Good Life Project - Scientist, Astronaut, Explorer | Kathryn Sullivan

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

Dr. Kathryn Sullivan is a distinguished scientist, astronaut, leader and teacher. She was one of the first six women to join the NASA astronaut corps in 1978 and is the first American woman to walk in space. Sullivan flew on three space shuttle missions during her 15-year NASA tenure, including the 1990 mission that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope.She has also been recognized as one of the 46 distinguished First Women by Time Magazine, the 15 Women Changing the World by the World Economic Forum, and Time’s 100 Most Influential People and is the author of the children’s book To the Stars! and Handprints on Hubble, An Astronaut’s Story of Invention. And, funny enough, she began her career studying not the reach of space, but the depths of the ocean.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Okay, so picture this. You're floating on a space shuttle far above the planet in space, and wearing a suit, you leave the vessel to find yourself walking in space. That is the experience of my guest today, Dr. Catherine Sullivan. She's a distinguished scientist, astronaut, executive professor, and the first American woman to walk in space. One of the first six women to actually join NASA as an astronaut in 1978. She flew three space shuttle missions during her 15 years at NASA, including the 1990 mission that deployed the world-changing Hubble

Space Telescope. That story, by the way, including the huge discovery once it was launched that it didn't work, and then trying to figure out how do we fix this massive telescope that is orbiting around the planet and how they eventually came to do that is the subject of a really fascinating new memoir of hers called Handprints on the Hubble. In the time since NASA, she has held a variety of senior executive positions,

including presidential appointments to the National Science Board as the Undersecretary Administrator of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, various appointments in academic institutions. been recognized as one of 46 distinguished First Women by Time magazine, 15 Women Changing the World by the World Economic Forum, and Time's 100 Most Influential People, and has been awarded the Explorers Club Medal, an Emmy, and nine honorary degrees. We talk about this entire journey, including the early years, her deep fascination and curiosity with all things science and how the world worked around her. The experience that led her incredibly and very unexpectedly to becoming an astronaut and how her choices and her life has unfolded in the time since then. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday.

We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. You were born across the Hudson, but grew up in L.A. from what I know, right? Yeah, we moved out there when I was six. Aerospace was moving westward and my father went with it. Ah, so tell me about your dad. Born and raised in New York, the greater Manhattan area.

Pretty well Astoria, I think, as was my mother. And their families, the kids in their families, overlapped in different social circles. That's how they met. He went to, I don't know what high school he went to, one of the like Brooklyn tech schools, very techie guy from the start. And as everybody his age did enlisted in the Army Air Corps, started training for B-17s to go over to Europe and was just about to be sent over when the war, the campaigns there ended. So they retrained him for B-29s and was just about to go to the Pacific when that all wrapped up. So he came back and did a master's at NYU, just complete airplane geek. I think his first job was with Curtis Wright as a young design engineer. And we lived in young

married apartments somewhere over on the other side of the Hudson. And around age six, one of his colleagues who had already moved west came back and said, you know, this is the promised land out here. This is going to be the epicenter. It's all happening. It's going to happen. Yeah, the aerospace equivalent of plastics, my son, plastics, right? So we drove across the country in 58 and stayed there until I finished college.

Do you have a memory of that drive? I have a couple of memories of that drive. I was six. My brother was 16 months older, so that's the age you've got. Our first ever motel, I remember in Wheeling, West Virginia. We had never heard of one of these before. The endlessly straight roads of Kansas, and this is all pre-freeways. So we were largely driving on two-lane highways that went through cornfields and then became main streets and then went back out into the cornfields.

Remember a big dust storm outside of Albuquerque. And I think that my brother and I share this favorite, seared in our minds memory of being little kids hearing a commercial in albuquerque for the grocery store chain which was called piggly wiggly five and six and seven year olds with that name the best right bouncing on the bed collapsing in laughter can you believe yeah that's too funny so so you land in la where in la were you uh we ended up in the san fernando valley okay the west end of it a place called woodland hills and and back, our house was essentially right at the edge of civilization. If we saved up three or four bucks, we could walk about 100 yards from our home and rent horses and go riding. So this would have been like late 60s-ish? This was late 50s, 1958.

Got it. The Warner Ranch area that is now all corporate offices and light industry and all that, it was still farmlands. We bought our corn from roadside stands. Man, it sounds like from a pretty young age also. You're into two things, maybe a lot more, but maps and language. Maps came well before, maps and a sense of exploring the area around me came much before the language parts i remember begging to walk with my mother when she walked my brother through the little woods behind our apartment for his first day at school because i'd seen them i was curious what

was out there i was always off exploring with my brother and his friends rather than sitting home playing with blocks or dolls so get get out and find, observe, what's there, what's it like. That was a long-standing interest. I think the AAA triptych that we navigated our way across the country with was probably the first entry point, my gateway drug to maps probably. So I remember being mesmerized that there was this long, skinny strip about three inches wide. But on one side, it just showed you that path you were going to be in. On the other side was all sorts of information about what was just off to the left or just off to the right, a thing you might want to see here, a diner you might want to stop at there, a motel you might want to stay at there.

And there were just so many layers of stories. I remember listening to my father and mother talk about all the logistics of our trip as she flipped back and forth on those pages. That was fascinating. It's a lot of foreshadowing there. Probably. Probably more than actually happened, but I vividly remember that triptych. It sounds like that sense of adventure, that sense of curiosity, not just for what's on the path that everybody else is trotting, but what's just to the left and what's just to the right. Those seeds were planted at the earliest days. They were either planted before I came out of the womb

or installed very soon after. Did that come at all from your mom as well? You know, it's hard to trace where it came from. It's a different variation than is obvious in either of my parents in some respects. They were both much more sort of home-bodied, and I was always, you know, what's over there? What's over there? Can I get up to the top of that hill?

What would it be like to climb that tree? What would things look like if I got a little higher? Right. So growing up, so you're a girl in the 50s and then 60s with this sort of like fierce interest in adventure. And, you know, this was a time in America, especially where we had sort of like society had certain assumed roles, like boys behave this way, girls behave this way.

How does that intersect with sort of like your wiring? I think it intersects by my good fortune having extraordinary parents who kind of never, I can't remember a moment where they ever signaled that sort of thing to either me or my brother. My brother could have been interested in ballet and wanted a tutu and it would have been, that's just fine. Let's help you explore your interest in dance and movement. I had some interest in typical girl things, but much more in a much more adventurous and sort of unusual way. But that was the nature of my curiosity,

and they were just completely invested in feeding and supporting our curiosity and, importantly, signaling and sort of inoculating us with the notion that no one gets to edit what you're interested in. You're interested in it. You're allowed to be interested in anything you're interested in, and we're committed to helping you explore that interest. No one gets to tell you you're not interested in that. They can tell you they think it's odd, but they don't get to tell you you're not or you're not allowed to.

Yeah, I mean, what an amazing gift, sort of like looking back, to have that as sort of like the family ethos from the earliest days. Absolutely. I mean, it really was like the best vaccine in the world, especially for a young girl who was going to end up making her way into odd places like geology and aerospace. Yeah. Where do languages touch down? Languages touched down starting in about fifth grade. I think I'd really always been fascinated by them because they, you know, I just, even in little things like some of our Three Musketeers comic books, you'd see people, the mice were talking other languages. Well, how does another language work? If someone actually says the word we to you and you're a Frenchman, do you hear we or

do you hear yes? I mean, how does that, how does that difference between the sound you heard and what you understand it to mean, how does that actually work? Because we only grow up as little kids knowing it in one language. And a friend of a favorite aunt when I was about 10 years old, turns out was a Russian-born, very elegant Russian-born woman who was teaching at the same school as my aunt, but she was the French teacher at that school. And over a family dinner, she put me through a few pronunciation paces, basics of French pronunciation, and pronounced to the table that I was actually quite good at it, which is sort of like the first blessing from outside the family I had had for a talent that I was sort of sensing in myself, but hadn't really

glommed onto yet. And then I just made a really simple theory of action. Cool. Learn a lot of languages and somehow parlay that into the getting to explore and travel that I had been dreaming about. We were a comfortable Southern California family, but not a family that was rocketing off on spring breaks to exotic locations in Europe or about to send me to boarding school or Switzerland and something like that. So I kind of figured out I've got to solve the puzzle of how do I get to do these adventures.

