me into his office and told me I’d been assigned to STS-129, scheduled for liftoff in November 2009. Butch was assigned to pilot the shuttle for what would be his first mission. We’d be joining Commander Charlie “Scorch” Hobaugh and mission specialists Randy Bresnik, Mike Foreman, and Bobby Satcher. After Kent gave me the surprising news, I went looking for the other crewmembers to congratulate them. Mike and I had been classmates so we had a great relationship. I had been on the selection board for Bobby and Randy, and it was cool to fly with people I had a hand in choosing. I was excited and shocked to be named to the mission since it had not been that long since I had flown.
I have been asked if being part of the Astronaut Corps affected my sense of time. It certainly does in the sense that you know you only have so many weeks to train to be perfect. If you are not perfect you can kill yourself, someone else, or the entire team and also end the space program. Having flown before in no way diminished my sense of high stakes during the months of training preceding my second mission.
I got a welcome break at the end of the year when I went home to Virginia for Christmas. Spending time with dear friends and relatives recharged my emotional and spiritual batteries. The atmosphere was festive in Halifax, where my mother was born, as my aunts and uncles broke bread and told stories of days gone by. The farm, which had been in the family for many years (and still is), was at the center of many of their tales. Later that month my dad and I walked the land, a sojourn that was becoming a holiday tradition for our family.
The new year started with considerable promise. My friend Melissa Noble, whose friendly overtures led to me taking a quilt to space, introduced me to the artist Elaine Duigenan. We met at Indika, one of my favorite Indian restaurants in Houston, where I learned about some photographs she was working on. The Micro Mundi series captures images of the trails that snails make when they are eating algae. When photographed from above, these tiny images look like aerial photos of Earth. I was so enchanted with her project that I took one of her pieces on the Atlantis in November and photographed it floating in the weightlessness of space.
The high point of the month was my trip to Washington, DC, to attend President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Watching alongside wives of the some of the crewmembers who rode on the NASA float in the inaugural parade, I saw a black man take the nation’s highest oath of office while his countrymen cheered. Like so many others, I was filled with the most incredible sense of pride. I remember hearing Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma lead a quartet performance of the song “Air and Simple Gifts.” Their sensitive performance moved me to tears even though it was ten degrees outside. Few things could reasonably be expected to match the thrill factor of such an extraordinary and historic occasion, except maybe going to space.
• • •
My training adhered to a typical routine over the next several months, full of exercises, repetition, and critical attention to detail. One welcome respite took place in May, and my fellow astronaut Suni Williams was very much a part of it. Our love of dogs was one of the many things Suni and I had in common. A few years after I got Jake, a second dog that looked almost exactly like him showed up on my lawn. I had watched Scout wandering around the neighborhood day after day. He had no collar, he was nearly blind, and I quickly learned he had heartworms. He must have had a home somewhere nearby but his owners clearly didn’t care about him. So there I was with two nearly identical Rhodesian ridgeback mixes who came to me by accident, separately. While Scout was relatively mild-mannered, Jake was considerably more excitable. He protected me like a grizzly bear defending her cub, a particular challenge when people came to the door. He sometimes tried to bite people who came too close.
Meanwhile, Suni’s Jack Russell terrier, Gorby (named after former Soviet le
ader Mikhail Gorbachev), was also having discipline problems. He had the unfortunate habit of going after dogs bigger than him. So far he had escaped any real consequences, but Suni was frustrated.
The NASA Public Relations Department caught wind of our dog problems and decided to turn it into publicity. And on a sunny day in May, Cesar Millan, star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer, drove down to Houston in a fancy RV that he parked in front of my house in El Lago. That’s when we filmed “Cesar, We Have a Problem.”
The voice-over began as I opened my front door to Cesar. Jake and Scout went nuts and jumped on him. Both dogs tried to slip past my legs and into the front yard. The camera panned to Suni standing in the hallway.
“Astronauts Suni Williams and Leland Melvin have been flawless in space but are experiencing technical difficulties with their dogs here on planet Earth,” the unseen narrator said. “Cesar likes to tackle the toughest problem first so he begins with Leland and Jake.” At one point, I thought Jake was going to attack Cesar. What our guest didn’t know was that Jake would often run to the window and bark at the garbagemen. The men, seeing my dog was stuck in the house, responded by beating on the window and harassing him. The men were Hispanic, and my fear was that Jake would associate his tormentors with Cesar, especially when Jake began snarling and showing the Dog Whisperer his teeth.