Margaret Dean - Endurance - A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

AT THE END of the week, we said our good-byes and went back to our respective homes. NASA was to interview six groups in all, and I had been in the third group, so patience would be required. For me, the wait was made harder by the fact that I thought I had done well. If I’d known that I’d blown some part of the process, or that one of the doctors I’d encountered had betrayed that something was wrong with me physically, I would have had a pretty good idea that I wasn’t going to make it, and the wait would have been easier.

As the weeks went by, I received a new Navy assignment: to join a fighter squadron at a naval air station in Japan. This was a move I would have been excited about under any other circumstances, and Leslie was prepared for the adventure, but I still hadn’t heard from NASA. I didn’t want to move my family there until I had to.

The moving company that contracted with the Navy called me to set up a date to come and pack up our stuff.

“Can you hold off for a couple of weeks?” I asked. The movers reluctantly agreed.

Soon, they called again. This time they had chosen a date they wanted to come and they were less interested in renegotiating it. I managed to put them off again. And again. Over the next few weeks, I started to hear from some of the people I had listed as references that they had been contacted as part of my background investigation. So I knew I had made it to the next level. That gave me hope, though I was still concerned about the fact that I was interviewed in the third group rather than the first. I asked people I had met at the interview if they had heard anything about when NASA would make their calls. No one did.

A few days before Memorial Day weekend, I got a call at home.

“Scott,” the voice said. “This is Dave Leestma.” Dave was one of the astronauts I had met in Houston and was the flight crew operations director—the direct supervisor of the chief astronaut.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“Would you like to come fly for us?” he asked. I paused, because it wasn’t entirely clear to me that this was the call I had been waiting for. I knew that NASA employed a lot of pilots who weren’t astronauts—maybe Dave was asking me to be a pilot, not an astronaut.

“Uh, maybe,” I said. “Fly what?”

He answered with a laugh. “The space shuttle, of course.”

It’s hard to describe what I felt then. I wasn’t entirely shocked, because I thought I had done well, and I had started to think I might be chosen. But I did feel an awareness of everything it had taken for me to get here, from reading The Right Stuff and setting a goal that seemed impossible, to this moment. And I felt humbled by the role I was going to be asked to step into.

“I’d love to,” I said. “Have you called my brother yet?”

Later, when I related this conversation to people, they thought it was funny that I didn’t even take a breath to process my own accomplishment before asking about my brother. But to me, waiting to find out what would happen with his application was almost as suspenseful as waiting to hear about my own.

“I just got off the phone with him,” Dave answered. “Yeah, he got selected too.”

This was the first time NASA had selected relatives. We’d been concerned they might not want to select brothers, especially twins, and in the back of my mind I had been anticipating that they might choose one of us and not the other.

“Mark actually asked me about you, too, and I told him I was about to call you,” Dave said. So my brother knew that I was to become an astronaut before I did. That was fine with me.

I hung up the phone after talking to Dave and I told Leslie: “I’m going to be an astronaut.” She was thrilled for me. Next I called my brother, and we spent a few minutes on the phone congratulating each other and talking about our moving plans. I got on the phone with my parents and they were overwhelmed by the news. Word spread quickly within our small family—the next time we saw our maternal grandmother, she had had a custom bumper sticker made for her car that read, MY TWIN GRANDSONS ARE ASTRONAUTS. I would imagine people thought she was crazy.

The next day, I told my colleagues that I had been chosen to be an astronaut. I particularly enjoyed telling Paul, my friend and flight test engineer, because I knew he would be excited for me. When I told him, he jumped up and, with a huge smile, exclaimed, “You’ve gotta be frigging shitting me!” A few seconds later he followed up with “Will you invite me to come down to Florida and see a launch?” I promised I would. I was surprised and touched by how pleased everyone was for me. They were all so thrilled, their excitement actually helped it to sink in for me what I had achieved. My life had just changed. I was going to have the chance to fly in space.

When the press found out that NASA had selected the two of us, they called the astronaut selection office to ask about it. A reporter asked Duane Ross, “Did you know you picked two brothers?”

His answer: “No, we picked two very accomplished test pilots who happen to be twins.”

ONE HOT DAY in early July 1996, Leslie and I packed up our two cars and left Pax River for Houston. Samantha, almost two now, was a sprightly and adorable toddler. We found a house we liked quickly and moved in on August 1. Mark and his family moved to town after we did, since they were having a house built nearby.

In addition to getting my family settled and learning about the area, I was also working out a lot, running every day. I wanted to show up at NASA in good shape. There was part of me that felt like I was still trying out for the job, and in a sense I was—I hadn’t been assigned to a flight yet. I still thought of myself as a below-average guy stepping into an above-average role, and I knew I would have to impress some people if I was going to be among the first in my class to fly.

On the Friday night before our official Monday start date, we went to a party where we met all of my new classmates. We were ASCANs (pronounced “ass cans”), short for astronaut candidates (we would become full-fledged astronauts the first time we left the Earth’s atmosphere). The party was hosted by Pat Forrester, who was selected in our class but had already been stationed at NASA as an Army officer. Because he already knew his way around, he was our official class leader.

It wasn’t until that party that I learned our class would include international astronauts. There were thirty-five Americans and nine astronauts from other countries, which made us the largest astronaut class in NASA history. At the party, I was chatting with Mark and some other new classmates when I heard a man nearby I hadn’t met before, who was speaking with an accent. I figured he might be one of my foreign classmates, so I went up to him, stuck out my hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Scott Kelly.”

Before he could answer, a woman pushed him out of the way, stuck her hand out, and said, “ I am your classmate. My name is Julie Payette.” The man she had pushed aside was her husband. They were both French Canadian, bilingual in French and English, and she had grown tired of people assuming her husband was the new ASCAN rather than her. She and I would go on to become great friends. I met so many people that night—not only my classmates, but their spouses and significant others, astronauts from previous classes, their partners, and other NASA people who worked in support of the Astronaut Office. It was exciting to know that we were going to be such a big part of one another’s lives, and maybe spend time in space together.