Clayton Anderson spent his first 15 years at NASA designing spacecraft. He spent his last 15 flying them. But somewhere in between there, Anderson spent time getting rejection after rejection for the astronaut program –15 in all, each inching closer and closer to the finish line before he was finally selected in 1998. In his book, The Ordinary Spaceman, he talks about his journey from small-town Nebraska to floating 250 miles above the Earth. He was kind enough to give us a few minutes on the phone to talk about this experiences. You can read an excerpt of his book here.

Popular Mechanics: After so many years of trying to get into the astronaut program, what was it like when you finally got up on the shuttle and experienced the micro-gravity for the first time?

Clayton Anderson: I don't know honestly if I thought back to the 15 tries to apply. I think that my 15 attempts to apply, and the trials and tribulations associated with that, were more reflected when I first got selected.

I talk about it in my book, how I went to Ellington Field as a baby astronaut. I went up into a room where a gentleman handed me my first blue flight suit and it already had my name tag on it. He asked me to try it on, and as I stood in front of that mirror, that's when it really dawned on me: "Holy cow, I've done it. I've made it."

When I first flew into space and experienced micro-gravity, it was more that I survived the training, because it was so long and arduous and there was so much time in Russia away from my family. That was kind of a relief, a breath of fresh air. I did all that and now it's starting to pay dividends.

PM: Is there something that stands out as one of your favorite moments in space?

CA: There were a lot. Something happened almost every day that's memorable, and there were so many of them that I forget them until someone reminds me and it comes back. One of the most fun things was to call people that I knew on Earth through the telephone system. I had a list of phone numbers in my crew notebook. Every day when I had some free time, I would go through that mini phone book and I would see whose name I had not checked off.

"I really enjoyed surprising people by calling them from outer space, because they kind of freak out."

I would dial them up and I'd get answering machines. It was always fun to record a nice lengthy message of greetings from the International Space Station, because people could then listen to them and play them back over and over and over again. I really enjoyed surprising people by calling them from outer space, because they kind of freak out. They can't believe that they're getting a call from the space station, 250 miles up.

PM: Is there something that spurred your first interest in becoming an astronaut?

CA: Absolutely. When I was nine years old, in 1968, my mother and father awakened my brother and sister and I and placed us in front of a black-and-white TV in Ashland, Nebraska around midnight on Christmas Eve, and we watched the Apollo 8 astronauts go behind the moon for the very first time in human history. That was my earliest recollection. My thought was, "This is cool. I want to do that."

PM: Prior to your actual candidate training, you worked at NASA, just not in the capacity of an astronaut. What were some of the things you worked at as a flight engineer?

CA: When I started at NASA in Houston back in 1981, there was no space station. It was on the drawing board, so as a young engineer I got to work on how the shuttle would rendezvous and dock and depart and fly around various space station configurations. To be able to work on the numerous designs that funneled down to the International Space Station, and then go fly on one of those shuttles and live on that station, it was kind of a great full circle opportunity for me. Here's this young kid who dreamed of just working on space stuff and then I got to work and live in it.

PM: Were there things on the ISS that you looked around and recognized, "I designed something very, very similar to that?"

CA: As an astronaut, one of my early assignments before I was assigned to fly in space was working with a group to come up with power strips. Just like under your desk you have a power strip that gives you five or six more places to plug your stuff into, we needed those on the International Space Station. The difficulty was we had to convert 120 volts of direct electrical current into something that could plug in a computer or a camera battery charger.

We worked on these power strips, so when I eventually got into space I could fly around and touch the very things that I helped work on on the ground. It was fun was to take photos of me with those pieces of equipment and then send them to the engineers that helped design them.

PM: What were your experiences with spacewalks and actually going out into the environment of space?

CA: I performed six spacewalks over my career as an astronaut, totaling about 40 hours. To me, doing a spacewalk is the ultimate activity for an astronaut. Some commanders would argue that flying the space shuttle is much cooler, but for a non-military civilian like me, to be able to get into that suit, pass through the air lock, go out the hatch, and start to crawl around on the outside of the International Space Station was the ultimate.

