![]() “Houston, Hubble has been released, it’s safely back on its journey of exploration as we begin steps to conclude ours,” astronaut Scott Altman, Massimino’s crewmate and the mission’s commander, reported back at the time. He might have given up had he not recognized his frustration - just like he had felt at Cold Lake. Massimino wound up spending more than eight hours on that spacewalk to fix Hubble. It’s a deep connection, you just know what you’re going to do as team.” Together as one “We may talk nonverbally just by tapping a checklist or by pointing to a bank of switches. ![]() “There can be so much chatter going on,” he says of his time aboard the shuttle. That ability to communicate quickly and effectively in the midst of any distraction - and to trust feedback even if it seems counterintuitive - helped Melvin on his later space missions. He broke free from the mud just in time to save himself. Melvin trusted their advice over his own instincts. With the tree bearing down, other members of his team called out to him from the bank, urging him to slow his movements. “Then I looked up,” he says, “and there’s this huge tree trunk coming down the river, about to impale me.” But the fast footwork exhausted him and only embedded his feet deeper in the muck. “I’m a wide receiver, so I’m doing ‘quick foot,'” he says. Astronaut Leland Melvin, STS-129 mission specialist, attired in a training version of his shuttle launch and entry suit, participates in a Full Fuselage Trainer (FFT) mock-up training session in the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center. As he began to ford the torrent, his feet got hopelessly stuck in the mud. Melvin was hiking with an 85-pound backpack on when he came to a turbulent river, swollen by recent flash floods. For Leland Melvin, a former NFL player who flew on two space shuttle missions, it came during a NASA-sponsored course by the National Outdoors Leadership School in Canyonlands. intuitionĮvery astronaut has a version of that breakthrough moment from survival training.įor Linenger, it came when he realized he could have complete confidence in his guide and his fellow pilots during his jungle trip. That’s where the true survival element of NASA’s training kicks in. They must be able to put aside bad moods, personal feuds and mental distractions of any kind. ![]() “They teach you how to deal with adversity.” In space, as in extreme environments on Earth, self-awareness and adaptability can spell the difference between success and failure - and ultimately, between life and death.Īstronauts need intimate knowledge of their own strengths and limitations, as well as those of their crewmates. “These things teach you how to work as a team and get through hardships,” Massimino says in the book. “The scariest part was nighttime - a cacophony of sounds, animals crawling underneath me.” “We were out there for two-and-a-half days, and had no idea where we were,” he says. ![]() One time, Linenger and three other aviators were dropped in a jungle in the Philippines with no supplies or instructions, aided only by a local guide who spoke no English. Former astronaut Jerry Linenger, a Navy pilot who in 1997 became the first American to spacewalk from Russia’s Mir space station, still vividly recalls what those trials were like. In the early days, the agency plucked astronauts from a pool of test pilots who had already completed the military version of survival training. Thrown to the elementsīeing thrown into dangerous, demanding outdoor ordeals has been a key part of NASA’s astronaut training program for as long as there has been a NASA, going all the way back to the original Mercury 7 team. But his steely resolve in the face of long odds - and his methodical approach to solving a difficult problem while floating weightless in the vacuum of space - was honed by the brutal regimen of survival training he had endured more than a decade earlier. Massimino was guided by experts on the ground, as astronauts always are.
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