NASA Shuttle-Mir Oral
History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript
Andrew
S.W. Thomas
Interviewed by Rebecca Wright
Houston, Texas –22 July 1998
Wright: We're
visiting with Andy Thomas, astronaut with the Shuttle-Mir Program.
We are here with the Shuttle-Mir Oral History Program. It's Rebecca
Wright, Carol Butler, and Summer Bergen.
Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule.
Thomas: Sure thing. My pleasure.
Wright: We know that you just got back a few weeks ago. How are you
feeling?
Thomas: It's going to be six weeks on Friday. I'm feeling very good,
actually. I feel remarkably normal for somebody who's spent 141 days
in space. I was a little surprised at the readaptation with gravity
was a lot easier than I'd anticipated it to be. I thought there'd
be weeks of ongoing problems. I have a few inevitable aches and pains,
but otherwise everything's fine. I'm out running and enjoying the
lovely weather here.
Wright: Getting used to the heat?
Thomas: Yes. [Laughter]
Wright: Well, you'll have to give us your secret. I don't think any
of us are used to the heat.
Thomas: Well, you know, I spent 141 days in a confined space at a
constant temperature. It is nice to get outdoors and in the sunshine
and just feel it. It really feels good.
Wright: Is that one of the benefits of coming home, to be able to
be outside.
Thomas: Oh, yes. I'd been looking forward to that, too, having the
fresh air and being outside, yes. It's a nice feeling.
Wright: I know you've talked about being up there and having an unnatural
environment that does become the norm. Did it take you long to adapt?
Thomas: No. One of the things that surprised me was how quickly I
could adapt to that environment. Now, true, it was my second flight.
My first flight was two years ago, and it was only ten days. I was
surprised, because on this flight I adapted to being at zero gravity
psychologically very quickly, and I very quickly learned to function
and to accept that environment as the normal environment, and it felt
natural. That was what was so strange, is an environment which is
fundamentally so unnatural could so quickly feel natural. It was an
interesting experience to go through that, and as the flight progressed,
of course, you become more blase about it because you have it all
the time, and every now and again you have these little reality checks
with, "Wait a minute. I'm weightless. I can float. That's the
way I move," and you just have to remind yourself that, yes,
you are weightless. Of course, another form of reality check was when
you would go and look out the window and have this spectacular view,
just to remind you of where you really were. It was a great experience.
Wright: Any way to describe what you saw out the window?
Thomas: Just a series of amazing sights, breathtaking sights; seeing
land masses as land masses as you're accustomed to looking at them
on a map, seeing familiar contours, but it's not a map, it's actually
the land; seeing the atmosphere and atmospheric effects; seeing storms;
seeing day change to night and back to day again forty minutes later;
and seeing the different parts of the whole planet over the course
of an hour and a half. It's really a unique vantage to have.
Wright: Was the Mir what you expected?
Thomas: No, not really. Well, it was and it wasn't. I had gone into
it expecting that, all right, it's going to be confined and it's going
to be crowded, but I have to say when I went in there, it was a bit
of a shock just how crowded it was, how much stuff was in there, and
that took some getting used to, but you can get used to it. In the
early part of the flight, the crew I was with, the Mir-25 crew, when
they arrived, and I spent a lot of time to try and tidy things up
so that it would be perhaps a little less crowded and the housekeeping
organized a little bit better to make it more comfortable. But it
is a confining environment. There's no doubt about that. At no time
did I feel claustrophobic up there. You don't have that sense at all.
There's enough room that you don't feel claustrophobic, but you are
aware that it's a confined environment, that you don't have a lot
of options of places to go inside this vehicle while you're there.
Wright: What were your feelings when you arrived and the first thing
you saw out of the Mir was the Shuttle leaving you for those few days
that turned into long days?
Thomas: Actually, by the time the Shuttle left, I was actually glad
to see it go, because while the Shuttle is docked at Mir, you're in
sort of a no-man's-land. You're partly the Shuttle crew, partly the
Mir crew, and you always have an out. You know you could go back with
them, in principle. While the Shuttle is there, things are very crowded.
