Episode 164: Nicole Stott
NASA Engineer and Astronaut
00:58:19
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Show Notes
Nicole Stott, a NASA engineer and astronaut who journeyed into space twice and was a crewmember of the International Space Station, shares her career journey. As a former crew member of the International Space Station (ISS), Nicole brings a unique perspective to today’s episode, shedding light on her extraordinary career journey and the profound human experiences that come with exploring the cosmos. Nicole discusses the essence of teamwork and what makes it truly successful. Drawing from her extensive space missions, she emphasizes the importance of assembling the right team members and nurturing their individual strengths to accomplish extraordinary feats. Her insights into the power of empathy, humanity, and personal responsibility within a team resonate far beyond the boundaries of space exploration, making this episode a must-listen for leaders and innovators seeking to achieve greatness. Join us as we explore the magic of space, the art of teamwork, and the vital role each of us plays as crewmembers aboard Planet Earth.
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About Nicole Stott:
Nicole Stott is an astronaut, aquanaut, artist, mom, and now author of her first book Back to Earth ~ What Life In Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet - And Our Mission To Protect It. She creatively combines the awe and wonder of her spaceflight experience with her artwork to inspire everyone's appreciation of our role as crewmates here on Spaceship Earth.
She is a veteran NASA Astronaut with two spaceflights and 104 days as a crewmember on both the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle. She was the last ISS crewmember to return to Earth on a Space Shuttle. Personal highlights of her time in space include performing a spacewalk (10th woman to do so), flying the robotic arm to capture the first free-flying HTV, painting a watercolor (now on display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum), working with her international crew on science that is all about improving life on Earth, and of course the life changing view of our home planet. She is also a NASA Aquanaut. In preparation for spaceflight she was a crew member on an 18-day saturation dive mission at the Aquarius undersea laboratory.
Nicole's 28 year NASA career started at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida where she worked as an engineer and manager for the Space Shuttle and ISS programs. Nicole gained valuable hands-on, operational experience with the actual spaceflight hardware and worked alongside the team of people responsible for the "care and feeding" of the vehicles.
Prior to being selected as an Astronaut, Nicole worked for 2 years at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston as a Flight Simulation Engineer (FSE) in the NASA Aircraft Operations Division. As an FSE she flew as a crewmember onboard the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA) helping to train astronaut pilots to fly the Space Shuttle. She also flew a range of other missions in the NASA T38's and the KC135 ("Vomit Comet").
Nicole believes that the international model of peaceful and successful cooperation we have experienced in the extreme environments of space and sea holds the key to the same kind of peaceful and successful cooperation for all of humanity here on Earth.
On her post-NASA mission, Nicole is a co-founder of the Space for Art Foundation --- uniting a planetary community of children through the awe and wonder of space exploration and the healing power of art.
Transcript
Astronaut, Artist, Author
We are going beyond the law and Earth with our guest, Nicole Stott, who is an astronaut with many adventures in space on the International Space Station and otherwise with NASA and is now bringing her talents back to Earth. Welcome, Nicole.
Thank you. It’s nice to be here.
I'm excited to have you. As we were talking before we started, there are relatively few people who have gone to space, even fewer women and multiple times as you have. I'm curious, and I'm sure a lot of people want to know. Did you always want to be an astronaut? How did you become one?
I didn't always want to be one. I'm old enough that I watched that first moon landing with my parents. Even at 6 or 7, if you had no interest in space at all, you would find it extraordinary to walk outside and look up to this place that you get used to seeing and knowing that there are people up there. When I'm asked this question, it's that hindsight thing.
I’m crediting my parents for sharing what they loved with me. That's everything from plopping me down in front of the TV to watching a moon landing. My mom was a nurse. She is artsy and crafty. She still is. Getting us engaged in that helped me develop the creative side of my brain. My dad built and flew small airplanes while I was growing up. We spent a lot of time out at the local airport. Long story short, I developed a love for flying, and not just flying but wanting to know how things fly.
That led me to what I studied in school, which is aeronautical engineering. I was up the road from the Kennedy Space Center, where the shuttle program was going on. I was like, “If you want to know how airplanes fly, why would you not want to know how rocket ships fly?” This rolling experience with the space program led me to question this astronaut thing. To me, and for a lot of people, it seems like one of those jobs that's something other special people get to do. Why would they pick me? What have I ever done?
