Chasing Space

Leland Melvin

• Publisher: Amistad
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062496775
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In thisrevelatory andmovingmemoir, a former NASA astronaut and NFL wide receiver shares his personal journey from the gridiron to the stars, examining the intersecting roles of community, perseverance and grace that align to create the opportunities for success.

Leland Melvin is the only person in human history to catch a pass in the National Football League and in space. Though his path to the heavens was riddled with setbacks and injury, Leland persevered to reach the stars.

While training with NASA, Melvin suffered a severe injury that left him deaf. Leland was relegated to earthbound assignments, but chose to remain and support his astronaut family. His loyalty paid off. Recovering partial hearing, he earned his eligibility for space travel. He served as mission specialist for two flights aboard the shuttle Atlantis, working on the International Space Station.

In thisuplifting memoir, the former NASA astronaut and professional athlete offers an examination of the intersecting role of community, determination, and grace that align to shape our opportunities and outcomes. Chasing Space is not the story of one man, but the story of many men, women, scientists, and mentors who helped him defy the odds and live out an uncommon destiny.

As a chemist, athlete, engineer and space traveler, Leland's life story is a study in the science of achievement. His personal insights illuminate how grit and grace, are the keys to overcoming adversity and rising to success.

1

I Really Can’t Hear

On my first day of spacewalk training in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center, the future loomed in front of me as bright as the heavens I had hoped to reach. I wanted to master the fundamentals and, like all astronauts, I knew that spacewalk proficiency was the quickest path to that coveted first flight assignment.

The sooner I could fly, the more time I would have to spend off-planet getting my orbital shift on. There are almost 7.5 billion people living on Earth. Only 555 of them have ever flown in space. Of that number, 362 were American astronauts. It’s a very, very exclusive club, and as I prepared for the day’s trials, I was determined to join it.

I began my descent to the bottom of the cavernous pool that houses a submerged space shuttle and International Space Station to practice installing and attaching hardware with the goal of one day doing similar work on the real $150 billion space station orbiting high above the planet. I had completed many scuba runs in the pool before, but training for extravehicular activity (EVA) in the suit is more like walking in the weightless environment of space. It isn’t easy. The suit alone made me look like a cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Michelin Man.

At a depth of ten feet, I noticed the little block of Styrofoam, called the Valsalva device, was missing. The device is usually attached at nose level inside the helmet to help a diver clear his or her ears by simply pressing the nose against it. Just a week earlier, I made sure to tell the technician that I needed it.

Through the helmet headset, I told test director Greg Sims that the device was missing. I enjoyed working with Greg. We met a few months earlier in Huntsville, Texas, when he administered the qualification dives for my scuba certification. I should have stopped the dive to get a new device, but I wanted to go on with my training. So, I convinced myself—and Greg—that I could continue without any problems. “Okay,” he said. “Just don’t hurt yourself.”

It didn’t take long before my ears felt full, like the pressure a passenger feels when a plane shifts in flight—only much worse. Desperate to clear my ears, I thrust my head forward to position my nose on the helmet neck ring, but it was too far out of reach. My doctors would later tell me that either my background as a professional athlete or my high tolerance for pain prevented me from realizing the true severity of my situation. Maybe. But, on April 3, 2001, I simply told myself that my ears would clear.

I knew something was wrong at twenty feet. “I can’t hear you,” I told Greg. “Can you turn the volume up?” I strained to hear a response, but all I got was static. I figured something was wrong with either the headset or the cable running from my suit to the pool deck as one kink in the cable could shut down the sound.

“Turn up the volume,” I shouted into the microphone, wondering why the men on the other end of the line were ignoring me.

Greg and his team began to raise me slowly up and down in the pool, thinking it might clear my ears in much the same way increasing altitude can do on an airplane. I still couldn’t hear Greg. Seconds later, I heard an irritating sound from the headset, followed by faint crackles and an obscured voice. Somebody was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t make out the words. At that point, the training ended. As I floated toward the surface, I saw Danny Olivas, a fellow trainee, at the bottom of the pool ready to demonstrate his EVA skills. I know he was thinking, What the hell is going on with Leland? and probably wondering if my problem would delay his training.

Dr. Richard McCluskey, a NASA flight surgeon who was assisting with the exercise, was waiting for me. The technician who helped me out of my helmet was the same guy in charge of my “suit-fit check,” the test run of all the equipment I would use the day of my underwater training. He had asked me if I needed a Valsalva device, and multiple scuba dives in the Red Sea had taught me that I could only clear my ears by blocking my nostrils. So I had said yes.

The look on the doctor’s face told me something had gone wrong. In fact, I saw concern on everyone’s faces. They were all mouthing words without sound, and I wondered why they didn’t just speak up. When Dr. McCluskey touched my right ear, I noticed the blood on his finger and began to feel it running down the side of my face. He quickly examined my ears and observed retraction of my tympanic membrane—the eardrum. Suspecting the problem occurred from the underwater change in pressure, he administered a nasal spray and politzerization, a medical procedure that involves inflating the middle ear by blowing air up the nose.

