The Space Shuttle: 4. The 35 new guys

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Speaker 8 Ladies and gentlemen,

Speaker 8 today we are introducing to you and to the world

Speaker 8 these seven men who have been selected to begin training for orbital space flight.

Speaker 3 It's the very beginning of American manned space flight.

Speaker 3 The year is 1959.

Speaker 8 These men, the nation's Project Mercury astronauts.

Speaker 3 NASA's first administrator, Dr. Keith Glennon, is addressing a room full of reporters.

Speaker 3 Sitting at a long table beside him are seven men. They're relaxed, confident.

Speaker 10 I'm quite sure that no finer group of men could have been selected by the tests that are available to us today.

Speaker 3 All have short hair, all clean-shaven, all white.

Speaker 10 These men have been chosen from a population of about 180 million.

Speaker 3 They've actually been selected from a smaller group than that. They're all from an elite group of military test pilots.
They're tough and disciplined and used to the risks of flying.

Speaker 5 What is the motivation of these men?

Speaker 13 The big question is, what is the motivation of these men? Let's try that starting from the left and go down.

Speaker 3 There's a bigger question underlying this.

Speaker 3 What kind of person wants to be the first strapped to a rocket going into space?

Speaker 3 One of the astronauts, John Glenn, knows exactly why he's here.

Speaker 14 I think we'd be almost remiss in our duty if we didn't make full use of our talents in volunteering for something that is as important as this is to our country and the world in general right now.

Speaker 14 This can mean an awful lot to this country, of course.

Speaker 3 Supremely skilled pilots with nerves of steel and unshakable confidence.

Speaker 3 They have the qualities the public would expect of their all-American heroes.

Speaker 3 These seven men have what writer Tom Wolfe famously called the right stuff.

Speaker 3 Two years later, on the 5th of May 1961, one of these seven men sits inside a tiny cramped space capsule, Freedom 7, ready to be launched into space.

Speaker 3 His name is Alan Shepard.

Speaker 9 Roger.

Speaker 3 Millions of people around the country and the world are watching and listening as he prepares to leave Earth.

Speaker 16 And luckily, they had a few problems in the countdown early in the morning.

Speaker 3 Including a 12-year-old girl in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Speaker 16 So luckily, it was delayed until after I got to school.

Speaker 3 Anna Fisher.

Speaker 3 Team minus 15 seconds.

Speaker 16 And our PE teacher, it was my first class in the morning, had us all gather around her. And we were listening to Hal talk to Mission Control.

Speaker 16 At that moment, I decided that's what I want to do. That is the combination of math and science and exploration that I wanted to do.

Speaker 12 This is Freedom 7, the Fure Liz Go,

Speaker 12 G7 at 14 CSI.

Speaker 16 But, you know, that was back in 1961, and so women weren't generally allowed or encouraged to do those kind of things, so it didn't seem like a very realistic goal.

Speaker 16 But from that moment on, that was what I wanted to do if I ever had a chance.

Speaker 3 At the very beginning of American spaceflight, only the Alan Shepards would be considered as astronaut material.

Speaker 3 But by the mid-1970s, America has changed. It's been through the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, feminist activism.

Speaker 3 The days of the space race are long gone, and with them, unwavering political and public support. For the first time in its existence, NASA is losing touch with America.

Speaker 3 NASA needs astronauts with different backgrounds and experience.

Speaker 3 But will it accept them? Can NASA change?

Speaker 3 From the BBC World Service, 13 Minutes presents the Space Shuttle. I'm Space Scientist Maggie Adarin Paycock.

Speaker 3 Episode 4 of 10, The 35 New Guys.

Speaker 18 Hi, I'm Michelle Nichols. But I still feel a little bit like Lieutenant Uhura on the Starship Enterprise.

Speaker 3 Michelle Nichols is known worldwide from the TV series Star Trek. As Lieutenant Yehura, the Enterprise's communications officer, she was one of the first black women on American television.

Speaker 18 You know, now there's a 20th century Enterprise. An actual space vehicle built by NASA and designed to put us in the business of space, not merely space exploration.

