JP AstroCast_Episode 2_Astronaut Don Thomas_How To Become An Astronaut

Full Transcript:

 

Captain Janet:

Welcome to The JP AstroCast, where we are traveling at the speed of thought. Today's episode is brought to you by Hunt Brothers Pizza. Eyezak, can you come help me tidy up our hologram stage for our guest today?

Eyezak:

Oh, I'm kind of in the middle of something. Can you come here for just a sec?

Captain Janet:

Oh, well sure Eyezak, how can I help?

Eyezak:

Well, captain Janet, after hearing Dr. John Grunsfeld speak about being an astronaut, going out for spacewalks, and fixing things in space, I decided that I want to be an astronaut. (Singing).

Captain Janet:

That's wonderful Eyezak, but as an alien, aren't you already an astronaut?

Eyezak;

Not the official NASA kind. I'm just looking for where to start.

Captain Janet:

Well, maybe let’s use the search words, 'Apply to be a NASA astronaut.'

Eyezak:

Wow, This is the link. I'm going to send my information in. Oh, a master's degree in engineering? I don't have that. Oh, but I am a pretty good pilot. Well, not really, but I am very good on my PlayStation 4. Any special talents? Well, I am an alien that ought to put me way ahead of the pack.

Captain Janet:

Well, certainly you have some interesting qualities for sure. I'll tell you what, help me get the hologram stage ready and you can ask our guest astronaut Don Thomas, some questions about how he became an astronaut.

Eyezak:

Perfect. And then I'll become an astronaut for sure.

Captain Janet:

Well becoming an astronaut can take years of preparation and applying.

Eyezak:

Years? Like how many years? I'm not getting any younger in alien years, or human years, or dog years.

Captain Janet:

Let's talk about that later. I think I hear the kids coming.

Kids:

Eyezak:

Captain Janet, the crew is here. We can work on my astro thing later.

Captain Janet:

Perfect Eyezak! Sounds good. All right my JP space crew, happy to have you gather here at our hologram stage to hear from astronaut Dr. Don Thomas. We have some great snacks for you, so please help yourself, get cosmically comfy and then we'll beam up Astro Don, and talk about his experiences as an astronaut.

Eyezak:

Hunt Brothers Pizza is proud to support the JP AstroCast, with over 8,000 locations in convenience stores near you, finding a Hunt Brothers Pizza is easy as pie. Choose between Hunt Brothers Pizza's original crust or thin crust, and top your pizza with any of our 10 toppings at no extra charge. With that many options, there's sure to be a topping combo for everyone to enjoy a Hunt Brothers Pizza.

Captain Janet:

All right, everyone allow me to introduce our guest today. What an honor it is to have Dr. Don Thomas beam up today. Astronaut Don Thomas first got interested in becoming an astronaut when he watched the early astronauts like Allen Shepherd, John Glynn, and Neil Armstrong blast off into space and that made him want to follow in their footsteps, and 33 years later, he would do exactly that.

Captain Janet:

Don started his professional career as a senior member of the technical staff at the Bell Laboratories Engineering Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey, working on materials issues and semiconductor devices. Ooh, he's super smart. From there, he joined Lockheed's Sciences and Engineering in Houston, Texas as an engineer, working on the space shuttle program. Selected as a mission specialist astronaut in NASA's 13th group of astronauts in 1990, he is a veteran of four space shuttle missions, three aboard Columbia, and one aboard discovery.

Captain Janet:

He has spent 44 days in space, completing almost 700 orbits of the earth, and traveling 17.6 million miles in the process. After retiring from NASA in 2007, Don became the director of the Hackerman Academic of mathematics and science at Towson University, working to encourage and inspire young Maryland students about the wonders of STEM. Since 2015, Don has been engaged in public speaking, continuing his efforts to excite and inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, and astronauts and encouraging all students everywhere to reach for the stars. Most wonderfully astronaut Don Thomas always says yes to speaking to the students of Janet's planet. Welcome Astro Don, thank you for being here today.

Kids:

Hello Dr. Don!

