The International Space Station was an incredible achievement and a testament to what’s possible when countries and people work together for the greater good. Photo courtesy of NASA
What a Wonderful World
Every spaceflight can be broken up into a series of moments, most of them indelibly imprinted in your memory. Liftoff. Becoming weightless as you leave Earth’s atmosphere. A meal shared with crewmates hundreds of kilometers above the earth’s surface. I see life the same way. Our days are filled with moments, some of them life changing, some of them quieter. But whether we’re in a space shuttle or in an operating room or at home with loved ones, every moment is precious. When you realize that your life is a finite series of moments, the importance of living in the present becomes a matter of choice. It is easy to be complacent about how we use our time, but every minute is paramount. If you commit yourself fully to bringing your best to every event, every encounter, every experience, there are no limits to your life. If you’re courageous enough to have tough conversations and take on life’s challenges, you can grow as an individual. None of us knows what life will bring, but we can decide how to live the moments we have.
Nine years after I’d first flown in space, I was finally about to live my dream again. It was August 2007, and as I packed during one of my final nights at home, Cathy and I marveled at how much had changed since the last time we’d done this dance.
“Olivia had just been born last time you flew,” Cathy said.
“Evan was barely old enough to understand where I’d gone,” I said. “You were a first officer then; now you’re a captain.”
“You were cancer-free then; now you’re a cancer survivor.”
“And I still am.”
“Do you feel differently about this mission?”
I paused. The same mix of excitement and apprehension simmered inside me, but I felt more clear-eyed the second time around. “I know what to expect,” I said. “Or at least I think I do.”
“How do you feel about the space walks? Are you ready?”
I had been wondering the same thing. Space walks are one of the most difficult and dangerous tasks for astronauts. “I think so. We’ve trained so much for it. As a team, we’ve worked out every detail, and we did well in the final evaluation simulation.”
“Train like you fly and fly like you train,” Cathy said.
Having the right mind-set helped to prepare me for the idea of spacewalking, but the hundreds of hours of training were also important. I had spent months preparing specifically for our four planned space walks with three of my crewmates: Rick Mastracchio and Tracy Caldwell, who would be flying on STS-118 with me, and Clay Anderson, who’d be flying to the ISS a few months before us and remaining there after we left.
Rick and Clay were quite a bit younger than I was, and I was determined to prove that I was fit enough and had the skills to do the job. Time to chase perfection, I thought to myself each time a new task was added to one of the space walks. No one wants to make a mistake in space, especially spacewalking. It is hard to have a flawless training run in the pool, so every training session was an opportunity to learn and get ready for our final performance in space. It was mentally and physically demanding. More than once, Rick, Clay, and I would climb out of suits after hours in the pool and we’d count our bruises.
“I’ve got at least three on each shoulder,” I announced after one training run.
“I’ve got about the same. You’re holding up pretty well for an old guy,” Clay teased.
The final training test for Rick, Tracy, and me was overseen by our instructors and an instructor astronaut who had done a number of space walks. We were given one of the space walks we would ultimately do in space to complete in the pool. If, after we’d finished, the instructors and the instructor astronaut felt that they wouldn’t be comfortable going out the hatch with us, or that we wouldn’t complete the space walk objectives, there would be a problem.
“This is it: Let’s do everything the way we’ve trained it,” I said as we got into our suits.
“Agreed. We know what we’re doing,” Rick said.
“I just don’t want to screw anything up.”
“You won’t. We’ll listen to each other and to Tracy and focus on working together, just like always. We do that, and everything will be fine.”
Rick was right. We did just that, and the test went off without a problem. Each of the evaluators gave us the green light, and with that, we cleared the final hurdle. By the time our launch was upon us, I felt as ready as I would ever be. I knew the risks, and I knew that I could trust Rick, Clay, and the rest of the crew with my life. If anything came up, we would handle it.
I have a picture of Cathy hugging Evan and Olivia, watching us lift off for our mission. Evan was a teenager, and Olivia was nine going on ten, so both of them were starting to understand the real risks of spaceflight. They, along with the other spouses, family members, and support astronauts, were all on the roof of the launch control center so everyone would be together in the event of an emergency. My mother, along with our extended family and friends, watched the launch from the VIP viewing area.
