Andy Thomas – Dani Valent

After the Columbia disaster in February, many people thought America’s space program was over. But now NASA is planning a new shuttle launch, and Australian Andy Thomas will be aboard. He spoke with Dani Valent.

A couple of weeks ago, Andy Thomas drove to the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida and looked for a place to park his rental car. The car park was packed, but finally he spied three vacant spots marked “astronaut”, right by the entrance. He had that covetous feeling the average worker bee gets when he sees a prime spot reserved for the CEO. And then it clicked. “I pulled up and thought ‘Ooh, that’s nice. I can actually park there’.”

After nearly 12 years as an astronaut, Andy Thomas still has trouble believing that a boy from Adelaide can fly in space. But two weeks ago it was announced that Thomas, 51, would be one of seven astronauts aboard NASA’s next space shuttle flight – the first since the Columbia disaster in February that claimed the lives of all aboard and threatened to halt the agency’s space program. Thomas was understandably rocked by the accident. “It’s a terrible thing to have seven colleagues and friends 16 minutes from home and to discover that they won’t be coming back.” But as deputy chief of the astronaut office, he was less surprised than many that it occurred. “It showed that space travel is inherently dangerous,” he says.

The “return to flight” shuttle, scheduled to launch in September 2004, will be Thomas’s fourth trip into space. He and his crewmates on the shuttle Atlantis will test a range of inspection and repair techniques that may have saved Columbia had they been in place 10 months ago. Despite the danger, Thomas insists that the prospect of space travel holds no fear. “I’m not scared. I’m very glad, very excited. In many respects this will be the safest space shuttle mission ever.”

Thomas has had a lifetime to prepare for it. In 1961, when the first men flew into space, he was a nine-year-old boy in suburban Adelaide. Entranced by the idea of space travel, he would take a chair into the backyard, lay it on its back, hop aboard and imagine himself rocketing into space. He made model spacecraft from cardboard tubes and plastic kits. “Not flying rockets, because we didn’t have them at that time,” he says. “Kids today have flying rockets, which would have been amazing.” He was a tinkerer, the kind of kid who could pull his bicycle apart then put it back together, and later, fix his own car. He took an engineering degree at the University of Adelaide and graduated with honours in 1973. By the time he finished his doctorate in mechanical engineering five years later, he was already working for aerospace firm Lockheed in the US. Thomas went to America planning to spend a couple of years at Lockheed before heading back home. But his career took off, he was promoted up the management chain and, by the mid-’80s, he realised his future lay abroad.

About the same time, one of Thomas’s best friends was killed in a motorcycle accident. “We used to do a lot of things together, mostly try to pick up girls,” he recalls. “He was always better at it than me. He was taller.” The loss was a defining moment. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be something more to life than this’. I thought about what I would really like to do. I thought I’d like to be an astronaut.” Thomas looked at the CVs of serving astronauts and realised he’d already ticked a lot of the right boxes. He began to make career choices that would fill in the blanks and in 1991 he applied to NASA. In October of that year, he was sitting at his desk when the phone rang. It was NASA wondering if Thomas would like to come and be interviewed for a position as an astronaut. “It’s the sort of phone call you never expect to get,” he says. “I was trying to be calm: ‘Yes, yes, I’d like to come down’.” Five months later, he got another call, offering him a spot on NASA’s astronaut training program – if he was still interested. He was, but he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone for 24 hours, pending a press release. So he bought a bottle of champagne and popped the cork alone.

The next day he phoned his parents in South Australia. “I’m not sure they really understood it because I’d never shared that I wanted to be an astronaut,” he says. “You don’t go around saying, ‘I want to be an astronaut’. People would say, ‘Grow up, get real’. My mother said, ‘That’s nice dear’. My father said, ‘Oh, perhaps that will make the newspapers’.” Four years later, in May 1996, Thomas took his first space flight, a 10-day mission on the space shuttle Endeavour. In 1998 he spent five months on the Mir space station, and in March 2001 he flew aboard the Discovery shuttle to the International Space Station, where he did a six-hour spacewalk.

Andy Thomas has spent 163 days in space but nothing has pushed him to the extremes that he experienced over two nights in Siberia. They called it winter survival training. Enduring it was a pre-condition to spending time on the ageing Mir space station. To simulate an emergency landing in an inaccessible backwater, Thomas and two other cosmonauts were dressed in their spacesuits, put in a tiny capsule and dumped on the coast of northern Siberia. The temperature was minus 40 degrees, and they were set the task of surviving for the two days it would take rescuers to find them. The three cosmonauts were squeezed inside a space capsule “like the front seat of a Mini”. Inside, the air temperature was 37 degrees, to simulate the heat that would be generated on re-entry. “You start dripping in perspiration, then you have to take all of your clothes off,” Thomas says. “You don’t want to sweat too much because it’s going to become really cold and if you’re wet in the cold you’re in a lot of trouble. So we sat there, stripped off to our underwear, and slowly putting clothes back on as it got colder and colder.”

