49. Beyond Gravity

Talking with Jim Wetherbee - an absolute delight!

[00:00:01] Jim: You know, the greatest fear an astronaut has is not one of dying. It's a fear of making a mistake.

Young Jim

[00:00:50] Jim:  I don't remember much before I was 10 years old. But suddenly when I was 10, I had this... very clear thought that I would be an astronaut.

You know, when you're a young kid at 10 years old, it's not, "I think I want to be an astronaut " or, "That's what I aspire to do". But it kind of guided everything I did. I went to school and I studied aerospace engineering only because that was the thing that interested me.

[00:01:17] Narrative: This is Jim Wetherbee, one of the most distinguished figures in the history of the American Space Shuttle program. Jim flew on six space shuttle missions in total. He commanded five of these missions, the only American to do so. It seems that Jim was always destined to be an astronaut.

Navy Pilot

[00:01:38] Jim:  The only thing I was ever really interested in was math and science and space. I never read science fiction books when I was a kid.

I read real science books and... I used to ask for mathematics books for Christmas, I was one of those weird kids.

When it was time to graduate college, I didn't want to get a real job. So I decided to join the US Navy and learn how to fly. Had a wonderful... two cruises in the Mediterranean.

[00:02:05] Narrative: After three years flying based on the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy, including 125 night landings on the carrier, Jim was looking for the next challenge.  

Navy Test Pilot

[00:02:18] Jim: When my first tour was up, I looked around and I said, "Well, maybe I'll apply to the U. S. Naval Test Pilot School and learn how to test airplanes".

That seemed like it would be a lot of fun, and certainly it was. We had the first seven F-18s off the assembly line.

A lot of problems with the airplane, but that's what makes it fun being a test pilot, is finding the problems so we could iron them out before issuing the airplane to the fleet pilots.

[00:02:49] Narrative: Another three-year cycle passed and again, Jim was ready to move on.

Joining NASA

[00:02:55] Jim: I realized I had enough experience... to apply to NASA, fully expecting I would not be selected, but I applied anyway, and feel very fortunate that I was selected to join NASA in 1984.

[00:03:09] Steve W: When you joined NASA from the Navy, you remain in the Navy, is that right?

[00:03:14] Jim: As long as I was on flight status eligible for space flight, I chose to remain in the U.S. Navy as an active duty military pilot.

You don't make as much money, but I felt that the Navy was the organization that gave me the opportunity and I was going to honour them by having my rank published every time I flew in space.

I wanted to, kind of, advertise the fact that I was a U.S. Naval aviator.

[00:03:43] Narrator: And there it was right there; honour, duty, gratitude, integrity before anything else.

Jim was ambitious and always hungry for the next challenge. But it was never a one-man crusade for success, just the desire to constantly present an ever-improving best version of himself, and to leave others to decide how that could be used.

What Jim didn't know at the time he joined NASA in 1984,. is that it would be a further five years before his first flight into space.

The world had watched in horror in January 1986, as the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after lift-off, with all seven crew losing their lives.

 It was the first space shuttle launch Jim had seen in person. But, as they say, the show must go on.

Jim Wetherbee, NASA

First space flight confirmed

[00:04:38] Jim:  So we were delayed being assigned to a mission until about 1989. I just found all of the textbooks and the manuals and... I signed up for every simulator I could. And I just figured if I became the best possible astronaut, they would have to assign me.

I don't think I would have been ready had we not had the accident. You know, to be assigned only two years after joining the organization would have been too quick.

But this ended up being about five or six years after I joined NASA and I had so many hours in the simulator and so much time studying the manuals and the books and talking to experts and learning how the system was designed that I felt very prepared when I finally did receive the flight assignment.

[00:05:25] Steve W: And what was the assignment?

First Mission Assignement

[00:05:28] Jim: There was a satellite called "LDEF", Long Duration Exposure Facility, and it had been launched by the space shuttle years earlier.

And after the accident, the Challenger accident, it was stranded in space and it was in a decaying orbit, and it was predicted to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere in March of 1990, and we were supposed to go up and retrieve the satellite and bring it back down to the Earth.

