ONE THING that surprised me about living in space was that it was hard to focus. There were many activities I had done over and over in the simulator, but when I got to space I found it much harder to concentrate on what I was doing. At one level I think it was just the experience of being in space for the first time—who could concentrate on a checklist of a procedure while floating with the beautiful Earth turning just outside the window? At another level, doing basic tasks was much more challenging in weightlessness, and I learned there was no way to compensate for that except to plan for the fact that everything was just going to take a bit more time.
There were physical effects too. Feeling the fluid in my body redistribute itself to my head for the first time was odd and at times uncomfortable. All astronauts experience some level of difficulty concentrating on a short mission—what we call “space brain”—and I was no exception. After you’ve been in space for weeks or months, you adjust and are able to work through the symptoms, which can vary based on CO2 levels, vestibular symptoms, sleep quality, and probably other factors too. I couldn’t afford to let my work suffer, because there would be serious consequences if I screwed something up.
One of the first things we did when we got to orbit was to open the shuttle’s huge payload bay doors. These needed to be open within the first few orbits, in order to keep the electrical systems cool. We needed to deploy and check out the robot arm, or we wouldn’t be able to grapple Hubble. If we failed to deploy or activate the Ku-band antenna, we wouldn’t be able to communicate as well with Earth or rendezvous easily with the telescope. Even tasks like using the toilet required our full attention—I was acutely aware that it was possible to damage it, potentially even permanently, which would mean a premature return.
On day three, Steve Smith and John Grunsfeld conducted their first spacewalk, successfully replacing the gyroscopes. The following day, Mike Foale and Claude Nicollier performed their spacewalk, replacing Hubble’s central computer and a fine-guidance sensor. On day six, Steve and John went outside again, this time to install a transmitter and a solid-state recorder. There had been a fourth planned spacewalk, but it was canceled in order to get us back on Earth before Y2K.
Day seven of the mission, the next-to-last day, marked the first time a space shuttle would be spending Christmas in orbit (and, it turns out, the last). We deployed Hubble, and after accepting congratulations from the ground for our success, Curt decided it was time to make his Christmas speech to mission control. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket, cleared his throat, and spoke in his most formal voice into the microphone:
“The familiar Christmas story reminds us that for millennia, people of many faiths and cultures have looked to the skies and studied the stars and planets in their search for a deeper understanding of life and for greater wisdom…We hope and trust that the lessons the universe has to teach us will speak to the yearning that we know is in human hearts everywhere—the yearning for peace on Earth, good will among all the human family. As we stand at the threshold of a new millennium, we send you all our greetings.”
Coming from someone else—from Billy Bob, say—this speech might have seemed heartfelt and even moving, but Curt wasn’t an emotional guy. As it was, we all sneaked looks at each other. If nothing else, Curt’s speech was remarkable for managing to completely avoid any religious content. Maybe Curt was thinking about the time the crew of Apollo 8 took turns reading from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve 1968. It was a beautiful moment enjoyed by many Christians and non-Christians alike, but an atheist group sued NASA for violating the separation of church and state. Nothing Curt had said would give First Amendment purists anything to get bent out of shape about.
There was a long, awkward pause, both inside the cockpit and on the ground. Usually the capcom would thank the commander for his great speech and reiterate that the spirit of humankind was alive in the space shuttle program or something along those lines. Instead, we just heard nothing. Moments later, the capcom, Steve Robinson, came on and said simply, “Roger, PLT is go for compactor ops.”
The schedule called for the pilot (me) to compact the toilet. In other words, someone needed to tamp down the shit.
Later that night, everyone gathered for dinner on the mid-deck. Billy Bob showed me some special French gourmet food he had brought up with him: quail in red wine sauce, foie gras, tiny liqueur-infused chocolates. No one seemed interested in trying it except me. Billy Bob and I heated it up and took it up to the flight deck. We turned the lights off and played some Mozart, watching the beautiful Earth turning below us while we ate this fantastic food and reflected on how lucky we were to be celebrating Christmas as no one on the space shuttle had done before.
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WHEN IT WAS time to go home, I decided to get Billy Bob back for pranking me by hiding the long underwear we layer under the pressure suits for reentry. He didn’t suspect anything when he started getting dressed, then he began tossing through his bag of gear again and again, a look of alarm on his face. Once he was thoroughly distressed, thinking he wouldn’t be able to get dressed in time for landing, I finally took pity on him.
The landing phase was the most challenging for the commander and pilot. When the space shuttle hit the air molecules of the outer atmosphere at 17,500 miles per hour, the resulting friction created heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. We had to do everything right and trust that the insulating tiles on the space shuttle would protect us.
We did the deorbit burn in the dark at four hundred miles above the Earth. As we moved into sunlight, we seemed troublingly low over Baja California. We had dropped from four hundred miles to just fifty miles entirely in darkness. Curt joked, “We are so low it looks like we won’t make it to Florida.”
“But we have a lot of smack,” I responded. We were still going Mach 25, despite our low altitude.
For about twelve minutes, hot ionized gases built up around the spacecraft. We heard an alarm: one of the air data probes, an instrument that measured air pressure and provided data for controlling the orbiter in the atmosphere, had failed to deploy. This was an emergency, but a minor one, as there were two probes and the other had deployed correctly. Curt and I, with the help of Billy Bob, responded just as we had to this kind of malfunction in the simulator, assessing what had gone wrong and deciding how to proceed safely. In some ways, it was a good thing to have to respond to an alarm like this one. It gave me confidence in the training we had received, that we would be able to handle anything that came our way.