You're not able to set things up. You're not able to really move in
because it's still there. It's like when you're moving into a new
house and the moving truck is still parked outside and you can't get
on with what you're doing because the moving van is still there unloading
stuff.
So although they are my colleagues, I was kind of glad to see the
Shuttle go, because it meant I could get on with what I needed to
do during that flight. I could unpack all my things. I could set up
my home there, which was going to be my home for four and a half months.
I could get into a routine of living on this vehicle, because until
you get into a day-to-day routine of living and have a comfortable
routine that balances your personal needs of recreation with the programmatic
needs of work, you're not really living there, and you can't begin
to enjoy the environment and establish a stable lifestyle until you
do that, until you develop your routine. So I was able to do that
after the Shuttle left, so in that sense I was kind of glad to get
on with what I was sent up there to do.
Wright: And what did you set as your primary focus? I know that everybody
has their sets of experiments.
Thomas: Well, I had a repertoire of science experiments and some engineering
things to do, but I would have to say, for me, the whole experience,
the primary focus for me was the personal experience. I knew this
was going to be a very difficult experience. Mike Foale described
it as the toughest thing he'd ever done in his life. I could well
believe that, and I knew that it's not the kind of experience that
everyone can do. Some people wouldn't like it and would not have a
good experience. So my personal goal was to make this a good experience
for me at a personal level and a professional level. The two go together
there. If the personal rewards were there, I knew that I would have
no trouble fulfilling the professional and programmatic requirements.
So my goal was that I would be able to look back on this in June,
after the landing, and say, "That was a good experience. I'm
glad that worked. I made that work, and I'm glad I did it," and
that was the focus of a lot of my energies during the flight.
Wright: I understand you took some things that would make you feel
comfortable, including Monty Python. Is that what I hear?
Thomas: Yes. I took a lot of recreation items. We have cassettes for
music. We had CDs for music, a Walkman to listen to music while you
work or while you're exercising. There was a very extensive collection
of videos up there, of fairly recent-release movies, plus I took some
more with me that had come out. So I had a lot of movies that I could
watch. I took quite a number of books up there with me to read at
night. I took CD-ROMs like the Monty Python and some others that I
used just as entertainment while I was there, because when you're
on a vehicle like that, you don't have a lot of options for your recreational
activities, but recreation is very important, because that's how you
regenerate yourself and keep charged up to get the work done and to
fulfill the requirements of the mission under these very trying circumstances.
So recreation's extremely important, and you've got to have personal
recreation there, something that you are interested in and which you
can escape in, because you can't physically escape the environment,
but psychologically you can, so you need something to remove yourself
from the environment and get regenerated so that you can have a productive
flight.
Wright: Did it help being the seventh one up there, that you had things
that people had left that you could--
Thomas: There wasn't that much that people had left, actually. Most
of what I took, the books, the CDs, the music was all my personal
stuff. They had their own, I think, but it was my personal stuff.
I know Shannon Lucid had a lot of books up there, but they were in
the Spektr module and inaccessible. So the things I took were mostly
for me.
Wright: Were these books that you'd been wanting to read for a long
time?
Thomas: Yes. Paperbacks mostly, because I wanted low weight, but there
were collections of a lot of science fiction, which I took just for
the escape value of it. I took some of the classics. I took some Mark
Twain because I'd always wanted to read Huckleberry Finn, since it's
a landmark book in American literature and it's a very controversial
book. I wanted to see what it was about. I'd never read it. Edgar
Allen Poe, as well as some books on science and things like that which
I've been interested in.
Wright: Did you find time to have recreation?
Thomas: Oh, yes. We set up a workday that sort of would start at about
nine in the morning, and it was a long day; we'd work through till
about seven. There'd be a break in the middle of the afternoon for
exercise on the treadmill, then clean-up, then lunch. Lunch was late,
usually about three, then work through again after that till dinner,
which would be at seven or eight, and then in the evening watch a
video, perhaps, or read E-mail or write E-mail or read a book. I would
usually read a book just before I went to bed, for half an hour before
I would turn out the light, same as I do on Earth. And we would do
that five days a week, Monday through Friday, that kind of routine.
