Would you welcome please Michael Massimino.
A couple of weeks after
I got my phone call from NASA that I was selected to be an astronaut my
information package came in the mail and the cover letter had a paragraph at the
beginning that said congratulations and then there was the second paragraph and
it said practice you're swimming. You'll will be required to pass a swim test in
order to go to water survival training with the United States Navy in Pensacola.
And I could not believe this because after years of applications and
interviews and medical examinations from head to toe
and an extensive background check, never once than anyone ever think to ask
"Do you know how to swim?"
And if they did my answer would have been not really. Although I grew up on
Long Island it was surrounded by water my entire life I didn't like swimming
and I completely hated the water. I was a skinny little kid who was always
freezing when I got wet and I didn't like having my head under the water. I
couldn't breathe, I didn't like having chlorine in my eyes. When I would go to a
pool party I would go on my tippy toes just so my head was exposed and pretend
like I was having a good time. And now the one thing that I hated and avoided
my entire life had now becomes the one thing that I had to do well and the one
thing that was going to stand between my me in my dream of flying in space. I
wasn't going to let that stop me. I had the summer to get ready. I took my
kids to the pool every day and I swam and I practiced and I practiced and I
practiced and at the end of that summer I reported for duty at the Johnson
Space Center, a much better swimmer but still very very nervous about what I was
going to have to do there. And I reported there with 43 other new astronauts but
we weren't really astronauts yet. We were astronaut candidates, or as our senior
astronauts called us Ass Cans.
We were all 44 new ass cans. And in our initial briefing they told us how we
could grow up to be astronauts and they gave us a list of things that we were
going to be doing over the next two years, all the different examinations and
qualifications that we would have to get in order to do that and the very
first test we were going to have was the swim test and I was like really? Can't we
have like a math quiz or a physics test? And then the briefer went on and said "Okay,
all the strong swimmers in this class raise your hand." And a couple of the
military people raised their hand. We have a Navy diver raise her hand. And
then asked "Okay, all the weak swimmers raise your hand and be honest." And I
sheepishly raise my hand along with a couple other egghead PhDs, you know and
he said "Great. You trong swimmers and you weak swimmers, this weekend you're
going to work together and you're strong swimmers we're going to get these weak
swimmers ready to pass the test." That's exactly what we did. And we showed up
that next week all 44 of us to take this test in full gear: flight suit, boots, and
helmet. And the feeling that day was everyone was going to pass and we were
not going to leave that pool until everyone passed. And we got in the water
and we did our long-distance swim demonstrating all the survival strokes
that we needed to show, we did a lap underwater, we demonstrated that we could
save each other, do a rescue swim, we drown proofed, we got on our
back with only our mouths exposed bringing in sips of air to fill our
lungs so we get buoyancy on the water, and then after you are good in charge of
all that so it's time to tread, tread water. And in the last few minutes of
that tread they blew a whistle and you had to bring
your hands out of the water and if your hands went underneath the water you fail.
and you had to do the whole test over again. And as I'm treading for dear life
with my hands out of the water those last few minutes I'm looking around at
my new classmates I look for Mike Fink and don't see him anymore but I see his
hands. They didn't say anything about your head being out of the water. They
only said your hands had to be out of the water, and by golly Mike was not going
to let his hands go under that water. And I realized just how determined this
group of people was, these people that I had now become classmates with, future
astronauts with. Every one of us passed, everyone passed that test. And a few weeks
later we flew down to Naval Air Station Pensacola, the home of Naval Aviation, and
for a kid who dreamt about being an astronaut and watched The Right Stuff a
thousand times and read that book about a hundred times I was in heaven.
There were F18s with Blue Angels in them screaming overhead, there were young
navy and marine recruits exercising and running all over the place and then there
was us. And we were there to be trained to eject out of a high-performance
aircraft be able to work our parachute and our survival gear and surviving the
water long enough for someone to come and get us. Now this is something that I
would never dream of doing in a million years, and I found out how the Navy was
going to get us ready to do this. You don't jump out of the plane the first
day. What you do is you take it step by step and they build you up inch by inch,
baby steps, until you're ready to do the big exercise at the end of the week. So
what we started to do was get by the end of the pool just on the edge of the pool
and jump in. And then once you got that down you went on a platform about a foot
off the water and you jump from there. And you got progressively
higher and then they taught us how to go through our checklist.
