Fellows Book Online Version 2020

27 worked with the Japanese on the F-2. In 1996 I joined the big leagues, NASA, very few people get to be an astronaut. In 1996 my dream started to come true, so far, I have had 3 space missions and 9 spacewalks. I would like to share some of that excitement. Oh, yeh and I also got married into an Indian family, to the most beautiful bride ever. So here is a picture of me when I was a kid and I would like to remark that the first model rocket that I ever built was a replica of a Soviet rocket call Vostock which is the same one which Yuri Gagarin launched off. When I was a kid growing up in the 1970’s in the United States, who would ever have imagined that we would be working with the Soviet Union and former Soviet Union and Russia. On my very first space flight, in fact my first two space flights, on the big game day I was on the same kind of rocket that Yuri Gagarin launched from and on Yuri Gagarin’s launch pad. So, the world keeps changing and we need to be ready for the change. Of course there is a lot of fun along the way in my profession, whether its living under water or flying in the sky, meeting the president or being on a famous TV show, going to India and being treated like a hero or going to Disney land as Buzz Lightyear’s commander, it’s a great adventure. And of course, it’s a great adventure to have a family, starting with marriage in 1999 and three children along the way. But why do we do this, why do we have a space programme? We all know why we have professional sports; we love them. But why do we have a space programme? We fly off the earth to make life on the earth better. And it works like this, every time we understand something about the universe, wemake things better on planet earth. For example, in the 1700’s, electricity was just a parlor trick, something to amuse your friends with. In the 1800’s we developed the Maxwell equation, so we understood that electricity and magnetism were the same thing and then we made it practical. Thomas Edison, an American inventor made some of the first lightbulbs and nowadays we have these new kinds of lightbulbs, LED lightbulbs, that help make life on earth better. As you can see, we have now conquered the night, no longer do we have go to bed when it’s dark outside and waking up at this early sunlight. As you can see, when we fly across the planet, all these orange spots, everything that we see, those are cities at night, we have conquered the night as we understand our universe better. So, in order to do that, in order to fly in space, it takes a team, and it can be argued that the biggest team sport ever is not football or American football, it’s space flight. It takes so many people together, working in harmony to make the space shuttle launch. It takes 15 nations working together to build an international space station. It takes astronauts on board working together whether they are Russian or American or European or Canadian or Japanese. It takes people with dark skin, light skin, people with a lot of hair and people with no hair. It takes boys and girls, all professionals working together, it’s a team sport. I would like to share more on the team aspect of space flight. It takes more than just training. Here you can see us at a neutral buoyancy laboratory, mastering the craft of a spacewalk. It takes more than just speed, launching on a space shuttle or on a dragonfly to the international space station that goes 28,000 km/h above planet earth. It takes more than those things, it takes a team, it takes courage. It takes a lot of courage to be on a spacewalk when its 500 km straight below you as a fall, just hanging out there with one hand. It takes a lot of skill to be able to be move in a 200 kg space suit, whether it’s an American or a Russian spacesuit. It takes everybody working together. Here is our ground control team, here is our fellow astronauts, here is myself on my first mission, me and a Russian aboard the space station. It takes all of us working together to build something like a space station. This is the big league if you will, for the space program, the international space station, we are putting together our team together to go to the moon, soon, in the next 4-5 years. Not every astronaut gets to do a spacewalk, it’s pretty much the most dangerous thing we do. Hanging outside of the space station that goes 28,000 km/h around planet earth trying to do something as simple as manage a grease gun. On the space station we stay fit, there is an important regime, we are trying to lift weights in a weightless environment, we have to be bound down on our equipment whether it’s a bike or a treadmill. Even though we need to know our skills, we need to know how to do things not just in English, but in Russian, in Russian spacesuits, in American spacesuits. It takes a lot of work, a lot focus, a lot of attention to detail. There are common lessons we have with all sports. It’s always good to have that feeling of accomplishment, a win for us is to come safely back inside, our teammates waiting for us. Of course, we are big boys and girls, we can undress ourselves, but we take the help from our teammates because it’s very difficult to do things by yourself all of the time. Of course, our big win is to make it home safely. Landing on a space shuttle, coming home to our friends and family is how we define success. It is not easy to be successful, sometimes we make it look easy but some of these keys to success are included in these following slides. I hope we get time to follow up on these points in the workshop. First, you have to have faith in your teammates, you’ve got to trust them, you have to know they are not waking up in the morning