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The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: Astronauts, Family Tree, and Drips
00:57:13
A special live event from Cooper Union. Andrew Solomon describes his circuitous route to becoming a dad, a cellist makes a disturbing discovery about a neighbor, and astronaut Michael J. Massimino details his high stakes mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.
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- [00:00]
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- [02:32]
Jay Allison
From PRX this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this show and in this hour we present a live Moth event held for the annual Moth Members show in the Great hall at Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the night was around the stories of coming home. The first storyteller of the evening is Andrew Solomon.
- [03:02]
Andrew Solomon
When I was a small child, my mother used to sometimes say, the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world. And people who don't have children never get to know what it's like. And I took it as the greatest compliment that she so loved my brother and me and so loved being our mother and that she thought so highly of that emotional experience. At the time that I was growing up, there was an article in Time magazine about homosexuality which said, it is nothing but a pathetic second rate substitute for life, a pitiable flight from existence and deserves no glorification as anything other than a pernicious sickness. Reading that and living in that world, I was sad as I began to think that I might be gay. And when I was a teenager, my mother would say, the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world. And people who don't have children never get to know it. And it made me intensely anxious. I thought, I think I'm gay, but I want to have children, but I think I'm gay, but I want to have children. And I felt myself banging back and forth. And at some point I decided that children were the primary thing and that I was going to change. And I read an ad in the back of New York magazine for sexual surrogacy therapy and I went for a kind of training to change myself into somebody else. It was a very peculiar experience. It involved women who were not exactly prostitutes, but who were also not exactly anything else. My particular favorite was a Buck's blonde Southern woman who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac and had taken this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue. When I was in my early 20s, I decided that this had not all gone as planned and that I really was gay. And I told people that I was. And my mother said, the love you have for your children is unlike any other emotion in the world. And if you don't have children, you'll never know. And having first been touched and then been made anxious, I was now made angry by this statement. And I said, I'm gay and I'm not going to have children. And I am who I am, and I want you to stop saying that. Many Years afterwards, in 2001, I met John, who is the love of my life. And he told me shortly after we met that he actually had been the sperm donor for Some lesbian friends. And I said, you have children? And he said, no, they have children, and I was the donor for them. A few weeks later, we were out at the Minnesota State Fair, and we ran into Tammy and Laura and their toddler aunt Oliver. And I looked at them with fascination, and I thought how amazing that Tammy and Laura were gay and they had children and that John was gay and in some sense at least had a child. Oliver had been told that he should call John Donor dad, but having a rough time pronouncing that, he came up with Donut Dad. So I looked at that and I thought, there's Donut dad, there's me. Who are we all to one another? A year later, John told me that Tammy and Laura had asked him to be a donor again, and they produced Lucy. So now there were two of these children, and we knew them a little bit and saw them from time to time and were warmly disposed toward them. And John said he'd promised to be in their lives when they were grown up if they particularly wanted him to be. The idea of having children in some unusual arrangement was not entirely novel to me. I had, some years earlier, been at a dinner with my closest friend from college, who lived at the other end of the country, and she had recently separated from her husband. And when I asked whether she had any regrets, she said, only about not being a mother. And I said, and meant it, you'd be the best mother in the world, and if you ever decided that you wanted to have a child, I'd be so honored to be the father. I said that assuming since she was beautiful and beloved and had lines of men eager to meet her and be with her, I assumed that it was just a statement in passing. But on my 40th birthday, she appeared in New York for a surprise party that John and my father and stepmother had organized. And we went out to dinner the next day and realized that we really did want to follow through with this plan. I wasn't ready to tell John right away. And then when I did tell him, he was angry about it. And I said, john, how can you be angry at me? You have Oliver and Lucy, and now there'll be this other arrangement. And he said I was a donor for Oliver and Lucy, and you're setting out to have a child of whom you will be the acknowledged father and who will have your last name. And we struggled with it for quite a while. And then John, whose kindness usually carries the day, said, if this is what you really need to do, then go ahead and do it. And soon thereafter, he asked me to marry him. I had never been a big fan of gay marriage. I thought everyone should have the right, but it didn't particularly preoccupy me. But after he proposed, we began planning a wedding. And I thought he had gone along with what I wanted to do, and