Space is the final frontier — and not too long ago, to explore it you had to be a man. Cady Coleman is a former NASA astronaut, retired U.S. Air Force colonel, scientist, pilot and musician. She joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how hearing Sally Ride speak changed the trajectory of her life and what months on the International Space Station taught her about career and motherhood. Her book is “Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change.”
Gaining perspective in space
By Sophia Anderson, Think Intern
Cady Coleman, who has spent 180 days living in the International Space Station, didn’t always plan on being an astronaut. It wasn’t until after she got a bachelors in chemistry from MIT, earned a PhD in polymer science and engineering from UMass, and entered active duty in the Air Force that she went on her first mission for NASA.
Coleman joined Krys Boyd for this episode of Think to discuss her book, “Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder and Making Change.”
In her book, Coleman emphasizes the importance of traits that not all highly successful people hold in high esteem: vulnerability, humility and collaboration.
“On a team, if everybody’s just kind of going, ‘yep, yep, understood,’ I’m kind of that elephant in the room person that goes, ‘So I still don’t understand what we’re really going to do today,’” Coleman said. “Then other people end up speaking up about what they are either unsure of or want to get straight … I think that by being vulnerable like that, I think that you actually invite other people to join you and you find out that they are too.”
It was astronaut Sally Ride’s openness and humility during her visit to Coleman’s college in 1982 that helped Coleman realize there was space for women to be astronauts as well as men. Coleman planned to apply for the NASA astronaut corps, but volunteered to test equipment for Air Force pilots in the meantime.
She was pleased to discover that the female volunteers withstood G-force just as well, and often better than the men. This experience further reinforced Coleman’s belief that NASA, like all organizations, greatly expands its potential when it opens its ranks to all kinds of people.
Coleman received judgement, not just for being a female astronaut in a male-dominated field, but for having a unique family structure. Coleman, her husband and her son commuted between different states when she was earthbound, and she often made international trips to various training locations.
Part way through her career, a friend and colleague of Coleman’s told her that supervisors were hesitant to assign her to another space mission because she might miss her family too much.
“And I’m just like, speechless, right?” Coleman said. “Because I’ve been doing this at that point for ten, fifteen years. Like a really long time.”
Coleman decided to join the space station program, and was eventually assigned another space mission, though she still isn’t entirely sure how the selection process for astronauts actually works. While seasoned astronauts tend to have more credibility, Coleman said that NASA tries to set aside assumptions and select a team that will work best on a mission.
Even though as many as sixteen countries are represented in the ISS during any given mission, Coleman says cultural and political differences tend to fade away in favor of the task at hand. Looking down from 250 miles above the Earth’s surface renders borders insignificant.
“We are who we are,” Coleman said. “We are up there. And the mission is more important than any of us.”
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Transcript
Cady Coleman Podcast Full.wav
Krys Boyd [00:00:01] It is incredibly difficult to be selected for NASA’s astronaut program. If there’s one thing these elite folks tend to have in common, besides being very highly educated and highly driven, it is that they started dreaming of careers in space from the time they were very small children. Cady Coleman, who spent a total of six months in orbit on two shuttle missions and one extended posting aboard the International Space Station. Her story is different because when she was a little girl imagining careers for herself, it appeared that to be an astronaut, you had to be a man from KERA in Dallas. This is think I’m Chris Boyd. Coleman was already in her junior year studying chemistry at MIT when everything changed. At the time, it was rare for women to even be invited as speakers to the students there. But in 1982, astronaut Sally ride gave a speech and more important, gave Coleman what felt like permission to pursue a career that had once seemed close to her. Cady Coleman is a former NASA astronaut, retired United States Air Force colonel, scientist, pilot and amateur musician in the astronaut band. Her memoir is called Sharing Space An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission Wonder, and Making Change. Cady, welcome to think.
Cady Coleman [00:01:15] Thank you very much. I’ve been very excited about talking together. Me too.
Krys Boyd [00:01:19] You know, so many successful people tell their own stories to emphasize how they always had unshakable self-confidence. I find this very inspiring, but also a little hard to relate to. So I appreciated the way you wrote about the effect of being underestimated by others at different points in your life. You do start to doubt yourself, but it doesn’t end there.
Cady Coleman [00:01:41] Like, it’s been an interesting thing for me to sort of figure out, you know, over my lifetime. Like, why does it bother me so much when people, you know, seem to just kind of go, really a real one, you’re a real astronaut, or you just show up somewhere in there like, what are you doing here? And you’re like, I’m in charge. Things like that. And I realize that part of the reason it bothered me was that, you know, I made little jokes there about the situations, but it would come up and I realized that it’s because I’m not always the most confident of people. And I needed to basically just understand that I own it and use it to my advantage in that. Then I was determined to show both that person and myself that I could do whatever it was, because I knew I probably could.