Yeah, and language is not so much a gateway, but it's something that sort of gives you access to different cultures and maybe lets you feel more comfortable stepping out into that unknown. Right, and being able to read some of their literature, some of their works in their language and get a sense of them before you really go to meet them. I think the other thing that influenced me about that same age, I was a very precocious reader, and I read James Michener's Caravans somewhere around that time. And I've read it a couple times since, and I realize I probably got about 4.3% of the total when I read it at age 10 or 11.

But again, this adventurous life of a young Foreign Service officer in these exotic places and the mixture of language and culture and figuring it out and navigating through all of that was just, wow, what lucky people get to have that kind of life. Yeah. You end up eventually, you head up to Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz. Was your intention originally when you went there to study language or was it something else? Oh, I was going to UC Santa Cruz because they had a great Russian language program. And I was pretty basically solidly

fluent in French and almost there in German. By the time you graduated high school? By the time I graduated high school. And Russian was the strategic language of the time, you know, the geopolitics of the time. So I figured, you know, if you want a high-value skill, I had no idea if that meant State Department or translating or quite what, but that was really a high-leverage central language of great importance in politics and business and a lot of things.

And it was fascinating. It was in a different script. It's inscrutable to an American eye. By this point, the Germanic and Romance languages, they look like ours. And I was familiar enough with them to think, let's try something a little more challenging. Cyrillic is definitely more challenging. So you end up thinking, okay, so this is where I'm going to go. And also, it sounds like the seed was planted. Okay, so and even after this, I'll end up somehow in some sort of foreign service or something like that. All that was very dim. Yeah. I mean, I had no specific in mind, and it certainly didn't have anything resembling a plan.

It was almost like looking at a distant mountain range and saying, one of those peaks, I'll figure out a way to get to one of those peaks. And then step by step, trail by trail, river by river, just keep finding your way forward for each pathway that takes you further into that. Of course, in those same years from about that moment over the dinner table to finishing high school, basically all of the space race happens. The early days of the space race all the way up to the Apollo 11 landing. Were you paying attention to that? I was mesmerized by it. Same thing. Look what these people are figuring out.

No one's ever done any of this before. They're figuring out how to do it. They're kind of step by step and a bit of trial and error. But the amazing experiences, the views they had, and again, I wonder what that would be like to see the Earth from that vantage point myself. I know what their pictures look like. What would it feel like to be the person seeing that scene, not just a girl on the ground looking at the picture? What would it feel like to be the person walking on the moon, not a human being on Earth watching it happen? That alone was pretty amazing. But what would it be like to be the explorer who's there? The master of all that equipment. One of the people, you created the plan. You're part of making it all

happen. You're not handed something to perform as a test. It's like, I sometimes liken it to a symphony or to a playwright. I'm on the stage as an actor performing the play I wrote. So the whole experience is part of you. What would that be like? Yeah. When at that earliest time, I mean, when you have this awareness and this curiosity and you're asking this question, what would it be like? I know down the road, this becomes a reality. But at that moment in time, was there a sense of even, well, maybe this could be me legitimately? Was there that level of possibility

or that wasn't even sort of like in your realm of possibility then? I don't think I thought at all about possible at that point. It really generated me, I remember just sort of a deep yearning. I would love for my life to have this kind of discovery and adventure in it. And I think it just became almost an unspoken commitment, a driving force. It's out there somewhere. We'll find a way. But it was not a particular, maybe it's astronaut or maybe it's trans. I didn't put specific labels on it at that point.

Yeah. But the draw, you know, the fire in the belly was. It was there. It was, yeah, it was not blazing fire. It was like the embers that will not go out. Yeah. So you start out studying, exploring Russian, but you have this, the undercurrent, you have the embers, sort of like this other thing, just kind of like there on the side, but always there. you when you're at Santa Cruz into earth science and oceanography and that whole thing? Because that is a profoundly different, or at least it seems like a profoundly different path than

studying Russian language. Yeah, the forcing function that moved my path over to the sciences was an unblinking demand from the university that as a declared language major, the first thing you're going to do in your freshman year is take three science courses. I was informed of this by my freshman advisor, who was a French lit professor. His wall was covered with Rousseau texts you laid out so he could walk back and forth and annotate them. And he was this jovial, friendly guy. And he had coached any number of French students through this before me. And he was having none of it as I argued. And he said, yeah, that's a dumb idea. And I laid out this and I know what I want. Yeah, that's fine. You're taking three courses. And by the way, he had pre-scouted several science courses that everyone had found interesting and really

informative and they were very well taught and not too hard for French majors. So I suggest you go for these three. And two of those were marine science classes. So the first quarter, the first term of that freshman year, the first term of that freshman year and the third term were fascinating out in the field, marine biology, general oceanography, the ocean as I'd really never understood it before and taught by these very vivacious, vibrant, passionate young scientists. And I think I kind of looked at my French prof in his quiet office with his pipe and his dog at his foot and Rousseau all over the wall.

And these two young guys were always out at the shoreline or up in the mountains and doing miniature adventurous things, but like every weekend. And I said, I'm going with them. That's amazing. What's interesting too, so for those who don't know, Santa Cruz is right on the coast in sort of like northern-ish California. And it's also kind of right next door to Monterey. It's on the north edge of Monterey Bay, in fact. Right, which is also this legendary place for the study of the oceans.

Right. And, you know, Cannery Row and Steinbeck and all of that great literature. It was not so legendary then. The aquarium and the research institute were not even glimmers probably yet in the Packard family mind. But still, it's a longstanding ocean heritage from the fishing fleets. You know, some of the first fisherman observations of El Nino were those Central Coast fishermen right after the Peruvians realizing something weird happens every few years. All the fish that are supposed to be here aren't, and all these fish that never are here suddenly are. So, yeah, it was – and it's one of the epicenters of early surfing on the continental United States.

So it's definitely an oceanic place. Yeah, I have a buddy of mine that actually moved to Capitola, which is sort of like right around there also. And he runs his own company, but he wanted to be able to wake up every morning and have like the perfect swell, which is exactly what he does. That's what you got, yeah.

Not a bad way to live your life. So you end up, eventually you go all in on this other side. You're in oceanography and our sciences and still languages at all or just like? Definitely still an interest in language because when I say, when I call myself an explorer, I don't just mean you go to some other geography or punch arrival tickets and get passport stamps. Every facet of geography, the landscapes, the landforms, the biota, the people, the cultures, I mean, all of that fascinated me. So I also had always wanted some chance to go live.

Back to that, what is it like when you're speaking and living in a different language? To go live somewhere, not just take the language in a class. And so my sights had been set from about eighth grade on doing a junior year abroad program. And that did not change just because I switched to the sciences. And so my sights had been set from about eighth grade on doing a junior year abroad program. And that did not change just because I switched to the sciences. The geography or the place I was interested in going changed from perhaps France or Germany to Norway, where they had geology you don't see any of in the continental United States and California, and a pretty solidly established oceanography program.