So when we finally did launch in January, the satellite was about two and a half months from its demise, where it would have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.

The point of that story is it was in a very low orbit. Normally we fly up at 250 miles above the surface.

For this mission, we were down at 90 miles above the surface of the Earth, so really zippin fast, right over the skim and the tops of the atmosphere to pick up this satellite,  so it was a pretty exciting mission for us.

Space shuttle Columbia

[00:06:28] Steve W: You were assigned the Columbia orbiter for this first mission. Did you have a soft spot for Columbia as your first, or were these just machines which did the job for you?

[00:06:43] Jim: Well, in a sense, they are machines that do the job. But each one has a little bit of a personality.

Columbia was the oldest, and so I kind of liked that. It had a lot of experience, a lot of miles on it. It looked old, you know, you could see the charred surface of the skin on the outside, the tiles were all burnt and such.

 I was comfortable flying on a vehicle that was proven and it had flown many times in space before. It was the heaviest of the four vehicles we had at the time.

We had not built Endeavour yet. So it had a lot of extra equipment on board, instrumentation... systems...

Endeavour that I flew much later was new and crisp and some of the switches were so new that they would stick a little bit when you tried to move them. You did have to be careful.

But all four of them that I flew were just superb flying machines designed by the best engineers that America has to offer.

Columbia being ‘shuttled’ back to Kennedy Space Center on modified Boeing 747 (SCA), 1982.

[00:07:41] Steve W: As the oldest of the orbiters which made it into space, presumably Columbia had a few quirks about her?

[00:07:48] Jim: Yeah... we didn't have air filters in, so you'd see dust particles floating around or... long pieces of hair from the female astronauts floating around.

 And I would grab it and stick it on the end of a doubled-over piece of duct tape on the wall. And at the end of the day, you'd have a giant hairball that you would dispose of.

Endeavour, during re-entry, it would creak a lot and groan. It was really kind of eerie sounding like an old Navy ship, even though it was the newest member of the fleet.

I found out later it was just the hydraulic system that was cranking up and, you know, moving the actuators to control the flight surfaces.

But it really did sound like it was coming apart during re-entry. That was kind of interesting.

[00:08:39] Narrator: You might notice Jim uses adjectives like 'interesting', where I might choose something more like 'existentially terrifying'. That's just the mindset of an astronaut.

 Although Jim's already been training for over four years, there's another 12 months of mission-specific training to go through.

Training

[00:09:00] Jim:  It's pretty intense. You spend more time with the flight crew members than you do with your own families. And it can get up to 80 or more hours per week.

But don't feel sorry for me. It doesn't feel like work. It feels like a lot of fun. You're in the simulator.

 The goal is to make the simulations so much harder than the real flight that it's a lot easier when you get up on orbit.

[00:09:25] Steve W: But of course, it's one thing to become super proficient on a simulator; in the back of your mind, you know, you're quite safe... you can always have another go...

[00:09:36] Jim: I could probably teach most humans to jump in the simulator and do a docking to a space vehicle.

But, the trick is the mental aspect of it. You know, can you perform under pressure and what happens if the computer fails? Or what if you start having a fire or the jet starts firing uncontrollably and you're out of control?

Will you know what to do and take the appropriate action to save yourself and the crew and the vehicle?

That's the fun part about it is the mental aspect, not necessarily the hand-eye coordination, though you do have to have both, I think.

8th January 1990 - The night before the first flight

[00:10:13] Steve W: So you eventually reached the 8th of January 1990, which you'll remember was the night before your first flight. What's going through your mind that evening?

[00:10:26] Jim: You know, the greatest fear an astronaut has is not one of dying. It's a fear of making a mistake.

So the night before my head hit the pillow, before my first launch attempt, I suddenly realized for the first time in my long career, you know, 14 years in the military, six at NASA, I've just now run out of time to get any smarter and it's too late to quit.

Well, this is a pretty dangerous situation I'm about to do. You know, how am I going to get to sleep?