Cathy told me later that when she and the kids were watching the launch, Olivia said, “It’ll be all right, Mom.” A few years later, when Olivia was a teenager, I was giving a presentation and I asked Olivia to comment on what it’s like watching your dad lift off into space, not knowing if he is going to come back or not. Cathy and I had tried to protect the kids from worries or fears, but hearing Olivia so maturely and calmly explain how she had dealt with those emotions and knowing how strong we were as a family gave me such pride then and still does to this day.
As Cathy and the kids huddled together on the rooftop, I was riding the 7.5 million pounds of combined thrust from the solid rocket boosters and the three shuttle main engines as we began our two-day journey to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station. I knew we had fully left Earth’s atmosphere when I saw the checklist in front of me begin to rise into the air. Although it was exhilarating, I breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that ride, I thought.
I unbuckled myself from my seat and carefully pushed myself out of it. My body seemed to intuitively remember the last trip, because it felt as though I had been in space the month before. Using only my fingertips, I floated out of my seat on the mid-deck to start reconfiguring the shuttle. This time I was in charge of the post-insertion timeline and I didn’t want to let Scott or the crew down.
Docking a spacecraft to the space station when both are traveling twenty-five times the speed of sound requires teamwork, precision, and focus. I used a handheld radar device—similar to the ones used by traffic police—to get data on the distance and closing velocity with the space station, then Barbara Morgan and I activated the docking mechanism that would secure the shuttle to the station. There were high fives around the flight deck when the latches were locked and we got the notification that we had docked successfully. Our pilot, Charlie “Scorch” Hobaugh, and I went into the shuttle airlock and waited by the hatch, getting ready for the go-ahead from Mission Control for us to enter our home for the next two weeks.
The International Space Station was an incredible achievement and a testament to what’s possible when countries and people work together for the greater good. Photo courtesy of NASA
It used to be said that a shuttle mission is like a sprint, and a space station mission is more like a marathon. Now, most long-duration astronauts say that station missions are more like a six-month sprint. There’s still lots happening every day, and while you may have a bit more breathing room to enjoy the moments in between the work, you still feel like you’re always on, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the mission.
The first night on the ISS, as I settled into my bed, I pulled out a couple of personal items that I’d packed carefully in my bag. The first was Cathy’s captain’s wings, which she’d earned the year before. I had flown her first set of Air Canada wings in space on board STS-90, and I wanted to bring her captain’s wings with me to space as well.
The second item was a CD. I pulled on my headphones and the sounds of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” swirled around me. It was Olivia playing it on the piano. I’d recorded the piece before I left, and I drifted off to sleep that night to the sounds of my daughter’s music.
The next day was spent running experiments and getting the equipment in place for our upcoming space walk. It is hard to describe the emotions you feel before your first space walk. It’s one thing to be inside a spacecraft looking out the window at the earth, but it’s something else entirely when you put on a space suit and step “outside.” Rick and I went to bed early the night before, hoping to get a good sleep. We slept in the space station Quest airlock with the hatch closed and the pressure lowered from the normal station operating pressure to help remove nitrogen from our bodies. Medically, space walkers have the same risk of developing decompression sickness that scuba divers do as we go from the higher pressure of the space station to the much lower pressure in our space suits. If we were to immediately go from the station pressure to the suit pressure, the nitrogen in our bodies would create bubbles of gas in our tissues similar to the ones that form in a soft drink when the cap is removed, causing the condition known as the bends. We didn’t want that to happen, so we were careful to follow the protocol closely.
Despite our best intentions to get to sleep on time, Rick and I were awakened in the middle of the night by the harsh sound of the space station alarm.
“What do you think?” I asked. We were isolated in the airlock with the hatch closed. Opening the hatch would break the pre-breathe protocol and impact the start of our space walk.
“Probably a false alarm,” Rick said, sounding frustrated with the interruption.
Seconds later, Mission Control confirmed Rick’s suspicions. We both closed our eyes and tried the best we could to get back to sleep quickly. I found it difficult: I couldn’t stop thinking about everything we had to do and the fact that now we’d be tired for our first space walk. Fortunately, I had practiced for something like this in my training by doing a couple of training runs in the pool with only three hours sleep the night before to see if fatigue would affect my performance. It took more focus, but I knew I could do it. As I mentally rehearsed the many tasks that Rick and I would be doing, I began to drift back to sleep.