Neither effort worked. I still couldn’t hear.

Dr. McCluskey then escorted me to the hypobaric altitude chamber, which simulates the experience of an airplane ascending in flight. At 10,000 feet, I didn’t feel any different but when the doctor tried to inflate my middle ear a second time, my ears began to clear. I could hear a little better.

According to the medical records, I could hear speech from about five feet away. However, when the chamber brought me back to sea level, my ears became blocked again, and I was unable to hear much of anything. All I could do was sit inside the steel tube, peering through the window at the faces of the doctors and technicians, and wonder if they felt any responsibility for damaging a member of the NASA family. After my stint in the altitude chamber, the room seemed to spin, and the walls, fixtures, and faces tumbled together in a confusing whirl. I threw up when I got to the shower. Thank goodness, I made it that far.

My next stop was the Flight Medicine Clinic, which wasn’t far from the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. The doctors there examined my ears and performed balance tests that I passed easily. Not bad for someone bleeding from his ear. Still, I couldn’t hear. The doctors then had me transported to Houston Methodist Hospital, where I was examined by Dr. Bobby Alford, a renowned ear, nose, and throat specialist. He admitted me to the hospital after a battery of hearing and balance tests revealed severe bilateral hearing loss. My treatment would consist of antibiotics, antivirals, and carbon dioxide to increase blood flow to the brain. Unfortunately, my doctors could not determine the cause of my deafness.

“Suspect cochlear process as source of hearing loss,” one of my doctor’s medical reports stated. “Ruptured round window possible, but unlikely. Possibilities include ruptured or damaged Reissner’s membrane, patent cochlear aqueduct, vascular lesions, infections, or undetermined.”

Dr. Alford thought exploratory surgery might provide clues.

Just hours before, I had been on top of the world, brimming with confidence. I was pursuing my future in space. Now, I lay in a recovery room, confused, disoriented, and uncertain. I watched as Dr. Alford scribbled notes on his yellow legal pad. The eardrums were intact, and an MRI revealed no evidence of a stroke. Yet, they couldn’t find the exact cause of my problem in my right ear. As much as I wanted to discover the cause of my hearing loss, I was more concerned with the space agency’s response to my situation. If something bad happens to an astronaut in training and NASA can’t explain it, the astronaut won’t fly.

My medical status changed, and as soon as it did, the nurses in charge of documents immediately altered my records to read “DNIF,” short for Duty Not Involving Flying. This medical disqualification barred me from future training in NASA’s high-performance jets, and I could forget those thoughts of living and working off-planet. One mistake had brought three years of training to a sudden, dispiriting halt. I wondered if I would ever get my time in space, or be consigned to an earthbound existence, left to look up forlornly at the stars.

“The Right Stuff”

Astronaut culture is a world Tom Wolfe famously described as divided into those who have the “right stuff” and those who don’t. Some folks are just born with it, and to prove they have it, they never admit defeat or show weakness. They certainly never end up in the hospital with sudden and profound deafness because a tiny block of Styrofoam was missing from their helmet.

For decades, the “right stuff” type of astronaut typically was a military pilot somehow supernaturally graced with “the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness to pull it back in at the last yawning moment.” That’s how Wolfe described it. A military pilot faced a 23 percent chance of dying in an aircraft accident and a greater than fifty-fifty chance of someday having to make a perilous ejection out of the jet and come down in a parachute. Yet, they still fly.

I never saw myself as one of those guys. They were the decorated officers who fought in Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. They talked about angle of attack and dog-fighting, spoke of days when their butts were on the line trying to save troops or keep the bad guys from hurting the United States. They had call signs, like “Dex,” “Hock,” “Ray J,” and “Zambo.” They sacrificed so much to protect this country.

I came to the space program as a civilian, not a military test pilot. Until three years ago, I had been a research scientist, working to develop optical fiber sensors at NASA Langley in Hampton, Virginia. Before that, I was completing my master’s degree with hopes of starting a lucrative career in the chemical industry. I was recruited to join NASA at a time when the space program was trying to improve the diversity of its workforce. I never aspired to a life off the ground, much less to become an astronaut. I knew that whatever path of life I was on, I wanted to do my best. But this stuff Tom Wolfe described? How could I have the “right stuff”?

The nation’s space program has made progress from its days when the staff and leadership of the space agency were largely white and male. We certainly have come a long way since May 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy stood before Congress and announced that the United States should commit to “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” within the decade.

However, during that time, America’s race relations were in turmoil. Dozens of Freedom Riders had put their lives on the line when they boarded interstate buses to travel across the American South in an inspired mission to end racial segregation. On Kennedy’s orders, a reluctant NASA selected Ed Dwight as the first African American to join the space program. “Kennedy picked me out of the turnip patch and plopped me in the middle of this,” Dwight told People magazine years later. “The Air Force and NASA felt someone was trying to cram a nigger down their throats.”

