At The Edge Of Darkness

Alone with a toolbox, American astronaut Michael Massimino faced an almost impossible task

- Michael Massimino

IN 1984, I WENT TO SEE the movie The Right Stuff. And a couple of things really struck me in that movie. The first was the view out the window of John Glenn’s spaceship—the view of Earth, how beautiful it was on the big screen. I wanted to see that view. And secondly, the camaraderie among the original seven astronauts depicted in that movie—how they were good friends, how they stuck up for one another, how they would never let one another down. I wanted to be part of an organization like that.

And it rekindled a boyhood dream that had gone dormant over the years. That dream was to be an astronaut. And I just could not ignore this dream. I had to pursue it. So I was lucky enough to get accepted to MIT.

While I was at MIT, I applied to NASA to become an astronaut. I filled out my application, and I received a letter that said they weren’t quite interested. So I waited a couple of years, and I sent in another application. They sent me back pretty much the same letter. So I applied a third time, and this time I got an interview, so they got to know who I was. And then they told me no.

So I applied a fourth time. And on April 22, 1996, I picked up the phone, and it was Dave Leestma, the head of flight-crew operations at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

He said, “Hey, Mike. How you doing this morning?”

I said, “I really don’t know, Dave. You’re gonna have to tell me.”

He said, “Well, I think you’re gonna be pretty good after this phone call ’cause we wanna make you an astronaut.”