Weekends were--there were still duties you had to do. The nature of
the vehicle is such that you can't just stop, but it was a much reduced
work level for us. So it was sort of like days off, days of rest,
so I used those days for watching movies or reading or something like
that.
It was funny, you know, up there in that work environment where you
get into this routine, you start to look forward to Friday, because
Fridays you can start to relax. You know, you're not going anywhere
different, you're in the same vehicle, but you still look forward
to Friday. And then on Monday, when Monday comes, it's like Monday-morning-itis,
"Here we go again, back to the grind." So all of those sort
of attributes about day-to-day life here we had up there, which is
actually good because it gives it an air of normalcy and comfort to
do it that way. So it was kind of interesting that we had that.
A recreational aid for me that turned out to be very important was
to do something creative. I'd actually taken some guitar music up
there, and there was a guitar up there, which I tried to play. Playing
a guitar in zero gravity is actually very difficult, because the guitar
won't sit in your lab. It turns out it's a lot harder than you might
imagine. So I only did that a few times.
The most creative recreation I did was to do sketches. I had paper
and pencils up there, and I would do sketches of things that I saw
out the window or internal views and things like that. Over the twenty
weeks I was there, I did a number of these sketches, not many, about
twelve, because they take a long time to do, but I found that a very
rewarding activity because you can get so involved in it, it distracts
you completely from everything else you've been thinking about, and
you're thinking creatively, which I like to do, and that turned out
to be an immense pleasure during the flight. I would do a sketch on
a Saturday, or do some sketching on a Saturday, and I'd find suddenly
that hours had passed, and at the end of it I felt just refreshed
and ready to go, plus it has given me a personal record of the trip,
which is perhaps a little more personal than just a whole series of
photographs.
Wright: Was it challenging since the scene changed?
Thomas: Oh, I'd have to capture the scene on a video or something
and freeze-frame it, yes, because out the window it's gone in a heartbeat.
You'd have to capture it and then draw it off a screen.
Wright: Would that be something that the public will be able to see
at some time, or is that your personal--you'd keep for yourself?
Thomas: No, that's personal, I think. The thing is, when you say publicly
that you got sketches done on Mir, everyone expects you to be an artist,
and they expect real high quality. Well, I'm not an artist. For me
these were very good, I was very pleased with them, but that doesn't
mean that they're really high quality, plus they are a personal record,
but I'm going to frame them and put them up in my house.
Wright: Have you reviewed them since you've been home?
Thomas: Yes, I've got them at home. They're kind of nice. It's nice
to see the date on them and remember the scene and what I was doing
when I did them.
Wright: Do you do sketches of your roommates?
Thomas: Well, I did--not do in-cabin sketches. I did sketches of them
when they were outside doing EVAs, based on the views that I'd seen
watching them do the EVAs. I never did sketches of internal scenes.
I was going to do that, but I never got to the point of sketching
that. It takes a long time to do a sketch, actually, because you have
to compose the subject, which you do by trial and error, and you have
to think about the view you want and how the light is going to be,
and you compose it, and then you start the sketch proper, perhaps,
and there's a lot of details you have to add. It takes a long time.
It took me a couple weeks to finish one to the level of detail that
I was pleased with, but that was good, because I had plenty of time
on my hands. That turned out to be a really rewarding activity.
I think the big lesson from that is, if you're going to do a long-duration
flight like this, the crewperson does have to have a personal recreation
device at his disposal which is something he or she really derives
a personal benefit from. NASA can provide tapes and videos and CDs
and things like that, but the crewperson needs to think about what
they really need for themselves for that time, what hobby is it they
can take with them that will give them the recreational needs that
they have, because it's really important that you have good recreation
for a flight like this to make your off time productive and to get
you away, psychologically remove you from the environment, so that
you can have productive times during your work, just like here on
Earth.
