Host: Leland Melvin
Male audience: [00:00:03] Three, two, one, zero.
[rocket launches]
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Female audience: [00:00:13] They should have set the poet so beautiful. Beautiful.
[song playing]
There's a starman waiting in the sky.
Leland: [00:00:27] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Leland Melvin. I'm an author and Moth storyteller.
July 20th marks the 55th anniversary of the moon landing. And to celebrate the occasion, we'll be sharing three of our favorite stories that are all about space travel. Our little intro now [chuckles] might have given it away.
Now there's something very, very special about space. Staring up at the night sky and imagining what it would be like, thinking about the vastness of the universe or staring back at earth from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, thinking about the vastness of our human experience.
By the way, full disclosure, I've been fortunate enough to do both. Because in addition to being an educator and Moth storyteller, I've also been to space twice as an astronaut.
The first story we're sharing is from Michael Massimino. He told this at a New York City Mainstage, where theme of the night was Around the Bin. Here's Michael, live at The Moth.
[audience applause]
Michael: [00:01:36] In 1984, I was a senior in college, and I went to see the movie, The Right Stuff. A couple things really struck me in that movie. The first was the views out the window of John Glenn's spaceship. The view of the earth, how beautiful it was on the big screen. I wanted to see that view. And secondly, the camaraderie between the original seven astronauts depicted in that movie, how they were good friends, how they stuck up for each other, how they would never let each other down. I wanted to be part of an organization like that.
It rekindled a boyhood dream that I had that had gone dormant over the years, and that dream was to grow up to be an astronaut. I just could not ignore this dream. I had to pursue it. So, I decided I wanted to go to graduate school. I was lucky enough to get accepted to MIT. I went up to MIT with the intention of following this dream of space flight.
While I was at MIT, I started applying to NASA to become an astronaut. I filled out my application, and I received a letter that said, “They weren't quite interested.” So, I waited a couple years. I was graduating from MIT, and I sent in another application, a second time, a few years later, and they sent me back pretty much the same letter. So, I applied a third time. And this time, I got an interview. So, they got to know who I was, and then they told me “No.” [audience laughter] So, I applied a fourth time.
On April 22nd, 1996, I knew the call was coming, good or bad. I pick up the phone, and it's Dave Leestma, the head of Flight Crew Operations at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. And I say, “Hello.” And he says, “Hey, Mike, this is Dave Leestma. How you doing this morning?” And I said, “I really don't know, Dave. You're going to have to tell me.” [audience laughter] And he said, “Well, I think you're going to be pretty good after this phone call, because we want to make you an astronaut.”
13 years after that, it's May 17th, 2009, and I'm on Space Shuttle Atlantis, about to go out and do a spacewalk on the Hubble Space Telescope. Our task that day was to repair an instrument that had failed. This instrument was used by scientists to detect the atmospheres of far-off planets. Planets in other solar systems could be analyzed using this spectrograph to see if we might find a planet that was Earth like or a planet that could support life.
Just when they got good at doing this, the power supply on this instrument failed. It blew. It wasn't working. So, the instrument could no longer be used. There was no way really to replace this unit or to repair the instrument, because when they launched this thing and they got it ready for spaceflight, they really buttoned it up. They didn't want anybody to screw at this thing, whether you were on the ground or whether you were in space, it was buttoned up with an access panel that blocked the power supply that had failed.
This access panel had 117 small screws with washers. Just to play it safe, they put glue on the screw threads, [audience laughter] so they would never come apart. It could withstand the space launch. There's no way we could get in to fix this thing, but we really wanted this capability back.
So we started working. And for five years, we designed this spacewalk, and we designed over 100 new space tools to be used. Great taxpayer expense, millions of dollars, thousands of people worked on this. My buddy, Mike Good, who we called Bueno, he and I were going to go out to do the spacewalk. I was going to be the guy actually doing the repair. And Inside was my friend, Drew Feustel, one of my best friends. He was inside. He's going to read me the checklist.
We had practiced for years and years for this. They built us our own practice instrument and gave us our own set of tools we could practice with, practice in our office, in our free time, during lunch, after work, on the weekends. We became like one mind. He would say it, I would do it. We had our own language. And now's the day to go out and do this task.
The thing I was most worried about leaving the airlock that day was my path to get to the telescope, because it was along the side of the space shuttle. If you look over the edge of the shuttle, it's like looking over a cliff at that point with 350 miles to go down to the planet. [audience laughter] There were no good handrails.