I would go along with what he wanted to do. And we ended up getting married in the English countryside, and we had a beautiful wedding. And I found that though our commitment had seemed to me to be permanent and declared and established before that, that the experience of having all of these hundreds of friends gathered together, witnessing our love, shored it up and strengthened it and gave it a new depth and gave it a new resonance that I had never imagined or anticipated. And I found the fact that we were celebrating that love in a ceremony that echoed, in some sense, the one my parents had had and the ones my grandparents had had and. And the ones that presumably went back generation upon generation exalted the feeling between us. And it was very joyful. Blaine was there three months pregnant with our child, and John ventured that we had had the first gay shotgun wedding. So six months later, our daughter, little Blaine, was born. And I was in the room when she was delivered. And I was the first person to hold her. And I had such a disorienting feeling of suddenly being changed. I thought, I'm a father now. I'm a father. It was as though someone had told me that I was still myself and also a shooting star. And I held her. And I then had to go down into the basement of the hospital to sign the certificate for her birth, where I was advised to get a paternity test before I signed for any love child. And I said, you have no idea the planning that was behind this. And John held her. And we all, I think, were enraptured, as one is, by the birth of children, because it's so much stranger than even intergalactic travel that someone wasn't there, and now, all of a sudden, they are. But when John and I got back to New York, I kept feeling, in a way, as though I was being highly supportive of something Blaine had done rather than as though it was something I had done. And yet I found myself thinking of this child all the time. John fell in love with Blaney. He fell in love with Blaine. We were all in love with one another. We were trying to understand how everything fit together. And sometime later, I said to John, don't you think it would be nice for us to have a child, also a sibling, for Blaney, who she might love to have in her life and who might grow up in our house all the time. John did not think that would be lovely. And so we had a year in which I kept saying how wonderful it would be and acting as the cheerleader for the cause. And through that year, John kept resisting and being unsure. And then finally, my birthday rolled around again, and he said, you, present is upstairs. And we went upstairs, and there was an antique cradle tied up with a bow. And he said, if it's a boy, can we name him George, after my grandpa? We then had to figure out how we were going to produce such a child, so we found an egg donor. And we were in the process of trying to find a surrogate, and we got together with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy one night, and Laura said to John, you gave us our children, and I'll never be able to thank you enough for that, but I could show you how much you mean to us by being your surrogate. And so she offered to carry our child, and she got pregnant on the second IVF protocol. And nine months after that, George was born, and we held him in our arms. We called Blaine and Blaney and everyone else in our circle, and we held him and we wondered at him. And then we came home and we sent out birth announcements. And the birth announcement included a picture of John and me holding George. And many friends said, I love that picture. I hung it on my refrigerator. But one of John's cousins wrote back and said, your lifestyle is against our Christian values. We wish to have no further contact. And I thought that world, the Time magazine world of my childhood, it was still there, and it was still going strong, and it made me very sad. But in the meanwhile, we had spent a lot of time with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy through that whole process. And we had all fallen in love, I think, again, anew more deeply with one another. And when Oliver and Lucy learned that little Blaine called us Daddy and Papa John, they said they'd like to call us Daddy and Papa, too. And I suddenly found that in contemplating two children, we seemed to have four in the period that followed that, I kept thinking about the angry cousin and what he'd said. And I thought, it's not really a question of our kind of love being as good as or better than or less good than anyone else's love. It's simply another kind of love that we found as five parents of four children in three states. And I thought that just as species diversity is essential to keep the planet in place. So there's a need for a diversity of love to sustain the ecosphere of kindness, and that anyone who rejected any bit of the love in the world was acting in a foolish way and from a position of falling. About six months ago, we had gone to a park and I had climbed up on a stand with George, from which you could view some animals below, and I held his hand and I said, we're going to go back down the steps now, go very carefully. And I took one step and I slipped and I fell all the way down the flight of stairs, pulling him along behind me. And I remember when it happened thinking that I really didn't care whether I had broken my arm or my leg as long as I hadn't injured my child. It turned out that I hadn't. And when I felt it, I suddenly the love you have for your children is like no other feeling. And until you have children, you'll never know. And I thought how even in the periods when my mother sang that made me anxious or made me angry, that it was her saying it so persistently that had caused me to pursue a family even under such complicated and difficult and elaborate circumstances, and that had led me finally to the greatest joys of my life. Thank you.
