Endeavour Astronaut Speaks at Harker of Wonders and Work in Space

Hundreds arrived at the upper school campus on Sept. 26 to see decorated astronaut Dr. Gregory Chamitoff kick off the 2011-12 season of the Harker Speaker Series with an in-depth talk about his inspiring life. His appearance was spurred by his visit to his alma mater, Blackford High School, now the site of Harker’s middle school campus. Prior to his speech, Chamitoff spent nearly an hour talking to Winged Post and Talon staffers. Once at the podium, after introductions by Chris Nikoloff, head of school, and Paul West, grade 12, Chamitoff began by recognizing some of the teachers who inspired him during his days at Blackford High, and by introducing his family, who were in attendance, as well as some Blackford High alumni. He briefly recapped his years as a high school student, struggling to find the right crowd in which to belong. “It felt to me like in high school, who you were was defined by where you had lunch,” he joked. He found that he was most comfortable among science students. He reminisced about the pranks he and his friends would organize, including one where they built a flying saucer to frighten the neighborhood. For this particular project, the young Chamitoff wrote to NASA to ask how to make it fly. To his delight, a NASA engineer wrote back with an explanation. “I still have this letter from a long time ago, explaining exactly how the lift would work on this flying saucer,” he said. This inspired him to pursue his dream of being an astronaut. Before continuing, Chamitoff touched on the topic of fulfilling one’s dreams. “You have to set your own standards in your work, and the standards that you set are really for you and based on what you can do and what you want to do,” he said. “You can’t compare yourself to the people sitting next to you.” Having many different interests is also an asset, citing the complaint that many high school students have about learning things in school that do not interest them. “It turns out those subjects later on in life could be very important to you,” he said. “The other thing is skills; sports, hobbies, whether it’s music or dancing or anything you’re interested in doing, these are things that you love to do, you have a passion for, and things you have a passion for are things that end up defining you, things that build character and make you who you are,” he added. Teachers also play an important role, he said, explaining that, “in my job right now, everybody is my teacher.” He said he often finds himself in the role of the student. “You can learn something from everybody,” he said. Chamitoff’s most recent mission was as a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle “Endeavour” on its final voyage earlier this year. In 2008, he spent six months aboard the international space station (ISS) as a flight engineer and science officer. He fondly recalled the camaraderie among his crewmates, who gave one another amusing nicknames. During the Q&A session following his presentation, Chamitoff revealed that his nickname was “Taz,” after the popular Looney Tunes character, because of the sounds he would make while eating. He told most of his story through photos, taking the audience from the launch of “Endeavour,” which included one striking image of the shuttle bursting through a cloud bank, a thick column of exhaust casting its shadow across the top of the clouds. The object of that particular mission was to complete the construction of the ISS. As “Endeavour” approached, what originally started out as a “dot on the horizon” eventually became a structure the size of two football fields. The “Endeavor” crew was actually delivering two key items to the ISS. One was a palette of spare equipment that would be used to sustain the station through 2020. A photo showed the palette being transferred from the shuttle’s robotic arm to a robotic arm attached to the space station, a job Chamitoff said was similar to a video game, “but if you look out the window, it’s real stuff, and it’s big stuff that you’re moving around.” The other piece being delivered was an alpha magnetic spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion piece of equipment made to look for “dark matter” that may explain why stars rotate at certain speeds around galaxies. It is also designed to look for anti-matter created by the Big Bang. “If they discover an anti-matter galaxy with this, that will be a fundamental breakthrough,” Chamitoff said. Chamitoff took the audience through more amazing photos of him and his crewmates at work on the space station. One wide-angle shot, taken at the end of the final spacewalk, was taken at the highest spot on the ISS, showing it complete after 12 years of construction, which required 36 shuttle flights. “During this spacewalk, we hit the 1,000th hour of spacewalking time,” Chamitoff said. “We were able to announce, ‘space station assembly is complete,’ after all this work by 15 countries for all this time.” The final photograph of the presentation showed the view from the window where Chamitoff slept during his stay at the ISS. “I’ve taken about 22,000 pictures in space, and this is my favorite one, and I took it during this mission,” he said. Upon arriving at the space station, he put his sleeping bag next to his favorite view from the space station. “Every night I would get into my sleeping bag, and I would open up a shutter, and I would look at this view and I would just stare at it until I was forced to go to sleep,” he said. In it, the earth and its glowing atmosphere float below the space station, with thousands of stars visible in the distance. “You feel like you can reach the future from here; you feel like you’re already part of the future, and all you need to do is go a little faster,” he said, “and this space station, which is really comfortable to live on for six months, could take you all the way to Mars.” Chamitoff’s presentation was followed by a video showing highlights from the mission, including several impressive first-person views from the spacewalks, and amusing footage of the astronauts maneuvering about the space station and catching floating pieces of candy and droplets of water with their mouths. Following the short film, Chamitoff took questions from the audience. In response to a question about floating debris inside the space station, he explained that spacecraft have advanced filtration and ventilation systems that keep the surroundings clear. Another audience member asked about the continued delay of a new space vehicle after the space shuttle had been retired. “It’s very disappointing,” he said, saying he thought the space shuttle was retired too soon. “There was this path of retiring the space shuttle, and there was this path of building the next vehicle, and those two paths should have been connected by milestones,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to retire the shuttle until the next thing is sitting on the launchpad.” He estimated that the next vehicle could be ready in five or six years. Until then, American astronauts will have to acquire seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. Responding to a question about physical changes in space, Chamitoff explained that he actually lost 10 percent of the bone mass in his hips and pelvic area during his time in space, and adjustment to life back on earth was difficult as a result.  “Gravity feels really strong when you come back,” he said. “You feel like gravity’s not happy unless you’re flat on the ground and every part of you is squished on the floor.” It was several months before he could move normally as before, but his bone mass eventually returned. Chamitoff said he knew from age 6 he wanted to be an astronaut and one particular step in the realization of that dream stood out for him. On his first space walk, as he hung by a hand rail from the very bottom hatch of the space station, the Earth 200 miles beneath him, he paused for a moment at the thought of trusting his life to the tether that held him to the space station, the Earth and his family. “You have to convince yourself that it’s OK to let go,” he said. “Because you have work to do.”