When we're spacewalking, I like to grab onto things in our space gloves and be nice and steady. But I got to this one area along the side of the shuttle, and there were no good handrails to grab. I had to grab a wire, or a hose, or a knob or a screw. I'm a big goon. When there's no gravity, you can get a lot of momentum build up and I could go spinning off into space.
I knew I had a safety tether that would probably hold, but I also had a heart that I wasn't so sure about. [audience laughter] So, I knew they would get me back. I just wasn't sure what they would get back on the end of the tether when they reeled me in. So, I was really concerned about this. I took my time, and I got through the treacherous path and out to the telescope.
The first thing I had to do was to pull off or remove a handrail from the telescope that was blocking the access panel. There were two screws on the top, and they came off easily. And there was one screw on the bottom right and that came out easily. The fourth screw is not moving. My tool is moving, but the screw is not. I look close and I realize, it's stripped. I realize that that handrail's not coming off, which means I can't get to the access panel with these 117 screws that I've been worrying about for five years, which means I can't get to the power supply that failed, which means we're not going to be able to fix this instrument today, which means all these smart scientists can't find life on other planets and I'm to blame for this.
I could see what they would be saying in the science books of the future. This was going to be my legacy, I realized that, that my children and my grandchildren would read in their classrooms, “We would know if there was life on other planets. [audience laughter] But Gabby and Daniel's dad--” [audience laughter] My children would suffer from this. “Gabby and Daniel's dad broke the Hubble Space Telescope, and we'll never know.” [audience laughter]
Through this nightmare that had just begun, I look at my buddy, Bueno, next to me in his spacesuit, and he's looking at me like, “Oh, don't look at me.” [audience laughter] Bueno was a rookie, and his job was to basically hand me tools. This was my job to fix this thing. And then, I turn and look into the cabin where my five astronaut friends, my crewmates are in there, and I realize, “Nobody in there has got a spacesuit on. Oh, they can't come out here and help me.”
And then, I actually looked at the earth, I looked at our planet, and I thought, “There are billions of people down here, but there's no way I'm going to get a house call on this one. No one can help me.” I felt this deep loneliness. It wasn't just a Saturday afternoon with a book alone. [audience laughter]
I felt detached from the earth. [audience laughter] I felt that I was by myself. And everything that I knew and loved and that made me feel comfortable was far away. And then, it started getting dark and cold, because we traveled 17,500 miles an hour. 90 minutes is a one lap around the earth, so it's 45 minutes of sunlight and 45 minutes of darkness. When you enter the darkness, it is not just darkness, it's the darkest black I have ever experienced. It's like the absence of light. It gets cold. I could feel that coldness, and I could sense the darkness coming, that's what we were going to enter, and it just added to my loneliness.
For the next hour or so, we tried all kinds of things. I was going up and down the space shuttle, trying to figure out where I needed to go to get the next tool they wanted me to get to try to fix this problem. And nothing was working. And then, they called up after about an hour and 10 or 15 minutes of this, they said they wanted me to go to the front of the shuttle to a toolbox and get vice grips and tape. I thought to myself, “We are running out of ideas.” [audience laughter] I didn't even know we had tape on board. [audience laughter] I'm going to be the first astronaut to use tape in space during the space flight. [audience laughter] But I follow directions. So, I get to the front of the space show, and I open up the toolbox and there's the tape.
At that point, I was very close to the front of the orbiter, right by the cabin window. I knew that my best pal was in there trying to help me out. I could not stand to even think of looking at him, because I felt so bad about the way this day was going, the way it turned out. Not like what we had thought about, but all the work he and I had put in. I couldn't even stand to even think of looking up at him. But I realized that he's actually-- and through the corner of my eye from my helmet, just aside there, I can see that he's trying to get my attention.
I look up at him like this, and he's a little bit above me in the window and he's just cracking up, smiling and giving me the okay sign. And I'm like, “Is there another spacewalk going on out here?” [audience laughter] I really can't talk to him, because if I say anything, the ground will hear. Houston will hear. The control center will hear. So, I'm like playing charades with him. I'm like, “What? You nuts?”
I expect him. I didn't want to look, because I thought what he was going to do, instead of giving me ok sign, I thought he was going to give me the finger, because I'm thinking he's going to go down in the history book with me. But he's saying, “No, we're okay. You just hang in there a little bit longer. We're going to make it through this. We're in this together. You're doing great. Just hang in there.”
