Instant Genius - Kathryn D Sullivan: What is it really like to walk in space?

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

Kathryn D Sullivan made history on 11 October 1984 when she became the first American woman to make an Extravehicular Activity, something most of us will know as a space walk, and in this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, she explains how maybe ‘walk’ isn’t the most appropriate way of describing it. She also reveals the importance of planning over plans, the influence of the Hubble Space Telescope, and whether this year’s news story about spacesuits for women was really as problematic as the headlines suggested. Let us know what you think with a review or a rating wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Mark McCaughrean: How do you launch a successful space mission? Monica Grady: What is the future of space science? Why is the Moon landing still relevant 50 years on? – Kevin Fong The most mysterious objects in the Universe – Colin Stuart Gaia Vince: What part does culture play in our evolution? Chris Lintott: Can members of the public do real science? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I felt more like a composer that wrote the score to a symphony and now was getting to perform it because our spacewalk, for example, did not start as a textbook you had to memorize and parrot back to a teacher. The checklist for our spacewalk started as blind pages. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team

with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Oh, and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, and this week our online assistant, Sarah Rigby, was lucky enough to talk to one of the few people

to have walked out in the vacuum of space. Catherine D. Sullivan made history on the 11th of October, 1984, when she became the first American woman to make an extravehicular activity. something most of us will know as a spacewalk. And in this episode, she explains why maybe walk isn't the most appropriate way of describing it. She also reveals the importance of planning over plans, the influence of the Hubble Space Telescope, and whether this year's story about spacesuits for women was really as problematic as the headline suggested.

She kicks things off by telling us how she got her start at NASA and began her path to becoming an astronaut. He came out of college with a degree in geology focused on ocean science. So a PhD in the same vein, all intending to become a deep sea oceanographer. NASA opened the gates to selecting space shuttle astronauts just as I was finishing. So I joined NASA straight out of graduate school in 1978. And between 1984 and 1992, flew three space shuttle missions. Then was feeling the urge to move back towards the Earth sciences and some role in which I could help make

the space vantage point really matter to decisions we have to make every day here on Earth. That took me to another agency called NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the early to mid-90s as their chief scientist. Then I made another little detour and spent a decade running a hands-on science museum in Ohio, and then a short stint at the University, Ohio State University, in a science technology policy role, back to the NOAA Oceans Agency, and now I'm just doing some board work and consulting. Semi-retired or rewired, I think you would call me today.

So in your career at NASA, you were one of the first female astronauts that they trained, and there's a picture I really like from your book that was taken just before your first spaceflight as you're waiting to board, and it's you and your colleague, Sally, ride, checking your watches. Could you please tell us the story of that picture? Yes, it looks like two intrepid astronauts about to embark on a mission, carefully synchronizing their watches as astronauts and military people do in every movie right before they go into something very intensive. In fact, we were just standing around in that little ante room right outside the space shuttle hatch. You have to load people into the space shuttle in a certain sequence.

And so it turned out Sally and I were the final two to be loaded in. And we're standing there waiting around. And we thought it probably looks a little odd that we're just standing here waiting around with nothing to do. So in a mischievous moment, we looked at each other and said, we should look like we're doing something and had that thought about you always synchronize your watches and movies. So we pretended to be synchronizing our watches. We're each wearing two watches because there's so many different times. sequences to keep track of. So we pretend to synchronize our watches and actually what we're saying to each other are comments like, yeah, I think we've done this for long enough. I wonder what the

news anchors are saying right now. Do you wonder if anybody knows that we're faking this, just having a good joke of it while we waited to get on board. And then you went onto your first spaceflight. So could you please tell me, could you please describe the experience of going on your first spaceflight? Well, there's a psychological experience and a physical experience, I think, for a first-day flight. And the psychological experience is a very long spell of anticipation, you know, hoping you get selected to a crew, hoping you pass all your rookie tests successfully, frequent utterances of the phrase that's known as the astronaut's prayer, which is please God don't let me screw anything up.

