WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE

[Music] else you know like be a nurse don't be a doctor or if if uh it's not put on you that um that this sexist trip um that this is an inappropriate goal for a little girl what you might hear from a counselor at school is that what you're trying to do is something that uh is beyond your abilities uh you're shooting too high uh if I could give any advice to anybody and and I hate people who give advice it would be not to let people tell you what you can't be you have to decide for yourself what it is that you want and if you want it really want it badly enough then you have to make it happen for yourself number Enterprise you go from 023 IOP saw C yes sir whenever you hear the name NASA the first things you think about are space spectaculars incredible inventions and the mysteries of the universe but the thing you have to keep in mind is that this place where dreams come true is made of just plain people human beings like you and me [Music] 15.9 okay the go Network go go f go Palmer go Rockwell [Music] go come left 8 degrees so heading at 347 stand by for SRT minus one Mark SRT minus one 905 copy go ahead we have a gpc2 failure uh that means flight control string to will be down and the accelerometers will be disabled Roger we see the configuration [Music] yeah hey capc or GNC you ready for the wraparound 2011 yes what kind of person goes to work for NASA when the space shuttle was first tested at NASA's dren flight Research Center in Southern California a lot of people didn't know that the director of the shuttle operations was a softspoken highly qualified former Air Force test pilot Isaac Gillum was born in Washington DC as a kid he liked math lots of math he built model airplanes and dreamed of flying as far as I'm concerned uh what I did is I pursued uh an interest that uh that that I had a lot of enthusiasm about uh flying airplanes rockets and space as is that evolved and uh my my joining NASA was relatively natural because I was interested in these types of things and uh my Evolution within the organization has probably been uh as natural as anything might be uh we now have uh black astronauts and female astronauts which is indicative of the agency's uh concern and desire to provide opportunities to everyone who wishes to participate in these types of activities uh We've offered our expertise and resources to them will be similar to lunar lander except that it's mobile it would be similar to the the lunar rover uh and the airplane would uh come uh down in a capsule would deploy uh into its uh flight configuration and then fly several th000 ft above the Mars surface and that way we could explore about 4,000 Mi of the Mars surface with instruments and penetrometers dropped from the airplane and things of that nature that meeting started at about 8:30 this morning and it didn't it didn't end over the years there has been a steady increase in the number of minorities and women involved in NASA's many programs the jobs they occupy range all the way from those of Clerks mechanics electricians safety inspectors straight through to computer programmers scientists and Engineers like Ming Tang one of NASA's top aeronautical Engineers his inspired work with highflying aircraft like the hl10 and other lifting body Vehicles contributed to the success of the early space shuttle Landings the headquarters of the new astronauts who will operate the space shuttle is the Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas although the number of human beings venturing into arter space is steadily increasing the quality of the individual who gains this opportunity remains exceedingly High particularly so among that new breed of astronaut the mission specialist when the shuttle made it possible for scientists to be a part of the program as astronauts then uh that was my break and I will be involved in payload operations performing some of the experiments there's any extra vehicular activity going on then I will be the one performing that so it's a you know multiplicity of Duties let's chat with the people of NASA people like Dr Ronald McNair A physics professor and one of NASA's newest [Music] astronauts you are uh you are a PhD from MIT aren't you that's right um isn't that kind of um that's kind of tough thing to get isn't it I have to agree why is it so tough oh it's it's a very broad feel involving many times involving the abstract and things which aren't exactly intuitive they violate our intuition and it violate the world as most people know it often and uh you you have to bring a lot of different disciplines together with physics you know your electromagnetism your thermodynamics a lot of things you must pull together but uh it's it's very challenging me but it's again one of those challenging efforts that's satisfying well now I mean um well for example I mean you don't come from U mathematics or Science Background do you no there are no scientists or math people in any of the Sciences in my family I didn't grow up around it I think uh where did you grow up Lake City South Carolina uh I think in my case I was had quite an initiative type of student I would I found that something I look put it this way I was interested in just about every subject that came along but science was the one that gave in mathematics was the most challenging gave me the most difficulty and it I had to work a little harder to sort of uh understand and master the techniques and it fascinated me and I dug I when I when I run out of books or would get ahead of a course I'd go out and find something else because