Sublime

Sweat the small stuff. Without letting anyone see you sweat.

See, a funny thing happened on the way to space: I learned how to live better and more happily here on Earth. Over time, I learned how to anticipate problems in order to prevent them, and how to respond effectively in critical situations. I learned how to neutralize fear, how to stay focused and how to succeed.

From all our sims, it felt very familiar: same sort of seats, same sort of tasks, same sort of checklists. Even the same voice was coming through our headphones: that of Yuri Vasilyevich Cherkashin, our instructor. Everything looked and felt just about as it always had, all the times we’d practiced—right

Everyone in the room has hard-won expertise in a particular technical area, and they are like spiders, exquisitely sensitive to any vibration in their webs, ready to pounce on problems and efficiently dispose of them.

Kaz spent the next morning watching the Apollo and Soyuz crews train on the spaceship docking system in Building 13.

Had Hadfield not focused on the humanity of his team, it’s possible we’d never have had as clear an understanding of “what they’re doing up there” as we do.