- [16:48]
Jay Allison
That was Andrew Solomon. Andrew is the author of the books Far from the Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, and the Noonday Demon, which won the 2001 National Book Award. To share any of the stories you hear on the Moth Radio hour, go to themoth.org where you can stream the stories for free and send the link to your friends and family. We'll be back in a moment with a story about a nightmarish event in apartment living. Support for the Moth comes from Home Advisor, matching homeowners and home improvement professionals for a variety of home projects, from minor repairs to major remodels. Homeowners can read reviews about local pros and book appointments online@homeadvisor.com the Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by prx. This is the Moth Radio Hour from prx. I'm Jay Allison. Our next story contains some disturbing subject matter and may not be appropriate for children or squeamish adults. From the Great hall at Cooper Union in New York City, here's Marika Hughes.
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Marika Hughes
I was living in the parlor apartment of a beautiful brownstone in Harlem, surrounded by all this old, grand furniture left to me by my grandmother when she passed away. When I realized, actually, I want to live in Brooklyn, I decided to move to Brooklyn, because that's where so many of my friends lived. And that's where I found most of my work was. I'm a cellist. So I went to see the first apartment I found, and when I walked in, I said, I'll take it, but I won't stay long. It was what a realtor would describe as charming, but the only word that came to my mind was tiny. So I decided it might be a good place to live for a little while. It might segue into something better down the line. So I packed all of my grandmother's things into storage, and I took my cello and my music and my books and my bed. And I moved into this apartment in Prospect Heights. And I loved living there. My career was going great, touring, making records. I kind of fell in and out of love. And I even managed to have some extraordinary dinner parties in this small, small space. And then about two and a half years into living in this apartment, early on a Sunday morning during a terrible heat wave in June, I got a call that you hope to never receive. The man on the other end of the line called to tell me that my younger brother had just died. He was found dead in his bed that morning. I don't recall exactly what happened to the phone, but I remembered I couldn't get air in or out, and I thought I might throw up, but the air wasn't coming. And I called my best friend to try and tell her what happened, but the words wouldn't form. I was absolutely devastated. My younger brother lived in England, and it was decided that he would be cremated. A week and a half later on a Friday at 2pm in England, my father and I, both New Yorkers, realized we wouldn't be able to get there in time for the cremation. And we live rather far from each other here in the city. But both agreed that we each wanted to be outside and in the elements when this event happened, when my brother was cremated. So the Thursday night before this event, I was eager to get to bed, anticipating a very emotional following day. So I fell fast asleep. And then suddenly I awoke in the middle of the night because there was a leak from upstairs dripping into my bed, and it would hit the mattress and splatter all over. And it woke me up. And I was so focused on my little brother Nico, that I thought, it doesn't even matter. I rolled over and went right back to sleep. But then I was woken again because it was coming down at a faster clip and hitting the bed and getting all over me. So finally I thought, okay, I better go talk to my neighbor. He has this terrible habit of running the bathtub in the middle of the night and forgetting about it. So I went up and I knocked on his door, and he didn't answer. And I thought, okay, fine, be that way. I went back downstairs and protected my mattress. It was from any further damage. And I tried to get the little sleep I could on my small couch. It was a restless and fitful sleep. And in the morning I woke. It was already really hot outside. And I was so eager to get outside, anticipating this day, that I forgot to change my clothes. I just went out funky in the sweatpants and T shirt I had slept in. The first place I thought to go was to the roof of my building. My brother and I grew up here in New York, and we had spent countless days on summers, summer days, actually, on what we would call tar beach. We call it tar beach because New York City roofs are full of tar. And we would grab towels and friends and a boombox and hang out, essentially. So I went up to the roof expecting to have a very emotional experience. It was 8am in New York, 2pm in England, but in fact, I couldn't really feel what I thought I should feel. And I was almost fighting the air to feel something. I had spent days and days crying, but suddenly not a tear. So I decided to change locations. I went to Prospect park. And