Speaker 3 And now, In this NASA promo from 1977, she's sitting at a console in mission control in Houston, wearing a blue astronaut astronaut flight suit.

Speaker 3 She's here to help recruit a new generation of astronauts.

Speaker 18 Now the shuttle will be taking scientists and engineers, men and women of all races, into space just like the astronaut crew on the Starship Enterprise.

Speaker 3 Remember that image of the right stuff, which the Mercury 7 astronauts epitomized in the early 1960s?

Speaker 3 Well, this film shows one thing very clearly, that NASA is trying to update that image that it's redefining the right stuff so that is why

Speaker 18 I'm speaking to the whole family of humankind minorities and women alike if you qualify and would like to be an astronaut now is the time

Speaker 18 this is your NASA

Speaker 3 as I was growing up Lieutenant Yohura was one of my heroes in the UK too there are very few black people on TV and here she is recruiting for astronauts. My dream job.

Speaker 3 Years later, my daughter and I would get to meet her. And she was just as wonderful as I'd hoped.

Speaker 17 That was a woman in a responsible crew position, not, you know, not the mess decks, not cabin steward, but you know, a ship's officer on a starship.

Speaker 17 So she was a perfect icon, they thought, both for minorities and for women to say, this is the real deal.

Speaker 3 While NASA is campaigning for new recruits, Kathy Sullivan is completing a PhD in oceanography in the small city of Halifax in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada.

Speaker 3 Up until now, she's never shown much interest in space.

Speaker 17 I had never thought about becoming an astronaut before.

Speaker 17 I was fascinated by this planet, by the Earth.

Speaker 3 But she hears about the opportunity to become an astronaut when she's back home in California for Christmas. And her brother tells her all about it.

Speaker 17 He was all over it. He had already put in an application.
Then he started trying to sell me on the idea of throwing my hat in the ring. And that's when I first said, that's ridiculous.

Speaker 17 I'm an oceanographer. You know, the seafloor is hard enough.

Speaker 3 A few weeks later, back in Halifax, Sullivan picks up a scientific journal. And somewhere in the back, she comes across an advert.

Speaker 3 NASA is looking for scientists to become astronauts for the new role of mission specialist.

Speaker 17 That triggered the new thought that, oh wait, now, these guys are actually building a research ship that goes into space instead of out to sea and probably will do all sorts of cool things.

Speaker 17 But most important to me was...

Speaker 17 And if you got to do that, you would get to see the Earth from orbit with your own eyes.

Speaker 17 Because you have to understand, I think I had looked at every single picture of the Earth that every astronaut from Mercury had taken. And they just fascinated me.

Speaker 17 Geography, writ large, was my binding interest in driving interest from a very early age. So that prospect,

Speaker 17 forget maps, forget other people's pictures, see it yourself, that was irresistible.

Speaker 3 This new role has been introduced specifically for the Space shuttle.

Speaker 3 Back in the early days of spaceflight, every astronaut was involved in flying the spacecraft. So every single one was selected from the best of the best of military test pilots.

Speaker 3 And the Navy and the Air Force at the time only allowed men to take up this role.

Speaker 3 But that's changed with the shuttle.

Speaker 3 It's a bigger vehicle with a bigger crew and not everybody needs to be a pilot.

Speaker 3 So NASA comes up up with a new role, an astronaut who will carry out specific tasks on the mission, from deploying a satellite to running scientific experiments in microgravity or testing a new piece of equipment.

Speaker 3 Now, they're not just recruiting from a small pool of test pilots.

Speaker 3 The door is opening for others.

Speaker 5 When I was about five or six years old, Hollywood started churning out science fiction movies that depicted astronauts going to the moon into distant planets.

Speaker 5 Movies like Destination Moon, Forbidden Planet, those type of movies. And boy, I was all into those.

Speaker 3 Mike Mullane has always wanted to be an astronaut. He's the son of a World War II pilot.
And as a child, he was fascinated by space.