So my first thought was, "Well, this is the only thing I've ever wanted to do since I was 10 years old". Helpful, but insufficient, because I could still die tomorrow and that's not what I wanted to do since I was 10 years old.

So I had to think a little more deeply, and it occurred to me after about 20 minutes of thinking, when I climb on this vehicle, if bad things start happening, you know, if the laws of physics combine or conspire with the evil gods of death and destruction and the vehicle starts coming apart, I'm going to spend my last seconds trying to save, in priority order, the crew, the vehicle, and the mission.

 And that helped me. Because essentially I'm taking myself out of the equation.

Doesn't matter what happens to me. If I can save the crew, I'll die happy. If I can save the vehicle, better still. And obviously if we can complete the mission, best of all.

Humans achieve greatness when we think of other humans.

Flight day - 9th January 1990

[00:12:16] Narrator: So, Jim managed to get some sort of reasonable sleep, which is just as well because at around 3:30 a.m., he was woken - on schedule, of course.

[00:12:28] Jim: And we go through a series of programmed timed events that are... to the second every one of them; you know, so you put your long underwear on and walk down to the briefing room where you understand what the systems status is of the vehicle.

We get a space flight weather briefing... where they talk about radiation from the sun and there were no storms on the cosmic horizon that day.

There's a traditional breakfast where they... have the members of the media come in for three minutes. It's very timed event, you know, and you put on your best smile, but the whole time I'm thinking about not making any mistakes.

Jim Wetherbee and crew ‘enjoy’ breakfast, 9 January, 1990.

You try to stay focused on the present. And you don't worry about the future. You don't worry about four hours from now, "I'm going to be sitting on a bomb". I'm going to do right now what is required to make sure I don't make a mistake.

[00:13:26] Steve W: And then one of the classic images that comes to mind is seeing astronauts being helped into their space suit shortly before launch?

[00:13:34] Jim:  Yeah, you really have to be careful and watch the suit technicians that are helping us. 'Cause you can see, you can sense that they are very nervous. And so I double-checked everything that they were checking to make sure we didn't make any mistakes. You put the suit on, and then it's time to egress the... crew quarters and get on the bus to be driven to the launch pad.

[00:13:57] Steve W: Can you remember much about that bus trip?

Bus trip to launch pad

[00:14:00] Jim: Oh yeah, I remember all of it. It takes about 20 minutes. I tended to just stay in the moment, not worry about anything in the future.

And you do the one last astronaut prayer, which is very short. And it's essentially, "Dear God, don't let me mess this up".

... when you make that final turn and you suddenly see the vehicle at the end of a long road to the launch pad, it's pretty sobering.

 Several of my missions were at night and you could see the vehicle bathed in 20 million candle power xenon lamps under a full moon.

 And again, you really try to stay in the moment. You don't think too far into the future.

Columbia awaits first ever space shuttle launch, STS-1, 1981

When you get off the bus... my only two thoughts were - make sure my zipper is closed because we open the zipper for extra cooling, and my other thought was don't trip getting out of the stairs.

[00:15:06] Steve W: But standing in front of the launch pad looking up at 180 feet of rocket must have jolted you just for a moment from your mission focus?

[00:15:17] Jim: Yeah. When I looked up in the vehicle, it was the only non-technical thought I had in this whole evolution.

, I'd say, "Okay, Columbia. It's you and me now. You take care of me, and I'll take care of you".

And then you take a deep breath, and you go right back into that mental trance of doing the technical things and thinking about doing the job as best you can.

Mindset

[00:15:42] Steve W: And despite this intensity of only thinking moments ahead, of concentrating on the job at hand, fear must still be lurking in there somewhere...

[00:15:54] Jim: Yeah, there is fear. But if you're doing it right, it's repressed way to the back of your brain and you just stay in the moment. We call it, "Be here now".

And as you're walking across the gantry the first time - I would say it's exhilarating it's not exciting, it's exhilarating - your senses are so heightened. You see everything, hear everything, feel everything, you remember everything.

And I looked to my left and there was a single word in two-inch high block letters printed on the side of the solid rocket booster. And the word said, "LOADED".

