“Planned a mission to Mars lately? Ever replaced a gyro on an orbiting telescope travelling at 17,600mph in a full vacuum?”
There just aren’t enough recruitment ads like this. These are the opening lines of NASA’s guide to employee benefits for its next intake of astronaut candidates – which is open for applications right now. Being an astronaut has been a dream to young people ever since the dawn of the Mercury and Vostok programs, but for a select few, it can be a reality.
But have you got what it takes to be an astronaut? And just what is it that you need to become one? To find out, DCM assembled some of the most knowledgeable voices imaginable: the head of astronaut selection at NASA, and two of the nine surviving men who have not only gone into space, but walked on the surface of the moon. You can’t get better advice than that.
To see this article as it ran, as Discovery Channel Magazine’s cover story, click here: Discovery_How to become an astronaut
THE GLAMOUR
“I was naked, lying on my side on a table in the NASA Flight Medicine Clinic bathroom, probing at my rear end with the nozzle of an enema. Welcome to the astronaut selection process, I thought.” So wrote Mike Mullane, who flew three times on the Space Shuttle.
For astronauts, the rewards of their missions are almost unimaginably good: sights that few others will ever see, and a chance to be part of the history of human endeavour. But all who have worked in the space corps are keen to stress that there is a lot of hard work, discomfort and a surprising amount of boredom involved in getting there.
Consider this: Alan Bean had one of the most stellar careers of all astronauts. He flew on Apollo 12 and was the fourth man to walk on the moon. He was mission commander on the second manned flight to the Skylab space station, and set a then-record for time in space. But in an 18-year career at NASA, he went to space just twice. Many fly once in an entire career. Vastly more time is spent waiting than adventuring.
“It was very frustrating,” Bean recalls from the Houston studio where, today, he paints pictures of his memories of the lunar surface. “Other people in my group were flying and I wasn’t. I felt that I wasn’t measuring up to the guys who were being selected.” But it was the same for all potential astronauts, even in the Apollo era when they tended to be fearless and hot-blooded “right stuff” test pilots from the Navy and Air Force who wanted nothing more than to get airborne. “Even in the early days there was a lot of preparation that went into a flight; it wasn’t just ‘let’s go strap it on’,” recalls Charlie Duke, the 10th man to walk on the moon, on Apollo 16, who had been selected while a test pilot under legendary aviator Chuck Yeager. “So for an astronaut patience was a good character trait, because you needed to wait your turn.” He waited six years between selection as an astronaut candidate and flying in 1972 – his only ever flight into space.
But how to get into the queue in the first place? It’s no longer like Bean and Duke’s time, when you had to be a pilot (and a man) to stand a chance. For NASA at least, a surprisingly broad range of people are considered. And it really all starts with education. “To get to this astronaut selection office, you have to come through the door of the Johnson Space Center,” says Duane Ross, head of the astronaut selection board at NASA. “But that’s the second door. The first is the door to the school building.”
While NASA no longer requires doctoral level degrees, as it did when the focus started to shift from pilots to scientists in the late 1960s, it does require an undergraduate degree in engineering, science or maths. You no longer need to have flight experience – that can be trained later – and you certainly don’t need to have been in the armed forces. “As the Shuttle progressed, fewer and fewer who were selected were pilot astronauts,” recalls Duke, who was around for the early years of the Space Shuttle program. “There were more mission specialists and payload specialists. Plus, of course, 50% of the competition was cut out for my generation – because no women were allowed.”
In fact, you’re more likely to be restricted by health – which obviously must be good – and by heightthan ability to fly a plane: the earliest Mercury and Gemini-era astronauts could be no taller than five feet eleven, so as to fit into the tiny one-man capsules, and even today the height limit for the latest NASA intake is between 62 and 75 inches, to ensure you can fit in the Russian Soyuz capsules that NASA currently has to use to take astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). “If you’re going to fly in space, you’ve got to fit in the spaceship,” says Ross. More than just height, he says NASA assesses what are called anthropometric requirements, such as the lengths of your arms and your legs, as spacesuits are also constrained by size.
Nationality is still an issue; NASA only accepts American citizens. But it’s no longer like the 1960s, when only a Russian or American could hope to go into space. Today, people from 38 nations have flown in space – and there’s every chance that the next person to set foot on the moon could be from China.