And then, you know, finally the sort of building towards this Christian, of being on a launch pad with a fully fueled rocket actually ready to go in, you know, not many minutes more off into outer space. And then the fiscal part of it is really begins most intensively at liftoff. You've heard other people's descriptions and stories and, and there are simulators that do a pretty decent job of making you aware of what sorts of shaking and sounds you'll hear during the takeoff so that you can figure out how to pay attention to the things that you need to pay attention to. But it is physically a really impressive, very impressive experience. It's 7 million pounds of thrust in rough numbers, lifting you off the earth

and space shuttle and everything altogether only weighs about 5 million pounds. So that's a strong push in the back. You jump off the planet pretty quickly. And part of the liftoff is like being on a shake table or being in an earthquake because the solid rocket boosters on the space shuttle stack were gigantic firecrackers, basically. And they were very turbulent as they burned. And all that turbulence rattles you pretty strongly inside the space shuttle. And then once they drop away, about two minutes in, you have another six minutes of continued strong, not bone crushing, but strong push against your back as the three remaining engines speed you up towards orbital velocity. So you realize that the acceleration force pushing through your back is only three times the force of gravity at the maximum, which is not terribly hard.

But you've never felt that kind of push on your back go on for that long. Maybe you've felt a burst of it at the bottom of a roller coaster hill or in a very spiffy, sports car, but you never felt it go on for eight and a half minutes. And it certainly never started with a two-minute earthquake as well. So that's, you know, eight and a half very intense minutes that my first flight, I was striving to keep an eye on all the instruments and gauges and make sure nothing was going wrong on us like it always did in all of our simulator sessions. On my second and third flights, I chose to ride up to space on the lower deck where there were no such concerns to bother me because I just wanted to absorb the sounds and the sensations

of being thrust off the planet by this amazing machine. Yeah, and while you were up there, you became the first American woman to carry out a spacewalk. What was that experience like? Well, walk is the wrong verb for the kind of work we did around the space shuttle or that astronauts nowadays are doing around the space station. Because you're in microgravity. So you move with your hands as if you're moving along a big jungle gym,

a bit of exercise equipment. And you feel more like a scuba diver. You're not sinking or floating anywhere. You can move your entire body plus the spacesuit with the touch of a finger. We had a fairly short task to do in the scheme of things, an engineering test out in the cargo bay of the space shuttle that took about three and a half hours. And then one antenna had misfired on the space shuttle itself, and I needed to do one extra task to get that antenna back into a position

where we could bring it back home. So it was a pretty short, pretty intense, a couple of three hours. Happily, our boss, our mission commander, Bob Crippen, watched us come out of the hatch. We could tell we were, David Leesman, I were completely focused on all the steps of our different tasks. and he very quickly ordered us to stop and to pivot ourselves around so we could really take in where we were because you trained to do a spacewalk in a very accurate model of the space shuttle that submerged in a gigantic pool.

And you become so familiar with working in that environment and become so natural. But Griffin realized that we were trucking along as if we were back in the training pool. And bless us as hard, you wanted us to be sure that we took in the fact that there was no water there, there was no scuba divers there. And that blue thing sort of above us was not the surface of the water in a giant pool. Now it was actually the earth and the surface of one of the great oceans on our planet. So those moments when you can break away from concentrating on your task to take in where you are above the earth are really impressive. They etched themselves in your memory. Do all astronauts react in the same way when they first take in that site?

I think largely the same way. The particulars will depend on a lot of your background. I had been fanatic about maps and geography since a little girl. So I was not as dazzled. I was not confused by the geography I saw. I was just rabidly eating it up and eager to see the next site and very aware geographically of where we were. but seeing places I'd either read about or sometimes traveled to but certainly studied on maps,

seeing them in a very different context and texture now that I was looking at them from sort of that god's eye vantage point with my own eyes. Others are sort of dazzled by the scale of things. I think some of my crewmates who I think were immersed in just the engineering right up until that moment that kind of had the scales fall from their eyes and suddenly became the most avid geographers you've ever met. And we're always tugging on me, you know, where's that, what's that? So it's a little different, but I think the sense of awe,

the sense of some really context-changing comprehension of what our home planet is and what our place on it and in the universe is, I think there's common elements of that to everyone because the scale of the experience and the perspective of the experience is so completely unlike anything you've ever seen or tried to absorb ever before in your life. What surprised me that hadn't really occurred to me until I read about it in your book was just how highly choreographed the tasks you do during a spacewalk really are. Could you tell us a bit about just how much planning and preparation goes into one of those?

