Story Musgrave Interview (page: 5 / 7) Dean of American Astronauts	Print Interview

You're racking up an impressive number of degrees. Could you recount what your degrees are in, as of May 22, 1997?

Story Musgrave: They're in mathematics and computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature, philosophy, and I'm working on two theses now, one in psychology and one in history.

As much as you've studied, you feel like there's still much to study.

Story Musgrave: There's a huge amount to study, but I think I am completing my formal education now. But for every book that I've read for a course, I've read two or three others just for the sake of doing it.

Despite all that formal education, I'm still a self-educated person. I've accomplished more in self-education than formal education, but my formal education does continue. I think I'm happy with where I am now.

With eight advanced degrees?

Story Musgrave: There's a couple more coming, but it isn't the degrees. Going to night school, as I have for the last 11 years, has been my culture. It's been my theater, it's been my opera. There's things I've missed because I've done that, but it's a choice. Everything in life is. You take what you want and you pay for it.

I've only taken things that I have a passion for, that I have a huge interest in. And after I've taken enough for interest, I see if I can fit these things into someone's program, and I usually can.

You said there's a relationship between history, psychology and space. That space is a place to study yourself and study the earth too.

Story Musgrave: I take my courses for the education itself, but since I have had the privilege of space flight, I have a responsibility to put it in perspective, to bring psychology to it, to bring history to it, to bring philosophy to it, to examine what it means. How do you express it? Why do it? How is it transforming humanity?

I've taken about 200 credit hours since 1986 -- philosophy, literature, psychology, history, sociology -- and in every single one of these courses, I have always had three spiral notebooks.

The top one is the traditional one for learning what is in this course. If I'm studying the existentialists, then I take notes so that I will know precisely, uncorrupted, what the person we're discussing believed, what they said, and the professor's remarks, and those of other students.

The second spiral notebook is: "What does this mean to Story Musgrave?" That's a separate context. The third spiral notebook is: "What does this mean to space flight?" I take notes in all three almost like a pipe organ, but the bottom one raises the question: "This concept that we're addressing in this class, how can it help me have a better experience in space? How can it help me express the experience of space travel better?" I have taken 200 credit hours in the humanities into the space flight context, and this is incredibly rich.

I'm very haunted by an image that you discussed in an interview of lying in the ocean before a space flight, and looking up at the sky. Do you literally get into the ocean?

Story Musgrave: Yes. I have an urge to immerse myself in nature before a space flight.

The ocean is an incredibly powerful part of this. It's a literal immersion to lie in the ocean, and to drink the ocean. It's what space flight is all about too. You are going off into a place where you have a different point of view. It's a different part of the universe, and you have a different perspective on it. So I always go swimming. It doesn't matter that the last one was in December. I didn't think about it being cold. You just walk in, and after a little while, it becomes just delicious. I'm there for hours, oblivious to the temperature. You can lie in it, and let the sun go down and there is the space ship with those great, powerful lights. These beams go by, and the shadow of the space ship makes these radiant beams going up into the heavens. You lie there and take in the other celestial sights, whether it's a moon or stars.

I always look for satellites going overhead. I'm doing this geometry in my head. The ocean's here, and I'm lying with toward the beach and the satellites go from west to east, and when I look to the left, there's my space ship. You look at the speed of the satellites and know that tomorrow you will be one of them. It's a form of closure in which this kind of existence, this experiential occasion, this meaning comes together in a marvelous way.

I do the same thing when I go to the launch pad. I've very often been the center-seater, the flight engineer on launch, who is the last one in. So I have an hour and 15 minutes out there all by myself to think what this is all about. I look through that space ship out into the ocean. I look for the alligators, the birds, nature, and I step back and think about human technology. I think about the amphibians, and how life came out of the ocean to the land. And we're like the amphibians, leaping off. It's an extraordinary, magical moment. It's as good as being in space itself.

I have an hour and 15 minutes just to do that. Once I have to start moving, then I'm bringing my focus down into getting in my suit and harness the right way and getting into the details of doing things right. That hour and 15 minutes is similar to the night before out on the beach, in which I can just think about what space flight is, why we do it, what it means.

Tell us about sleeping in space. What is that experience like for you?

Story Musgrave: I've gotten a lot better at doing that. You have to leave your earthly self back here. It's not just night, you know. The sun's going up and down every hour and a half. Before going to sleep, I try to spend ten or 15 minutes thinking about how I'm going to have a creative sleep period.

Here's another opportunity. I'm in space. I have an opportunity to do something different than climbing in a one-G bed and lying there. I could simply get in a sleeping bag. That's the way it's always been human space flight You get in a sleeping bag and you strap yourself in it, strap your head down and here you are.

I always try to do things that are unique up there, because it's such a privileged opportunity. I spend ten or 15 minutes before I embark on sleep to think of something that I've never done before, to experiment.

You float, right?

Story Musgrave: At times. On my first flight, I started playing around with sleeping bags. I'd try them all different ways. But then...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. On my second flight, one time we worked 24-hour day shifts, where you had one team work 12 and you'd work 12. They were banging around all night. And, with their banging around all night working, it was hard to sleep. I took a pill to help me to sleep and I forgot I took the pill. So I went off to sleep, nowhere, just out, floating around. You don't get the head nods in space. Your head doesn't fall, there's no gravity to make that happen. So I went off to sleep, and actually I went floating upstairs where my buddies were, and they said, "Oh, a monster!" They threw me back downstairs. They didn't tuck me in, they just played with me all night. I'm off sleeping with the pill, you know. I bounced around all night. And so from there I learned to float, just plain to simply float.

It's just delicious to go off to sleep, in the twilight zone. You don't know where earth is, it could be in any direction. You also don't know where the shuttle is around you. You are not touching anything. It's just a fantastic separation from everything. You go into the twilight zone, and occasionally these cosmic rays go through, so you have these little light flashes going off in your eyes.

There's times, falling asleep, when you feel like you're outside of the space ship. You see the earth, and you see the space ship going around it. It's a huge meditation in which you can let go of everything and have no contact with anything. I'll turn a little switch in my mind and I can turn my mind off totally, in an instant. Nothing, no images, no thoughts. I can accomplish that instantly, but I'm aided by that kind of environment.

There's other ways to sleep too. On the Hubble repair mission, we had four space suits in a rather small closet called our air lock. Two of them were affixed to the wall, the other two were floating around. I'd swim up into their arms and get a bunch of them ahold of me. I might grab a leg over here, bend the knee, so I have several feet which are pushing on me and I'm wrapped up in several arms, and I go to sleep this way, being held in the arms of unoccupied space suits. That's another way of trying to have a great sleep experience.

Are these suits that you designed?

Story Musgrave: I helped design those in the 1970s. Although going off to sleep with them, I didn't think of them that way, I thought of them as people.

Doing that within this small closet, I didn't expect to move or go anywhere. There's one little window in the back. We get 45 minutes of light in there, and 45 minutes of night. Every time I woke up a little, I would find that I had rotated. It turn out that even with that many things holding me, I was rotating. Two of those suits and me were doing this dance all night.

A lot of times I'll go in the laundry. I'll take a bunch of laundry bags and curl up with them, and we'll get stuffed in some corner. It's like a water bed, but it's a laundry bag bed at zero G.

Sometimes, as opposed to that kind of softness and floating, I will choose a very hard environment. I'll jam myself in an aluminum corner, where there's no room to go anywhere and the steel has got me contorted into some position. It may not sound nice, but it's another opportunity, and I try to do it all.

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