We were absolutely overjoyed at the success. I mean 110% success, not just in our part of the mission but in the whole astronomical results that the Hubble telescope is not only as good as, but better than, new. So on a personal level, to have been able to have the privilege really to have been a part of making that happen is something I'll never forget.
There's obviously certain scenes that I will carry in my mind that are particularly vivid. Holding onto a delicate scientific instrument the size of a grand piano and manipulating it with my fingertips into a very tight environment was very exciting, and really showed the sorts of incredible things that you can do in a weightless environment that you just wouldn't dream of on the surface of the Earth. And the other thing is when we rode the manipulator arm way up to the very top of the telescope, most incredible view that I've ever had in my life, that's for sure. Fifty feet above the shuttle's payload bay, 350 miles above the Earth, it's just incredible.
Q: How did the training for the mission differ from the previous flights you've had, and how did the actual work in space differ from what was anticipated on the ground?
In my previous two flights -- and I'm not including my first flight because the training for a first flight is kind of unique actually, because you're doing everything for the first time -- but the other two flights I had actually worked on for many years. The flight I took in 1990, the Astro mission, I had actually worked on since 1982, and the flight I took in 1992 with the Tethered Satellite I had been working on since 1987, and I had actually played an integral role in the development of all the proceedures and the hardware that we took up to use.
This mission was a little different. I got involved about fifteen months before flight, after all the hardware was built, the proceedures were pretty well developed and it was more a question of training, learning how to do the proceedures, although in fact we ended up making a lot of our own improvements and really making things even better than when we started training for it. But it was much more concentrated, the preparation for this mission. For fifteen months before flight it was really very, very intense, mostly concentrated for the four of us doing the spacewalks it was very much concentrated on doing the spacewalks. We pretty much by-and-large stayed away from tasks involving flying the orbiter (the space shuttle), doing the rendezvous (with Hubble) or working the manipulator arm, or some of the other shuttle-related things. We really concentrated on the spacewalk and the repair.
Q: The impression from outside was of really intense training on this mission, more so than the perception I've had on other flights.
If you look at some of the other flights where we've done spacewalks or EVA's (ExtraVehicular Activities), it's true that we had far more training on this flight when you look at the total number of hours. There were 400 hours spent in the water (practicing EVA work in a weightless environment) on this flight by the whole crew, but when you divide that by the number of hours that we spent outside the shuttle, the training per hour of EVA, it really is less than we've had for some other flights. So yeah, the training was very intense. It was very long, it was very extensive, but that was a reflection of, you know, we had five days worth of jobs to do, each one of which could have taken an entire mission's worth of EVA on a normal flight.
Q: Looking from the ground, it is very hard to get a sensation for what the EVA's are like. Since the microgravity environment is so completely different from anything we get to experience, and working in the spacesuit is completely different from anything we can envision. What is that like?
We spent so much time preparing and taking our suits into a vacuum chamber on the ground ...
Q: I'm asking not so much about your preparation, but for someone who hasn't had the chance to go ...
What I'm trying to get to you is that, as strange as it may seem looking at us up there and thinking how strange it all looks, our preparation was such that we really got into the groove, we felt comfortable in this, and it was almost like you get up in the morning, you put on your suit and you go out to work. It's just what you do. I actually had this feeling sometimes when I was outside working that it was hard to convince myself that it was really a vacuum out there, I mean I just felt so comfortable in what I was doing, that yeah I was wearing these bulky gloves and this bulky spacesuit around me, but I just felt like I was working in an environment that I was comfortable in.
Q: Of course flying is a rare event in your overall work, and I suppose the training is most intense during the period right before a mission. What is the regular day to day work like at Johnson Space Center in the astronaut office?
Day to day, when you're not actually assigned to a mission, you are responsible for other tasks and I've done many things over the course of my career. At times I was the astronaut representative to our training division. I have worked on a panel devoted to checking the safety of the payloads we fly. Right now I am working on a group devoted to actual future spacewalk activities where we'll be trying to apply some of the lessons we've learned from all the spacewalks that we've done over the last year to future spacewalks on the shuttle, and eventually into building of the space station. We have other people involved in piloting tasks, developing techniques for improving shuttle safely, getting the shuttles ready to launch at Cape Canaveral, there are dozens of different tasks that the astronaut office has responsiblity for, and when you're not actively involved in crew training you're assigned to one of those jobs. It's different every day, that's one of the interesting things about working here is that every day you're doing something different.
Q: Space station has been a primary focus of NASA's planning for many years. What is the atmosphere like, with both the changes now involving the Russians and also, in the outside world one of the main concerns had been that quantity of construction work and STS-61 showed that NASA can do that. What is the overall feeling and spirit like now on that program?
I think basically it's good, but it's a tremendous challenge ahead. I think there is a new sense, with the whole international flavor now of the space station, that there is a poltical commitment by the administration. It's almost part of their foreign policy in the relationship that we're trying to establish with Russia now. So there is that element of support that was always in doubt. On the other hand budgets are critically tight, so it's going to be a tremendous challenge to do this project with the same attention to detail and eventual level of success that we showed in the Hubble telescope (repair mission).
Q: How do you feel that the Amherst education either shaped your career, your way of thought or your general life experiences out in the world?