If there was ever a time in my life that I needed a friend, it was at that moment. There was my buddy, just like I saw in that movie, the camaraderie, those guys sticking together. I didn't believe him at all. I figured we were really out of luck. But I said, at least if I'm going down, I’m going down with my best pal.
As I turned to make my way back over the treacherous path one more time, Houston called up and told us what they had in mind. They wanted me to use that tape to take the bottom of the handrail and then see if I could yank it off the telescope. They said it was going to take about 60 pounds of force for me to do that. Drew answers the call and he goes, “60 pounds of force?” They call me mass. It's short for my last name. He goes, “Mass, I think you've got that in you. What do you think?” And I'm like, “You bet, Drew. Let's go get this thing.”
I get back to the telescope, and I put my hand on that handrail and the ground calls again, and they go, “Well, Drew, you guys are okay to do this, but right now, we don't have any downlink from Mike's helmet camera.” I got these cameras mounted on my helmet, so they can see everything I'm doing. It's like your mom looking over your shoulder when you're doing your homework. And they go, “We don't have any downlink for another three minutes, but we know we’re running late on time here, so if you have to.” And I'm saying, “Let's do it now while they can't watch.” [audience laughter]
Because the reason I'm taping this thing is if any debris gets loose, they're going to get all worried and it's going to be another hour and never fix this thing. We've been through enough already. So, I'm like, “Let's do it now while mom and dad aren't home. Let's have the party.” So, I'm like, “Drew, I think we should do it now.” Drew's like, “Go.” And bam, that thing comes right off. I pull out my power tool, and now I've got that access panel with those 117 little bitty screws with the washers and glue, and I'm ready to get each one of them. I pull the trigger on my power tool, and nothing happens. [audience laughter]
I look and I see that the battery is dead. [audience laughter] I turn my head to look at Bueno, who's in his space suit, he looking at me like, “What else can happen today?” [audience laughter] I said, “Drew, the battery's dead in this thing. I'm going to go back to the airlock, and I'm going to swap out the battery and I'm going to recharge my oxygen tank, because by all this moving around, I was getting low on oxygen. I needed to get the refill.” And he said, “Go.”
I'm going back over that shuttle, I noticed two things. One was that treacherous path that I was so scaredy cat sissy pants about going over, it wasn't scary anymore. That in the course of those couple hours of fighting this problem, I had gone up and down that thing about 20 times. My fear had gone away, because there was no time to be a scaredy cat. It was time to get the job done. What we were doing was more important than me being worried. It was actually fun going across that little jungle gym that I had back and forth over the shuttle.
The other thing I noticed, is that I can feel the warmth of the sun. We were about to come into a day pass. The light in space, when you're in the sunlight, is the brightest, whitest, purest light I have ever experienced. It brings with it warmth. I could feel that coming. I actually started feeling optimistic. Sure enough, the rest of the spacewalk went well. We got all those screws out, new power supply, buttoned it up. They tried it, they turned it on from the ground, it all was working. The power supply was working. The instrument had come back to life.
At the end of that spacewalk, after about eight hours, I'm inside the airlock getting things ready for Bueno and I to come back inside, and my commander says, “Hey, Mass, you've got about 15 minutes before Bueno is going to be ready to come in. Why don't you go outside of the airlock and enjoy the view?”
So, I go outside, and I take my tether, and I clip it on a handrail, and I let go and I just look. The earth, from our altitude at Hubble, we're 350 miles up, we can see the curvature. We can see the roundness of our home planet. It's the most magnificent thing I've ever seen. It's like looking into heaven. It's like paradise. I thought to myself, “This is the view that I imagined in that movie theater all those years ago.”
As I looked at the earth, I also noticed that I could turn my head, and I could see the moon, and I could see the stars, and I could see the Milky Way Galaxy, and I could see our universe, and I could turn back and I could see our beautiful planet. And at that moment, it changed my relationship with the earth, because for me, the earth was always a safe haven where I could go to work, or be in my home or take my kids to school. But I realized it really wasn't that. It really is its own spaceship. I had always been a space traveler. All of us here today, even tonight, we're on this spaceship earth, amongst all the chaos of the universe, whipping around the sun and around the Milky Way Galaxy.
