Keith’s note: this combination of auto-generated text proofed and corrected by an actual human at NASAWatch.com – me.
Good morning everyone. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Steve Smith.
In my NASA career, I had the privilege of flying four missions on a spaceship, just like the incredible one behind me right now, which generates over seven million pounds of thrust to get us into space. Yes, astronauts know all about launching things. We know what it’s like to be hurled into space and be up a couple hundred miles above the earth and look back on it with wonder.
From there, you don’t see red states or blue states. You don’t see gerrymandered electoral districts or TikTok. You just see the planet that we all share and it changes you to see it from that perspective.
It changed each of the NASA former astronauts now walking onto the stage, all 20 of them. We come from every corner of this country in all walks of life. We come from every corner of this country in all walks of life.
We’re Republicans, Democrats, and independents. We’re mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, neighbors, and Americans. I would like to call special attention to one of our members up here today who flew before the rest of us.
It’s our hero, Rusty Schweickart, who flew on Apollo 9. Each of us knew before joining NASA that some of the missions prior to ours had failed, resulting in the tragic losses of life and friends. We signed up anyway because of our collective love for our country, which was the greatest driver in our lives. That remains true today.
That’s why we’re here on July 20th, the 57th anniversary of the moon landing, in order to launch another moonshot, this one designed to reunite our great country. Our organization, Astronauts for America, is on a new kind of mission. We’re going to tour American colleges and universities, going state to state, campus to campus, to remind them, the young people, of their great privilege and their duty to vote.
It is our most precious freedom. It’s with a uniquely American kind of freedom that we were able to go to the moon, and that same freedom launched the spaceship behind us 25 times into space. Now we see those freedoms under heavy threat because the principles that have always guided this nation and made it great including faith, faith in the constitution, the rule of law, checks and balances, the peaceful transfer of power, the freedom of the press, and respect for a healthy press, are now under siege.
The result? We’re seeing chaos instead of community, violence instead of votes, lies instead of laws, and fear instead of faith. That’s how democracy and freedom die. So we’re going on the road to your state, to community colleges, state colleges, county fairs and town halls, from Alaska all the way to Florida, and everywhere in between where Americans will gather and we will tell them our story, which is in space nothing matters except the mission, nothing.
Astronauts don’t ask each other what political party they’re part of or support, we just work together to get that important job done. The mission is all that matters. Now our country is the mission and our message is simple.
Going to the polls is one small step for you and one giant leap for our country. To support this effort, please visit astronautsforamerica.org. We hope you do that because we need you to launch. I’d also like now on our behalf to thank the California Science Center for their generosity in allowing us to use this space, which as you know is not yet open to the public.
We were able to take a tour around the spaceship today and all of us wish we could fly in space again. And our thanks to all of you for your attendance, interest and attention. Now to continue our conversation, I’d like to ask two of my colleagues to come forward.
The first is Dr. Ellen Ochoa. Dr. Ochoa flew in space four times. She served as the president, excuse me, the director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
She has eight schools across our country named after her, including two within 10 miles of us at this moment. And the Mattel Corporation also created the Ellen Ochoa Barbie doll. Now let me introduce Major General Charlie Bolden.
Charlie flew in space four times and served as our NASA leader, the administrator of NASA for eight years. He served our country in the Marine Corps for several decades and served at NASA for many decades for a total of over 55 years serving our country. Charlie.
Now Emmy award winning journalist Alex Cohen from Spectrum TV will now moderate our session. Alex, over to you.
[Alex Cohen] Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you to all of you for joining us here today. Together, these three have more than 75 years invested in their NASA careers. Individually, they have all accomplished so much.
You have a Barbie doll, Dr. Ochoa. I mean, come on, at this point, I think it would be okay if you were tired, traveled, played some golf, and yet you are going out on the road for this tour. Why are you doing this now? Dr. Ochoa, let’s start with you.
[Ellen Ochoa] Well, as Steve said, we really, really care about our country. And I can tell you, I learned from Charlie and other Marines in the office that you have two jobs, accomplish the mission, take care of your people. And I feel this is exactly a follow on to what I did at NASA, including as director of Johnson Space Center.