Speaker 5 Then, at age 12, Sputnik was launched. And then the science fiction movies became basically reality.
The space race started. They had the first seven astronauts selected.

Speaker 5 And at that time, I didn't just want to be a fighter pilot. I wanted to be a test pilot.
I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to be John Glenn or Alan Shepard and ride rocket ships into space.

Speaker 3 As a boy, Marlane's home was Albuquerque, New Mexico. His backyard was the desert, where he tested his own homemade rockets and watched the stars.

Speaker 5 The newspapers published the times at which satellites would be visible flying over. I'd go out there with a blanket and lay on the ground and look up and watch those streak over.

Speaker 3 Many years later, Malain graduated from a military academy and entered the Air Force. But his dreams of becoming a test pilot were crushed by a technicality.

Speaker 3 His eyesight wasn't good enough. He doesn't have the right staff after all.

Speaker 3 He becomes a backseater instead, supporting the pilot with communications, navigation and weaponry. Later, he studies aeronautical engineering.

Speaker 5 I could not be an astronaut. But then, in the summer of 76, NASA announced that they were going to start recruiting astronauts for this new space shuttle program.

Speaker 5 And they had a new crew position called Mission Specialist Astronaut. And you did not need to be a pilot to apply to be the Mission Specialist Astronaut.

Speaker 3 For mission specialists, NASA is now looking for engineers, scientists, and medical doctors. So they need a different approach.

Speaker 19 He asked, Dr. Kraft asked me, do you want to apply to be an astronaut? And I said, no, I don't.
He said, are you sure? And I said, I'm sure.

Speaker 19 And so then he said, well, then I want you to work with us to select and make sure that we select some good astronauts, both men and women. And so I did that.

Speaker 3 In the mid-1970s, Carolyn Huntoun is head of life sciences at NASA and the highest ranking woman in the organization.

Speaker 19 It was an interesting time when NASA was getting the shuttle ready to go and the laws were changing in our country that women could no longer be discriminated against.

Speaker 3 She becomes the first woman on a NASA astronaut selection board.

Speaker 19 It was not a matter of whether you want to be an astronaut or I want to be an astronaut. The idea is there were people who did want to be and there were people who wanted to be who qualified women.

Speaker 19 So they could apply and if they competed well in the selection process, they could be selected.

Speaker 3 And this means a fundamental change in the way NASA recruits astronauts.

Speaker 17 And I think both legally and politically, NASA knew there was no way in 1977, 78, when you say you need scientists and engineers, not just the world's best pilots, there's no way you can argue that there are not qualified women and minorities that have those credentials that are doing that work.

Speaker 17 So they really needed to change their game. It was not enough to send announcements out to a number of military facilities or through the services.

Speaker 17 They needed to let people like me know that the door would actually be open to someone like me.

Speaker 3 NASA organizes a series of 10 selection weeks where the potential candidates are put to the test. Out of more than 8,000 applicants, they've narrowed it down to around 200.

Speaker 17 Kathy sullivan is among them so off i went down to houston how many ways was that a bewildering trick i'm a 25 year old grad student i'm dead broke i don't know anyone at nasa and all i know about nasa is what i watched as a little girl i felt like fish out of water i remember thinking to myself oh catherine enjoy this week really well because these guys seem to have it figured out and you are absolutely clueless

Speaker 3 It's a full schedule. There are physical tests.
There are psychological tests.

Speaker 3 there's a good cop, bad cop interview with two psychiatrists, and then there's the most important moment of the week, the interview.

Speaker 3 90 minutes in front of a panel of astronauts and managers, the people who will decide on their future.

Speaker 3 Carolyn Huntoon is on the panel and John Young too, who'll become commander of the first shuttle mission. And between them is George Abbey, the director of flight operations.

Speaker 3 He's the one making the final decisions, the so-called astronaut maker.

Speaker 17 Tell us about yourself. Start with high school.
End of instructions.

Speaker 17 And that's a great test, right? How quickly can you think through what is this moment about? What is this audience trying to figure out and decide about me?

