Spaceman

A stirring, straightforward memoir of Mike Massimino, a “regular guy” astronaut.

When starting this, I was unsure if Yet Another Astronaut Memoir was needed: I had read and enjoyed Chris Hadfield's memoir and couldn't imagine the marginal added value of another one. But Mike Massimino's felt more emotionally stirring than Chris Hadfield's; I don't remember laughing and getting choked up in the same way with Hadfield's bio. Though they do follow the same pattern: these are basically motivational speeches in book form. They're also big time NASA plugs: Massimino addresses, in particular, the way that the 1960s space craze has diminished over time (though we do have SpaceX getting people excited again, which is nice).

Anyway, Massimino is a Long Island Italian-American kid who wasn't a super-genius, but was just a real mensch. His warmth as a storyteller and people-person jumps off the page: you end up wrapped up in his excitement, his nervousness, his highs and lows. It was also, indeed, motivational and inspiring and heartening to hear him struggle with very real feelings and real failures: he bombed his qualifying exams at MIT and had to re-do them; he struggled with imposter syndrome while at NASA; he felt clumsy and was bad at things and went to sometimes hilarious heights to reach his dream of being an astronaut (the reshaping his eyeballs thing being, maybe, the coolest and most funny thing I've ever heard of). I would slot this next to Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor's memoir, My Beloved World, as being about a real person achieving extraordinary things - while still feeling very real. (And being from New Yawk!)