Our country is our mission. The people are what is important and the rights and freedoms that they have. And this is something I can do right now, take this step to help protect our democracy and encourage people to support that.
Major General Bolden. I’m going to just give you a physical example of why I’m doing this. Kai, stand up for a second.
[Charlie Bolden] How old are you? How old are you? You want to sit up here with me? You can sit here if you want. Okay. But I have five grandchildren and they’re two, five, and then three girls in their 20s.
But for them and for Kai, I’m really worried because I grew up in this country. I watched us grow and improve. But over the years, I’ve seen how we’ve started letting our democracy deteriorate.
And so we came together to try to reverse the trend that Steve talked about and get people like Kai educated on civics so that they understand that this country was founded on an idea that’s embodied in the constitution. And I would recommend to every single one of you that you go home and read the Declaration of Independence this afternoon. It’s really short, but it’ll tell you what the founding fathers believed and what they were battling against the King of England when they decided that they were going to break away and form this country.
We need to be reminded of that. So that’s why I keep going. Oh, Kai’s mom wants him back.
[Alex Cohen] Yeah, that’s fair. Kai, thank you. Steve, he might want to stay. I don’t blame him. You don’t get to do that every day.
Steve, you talked about how seeing this planet from outer space fundamentally changes you. That is not an experience we all get to have. I like to think that voting fundamentally changes you as well. I’d love to hear from all of you.
Steve, let’s begin with you. How is participating in our democracy affected your life? Yes. So thank you, Alex, for that question.
[Steve Smith] First of all, we have for you a pocket constitution at the reception. And I personally, total transparency, had not read the constitution for decades. And when you read it, it’s about what we should be doing.
We should have faith in the constitution. 250 years, it served us well. It’s still an experiment, but it’s all in this book.
So I hope you had a chance to read that. And in terms of voting for me, you know, when I was in college, just transparency, I was worried about other things, right? About finding a date, doing well on the math test, playing well against USC to defeat them in water polo. Charlie wore a USC shirt yesterday.
In any case, over the years, it became obvious that it’s an incredible privilege, our highest privilege. And when we go talk to the young people, we know they’re distracted, but we’re super excited to go talk to them. And we’re just going to remind them, as Charlie just said, is, you know, our generation is going to vote.
And so they need to vote to determine their future. And we all watch television and read newspapers over the last several decades. Not all countries allow people to vote.
And every once in a while, it just hits me like a brick wall, how there are actually human beings in the world who have no chance to vote. And so we should really value our vote. And I am just so excited to go out and meet these university students.
And we’ll have the whole spectrum. Some of them will be apathetic. Some of them will be despair and despair.
But we’re going to help them, remind them what their role is and get them excited about it.
[Alex Cohen] Charlie, what has voting meant to you personally? Well, I’m a child of the segregated South. So I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina.
[Charlie Bolden] I was telling somebody the other day, I graduated in 1964. Anybody know what happened in 1964? The Voting Rights Act. So as a as a person growing up in my hometown, you know, it wasn’t wasn’t a guarantee that my mom and dad were going to be able to go out and vote.
In 1964, that right came again. But today, if you look at what what’s going to you want to go back, I can see you. Your mom is nervous over there.
But, you know, I look at what’s – what’s going on today about people trying to restrict the ability of people to cast their ballot. That’s not who we are. That’s not America.
The thing that separates us from every other country in the world is one that we were founded on an idea that’s embodied in the Constitution. And then, like Steve said, a lot of nations, people can’t vote. They don’t have a right to say how their governments run.
So that’s what why it’s so important to me, because I remember when we it wasn’t the law that we could vote.
[Alex Cohen] Women weren’t always allowed to vote either. What voting meant to you?
[Ellen Ochoa] I was going to tell you, I almost 30 years ago, I had the privilege of bringing on a presidential commission for the celebration of women in American history.