every I'd hear about something somewhere or or glance at A New Concept and I'd want to go and find out what it's all about so I think with that case it was an inner drive a self type of motivation motivating thing has Athletics had any value to you as an astronaut in your job here at N I say very definitely especially in the developmental stage um I've always been involved in lots of athletic like in high school I was Captain of football track and baseball teams and uh I'm still involved in each of the sports to some extent but for the most part now I'm a karate instructor and that's where I spend most of my uh hours and physical activity that's something I've been doing for the last 12 years and I've become quite involved in it now I think Athletics helps develop a great deal that discipline I was talking about that uh ability to do a job even when you don't feel like doing it something that you do something that you have to do and need to do whether you feel like it or not and I think that's where that's where I think it helped me a great deal on the football field suffering and um you have to take that next step and keep going and not giving up develops a great deal karate has been in addition to keeping in shape has been very good for sustaining a discipline and for keeping a calm frame of mind and a positive outlook I'd like to think that I've gotten into the space program at what in 20 years will turn out to have been the start of the space station era and 40 or 50 years from now maybe I will be privileged enough to look back and realize that that was where I jumped into it I've been very fortunate in having a part in that aspect that period of the Space Program um I would hope that there'd be some further manned Planetary Exploration during the time that I'm in the program I'd very much like to go to the moon or to Mars and participate in firsthand observations of another planet a conversation with astronaut Dr Katherine Sullivan geologist now what is a mission specialist what's a mission specialist in 25 Wars or L um a mission specialist is really the chief scientist aboard the space shuttle there are two other people on board who have responsibility for getting the craft into orbit and maintaining its safety keeping it at the right attitude and so forth and bringing it back Landing it safely then there's another group of people that want to make use of the fact that you're there they want you to put a satellite out for them or they have a broken satellite they want you to pick it up and bring it back or fix it um maybe it's a scientist who wants you to uh operate a furnace for him and see if he can melt uh make a new kind of metal alloy or do some kind of materials processing maybe it's a a geologist who wants to look back at the Earth or an astronomer who wants to look at the Sun or ultraviolet radiation from the Star those people need someone on board the shuttle who thoroughly understands the space shuttle systems and also understands their scientific priorities and who can make judgments about what to do at what point in time during the mission um you plan all of this out of course before you ever go up on the flight but things happen during the flight that force you to change that plan on a momentto moment basis so you need a number of people who are fully acquainted with the shuttle systems and their operation and fully acquainted with the scientific systems and the scientific priorities Mission specialist stands at the middle between the flight crew and the scientists I must say that's a marvelous explanation uh tell me it sounds like an incredibly fascinating opportunity for a scientist is it I think it's the best there is just the tops I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do more the volcanoes on Mars are really spectacular Viking has shown us that the Marin missions showed us that and volcanoes are one of my strong GE geological interests so uh I would be only too happy to be the first geologist to sample the farus volcanoes [Music] anytime well they have a quite a quite a stable of airplanes out there all of them are t38 the 35 pilots and Mission Specialists chosen will all fly it of course the pilots will fly as aircraft commanders the mission mission specialist will fly in the back seat of it astronaut Frederick Gregory tells us about his background well I grew up in Washington DC and of course went to high school in Washington uh I had a a couple of years of college because then I I went to the Air Force Academy uh my flying initially was helicopter flying including a a rescue tour in Vietnam the Air Force then gave me the opportunity to cross Trin the fix wi and we went immediately to Jets or I went immediately to Jets and that was in 1970 and I've been flying as a test pilot as a research experimental test pilot since about 19 1971 to 1977 uh I was able to uh accumulate many hours perhaps 2,000 hours of actual testing and uh I've flown probably 40 or more different kinds of airplanes one morning I I was going to school I was at the Armed Forces Staff College at the time I got to uh got to the school opened up my mailbox and there was a note that said call Houston and uh I called down and uh the director of operations Mr Abby asked me if I was still interested in the job down here and so that's the way I was notified didn't take me long to think about that answer either and what was your reaction I was I was I was stunned I guess I went into shock we are now in the era of the Space Shuttle and once again the world will focus its attention on America's astronauts how do the astronauts feel