Don’t give up
The next thing you need is persistence. The first time Bean applied for the Apollo program, he was rejected. “They didn’t ever tell me why,” he recalls. But he noticed everyone who was selected was older and more experienced than him, so he just got more experience and applied again, this time successfully. In his view, it wasn’t just a question of being top of the class – which he was not, either academically, or as a pilot. “You need to be a certain IQ so you can learn things quickly, but you don’t have to be the smartest guy in the class. You’ve got to be able to get along with all sorts of other people, and not everybody can do that either. You don’t just hire a valedictorian and hope they work out.”
Some NASA intakes have attracted 8,000 applications, and the last time, 3,500 applied. 113 were interviewed, 48 got to a second interview – and just nine were hired. “There are two messages,” Ross says. “One, it’s very competitive. But two, the one guarantee is that if you don’t apply, you can’t get picked.” Like Bean, he stresses that being a genius isn’t the whole point. “It’s pretty simple: you need nice people. The world’s best scientists or pilots may not be the team players you need to go fly in space, particularly now we’re flying six months on the International Space Station. There is a huge personal aspect to this.”
Study once selected is intense. Ross calls it “kind of like getting a doctorate degree in being an astronaut in a two year period.” Since most space travel in the world today is geared around the ISS – and Russia’s Soyuz craft are currently the only way of reaching it since the Space Shuttle stopped flying – it is thought that astronaut training is fairly similar in Russia, Europe and the US today. On the menu are training to understand ISS systems, competence at flying (in NASA’s case in T-38 jets), land and water survival training, spacesuits, EVAs (extra-vehicular activity, or spacewalks), robotics on board, and mastery of Russian.
Parts of this are guaranteed to set the pulse racing: the jet flying, the simulators, the so-called Vomit Comet flights that simulate weightlessness. There’s plenty of work in 300-pound spacesuits in deep swimming pools.
There is, though, a lot of repetition. “In our lunar module simulator I probably landed on the moon 2,000 times over the time I was there,” recalls Duke. “I crashed it a few times too. But in the one that counted, we pulled it off.” In his case, one almost unique branch of training was the lunar rover, which he and John Young spent much of their three days on the moon driving around at what looked a fair old clip (in fact 11 miles an hour – the record for the fastest land speed attained on the moon).
Life in space
So you’ve waited the best part of a decade for your chance; you’re on the launchpad, ready to go. What should you expect about life in space?
OK, let’s deal with the obvious one first. Apollo veterans say the question they still get asked most frequently today is how you go to the bathroom. “When you’re on the moon and you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go,” Duke says. “You don’t run over to the nearest rest room and say ‘excuse me’.” In Duke’s day, when he was getting dressed in the lunar module to prepare to step onto the moon, the first thing he had to put on was something called an FCD, basically a diaper, followed by another similar gadget for urine, followed by a set of long underwear filled with plastic tubes to distribute cold water around the body and keep him cool. “One of the most efficient air conditioners I’ve ever had the pleasure of being associated with.”
By the Shuttle era, flight suits for take-off and spacewalks featured a sort of condom male astronauts would roll on before flight to take care of their urine; creating a similar system for women has been an enduring challenge. One of the biggest problems shuttle astronauts talk of is when they’re still on the ground, strapped on their backs, facing upwards, for several hours as the various checks are conducted during countdown. That condom device is all well and good, but try urinating directly upwards when strapped on your back. On board orbiting craft or space stations things are a little easier, with functioning toilets that never existed in the Apollo era, where they had to try to persuade their waste to descend into bags in a zero-gravity environment. “This bag,” says Duke, “is not a triumph of technology, believe me.”
Zero gravity is said to be a magnificent, freeing, euphoric experience, but it brings some curious reactions. Duke recalls zero gravity as “really fun, but at first very uncomfortable. Your head throbs with every heartbeat, your sinuses fill up; it’s like having a headcold. But within hours, everything adjusts.” And spacesickness has been a challenge ever since Apollo 8, when mission commander Frank Borman vomited and had diarrhoea, filling the cramped capsule with globules of vomit and faeces. Tricky to maintain mission camaraderie in those circumstances.
Odder still, astronauts routinely get taller in space, a consequence of the vertebrae of the back stretching out. “I grew about an inch and a half on my way to the moon,” Duke recalls.
