Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) Read Online Free PDF Page A

occurred, I could handle. It was where I slipped back into an ego thing. I anticipated failures that I would correct and then the newspaper would say, ‘Gregory Saves Shuttle,’ but heck, none of that happened. It just went uphill, just as sweet as advertised.”
    As pilot, Gregory said his main job once the vehicle was on orbit was to make sure it was working properly. Since there were no major issues, he found that he had frequent opportunities for looking out the window. Said Gregory,
You immediately realize that you are either a dirt person or a space person. I ended up being a space person, looking out in space. It was a high-inclination orbit, so we went very low in the southern hemisphere, and I saw a lot of star formations that I had only heard about before and never seen before. I also saw aurora australis, which is the southern lights. I was absolutely fascinated by that. But if you were an Earth person, or dirt person, you were amazed at how quickly you crossed the ground; how, with great regularity, every forty-five minutes you’d either have daylight or dark; how quickly that occurred, about seven miles per second; how quickly you crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
    Although he was a self-described “space person,” Gregory still enjoyed occasionally gazing down on Earth below him and found it a fascinating experience.
The sensation that I got initially was that from space you can’t see discernible borders and you begin to question why people don’t like each other, because it looked like just one big neighborhood down there. The longer I was there, the greater my “a citizen of” changed. The first couple of days DC was where I concentrated all my views, and I was a citizen of Washington DC . I was confused because I thought everybody loved DC , but [Bob] Overmyer was from Cleveland [Ohio], and Don Lind was Salt Lake [City, Utah], and Norm [Thagard] was Jacksonville, Florida, and Lodewijk [van den Berg] was the Netherlands, and Taylor Wang was Shanghai [China], so each had their own little location for the first couple of days. After two days, I was from America, looked at America as our home. Taylor, China. Europe for Lodewijk. And after five or six days, the whole world became our home.
    During his flight, Gregory developed a sense not only of Earth as a whole being his home but of just how interconnected the global community truly is, and the extent to which all people are sharing one planet.
You could see this kind of sense of ownership and awareness. We had noticed with interest the fires in Brazil and South Africa and the pollution that came from Eastern Europe, but it was only with interest. After five or six days, then it was of concern, because you could see how the particulates from the smokestacks in Eastern Europe, how that circled the Earth and how this localized activity had a great effect. When you looked down at South Africa and South America, you became very sensitized to deforestation and what the results of it was with the runoff, how it affected the ecology. Then you’d have to back up and say, well, this is not an intentional thing to destroy; this is something that they use coke as part of their process, and in order to get coke, you’ve got to burn. So you began to look at things from different points of view, and it was a fascinating experience. So that was the science that I was engaged in, but never anticipated it. And it was a discovery for me, so as each of these other great scientists who were with us discovered something that they had never anticipated, I also did, and I think the whole crew had.
    In order to live and work in space during their missions, astronauts must learn to adapt to the microgravity environment, and that adaptation varies from individual to individual. Part of the adaptation is simply learning to get around; moving through the vehicle without gravity is an entirely different process than walking through it on the ground. For many other astronauts,