Once we ejected from the aircraft make sure your canopy was good. We needed a
good canopy above your head and if you didn't have one they told you what to do
to fix it. And then you went through all your other checks. Make sure your mask is
off, your visor is up, deploy your seat kit with all your survival gear, and then
make sure most important one of the most important things for me anyway was that
your LPU, your life preserver unit, was inflated because that's what's going to
keep employing when you hit the water and then pull three lines, a three line
jettison which allows you to steer the parachute. And after you got into the
water they taught us how to get away from the parachute and how to release
from it because that could fill with water and take you to the bottom of the ocean.
We did the step by step and the graduation exercise came at the end of
that week, and what that was was going to be a parasail above the Gulf where we
were going to release from the boat, enter the water, get out, get into a raft, signal
for help, and they would come pick us up and we had to do that twice. And if you
did that twice successfully you passed the water survival course. That Friday
came and I'm out on the Gulf of Mexico on a platform ship getting ready to be
hooked up to a cable to be taken parasailing for this final exam. And my
classmate right in front of me is Stephanie Wilson. Stephanie Wilson is
about five foot two and weighs about a hundred pounds.
Stephanie Wilson is about the size of one of my legs.
Stephanie starts marching in place, she gets a little tug from the boat,
takes about a step, and off she goes like Peter Pan. Okay, then he hooked me up to
the boat, to the line, and I'm really really nervous because not only
am I scared of the water, I am also afraid of heights.
Yeah I know, let it out an astronaut. An astronaut who's afraid of heights.
I start marching in place just like they told me and then I start walking and
I'm getting pulled and then I start walking faster and I start running and
then I started thinking "This boat is not infinitely long." I get to the edge of the
platform and I'm still moving my legs, I haven't gotten airborne yet. And I
start going toward the ocean and I plunge and belly-flop about 20 feet and
do a faceplant into the water and then the boat starts dragging me through the
water. And as I'm trying to gasp for air and look I see this chief petty officer,
our instructor, in the back of that boat signaling to me, telling me release from
your chute, release from your chute. I release from the chute just like she
told me. Then they come and get me and my LPU, the thing that's supposed to save
me, the life reserve unit, had popped on impact. They had a navy doctor check me
out and he turns to the chief petty officer and says "He'll be ok." And she
looks at me and says "That's good. you still got to do it twice, that didn't
count." I get hooked up to the boat again
I start marching, I start running, I hit the edge of the boat again, and here
comes round two with the water. But this time I skim the water with my feet. My
sail inflates and I rise above the water and then I get a signal from the
chief petty officer, the green flag's waving at me and that means to release
from the boat and I do that. And then I go through my checklist: canopy, visor, mask, seat kit,
LPU, three line jettison and I steer myself down and I keep my eye on horizon.
Horizon, horizon, let it come, wait for it wait for it.
I see the horizon coming up, my feet get a little bit wet, I release from my
chute, I do my survival exercise, they come get me and have to do it one more
time and I can pass. They hooked me up again I march, walk, run, drop. Don't get
wet, come up high. And I paused for a moment and I looked around. It was a
beautiful day above the Gulf that day. I could see the coast of Florida, I could
see the Atlantic Ocean, and it hit me, what I was doing what an extraordinary
experience this had been. The skinny kid from Long Island was going through water
survival training as an astronaut candidate, soon to be astronaut hopefully,
with the United States Navy. And then I looked down at the boat and frantically
to chief petty officers waving the flag. I release, do the whole routine again,
land in the water and they come get me. And I had this great feeling of
accomplishment, more than I ever had in my life.
I mean I had gone through some tough tests as a undergraduate at Columbia, it
almost killed me to get through my qualifying exam for my PhD at MIT and to
complete my dissertation. But those things are some raisin seem doable.
This was facing one of the greatest fears I had and I had to do this in order
to achieve my dream of flying in space. I just felt like a superhero getting this
done. And then they realized I had become a good swimmer. Over those months of
practicing and going through the swim testing all these lessons and the Navy I
had become a really good swimmer. I had swim goggles. I had a bathing suit.
I could maybe do this for exercise for the rest of my life.
Since that day over the Gulf of Mexico 20 years ago I have never swim another lap.