NASA's Curious Universe - Field Notes: Astronaut Shannon Walker

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

From dusty deserts to icy mountain tops, NASA experts visit incredible places along their career path. But what about our explorers who take their work off the Earth? Join astronaut Shannon Walker on a look back at her excursions into space.

snowy vistas, the Australian Outback, and far beyond our atmosphere. NASA experts travel to some incredible places to learn more about our universe. As scientists have started venturing out once again, we're restarting our FieldNotes series. These special episodes offer a look into the people and places behind some of the wild work NASA experts do beyond our offices. Astronaut Shannon Walker has traveled to the International Space Station twice in her incredible career. She's now back on Earth with a unique perspective. From her home state of Texas to floating far above the atmosphere and so many destinations and adventures in between, come along with us as Shannon describes just a few of her out-of-this-world experiences.

Space Station in so many ways felt exactly the same. when I was there the second time as I was the first time. The difference, however, was there is so much more stuff on the space station. I swear everybody on the ground acts like they're a pack rat and don't want to get rid of anything. And so we've got cargo stowed everywhere. And we've installed so many computers. And so we've got wires strung everywhere and cables and everything. And so it's a more crowded space, but a very familiar space to live.

My name is Shannon Walker and I am a NASA astronaut. I have flown to the space station twice. The first time I flew was in 2010 and the second time I flew, I launched the end of 2020 and landed in 2021. So I've been home just over a year from my last flight. First time I flew, I actually flew round trip with the Russians. I was trained as the pilot, essentially the pilot seat on the Soyuz spacecraft. I spent a lot of time over in Russia training for that flight. I spent a lot of time in this country, training for what we were going to do on Space Station.

I spent a lot of time in all our international partner countries, Canada, Europe, and Japan. So that whole training part took roughly three years before I flew a six-month mission. When I was on the Space Station, at that time, we were just finishing up building of the space space. station and transitioning into all the science that we're doing up there now. It was kind of a mix of maintenance and making sure the space station was ready for all the science and then just starting to do some of the initial long-term science we're doing. Fast forward, it didn't seem very fast, but fast forward ten years later for my second flight, and I was able to travel to and from the space station on the crew one, SpaceX Dragon.

That was their first time they sent people to the space station for six months, and so I was part of that crew. At 7.27 p.m. Eastern Time this evening, NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi will lift off from this historic launch complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and begin their six-month journey. Did a lot of training ahead of time, although COVID had just hit the world. So training was very, very different. We've gotten quite a bit smarter on how we need to train people for Space Station. Instead of three years, if it's a normal expected training flow, we're talking

about a year and a half, two years, depending on which position you have within a capsule, and then train some for what you're doing on the station. Now it was mostly science because we've got the space station built up and running, and so a lot of my time up there was doing and all the research that needs to be done. There's so many things that are so neat and so fascinating about living on the space station. You have to go back and think, wow, how normal it feels to be in space.

That's what strikes me that once you're up there and you've been there for a short while, you realize how normal it is to float all the time, to float in your sleeping bag when you're sleeping at night, to get out and to float while you're part. putting on your clothes and float down to have breakfast with your crewmates. I mean, it just becomes a normal way to approach your day. And that still fascinates me that you get to do that.

And it just feels normal. Beyond that, some of my favorite activities of, you know, of course, looking out the window, it never gets tired to look at the earth. And there's always something to see. On the space station, we have a place that we call the cupola as the best thing ever because it is a set of windows that are on what you would call the bottom of the space station. So they are facing Earth and you can have this wonderful 360 degree view of looking at the Earth. So it's not like looking out a window on an airplane or something. You get to look

down at everything and it was just so amazing to see the beauty of the Earth. My first flight was Over a summer time period, I launched in June, came home in November. Second flight launched in November, came home at the beginning of May. So I had all the seasons. The first time, the Northern Hemisphere, Spring, Summer, Green, you could see everything. Second time, it was winter in the Northern Hemisphere. And so everything is frozen and how much ice and snow is everywhere. It was interesting because I don't live where it snows.

Houston doesn't snow normally. To see it from above and to see how much of the earth is just covered with snow and ice was really interesting. Looking out the window at night is absolutely fascinating because it has always struck me how many lightning storms are going on all around the planet all the time, and especially the middle north of Africa. Africa has got the most amazing thunderstorms ever, and every night, if you fly over Africa, you can just see lightnings. going off all over the place. It's fascinating and really cool to watch. Earth during the day is great because you can see what's going on with the rivers and the oceans and things.

And at night, you really get to see not just the spectacular shows of lightning, but you can tell where people are. You can tell what people don't live and all the city lights and the little roads connecting all the cities. I mean, it's just a fascinating place to look at. You can see how tiny our atmosphere is. and it's just this little tiny band that you see on the edge of the earth. It drove home to me.

It reinforced really how fragile our Earth is, looking at how tiny, how thin our atmosphere is. Earth's big compared to our atmosphere for sure. I would love to talk about launches because those are so awesome. They are amazing. So it takes about eight and a half minutes to get into space. Now think about that eight and a half minutes. You're sitting on a launch pad, eight and a half minutes later, you're in space.

