NASA Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript

Ronald M. Sega
Interviewed by Carol Butler
Colorado Springs, Colorado – 6 July 1998

Butler: Today is July 6, 1998. I am speaking with astronaut Dr. Ron Sega at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where he is currently the Dean of College of Engineering and Applied Science. The interview is being conducted by Carol Butler.

Thank you for taking some time out of your busy schedule to be able to talk with me today.

Sega: It's great to do this.

Butler: Wonderful. I'll just ask a few quick questions while I have a chance. You've had a very unique experience to be able to work first with STS-60 and flying the first cosmonaut aboard the Space Shuttle, then working as a DOR in Moscow and then flying on STS-76, the third docking mission. Can you reflect a little bit? When you first joined NASA, would you have ever imagined that you would have this chance?

Sega: No. As I entered the astronaut program, I think, first of all, I was surprised to even have the opportunity to be in the program and perhaps get a chance to fly in space. But, secondly, I would not have expected to fly those flights if they had occurred with the Russian cosmonaut or to live in Russia or to visit the Mir Space Station. So all of those experiences were a surprise to me.

Butler: Wonderful. Being a surprising experience, how did you adjust? How did the program work with the cultural differences, language differences? How well did things relate? I know part of your job in Moscow was to help keep things running on an even keel. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Sega: The process evolved from our initial agreements to fly a cosmonaut on the Shuttle. Fortunately for me, it was STS-60. I believe it was important that on STS-60 the crew, under leadership of Charlie Bolden, our commander, worked hard to integrate not only the cosmonauts in this case, Sergei [K.] Krikalev and Vladimir [G.] Titov but also their families, who moved to the Clear Lake [Houston, Texas] area as part of our team, our greater team. So we consciously and again with Charlie taking the lead provided opportunities for crews and families to get together during the course of training for STS-60. Looking back, I believe that was very successful. The crew got along very well during the training and during the flight, so I viewed that as a very positive and very successful experience.

Butler: Wonderful. Wonderful. How did that experience then help you as you moved into Moscow with the DOR position?

Sega: During the course of training for STS-60, we learned not only about the individuals, but the culture that the Krikalevs and Titovs had grown up in and were living in. So as I arrived at Star City, it was not for the first time. We had visited as a crew after the flight of STS-60. Then I also had the opportunity of visiting it with the Association of Space Explorers that summer.

In 1991, I was also in Moscow. I was part of an AIAA conference in microgravity and I also did an invited paper on vacuum, ultra vacuum technology with a weight shield facility. So it was a conference sponsored by AIAA and EKE [phonetic] out of the Soviet Union at that time. The conference participants included Soviet Union, United States, and Canada.

So it was my fourth, I guess, trip to the Moscow area, and it was still early in the program, in the late fall of 1994 in Star City. And much changed during the course of nearly five months that I was there as director of operations. I believe those changes were positive, and I was able to find this morning the copies of our reports that we wrote each week and sent electronically back to Houston, Marshall, Washington, D.C., and other NASA centers and activities that were involved with the program.

I'm looking forward to reading through those when we do our second part of the interview and kind of refresh my own mind what we had done during those five months. But we worked together on each week's report and called it the Star City update, wrote it together as a team of those that were assigned to Star City, as well as our visitors that would be there, whether it was scientists or technicians or others that were joining us for either a short stay or extended stay in Star City. We also included the Russian national personnel that were part of our team. We viewed them as part of the team, so we wrote it together. It reflects probably one of the better well, it reflects at least a near real-time view of the activities that were taking place at Star City.

Butler: Wonderful. I look forward to looking that over and seeing some details about everything that you were involved with.

Sega: Same here.

Butler: You did mention teamwork. You've talked a little bit about relations with Russian members both in your office and crew members. Looking at the Shuttle-Mir Program as a whole, what would you say some of the biggest achievements were and lessons learned, possibly? Is teamwork a big part of that?

Sega: There are many lessons learned through the course of our involvement with the Russians. It also included interaction with those in ESA [European Space Agency], because they were part of the activity that was taking place at the same time, particularly in the Star City era. But learning to work together was important, realizing that there were areas that one program had done very well and other areas that the other program had done very well, and trying to take advantage of the lessons learned in the individual programs as we brought it together into a joint program, I thought was one of the highlights of the Shuttle-Mir Program.

Some of the background work that took place to prepare for not only the flight of either STS 60 or flight out of Baikonur, Norm [Norman] Thagard's flight, or getting ready for STS 76, the word that is necessary to prepare for a flight, in this case, involved the teamwork on many levels. So we needed to bring the scientists together, the trainers together, technicians together, crews together, controllers together, flight surgeons, and so forth. So at many, many levels the interaction and the teamwork needed to take place.

It took many meetings and building relationships to bring the communication system on to Star City that we had brought to the TsUP in Kaleningrad and some other locations within Moscow during the tour as DOR in Star City, had just got those relationships built to the point where agreements were in the final state at the end of the tour in Star City. So many changes took place in Star City. Many changes were taking place in Moscow as the economy and the city was undergoing many changes in its evolution as well during those it seemed now a fairly short period of time, but the change that took place in Moscow was also pretty dramatic from November of '94 to March of '95.

Butler: Wonderful. Thank you very much. I'll let you go here, although we could keep going for a while, I'm sure.

Sega: Yes. I think that we'll need to carve out some time and continue this. I look forward to looking through the reports, the Star City updates, as well as the crew notebooks from STS-60 and 76.

Butler: Wonderful. That will be great. Well, hopefully after you've had a chance to look those through and we'll look through what you gave us on the updates, and hopefully we can set up a time and be able to talk again.

Sega: Sounds good. Look forward to it.

Butler: Thank you very much.

[End of interview]