I just looked at that and I said, "Yeah, this is not a simulator. This is the real deal. School's out. It's time to go to work... focus".

 And I got into the white room, where the technicians help us put the harness on just before we ingress the vehicle, and the technician tried to put my harness on upside down and, again, I could sense that other people are more nervous than we are.

And we put it on correctly. And then I ingress the vehicle. It's about two and a half hours of pre-flight checklist that you do once you're strapped in...

...but the closer you get to launch, the more in the present you become and, two minutes before liftoff when you've completed everything and you're just sitting there waiting, and now the temporal horizon is only 10 seconds into the future, if it's a minute and a half from launch, you're still a long way from launch.

You're only focused on right now.

Countdown to zero - and take off

[00:17:37] Steve W: Okay. Now you're not a minute and a half from lift-off, you're at lift-off. This is really going to happen. That moment that the 10-year-old boy dreamed about 27 years earlier is about to happen. I'm actually welling up thinking about it...

[00:18:11] Jim: By the time the countdown clock gets to zero, I want to tell you there's no difference between two seconds before lift-off and two seconds after lift-off, with the exception of physiologically - there's seven million pounds of explosive thrust pushing you up - but  the mental aspect is identical.

You're in the moment, you're focusing on what you need to do, and you do the job. You see everything, hear everything, feel everything. You're sensing every gauge and every dial that's moving.

[00:18:49] Steve W: And aside from the mental aspect, tell me how it feels to have that seven million pounds of thrust coming from underneath you.

[00:18:58] Jim: It is unbelievable how hard it's pushing. If you've seen a launch, even in person, it looks like the vehicle is climbing very slowly.

I'll tell you, sitting in the vehicle, there is nothing slow about it. In your peripheral vision, you can see the tower, and it just disappears. You are just gone instantly and being pushed into your seat with the force of two times gravity.

 Later on, it builds up to three times the force of gravity, but it is really pushing hard, so hard that it pushes down on your chest and it's hard to breathe.

 The trick is, you have to inflate your lungs, and then, kind of, use short panting breaths using the diaphragm the whole way up.

Crew of space shuttle Columbia - STS 32: front left to right, are Daniel C. Brandenstein, commander; and James D. Wetherbee, pilot. rear left to right, Marsha S. Ivins, G. David Low, and Bonnie J. Dunbar.

Because if you ever feel like you deflate your lungs, you won't be able to get them reinflated. It feels like a bear sitting on your chest.

 3Gs may not sound like a lot, but... so I weighed at the time 190 pounds, plus an 85 pound suit is somewhere around 270 times 3 is... it's half a ton, it's... what is that, over 800 pounds.

[00:20:09] Steve W: And in terms of vibration and noise, try and quantify that for me. I mean, does it feel like the shuttle's going to shake apart?

[00:20:18] Jim: Well, it... does feel that way. Other astronauts have commented that it seems like you're on a... on a rough train ride, and I have to agree with that. It's a whole lot of vibration.

It does feel like the vehicle's gonna come apart, but it doesn't . You know, if it's done right, it's all going in a straight line with everything lined up and all the masses and the forces are all in the proper direction so the vehicle doesn't rip itself apart, thankfully.

[00:20:47] Steve W: I guess the second stage is smoother?  

[00:20:52] Jim: Second stage, once the solids come off, is a little more smooth. It's like electric glide, but it is really pushing hard. So hard, that I was surprised we weren't halfway to Mars.

And... it's just going and going and going and pushing and pushing. It's probably the longest straight-line acceleration a human can endure and stay alive at the other end.

It's unbelievable how much force is pushing.

Going to zero gravity

[00:21:20] Steve W: How long does it take to get from lift-off to zero gravity?

[00:21:24] Jim: So it only takes 8 minutes and 23 seconds to go from a standing start to 25,000 feet per second, or 17,500 miles an hour.

And when you run out of fuel, the engine throttles back and then suddenly cuts off. You are instantly weightless.  It's pretty amazing.

