This wasn’t just an exciting adventure story. This was something more like a life plan. These young men, flying jets in the Navy, did a real job that existed in the real world. Some of them became astronauts, and that was a real job too. These were hard jobs to get, I understood, but some people did get them. It could be done. What drew me to these Navy pilots wasn’t the idea of the “right stuff”—a special quality these few brave men had—it was the idea of doing something immensely difficult, risking your life for it, and surviving. It was like a night run in the ambulance, but at the speed of sound. The adults around me who encouraged me to become a doctor thought I liked being an EMT because I liked taking people’s blood pressure measurements, stabilizing broken bones, and helping people. But what I craved about the ambulance was the excitement, the difficulty, the unknown, the risk. Here, in a book, I found something I’d thought I would never find: an ambition. I closed the book late that night a different person.
I would be asked many times over the following decades what the beginning of my career as an astronaut was, and I would talk about seeing the moon landing as a kid, or seeing the first shuttle launch. These answers were to some extent true. I never told the story about an eighteen-year-old boy in a tiny, stuffy dorm room, enthralled by swirling sentences describing long-dead pilots. That was the real beginning.
—
WHEN I BECAME an astronaut and started getting to know my astronaut classmates, many of us shared the same memory of coming downstairs in our pajamas as little kids to watch the moon landing. Most of them had decided, then and there, to go to space one day. At the time, we were promised that Americans would land on the surface of Mars by 1975, when I was eleven. Everything was possible now that we had put a man on the moon. Then NASA lost most of its funding, and our dreams of space were downgraded over the decades. Yet my astronaut class was told we would be the first to go to Mars, and we believed it so fully that we put it on the class patch we wore on our flight jackets, a little red planet rising above the moon and the Earth. Since then, NASA has accomplished the assembly of the International Space Station, the hardest thing human beings have ever achieved. Getting to Mars and back will be even harder, and I have spent a year in space—longer than it would take to get to Mars—to help answer some of the questions about how we can survive that journey.
The risk taking of my youth is still with me. My childhood memories are of the uncontrollable forces of physics, the dream of climbing higher, the danger of gravity. For an astronaut, those memories are unsettling in one way but comforting in another. Every time I took a risk, I lived to draw breath again. Every time I got myself into trouble, I made it out alive.
Most of the way through my yearlong mission, I was thinking about how much The Right Stuff had meant to me, and I decided to call Tom Wolfe; I thought he might enjoy getting a call from space. Among the other things we talked about, I asked him how he writes his books, how I might start to think about putting my experiences into words.
“Begin at the beginning,” he said, and so I will.
1
February 20, 2015
YOU HAVE TO go to the ends of the Earth in order to leave the Earth. Since the space shuttles were retired in 2011, we’ve depended on the Russians to launch us into space, and we must start with a journey to the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan. First, I fly from Houston to Moscow, a familiar journey of eleven hours, and from there ride in a van to Star City, Russia, forty-five miles away—anywhere from one to four hours, depending on Moscow traffic. Star City is the Russian equivalent of the Johnson Space Center; it’s the place where the cosmonauts have been trained for the last fifty years (and, more recently, the astronauts who will travel to space with them).
Star City is a town with its own mayor and a church, museums, and apartment blocks. There is a giant statue of Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human in space in 1961, taking a simple, humble socialist-realist step forward while holding a bouquet of flowers behind his back. Years ago, the Russian space agency built a row of town houses especially for us Americans, and staying in them is sort of like staying on a movie set based on a Russian stereotype of how Americans live. There are huge fridges and huge TVs but somehow everything is slightly off. I’ve spent a lot of time in Star City, including serving as NASA’s director of operations there, but it still feels foreign to me, especially in the heart of the frozen Russian winter. After a few weeks of training, I find myself longing to head back to Houston.
From Star City we fly 1,600 miles to Baikonur, once the secret launch site for the Soviet space program. People sometimes say that a place is “in the middle of nowhere,” but I never say that anymore unless I’m talking about Baikonur. The launch site was actually built in a village called Tyuratam, named for a descendant of Genghis Khan, but was referred to as Baikonur, the name of another town several hundred miles away, as subterfuge. Now this is the only place called Baikonur. Early on, the Soviets also referred to their launch facility as Star City so as to further confuse the United States. For an American who grew up and trained as a Navy pilot during the tail end of the Cold War, it will always feel a bit strange that I’m invited into the epicenter of the former Soviet space program to be taught its secrets. The people who live in Baikonur now are mostly Kazakh, descendants of Turkic and Mongol tribes, with a minority of ethnic Russians who were left behind after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia leases the facilities here from Kazakhstan. The Russian ruble is the main currency, and all the vehicles have Russian license plates.
From the air, Baikonur seems to have been flung randomly onto the high desert steppes. It’s a strange collection of ugly concrete buildings, horribly hot in summer and harshly cold in winter, with mounds of rusting, disused machinery piled everywhere. Packs of wild dogs and camels scrounge in the shadows of aerospace equipment. It’s a desolate and brutal place, and it’s the only working human spaceport for most of the world.
I’m descending toward Baikonur in a Tupolev 134, an old Russian military transport plane. This aircraft might once have been outfitted with bomb racks and in a pinch could have served as a bomber, part of the Cold War arsenal the Soviets developed with the purpose of attacking my country. But now it’s used to transport international crews of space travelers—Russian, American, European, Japanese, and Canadian. We are former enemies remade as crewmates, on our way to the space station we built together.