Chasing Space

by Leland Melvin

  When Jake started to act up, Cesar saw my alarm and told our viewers, “That joyful, calm, passionate astronaut went out the window.” Cesar’s advice: Be calm, just like I had been in space. If Jake sensed a fearful attitude in his owner, he’d react accordingly. If he sensed a calm unruffled attitude in me, he would take the appropriate cue and settle down too. Cesar’s patient counsel proved helpful. In time, Jake settled down. Cesar went on to give more advice that helped Suni and me better handle our dogs. The episode aired the following year.

  A summer hiatus took the form of a big reunion with family and friends at Holiday Lake State Park in Appomattox, Virginia, just down the road from the courthouse where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. I’m sure neither man could ever have expected we would send humans to space one day, and most likely could not even begin to fathom a man with slave ancestry, one that owned property in Appomattox no less, eventually flying in space. My parents, cousins, and friends from past and present joined me in walking the fields of Serenity after the picnic. As we walked, I felt grateful to be surrounded by and immersed in family and community. To love and be loved was its own kind of protection, armor for my upcoming journey. I had only four months before heading off to the heavens again.

  September brought a collaboration that would produce another work of art to take with me in space. Instead of a beautiful patchwork quilt or inventive photograph, the result this time was a musical recording. When I began to write poetry in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I never imagined that my efforts would lead me to Pharrell Williams’s studio. I met the Grammy Award-winning singer-producer at the fortieth anniversary of spaceflight at the Udvar-Hazy Center in our home state. Our discussion sparked his imagination, and led to a trip to Miami, where he had me read my poem, “Exploration.” It begins,

  The journey of a city made in haste

  Many people frown about the waste

  Cluttered minds and empty souls

  Wonder how we will one day behold

  The world without treasures found today

  In the atmosphere far away

  Floating around the heavens we see

  Advancing the future with harmony

  Seen in galaxies miles away

  Solutions to the crisis in the world today

  Listening and working intently, he crafted music to the lyrics. The finished product arrived in the mail a week later.

  I did one final hike in Muir Woods in late October, after completing training in the simulator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett, California. I had walked the same terrain after the Columbia accident to calm my soul following the loss of my friends. This time it was to gather my wits as I prepared to leave the planet again. I hiked from the visitor center, ten miles round-trip, along the Dipsea Trail down to the beach where I had seen the Sportsmobile six years before. Then I had been in a totally different state of mind. Now I was about to head back to the cosmos. I devoted the hours to exploring the outdoors, communing with nature, and finding peace within. I ate my favorite meal at the Parkside Café, the house salad with ahi tuna, delicious. It had been a tradition to eat it on my three visits to Stinson Beach. Each journey I had taken since receiving my second assignment had served a purpose, whether to connect with planet Earth, to embrace friends and family, or even to behold a new president. My experiences in the Astronaut Corps had taught me that you never know what will happen from day to day. It’s best to experience life as fully as possible while you have the time, health, and opportunity.

  • • •

  “Liftoff of space shuttle Atlantis,” launch commentator George Diller announced, “on a mission to build, resupply, and to do research on the International Space Station.” We launched at 14:28 EDT on Monday, November 16. We shimmied in our seats, feeling the familiar twang as the rockets fired. And we were off.

  Diller’s job description was accurate. We had a variety of tasks on our to-do list, most of them focusing on staging spare components outside the space station. You may have noticed by now that NASA is fond of acronyms and abbreviations. I mention this because our primary payload was the ExPRESS (Expedite the Processing of Experiments to the Space Station) Logistics Carrier ELC-1 and the ELC-2. The carriers contained a good deal of hardware, including gyroscopes, nitrogen tank assemblies, pump modules, and a high-pressure gas tank—some 30,000 pounds of replacement parts. Installation of the equipment would require three spacewalks and frequent operation of the robotic arm.

