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It was May 17, 2009, and Astronaut Michael Mbadimino was lapping Earth at 18,000 miles an hour, sweating up his spacesuit as he struggled to fix the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. A stripped bolt was stopping him from a handrail to a crucial piece of hardware, and his nerves were fraying.
Mbadimino smoked at the bolt repeatedly, but without luck. It seemed like a dumb piece of metal might stymie NASA's billion-dollar rescue mission – but that's not how things turned out. He finally managed to open the telescope and complete his job before clambering back inside Space Shuttle Atlantis. Hubble returned to action, going on to snap some of astronomy's most iconic photos.
Mbadimino was guided by experts on the ground, as astronauts always are. But he steely resolve in the face of long odds – and his methodical approach to solving a problem while floating in the vacuum of space – was honed by the brutal regimen of survival training
Thrown to the elements
Being thrown into dangerous, demanding NASA's astronaut training program for NASA, going all the way back to the original Mercury 7 team.
In the early days, the agency plucked astronauts from a pool of test pilots who had already completed the military version of survival training. 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 they were.
One time, Linenger and three other aviators were dropped into a jungle in the Philippines with no instructions or instructions, aided only by a local guide who spoke no. "We were out there for two-and-a-half days, and had no idea where we were," he says. "The scariest part was nighttime – a cacophony of sounds, animals crawling underneath me."
During the Apollo program of the late 1960s, NASA launched rigorous outdoor exercises in Iceland, Hawaii and Arizona's Meteor Crater. The NASA astronaut, NASA's National Astronaut, is a member of the International Space Station.
Now NASA astronaut candidates must complete two years of intensive preparation water survival exercises. The training begins before the candidates learn the mission-specific skills – even before they are accepted into the body.
NASA's survival training has changed over the years, the goal remains the same. It's not really about teaching astronauts specific skills in the face of life-or-death danger. NASA has underwater spacewalk exercises, flight simulators, and T-38 training
As Mbadimino discovered during his Hubble near-disaster, NASA requires astronauts to go through survival training with a more subtle purpose in mind.
What's the point?
A decade before his fateful day in orbit, NASA feels Mbadimino and other astronauts have 10-day wilderness expedition in the Canadian Arctic. He was less than enthusiastic about the badignment. "We went to a training exercise in Cold Lake," he recalls. "They gave it that name for a reason. It was really fricking cold! "
The basic survival-gear – coats, hats, a few tools, navigation equipment and sleds – before a helicopter dropped along a unfamiliar stretch of tundra. They are doing their tents, prepared for food and they are hungry down the middle of the sky.
Daylight hours were short, making for a hectic schedule of breaking camp, moving to a new site and setting up again. The men had to haul everything themselves. The extreme cold made routine tasks like tying knots awkward, often infuriating.
One day while scouting a new campsite, Mbadimino got lost and spent hours walking in circles. Another time has leaky boot gives him a frostbite that takes months to heal. "That was a little uncomfortable," he deadpans
Bad as it was, Cold Lake was not the worst survival training exercise Mbadimino had to face. That can be done in Canyonlands, Utah – "he likes it" (19659004) Or maybe it was the time he was browsing through a sudden storm during a kayaking expedition in Alaska. "The sea got angry, we were still capsized and I thought I was going to drown," he says.
A chilly epiphany
Mbadimino, an outdoors-hating guy from Long Island, New York, initially cursed the exercises for their seeming pointlessness: They seemed far removed from the kinds of tasks that he would actually be doing in space. But halfway through his Cold Lake adventure, his perspective changed.
He recalls the epiphany in his 2016 book, "Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe." Alone on the ice one night, mulling over what he was doing in northern Canada, he suddenly became aware that the frustration that had been dogging him had lifted. He realized that he met the challenges of outing, he had gained insights into his psychological quirks and learned how to work more effectively with his companions.
"These things teach you to work as a team and get through hardships , "Mbadimino says in the book. "Astronauts need intimate knowledge" 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.
Astronauts need intimate knowledge of their own strengths and limitations, as well as those of their crewmates. They must be able to get along bad moods, personal fire and mental distractions of any kind. That's where the true survival element of NASA's training kicks in.
Teamwork vs. intuition
Every astronaut has a version of that breakthrough moment of survival training.
For Linenger, it came when he realized he could have complete confidence in his guide and his fellow pilots during his jungle trip. For Leland Melvin, a NFL player who flew on two space shuttle missions, it came during a NASA-sponsored race by the National Outdoors Leadership School in Canyonlands.
Melvin was hiking with an 85-pound backpack on when he came to a turbulent river, swollen by recent flash floods. As he began to ford the torrent, his feet got hopelessly stuck in the mud.
"I'm a wide receiver, so I'm doing 'quick foot,' "he says. But the fast footwork has been taken deeper into the muck. "Then I looked up," he says, "and there's this huge tree trunk coming down the river, about to impale me."
With the tree bearing down, other members of his team called out to him from the bank, urging him to slow his movements. Melvin trusted their advice over his own instincts.
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. "There can be so much chatter going on," he says of his time aboard the shuttle. "We can talk just by tapping a checklist or by pointing to a bank of switches. It's a deep connection, you just know what you're going to do. "
Together on one
He could not have had his frustration – just like he had felt at Cold Lake.
"When I could not get that handrail off, I started to get upset," Mbadimino says. "I was ready to beat myself up about it. I was not going to be able to do this job and it was all my fault. "But this time, he knew how to manage his feelings. He would have his help in his work.
Drew Feustel, who had been through the same kind of training and who had a great experience. Fuestel recognized his friend's stress and talked him through it. "He knew the No. 1 thing for me to keep my spirits up," Mbadimino says.
As it turned out, the fix for Hubble 's balky bolt was using brute force – but just enough to do the job damaging the $ 5-billion, bus-size space observatory or rip open his spacesuit.
Two days later, Mbadimino was back in his spacesuit, sizing up the rehabilitated Hubble like a proud dad as he and Feustel "Houston, Hubble has been released, it's safely back on its journey of discovery to we begin steps to bear," Scott Altman astronaut, Mbadimino's crewmate and the mission's commander, reported back at the time. "Not everything went as we planned, but we planned a way to work around everything, with the whole team pulling together."
If that sounds more like a motivational speaker than a space daredevil imbued with the Right Stuff, so be it . It's precisely the kind of resolute, can-do camaraderie that astronauts like to take in.
"You learn how to be a leader, and also how to be a follower," Mbadimino says. "
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