CHAPTER 4 DAY IN THE LIFE: THE MAKING OF A MISSION 78 The Making of a Crew Member Robert Behnken, Lead Spacewalker STS-130/ISS-20A During the making of a mission into space, whether it is a short-duration, long-duration, first, or last flight, crew members need to strike a balance between taking enough ownership that they are ready for all the tasks they will face, but not taking so much ownership that they become too disappointed should the mission change before their eyes. NASA has plans for lots of exciting missions that have not been done, and none of us can do them all! For STS-130/ISS-20A and ISS Increment 22, the missions covered a wide range of exciting tasks right up until they were executed. As a part of the many mission permutations, after the Columbia accident in 2003 and prior to the Space Shuttle Return to Flight in 2005, NASA built plans to keep the station populated in the face of an unpredictable shuttle launch schedule. I was part of a group of astronauts assigned to prepare for the ISS missions without a firm mission date. Our supervisor at that time was fellow astronaut and ISS veteran Peggy Whitson. I still remember her words to us as we began training: “The good news is you are all assigned to missions to the ISS. The bad news is I can’t tell you when they will be or how you will get there!” Officially, we were known as the “ISS Training Pool”… or “в бассейне” (literally “in the pool”) to our cosmonaut friends. (They found this quite humorous. To them, it implied we were on vacation in a “swimming pool” while they were hard at work!) And so we started, knowing we were headed to space but not knowing whether we were preparing for shuttle or Soyuz flights. When foam insulation again separated from the external tank during the STS-114/ISS-LF-1 (Return to Flight mission) launch, the launch manifest continued to evolve and we did our best to prepare for all options. Figure 14. Bob Behnken and Nick Patrick installing ammonia lines and associated insulating blanket during the second STS-130 spacewalk. Limited consumables dictated that the installation plan proceed precisely according to schedule to ensure enough clean-up time after the predicted ammonia leakage time frame. Over the course of the next year and a half, those of us in the ISS Training Pool became certified operators and specialists on various ISS systems, continued our study of the Russian language, and traveled to Star City to be trained on the Russian portion of the ISS. From time to time we would hear snippets from the training or the planning flight controllers on what NASA had in store for us, and we would receive congratulations from cosmonauts that had seen our names on future manifests (sometimes as their crewmates). Through it all, we tried to not get our hearts set on any particular solution and to prepare the best we could for spaceflights…however and whenever they came. Largely outside our day-to-day life as assigned astronauts, NASA continued to make progress on the challenges with the shuttle external tank, and the flight manifest began to stabilize. For those of us who were prepping in the ISS Training Pool for uncertain missions, things became a lot clearer. For me, it meant leaving the “swimming pool” and preparing for the longest shuttle-docked mission to the ISS and the first five- spacewalk mission to the ISS, and leaving behind a Soyuz flight to the space station in the Increment 22 time frame. The shuttle manifest continued to remain relatively stable for the next year. In March 2008, my shuttle crew and I completed STS-123/ISS-1J/A, finished our post-flight activities, and began technical jobs back within the astronaut office. I was assigned to future program support