By Mike Massimino
Have you puzzled what it'd be wish to end up strapped to an immense rocket that’s approximately to move from 0 to 17,500 miles consistent with hour? Or to seem again in the world from outer house and notice the unusually special line among day and evening? Or to face in entrance of the Hubble house Telescope, thinking about if the emergency fix you’re approximately to make will inadvertently spoil humankind’s likelihood to liberate the universe’s secrets and techniques? Mike Massimino has been there, and in Spaceman he places you contained in the swimsuit, with all of the zip and buoyancy of lifestyles in microgravity.
Massimino’s early life house goals have been born the day Neil Armstrong set foot at the moon. transforming into up in a working-class ny relatives, he catapulted himself to Columbia after which MIT, basically to flunk his first doctoral examination and be rejected thrice through NASA sooner than making it during the ultimate around of astronaut choice.
Taking us throughout the surreal ask yourself and sweetness of his first spacewalk, the tragedy of wasting associates within the Columbia go back and forth coincidence, and the improvement of his enduring love for the Hubble Telescope—which he and his fellow astronauts have been tasked with saving on his ultimate mission—Massimino has written an ode to by no means giving up and the ability of teamwork to make whatever attainable. Spaceman invitations us right into a infrequent, marvelous global the place technological know-how meets the main exciting experience, revealing simply what having “the correct stuff” particularly capacity.
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Additional resources for Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe
Sample text
It burned bright and burned out, like many childhood dreams do. It was the same for the rest of the country. The Apollo program stopped in 1972. By then the thrill of the space race was over. America had won and people moved on. I did, too. The astronomy books went back to the library, my Astronaut Snoopy went on a shelf, and by fifth grade I’d mostly forgotten about space. ” How the heck do you do that? In my senior year of high school I applied to the engineering school at Columbia University on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Once or twice a week I’d go down to the World Trade Center, work with their information technology guys, take people to lunch. The sales team was also responsible for the entertainment at IBM’s monthly branch meetings. We’d put on little skits about the slow elevators and the bad food in the cafeteria. I was making a decent salary and people were treating me like a grown-up. And IBM was a great company: They took care of people. But something was missing. I didn’t have that sense of purpose I was looking for.
So I went back to class and buckled down, studying as hard as I could. I went to a completely different level. My TAs were great. They spent extra time with me going over everything. My friends let me share their notes and spent hours helping me out. On the second midterm for Circuits and Systems, I got an 80. On the third, I got a 100. I went from the lowest score in the class to the highest. That semester I turned everything around. I made the Dean’s List for the first time. I also started thinking about the space program again.