And it was time to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the very first women’s rights convention in the country in 1848. And, you know, as we heard from a lot of people and learned, I thought about the more than 70 years it took from that convention for women to federally get the right to vote, and then how a good part of the rest of the 20th century was still focused on making sure that people had that right, that there weren’t barriers. And, you know, when you’ve kind of really considered that in depth, you realize I absolutely have to take this right so seriously.
I always vote. And part of that is also being informed and trying to understand, you know, issues and candidates and making sure that, you know, I’m voting in a way that I think is best for the country. And so it certainly absolutely is incredibly important to me.
[Alex Cohen] I was so struck by Steve’s words, and I know I’m not the only one about not seeing TikTok from space. So much has changed since you were flying, Charlie, what feels different about this country to you now?
[Charlie Bolden] I, you know, I became an astronaut candidate in 1980. So I moved my family from Maryland down to Houston, Texas. And I remember one of the things that struck me the most was Vietnamese immigrants had come in, and a lot of them were settled in the Texas Gulf Coast. And there’s an organization that some of you may have heard of called the Ku Klux Klan. And they had revived themselves to – they burned a few of the Vietnamese boats. They were trying to run them out, which again, is not what our country is all about. And the churches in the area kind of stepped forward and took over and essentially ran them out.
But to me, I thought that was done. And here I was with my two kids, moving to Houston to find out that they’re now going to see what I saw as a child. I don’t want to see that again, but things progress if you don’t speak up and if you don’t happen to speak out.
So my time with Bill Gerstenmaier, who’s sitting here on the front row and ran human space flight for us at NASA during my time as the NASA administrator, we’ve seen the nation go like this. And all of a sudden now we’re kind of plateauing and we’re starting back down. So that’s why, you know, I look at where it was when I first came to NASA and where it is now. And I hope we don’t make that turn down.
[Steve Smith] Yeah. And I’ll just add one of our founders, Steve Lindsey, who couldn’t be with us today, flew with John Glenn back in 1995 and he tells the following story. So John was a senator at the time, but was planning to leave. And one day Steve asked Senator Glenn, I noticed that you’re going to resign and not going to keep going. And he asked John why. And John gave him a couple reasons. But one of the reasons John said at that time, which is what, 30 years ago, is that it’s getting hard to work across the aisle and members of Congress are now beholden to their party rather than to the country.
That was 30 years ago. So we’re addressing the issue that’s at hand now, but it’s been a slow decline. And for me, that was kind of an awakening call maybe 15, 20 years ago. And I was so mad at myself for sitting on the sidelines until then. So when we came together, 108 of us, for me, it was just a blessing to be able to use our resources to help our country.
[Ellen Ochoa] And I would say, you know, a lot of us, most of us are scientists or engineers or have that kind of background. And my first flight, actually my first two flights, we were studying the Earth’s atmosphere, trying to understand more about the ozone hole, about human activities that were affecting it, as well as natural activities. And just a few years before we flew, there was a UN protocol, the Montreal protocol, that countries signed on to, to eliminate the use of CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, because scientists had made the connection between that and the destruction of ozone.
Every single country in the UN signed that protocol. And even today, they said, hey, it’s going to take 50 years or more for the atmosphere to repair itself. And we’re still watching that happen. And it is getting better. What I worry about is whether or not the United States would sign such a protocol today. We need to continue to base policy on the best available science.
You may have a difference about what that policy is, but you should be using the best available evidence.
[Alex Cohen] I’d like to spend a little time speaking with each of you about your careers in NASA. A lot of kids say, I want to be an astronaut when I grow up, and not everyone does. Beginning with you, Steve, can we hear down the line what you were doing before you joined NASA, and what specifically called you to this line of work?
[Steve Smith] Yeah, it’s really interesting. All three of us came from different places. So I grew up the son of an IBM engineer who worked for IBM for 50 years. So I was interested in electronics. But I also was living in California. So I was outdoor backpacking, going to the ocean, going to Death Valley, skiing, et cetera. So I wanted to be an explorer as a child. I was watching Jacques Cousteau on TV explore the inner ocean.