about being the center of so much attention when I talk to people I tell them that probably for every astronaut who of course gets all of the publicity there are probably a thousand support people behind behind him behind the scenes that you never see and those are really the essential people real numbers 7342 on 3 523 on 32 734 the ones who plan it execute it ensure that it's conducted in a safe way they get us back of course the only people that uh everybody sees is the astronaut or the only person they see is the astronaut but it takes so many different kinds of people with so many skills to make a mission fly a mission and so it is one huge team the astronauts of course they just the focal point the crew on board the will just be the focal point but it takes the entire crew to accomplish the mission okay we're going to start collecting Baseline data now are you ready yes I'm Ready the Interval Timer is on with a green light and a decrease when you see the red light [Music] right Dr Patricia cowings a key figure an astronaut survival what we found is that no matter how I make a subject sick in the rotating chair and a vertical accelerator in a lar jet an individual's symptoms are still the same if he can control his symptoms under one condition we assume we should be able to control them under another condition uh what we plan on doing eventually is to test the treatment in space well right now there's a problem associated with the man space flight programs coming up wherein uh when people are initially exposed to zero gravity they sometimes experience symptoms similar to motion sickness on the earth the symptoms are similar but the cause is quite different the kind of uh stimulation your inar G is totally alien to anything you you could have experienced on the earth I see now uh what exactly is your um your area of concern well I'm a psychop physiologist ious and my field is psychosomatic medicine so I study the relationship between the mind and the body uh what I'm doing here is using a a variant of biof feedback um research wherein I can train subjects to control several of their own autonomic responses their own physiological responses simultaneously and thereby suppress the symptoms that would normally occur in motion [Music] sys [Music] but you don't have to be a PhD to work at NASA or even an astronaut most of the people who work at Nasa work in a wide variety of jobs which on the surface seem far removed from science and outer space everyone is crucial to the success of the space shuttle program a simple secretarial error can jeopardize the performance of a computer controlling a space BR millions of miles away there are plenty of opportunities to learn and grow in a job at Nasa also there are educational programs which NASA sponsors and universities and colleges throughout the country for persons interested in careers in the space Sciences in many instances NASA gives financial help to college students who are interested in joining NASA um and also including the I'll give you an analogy of basically what we're doing here let's assume you're going to the beach uh okay the wife is supposed to get the food maybe the husband takes the charcoals and the things like that and the children get their toys and when you get there you know you're going to get there and have fun and you know at a certain time everybody's got a job to bring things back and you're back home and everybody's happy you didn't forget the dog or car keys or anything else well it's the same thing here basically we're processing payloads through the various facilities we have here the orbitor processing facility for horizontal payloads the vertical processing facility for vertical payloads and in each one of these facilities we got to account for what we have to do from day one to the day that we launch Roberto Rees is one of those people in NASA who has worked his way up to a position of considerable responsibility and it is our job to lay out a plan and once that plan is agreed upon then it is our job to implement it uh we're the straw boss we're the ones that are going to be getting on people if the job isn't done on time because management is on us to get the job done on time what made you want to come and work here I guess uh it all started many many years ago when I used to see the V2 Rockets take off from White Sand's Proving Grounds at the time my home is in El Paso was in El Paso Texas and after the war we used to see the Germans assemble and launcher rocket ships and the rocket ships used to be taken out of town on a little dirt road going out of East East El Paso West El Paso and uh they used to have the V2 rockets on sandbags on flatbed trucks and we used to see them early in the morning go out and we know what they were cuz we'd seen them in the movies and then in the afternoon about 3:00 you'd see a vapor trail going up in the sky and it was most unusual and U it was a it looked rather fascinating and some of us I guess we read the Wy post stories and other things where we felt that eventually we would be going up and when that happened and Ellen Shepard went up I made my mind up that I was going to be in on it I think NASA has the an opportunity for people that want to do things uh George low once said that the greatest asset that NASA had was its people and in my exposure to NASA and my working elements and in the various working associations that I have I find that NASA has has had in the past some very Dynamic and people that want to do things uh that can do attitude hey show me something and I'll get it done and I think anybody boy girl person