Chasing Space

by Leland Melvin

  Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, has produced some of the most intriguing thinking on success. She maintains that what you believe about your capabilities has a great deal to do with whether you will ever succeed. It all comes down to mind-set, she says. I think I have always fallen into the mind-set camp, before it was even labeled that. People with a growth mind-set believe their most basic abilities can be developed through hard work and dedication. This view creates an appreciation for learning that is essential for achieving anything great.

  Dweck asks, “Do people with this mind-set believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.”

  Malcolm Gladwell offers an alternative to the raw talent argument in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. But he contends it’s not all about mind-set either. Success, Gladwell says, has to do with historic circumstance and environment. And then there’s Geoff Colvin, who believes talent is just one component that contributes to success. The author of Talent Is Overrated, Colvin says most great success is the result of something called deliberate practice and develops over time, often years and years. As an athlete, this is something I experienced. But it was the circumstances of my early life that also made my success possible. Guided and nurtured by our parents and inspired by pioneering role models in our community, my sister, Cathy, and I learned that we could do anything we wanted if we were willing to work for it.

  • • •

  It was early June when I got word of my acceptance into the Astronaut Corps, giving me nearly two months before I had to make the 1,400-mile drive southwest to Johnson Space Center in Houston. Great, I thought. Just enough time to finish up with my team at Langley and put my house in Hampton on the market. Joining the Astronaut Corps wasn’t anything like getting just any new job; I was stepping into a new life.

  My last afternoon at Langley happened to be the same day Franklin Chang Díaz was giving a speech there. Chang Díaz is a brilliant and respected Costa Rican–American astronaut who had already flown five shuttle missions and would eventually fly two more. He was something of a legend among legends in the space program. I asked him if he had any advice for me, the rookie. “Just be yourself,” he told me. “Be authentic.” His words stayed with me. I realized then that I was entering a world of public attention and celebrity that I hadn’t fully understood until then. I’d received a certain amount of attention as an NFL draft pick, and I had seen what that kind of success could do to a player’s character. I vowed I wouldn’t let that happen to me.

  Not long after, Woodrow Whitlow, at the time a fellow research scientist at Langley, threw a party for me at his house. A brilliant African American from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Woodrow had relocated often as he made his way up the ranks. We followed each other around the country and would eventually wind up in Washington, DC, working as peers during my final four years at NASA. He was joined that night by Rosa Webster, Katherine Johnson, and many of the colleagues and technicians who had encouraged my growth. They were all part of a community that believed in me and helped me realize that becoming an astronaut was the right thing for me to do.

  My final stop before heading to Houston was a celebration in Lynchburg, hosted by my sister, Cathy. It was an important step on my journey to come back to the community where I grew up, to the people who had helped me gain solid footing in the world. My neighbors and friends there, folks like Mrs. Williams, whose husband was the pastor of our church. The Powell family, our closest family friends, were there, too. They always made me feel supported and valued. My dad always got this certain look on his face when he was happy, and I remember he wore that look all day. As I hugged my mother, I knew that all my years of playing football had helped her prepare for the mix of fear and pride she was likely to feel in the years to come.

  Astronaut Town

  If you’ve never been to southern Texas, you don’t know cockroaches. There’s also unbearable heat, bad drivers, and racial prejudice that astonished even me. But the humongous size of the cockroaches was one of the first things I noticed when I settled into my new home in Houston. And the fact that they flew. Flying cockroaches. Let’s just say Texas is not my kind of place.

  I bought a house in El Lago, the same subdivision where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin lived at the time of the first moon landing, and where Jim Lovell called home during the treacherous Apollo 13 mission. If you’ve seen the movie Apollo 13, El Lago is aptly portrayed as the cookie-cutter neighborhood where Marilyn Lovell and the other astronaut wives gathered as their husbands faced an uncertain return to Earth. El Lago City Hall has an Astronaut Wall of Fame with photos of all the astronauts who had lived there—forty-eight at last count, including me. Buttressed by Taylor Lake to the west and Clear Lake to the south, most of the residences in El Lago back then were modest four-bedroom ranch houses surrounded by big lawns, though in recent years ornate showpieces have replaced many of the modest homes from those days. The place I found was a simple yet beautiful one-story house with a bougainvillea that crawled up the wall of an atrium. I remember thinking, I could get used to this.

  On the other hand, some people had to get used to me. Let’s just say there were probably fewer African Americans in El Lago when I arrived than there were black astronauts in NASA, and that’s not saying much. I’ll never forget the day I moved in. A woman across the street stared at me, her arms folded across her chest. “Hi!” I said and waved to her. But she just shook her head and walked into her house. Thanks for the warm welcome, neighbor.

  Becoming a Penguin

  “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Honor and recognition if successful.”

  Legend has it that the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton ran this ad in the Times of London when he set out to find the perfect crew for his 1913 expedition to the South Pole. He got five thousand responses for twenty-eight positions and had to turn away hundreds of qualified candidates. I’m quite certain that all the men and women in the 1998 class would have answered that ad.

