Mission Possible: Square Astronaut, Round Hole

The windows of a spaceship casually frame miracles. Every 92 minutes, another sunrise: a layer cake that starts with orange, then a thick wedge of blue, then the richest, darkest icing decorated with stars. The secret patterns of our planet are revealed: mountains bump up rudely from orderly plains, forests are green gashes edged with snow, rivers glint in the sun­light, twisting and turning like silvery worms. Continents splay themselves out whole, surrounded by islands sprinkled across the sea like delicate shards of shattered eggshells.

Floating in the airlock before my first spacewalk, I knew I was on the verge of even rarer beauty. To drift outside, fully immersed in the spectacle of the universe while holding onto a spaceship orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles per hour—it was a moment I’d been dreaming of and working toward most of my life. But poised on the edge of the sublime, I faced a somewhat ridiculous dilemma: How best to get out there? The hatch was small and circular, but with all my tools strapped to my chest and a huge pack of oxygen tanks and electronics strapped onto my back, I was square. Square astro­naut, round hole.

The cinematic moment I’d envisioned when I first became an astronaut, the one where the soundtrack swelled while I ele­gantly pushed off into the jet-black ink of infinite space, would not be happening. Instead, I’d have to wiggle out awkwardly and patiently, focused less on the magical than the mundane: trying to avoid snagging my spacesuit or getting snarled in my tether and presenting myself to the universe trussed up like a roped calf.

Gingerly, I pushed myself out headfirst to see the world in a way only a few dozen humans have, wearing a sturdy jetpack with its own thrusting system and joystick so that if all else failed, I could fire my thrusters, powered by a pressurized tank of nitrogen, and steer back to safety… A pinnacle of experience, an unexpected path.

Square astronaut, round hole. It’s the story of my life, really: trying to figure out how to get where I want to go when just getting out the door seems impossible. On paper, my career tra­jectory looks preordained: engineer, fighter pilot, test pilot, astro­naut -- typical path for someone in this line of work, straight as a ruler. But that’s not how it really was... I wasn’t destined to be an astro­naut. I had to turn myself into one.

I started when I was 9 years old and my family was spending the summer on Stag Island, Ontario. My dad, an airline pilot, was mostly away, flying, but my mom was there, reading in the cool shade of a tall oak whenever she wasn’t chas­ing after the five of us…. We didn’t have a television set but our neighbours did, and very late on the evening of July 20, 1969, we …jammed ourselves into their living room along with just about everybody else on the island. …. Slowly, methodically, a man descended the leg of a spaceship and carefully stepped onto the surface of the Moon. The image was grainy, but I knew we were seeing the impossible, made possible. The room erupted in amazement. The adults shook hands, the kids yelped and whooped. Somehow, we felt as if we were up there with Neil Armstrong, changing the world…

At that moment, I knew with absolute clarity, that I wanted to be an astronaut. Excerpt from the Introduction to An Astronaut’s Guide To Life On Earth, Pan Macmillan India