Face-to-Face With Shannon Lucid

We had the chance to talk to Shannon Lucid face-to-face a few weeks ago in Houston, TX. She had a lot of really good things to say about her experience, and a few things to say about how it could be improved. Those things seemed to get picked up with John Blaha, for example, who is now up on the Mir Space Station. Some of the things that Shannon talked about have been corrected or improved. So, as each crew member goes up there, and the previous one comes down and passes on their experiences, we keep refining the program. Hopefully, we will then have a good template for the International Space Station.

The meeting with Shannon was outstanding because she's so open and easy to talk to. I tend to get a little intimidated talking to any crew member because I don't want to be a "Golly, gee whiz!" They're just like us. Shannon just makes you feel comfortable just in the way she come across.

She is perfect for the role because I think she retains a lot of her experiences in very fine detail. She is more than willing to discuss them with everybody, and make sure that her experiences get passed on. John Blaha's should be the same the way, having been a shuttle commander. They're able to focus, and really be aware of everything going on around them. I think Shannon also adds the everyday person's outlook, even though she is very uncommon and very extraordinary, and she communicates that back, whereas John might communicate more from a technical, pilot, shuttle commander point of view. Shannon has a way to relate to us as common people.

Common Sense and Willingness

One of Shannon's anecdotes I really liked was that she was talking a lot about the training program she received. She said the best training she ever received for being on Mir was when she and one of her sons tried to fix the electrical system of their truck one day. They really didn't know much about it, and they were just kind of ad-libbing as they went through. But eventually, on their own devices, they made it work. She said, that just having the common sense and the willingness to jump in and do it was what they relied upon on Mir.

On Shuttle, she said that any time you had a problem, you called to the ground, and a ground crew of about 50 to 100 people, who had all the documents at their fingertips, would run around and get an answer back, telling her how to fix the problems and what to do. The communications with the ground is high enough that the astronauts don't have to wait eight to twelve hours until they talk to the ground again, like they do on Mir. The ComPass, or the opportunities to have a live conversation with the ground is limited to just a few times a day, for maybe 30 minutes to an hour. So, they're forced to get down just the key information. There's not a lot of opportunity for a long interaction.

If a problem is reported, it will be several hours before an answer is received. So Shannon said they just learned to do what they could to fix it on their own, and just try to be self-sustaining, as much as possible.

Working With Quail Eggs and Figuring Things Out

Basically, what we were doing was talking to her about our fundamental biology experiments. She really enjoyed working with the quail eggs. They seemed to get a real lift out of working with living things. She was up there over the course of the summer when we started growing the wheat, and they took a lot of pride in being successful in starting life. She said that the cosmonauts that she worked with most of the time, Iriana Frenko and Yuri Yusachev, left her in August. She was still up there several weeks afterward. One of their parting words was, "Make sure that you keep the plants alive."

All three of them are very proud of having gotten the experiment started because they basically had no training for that experiment. It was one of those things where circumstances dictated that we had to start the experiment at that point in the summer in early August. The crew that had originally been trained for the mission were John Blaha and his original cosmonaut pair, but all of their missions slipped. Because all of the missions had slipped, we had to get the plants started.

So I think it was their ability to just figure things out on their own and be self-sustaining. They were successful in getting the greenhouse assembled and getting the seeds planted. The scientists on the ground have been extremely happy with the growth of the plants.

Developing A Salad Machine

There's been an effort at Ames Research Center to develop a "salad machine" that would be a system for growing vegetables on the Space Station for consumption. So we asked her, "How would you feel if we had a system like that?" She was really excited about it. She relayed the story about how the Russians use the Progress Vehicle, which is an unmanned canister that they send up several times each year to keep the Mir supplied with food, water, fuel, batteries, and things like that. She said the biggest kick they got out of one of their Progress missions was when they sent up a load of fresh tomatoes, and the crew was eating tomatoes for many days. So she was really excited about the idea that someday the crew members would be able to grow and eat fresh vegetables.