Krys Boyd [00:02:27] I mean, I think confidence is very important to anyone who’s going to have great success in their career. But I also think that humility is important. And I wonder if you have found a role for humility in being a successful astronaut.
Cady Coleman [00:02:41] There are absolutely is that role, I think, on every team. And I think surprisingly more people have it. If you actually are one of the people that helps introduce it, you know, like in in a group, on a team, if everybody’s just kind of going, yep, yep, I understood. I’m kind of that elephant in the room person that goes. So I still don’t understand what we’re really going to do today. No. And but also then other people end up speaking up about what they are either unsure of or want to get straight or want to, you know, all those things. And so I think that by being vulnerable like that, I think that you actually invite other people to join you and you find out that they are too.
Krys Boyd [00:03:21] You have this great chapter in the book which is called there is an AI in team. And by AI you mean individuality. You’ve come to realize that it’s not like everybody on the team has to be the best at absolutely everything. People bring individual strengths and weaknesses.
Cady Coleman [00:03:37] I used to I used to, help run an innovation platform at NASA in my last couple of years, and we would bring in some innovators for important things, too. It was a really cool group. It was, the State Department, USAID, NASA, and Nike, and it was all about what, you know, what can we do for sustainability? And you realized that, you know, every we have like three days with these people, this, these innovators, and that is it. And then they are off to the races. That’s all the help we’re able to give them in that in that platform and in that they need to make the most of getting to know the people who have come to coach them and get the most out of it. And so I’m generally the person who sort of starts off and just says, we have no time to lose. We have to get to know each other. You have to ask each other blunt and embarrassing questions. And because you know, you have only this time there’s a time limit. And as the crew of planet Earth, we don’t get to kind of go, I don’t feel like working on that anymore. Whether it’s for your planet or for your town.
Krys Boyd [00:04:38] You went to hear Sally ride speak at MIT in 1982 when you were a student there. And if I have the dates, right. She was one of just a handful of women serving as U.S. astronauts, but she had not yet taken her historic flight. Why was it such a profound experience for you just to see this woman wearing a flight suit?
Cady Coleman [00:04:56] It wasn’t just what she was wearing. It was just like. Like by being in. Auditorium with her, and it’s a lecture hall that I’ve been in many times during my classes at MIT. And just it was just hearing her talk, seeing what seemed to be important to her. It was important that she she loved science and she was, you know, constantly learning and doing new things. And and so I love the fact that she was always trying to learn new things was important and well educated. And at the same time, she had this, this passion to sort of do more and to have some adventure in her, in her life. And I realized that these were things that I could identify with, and I had never occurred to me. So it wasn’t just the image, but I think the image does go a long way. You know, woman is about five foot four. Maybe she was a little taller than I was. You know, in a blue flight suit and black flight, blue boots. And and she didn’t just brazenly sort of stand up there and say, hey, I’m here. I’ve done this, and I’m about it. I’m about to go to space, and not many of you will ever get to do that. And it just made me realize maybe that could be me too.
Krys Boyd [00:06:06] So after grad school, you served in the U.S. Air Force as a research chemist while. And I love how you phrase this working on your PhD on in your spare time, you were planning to apply for the NASA astronaut Corps, and then in the meantime, in your additional spare time, which I don’t know where it came from, you signed up to be a test subject for something called the Human Centrifuge Testing Panel. What did that entail?
Cady Coleman [00:06:34] Well, I can I just take the first part? Sure. I’m a little a little slower, which is that as an undergrad, that’s where I first met up with the Air Force, in that I had come from a military family. I, and, I wanted to go to college. We didn’t have the money for college. And, because I was one of four kids. And so the Air Force in serving, serving actually your country, either in the military or in any other fashion, it doesn’t have to be the military was seemed like a very good deal to me. I got an ROTC scholarship. I got to go to school where I wanted to go. And so that’s how I started into the Air Force. And by doing that, when they pay for school like that, you owe them a four year commitment. And in my case, we agreed we had sort of a handshake. So we put that aside and I went to grad school and to get my PhD. But before I actually did the writing of the thesis, that’s when I started back into the Air Force and was finishing that up on my own while working full time. But part of that job could be this volunteer job, which was only a few hours a month, really. I would go once or twice a month over to the centrifuge at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And this is the place where they tested equipment and physiology to figure out, you know, when pilots are having these, you know, when they’re, you know, doing been doing their maneuvers and pulling high GS is are we making equipment that works for them? If it’s new night vision goggles, are they slipping down their nose and making it so they can’t breathe? Or, you know, do these new G suits help them withstand the G-forces that, you know, they’re sort of forcing the blood from their head down to their toes. It just to these new GI suits help them. So, you know, in a way, as a chemist, you know, work is slow. I could take me a few months, if not a year, to make a new compound, new materials for airplanes. And so if you go in and do a test and be part of a test and be done right, then either did well or you didn’t, and in any case, you were data. I also had a motive in that I wanted to apply to the astronaut corps, and I knew that by then, because I’d started looking at it in college, and I wanted to be able to show them that I understood something about the job that I was applying for. And, you know, they’re used to pilots and flight test engineers. And here I am, a chemist in the Air Force, so doing. And but we’re also medical subjects. So I thought that I could at least show them that I understand what it’s like to do that, and I can learn more about it myself and make sure I’m really going to be on board. So I liked being part of that. And it was actually a really neat experience. Some of the folks who ran that centrifuge actually ran it back when it was like the Gemini, Mercury. Apollo folks were doing things so and and they were these, these older guys. And it turns out that they were actually the biggest champions of the, the unexpected ones, which would be the few women that were on the centrifuge panel who turned out to be actually certainly just as good, if not actually more capable in the centrifuge than, the other people on the panel.
