I know I was when I applied for the job. I didn’t think being selected was a sure thing—far from it; the process was nerve-wracking—but I was confident that I was a good fighter and test pilot. Being chosen as one of four new CSA astronauts felt like the biggest possible affirmation of my competence, and I was both proud and excited when shortly thereafter, I was told to pack my bags and head to Houston along with Marc Garneau to start training as a member of the class of 1992. It was the heyday of the Shuttle era, so ours was a big class by current standards: 24 of us in all. We took the elevator up to the Astronaut Office at JSC, quietly giddy: this was one of the hardest offices to join in the world, yet we’d made it. We were the crème de la crème.
Then we got off the elevator.
Just like that, we were nobodies. We weren’t even called astronauts but ASCANs (pronounced exactly as you might imagine), meaning “astronaut candidates.” Plebes. No hazing was required to knock us down a peg. Just looking around the office and seeing people we’d idolized for years did the trick. When I was assigned to a desk beside John Young—one of the original Gemini astronauts, one of only a dozen men to walk on the Moon and the commander of the very first Space Shuttle flight—I didn’t feel like I’d finally arrived. I felt like a gnat.
In the course of my first day at JSC I went from the peak of my profession to the bottom of the food chain—and I was down there with a bunch of other overachievers who were used to being on top and determined to get back there ASAP. It’s not as though there wasn’t camaraderie. There was. Each class has its own particular character and nickname: members of a particularly large class were “the sardines,” and those of us who joined in 1992 were called “the hogs” (partly thanks to a Muppets skit called “Pigs in Space,” and partly because we decided early on to sponsor a pot-bellied pig at the Houston Zoo). There was definitely a sense that we were all in this together, but the environment was also highly competitive, without the competition ever being explicitly acknowledged. Each of us was being evaluated and compared on everything we did—everything—and it was very clear that space flight assignments would be based on how well we performed. So the demands were bottomless. I never wanted to turn down any request or opportunity, and like everyone else, I kept trying to make it all look easy.
In the meantime, my family had relocated to Houston, which meant a new house, new schools for the kids and for Helene, a new job. The first year is very tough on families because of all the adjustments and changes. Some ASCANs’ marriages implode, partly because of the strain on the spouses but largely, I think, because of the astronauts’ struggle to adapt to a new place in the pecking order. The reasoning seems to go like this: My dream’s come true, yet I feel like a gnat—but I’m still the same high achiever, so the problem must be … my marriage! I’m extremely lucky because my family approached our many moves with a sense of adventure. Still, coming from the military, we found the whole set-up in Houston a little disconcerting at first. It seemed military, yet it wasn’t. Typically on a squadron, pilots’ families live near each other on base and tend to do things together, too. But at NASA, everybody’s just too busy. Having grown accustomed to a certain communal rhythm, it felt lonely for all of us at first.
In a sense, too, going to work every day was disconcerting. During the year I was an ASCAN, the learning curve was daunting and there weren’t a whole lot of opportunities to stand out. After that first year, I worked on certifying payloads, which involved endless meetings to make sure that all the science experiments were actually safe for space flight. In the meantime, just like all my classmates, I was going through general training: geology, meteorology, orbital mechanics, robotics and so on. People who’d been in the Astronaut Office only a year or two longer seemed to be light years ahead, even though they hadn’t been to space yet.
Then came the day when the first person in our class got assigned to a space flight. It was a great moment: “Wow, one of us made it!” It felt like a group affirmation, as though all of us were on our way at last. Then the second person got assigned, and it wasn’t me. I told myself, “Okay, they picked a scientist—they weren’t looking for a pilot.” Then in the middle of that night: “I’m Canadian. That’s probably why they didn’t pick me.” Then the third person got assigned, and the fourth, and I started thinking, “What’s wrong with me? I’ve always been good at stuff. Why am I not getting assigned?”
This is when attitude really started to matter. I have a clear memory of giving myself a pep talk right about then that started with, “Don’t be an idiot.” I reminded myself that I wasn’t sitting around doing nothing. I was learning so much every day that I could almost hear my neurons firing.
If you’ve always felt like you’ve been successful, though, it’s hard not to fret when you’re being surpassed. The astronauts who seem to have the hardest time with it are, interestingly enough, often the ones who are most naturally talented. Just as some people can pick up a golf club for the first time and play incredibly well, some astronauts are simply more gifted than the rest of us. They have great hands and feet—the first time they got in a plane, they could fly as well as or better than the instructor. Or they’re academic superstars with dazzling interpersonal skills. Whatever their particular combination of gifts, they’re standouts, and until they got to JSC, everything was easy: they won the flying competitions, aced all the tests, told the best stories—all without breaking a sweat.
Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.
Even the most gifted person in the world will, at some point during astronaut training, cross a threshold where it’s no longer possible to wing it. The volume of complex information and skills to be mastered is simply too great to be able to figure it all out on the fly. Some get to this break point and realize they can’t continue to rely on raw talent—they need to buckle down and study. Others never quite seem to figure that out and, in true tortoise-and-hare fashion, find themselves in a place they never expected to be: the back of the pack. They don’t know how to push themselves to the point of discomfort and beyond. Typically, they also don’t recognize their own weaknesses and are therefore reluctant to accept responsibility when things don’t turn out well. They’re not people you want on your crew when you’re laboring in wicked environmental conditions with very specialized equipment and a long list of goals to accomplish in a short period of time. They go from being considered rock stars to having a reputation as people you can’t count on when things are going badly.
