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Overview:

This book was an interesting look at the preparation and mindset of astronauts. There are several important lessons for those who operate in high-pressure, high stress environments. Highly recommend reading.

The Big Ideas:

1.       Astronauts spend an extraordinary amount of time preparing in relation to the time spent in space.

2.       They continually rehearse and drill what to do in worst-case scenarios, so when they do occur, the reactions are automatic and without emotion.

3.       Rehearsal and drilling provide a lot of comfort and calm.

4.       The patience required to gain the skills before even getting the chance to get into space would make most people quit.

5.       Fear comes from not preparing.

6.       Mistakes are exposed so that everyone can learn. Don’t bury mistakes because it makes you look bad. Embrace mistakes because others can learn from them.

7.       The debrief – after a mission/project, the actions and results are thoroughly discussed and any mistake is examined deeply. Mistakes are not simply dismissed. They are drilled into to uncover learning. Similar to the after action report used in the military.

8.       Early success is a terrible teacher.

9.       Watch how people treat assistants, secretaries, servers, etc. If they treat them bad get rid of them.

10.   Don’t announce yourself as successful, helpful, etc. Show it instead.

11.   While most people expect a linear, upward trajectory in career responsibilities, astronauts expect they will move up and down based on their skills relative to what is needed.

My notes:

1.       If the only thing you really enjoyed was whipping around Earth in a spaceship, you’d have being an astronaut. The ratio of prep time to time on orbit is many months: single day in space. You train for a few years, minimum, before you’re assigned to a space mission; training for a specific mission then takes between two and four years, and is much more intensive and rigorous than general training.

2.       I didn’t walk into JSC a good astronaut. No one does. The most you can hope for is that you’re good astronaut material. Some people who make it through the selection process turn out not to be, and what makes the difference is that quality I mentioned earlier: attitude. You have to be willing to sit in Russian classes for years, and willing to train repetitively on safety procedures on board the ISS even though you think you know them inside out. You have to accept that you’ll need to master a lot of skills that seem arcane, or that you might never even get to use, or both. And you can’t view any of it as a waste of time.

3.       Naturally then, when people try to imagine what it feels like to sit in a rocket with the engines roaring and firing, they assume it must be terrifying. And it would be terrifying if you were plucked off the street, hustled into a rocket ship and told you were launching in four minutes – and on, by the way, one wrong move and you’ll kill yourself and everybody else. But I’m not terrified, because I’ve been trained, for years, by multiple teams of experts who have helped me to think through how to handle just about every conceivable situation that could occur between launch and landing.

4.       In my experience, fear comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what’s about to happen. When you feel helpless, you’re far more afraid than you would be if you knew the facts. If you’re not sure what to be alarmed about, everything is alarming.

5.       Feeling ready to do something doesn’t mean feeling certain you’ll succeed, though of course that’s what you’re hoping to do. Truly being ready means understanding what could go wrong – and having a plan to deal with it.

6.       For the same sort of reasons, trainers in the space program specialize in devising bad-news scenarios for us to act out, over and over again, in increasingly elaborate simulations. We practice what we’ll do if there’s engine trouble, a computer meltdown, an explosion. Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on – to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences- really works. After a few years of doing that pretty much daily, you’ve forged the strongest possible armour to defend against fear: hard-won competence.

7.       A fire is one of the most dangerous things that can happen in a spaceship because there’s nowhere to go; also, flames behave less predictably in weightlessness and are harder to extinguish. In my first year as an astronaut, I think my response to hearing that alarm would have been to grab an extinguisher and start fighting for my life, but over the past 21 years that instinct has been trained out of me and another set of responses has been trained in, represented by three words: warn, gather, work. “Working the problem is NASA-speak for descending one decision tree after another, methodically looking for a solution until you run out of oxygen. We practice the “warm, gather, work” protocol for responding to fire alarms so frequently that it doesn’t just become second nature; it actually supplants our natural instincts. So when we heard the alarm on Station, instead of rushing to don masks and arm ourselves with extinguishers, one astronaut calmly got on the intercom to warn that a fire alarm was going off – while another went to the computer to see which smoke detector was going off. No one was moving in a leisurely fashion, but the response was one of focused curiosity, as though we were dealing with an abstract puzzle rather than an imminent threat to our survival. To an observer it might have looked a little bizarre, actually: no agitation, no barked commands, no haste.

8.       I doubt anyone’s heart rate increased by more than a beat or two while we were dealing with those fire alarms, even during the first minutes when the threat of a raging inferno seemed most real. We felt competent to deal with whatever happened – a sense of confidence that comes directly from solid preparation. Nothing boosts confidence quite like simulating a disaster, engaging with it fully, both physically and intellectually, and realizing you have the ability to work the problem. Each time you manage to do that your comfort zone expands a little, so if you ever face that particular problem in real life, you’re able to think clearly.