Speaker 5 What they were trying to get a feel for, I think, in the interview, was just more about your personality, how well you got along with other people. Were you a team player?

Speaker 3 Mike Malane has also made the cut.

Speaker 5 Gone were the days of the single seat fighter pilot in a capsule. The right stuff.

Speaker 5 If you brought in the image of the right stuff to that interview, I guarantee you would not have been selected.

Speaker 5 They wanted people who could work together as a team with people who looked and acted and thought different than they did.

Speaker 17 Yeah, at the end of that week, it was interesting how different I felt from the start of that week. From, oh my god, I think I'm clueless compared to these guys.

Speaker 17 At the end of the week, I headed home to Halifax, knowing a couple of these very clearly. It would be a really cool job.
I could do it and do it well.

Speaker 5 And I went home, but I never thought that I would be able to actually compete and be selected.

Speaker 3 One morning, a few months later, Kathy Sullivan is up early. She's about to get a coffee, when suddenly, the phone rings.

Speaker 17 This is pre-cell phone. This is olden days.
Long distance calls are still kind of expensive.

Speaker 17 Any call that came way early in the morning or way late at night was scary because it was probably bad family news. My roommate grabbed it, was down at her in the hallway,

Speaker 17 and I could see her mouth the words,

Speaker 17 it's for you, it's NASA.

Speaker 17 It's NASA.

Speaker 3 More specifically, the director of flight operations, George Abbey.

Speaker 17 Hi, it's George Abbey. And

Speaker 17 well,

Speaker 17 I wonder if you're still interested in coming to work for us.

Speaker 17 It was the voice you would expect when someone was asking if you could come down to the grocery store and bag groceries for a while.

Speaker 17 Hi, would you come fly in space with me? Is what he's actually saying.

Speaker 17 You know, your life is going to go inside out, upside down, and absolutely crazy in about an hour and a half when this hits the news wires.

Speaker 17 And it's about as exciting as we have an opening for grocery checker. Are you interested? I literally took the phone away from my head for a moment and looked like, did he really just do that?

Speaker 17 Of course I said yes. Yes, yes, definitely interested.

Speaker 3 On the morning of the announcement, Mike Mullane is at an Air Force base in Idaho testing a new prototype fighter bomber. He hasn't received a call yet so he turns on the TV.

Speaker 5 I didn't turn it on expecting to see myself, but a lot of other friends of mine had applied and I was curious

Speaker 5 if any of them got selected. And I turned it on and saw immediately reporters interviewing the women astronauts.

Speaker 3 The press has found out who the new female astronauts are. So they've pre-positioned themselves and are already bombarding the new candidates with questions.

Speaker 5 So the novelty of the women being now astronauts was a huge, huge thing on the news. So I saw that and figured, well, that's the end of that and just went to work.

Speaker 3 Milane isn't surprised. It's been his dream, his passion, for as long as he can remember.
But at the end of the day, it's just that.

Speaker 3 This isn't like the sci-fi films he watched growing up. Dreams don't always come true.

Speaker 5 And when I got to my office, there was a note on my desk to call Mr. Abby at Johnson Space Center, and he had headed up the interview process.

Speaker 5 And I really expected it to be a thanks for the try, or, you know, maybe pie next year or something like that. And when he asked me, in a very understated question,

Speaker 5 are you still interested in coming to JSC as an astronaut?

Speaker 5 I am sure that when I answered my voice, he probably thought he was talking to one of the women because my voice was a couple of octaves higher.

Speaker 5 I was over the moon joyous at the idea that I'd been selected as an astronaut.

Speaker 3 Milane immediately calls his wife, then his mum and dad. He buys his Air Force buddies some beers for the night.
And then he drives into the desert all by himself.

Speaker 5 Dusk, the sun was deep into the horizon, and I

Speaker 5 just got out and I just shouted to the wind and kicked the dirt.

Speaker 5 And I jumped up on the car hood and laid back in the it was cold and laid back on that hood for warmth and just laid there and watched the watch the stars

Speaker 5 and thinking that I had a chance of someday flying in orbit.

Speaker 5 It was incredible.