Krys Boyd [00:09:41] So I’m a here. So I don’t think this would work for me at all. Can you go on, like, any ride in any amusement park and be unscathed?
Cady Coleman [00:09:48] I do like them very, very much. But I will say that I get seasick, which just kills me because I love the water.
Krys Boyd [00:09:59] So I mean. It seems that the story of women’s success at NASA is, in some ways, the story of how much potential is unlocked when cultures are open to not doing things the way they have always been done before, like not only choosing white men to go to space. How did you figure out a family living situation that worked for your family, but didn’t necessarily look like the way it’s normally done?
Cady Coleman [00:10:22] Well, first of all, just thank you for the first part of your statement in that. I mean, that’s exactly why I wanted to write a book, is that people need to realize the potential that we still have yet to explore, because we’re not including all the people that could be on our team. It doesn’t mean you’ve checked every single person on your team. But, you know, we all bring things and we also all make assumptions, I think. And I think it’s still a world where I know that when I was at NASA, I did not want to show up at work. And when the class that was supposed to end at 530 was creeping on until quarter six and six, you know, be just thinking, oh, no, daycare closing at six. I mean, I you know, I made sure that every time there was even that potential, there was people that I could call text. They were ready for that day to go and get, you know, our son from daycare because it made my husband and I were geographically single, so to speak. Living in different places, we commuted between Texas and, Massachusetts and, and so, so I think it’s still a world that is a bit like that where we can make assumptions about family. And I mean, everyone has to do family in the way that they that works for them. And family doesn’t mean husband wife, kids times two. It means, you know, in our astronaut sense, it means, you know, whoever it is that when you go to space, you long for and you wish you could be with more. And it was actually and candidly, a little bit discouraged when I found out through midway through my NASA career, I really wanted to go to the space station, and someone who was working in that world came and found me and said, I know you want to go. They were a friend. He said, I know you want to go. What I’m hearing is that people wonder, you have this alternative relationship where you don’t live in the same place as your husband, and you have a kid, and they’re worried that when you go to space and you do all the training beforehand, you’re going to miss your family. So they’re a little hesitant to assign you. And I’m just like, speechless, right? Because I’ve been doing this at that point for I don’t know. Ten, 15 years, I go freely.
Krys Boyd [00:12:33] You don’t mean to space twice by this point.
Cady Coleman [00:12:35] And Penders exactly been in space twice on shuttle missions. And I was like, really? I mean, I’ve never missed work for, you know, because I’m away. I come home early, we pay change fees, all those things. And and yet the facts are the facts. And at the time, it’s not my way to be. I mean, you can be mad for a little while and evening or whatever, but it’s not constructive. And this person said, you know, here’s what I think might be a solution, but you can work out your own, which is, you know what? If we all have extra jobs as astronauts, why don’t you request an extra year that your extra job be in the space station program? And that way they get to know you, they realize how capable you are, and boom, you’ll be assigned. And it seemed to work. And I just thought, okay, because like, there’s only one line to space, but the astronaut program isn’t unique in that way. I mean, for the job that you personally want and you I’m sort of looking around the whole world, there’s probably not that many paths to it. You know, it’s the company. It’s the work you want to do in your town where your family settled. And there’s one person that hires. And so there’s often not a very, not too many ways to get to the place you want to, you know, and I think you end up more than you’d like to having to go, okay, I can work with that. Let’s figure out how to get around it. And I and I say that not to be discouraged, but because I think people should realize that they have what’s inside of them and they can figure their own best way around some of these things that are still obstacles.
Krys Boyd [00:14:04] Cady being selected for the astronaut program at NASA in any given class is not a guarantee that you’ll be assigned to any given space mission in a particular order. You note that the process is not transparent. It’s not predictable. How are astronauts chosen for space travel and assigned to particular missions?
