So, my name is Garrett Riesman. I grew up in Parsippany, New Jersey.
Always was fascinated with space
and, uh... but, never thought my mom would ever let me become an astronaut, because back then
all the astronauts were test pilots and
my mom was scared of flying, so I figured that becoming a test pilot was not in the cards.
I went off and I got my engineering degree and I saw that
– and that was at University of Pennsylvania – and I saw that what some of the astronauts that they had selected had done
for their education and also for
their hobbies, like flying, scuba diving, those kinds of things
were similar to what I was doing with my life.
And so I kind of had a Eureka moment where a light bulb went off I said 'hey, maybe this could actually happen.'
I went off to graduate school, came out here to California to Caltech in Pasadena and studied
multi-phase fluid mechanics, so that's a fancy way of saying bubbles. If you have any questions about bubbles I could probably still help you out.
I got my PhD in... over there at Caltech and when the time was right I applied to the program.
Actually time wasn't quite right, I think I was in a gray area about being even minimally qualified, but I applied anyway.
And didn't get selected that first time, but I was encouraged because they actually didn't
throw my application back at me and laugh at me, so that was nice.
And then a couple years later I was working here, again, in Southern California at a company called TRW
in Redondo Beach, an aerospace company.
I was designing a satellite for NASA and it was time to have another selection, so I applied again.
And by the way, in case you're wondering, when you apply to become an astronaut
you start out by filling out the standard form for federal government employment.
I think it's the SF 171-A form. Don't ask me why I remember that but,
it's a standard form. It's the same thing you fill out if you want to become like a postal worker.
It's just a block nine. Instead of writing postal worker, you write astronaut
and you send that in. So, that's how it starts and I went through that whole process and
obviously at NASA failure ((is)) an option, because they messed up and they took me instead of the other
19 incredibly well-qualified people that they had to choose from in my group.
I still, to this day, don't know why they made that error, but I'm very grateful that they did and I was selected.
Back in 1998, I came down to Houston, started training and I didn't fly until 2008,
when I had my first mission on – right here on Endeavour. And that was, uh, mission, STS-123.
And on that mission I went up to the space station and I stayed up there for 95 days,
until space shuttle Discovery, commanded by Mark Kelly, came up and brought me home.
Some years later, I got a chance to fly again. This time in Atlantis and that was STS-132
and I went up – back to the space station again. Did a couple more spacewalks and had an incredible crew
that made it just an amazing life experience, and came back and pretty soon after that I left NASA.
I remember sitting in this seat and with a mirror I can look back through these windows
and and when you hold a mirror up here, when you look back you can actually see the water
deluge. So, there's a giant water tower at the pad and right before the engines light,
all that – tons and tons, I don't know a lot of water, some... I'm sure the other guys probably know how many gallons –
but a lot of water comes flying out of that thing like Niagara Falls, down into
the flame trench. It's all to dampen out the the acoustic energy, the noise that the engines make.
If you flood it with water it tends to dampen out and it won't damage the pad as much, so...
so it... you, you can see that happen, right before the engines light, by holding up a mirror like here and looking out through that windows
down the pad because, we'd... you'd be... I'd be lying on my back right now, right?
And you can see that and then the engines light then, and when the main engines light
the whole stack rocks forward,
okay like this way, because the engines are back there and
they're. they're not quite lined up perfectly, so -- the main engines anyway with with CG, so...
so the whole thing pitches forward, there's a moment, and then it comes back like a diving board
and right when it comes over the center, that's when the solid rockets light.
And as soon as that happens it's [cuh-chh sound effect] like that. You get this kick in the pants and, and now you're going somewhere.
You can... We ((have)) shut down the main engines after we've lit them. You can throttle them, you could shut them down.
There are three buttons right there that do that, but the solids are like firecrackers. Once they're lit,
there's no shutting them down, right? So you're going somewhere in a hurry.
That force that you're feeling is the force of the thrust of these massive engines that are accelerating you.
And your brain is doing this integration where you're, you're, you're realizing
that you know the whole F equals MA thing. And you realize that all that G is translating into speed.