That means that you are going to be moving fast. If you're in the launch pad, you don't get a countdown. There's nobody in your air saying three, two, one launch. You're just watching a little timer. Right before T0 happens, fuel starts flowing. You hear some stuff. You're on top of all this fuel. you know stuff is flowing, you got these engines,

you hear some rumbles, you can kind of feel vowels moving, so there's some vibrations and there's some noise. And then, okay, the engines have lit. Big rumbles start happening, and you can tell you are moving up. You are starting to get faster and faster and faster, and you know that, not just by the noise, you know that because of the G-loads, that your body experiences.

We're sitting just so in the spacecraft, So you feel the G-loads perpendicular to your chest. So it feels like somebody is sitting on your chest. It makes it a little hard to breathe. On the Soyuz, they have a three-stage rocket. You go up a little ways, and then they get rid of the first stage. So you're sort of here and feel these explosions. But the central core of the rocket is still going,

so the engine is still going, and you're getting faster and faster and faster. On the Soyuz, you will get about four and a half Gs. So get a couple of your friends to sit on your chest, and that's what four and a half Gs feels like. And then at the end of that, it's the end of the second stage. There's this explosion that you feel, where they get rid of the second stage behind you. There's a few seconds, and then the third stage lights.

And you're always like, okay, is it going to light? It's going to light. Believe me, you know when it lights, because then you start moving again, really fast. And so you write that all the way, all the way into space on the Soyuz spacecraft, but the G-loads don't get nearly as high again. On the Dragon, you got two stages,

and so the first stage goes up, and they throttle their engines to maintain the G-load between 3 and 3.3 Gs on the first stage, and they do this to make sure that basically you're not going to shake anything apart. You do that for a while, and then that stage cuts off explosions, and then the second stage, stage lights. There is a bigger pause between the first stage and the second stage on the dragon

than there is between the second stage and the third stage on the Soyuz. And so the commander, Mike Hopkins and I both had flown on a Soyuz before. And so are like, is it going to light? Is it going to light? And eventually it does. And boy, is that a kick in the pants. By the end, it felt like I was in this little cartoon, you know, a little cartoon characters are going really fast and their faces are being smushed back and that's what I felt like. But then engine cuts off and boom, you are in space for both of them at the end. As soon as the last engine cuts off, you're floating around and it's pretty amazing that eight and a half minutes. A lot of noise, a lot of rumbles, a lot of fun. I was born and raised in Houston. And so I did grow up with the

space program, the human spaceflight program, in my backyard. What really sparked my imagination as a kid was our first moon landing. Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now. And I have these memories of my parents taking me and my older sister out into the backyard and the moon was coming up over our roof and then pointing up there and saying, we have people there.

And at four years old, I was like, wow, that just sounds like the neatest thing ever, and that's what I want to do. That's one small six, one. I get to tell that story just about every time I'm interviewed by somebody. I think it's neat because it really shows how some small thing or big thing or something in somebody's childhood can really set a path and a dream that you don't know how you may end up there.

You know you may not ever end up at that particular final destination, but something to work towards and it's something to sort of provide direction, I guess, in somebody's life. It's important to know these big things that we do, these big, huge, important things that benefit society take a long time and it can take a long time to get there, but it's worth the effort. It's science, it's helping the world understand its place in the universe and helping people in society with technology. just keep moving forward.

Any kid that wants to be part of NASA, I really encourage you to follow that dream and passion. And I also want to point out, NASA does so many things. It's not just the astronauts. It's not always the science and engineers. If there is something you want to do in life, we're doing it at NASA.

I can guarantee you. I mean, we have photographers that work for NASA. We have scuba divers that work for NASA that help us prepare for space. for spaceflight. We've got all the technicians. We've got people that sew our spacesuits. I mean, it's just amazing the breadth of jobs available at NASA, and there's so many ways to be part of it, even if you don't want to or don't have the opportunity to go into space. My pitch for, come work for NASA.

Shannon has spent a career total of 331 days in space. Since her second trip, we've kept her busy, training the next class of astronauts, assisting with launches and landings, and helping out with future missions, from trips to the space station and the moon, looking all the way to Mars. SpaceX also recently named a new recovery vehicle in her honor. The Shannon and the Megan, named for astronaut Megan MacArthur, are ships that assist in picking up our astronauts once they splash down back to Earth. Thank you, Shannon, for your hard work and for sharing your story. with us. This is NASA's Curious Universe.

This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana. Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson. The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold and Michaela Sosby, with support from Erica Criner. Special thanks to Courtney Beasley, Megan Dean, John Stephen, and the Johnson Space Center team. If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing NASA's Curious Universe with a friend.

Still curious about NASA? You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers. You can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-curious Universe at mail.nassah.gov. Go to nassah.gov slash curious universe for more information. And remember, you can follow NASA's Curious Universe in your favorite podcast app to get a notification each time we post a new episode.

And then I ended up leading a group of engineers that are in the control center daily. You never see them on TV. But they are responsible for the technical health of the space station is how we would put it. Anything that breaks on the space station, we got to figure out how to fix it. That was an awesome challenge to do a whole bunch of problem solving in the early days of the space station and just figure out how it's going to work. You were in Houston. In Houston, we have a problem.

I was. I was. I often tell people that if they've seen the movie Apollo 13 where they have the problem and these people in a room and they dump a bunch of equipment out and they say, we need to make a round one of these fit into a square one of those. That is exactly what we were doing. It's like, okay, what went wrong? What do we have on Space Station to fix it? What do we need to launch if we can launch something? What do we need to reprogram? That is exactly what I would do. It was great.