Cady Coleman [00:14:25] I have no idea. You can sit there for 24 years. I mean, it is a bit of a black box, but it depends on the circumstances at the time. And there are there were times in the shuttle program where you were assigned to a shuttle mission. You trained for at least a year, usually, if not more, and in my case for science missions a little more. And then, you know, you did that mission, you came back, you got assigned again. But then we started building the space station. And part of the astronaut job is to not just train and go to space, but actually to be part of these teams that are doing things like designing the space station. And we try to put astronauts, you know, into those groups so that they have the user, the user opinion and understand, you know, like, I’ll give you an example. They were going to they were going to build a new kind of place for us to slide our feet into and be able to stand, so to speak, in one place for spacewalks. And then somebody simple, instead of having all those tools and on their spacesuit, you know, attached on the chest to their spacesuit, what if we put we made that plate, not just a plate but a stand, and we put all the tools there, and then what if we put this there and that and and soon it had grown to become like a platform that was a couple feet by a couple feet and weighed like 60 pounds when it started off as like, you know, a foot by a foot and weighed about 15 pounds. And so to move it from place to place was like so much work and so on. That team, the astronauts that were experienced spacewalkers, said, you know that, like what you’re dreaming of. It’s convenient in some ways, but in the ways that are important out there, it’s not going to work for us. Let us explain why. So those are the kinds of jobs that, you know, we would have in between flights and in doing, you know, those kinds of jobs for the space station. Often if you’ve flown in space, people listen to you, more. And if you fly somebody like me twice, you don’t get actually, you know, twice as much credibility. You’ve already got your credibility. So in that way, we started actually flying people in space once and then flying the new people so it can the line can seemed like a mystery, but there’s usually some logic behind it. And at the same time, there’s a part of figuring out who should go next that all of us have to really look at. What are our assumptions, what are that? What are our assumptions about people, and do we need to talk them out? Do we need to really look at look at those and make sure that we’re doing what’s best for the mission?
Krys Boyd [00:17:00] Cady, you experienced, I think it was seven delays before your first trip to space, including a couple of times where everybody was like strapped in, ready to go. And then the mission was delayed. What is it about your training that maybe prepares you for those kinds of frustrations, and to remain patient and optimistic that eventually things will work?
Cady Coleman [00:17:23] The biggest thing is that you understand that. I mean, the mission is the mission, and you can’t go until you know it’s as safe as it can be. And so whether it’s the weather or some, you know, something that broke before you even got to the launchpad in your spacesuit, which is what happened the first time. You know, it’s really frustrating for the crew. We know we’re going to go when everything is ready. And for the families who have bought plane tickets, rented cars and hotel rooms. And, you know, my mom, my mom was like, okay, sweetie, tell me, like, when are you going to go? I’m like, mom, we don’t know. The next attempt is in about a week when they think they can have that thing fixed. She’s like, you can tell me. Yeah, so it’s hard. It’s hard on the families. Not so much on us. And. And there’s a situation up on the space station. You know, right now, this summer where the Boeing capsule is still attached to the space station, they were supposed to come home a few weeks ago. And people, you know, I read I read the right facts in the news, but not always the right context, which is that the capsule is up there longer than they planned. There’s two people that were planning to be home earlier and and people, you know, use the words stranded and things like that. But the way NASA works and works with their partners, like the Boeing Company, is that before those people even left the ground, questions were asked, how long can Sunny and Butch stay up on that space station if they have to stay? What if they can’t get home in that capsule? How will they get home? And what are we going to do that’s constructive up there? What can what’s the most we can get accomplished by sunny and butcher up there? And so the reality is, is that staying parked like that up on the space station is the best way to understand the problem that they’re having, which is on a part of the spacecraft that doesn’t come home with them. So they can’t. If they come home, they lose all the data in the possibility to learn from their test flight. And this is not just like the party line. I don’t even work there anymore. But it is. It is NASA at their best, really, and up on that space station. But Wilmore and Sunny Williams are working away. They are two extra sets of hands that are experienced working on the space station, and they are knocking that to do list, which is so daunting. It’s unexplainable how much their good work there is to do on that space station that we never get to, because there’s not enough time and they are making so many more things possible up there. So, you know, I, I urge your listeners to really think about what they’re hearing, think about the facts and think of they really do all string together to equate to words like stranded.
Krys Boyd [00:20:04] One of your missions aboard the shuttle involved the deployment of the space telescope known as Chandra. And what is so remarkable to think about is that you realized this device you helped put in place would lead to astronomy textbooks being rewritten.
