‘If an alien saw Earth from above, they’d think it was paradise’

How does it feel to ride a rocket all the way up into space? What does our home planet look like from above? What will the new generation of manned flights to the moon achieve? And what would an alien think if they came across Earth on a fly-by journey?

All good questions. Questions that Bruce Melnick can answer. A Nasa veteran, Melnick flew on two Space Shuttle missions at the beginning of the Nineties (STS-41 on Discovery in October 1990; STS-49 on Endeavour in May 1992) – the second of which successfully relaunched a commercial satellite that had become stranded at a low orbit.

Here, to mark the start of World Space Week, he talks about first encounters with G-Force, rocket launchers, collisions with unidentified “flying” objects, and what Shuttle veterans always failed to tell the new guy.

Before you joined Nasa, you were with the US Coast Guard as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot. Did that first part of your career prepare you for the second? 

It really did. I applied to Nasa six times over the course of 10 years. On the first four or five occasions, I didn’t have much of a resumé. 

But then, after fully qualifying as a pilot, I was able to pass all the tests – physiological, psychological, physical and mental – which Nasa throws at you as part of your interview. 

The interview is a week long. I’m sure being in the Coast Guard also helped in that they hadn’t had one of “our lot” yet. It may have been a case of: “We’ve got a new guy, from a new service. We’ve got a new story!”.

You must have been in some tricky situations long before you boarded the Shuttle…

Oh yes. In the Coast Guard, I flew into harm’s way all the time. 

When I had my last Nasa interview, I told them the story of a rescue I did one night in Alaska, before GPS, before night-vision goggles. We were flying into the mountains in bad weather. 

We had to fit the helicopter into a very tight space. We had to land on a shaky dock, and we couldn’t shut the engine down. I couldn’t climb any higher due to the risk of icing over; I couldn’t get any lower. 

So I followed the harbour buoys into this little town, Waterfall [on Prince of Wales Island]. The first part went well. But the dock wasn’t strong enough to support the helicopter, and I had to figure a way out without radar, with no visibility. 

I just calculated… accelerate to 60 miles an hour, turn left. And if the radar kicked in, we were over open water. But if we turned and found that the mountain was in front of us, well… When we made that turn, and the radar opened up, let’s just say we were all very relieved.

It sounds as if flying on the Shuttle may have been a less stressful experience…

Well, with the Shuttle, we were just doing our jobs. Everything worked well. Although, we had a few moments, like when we were rendezvousing with the satellite [on his second mission]. You train for everything, but everything is pretty much automated. 

Still, I worked for a year on how to calculate the approach to the satellite manually – just in case we had a computer problem. Sure enough, approaching that satellite, we had a computer problem. That isn’t a scary moment – but it’s one that really gets your attention.

How did a Space Shuttle launch feel? That must have been a nervous experience. Or was it something that, because you’d trained for it, was just a case of going to work?

Exactly. It took me three years of preparation. Everybody goes through two years of basic training. And then, when you get selected for a flight, you spend a year training purely for that flight. Every contingency, every issue, everything you can think of. You tend to “die” every time you get in the simulator. You’re thrown all these emergency procedures.

I remember my launches well. I was one of the last people to get strapped in on both my flights, because I was sitting between the commander and the pilot. They had to step on my seat to climb in. So while they were getting strapped in, I was standing out on the side of the platform, looking at this beautiful rocket, ready to fly. 

When it was finally my turn to get on board, they closed the hatch, and it was quiet. I was lying on top of eight million pounds of high explosive thrust… and I fell asleep. On both flights. I probably napped for 15 minutes. And then five minutes before we took off, it got busy again, and off we went.

Surely a Space Shuttle launch got a little more dramatic…

Well, as good as our simulators are, they couldn’t simulate the real thing. All of a sudden, the boosters ignite. With a big bang. It’s a kick in the pants. Soon, you outrun the speed of sound, so you don’t hear the rockets anymore, but it’s rough for the first two minutes. 