Wright: Speaking of things that you brought with you, I was reading
how you took steel flint from your--
Thomas: That was actually on my first flight that I took that. Yes,
my great-great-grandfather in Australia served on an expedition that
was the first expedition to actually cross Australia from south to
north over 100 years ago now, 130 years ago, and that was an important
expedition because no one knew what was in the center of Australia.
They thought it could be an inland sea or--they had no idea. He served
on that expedition. So on my first Shuttle flight I took a memento
of his on the Shuttle with me sort of as a souvenir.
Wright: Do you see yourself as an explorer?
Thomas: Of a kind, we are, because seeking new knowledge is exploration,
but I don't see myself in the same league as people who do expeditions
like that or like Lewis and Clark and so on, or the people that explored
the Antarctic and the Arctic regions, because when they went off on
those very courageous journeys, they went by themselves. They planned
and everything, had a lot of support, but once they'd gone, they were
gone. They were alone. When we do these kinds of flights, it's true
we're alone up there but we have radio communications to a huge group
of people down here who have a lot of resources to provide assistance
in the event something goes wrong, and a lot of guidance about what
should be done next. So in that sense we're not alone. So there is
a fundamental difference in the approach, although what we do is explorative
in nature.
Wright: The crew that you were with, how much time and what kind of
relationship did you have with them? I know you worked with them up
there, but did other parts of the day did you spend--
Thomas: Yes. Actually, I didn't work with them that much. Most of
the work I did was in the Priroda module, which was this module up
here, and I was there doing the science program that I was sent up
to do, and they were doing work mostly in the base block, which is
in this module here. So my science program was sort of a one-person
show and I did that.
The time we spent together was recreational time and meals. I made
a point to share mealtimes with them, because I thought that was important,
and it was fun, too, and it gave you some human contact. So we would
eat all our meals together and watch videos together after the meals
and talk. There is a dining table set up in the base block here, which
is the main dining area where the water is, the galley is, and the
food is, and so we had meals there and tea breaks and watched videos
there. That's where we had the communication systems to the ground,
too, so we'd do all our talking to the ground from there. So we spent
a lot of time together in the base block socializing and recreating.
Wright: Did you bring special food items as well as bringing recreational
items?
Thomas: No. There was an abundance of food up there. I had my choice
of American food and Russian food, much more food than I could eat.
It was really a good selection of food, actually. The food is largely
canned food and rehydratable foods, much like you might use on a camping
trip or something like that, and I had more than enough to eat. The
Russian foods were really good. The Russian soups were just outstanding,
and the Russian juices, fruit juices, were really good. They had a
very nice natural taste, and they tasted very fresh, perhaps more
so than the American fruit juices, which tend to be a little bit artificial,
Tang-type things. So I really enjoyed the food that was available
to me.
We had Progress vehicles--that's the small vehicle here--that came
unmanned and brought supplies up periodically, and two of those arrived
while I was there, and in that people would put letters and photographs
and things from home in there for me plus treats, like we'd get some
fresh fruit, some fresh vegetables, and got a nice big bag of M&Ms,
a nice big bag of Oreo cookies, things like that.
Wright: No lasagna?
Thomas: No lasagna. No lasagna. That came later.
Wright: What other forms of human contact? I know you used E-mail
quite a bit. Was that something you enjoyed doing?
Thomas: It turns out E-mail, actually, I think, really is very important,
perhaps more important than voice communication. I missed E-mail when
it didn't work, and there were quite a few times that it failed, and
you really notice it when it's not there because it provides a link
to people. You know, it's like getting a letter in the mailbox, something
you can sort of hold in your hand and you can reread and prepare a
response to. You can relive it. In that sense it's actually sometimes
more rewarding to receive an E-mail from home from someone rather
than talk to them on a voice contact, which is over in a couple of
minutes. So I really enjoyed E-mail very much. I think E-mail is very
important for the people on these kinds of missions.
Wright: Of course, you spent time away from home when you were training
in Russia.
