Former Astronaut Visits USU

By: Di Lewis in The Utah Statesman

Issue date: 10/11/06 Section: Campus News

 

A few USU students got a short glimpse of what the life of an astronaut and NASA employee would be like when USU alumna Mary Cleave came to campus on Friday.

 

Cleave is a former astronaut who has flown two space shuttle missions and logged more than 260 hours in space.

 

She came to USU as the keynote speaker for the Four Corners Regional Meeting of the American Physical Society. However, before her speech at the Friday night banquet, Cleave took a couple of hours to talk with a group of more than 50 USU students and faculty. She fielded questions from the crowd on topics ranging from what her experience in space was like to the research differences between engineers and other scientists.

 

“It’s hard to see other planets because there are other lights that show. If you want to see things, you have to put yourself in a bag and Velcro it to the window,” she said. “Looking at the earth was great. Looking down with all the guys, they were all waxing poetic about how you can’t see the differences from up here, everyone’s the same. And I looked down and thought, ‘Look there’s the demarcation line between those two African countries.’ One has a lousy land management policy and one has a good one, and you could just see the political line between the two.”

 

There were fires near the Nile River and she could tell what the gross national product for each country was by what lights they had on at night, she said.

 

Cleave said it is hard to adjust to the return to Earth, because astronauts have to restore 10 to 20 percent of their body weight. “You’re strapped down, and you can’t get up and go to the can and you just keep drinking and drinking and your body reabsorbs it,” she said.

 

She said the taste of food is also changed because of the iodine in the water.

 

“You don’t go to space for the food,” she said dryly.

 

Cleave was selected as an astronaut in 1980 and has received two Space Flight medals, two Exceptional Service medals, an Exceptional Achievement medal, and Engineer of the Year from NASA; she also received the American Astronautical Society Flight Achievement Award.

 

She said she was annoyed when she was told at first that they wouldn’t buy a smaller space suit for her, and she would have to be a flight engineer instead of an astronaut.

 

Now Cleave says she has to deal with the bureaucracy of Washington, D.C.

 

“I’ve got a boss in the White house and how many hundred up on the hill who think I work for them and then I’ve got my own internal bosses at the agency,” she said. “You try and decide who’s the best person to piss off. That’s life in Washington.”

 

Cleave now works as a selection official for which projects get funded at NASA, and says the goal of planetary exploration is still the same, “follow the water.”