  A few hours after we got to space, we were all working hard. A couple of the rookies were feeling sick and moving slowly but I felt fine. Suddenly I began to make strange sounds, like a turkey gobbling. Before I knew it I was barfing my brains out, even though I had never felt sick. I aimed for the emesis bag designed for such occasions but didn’t quite hit the target. The green fluid bounced and hit the University of Richmond hat I was wearing before it migrated to my eyebrows and mustache. I peered through the veil of vomit that had been trapped by my hat and could see Butch and Scorch looking down at me from the flight deck, their faces frozen in astonishment. Like a football player who has been knocked to the sidelines, I just wanted to shake off my troubles and return to the field. Welcome back to space.

  • • •

  We docked on day three and met with the station crew. Commander Frank De Winne welcomed us, along with Jeffrey Williams, Robert Thirsk, Nicole Stott, and cosmonauts Roman Romanenko and Maksim Surayev.

  Later that day, Randy and I used the shuttle’s robotic arm to lift ELC-1 out of the payload bay. We handed it over to the station’s arm operated by Butch and Jeffrey, who then permanently installed the carrier to the outside of the station. The following day Bobby and Mike performed our first spacewalk and completed their tasks without a hitch. That night, however, a false depressurization alarm sounded and woke us, but flight control teams on the ground determined there was no danger to the station or crew. It was the first of three alarms that would sound during our mission, all of which proved false. Had they signaled real emergencies, we would have been prepared to handle them.

  Everything about our training drives home the point that space is an incredibly dangerous place. If you do something wrong it’s game over. To keep everyone safe, we routinely practice emergency procedures. The biggest emergency is depressurization. If something’s coming at you and hits the space station, it’s going to cause a breach. Even something as small as two centimeters in diameter can do a lot of damage. If that first alarm had been genuine, everyone would have gone to their respective vehicles and closed the hatches. We would have had only so much time to get in that vehicle, secure it, and be ready to go home. Another situation we train for is fire. If a fire alarm were to go off, our computer screens would display the module where fire is suspected. Then we would go to the location to see if we could identify smoke or flames or anything coming out.

  Solar flares present another kind of danger. They occur when the sun kind of burps every so often, sending out dangerous high-energy particles. If there’s a solar flare all the astronauts float up into a space at the top of the station (we call it the doghouse). It has a ton of water bags surrounding it and the water will absorb the radiation and keep it from coming into our bodies. Then we just wait until Houston calls us and says everything is clear. As astronauts we’re trained not to be alarmed by things. We’re trained to ask, “How will I fix this? How will I do all the steps required to make sure that we come home safely?”

  Surprises can still happen despite all our practice, but even then our training kicks in and enables us to respond accordingly. Experience can be equally helpful.

  On Extra Vehicular Activity 3, for instance, Butch Wilmore and I were supporting Bobby and Randy with the robotic arm. We were moving an oxygen tank from ELC-2 that needed to be installed outside the airlock. Butch and I got a little behind in our ops and while we were moving the arm in for the grapple, we had not configured the business end of the arm. It contained three wires that would w
rap around the target grapple pin on the payload and allow us to attach it to the arm. Butch was flying and I was supporting and started to set up the grapple. It appeared that we were not ready for capture, but I told Butch to keep moving the arm and it was going to be OK. My confidence had been bolstered from my experience successfully working the arm during my first mission. That was a great moment between the two of us because we saved precious time by capturing the tank without having to stop and reset everything.

  Extra Vehicular Activity 2 had been eventful too, but for a different reason. When Bobby and I worked together to move ELC-2 out of the shuttle payload bay and hand it off to the space station’s robotic arm, we helped resolve a long-standing historical injustice. Forty-three years after racism forced Ed Dwight from the astronaut program, we became the first African American men to fly together on a shuttle mission.

