Hi, I'm NASA Astronaut Jim Kelly. Welcome to NASA Direct.
Music.
You know, I was born in 1964 and that was right when the space program was really getting rolling.
And I was five years old when the first Apollo moon landing happened.
That was a big event in my house, as it was, I think, for everybody back at that time.
And, you know, gathered around the TV as a family, taking a look at what was happening.
My dad would take me out in the yard, you know, when men were walking on the moon
and we'd point to the moon and talk about, you know, guys walking out around the moon.
I thought, obviously, that was really cool, as a five year old. And so, you know,
I decided like a lot of kids back then that I wanted to become an astronaut and was
just fortunate along the way to pick up the things I needed to do to become one and was lucky enough to be selected.
The hardest part about being a pilot is all the studying, although I actually find that to be very exciting.
I really, really enjoy a challenge. But it's very hard when you get in the simulator day after day after day,
and you have this team that's just waiting to torture you.
Their whole job is to break things in a new way so you have to figure out a way to fix it.
And that's a very unique and interesting thing, and it's like being on stage all the time.
There's not a single thing you do as an astronaut that you don't have people looking at you
all the time and grading you and critiquing you. And, and so that can be very difficult, especially if you have bad days,
which we all do, where you go in and you didn't get enough sleep, or you're not feeling exactly right,
or you forgot something that you were supposed to remember, you know, and so you have difficult days like that.
So that's probably the hardest part of it, is there's just so much to know and so much to keep in your, in your head.
The best part of being an astronaut, obviously, is getting to fly into space. You know,
that lifelong dream of being able to leave the planet and go float around on our beautiful orbit around the Earth in the,
in the space shuttle and look down on the beautiful Earth below you. That obviously is the high point of any astronaut's career.
Well, it's interesting. The systems that we have onboard the space shuttle are about the
same or a little bit earlier of a lot of the, the airplanes that I flew.
But as you said, they're far behind some of the later airplanes I flew -- the newer model F-16s and those kind of airplanes
have a lot better systems than we have in the shuttle. The difference is, in order of magnitude, more of them.
There are so many more systems and more complex interactions between those systems on the space shuttle.
It's like learning five F-15s to fly all at the same time. So while an F-15 may have more
up-to-date systems and it may be a little bit harder to learn those individual systems, there's just so much more
packaged together on the space shuttle that it's, it's the density of knowledge you have to know and the inter-relation
between all those things that really makes it much more difficult than, than learning the systems on an airplane.
Hands down, the coolest part about being an astronaut is flying in space.
Getting the opportunity to leave the planet, go up and be in zero G for two weeks is fantastic.
I'm, I'm really looking forward, I don't know whether it will be me or, or who it will be,
but really looking forward to the folks that get to be the next ones to go put their footprints on the moon and then on to Mars.
And so I just think, you know, the whole idea behind this job, from a personal perspective, is,
is getting out there and doing the thing that you wanted to do and trained to do for most of your life,
to go out there and, and leave this planet and go out and explore.
3,2,1 and liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery, beginning America's new journey to the moon, Mars, and beyond.
And the Shuttle has cleared the tower.