And so that's where I ended up doing my third year of university. Got it. So then you come back from there. When you come out, because I know eventually, sometime shortly after that, you also end up Navy Reserves. Was there a window between that I'm missing there? Yeah, there's a long span between my graduate work and ending up an oceanographer in the Navy. Okay. That came about 10 years into my NASA career. Ah, got it.

So that was sort of like an overlap. Yeah. So you come out then and you go into the world of oceanography. Yeah. I get my undergraduate degree in earth sciences with a specialty in marine. I've become familiar while I'm in Norway with the work of scientists at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and the Bedford Institute of Oceanography nearby. And, you know, the Atlantic and Pacific are very

different places geologically from a seafloor geology point of view. And probably because I loved Norway and it was right on my doorstep while all the plate tectonic stuff was blossoming, I really wanted to work in the Atlantic. So I went to Nova Scotia for graduate school and spent five years there being a deep sea geologist and mapping my own little corner of the seafloor and naming sea mounts and doing all sorts of cool things. Yeah. When you're doing that, how much of that exploration happens with you deep under the water versus you sort of like in the lab or you in a classroom, you studying? How much of that is actually you out there in the environment?

So a lot of it was me in the environment in that case, but it was kind of a remote sensing project. So always on a surface ship and using instruments that you could tow through the water or put on the bottom of the ocean to collect the kind of data that would let you psych out. How did the geology of this piece of the seafloor evolve? Yeah. What's happening just in terms of in the scope of your fascination, your interest while you're out there doing all of this work? I'm loving it. I own a little piece of the seafloor that no one's ever mapped before. So for the little kid that was always stealing the National Geographic maps to actually be making a map that's going to go into the records and discovering that because I charted these seamounts for the first time that I was entitled to name them.

I mean, that was like crazy cool. It's almost like taking it back to Piggly Whaley. Now I get to call it what I want. Yeah, no, that was super cool. But what I was becoming most fascinated in as an oceanographer and geologist was, I want to go see the actual geological landforms on the bottom. So I was at sea, my second cruise as a graduate student was on an international oceanographic expedition that was jointly French and the U.S., run out of the Azores. And it was the first time that small submersibles, little two-man submersibles, with enough depth capability,

were going to go down to these long ridges that run along the bottom of the oceans. These are the places where oceanic plates are actually coming apart. They're big rift valleys with active volcanoes. And I got to be a flunky and a grunt on that cruise with all the luminaries of the field who were getting in these little submersibles and going down and being, you know,

being like the field geologist on the ground and seeing all this stuff up close and personal. So that kind of became the next beacon on my horizon. To be in the submersible. I want to, yeah. And this was early enough that, I mean, they were the luminaries of the field.

There were only two women aboard ship. And I'll tell you how distinct the culture change was there. The captain of the ship that I was working on had his wife aboard. That was allowed. And we're going to head back into port, and all the VIPs from France and the United States are going to be out for this big celebration. And I have personally equipped one of the laboratories on the ship. I've driven the gear down from Nova Scotia. I've installed it on the ship.

I've been running the lab the whole time. And the ship's captain comes up and informs me as we're heading into port that she's going to need me to help serve hors d'oeuvres when we get to the port. And I, with my mother's caution about respect for your elders ringing in my ears, I managed to say politely that that would not be possible because I would have to be representing my university in the laboratory that I equipped. And then I turned quickly on my heel and got out of there before I did something my mother would not forgive me for. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Yeah. I mean, was the entire space that you were working in there, like, predominantly male at that point? The whole ship, except for me, one other graduate student, and the captain's wife, was male.

In fact, the bosun's mate on that ship had painted a line across the fantail of the ship and announced to us in no uncertain terms that no woman goes after that line on his ship, which just wasn't going to work because we had work to do after that line. And so we just largely ignored it. Yeah. I mean, did you feel this sense of, I guess, how did you experience that? I mean, knowing that you're fiercely bright, a hardworking person who's capable of anything and everything, and you showed up to do a job. Like I said, I think we just sort of said, yeah, that's not going to work. Yeah. No. The submersible, did you ever have a chance to go down one?

I did many, many years later in my while at NASA. And then finally, the best dive I got was just as I was leaving from my first stint at NOAA and heading out to Ohio. I did finally get down. Oh, so that was years later. That was years later. That was 1996. I did finally get down to those really amazing ocean vents where the crazy volcanic landforms exist. Oh, man. And I got to fly the submersible on the bottom for a little bit.

That was very cool. That sounds incredible. What makes you jump from oceanography, exploring the depths of the planet, to NASA? Well, the deep undercurrent of the interest is how does this planet work? Okay. And, you know, it's flora, it's fauna, it's geological processes, the people that live on it. So any, kind of any opportunity to get a fresh, new, deeper or wider perspective on that is intrinsically interesting to me. And the simple parallel I drew in my mind after I thought about the proposition a little bit is, I mean, this makes no sense to go 200 miles further up to keep trying to study the ocean bottom 12,000 feet underwater.

That's nonsense. That's not what NASA was looking for, was an oceanographer who would come try to do seafloor geology from orbit. They were looking for people that were scientists and engineers with an operational bent, the sort of practical skills to put together a field campaign or fly an airplane or work on a research ship. Because the way I came to think about the shuttle, and I think the way NASA was conceiving of it, is this is a research vessel. It doesn't go out onto the sea at 12 knots. It goes up into orbit at thousands of miles an hour. But fundamentally, it's meant to be a research

vessel and take experiments and operations with it on behalf of different teams on the ground. And in oceanography, the scientific team gets to go out to sea and sort of conduct their operations and then come back home and swap for another team. With the shuttle, we, the people that were called mission specialists, we were going to be the proxies for the scientists or the engineering teams that needed something done. Deploy my satellite, please. Fix this thing, please. Make these measurements. Run this instrument. They were going to be our colleagues and alter egos on the ground, but we were their eyes and ears and hands in orbit.

Yeah, incredible responsibility. It is. I mean, it's a crazy fun experience to get to fly in space. But, you know, some tens of people have put millions to sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in your hands. And frankly, their career prospects for five to 10 years to come and asked you to please, please go do right by me for the next five or 10 days. Yeah. So when you make that jump, was, how did you actually, I mean, was there an outreach to you? Were you just curious and looking to them? And then how, how does sort of like the moment happen where you're like, okay, so NASA, yes, I'm in. It's a crazy story. I went home for Christmas to California one year. I think this would have been Christmas of 76, I guess. And my brother, my 16-month older brother, is actually the flying nut in the family. For as long as I've been a map nut, he's been the flying nut. And he's a corporate jet pilot at this point with an engineering degree. So he's been following the whole NASA selection. He's already filled out a

form to be considered as a pilot and to be considered as a mission specialist. And he starts lobbying me that I should also apply. They explicitly want to have women and scientists apply. They're really eager. And how many 26-year-old PhDs can there be in the world? And I blew them off at first because my first thought was 12,000 feet of water is hard enough, you idiot. I don't need 200 more miles. That's crazy. And I went all the way back up to Nova Scotia and then a couple weeks later saw one of NASA's ads in some scientific journal. And that's when the other shoe dropped and I made the comparison, the analogy to a research ship. Well, that was a different prospect. I love doing the expeditionary part, whether it was helping my dad plan a fishing trip and drive the bass boat or flying little airplanes or my own little field

trips as an exploring young kid. I loved that, you know, plan it and do it and deal with what comes up along the way. And I'm good at it. So I thought, boy, and if by some odd chance you succeed, because they're going to have a gazillion people apply, and they don't need a gazillion, they need a few. By some odd chance, if you succeed to actually get to see the Earth with my own eyes from that vantage point, how can you not? You've got to at least try. It's like that question you had as a kid. Yeah, you've got to at least try. The odds are against you.