Bean went into uncharted territory when he went 59 days in space on Skylab. “My concern to begin with was that we would get weaker and weaker as time went on,” he says. Much effort was spent on working out an exercise regime. “We began to understand what humans can do, which is why now they can go up on stations for six months or more and be OK when they come home.” This has given him some useful ideas about space tourism. “Someday when passengers go up in space, they’re going to have to spend an hour a day with a physical trainer. If one says ‘I feel sick today’, the captain’s going to say: ‘you got a choice. Exercise, or you go in the brig. Otherwise when you get back you’re going to die and then blame it on me.’”
NO FEAR
One thing early astronauts speak very little about is fear. It’s very much the Apollo-era way to be dead-pan about death (Duke on the parachutes on his returning capsule after re-entry: “Without those chutes, we would hit the water at a great rate of speed that would spoil your whole day.”) But both Duke and Bean had every reason to be fearful. Bean’s ship was hit by lightning in the first minute of its ascent, prompting Pete Conrad’s famous remark: “The flight was extremely normal for the first 36 seconds and after that it got very interesting”. One of its guidance systems was knocked out. And before his flight, Duke had seen the dangers while on the back-up crew of Apollo 13, which suffered an explosion and came within a whisker of losing its crew before a rescue even more remarkable than the flight itself.
But they were well trained and knew the odds. “We knew about risk before we joined up; we’d been doing things like that in airplanes for our whole career,” says Bean. “Some who weren’t so good at it got killed. You have to have luck. Look at Challenger: no matter how good an astronaut you are, you’re going to get killed.”He recalls Neil Armstrong saying he had a 90% chance of coming back alive and a 50% chance of making a landing; asked about his thoughts ahead of his own mission, Bean says his odds were “about the same. You have in your head these thoughts, but you think: is it worth it? Obviously, to us, it was worth it.” Chillingly, he adds: “Losing two crews on the shuttle [Challenger and Columbia] was better than we thought. We thought we’d lose more.” It’s a price crews are willing to pay to do what they love. “When you want to explore, it’s not like the American public think it is. You are on the cutting edge of what you can do.”
For Duke, the one moment he recalls fear was somewhat comical. He and John Young had spent three days on the moon and had achieved a great deal; it was almost time to go home, and with all their work done, in one-eighth earth gravity, they decided to conduct their own Lunar Olympics and set the record for the high jump. They began bouncing, then Duke fell flat on his back. You’ve probably seen the famous footage of Duke falling on his front earlier in the mission when attempting to conduct a drill experiment; his bouncing, press-up attempts to get upright again added to the sense of fun and humour of that whole mission. But falling on your back was a very different deal. “That was scary,” he says now. “That backpack was not designed for that kind of impact. If I’ve split my suit open, I’m dead.” He survived – and his high jump record still stands.
Nevertheless, acknowledgement of potential danger is essential. Mullane says that during his training, astronaut candidates for the Shuttle program were played the tape recording of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee as they burned to death in the testing of Apollo 1 in January 1967, just to remind them what they were getting into. And, indeed, many members of Mullane’s class did die on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.
There are sacrifices, too; separation from family is taxing, and not just on the astronauts. When Duke wrote his autobiography he did so in partnership with his wife, who wrote openly and movingly about how the depression she felt in being neglected during Duke’s career led her almost to suicide.
SO NOW WHAT?
For the Apollo moonwalker astronauts in particular, another question is just how you find meaning in your life after having done something extraordinary. “After Apollo I was standing on top of the mountain,” Duke says; “…there was nowhere else to go.” It’s fascinating to see the variety of paths their lives took. Buzz Aldrin suffered clinical depression and alcoholism after his return before successfully beating both; Armstrong became something of a recluse. Edgar Mitchell found belief in the paranormal and faith healing, while Harrison Schmitt became a Republican senator in New Mexico, and something of a sceptic about climate change.
For Duke, after a few years in the space shuttle program and a shift to business, he found meaning in religion. “I found peace and a purpose through my faith,” he says. And Bean found perhaps the most distinctive next phase of all: he has spent the later years of his life painting images from the Apollo missions, using small amounts of moondust from his mission patches, and applying texture through a bronze cast of his moonboot and the hammer he used for experiments while on the moon. “When I’m dead and gone these paintings will remain, and tell stories that would be lost any other way,” he says. When DCM calls, he is painting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s lunar module, the Eagle, flying over a crater looking for its landing site.
Have we put you off with this list of challenges, sacrifices and negatives? The final word, then, to a positive, to remind you what it’s all about. We asked Charlie Duke to cast his mind back 40 years to the Descartes Highlands of the moon and tell us what image stayed most clearly in his head. He thought for a moment.
