Scott Detrow

Two summers ago, I visited the crew at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

I wanted to get a sense of what it is like to prepare for the mission.

Captain Reid Wiseman guided me as I awkwardly crouched down, trying not to bang my head and trying...

to figure out how to wedge myself into the front of the training mock-up of an Orion space capsule.

We have to teach you how to do this like an astronaut.

Okay, and now you just kind of start rolling your weight.

Don't scratch your watch.

Yep, and now your feet come up and over.

Yes, perfect.

It should be said he was much more smooth about making his way into the tiny space in the training capsule.

Situated on our backs, we could see through four port windows when we craned our necks up.

And looking straight forward, we were flush against a complicated panel of screens, knobs, and switches, some of which they hope they will never need to touch.

In general, the switches are not intended to be used

if everything is going well.

These switches are last-ditch efforts.

Like for here, this is main parachute deploy.

So if we are in a really bad day and our main parachute does not deploy, moving this switch will send an electrical signal from the battery directly to the employment

The screens display dense lines of flight data.

To me, they're all random numbers.

To Wiseman, they're telling a high-stakes story.