The probability is you're carrying on with your life as an oceanographer, which is pretty cool. I was still working on that, get into this immersive pathway. pathway. But you got to at least throw your hat in the ring. The worst that happens is they say no. So you did. How did you learn that you were in? So I had two tracks going at once because I knew the odds were very long. Right, so just do it and forget it. And I did. And I'm in the middle of so just do it and forget it. And I did. And I'm in the middle of writing up my thesis and I'm not the world's best correspondent

or administrative organizer, so it's gone and it's like falling completely out of my mind. And I was pursuing more conventional postdoctoral fellowships and one of them was at Columbia University, what was then called the Lamont-Thordy Geological Observatory. And I'm merrily chunking along, trying to type up my thesis and get through with all of this.

And the phone rings, and it's the professor at Columbia whose postdoc I would be if I was picked, a guy named Bill Ryan. And he's sort of knocking on my head saying, are you planning on answering the letter in which I offered you this postdoc, which was lost somewhere in my office, I'm sure. And I, you, oh, yeah, well, probably. But there is just this one other thing that I haven't heard on. And so we go into this conversation about the whole NASA thing.

And the serendipitous point is Bill Ryan had applied to be an astronaut in the immediately preceding NASA selection some nine to ten years earlier. The first time ever NASA selected scientist astronauts. And he'd been a finalist. And he, in the end, was glad he'd not been selected because those 11 people they picked in that class were still waiting to fly. And he had had himself a lovely career as a very prominent and successful oceanographer. But it made him really sympathetic and appreciative of where I was. So I actually had no idea where I stood at that point. I said, go call him up and find out what's going on.

So I think I applied in January or so of 77. And this is now late October. And I've not heard a word from NASA. And I reach finally the guys that are doing this, and their first response is, haven't we told you no already? You haven't told me anything. So he goes rummaging through.

I could literally hear him rustling papers in the background. He said, oh, that would be because we're going to interview you in a couple of weeks. So what does this mean? You had 1,000 or you had 10? Where does this fit in the how far into what stage of this am I? He gave me kind of no information about that at all, but said that they were – this was the final group of interviews and then decision, blah, blah, blah, and it would be announced by year's end.

So I let Bill Ryan know that, and he held my postdoc open. And he was really great. It's the classic line. He said two things that stuck with me and I had fun writing about them in the book. He said, so you understand the odds are that you are coming to be my postdoc. I mean, you can do math. The odds are you're coming to be my postdoc. But this is one you don't walk away from.

You make them tell you no. So I'll hold this open. And then by what great strokes of good fortune, they told me yes. Yeah. When that happens, what's your emotion in that moment? You know, numb, I think, was the first thing, because it is really as if the world, as I had known it, had suddenly been put on pause. I mean, sort of any ability to think about tomorrow or next or next is just stopped because some massive left turn is going to happen. No ability to really imagine it.

And, of course, the world lights up. NASA has not selected astronauts in nine years. It's a really big thing. I'm an American, but I'm living in Nova Scotia, so there's not going to be a whole lot of this in Canada. And so the switchboards light up, the press lights up, the university. It's just I'd never been in that kind of a whirlwind before, and it just happened in a flash. Was that – I mean, for somebody who's kind of like doing your own thing and just loving it and immersing yourself in the research and going out into the world, to then in the blink of an eye not just know that you were going to space, but the entire world was now curious about you and focusing on you and wanting to know more.

How did you experience that? Yeah, the implications of all that, I think, dawned on me in stages. NASA sent a film crew. This is the olden days, right? So it was an actual cellulose film crew. They sent a film crew out to the hometowns of each of the 35 people they had chosen and made a little brag flick about each of us. Like, that's never happened before. So all of a sudden, the guys I sailed with are wrapped into this because they want a sailing shot.

And so just watching all of that and how it worked through my laboratory and my apartment and the sailing community I was in was kind of crazy. It was just kind of a long for the ride and a bit exhilarating at the moment. And then it all went away. I mean, it was a film crew visit for a couple of days and then life sort of went back to normal. The larger reality of how different this would be in terms of living your life began to hit when we all reported down to Houston in, I think it was February, January or February of 78, for our first introduction. And one senior NASA gal there, the most senior person, I think, at the Johnson Space Center, or female at the Johnson Space Center, took the six of us, the first six women,

took us aside and tried to just give us a little bit of coaching and a little bit of situational awareness. There was going to be an introduce everybody moment, seats on stage, and then turn everybody over to media for interviews. And she realized, I don't think we had figured this out yet, out of a class of 35, there are six women, there are three African Americans, one Asian American. There have never been, NASA's never had an astronaut like any of those 10 people. So these 10 are the novelties.

And the other 25, extraordinarily accomplished and talented people, were far too much like the ones they'd seen before. So all the attention was going to go to the 10 odd people, if you will. And a couple of us were 26 years old. This was my first job straight out of graduate school. My first ever full-time job as astronaut. That's crazy. So grossly unprepared. I mean, no interviewing skills.

Just crazy. I'm just thinking how unprepared for every job that I've ever had was on my first day compared to showing up. Oh, yes, your job is astronaut. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, you walk into the Army as a recruit, you're unprepared for that. But you walk into the Army for the first time with four stars on your shoulder, like, whoa, you are seriously unprepared. That's wild.

And then you get dropped into this world of, I mean, it really is sort of like a completely different universe within NASA also. And it's not like, okay, so we have six months of training and then you're going up. I mean, this is an intensive, intensive physical, psychological, academic training window that lasts for years. Yeah, it really is. And we came in in 78. The shuttle was allegedly going to fly within a year, but of course that ended up being a three-year span. So we got put through a year-long crash course, you know, hyper-condensed grad school for astronauts kind of thing. Every facet of engineering and physical sciences and biological sciences that

could faintly pertain to spaceflight, we all went through together, all 35 of us. I had a PhD in geology and oceanography, meteorology, went through the basic classes, and medical doctors went through the basic anatomy with us. And then they just started plugging us into support roles out sort of in the bowels of the machine. I really kind of think of it as if they made a start at the mailroom. So you'd go do software verification work or some engineering advisory work and start to learn by working on the building block teams for 12 to 14 months. Learn what it takes to bring spaceflight together. Learn how the different pieces work. Get familiar with more of the technology. Learn the people and the hierarchy of the whole thing. And for us, it was 78 to, I think it was late, mid-82, so about four years before any of our class got assigned to a flight.

There were guys in line ahead of us, and they flew the approach and landing tests in the first four flights. And then starting with number seven, one or two of us at a time started getting slotted in, and we kind of all completed a first cycle in 1983, 1985. Yeah, and just to be clear also, because I'm just realizing, we probably haven't even mentioned that, we're talking about the space shuttle. We're talking the space shuttle. And the shuttle missions. Yeah, at the beginning of the space shuttle program. Its first four test flights and its first dozens of flights.