Speaker 3 NASA now has the men and women it needs to meet the future of spaceflight head on.

Speaker 3 But first, it needs to turn them into astronauts.

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Speaker 3 Going way back, NASA's astronauts have gathered every Monday morning to catch up and discuss next steps. But this particular Monday morning is an important moment in space history.

Speaker 11 It was considerably different.

Speaker 11 So we wanted both test pilot types and scientific types to be able to do some of the missions on the shuttle.

Speaker 3 At this point, Bob Trippin is still waiting for his first flight into space, aboard what will be the very first shuttle mission, STS-1.

Speaker 3 But he's already part of the old guard. Also around the table are John Young, Fred Hayes, and two dozen other astronauts who have been here since before the shuttle program.

Speaker 3 But this morning, 35 new recruits walked through the door, among them Kathy Sullivan and Mike Mullane.

Speaker 5 It's like a first day of school. Where do I sit?

Speaker 3 That was the first I remember.

Speaker 5 That was what was all my mind.

Speaker 5 They had a table, a big conference type of table, and then rows of seats in the back.

Speaker 5 I walked in and I said, I am sitting in the last row in the back because I don't want to step on anybody's toes with where the seating arrangements might be. It just seems so otherworldly.

Speaker 5 to be sitting there and there's these legends sitting around there. So it was very intimidating.

Speaker 3 It's immediately clear that this group is different. They're younger, they're more diverse.
There are three African-American astronauts, one Asian American and six women.

Speaker 3 Some of the new recruits have a military background, but there are also civilians, engineers, scientists and medical doctors.

Speaker 16 It was

Speaker 16 you know, it was another one of those pinch me moments. Am I really, really here?

Speaker 3 Also among them is is the 12-year-old girl who listened to Alan Shepard become the first American in space, Anna Fisher.

Speaker 3 She's now 28 years old and a medical doctor. Like Melane, she sits down at the back and scans the veteran astronauts at the conference table.

Speaker 16 I'm sure they weren't really happy to see us.

Speaker 16 They felt they had enough people at the time to manage the foreseeable future.

Speaker 16 Some didn't necessarily really feel supportive of the position of mission specialist, but there was nothing like overt or, you know, clear that they really didn't want us there.

Speaker 16 But, but you definitely knew that they would have preferred that we not be there.

Speaker 3 Bob Trippen doesn't seem concerned about the new competition.

Speaker 11 To be able to do some of the missions on the shuttle, we were going to fly with crews up to seven that would allow us to do a lot more science on orbit.

Speaker 11 So we needed some more crew members and bringing in 35 people, we felt like we were outnumbered a little bit, but we were thankful to have them.

Speaker 3 But even among the new group, there are people who aren't entirely happy with some of the new astronauts, notably Mike Malane.

Speaker 5 I had never worked professionally with women. I had no experience.
I was 32 years old when I got selected.

Speaker 7 walked in there.

Speaker 5 I did not think when I saw the civilians, not just the women, but the other male civilians who had been what they call postdocs.

Speaker 5 They had spent their whole life in university, many of them doing research after they graduated. And

Speaker 5 to me, I thought, what could they possibly bring into the table here?

Speaker 3 Kathy Sullivan knows that some of her new colleagues, especially those with a military background, will be looking at her and asking some challenging questions.

Speaker 17 Will these people be tough enough? Are they, you know, have they been seasoned enough and challenged enough and tried enough down that pathway? That's just an academic pathway.

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 17 Are they up to this? So we had, I think, that to prove.

Speaker 20 In Houston today, a new group of astronauts began preparing for space shuttle missions, including the first women astronauts and the first blacks.

Speaker 3 And of course, the new group attracts a lot of media attention.

Speaker 3 Some of the new intake even quip that there are 10 interesting recruits, the women and the people of color, and 25 white guys this is judy resnick age 29.

Speaker 9 she has a doctorate in electrical engineering and is one of america's first woman astronauts there are five other women and three blacks in judy's group i think in my case

Speaker 3 i was interested in just about every subject that came along ron mcnair is one of the three black astronauts and a true renaissance man He has a PhD in physics, competes in karate tournaments, and plays the saxophone.