I walked around struggling to feel what I thought I should feel, except all I really felt was guilt that I didn't feel what I thought I should feel. So I continued walking in my neighborhood and found myself at my local cafe. And I got a cup of coffee, and I thought, let me call my father and check in with him, see how he's doing. And in our family, we're really good at sharing joy and love and happiness, but when it comes to emotional hardship and pain and loss, and we've had our fair share, we're very, very private individually, very stoic, and very supportive. And that was the tenor of the conversation we had. So it was no surprise that I quickly turned the conversation to what I felt was a great distraction from this fitful rest I'd had from this leak in my apartment. So my father said, well, why don't you go back to your apartment and deal with all that business? So I went back, I put my keys in the kitchen, and I went up to knock on my neighbor's door again, and he still didn't answer. So now I was concerned. So I hustled up some Neighbors in the building, and it turned out other people, too, were saying, well, actually, we haven't seen him in a while. So a collective decision was made to find the extra keys somewhere in the building and to go in and check on him. A friend of mine had just arrived. We were going to spend the day together. So we stood in my kitchen right by the front door with the door wide open, while the neighbor who found the keys walked up the stairs, and we heard her put the key in the door, open the door and walk in his apartment. And then we heard her call his name. Randy Spruels. Randy Spruels. And then she screamed, call the coroner. He's dead. He's decomposing. There are maggots and flies everywhere. And then she came charging down the stairs to the threshold of my apartment, looked me straight in the eye, and she said, you need to take a shower. And Lysol. That's his dead body all over you. As you can imagine, I felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me. I fell straight to the ground. And I wept and I wept. And I didn't know if I was weeping for my brother or for my mother who had died almost 20 years earlier, or for my grandmother, or for this poor old man who had died and nobody even notice, or maybe I was weeping for me. I thought, poor me, there's literally death on me. I don't know if I was down there for 10 seconds or 10 minutes, but boop. Like that. I stood up, I looked at my friend, and I said, I gotta get these clothes off of me. And in the shower, I ran to the bathroom, taking my clothes off as I got in there, and I jumped in the shower, and I took what I now call the Silkwood shower. I swear, scrubbed my body like I have never scrubbed before. It's amazing I didn't draw blood, really. When I got out, I put a towel on and I came out into my apartment, only to discover that there were police and EMT and neighbors swarming my apartment. Right away, someone came up to me and said, you know, dear, you probably won't be able to sleep here tonight. And I thought, yeah, okay, and just trying to keep the towel up. And another friend of mine randomly had come by, and he looked at me and he said, you look like a little girl. I could only imagine how bewildered I was in this chaotic scene. And then suddenly, someone came running in the apartment and said, the body's gonna fall through the ceiling. The body's gonna fall through the ceiling. The floors are compromised. So we were suddenly moving everything from one side of my tiny apartment into this kitchen, and we were struggling to get around chests and shelves and et cetera, et cetera. And then someone else came up to me and said, you know, it might be a week or two before you can sleep here. And all I could think was, I need to get some clothes. I was trying to find a place in my apartment where there was nobody. It was maybe 350 square feet, and I found a little corner, and I put on some clean clothes, took off my towel. And then suddenly it hit that stench and stank. The sour, sour smell of death. It had permeated the building at this point. So then we were suddenly busy creating little compresses out of cotton swabs soaked in witch hazel and lavender oil to protect the cops and the EMT as they walked into this apartment full of the stank of death. And then another woman came up to me and she said, you know, actually, Marika, it could be over a month before you can stay here again. And I thought, you know what? It really doesn't matter, because I am never sleeping here again. Ever. At this point, a number of my friends had shown up and were willing to help me. And we were grabbing my chair and my music and clothes and gear. I had tons of gigs that week I had to prepare for. Another friend of mine had called when she heard what happened and said, you have my keys. I'm out of town. My apartment in Fort Greene is yours. So we jumped in my friend's car, and they dropped me off at her apartment. And I ran up the stairs and I walked in the apartment and the door closed behind me. And for the first time since all this craziness has