Cady Coleman [00:20:23] This telescope had been designed like 25 years earlier, where they figured out that if we put a telescope outside the atmosphere of the Earth, we are going to be able to see x rays. And it’s the same x rays that we use to have an x ray and see a broken bone. But out in space, those kinds of high energy phenomena are things like stars, exploding supernovas and black holes. When they’re sucking things in, they’re also spewing things out. And I’m just really proud to be part of, you know, I was the person on our crew in charge, but our whole crew launched this telescope out into space. It was supposed to work for five years. Back in 1999, and I’m about to attend the 25th anniversary of deploying that telescope out in space. And what was really a revelation to me was, as you said, like I was trying to I didn’t I didn’t know anything about black, you know, about what? X rays and this, this part of astronomy. And so I’m reading a textbook and and realizing that if I don’t finish that textbook before we launch, it’s going to be out of date, because we’re going to learn so many more new things than we ever could. And so it’s been really neat to be part of a mission that even after you get home, the mission continues. And I’m actually now meeting like the grandchildren, okay. Of the people that were part of launching this telescope and being the first scientist. But we’re all pretty excited about being grandkids.
Krys Boyd [00:21:54] Why did your colleague Eileen Collins suggest you take your hair out of your ponytail when you did interviews together about Chandra?
Cady Coleman [00:22:01] Eileen looked at me. We were about to do an interview and I had my hair out because I have a lot of hair. It takes a while to dry up there or anywhere really. And, but, you know, there’s sort of this unwritten rule that in space, thou shalt have your hair tied up out of the way. And it makes sense in a physical sense. The shuttle is kind of small, and you don’t want it to get in the way of other people in the way of equipment. But there was just there was this little sort of sense of like, everybody should look like everybody, at least to me. And so I was surprised when I went to go put my hair up and Eileen said, you know, hey, you know, leave it up to you. And I was like, Eileen, you know, we’re not supposed to. And she kind of looked at me, you know, that kind of look. And she goes, Cady, you know, I have short hair. You have, like, big hair. Everybody watching this interview is going to know that we are in space, and especially girls are going to see that they belong up here.
Krys Boyd [00:22:56] Let’s be clear. The challenges for women in the astronaut program went beyond visible role models. I mean, it blows my mind that occasionally decisions were made about who could go on what missions based on who fit the available equipment.
Cady Coleman [00:23:13] That is correct. And I’ve got that big silence for a reason. I mean, when you put it like that, I’m like, well. But, but but actually, I mean, it’s true. And, you know, people can only make the best decisions they make at the time. And I’m happy to say they’re not making the same decisions now. But at the time, both logistics and money dictated that they couldn’t bring all four spacesuits, all four sizes of spacesuits, up to the space station. So we started off with an extra small space suit, a small space suit, a medium space suit, a large space suit, and an extra large space suit. They never even made copies of the extra small because they decided it didn’t fit enough people. And so we had small, medium large x-large. They decided they would eliminate the small and the extra large. But it turned out which eliminated eliminated some of the guys because it turned out they didn’t think it actually eliminated many, if any, of the guys. But it turns out that it did eliminate, some people who were bigger. They couldn’t fit in the large space suit, so they brought the extra large space to its back, and the small space suits that eliminated at least a third of the women in the program at the time from doing spacewalks. And it’s one thing to think about what did this mean? For, you know, being assigned to shuttle missions. But the bigger implication is that we were talking about the space station now in the space shuttle, we could still bring some of those other sizes of suits in that program. But up on the space station, we just didn’t have the sort of logistics to be able to have them all up there. And what that meant was that if you didn’t qualify in the medium or the large or the extra large space suit, then you could not be assigned to a long duration spaceflight. And that was true. Now, I went to the space station in 2010, came home in 2011. And that statement is true through 2021. When we first began to have missions where there have been going up in ships that have more than three seats, because if you think about it, going out in a spacewalk always going to be in pairs, have to have a backup that’s essentially three seats. And we needed spacecraft that had a lead that had four. So you didn’t have to be qualified in every aspect of being an astronaut. And if you’re a smaller person, you are just not going to be able to be qualified in that space suit. And I am a smaller person and I’m proud of being qualified, but I got I got a lot of help from both men and women to be really ready for that mission and actually really showed some different ways of using the suit, of being fitted in the suit, of making the suit work the best for everybody. And at the same time, what I am really proud of is the way NASA and the and the astronauts that are there today, are really embracing spacewalking and that when the new class trains, if they don’t succeed in being qualified in spacewalking, they don’t call that success. Everyone in the class needs to succeed. And there is an active let’s help everybody. And that doesn’t mean to say that I didn’t have help. I had so much help. And I had has help from men, from women, from instructors, from engineers. I did have to work hard to get that help or recruit that help. There were people that didn’t expect it. Expect me to be able to be qualified. And I do think that it’s. It would be. It would be, I don’t know, I, I would I like being in a place I would like to be in a place where people said Cady or person X, Y or Z brings something to our team that we need, and we need her on the space station. So let’s make sure that she can be qualified in all the ways we need her to be qualified, and let’s make sure that she has equipment that actually fits her, because I guarantee you that basically many of the women and actually some of the men have been doing spacewalks in suits that really don’t fit them. And it’s much more difficult.
