Terry and Samantha show me around, reminding me how things work up here now. They start with the most important piece of equipment to master: the toilet, also known as the Waste and Hygiene Compartment, or WHC. We also run through a quick safety brief that we will redo more thoroughly in a couple of days once I’m more settled. An emergency could strike at any time—fire, ammonia leak, depressurization—and I’ll have to be ready to deal with whatever comes, even on day one.
We head back to the Russian segment for a traditional welcoming party—special dinners are held there every Friday night and on other special occasions, including holidays, birthdays, and good-bye dinners before each Soyuz leaves. Welcoming parties are one of those occasions, and Terry has warmed up my favorite, barbecued beef, which I stick to a tortilla using the surface tension of the barbecue sauce (we eat tortillas because of their long shelf life and lack of crumbs). We also have the traditional foods we share at Friday night dinners—lump crabmeat and black caviar. Everyone is in a festive mood. It’s been a long, tough day for the three of us who just arrived. Technically, two days. Eventually we say our good nights, and Terry, Samantha, and I head back to the U.S. segment.
I find my crew quarters, or CQ, the one part of the space station that will belong just to me. It’s about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth. Four CQs are arranged in Node 2: floor, ceiling, port side, starboard side. I’m on the port wall this time; last time I was on the ceiling. The CQ is clean and empty, and I know that over the course of the next year it will fill with clutter, like any other home. I zip myself into my sleeping bag, making a special point to appreciate that it’s brand new. Though I will replace the liner a couple of times, the bag itself won’t be cleaned or replaced over the next year. I turn off the light and close my eyes. Sleeping while floating isn’t easy, especially when you’re out of practice. Even though my eyes are closed, cosmic flashes occasionally light up my field of vision, the result of radiation striking my retinas, creating the illusion of light. This phenomenon was first noticed by astronauts during the Apollo era, and its cause still isn’t thoroughly understood. I’ll get used to this, too, but for now the flashes are an alarming reminder of the radiation zipping through my brain. After trying unsuccessfully to sleep for a while, I bite off a piece of a sleeping pill. As I drift off into a restless haze, it occurs to me that this is the first of 340 times I will have to fall asleep here.
4
FOR THE REST of that fall of 1982, I walked around the campus of the University of Maryland–Baltimore County with a new outlook on life. Before, I had always wondered where everyone got the motivation to get out of bed early to make it to class. They left parties while the music was still playing and while there were still beers unopened. Now I knew why: they each had some kind of goal. Now I’d found mine too, and it was a great feeling. I counted myself lucky to have picked up a book that showed me my life’s goals so clearly, and I intended to fulfill them. Not only was I going to become a Navy pilot, I might even become an astronaut. These were the most challenging and exciting goals I had ever come across, and I was ready to get started. I had only one problem: the path to becoming a naval aviator is an extremely competitive one, and I was still a chronic underperformer with a terrible academic record. I would have to become a commissioned officer in the Navy, but that pipeline was clogged with accomplished young people who had excelled in high school and were then nominated to the U.S. Naval Academy by their congressman or senator. They had aced their SATs. Because I’d daydreamed and bullshitted my way through high school, I didn’t have the basic knowledge even to begin the kinds of courses I’d have to take: calculus, physics, engineering. Beyond that, I knew that even if I started at a remedial level, I still probably wouldn’t be able to keep up. However strong my motivation, I lacked the skills necessary to learn.
Everywhere I looked, I saw students who could listen to an hour-long lecture, asking intelligent questions and writing things down. They turned in homework assignments on time, correctly done. They took a textbook and lecture notes and did something they called “studying.” They were then able to do well on exams. I had no idea how to do any of this. If you’ve never felt this way, it’s hard to express how awful it is.
By now, my brother was a freshman at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York. Our maternal grandfather had been a Merchant Marine officer in World War II and later served as a fireboat captain for the New York City Fire Department. Mark was thinking of following in his footsteps in the Merchant Marine, but he wasn’t dead set on it, so he liked the idea that the education he was getting at the academy was a good starting point for a range of careers. Given my new goals, this seemed like a good place to start for me too, because Kings Point offered a path to a commission in the Navy. Even if I couldn’t get into a military academy, Kings Point would still give me the structure of a military environment, which I felt I needed. Best of all, I would already know someone there who could help me get my bearings as a transfer student. I arranged a meeting with an admissions counselor over the Christmas break.
When I arrived on campus that January wearing the most formal thing I owned—khaki pants and a polo shirt—I was greeted by the dean of admissions himself, in full military dress uniform. I’d never dealt with a uniformed officer before (aside from cops, of course). He invited me into his large office that seemed to be constructed almost entirely from wood—wood furniture, wood bookshelves, wood chairs, model ships, and other nautical memorabilia all over the walls. A tarnished brass ship’s engine order telegraph stood alone in the far corner of the room. The dean looked me in the eye and asked me why I wanted to transfer there.
“Well, sir, I want to become a commissioned officer in the Navy. My goal is to fly fighter planes and land on aircraft carriers.”
In my mind, this was such a clear and compelling goal. But the man’s eyes glazed over as I spoke, and he kept looking at his watch, as if he was already thinking about his next appointment, or maybe about what he was going to have for lunch. He kept looking behind me, toward the window, rather than meeting my eyes. When I was done talking, he cleared his throat and closed the folder on his desk that contained my sad credentials.
“Look,” he said, and sighed.
Not a good sign.
“Your high school grades are pretty terrible. Your SAT scores are below the average for our incoming freshmen. Your grades in your first semester of college are no better than high school. There’s just nothing here to indicate that you would be successful in the very challenging program here.”
“I intend to improve my grades now,” I explained. “I know I can do it. And my SAT—I didn’t even study for it. I think I could do much better if I tried taking it again.”
“Well, your two scores would have to be averaged,” he explained, “so you’d need a perfect score in order to bring your new score up to our average. And even that wouldn’t be enough to balance out your grades.”