So one of the famous models of the astronaut corps back in my day was plans are nothing but planning is everything. And we would do a lot of detailed planning of every aspect of the mission and a spacewalk, knowing full well that when we got to that point in time, undoubtedly some circumstances would be different than the ones we had assumed and you'd have to adapt. But there are a couple of factors involved here. One is time in orbit is a very precious commodity. So it's incumbent on the NASA team and the crew to be sure you're using it both as effectively as possible and also as efficiently as possible. Second thing is, in our case, for example, on the shuttle, we astronauts were proxies for other scientists or engineers whose experiment or his project we were carrying out for them.

So there's a delivery responsibility to be sure you get things done. And overall that breeds the sense of the importance of reliability of assuring we can get things done. So you do a lot of planning to live up to and rise up to that level of performance and assurance. The other factor is a spacewalk looks like two people cavorting around outside the shuttle or the station. but it's actually many different teams, you know, interacting together the way, you know, the top-notch world football team would interact. And so the practice and preparation and choreography helps ensure that each part of the team is ready, ready at exactly the right thing with the right time when that moment comes.

And you're not confusing each other. You're not failing to be there at the right time. You're not creating causing problems. gaps, time delays that again can become domino factors in not getting the work done that you need to get done. And that sounds very dried. I mean, I think maybe that may come across to people as, oh my goodness, you're just sounded of a robot going out there, you know, checking off each step. I always felt very differently about it. I felt more like a composer that wrote the score to a symphony and now was getting to perform it because our spacewalk, for example, did not start

as a textbook you had to memorize and par it back to the teacher, the checklist for our spacewalk started as blind pages. We sat down with the engineers and we wrote it. We composed it. We wrote it. We refined it, just like a composer would refine the score to a symphony. And then we were up there performing the music that we had written. So it didn't feel like a dry robotic experience to me at all. It felt like finally getting to be on stage and perform the spectacular symphony

that I had written with my teammates. Did the knowledge that you were one of the first women ever to perform a spacewalk, did that make you feel like you were under any additional pressure than your male colleagues, or did your astronaut training just carry you straight above that? A combination, I think, of my prior experiences in my astronaut training. I never worried about that. The only issue in my mind is we've got tasks. They've got to be done, period.

And so it was entirely the challenge to me as an individual to be sure I was trained and ready and able to do my bit in carrying out all those jobs. I could have been the 743,000th woman to do a spacewalk, and I would still have had that obligation and that focus on my commitment, my responsibility to the shuttle, to the rest of my crew, to the engineers whose experiment we were carrying out for them. So it made no difference to me how many astronauts had done spacewalks before me or how many of them were, you know, male, female, red, white, or blue. It's about now. It's about this spacewalk and this performance. And that's all it's about.

Absolutely. And you played an important role in the history of the Hubble Space Telescope. Could you tell us a bit about why you think the Hubble Space Telescope was such an important satellite? Well, the Hubble Space Telescope has absolutely revolutionized astronomy, not just in the scientific findings, but also in how astronomy is done nowadays. That's partly about it being the first really major observatory scale astronomical instruments to be put into space. And it's partly about Hubble's timing lining up with the blossoming of the computer age that we're now still living in. And we could recognize those of us on the crew that put the telescope into orbit in 1990. We all sort of sent that potential and joked amongst ourselves that every astronomy textbook we had ever used in college. And everyone that was in use in a college classroom right then would pretty soon have to be burned because it would be obsolete once Hubble got going.

So it revolutionized how scientists do astronomy globally. It's arguably the first, I think the first telescope that really brought the cosmos into the public imagination. I mean, I see the Hubble Space Telescope on the side of hired moving vans and on clothing in stores and on lunch boxes that kids take to work. And, you know, it becomes a decorative pattern. It's gotten into the public art and pop art and public imagination in a way that no bit of astronomy has ever done before. you know, rivaling Star Trek or Star Wars for a space place in the popular imagination. And it's, you know, it's running still today coming up towards twice the design lifetime that the engineers committed to. Not only is it still running, but it's about a thousand times better telescope today than it was when we put it into orbit in 1990.

