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SLATE: What inspired you to become an astronaut?
I think that it's probably characteristic of all the people in our office is that everybody had
pretty broad interests, kind of a career anxiety if you will that could only be solved in a
place that puts so many incredible things together. I think at one time I wanted to be an
astronomer, at another time, an oceanographer, another time a paleontologist and human
medicine, obviously, is what took me to medical school and guess what?
The space program puts that all together. As an astronaut you do Earth observation,
we do ocean science. I lived on an underwater habitat in my astronaut career and that’s
along with what happens to the human body in spaceflight,
obviously very near and dear to my heart. And just doing your normal mission specialist
duties on the space station. So, there's nothing that puts all those things that we love
together better than spaceflight.
SLATE: What was it like to spend 199 days in space?
Well, I loved it. I could sum it up that way, but I can tell you,
that was my first spaceflight and flying out of Baikonur Cosmodrome was pretty special.
I mean, I launched off the same pad that launched Yuri Gagarin and that's pretty neat.
I had a terrific crew. We got up there and the first look at the station was just
unbelievable. When you open the hatch and see how big it is, that's going to be my home
for the next six-and-a-half months, that's pretty overwhelming and it did take me awhile
to get used to navigating around in zero gravity and doing my work and learning how to
work the timeline, work with the ground, find things, not lose things in zero gravity. I
think probably a few weeks into it, I really felt like I was hitting my stride and then I
really, really enjoyed it. I can tell you that as tightly attached as I am to my family,
at the end of six-and-a-half months, I didn't really want to leave,
so it was an incredible experience.
SLATE: What are the differences between launching on a shuttle and a Russian Soyuz?
Well the differences between the Soyuz and the shuttle are huge.
The mission statements of each vehicle are quite different. The Soyuz, I like to think of as
a commuter rocket that takes three people to work. And you park it.
Park it for six months. And then at the end of six months you turn the key and it goes and
you come home. Whereas the shuttle delivers a load, a big load, to the space station.
It's designed to carry those loads and up to seven people and, of course, bring back large
amounts of pressurized cargo as well. Both vehicles do their job very nicely,
but obviously you have very, very different launch profiles, very different launch
experience with each of them.
With the Soyuz, it's all-liquid boosters, it's a very gentle ascent.
It's hard almost to know that you've even left the pad because you have the shaking as the
engines spool up and you really don't feel a difference when you leave the pad.
You only know that from your clock that starts with your ascent indicators.
With the shuttle there is no doubt. The main engines start and in about five seconds those
things kind of spool up. You feel the orbiter shake and creak and groan and tilt a little bit
on the launch pad and you know it's getting ready to do something,
but when those solids light, there is no question, that is the moment you have left the
planet and you are starting to scream toward space. So, very exciting ascent on the shuttle
I would say.
Now landing, I would say, is much more exciting on the Soyuz.
The shuttle of course lands like an airplane, the Soyuz hits the ground with a parachute
descent.
SLATE: What happened during STS-133?
Well the time went by in the blink of an eye. What I can say, as an astronaut you look for
certain kinds of space activities that are just really exciting, I mean, everybody loves to
do robotics and spacewalks, the docking and rendezvous, the dynamics of flight,
if you will. And 133 put a lot of those in a very short timeline, so everything that really
makes spaceflight wonderful for an astronaut, we had compressed into this 13-day flight
for us. So, of course, we had Discovery with us for this final flight,
we did the docking, the rendezvous. Two spacewalks and a lot of outfitting of that new
module that we put up there and a lot of science. We transferred cargo back and forth.
So you're always busy doing something dynamic, something different every day so it was
really magnificent.
SLATE: What was spacewalking like?
I think a spacewalk is where the rubber meets the road for an astronaut.
It's the closest you can be to the space environment and it's just an amazing thing.
I think all of us are glued to the windows whenever we can. We look at the Earth,
we look at our station and we look at the stars and whatnot and that view is just
incredible. But when you get outside the ship, when you are just out there in your
spacesuit and you have a big, wide-view helmet, then it's almost overwhelming.
Seeing the Earth below you much more panoramically,
seeing the station around you is just amazing.
SLATE: What was it like to be part of Discovery's final mission?
Well it was an incredible honor. I was assigned to this flight while I was still flying my
long-duration flight, so that was a shock and a surprise.
I thought that the door to shuttle flights had slammed shut quite a bit before even I
launched. So out of the blue comes this opportunity to fly on one of the few shuttle
flights. I was incredibly honored for that. I landed and they said, OK,
you're behind in your training schedule already, you better get to work.
Fortunately the crew that I was training with, the 133 crew with Steve Lindsey as
commander and the rest, all my classmates from the class of 2000,
the crew was fantastic, and I think the training flow was just a lot of fun.
SLATE: What went through your mind when you landed at the end of Discovery's mission?
When we fly, even when we know it's the final mission of our orbiter,
in this case Discovery, overwhelmingly our thoughts are on our mission.
Our job is to execute our timeline, to do it as accurately and as on-time as possible
and that's pretty much where your head is. We definitely were asked a few times
on the flight about the legacy of Discovery and the shuttle program
and of course we would turn our thoughts to that for a moment,
but it's only when you successfully land, after wheels stop, that two things happen.
One, you can reflect back on your mission that was successful, safely done,
the vehicle was incredibly clean. But the other thing is that,
now you realize it's the last flight, and now you're turning the ship
back into the hands of the people who have cared for her for so many years
and back into this facility that's taken care of her and that's when it really hits you
that it's the final flight and you're taking this magnificent spaceship
and she's being retired.
So I think a lot of us started to feel the emotion at that point.
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