“On our second EVA, we drove the rover to the south and up the side of Stone Mountain,” he says. “When we got up two or three hundred feet off the valley floor, we turned the rover around on a little bench on the hill and looked across the valley of the Cayley Plains. There was a distinct gap between the lunar surface and the blackness of space, with the lunar module sitting in the middle of the valley. It was a very dramatic sight… the beauty of the moon.”
It is for memories like this that people will always dream of being an astronaut.
Sidebars
Charlie Duke’s famous line
If you don’t know Charlie Duke by name, you know his voice. One of the most famous radio exchanges in history took place when Neil Armstrong piloted Apollo 11 on to the surface of the moon for the first time in 1969. Having found his planned landing site unsuitable, he flew over a crater and was almost out of fuel when he finally landed. “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed,” said Armstrong. A broad southern drawl responded: “Roger, Twanq… Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”That was Duke, serving as CAPCOM on the ground in Houston.
Today, he recalls: “The actual moment of landing was one of intense relief. I remember the tension in mission control was the highest I have ever felt it. There was dead silence, which was extremely rare, as people focused on their consoles. When Neil came back and said ‘The Eagle has landed’, it was like a balloon popping in mission control. I was so excited I couldn’t even pronounce ‘tranquility’. And it was true: we were holding our breath waiting for that landing.”
Charlie Duke’s famous measles
Charlie Duke had one of the world’s most famous cases of German measles. In inadvertently exposing Ken Mattingly to the illness, he caused Mattingly’s withdrawal from the Apollo 13 mission just three days before its ill-fated launch; it would have been him, rather than replacement Jack Swigert, who flicked the switch that caused the craft’s oxygen tank to explode, triggering the most audacious rescue in history. In real life Mattingly still got to fly to the moon, but on Apollo 16 instead – with Duke, the man who exposed him to the measles in the first place (which, incidentally, he never got).
Office politics on the moon
Even in the glorious Apollo era there were office politics when astronauts were jostling for assignments on to lunar crews. Alan Bean, prior to his assignment on Apollo 12, decided he must have been failing to show his good qualities to Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard, the Mercury 7-era astronauts with the greatest power in assigning Apollo crews. “If I had my time over, I would learn to hunt and go hunting, because Deke was a big hunter,” he says. “There’s politics in everything, it’s just the way it is.”
Looking back he thinks he was impeded by his tendency to go to Shepard and Slayton with occasionally crazy ideas; his colleague and mentor Pete Conrad, who would be commander on Apollo 12, told him to keep the weirder ones to himself. “I learned to shut the f*ck up. It worked out OK.”
But today, Bean thinks the differences in his approach serve him well – in his painting, such as using moon boot soles and a lunar hammer to give texture to his creations. “If Al and Deke had been on my committee as a painter and I’d told them that, they’d have said: that’s a crazy idea, Bean. They’d be looking at me like: that is really stupid.”
Record breaker
The man who has spent the most time in space is Sergei Krikalev, a Russian cosmonaut. He spent time on Mir – he was up there when the Soviet Union disintegrated beneath him – flew on the first US/Russian joint space shuttle mission in 1994, and was one of the first two men to enter the International Space Station in 1988. By the end of his sixth mission in 2005 he had spent 803 days, 9 hours and 39 minutes in space.
Changing politics
It’s no secret the Apollo missions were launched primarily to beat Russia at something: they were a function of the cold war. “Apollo was a political decision in the beginning: a race to space with the Russians,” Duke recalls, although he said once selected, it was never really an issue. “The political context quickly changed to a scientific one.”
Today US-Russia relations have improved so much that American astronauts must use Russian Soyuz capsules to get into space, and are expected to learn Russian in their basic training. Russian cosmonauts must learn English and do parts of their training in the USA.
Instead, if there’s a space-race competitor today, it’s China. “I don’t have a sense of what China does at all,” says Ross. Well, the China Manned Space Engineering Office didn’t return DCM’s calls, but we do know this: the first Chinese man, Yang Liwei, flew to space onboard Shenzhou 5 in 2003; China launched a module called Tiangong 1 into space in September, then an unmanned ship, Shenzhou 8, to dock with it in October; and the first section of a permanent space station should be in place by 2015, with the full station complete by 2020 – when the International Space Station is due to retire. Further ahead, China has announced plans to send a man to the moon by 2025, to build a lunar observatory, and to send missions to Mars.