happened, I was alone. And suddenly I thought I was going to go mad. I felt like I was actually going crazy. I started to shake. My body was shaking, and I had to hold on to the kitchen counter and the kitchen island just to stay steady. And I thought, I'm cursed. I'm cursed. My brother and this old man death is literally on me. He died on top of me. I'm going to go absolutely crazy. And then I remembered to breathe. I tried to take those deep breaths I couldn't take the morning I heard my brother had died. And I breathed in and out slowly. And in those breaths, I thought, call Daddy. He always makes you feel better. Just call Daddy. So I called my dad. I told him I thought I was going crazy. And he explained to me, no, Your brother's death and this old man, these Two deaths have nothing to do with each other and nothing to do with you. And you're not staying. You're not cursed. You're going to be okay. And I was glad to have called him because I hung up the phone and I started to feel a little bit better and realized I need to get outside. I need to be around people. So I grabbed my bike, one of my prized possessions, it's covered in flowers on the front banister arms and in the back on the basket. And I rode up the hill to Prospect park to one of my favorite music events in New York, Celebrate Brooklyn. Friends of mine were playing there that night as well as had had lots of friends in the audience. And right away I started to tell people the tale of what had just happened with the drip. And as you may imagine, it spread around Brooklyn like wildflowers. No sooner had I told someone this story when someone asked, well Marika, what are you going to do? And without a thought I said, I'm going to find a full one bedroom apartment with good light, a cross breeze, a window in the bathroom, a bathtub, an eat in kitchen in a nice building in a neighborhood I'd like to live in near the train and all on a musician's salary. They laughed too. But something, something inside of me said, it's going to be okay. You can find this place. And all summer I spent going from couch to couch. People were my and people I didn't even know were so kind to me. I stayed in kids rooms when they were at camp, on people's couches and in houses when people were on vacation. About a few weeks after this whole event had taken place, I was sitting in a bar with a friend of mine in my old neighborhood and a bass player I know came up to me and he said, marie, I heard what happened to you. What are you going to do? I said, you know, I'm not scouring Craigslist. I'm not going to knock on super's doors and find out if there are apartments in there. And I gave him my spiel about what I was hoping to find. And he looked at me and he said, marika, my friends just emailed me last night. I think they have exactly what you're looking for in a beautiful old Victorian house in Ditmas Park. Get in touch. Well, you know that night at the bar, I emailed his friends the next day I went to see the apartment and it was everything I had said I wanted, except it was two bedrooms. So I woke up at the end of the summer on the last couch I had to call home. And I took my cello and my suitcase and I went to move into this new apartment. And I watched the movers arrive from the storage company as the movers hauled all of this grand old furniture of my grandmother's that I had so missed for the three years I lived in that small apartment. They brought boxes and grandfather clock and chests and dressers, and they left it and the door closed behind them. And I stood there and suddenly I started to cry again. I was there then, surrounded by the love and the memories of my mother and my brother and my grandmother. Three people I had loved more than anyone else on this earth who were no longer here with me. But somehow with these things, knowing they had touched them and breathed air around these things, I started to feel a little bit better. I opened a box and I found photographs of my brother and I from when we were little that I hadn't seen in years. And I found a box of journals my mother had kept when she was a woman about my age I didn't even know she had. And in this moment, I remembered to breathe again. I was alone once again in an apartment. And I was crying. But in those breaths, I started to really feel much better. And I realized, yes, this is where I can live. Thank you.
- [32:05]
Jay Allison
That was Marika Hughes. Marika is a cellist who has performed with Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, Sean Lennon, and many others. Two solo CDs of her work were released in 2011. This tune is from one of them. All the stories you're hearing in this hour are available at the itunes store, and you can find photos and web extras@themost.org we'll be back in a moment with our final story about adventures in space. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange. PRX.org From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show. The theme of this live storytelling event is around the Bend Stories of Coming Home. Our last storyteller this hour is Michael J. Massimino.