There’s a big variety in terms of ability and skill within the astronaut corps, more than most people imagine, though much less than there used to be back when 50 people were flying a year and the crews were larger, so everyone didn’t have to be good at everything. On the Shuttle you really only needed two people who were good robotic operators. Today, with a crew of just three on the Soyuz, at least one of whom is a cosmonaut, if you’re not good at robotics and not qualified for EVA, you’re likely not going to be assigned.
When the missions were just two weeks long, crews were put together a little bit like a sports team: it was all about the mix. Administrators wanted both experienced people and rookies and sought a balance between military and academic types, in-your-face people and laid-back, affable ones. Of course, politics played into it too: whose turn it was to fly mattered sometimes, as did nationality. Canadians were not usually high up on the list, but when Canadarm2 was being installed, it made sense for one of us to go. Some crews never really did jell, but it wasn’t all that important. If you’re only off Earth for a couple of weeks, you can put up with just about anyone. You don’t need to have the time of your life. You need to get the job done.
On the ISS, by contrast, homogeneity has a greater value because you need redundancy of skills—if only one of the three astronauts on board has medical training and she’s incapacitate
d and in dire need of medical care herself, you’ve got a serious problem. Training is also much more solitary. For two years astronauts are mostly solo, training and studying one-on-one with instructors, and then, in the last six months before a flight, when everyone has the requisite skills, we start to integrate as a crew.
Sometimes integration is not so easy, because we don’t get to pick our fellow travelers. It’s like a shotgun wedding, minus the conjugal rights—and the “honeymoon” is half a year in isolation, where we have to be able to count on one another for absolutely everything: companionship, survival, taking responsibility for a fair share of the work.
That’s why “Who are you flying with?” is the first question astronauts ask each other. No one wants to go to space with a jerk. But at some point, you just have to accept the people in your crew, stop wishing you were flying with Neil Armstrong, and start figuring out how your crewmates’ strengths and weaknesses mesh with your own. You can’t change the bricks, and together, you still have to build a wall.
Sometimes you get lucky. Both Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko, my crewmates on my last mission, have superlative technical skills as well as a killer work ethic. They are also two of the most easygoing and pleasant people on or off the planet. I didn’t have to make peace with the fact that I was going to space with them. I had to refrain from crowing about my good fortune.
The longer the flight, the more important personalities become. If the three of you don’t get along on Earth, you’re even less likely to be able to tolerate each other after a few months without the benefit of showers. Or Scotch. Some of the first American astronauts who went to Mir for long stays experienced depression and felt isolated and irritated both by crewmates and by what they felt was a lack of support from Mission Control. When you can’t even go outside to let off steam, personality conflicts can compromise a mission or derail it altogether. Simmering tensions have boiled over in the past, according to some of the first long-duration cosmonauts, who have colorful stories of personality clashes. I’ve heard rumors of fistfights and refusing to speak to one another (and the ground) for days on end. So these days, NASA looks for a certain type of person, someone who plays well with others.
One thing hasn’t changed, though: astronauts are, without exception, extremely competitive. I may have mentioned this before. So how do you take a group of hyper-competitive people and get them to hyper-cooperate, to the point where they seek opportunities to help one another shine?
It’s a bit like gathering a group of sprinters and telling them that, effective immediately, they’ll be running an eternal relay. They’ve still got to run as fast as they can, only now, they’ve got to root for their teammates to run even faster. They have to figure out how to hand off the baton smoothly so that the next person in line has an even better shot at success than they did.
For some astronauts, the transition is relatively painless—a relief, even, after decades of solitary striving. For others, it’s a huge shock to the system and requires a fundamental reorientation.
I was somewhere in the middle. To my chagrin, I was the kind of father who rarely let my kids win—they had to earn victory, fair and square. I don’t have a lot of regrets in life, but one of my biggest is that when my son Kyle was about 10 and was proudly demonstrating how many laps he could swim underwater without taking a breath, I jumped in the pool and swam one more length than he did. It was an unthinking moment, and a great demonstration of the destructive power of competitiveness. I didn’t just show up my child; I risked damaging his self-confidence and our bond.
Paradoxically, it took a few years working with other wildly competitive people for me to learn to think of success as a team sport. To instill and reinforce expeditionary behavior—essentially, the ability to work in a team productively and cheerfully in tough conditions—astronauts do survival training, on water and on land. Over the years I’ve done that with the U.S. and the Canadian military, as well as participating in wilderness expeditions in Utah and Wyoming, both run by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). The specifics of the experiences were different, but the focus was always the same: figuring out how to thrive, not just individually but as a group, when you’re far outside your comfort zone.
