On Friday, January 24th, Astronaut Mike Massimino visited Pine Crest to share his experience with students. During his presentation, Massimino elaborated on his work at NASA, where he had the opportunity to fly two missions on space shuttles Columbia and Atlantis. Massamino also shared with students his experience training for his missions. His two missions both flew to the Hubble Space Telescope, where he, alongside six other astronauts, visited the telescope to perform maintenance.

Massimino was first inspired to become an astronaut when he saw the moon landing as a child.  His interest in the space program was later sparked when in college when he “saw this movie called The Right Stuff,” a 1983 movie about the original Mercury astronauts. But what really interested Massimino in the job? He explained, “What I saw in the astronaut job was being a part of something that’s bigger than yourself, the camaraderie, the teamwork, the way you stick together. You’re doing something really cool. You’re doing it because it’s important.”

Before joining NASA, he worked at IBM, got his PhD at MIT, and then worked at McDonald Douglass, where he worked on human-machine interfaces, particularly robots, such as those employed by NASA to perform science on other planets or robotic arms to manipulate objects in space. That was when he realized, “I wanted to try to be a part of (the space program), and I didn’t know how I was going to make that happen, but that’s when I decided I had to do something.” That was when he started to apply to NASA to become an astronaut. Over almost a decade, he applied three times and was then accepted into the NASA Astronaut Class of 1996.

After being accepted, “It took six years before I had my first flight, and then it was another seven for my second one,” said Massimino when detailing his time at NASA. “In the time in between, I worked in a control center, I worked on spacesuits, I flew airplanes. You train all the time. It’s a very interesting job on the ground. You help other people go to space. You help people prepare for launches and spacewalks. And so you’re always training.”

Massimino also had a couple of interesting stories about his time in space, one of the notable ones being when he was the first person to ever send a tweet from space, which read the following:

“From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views; the adventure of a lifetime has begun!”

This tweet, which even had an SNL sketch where Seth Meyers criticized his lack of poeticism, was arguably not the first tweet in space. There was no live internet connection on the space shuttle, so what Massimino did instead was “put that tweet in an email and sent it to the Public Affairs Office, and then they sent it out on my account. Years later, another astronaut, when he hooked up to the internet, could live tweet. So, a little controversial there, but I still get credit for the first tweets.”

Another story Massimino shared at his assembly occurred during his second mission to Hubble in 2009. During a spacewalk, he, alongside fellow astronaut Michael Good, was tasked with replacing a failed spectrograph on the old telescope. The spectrograph, fastened to Hubble by four bolts, slowly removed each bolt using a power tool, which failed as Massimino reached the last bolt. NASA ground teams quickly worked to devise three plans: A, B, and C. On earth, engineers with access to a full-scale replica of Hubble made a custom tool with only what would be available on the Shuttle. The first tool, Plan A, didn’t work, nor did the second, Plan B. This left them to try and use the final resort, plan C. Plan C, much less high-tech than the other solutions, was simple: to have Massimino grab the spectrograph and try and yank it off with all his strength. It worked. The astronauts were then able to replace the component, finish their spacewalk, and focus on the rest of their mission.

Source:

https://www.space.com/6711-astronauts-brute-force-rip-handrail-hubble.html