Speaker 21 Because I'd hear about something somewhere or glance at a new concept and I'd want to go and find out what it's all about.

Speaker 21 So I think it was in my case it was an inner drive, a self-type, a motivation, motivating thing.

Speaker 3 McNair is also someone fighting to challenge the racism of America at the time.

Speaker 3 When he was nine years old, growing up in Lake City, South Carolina, he tried to check out books at the library. He was told he wasn't allowed.
It was racially segregated.

Speaker 3 He refused to leave. The librarian called the police, but when they arrived, they convinced the library to lend the books to the nine-year-old boy who wouldn't take no for an answer.

Speaker 3 Hearing this about McNair and his childhood really means something to me. He was a pioneer, a trendsetter, smashing stereotypes for all of us.

Speaker 3 I'm a black female PhD physicist and a space scientist, but I think that my path was made easier because of people like McNair, fighting for equality even as a child.

Speaker 3 McNair is just one of 35 exceptional people, ready to help make the space shuttle a reality. And just like the first group of astronauts, the Mercury 7, they need a name.

Speaker 5 There was an obscene expression in the military when somebody new showed up at a squadron.

Speaker 5 They were called an FNG, an effing new guy. Worked out conveniently that we could call ourselves the 35 new guys,

Speaker 5 but within the ranks, we all knew what the FNG stood for. We were the effing new guys there at NASA.
So TFNG is what we called ourselves.

Speaker 3 To officially become astronauts, the 35 new guys are put through their paces. Their training ranges from classroom lessons on planetary physics to flying T-38 fighter jets.

Speaker 3 The military test pilots have to prove themselves in the classroom and the mission specialists their adaptability to working in space.

Speaker 17 You know, did we look lost? Did we panic? Did we appear frightened? Could we not handle something?

Speaker 17 Did the women shriek when they were launched off the deck on the Parasail?

Speaker 17 And none of that happened. We just did it just like they just did it.
We just did it and did it perfectly well and enjoyed it, which maybe shocked them the most.

Speaker 3 After a year and a half of extensive training, the 35 new guys are finally considered astronauts. But it's actually nearly five years before any of them are launched into space.

Speaker 15 And lift off, lift off of STS-7 and America's first woman astronaut. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Speaker 3 Aboard Shuttle Challenger for mission STS-7 are four rookies and Bob Crippen, commander of the mission.

Speaker 11 Probably the biggest thing was having Sally on board. That was pretty monumental as far as the public was concerned, the first woman astronaut from the United States.

Speaker 11 It was Sally Wright and others that was the crew of STS-7.

Speaker 3 One of the most magical moments of my life was was meeting the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She's one of my heroes, the first woman in space in 1963.

Speaker 3 It's taken the United States two decades, but they've finally followed suit with 32-year-old physicist Sally Ride.

Speaker 22 But she shuns the publicity which surrounds the flight.

Speaker 22 Even though at the pre-launch news conference, she agreed to sit in the center of the rostrum, a position normally reserved for the crew's commander.

Speaker 23 I think that it's maybe too bad that our society isn't further along and that this is such a such a big deal.

Speaker 23 I think it's time that we get away from that and it's time that people realize that women in this country can do any job that they want to do.

Speaker 3 The 35 new guys are happy to see the first members of their astronaut class flying at last.

Speaker 3 But for some, this is also tinged with disappointment.

Speaker 5 It's kind of deflating to you. You wanted to be on those.
You know that everybody can't be number one, can't be on the first flight.

Speaker 5 But it's something you want so dearly, so desperately to do to fly into space. that I'll be the first to admit, I envied these people.
I envied that they were going to get an early flight.

Speaker 5 How many more years would I be on the ground before I had that flight? So it was definitely deflating. A little piece of all of us died.

Speaker 3 Most of the astronauts are on standby, working on different aspects of the shuttle program and waiting for their chance to go. Waiting to hear from George Abbey.