 The first two things I saw that floated up in front of me were; a piece of a cookie, presumably from the previous flight crew in space, or maybe the maintenance folks down on the ground, and a bolt.

My first thought when I saw this bolt was, "Man, I hope that isn't the bolt that holds this whole vehicle together".

First sight of the moon

[00:22:21] Steve W: Now, at this point you wouldn't be human if you didn't take a quick look outside the window. So tell me what the moon looked like and... is it true you can't see stars in space?

[00:22:37] Jim: Yeah, so, the moon was just incredible to me. It looked so bright and so big and so clear because you're seeing it outside the atmosphere and it's illuminated by the sun, of course, viewed against the blackness of space.

 On the daytime side of the Earth, the sunlight is too brilliant, too bright, and your eyes do not have the ability to adjust down and close the iris enough to be able to see the very faint stars.

On the night-time side of the Earth is pretty amazing when the sun goes down, dips behind the Earth. Now you're suddenly confronted with the beauty and grandeur of this universe. It's unbelievable how many stars you can see.

Tens of thousands of stars with the naked eye, all different colors, mostly white. Some yellowish, some reddish, some brownish, some bluish. And they don't twinkle. They're just solid points of light.

Domestic tasks

[00:23:47] Steve W: So you're now in space, it's your first experience of weightlessness, what's the first thing you notice?

[00:23:54] Jim:  The first thing that happens when you get up under the absence of gravity is you have a huge fluid shift.

All the fluids, the blood, pools up towards your head. It feels like you're hanging upside down on monkey bars and all the blood is pooling to your head. Your body doesn't like this and it tries to reduce the fluid pressure on your brain.

Jim Wetherbee weightless

So the automatic system starts to shunt the fluid overboard out the kidneys and the bladder and so you spend, you know, the first six hours urinating and that's why we wear diapers in the suit because you can't take the suit off to go to the bathroom.

 Within probably six hours, you've lost fully 25 percent of the blood plasma volume in your body. When you look at astronauts, some of them, their faces are kind of puffy, but then their legs will look like bird legs, you know, stick legs.

That would be okay if you were gonna stay in space forever. But when you have to come back and re-enter the Earth's gravity... you've gotta replenish that fluid that you've lost, and so we do a lot of fluid loading or drinking.

[00:24:58] Steve W: And once you have your fluids under control, then there's eating to consider?

[00:25:04] Jim: Eating the first couple of days: I didn't have much of an appetite because you're not really using any energy. It's weightless. And so everything is so effortless and you're not using your muscles.

 When my appetite did return after about three days, I chose to eat things that were easy to cook and prepare and easy to clean up after...

...you know, you can't have, for example, a spoonful of peas because they'll float everywhere, but you can have thick, chicken stew or something in a foil package - it would stick to the spoon.

You know, I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but you can't take bread in space because It produces too many crumbs which you aspirate, or it gets in your eyes. And so we took tortillas, and we would have peanut butter and jelly tortillas in space.

 I would always eat at least one meal on the ceiling just to say I did it, to be able to tell my kids, it's great stuff.

Jim Wetherbee on the ceiling

[00:26:02] Narrator: Mary Poppins, eat your heart out. Now, aside from a multitude of day-to-day tasks that Jim had to become familiar with on this his first time in space, there was also the small matter of completing the main mission for the trip.

Capturing a satellite

[00:26:19] Jim: We were trying to recover a satellite. It's about the size of a small school bus, or it had the mass of about 20, 000 pounds of mass. Of course, in space, it's weightless, but it still has the mass.

Typically when we rendezvous on a satellite or a space station, we come up from below.

 If you're chasing a satellite, you're trying to catch up to it, you don't thrust towards the satellite because as you accelerate, it puts you in a higher orbit and then you slow down and you never catch up to it.

So you have to come in at a lower orbit, which is necessarily faster. And then as you climb, you time it so that you approach the satellite from below.

We couldn't do that on this mission because the atmosphere was right below us. So we had to come in from above and rendezvous down.