Right. It's fascinating also. It's sort of like the way you described the training. It's like when you go into these giant corporations corporations and they rotate you through all the different things and like you got to know a little bit about everything but then at the end of that they're like okay so pick the one you want to start with but for you the it sounds like the intention was different the intention was look there's only a handful of people that that are going to be on this you know really far away from the surface of the Earth. And the more each

individual can know about every part of this thing, the better it is for everybody. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, astronauts kind of need to be generalists and operators. We don't have to be the best scientist. I don't have to know as much about atmospheric physics as the person who created the experiment I'm operating. But I need to know enough about and about the scientific objectives that they have and certainly need to master the engineering and how their instrument interacts with the space shuttle. So generalist is good. I think another perspective on it that's occurred to me later in my career as I moved beyond it, and I've had some experience in the corporate world, if you're grooming or seasoning a cadre of people to be potential successors to the senior most people in the company,

the higher up in a company, the more responsibility you have for the totality, for all the interconnections, for all the interdependencies that you might not see if you're just in one role in one department. So some exposure to the finance side, the shared services side, the operating side, the engineering side, gives you a better aptitude if you do end up in the CEO seat to understand how those functions need to work together. Astronauts are not the CEOs. The astronaut, not even the pilot, not even the commander of the shuttle is the CEO of the mission. That's a person on the ground called the flight director, technically. But you have a very central and

pivotal responsibility and visible position. And so I think the role of astronaut is in part to be an integrator and a connector. And you will be better at that if you've had some insight and experience into the building blocks that come together to make a flight happen than if you just focused on your stick and rudder skills. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. You're the systems that you play a key role as systems integrator and systems operator. So get a sense of the whole system. Right. So you're in there for about four years training in all these different areas. And then you learn, okay, so I'm actually going up. What's that like when you actually learn, okay, so this has been real in terms of like, I'm here, I'm in the program, I'm training, I'm doing all this work, I'm learning all these things. But now it's about to get real on a whole different level.

Yeah. So I think when you're selected as an astronaut, you become a real astronaut to everyone who's not in the astronaut corps. And I certainly felt, and I think a lot of our classmates based on conversation over beers on different evenings, we moved the bar a little bit. We would, yeah, it becomes really real if I've flown and I've done a successful mission. And then I can really wear the title astronaut feeling like I completely fill out the jacket. Right now I've got the flight suit and I've got the nice pin, but I haven't actually done it yet. So to get tapped, put into a sequence, that starts a whole other training flow. You're back at the start of a learning flow that will get more and more intense and more and more detailed and specific to the particulars that will happen on your mission. Not the generic, how does the electrical system on a space shuttle work,

but the particulars of on your flight, this circuit will be connected to that experiment with that circuit breaker and that level of detail. Because you're the operator, and you're the troubleshooter, and you're the repair person. You're the wrench turner, if need be. You're the window cleaner, if need be. The five or seven of you aboard are all of those things.

So you start marching up that roadway as well. If you've been around aircraft operations or flight operations of any sort, you know how fluid schedules tend to be and schedules and launch schedules where the launch manifest was very, very fluid in the early shuttle days. So there's another sort of I'm assigned and we have a date, but I think I'll believe the date when the solid rockets ignite. And right up until then, something could shift. There could be a big technical problem that grounds the whole fleet for a while. There could be a problem with our payload that slips it to the right for a while.

So you're eager and you're racing along, moving at a very fast pace through this intensive syllabus of things that needs to get done. And eager for the months and days, months and weeks and then days before flight to shrink. But kind of always a little bit bated breath. You believe it when you see it kind of thing. That day finally comes, I guess, late 84? October 84. October 84.

You're in the Challenger. What's it like when you and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, Mike Collins. They walked this hallway. They walked this hallway. They suited up in this room. They went down this elevator. They walked out of this same doorway. They got onto a very similar vehicle and drove out to the launch pad. And I watched that as a 10 to 16-year-old girl. And, you know, a decade later, I'm a colleague. And six years after that, I'm doing it. And it was, I don't know, I drove a house of mirrors moment where of course, life's going to get real busy in a couple hours.

So very focused on what's ahead. But with these reflections passing through my mind about how amazing to actually now be the person who's walking down this hallway and getting into that van and driving out to that launch pad. And then sort of wondering how many little kids, girls, boys, both, how many little kids are watching us do this? And maybe getting that same fire in their belly, that same passion rising in them to be a part of something so amazing someday. When you board, do you call it the ship, do you call it the shuttle? The shuttle. So you board the shuttle you call it the ship, do you call it the shuttle? The shuttle. So you board the shuttle. Everything's checked.

It's go time. Can you even put words to the experience of liftoff? Sure, but they fall really short of the actuality. It's a crazy hybrid. It's partly earthquake. We used to tease it was like sitting in a dumpster with your friends beating on the dumpster with a sledgehammer. It's loud.

The first stage of a space shuttle was loud, percussive, because right now you're riding firecrackers, and they burn very turbulently, so that gives you the earthquake kind of thing. Somebody's pushing on the back of your chair. It's not bone crushing, but it's impressive. You've felt that kind of push maybe at the bottom of a roller coaster or maybe in a super soupy sports car that you punched off of a traffic light, but you felt it for a fraction of a second. And this goes on for eight and a half minutes. And somewhere in that first liftoff,

I remember realizing, I have felt about this kind of acceleration before, but this is really going on for a long time. Yeah, it's earthquake, rock concert, dumpster, giant pushing on the back of your chair. Yeah. Yeah. Emotionally, what's going through your mind during that experience? You know, I think I was just absorbing, trying to absorb the sensations, the physical sensations at that point.

It's, we're going. And just, you know, soak that all in. On a first flight, on my first flight, you've been through months and months and months of simulations. And every simulation of a liftoff goes wrong with two exceptions. The first time you do the practice, they let you see what liftoff probably will be like, nothing going wrong. And the very last training session before you go down to the Cape, they go, okay, let's just remind you, probably none of the weird stuff that we've thrown at you for months, probably none of that's going to happen. This is probably what liftoff will be like.

Every launch in between, two, three, five, ten things break. Alarms are going off all the time. Some fair number, they push both the mission control team and the flight crew. Their goal is to push you so hard, saturate you with so many things going on that you will invariably miss something. And so the ascent skills simulator lessons are colloquially known in the astronaut corps as ascent kills because you splash the orbiter in the ocean or you don't make it a number of times. So to be actually in the space shuttle for a real liftoff the first

time and sort of suspend that cynicism that comes from all the disaster scenarios, that was also sort of different. I was staring, I remember staring at the instrument panels very intently, waiting for the alarm, kind of not daring to believe that the next eight and a half minutes will really go smoothly and we really will end up in orbit. Yeah. But we did. Does the sensation of fear enter the equation at all for you, or is it literally like it can't be there to a certain extent? It can't be there as fear, as stop you in your tracks, chill in your tummy.

If really that's your reaction, we need you not to be on a spacecraft. Yeah. I guess that was sort of almost expressly screened out over time to a certain extent. Yeah, to a certain extent. I don't mean to say, I mean, individuals react differently. One of my classmates has written in his own books about his prelaunch experiences, and he writes candidly about night sweats and real fear. So the way he processed, I mean, it's risky.

It's hazardous. People do die doing this stuff. You're riding a bomb. You've got to understand what you're doing here. But different people process that fear and deal with it or process that risk, that hazard in different ways. But even this guy who's written about it when he's in the spacecraft has the ability to be there. You have to be there as part of the solution to anything that needs to be done. You can't be there as the person that's diving under the table.

Yeah. It's almost like there's no room for that at this moment in time. It's the guys in the front of the airliner compared to the people in the back of the airliner. Yeah. Zero to 17,500 miles per hour in eight and a half minutes. 2,000 miles an hour faster every minute in round numbers. Unreal. Unreal. It's quite a ride.