As I started to see more about what astronauts do, sadly, to astronauts, the majority of it is not flying in space, it's here on Earth. The best I could tell, a lot of it was all that I was already doing. That encouraged me to speak to some mentors who encouraged me to do the one thing I had control of, which women, in particular, tend to discount themselves sometimes or not even take that step that is in your control, and that was to pick up the pen and fill out the application. I’m thankful to those people who did that. It's why I'm sitting here in front of you.
Women in particular tend to discount themselves sometimes, or tend to not even take that step that is in their control and that was to pick up the pen and fill out the application.
There are a lot of times on the show talking to others who have the same experience. If there are 20 requirements, we make sure we have 18 of them before we apply. That happens in a lot of settings. I could imagine even more in the astronaut setting because there is a first thought like, “Me, from amongst all of these, to be chosen? That would seem somebody else, not me.”
What you talked about in terms of mentors and those encouraging you is important. That's part of what spurred me on to do the show and hope that folks like you, who are the guests on the show, would have that a-ha virtual mentoring moment with people who read and would say, “That's encouraging me to go ahead and do something that might be beyond my reach,” but there are a lot of stories of mentors or people coming forward at the right time and encouraging.
These were two men who were in my leadership hierarchy at the time. The reason I felt comfortable reaching out to them was that they were encouraging me and my colleagues all along the way. They were the ones that I was learning stuff from. I have this with me all the time now. It's this little astronaut. JH is from my friend Jay Honeycutt. The motto we had in the space shuttle program was, “Here's how we can, not why we can't.” It was embedded in everything.
This is a bunch of young engineers coming in after the Challenger accident, getting the shuttle back ready to fly. That was a challenging time. It's challenging enough to build and fly a spaceship, but to come after an accident and get it going again, he's like, “The way we solve our most challenging problems is to believe there is a solution and go into it with this attitude of here's how we can, not why we can't.” That got into me. It spoke to me. It did a lot of my friends and colleagues who worked with him.
The way we solve our most challenging problems is first of all to believe there is a solution.
It made you feel like you could reach out to him and the other people that were surrounding us and that we were working with. We ask them something like, “What do you think about this astronaut thing?” I was thankful. They didn't go, “Nicole, thousands of people apply for this.” They didn't do that, and they didn't do the other thing either, like, “You'd make the greatest astronaut there ever was.” Although I'd like to think they believe that now. They encouraged me to do the one thing I had control of. It gave me permission to pick that pen up and fill out the application. There are many ways we can apply that in life, whether it's around the house, with our family, or for things like careers that we want to pursue.
Pursue our dream, but in a way that isn't, “You would be the best ever.” It’s not in an unrealistic way. It is in a way that gives you confidence, like, “They have faith in me.” Even more, in that case, with that motto of being open to innovating and trying out different things. There would be an openness to asking them questions about things. That's a good example of how you encourage innovation in a team and an organization.
I always felt under their leadership that there was an openness to different ideas. If you're encouraging me to figure out how we can, we've got to be looking at it from all different angles. If you mean that, mine might sound wacky. Nicole wanting to be an astronaut might sound wacky. If I'm going to do that, how do I do it? What are the things I can do to make that happen? Filling out the application was one of the requirements. Nobody else can do that.
Even about the lottery, you have to be in a twenty and buy a ticket. You have to put yourself in the mix, but it's hard to take that step and do that. There are many questions along the way of the process. Were there other ways that people mentored you through that process?
I reached out to people who I knew in the astronaut office that I had met. As I was helping get space shuttles ready to fly and working as a NASA engineer, I met astronauts along the way. I asked some of them what their advice would be, if nothing else. That's one thing I felt in the human space flight program because I think of what we're doing. It is a greater good mission. Everything we're doing is off the Earth and for the Earth. It's about improving life on Earth. That was one of the things that got me even questioning those mentors.
A lot of people consider that astronauts are about the adventure stuff, the launch, the landing, and the flying in space. I can safely say that most of us want to do that adventure stuff because of the work we're doing once we get there. I'm sure you've experienced it too. There are realms of it in all different industries and walks of life where you come in contact with a group of people who generally collectively want to lift everyone up, not just to lift up and launch vehicles but to lift the community of people they're working with up. I felt that every step of the way.
That's neat. It doesn't happen as often as you'd like.
Some friends of mine and I have talked about this before. What is the secret sauce that happened in the human space flight program? There's always still room for improvement. Fifty years ago was not that long ago. Those last people were walking on the moon, and during the Apollo time, you had no women in the mission control room up front. You had one woman in the back room there, Poppy Northcutt, cranking out the science. You had one woman, JoAnn Morgan, in the launch control center.