A few days later, we get back. Our families come to meet us at the airfield. I'm driving home to my house with my wife and my kids in the backseat. She starts telling me of what she was going through during that Sunday that I was spacewalking and how she could tell, listening, watching the NASA television channel how sad I was that she detected a sadness in my voice that she had never heard from me before. It worried her until she heard me say, “For the love of Pete.” And once she heard that, she knew everything was going to be okay. [audience laughter] It's a line from Little Rascals.
Anyway. So, I thought, “I wish I would have known that when I was up there, because this loneliness that I felt really Carol was thinking about me the whole time.” We turned the corner to come down our block, and I could see my neighbors are outside and they decorated my house. There's American flags everywhere. My neighbor across the street is holding a pepperoni pizza and a six pack of beer, [audience laughter] two things that unfortunately, we still cannot get in space. [audience laughter]
I get out of the car and they're all hugging me. I'm still in my blue flight suit, and they're hugging me and saying how happy they are to have me back and how great everything turned out. I realized my friends, they were thinking about me the whole time. They were with me too.
The next day, we have a return ceremony. We make these speeches. These engineers who had worked all these years with us, our trainers, the people that worked in the control center, they start telling me how they were running around crazy while I was up there in my little nightmare all alone, how they got the solution from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and how that team that was working on that Sunday figured out what to do. And they checked it out and he radioed it up to us.
I realized that at the time when I felt so lonely that I felt detached from everyone else, literally, like I was away from the planet, that really I never was alone, that my family and my friends and the people I worked with, the people that I loved and the people that cared about me, they were with me every step of the way. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Leland: [00:19:32] That was Michael Massimino. Mike is a former NASA astronaut, a Columbia University engineering professor and New York Times bestselling author of Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe, and also Moonshot: A NASA Astronauts Guide to Achieving the Impossible.
Now, Mike appears regularly on news programs and documentaries, and is a much sought after inspirational speaker. He inspires me, because we call him the Rodney Dangerfield of astronauts, because he's always got jokes to tell and he's a super, super funny guy.
Up next is Cathy Olkin. She told this story at a Boulder, Colorado Mainstage where theme of the night was High Anxiety. Here's Cathy, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Cathy: [00:20:22] So, it was the 4th of July, this past Summer. I was really looking forward to a day off. I had been working super hard for a long time. I was working on NASA's New Horizons Mission to Pluto. There were always something to do, but I was going to take the 4th July off. So, I slept in. I read a little. Later, I decided to check email. Never check email on a day off.
There was a message there from the Mission Operations Manager, Alice Bowman. My eye immediately went to it. It said that the spacecraft had gone safe. That's like the worst possible thing that could happen. I couldn't believe what I saw in the message. I'm like, “How could this have happened? It was going to be a simple day, a day off.”
You see, I had been working on this project for more than a decade. In 2004, I had relocated my family from California to Boulder, Colorado, to work on this mission. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I'm an astronomer, and I had been spending decades looking at Pluto through ground-based telescopes. It's just this fuzzy dot. You can't make out any surface details. We kept looking through these ground-based telescopes. Even through the Hubble Space Telescope, it's still just a fuzzy dot, because Pluto's really far away.
So, we move. My husband starts telecommuting for his job. We move our three-year old and our five-year old. We're here. We're settled. All we need to do is build a spacecraft, test it, launch it and fly it three billion mile to Pluto. [audience laughter] So, we did. It worked out. We built a small spacecraft about the size of a baby grand piano. We launched it on the largest rocket we could get, an Atlas V. It's about 20 stories tall. So, you've got a small rocket or small spacecraft big rocket. What you get is the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It's going at 34,000 miles per hour.
To put that in perspective, when the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, it took over three days. For New Horizons, the spacecraft passed the moon in just nine hours. We were flying. It's an unmanned spacecraft, so I mean that figuratively. There's no one on it. So, we've got nine and a half years to go from Earth to Pluto. So, we've got a lot of time on our hands. We think about what data we're going to collect, how we're going to do it. We make contingency plans, so plans in case something goes wrong. We considered more than 200 different scenarios, “What do we do if this breaks? What do we do if that goes wrong?” We had this huge binder full of contingencies.
So, I find myself on the 4th of July, it's just 10 days before our closest approach to Pluto. You see, we can't stop and orbit, Pluto. We don't have enough fuel to slow ourselves down, because we're going really fast. So, we can't stop. We just have to go right by and take the best images we can as we're flying past. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. We have to get it right at this time. The spacecraft has gone safe. It's called home, which is basically saying, “Help me, I'm broken.”