  It’s a tradition in the astronaut program for the previous class to bestow a name on the new class. Our predecessors, the Sardines, chose to call us the Dodos, after the flightless bird. (They said it would be a while before any of us flew, if ever.) Not eager to be associated with an animal that became extinct and happened to be quite ugly, we changed our name to the Penguins. We were still identified with a flightless bird, but at least a more elegant one.

  On my first night in town, we met up for a reception at the home of Gregory Johnson, a retired Navy captain who went by his pilot handle, Ray J. As the oldest member of the class and a veteran of Johnson Space Center since 1990, Ray J became our class leader, along with army helicopter pilot Timothy “TJ” Creamer. TJ was an army aviator who had been working in the space shuttle program for the past three years. Clearly NASA brass thought the Penguins needed some leadership with inside knowledge of the organization, and I’m sure they were right.

  The Penguin class brought together twenty-five decorated military-trained pilots, research scientists, and a schoolteacher to “pull us into the future,” as Ronald Reagan would say of space travelers. (Another six candidates were joining us from other parts of the world, but they weren’t scheduled to show up in Houston for another month.) Decades of scientific research and trial-and-error devoted to what makes a good astronaut had brought us to that point, but looking around the room you couldn’t have guessed what we had in common. Still, from that moment forward, everything we did was designed to solidify us as a team.

  Many years later I would realize just how much my training in football helped me be a better astronaut. Both require the same notion of teamwork: Just like the quarterback sets the tone and tells the team what play to r
un, the commander of a shuttle mission might say, “We’ve got a malfunction and it’s time for you to take on this role.” Like the quarterback and the wide receiver, the shuttle pilot and the mission specialist develop a synchronicity—they can anticipate each other’s next move.

  Through football I also acquired a perfectionist mind-set and concentrated on being exact and deliberate. I learned to control the adrenaline rush and stay focused. Space travel involves the same kind of control of your acceleration. In football you propel yourself from a dead stop toward an opening, somewhat similar to pushing yourself off the walls of the space shuttle in the zero-gravity environment of space. In both cases, success can hinge on decisions, by multiple players, that take place in an instant. This was all part of the training I embarked on that first year.

  • • •

  On a bright Texas morning in August 1998, I walked onto the hallowed grounds of Johnson Space Center eager to make my mark on the program and advance civilization by boldly exploring new worlds. I also remember wondering when they were going to serve lunch.

  Because I never had a burning desire to become an astronaut, I hadn’t spent my teenage years avidly following the career trajectories of John Glenn and Alan Shepard and wondering what I had to do to be just like them. At least I didn’t before my friend Charlie applied and flew into NASA Langley on a T-38. At the time, I didn’t know much about John Young, except that he’d once walked on the moon. But even that knowledge didn’t make a big impression on me. So it didn’t bother me too much when on that first day at the Johnson Space Center I was reminded I was just an “AsCan,” short for astronaut candidate and pronounced “ass-can.” The label pretty much says it all. Until you’ve finished training, you’re just a rookie. You haven’t proved a thing. For many astronaut candidates, this is the first time they haven’t been the smartest guy in the room. I’d been a journeyman plenty of times, the guy who got things done. It reminded me of my experience in the NFL, except this path, I hoped, had a future.

  Before too long I would find myself steeped in the astronaut world. NASA’s culture of perfection is a humbling experience at first, but one that reinforces the awesome responsibility that is part of becoming a space traveler. Consider that NASA invests tens of millions of dollars to train a single astronaut. And these days, until we have an alternative, the United States pays Russia at least $80 million for each seat on a Soyuz rocket to taxi astronauts to the International Space Station. It wasn’t until that first day at the space center in Houston that it hit me. I was joining this elite club. Me, the unexpected astronaut.

  • • •

  The first year of training involves moving from one activity to another like kids do at summer camp. Boats! Planes! Swimming lessons! Plus there’s robotics, extravehicular activity training, and survival training in water and on land, plus time (lots of time) in the space shuttle simulator.

  But it was the jet that got me. The T-38 is NASA’s two-seat, twin-engine, supersonic flying machine that has been a fixture at the space center since the 1980s. It trains you to think fast and adapt to changing situations—while wrenching through seven G’s—seven times the force of gravity—while performing acrobatics. Operationally, it’s one of the closest things to flying in the space shuttle you can experience. Even a non-pilot mission specialist like me had to get hours in the jet because NASA’s research shows that skills like “cockpit resource management” benefit a crew working in a highly dynamic environment like flying in space. All the navigation skills learned in the jet can be used aboard the space shuttle, the Russian Soyuz, or operating the controls of the International Space Station. It was imperative that we all “got our mins,” our quarterly minimum flight time in the jet, to demonstrate operational safety and proficiency.

  I had some of my best moments in the backseat of a NASA T-38. One time I was sitting low in the backseat when I caught a glimpse of Mike Anderson’s face in the rearview mirror, his broad smile indicating complete happiness. We were making our slow ascent from Cape Canaveral after watching the space shuttle Discovery, STS-96, soar into the cloudy sky.

  Mike was one of only two other African American astronauts at NASA when I arrived and he was the only “front-seater,” meaning he had military-trained pilot status and could fly the T-38s. Before I arrived at Johnson Space Center, Mike had taken his first shuttle flight aboard Endeavor, delivering equipment and fresh water to the Mir space station. A few years later, he would never return from his second flight, as payload commander aboard Columbia.