You get up, your first mission, eight days, 10 days? Eight days. Part of that is you also not staying inside the whole time. Yeah. The real treat of my first spaceflight, it was a pretty cool flight. One major set of the experiments and the satellite we were going to deploy were all about earth sciences. So I loved that. Because of those experiments, the cameras and the radars that were going to make measurements of different features on the earth, our orbital plane was inclined to the equator by 56 degrees so we were going to see all the territory on the earth between 56 degrees north latitude and south latitude

a lot of shuttle missions if they're not doing earth scientists stay within 28 degrees which is mainly oceans so i was delighted we were going to get to see so much of the world. And then the gravy on top of the icing on top of the cherry, the epitome of everything, I was tapped to do a spacewalk with Dave Leesma to demonstrate some new technology NASA was developing to refuel satellites. So I was pretty much a trifecta as far as I was concerned. I mean, so many curiosities around here, too. I'm going to try not to so many curiosities around here too. I'm

trying not to go too deep into that rabbit hole, but one is just the very first time you had the ability to take your own eyes and from space, look back and see the earth, what that experience was like for you. And then following immediately behind that is the minute you step out into space. Yeah, so the first, absolutely first moment I had a chance to see the Earth with my own eyes, I got in trouble. It was a fraction of a second after the main engines cut off, and I finally lifted my gaze from the instrument panels

and looked up through the six big windows that face forward, and we're upside down at this time. So there's this big arc of blue and white earth in the upper part of the windows. And it literally took my breath away. And without having any ability to think about it, I just blurted out, wow, look at that. And of course, the engines have just shut off. We're still in the middle of a critical checklist. So Bob Crippin, commander sort of shakes his hand at me a little bit and says, no, no, not yet. And of course, so now I'm thinking, great, eight and a half minutes in my first flight, I'm getting demerits from my commander. This is not the way I wanted to start.

But I'm not the only rookie that's had that eight and a half minute later reaction. It's breathtaking. The other fun part of that eight and a half minute story,. It's breathtaking. The other fun part of that eight and a half minute story, when the main engines cut off, a routine radio call in the shuttle time was for the commander to radio down to Houston, good main engine cut off, good MECO, and then a number. And the number was the velocity that he showed on his instruments. So Crip does that, you know, Houston Challenger, good MECO, 25668. And we're all expecting a nice little Capcom drawl to come back and say, Roger. This really angry British voice pops onto the airwaves.

Because eight and a half minutes after leaving the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, we're over England. And it turns out the Royal Air Force had some jets out on a training range 90 miles below us. And they thought they owned one of the radio frequencies that we were using. And so this guy gets on the radio to chew out whoever has jumped on his radio frequency. It was just hilarious. Some annoying kid like changes. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, it was just hilarious.

That's too funny. Stepping out into space. So step, of course, is the wrong verb. Okay. The guys who got the good fortune of landing on the moon stepped out of a lunar module because they were still in gravity. Only one-sixth what we have here on Earth.

But they could walk. They're in gravity. When you step out of the airlock on the space station or space shuttle, you're really swimming out. It is very much like swimming. And in fact, underwater tanks are the place that you can practice those activities. The only sort of semi-high fidelity way you can do that. So you're swimming out. And for us, we came out sort of on our backs. You would have thought we were on our backs looking up along the same direction of the tail of the orbiter. And the first thing you're thinking about is your safety tether because you are sort of a mountaineer here.

So there's, you know, attach one before you loosen the other one. When you finally get tethered in and start to move around a little bit to pick up your tools and things like that, that's when you have a moment to kind of pivot away. You have to pivot your whole body away from the shuttle to see the environment around you. And it's pretty amazing to have that without a window frame, to be sort of hanging off the space shuttle as if you were hanging off a treelim and just have this planet sliding by beneath your feet.

Carl Sagan called it a pale blue dot. We didn't get that far away. So I call it a vivid blue beach ball. Still sounds pretty good. Do you have any sense when you're out there like that of up or down or sort of perspective in terms of, I mean, you can orient yourself to like the pale blue dot, but without having the experience or the sense of gravity pulling you in a particular direction, do you have a sense of directionality beyond the visual? It really is just the visual because your inner ear is not giving you any signals and nothing is pulling you in some direction. And that's kind of part of the fun of working in microgravity is you can redefine the directions at will. So something that was always the starboard bulkhead, you can declare that to be the floor or you can declare it to be a ceiling. A door that used to come down a hallway and turn left through a doorway, you could declare that to be a hatch in the floor and just convince

yourself that you're floating along and diving through it instead of turning left through it. If you're working around, when we were working around the space shuttle, the shuttle itself was the common frame of reference because you're typically working on something that's attached to the shuttle and your crewmates in the cabin that may be helping with camera work or may be helping with the robotic arm, they're really operating that frame of reference as well. So the tail was up. Let's just sort of talk about the tail was up,

even if the tail was pointed towards the Earth. And we had a very particular kind of frame of reference vocabulary to keep ourselves straight about. What am I talking about the XYZ axis of the space shuttle and what am I talking about which way those are pointed right the apple watch series 10 is here it has the biggest display ever it's also the thinnest apple watch ever making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running swimming or sleeping and it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be You end up becoming the, tell me if I'm getting this right, the first U.S. woman to do a spacewalk. Is that at all even present in your mind before, during, or immediately after? Or are you just there doing the thing that you're here to do? And if it's not actually present at all, is there a time sometime later where it becomes something to you? It really was essentially not present to me from assignment up to doing it. It's my first space

walk. And, you know, if you'd like to do a second space walk, it's probably a good idea to succeed at the first one. So that's entirely where I was. It's an amazing experience. It's a complex experience. You're a pilot in command of your own spaceship. That's what a spacesuit was. It's an amazing experience. It's a complex experience. You're a pilot in command of your own spaceship. That's what a spacesuit is. It is your own body-shaped spacesuit and spaceship. So, you know, mastering all of that, being comfortable in it, and then so competent in it and comfortable in it that you can mainly focus on doing other work, not just on managing the system. So that was really all, and still is really what it was to me. I appreciate the opportunities the historical first gives me,

and principally the ones it gives me to hopefully inspire and motivate other young people. I never was someone who felt a big ego need to have fanfare. I didn't apply to become an astronaut to get press and headlines or to become famous. I did it for the adventure, the discovery, for the opportunity to be part.

I have to believe this space program has been a huge net benefit to our country and to humanity. And to get to be a part of the team that's doing those amazing things and opening the space frontier and bringing the power of the orbital perspective back to Earth, to get to be a part of that effort was an amazing thing.

And that's what drew me. So I could have been the 943rd woman to do a spacewalk and I would have approached it exactly the same way. Yeah. And in fact, your second mission, you end up on Discovery launching something which would make a profound difference on so many different levels. But in the intervening years, there was a huge tragedy at NASA. And in fact, so you come back down on the Challenger. 12, 14 months later, the Challenger goes back up. And this is a story that everybody remembers.

A minute, minute and a half into that flight, the entire thing just goes up in smoke and flames. And everyone was watching that. The news covered it in part also because it also, one of the crew was this, you know, like public school teacher. And this was the same vessel that you were on. What was going through your mind and heart when that happens? Well, I was not one of the people that was watching it on television.

I was actually on an airliner flying back from California. I had been out in the San Francisco Bay Area working on the Hubble Space Telescope, which we were slated to take to orbit in October of that year. And I'm just flying home. We did all our work in the middle of the night on Hubble, so I'm pretty exhausted. And I learned when we landed at Dallas to miss, and I was making my connection to my Houston flight. That's when I picked up the fact. I picked it up by calling the office to tell my secretary I was too exhausted to come into work. So I hadn't seen any news. I'm in this little bubble.