On a later mission, Jim Wetherbee visits the International Space Station

And so my commander, Dan Brandestein, is doing the flying task. He's controlling the vehicle manually. And while he was doing that, I was controlling all the other systems, making sure we knew what to do if we had a computer failure or an electrical failure or a jet failure.

[00:27:28] Steve W: And of course the speed differentials are astounding, aren't they?

[00:27:32] Jim: We're traveling at 17, 000 miles an hour and he has a closure rate of a 10th of a foot per second with plus or minus three thousandths of a foot per second because you don't want to smash into the satellite.

So he has to concentrate on that satellite, and meanwhile, the Earth is just blowing by. He did a great job at flying up next to the satellite. And then Bonnie Dunbar grabbed it with the mechanical arm and then Marsha Ivins took pictures of it as Bonnie maneuvered the satellite around.

We had to take pictures of each of the different sides of it before we put it in the payload bay. So we had the satellite in our payload bay.  And we did bring it back down to the Earth.

Re-entry

[00:28:19] Narrator: But of course, to get the satellite back down to Earth, everything had to come back down to Earth. It was time to head home. But that meant it was time for the most dangerous part of the mission - re-entry.

[00:28:36] Jim: There's a lot of miracles that have to happen properly to come in at 25,000 feet per second, screaming through the atmosphere.

If you remember on launch, all that fire coming out of the vehicle is kinetic energy going into the vehicle. You have to take that same energy out if you want to land on a runway.

And it's that same amount of fire as you're coming through the atmosphere that you're screaming through and you see this 25-mile long trailing plume of fire behind the vehicle.

 But, as we're getting ready for the deorbit burn, it turned out we had bad weather at the Edwards Air Force Base in California and at the Kennedy Space Center.

So we had to wave off an extra day, take our suits off, go to sleep, come up the next morning, or later that afternoon.

When we finally had good weather, we put the suits on again, and we're getting ready to do the deorbit burn, and an hour before this critical operation, one of the computers fails.

[00:29:35] Narrator: That computer failure, and the process of reprogramming the other three computers, meant that STS 32 ran out of time to carry out the deorbit burn.

 The deorbit burn is the process which initiates the space shuttle's return to earth, transitioning from orbital flight into atmospheric re-entry.

 The commander executes the deorbit burn by precisely firing engines at the right moment to reduce the shuttle speed to allow it to fall back to Earth.

Well, on the next orbit that's exactly what commander Dan Brandenstein executed. They were ready for re-entry.

[00:30:24] Jim: Re-entering - just an incredible feeling again, all the vibration and the G-forces. Now, you've weighed zero pounds for the last 11 days. And suddenly you weigh 500 pounds as you're slamming through the atmosphere. So a quarter of a ton and you've just been zero.

So it's a huge physiological stress on the system. The heart is pumping faster, trying to get the blood up to your brain to retain consciousness.

The spaceflight business is not the business for old people or... weak. I mean, you really have to be in good shape physically.

Flying home

[00:31:04] Steve W: Yeah. Now, of course, you don't have an engine at this point do you?

[00:31:09] Jim: So, it's a thing where you cannot make a mistake and there's no second chances. You don't have the engines to go around.

It's also a hundred ton vehicle. Huge amounts of drag on the vehicle. Very low lift to drag ratio of about 4 to 1. Some people say when you're coming down on the glide slope, it's analogous to a brick. Others say it's like a piano, a flying piano.

[00:31:36] Narrator: It was 1:30 a.m. as the space shuttle Columbia approached Edwards Air Force Base Los Angeles. It would be only the third night-time space shuttle landing in the program's history.

[00:31:56] Jim: Dan tapped me on the shoulder as we were approaching California, he said, "Make sure you look out the window to at least see what it looks like so you can tell people".

All Southern California lit up. It was a beautiful clear night, you could see for hundreds of miles, just a spectacular view.

[00:32:13] Narrator: Despite at one stage looking like they might overshoot the runway through excess speed as they came round for the final spiral, commander Dan Brandenstein guided Columbia successfully to a stop at exactly 1:35 a.m. on the 20th of January 1990.