Dr. Don Thomas:

Oh, that's the way to do it there.

Captain Janet:

Eyezak has a question. Eyezak, can you ask about how one becomes, what you want to become?

Eyezak:

Yeah. How do you become an astronaut?

Dr. Don Thomas:

Yeah, that's a great question, Eyezak. I wanted to do this since I was just six years old, and when I was six years old, back in 1961, that's when we launched the first American into space and I watched the launch at my kindergarten class there. And as soon as our astronaut was in space, I knew I wanted to do that as well. So this was the dream my whole life, and one thing I recognized early on was, it was going to be really difficult to do this. I knew there was a lot of competition, thousands of people apply to be astronauts and then just a small handful gets selected. So I knew the key, had to be working hard and doing my best in school every single day.

Dr. Don Thomas:

I never knew if I was good enough, if I could get selected, but I figured I'm going to give it a try, and to do that I got to work as hard as I possibly can and do my absolute best. So that's what I did all through school, and after high school, I went on to college and got my bachelor's degree in physics, one of the sciences. And then I went on to graduate school and got my master's and Ph.D. in engineering, just because I knew that would help me become an astronaut. I also learned to fly. I got my private pilot's license. I learned to skydive, and I taught a university course.

Dr. Don Thomas:

These are things that are not requirements to be an astronaut, but I noticed that they seemed to really help. I looked at the people that they were selecting, and most of the people had flying experience, skydiving or maybe had taught a university course. So I watched who NASA was selecting and tried to model my career, a little bit around those requirements and what everybody was doing that was getting selected, and the key also for me becoming an astronaut was persistence.

Dr. Don Thomas:

I dreamed of this when I was six, and I started applying to NASA when I was in my late twenties, and I applied four times, and I got turned down the first time, the second time and the third time. And I felt like giving up on it all, but I really wanted to do this. So the key in any dream you have in life is to never give up on it. You want to keep improving yourself, keep making yourself a better candidate. You don't have to be a A++, 100% perfect student, you just have to work hard and do your absolute best, and nobody will ever argue with that ever. And if you don't give up, you work hard, you keep going on your journey, on your dream. I'm convinced that you can become anything you want to in your lifetime.

Captain Janet:

One of my favorite stories is how deep they went into looking into Dr. Don's past when he applied to NASA. And wow, can you imagine being investigated by the FBI? Maybe you might think twice before you post something that isn't so nice on social media. Dr. Don, can you tell us more about that?

Dr. Don Thomas:

Yeah, that's a great question there Miss Janet. The third time that I applied, NASA invited me down to the Johnson Space Center for a week of medical testing in an interview. And out of the thousands of people that apply NASA selects a hundred individuals. They bring you to Houston and again, you spend a full week, most of it is on a very thorough medical exam, and then there's a one hour interview. The interview is very simple, they just ask me, "Hey, tell me what you did since high school? Why'd you major in physics." They're just asking... They want you to talk about yourself and asking general questions.

Dr. Don Thomas:

And I went through all that and it went really well, and then a week later, some of my friends started calling me up from across the country. And they were calling me up and they said, "Hey, Don, the FBI's been calling about you." So usually when the FBI is calling about you, it's either really good or really bad, right? In this case, it was really good. NASA was doing a security background check on me and they looked into my background. They checked the police records in every city, wherever I lived.

Dr. Don Thomas:

They met with all my former bosses, every company that I worked for, from high school on. They would talk to my bosses and ask, what kind of worker was I? How did I treat the customers and coworkers? And did I show up to work on time? And then they went up and down the streets in all the neighborhoods, wherever I lived talking to the neighbors, and asking what kind of person was I in the neighborhood? How did I treat people? And had we had social media, we didn't have social media 40 something years ago when I was going through this but had we had social media, can any of you guess what they might have been doing?

Isaiah:

Stalking it?

