The Spacewalker

Episode 1:

What’s it like repairing a billion-dollar solar panel while hurtling 4.67 miles per second through space? Our guest this week, Scott Parazynski, shares the answer with us as we discuss his experiences as an astronaut, mountaineer, and physician to aerospace icon John Glenn, who he likes to describe as a “space rookie.” A former Eagle Scout, Parazynski understands that accomplishing huge goals—like being an astronaut and climbing Mt. Everest—is the result of completing small steps along the way. Parazynski also explains why it’s worth it to pursue space exploration: “It’s our human destiny to be explorers, to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”

Think you can match Scott’s space skills? Visit our NASA Full Fuselage Trainer to find out, and get his full story by reading The Sky Below.

Transcript after the player.

SEAN MOBLEY:       Hello, and welcome to the Flight Deck. The Podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I am your host, Sean Mobley. The museum regularly hosts fascinating speakers and public programs. Astronaut, mountaineer, doctor, and all around really cool, Scott Parazynski recently stopped by the museum to share some of his stories. I had the opportunity to sit down with Scott before his program for a one-on-one chat about meeting your heroes, his Star Wars nerdom, and how the boy scout law comes in handy when you’re hooked into a robotic arm on a space walk hurtling 4.67 miles per second hundreds of miles in orbit around the earth. So, you know, just another day at the office for an astronaut.

SM:     Scott Parazynski, thank you so much for being here today; for coming to the Museum of Flight and sharing a bit more of your story.

SCOTT PARAZYNSKI:      Thrilled to be back here. This is one of the great museums of the world.

SM:     Yeah, well, we appreciate that. And you’ve seen a lot of the world so I’ll take that.

00:01:28

SP:      Yeah, I’ve been very, very fortunate to both see it, you know, kind of in the stratosphere and then, you know, well above it as well, so, yeah.

SM:     I was really intrigued about your childhood. You’re an Eagle Scout.

SP:      Right.

SM:     I’m an Eagle Scout.

SP:      Terrific.

SM:     And I thought I had it hard enough—my dad in the Navy—moving every two years. Your childhood, you were all over the place—Africa, Europe, the Middle East. How did you fit an Eagle project into that with the Revolutionary Guard taking over Tehran and all this, like?

SP:      It was—it’s really interesting. So I had about three and a half years in Athens, Greece, and so that’s when I did the bulk of my scouting. And, yeah, I think it was one of the best things I could have done with my time; you know I hearken to those years as really setting the stage for me—being able to set lofty goals and then achieve them and I don’t know how it was for you and your path to Eagle but, you know, when you have such a far away goal, like becoming an Eagle Scout, you have to break it apart into manageable piece parts otherwise it can be really intimidating and that’s why so many people, young boys, quit the process because it’s such an arduous path but if you can sort of see it at one merit badge at a time, one service project at a time; or, as I like to talk about in the context of Mount Noring, you’re one rope length at a time or even one step at a time on your way to the summit of Everest, you can achieve lofty goals.

00:02:49

SM:     Right, literally.

SP:      Yeah.

SM:     Footstep by footstep—

SP:      Right.

SM:     . . . on some of these things.

SP:      That’s right, that’s right.

SM:     But you get through it. Growing up, you idolized a lot of the Apollo missions, the Apollo astronauts, and they say you should never meet your heroes and yet you became the physician for one of your heroes.

SP:      Well, what a godsend that was to actually get a chance to know John—not only as a crew mate but also a close friend—and to share the cosmos with the mercury astronaut who opened up space for Americans. It was, you know, a dream come true. Like I describe it often, like getting a chance to play basketball with Michael Jordan, you know, to be in the game with the best of the best. So we miss him dearly. He unfortunately passed about a year ago, at age 95, but what an incredible American he was—I would say one of the greatest Americans of our time.

00:03:43

SM:     Yeah, I agree. I actually saw that launch in person, kind of. My dad was stationed in Jacksonville at the time—

SP:      Oh, fantastic, yeah.