- [33:14]
Michael J. Massimino
In 1984, I was a senior in college and I went to see the movie the Right Stuff. And a couple things really struck me in that movie. The first was the views out the window of John Glenn's spaceship. The view of the earth, how beautiful it was on the big screen. I wanted to see that view. And secondly, the camaraderie between the original seven astronauts depicted in that movie. How they were good friends, how they Stuck up for each other, how they would never let each other down. I wanted to be part of an organization like that. And it rekindled a boyhood dream that I had that had kind of gone dormant over the years. And that dream was to grow up to be an astronaut. And I just could not ignore this dream. I had to pursue it. So I decided I wanted to go to graduate school. And I was lucky enough to get accepted to mit. And I went up to MIT with the intention of following this dream of space flight. And while I was at mit, I started applying to NASA to become an astronaut. And I filled out my application and I received a letter that said they weren't quite interested. So I waited a couple years and I was graduating from mit and I sent in another application a second time a few years later, and 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 knew the call was coming, good or bad. And I pick up the phone and it's Dave Lietzma, the head of flight crew operations at the Johnson Space center in Houston. And I say, hello. And he says, hey, Mike, this is Dave Lietzma, how you doing this morning? And I said, I really don't know, Dave, you're going to have to tell me. And he said, well, I think you're going to be pretty good after this phone call because we want to make you an astronaut. Thirteen years after that, it's May 17, 2009, and I'm on space shuttle Atlantis about to go out and do a spacewalk on the Hubble Space Telescope. And our task that day was to repair an instrument that had failed. And this instrument was used by scientists to detect the atmospheres of far off planets. Planets in other solar systems could be analyzed using this spectrograph to see if we might find a planet that was Earth like, or a planet that could support life. And just when they got good at doing this, the power supply on this instrument failed. It blew. It wasn't working. So the instrument could no longer be used. And there was no way really to replace this unit or to repair the instrument. Because when they launched this thing and they got it ready for space flight, they really buttoned it up. They didn't want anybody to screw at this thing, whether you were on the ground or whether you were in space. It was buttoned up with an access panel that Blocked the power supply that had failed. And this access panel had 117 small screws with washers. And just to play it safe, they put glue on the screw threads so they would never come apart. You know, it could withstand the space launch. And there's no way we could get in to fix this thing. But we really wanted this capability back. So we started working, and for five years, we designed the spacewalk. And we designed over 100 new space tools to be used. Great taxpayer expense, millions of dollars, Thousands of people worked on this. And my buddy Mike Good, who we called Bueno, he and I were going to go out to do the spacewalk. I was going to be the guy actually doing the repair. And inside was my friend, Drew Feustel, one of my best friends. He was inside. He's going to read me the checklist. And we had practiced for years and years for this. And they built us our own practice instrument and gave us our own set of tools we could practice with. Practice in our office, in our free time, during lunch, after work, on the weekends. We became like one mind. He would say it, I would do it. We had our own language. And now's the day to go out and do this task. The thing I was most worried about leaving the airlock that day was my path to get to the telescope, because it was along the side of the space shuttle. And if you kind of look over the edge of the shuttle, it's kind of like looking over a cliff at that point, with 350 miles to go down to the planet, and there were no good handrails. When we're spacewalking, I like to grab onto things in our space gloves and be nice and steady. But I got to this one area along the side of the shuttle, and there were no good handrails to grab. I had to grab, like, a wire or a hose or a knob or a screw, and I'm kind of a big goon. And when there's no gravity, you know, you can get a lot of momentum built up, and I could go spinning off into space. And I knew I had a safety tether that would probably hold, But I also had a heart that I wasn't so sure about. So I knew they would get me back. I just wasn't sure what they would get back on the end of the tether when they reeled me in. So I was really concerned about this. And I took my time, and I got through the treacherous path and out to the telescope. And the first thing I had to do was to pull off or remove a handrail from the telescope that was blocking the access panel. And there were two screws on the top, and they came off easily. And there was one screw on the bottom right, and that came out easily. And the fourth screw is. Is not moving. And my tool is moving, but the screw is not. And I look close, and I realize it's stripped. And I realized that that handrail is not coming off, which means I can't get to the access panel with these 117 screws that I've been worrying about for five years, which means I can't get to the power supply that failed, which means we're not going to be able to fix this instrument today, which means all these smart scientists can't find life on other planets. And I'm to blame for this. And I could see what they would be saying in the science books of the future. This was going to be my legacy. I realize this. That my children and my grandchildren would read in their classrooms. We would know if there was life on other planets. But Gabby and Daniel's dad. My children