  When we took to the air on that beautiful morning in May, the sky was full of the kind of bright billowy clouds that blow in after a Florida thunderstorm. We’d been cleared to ascend to 40,000 feet, but Mike had no intention of taking the direct route. Rather, he steered the jet toward the sun and banked through the clouds like he was gliding through fresh snow. It was perfect.

  Many years later, while watching the movie The Tuskegee Airmen, I was reminded of that day in the sky with Mike. There’s a scene where one of the airmen, played by Malcolm-Jamal Warner, is piloting a sputtering plane, searching the landscape for a place to make an emergency landing. Somehow he and his fellow pilot (played by Laurence Fishburne) manage to softly guide their planes onto a country road, where two white prison guards with shotguns are overseeing an all-black crew of prisoners clearing brush. When the pilots climb out, happy to be alive, their oxygen masks are obscuring their complexions. The white guard is fixated by what he just witnessed and eager to meet the heroes. “They’s our boys,” he says proudly. Jamal-Warner and Fishburne take off their masks, revealing their faces. Black pilots? The guard sputters in confusion while the camera zooms in on the proud faces of the prisoners. I felt similar pride when Mike and I sailed through the clouds over coastal Florida.

  Mike loved cars almost as much as jets, and he particularly loved his gray Porsche 911. I remember the sound of that car’s engine as Mike whipped it around the corner and into his parking space at the space center. The Porsche made a steady, comforting hum, and when we heard it we knew Mike had arrived. But the car was too small for his growing family—he had two daughters—and, reluctantly, he decided to sell it. We arranged for me to buy it after his Columbia mission, agreeing that he would still be able to drive it whenever he wanted. But after the Columbia accident, there was no question that Mike’s wife, Sandra, would want to keep the car for the girls, and I found another Porsche 911 to buy. For years after, the hum of the engine around those same sharp curves made me think of my old friend.

  Another time I was getting my “mins” with Jim Wetherbee, a Navy aviator who had already flown four shuttle missions, including one as pilot and three as commander. He would later fly two more. As director of flight crew operations, Jim was tough on AsCans. “You need to fly more!” he would tell us, again and again. No one wanted to fly with him because you knew that if you made a mistake or didn’t stay “ahead of the plane” it could affect your getting assigned a spaceflight. At least that is what some AsCans thought.

  Being “ahead of the plane” means staying on top of all the checks and details under your responsibility, like calculating the fuel and moving the radio dial to the next frequency you’re going to use. You try to do as many of these things ahead of time as you can. By developing this “situational awareness” you are training yourself to identify potential problems before they arise. When you’re flying with a guy like Wetherbee your every move is carefully observed and evaluated. The idea is if you can do it in the jet, you can manage in the space shuttle, which means the reverse assumption is also true—if you make a mistake in the jet, they assume you could make it in space. So most AsCans simply avoided flying with pilots like Wetherbee.

  But there I was, in the backseat of Wetherbee’s plane. I was in charge of setting the altitude alerter, which tells you when you’re nearing a certain altitude range. If you were out of your intended range, the melodic recorded voice of Bitching Betty would come on the speaker and issue a warnin
g.

  On that day, Wetherbee and I got word from air traffic control that we were “cleared for flight level 1-8-0,” after visual confirmation that there were no aircraft in range above us, and we could ascend to 18,000 feet. I dialed in 1-8-0 and informed Wetherbee, who replied, “I see it.” I took that to mean that he saw the traffic above, when in fact he was merely confirming that he’d seen me dial in our target altitude. We got lucky that day because there were no aircraft in our path, and I’m sure I became a better navigator after that.

  • • •

  Near the end of our first year as AsCans, I looked out the window as my plane made its final approach over Brunswick, Maine. I noted with interest the dense forest and rugged peaks below. Looks cold, I remember thinking. We were about to endure four days of survival training, like Outward Bound for astronauts—but with an entourage. Paige Maultsby, our “den mother,” Duane Ross (head of astronaut selection) and Robert “Beamer” Curbeam Jr. had accompanied us. Beamer had completed his first mission aboard Discovery and had been assigned to shepherd us through these exercises. We were also all under constant observation by a few psychologists to help assess our attitude and our skills. Ours was only the second astronaut class to be evaluated for both short and long-duration missions, which meant we really had to show we could get along. We also had to prove we could be leaders, as well as leaders who could follow if the circumstances demanded it.

  For the land survival part of the exercise, I was paired with Sunita Williams, a Navy test pilot and triathlete. I would quickly discover that she was the toughest and most competent partner you’d ever want. On a two-month stint as commander of the International Space Station in 2012, Sunita would become the first person to ever complete a triathlon in space. The hardcore military aviator and the civilian former football player were an odd couple, but we formed a bond. We were instructed on navigating, reading maps, constructing shelters, finding our own food (not to mention skinning it), and building fires. A driving rain on the second day kept us from a good night’s sleep, but other than that it wasn’t too bad. Except for the part with the rabbit.