Story Musgrave Interview (page: 7 / 8) Dean of American Astronauts	Print Interview

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.

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

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.
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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?

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.
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