When the wake-up call came, Rick and I slowly floated out of our sleeping bags and quickly brought our focus to the task at hand. The timeline to finish the pre-breathe and get into our suits was filled with countless things to do, and we didn’t want to fall behind. I’d long since learned that it was best to get ahead and stay ahead of the timeline.
We spent the next four and a half hours getting into our space suits and depressurizing the airlock to a vacuum. Scott and Tracy helped Rick and me get into our suits and move into position in the airlock. When you’re not wearing a space suit, the airlock seems roomy. But two astronauts wearing bulky space suits can quickly make it feel cramped, like sardines in a can. Rick and I floated heads-to-feet. Rick was looking at the airlock hatch, ready to open it when we reached vacuum, while I faced the opposite direction, Rick’s feet dangling by my face. In front of me was a panel that we used during the depressurization and repressurization of the airlock.
I carefully went through the process of depressurizing the airlock. Any mistake would result in a delay in opening the hatch and we would be behind on the timeline. Remember your training and stay focused, I thought. In space, going slowly to avoid an error is much faster than going fast, making an error, and then having to stop and reconfigure or recover. Everything went smoothly. Cathy’s words—“Train like you fly, fly like you train”—echoed in my ears.
“We’re ready to open the hatch,” I said.
Rick and I had talked about this moment. We knew that we’d be hyperaware of our surroundings when we went outside, and we didn’t want to freeze up on a handrail. Would we have a sense of falling like a skydiver when we saw the earth that far beneath us? We’d trained using virtual reality and simulations to prepare ourselves for every eventuality. It was inherently scary entering the cold vacuum of space, but I felt in control.
As I slid out the airlock feet-first, everything was dark. Totally, absolutely dark. The earth was between us and the sun, so there were no lights apart from the ones on our helmets and those of the twinkling cities sprawling beneath us. The helmet on a space suit is fixed, so you can’t turn or extend your neck: your field of vision is limited to what’s in front of you. I pivoted my body to see if the view changed behind me, but I was surrounded by a deep, infinite blackness that extended in every direction.
Rick had tethered himself to the handrail outside the airlock, and I locked in beside him.
“So much for the view,” I said.
“Nothing like opening the hatch during a night pass,” Rick replied.
We made our way to the starboard side of the station, and as we reached our next tether station, Tracy radioed us. “Dave, Rick, the sun’s about to come up. You can turn off your helmet lights and glove heaters.”
I felt the sun before I saw it. My back was to the earth, and I felt myself getting warmer as the station grew brighter around me. It was more than just the sun’s warm embrace, though: I sensed its life-giving nature seeping into my suit, as though to say, Everything is going to be all right. Before moving on to the next point, I turned to look behind me, and as I saw the spectacular blue of the planet starting to glow, I felt a sense of calm come over me.
We moved to the farthest starboard extent of the station, where we were to install the next major section of the truss on the existing backbone of the station. Rick and I gave feedback to Scorch as he maneuvered the Canadarm2 to bring the new truss into position. It was a delicate handoff—the first Canadian robot arm passing the truss to its successor, and finally from its mechanical hands to our human ones—and once the truss arrived safely, Rick and I got to work.
As Rick and I were tightening the bolts, a drop of water floated up beside my face. That’s odd: there shouldn’t be any water in my space suit. By the time I figured out that the water had come from the mouthpiece of my in-suit drink bag, the drop had adhered to the front of the left lens of my eyeglasses, so I wasn’t able to blink it away.
I kept working on the truss as I tried to figure out a solution. I realized that if I angled my forehead forward, I could use the flow of oxygen that came in through the top of my helmet to evaporate the water. No worries: Solve the problem and move on.
After we finished installing the truss, it was time to move the grapple fixture into a permanent stowage location. To get it to there, though, we had to be a bit creative. I stepped into my foot restraint and grabbed hold of the bracket. After we released the bracket, Rick rotated my foot restraint 90 degrees so we could install the piece on the outer side of the station. Once we finished, I was sticking straight out into space.