Thomas: Yes. I was there for a year in preparation for this flight.
Wright: Could you share some experiences that you went through there,
the differences of training from here to there?
Thomas: It was actually a fascinating experience. The training all
takes place in what they call the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center,
which is in a small town called Star City, which is outside of Moscow,
about an hour outside of Moscow. It was fascinating to go there, because
there's so much history there of the space program, the Russian space
program. It was just fascinating, being involved in it.
It was hard work, though, because all the training I had in the systems
that make up the Mir and the Soyuz spacecraft was all in Russian,
so I had to spend a lot of time learning some competence in Russian
so that I could understand the instructors who would give me the classes
in Russian, the technical classes. And then I had to do exams, oral
exams, to a board of instructors, in Russian, on these systems, and
I can tell you, that was a lot of work. That was a big undertaking
to do that all in a year to prepare for flight on this vehicle. I
did it. I don't know how I did it, but I did it. [Laughter] But it
was really fascinating to do that.
The other thing about it, being in Moscow was fascinating, too, because
Moscow is a city that's, in some ways, caught between the nineteenth
and the twenty-first centuries in part of its culture, and it's a
culture that clearly grew up as an autocratic Communist state. Geographically
it's caught between Eastern Europe and the Far East or even the Middle
East, and you can see that reflection in their architecture and in
some of the clothing and cultural habits. So it was fascinating to
just be in that sort of environment and see that aspect to it and
to live there for a year and get to know them. It's something that
would have been unthinkable ten years ago, to do that, but I got to
do it. So it was just an amazing experience, to have that time there.
Wright: When you originally went over there, you had the possibility
of flying the course--
Thomas: I went as a back-up. The plan was I'd stay there a year, and
David Wolf would go fly the last increment on Mir and I would come
back and do something else. I actually undertook that mostly because
I was curious about the Russian environment and so on, not expecting
that I would get a flight out of it. But I did. I got to fly when
the crew reassignments were made, and I feel very privileged that
I was one of the seven people that served on this vehicle. It's just
amazing to even contemplate that, actually, in hindsight.
Wright: And how did your family take the announcement that you were
going to be gone so far away?
Thomas: Well, I don't think they minded that so much. I said, "I'm
going to Russia for a year to just be a non-flight training back-up."
They just sort of thought, "Well, that's an unusual thing to
do, but you're coming back?"
"Yes, yes, I'll be coming back."
But I noticed the conversation got decidedly quiet when I announced
that crews had been reassigned and that I was, in fact, going to fly
on this vehicle. But I think they trusted my judgment and knew that
I wasn't going to do anything impetuous or foolhardy.
Wright: Are they concerned because of all the information that had
been released of concerns for safety of Mir?
Thomas: They never vocalized any concerns, but I've noticed that since
I've got back they've vocalized a lot of relief that I'm back. I think
they trusted my judgment. All the time I was on that vehicle, I felt
safe. I never felt threatened. I thought it was a fascinating way
to spend four and a half months, and I never felt any sense of impending
danger or any problem like that.
Wright: We all get into routines every day, like you mentioned earlier.
Was something more than others that you realized that you couldn't
do your routine, something that you do every day here, but up there
it changed?
Thomas: The thing you notice the most is the lack of options for what
you can do. Here you can get in a car and drive up into town or go
to a restaurant or go visit a friend or go to a movie or go to the
beach, and you have that mobility that provides you a lot of options
in what you can do. That's not the case up there. You don't have a
lot of options. That's why I talked about recreation being important.
You have to exploit the environment for whatever you can to give you
as much interesting activities as you can find. So that was the biggest
thing, was just not having a lot of options.
Of course, I flew with a good crew. I'm lucky I flew with them. I
feel they were good guys. But there is only two other people you see
the whole time. You don't have a lot of diversity in the people you
see over the course of that four-and-a-half-month period.
Wright: You were with two other crewmembers, other than you were with
two Russians. You felt like you were all a crew working together?
