From Nebraska to NASA: Clayton Anderson's Stellar Journey
Join Kassi Kincaid for an inspiring conversation with Clayton Anderson, retired NASA astronaut and engineer. With a 30-year NASA career spanning 15 years as an engineer and 15 as an astronaut, Clayton shares his journey from a space-fascinated child in Nebraska to performing six spacewalks. Tune in to explore the creative aspects of space missions, the surreal experience of spacewalking, and learn how Clayton's journey continues to inspire the next generation to reach for the stars.
Transcript:
Links from episode:
https://astroclay.com/
Kassi Kincaid (00:00):
Welcome to The Edge of Creativity Podcast. I'm your host, Kassi Kincaid, and joined with me today is NASA retired astronaut and engineer, president and CEO of this Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum and adjunct professor at Iowa State University, author, speaker, Astronaut Clayton Anderson. Oh my word. Thank you so much for joining us today!
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (00:28):
My pleasure, Kassi. Thanks for having me.
Kassi Kincaid (00:30):
I am so excited to delve into the world of space today with our listeners. So just can you kick us off today and share with our listeners where your astronaut journey began and how it led to where you are today?
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (00:45):
So my journey began in Ashland, Nebraska in 1968 when I was nine years old on Christmas Eve at around 2:30, in 1230 in the morning on Christmas Eve. So mom and dad awakened my brother and sister and I and put us in front of a black and white tv, and we watched the Apollo eight astronauts go behind the moon for the very first time in human history as a 9-year-old kid with an active imagination. It was a little scary for me when the black and white TV we were watching that only showed mission control was communicating with the astronauts until they went behind the rock, we know was the moon. And then everything went static. There was no communication and it was just, and I'm thinking something bad might've happened, like a volcano on the backside of the moon erupted and blew 'em out of the sky.
(01:38):
So when they came around about 20 minutes later and they communicated with mission control in Houston, I was pretty pumped. I was pretty excited, and I decided at that moment in my mind that that's what I wanted to be when I grew up. Now, my mother, Alice would've told you that I was six years old and she and I would have conversations about how I was going to one day become an astronaut. So I do not remember those conversations, but she assured me many times during my astronaut career that we had talked about that. So that's my start.
Kassi Kincaid (02:13):
Wow, that is incredible, especially for your mom to remember even earlier conversations. I feel like when you talk about careers with kids, astronaut is one of the things that kids talk about and everything, but I mean, only a handful of people ever in their lives end up making it all that way. That is such an amazing start and story. So lead us down your journey a little bit. So it took you 15 applications. What kept you going in that process?
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (02:45):
So as a college graduate, I got my first internship at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas with NASA. That was 1981, and I was kind of bored during that three month internship. The people were really nice, but they didn't know what to do with a college kid. So I was probably, and I'm pretty sure I remember I was their first intern that they'd ever had in their organization. So the second summer after I started my graduate school career at Iowa State University, I was reselected to be a summer intern at the Johnson Space Center. But this time I was smart enough to say, "Hey, could I really work in a group that did trajectory analysis or trajectory design?" And they said, yeah, sure. So they put me with a new group and I really loved them. I loved the work they actually gave me real work to do.
(03:37):
I became fast friends with a few of the people, so much so that they asked me to quit going to Iowa State and just become a NASA employee. I wasn't ready to do that because I was so close to graduating with a master's degree. I knew I needed at least a master's degree to one day become an astronaut. So I said, well, I'll take my chances. I'm going to go back to school and finish. And fortunately for me, the government hiring freezes and all that sort of stuff were still open when I graduated in May of 1983. And they immediately offered me a job, which I accepted. And I think I started in, I guess I must've gone down there in June. So I started my full career at NASA in 1983. In June, I would spend 15 years as an astronaut or as an engineer, and I would also spend those 15 years applying to become an astronaut. And in those days, you had to submit every single year you had to fill out all the paperwork. And once you did that though, you could supplement your application. So if I took a different job and I filled out the right application form, I could send that in and they'd staple it to my package. So as I went through the 15 years, apparently my package got thicker or changed a little bit, and I didn't get an interview until the 13th year.