“Your go for egress,” Tracy said over the radio as she watched us from the shuttle’s overhead window.
“Copy, my local tether is locked and secure,” I said.
On paper, the egress sounded straightforward: I had to release myself from my foot restraint and, while floating in space, reposition myself to turn around and face the outermost portion of the station. Then, using my tether, I would pull myself back in to grab onto the station. But without handrails to pivot my body, it was a tricky maneuver.
I’d practiced this next part dozens of times before, but in that moment everything seemed hyper-real. I pulled on my waist tether, which was attached to my foot restraint, to put force on the bottom of my feet and anchor myself. I slowly rotated one foot out and let it hang beside me. I rotated the other heel and gingerly eased it out of the restraint.
I breathed slowly and tried to block out the thoughts racing through my mind. The space station was moving at about 8 kilometers a second, or 17,500 miles per hour—roughly eight times faster than a bullet—and I was floating freely, with nothing between me and the depths of space except for the tether in my hands.
As I floated there, I looked at the earth far away beneath me. The view was like nothing I had ever seen in my life. Far in the distance were the bright blue waters of the Pacific Ocean with clouds that looked like cotton balls scattered around. Rick and the station were only five feet behind me but they could have been a mile away.
Pull yourself in, Dave, I thought. I gently pulled on the tether to spin and drag myself in toward the station. When I finally locked myself to a handrail, I let out a long, relieved breath. At least that’s the hardest part done.
Six and a half hours later, Rick and I took once last glimpse at Planet Earth before reentering the airlock on the station. When we finally pulled our helmets off, I turned to Tracy and Scott and said, “Wow, that gets your attention!” In other words, That was incredible, but I was scared to death the whole time.
Later that evening I had a chance to call Cathy and the kids. The technology had improved since my first spaceflight, and we could now speak with our families using laptop computers.
“How did it go today?” Cathy asked.
“It was incredible. Scary at points, but amazing.”
“How does the planet look from up there?”
“Good question. At first we didn’t get to see much, because it was dark when we came out of the airlock. But as we started moving toward the work site, the sun came up and the view was incredible. The tethered egress from my foot restraint was amazing and frightening at the same time.”
“I can’t wait to hear about it in detail when you get back. Want to talk to the kids?”
“Of course!” There was a scratching over the headset as Cathy passed the phone to Olivia.
“Dad?”
“Hi, Olivia!”
“You sound like you’re talking from inside a tin can,” Olivia said.
“I kind of am,” I said. “But it’s a really fancy tin can.”
“Are you coming home soon?”
“Not for a few more days, but I’m thinking about you and Evan every day. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
They say the second time is always easier than the first. In the case of spacewalking, I’m not so sure, but I’m willing to go with popular belief. Rick and I started the next walk by pulling ourselves hand over hand along the side of the space station. We had to replace a failed gyroscope, a piece of equipment that stabilizes the space station as it orbits the earth, and once again we would have the help of our pilot, Scorch.
The space walk started with Rick and me removing the failed gyroscope and temporarily stowing it by the work site. I then went back to the airlock and stepped into the foot restraint on the end of the Canadarm while Rick continued down to the payload bay. Rick and I would rendezvous in the payload bay to remove the new gyroscope, and I would carry it back to the station while riding the arm.
“I’m in position, Scorch,” I said. “You can bring in the arm.”
The Canadarm2 swung into view. Of course, you can’t just step onto the Canadarm like stepping onto a ladder. I had to attach my tether, then lock myself into the foot restraint on the end of the arm.
I carefully slid my boots under the toe loops and turned my heels outward to lock my boots in place.
“Go for motion,” I called to Scorch, and let go of the handrail.
The training arm we’d used underwater at NASA was rigid and jerky, so I was amazed at how smoothly the real thing moved in space. Scorch had to extend me away from the station to reposition me properly over the shuttle payload bay, and as I glided away from the station, I could not help but admire the view.
Behind the shuttle was the curve of the earth, the bright blue of our beautiful planet cast against the black infinite void of space. The oceans were every hue of blue imaginable. I looked past the Canadian flag on my left shoulder to see a pale golden halo surrounding the planet as the sun’s rays lit up the atmosphere.