Now, if you look at the space program across the board, it's incredible women that are running those. If you look at all the different workers on the consoles, it's this mix of humanity. You're not saying, “Where's JoAnn now?” Every flavor is somehow blended into this thing. That's in the astronaut office, training world, and mission control. I don't know what the secret there is, but I would love it if we could figure it out more. It makes me happy that you're talking to other people like Shelly and others who are in this in a way that maybe we can figure that out and splash it into some of these other places.
I do think that the greater good component of what draws people to it and the contributions to humanity might put the whole endeavor into something different. It is a certain amount of meaning, but meaning beyond yourself. That can elevate things. That's part of it, but also this sense of, in order to accomplish some of those great things, you have to have the motto or the attitude that your boss had. There's something freeing to the spirit about that. Everybody is going to perform their utmost. It would be nice to bottle that up and put it in other settings because that's how you do extraordinary things.
We wouldn't have walked on the moon without that attitude. We wouldn't have been getting ready to go back. I believe without a here's-how-we-can attitude, I do not think for several years we would have had people representing one crew on this international space station, orbiting the planet 16 times a day for over 20 years, representing 15 different countries as one crew peacefully and successfully, somehow functioning there with this off the Earth for the Earth mission. You can't do that by bogging yourself down with all the, “Here's why we can't,” stuff. What you were saying about the greater good mission thing boils down to having a meaningful purpose and what you're doing. People like to be part of that.
Everybody wants to have some meaning and purpose in their work. That seems an extraordinary one. When you were saying about the women being in leadership in the missions at this point being different from earlier on, I was also watching India's launch to the moon. I was checking. I'm like, “Do they have women?” There were quite a few, quite more than I had anticipated. The second in charge was also a woman. I was like, “We're integrated in that space system.”
Space seems to be that way. To figure out how you can, you have to bring everyone's individual talents to bear and welcome the talents of many different people with many different experiences. It's cool to see how it works, and it can be successful that way.
You're right about the talents thing. That's something that is more broadly in the space community that I've seen, whether it's space law. There's an interest in, “You have a special expertise in this. You have a different perspective. How can we combine that or apply that to this problem, look at it in a different way, and do some problem-solving together?” It's great to harness all the different talents and bring them together to create something better, novel, or hard to do.
It's cool to think about the experiences and different talents that people have. You might not even consider them to be the thing that you would apply to a problem necessarily. For kids or students in my presentations, I have this picture of my astronaut class. It's our goofy picture. Our class name is The Bugs. We have these bug antennae on and these glasses. We're being goofy in the picture. We just met each other. We had been together for a few two weeks.
People want a checklist for how you become anything, like, “If I do these five things, they'll pick me.” Sadly, there's not that. There are the basic requirements. This is something I've seen in the astronaut office for sure, and it spreads across the space program mentality for how you bring people in. Every single one of the people in that picture of my class is satisfied with NASA's basic requirements for education, career, and some medical stuff.
The needer thing is to look at how not one of those people got there the same way. They all had different pathways and experiences. Every single one of them has something going on that's outside of that career education thing. They're artists, chefs, musicians, race car drivers, water skiers, or house builders. This creative part of themselves comes together with what you would think of as an astronaut, like technical sciencey stuff that encourages their brain to consider problems in lots of different ways. That's neat.
You always think, “Clearly, it's some science background that is the most directly useful.” When you were talking about that, I was thinking, “Renaissance men and women.” Being able to be creative in solving problems because you need that when you're in space.
I love talking to kids about it. For me, it's art and space. I don't want to be disparaging of the STEM movement, but this push for all of our students to be doing something STEM-related has been done at the expense of the humanities and the arts to the point where I could see kids being discouraged or feeling not worthy because they want to study the humanities or do something that uses a different part of the brain. We need to be encouraging people to use their whole brains.
When I read Jay’s, “Here's how we can, not why we can't,” that's what I get out of that. I want you to bring every talent you have to bear to help solve this problem. That's whether it's how we launch in space. How do we provide clean drinking water? How do we solve every planetary challenge we have? It needs to be with that consideration in mind.