(05:03):
And the 13th year, I believe I got an interview simply because of the job I had at the time. I was the emergency director of emergency operations at the Johnson Space Center. I'd moved up the ladder into management, and that job gave me enough visibility so as people knew who I was and the people that knew who I was, apparently liked my work ethic and what I'd contributed at NASA, so much so that I was worth an interview with the Astronaut Selection Board. I didn't get chosen in 1996, but I interviewed in the fifth group of astronaut candidates. And then a year or two years later, in 1998, I was moved up to the first interview group and was selected. So it was a 30 year career, 15 as an engineer, 15 as an astronaut. But that selection process was ongoing over those first 15 years.
Kassi Kincaid (06:02):
Wow, that's incredible. You see, you hear so many different stories of just people applying versus working at NASA. And then I love that everything led up to you getting selected for those missions. Astro Clay, I would love to just spend some time talking with you about your spacewalks, and you spent so much time, so you spent over 38 hours for sixwalks doing spacewalks, as far as creativity goes what did that look like? What were the feelings of the spacewalk actually working out in space, not inside, and how did creativity play a part in all the work that you did? Were there ever times you had to shift or something went wrong?
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (06:46):
Yeah, I think for a spacewalk creativity in both the planning and training phase and the execution phase is kind of critical. There's a team of folks on the ground who are very adept at what they do, and they plan the spacewalk so they know the objectives that they're trying to accomplish over a roughly six to six and a half hour period to that. They creatively create, creatively create. They creatively design the plan. It's like if you were going to go run errands and you were going to go to the Home Depot, the hardware store, and you were also going to go to the grocery store and buy ice cream in July, you wouldn't go to the grocery store first and buy the ice cream first because you'd have to put it somewhere and be melted by the time you got back from the hardware store. So these people actively create the plan that makes the most sense. So that takes creativity. They also are creative in the way you attack multiple EVAs in sequence. So you may have to do this task in the very first EVA, but then you may have to wait for something to happen such that you do this task in the third EVA.
(08:07):
So those guys were very creative. They were also creative in the swimming pool, the neutral buoyancy lab where we trained, and we went in our spacesuits underwater for six hours at a time because that's where you talked about how things adapt. Do we change things on the fly? Well, that's why we practice in the swimming pool because creativity may come up and Clay may say, it would make more sense to me if we did this task this way before we did that task the other way. And so those type of things allow us to iterate on our proposal because when you go to space, that's very expensive time and we don't have time to waste. And so everything we could do creatively to massage the plan and make it the best possible plan that could launch into space with then made it much easier to practice in the water and execute when we got there.
(09:02):
Now, when you get to space, the visuals that you have looking at the earth and those kinds of things, they cause your creative juices to flow as well. But you can't do much about it, right? You're still working. You take a few moments to look and to pause and to go, holy cow, look how beautiful that is. But then you go back to work, and so you somehow with a camera, you can capture some of those moments, which I tried to do, but you can also capture them in your brain. And that's harder, right? Because you have to be able to go back then and regurgitate those visuals and those memories. And then what do you do with them? Well, I wrote books. I wrote journals. I tried to capture the space experience so that I could share it with people later. Honestly, Kassi, I've never really thought of the EVAs in that creative mindset before, but it makes a lot of sense now.
Kassi Kincaid (10:00):
Oh, that's really interesting. So how did it feel compared to your training? I know that you train underwater because that's the closest thing maybe to feeling outerspace. What was it like going from training to actually you are outside in space in your space suit? Was it just pretty surreal or were you a little bit fearful?
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (10:23):
I wasn't fearful. It was surreal, but I wasn't fearful. I was pretty confident. I feel like I was born to be a space walker. I write about that in my first book, my memoir, The Ordinary Spaceman, that all I could think of hovering over the hatch before I went outside for the very first time as a rookie space walker. All I could think of was I was born to be here right now doing this. And why was that? Well, I don't know, but that's what I felt. And I was a very successful space walker. I would become an instructor space walker later in my career as an astronaut. So somebody thought I was good at it and I believed I was good at it. And so those times in space were surreal, but your focus had to be on the job. And what I would tell people quite often is that in the swimming pool, it was much more physically taxing than it was mentally taxing, although it was mental.