Admittedly, I was watching the fake explorers too. So Lloyd Bridges in Sea Hunt, as Mike Nelson, the family of Robinson in Lost in Space, but of course, the heroes of the Apollo program on television. And so I always wanted to be an explorer. It was quite a difficult path there. I was rejected from the military for medical reasons, later rejected by NASA for medical reasons. But I decided to go work for NASA as an engineer, knowing that if I couldn’t fly, serving our country was so important to me that I could be a NASA engineer. And so there’s a few of us here today that came through the NASA engineering path.
My mom is 100% Ukrainian heritage. Her daddy was born in Kiev and became an American citizen and served in our military. And so I came from a family that has had these years of Federal service. My sister was an FBI agent for 25 years.
[Charlie Bolden] I’m one of these, there’s several of us, I think, up there who may be like me, who never dreamed of being an astronaut. In fact, who had no desire to be an astronaut. At the age of 12, I saw a program about life at the Naval Academy called Men of Annapolis, and I decided right then that’s where I wanted to go to school. Didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I just knew I wanted to go to Annapolis. And I battled and I finally got in. And when I left home, I said, okay, there are two things I know I’m not going to do. I’m not going to be a Marine and I’m not going to fly airplanes. And so I’m just saying this for Kai again, never say never, okay?
So I ended up coming out of the Marine Corps and because of one of my company officers who had been incredibly influential on me, I chose to be a Marine. I wanted to be an infantry officer. It was the height of Vietnam. And my wife did not like that idea and constantly kept saying, why don’t we go to Pensacola? I said, because that’s where airplanes are and I don’t want to fly. And doing one of our last exercises before I came out of what is called the basic school, I found out I really hated crawling around in the mud. And the only option left for me was going to flight school. And so I reluctantly went to flight school.
First time I got in an airplane, I fell in love with it. And then again, being influenced by other people, I decided I wanted to be a test pilot. And I struggled to do that for a number of years, became a test pilot at a place called Patuxent River, Maryland. The same time I did that, NASA selected the first group of space shuttle astronauts. And among that group were people who became my heroes were Sally Ride and five other women, three blacks, Ron McNair, Guy Bluford, and Fred Gregory. And Ron was special because Ron was from South Carolina, just like me.
So I’m having a good time being a test pilot. All of a sudden, one day, these airplanes come in, these sleek looking supersonic NASA jets came in for a reunion and out of the backseat gets, climbs this little, like me, black guy. And with glasses, looks professorial. And it was Ron McNair. And I ran over, introduced myself, took him home to meet my family. We talked the whole weekend. And when he got ready to leave, he said, hey, are you going to apply for the space program? I said, not on your life. And he looked at me, he said, why not? I said, Ron, they’d never pick me. And he paused for a minute. He said, you know, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard.
And just him saying that embarrassed me. And it made me feel about this big because my mom and dad were teachers. My father had been my high school football coach. And it said, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. I’d grown up that way and I’d forgotten that. And Ron just, just hit me. And he went back to Houston. I went home and told my wife I was going to apply for the space program, got an opportunity to interview and then got selected in the second group of space shuttle astronauts.
So I kind of fell into it. Ellen, how about you? How did you wind up doing this?
[Ellen Ochoa] Well, so I was 11 when the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon. Of course, the whole country was watching, but no women astronauts, no astronauts color. It never entered my head, you know, how much things might change as I grew older. I went off to college. I thought I might be a music major, maybe business, but I’d always done well in math, took a lot of math classes.
And that’s what made me start to explore things that used math. And of course, unfortunately at the time there were some professors that told me I wouldn’t be interested and wouldn’t be good at it. But fortunately I talked to a physics professor who was really encouraging. So I ended up majoring in physics. And I think it was maybe six months after I changed my major to physics that the 1978 astronaut class was selected. The one with women and astronauts of color.
And that was a huge deal. I can’t say I was actually thinking of it yet because I literally was just starting to study science. But the fact that there was this career path open that had not been open before was a huge deal. So got my degree in physics, decided I wanted to do research. I went off to graduate school. And at the end of my first year was when the space shuttle flew for the first time. And what was so compelling about the shuttle program was that the shuttle could be used for many, many things. A lot of what it was going to be used for was scientific research and development of new technology. And that’s where I was headed.