Dr. Don Thomas:

They would've been looking at every single post that I had put online there. So you have to be careful today, because you never know, maybe five years, 10 years, 15 years from now, you're applying for some incredible job, maybe to go to Mars or do something else really incredible. And they may do a security background check on you, and just know they're going to be looking at everything they can find, and all your posts are there forever. So you got to be really careful. Be smart about what you post today, because you never know in the future if somebody's going to be looking into that.

Andrew:

So I've heard that you've had an engineering career. So my question is, how did your engineering career compare to your astronaut career?

Dr. Don Thomas:

Good question, Andrew. I start it off as an engineer, I became an astronaut, and for the last 15 years, I've been working in education. I had a great job in engineering. I really loved the work that I was doing, but almost nothing compares to going in space. I worked as an engineer for six years at a company called Bell Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, and then three years I was working at the Johnson Space Center as an engineer before I became an astronaut. And I loved those careers. And I was just so thankful to be working at NASA as an engineer. I really loved it, but I'll tell you nothing can compare to being an astronaut and going in space.

Dr. Don Thomas:

And I did that for 17 years, and then I told you I've been in education for 15 years, and this is pretty close. There hasn't been a day since I left NASA that I've been sitting around saying, "Why did I leave? Why oh why did I ever leave?" I found a good career to do after the astronaut job, working with young students like yourself, working with great educators, like Miss Janet here. And it's really rewarding work for me. So, I think my favorite career would be the astronaut, the second favorite on the list would be working in education, and maybe the engineering was a close third there.

Dharma:

You mentioned that you got your private pilots license. So what was the best memory you've ever had about learning how to fly? And what's some advice you would give to a student pilot learning to fly like myself. I really look up to in your whole flight career.

Dr. Don Thomas:

Wow. That's fantastic. That's great. You're doing that Dharma. I'll tell you my memory of my very first flight. We took off, the instructor gave me the controls, and we started bouncing around. It seemed like a really rough day. And I asked the instructor, I said, "Is that me? Or is this turbulence?" He said, "Let go of the column." So I let go of the stick and the plane smoothed out. And then I took control again and I was bouncing around the sky.

Dr. Don Thomas:

So that's one of those funny moments that I remember. I also remember when I soloed the first time, I don't know if I had 20 or 30 hours, I don't know how many hours of flying time I had, but we were practicing touch and goes, coming down, landing, taking off, going around and doing more landings. And after one of those, the instructor just said, "Hey, go over to the control tower, let me out, you're going to go solo." And my jaw dropped, it's like, "Wow." And it was an amazing feeling knowing that, once I took off, there was only one person that could land that plane. That was me. I always had the instructor sitting next to me, and that made it a lot easier, if anything goes wrong, there's an instructor there to take over. But when you solo, you're there on your own. It's a little scary, but in incredibly exciting.

Captain Janet:

Dharma, do you have a favorite moment from your flight training so far?

Dharma:

I'm often very stressed, but when I get in the plane, just this calmness washes over me. So anytime I get to be in the plane is my favorite moment ever, just that I could be away from everything. So that's my favorite thing ever, I couldn't pick a single memory.

Isaiah:

Did you serve in the military, and is it a requirement for the astronauts?

Dr. Don Thomas:

Yeah Isaiah, good question. We have two types of astronauts that we select, pilot astronauts and then mission specialists. And almost all the pilot astronauts come out of the military, and even some of the mission specialists do as well, but I never served in the military. I just went the science route. When I was in high school, the United States launched a space station called Skylab, it was our first space station, and they were selecting science astronauts to fly on those missions to do science. And I loved science when I was your age, and I knew that that was my path.

Dr. Don Thomas:

Probably about two thirds of the astronauts they select, come out of the military, maybe a third or just strictly civilians. Typically, they select a lot of people out of the military.

Eyezak:

What makes a good crew mate?

Dr. Don Thomas:

Eyezak, good question. We are in space, like on the space shuttle on my missions, we're in a very small area for two weeks or more in space. So, the number one requirement is to really work as a team, to get along with other people. That's why NASA was carefully looking at, interviewing my neighbors to see how I treated people in the neighborhood and talking to my former bosses to see how did I get along with my coworkers. Because it's so important in space, almost everything we do in space, it's a team effort, and it takes everybody working together, and you have to learn to work with different personalities.