(11:23):
But the physicality portion in the water with resistance with gravity made it with a suit that pushed and pulled on you and chafed you and made you hurt and ache. That was way harder to me to get through a six hour practice run than in space. In space it was more of a privilege was there was pressure in that I had to execute all the tasks. I'd practiced for hours and get 'em right. Well, we did that. So that's a testament to our training process. We adapted as we needed to, just like we talked about before in the creativity world. But the spacewalk in outer space was far less physical and much more mental because you're in that environment where you're weightless, you're attached with a thin wire tether, you're 250 miles above the earth, and now success becomes the watch word. And it's no longer creativity unless you need it at the time.
(12:27):
But you only do that to be successful in the objectives that you're trying to execute. And that makes it very mentally taxing, or at least it did for me. I don't want to screw this up. I want to make sure I do it so that someone doesn't have to come back and repair my work. And we actually had an astronaut who, there's a piece of equipment on the space station, they accidentally set the brake or failed to set the brake, and that was a problem. And it was so much of a problem they had to create another spacewalk for this same astronaut to go out and fix what he messed up. Well, you can do it, and they did it and it worked. But that's costly, right? You're going outside and you're taking a risk that maybe had the incident not happened, you wouldn't have had to take that risk. And in space, it's all about risk, even though NASA and SpaceX and these companies make it seem easy. It's not easy. It's risky every time you do it. So keep that in mind, I guess.
Kassi Kincaid (13:31):
Wow. No, that is so incredible. I don't think I've ever talked with anybody that's done a spacewalk. So this is such amazing firsthand experience. You're it Astro Clay. So kind of a pivoting from the use of creativity. What are some of your favorite highlights of the impact that you have seen from your work? And I know you do so much now, you're not only have been an astronaut engineer, but now your professor teaching college students. What are some of the highlights that just mean the most to you?
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (14:03):
I love talking to people. I love sharing my story. I'm a storyteller at heart, I think. But I want those storytelling episodes to have a purpose. And so with kids at Iowa State, when I teach the freshmen in Intro to Aerospace Engineering, I'm hoping to give them real life perspectives on careers and jobs and a work environment that many of them hope to succeed in. It's one thing to work in a textbook and work on, read the text and work on problems in the back of the chapter and solve the problems and get the right answer. That's all important. But it's also critical to these young people that they actually understand the real world. Sometimes we don't. I don't know that I understood the real world when I went to college at Iowa State. I didn't really learn about that until I got into the job environment.
(14:56):
And that's where kids struggle today. Their expectations of a job environment are way different than mine and much disappointingly. So you mean I got to work 40 hours a week and you're only going to pay me that? Well, I'm worth way more than that and I'm entitled to. There's lots of stuff out there, but we have to be careful in that. We have to understand that when you're being paid to do a job, you have to do that job. And that job has expectations that you must meet in order to receive that salary and those bonuses or whatever you have in your environment. So that was, I guess I kind of got off. I'm not sure I'm answering your question, Kassi.
Kassi Kincaid (15:46):
No, this is great. This is great. You love storytelling. Is there maybe one more thing, and it can be anything in your life, the impact of you being an astronaut or engineer that you've loved?
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (15:57):
I think for me, I came from a small town of 1800 people in Ashland, Nebraska. I'm the only astronaut ever selected from that state. I hope they fix that soon. But for now, I'm it. And I take tremendous pride in talking with young people and kids and trying to convince them that they're just like me, that if they look at me and see what I accomplished, I want them to think in their mind I can do that too. Two, and I just take enormous pride in being Nebraska's astronaut and being able to talk to people, to families, to adults, to kids, and share these experiences because I want them to do what I did. I want them to believe it's possible. I want them to see what's possible. And that's what we try to do with The Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum is we're trying to put forth a product that allows kids to see what's possible. And we do that by trying to entertain them, educate them, and inspire them. And if I can be successful with that, I hope to grow an entire species or population of the Midwest that can become astronauts eventually or do great things, maybe not be an astronaut, but do great things.