9.       While play-acting grim scenarios day in and day out may sound like a recipe for clinical depression, it’s actually weirdly uplifting. Rehearsing for catastrophe has made me positive that I have the problem-solving skills to deal with tough situations and come out the other side smiling. For me, this has greatly reduced the mental and emotional clutter that unchecked worrying produces, those random thoughts that hijack your brain at three o’clock in the morning.

10.   It's almost comical that astronauts are stereotyped as daredevils and cowboys. As a rule, we’re highly methodical and detail-oriented. Our passion isn’t for thrills but for the grindstone, and pressing our noses to it. We have to: we’re responsible for equipment that has cost taxpayers many millions of dollars, and the best insurance policy we have on our lives is our own dedication to training. Studying, simulating, practicing until responses become automatic – astronauts don’t do all this only to fulfill NASA’s requirements. Training is something we do to reduce the odds that we’ll die.

11.   But when risks are real, you can’t wing it.

12.   Preparation is not only about managing external risks, but about limiting the likelihood that you’ll unwittingly add to them.

13.   Whatever happens, it’s going to happen fast, and your survival will to a large extent depend on your competence. The interactions – between the vehicle’s own internal systems, it’s actual velocity and attitude, how far it is from Earth – are really complicated. It is rocket science. You have to understand what causes which effects, and you have no time to explain things to your crewmates or to yourself. You really need to know what it means if you’re 20 degree off attitude, or what to do if one of your thrusters fails, as well as the dozens of follow-on consequences that will trigger yet more chain reactions. You don’t even have a few seconds to wrack your brain – you need that information right now, front of mind, in order to make a good decision.

14.   A lot of people talk about expecting the best but preparing for the worst, but I think that’s a seductively misleading concept. There’s never just one “worst.” Almost always there’s a whole spectrum of bad possibilities. The only thing that would really qualify as the worst would be not having a plan for how to cope.

15.   It’s puzzling to me that so many self-help gurus urge people to visualize victory, and stop there. Some even insist that if you wish for good things long enough and hard enough, you’ll get them – and, conversely, that if you focus on the negative, you actually invite bad things to happen. Why make yourself miserable worrying? Why waste time getting ready for disaster that may never happen?

16.   Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying: it’s productive. Likewise, coming up with a plan of action isn’t a waste of time if it gives you peace of mind. While it’s true that you may wind up being ready for something that never happens, if the stakes are at all high, it’s worth it.

17.   But I’m not a nervous or pessimistic person. Really. If anything, I’m annoyingly upbeat, at least according to the experts (my family, of course). I tend to expect things will turn out well and they usually do. My optimism and confidence come not from feeling I’m luckier than other mortals, and they sure don’t come from visualizing victory. They’re the results of a lifetime spent visualizing defeat and figuring out how to prevent it.

18.   Like most astronauts, I’m pretty sure that I can deal with what life throws at me because I’ve thought about what to do if things go wrong, as well as right. That’s the power of negative thinking.

19.   An astronaut who doesn’t sweat the small stuff is a dead astronaut.

20.   In any field, it’s a plus if you view criticism as potentially helpful advice rather than as a personal attack. But for an astronaut, depersonalizing criticism is a basic survival skill. If you bristled every time you heard something negative – or stubbornly tuned out the feedback – you’d be toast.

21.   At NASA, everyone’s a critic. Over the years, hundreds of people weigh in on our performance on a regular basis. Our biggest blunders are put under the microscope so even more people can be made aware of them: “Check out what Hadfield did – let’s be sure no one ever does that again.”

22.   The debrief is a cultural staple at NASA, which makes this place a nightmare for people who aren’t fond of meetings. During a sim, the flight director or lead astronaut makes notes on major events, and afterward, kicks off the debrief by reviewing the highlights: what went well, what new things were learned, what was already known but needs to be re-emphasized. Then it’s a free-for-all. Everyone else dives right in, system by system, to dissect what went wrong or was handled poorly. All the people who are involved in the sim have a chance to comment on how things looked from their consoles, so if you blundered in some way, dozens of people may flag it and enumerate all the negative effects of your actions. It’s not a public flogging: the goal is to build up collective wisdom. So the response to an error is never, “No big deal, don’t beat yourself up about it.” It’s “Let’s pull on that” – the idea being that a mistake is like a loose thread you should tug on, hard, to see if the whole fabric unravels.

23.   And as in any debrief, everyone also wanted to review what we could have done better – and to magnify and advertise our errors, so other astronauts wouldn’t make the same ones. One of the main purposes of a debrief is to learn every lesson possible, then fold them back into what we call Flight Rules so that everyone in the organization benefits.