Then, when you get off the rocket boosters, and you’re running on the three main engines, with the remaining fuel from the external tank… a lot of astronauts call that “the electric drive”. It’s a smooth ride for the next six minutes. But that’s when the Gs build up. 

You are pinned back in your seat until you hit three Gs – when we throttle back the engines so as not to exceed three Gs, because that would rip the wings off, and that would be a bad day. You go until you run out of gas, and hit the main engine cut-off. 

You’re still squished into your seat; it’s hard to talk, to breathe. Then instantaneously, poof, you’re free-floating in zero G. It’s smooth and quiet – you don’t even feel like you’re moving. It’s a great ride.

Had your training prepared you for this?

The only thing my training hadn’t prepared me for is a trick that the veterans play on the rookies. They say that, when the rocket boosters come off, there’s “a little pop” – and off you go on the main engines. 

All that’s true, except for the “little pop”. Actually, there’s a huge explosion, and a fireball goes across the windshield. The booster separation motors, which are on the top of the rocket boosters, are rockets themselves. They fire, and thrust the boosters away, so that they don’t come into contact with the Shuttle. 

So that’s the big fireball. You’re sitting waiting for this “little pop” – and then you think you’ve blown up.

Did you have any really unnerving moments once you were in space?

There was a particular moment on the last night of my second flight. We were tucked in, ready for bed. All of a sudden, we heard a bang. Something shook the Shuttle. 

We started listening for the telltale “shhhhhhhh” noise that would tell us we had a leak – or for the alarm to go off, to tell us we were losing pressure. We heard nothing. 

Next morning, in the corner of the window, you could see where something had hit us, and splattered on the window. A tiny dot. 

Thankfully, the windows are triple panes; an inch thick. When we got home, they did forensic tests. What we’d felt was a fleck of paint from a satellite. It had that much energy. That tells you the kind of velocities you’re dealing with up there. 

You were on the first flight of Endeavour, the new Space Shuttle, which had replaced the destroyed Challenger. Was there an added pressure there?

I don’t know if Nasa felt any extra pressure. But I was the astronaut assigned to the team overseeing Endeavour’s construction – and then I ended up being part of its first flight. So that was interesting. 

I’d been out in California, seeing it being built. It was put together with spare parts. So I saw where the wings didn’t fit just right, and I saw where something else didn’t look exactly perfect. And then they put the tiles on, and everything looked beautiful. But later – when I got to fly it – I did think back to it being put together.

How do you feel about the next-generation moon missions [which are due to take place on Nasa’s new Orion spacecraft in 2024]? Hasn’t this all been done before?

It’s been done before, yes. But that was to show that we could do it. And we didn’t do a lot while we were there. Yeah, we brought back some moon rocks, but we didn’t do any real exploration. 

The new missions will help us look at our planet’s roots. The surface of the moon is millions of years old, but because there’s no atmosphere, nothing has deteriorated. It’s also part of getting to Mars. 

That first escape from the Earth requires a tremendous amount of energy. But if we leave from a gateway orbiting the moon, and we refuel a spacecraft there, it takes much less energy to go to Mars. It’s really the next step.

Is the view of Earth from above as beautiful as other astronauts have said?

You get an amazing perspective. My missions weren’t too far from the Gulf Wars, with oil fields burning. Mount Pinatubo was erupting in the Philippines around then, as well – and that harmed a lot of people. 

So you know about all those negative things on the ground. But when you’re up in space and look back, everything has its own beauty. A hurricane is symmetrical and perfect. 

Even the burning of the tropical rainforest alters the colour of the sunrise and sunset. Cities, which have their problems, look amazing with their grids of lights. 

If you were an alien and you saw Earth from above, you would say “Well that must be paradise. There can’t be anything wrong down there.” That was what got to me. I said: “Wow, what a beautiful place. How come we screwed it up so badly?”.

Bruce Melnick is part of the “Astronaut Encounter” team – which lets visitors meet Nasa alumni – at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, at Cape Canaveral in Florida (kennedyspacecenter.com). From $75 (£62) per adult; $65 (£54) per child 3-11.