Krys Boyd [00:27:15] Just to be clear. You said it. You know, a spacesuit that doesn’t fit makes the job more difficult. We’re not talking about this being unflattering or mildly uncomfortable. You. You could get cut up and bruised inside the suit. It’s harder to move around safely and effectively. How did you make strategic decisions about when to just kind of buck up and deal with the additional challenges, without complaining, and when to speak up?
Cady Coleman [00:27:44] In trying to make change. I mean, there are just those two sort of ends of the spectrum, I think. You have to do what works best for you and best for this situation. I’m not that great a debater or arguer, but I am actually really good at being part of a team and figuring out how to communicate with people on the team. And so my way of making change, of adding myself into the equation of spacewalkers when I wasn’t really expected to be there, was to help people who were making those decisions, help people who I was working with, help them understand what I what I brought to the equation, and also what they could do to help me succeed. And to me, I mean, it takes more to, you know, convince people and to help people understand that it’s to me, it’s it’s really important because if the people don’t embrace you, then you’re never really exactly part of that team. And when in having your success be their success and the team’s success, that I think is the the quicker way to make some incremental change. Other people are better at doing those arguments and figuring out how to just say, this is wrong, we’re going to fix it. We’re going to change it. One of the things that’s really complicated about this discussion is that none of it is simple. I mean, these are spacesuits are not just, they’re not just spacesuits. And as you pointed out, it’s not just fashion. I mean, these are your own little spacecraft in the shape of a human. You are outside. It is your breathing. It is your communication. It is your air, your water, everything. And it it if it’s this system is working to redesign it. It’s not something that happens in a week or a month or even in a few years. It is a very complicated system to to be able to say, we are sure it’s safe enough to put people in it and send them outside. And I’m very proud that people are taking a really good look at redesigning suits, and they are redesigning suits for the trips back to the moon. And, and, and I’m really excited and I’ll say that I’m, I’m really, really excited for the Artemis program, where NASA is committed, sincerely committed, that the first people to walk on the moon, on the moon will be a woman, a person of color, and they are working hard on the suits that will fit them.
Krys Boyd [00:30:13] Reading your book, Cady invites readers to imagine being strapped down in a tiny spacecraft attached to a very large rocket. It seems terrifying, I think for those of us who have not trained for this, but you know that any astronaut has made their decisions about risk long before they’re sitting on the launch pad. I mean, obviously, you know that you’re signing up for that risk when you apply for the astronaut program. But I wonder if there was a moment when it really did sink in for you that this was a choice you were making. It’s a.
Cady Coleman [00:30:47] The way I felt after I got to orbit for the space station. I mean, a shuttle mission happened so fast, and I mean, the launch happens and then you’re up in space. And then actually, we had to deploy the Chandra telescope seven hours, 17 minutes and 17 seconds after launch. I always remember it was a great number. So things are happening fast, and, you know, you have made that decision. You’ve made it together with your family. And I feel good about those decisions because I trust the people that I work with and everyone that turns any bolt on that spacecraft. I trust them to be doing their best. And I also trust NASA and her contractors to be making sure that people are enabled to do their best when they do those things. So feeling like, you know, I trust people. I definitely wanted to be there on a shuttle mission. I didn’t have much time to think about it, but on a space station mission, it’s sort of like you get up there and it’s like, welcome to the welcome to the next six months of your life, where, I mean, there’s a little time to think, and I mean, it’s a little bit more of an arrival and a plus. We go up in groups of three at the time when I was up there, and you get there and three, you know, our two Russian crewmates and, and Scott Kelly, our American crewmate, was there to greet us and take us on a tour and show us everything. And and so I got to, you know, sort of when you go to sleep that night, which happened pretty fast, we were pretty tired. I just remember just being pretty relieved that, well, I’m glad that part went right, because it’s, I mean, basically going up, you know, launching and going home and landing. Those are the parts that are the most dangerous. Everything. All of it’s dangerous. But, there’s the parts that are the most critical, and it was nice to get one of them out of the way. I would have stayed longer, and I would go again in a minute.
Krys Boyd [00:32:38] I hadn’t realized that you were able, on the ice, to speak with your family most days. And on the one hand, I would imagine that those connections are really important and sustaining. On the other hand, you know, you’re I think your son was about ten at the time that you were aboard the ice. I mean, are you distracted by thoughts of, you know, whether he will get the backpack he needs at target, you know, on time for next week to start school or whatever the case may be.