So, I rush over to the mission operations center. I settle in the situation room. This is a conference room right outside the mission operations center. You can see the operations people through the window, but they like to keep the scientists a little separated, so we don't get in the way. So, I settle in. I'm sitting with my colleagues. We're starting to get information back.
And interestingly, I'm starting to feel calm. That sick feeling in the pit of my stomach is relaxing, because I've been working with these people for more than a decade, and everyone knows what they need to do. We all know what our responsibilities are and how to make this work. You see, we have three days to get the spacecraft back in working order. By July 7th, we have to have it up and ready to start executing those commands, so that when it flies by Pluto, we get the data that we've been waiting more than a decade for.
So, we start to get information back. But it takes a while. It takes the signal four and a half hours to travel from Earth out to the spacecraft. And then, it takes another four and a half hours for it to come back, so we can hear what the spacecraft had to say. So, it's a really slow conversation. Imagine you say hi to someone, then you go watch three football games, and you come back and they say hi. So, that's the kind of data rates we were getting.
We start to find out what went wrong. We had overtaxed the computer on the spacecraft. Remember, this computer is 10 years old. My guess is that none of you use a computer that's 10 years old on a daily basis for really important things. [audience laughter] But we planned for that, because we sent two computers. So, we overtaxed the prime computer. And before it crashed, it started up the backup computer and said, “Call home.” Okay, good. It's working, kind of.
So, now, we're on the backup computer, we know what went wrong and we've got a big question in front of us. “Do we try and get back on the prime computer or do we fly through closest approach on our relatively untested backup computer?” You see, the whole time we've been flying across the solar system, we'd never turned on the backup computer. The last time it was on was on the ground when we were testing it a decade ago.
So, we make the logical decision to switch over to the prime computer. But we're worried, because if we really messed it up, it may not start. We're getting short on time. We've been in the situation room for three days. People are taking naps in the conference room. Many orders of pizza are coming in, being eaten. So, we don't have a lot of time left.
We send up the commands to switch over back to the prime computer, and then we wait. We wait nine hours. I find myself nine hours later back in the situation room, looking through the glass window at the operations, people hoping this works. When I see people start cheering, and erupting, and cheers, and excited and I hear Alice Bowman's voice over the intercom, “We are back on the prime computer.”
Everybody was so elated. I let out this huge sigh of relief. I didn't even realize I had been holding my breath. It was amazing. We managed to get the spacecraft back in working order. Everything was going right, and we had four hours to spare. It was outstanding.
We start going back to our main sequence and we start getting data. It was absolutely stunning views of Pluto like we had never seen before. I couldn't believe the beauty and the details that we were awaiting us at Pluto. We would have never expected the unusual terrain we've seen. We saw a heart shaped glacier made out of nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices. At the edge of the glacier, there's huge mountains, mountains as tall as the Rocky Mountains made out of water ice.
Pluto has a large moon named Charon. And on that moon, there's a deep canyon deeper than the Grand Canyon. All of these wonders awaited us as I had previously looked at Pluto through our ground-based telescopes, they were there and I just couldn't see it. It was miraculous. We had accomplished our objective of transforming Pluto from a fuzzy point of light to a complex, rich geologic world. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Leland: [00:30:00] That was Cathy Olkin. Cathy is Vice President, Infrared Missions and Data at Muon Space in Mountain View, California. She is the mission scientist for a satellite system to detect and monitor wildfires across the globe. Now, previously, her research focused on the outer solar system, specifically planetary atmospheres and surfaces. She also mentors the next generation of engineers and scientists through programs like first robotics.
If you'd like to see the amazing photos that we have of Pluto now, thanks to Cathy and her team. We'll have links to them on our website. Just go to themoth.org/extras. It's absolutely extraordinary, the leap from our blurry photos from the 1990s to these high-definition pictures that we have now.
One of the coolest things about space exploration is getting to share what we learn with everyone on earth. It's so easy to think of these huge projects, whether they're landing on the moon or Mars or taking crystal clear photos of Pluto as impossible. But we want to show that these are doable, that they are, in fact, mission possible. These young engineers and scientists can dream big, become explorers and accomplish the previously unimagined, and it's educators, engineers and scientists like Cathy and Mike who helped spark that curiosity.
The final story we'll be sharing is from-- well, it's from me. I told this story at an Austin Mainstage where theme of the night was Leap of Faith. Here I am live at The Moth.