[00:32:41] Jim: I learned a lot from him as a commander during the whole mission and then, of course, during the landing, watching him maintain his composure and land that hundred-ton vehicle and grease it in on a cold winter's night in Edwards Air Force Base, California.

Jim Wetherbee lands Atlantis (STS-86) in a later mission, 1997.

Back on Earth

[00:32:57] Narrator: Once returned, there's a process of rehabilitation and reconditioning to work through - largely reacquainting the astronauts with gravity.

 They have to refind their balance having been weightless for two weeks. Even turning a corner can be tricky. Holding a glass of water can be hazardous because you might not hold it tight enough. Fainting is common as you rehydrate over a number of days.

 But there's one more, very important reacquaintance that Jim had to contend with at this time. His wife.

[00:33:33] Jim: Traditionally we give a landing party as a thank you to the flight controllers and the instructors and the support personnel and the crew members. And so we typically have a party at the commander's house and we had a pizza party after my fourth mission.

  And my wife looked at me after the last guest left the party, she looked at me and said, "Great flight, big boy. Now take out the garbage".  And so she had a way of bringing me back to Earth pretty quickly and making sure my head didn't get too full of itself.

[00:34:18] Narrator: STS 32 would be Jim Wetherbee's only space shuttle flight not as commander. In fact, he would become the only astronaut in history to command five space shuttle missions. He also landed the space shuttle five times - again a record.

Jim retired from NASA in 2005 after 20 years service. He then spent time as a safety auditor with British petroleum and has consulted with corporate leaders responsible for hazardous environments for the last 20 years.

For Jim, there's a secret source for his 50 years of achievement...

Controlliong Risk in a Dangerous World

[00:34:58] Jim:  I learned after 20 years at NASA that it's all the same kind of thing. You're trying to control the risk and accomplish a mission. But we do the same thing down here on the earth.

When I joined the oil and gas industry, I recognized... same thing. If you don't do it right, people will die.

[00:35:27] Narrator: In fact, Jim spelled out how to control risk in his 2017 book, "Controlling Risk in a Dangerous World".

[00:35:36] Jim: You can have not only following rules, policies and procedures, but you can use the techniques of operating excellence that I learned from the original Mercury 7 astronauts and all the astronauts who went before me. They developed a suite of techniques of operating excellence that we would use.

[00:35:55] Steve W: There's a lot of detail for businesses on how to operate safely, but there are also lessons in how we can all take steps to control our own risks in life. So, how to drive a car safely, or things to think about if you're staying in a hotel, for instance...

[00:36:11] Jim:  You know, the things I think about when I'm driving a car; don't ever put my car in a place where somebody else can possibly hit it. And I also recognize intersections are very dangerous.

You also asked about hotels. You know, everybody thinks about when you go into a hotel, first thing you want to know is where are the exits, but I'll give you three other ones that are interesting to think about:

Don't ever open the door unless you look through the peephole and see who it is on the other side. I have a friend who was the victim of an armed robbery when he opened the hotel door... didn't know who was on the other side.

If you hear an evacuation alarm, don't just assume that it's a false alarm and stay in a room. Get out of the hotel. I've been in a hotel where there was a kitchen fire right below my room. And if I had not left, I could have been in severe trouble.

And the other one is, yeah, of course you know where the exits are, but think about, "How am I gonna crawl to the exit, because sometimes the smoke is not visible".

The toxic fumes will be invisible and they'll be in the upper part since they're lighter than normal air. And if you're walking down the hallway in a vertical position, you might pass out from the toxic fumes.

So these techniques, I think, can help everybody down here on the planet.

Rules & Procedures v Techniques

[00:37:41] Steve W: The biggest lesson I took from the book wasn't so much about the specific situations of cars and hotels, but a broader one: that yes, it's great to have rules and procedures. These are things that are recorded as a result of previous mishaps or disasters.

That's fine, but you also need to know how to deal with situations that don't appear in a rule book, because the mishaps or disasters haven't yet happened in a particular situation.

How many times have I seen speed limits on a road being reduced after a child is killed. Or more dramatically, aircraft cockpit doors were reinforced and mandated to be locked during flight after 9/11.

