I started training to be an astronaut when I was six years old, but I think I actually began preparing when I was born. I had to learn, from day one, to adapt to hostile environments that threatened my existence.

Not being picked up when you cry is a hostile environment.

Having a social worker come into your home and realize your diaper hasn’t been changed in an entire day is a hostile environment.

By the time I was three, when my parents adopted me after my biological mother officially chose drugs over me, I’d been in seven foster homes.

The thing about being an astronaut is that you have to spend your whole life training. From the second you decide you want to be in that big white suit someday, to the moment you’re strapped in, listening to that ten, nine, eight, seven, six—you never stop getting ready for the mission.

Your whole life is a sim.

Practicing for disaster. For the worst-case scenario. For Houston, we have a problem.

Expecting the unexpected.

The worst happens and you work the problem. Right away. That’s what you do. You do not cry or have a panic attack or pray or get angry at the engineers on Earth who did incorrect calculations or blame it on the Russians or have a deep-space existential crisis. No. You work the problem.

Work the problem is NASA protocol when there’s bad news or flashing red lights or space debris in your trajectory: Work the problem.

My favorite scene in Apollo 13 is when the engineers all get in a room and one of them holds up a cylindrical carbon dioxide filter and says, “We need to fit this”—and then he holds up a square one—“into this”—and then he points to a bunch of junk he’s thrown on the table—“using this.” The Apollo crew is up there breathing in CO2, dying, in a shuttle that might not have enough juice to make it back to Earth. These engineers on the ground have to figure out how to turn what those astronauts have on the shuttle into the ultimate breathing hack. In outer space. And they do it. They save the astronauts. That’s working the problem.

Astronauts spend hours in simulators, dying every single day so that they can stay alive on the day that counts.

A good astronaut knows that anything—rejection, failure, death—can be a sim. Everything in your life is preparation for the mission.

I start working the problem before Hannah gets to the house, which means I have been on hold with the Red Cross or the State Department for the past twelve hours. From the time Gram called last night, I had to alternate between calling my sister’s boyfriend and trying to ascertain whether my parents have survived a wave that has destroyed a good portion of the Malaysian coast.