ONE HOT DAY in early July 1996, Leslie and I packed up our two cars and left Pax River for Houston. Samantha, almost two now, was a sprightly and adorable toddler. We found a house we liked quickly and moved in on August 1. Mark and his family moved to town after we did, since they were having a house built nearby.
In addition to getting my family settled and learning about the area, I was also working out a lot, running every day. I wanted to show up at NASA in good shape. There was part of me that felt like I was still trying out for the job, and in a sense I was—I hadn’t been assigned to a flight yet. I still thought of myself as a below-average guy stepping into an above-average role, and I knew I would have to impress some people if I was going to be among the first in my class to fly.
On the Friday night before our official Monday start date, we went to a party where we met all of my new classmates. We were ASCANs (pronounced “ass cans”), short for astronaut candidates (we would become full-fledged astronauts the first time we left the Earth’s atmosphere). The party was hosted by Pat Forrester, who was selected in our class but had already been stationed at NASA as an Army officer. Because he already knew his way around, he was our official class leader.
It wasn’t until that party that I learned our class would include international astronauts. There were thirty-five Americans and nine astronauts from other countries, which made us the largest astronaut class in NASA history. At the party, I was chatting with Mark and some other new classmates when I heard a man nearby I hadn’t met before, who was speaking with an accent. I figured he might be one of my foreign classmates, so I went up to him, stuck out my hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Scott Kelly.”
Before he could answer, a woman pushed him out of the way, stuck her hand out, and said, “I am your classmate. My name is Julie Payette.” The man she had pushed aside was her husband. They were both French Canadian, bilingual in French and English, and she had grown tired of people assuming her husband was the new ASCAN rather than her. She and I would go on to become great friends. I met so many people that night—not only my classmates, but their spouses and significant others, astronauts from previous classes, their partners, and other NASA people who worked in support of the Astronaut Office. It was exciting to know that we were going to be such a big part of one another’s lives, and maybe spend time in space together.
The first day on the job involved a lot of paperwork and learning the basic aspects of working for NASA. Jeff Ashby was the astronaut from the previous class in charge of getting us oriented. We were introduced to the rest of the Astronaut Office and shown where our desks would be. I was to share an office with my classmates Pat Forrester, Julie Payette, Peggy Whitson, and Stephanie Wilson.
Our training started out in classrooms, where all forty-four of us began to realize the magnitude of knowledge we were going to need. We heard lectures on geology, meteorology, physics, oceanography, and aerodynamics. We learned about the history of NASA. We learned about the T-38, the jets the astronauts fly.
Most of all, we learned about the space shuttle. We were given an overview of how the shuttle worked as a whole, and we got specific lectures on each of the many individual systems—their designs, their nominal operations, their possible malfunctions, and how we should respond to those. We worked through a number of different failures that could occur as we executed the procedures we would use on actual missions. We trained that way on the main engines, on the electrical system, on the environmental control and life support system. It was challenging to master all of it, but it became even harder when we moved on to the shuttle mission simulator, which integrated all these systems together during the mission phases: prelaunch, ascent, post-insertion, on-orbit operations, deorbit prep, entry, landing, and post-landing.
Our trainers hammered us with the malfunctions we could face during a real flight. A critical phase was post-insertion, the period of time just as the shuttle is getting into orbit. We have to convert a vehicle that has launched as a rocket into a working orbital spaceship—reconfiguring the computers, getting the enormous payload bay doors open so their radiators could cool the shuttle’s electrical systems, deploying the Ku-band antenna so we could communicate with the ground, deploying the robot arm, making sure everything was working properly, and getting ready for on-orbit operations.
By far the most challenging and complicated phase of shuttle training was ascent. On a real launch, when everything went right, the flight crew had very little to do besides monitoring the systems, but NASA had to prepare us for every eventuality. So this phase of flight revealed those who had learned their stuff and those who hadn’t. We trained for the orbit phase, since that was where we would spend the most time on a real mission. We practiced payload operations—for instance, deploying and then retrieving a satellite. We practiced rendezvous and docking with Mir (the International Space Station didn’t exist yet).