Story Musgrave Interview (page: 6 / 7) Dean of American Astronauts	Print Interview

What have been some of your most exquisite views from space?

Story Musgrave: If you close your eyes and you think about earth, you have this whole map or globe of the earth that's human-created, with the cities and the countries all different colors. But over the last 30-some years, because of TV pictures, and IMAX and photographs, humanity is being transformed in how they look upon earth, and they're getting to be very sophisticated geographers.

As an individual, the same thing happens. When you first go into space, you've studied geography, and you think of earth as a map. But then you look out and you get the real picture. The Hawaiian Islands, for instance. You get a real visual image of the whole chain of Hawaiian Islands and what they look like. You pass them again, and again, and again, but there's a hundred different images, they move. There isn't just one picture of Hawaii. What's the sun angle? Sunset, sunrise, sun over head, what are the ocean currents? What is the weather?

It's a huge, moving thing. So many images that it replaces the map in your head. And so, as you do this you eventually have an image of the earth in your head which is part map and part real. You get this montage of places that you've been over and experienced, and it's the real stuff. And you fill in the rest with a map

If you talk about South America, I have to work hard to picture a map of South America, because I have passed over South America. I know what a South America pass is. I know what passes are over almost the entire earth now. I can sit here and play this incredible video in my head of what it's like to make a pass over a given area. Right down to very small details. The more I do it, the richer this kind of experience is. I keep adding to it, and I get more and more defined in my details.

What's it like to see the South Pacific from space?

Story Musgrave: The South Pacific is probably the most beautiful place for me. I haven't been there yet, but I'm going there soon. Just because you haven't been there on the earth, doesn't mean you can't fall in love with a place from space. When you look at the earth, you have an experience just as powerful as being there.

The beauty, the aesthetics, the different shades of blue, the coral atolls where a volcano has come up! The coral lives at a certain depth below the surface, the volcano sinks back down and it just leaves this kind of lagoon in the middle. The shades of blue, the green, and the beaches on both sides of these atolls! The beauty is extraordinary and you don't see it so much your eyes or your head, as you perceive it in your abdomen.

This goes on all the way from the Philippines to New Guinea and northeastern Australia, and all the way to Hawaii, one coral atoll after another. Extraordinary beauty, these big patterns before you. It is just a wonderful place in the world, although each continent has its magic.

What do you now know about achievement that you didn't know when you were younger?

Story Musgrave: When I was younger my world was a thousand-acre farm, not even the county. My perspective was nature. That's all I had. My horizons started to expand when I went off to Korea in the Marine Corps. As the saying goes, you join the service to see the world. That's when my horizons began to expand.

And of course, with space flight, that is part of the human experience. The scale -- the distances -- are just extraordinary, and distance touches. Our repair mission was the highest that we go with the shuttle, 370 miles. When you're looking at Florida and the launch pad, and you're seeing a thousand-mile aurora, a thousand-mile shimmering curtain over northern Canada, then the scale of things is just huge.

You're at the top of the telescope, with this six-story building down to the bay of the shuttle, that kind of expansiveness is just amazing. You haven't gotten to Australia yet and you're seeing the Great Barrier Reef. You're seeing the entire continent. That is what space flight is all about. I think that's part of what America is, and the roots of America.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It started of course with rediscovering America and the frontier. And wide open spaces and pushing on out there to new territories and exploration, up and down. Exploration, it's just going beyond. It's going from the known to the unknown, the familiar to the unfamiliar. Getting out of the comfortable path. Just pushing on, I think that's what exploration is all about. Just going beyond the point at which you are now. Whether it's physically taking a body out there, or pressing on to new realms of science, or new realms of human performance, such as the arts, or athletics.

[ Key to Success ] The American Dream

To somebody who doesn't know anything about this field, what has turned you on so much about space?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Story Musgrave: For me, life is 99 percent a spiritual quest. And it started in childhood with myself and nature, and the universe. And finding truth, finding serenity, finding myself by being immersed and embracing the whole thing that is part of us, that has created us, evolved us, that we are part of. Space flight has allowed me to extend that into unbelievable kinds of realms in which you see a third of the earth, in which you see entire continents, and you see patterns. And you come over the Near East and you see, framed in the space ship window, all of the civilizations, the old civilizations. And you see nature at work, and great, huge lines of volcanoes, from the tip of South America, all the way up through the Aleutians and Alaska.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

It's serendipitous that I was interested in that early on. Then had this opportunity to continue the quest on this scale, in a very new way, with a new point of view of nature. To take our organism, which has been created and designed by this environment, to put it in a new environment and to appreciate its struggle, and how it gropes with that, and to appreciate and actually enjoy the miscomparisons between how the body perceives this environment and what the mind knows. And to have his dialogue going on between body and mind, and to be comfortable with it, and even enjoy the fact that things don't compare.

When you're in space, do you get lonely for earth?

Story Musgrave: I don't miss earth. I have not been to the moon, where the earth is the size of your thumbnail. The earth is hugely powerful and it's got a hold on you. I don't bother to eat in space, I stuff myself with things that will go down and get rehydrated. Every second that I have, or that I can steal I will go to the window and look at the earth. It grabs you aesthetically, it grabs you by its size, and its beauty and its patterns. You don't miss it, because it's there. It's a different point of view. It's in a different form.

When we go to Mars and to the planets, we are going to miss it. I do not think people, including NASA, understand what it is going to be like to see earth become the size of your thumbnail at 220,000 miles. In a day or two it will only be a bright planet. And then it will be a star.

I don't think people realize how much they are going to miss that kind of contact. There are different scenarios, but if we were to go today, you would reach a point of no return. Once you've attained the velocity to go there, there's no turning back, until you get there, loop around and come back.

When earth becomes just another planet out there, you're going to miss earth. You are really going to feel that sense of detachment. We need to have some kind of virtual reality things on board to give you earth in an artificial way.

It sounds as if space flight has grounded you on earth, in the sense of loving and respecting earth.

Story Musgrave: It has, it's given me a huge love of earth. But even as a three year-old I used to love to walk barefoot in freshly plowed, cool soil. I actually used to eat soil. It was just delicious, the mud, and the soil, and the animals, the whole thing.

Space travel has extended that to a different realm. It all plays together exceedingly well, but I do think the earth was the building block. It was the foundation for this organism going up there and having the perspective that I do, the sensitivities for what I feel and for what I see. And my whole approach, the way I think about nature.

It's earth-bound.

Story Musgrave: Yes, it is earth-bound, and that's what space flight does. The basics motivation pushing you out there is, in a way, an inward turn toward meaning. You can only find a self if you related to another. If it's only you, then you can't find yourself, you can't define yourself. You really don't know what you've got until you see another, and interact with another.

So going out into space is and exploring your universe helps to define who you are, and what a human is, and why.

What does the American Dream mean to you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Story Musgrave: We have been a frontier culture. We were born out of exploration, we were born out of adventure. We were born out of the plains and the mountains. We've been a very physical kind of culture. And so, if you look at adventure, if you look at exploration, if you look at immersion in nature, a physical culture, and all those things, you can see directly how space flight relates to the way America has been born and how it evolved.

[ Key to Success ] The American Dream

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