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NASA’s survival training: What’s the point?
NASA, it seems, puts its Astronaut want-a-bees through some very serous survival training on earth. It really does not relate to what they will do in space. Or does it?
What helped Massimino not give up?It was May 17, 2009, and Astronaut Michael Massimino 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 removing a handrail to get at a crucial piece of hardware, and his nerves were fraying.
Massimino fumbled at the bolt repeatedly through thick gloves, but without luck. It seemed that one dumb piece of metal might stymie NASA’s billion-dollar rescue mission — but that’s not how things turned out. He finally managed to pry open the telescope and complete his job before clambering back inside the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Hubble returned to action, going on to snap some of astronomy’s most iconic photos.
Massimino was guided by experts on the ground, as astronauts always are. But his steely resolve in the face of long odds — and his methodical approach to solving a difficult problem while floating weightless in the vacuum of space — was honed by the brutal regimen of survival training he had endured more than a decade earlier.
This training is not for space- that will come later. This is for something else.Being thrown into dangerous, demanding outdoor ordeals has been a key part of NASA’s astronaut training program for as long as there has been a 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. Former 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 those trials were like.
One time, Linenger and three other aviators were dropped in a jungle in the Philippines with no supplies or instructions, aided only by a local guide who spoke no English. “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 initiated rigorous outdoor exercises in Iceland, Hawaii and Arizona’s Meteor Crater. As the era of the International Space Station dawned in the late 1990s, NASA formalized its survival-training requirements, often partnering with the nonprofit National Outdoor Leadership School.
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 as he met the daily challenges of the outing, he had gained insights into his psychological quirks and learned how to work more effectively with his companions.
“These things teach you how to work as a team and get through hardships,” Massimino says in the book. “They teach you how to deal with adversity.” 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 put aside bad moods, personal feuds and mental distractions of any kind. That’s where the true survival element of NASA’s training kicks in.
And that is a lesson for all of us.
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Originally Posted by Peter1469