And it was just, you know, it was stunning. I mean, just she said the shuttle exploded, which was not a sentence that could compute. I could imagine in any number of other scenarios of how a shuttle might have been destroyed and a crew lost, but it exploded, was just not, just didn't register. So that was another one of those world-stopping, fully numb moments. And I think I was numb, disappointed, sad, angry. Who screwed what up? How did we screw this up? Something killed seven of our people, five of my folks, four of my classmates. We've got to figure out what happened.

And we've got to get back to fly. One thing I was really worried about, maybe foolishly, maybe needlessly worried, but with all the venting and trauma and anguish about the loss of the crew, and in particular the loss of Krista McAuliffe, somehow, I mean, I guess it's sensible that she became the icon of the lost crew. But if the country had decided that the pain of that loss was so great that we were just not going to do this anymore, not going to fly in space anymore, lay up the shuttle, I would have felt really cheated.

I would have felt like I had been snookered. I didn't think I was doing this just because it was good television or fun rides for people. The equation and the analysis I had done for myself when I applied to the program was a bother to worth, a value to the country versus the risk that I would be signing up to take if I went down this path. And I concluded as I spent a couple weeks thinking about that, and I'd run up around airplanes and small boats, I'd known people who crashed airplanes and were killed. This was not novel to me.

But my conclusion was the value of this to the country and to mankind is enough for me. And you have to bank on the competency and good faith of a lot of people you won't ever get to see or know or coach or buck up yourself. I'm confident enough in that and I believe enough in the value. That's why I was willing to take the risk. And if we were going to quit after one accident because it was sad television, that would have made me crazy. I guess the program went on a semi-haotist,

not entirely shut down, but everything was grounded for a window of time. The fleet was grounded. The program was very busily trying to analyze what had happened and find the root causes and figure out the mitigating actions and make the corrections, the re-engineering, whatever adjustments in either the hardware itself or the way we were operating the hardware, what adjustments do we need to make to remove or lower the risk of anything like this happening again? Yeah.

Behind the scenes, you and your team are also still working on what would eventually become the Hubble telescope. And this becomes the second mission where you go back up, I guess about two years later, 86? 1990. Oh, it was 90. Okay, so it was a longer window of time than I thought. So you finally go up and you, you know, the Hubble, I think we've all heard of the Hubble, right?

It's this thing in the sky that takes awesome pictures, right? Explain, like, why this really is so profoundly important. Well, it's important to astronomy is a bit of a stretch to ask a geologist to explain very well. Just in terms of like a general context, in terms of like us and what it means to be here and how much value it provides. I mean, Hubble is an amazing instrument

in a number of ways. And the idea of putting a telescope above the atmosphere arose, I mean, a decade before Sputnik even. It's a way early idea. to put a telescope up above the atmosphere, but to have astronauts tending it, maintaining it. This idea comes out at a time there hardly aren't any astronauts yet. It's like 1963. So by the time we come along, it's a real telescope.

It's about the size of a school bus. It exists. It's been built. It has an architecture that's friendly to maintenance. It's easy to get at the pieces you might need to change. But there's not yet been the detailed work done to be sure that you have the tools and the other equipment that will actually let you do that maintenance. And that was sort of a center part of what Bruce McCandless and I were assigned to do from 1985 when we were tapped for the flight until whenever it went into orbit,

which ended up being 1990 instead of 1986. But we could foresee even then that the size of the mirror, the capability of the instruments, even the first-generation instruments, it had such promise to revolutionize astronomy in so many ways. And Lyman Spitzer, who first wrote the motivating proposal in 1946, I mean, his description of what this telescope might do was extraordinarily prescient and how revolutionary it could be. So we were all thrilled at that prospect of being able to deliver an instrument like this

that might so transform how we understand our universe, how it works, how stars form, what are galaxies, what else is out there, our place in all of this. I think what I certainly couldn't have foreseen, and maybe nobody really did, was how the rise of the computer age on a sort of parallel path would intersect with Hubble and bring another set of transformations. Because Hubble and its images have entered pop culture and pop art and the popular imagination in a way that I can't think of any other scientific instrument ever that has had as widespread and as pervasive an impact through general society as Hubble has. You see it on people's clothing and on lunchboxes and on posters. The imagery is everywhere.

It's that dramatic. It's that dramatic. It's that inspirational. And the telescope that's up there today in 2019 is, I would guess it's probably about a thousand times better instrument than the one that we put in orbit in 1990. Because this foresight about giving it an architecture that makes it maintainable and the prep work that Bruce and I and other engineers did from 85 to 90, to be sure we had the full toolkit that would really work. And we knew the details. You'd never get up to the telescope and say,

hey, guys, the wrench doesn't fit or I can't reach this. That preparatory work let five different shuttle crews not only fix things that had broken or gone wrong, but take up the next generation of detector, the next generation of solid state memory, make everything more reliable, more efficient, better power density, and far better resolution for the astronomy. So it's probably about a thousand times better instrument, at least, than what we put up in 1990. Yeah, I mean, that's amazing. And especially considering what happened shortly after.

So you guys, you go up, you have a successful mission, you launch the Hubble, and then realize that the images are coming back fuzzy. So this, like, years and years and a zillion dollars of investment and tons of research and thousands and thousands of people hours. And something's not quite right. And everybody's waiting for the super incredible picture. That's going to be this galaxy as seen from Mount something or other telescope. And here it is seen from Hubble. And it's going to be, you know, the scales will fall from your eyes and you will see the universe as you never did before. And it won't focus.

And Steve Hawley and Charlie Bolden spent some anguished weeks worrying as they were lifting the telescope out of the payload bay where it just fit by the skin of its teeth. It was a very tight fit. And it had kind of oscillated and wafted around a little bit as they were lifting it out. So they'd been very ginger about how they put it up out of the payload bay. But then it turns out we can't make it focus. And they spent a couple of anguished weeks thinking, oh, hell, we must have bumped it

a little bit and something's out of alignment and, oh, you know, we killed Hubble telescope. So I know they were relieved. They were probably the only two people on planet Earth that were relieved to discover that the real flaw was in the mirror, the big mirror itself. And this then becomes the story of some lateral thinking and a clever engineering insight that truly popped into a Hubble engineer's mind when he was in the shower one morning at a meeting in the Netherlands and thought about how you can move shower heads up and down on a rod and bend and pivot them different directions. And that gave him the flash of inspiration to think about how could you get, the trick is I need to get new optics, either lenses or mirrors into the guts of the telescope. How do I do that? It's in orbit, it's built, it's assembled, and I'm talking like right into the guts of the telescope. And the insight was, well, we've got boxes that we have instruments that put optics right in the middle of the telescope.

They're the science instruments. We could take one of those out if I could figure out how to get the new mirrors in there very, very precisely. So the bad news was you had screwed up and the mirror was wrong. The good news was you screwed up very precisely. So the bad news was you had screwed up and the mirror was wrong. The good news was you screwed up very precisely. And so you could calculate precisely the fix you needed just the way your eye doc can calculate the fix they need to give you a prescription lens. And then the trick was get them in there. And that's where this showerhead inspiration became the idea for a device with multiple arms that could pop these mirrors into place and

intercept the bad light and turn it into good light. So the weird, like the weirdo in me is, is, is thinking to myself, what if that one guy preferred baths over showers? He's too tall to fit in a European bathtub. So, so, I mean, it, it takes some time, but, but, but that is, you know, this repair is actually able to be made and it is made. And like you said, now, gosh, we're going on 30 years. 30 years next April. Where this is still up there. Like you said, it's the evolution that's happened and what's there now compared to what was there is kind of stunning and what is producing and sending back to us.

