The ideal entry is not to sail in and make your presence known immediately. It’s to ingress without causing a ripple. The best way to contribute to a brand-new environment is not by trying to prove what a wonderful addition you are. It’s by trying to have a neutral impact, to observe and learn from those who are already there, and to pitch in with the grunt work wherever possible.
One benefit of aiming to be a zero: it’s an attainable goal. Plus, it’s often a good way to get to plus one. If you’re really observing and trying to learn rather than seeking to impress, you may actually get the chance to do something useful. For instance, before I’d ever flown in space, I was in a Shuttle entry sim with two very experienced astronauts. I was in student mode, keeping my eyes open and my mouth shut, when the commander reached up to turn something on. Because I was watching so closely, I knew without a doubt that he was about to press the wrong button. So I said, “Wait, that’s not the right one.” No big deal. He readjusted, the sim went on and I didn’t say anything else about it nor did anyone else. A few months later, though, we happened to be at the Cape together for a launch, talking to the head of JSC, when with no prompting or warning, the commander began extolling my powers of observation for having caught this error in the sim. I got assigned to my first mission shortly thereafter. There may not be a connection, but one thing is certain: aiming to be a zero didn’t hurt my chances.
Approaching a space station, you turn your mind to the technicalities of rendezvous and docking. It’s not like parking a car. It isn’t intuitive, because orbital mechanics aren’t like anything on Earth. When you throw a ball or roll it down a hill, you can predict with fair accuracy where it will go, and how its trajectory would change if you threw harder or softer. But in space, you have to go faster to reach a higher orbit—and once you get there, you actually go slower. So in order to maneuver to link up with another orbiting vehicle, you have to think in a whole new way about how objects behave. Yes, you’ve got all kinds of sensors and lasers to help you gauge distance and angles, but first you have to understand what they’re telling you—and not telling you—and how to use them.
My first space flight, in 1995, was all about rendezvous and docking, since the purpose of our mission was to add a permanent docking module to Mir so the Shuttle could go back and forth regularly. Just a few years earlier, I’d been intercepting Soviet bombers for NORAD, but now I was part of a mission aiming to help create a closer relationship between the United States and Russia. When the U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, its space program was in danger of dissolving, too, as government funding evaporated. The U.S. didn’t want Russian military technology being sold off to or shared with politically unstable countries, so NASA did what it could to shore up Roscosmos, its Russian counterpart, by providing funding for cooperative ventures such as regular visits to Mir. Of course, there was something in it for NASA: learning from the people who had the most experience building and maintaining space stations, and in the process creating a partnership that is absolutely vital today. Now that the Shuttle is not in service, we couldn’t get up to the ISS without the Russians. Ultimately, it was a very smart move for both countries to figure out how to work together on space exploration.
But in November 1995, the linkage of the two space programs was still a work in progress. The Shuttle had managed to dock with Mir only once before, earlier that year, and that had involved reassembling an entire module of the space station in order to jerry-rig a spot. It was not a viable or safe option going forward. Which is where we came in: our job was to build a permanent dock. The docking module—which looked a lot like a giant version of a propane container you might hook up to your barbecue, only orange—had been assembled on Earth and then placed in Atlantis’s payload bay. Once we were in space, we had to attach the module securely to the top of our craft, then ease on up to Mir and connect. Which we really, really hoped would work, given that it had never been tried before. Since the Shuttle flew rather awkwardly at best, docking promised to be a form of elephantine ballet.
My role in all this was to operate the Canadarm, the Shuttle’s robotic arm and the crown jewel of the Canadian Space Agency. I knew it was a national treasure, but to me it was a tool, like a hammer or a farm implement. I would use it to reach into the payload bay, carefully haul the docking module out into space, rotate the module to a vertical position, and maneuver it to within a few inches of our docking mechanism. In order to get them to connect, we then had to fire all the Shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters and slam into the docking module, like two trains coupling. If we did it correctly, hooks and latches would engage to form a solid, airtight seal. If not, well …
I’d been practicing robotically lifting, turning and manipulating large objects for a full year beforehand on Earth, but of course we were worried—really worried—that plan A might not work. So we had a few backup plans. If firing the Shuttle thrusters to drive us up into the docking module didn’t work, we’d try to slam the module down into place using the Canadarm. Since the arm is like a large pair of forceps, designed for positioning things, not for ramming them, there was a chance it might break if we tried this, in which case the 5-ton module would float off serenely into outer space.
Helping to lose a docking module on my first space flight would put me well below minus one, so I really wanted plan A to work. Thankfully, it did. By the end of the second day of our mission, we had what looked like a huge tower sticking out of the top of the Shuttle. Now we had to dock with Mir, which looked like a thick pole with spokes radiating out of it. One drawback of our new 15-foot tower of a docking module is that it blocked any view of where we needed to ease in, exactly. On Earth we’d rigged up a simulator to practice, of course, and had figured out that the camera on the elbow of the robotic arm would be the same height as the place where we’d need to link with Mir. Yes, the angle would be weird, but at least it would give us a visual.