Thomas: Yes. Oh, yes, yes. I definitely felt that we were a team up
there, and to their credit, I'll say they worked hard to make sure
that that was the way everyone felt, and that was what they wanted,
too, because, you know, they were in the same environment I was. They
had the same needs, and if any one of them had not been sort of integrated
as a crew, it would have been tough on them, too.
Wright: Of course, you left them and they're still there. Have you
communicated with them at all since you've been down?
Thomas: No, I haven't. Mir is going to be flying over, possibly visible
tomorrow night, so it's going to be interesting, the first time I
actually get to see it go over now that I'm back. That will be interesting.
Wright: How was it to look over your shoulder and see that you were
flying off in the Shuttle and leaving them behind?
Thomas: It was fascinating, because, you know, I'd spent four and
a half months on Mir, but it was inside Mir. I really didn't see the
outside of the vehicle. I'd seen it briefly when we first docked,
but not a lot. So the fascinating part was that as we pulled away
and did a fly-around, I was able for the first time to get to see
the outside of what had been my home for twenty weeks. That was really
interesting. I'd say, "Oh, yes, I know that window. I used to
look out that window. Oh, is that what that was? I wondered what that
thing was." And so that was kind of fun.
Wright: Your crewmates did go out. You said they had done an EVA.
Thomas: They did five EVAs, yes.
Wright: What were your duties while they were busy on the outside?
Thomas: Most of the time I was glued to the windows, photographing
their activities while they did the work, and also taking care of
anything that came up inside the station if something did. There were
a few calls from the ground to check a few things while they were
outdoors. But, yes, they did thirty hours of EVA, and five of them.
They did one series of EVAs to repair a solar array on the Spektr
module that had been damaged in the collision, to brace it up, to
give it some strength, and the other one was to replace an engine
which is out on a boom out here that's used for controlling the attitude
of the station. So they came out and climbed up this tall boom that's
mounted on the station and replaced this engine. There was quite a
lot of work that they did.
Wright: Were you envious that they were there and you were inside?
Did you want to be out there with them?
Thomas: Well, I would like to have tried it, but I have to say, thirty
hours of EVA is hard, hard work. They worked very hard, and they have
my respect for that because it was not an easy thing that they did,
by any means. I didn't envy the hard work.
Wright: The experiments that you performed while you were there, will
you be able to follow the results once you're home?
Thomas: I won't be following them, but they're going to be providing
me some briefings on them from time to time--I suppose that's following
them, isn't it?--and giving me updates on what they find. It's still
too early yet. I haven't had feedback from the results yet. It'll
be some time before I do, too. There's a fairly complex analysis needed.
Wright: Did you have a favorite of all the ones that you were working
on?
Thomas: No. I enjoyed them all, because they provided activity, stimulating
activity. The biotechnology experiment, growing the cells in the bioreactor,
was perhaps the most time-consuming. I'd say that was the one that
got most of my attention. That's the one I'm sort of going to be interested
to see what the outcome of that was, and it also gave quite a lot
of problems during the flight which required a bit of careful work
to overcome. So it remains to be seen what the outcome of all that
is.
Wright: At the end of the flight, there was a computer glitch.
Thomas: Yes.
Wright: Did that give you little anxious feelings of maybe your flight
home was going to be delayed?
Thomas: Yes, it was a concern. The Shuttle was to launch on a Tuesday,
and the Saturday before that, just before I was supposed to give a
press conference, the attitude-control computer failed, and I thought
it was unbelievably bad timing. After twenty weeks this happens and
just before a press conference, because one of the things I was going
to say in the press conference was how problem-free the flight had
been and so on. It turned out the press conference had to be canceled.
But I was concerned that if they didn't have attitude control, which
meant that the station would be slowly rotating, it wouldn't be possible
to dock the Shuttle to it, in which case they would delay the launch
until it did get control back.
But they worked very hard to change out the computer and reestablish
operations, which they had done within a day, I think, a day and a
half, perhaps--yes, a day and a half, and so the Shuttle was launching
on time and came on time. But for a while there I was thinking, "Hmm.