Cady Coleman [00:33:10] I don’t think quite distracted him. And it’s a little bit like home where you’re multitasking on different levels. And, you know, we were a commuting family. And just like during training where maybe I had to go on a trip and I meant to stop by and get those blue jeans at jcpenney’s and didn’t have time and got called then girlfriend. And it’s like, Diane, can you make sure he gets those blue jeans? Because otherwise his dad is going to take him shopping at the kid’s store, you know? And my friend Diane knew how he felt about it, and she’d make sure that that had happened. And and some of that stuff happened up on the space station, too. And, you know, I actually learned some of my great coping strategies from my guy crewmates, while we were, working hard to train over in Russia. And we’re on a different time schedule. And one of them had his kids and he had five kids. In fact, my boss, Mike Barrett, he’s up on the space station as we speak. And he he said, you know, Cady, in our family, something that works is I’m home working and that keeps my wife, you know, the, you know, time to be able to get dinner together and, you know, do things that need done and not have to sort of be that person too. And I, you know, he showed me some of the ways he did that back then. It was the fax machine. And after a while I used to take pictures or, you know, snap snapshots of my son’s, math book. And then we’d do math homework together. And some of that continued on the space station. And so thinking about those times, not just is how are you, how are you, but time to be together. And, you know, how can I fit into this family now that we’ve kind of changed our shape, so to speak? How can I be helpful? How can I be there for them? It’s calling them all the time isn’t always being for them, being there for them. And if anybody wonders what some of those conversations between Earth and space are like, there is a PBS independent lens of documentary called Space The Longest Goodbye. And that documentary uses videos from our Sunday morning conferences together as a family, where you see real conversations about things that are fun. I mean, just seeing my son with his cat, you know, I’m pretending the cats in Zero-G. Everything from that to, there’s a thing in that movie that we call that the. I heard you’ve been rude to your grandma. Look. And you can do that from space.
Krys Boyd [00:35:27] Your two shuttle missions were flown aboard Columbia in 1995 and 1999. Listeners may remember Columbia was destroyed on reentry in 2003, at the end of a 16 day mission with seven of your colleagues, crew members aboard. I imagine that anybody feels devastated by that loss. But I guess you didn’t feel entirely powerless in that your work as a chemist had this new purpose in the wake of that.
Cady Coleman [00:36:00] I think I could speak for everybody in the whole NASA family, which includes certainly so many other companies. And I mean everybody who was part of those missions understands. You know, I hadn’t felt a huge loss in all of us. So I think we’re pretty. We’re really motivated. I mean, everybody wants to do what they can before the shuttle launches, but especially in a situation like this. And I was really proud. I’m a polymer chemist by training. And, you know, my education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was, in this, this world of polymers, which is molecules that are sort of big and long and stringy, and it’s like the spaghetti of, of I mean, it’s like the chemistry of spaghetti versus the chemistry of like little tiny, tiny little, you know, bits of pasta or something. And so the mixing around is different. And it turns out that that’s what we needed to repair, be able to repair the bottom of the space shuttle, which isn’t actually the part that got hurt during the Columbia accident, but it was the Columbia accident showed us that this was a possibility. And so we literally needed to learn how to make some goo that was kind of like cook. Like you would maybe cook something, you know, on your roof or in your bathtub and with a Coke gun just sort of beefed up on steroids for going out on a spacewalk. And I was proud to be able to bring my chemistry background to that. And but also, when you wear that astronaut hat, you know, your place in the meeting is often to take the temperature of everybody there. And at a certain point in that team, we had a lot of people, all of us wanting to, all of us wanting to, you know, get part of the solution. Everybody with good ideas. But we had to start narrowing things down and speaking the same language in deciding this is the path, we’re going to go down together and make sure we’re really all on the same page. And that was to use this goo to literally frost the bottom of the of the space shuttle like a cake. When something got done, when, if, if it got damaged and make sure that was going to stick and and we got to all acknowledge that we’re doing our best and we’re going to go forward with the best solution that we have.
Krys Boyd [00:38:11] When you’re living aboard the International Space Station for months at a time, how much alone time do you get? Are there ways that people behave with each other to sort of pretend that you’re alone?