I was peering into a 30 foot deep, five million-gallon pool. I was an ASCAN, that's NASA speak for astronaut candidate. I wanted to see if I had the right stuff. We were training to do a spacewalk in this five-million-gallon pool. I was in this suit that looked like a cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy and a Michelin Man with a helmet on.
They start lowering me down into the pool. I get to about 20ft, and I realize that this little Styrofoam block that costs about $2 that's in my helmet is not there. That's used, if you're the kind of person that needs to squeeze your nose to clear your ears, well, you can't reach your hand in the helmet, so you press your nose against this to clear your ears. The technician forgot to put mine in.
At 20ft, I tell the test director to turn the volume up in the headset. From that point on, I hear nothing but static like in a white noise. They start raising me out of the pool. look at the connection to the pool deck, which is the yellow cable, and I think maybe that cable is actually kinked and they're going to fix it when they bring me up to the top of the pool deck.
I get up there. They take my helmet off. The doctor, Rich Mikulski, starts walking towards me. He's just moving his lips. And I'm thinking, “Why is this guy playing with me?” And he gets to me, and he touches my right ear, and he pulls his finger back and there's a river of blood just starts coursing down the side of my face.
At that point, I realized that something's wrong. [audience laughter] As a scientist and an engineer, there's usually a very simple solution to problems. And so, we just have to figure out what it is and fix it. They take me to the showers, and my head starts to violently turn. I fall to the ground and I violently throw up. They rush me to the hospital, the Houston Medical Center, and they do a battery of tests. The next thing I know, I'm rushed into the OR. The world-renowned surgeons are now going inside my head, into my ear to look to see if there's anything that they can see that caused this problem.
As I wake up from the anesthesia, I see three doctors faces that don't look good at all. They couldn't figure out what happened to me. I'm lying in the hospital bed. The only way I can communicate with the outside world is through these yellow legal pads. I can still talk, but I can't hear anything. I get these notes written to me. And at one point, there's a note that says, “You will never fly in space.”
One of the yellow legal pad notes comes to me from a friend, and it says, “Remember what Jeanette said.” I'm thinking about this note. And if you back up four days before this accident, I was in Virginia, and this woman sought me out to tell me that something was going to happen to me. No one's going to know why this happened. You'll be healed of this, you will fly in space, and you'll share this story with the world. I'm like, “Okay/ Thank you.”
So, at this point in the hospital, that note is the only hope I have to hold on to. I get released from the hospital at about the three-week point, and I'm still severely hearing impaired to my left ear. But now, I can start hearing things. As I lay in my bed at home in Houston, Texas, and the air conditioner handler kicks on, I have earplugs in and noise canceling headsets, because my brain is starting to rewire itself to hear again. It feels like ice picks are going to the side of my head.
My hearing gets better. I'm functional. I can talk to people. I hear what they're saying. And NASA's trying to figure out what to do with me. They don't want to release me.
They are trying to find a job that I can do that doesn't require diving or flying or doing something that requires hearing, because I'm truly medically disqualified by NASA standards. So, they put me in the robotics branch, which is basically playing a big video game where you have hand controllers, you have a monitor and you can run the robotic arm into the space station, but it doesn't hurt anything. You can just fly it around like a video game.
And then, they asked me, since my parents were both educators, they asked me, “Do you want to go to Washington to work in this new program called the Educator Astronaut Program?” And I agree. I fly to Washington. In this program, we're trying to inspire children to nominate their teachers to become astronauts. I have to tell them that it's a round trip, not a one-way trip for your teacher, [audience laughter] so you're not getting rid of your teacher, they're coming back home. And so, we're doing this program, and space shuttle Columbia is launching off to the cosmos. I'm there in D.C. We're kicking off this program, and I decide to drive from Washington, D.C. to Lynchburg, Virginia on Highway 66.
My boss, who is new to NASA, she says, “What does it mean when the countdown clock for the Columbia is now starting to count up?” I knew at that point that something was seriously wrong. I did an illegal U-turn on 66. I started back to the headquarters, and I turned the radio on and there were eyewitness accounts of large pieces of debris falling over the west Texas sky looking like a meteor shower. I got to headquarters, and they dispatched me to David Brown, who was one of the mission specialists. I went to their parents’ home, that was outside of D.C. in Washington, Virginia.