Wonder when I'm going to see the Shuttle?"
Wright: Did you see it approaching?
Thomas: Oh, yes. I saw it first as a point of light out on the horizon,
like a bright star. Then you could get binoculars and you could look
at it. You could just make out that it was not a star, that it actually
was the Shuttle. Then, of course, it came closer and you could see
it clearly, and I got some spectacular photos of it just floating
around next to us to come up underneath and dock to us. It just got
closer and closer, and then at one point you feel the whole station
shudder, and you know that they've made contact and have latched on.
So it was a great moment.
Wright: And I guess the next great moment was when they opened the
hatch?
Thomas: Yes. At that point I knew I was going home. And we had a good
time. We spent time together socializing and saying goodbye and packing
up, and after three days closed the hatch, made sure I was on the
Shuttle side of it, waved goodbye, and slowly pulled away, and then
did the fly-around, when I got to look at my home for the last four
months.
Perhaps one of the most moving moments, though, was as we drew further
and further away, we went into the night side of the planet, and I
could see stars, and the running lights of the station were on. You
couldn't see the station. All you could see was lights flashing, and
they were just going off into the distance, these flashing points
of light fading out slowly. That was kind of an emotional moment,
because I knew that would be the last time I would see it--ever. And
that's been the case, too.
Wright: You rode home with one of the people who were very instrumental
in having Mir.
Thomas: Yes, Valeri Ryumin.
Wright: Did you get a chance to visit, to share any information on
the way?
Thomas: Not a lot during the Shuttle flight. He spent a lot of time
on Mir while I was doing the transfer of all the bags and things that
I'd packed, and it's my understanding he's going to be preparing some
kind of report on the Mir for the Russian Space Agency. I would assume,
and I certainly hope, that we would get a copy of that, to see what
their interpretation of it is.
Wright: You were the last American, probably will be the last American
there.
Thomas: Definitely will be, yes.
Wright: What makes your mission different than the rest?
Thomas: Well, it was my mission. [Laughter] There were seven people
that flew up there. We all had sort of similar science that was undertaken.
I think mine was probably the most placid of all of them. The first
person, Norm [Norman] Thagard, when he went up there, there were a
lot of problems to do with the fact that he was the first, and a lot
of the things that you need to sustain yourself I don't think he had.
So that must have made it tough for him. I don't think they had the
E-mail situation worked out nor the [unclear], things like that. Shannon,
when she flew, her flight got extended because of Shuttle problems,
actually. So she had to stay up there six months instead of four,
and that would have been tough, I think. She has a very good spirit
about it, though.
And of course, for Jerry's [Linenger] increment, John Blaha flew.
He had a fairly benign increment, too, much like mine. For Jerry there
was the fire, of course, and for Mike [Foale] there was the depressurization.
So they had some exciting times on theirs.
David [Wolf] had a number of power failures during his. Mine was fairly
placid by comparison, which I think is testimony to the capability
of the Russians to restore operations, to bring the system back on
line, which I think they did well, because I think they recognized
that the world was sort of watching what they do with the station,
and that they were on the world stage and needed to prove that they
could do it, and they did that.
Wright: Was this your first dealing, working with the Russian partners?
Thomas: Yes. I got to know the Russian culture and mentality reasonably
well by spending that year in training beforehand. It sort of gave
me a sense of the way they think and the way they approach things
and so on, and the Russian engineering, the quality of the Russian
engineering.
Wright: You've been from Australia to American, Russia to Mir, and
now back again.
Thomas: I want to stay at home for a while. [Laughter] Yes, I do.
Just before I went to Russia, I bought a small house here, which I
moved into, only to have to pack up and go to Russia. So I've only
just sort of moved into it again. I want to spend time to turn it
from a house into a home and enjoy that. For the whole of my time
while I was on Mir and the whole of my time training the year before
it, my whole life was scheduled. Each day you'd have a piece of paper
telling you what you had to do, where you had to be throughout the
whole day, and you had to follow that up with hours and hours of study
at night because it was all in Russian. It took a long time to read
a twenty-page document, a long time.