24.   Flight Rules are the hard-earned body of knowledge recorded in manuals that list, step by step, what to do if X occurs, and why. Essentially, they are extremely detailed, scenario-specific standard operating procedures.

25.   One reason we’re able to keep pushing the boundaries of human capability yet keep people safe is that Flight Rules protect against the temptation to take risks, which is strongest when momentum has been building to meet a launch date.

26.   If you’ve always felt like you’ve been successful, though, it’s hard not to fret when you’re being surpassed. The astronauts who seem to have the hardest time with it are, interestingly enough, often the ones who are most naturally talented.

27.   Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.

28.   In a real emergency in a fighter – an engine failure during takeoff, for example, or a fire in the cockpit – there’s usually just a split second or two when the decisions you make will determine whether you live or die. There’s no time to consult checklists. You need to know the boldface, the actions that are absolutely critical to survival – so called because in our training manuals, they’re written in boldfaced capital letters.

29.   “Boldface” is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life. We say that “boldface is written in blood” because often it’s created in response to an accident investigation. It highlights the series of steps that should have been taken to avoid a fatal crash, but weren’t.

30.   Over the years, I’ve realized that in any new situation, whether it involves an elevator or a rocket ship, you will almost certainly be viewed in one of three ways. As a minus one: actively harmful, someone who creates problems. Or as a zero: your impact is neutral and doesn’t tip the balance one way of the other. Or you’ll be seen as a plus one: someone who actively adds value. Everyone wants to be a plus one, of course. But proclaiming your plus-oneness at the outset almost guarantees you’ll be perceived as a minus one, regardless of the skills you bring to the table or how you actually perform. This might seem self-evident, but it can’t be, because so many people do it.

31.   Applicants certainly know during the social mixer with astronauts from the office that we are evaluating them as potential crewmates, but they probably don’t know who else has input. One Chief Astronaut used to make a point of phoning the front desk at the clinic where applicants are sent for medical testing, to find out which ones treated the staff well – and which ones stood out in a bad way. The nurses and clinic staff have seen a whole lot of astronauts over the years, and they know what the wrong stuff looks like. A person with a superiority complex might unwittingly, right there in the waiting room, quash his or her chances of ever going to space.

32.   Which is a good thing, really, because anyone who views himself or herself as more important that the “little people” is not cut out for this job (and would probably hate doing it). No astronaut, no matter how brilliant or brave, is a solo act.

33.   When you have some skills but don’t fully understand your environment, there is no way you can be a plus one. At best, you can be a zero. But a zero isn’t a bad thing to be. You’re competent enough not to create problems or make more work for everyone else. And you have to be competent, and prove to others that you are, before you can be extraordinary.

34.   Even later, when you do understand the environment and can make an outstanding contribution, there’s considerable wisdom in practicing humility. If you really are a plus one, people will notice – and they’re even more likely to give you credit for it if you’re not trying to rub their noses in your greatness. On my second National Outdoor Leadership School survival course I shared a tent with Tom Marshburn, my crewmate on Expedition 34/35. Tom is the ultimate outdoorsman: a vastly experienced mountaineer, he’s summited on several continents and also walked the Pacific Trail – alone – from Canada to Mexico, covering more than a marathon’s distance each day. And yet during our course in Utah, he never imposed his expertise on anyone or told us what to do. Instead, he was just quietly competent and helpful. If I needed him, he was there in an instant, but he never elbowed me out of the way to demonstrate his superior skills or made me feel small for not knowing how to do something. Everyone on our team knew that Tom was a plus one. He didn’t have to tell us.

35.   It was also a big part of what made him a plus one on our crew. Not only did he bring a wealth of experience and knowledge, but he conducted himself as though no task was beneath him. He acted as though he considered himself a zero: reasonably competent but no better than anyone else.

36.   The ideal entry is not to sail in and make your presence known immediately. It’s to ingress without causing a ripple. The best way to contribute to a brand-new environment is not by trying to prove what a wonderful addition you are. It’s by trying to have a neutral impact, to observe and learn from those who are already there, and to pitch in with the grunt work wherever possible.

37.   In most lines of work there’s a steady, linear ascent up a well-defined career ladder, but astronauts continually move up and down, rotating through different roles and ranks. From an organizational standpoint, this makes sense: it keeps the space program strong at all levels and also reinforces everyone’s commitment to teamwork in pursuit of a common goal – pushing the envelope of human knowledge and capability – that’s much bigger than we are as individuals. For astronauts, too, it makes sense, because it helps us come right back down to Earth and focus on our job, which is to support and promote human space exploration. Any inclination we might have to preen is nipped in the bud, because our status has changed overnight and we are expected to deliver in a new, less visible role, not sit around reminiscing about the good old days when we were in space.