I wondered whether I had used the phrase “human space program” too many times. I wanted to show that I understood that human spaceflight is not the only thing that NASA does, and also that I knew the phrase “manned spaceflight” was outdated. I had found this essay fiendishly difficult to write, because I knew my answer to the question “Why do you want to be an astronaut?” would be more or less the same for everyone else. We all wanted to do something difficult and exciting and important. We all wanted to be involved with something that would be in the history books for hundreds of years to come. What more was there to say about it? How could one applicant differentiate himself or herself from the others? Now that I have served on the astronaut selection board, I know that the essay doesn’t do much to help or hurt an applicant unless it is extreme in some way. But at the time, every detail seemed important.
In an earlier draft, I had tried, just as an experiment, to be more honest and see how it sounded.
“Actually the real reason I want to be an astronaut is that when I was in the tenth grade and visiting Kennedy Space Center on a family trip I wanted to see the film about the manned space program. My parents said the line was so long we would only go if Mark and I were in it.”
I had looked the new paragraph over with a stern eye, then decided it was too big a risk to try to be funny or cute. I stuck with the original message. It might be a cliché, but it was true.
I knew from Mark and Dave that an intimidating group of twenty people would be interviewing me. Some of them I recognized. John Young was one of them, the only astronaut to have launched on three different spacecraft: Gemini, Apollo, and the space shuttle. He had orbited the moon alone on Apollo 10, then walked on its surface during Apollo 16. He was chosen to command the first flight of the space shuttle, making him and his pilot, Bob Crippen, the only two people to launch into space on a rocket that hadn’t been previously tested on unmanned flights. He was what you might call an astronaut’s astronaut, a living legend. I wanted to be just like him. I also recognized Bob Cabana, the chief of the Astronaut Office (he had greeted us a few days earlier), and astronauts Jim Wetherbee and Ellen Baker.
I got settled into a chair at a T-shaped table surrounded by the committee and tried to sound calm and confident as I greeted them.
“I’m afraid this might all look pretty familiar to you guys,” I said, pausing for a laugh. “You’ve seen this suit before.” Then I explained how I had loaned it to my brother, who had been too cheap to buy me a new one. But he did lend me his shoes.
It’s risky to try to make a joke in a job interview, but everyone laughed, which made me feel a bit more at ease. They might have been wondering how Mark and I would deal with being twins applying at the same time, and I wanted them to feel they could treat us like any other candidates.
John Young took the lead. He said, simply, “Tell us about your life.”
My mind raced. What aspects of my life did he want to hear about? How far back should I go?
“Well, when I graduated from college in 1987—,” I began.
“No,” Young interrupted. “Go back further. Go back to junior high school.”
In retrospect, I wonder whether they cut off everyone’s response and made them start in a different place, to see how they would respond to being interrupted. In my case, junior high was not a great place to start. I wasn’t about to tell them about staring out the window and earning C’s. So instead, I told them about fixing up boats with my father, about learning to be an EMT and the experiences I had had working on the ambulance, about becoming licensed as a Merchant Marine officer in college, about learning how to work in an operational environment, and about the challenges I faced along the way. As I spoke, I was trying to put my experiences in a context that would differentiate me from the other candidates they were seeing. Being a test pilot, as tough as that had been to achieve, wasn’t going to set me apart from the other test pilots. But repairing a clunker boat in the open waters of the Atlantic might, or delivering a baby in a roach-infested slum in Jersey City.
“What’s the frequency response of the longitudinal flight control system in the Tomcat?” John Young asked.
I had mentioned in my application that I was working on a new digital flight control system in the F-14. I had also been tipped off by an F-16 pilot who interviewed the same week as my brother that Captain Young liked to ask about longitudinal frequency response, so I was prepared.
“Fifty hertz,” I answered.
Young nodded approvingly. It would make sense that the selection board would want to see whether or not I knew my stuff technically, but I also think he was just fascinated by planes and never stopped wanting to learn about them.
The official interview lasted around fifty minutes, with Captain Young and Bob Cabana leading the conversation. In general, I felt that I was doing well, though at one point I noticed that Ellen Baker looked like she might be falling asleep. My interview was the first one after lunch, and I hoped that it was something she had eaten that was making her eyes droop and not my boring stories.
—
PART OF the selection process involved psychological tests, which I found interesting but stressful, since so much was riding on them. I was tempted to try to figure out what the “right” answer for each question was. The answer to “Do you ever hear voices telling you to do things?” wasn’t hard to guess, but I figured the test was designed to reveal people choosing to lie. One question I remember specifically was “Would you rather steal something from a store or kick a dog?” I had to choose one, so I said I would rather steal something. With that type of question, I suspected there was no right or wrong answer, but rather that our responses would be cross-checked against other responses to similarly worded questions to detect someone trying to game the test. Years later, one of the psychiatrists told me I’d almost failed the test for that reason—my answers reflected that I was trying to tell them what they wanted to hear.