 What you're saying is that rather than just relying on rules or procedures, if we also learn techniques, which apply to all future types of mishap or disaster, they might not happen so often.

[00:38:40] Jim: Exactly. That's a great way to say it. Yeah, you have to follow the rules, but if you have the techniques, now you have a winning combination of how am I gonna survive when the unexpected happens?

And it will happen.  Always, something unexpected will happen, so you better be prepared, to make the right decision.

[00:39:07] Narrator: Jim is acutely aware that the laws of physics didn't combine or conspire with the evil gods of death and destruction, and he was safely delivered back to earth on six occasions. Others were not so lucky.

It's a poignant detail that the first space shuttle disaster in 1986, Challenger, occurred just after Jim had joined NASA, and that is sixth and last space shuttle flight was the one that preceded the second and final space shuttle disaster, Columbia, in 2003.

Columbia tragedy 2003

[00:39:41] Jim: I was the last commander of the flight immediately before the Columbia tragedy. So I was the off-going commander.

We were in a process of technical debriefings when the Columbia Mission STS 107 launched into space with Rick Husband and his crew... and they tragically perished over East Texas.

Because I was so senior in the organization, I was responsible... I was assigned the job of being the search director responsible for finding the human remains of the Columbia crew up over 10,000 square miles of East Texas landscape.

And the two things that I remember about that most vividly, probably more importantly than the missions I flew, were the thousands of people who helped us in that recovery effort to search for, find, and recover the human remains of the Columbia crew with dignity, honour and reverence.

 And the other thing I think about all the time is Rick Husband and the crew. They were the nicest crew. He was the nicest commander, just wonderful people.

And someday if I have the opportunity to meet them up in heaven, I hope to be able to go to them and say we did the best we could in recovering the human remains.  

Crew of the stricken Columbia STS-107, 2003: From the left (bottom row), Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; Rick D. Husband, mission commander; Laurel B. Clark, mission specialist; Ilan Ramon, payload specialist. From the left (top row), David M. Brown, mission specialist; William C. McCool, pilot; and Michael P. Anderson, payload commander.

Reflections

[00:40:57] Narrator: To listen to details of Jim's career and extra-terrestrial activities was fascinating. But for all his achievements, perhaps I was most struck with his humility and willingness to share. In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan declares, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven". I think Jim might disagree. As he said himself, "Humans achieve greatness when we think of other humans".

[00:41:43] Jim:  I think back on all the incredible things that you can see of this universe and how beautiful it is.  

 I can look outside my window right here in Oregon and see the beautiful landscape and the mountain ranges. I mean, this place is incredible.

 I feel incredibly privileged to be able to do the only thing I've ever wanted to do since I was 10 years old.

 I just encourage people to enjoy life, enjoy the beauty around us.   You don't have to go into space to recognize this place is a phenomenal universe that we are so privileged to be living in.

Attributions

- Jim Wetherbee: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Columbia being ‘shuttled’ back to Kennedy Space Center on modified Boeing 747 (SCA), 1982: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Jim Wetherbee and crew ‘enjoy’ breakfast, 9 January, 1990: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Columbia awaits first ever space shuttle launch, STS-1, 1981: NASA/KSC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Crew of space shuttle Columbia - STS 32: front left to right, are Daniel C. Brandenstein, commander; and James D. Wetherbee, pilot. rear left to right, Marsha S. Ivins, G. David Low, and Bonnie J. Dunbar, 1990: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Jim Wetherbee weightless: National Archives at College Park - Still Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Jim Wetherbee on the ceiling: National Archives at College Park - Still Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Jim Wetherbee visits the International Space Station: National Archives at College Park - Still Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Jim Wetherbee lands Atlantis, STS-86, 1997: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Crew of the stricken Columbia STS-107, 2003: From the left (bottom row), Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; Rick D. Husband, mission commander; Laurel B. Clark, mission specialist; Ilan Ramon, payload specialist. From the left (top row), David M. Brown, mission specialist; William C. McCool, pilot; and Michael P. Anderson, payload commander: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons