Ah, That's A Really Good Question!  I Think I Would Say, Study As Much As You Did, But Also Try To Have

Working at NASA has been an extraordinary experience and I have a lot of memories I can tell you are my favorite.  But there's one in particular that stands out above the rest.  

I was a new flight director, only been in the office for two years, and we were executing the STS-120 mission, where we were taking these solar arrays that are in blankets, and you put them up on board the space station and you unfold them like an accordion.  

As we were unfolding one of them, we saw it rip.  And by the time that the power discipline expert could make the array stop, we had a huge tear inside the solar array.  After several meetings, it became clear that we were not going to be able to undock the shuttle in that configuration and we had to figure out a way to fix the solar array.

At that time I was working at what we called a team four.  So three teams used to support the shuttle mission, but we always had a fourth team waiting in the background for something to go wrong.  So at that point we called together a meeting and a young engineer showed up who was about 24/25 years old.  And [he] said "Flight!  I have a solution!"

So he walks into my meeting with this. [holds up object] And I said, "what is that?"  

And he says, "It's a cufflink, Flight, and I made it out of spare parts that are available to the astronauts on the space station. And if you take this and you weave it through some of the holes and you pull it tight, we'll be able to secure the solar array."

And so sure enough, we were able to take this cufflink and a couple more like it, and put one of our tallest crew members on board a stacked set of robotic arms and he installed a cufflink.  And that cufflink is there today and keeps the space station solar array structurally sound.  So best moment ever.  You never know what a 24/25 year old can accomplish.

What has been the best memory you have so far at NASA?

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?

"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 ❤️

Other than flying in combat in my military days, I would say my time at NASA when I've been exploring--probably the scariest time that I had was taking off in the ER-2 behind me on the island of Oahu off a cliff into the ocean of Kaneohe Bay.  

And the reason for that is it climbs up so steep on initial take-off that at night you just go into pitch black, and all you can see is dark sky and dark water, so you can't tell what's what.  And that gets a little unnerving for about the first minute or two of the flight until you know your way up and away from the water.  Otherwise it's a little disorienting and you could be diving into the water.

Have you ever been scared while flying? What was the event that scared you the most?What's your favorite plane to fly?

The first time I saw Earth from space I couldn't even talk; I was absolutely speechless, as were my crewmates.  The three of us were just silent it seemed like for thirty seconds, it was such a beautiful sight.  And one of the things that was really interesting to me was how different it was seeing it out the window with your own eyes versus seeing the picture.  

I think I had this idea in my head that I knew what Earth looked like because you've seen so many videos, but they're all photographic images, so the dynamic color spectrum is a little bit dulled.  When you see it with your own eyes, it's so much brighter.  It's so much more vivid than I could have imagined.  It's just this beautiful blue planet.

What was your first thought when you first saw earth from space? And what realizations did you have?

So this was a really neat project.  This was a partnership with hospitals all around the world, and there are kids that are in the cancer units in these hospitals.  And as part of their care they do art therapy.  So they paint, they draw, and they get to express themselves.  

So part of the project was that each kid got a little patch, and they got to paint or draw or color whatever they wanted.  They then sewed all of these patches together to make this space suit, and we got to fly it to the space station.  So it was really neat--all these children got to see their work flown in space.  

But it's so colorful because each individual patch represents a little artist's contribution.  And so I got a chance to meet some of these kids and hang out and do some art with them and it was so incredible.  It was just really a joy to see.

Why's your suit so colorful?

"So the way we understand that black holes form is when a massive star basically runs out of fuel and collapses in on itself.  And the reason that happens is because, the reason stars don't collapse in on themselves on a regular day is because they're hot.  

Hot gas has pressure, so you have all this gas pushing out, you have gravity pulling in and you get a nice balanced equilibrium.  But eventually you run out of fuel, so you run out of temperature, you run out of pressure, and the gravity wins.  So the gravity just pulls in and there's not enough hot gas to hold it up anymore.  

That's how they form.  How do they move?  They move pretty much like every other star in the galaxy.  Mostly orbiting around, for example in the solar system, orbiting around the center of the galaxy with a little bit of random motions here and there."

How do blackholes form and how do they move ?

"So I think what we mean when we say a "gentle" black hole is probably that there's not a lot of hot gas, x-rays, gamma rays, relativistic jets around the black hole.  That makes it safe to go closer to.  In terms of that actually, the supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is a pretty gentle black hole.  But even so it still would be far too dangerous to get close to and survive."

Is there such thing as a ‘gentle black hole’ (as in Interstellar) that would one day be a candidate for sending probes? Or is it a lost cause?

My mother gave me the best advice I'd ever received, and it was "trust your instincts."  I've applied that when I was afraid to go away to college, and she told me, "Trust your instincts, stay at home."  

I've applied that every time I take on a new position where I'm afraid: I think I can do it, I'm not sure if I know everything that's required, but I'm pretty sure I could do it.  So trust your instincts, even though you don't have all the information, believe in yourself and you can achieve great things.

What’s the best piece of advice you have ever received?

I think it's actually just an incredible thing that we have picked a line-up of space-walkers--we've taken the most qualified people--and we happen to have enough female astronauts that we have two women doing a spacewalk now.  I think it really is a testament to NASA's inclusivity in their selection process.  

The last several classes we've seen a lot more women applying in these classes and also being selected.  And so I think everybody can look at that and say, "You know, that could be me someday!"

As an astronaut who has been on a spacewalk before, what does the all-woman spacewalk mean to you?