  For a historic moment our “first” was pretty subdued, although Bobby and I had made up shirts that said PTAP (Power To All People). We thought back to the 1960s and 1970s when activists chanted “power to the people” in protest against racism and discrimination. Looking down at our planet, we were moved to raise the bar and ensure that all people were empowered. Seeing the world without geographic boundaries really puts things in perspective and makes one wonder why there is so much division, hatred, and malice.

  We shared these sentiments the next day on The Tom Joyner Morning Show, a popular syndicated radio program with a huge African American audience. Bobby and I fielded questions from the host while reaching out to young listeners. We talked about some of the experiments we were conducting with researchers from Texas Southern and Delaware State, two historically black colleges. And we offered a message especially for younger listeners. “They can achieve anything they put their minds to if they believe in themselves and stay determined,” I told Tom. “Anybody can do this job. You just have to be focused and determined and just make it happen.”

  Every crew has their own chemistry and we started to get ours early, before our rendezvous with the space station. Scorch told a joke about two friends going waterskiing on the boat called the FishBro’. They were first-time skiers and really didn’t know what they were doing. When the one guy asked the other if he was ready, his friend replied, “Make it happen, Captain.” The boat accelerated, but the slack in the rope launched the rookie skier into the air. The joke was kind of stupid but from that point on before we did anything we would always start with “Make it happen, Captain.” For example, while operating the arm, when I asked Bobby if he was ready to move to a specific location to start service on an end effector, he would say, “Make it happen, Captain.”

  We had gone to space with six crewmembers but we were coming back with seven. Nicole Stott had been in space for ninety-one days and we were her ride home. It was so funny how the chemistry changed when she came on board the shuttle. It went from a locker room with sailors to a civilized, dignified place. She raised our shuttle aesthetic to a whole new standard, motivating us, as Mike said, “to mind our p’s and q’s.”

  Our to-do list left us room for less intense moments, not least because we were able to complete several tasks ahead of schedule. As with other missions, we all brought carefully selected mementos to space. Randy’s items included a scarf worn by the famous American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart. Albert Louis Bresnik, Randy’s grandfather, had been Earhart’s personal photographer from 1932 until July 2, 1937, when she tragically disappeared. My own artifacts included Elaine Duigenan’s Micro Mundi photograph and a T-shirt from Pharrell William’s BBC Ice Cream clothing line. I also brought along a recording of “Exploration,” the song we’d composed together. Bobby recorded me floating Pharrell’s rocket logo while playing the song in space.

  My future plans continued to take shape in my mind as we completed our mission. The rhythms of “Exploration” lingered like a refrain in my head: “Floating around the heavens we see / Advancing the future with harmony.”

  While showcasing Elaine and Pharrell’s art in such a scientific setting, I had seen my own notion of advancing the future evolve. My interest in developing a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics foundation to educate and inspire people had expanded to include art, turning STEM to STEAM. I could do a lot more with it once I returned to Earth.

  10

  Educator

  Following our landing at Kennedy Space Center, the ladies at crew quarters prepared a Thanksgiving feast with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and all the trimmings. Breaking bread with our families, we had much to celebrate. We had successfully installed two Express Logistics Carriers (ELCs—unpressurized attached payload platforms for the space station), and we brought Nicole Stott back from the station. I slept really well that night, unlike my return from my first mission. That time, staying in crew quarters alone, I awoke in the night and thought I was still in space. As with my first flight, I spent the following morning walking on the beach. Making figure eights in the sand and looking at the horizon helped me get oriented and distinguish between up and down. My sister, Cathy, and my friend Mary joined me on my stroll. We bumped into Mike, my fellow crewmember, and his wife, Lori, and later we saw Bobby Satcher walking along the shore. Nearby, Nicole’s sister played with her dogs in the waves. Seeing them frolic in the foamy surf made me miss my own canine companions, Jake and Scout.