would suffer from this. Gabby and Daniel's dad broke the Hubble Space Telescope. And we'll never know. And through this nightmare that had just begun, I look at my buddy Bueno next to me in his spacesuit, and he's looking at me like, don't look at me. Bueno was a rookie, and his job was to basically hand me tools. This was my job to fix this thing. And then I turn and look into the cabin where my five astronaut friends, my crewmates, are in there. And I realized nobody in there has got a spacesuit on. They can't come out here and help me. And then I actually looked at the Earth. I looked at our planet, and I thought, there are billions of people down there, but there's no way I'm going to get a house call on this one. They cannot. No one can help me. And I felt this deep loneliness. And it wasn't just a Saturday afternoon with a book alone. I felt. I felt detached from the Earth. I felt that I was by myself. And everything that I knew and loved and that made me feel comfortable was far away. And then it started getting dark and cold. Because we travel 17,500 miles an hour. 90 minutes is a one lap around the earth. So it's 45 minutes of sunlight and 45 minutes of darkness. And when you enter the darkness, it is not just darkness. It's the darkest black I have ever experienced. It's like the absence of light, and it gets Cold. And I could feel that coldness. And I could sense the darkness coming. That's what we were going to enter. And it just added to my loneliness. And for the next hour or so, we tried all kinds of things. I was going up and down the space shuttle, trying to figure out where I needed to go to get the next tool they wanted me to get to try to fix this problem. And nothing was working. And then they called up after about an hour and 10 or 15 minutes of this. They said they wanted me to go to the front of the shuttle to a toolbox and get vice grips and tape. And I thought to myself, we are running out of ideas. I didn't even know we had tape on board. I'm going to be the first astronaut to use tape in space during the spacewalk. But I follow directions. So I get to the front of the space shuttle and I open up the toolbox and there's the tape. And at that point, I was very close to the front of the orbiter, right by the cabin window. And I knew that my best pal was in there trying to help me out. And I could not stand to even think of looking at him because I felt so bad about the way this day was going, the way it turned out. Not like what we had thought about, but all the work he and I had put in. And I couldn't even stand to even think of looking up at him. But I realized that he's actually through the corner of my eye, through my helmet, you know, just aside there. I can kind of see that he's trying to get my attention. And I look up at him like this, and he's, you know, a little bit above me in the window and. And he's just cracking up, smiling and giving me the okay sign. And I'm like, is there another spacewalk going on out here? And I really can't talk to him because if I say anything, the ground will hear. You know, Houston will hear the control center. So I'm kind of like playing charades with him. I'm like, what are you, nuts? And I expect him. I didn't want to look because I thought what he was going to do instead of giving me the okay sign, I thought he was going to give me the finger because I'm thinking he's going to go down in a history book with me. But he's saying, no, we're okay. You just hang in there a little bit longer. We're gonna make it through this. We're in this together. You're doing great. Just hang in there. And if there was ever a time in my life that I needed a friend, it was at that moment. And there was my buddy, just like I saw in that movie, the camaraderie of those guys sticking together. And I didn't believe him at all. I figured we were really. That we were out of luck. But I said, at least if I'm going down, I'm going down my best pal. And as I turned to make my way back over the treacherous path one more time, Houston called up and told us what they had in mind. They wanted me to use that tape to take the bottom of the handrail and then see if I could yank it off the telescope. And they said it was going to take about 60 pounds of force for me to do that. And Drew answers the call, and he goes, 60 pounds of force. And they call me Mass. It's short for my last name. He goes, mass, I think you got that in you. What do you think? And I'm like, you bet, Drew. Let's go get this thing. And I get back to the telescope, and I push my hand on that handrail, and the ground calls again, and they go, well, Drew, you know, you guys are okay to do this, but right now, we don't have any downlink from Mike's helmet camera. I got these cameras mounted on my helmet so they can see everything I'm doing. It's kind of like your mom looking over your shoulder when you're doing your homework, you know? And they go, we don't have any downlink for another three minutes, but we know you're. You know, we're running late on time here, so if you have to. And I'm saying, let's do it now while they can't watch. Because the reason I'm taping this thing is there. If any debris gets loose, they're going to get all worried, and it's going to be another hour and never fix this thing. We've been through enough already. So I'm like, let's do it now while mom and dad aren't home. Let's have the party. So I'm like, drew, I think we should do it now. Drew's like, go. And bam. That thing comes right off. And I pull out my power tool, and now I've got that access panel with those 117 little bitty screws with the washers and glue, and I'm ready to get each one of them. And I pull the trigger on my power tool, and nothing happens. And I look, and I see that the battery is dead. And I turn my head to look at Bueno, who's in his spacesuit again, looking at me like, what else can happen today? And I said, drew, the battery's dead in this thing. I'm going to go back to the airlock, and I'm going to swap out the battery, and