It struck me then: I needed to take a picture of this moment. I reached down to my waist and checked the tether on my camera, then tried to capture the moment with my best point-and-shoot technique. In a space suit, it’s impossible to look through a viewfinder, so I just aimed the camera in the direction of the earth and pressed the button, hoping for the best. The camera body was covered with white thermal insulating material, so I wasn’t able to see the digital image until after I was back inside the shuttle. Hope I didn’t have my thumb over the lens, I thought as I put my camera away.
Time seemed to stand still and my mind went back to a movie I had seen in my first year of medical school called How Can I Not Be Among You? It celebrated the life of poet Ted Rosenthal. Tragically, Ted was diagnosed with leukemia in 1970 when he was in his thirties. In his poetry, Ted talked not about the fear of dying but about the fear of living an unfulfilled life. He spoke of the opportunity we all have to live a lifetime in a moment, to savor the moment, to love family, friends, and strangers. Watching the movie was an epiphany for me at the time and has remained so. As soon as the end credits rolled, I promised myself I would live my life to the fullest.
The view of Earth from the Canadarm2 was one of the most spectacular things I’ve seen in my life. It was truly a moment that lasted a lifetime. Photo courtesy of NASA
This was one of those moments. I felt connected to humanity. I watched the earth rotate beneath me—a 4.5 billion-year-old planet on which the entire history of the human species, of all living things, had taken place. There were no boundaries visible between countries, simply the majestic beauty of this blue oasis in space. I was in awe and completely humbled. I felt like a speck of sand on an infinite beach. In that moment I realized our legacy is not what we leave, it is how we live. I felt thankful to have had the benefit of Ted’s wisdom at such a young age. This was one of many miraculous moments throughout my life, and now, flying in space as a cancer survivor, I was reminded yet again of the importance of living in the moment.
A few minutes later Scorch had me in position over the shuttle payload bay. The gyroscope and its flight support equipment weighed around 1,200 pounds, and I would be holding on to it with two hands, which meant I had to make extra sure I had my feet locked in properly, as they’d be the only thing connecting me to the Canadarm.
“Tethers configured properly?” Tracy called before I asked Scorch to move me straight up out of the payload bay.
“Roger,” I responded. Scorch moved me straight up with surgical precision, a testimony to his skill as a robotic operator.
“How’s the ride, Dave, and the stability of that big boy?” Scorch asked.
“Great,” I said.
Several hours later, after Rick and I had finished installing the equipment, I prepared for my final ride back to the station on the Canadarm. To get me back to the airlock, though, Scorch had to fully extend the arm away from the station, effectively dangling me by my toes into the vast emptiness of space.
“Ready for motion,” I said.
“Here we go, Dave,” Scorch radioed.
The arm swung out almost sixty feet straight aft of the station. Rick, the station, and everything else disappeared from view. Finally, the arm stopped moving.
“Dave, it’ll take me a couple of minutes to reconfigure the arm,” Scorch said. “How’s the view out there?”
The view in front of me was almost overwhelming. I felt like I was hovering alone in space. It began to feel like I was floating freely; I knew it was an illusion but I still squeezed my eyes shut and repeated to myself, “Heels out, heels out, heels out . . .” reminding myself to lock my feet to hold myself in place.
My heart was pounding, but I cracked my eyes open. The only thing I could see was the earth far away beneath me. The beauty of it was astounding. I slowed my breath and listened to the sound of my own heartbeat. This was the first time I felt completely alone in space. I knew I was still firmly locked into my foot restraint, but I had the sense of floating above the earth, in the heavens, as I watched it go by. We were flying over the Mediterranean, and the white clouds above it rippled into ridges that I felt I could reach out and brush with my hands.
My reverie was interrupted when my radio crackled to life. “Are you ready for motion?” Scorch asked.
The words pulled me back to reality. “Affirmative,” I said. I slowly started moving back toward structure, safety, and my crewmates. As I climbed into the airlock feet-first, gently maneuvering around Rick to fit inside, I had one more incredible glimpse of our planet. I grabbed hold of the airlock hatch and paused to appreciate the beauty of the view as long as I could. Every second of it, I knew, would remain with me for the rest of my life.