Speaker 5 He made the flight assignments, but we don't know how he came to crewing people together. It was never discussed with us.
I was never asked if I wanted to be on a mission. I have no idea.

Speaker 5 And I don't think anybody else can ever answer that question either.

Speaker 3 As an astronaut, you get assigned to different jobs on the ground. Maybe it's working on spacesuits or maybe in mission control.

Speaker 3 Every few months, you are reassigned to a different role until one day you arrive at work and find a note on your desk that just says, report to Mr. Abbey's office.

Speaker 5 And you would find out that maybe three or four other people had the same note on their desk and you're walking out the door to go there and and you all see look at each other and say well I guess we're on a mission.

Speaker 5 The day you get selected as an astronaut you're joyous beyond description. You're just that one big huge step closer to flying.

Speaker 3 For Kathy Sullivan this happens slightly differently. Having flown once before Sally Wright has got wind that she will be selected together with Sullivan.
and she lets her know ahead of time.

Speaker 3 And it's a special one, a seven-day flight. It has earth science experiments and most importantly, a spacewalk.

Speaker 17 That's a pretty good mix.

Speaker 17 I think I acted suitably surprised.

Speaker 3 This is Sullivan's opportunity to become the first American woman to walk in space.

Speaker 9 Challenger, Houston with you through Hawaii for six minutes.

Speaker 3 It's the 11th of October 1984, day seven of Kathy Sullivan's first mission.

Speaker 9 And we've got a good picture of Dave in his EVA prep.

Speaker 3 Since the beginning of the program,

Speaker 3 two new, almost identical orbiters have been added to the shuttle fleet, including this one, Challenger.

Speaker 4 Houston Challenger, this is EVLAN Bravo. How do you read, Hobert? Land clear on Bravo, Dave.

Speaker 3 As Challenger orbits the Earth, two astronauts are in the airlock, testing communications with mission control.

Speaker 3 Kathy Sullivan and fellow mission specialist Dave Leesmer are ready for their very first spacewalk.

Speaker 24 This pass through TEDRA should include live television of the first American woman to step into the vacuum of space for a spacewalk.

Speaker 17 Well, you kind of swim out. you know,

Speaker 17 the guys that went to the moon could legitimately talk about spacewalking. The rest of us were space swimming, space floating.

Speaker 3 Sullivan pulls herself out of the airlock and into the open payload bay.

Speaker 3 She's still connected to the shuttle via a safety tether, which keeps her from floating away into space.

Speaker 17 Your spacesuit is a spaceship. It is your personal body-shaped spaceship.
It's got oxygen tanks, it's got air scrubbers, it's got water for the coolant loop, pumps that move all that around.

Speaker 17 That's all happening in that little backpack on your back. And so

Speaker 17 you hear those motor sounds. Sound doesn't propagate in the vacuum of space.
So if it were possible to survive taking your helmet off, you ought not be hearing anything.

Speaker 3 But somewhat surprisingly, Sullivan's first spacewalk feels quite normal.

Speaker 17 I mean, it just all felt so familiar. We've done it dozens of times in the water and been in the suit loads and loads of times.

Speaker 3 The water Sullivan mentions here is the huge pool at Johnson Space Center. It's where astronauts practice their spacewalks.

Speaker 3 Close to the back of the payload bay, Sullivan and Nisma start their task, to practice a procedure for refueling a satellite.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, Commander Bob Crippen watches them from Challenger's flight deck.

Speaker 3 This is his third shuttle mission and he's come a long way since being the rookie on STS-1.

Speaker 17 So we're cranking along and you get a face full of spaceship when you're spacewalking. You can't just turn your head and look.
All you'll see is the inside of your helmet.

Speaker 17 You have to turn your whole body to see something other than straight in front of you.

Speaker 17 And you're maneuvering with your hands along the shuttle so you're usually looking at the shuttle you're looking at structure just like in the water tank

Speaker 17 and Crippen made us he made us stop and look and realize this is not water this is vacuum this is space there are no scuba divers around helping you out And that thing there is the Earth.

