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Alan Shepard
First American in Space
You take that initial attitude of believing you can do it, and you build a lot of confidence, because -- particularly in the simulators -- if you respond to two or three horrible emergencies during the course of a morning, and do that day in and day out for weeks and months, it's a tremendous confidence-builder. Some people could probably say it's brainwashing in its best form. But, there is a total confidence at the time of launch because of the initial attitude, and because of the training philosophies -- coping with contingencies.
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Alan Shepard
First American in Space
I think all of us certainly believed the statistics which said that probably 88% chance of mission success and maybe 96% chance of survival. And, we were willing to take those odds. But, we wanted to be sure that if there were any failures in the machine that the man was going to be there to take over and to correct it. And, I think that still is true of this business -- which is basically research and development -- that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.
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Carol Shields
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
I can remember a moment of illumination, and it was when I was writing a series of poems. I was 29. I remember exactly because I wanted to enter them into a competition, and the competition was only open to people under 30. So I was right at the deadline of this. I did what I have never done before. At the end of each poem, I asked myself, "Is this what I really mean?" and it was the first time I felt I took myself seriously. I was not thinking of that reader, what that reader would -- what the expectations of that reader -- and I think we can never think about that. That's like thinking about market. We have to say -- and I put that question to myself very sternly, and it often resulted in the rewriting of the poem to make sure I said what I really meant. Now this is a piece of wisdom you would think I would have absorbed at once, but in fact, it seems I'm one of these people who has to learn the same thing over and over again. So there have been many times in my writing life where I've had to remember that.
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Donna Shirley
Mars Exploration Program
I signed up for 19 hours. The normal load was 15, but I wanted to take flying. And so, I signed up for this flying class, in addition to a fairly heavy course load. And plus, I'm good at taking multiple choice tests, which was the entrance exam for school. And so, they put me in advanced chemistry and calculus and all these advanced classes, and I was woefully unprepared for them. So, with the heavy course load, flying took a lot of time. So, I really didn't do very well for at least the first eight weeks. And in fact, I was flunking and my parents came up and, oh my gosh, you know, "Can we get you a tutor? What can we do?" So I went home over Christmas and just studied the whole time, and pulled out a B average that semester. But it was pretty hairy.
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Donna Shirley
Mars Exploration Program
The best teacher I had was my high school senior English teacher, who really taught us to love literature and be good at writing and things. Which came in very handy, because a lot of engineers can't communicate, and that was one of the things that helped me become a good communicator was taking this inspiring English class. And then in college I took Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and a few things like that, which was fairly unusual for engineers. So, having some sort of literary background turned out to be really helpful.
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