As it happened, that one camera turned out to be crucial, because when the time came to dock, all of our distance sensors malfunctioned. Every single one. They were lying to us, basically, giving us the wrong information about range and speed, so we had no choice but to try to dock by eyeballing it, via the camera view. Fortunately, we had a good idea how to do that, because our instructors had insisted that we memorize every sensor reading from rendezvous to docking, which seemed ridiculously theoretical at the time but meant that we did have a good idea of how to do this manually.
Nevertheless, as you might imagine, there were some very tense minutes while Ken Cameron, our commander, got Atlantis into position. If we came in too tentatively, we’d bounce off and have to wait 24 hours to try again, because we needed to attempt docking while we were over Russia, so that the crew on the station could communicate with Mission Control in Korolev (Mir did not have continuous communication with the ground). During that 24 hours, we’d be using up fuel and running the risk of something else breaking, plus we’d still be facing the same problem when we tried again—at which point we’d also be risking total mission failure. However, if we came in too fast and too aggressively, we might collide with the station and cause it to depressurize, in which case everyone inside would be dead in a matter of minutes.
Ken opted not to over-control or under-control. He aimed to be a zero, just relied on his training and wisely didn’t try to add any flourishes now that we had a giant barnacle clinging to the top of our vehicle. It worked. We wound up linking up with the docking module just three seconds early. Perhaps you can imagine our sense of relief and anticipation when the moment finally came to open the hatch and enter Mir. Cue triumphant Chariots of Fire–type theme music, appropriate to an historic moment of international cooperation.
Only, we couldn’t get the hatch open. On the other side, they were kicking it with all their might. But the Russian engineers had taped, strapped and sealed our docking module’s hatch just a little too enthusiastically, with multiple layers. So we did the true space-age thing: we broke into Mir using a Swiss A
rmy knife. Never leave the planet without one.
As we floated into the station to greet the waiting crew—Russians consider it unlucky to shake hands across the threshold, and wanted us to wait until we were all the way inside—there was a magical, faint tinkling of bells and chimes. It took me a moment to figure out that this was actually the gentle clanging of old experiments that had been tethered to the sides of the metal spaceship, awaiting disposal or return to Earth.
While we were still in transit we’d resolved to be good house-guests: to help out with the chores, not get in the way, and bring gifts (including a specially made collapsible guitar, called a SoloEtte, which I got to play one evening in a two-crew, three-nation sing-along). The not-getting-in-the-way part turned out to be the most difficult. The station was so cluttered that navigation required extra care; to get from one section to another, we had to pull ourselves through narrow, circuitous tubes that were like flexible ventilation ducts. It was a strange feeling, like being inside the intestines of a giant but not unfriendly robot, and in our few days there I learned to do it quickly, so I’d pop out the other side and the rush of air would set the experiments to chime-like tinkling again.
When we got back to Earth, a lot of people asked whether everything had gone the way we’d planned. The truth is that nothing went as we’d planned, but everything was within the scope of what we prepared for. That was one of the fundamental lessons of STS-74: don’t assume you know everything, and try to be ready for anything. The other lesson, for me anyway, was that when you’re a rookie, aiming to be a zero is a good game plan. My goals had been modest—fulfill my responsibilities to the best of my ability, and not distract or cause any trouble for anyone else on the crew—and I’d achieved them.
When you’re the least experienced person in the room, it’s not the time to show off. You don’t yet know what you don’t know—and regardless of your abilities, your experience and your level of authority, there will definitely be something you don’t know.
In 2001, shortly after we docked on my second mission—which was my first visit to the ISS—the main computers that ran the ISS failed. All had an inherent flaw and started overwriting their own hard drives. This meant that for all intents and purposes, the Station was dead: it couldn’t control its attitude, point its antennae, run its own diagnostics—all kinds of capabilities were gone, and the ground could barely communicate with us. If we hadn’t had the Shuttle docked and ready to control the entire combined structure, we would have been in serious trouble. Fortunately, we could use the Shuttle’s communications and thruster systems, and we still had oxygen, food and water, so the crew’s attitude was just to keep working the problem.
However, because the computers were down, most of the things we’d been scheduled to do were no longer feasible and we wound up with a day when we were at loose ends. My crewmate Scott Parazynski and I were both rookies on Station and given our limited skill set, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do to help solve the computer problem. So we went to Yuri Usachev, the commander at the time, and asked, “What’s the most useful thing we could be doing right now?” He said he’d really appreciate an inventory of the inside of every single locker in the Russian cargo block. It’s a pretty big module lined with cupboards, so we just started at one end and went through every single one, cataloguing all the stuff that was in there. It was a lot like organizing your closets: useful but time-consuming and glory-free. It took us a few hours and was clearly the kind of task two crew members would never have been able to fit into the schedule if the ISS had been fully operational. We joked around and tried to make it fun while we were doing it, and when we finished, we felt celebratory. We’d managed to add a bit of value on a day when otherwise we wouldn’t have accomplished much at all.