So I'm looking forward to not having a scheduled life. It still is
scheduled, the post-flight activities require that, but I'm looking
very much forward to, for a while, having an unscheduled life and
be free to do what I wish and come and go and be my own master for
a while, and enjoy just building a home, getting back into establishing
a home here.
Wright: You might even have a pet. You certainly couldn't have pets
on Mir.
Thomas: No. I don't think I want a pet.
Wright: I was going to ask Carol and Summer if they had a question.
Butler: Would you say the Shuttle-Mir Program has accomplished everything
it set out to?
Thomas: Yes, I think so, in spades and more, perhaps. The Shuttle-Mir
Program has taken a lot of criticism over the two or three years that
this program's been running, particularly last year with the problems
that Mir was facing. Perhaps some of those criticisms are justified,
but I think you need to step back and look at this program and this
collaboration. In fact, if you even go back forty years ago when NASA
was formed, NASA was formed because there was a space race and there
was competition between Russia and the U.S. in the Cold War, and the
role of this agency was to represent the U.S. interests in going into
space, and it was definitely in competition with the Russians.
Well, the Cold War is over. I think one of the great geopolitical
and social events of the twentieth century history will show will
be the ending of the Cold War and the peaceful demise of Communism
in the Soviet Bloc countries. I think that's just an extraordinary
historical event to contemplate. And it is equally amazing that over
the course of that, that spirit of competition that existed for forty
years has evolved smoothly into a spirit of cooperation, and the Shuttle-Mir
Program was the instrument of doing that.
I think it's very important that we judge the Shuttle-Mir Program
by the standards of today and by the standards of the nineties and
by the geopolitical world that exists now and we don't judge this
program by the prejudices of the Cold War era, which we all grew up
in. Those aren't valid now, and you have to look at this program and
say, "Is this the right thing to do?" I think the answer
is yes. From a purely U.S. point of view, it is the right thing because
it serves the interests of the United States to support this program
and, in so doing, support the new directions that the Russian society
is trying to take. It's very much in our interest to do that and to
have access to the technology of these systems, which we didn't have
before. That serves the interest of our space program. It serves our
interest to help stabilize the economy of Russia, because that's potentially
a huge market that we can one day participate with. It stops the technology
falling into the wrong kind of hands, because there's lot of bad guys
out there that would like to have access to some of this technology.
So [from that]..perspective, I think, you have to say that this program
of collaboration serves the interests of the United States and is
something that should be done. I think, also, on a global point of
view and sort of a human point of view, collaboration, as we start
to explore space, is the right thing to do, too, because no one nation
should have control over space or dominion over space. It should be
something that is shared by everybody as an international venture,
and that's another reason why this collaboration is the [direction]
to go.
So those are all the reasons why the Shuttle-Mir Phase One Program
was the right direction to go and the Russian collaboration we have
is the right direction to go. Just looking at the Phase One Program
by itself, though, it provides a lot of benefits, because it's taught
us and given us experience on operating and living on a day-to-day
basis in an orbiting space station, which we didn't have. It's taught
us how to resupply a space station, how to bring crewpersons up, how
to change our crews, how to train crews for these missions. It's taught
us how to fly a Shuttle up to a space station and dock with it and
do all of these exchanges. These are not trivial problems, by any
means. So we've learned a lot from doing that, and I think that information
is going to be of profound importance as we do the International Space
Station. I actually think it's inconceivable to think that we could
have even attempted an International Space Station without the Shuttle-Mir
lessons-learned program that we have now.
Wright: I believe a lot of people agree with that. Any more? Do you
have anything else that you'd like to add?
Thomas: No. You've heard me talk enough, I think.
Wright: We thank you again for taking time and visiting with us, and
we wish you luck and lots of rest and free time for yourself.
Thomas: Absolutely.
Wright: Thank you.
Thomas: Thanks.
[End of interview]