Well, the engineering commitment when it was built was for a 15-year life. So it's already doubled it. So it's doubled its life and that's down largely to the maintenance. You can repair and replace batteries and solar arrays and tape recorders. So you've been able to keep it running and you've been able to upgrade the onboard technology every time you replace something. So that gadget that was built in the early 90s and installed in 1993 to correct Hubble's vision, it's no longer needed. You can go see it at the National Air and Space Museum. It was brought back to Earth. Because each new instrument, when the science was upgraded, a new observing program, a new idea, that

team of new scientists would build that optical prescription into their instrument. And so it's all new optics and new detectors and just an amazing machine. You end up doing one more mission and then finally come down. After that, you've now left the planet three times you have experienced things that the smallest smallest smallest percentage of percentage of human beings have and will ever experience and you as an adventurer who also clearly has this bigger sort of sense of civic duty comes a time where you decide, okay, this season is ended. What leads to that decision? There were a couple of things that led to that decision.

One was I was having a lot of interesting opportunities in my Navy work and in some collateral assignments that NASA had given me to step up and have a leadership role in different projects and activities. The astronaut office is a pretty flat organizational place, so there's not a lot of, there's really not a lot of capability to develop leadership talents. And starting in the program at age 26 as a totally wet-behind-the-ears baby, I'm just kind of reaching that early mid-career point where I'm starting to think about my own leadership capability

and what to do with it, how to work on developing it. And secondly, I had noticed, I think, in the years between the Hubble flight and my third flight, my third flight was, again, very much oriented towards understanding the Earth, Earth sciences, atmospheric physics in particular. And I had noticed that I was beginning to get more and more interested in following what was happening in the geological and Earth sciences literature. Something was sort of pulling me back to Earth.

And a final piece of that, I think, was our third flight came not long after the first Persian Gulf War. So as we looked down over the area around Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, you could still see this big black smudge where the ashes had fallen out from the thousands of oil wells that were torched. A good friend of mine was the chief scientist at NOAA at the time, and I was hearing from her when we talked about the kinds of issues along the coastal zone that they were worried about with the fallout and the consequences of battle.

And there I was looking down from orbit, the vantage point that all of them kind of wished they could have to see the whole area in context. And something in me now wanted to be active in a role that helped bring the space vantage point back down to Earth and make it matter, make it of value to issues and to decisions that we all face here on Earth as heads of household or heads of company or heads of state at every different level, how we interact with our environment, what kinds of decisions we make, and really be very richly informed by the space perspective and keeping the pulse of the planet. That's kind of what NOAA does. The simple distinction I would draw between NOAA and NASA, besides NOAA doesn't have astronauts, is NOAA's business really is to connect knowledge of the Earth and understanding of the Earth, measurements,

monitoring, connect that with real people facing real issues, making real decisions, and be that sort of broker and packager of information that will help them. And then as it turned out, not long before my first flight, this friend who was the chief scientist needed to step down from her post for personal reasons and called up and told me she wanted to suggest me as her replacement. I said yes and explored that possibility with one visit to the NOAA administrator and then put it out of my head and went off to complete my third and final flight. But he called the day we landed. In fact, he called like moments after I had changed on my flight suit and said that I was indeed the person he wanted to pass along to the White House as the prospective nominee.

And it felt right. It made sense. Yeah. Was there a moment or a window of time where you had any sense of grief following, like, the decision to say, okay, so this chapter is closed? Like, I, unless something changes in some dramatic way, like, my time in space is now behind me. You know, I don't think there ever was anything resembling grief. I mean, I'd had three great flights, you know, great cruise, remarkable experiences.

I characterized it as the perfect blend to me is if you're glad to be going but sad to be leaving. That's probably about right. Good people, great times. Never have, probably never have a headline font as big as my astronaut fonts. But it was done. It was good. It was enough.

Yeah. And you take that experience and all of the, not just knowledge, but profound shift in perspective, I guess, to now NOAA. For those who don't understand, what is NOAA, actually? So the acronym is National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Right. And it's an agency that sits within the Department of Commerce because its purpose is information that helps the economy thrive. And it came about in 1970, Richard Nixon signed it into law, to bring together under one roof the scientific agencies that focus on understanding the oceans and the atmosphere, how they function and how they interact with and how they touch and impact society.

Yeah, and it's basically all day, every day, it's gathering billions and billions and billions of data points from literally everywhere from deep underneath the ocean surface to all over the land, up from the sky, looking back down and feeding into like massive supercomputers and along with really intelligent people trying to figure out what does this mean and how does it help us in some way? Right. It is your National Weather Service. It is your Tsunami Warning Service. It is every nautical chart you ever touch. It is your National Marine Sanctuaries.

It is countless things that touch. NOAA touches every American life pretty well every day, at least in the form of your weather forecast. Whether you get it from some app on your phone or your television broadcaster, it's NOAA data and NOAA models and NOAA experts that originate the information that's coming to you. Yeah. What's it like for you being part of this one giant, you know, one federal agency where you're part of a small crew, but also part of a big bureaucracy, but they're very discrete missions and you're working with a small group of people together to then step into a large federal agency with levels and levels of bureaucracy. And it's also, it's a political appointment.

So you're like, you're used to navigating what it's like to be in the most extreme environments deep underneath the ocean surface and, you know, like a zillion miles up above the planet. This is a different challenge. Yeah, it was. I think I was probably about a B, maybe B minus student on how organizational dynamics work when I shifted over to NOAA and, you know, got a crash course and became awfully good at it, actually. But and to me, it became awfully good at it, actually.

And to me, it became an interesting jigsaw puzzle. There's still such clarity of purpose and sense of service and mission within NOAA, and NOAA is significantly smaller in terms of total number of people. If you can find that sense of shared purpose and shared mission, then it's about finding the ways to keep people moving towards that common direction. You have no point having a personal fight over whether 2 plus 2 is 4 or 2 plus 2 is 5. And at some point, if we're both serious about putting the right weather forecast out, whoever's defending the 2 plus 2 is 5 position is going to give up because someone's going to lose their life over that. As we sit here, I guess a little over two years ago, your time at NOAA wrapped, which feels like it's kind of like this was the beginning of a new season for you.

So over this, I'm curious now, having all these incredible experiences and being such a fierce adventurer, what is this season, what is the adventure that's teeing up for you now? So I consider myself rewired rather than retired. Got it. And I'm serving on a number of boards, some corporate and some nonprofit boards. And I really enjoy that from the point of view of the opportunity to sort of critique and join in and help shape strategy and then some of the tactics to achieve that strategy. But it's kind of an overview effect role that I really enjoy. I've got a gaggle of contemporary and younger associates that I'm kind of coaching and mentoring

in an informal fashion. And I really like having the time availability and the mental bandwidth availability to really be present with them and talk with them and spend some time to appreciate and understand where are they and what are they wrestling with instead of shooting off a quick missive between 34 other emails. I've lived in Columbus, Ohio for 23 plus years. It's a great community to live in. And I'm also really liking having time to plant and cultivate some of my seeds there. So I've got more time for other people now in a way that the intensity of my earlier careers didn't really quite let me do. And my bucket list item, I'm still doing adventuring.

I have the great good fortune to have worked for a long time with outfits like National Geographic and Lynn Blatt and Silversea. So I get occasions to go off to fun places like the High Arctic or the Antarctic. My bucket list item was to have a puppy and have the time and the flexibility to enjoy raising a young dog and just hanging out with a pooch. And do you? I do. Awesome. So as we sit here in the context of a good life project, feels like a good place to come full circle also. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life,

what comes up? To explore and to learn and to give. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. Thank you. then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next

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