Who doesn't want to bring their whole self, best self, and all the different aspects to bear on a problem or at work? There's something inspiring about that. You're inviting someone to bring all of themselves to it. A large part of creativity is making connections between things that other people don't see. If you don't have a broad range of experiences like that with other creative endeavors, you don't have that to bring to the pot all the things that we could connect with and find a new way of doing something. You want to have all of it not too focused in one area.
A large part of creativity is making connections between things that other people don't see.
Many people get caught up. They're like, “Scientists don't use anything artsy.” I'm like, “Are you kidding me? Since the beginning of humans flying in space, there have been astronauts or cosmonauts wanting to create art while they're there, and it continues.” It works the other way. Imagine that connection you were talking about.
I think about that from the standpoint of the relationships we can create for people to things they might think are complex or crazy to even imagine understanding. The thing that always comes to mind for me is Hubble Space Telescope images. We have the Webb Telescope. I get goosebumps thinking about it. Those scientists could be looking at the 1s and 0s, but by falsely coloring the images and saying, “This color represents this gas for this temperature or distance,” they understand it better because, visually, they can comprehend how all of that's coming together. It makes a beautiful picture for the rest of us.
You don't have to be an astrophysicist to look at that and think, “That's this gorgeous nebula in space, however many thousands of light years away, that is sharing the same space I'm in with.” Considering the who and where we all are together in space from something as extraordinary as that. That takes a whole brain.
It is a sense of awe. Seeing that puts you in a different space. To transcend you and your particular needs into something greater, it elevates everything or has the potential to do that. That's one of the things that I know is often discussed or that Frank White coined in terms of interviewing several NASA colleagues of yours and maybe you as well. In terms of the overview effect, seeing Earth, and having that perspective on Earth from space and the impact that has on your views of what can or should be done on our planet.
He's gone even further to that if we're going to be interplanetary, the cosma effect, having that even greater understanding of where we are in this vast universe and how that will impact how we relate to each other, and how we treat each other and the Earth. I don't know if you wanted to say anything about your experience in that regard and how it's impacted you since you came back from space.
I'm thankful that you led with Frank in that. There's so much out there now, and people are speaking using those two words that Frank coined. It makes me sad when I encounter people using that, but they don't understand where it came from, who Frank is, what the motivation is, and his backstory with it all. I hope you'll interview him sometime. He is an incredible, humble, thoughtful human being. I never do justice to what he beautifully brought to life.
It helped me understand better the experience I had by thinking about it from the perspective that he was considering, looking out the window of an airplane one day. He and I have had a lot of conversations. There is so much complexity about sending humans to space, even being able to float in front of a window and look back at Earth from space.
Gratitude is the word that comes to mind when I think about even having that experience. There's the simple part of it that makes the most sense to me, like floating in front of a window where you have this special vantage point and being like, “We live on a planet.” We know that when we're in kindergarten. I remember thinking, “I know this. We live on a planet. I’m seeing it that way. There's not a day that goes by now where I don't wake up, my feet hit the floor, and I'm like, “I'm standing on a planet. It's part of me I want.”
Whether you get to go to space or not, I highly recommend it, but feel that connection and understand the interconnectivity of it all. Not only do we live on a planet, but we're all earthlings, and the only border that matters is that thin blue line of atmosphere. How does that compare to the way we've managed to build this mechanical life support system in space and the things we consider while we're there that are the basic needs for our survival that we need to be doing, treating Earth as our spaceship here?
It's oversimplified. I've talked to Frank about this a lot, and he agrees. We have to figure out how we can all behave like crew mates and not passengers on spaceship Earth. That's what encourages the actions to be taken. If I'm a crew mate onboard a space station, every day I wake up, and I'm saying, “How much carbon dioxides are in my atmosphere? How much clean drinking water do I have? What's the integrity of my thin metal haul and the health and well-being of all my crew mates?”
That might be orders of magnitude to consider down here on Earth. It's the same thing that we need to be doing. In all of our considerations, what is my role as a crewmate with respect to all the life I share this planet with? By behaving that way, we can create a future for all life on Earth that's as beautiful as it looks from space. I'm thankful to Frank for encouraging me to think about the experience I had and to be able to ramble like I did to you.
I was thinking about the difference between crewmate and passenger. I'm like, “That implies some responsibility of action as opposed to, ‘I'm going to watch and see what floats by.’”
That's what we're trying to do with our kids. We're trying to encourage our kids to be active members of society, not lay there on the couch with the video game, but we like to step out into it and figure out what their place is and how they do their good in the world.