But increasingly, politics aren’t going to matter at all as the business of space travel – particularly cargo and space tourism – passes from state-backed agencies like NASA to the commercial world of groups like Virgin Galactic. Once it becomes viable to earn a profit from these ventures, expect space to become very crowded with private sector businesses.
Passport in Senegal
When Space Shuttle flights departed from Cape Canaveral in Florida, they had an option of a transatlantic landing if one engine failed, which on some launches would put them in Dakar, Senegal. To deal with this possibility, one astronaut would be sent all the way to Dakar International Airport to help air traffic control – with their entire crew’s passports and pre-arranged Senegal visas. Mike Mullane wrote: “I had a vision of standing in the customs line at Dakar airport in our shuttle flight suits with our helmets in the crook of our arms while a bureaucrat asked: ‘Anything to declare?’”
What’s next?
Since NASA no longer has a shuttle, why apply? In the short term, astronauts are being trained for the International Space Station. But a new multi-purpose crew vehicle is being designed (known as Orion), capable of taking humans beyond earth orbit. Further afield are plans to visit an asteroid.
But for Ross there’s one ambition that matters above all others. “For me, since I was a kid, all I think about is going to Mars,” he says. “That’s got to be one of the first destinations we go to. That’s the next hill we’ve got to go climb.”
Other missions will include developing and deploying a successor to the Hubble space telescope, and exploring what is probably the most exciting celestial body in our solar system – Jupiter’s moon of Europa, an ice-covered moon believed to have a water ocean beneath it. If there’s life elsewhere in our solar system, Europa’s our best candidate.
Advice from the man
Nobody’s advice is more relevant than the man in charge of astronaut selection. So, Duane Ross, what should budding astronauts do? “Don’t do anything just for the sake of getting to be an astronaut. A good education will help you whether you get to be an astronaut or not. Getting in to science and engineering is a good place to be. Also, it’s not just academics; be well rounded, do a lot of things, show teamwork, and enjoy working with other people in different situations and environments.” So far NASA has selected 330 astronauts since 1959.
[Facts and figures]
- $45,360: The minimum price to commission an Alan Bean original.
- 130-140: the measured heart rate of Alan Bean and colleagues when lightning struck Apollo 12 at launch.
- 12: number of men who walked on the moon, in six successful missions. 24 men have been tothe moon – three of them twice – but only half landed on it, and none more than once.
- 1963: year Soviet Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. 20 years later Sally Ride became the first American woman in space on the Challenger Space Shuttle.
- 100: kilometres to the Kármán Line, where space officially starts (though NASA designates anyone who reaches more than 50 miles in altitude as an astronaut). Either way, it’s not far: you could drive there in an hour if your car would go straight up.
- US$64,724 to US$141,715: pay scale for NASA’s latest intake of astronaut candidates (most new recruits will be at the bottom).
- Charlie Duke left a picture of his family on the moon, including a dog called Booster – which provided a paw-print.
- Among the benefits NASA lists for becoming an astronaut are “free parking”.
- Transcripts of Bean’s flight are filled with Pete Conrad’s country and western music, starting with San Antonio Rose.
- Apollo astronauts underwent not only the incomparable thrust of a Saturn Five rocket, but the jolts when one stage of the rocket stopped and was discarded and the next one fired up. Duke said it was “like a train wreck. So violent my first thought was we’d blown up.”
- Apollo 16 was nearly aborted just a few miles from the lunar surface.
- The first thing Duke and Young were ordered to do after landing on the moon was sleep.
- Duke had a leaking valve in the drink bag within his space suit as he walked on the moon. Frequently a globule of orange juice would come out and start flying around his helmet. “It was very frustrating. It would hit my nose and start crawling up my head.”
- Some found moonwalking easier than others. “John [Young[ could run like a gazelle,” Duke says. “I just waddled around like a duck.”
- When Bean opened and Conrad opened their checklist on the moon, they found a picture of a naked woman had been added, presumably by a back-up crew, with a note: “See any interesting hills or valleys?”
- On the way home Apollo 16’s Ken Mattingly did a space walk. As he did so his wedding ring, which had earlier been lost, drifted out of the capsule and into space – but bounced off the back of his helmet right back into Duke’s hand.
- The last man on the moon was Eugene Cernan, who flew with Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17 in December 1972. The youngest remaining moonwalkers are in their late 70s; Bean believes there will one day be nobody alive who has walked on the moon.
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