Spaceman

An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

By Mike Massimino

The title of the thesis I proposed was “Sensory Substitution for Force Feedback in Space Teleoperation.” In English, what that describes is a problem with controlling a robot when you’re dealing with a time delay. Whenever you manipulate an object with your hand, pulling a lever or twisting a knob, the amount of resistance it gives you is something you can feel. It’s instantaneous, and you can react to it right away. The brain knows automatically how to read those signals and adjust to apply more force or less. But if you’re manipulating an object remotely via a robot-for example, communicating with a rover on Mars—there’s a time delay between the signals the robot is sending to you and the commands you’re sending to it. You might push too hard or not hard enough based on wrong information about what’s happening on the other end, and the object you’re manipulating becomes unstable very quickly and you start knocking into things. It’s a problem of force information, force feedback.

(Massimino 2016, 43)

When I flew on that mission, Gabby was eight and Daniel was six. Looking down on the Earth from space, I started thinking about the planet as a father, as a parent. When you have kids, you want to give them everything. You try to find the best house in the best neighborhood. If you can afford to give your kids their own room, you try to fix it up as best you can. You get those blackout curtains so it’ll be dark when they need to nap. Room in there for them to play with. You give them a home. And my thought looking down at the Earth was Wow. How much God our Father must love us that he gave us this home. He didn’t put us on Mars or Venus with nothing but rocks and frozen waste. He gave us paradise and said, “Live here.” It’s not easy to wrap your head around the origins and purpose of the universe, but that’s the best way I can describe the feelings I had.