with the right attitude uh of willingness to do a job there's always a premium on a person that is able to accomplish a job wherever within NASA industry or anywhere else okay another okay so this area is it's over here well the reason I find it so exciting is because of the fact that uh due to the nature of NASA's work I really feel that I am involved in in an agency which is at the Forefront of technology I mean we are doing things which have never before been done in the history of mankind and perhaps will never be done again if a 10 wat transmitter 10 watts is just slightly more power than a Christmas light uh uses up with a 10w transmitter we were able to communicate from the distance which Jupiter was at when we encountered which is about 900 million kilm how did you get a transmitter of that size it's such a small transmitter to um communicate over such a large distance I think that's the one thing that I was referring to and that is that it's an indication of the type of technology that NASA has built up in order to be able to do these things tell me Mr Ramos is there any opportunity for creativity in your job here at Nasa definitely there is uh I feel that I'm in a very unique situation like I said before NASA is doing things that have never been done before and therefore there is a lot of [Applause] creativity ft down two and a half I think people can think back of you know 20 years ago and perhaps laugh at some of the things that Buck Rogers and uh the other science fiction characters used to do and we can see them uh coming into being now right okay engine stop some of the things uh one of the obvious ones of course is putting a man on the moon I think that's one of the things that NASA that perhaps was a culmination of NASA's technological efforts we copy it down Eagle uh Tranquility base here the eagle has landed Roger TW Tranquility we copy you on the ground you got a bunch of guys about to turn blue we're breathing again than a lot and um did you uh were you were you interested in uh in outer space before you came into this area or what uh this might sound silly to you but I've wanted to be an astronaut since I was about 8 if the truth be known and I think I've come about as close to it as I might get having been in that space shuttle simulation as a payload specialist but might still have a chance because uh now I'm the principal investigator on a series of flight experiments and in the shuttle program the plan is to choose one investigator from all the teams and all the experiments that have been accepted on the flights to go on board as a payload specialist That's a a one shot astronaut why would you want to uh why would you want to be an astronaut that's a strange question why do you want to be a director um I want to be an astronaut because I want to go outside the world and look down at it uh I want to look out the window I want to know what it feels like it just struck me as something that I'd really like to do it's like when you were a little kid you thought that if you'd run far enough or fast enough and you spread your arms out you could fly in space you can uh it's the way people learn to look at these things and those things are what what makes things easy and what makes things difficult uh anything that you think is easy is easy anything that you think is difficult is difficult the people who work at Nasa are people who think positively no matter how difficult or unique the challenge as you know Mr Gregory there was a time when there weren't uh any minorities or women involved in the space program tell me at that time did you feel there was any doubt in your mind that uh you wouldn't get in I I don't think so I I uh have been in this uh situation many many times before I was uh one of the first blacks in integrated schools in Washington DC in 1955 I was the only one in my class at the academy uh I was the only one here the only one there and I thought that if if I really wanted wanted to do it and I worked hard to do it and prepared myself that uh if there were a barrier it would have to be a big one to stop me the people who work at Nasa are people who think positively no matter how difficult or unique the challenge that's sort of hard to answer in those terms um I never thought of or I rarely thought of whether the things I was trying to do were hard or simple um that doesn't seem to matter to me a whole lot what matters more is what whatever you do do it well and that can be any job any class at any level whatever task you choose to do do it well because you will only get a return from doing that if you have done it well certain goal the people who work at Nasa are people who think positively no matter how difficult or unique they challenge detriment to that effort identify what you want to do and go straight forward and sort of be willing to sacrifice and uh ignore these forces that try to limit you and divert your [Applause] [Music] efforts NASA the people of NASA with their many skills disciplines and interests make it a place where dreams come true did you do that yes how do you do that I wrot a program that's really neat uh this afternoon Dr Schneider is visiting to look at our o data acquisition and Data Systems facilities people from all over men and women of every color race and religion a group of people who demonstrate daily the ability of human beings to work together closely cooperatively a group of people whose commitment and support of one another in their work is very high a group of people who on this planet we call Earth reveal the human species at its very [Music] best9 [Music] look e