Kassi Kincaid (17:17):
That is so profound. And the legacy you're leaving from not only your story, but inspiring the next generation to believe that they can be anybody that they want to be. And that's such a profound legacy. Oh my word.
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (17:31):
A lot of kids in their home environment, it's tough. Hopefully they go to school every day and they're exposed to an educational environment that's positive for them. But if they just go back to their home environment and that's all they experience every day is home and school and home and school, well, those environments are critical to shaping their ability to be successful in the future. And no matter what the education system teaches them and makes them excited about, if they go back to a home environment that depresses them, that scares them, that is difficult for them, where they worry about their next meal or whether they'll get to sleep that night, that's incredibly disheartening. And that's where we need to show them that you can succeed. This is possible for you. And so that's kind of where I'm at. I'm trying to use the museum as a platform to expose kids to what's possible. You might have the next pilot, Sully Sullenberger in Omaha, Nebraska at a school or in Lincoln, you might have the next astronaut, Clayton Anderson. You might have the next flight director. Who knows?
Kassi Kincaid (18:50):
It's so true. And I work in a lot of Title one schools and my mission with kids is based off of encouraging a love of reading. So I love the educational aspect, and I do. You never know. I work with thousands of kids and you never know. You hope that all of them go on to do great things, but you just never know. The potential in each kid is just so valuable. And I wish we had a see in the future of what they would grow up to be, because every child has just so much potential. And navigating them when they're young is so important.
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (19:30):
But I love that you're encouraging them to read because my first children's book, A is for Astronaut. I sign everyone with the phrase "Turn Pages into Dreams."
Kassi Kincaid (19:41):
I love that.
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (19:43):
So every kid that reads a book, as they turn that page, I hope they're dreaming about what's possible, what they can be. And I was a big reader as a kid. I want to read more today. I just don't. Life gets in the way, but I love to read. And the books that I read as a kid and the things that they've exposed me to, and I have favorite authors, I have favorite genres I have Reading, allows you to step beyond real life into a world of fantasy where you can be that person and you can see yourself doing that amazing thing. And for kids to be able to succeed in life, they have to be able to see themselves doing that amazing thing. What better way than with books?
Kassi Kincaid (20:32):
Oh, there is no better way. And especially all the different plots and characters in the children's books is one of the things that I love and honestly helps kids, I think creatively, start to think creatively about just things about the world and eventually what they'll be when they grow up,
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (20:48):
Grow. Absolutely.
Kassi Kincaid (20:49):
Astro Clay, this has been such an amazing time with you today. So just wrapping up, we've talked about so many different things, creativity, impact. What is one final thought you would love to leave our listeners with today?
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (21:02):
I would, well, it's kind of redundant, I think, but I would tell them that you are just like me. You need a dream. You need to persevere in the pursuit of that dream. You have to realize that you don't have to be a genius to do this. Sometimes we get caught up in the, oh, if I don't get straight A's, I'm a failure, or if I don't do this by the time I'm 21, I'm a failure. But you do not have to be a genius to do this. Now, can you get D's and F's and flunk your way through? No. But if you're average and you work hard, you can do this. And then the final thing I would tell people is given that dream and pursuing that dream, realizing you don't have to be a genius. Be proud of who you are. Be proud of where you're from. Be proud of your family and those who raised you, the community that helped you become the person that you become. You have responsibility in that world. You have choices to make and the choices you make dictate your success level in the future, and you need to make good choices. So have that dream, persevere it. Realize you don't have to be the smartest person in the room and be proud of who you are and understand that who you are is dictated by the choices you make in life.
Kassi Kincaid (22:33):
Amazing. Astro Clay, this has been such a profound time. Thank you so much for being here today day.
Astronaut Clayton Anderson (22:40):
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Kassi. And to all the folks listening to her podcast, check out astroclay.com. Check out sacmuseum.org and follow me on all the social media platforms. I think if you Google Astro Clay, you'll find pretty much everything you need.
Kassi Kincaid (22:59):
Amazing. And we'll put all those links in the notes, so be sure to check those out. Thank you so much for joining us today on today's episode of The Edge of Creativity Podcast. And be sure to follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming conversations. We'll see you next time.
