It’s a beautiful October morning in Houston, but I am
grumpy and bleary-eyed as I make my way into Mission Control. I’ve just come
off a string of Orbit 1 shifts (midnight to 0800) working as CAPCOM in the
International Space Station Mission Control Center. (CAPCOM is the call sign
for the astronaut on the ground who speaks to the crews that are in space.) Now
I’ve slam-shifted back to daylight hours to work as CAPCOM during a simulation
of the rendezvous planned for an upcoming shuttle mission.
I see my friend Ray J in the parking lot, and he waves me
over. Ray J is a pilot in the astronaut class ahead of mine. We’ve flown dozens
of training flights together in the T-38, and he is a good friend and mentor.
And he is always smiling, even at 0645. We chat for a minute, which mainly
involves me complaining about my schedule, and then he asks, “So, have you
talked to Scooter lately?” I raise my eyebrows at him. Scooter is way senior to
me, a flown guy, a space shuttle commander. Of course I haven’t talked to
Scooter. Scooter sometimes stops by the office I share with Mike Massimino
because they flew on the last Hubble mission together, but it’s not like he’s
coming there to shoot the breeze with me. So I say, “No. Why do you ask?” “Oh,”
says Ray J nonchalantly, “I was just wondering how he’s doing.”
That was weird, I
think as I head into Mission Control. But then I forget all about it and spend
the next ten hours working the simulation. That evening, as I’m propped up on
the couch at home trying to stay awake until a reasonable bedtime, my phone
rings. It’s Steve Lindsey, the chief of the Astronaut Office. This is
definitely weird. Why is he calling me at home? This can’t be good.
He says to me, “I’ve been trying to reach you, but you
haven’t been at your desk for the last four days.” Feeling a little indignant,
I mention that I’ve been living inside Mission Control all week. “Well,” he
says, “how would you like to be the flight engineer and robotic arm operator
for the final Hubble mission?” And then I just start laughing. Chalk it up to
sleep deprivation, or maybe sheer giddiness at finally getting a flight
assignment after six years in the Astronaut Office, but I couldn’t help it.
Steve says, “I guess that’s a yes!” and proceeds to tell me who else is on the
crew. Scooter is the commander, of course; Ray J is the pilot; Mike Massimino
and John Grunsfeld are the two veteran spacewalkers; and two of my classmates,
Drew Feustel and Mike Good, round out the spacewalking team. And then there is
me, the last to know. But that’s okay—I’m not complaining!
The next week NASA makes the big announcement. Our crew
(now I’m on a crew!) gathers around the television in Scooter’s office to
watch. Previously, the final servicing mission to the HST had been canceled,
but now Mike Griffin, our NASA administrator at the time, details his reasons
for adding the mission back to the flight manifest, and then proceeds to
introduce the crew. He reads a brief but glowing bio for each crew member, but
by the end he has run out of steam. “Megan McArthur will be the robotic arm
operator and will, um, perform other tasks as needed.” Oh boy. Just call me
“other tasks as needed.” But I’m still not complaining. Formerly an
oceanographer, I am now the flight engineer and robotic arm operator on the
final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope—a telescope that has
forever altered mankind’s view of the universe and our place within it. I am
thrilled.
After all these years, training for an actual mission is
incredible. And what a mission: launch in a space shuttle, rendezvous with
another free-flying spacecraft in orbit around the Earth, grab that spacecraft
and load it into the space shuttle’s payload bay, conduct five space walks in
five days, let the spacecraft go, come home. I can hardly believe I get to be a
part of all this. I can hardly believe I’m the one who has to capture the
telescope! It’s not like I’m the first person to ever grab the Hubble. But it
will still be the first time I’ve done it, right?
Well, yes and no. A large part of my training is spent
learning how to capture the HST in every scenario my instructor, Linda Snider,
can imagine. The telescope attitude control might be broken, so the telescope
is spinning rather than stable. The robotic arm might be partially broken, so
it can only move a single joint at a time. So many things can go wrong, and I
have to learn how to respond to all of them. The first time I sit down with
Linda to grab the telescope, we use a desktop simulator. I break into a cold
sweat and squeeze the hand controllers so hard it’s a wonder that I don’t crush
them. When I finally get a capture, I look at Linda and say with a grimace,
“Well, that was fun.” And she dryly replies, “And that’s as easy as it’s ever
going to be.”
Linda and I spend hundreds of hours in a simulator we
call the Dome, where we simulate the rendezvous-and-capture portion of our
flight. The Dome consists of a mock-up of the rear portion of the shuttle
flight deck and a large curved screen (hence the name). As you look out the
rear and overhead windows of the shuttle mock-up, you see an image projected
onto the curved screen that represents what you would see out the real orbiter’s
windows during flight. Think of the space shuttle as an extended-cab pickup
truck. Take the backseats out of the cab and look out the rear windows into the
bed of the truck and you’ll get an idea of the setup. By the time I get through
eighteen months of training, I’ve captured hundreds of virtual Hubble Space
Telescopes with the virtual robotic arm and placed them in the virtual bed of
our space pickup truck. Telescope upside down or spinning, robotic arm
busted—you name it, and thanks to Linda, I can do it.
Now that it’s time to launch—at last!—I’m feeling pretty
confident, or as confident as you ever want to feel before messing with a $10
billion piece of government hardware. But whenever a journalist asks me, “How
do you think you’ll feel when it’s time to catch the telescope? Nervous?
Excited?” in a preflight interview, my answer is always, “I have no idea.”
There’s just no guessing how it will feel when the moment arrives. Anything can
happen.
It’s now the third day of the mission, and the moment of
truth is upon me.
In order to capture the Hubble, the space shuttle has to
be in a very specific position relative to the telescope so that the robotic
arm can reach the grapple fixture, a structure on the side of the telescope
that allows us to grab hold of it. Throughout the day, Scooter and Ray J have
been expertly maneuvering Atlantis into position. Near the very end of
the rendezvous, due to a problem with ground commanding, we have to execute a
final maneuver, a delicate pas de deux with the Hubble sitting 150 feet from
the shuttle while both vehicles are moving at 17,500 miles per hour in orbit
around the Earth. No problem. Scooter continues to fire jets to slow Atlantis
down as we get closer and closer to the telescope. I am using the camera on the
end of the robotic arm to tell him when I think the shuttle is in the right
position.
I know we have five space walks to conduct over the next
five days. Drew, John, Bueno, and Mass will perform impossibly hard,
never-before-attempted “brain surgery” on this one-of-a-kind telescope, a
telescope that will help unlock the secrets of the universe. But first I have
to grab it.
As it turns out, I feel absolutely calm. Out the window,
the telescope is—finally!—exactly where it is supposed to be. Scooter has flown
a flawless approach. The robotic arm is in perfect working order. Thanks to my
instructors, I know exactly what to do. So I do it. And then I exhale. And then
I laugh.
How do I feel?
I feel good.
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