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AS PART OF my ASCAN training, I learned to fly the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA), a Gulfstream business jet that had been modified to re-create the approach profile and handling qualities of the space shuttle in the landing phase as closely as possible. Flight computers simulated the drag we would experience in the heavier, less agile orbiter by putting the engines in reverse while airborne. The left side cockpit and the controls had been designed to simulate the experience of landing the shuttle. The STA generally flew out of El Paso, Texas, so we would fly over there in a T-38, which took a little over an hour, get in the STA, then fly another thirty minutes to the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico. I did many practice approaches to the dry lake bed runways in that aircraft, stopping short of actually touching the wheels down. At first, we’d fly the STA every few weeks, learning to land the space shuttle. Eventually, we moved to flying every other month, then every quarter to maintain our proficiency, until we were assigned to a real mission.
I was in El Paso one day in March 1999, just having finished my ten practice landings and getting ready to fly back to Houston, when one of the senior shuttle commanders, Curt Brown, a tall guy with a receding hairline and a thick Tom Selleck 1980s mustache, came up to me. He had only spoken to me a couple of times before. He was known to be extremely technically competent, and his experience—five shuttle missions in six years—was nearly unequaled. But he also had the reputation of being arrogant and unfriendly to those not worthy of his attention. A high flight rate, training for missions one after another, practically without a break, can also bring burnout.
“Hey, come over here,” he said sternly. “I need to talk to you.”
I followed him into a private office, wondering what I had done to piss him off. He shut the door behind us, then turned and poked me in the chest three times while staring straight into my eyes.
“You better have your shit together,” he said to me, “because we’re flying in space in six months.”
I felt a couple of different things at once. One was: I’m fucking flying in space in six months!
Another was: Wow, what a shitty way to let someone know he’s got his first flight assignment.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ve got my shit together.”
Curt told me to keep this news a secret. I told my brother, of course.
A couple of days later, I was called in to see Charlie Precourt, the new chief of the Astronaut Office, along with Curt and French astronaut Jean-Fran?ois Clervoy (we called him “Billy Bob” since “Jean-Fran?ois” didn’t sound very Texan). Charlie looked very serious. He told Billy Bob and me that we were in trouble. A few months earlier, he said, we had screwed up on a T-38 flight and had drawn a flight violation from the FAA.
Because of my run-in with Curt earlier that week, and knowing that we were being assigned to a flight, I had a strong feeling that he and Charlie were just messing with us. Billy Bob didn’t know that, though, and all the color drained from his face. Once Curt and Charlie had had enough fun, Charlie said, “We’re just kidding, guys. You’ve both been assigned to STS-103 on Discovery. It’s going to be an emergency repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.”
Billy Bob was visibly relieved. Curt would command the mission, and we would be joined by John Grunsfeld, Mike Foale, Steve Smith, and Claude Nicollier. I was to be the only rookie on the crew and the first American in my class to fly. The primary goal was to fix the failing gyroscopes on the Hubble Space Telescope on four spacewalks, each more than eight hours long. Hubble needs at least three of its six gyroscopes to be working in order to make precise observations, and three had already failed.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been making observations of the universe since 1990. Until then, astronomers could never get a truly clear view of the night sky because of the distorting effect of the atmosphere, the same effect that causes stars to appear to twinkle. Observing stars and galaxies through the filter of our atmosphere was like trying to read a book underwater. Putting a telescope in orbit outside the atmosphere and past the reach of light pollution has changed the field of astronomy. By observing distant stars, scientists have been able to make discoveries about how fast the universe is expanding, how old it is, and what it is made of. Hubble has helped us to discover new planets in new solar systems and confirmed the existence of dark energy and dark matter. This one scientific instrument has revolutionized what we know about our universe, and the task of repairing it—which always brings the risk of damaging or even destroying its sensitive components—is an enormous responsibility.
Once our training was in full swing, we spent a lot of time in simulators. Running simulated missions is the only way for astronauts to get hundreds of hours of experience doing something that in reality we would get to do only a few times. The simulations re-created the experience as closely as possible—same screens, switches, and buttons; same uncomfortable metal-framed seats, same headsets, and same thick procedure books. The simulation supervisors devised fiendish scenarios for us to work through, such as multiple interrelated systems failing while other systems continued working just fine, though their sensors might erroneously report they had failed too. We practiced solving problems quickly. Often the simulations were designed so that one of us would be barraged with problems to test how we worked together as a team.
About halfway through our training, we were in a simulator dealing with a complex failure—all the cooling systems had gone down at once. Those controls were all on the left side of the cockpit, where the commander, Curt, was sitting. He was hit with one malfunction after another, but because he was so talented and experienced, he was able to identify and focus on the most critical issue. Simultaneously, a computer failed. This would normally be his responsibility too, but because I wasn’t as busy and could reach his keyboard myself, I decided to fix it for him by switching out the backup for the primary system. I typed in the commands while Curt’s head was still buried in cooling system problems. Item 16, execute, I typed.
A few minutes later, Curt got through his work with the cooling system. He looked at the display and saw that the computer failure had disappeared. He looked confused.
“What happened to the port failure on FF One?”
“Oh, I port-moded it for you,” I answered. As I spoke, I sensed this was not the answer he wanted to hear.
“You did what?”
“I port-moded it.”
A second went by—and then Curt turned toward me, which was difficult to do wearing a pressure suit while strapped tightly into his seat. He punched me on the arm as hard as he could.
“Don’t ever do that again!” he shouted.