And that's because engineers going all the way back to the middle 1960s had the foresight and the design skills. to make the telescope maintainable. I mean, in the mid-60s, the space age almost had not begun yet, and yet you've got engineers planning a telescope the size of a school bus and presuming that astronauts will be able to go up and fix and replace whatever gets broken. There'd been almost no spacewalks ever done at that point, and yet engineers are not only imagining this prospect, but they're creating the technical ability to do it.

And the crew that I worked on, my spacewalking buddy on that flight, Bruce McCandless and I, with some engineers at NASA's Huntsville Center and at Lockheed Martin, our job was to take that general idea of hypothetically being able to maintain the telescope in orbit and to actually design and build all of the tools and equipment that it would require to do that. And it was important for us to do all of that work before we put the telescope in orbit, orbit because we could go out to the telescope with every tool and every bit of equipment. And we could confirm, we could verify, you know, this wrench does indeed fit on all of those fittings. And, you know, there's enough room to turn it. This repair procedure will work.

It is possible to get at that box and take it out. And so just add that, I come back again to assurance to reliability. It was, I think, our job to set the equipment foundation that guaranteed that any shuttle crew that went up to fix the Hubble telescope far into the future could start from a solid foundation of high confidence that every tool in their toolkit had been proven to work on the real telescope. They had plenty of other things to get right and to be able to master to actually do those repairs. But please God, let them knock it up there and say, hey, guys, the wrench doesn't fit.

So shortly after your team deployed Hubble, as I'm sure many of our listeners will know, there was a bit of a disaster in that it couldn't quite focus correctly. That must have been quite a devastating revelation after you'd worked so hard on getting it deployed. It was way felt crushed by it as the crew that put it up there, but I can only imagine the even greater depth of disappointment and despair, the whole engineering team that had built the Hubble,

but which had spent decades doing that for them to discover that hidden inside the telescope undetected until just that moment was an almost fatal flaw. And of course, the politics around that, the remonstrations and criticisms from the Congress and the ridicule from the media, that was all just salt on a very deep wound already. I cite in the book a remark I found in an article that struck me as, was capturing the moment just dead on in a sentence. I can't remember now the name of the individual who said it, but he said it was as if an eagle had turned into a bat.

It's this elegant grand machine that's suddenly not worth anything at all, despite all of the investment made in it. It was a crushing moment that could well have crushed all of NASA. But fixing it was quite an achievement of engineers. Could you please just describe how it was fixed? Well, there are two bits of engineering to how it was fixed. The really clever, creative bit was figuring out how do you install corrective lenses in a telescope that's already 300 miles above the Earth

and moving at 17,500 miles an hour. You know, we all know how our eye doctor puts corrective lenses into eyeglasses or contact lenses for our eyes. For Hubble, you used mirrors instead of transparent glass. The trick was, how do I get the correction into the telescope? That was a flash of insight that came about during, actually during a morning shower, as it turns out, where one engineer thought about the way you can adjust a showerhead, move it up or down or bend which way the water goes,

and thought that's exactly the kind of movable arms that we need. and then realized back to the maintenance planning, the Hubble ability to remove and replace the very large astronomical instruments, they gave you the pathway that you needed. So there are four large instruments at the back end of Hubble about the size of old-fashioned telephone booths. So the idea was we'll sacrifice one of those. We'll take that box out. We'll build an exact replica box on the ground.

And instead of scientific gear inside, we'll put the, these little movable arms that carry the right number of mirrors. And that box is designed to go right into the light path. So that's what we'll do. So the flash of insight from a morning shower, the fact that engineers had been planning since the mid-60s to allow for these exchanges of scientific instruments, and then the tools and equipment that we had put into place to be ready for the maintenance

missions, all those came together in 1993, and resulted in complete success in fixing Hubble's eyesight. So if it had been, say, any other satellite that hadn't been designed in this remarkable way to be completely maintainable, you might not have been able to fix it like that and maybe wouldn't have got all these amazing images that Hubble sends back every day. That's right. The fact that the architecture of Hubble was set out to be maintainable, modularized, accessible, standard fittings so you don't need 1,400 tools, 2 will do, all of those sorts of principles, set up the framework for being able to do it, having the equipment that was reliable, helped being in an orbit that is accessible by a very capable vehicle like the space shuttle