  Later that morning the crew boarded a jet and headed back to Ellington Field, where we received a heroes’ welcome. Years later at an astronaut reunion, I would recall that enthusiastic greeting while listening to Michael Collins of Apollo 11 fame. In his keynote speech, he told us that none of us were heroes. If your head gets big and you parade around as if you have a big “H” on your chest, he said, you should remember that you were just doing your job.

  The next month our entire crew assembled at a Houston Texans football game. We brought home the jersey of the team’s leading receiver, Andre Johnson. I had caught a few balls in space while wearing it, after which the whole crew signed it. However, returning the jersey to its rightful owner wasn’t the highlight of the day, at least not for me. The best moment occurred when we stood next to former president George W. Bush on the sidelines in our blue flight jackets, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” During my football days, I’d always felt patriotic every time I heard the anthem before going on the gridiron to do battle. But there in Reliant Stadium, while I stood with my crewmates and the athletes arrayed nearby, the song’s familiar refrains offered a stirring coda to my athletic and astronaut careers.

  I began 2010 at NASA HQ in Washington, where I’d been asked to support the Summer of Innovation campaign. The program was designed to help underserved and underrepresented students overcome the “summer slide,” in which they were likely to lose ground academically and have to play catch-up when the next school year began. I saw it as a chance to use my blue astronaut suit to inspire the next generation of explorers, especially those who didn’t always have opportunities in the STEM fields. It was going to be a one-year detail, but the heat and humidity of Houston had convinced me that the East Coast would be my ultimate home. I bought a brownstone on Capitol Hill and went to work.

  Between tasks at HQ, I went to Maui in March to receive an award of excellence at the NFL Players Association convention, where the NFLPA was really trying to focus on life after football. I was one of a group of former players lauded for their work beyond the playing field. NFL great Emmitt Smith and other retired players were on hand, along with Muneer Moore and other former Richmond Spiders who had made it to the league. They responded to my presentation about my career as a scientist and astronaut with a standing ovation. As a scientist, I know that predicting outcomes is based as much on probability as on cause and effect. It isn’t always possible to isolate the one factor that led to a particular result. Still, as I stepped forward to receive my award, I couldn’t help rethinking, however briefly, my journey backward through time, from an NFL event in Maui, through two missions on the s
pace station, to a football field at Heritage High. It had all begun with a dropped pass.

  In March, I also met with Thomas Kellner, a German-born artist who had attended the launch of STS-129. With the assistance of my good friend Laura Rochon, I had helped Thomas gain access to Mission Control. He was beginning work on a book that he wanted to call Houston, We Have a Problem, inspired by Mission Control’s effort to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home. I convinced Thomas to change the title to Houston, We’ve Had a Problem, and he eventually published the book. My collaborations with Pharrell, Elaine Duigenan, and Thomas reinforced my realization that art formed the creative thread that tied civilizations together. In providing the common cultural language that unites humanity, it is as valuable and necessary as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

  By May, the Summer of Innovation program was getting under way. I learned that the associate administrator for education had been let go. If I expressed interest in filling the vacancy, I’d be contending for my former boss’s job, which might look questionable to some of my colleagues. In addition, candidates with doctorates in education were usually hired for the job. Despite my reservations, my friend Charles Scales, NASA’s associate deputy administrator, encouraged me to apply. In June I called my former space station commander Peggy Whitson, who had become the chief of the Astronaut Office. I asked her if I would have another chance to fly. She thought about it for a few minutes and said no. I could not fly long-duration missions on station because of my ear condition, and we had only a few shuttle flights remaining. Peggy told me she could not offer me anything as good as a senior executive job with NASA. When talk turned to the open associate administrator’s position, Peggy was emphatic.

  “Go for it,” she advised.

  I turned in my application and headed off to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to kick off the Summer of Innovation program with Charlie Bolden, who had become head of the agency in 2009. I recruited some folks from the Corps to help us, including Stephanie Wilson, along with Mike Foreman, Bobby Satcher, Butch Wilmore, and Randy Bresnick, most of whom had been in space with me in November.