Speaker 17 He knew and he was exactly right.

Speaker 17 We could have just boogied through that spacewalk and come back and kind of hardly registered that we'd actually done a real spacewalk a couple hundred miles above the earth.

Speaker 3 As they pass over Canada and the northern United States, Kathy Sullivan and Dave Leesmer look down on Earth.

Speaker 4 I'm sorry, but good, good God.

Speaker 4 Oh, look at that. Cape Town is beautiful.

Speaker 4 Bottom island, Sally.

Speaker 4 Long Island, New York.

Speaker 4 Oh, there's a lot of Sullivans down there.

Speaker 3 They can see the curvature of the Earth, a few white clouds, the green and beige of the coastline, and the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean.

Speaker 3 Then she spots Nova Scotia and informs Mark Gunneau, another crew member on board Challenger and the first Canadian in space.

Speaker 3 Little more than six years ago, Sullivan was a PhD student, an oceanographer, an explorer who wanted to see the Earth from space.

Speaker 3 Now this view of Earth, of Nova Scotia, the place where her dream started, is far more beautiful than she could have ever imagined.

Speaker 3 With the 35 New Guys, NASA has performed a remarkable achievement. They have redefined what it means to be an astronaut and who can be an astronaut.
Redefined the right stuff.

Speaker 5 So it took me a while, a couple of years, to really grow a brain and realize these folks brought a lot to the table.

Speaker 3 But it's also changed some of the 35 New Guys themselves, like Mike Mullane, who arrived at NASA from a military background, convinced that civilians, and particularly women, would never measure up as astronauts.

Speaker 5 So I grew to respect the women and the civilian postdocs that were flying, greatly respect them. Frankly, I was in awe of some of them.

Speaker 5 When I really was honest with myself and tried to compare myself to them, I came up short, frankly, certainly with just the sheer brain power some of these folks had.

Speaker 5 So I changed, but it would have been helpful early in my life if I had had a better sense of working professionally with the women.

Speaker 5 I regret now looking back on my life some of the things I said and the way I acted.

Speaker 3 NASA has created a multifaceted team for a multifaceted vehicle in a new and different America.

Speaker 3 Now it's up to these astronauts to fully realize the dream of the space shuttle. But things don't always go to plan.

Speaker 7 Hey, when you guys launched the satellite, did Weststar look like it was okay to you guys?

Speaker 25 We said, Yeah, does this mean you can't find it? And they said, Yeah, we don't know where it is.

Speaker 11 We can't find it, it's not where it's supposed to be.

Speaker 3 That's next time on 13 minutes.

Speaker 3 This has been episode 4 of 10. Thank you for listening to 13 Minutes Presents, The Space Shuttle from the BBC World Service.
It's a BBC Audio Science Production. I'm Maggie Adarin Pocock.

Speaker 3 13 minutes wouldn't be 13 minutes without the people who made these space stories happen and then shared them with us. Thanks to every single one of them.

Speaker 3 We'd like to thank NASA for its archive sound and the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for its archive interviews. In this episode, it's interviews with Carolyn Huntoon and Hoot Gibson.

Speaker 3 Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects. I really hope you're enjoying listening to our story of the Space Shuttle.
Where you can, please leave a rating and a review.

Speaker 3 If you're new to 13 Minutes, seasons 1 and 2 are available right now.

Speaker 3 The extraordinary stories of the first moon landing and the near disaster and rescue of Apollo 13.

Speaker 3 The 13 Minutes series producers are Florin Bohr and Jeremy Grange. The assistant producer is Robbie Wojciechowski with additional research by Fabri Smallhart.

Speaker 3 Technical production is by Jackie Marjoram. Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg and produced by Russell Emmanuel for Bleeding Fingers Music.

Speaker 3 The sound design is by Richard Gould from Skywalker Sound.

Speaker 3 Our story editor is Jessica Lindsay. The senior podcast producer for the BBC World Service is Anne Dixie.
The podcast commissioning editor is John Mannell.

Speaker 3 And the series editor is Martin Smith.

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