It's interesting that you said about, in a way, a service or how Frank asking those questions and interviews with all of you helped you fully realize and understand your experience and bring that back. Sometimes, we think, “That's my experience.” When you have the collective, there's a pattern here. There's something that we're all seeing, and what, why, and how is that? How can we put it to the highest and best use?
I didn't know the two-word overview effect before I flew the first time. I discovered that it was through my husband, who had attended the International Space University. He's like, “There's this guy, Frank White.” I had put it in the back of my brain after that. When my friend Ron Garan and his crew were getting ready to come back from space one time, I remember being outside, looking up, thinking about them on the space station, and getting ready to come home. I'm like, “This whole overview effect thing that this guy Frank White came up with works both ways.”
It's not just about looking back at Earth from space. It's about looking out and appreciating the awe and wonder wherever you are, how that defines who and where we all are in space together, and this appreciation for home. Looking back at a planet that's our home, or in that case, I'm looking up at Ron and his buddies who are about to come back to Earth. I'm like, “That place is our home.” With this place that I spent in space, I could think of it like that.
Anybody who's flown in space wants everyone to realize that you don't have to fly in space to appreciate this thing and understand the interconnectivity of everything on this planetary home you share. Open your eyes, heart, and mind to the awe and wonder that surrounds us every day, no matter where we are. Build that into those actions that we're going to take as crew mates.
For those of you who happened to space to tell that story, and maybe it will resonate with some people, you never know how some things resonate more with other people. Some people find that going out into nature, getting beyond themselves, and being in the ocean, a forest, or something like that. This is the tenth degree of power going to space to have that.
I'm looking out in my own backyard, and I can imagine myself standing in the dirt. That's why I try to encourage people. I'm like, “You are on a planet. It's spinning at 1,000 miles an hour in space and orbiting the sun at 60,000 miles an hour. We feel like we're in this place that we're supposed to be. At least once a day, go out, stand in the dirt, stand on your driveway, and viscerally engage in that connection that your feet are making with this planet.
Open yourself up to consider that. It's powerful. With that nature thing, it's why it's around us. It's there for a purpose. Our planet has many otherworldly places. There are acid lakes in Ethiopia. We can't survive there. We have to put on spaces to trump around in those places, and yet there's life in them. That's awesome to think about.
You've done a lot of exploring on the earth since you've been back. That's always interesting.
I have a friend who you should speak with. We've been going to these places with the idea that it's like, “This place I saw from space.” I'm getting experience it down here on earth. I consider all the other awesomeness of it besides how beautiful it might look from a space station.
That's a different travel bucket list, but I like it. We've talked about some of the leadership that you grew up with and experienced at NASA and that spirit of innovation and aspiring to do something new and different. I wonder, are there any other lessons you think you got from being in space itself that would impact how you lead others or what you think is important to building a great team?
I wrote a book about it. It’s called Back to Earth. I never wanted to write about how Nicole became an astronaut book. I didn't feel like there was as much purpose in that. Nicole became an astronaut and did these things. What about that experience? Can I share that? Hopefully, it can be meaningful to more than people who want to be astronauts.
I looked at the ways we somehow figured out to live and work in that peaceful, successful way on the machine in space, which comes down to how you work as a good crew, lift each other up, solve challenging problems, and be away from your family for the extended period of times. You have to be all of those kinds of things.
Some of the things are like what we've already talked about. We live on a planet. Everything that we think of as far away on the other side of the planet or global is local. How we behave right here in our little piece of it is impactful to the whole thing that is not that far away. With the communication ability that we have now, thanks to what we do in space, you can't ignore that there was a tragic earthquake in Morocco. You could choose to ignore it, but these kinds of things are planetary. We're looking at the experiences of everyone we share within a planetary way, which makes it become local. It's not far away anymore.
One of the chapters is Go Slow To Go Fast. That was such a huge lesson. Being willing to take in not the information that's coming in from all different places with respect to whether it's an emergency situation going on or some day-to-day challenge you're having. It’s this willingness to consider all of the talents of everyone that you are working with and how much better the solution ends up being.
There are going to be times when you're going to have to say, “We're doing it this way.” You might be at risk in a way that requires that to happen. If you know your crew mates well enough and you understand how they're motivated, you can at least understand, when you make that decision, what the fallout of it might be. That's important to understand as, “What are the decisions I'm making? How are they going to impact the relationships, outcome, success, and overall vibe of the team afterward?” That's important.