Dr. Don Thomas:

So I think that would be the number one thing to be a good crew member. You need to be a really good team player, and work together with the team.

Isaiah:

What was your favorite food in space?

Dr. Don Thomas:

You are talking with the very first human being to take pizza to space.

Captain Janet:

Famous even, right? You're famous for this, right?

Dr. Don Thomas:

I'm, famous for that. Yeah. I'm not famous for much else, but I'm famous for flying the first pizza in space. And I'll just tell you the story quickly, we're allowed to carry a sandwich with us out to the launchpad, on launch morning, because we may be laying on our backs out there for a few hours if there's weather to even longer than that. So they would let us take a sandwich, and most of the time you may take a Turkey sandwich or something like that. But on my third mission I asked instead of a Turkey sandwich, could I get a slice of pizza? Because I love pizza. And they said, "Yeah, we can do that." So they made me a little personal pizza. It was pepperoni, and we flew that in space. I did that both on my third and fourth missions.

Dr. Don Thomas:

So, we don't normally fly pizza, most of our food, as you probably know is freeze-dried food or military rations, MREs Meals Ready to Eat, that come out of the military. And most of that food is okay. When I get asked the question, what's my favorite space food? I say none of them. Because it isn't that good, and I would never go to a restaurant that was serving space food. I wouldn't do that. But it's okay, it's a lot like camping food.

Dr. Don Thomas:

My favorite overall of the food that I had in space, they had beef and barbecue sauce. That was one of the MREs, the military rations that were pretty good. And we had sweet and sour chicken, which was good up there too. I did make, before I flew the pizza in space, we made what we call space pizza and that would be taking a tortilla, and then I would spread some spaghetti and meat sauce on top of that, and then roll it up. And that was as close as I could get to a pizza.

Andrew:

What was the funniest thing you saw in space?

Dr. Don Thomas:

We don't do a lot of practical jokes. People always ask that, so tell me about the practical jokes you do in space. And it's like, "Boy, I don't have any stories like that." Because you don't want to go up to somebody and try to scare them going, "Boo." And have them jump and maybe hurt themselves. So, we don't do a lot of practical jokes up there, but one of the funnier things that I saw in space, is sometimes when the astronauts have free time, we goof around. I don't know if any of you guys goof around all, but sometimes the astronauts goof around and what we like to do, we play catch, up in space. And when you play catch here on earth, you're probably using a football or a baseball. In space we don't have anything like that, so what we'll do, we have one of the astronauts, we'll tuck themselves into a little ball and then two of us can play catch with that individual. And it's really funny to watch two people playing catch, with a third person going back and forth, just tucked into a little ball like that.

Dharma:

Was there any feeling that compared to looking back on earth while in space?

Dr. Don Thomas:

There is nothing like that. Before I first flew in space on my first mission, I trained to be an astronaut for four years for that flight, and in that four-year period, I probably had 40 or 50 hours of training on earth observation training. So, specialists would come in, show us pictures of the earth taken from space and tell us what we're looking at. So once we got to space, we would be very familiar with what we're looking at back on planet earth. So I thought, okay, I've seen it, I know exactly what it's going to look like when I get to space, but that wasn't the case. Once I got to space and I looked out the window the first time I just gasped, I went, "Oh wow." It's just so incredible when you see it with your own eyes.

Dr. Don Thomas:

The pictures that we take, the IMAX movies that you'll see of the earth, they don't do it justice. You see much more detail and subtle color variations with your eyes, than any of the pictures can take. So, it just doesn't do it justice, and every astronaut, the very first time they look out the window with their own eyes, you'll hear that gasp. And I'm gasping at how thin the atmosphere is from space. Our atmosphere is just a paper-thin layer around the earth and it's glowing blue, like a blue fluorescent light glowing. And then I'm all also gasping at the black sky. The sky in space is a darker black color than I've ever seen anywhere else. I've been caving, where we all turned off our lights, it's pitch black, but I think the sky in space is even darker, darker than that.