SM:     . . . so I remember we would—

SP:      That’s just ’95.

SM:     Yep, we watched it on the screen and then went outside to try to catch a glimpse of it during the school day.

SP:      Terrific.

SM:     And that was about when my infatuation with space started.

SP:      Hm-hmm [affirmative].

SM:     So you were there at the start, I guess.

SP:      Well, you’re making me feel old, Sean. We always would joke with John that he was kind of a space rookie, because when he flew on Mercury, he could barely experience weightlessness. He was inside of his Mercury Friendship 7 Capsule, but all he could do was really kind of loosen up the harnesses in his spacecraft. And his arms would float but he couldn’t really float freely and he had limited visibility outside of his capsule, so he didn’t like it very well. We called him a rookie. We had one other rookie on the flight, Pedro Duque, from Spain, who was going to become the very first Spaniard in space. We nicknamed him “Juan Glenn” which we thought was pretty clever too, but on the launch, we did prank John pretty good. You’ll have to read the book to see how it ends.

00:04:44

SM:     On the note of pranks, one of the things that, as we’ve developed our Apollo exhibit here that’s come up, especially with the old Apollo astronauts was the Turtle Club. I’m curious, was that still a thing, when—

SP:      It was, yeah. In fact, I believe it still exists. I don’t get down to Clear Lake very often anymore but I live in Houston still. But it’s a, you know, just a bar right on Clear Lake, right outside the gates of the Johnson Space Center. Yeah, Clear Lake is a real misnomer as well; it’s more like brown lake, muddy lake; nothing clear about it.

00:05:14

SM:     You quote Gus Grissom in your book talking about the conquest of space being worth sacrificing lives. Why do you think it is worth it? What do you say to people who are a bit more naysayers? Why are we spending all of this money doing all this stuff?

SP:      First I would say, Sean, that we don’t spend very much money on space and I think we ought to be spending more, you know. Investments in high tech always return incredible investments to our economy; to new jobs; new industries; even new inspiration for young people to have a place to go and I think it’s human destiny and part of the American fabric to be explorers; to push the boundaries of what’s possible, you know. America leads—at least we need to continue to lead. So we only spend about half of a penny of every tax dollar on the space program in total, so that’s everything from the International Space Station to aeronautics and many other things that NASA does so it’s a very small amount of money but the rewards that our country gathers from that is just phenomenal, you know. I’m a physician by training so when I go into an ICU or an operating room, I see all the sensing systems, the materials, the informatics that hearken to the evolution of the space program in their early days, so we have to keep pressing the boundaries as a nation, I think.

00:06:36

SM:     Well, and it doesn’t help that every new administration, NASA gets a new charge and redirection.

SP:      Yeah, this redirecting is really counterproductive, you know? I think we need to really be clear that our ultimate destiny is to get to Mars. What’s the most logical way to do that? And let’s just fund it in whatever way that we can—is it going to take 10 years, 15, 20, 30 years? Let’s start, you know, set sail now instead of, you know, kind of redirecting each time a new president gets elected. It’s really costly, I think, for our country and, yeah, there will be other countries, including China, that will have ambition to beat us to it if we’re not smart about it.

SM:     And private companies—just the news—this will probably date our recording a little bit, but just in the news now is Boeing is saying that they’ll be the first ones to get to the moon and Elon Musk responded, do it.

SP:      Well, it’s great to have competition, you know? Competition is kind of the American way as well and so I love the fact that, you know, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, you know, flew Origin and Boeing and other major space companies are competing now. It’s not just large government contracts but actually private enterprise. And it’s also real exciting that there are these human space flight companies—Space X, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic—that are going to be taking many thousands of people up into space in the not too distant future.

00:08:01

SM:     So, let’s talk about your billion dollar sewing job.

SP:      Yeah.

SM:     You go into it in a lot of detail in the book—so I’m not going to ask you to read—I think three chapters; very well put together—

SP:      Thank you.

SM:     . . . on STS-120 when the solar panel on the Space Station did not deploy properly—

SP:      Hm-hmm [affirmative].