I'm going to recharge my oxygen tank. Because by all this moving around, I had was getting low on oxygen. I needed to get a refill. And he said, go. And I'm going back over that shuttle. And I noticed two things. One was that that treacherous path that I was so scaredy cat pants about going over, it wasn't scary anymore that in the course of those couple hours of fighting this problem, I had gone up and down that thing about 20 times, and my fear had gone away because there was no time to be a scaredy cat. It was time to get the job done. And what we were doing was more important than me being worried. And it was actually kind of fun going across that little jungle gym that I had back and forth over the. Over the shuttle. And the other thing I noticed is that I can feel the warmth of the sun. We were about to come into a day pass. And the light in space, when you're in the sunlight, is the brightest, whitest, purest light I have ever experienced. And it brings with it warmth. And I could feel that coming. And I actually started feeling optimistic. And sure enough, the rest of the spacewalk went well. We got all those screws out, New power supply, buttoned it up. They tried it, they turned it on from the ground. It all was working. The power supply was working. The instrument had come back to life. And at the end of that spacewalk, after about eight hours, I'm inside the airlock getting things ready for Bueno and I to come back. And. And my commander says, hey, Mass, you know, you've got about 15 minutes before Buenos going to be ready to come in. Why don't you go outside of the airlock and enjoy the view? So I go outside, and I take my tether and I clip it on a handrail, and I let go, and I just look. And the Earth from our altitude at Hubble, we're 350 miles up. We can see the curvature. We can see the roundness of the. Of our home, of our home planet. And it's the most magnificent thing I've ever seen. It's like looking into heaven. It's like paradise. And I thought to myself, this is the view that I imagined in that movie theater all those years ago. And as I looked at the Earth, I also noticed that I could turn my head and I could see the moon and I could see the stars and I could see the Milky Way galaxy, and I could see our universe, and I could turn back and I could see our beautiful planet. And at that moment, it changed my relationship with the Earth. Because for me, the Earth was always a kind of a safe haven, you know, where I could go to work or be in my home or take my kids to school. But I realized it really wasn't that. It really is its own spaceship. And I had always been a space traveler. And all of us here today, even tonight, we're on this spaceship Earth amongst all the chaos of the universe, whipping around the sun and around the Milky Way galaxy. A few days later, we get back. Our families come to meet us at the airfield. And I'm driving home to my house with my wife and my kids in the backseat. And she starts telling me of what she was going through during that Sunday, that I was spacewalking and how she could tell, listening, watching the NASA television channel, how sad I was that she detected a sadness in my voice that she had never heard from me before. And it worried her until she heard me say, for the love of Pete. And once she heard that, she knew everything was going to be okay. It's a line from Little Rascals. Anyway, so I thought, you know, hey, I wish I would have known that when I was up there. Because this loneliness that I felt, really, Carol was thinking about me the whole time. And we turned the corner to come down our block, and I could see my neighbors are outside and they decorated my house and there's American flags everywhere. And my neighbor across the street is holding a pepperoni pizza and a six pack of beer. Two things that, unfortunately, we still cannot get in space. And I get out of the car and they're all hugging me. I'm still in my blue flight suit, and they're hugging me and saying how happy they are to have me back and how great everything turned out. And I realized my friends, they were thinking about me the whole time they were with me, too. The next day, we have a return ceremony. We make these speeches. These engineers who had worked all these years with us are trainers, the people that worked in the control center.
- [50:18]
Marika Hughes
The.
- [50:18]
Michael J. Massimino
They start telling me how they were running around crazy while I was up there in my little nightmare all alone. How they got the solution from the Goddard Space Flight center in Maryland. And how that team that was working on that Sunday, figured out what to do, and they checked it out and they radioed it up to us. And I realized that at the time when I felt so lonely that I felt detached from everyone else, literally like I was away from the planet, that really I never was alone, that my family and my friends and the people I worked with, the people that I loved and the people that cared about me, they were with me every step of the way. Thank you.
- [51:12]
Jay Allison
That was Michael J. Massimina. He has logged a total of 30 hours and four minutes during four spacewalks. A graduate of Columbia University and MIT, Michael is now the Executive Director of the Rice Space Institute at Rice University. Remember, you can pitch us your own story by visiting themauth.org that's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from the Moth. The stories in this hour were directed by Meg Bowles and Katherine Burns. The rest of the Moth directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin, Janess, and Jennifer Hickson. Production support from Brandon Echter, Laura Haddon and Jenna Weisburman. Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Tin Hat, Marika Hughes and the soundtrack from the Right Stuff. The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the public radio exchange prx.org for more about our podcast. For information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.