"As I hung on the front of the Space Station flying backwards, I was able to see the moon rise."

You throw in the ability to hold on with two fingers and turn your body and look at the Earth rolling by at five miles a second, or 17,500 miles per hour—it's just an incredible vista to be a part of. I remember my very first spacewalk, as I hung on the front of the Space Station flying backwards, I was able to see the moon rise. That was one of the most breathtaking things that I had ever seen in outer space.

PM: What do you see as some possibilities that commercial space flight is opening up at NASA?

CA: We're at an interesting time in space flight. The United States budget is a very difficult thing to navigate. NASA and her funding are dropping precipitously from what they were back in the heydays of Apollo. Given all that, we have to make the analogy that Orville and Wilbur stood on the beach at Kitty Hawk having watched their Wright Flyer fly 122 feet the very first time they flew. They had no idea that eventually there would be B-1 bombers and 787s and luxury liners flying people all around the world.

We're kind of at that same point, I think, in commercial space flight. The ideas exist, it's just creating the way for tourists or normal people to be able to go into space and visit a hotel or a space station. We have to be patient. It looks to me like the money is still going to come in very slowly, but we do have some wonderful entrepreneurs out there who are trying to stimulate the commercial side of space flight.

You have your SpaceX folks, your Boeing folks, your Blue Origin folks, your Sierra Nevada folks, Bigelow Aerospace, all working to potentially give everyone the opportunity to fly in space one day by purchasing a ticket. I think the future is hopeful. I would like the pace to be faster, of course, but the pace is dictated by technology development and money, so we'll just have to wait to see how all that pans out. I would like to think that we're in the same boat that Orville and Wilbur were back in 1903.

PM: What has you excited about the possibilities for government space flight and non-commercial space flight?

CA: It's important for me that the United States and NASA continue to lead the way. I think we should be the preeminent space-faring nation in the entire world. We have to be careful that we maintain that ability and not let other nations usurp our leadership. I'm hoping NASA continues pound on Congress and tell them why NASA is important for the all humankind. I think that's an easy thing to do, except that NASA is not allowed to advertise.

Guys like me, retired astronauts, current astronauts, we can gather the biggest audience just by virtue of the job that we've done in our careers. I tend to spend most of my time trying to applaud the abilities of NASA and what we're doing, where we're going, and the things that we've accomplished along the way.

For me, it's not the destination so much as the technology development we learn along the way. Whether we go back to the moon or whether we go to Mars or whether we drag an asteroid to a Lagrange point and crawl around on that—all of those are wonderful, viable projects, but they're going to lead to technology development that will eventually come back to benefit all humans on the Earth. That's kind of my job right now, to motivate people to continue to support the space program because on the government side, without public support we're nothing.

PM: What do you think is the key capturing the imaginations of people all over again?

CA: I think going to Mars is the ultimate destination that everybody wants to see us achieve. We should go to the moon first and build a lunar base where a small cadre of people, perhaps a dozen or more, learn to live off the land on a foreign body like the moon, such that we can learn what we need to do when we make that six to nine month journey to Mars. Mars is kind of the cool destination. It's where everybody wants to go, but I see us needing to take some steps closer to our home planet along the way to learn what we need to do.

Unfortunately, every time we discuss sending humans to Mars, we're talking about the 2030s or whatever. If we can keep to that target date, maybe by 2025 we will have the excitement. It's not like when we were heading to the moon and we were given the challenge of going in less than a decade. That's the kind of challenge that catches people's interest, that sparks their imagination, and those are the things that we need to do.

A space station laboratory is a great benefit for everyone on Earth, but in all honesty it's boring. It sails around Earth sixteen times a day and it's dull. We need that exciting thing that captures the imagination of people on Earth. We need that, and we need it soon. Maybe it's commercial trips with ticket buyers who go to a Bigelow inflatable hotel in space. I don't know, but we need it sooner than later I think.

(This interview has been edited and condensed.)

University of Nebraska Press

To learn more about Clayton Anderson, you can visit his website, or follow him on Twitter or Facebook. "The Ordinary Spaceman" is available here.

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