We trained to do deorbit prep, which is post-insertion in reverse: learning to take an orbiting spaceship and reconfigure it into something that could reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and land—a space plane. We worked on putting the antenna and robot arm away, closing the payload bay doors, getting the computers configured for the last phase of flight, then programming the deorbit burn to slow us down by just a few hundred miles an hour, which is enough to get us to reenter the atmosphere. As a pilot, I practiced reentry and landing thousands of times. We never stopped practicing. This is the moment in the mission when having something go wrong can be the most serious, so I had to be prepared to deal with anything. I remember the first reentry simulation I ever did: I was sitting in the pilot’s seat and an experienced astronaut was monitoring me. I felt a lot of pressure to perform well, since this was my first time trying to demonstrate my fledgling astronaut skills in front of a real astronaut. I messed up starting the auxiliary power units, which provided power for controlling the shuttle’s three engines and for moving the control surfaces on the shuttle, like the elevon, rudder, and body flap. The APUs lowered the landing gear and powered the brakes, so we couldn’t land without at least one. Because of the way I started them up, one of them probably would have exploded. Not a great start. I didn’t do particularly well at following procedures verbatim, either. I had been under the impression that the detailed procedures we were learning were more like guidelines; I was wrong. To top it all off, my landing was bad enough that it might have killed us all. The space shuttle is one of the hardest planes to land ever, so on that I got a bit of leeway. On all the other screwups, not so much.
The very complexity of the space shuttle was why I wanted to fly it. But learning these systems and practicing in the simulators—learning how to respond to the myriad of interrelated malfunctions in the right way—showed me how much more complicated this spacecraft was than anything I could have imagined. There were more than two thousand switches and circuit breakers in the cockpit, more than a million parts, and almost as many ways for me to screw up.
The amount I learned in order to go from a new ASCAN to a pilot on my first mission was, from what I could observe, an education comparable to getting a PhD. Our days were packed with classes, simulations, and other training. In the evenings, I would have a quick dinner with Leslie and Samantha, then get back to work studying. I went over notes from lectures and made a training notebook for myself that I could continue to study and add to as my education progressed. I spent at least one full day each weekend going over all of this material.
We went on field trips to different NASA centers—Ames in California, Glenn in Ohio, Goddard in Maryland, Michoud in Louisiana, Marshall in Alabama, headquarters in D.C., Kennedy in Florida. We needed to learn about what happens at each of these sites and how all of NASA’s projects work together, even the ones that didn’t directly affect the shuttle. As astronauts, we were going to serve as the public face for NASA, and we needed to be able to talk about everything NASA does. At the same time, it was important that the workers at these sites knew us as human beings whose lives would depend on their work.
My class had earned a reputation by this point for asking a lot of technical questions whenever we got the chance. In an atmosphere where forty-four people are vying for a small number of flight assignments, one of the ways to make an impression on our management was to ask complex questions that made clear how hard we’d been studying and what a strong grasp we had on the technical issues. Just before we went to Ames, NASA’s center for aerodynamic research, we were in a lecture when C. J. Sturckow, an astronaut from the previous class and a Marine Corps officer, burst into the room wearing his Marine camouflage uniform.
“Listen up,” he said from the front of the room. He took a giant knife out of its sheath and slammed it down on the table. “Everyone is getting tired of all of your questions! You think you sound smart, but you’re just slowing things down. When you go to Ames in a few days, I only want to hear yes-or-no questions like ‘Is this the biggest wind tunnel you have here at Ames?’?” With that, he picked up his knife and left the room without uttering another word. Some people in our class were offended or weirded out by his militaristic display, but I appreciated the directness.
Generally speaking, each of us would be actively training for a mission every few years. In between, we had specific responsibilities within the Astronaut Office. Most of us were put in charge of a system on the shuttle: we were to learn everything about that specific system, take part in redesigning it or improving it, and represent the astronaut’s point of view with the engineers. This practice has been ongoing since Gemini days, when the spacecraft first became so complicated that it was impossible for one astronaut to know everything.
I was put in charge of the caution and warning system on the space station, which sounds pretty important until you consider the fact that the space station didn’t yet exist. I was trying to learn as much as I could about the space shuttle, because it was the vehicle I was preparing to fly. For the pilot and commander, there are so many seemingly insignificant errors that could result in the loss of the vehicle and crew—it was the most important thing for me to learn not to make those mistakes. So the space station was going to take a backseat in my mind.
Some of us were also assigned to phases of flight to gain a special expertise—in my case, the rendezvous phase. I was pleased with that, because I knew there was a good chance I would fly a mission that would rendezvous with a space station or a satellite someday, and this way I would be well prepared. I would receive rendezvous training well ahead of my classmates, which would have ramifications going forward.
The Astronaut Office was a busy place in those days with such a large new class adding our numbers to the already existing corps. Some very experienced astronauts were still around, and it was an honor to serve along with them. John Young, the Gemini-era astronaut who had been on my selection committee, was always in the astronaut gym, putting everyone to shame just by showing up. Another spaceflight legend, John Glenn, was assigned to his space shuttle flight not long after I became an astronaut. One day I had four-year-old Samantha with me at work because Leslie had a dental appointment, and as I was walking her around I saw Glenn working diligently in his office. I introduced myself and Samantha.
He looked up and said, “Hi, young lady. What are you doing today?”
“I’m going to lunch with my dad,” Samantha answered.
“What’s your favorite food?” he asked her.
“Macaroni and cheese,” she said.
Senator Glenn gave her a look of pleased surprise. He held up the papers he had been working on.
“Look right here,” he said. “I was just selecting my space food for my mission and I just wrote, ‘Macaroni and cheese.’ That’s my favorite, too!”
Another time, I had Samantha with me at a party, and I encouraged her to talk to John Young about his experience walking on the moon. Samantha approached him and said, “My dad says you walked on the moon.”
John responded, “I didn’t walk on the moon. I worked on the moon!”
More than a year later, we were watching a documentary about Apollo, and I pointed out John Young to Samantha. “You met him, remember? He walked on the moon.”
Samantha didn’t miss a beat: “Daddy, he didn’t walk on the moon, he worked on the moon.”
John Glenn completed his mission, in October 1998, after which I inherited his parking space and used it for the next eighteen years.
Leslie and Samantha took easily to life in Houston. Leslie was always good at making new friends, and she quickly became part of a tight circle of women in our neighborhood. I would often come home from work to find a group of five or six women clustered in the kitchen, drinking wine and eating cheese, talking and laughing. She also became the head of the astronaut spouses’ group, which was responsible for planning social events for the astronaut corps, especially the traditional parties in honor of the spouses of the crew that was flying next. They also helped out with meals, babysitting, and other favors for anyone in the group who had a special need, like a death in the family or a new baby. The role suited Leslie well.