Even before I got into the astronaut program, I've always been extremely interested and enthusiastic about space. I was much too young to be involved when people went to the Moon, but it was something that I felt -- this was something that I was a part of, I believed in. This was something I had always anticipated was going to happen. So it's not now like I'm doing something that I had never imagined doing before, it's something I had dreamed about, and I've just been lucky enough to be able to realize that dream.
You certainly get a new perspective on looking at the Earth, but it's not dissimilar -- you know, if you can remember back, most people probably don't remember the first time they were in an airplane because it's something we do when we're so young nowadays -- we don't think anything of it now, and yet it certainly has given human beings as a whole now a new perspective on their planet and civilization, the fact that we can look at things from the air and fly around getting in a few hours from one place to another.
Clearly, for me, looking at the Earth from space, it does give me a sense of the Earth as a planet, but that's something I think a lot of people have been able to get over the last few decades with the pictures that have come back. I think some of the visual experiences that we have up there it has been possible to share with people, maybe not in the same intensity, but if you go to the IMAX films (high-resolution movies shot from the shuttle), or you see the pictures of the Earth floating in space that they took from the Moon, I think that is something that all human beings have shared. So I think you appreciate to an extent what we all feel when we go up there, we're just feeling it first hand, and of course that makes it somewhat more intense. But it is something which I think is important to try to share.
Q: I remember the quote from Rene Daumel that you gave on 51-D. This may be an impossible question to answer. I recall a line from that -- "there's an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up". I wonder how seeing the Earth from space may affect how you conduct yourself in the lower regions.
I think human activities in space -- the expansion, the exploration -- I look at it as being part of a large historical process. It will proceed by fits and starts, and sometimes we get frustrated in the day to day hassle of trying to meet budgets and work with bureaucratic regulations and getting contracts signed, but I think it's given me the ability to pull back and maybe look at it from not just from a global perspective but a perspective in time, saying this is a large project, and you know, gee, probably on a day-to-day basis Columbus had the same hassles with bureaucracy and finances that we do nowadays, but those weren't the important things that we remember when we look back on what he was able to do. So I think it's a tremendous motivational force for keeping track of where we are and where we're going, to realize that we're part of something bigger than any one person. So in that sense I'd say it gives me a nice perspective on what I'm doing in my life. I hope I'm able to keep the perspective.
Q: What kind of advice would you give to students at this point planning what they do with life, not necessarily for people who might be going into the astronaut program but for anyone who might be interested in working in the space program generally?
This is oriented specifically to people who ask about what they should be doing to try to get into the astronaut program. And that is you can't tailor your education that closely because you need to be doing what you love, because to be an astronaut is a long shot, I was very lucky, but there are a lot of good people out there who don't get selected just because we can't take that many people, and your choice of professional career which flows out of your education ought to be based on what you want to really do with your life.
People need to learn about what we're doing in the space program if they're interested in it, because looking ahead 10 or 15 years we'll probably be doing a lot of things that we're not doing now and we'll need new skills and new types of people. 15 years ago who would have thought that we'd be taking biologists and materials scientists into space, and yet life sciences and fundamental materials and fluid physics research are some of the fundamental things that we expect to be carrying out on the space station. But there's a whole range of activities, both science and engineering, that are invovled in the space program. I was involved in the space program when I was an astronomer. I launched my telescopes in rockets and satellites, and that's been one of the most exciting areas of astronomy, is space astronomy. Now that the option to do research in space is open to biologists and geologists, there are a lot of opportunities.
Q: In Merrill, they have over there what is titled "space dog" that apparently you took on 51-D?
Or bear. You probably heard the contraversy as to whether it was a bear or a dog. The students thought it was a bear, the professors apparently thought it was a dog. They were the ones who got to make the sign.
Q: I was wondering what that was.
I'll give you a short description, but it's probably worth talking to one of the physicists over there who were around, they can tell you the whole story. Bob Romer (SPELLING?) is the guy who can give you the whole story of how it came to be there. I was looking for a suitable momento from my days at Amherst to take on my first flight, and one of the technicians in the department came up with the idea that that was the dog that Professor Aarons (SPELLING?) back in the old days used as a demonstration of the idea that the forward velocity of an object doesn't affect the downward velocity. And so the bear would be suspended at one end of the room, and a cork gun would be at the other end aimed at the bear, and then you'd fire the gun simultaniously with letting the bear start to drop, and inevitably the cork would hit the bear down near the floor to the applause of the entire freshman physics class. They figured that that bear had already experienced probably many hours of weightlessness in his service to science, and he was at the time sort of rotting away in a closet having been retired, so that would be something nice to take as a momento on my first flight, which I did and then presented it back to the college, to the physics department.
Q: Is there anything that you would like to say to the Amherst students?
At Amherst, we value a liberal education, and I did not go right away into heavy duty engineering as an undergraduate the way some people do who go to other universities. We take those values that we get from our education along with us, and I've found that it's important to be able to write and speak and read and carry along a sense of history, all the sorts of things that we learned to value as part of our liberal education have fit in very well with my extremely technical career, even though you would think that this is something which flows mainly out of science and engineering, nevertheless I look at it as a very, it's a very human endeavour, and so all the human values that we take along with us, to me at least, have been important.
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