There are two things in there. One is being intentional in selecting the team members who work on a particular project because you know their different strengths and what they bring together and putting this team together for particular reasons. The second point is the team continues past this particular project. We want to make sure we do our best on the project, but we also maintain the team and are prepared to do the next challenge together.
As European Space Agency astronauts, all of the partners that we have, and I was fortunate to work with for the Space Station program, we do so much training. There's all the technical stuff. You have to learn how to fly things and how to do spacewalks. Underlying all of it is how you work as a good team to make any of that happen. There's not a single thing, even if you're alone in a space suit, that doesn't depend on other people carrying and feeding you somehow or making sure you're safe in that place. It's all teaming.
We go off to the Utah Canyonlands. We are out there for 10 days, 6 people, identifying your own strengths and weaknesses. When you've got a whole bunch of type-A people who have been successful in their own little worlds now coming together, it's sometimes challenging to want to accept that you might have weaknesses. We all do. Once you understand those, how do you take advantage of the people around you who are good at that stuff that you're not and be okay with the fact that somebody's better than you?
When you have a whole bunch of type A successful people that have been successful in their own little worlds now coming together, it's sometimes challenging to want to even accept that you might have weaknesses.
We go live underwater for weeks at a time and do these things because it puts you in a place that is not necessarily comfortable. It is going to bring out all of those things about yourself and your crewmates. When you get into the real scene on a space station, and the alarm's going off at 3:00 in the morning telling you all the air is spewing out of your space station, which you don't want to have happen, it’s beautiful.
One of the things I was proud of was to be able to watch how we all floated out of our crew component. We made sure we'd accounted for each other. We all divided and conquered what we had been trained to do and got ourselves in a safe configuration to be able to sit back and say, “Let's figure it out further.” It’s cool how you can train to respond that way in a cool, calm way to something that could be immediately catastrophic, and yet you're doing what you need to do.
That is amazing, but the teamwork part is important. If you think about that, it has to be in that environment.
It has to be that way everywhere.
It would be great if it were like that everywhere. Let's put it that way. Some of it is empathy, humanity, and fundamental things that people forget to do in working with each other. That can yield many amazing things.
I interviewed to be an astronaut, but before I retired from NASA, I got to sit on the other side of the table to do the interview. Anybody who gets to that point, their application gets through, they get into this group of 100 or 120 people that we're going to do interviews with. They satisfied all those school, career, and medical requirements. You want to get to know them.
There are two things, personality and professionalism. You want that as part of any team. I don't care if it's going to space or working in an office setting somewhere. You should have a good time. Enjoy the time that you're with this other group of people that you're with your team, but you should also know when it hits the fan and when things are not going as planned as they will, that every single person that's on your crew will have your back. They need to trust that you'll have theirs. That's what we're looking for when we are doing these interviews now.
First of all, would I want to be locked up for several months in a relatively confined space with this person? Is there so much ego that I'm not going to be able to know that? It is an important question. What do they enjoy outside of what I've already seen on their resume of career and education? How might that help us have a good crew and have a successful mission? Will they be thoughtful enough to put their stuff away at the end of the day?
It seems silly, but if you don't set the torque wrench back to zero, that messes up for me the next time I want to use that tool. You want to trust that it is going to happen. That sounds silly, but in the grand scheme, things make a big difference. There are those kinds of things in every work or experience with people.
When you were applying and doing the interviews for the astronaut position, did you at all think that the people who were interviewing you had in mind some of the things you were talking about as being part of the selection? Is that something, having been there, you know this is important?
The thing I heard is they want to get to know you. It made sense that it was like that. You're stressed when you go into that. You're like, “Can I tell them about myself?” You don't have to get goofy or unprofessional. They want to get a sense of, “Can this person hold a conversation about something that doesn't have to do with whatever technical thing they were?” It makes sense that we're looking for people who can work in stressful sometimes and always confined remote, challenging environments. It's a little difficult to psych that out completely doing an interview thing, but you can get a sense.
The other thing we looked forward to was stuff like there's the basic requirements that NASA has. Certain degree programs and career success, but there are things that people think NASA wants. People think NASA wants you to have a pilot's license of any kind. People think you probably should be a scuba diver. All these things are nice. If you go off, you get your pilot's license, and you never fly, it's like this, “They're trying to find the boxes.”
