Back to Earth by Nicole Stott

Author:Nicole Stott [Stott, Nicole, Astronaut]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

In 1998, I interviewed for that year’s astronaut class but wasn’t selected. Still, David Leestma, who was the NASA director of flight crew operations at the time, took me aside and said, “Hey, Nicole, we didn’t pick you this time, but we’d like to see how you do with crew operations, and see if maybe you make it next time around.” With that, NASA offered me a job at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, in the aircraft operations group, as a flight engineer on the shuttle training aircraft (STA). This was the airplane they used to train astronaut pilots to land the Space Shuttle. Up to this point, for about ten years, I had been working as a NASA engineer in the space shuttle operations group at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

I was very excited about the STA flight engineer’s job, which also included the opportunity to fly as the backseat crew member in T38 trainer jets. To qualify for that assignment, I had to pass the Navy’s aviation water survival course, which included a swim test.

Three of us NASA trainees were inserted into a training schedule for about forty Navy cadets, though our activities were always kept separate. Clay Anderson had been selected for the NASA astronaut “Penguin” class of 1998 but had been unable to attend the training with his class, and Terry Lee, like me, was moving into a flight operations position. Shortly after our arrival at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, the three of us waded into a large lap pool dressed in ill-fitting full flight gear that had been doled out to us after a quick visual “sizing.”

The baggy green flight suit and beat-up helmet didn’t concern me as much as the stretched-out, waterlogged combat boots, which were at least one size too big and impossible to lace tight enough to keep any water out.

The test required us to swim three lengths, in full gear. The first two lengths were in shallow water, about three feet deep. We were to start in one corner, swim straight ahead, then swim diagonal to the other corner, and finally swim straight down the other side to the deep corner (about eight feet deep), where we had to tread water while inflating our life vests.

All of this had to be performed without stopping, standing up, or grabbing the side of the pool. If I did any of that, I’d have to start over.

This test was the first thing we had to pass before we would be able to learn anything else, including helicopter rescue, parachute drag (how to handle being dragged by your parachute through water without drowning), zip-lining into the water while presetting all your gear to land safely, and lots of other pretty fun stuff. If I failed the swim test, though, none of that would matter because I’d be out of the course.

We stood in the water while an entire squadron of about forty cadets sat in the bleachers and awaited their turn.

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