And after about a couple minutes of that – being smart rocket scientists like we are –
we think like, 'oh man, I'm going really fast' [chuckles]. Now like a couple more minutes go by and you're like,
'I'm going super fast' and then another minute goes by and you're like, 'okay, this is ridiculous I'm going ludicrous speed, get me out of here,'
but the solids are lit, you're not going. You can't get out of anything and you're going.
And sure enough you go from zero miles an hour to 17,500 miles an hour
in eight and a half minutes in this thing and so there's no other acceleration quite like that. And that's what's really unique about it.
And then you get up to the top. And when you get up to the top and you're looking on the screens and you see the,
the main engine cutoff bug come alive and you know it's about to shut down.
When it hits the the, the center mark,
the engines shut down, instantaneously you go from 3 G's to zero.
And I remember on Endeavour – I was actually downstairs – but I remember sitting in my seat and when that happened,
it... it felt like I was gonna get catapulted out of the
-- out of my chair. I put my arms up like this because I
was afraid of being a bug on the, on the... on the windshield kind of thing like getting squashed against the, the bulkhead down there.
And then the two veteran astronauts are sitting next to me, start pointing at me and laughing [chuckles]
like, 'look at the new guy, with the arms up,' because I felt really silly.
I wasn't being shot out of my seat, I just was no longer being held down into it.
And everything was floating, we're up in space and I was like 'yeah, I knew that was gonna happen, yeah'
It was a key era in our spacefaring attempts. I think,
you know – someday, I really hope that we look back at all this and think it's incredibly primitive. Kind of like,
the way we tour sailing ships today and look at how, you know,
how, um, how they lived on the HMS Victory, for example.
How incredibly primitive that seems by today's standards and I'm sure that will happen, I mean our technology keeps getting better,
but boy, you know, what it did – what this vehicle did in its day isn't, isn't, it still amazes me.
When you considered that she was designed in the '70s. And she can launch like a rocket, land like an airplane,
you can do a space walk out of that airlock, you have a robot arm on here, you have this payload bay that you could take
the Hubble Space Telescope off to space with in your trunk.
We are far from creating a vehicle that can.. that has the capabilities that this
thing has – even today, even with our advanced technologies. Now we're advancing in a lot of other ways.
I think our new vehicles are going to be safer, they're gonna be more sustainable from an economic standpoint
and they're gonna be easier to fly – they're not gonna have all these
switches, that's for sure. But... so we are, we are definitely advancing and, and this is... but this
thing will be looked at upon, no question, as it already is, as a incredible technical marvel for its time.
It's the absolute pinnacle of human in the loop when it comes to operating a vehicle.
When you look at all these switches and you think about all the things we were trained to do,
because the computers that ran this vehicle were by today's standards incredibly primitive.
We would never ask that of another crew again and ever since we started making boats and airplanes and cars
the level of human... the demand that we place on the operator, on the pilot
has gone up, and up, and up, and up until we reached this peak. It's all downhill from here.
We'll never have humans this involved in flying their machines.
In the future we're going to have... in the near future we're gonna have cars that drive themselves.
Our vehicles that we're working on now for going back to space demand a lot less of their crews.
It'll never be like this again and, and that's in a way,
it's the right thing to do from a technology standpoint, but it's also
to me kind of bittersweet in the sense that this is a human capability endeavor
that will never be performed to this level ever again.
It is kind of weird -- I mean you signed up to do this thing and, and then
you get up to the space station and all your friends you've been training with for a year shut the hatch and go away
and they come back in here and they leave you on the other side of the hatch [chuckles].
And you're there... you know you're in there for kind of a long haul.
And so there was a moment there, I remember when it closed the hatch
on the space station side and I looked around at Peggy and Yuri and I'm like wow, these are the only two people I'm going to see for a while.
That, that was a strange feeling, but that passed almost immediately and it really wasn't... I wasn't concerned about that I...
about... it is strange that you know, you know that you're doing this for the first time and,
and there's no quick way back, so, so, but, but you know so many other people had done that before.
If I was the first one to make that commitment, it might have been strange, but I saw lots of other people do it and
I was like, 'wow, you know, if, if Mike L-A could do it, you know, I can do it'. [laughs]