When things like this happen, we go into this mode where we take care of our friends and our family. I get to the home, and I knock on the door, and I go in, and David's mother, Dottie, is there, and I hug her because I'm there to console them. I hug her, and we both start crying. I make my way over into the living room to David's father, Judge Brown, who's in a wheelchair. I reach down to hug him. He looks up at me with the same sparkling blue eyes as David, and he says to me, with tears in his eyes, he says, “My son is gone. There is nothing you can do to bring him back. But the biggest tragedy would be if we don't continue to find space to honor their legacy.” He's already thinking about the legacy of son, and I'm medically disqualified and I'm trying to figure out how I will fly to honor that legacy. I am torn. I'm trying to figure out what I will do.
A few days later, we fly in the NASA jet to the different memorial services. We take off and we land. I notice to my right, there's a person sitting next to me on every flight taking notes. His name is Rich Williams. As I descend in the airplane, I squeeze my nose and I clear my ears like I usually do, even though I don't have any hearing in my left ear. When we go to the services, and I'm trying to figure out what my next steps are because this education program is over, so I'm ready to transition back to Houston to figure out what I'm going to do as a semi-deaf astronaut.
Rich Williams calls me in his office and he says, “Leland, I've been watching you. I believe in you. Here's a waiver for you to fly in space.” And so, I fly back to Houston. I go to flight medicine and I wave this waiver like, “I got some ice cream. I got some--” [audience laughter] I hand it to the flight docs, and I soon get assigned to a mission in 2005.
As I'm sitting there three and a half hours before launch, I'm thinking about David's legacy. Three, two, one, liftoff. Space Shuttle Atlantis is now careening to the cosmos. We're shaking. We're rattling. The screens are pretty much unusable, because our heads are moving so fast from the buildup of Gs. The solid rocket boosters get jettisoned after two and a half minutes, and the shuttle is turning.
Six and a half minutes later, we are now floating in space. I undo my five-point NASA certified seatbelt and float over to the window. We're currently flying over the Caribbean Ocean. I almost need new definitions of blue to describe the hues that I see. I exhaust my vocabulary with azure, indigo, turquoise, cerulean, navy blue, light navy blue, dark navy blue. I'm trying to figure out ways to describe these colors, and I need about 20 more definitions to do that.
My job is now to install the Columbus laboratory, which is a $2 billion [unintelligible 00:42:02] piece of hardware that goes on to the space station. I use my robotic skills to safely install it. And next, the commander of the space station invites us over to break bread. She says, “You guys bring the rehydrated vegetables. We'll have the meat.”
And so, we float over with this bag of vegetables, and we get to the Zarya service module. It's like someone's home. You can smell the beef and barley cooking. You were watching the planet go by at 17,500 miles per hour, going around the planet every 90 minutes, seeing a sunrise and a sunset every 45, breaking bread with people we used to fight against, the Russians and Germans are on this mission. It's like a Benetton commercial. African-American, Asian-American, French, German, Russian.
The first female commander sharing a meal by floating food to each other's mouths, all while listening to Sade's Smooth Operator. [audience laughter] This is the moment. This is the surreal moment where I have this cognitive shift. I get this thing called the overview effect or the orbital perspective. I looked out the window. We were flying over Virginia, my hometown. My family's probably breaking bread down there. And five minutes later, we're over Paris, where Léo Eyharts’ family's breaking bread and Yuri's looking off to Russia. This is the moment, the moment that changes me. I remember what Jeanette said. I remember what David Brown's father said. We honored their legacy. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Well, everyone, that's it for this episode. Now, from all of us here at The Moth, we hope your next week is-- Okay, guys, I was told to say this. I'm not this cheesy. I hope your next week is out of this world.
Marc: [00:44:22] Leland Melvin is an ex-professional football player, a chemist, engineer, educator and the author of Chasing Space: An Astronauts Story of Grit, Grace, and Second Chances. He’s traveled off planet twice on space shuttle Atlantis to help build the International Space Station, and now shares his life story to help inspire the next generation of explorers to pursue steam careers.
This episode of The Moth podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Marc Sollinger. The rest of The Moth’s leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant-Walker, Lee Ann Gullie and Aldi Kaza.
The Moth would like to thank its supporters and listeners. Stories like these are made possible by community giving. If you’re not already a member, please consider becoming one or making a one-time donation today at themoth.org/giveback.
All Moth stories are true as remembered by the storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.