When I Learned That I Had Been Medically Disqualified From Consideration Of Being An Astronaut, I Was

Yes, there’s several paths to get to where I am right now and where the other researcher pilots are here at NASA.  We have some that come up through civilian flying and they’re educated in different areas.  Typically most of us have engineering or STEM related degrees in college, and usually Masters degrees on top of that. 

The flying portion, most of us actually come from a military background because that’s the best way to get a lot of intense experience very quickly.  So most of us are retired military pilots from all different services, but then we do have several pilots who have grown up flying corporate jets, larger airplanes and became test pilots for companies like, say, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, things like that.  And then they get hired at NASA based on their depth and breadth of experience.

 So several paths to get there, but these are the most common.

I want to pursue a career in aeronautics and want to get into NASA. Any advice?

Ah, that's a really good question!  I think I would say, study as much as you did, but also try to have a little bit of fun.

Hey, Kate! What would you say/what advice would you give to your younger self? ✨

When you first get into the capsule sitting on top of the rocket, it actually feels incredibly familiar.  It looks like the simulator that we've trained in for years and years, and so you sit down and you strap in, and it feels like you're just gonna go for another three hour sim.  And it might be really boring, and then there might be a fire, and then all of a sudden as you're thinking about those things the rocket starts to lift off and you realize it's not a simulation.  

So there's a lot of g-forces, the rockets shake, and the whole time you're thinking, "this is the most amazing experience I've ever had."  And really, the whole thing culminates at the end of it, after that nine-minute ride when you look out the window and you see the planet.  

We never get to see that in the simulator.

How does it feel to into space for the first time? Like liftoff and leaving earth’s atmosphere? It seems like the world’s terrifying roller coaster, but what’s it really like?

"The answer is both.  You will disappear forever, but you will still exist inside of the black hole.  So how does that work?  

Well, you disappear forever from the point of view of everbody outside of the black hole.  As you get closer and closer to the event horizon you get what we call redshifted.  You get kind of faded away darker and darker and darker until you just disappear.  That's what it looks like from the outside.

From the inside--from your point of view--everything goes pretty well at least for the next five or six milliseconds, before you get crushed to death."

What would happen if I go into a black hole? Do you think I would disappear forever or would I still exist inside the black hole?

"Every job that I have had here, I have had to overcome challenges in order to succeed in it. Whether it's somebody telling me I can't be a flight director because I've never been a flight controller.  Or I can't possibly manage a significant amount of budget and personnel because I've never been a low level line manager before.  

And my--the way I live my life is you never know until you try.  And a lot of people that take on these jobs are never fully prepared when they first start.  But as long as you are fully prepared to acknowledge where you fall short and willing to go off and seek help from people who are masters in those areas, then you will succeed."

What challenges have you overcame to get to the job that you have now? Love from Ireland ❤️

"Short answer: No.  Long answer: Definitely no."

Science fiction sometimes makes it seem like it’s possible to live in a black hole. What is the truth behind this?

We train a lot for space walks, so hundreds of hours underwater in the pool, and we spend a lot of time going over every detail of the space walk.  But one of the things you really can't train for is the feeling you're in an absolute vacuum.  So we do a few tests in the vacuum chamber, but when you first go outside the hatch and you see the total darkness or the brightness of the Earth, and you realize that there's no air molecules anywhere else around you - that's the biggest surprise.  

And then I think the second surprise is after an hour or two, getting comfortable working in an absolute vacuum, knowing that the suits are going to protect and you have a whole team of people on the ground taking care of every aspect of that spacewalk.  I think that was the thing that was the most surprising, was how alone and distant from the planet you can feel, yet totally supported by all the people working down in Mission Control.

I’m sure you’re trained so that nothing in space is really a surprise, but: was there anything about spacewalking that surprised you when you did it for the first time?

I think some of the greatest things that we can take a look at what we're currently doing in space and see that future generations are really going to appreciate is all of the science that we're doing on board the International Space Station. So I was lucky enough to participate in just a few of those science experiments.  We did about a hundred different science experiments that I actively participated in on board, two hundred total.  

And I think that's just adding to the knowledge about how the human body works in microgravity, and also how we're going to explore, both in lower orbit and then beyond deep space exploration.  So all of these little bits of scientific inquiry add up to really a big body of knowledge, and I hope that's the legacy of the International Space Station and NASA's work in space.

Hii! I'm unsure if you've been asked this before, but I'd like to give it a shot anyway. What's the greatest legacy you hope to leave to the future generations? Whether it's one of the things you've accomplished already or are hoping to accomplish yet. Thank you very much!

So floating is really interesting.  You're actually very unstable when you float for the first time because your body's rotating on all these different axes, and anything you touch anything, you're inputting motion into that system.  So one of the things we learn the first week or so we get on board is how to stabilize ourselves.  

So we actually hook our feet underneath some hand rails and kind of use our toes [wiggles fingers] to keep ourselves steady.  Then--only then--when we've mastered that, we start to learn how to float in a given direction.  We learn how to push off and get to where we want to go.  It's not always perfect at first, there's a lot of times when you bump your forehead into the hatches or you slam into the wall and knock the computer off.  That's like every first time astronaut experience. But after a little while, you get pretty good at getting around the space station.  

It's a whole 'nother concept when you come back to Earth and you have to remember how to walk again.  So again, there you're kind of unsteady the first few days you're figuring out--your feet haven't touched the ground in a long time, so you have to figure out how to walk. And then you move on to how to jump, and then finally you get good enough and you can learn how to run again.

What does it feel like to float?? Do you have trouble adjusting to walking on the earth after that ??

I thought, um, I actually thought The Martian was pretty good.  They do a good job there of kind of showing the challenges of working in a space environment: some of the isolation, how do you troubleshoot problems, the kind of interactions that crews would have.  I think that's a movie that captures somewhat the feel of space exploration.

What popular film is the closest to reality for you?