You want somebody who's excited about the work they're doing. If they don't get selected, they're going to continue to do great things with the work they're doing. They're going to be pursuing things outside of that work they're genuinely interested in. If you weren't genuinely interested in getting a pilot's license, don't get it because you think somebody on some astronaut selection committee wants you to have it.
That's such great advice for everything. If you think, “I have to have this. I'm checking all the boxes,” it comes across eventually that you're just checking the boxes you think are supposed to be checked, as opposed to, is it a genuine expression of you, your interest, and your skills?
That's the thing that comes out. If you went off and got your pilot's license, but you never flew, because if you put down, you got your pilot's license on the application, it's going to be, how many hours of flying do you have? When did you get it? We're going to ask you, “You like to fly.” You go, “I got it, but I never fly.”
Thank you for that insight into this selection process. It's great because it makes you think about it. If you want to build a great team that can accomplish great things, think about some of these things in the hiring process.
It applies to everything.
Many people are like, “How do I build a great team and build innovation into it?” and all of what you've talked about. Share some of that secret sauce to some degree. It involves selecting the right people and members of the team that all fit together well and inspiring them as your boss did.
One of the things I loved about the experience with NASA was that they realized everybody comes from different places, backgrounds, and experiences. If we want to understand together what we consider a good crew and team to be, they knew they had to provide the training experiences with us together to learn, understand, and be able to develop it. It wasn't like they threw you in and said, “Figure out how to be a good team.” It was always built into everything we were doing. I am thankful for that.
To understand it is to be able to develop it.
They were some of the coolest experiences to be out, living under the ocean or in the Canyonlands, or out doing water survival or winter survival. You don't want your spaceship landing in the middle of the frozen tundra. You want it to land where it's supposed to, but the training for that stuff puts you in a place where you think that you would be successful if that did happen. It does challenge you in a way to discover stuff about yourself you might not you and your crewmates.
You can fine-tune the teamwork for the space mission.
One of the things that was great about the way this training would go down was the best of it was always in a real experience. You are going to live underwater in a place that is an extreme environment. You have to bring your talents and understand your strengths and weaknesses to bear. It wasn't sitting around the table and pretending you're this leader. It was stuff that happened and put you in a real situation to help you develop your own skills and understanding.
It wasn't hypotheticals in a room. You're talking about real situations.
Even the simulation situations were real scenarios and experiences versus you having to consider yourself being somebody different than you are and how you might deal with it. It was always about how the real you are going to deal with this and figure out how to best manage a situation.
It helps you recognize how you would show up in that, and you go, “This is what I did.”
I'm being challenged with drowning right now. How am I going react to this?
You, to some degree, cannot know until you're in a situation like that.
That is why it's nice to have those people lifting you up and helping you figure it out.
There are two mutual benefits all around to having that approach for everyone. You need everyone's support at different points in time. I'm curious what your thoughts are about this reinvigorated interest in space and the expanded group of players, whether we're talking about many more countries and private companies engaged in space exploration and going to the moon and Artemis. What's your view on all of that? What do you think that opens the doors to you? What new growth do you think can come from that?
I'm excited about it. I'm a person who would like to think that the excitement for space had never gone away or never waned. I also understand the reality, but it's exciting to me from many different aspects, this continued exploration of our planet, going back to the moon, establishing a permanent presence there, leveraging that for all it can be to help continue to improve life on earth from space, how we explore further, utilizing what we discover and develop on the moon to find a better way to get to places like Mars or wherever else it might be that we should be going.
I like that more people are going to have the opportunity. I love it when I see three more people fly suborbital and have their faces in front of the window. It drives something inside you that makes you want to come back and appreciate Earth and all the life we share it with in a new way. The more, the merrier when it comes to getting people that experience.
Every single one of those flights is helping us develop something bigger. That's going to allow us to lift the icky industrial stuff off of our planet and into the benign environment of space to generate all the power we need for everyone on the planet from the resource of space to expand our presence. Every aspect of the way that we can improve life on Earth can come to us in a much better way by continuing to leverage the exploration of space. That's going to require more players in it.
Every aspect of the way that we can improve life on Earth can come to us in a much better way by continuing to leverage the exploration of space.
This might've been before we hit record, but we were talking about encouraging people who are not the just science tech part of our planetary community to think about what their roles in space exploration, space flight, or the world of space could be. Every job that we need on Earth we are going to need in space. At some point, it's going to be that way. It already is that way if you look at it. People need to understand that their talents, as unique as they might be, can have a positive influence and result in the world of space exploration.
