For the past 50 years, if you were to ask any kid for his or her top career choice, there would be a good chance you’ll get the answer “astronaut”—that hasn’t changed in decades. So when real life astronaut Dr. Garrett Reisman paid a visit to the Malibu Library for a talk with kids—perhaps a first ever astronaut visit to the Malibu Library—kids showed up and so did their parents.
Reisman, who also spoke to adults at Malibu City Hall Tuesday evening, regaled the youngsters and oldsters about his adventures in space that include three missions on Space Shuttles, a 95-day mission aboard the International Space Station and three space walks. Needless to say, the crowd was rapt with attention. But with his focus on communicating to youngsters, Reisman started out by explaining that the best chance to become an astronaut is being a superior student in math and science.
“When you’re sitting in your math and science classes, you might not realize this, but you’re doing astronaut training. That’s the first step,” Reisman told the kids. “None of this stuff we do could work if we didn’t have very smart people and if we weren’t also very good at math and science. That’s the foundation for everything we do.”
After primary school, Reisman explained, he studied engineering in college and eventually got chosen by NASA to be an astronaut.
Reisman spent most of his children’s program describing blasting off in the Space Shuttle. He began with the night before the launch. He and his crew sleep in what he described as a small quarantined facility at the Kennedy Space Center—”you spend your last week there before you blast off in the Space Shuttle.”
On launch morning, the astronauts are helped into their massive and complicated space suits by assistants who zip up all the zippers and make sure the helmets are holding pressure and functioning properly. Then the crew walks out, as he jokingly claimed, in “slow-motion” (because that’s the way it’s portrayed in movies). Reisman explained the crew is trucked to the towering launch pad. Describing it “out of a movie,” Reisman called the shuttle a “monstrous space ship about to blast you off the planet.”
“It’s making all these noises. It’s like it’s alive,” the astronaut recalled.
“It’s venting. There’s liquid oxygen coming out of the thing. There’s creaking and groaning machinery and hissing and it’s gigantic,” he described.
Reisman also mentioned the isolated feeling of being alone with the crew and the few people who strap them in. “It’s like a big bomb ready to go off in the sky. All the sane people are at least five miles away from this thing.
“You go up a tower and at the top—you know what there is right before you enter the space shuttle?” Reisman asked the children. “Something super important,” he continued. “A bathroom. The last bathroom on Earth for you. So, you use it, because the next one isn’t coming around for a while,” Reisman chuckled.
The veteran astronaut then described lying on his back in discomfort with the cumbersome space suit fitted with hoses and the anticipation in that position for hours waiting for blast off.
“Typically, there’s only a 50/50 chance that you’re going to launch on any given try,” he said, explaining the weather could be bad in “France or Africa and they may not let you go. There’s lots of reasons why you may not go.” Then, his voice getting more dramatic, Reisman described the go-no-go poll.
“You hear in your headset, ‘Okay. Boosters? Go. E-com? Go. Space Shuttle Atlantis are you go?’ And the commander says, ‘The crew of Atlantis is go.’ And then there’s no countdown you hear in the Space Shuttle. That’s just for people watching on TV. Inside, you see computers and the navigation system initialized. Then the main engines light up and the rumbling starts and the shuttle leans forward.”
Then, with a loud clap of his hands, Reisman yelled out, “Boom!
“The solid rockets light up and all of a sudden you’re going somewhere in a hurry and there’s no turning back,” he said. “It’s like a big kick in the pants when you’re shot up into the sky. When you pass the top of the tower, you’re going faster than 100 miles an hour straight up. It’s loud and it’s shaking.”
To describe what it’s like in weightlessness in space, Reisman showed a brief film featuring he and his crew juggling in space and eating lots of candy because it’s sticky, explaining that astronauts can’t eat crackers in space: The crumbs would go everywhere.
