“When NASA hired me to be an astronaut, I had a lot of imposter syndrome going on. It was as if I was braced for someone to realize they had made a mistake hiring me. I love my job at NASA. I get to learn how spacecraft work, fly jets, scuba dive, train underwater to simulate spacewalks, work in the mission control center. If I was able to just do those things, even never flying in space, I would’ve felt like I had a pretty stinking cool job. Getting a spaceflight was a bonus.
“One of the big things for me during a long spaceflight was trying to stay focused on the gain rather than the lack. This helps in many areas. Exercise, for example. When you start feeling really tired, the reason you want to quit is frequently because of anticipating the difficulty of the future. We have brains that help us plan. That same planning capacity can lead us to start thinking maybe we can’t do this. Maybe we don’t have enough left to make it. However, if you think to yourself instead, I’ve already made it this far. This hurts really bad right now. How does this feel, the pain in my legs, my breathing? If you have curiosity about that moment, then suddenly you can get past that really painful stuff in the future because you’re not paying attention to it.
“About three weeks left in a 355-day flight, my doctors for the first time said, ‘Hey, congratulations, you only have three weeks left!’ I said, ‘Never talk to me about how much time I have left. I only have today, every day.’ I would have been miserable if I was counting off the days to some bright event in the future. That isn’t living in the moment. It isn’t paying enough attention to the gift of the day I’m actually living.”
– Mark Vande Hei, Astronaut, NASA’s Johnson Space Center
Image Credit: NASA / Mark Vande Hei
Interviewer: NASA / Tahira Allen