Ed belonged in NASA. Born in the Kansas City, Kansas, area, he was an avid reader and enjoyed the arts. In 1953, he joined the U.S. Air Force, and within three years he became a test pilot. He rose to the rank of captain and earned a bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Arizona State University. In 1961, the Kennedy administration selected Ed to be the first African American astronaut trainee. The move brought favorable media coverage, particularly among the black press.

Enduring criticisms from fellow astronaut trainees and demeaning incidents at NASA, like his assignment as a liaison to a test pilot facility in Germany that didn’t exist, took their toll. Dwight told Ebony magazine that Kennedy’s death in 1963 prompted him to leave the space program, but that seemed like only part of the reason. Another twenty years would pass before the first African American would fly in space.

• • •

I was well aware just how quickly an astronaut could be disqualified from flying. The annual physical with the NASA flight surgeon is something to be feared. Every astronaut knows you can walk into the doctor’s office a test pilot and walk out a desk jockey. Physicals by flight surgeons are so dreaded that pilots often go to great lengths to have medical procedures done off-base, sometimes even in secret.

Alan Shepard knew this as well as anyone. In the late 1950s, Shepard had been one of the original seven astronauts recruited by NASA for Project Mercury. These handpicked former military test pilots, “fighter jocks” who would become known as the Mercury Seven, were fiercely competitive and entirely focused on beating the former Soviet Union into space. The race was on, and nothing was going to stop them. It was widely known that the blue-eyed Shepard was the most competitive and cocky of the bunch.

What happened next was a setback for the American space program. On April 12, 1961, Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin climbed into his Vostok spacecraft and became the first human to journey into space and orbit the Earth. He beat the United States’ Freedom 7 mission by a scant three weeks.

Still, the May 5 Freedom 7 spaceflight made Shepard a national hero. He was honored with parades on both coasts and received NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal from President John F. Kennedy. His place in America’s space program seemed secure. Or was it?

Two years after becoming the first American in space, Shepard began to have a terrible pain in his ear as he trained to command the first Gemini mission. He was dizzy and sometimes found himself unable to walk. The NASA medical team soon diagnosed him with Ménière’s disease, a then incurable condition of the inner ear that causes nausea and dizziness, and in Shepard’s case excruciating pain. Shepard tried to downplay his symptoms to no avail. In early 1964, he was grounded, disqualified from flying. He was barred from even flying a Navy jet without another pilot on board. He was assigned a management role at NASA—chief of the Astronaut Office. He continued to suffer and all but gave up hope of ever flying in space again.

Fortunately for Shepard, his friend and fellow astronaut Tom Stafford told him about an ear, nose, and throat specialist in Los Angeles who was pioneering a new procedure to correct Ménière’s disease. The process called for implanting a small tube in the inner ear to drain the fluid. It was against NASA protocol to seek outside medical care, but Shepard checked himself into a Los Angeles hotel under a pseudonym to keep the operation away from both NASA and the media. The surgery was a success. Shepard’s symptoms were gone.

It took Shepard two years to convince NASA to let him fly again. In 1971, at age forty-seven, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 and became the fifth and oldest astronaut to walk on the moon. During that mission, he made more history by managing to hit two golf balls on the lunar surface.

Many years later, Chris Hadfield would come close to a medical disqualification during preparations for his 2012 trip to the International Space Station. Hadfield suddenly experienced a painful intestinal infection stemming from an appendectomy he’d had as a child. Only by working outside the NASA network was he able to get the surgery he needed. Luckily for Hadfield, the cost to the astronaut program of his not flying was greater than his medical risk, so after months of analysis he was allowed to take flight. The Corps is full of stories that ended in disappointment for the astronaut. I didn’t want mine to be one of them.

• • •

Shortly after I was admitted to Houston Methodist Hospital, I met a nurse named Nancy who began to run a battery of hearing tests that would soon become a daily routine. Her teeth flashed as she smiled, but her eyes told a different story. They were full of fear—fear that I might not regain my hearing and what that would mean for my life as an astronaut. At first she didn’t understand that I couldn’t hear at all. She kept asking me to hold up my hand every time I heard a beep in my headset. As the machine went through its paces, I never raised my hand. Are they fooling with me again? When is the beeping going to start? Knowing this most likely meant that my astronaut career would soon be over, Nancy turned her head and started to cry.

The day after my surgery, my sister, Cathy, and her husband arrived from Virginia, as did my close friend Mary. Mary and my parents were connected through the deep Christian faith they shared, and she had become like part of the family. In the days following the accident, somebody called her to come down. The three of them stayed at my bedside monitoring my progress and supplying me with endless doses of optimism, shared via the yellow legal pads that had become my link to the world. My mother, Gracie, was at home in Lynchburg, taking care of my father, who was in treatment for prostate cancer. I would learn later that friends, neighbors, and people in my hometown whom I didn’t even know were praying for my recovery. Prayer groups were established, sermons preached. Word had spread that one of their community members was in trouble.

Soon my hospital ro...