SM:     . . . it got torn. And you were the one—

SP:      I was the chosen one. Yeah, it was the best day of the job ever, for sure.

SM:     What surprises people the most about that story?

00:08:28

SP:      I think the audacity of it; the fact that we were going out to do something that was designed to be serviced, you know. A live solar panel that could shock you out at the very tip of the Space Station where we don’t have the ability to really visit. We had to invent new robotic arm systems that would actually allow us to reach there. We had to develop new procedures to work on it. We had to develop new robotic trajectories to get me out to the tip of the Space Station. We had to accept a higher degree of risk because the rewards were so important to save that solar panel so that we can complete the International Space Station. So there’s so many different driving forces there that all played out perfectly. And I like to really champion and celebrate the men and women who made it all possible. It was really one of NASA’s finest hours, you know; sort of an Apollo 13 experience where we had to develop a repair capability within 72 hours or we were going to go out and throw away a billion dollar solar panel. And NASA always rises to the occasion; they take these things that are almost impossible and they develop brilliant solutions and make it look almost easy—even though it’s not at all.

SP:      Yeah. You’re involved in the Challenger Learning Center?

SM:     I was the Chairman of the Board of the National Challenger Center for Space Science Education; really one of the most wonderful STEM education groups in the world. We see 400,000 school kids every year around the country and in other countries, so.

00:10:02

SP:      Including right here.

SM:     Right here in Seattle—wonderful program.

SP:      One of the things that I appreciate about it is what you touched on. People who think of the space program, they just think of the astronauts and one thing I’ve learned with the Challenger Learning Center myself is it is a team effort.

SM:     It’s a team sport.

SP:      You’re really not in control when you’re the astronaut.

SM:     Absolutely no.

SP:      And then, again, you are.

SM:     Well, you know, you may be quite visible in the process but it’s, you know, a team of thousands of people for each and every mission; it’s the scientists, engineers, the instructors, the flight controllers, the suit technicians. There are so many aspects that go into successfully conducting emissions—very, very difficult and no one can do it alone.

SP:      Yeah. I enjoyed reading the pieces about you going out there. I kept envisioning you as the ultimate Eagle Scout out there and I was, like, oh, he’s being thrifty; they’re using all the different arms in different ways. Star Wars music played a big part in that story. I don’t want to spoil it for anybody—have you been seeing the new Star Wars movies?

00:11:00

SM:     I have not seen the most recent one but, yeah, our family loves Star Wars. I get asked all the time, Star Wars or Star Trek? We’re definitely a Star Wars family but I’ve not seen the latest and greatest. We were able to fly Luke Skywalkers’ light saber on my last trip up into space, so it was really kind of cool to take that up into space and then after the mission present it back to George Lucas.

SP:      Right.

SM:     So that was a really cool treat for not only our crew but my son, Luke, got a chance to actually do the presentation.

SP:      Yeah. That music seems to resonate very much with you.

SM:     Yeah, the opening sequence just kind of the star field and it’s, you know, it’s an uplifting, kind of, inspirational piece and it was music that was played for me right before the last spacewalk of my career—that solar ray repair that you mentioned—so it was a great way to start the day.

SP:      Well, Scott Parazynski’s book, The Sky Below, is out and available now. You’re doing some interesting things with e-books, I saw, with this edition.

00:11:55

SM:     It’s an amazing way to experience this book in particular. It’s the very first memoir done in Kindle in Motion and what you’re able to do—depending on what you download on your Kindle device or on an iPad or laptop—you can actually switch it over to an immersive version of the book and so there are embedded videos; there’s schematics; additional imagery that are not in the printed book and so if you really wonder what it looks like to actually arrive on the summit of Mount Everest or float out on your very first spacewalk, you can actually see the video right there. It’s really powerful.

SP:      Yeah. And we didn’t even cover all your other adventures—mountaineer and everything—so it’s an excellent book, Scott. Thank you so much for being here.

SM:     Thanks, Sean.

Host: Sean Mobley
Producer: Justin Braegelmann
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