Inject your life with some rocket fuel
It was the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 that inspired Mike Massimino to seriously pursue his dream of becoming an astronaut. A tragedy in which a spaceship fell apart in mid-air, killing its seven crew members, might inspire you or I to pursue a career in, say, accountancy or the retail industry.
But astronauts aren’t like you and me. For Massimino, who was working at IBM at the time, the disaster reminded him ‘how short life can be and how important it is to live your life – and even risk your life – in pursuit of something you love’.
He had been a six-year-old boy living on Long Island when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Massimino immediately knew what he wanted to be when he grew up and asked his mum to turn the elephant costume he’d worn in the school play into an astronaut costume. After applying and failing a couple of times, he was eventually accepted into the Nasa Astronaut Class of 1996.
Massimino is probably best known for his missions to service and repair the Hubble space telescope, but Moonshot isn’t a straightforward memoir about his career in space. It’s a distillation of 10 life lessons he learned as an astronaut.
The first lesson is that ‘one in a million is not zero’ – that a small chance is not no chance. Massimino had little chance of becoming an astronaut. He had bad eyesight, was a poor swimmer and wasn’t good with heights. But he persisted and he worked hard and he didn’t give up.
The idea that hard work and dedication can bring rewards is not a radical notion and these lessons are mostly of the variety you can find in any self-help book. They include: ‘Speak up – when you see something or you do something wrong, let people know’, and ‘Know when to pivot – change is inevitable. Accept and embrace it’.
However, the book is also filled with fascinating details. Such as the fact that at Cape Canaveral there is a Range Safety team, whose job it was to vaporise the shuttle if something went wrong. And the fact that astronauts train for space walks in a gigantic pool. And that flights into space are classed as business trips for astronauts.
Moonshot also details Massimino’s extraordinary experiences, such as a space walk to replace the failed power supply on the Hubble space telescope, which required years of planning.
The easiest part was supposed to be removing a handrail blocking the power supply. The rail was fixed in place by four bolts and Massimino managed to strip the head of the last one. That’s an experience familiar to anyone who has ever tried to build flat-pack furniture, but Massimino was floating more than 560km above the surface of the Earth. After an hour, Houston had a solution – pull it off. Sometimes all that is required is just good old-fashioned brute force.
The ground job he most relished was as Capcom (‘capsule communicator’), the astronaut who sits in mission control and speaks directly to the crew. Capcom does not just relay technical information but also acts as emotional support.
Massimino’s most important shifts came in the wake of the Columbia disaster in 2003, when the shuttle disintegrated as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, killing seven. Shuttle flights to the International Space Station were suspended so the three astronauts on board lost their ride home.
Eventually they would be saved using the Russian Soyuz spacecraft as a lifeboat, but they were effectively marooned in space for weeks during which time Massimino relayed family news and kept them updated.
It’s a poignant reminder that although space exploration depends on hard science, complex calculations and cutting edge technology, it is, at heart, a very human enterprise.