Story Musgrave Interview (page: 5 / 8) Dean of American Astronauts	Print Interview

You're racking up an impressive number of degrees. Could you recount what your degrees are in, as of May 22, 1997?

Story Musgrave: They're in mathematics and computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature, philosophy, and I'm working on two theses now, one in psychology and one in history.

As much as you've studied, you feel like there's still much to study.

Story Musgrave: There's a huge amount to study, but I think I am completing my formal education now. But for every book that I've read for a course, I've read two or three others just for the sake of doing it.

Despite all that formal education, I'm still a self-educated person. I've accomplished more in self-education than formal education, but my formal education does continue. I think I'm happy with where I am now.

With eight advanced degrees?

Story Musgrave: There's a couple more coming, but it isn't the degrees. Going to night school, as I have for the last 11 years, has been my culture. It's been my theater, it's been my opera. There's things I've missed because I've done that, but it's a choice. Everything in life is. You take what you want and you pay for it.

I've only taken things that I have a passion for, that I have a huge interest in. And after I've taken enough for interest, I see if I can fit these things into someone's program, and I usually can.

You said there's a relationship between history, psychology and space. That space is a place to study yourself and study the earth too.

Story Musgrave: I take my courses for the education itself, but since I have had the privilege of space flight, I have a responsibility to put it in perspective, to bring psychology to it, to bring history to it, to bring philosophy to it, to examine what it means. How do you express it? Why do it? How is it transforming humanity?

I've taken about 200 credit hours since 1986 -- philosophy, literature, psychology, history, sociology -- and in every single one of these courses, I have always had three spiral notebooks.

The top one is the traditional one for learning what is in this course. If I'm studying the existentialists, then I take notes so that I will know precisely, uncorrupted, what the person we're discussing believed, what they said, and the professor's remarks, and those of other students.

The second spiral notebook is: "What does this mean to Story Musgrave?" That's a separate context. The third spiral notebook is: "What does this mean to space flight?" I take notes in all three almost like a pipe organ, but the bottom one raises the question: "This concept that we're addressing in this class, how can it help me have a better experience in space? How can it help me express the experience of space travel better?" I have taken 200 credit hours in the humanities into the space flight context, and this is incredibly rich.

I'm very haunted by an image that you discussed in an interview of lying in the ocean before a space flight, and looking up at the sky. Do you literally get into the ocean?

Story Musgrave: Yes. I have an urge to immerse myself in nature before a space flight.

The ocean is an incredibly powerful part of this. It's a literal immersion to lie in the ocean, and to drink the ocean. It's what space flight is all about too. You are going off into a place where you have a different point of view. It's a different part of the universe, and you have a different perspective on it. So I always go swimming. It doesn't matter that the last one was in December. I didn't think about it being cold. You just walk in, and after a little while, it becomes just delicious. I'm there for hours, oblivious to the temperature. You can lie in it, and let the sun go down and there is the space ship with those great, powerful lights. These beams go by, and the shadow of the space ship makes these radiant beams going up into the heavens. You lie there and take in the other celestial sights, whether it's a moon or stars.

I always look for satellites going overhead. I'm doing this geometry in my head. The ocean's here, and I'm lying with toward the beach and the satellites go from west to east, and when I look to the left, there's my space ship. You look at the speed of the satellites and know that tomorrow you will be one of them. It's a form of closure in which this kind of existence, this experiential occasion, this meaning comes together in a marvelous way.

I do the same thing when I go to the launch pad. I've very often been the center-seater, the flight engineer on launch, who is the last one in. So I have an hour and 15 minutes out there all by myself to think what this is all about. I look through that space ship out into the ocean. I look for the alligators, the birds, nature, and I step back and think about human technology. I think about the amphibians, and how life came out of the ocean to the land. And we're like the amphibians, leaping off. It's an extraordinary, magical moment. It's as good as being in space itself.

I have an hour and 15 minutes just to do that. Once I have to start moving, then I'm bringing my focus down into getting in my suit and harness the right way and getting into the details of doing things right. That hour and 15 minutes is similar to the night before out on the beach, in which I can just think about what space flight is, why we do it, what it means.

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