Later on that same flight, after the computer problems had been fixed, I had a similar sort of opportunity. We’d set up a video camera for a media event, but the video feed wasn’t making it back to the ground. Someone was going to have to start at one end, untangle all the cables, and test each one. I thought, “Might as well be me.” Sure enough, it turned out that although we’d checked them before launch, two out of the three cables were bad, so I scrambled around for others, cobbled something together, threw the switch and got the video up and running. It seems trivial maybe, being the cable guy, but I felt good that I’d worked the problem so we could deliver what we’d promised.
In a way, it feels wrong even mentioning it—I didn’t, at the time—because I know everyone else on board did similarly unheralded, unobtrusively helpful things. We’ve all fixed the toilet in space (it breaks down regularly). We’ve all wiped jam off the walls (it has a way of floating off your toast and splattering everywhere). On the ISS you have to be ready, willing and eager to do every job, from the highest-visibility stuff right down to rewiring an antenna, because there’s nobody else to do it.
But if you are confident in your abilities and sense of self, it’s not nearly as important to you whether you’re steering the ship or pulling on an oar. Your ego isn’t threatened because you’ve been asked to clean out a closet or unpack someone else’s socks. In fact, you might actually enjoy doing it if you believe that everything you’re doing contributes to the mission in some way.
Still, I’m human. I like recognition and I like feeling that others consider me a plus one. Which is why, as we approached the ISS on December 21, 2012, I consciously reminded myself to aim to be a zero once we got inside. Back home, it was a big deal that I was going to be the first Canadian commander of the ISS. Up here, there already was someone in charge: Kevin Ford, who would continue as commander until he left 10 weeks later and handed over to me. He and his crew were completely acclimated and had been successfully running the ISS for several weeks by the time we showed up.
My smartest strategy was simply to try not to mess anything up or make things worse. I was sure that once in a while, I’d be able to do something good and make an authoritative decision, but it didn’t need to happen in the first hour or even the first week. If I barged in, intent on making my mark, I probably would—just not in the way I wanted.
Two decades into my career as an astronaut, I felt as close to being a plus one as I ever had. And I knew that my best bet of getting the crew to see me that way was to keep on doing what has always worked for me: aiming to be a zero.
10
LIFE OFF EARTH
THE ISS IS A ONE-MILLION-POUND SPACESHIP that’s the size of a football field, including the end zones, and boasts a full acre of solar panels. Inside, there’s more living space than you’d have in a five-bedroom home. It’s so big, with so many discrete modules, that it’s possible to go nearly a full day without seeing another crewmate. It’s an awe-inspiring international project, this mammoth co-op in the sky, and when we docked there on December 21, 2012, the mood inside our humble rocket ship was one of anticipatory excitement. Every potential obstacle had been overcome. We were eager to tumble out, unbathed and hungry, to stretch our limbs and explore our impressive new home.
Not so fast. Opening the hatch always takes longer than anyone would want: two and a half hours, in our case, because first we had to ascertain that the impact of docking hadn’t damaged the Soyuz. It had bumped into the Station with reasonable force and speed; we needed to check all our seals to ensure there wasn’t a slow leak. Only when we knew the vehicle was intact could we change out of our Sokhols and into regular blue spacesuits, which, like all Russian space clothing, have straps that go under your feet to pull the pant legs down. That’s helpful in zero gravity, where there’s nothing to prevent the hem of your pants from migrating well north of your ankle. Finally, we were ready.
The Russians view the opening of the hatch, not launch or docking, as the start of an expedition, and certainly it’s true that the moment you float into a space station, you enter a new phase of life off Earth. We’d been tapping on our hatch and the Station crew had been tapping back in response—a comforting sound this far f
rom our planet—but we couldn’t see them until Roman clunked our detachable hatch handle into place, turned it until it clicked and pulled down. The hatch creaked open like the door of a haunted house, and then we could see them: cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin and astronaut Kevin Ford, all beaming and looking much cleaner-shaven than we were.
We emerged to join the rest of the Expedition 34 crew in Rassvet, a long, tunnel-like structure jutting out from the Russian segment of the ISS. This mini-module is narrow enough that you have to float down it single file, which made for an awkward six-person photo op as we bumped and twisted around to face the camera that had been set up to record this moment for posterity. But our smiles weren’t forced; we were delighted to be together in this remote place. I knew the crew well, especially Oleg, a former Director of Operations for Roscosmos in Houston, but there was no time to get caught up. Already, there were things to do.
We floated out from Rassvet and into the main core of the Russian segment for the televised post-docking press conference, which was also our first chance to speak to our families since launch—a public private event, complete with reporters. Our families were in Mission Control in Korolev, sitting on a balcony overlooking the flight controllers; they could see the video feed of us grinning at the camera, but we could not see them. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to hear their voices as they took turns at the microphone to tell us they loved us. A few even went so far as to say they missed us already. It was a bit self-conscious and stilted on both sides, this televised intimacy, but it felt good to be able to reassure them that we were fine. My crewmates’ children asked their fathers to demonstrate somersaults in zero gravity, and Tom and Roman happily, though probably slightly queasily, obliged. But the biggest laugh of the event belonged to Kyle, my 30-year-old son, who took the mic and deadpanned, “Hi Dad, great to see you launch. Now can I have a pony?” There was only one possible answer and I gave it: “Ask your mother.”