I was headed toward a career as a research engineer. So the idea of being able to do that in a unique laboratory where you could do experiments that you could not do anywhere else, you could not do on the surface of the earth. That’s what really captured my attention. [Host]
It all just sounds so cool. It really does. But I also imagine that there are very trying and rigorous and demanding moments. Charlie Bolden, what was the hardest part of training for you?
[Charlie Bolden] For me, you know, I consider myself a relatively accomplished person. But when I started going through the training, it was I mean, it was just overwhelming for me personally. I had wanted to major in electrical engineering. I didn’t coming out of the Naval Academy, but that was my field of choice. And the pilot in the space shuttle has all the systems except two and, you know, computers and environmental.
And so I finally when I was prepping for my first flight about six months out, I went to my commander, a guy named Hoot Gibson, and I said, Hoot, I don’t I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this. I just you know, I I can’t get all this stuff. And Hoot said, hey, hang in there. Just keep working at it. And I did. I apologize for the for the emotion. But he was right.
I kept plugging away and I had one other thing happened. I killed my crew – in simulation – because I wanted to prove how good I was and how much I knew. And we had an electrical failure, a bus failure right off the pad, right at launch, and it shut down an engine. And so I diagnosed the problem and I told Hoot, I said, hey, we’ve got a bus problem. I’m going to isolate it the way the procedure says and we’ll be OK. And Hoot said, OK, go ahead.
And I everybody sitting here knows how complicated the shuttle is. I reached over and I grabbed the bus switch that I thought was the right one. I shut it off and all of a sudden it got really quiet in the simulator. I had killed my crew. I mean, I shut down the second engine and get to space on one, but you can’t get to space on two. And so we as we fell into the Atlantic Ocean and we were laying there on the floor of the Atlantic, not real. OK, don’t worry. Who put his hand on my left shoulder? And he said, Charles, did I ever tell you Hoot’s law? And I said, Hoot, you did not. He said, no matter how bad things get, you can always make them worse.
And but from that came this. You’ve heard us talk about teamwork and all that kind of stuff today. From that came the realization that this is a team effort. This is not a this is not an individual thing. So if you want to star and you want to show people how good you are, you’re in the wrong place. You’ve got to work together.
And every flight I flew after that, we never took any action, no matter how bad the emergency was, before we had at least two sets of eyes and two brains to think about it, to make sure we were doing the right kind of stuff. So I have failed any number of times and I live to tell the story.
[Alex Cohen] Steve, how about you?
[Steve Smith] So training is completely overwhelming because each of the instructors has their system that they’re responsible for and they want you to know everything about their system. And, you know, you go home at night and just be overwhelmed, absolutely overwhelmed. And then at home, of course, you have your family duties, children. You want to be a good spouse and then you want to be a good member of the community.
So for me, I was overwhelmed and I was terrified, not of dying in space, but from not keeping up with these amazing people. A couple of people in my class had six college degrees. I mean, just incredibly brilliant people. And so I was really fearful of that and thought, you know, I’m not going to make it. This is never going to turn out. But as Charlie said, that Hoot said to him also, you know, just keep grinding, just creep, keep grinding with grit to keep going forward.
And we’re kind of that same situation in our country, right? It’s really tough sometimes. And you’re just really terrified that things are going to go a different direction. And so we just keep grinding and we each try and move the needle a little bit. And so when I got the call in November, December from our founders that they were doing this, I was rejoiced because it gave me something to do with the experiences that we had to participate.
But anyway, back to the shuttle program. I also died several times in simulations. We used virtual reality way before the public was using virtual reality. And one of them was we wear a jet backpack and you’d be doing your pretend spacewalk in a virtual reality lab and you’d be fixing Hubble and they’d go, they would whisper in your ear, the instructor say, hey, let go of Hubble now. So you’d let go.
