Astronaut sharing View From Above
Astronaut Terry Virts will share lessons from space with his Calgary audience
Terry Virts reckons the experience lasted 30 seconds.
It was in February of 2015 and Virts was in space. Specifically, he was on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station performing tasks as a flight engineer for ISS’s Expedition 42. This particular spacewalk had him busy “plugging in connectors and stuff,” which meant his view was mostly limited to a close-up of the metal equipment in front of him. Then he turned around. “I stopped and kind of rotated my body out and looked out into space,” says Virts, in a phone interview from his home in Houston. “There I was in the blackness of space. The sun was rising, so you couldn’t really see the Earth or space. It was just this pink-orange line that went from one side of my peripheral vision to the other as the sun was rising. It was like I could hear from God. It was like God was saying ‘I am.’ It was the coolest, most surreal moment looking out over creation.
“And then it was back to work because I’ve got this connector to plug in.”
In Chapter 7 of his 2017 book, View From Above: An Astronaut Photographs the World (National Geographic Society, 304 pages), Virts writes about his three spacewalk experiences. It’s the longest chapter in the book even after Virts cut out half of what he wrote for the final draft.
In some ways, the spacewalk experiences seem to nicely encapsulate the missions he undertook for NASA, particularly the 200 days he spent on the International Space Station. There were flashes of inspiration and profound thoughts to be had as he took in the breathtaking views of Earth and the universe and contemplated our place in it. But these were generally short-lived.
He figures more than 99 per cent of his time was spent hard at work rather than gazing into space or “floating around,” something the general public tends not to realize.
“You’re on the clock,” he says. “There’s this internal mental timer that, as a pilot, you have to have. You can never get distracted for too long because you’ve got to fly the airplane. So pilots tend to have this internal clock that’s always shaking them back to paying attention to what’s going on. That internal timer is an important thing to have when you’re flying in space.”
Virts retired from NASA in 2016 and is on a National Geographic Live! tour that hits the Arts Commons’ Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary Sunday and Monday. The presentation will include motivational and philosophical messages, including his thoughts on environmental problems and global wealth. He got a unique perspective of these issues from his view in space. His pictures of South and North Korea at night, for instance, garnered attention around the world as they offered a telltale image of economic disparity: the south was illuminated, while the north was left in the dark.
A large part of View From Above with Terry Virts will be made up of stunning visuals, many of which Virts captured. In his first stint on the International Space Station, Virts installed the Cupola module which allowed him to take photos with a 360-degree view of the station. Virts, who took command of the ISS in March 2015, took full advantage. He took more than 300,000 still photos, the most anyone has taken in space.
The photos were great fodder for his book, as were the videos he took, many of which made it into an Imax film called A Beautiful Planet. But they don’t tell the entire story.
“It’s the best way to capture space flight in a movie, but nothing compares to being there,” Virts says. “There’s something emotional about looking out the window and seeing the universe. It’s hard to beat that. But the imagery is pretty cool. The photography is really important. I think it captures the essence of what it’s like to be there better than anything.”
As for the motivational aspect of the presentation, Virts’ message for any future astronauts in the crowd is “Don’t tell yourself no.” He was in kindergarten in Columbia, Md., when he decided he wanted to one day blast off into space. But he also eventually realized it was a tough road. So he set a course that he would enjoy whether the final destination was outer space or not.
He studied mathematics at the U.S. Air Force Academy and graduated in 1989 before attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where he earned a master of aeronautical science. He became a test pilot at the Edwards Air Force Base in California and joined NASA in 2000. Before making his first trip to the International Space Station in 2015, he piloted Space Shuttle Endeavour.
“It worked out for me,” he says. “But even if it hadn’t, I would have ended up as a pilot, which is great; or a test pilot, which is great. I didn’t do a bunch of stuff I hated hoping to get that dream. I was pursuing things I enjoyed anyway.”
And, as has already been pointed out, it all requires a lot of work that doesn’t end when you reach space.
Curiously, Virts says a big misconception about astronauts is they still travel to the moon, or even to Mars. Part of that is because movies have become so authenticlooking that people often mistake fiction for reality, he says.
Last month, major news outlets including CNN and the New York Times reported on claims made by former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo, who said he believed there was plenty of evidence of alien life reaching Earth. Virts was vacationing at the time so didn’t pay too much attention to it.
But his view on alien life visiting Earth is decidedly more down to earth, at least metaphorically.
“I think most people believe there are aliens out there, so whenever anybody says anything that hints of that there’s going to be a lot of interest,” he says. “There’s lots of good reasons to go to space, aliens or not. To me, what’s interesting is that if they are out there they are tremendously far away. The nearest star would take tens of thousands of years to get to using our current rocket technology.
“The way Star Wars and Star Trek propulsion works is not the way physics works. Maybe they are out there, maybe they are not. But they are a long way away if they are and there’s lots of other cool things nearby that we can visit, see, explore and use in the interim.”
Speaking of down to earth, Virts says his return to solid ground after 200 days in space was not as difficult as he imagined it would be. The first day, he was incredibly dizzy and needed handrails or someone near him in case he fell. (He didn’t.) By the second and third days, his dizziness began to fade. Not long after, he was car-shopping with his then 16-year-old and newly licensed son.
“I was like: ‘I’m back on Earth,’” he says. “I was just in space and here I am shopping for cars with my teenager. It was completely normal. To the degree it was normal kind of surprised me.”