helped. Any other spacecraft, if it was in a place that the shuttle could get to, you could grab it and bring it home and refurbish it. NASA had done that several times in the mid-1980s, but to be able to repair, replace, improve something in orbit, as now has been done for almost 30 years with Hubble, that is still a one-off. The space station arguably is the second example in that class. But that's it, just two in all the years of living and working in space. So earlier this year, NASA finally announced that they would be carrying out the first

all-female spacewalk, even though it ended up being delayed after there were not enough of the right-sized spacesuits. And at the time, many people said that this was a result of space exploration being designed with men in mind, with men as the standard and then sort of retrofitted to fit women as well. Do you think that's the case? I think that's a fair description of much of the timeframe. with the specifics around the current spacesuit that's being used are a little different. That space suit was designed, intended to be agnostic about the gender of the person in it.

So they were trying to get to where, you know, it takes some extra work just to bend your elbow, for example, in a spacesuit. So if you're trying to lift something heavy, you've got to do the work to lift that object. And then in a space suit, you have to do extra work to make your arm bend because the suit, It's a stiff balloon, basically. So the suit was designed to lower those extra forces, be easier to work in for anybody. And it was designed to be assembled by bits and pieces,

from a Mr. Potato Head fashion, so that it could fit a wide range of human body sizes from quite small, fifth percentile female, up to 95th percentile male. The design didn't fully live up to that fit everybody potential. and NASA's procurement decisions stinted on the small end. So they basically didn't buy enough parts, enough of the parts of each size. So, you know, I think there was a, I credit that the intention to design the space shuttle suit so male or female could work in it was sincere.

And a genuine step out of, let's just do it for the guys and then the ladies can come along and suck it up and deal with it. There was a genuine attempt to be agnostic now. We're going to have male and female, and they've all going to be capable of working in a space suit. But it just fell short of that design objective, both of the design and then in the numbers of pieces and parts that NASA ordered and purchased for it. And why do you think it has taken this long to get to the point where there are two women doing a spacewalk together when presumably two men have been doing it for many, many years?

Well, I imagine that several factors are in work. There is an increasing number of women in the NASA Astronaut Corps, still not 50-50, certainly, but a growing number. Not all of them go out for or qualify on the spacewalk track. NASA doesn't need everyone doing spacewalks. They need people on certain engineering track. They need people on a robotics track. They need people on a spacewalking track. So there's a little bit of talent management for how many spacewalkers do I need.

Again, the design of the suit disadvantages people of small stature, regardless of whether they're male or female. But if you look at the spectrum of people in the astronaut corps, that small size disadvantage will hit more women than men. And so fewer women can work effectively in the suit. So the numbers only about a quarter to a third of astronauts ever do space. spacewalks anyway, so that's already a small number. So, you know, you've got a small number of people going through a couple of filters that tend to make all the numbers very small. But the other factor is I think, and this is, I would say, rather than NASA's credit, I think no one's been working consciously to try to mount some stunt and say, golly, you know, let's do an all-station female crew or an all-shuttle female crew or an all-female spacewalk just because we could make a PR moment out of it. and a little golly to you whiz and get some press,

that's not been on anybody's mind. They've been focusing on the more important and more, they've been focusing correctly on the more important things associated with getting the mission done. Yeah, absolutely. And do you think that more needs to be done to get the male-female split in the astronaut corps up to 50-50? I think it's good to move in that direction, and I think NASA's doing a pretty good job of that.

The trick, of course, is move in that direction while not giving up on any assurance that you're picking the caliber of person you need to do the actual work. And I think certainly everyone who's in the astronaut core now, I'm sure would agree with that as well. When you're out there talk about battle buddies or foxhole buddies, you're it. crew on a spacecraft. There's, you know, there's no maytag repairman to call up. Mom and Dad aren't there. You've got to be operating it, getting the work done, fixing it, solving emergencies, whatever it might be, taking care of each other medically. So it matters that you can look across the cabin and see only other people who you know, you are trusting your lives together and you know that you're all in it competently top-notch and up to whatever challenges might come your way.

Thank you for listening. Please remember to rate and review the show wherever you listen to your podcasts and be sure to tune in next week where we get into the festive spirit with comedian and former doctor Adam Kay and find out what it's like to work on the front line of the NHS on Christmas Day. Until then, grab a copy of the December issue of BBC Science Focus magazine where we head back into space and explore the toxic surface of the planet Venus. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team.

with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at namea audio.com.

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