Isaiah:

How old were you when you went to space?

Dr. Don Thomas:

Okay. When I got selected to be an astronaut Isaiah, I was 35 years old and the first time I made it to space, I was 39 years old. And 39 years old, that's pretty much an old man, right Isaiah? You could be honest. That's okay. Is that an old man or not?

Isaiah:

Kind of.

Dr. Don Thomas:

Kind of. Yeah. And my point is, some of the careers you're going to pick, it's going to take time to get there. If you want to be a teacher, doctor, lawyer, scientist, professional athlete, it takes a lot of time after high school to get there. So don't be turned off by that, just keep working hard, keep following your dream, follow your path. You can accomplish anything you want to, don't worry about how much time it takes.

Captain Janet:

JP Space Crew I really want you to hear this. I think sometimes we think that things are going to happen instantly, the moment that we apply, and if we just put our best out there, there's going to be an instant yes. But as we listen to Dr. Don's story, he applied, and applied, and then applied for a third time and got another no. And Don, I just have to say, please tell them more about this experience of getting that third no, going to bed that night and then waking up the next with what decision.

Dr. Don Thomas:

I thought I got to do something else. NASA doesn't want me, and I thought I'll go to bed, get a good night's sleep and then in the morning when I wake up, I would put together a new plan for my career that did not involve being an astronaut. Because I had worked hard, I did my best, and just three times in a row NASA said no to me. I went to bed that night, the next morning when I woke up, the very first thought that popped into my head was, I still want to be an astronaut. And that dream never died as I slept that night.

Dr. Don Thomas:

So I just kind of dusted myself off and said, "Okay, what else can I do? I've learned to fly. I've learned to skydive. I've taught a university course." And just looking at who NASA was selecting and who they weren't selecting, it was pretty clear that I could increase my chances quite a bit by working down at the Johnson Space Center. So I moved, I quit my job. I moved down to Houston, got a job there with NASA, as an engineer and did that for three years and then became an astronaut.

Dharma:

What is your life advice for students?

Dr. Don Thomas:

My life advice for students, whatever your dream is in life, you don't have to be dreaming of being an astronaut, whatever your dream is, if you want to be a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, whatever, just work hard and always do your best. You want to do your best every single day, in all your subjects, because you never know when something you're learning today is going to help you out in the future. And the other thing is to never give up on that dream, keep working hard towards that goal. You'll get discouraged. You'll fail along the way, I failed three times, but you just got to pick yourself up and try to figure out, okay, what am I missing here? How can I make myself a better candidate?

Dr. Don Thomas:

But the key is to never give up. It takes hard work. It takes time, and never give up on your dream and you can accomplish anything you want to in your lifetime. Because I was just an average student in school, but I had a big, big dream and I was going to go for it and nothing was going to hold me back.

Captain Janet:

We are so glad that you stuck with it, that you didn't give up and that you persevered, otherwise we wouldn't be having this incredible conversation with you. To learn more about astronaut Don Thomas, you can visit his website, Ohioastronaut.com. And if you're really wanting to know more, read his book Orbit of Discovery available on Amazon.

Dr. Don Thomas:

Thanks. It's been great being with you, Isaiah, Andrew and Dharma, thanks for the great questions and Eyezak always great getting your questions as well. Thank you so much.

Captain Janet:

Bye

Kids:

Bye.

Eyezak:

Wow. Astronauts are the best!

Captain Janet:

Indeed they are, and just like astronaut, Don said, NASA is looking for all kinds of people to be astronauts and especially those who are kind and know how to get along well with others. And Isaac, you definitely are one of the best crew members I've ever had.

Eyezak:

Wow, thanks Captain Janet. Hey, would you be willing to write me a recommendation letter?

Captain Janet:

You bet I would. Thanks everyone for listening to the JP AstroCast. Let your mind revolve around this thought, the universe is always expanding, let your dreams do the saying. And that's the view from the JP AstroCast. (Singing).