Dr Piers Sellers, British-born and at 56 the veteran of three shuttle missions, vividly recalls his first ever spacewalk. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?
“It was on my first mission, Atlantis, in 2002. It was more exciting and more beautiful than I ever imagined. It exceeds even your wildest expectations. You float out gently, you see the Earth quietly turning, the black sky and a white, white sun moving across, so bright it hurts your eyes. The Earth glows neon-blue, like a curved wall next to you. You can hear your breathing through the little fan in the back of your suit. It’s a remarkable, beautiful thing.
“I could see the shape of the Thames very clearly. Later, I let the Amazon roll beneath me for hundreds of miles because the course of the International Space Station [ISS] was taking us right down the length of it. I saw fires burning in the Amazon basin, and 25 minutes later I saw the Sahara go by. Then into night over India, the industrial lights, thunderstorms over the equator, then daylight again over the Americas. Right round the world in an hour and a half.
“When you look down and can see fields or rivers, which are on the everyday human scale, while still flying round the world in such a short time, it really strikes you how small Earth is.”
Since that first mission, Sellers has racked up nearly 41 hours of spacewalks while on missions to tweak, mend or reattach errant parts of the ISS. He is one of only three British “career” astronauts — as opposed to others, like the chemist Helen Sharman from Sheffield, the first Briton in space, who flew to Mir after responding to a radio advertisement (“Astronaut wanted: no experience necessary”), or the several hundred space tourists who have laid out $20,000 deposits to travel to space on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic missions. In January, Sellers was awarded an OBE for services to science.
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People tell you that a spacecraft is safe, and what that means is: ‘It’s as safe as we can make it'
“I wanted to become an astronaut since I was seven,” he says. “I learnt to fly gliders at 16, aircraft at 17, and I did science A-levels.”
Sellers was born in Crowborough, Sussex. His father was in the army, “so we were posted everywhere. Mum says she moved 32 times in 32 years. My four brothers and I all went to boarding schools”.
He took a doctorate in biometeorology at the University of Leeds, and then says he “got really lucky and was asked to do a fellowship at Nasa. From there it took 13 years and three applications to become an astronaut”. He became a US citizen along the way, as all foreign-born Nasa astronauts must.
What else were they looking for? “You don’t have to be the absolute best athlete in the world, the most intelligent, most organised, the best pilot, the Nobel laureate physicist, to go into space. You do have to be able to do all those things to a reasonable level. Because when you get up there, you have a tiny crew and you’ve got to do everything, whatever is required.” The reality of flying in space, he says, was “different and in many ways better than the dream, after so many years of just hoping. As I got older, I realised how incredibly privileged we crew members are to have gone into space and to have played even a small part in the business”.
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Sellers flew his third and final space voyage in May last year, again aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, and he’s now been posted to the lab-bound role of deputy director of science and exploration directorate at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland. “We’ve got about 1,600 space scientists, and we study astrophysics, the heliosphere — you know, the sun — and the solar system. Mostly now I’ll be using satellites and space technology to help us here on Earth.”
Sellers and the other shuttle astronauts were paid standard US government/military salaries. The most they could hope to earn would be about $100,000 a year. Sellers also received an extra $2.30 a day for every day spent in space. This was supposed to cover “incidental expense”.
“Yeah, it’s not much,” he says. “It’s for phone calls and cleaning, which you can’t do up there in any case. Apparently it’s government regulation that they have to give it to us, or they’d be breaking the law.”
Sellers says he was never nervous while spacewalking: “You’re more afraid of not getting it right than anything else, never of the physical threat. We’re very, very well trained.”
His second mission, on Discovery in 2006, was only very shortly after Nasa engineers managed to fix the problem that caused the Columbia disaster. He recalls the anxious launch: “About the time Columbia first ran into problems, we felt a couple of bumps. It turned out it was because we were going through a denser layer of the atmosphere, but I looked at my friend Mike Fossum and we both put our eyebrows up.” Is that all? “We got home safe. I’m a lot more nervous watching other people’s launches than my own. People tell you that a spacecraft is safe, and what that means is: ‘It’s as safe as we can make it.’ Spaceflight is inherently dangerous, there’s no way around it.”
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For every mission, he wrote two letters each for his wife, Mandy, a nurse, and two grown-up children: “An A letter and a B letter. The A to give them if everything worked out okay, and B if it didn’t. That’s the nature of the game.”
In fact, the worst that happened to Sellers was losing a tool while spacewalking.
“If you release a piece of equipment, it will slowly drift away. I lost a spatula that way, it just snuck away when I wasn’t looking.”
He reported it, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command put a track on it. “Eventually it hit the Atlantic four months later.”
How does he see Nasa’s future without the shuttle? “We’re in transition now. We don’t have a US spacecraft ready to go off, so it’s a little bit uncertain. These next few years are going to be tough for the agency as we figure out the best way ahead.” He accepts the glamour of spaceflight is behind him, “unless I make a billion dollars and become a space tourist, which doesn’t sound bad at all. I’d like for lots of people to experience space travel. I wish I could take everyone I know there with me”.