And electronically, they would throw you off into space and you’d be tumbling and they don’t let you do anything for five seconds. It’s called the startle factor. They want you to have the startle factor. So the space station is getting smaller and smaller and you’re starting to twist and then they say, okay, go. And so you activate the jet backpack. There’s only very little nitrogen in that thing to get you back. And so you try and learn to fly back to the space station. First time, second time, third time, fourth time, fifth time I died. But the sixth time got there with just a little feel. Seventh better, eighth better. So that’s what we need to do for our democracy. Just do your part little by little. Don’t despair. You know, have hope that we can all get there together.
[Alex Cohen] I have been spending the past 24 hours with these folks. And I just want to say, first of all, you’re not just the most just brave and inspiring folks. Also, just some of the kindest people that I have ever met. And I’ve learned so much, including just five minutes before we started. I was speaking with Steve and Marie, and we were talking about the fact that just before a shuttle will take off, there is a tour, and sometimes the spouses don’t go. And Steve, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the reason why is it is a scary moment. And you all do this knowing that not all NASA missions will end safely.
Dr. Ochoa, what goes through your mind as you’re about to embark on a mission like that, knowing that you don’t know the future?
[Ellen Ochoa] Well, first of all, it can be pretty unnerving to be on your back in your orange survival suit, sitting on 500,000 pounds of self-igniting propellant. So, you know, I think it’s about, okay, how do you focus and not freak out, right? For me, I absolutely just went back to my training. I remember sitting in the shuttle thinking, okay, you’re in the simulator. You’ve done this many, many times. NASA’s prepared you well. You know what you’re doing. And so focus, just pretend like you’re in the simulator, because you know how to respond then. And, you know, I think the things that you’re really worried about, it’s like Steve said, is you don’t want to let your crew down, and you don’t want to let down the people who are counting on you to do the job. So as I mentioned we were studying the Earth’s atmosphere. And so there were scientists who had spent years of their lives developing the instruments that we were carrying onboard and were waiting for the data. So, you are waiting and it’s important to focus and not get distracted and, you know, be excited about the mission – but absolutely – lock in.
[Steve Smith] One thing I like to remind people why we have a space program – why we have explorers – why we invest in our national budget in science – that’s to make lives better. That’s the only reason NASA exists to go out into space and to gather data to bring it back to Earth to make our lives on Earth better.
We don’t go out there with 25 billion dollars and open the hatch and throw the money out the window, right? So all of us believe that we’re making lives better and that is one of the reasons that we took the risk. And this love for our country. So for me, as Ellen said, we’re trained really well. Really well.
And so on the launch pad I don’t think any of us were terrified by the prospect of not making it back. But you are concerned about making a mistake that could cost your country billions of dollars, or embarrass the United States of America – right? So you’re really worried about that.
But we’re trained so well that we’re kind of automatically adjusted to reacting. Many of the folks come from the military and that’s the way they train in the military is to have things be rote memory.
The thing that I think is the hardest for many of us is when you are in space you can’t get to your family in case something bad happens. And we’ve been lucky enough in our space program to not have that happen. The Russians have had one or two cases. We’ve had a couple of people lose parents when they were in space but it was expected including one of our member up there but you really do worry about your children and your spouse.
And the other thing I’ll mention you before we fly in space, we have discussions with our spouses for years about why we’re doing it, and we thank them, of course, for their support. But also we talk to them a lot about why we are flying in space, which, as I just mentioned, is to make people’s lives better – including the lives of our own children and our friends.
And so for Peggy, my wife, that really helped a lot. And she understood that. That wouldn’t have made living without me easy, but she understood that is why we were taking the risk.
And many of us write letters to our spouses and children before we fly in space just in case we don’t come back. And they’ve never seen those letters. I think I’ll plan to give mine to my children when they become parents.
[Alex Cohen] I want to thank the three of you for doing this – for taking your time with us here today. We are going to wrap this conversation now so that you all will have the opportunity to ask whatever questions you might have of our very brave patriots here. So with our deepest gratitude to everyone here at the California Science Center I want to let our members of the media know you are now free to orbit the astronauts and invited guests please take advantage of this extraordinary exhibition that we have here at the Science Center. It’s really remarkable. Thank you all.
End