With many different actors involved, there are more opportunities for more people to be involved and part of that. Some of the smaller countries that have space programs and are interested in participating in some way could never have been part of the launch situation but maybe can have other roles in space exploration. It's exciting to see that spread around the globe.
It’s another one of the wonderful examples that the International Space Station program has given us. When you look at the partnerships that have been in place so far for ISS, you've got five international space agencies with fifteen countries involved. Eleven of them are European Space Agency countries. They're not all big countries.
If you think about a country like Belgium, it’s relatively small. It has always been involved in one way or another with space-related activities. When I flew for the first time, one of my commanders on the space station was the first European commander on the station, and he was from Belgium. From the human space flight side of things, being actively involved in every aspect of the programs to the science and the engineering that goes into making it happen, I don't think it's about how big your country is. It's about understanding that the talents and expertise you have in whatever industry it might be can be applied to space exploration. We already see it happening all the time.
I remember in one of the classes I had there, one of my co-students was the Head of the Rwanda Space Agency. I was like, “I had no idea that you had a space agency.”
Kigali University is doing such incredible things with respect to sustainable energy solutions. You're like, “How is that where that is happening?”
It's neat, but that's a way to harness all of the talents everywhere, apply them to some big, thorny problems, and accomplish some great things. Thank you so much for talking about your experience. I enjoyed it and learned different things that I didn't think I would learn. It's been cool. Usually, I end with a few lightning-round questions. I'm going to ask a few. Which talent would you most like to have but don't? I know you're a Renaissance woman.
Foreign languages.
That would help on the ISS.
Thankfully, the official language on ISS is English.
What trait do you most deplore in yourself and what trait do you most deplore in others? It might be the same, but it could be different.
That would be how I can tolerate things in people that aren't my family, but I have less tolerance when it is my family member.
It's hard when you're close.
If somebody's sucking the coffee out of their cup from 3 inches away, it doesn't bother me when it's somebody else, but when my husband tries to do it, I make him go to another room. I don't know if that's the worst one I have. The word intolerance is a word that comes to mind in general. It applies to everything we talked about, people with different talents and skills and not wanting to do things necessarily the same way you do, but it's as good. If we can't tolerate that, we're not going to solve the biggest problems we have.
Who are some of your favorite writers?
Frank White, I will throw him out there. One that will be surprising is a fellow astronaut, Al Worden. This brings that whole art and space thing together. This is a guy who was an Apollo astronaut who orbited the moon during Apollo 15 while his buddies were walking on the moon. He wrote a poetry book when he came back to Earth. It's called Hello Earth. I love that that is the way he chose to do that. He spoke all these others, but to write a poetry book, you think Apollo guy.
You don't think poet. That's neat. That's a great illustration of what you're talking about in terms of many different facets of people who are astronauts. I'll have to check that out. I love poetry. Who is your hero in real life?
That's a difficult one. It’s my parents. When I look back and think about all the steps that had purpose along the way for me, I was influenced by them in one way or another. I'm still in awe of my mom and how she has dealt with things along the way that you wouldn't want people to have to deal with. The people that came up with this thing. Here's how we can think. There are teachers. Art and astronaut one, my friend and mentor Alan Bean, the fourth person to walk on the moon and come back to Earth as an artist. There are many people. My dearest friends, husband, and son are all heroes to me. My dog that I lost. We tend to think of people, but the way she loved was heroic to me.
You can't forget the animals. They're important little beings. Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you invite to a dinner party?
The same people I always invite to dinner parties. I enjoy the people that I have. There are those people out there that seem distant and unreachable. I feel like I have excellent people in my life that I know will come to dinner at my house already, and I love having them.
It's the thing I do already that I enjoy. It exemplifies your point about coming back to Earth and enjoying the things that you enjoy. Good friends and good conversation are priceless. The last question is, what is your motto? We know your boss' motto.
We talked about it a little bit. It comes down to the crewmate passenger thing. What I like to share with anybody is if we choose to behave like crewmates, not passengers, we have the power to create a future for all life on Earth that's as beautiful as it looks from space. I try to think about that every day.
Everything we put our thoughts towards energy and everything we can do to help manifest that to make it real is important to do. Thank you so much for this conversation. It made me think hard and I hope the readers do too, about teamwork, what it means to build it, what can be accomplished with it, and what happens if you unleash the spirit and the talents of those you are working with or those who work with you.
It's my pleasure. Thanks for including me.