Survival training simulates some aspects of space travel really well. In both cases, a small group of people is thrown into a challenging environment with specific objectives to accomplish and no one else to rely on except each other. At NOLS, for instance, we divided into teams and took turns as leader, with the goal of safely traversing a wilderness route in 10 to 14 days. It was a harsh collective experience: sleeping rough, orienteering, rappelling down cliffs, searching for pure water and so forth, all while lugging a heavy backpack.
During the Utah course, I remember reaching the top of an especially daunting ridge and looking down to the valley where we were supposed to set up camp for the night. Our hearts sank. There was no way to get down there. Everyone was tired and cranky, and had there been an option to quit the course and be airlifted to the nearest Hilton, I think most of us would have signed up for it on the spot. But after studying the situation, Scott “Doc” Horowitz and I thought it just might be possible to descend by zigzagging down a particular slope. If we were wrong, though, the group might get stuck there as night fell and temperatures plummeted; we’d be in far more danger on a steep, rocky slope than we currently were at the top of the ridge. So instead of trying to persuade everyone else to try our route, Scott and I volunteered to scout it out. We proved to ourselves that it was doable, then climbed back up to show the others how to descend safely. The lesson: good leadership means leading the way, not hectoring other people to do things your way. Bullying, bickering and competing for dominance are, even in a low-risk situation, excellent ways to destroy morale and diminish productivity. A few NASA teams have in fact come somewhat unglued and been unable to complete survival exercises, which no doubt was noted back at JSC by the people who determine flight assignments.
Another thing we learned in survival training is that risk management is crucial when you’re in the middle of nowhere. I was extremely careful scouting our descent because I knew that if I broke my ankle, I wouldn’t be seen as a hero or a martyr. I’d be the guy who compromised the mission. Groupthink is a good thing when it comes to risks. If you’re only thinking about yourself, you can’t see the whole picture. Whether in the mountains of Utah or clinging to the outside of the ISS, getting hurt—or losing the only hammer the group has, or rushing through a tricky procedure—creates serious problems for the entire team.
For me, the takeaway from all my survival training is that the key question to ask when you’re part of a team, whether on Earth or in space, is, “How can I help us get where we need to go?” You don’t need to be a superhero. Empathy and a sense of humor are often more important, as I was reminded during the most arduous survival training I ever did, in central Quebec with five other astronauts. We were on the edge of the Laurentians, so the terrain was mountainous and hiking would have been challenging at the best of times, but this was February and the snow was relentless. It just never stopped coming, almost a foot a day, and for two weeks we had to trudge through the drifts in snowshoes to break a trail for the sled that was loaded down with our food and supplies. When you think of a sled, you probably picture flying down a hill. That was not our experience. This one weighed 300 pounds and wasn’t going anywhere unless we were pushing and pulling it. We took turns at the front, a few of us at a time, straining to drag this thing, often uphill. We’d go 15 paces, then, so exhausted we were almost spitting blood, take a break and trade places with the people who’d been pushing. I was the only Canadian, so I was supposed to be used to rugged winter outings of this nature, but … I wasn’t. I didn’t grow up in the wilds, sleeping in snowdrifts.
The situation was perfect for developing leadership—and followership—skills, and it was a great test of physical endurance and mental stamina, too. In retrospect, in fact, there
’s a pleasing, epic quality to the whole enterprise: the blinding snow, the heavily laden sled, the laborious slogging. At the time, though, it didn’t feel pleasing at all.
This is where expeditionary behavior comes in. You can choose to wallow in misery, or you can focus on what’s best for the group (hint: it’s never misery). In my experience, searching for ways to lighten the mood is never a waste of time, particularly not when it’s 10 degrees below zero. Among our supplies there was a pineapple, oddly enough, and someone came up with the idea of carving a face on it and calling it Wilson, in homage to the volleyball that is Tom Hanks’s only companion when he is stranded on a tropical island after a plane crash in Cast Away. Wilson became a member of our crew and was treated with the same reverence Hanks showed his volleyball, right up until the pineapple turned a rather unsavory color and a funeral was deemed necessary. But Wilson served his purpose, morale-wise.
I hit on something during that Quebec expedition that I’ve used subsequently as a distraction when the going gets tough: suggesting that one by one, we each describe how we got engaged to our spouses. Everyone liked telling his or her own version. I liked hearing other people’s stories, too, because most of the other astronauts were older than I was when they got engaged, and their proposals were considerably better orchestrated than my own. I asked Helene to marry me on Valentine’s Day. I was 21, still in military college, and took her out for a candlelit dinner with the ring in my pocket, planning to propose in the restaurant. But once we got there, it just didn’t feel right, so I wound up asking her later that evening, sitting on the side of a bed in the Holiday Inn in Kingston, Ontario. I was nervous, she cried and neither of us remembers exactly what was said, though Helene’s recollection is that the proposal would have benefited from a poetic flourish or two. Sharing that story with the other astronauts on the survival course gave them insight into my life, and their own tales of picture-perfect proposals on sunlit beaches, complete with beautifully crafted speeches, gave me insight into theirs. Storytelling also provided a pleasant and prolonged diversion from the Sisyphean task of dragging that sled through the snow.