Cady Coleman [00:38:24] Yes. Even on the shuttle where the shuttle is, shuttle is like the smallest apartment you could think of. You know, we were in these two stories, so it’s like, I’m really, like, at two tiny houses on top of each other. And so it’s kind of home to be alone there. And people learn to, to bring. At the time, it would be, remember when we had Walkmans. Great little ways to play a cassette. My first mission we brought up cassette tapes. My second mission on the shuttle we brought up CDs, and by the time we got to the space station, it was iPods. We didn’t get to bring phones. No. And and, on on my crew, we didn’t have iPods, but those came later. Anyways, I’m just making music so that, you know, having music in your ears allows you to kind of have your own little world. On the space station, we had cabins, and this meant a lot to me. We had cabins that were soundproof, and that meant that, I mean, you could have a conversation in your cabin and nobody could hear. And that was important to me to be able to just kind of vent and talk to people, you know, down on the ground and, you know, do a little, you know, this happened. You know, just makes me crazy when that happens. And just the ability to be able to do that. Meant the world to me. So we have those cabins. It’s also the space station is huge. And I mean, the shuttle is tiny. The space station, if you envision a football field from end to end, that’s our whole big trust. You know, the big sort of, scaffolding with all the, all the solar arrays. And then down the 50 yard line is where we have about ten different modules, each the size of like a, like a school bus without the seats in it. There’s sort of smaller school busses and bigger, but it’s some are up and some are down, but that’s the place we live. The 50 yard line still takes a long time to walk across. It’s a little faster to fly through it, but the space station is huge and we do actually sleep sort of at either end of the station. And that means that it at the, that means that in the middle where the window is, that’s where the cupola window is. That’s where we can actually, be alone. And that’s where I used to spend many evenings.
Krys Boyd [00:40:33] You make a very deliberate point here, Cady, of sharing that in the village of people you have called on over the years for help, our mental and emotional health professionals, and I have to wonder, is it hard to find a therapist who can get their head around the particular challenges of an astronaut’s life? Or did you realize, with the help of a therapist that the challenges in your life were just sort of slightly different versions of challenges lots of people face?
Cady Coleman [00:40:59] I’m going to go for door number two.
Krys Boyd [00:41:01] Okay.
Cady Coleman [00:41:03] And that, first of all, I think it well, I, I joke around that the only thing better than counseling is free counseling. Okay. Well, and, you know, it depends how you process. And probably the people on this podcast already know that I process in a verbal way, and I make decisions often by talking them out with people. And so and I led to a different and busy life. I mean, I was part of a commuting married for 26 years. And, you know, we we had diverse stepson and a son and keeping all those things together, just finding the time that you and your husband, you know, both have time to, you know, talk about this or that or, the fact that NASA was so open to counseling was so helpful to me and to others, and it is actually a requirement for living on the space station. You know, before we go, there’s a certain number of sessions that you’re doing, and that is so that they can really get to know you, the the folks who counsel us up on the space station. And that goes for our medical doctors as well. And that way, you know, to me, it’s it’s not easy. This job is not easy. And the things that are hard about it are very, very human, in my opinion. And I think what a lot of us have found is that the things that you struggle with down on the ground are going to be the same things you struggle with up, up, up in space. So I think it was really constructive, to be able to, to be encouraged to get the help you need to figure out how you can be your very best self.
Krys Boyd [00:42:41] I’ve had the privilege of talking to a number of astronauts on this show over the years, and everybody talks are writes about how that view of the Earth from a distance reminds them that borders are artificial. The divisions between countries are just things we’ve made up. I wonder in this particular moment, Cady, if there’s anything about space travel that gives you perspective on life in a country where at the present moment, many of us feel divided from people not in the next country, but the next state over, or town over, or even house next door to ours.
Cady Coleman [00:43:13] I’d like to point out that just keeping your eye on the mission, and we can point back to the pandemic. We can point back to, you know, other difficult kinds of circumstances where, you know, there’s your politics, there’s the way you feel about things. But, you know, up on a space station, we actually have a very large luxury, which is that it’s very clear to us we don’t get to go home when we want to. We don’t pick our team. We don’t get to make our team be different or our crewmates be different. We are who we are. We are up there. And the mission is more important than any of us. And with that in mind, having 16 different countries represented, being up there with, you know, people who feel differently about different things going on in their countries. I mean, looking at Russia and the Ukraine and realizing that we still have our own mission up there and we have to make that mission work. And I think the key is to do your very best to figure out what missions you do have in common, even when you have large differences from other people.
Krys Boyd [00:44:23] Cady Coleman is a former NASA astronaut, retired United States Air Force colonel, scientist and pilot. Her memoir is called Sharing Space and Astronauts Guide to Mission Wonder and Making Change. Cady, thanks so much for making time to talk.
Cady Coleman [00:44:38] Well thank you. Your show is fascinating and I love how you really expose people to a lot of different points of view and fleshed things out, and I’ve enjoyed listening to the podcast, so thank you very much.
Krys Boyd [00:44:48] Thank you. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram, and you can subscribe to the podcast wherever you like to get your podcasts by searching for KERA think or if it’s easier, listen right at our website. Thanks, Craig dawg. Again, I’m Chris Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