Finally, when it was as cold inside the capsule as it was outside, the trio stepped on to the ice. “It was three in the morning and a full moon. There we were, isolated, the northern lights were shimmering, the Hale-Bopp comet was visible. Each step you took on the ice would break it and send huge cracks away from you with deep-throated rumbles.” With the temperature down to minus 50 degrees, the three stumbled upon a wooden fishing hut, which they broke up to make a fire; the freezing cosmonauts stood so close to the flames that their thermal gear began to melt. They heated water to drink in an effort to keep warm but whenever they put a cup down to stoke the fire, the water turned to ice by the time they picked it up again. All around them was nothingness. “It was dead still, icy cold,” recalls Thomas. “I thought, ‘This is as close as you can get to being on another planet’. It was extraordinary.”

With training like that, it’s little wonder that space travel can be the easiest part of being an astronaut. Thomas’s spacewalk was a breeze. “I’d gone through it so many times on the ground that once I got going, it just started to unfold and went very smoothly. We train for it by doing everything in a really huge tank of water with a full-scale mock-up of the space station. It’s so accurate that when you actually do it in space you have the sense that you’ve done it before. You put your hand out expecting a handrail to be there, and it is.”

It’s no free ride, though. Space shuttle missions are brief and busy. “On my last flight of 12 days,” Thomas recalls, “we would get up and it would be 16 hours of go, go, go. You grab a bite to eat on the fly when you can. Suddenly, they call up from the ground and tell you it’s time to go to bed. You wonder where the day’s gone.” Mir was different: 130 days and over 2000 orbits of the Earth left plenty of time for reflection. Thomas watched summer arrive in the northern hemisphere, saw ice sheets melt and vegetation colour the landscape. His inner greenie was piqued by deforested swathes he saw in south-east Asia and South America. He worried about the bad air over China, and about a huge slash-and-burn fire that he saw run out of control in Mexico, sending a plume of smoke as far as Chicago. “It was sobering to see that,” he says.

He wasn’t a passive observer. Knowing he would have some free time on Mir, Thomas decided to take up sketching. “I’m not professing to be an artist,” he says. “In fact, I hadn’t done any drawings prior to that, but I thought it would be nice to try and record some of these experiences in drawings.” Sketching in zero gravity poses problems that no plein air artist would dream of. For a start, Thomas needed to put his feet under straps on the floor to stop himself floating away. He needed to fix his paper in a special clipboard, and his pencil had a velcro strip so he could stick it to the wall when not drawing. If it became detached, it would disappear in a trice. “It’s so frustrating. You let go of something for just a moment and it will float away and be gone.” Pencil tightly in hand, Thomas sketched the Earth, the spacecraft and the other cosmonauts when they went outside to do a spacewalk. “I really enjoyed it,” he says. “I would get so involved that I would intellectually remove myself from my environment and hours would go by. I’d feel completely liberated.”

A demanding career in aerospace hadn’t left much room for relationships, but after a couple of space flights, Thomas started to think about forming closer ties on Earth. “I wondered whether being self-focused detracted from my ability to get involved. Now that I’ve achieved my personal goals, it’s made me look at the age I’m at and ask ‘Do you want to remain as a single person on this planet or do you want a partnership?’ I’m doing that, I have a lady friend.”

Thomas started dating Shannon Walker after he touched down from Mir. She manages NASA’s Mission Evaluation Room, the room full of engineers that keep an eye on the spacecraft during flight. Walker monitored the space station systems when Thomas was on his last shuttle flight, but he insists there was no place for sweet nothings in the telemetry streams. “When you’re in orbit there’s a cast of thousands looking at everything. Even though you’re isolated in space, you’re not alone.”

And nor, says Thomas, are the rest of us. It is almost inconceivable, he says, that there is not life elsewhere in the universe. “I think life is a natural manifestation of the way physics and matter behave in the universe, and I don’t think the conditions here were so unique that it would only happen here.” Looking for this extraterrestrial life is one reason the space program is so important, he says. He doesn’t have much time for the naysayers that chime in whenever there’s a setback. “After the Columbia accident I saw a cartoon that showed Magellan or Columbus, I am not sure who, sailing off into the sunset looking for new worlds. Behind them was a bureaucrat in a rowboat paddling madly to catch up. And the caption said ‘Stop, stop, you can’t go. It’s much too dangerous and much too expensive’. It’s sad that people have that view.

“My own feeling about human exploration of space is that it’s going to allow us to answer some profoundly intriguing questions. It will help us to understand how life arose and what conditions you need for life to arise. Knowing the answer to the question ‘Is there life elsewhere in the universe, or in the solar system even?’ would have a huge impact on us as a species. It would affect our culture, our society. I can’t imagine any question that could have a more profound effect on humankind.”

Click here to read the article as it appeared in The Age.

2017-10-22T16:15:49+11:00

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