“In aviation, arrogance tends to come up and smack you in the face, frequently!”
A conversation with former American astronaut Richard N. Richards, on space exploration, the awe of space flight, and risk management.
Born in 1946, Richard N. Richards was a highly experienced test pilot, logging over 5,300 hours of flight, on 16 different types of aircraft, especially on carriers, and a NASA astronaut, with four space flights in the ’80s and ’90s, for a total of 33 days, 21 hours and 32 minutes ‘off world’.
In his first mission, back in August 1989, he was the pilot of Columbia Shuttle, then a commander for three other missions, in 1990, 1992, and 1994. In 1997, he worked as Mission Director/Manager for the second repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
He now travels the world to promote the wonders of science and space exploration — and to share his experiences from the great era of the Space Shuttles.
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You’re described as a hell of a pilot (with all the best connotations of this expression). You flew and tested very different kinds of aircraft, landing them on aircraft carriers, which people say it’s pretty hard… What makes a man want to push the envelope so far in such dangerous situations?
Well, I think it’s just that this is in human beings’ nature — most of human beings at least. When you fly one type of aircraft and you enjoy it, you want to challenge yourself by doing the next thing, and then the next thing, and so on.
For me it was an easy decision: after I had spent a dozen years with the Navy, flying on and off various aircraft carriers, when NASA had the most exotic type of high performance airplane that was ever build, the Space Shuttle, it was the logical next thing for someone in my profession, to want NASA to pick me, so I could have that experience as well.
I didn’t think too much about ‘the right stuff’, or anything else like that, what I thought about was just the challenge of doing a different type of flying for an organisation that I had grown up with and I was of course very proud of. To be part of it and then at the same time to get to participate in the flying of this great, fine machine, the Space Shuttle, it was just a natural thing for me to do. I had a lot of competition from my fellow colleagues. Everyone wanted that particular job. I was just fortunate enough to be one of the people selected for it.
People often point to astronauts as examples of ‘alpha individuals’ in their profession. The competition is hard, the ambition is great, how dangerous is it to become arrogant?
One really important thing about aviation is that if you’re arrogant it tends to come up and smack you in the face, frequently! Also, flying around aircraft carriers, if you get arrogant it usually lasts as long as your next landing. And then you may get taught a hard lesson, that you’re not really as good as you think you are. So you need to keep your personal emotions in check. It’s good to display confidence, but it’s never a good thing to display arrogance — particularly if you like to have friends in the squadron.
Aircraft carriers were a great venue for me to start gaining maturity, and when I arrived at NASA I also arrived at the same time with people that had also gained maturity in their own professional lives. And I think NASA (the people that were interviewing us) was looking for that sort of maturity in the first place. They were done with hiring ‘Buck Rogers’, they were more interested in people that could have confidence, but at the same time integrate themselves with a larger team.
Psychology seems to become more and more important, now that space explorations also means living in orbit (or farther) for months and years.
It does. And it’s important to understand it. Every time I flew I had a great team on the ground, just absolutely fantastic team! Part of getting ready to go on these kind of flights is to understand what their capabilities are and where they are better than you, so if or when something comes up you know immediately to defer to the mission control, because they are in a better position to analyse what is going on and provide you with the help you need.
Now, there were other areas that the astronaut onboard the spaceship had that perception and that view, but because of our training together they (on the ground) knew that we were in the best position to make that particular call.
It will be even more important to make sure those relationships are understood, particularly when we go on out to Mars. Just the time difference of getting a signal or a radio transmission to Mars is a problem. Astronauts and their own decision making will become more and more important, largely because the ground will not be able to help them as much, particularly for time critical types of things. And those will be whole new training situations and things that that team will have to come to grips with.
How did you managed fear? How can we (those of us who aren’t functional psychopaths), learn to manage this basic and strong emotion?
I describe it by pointing to combat situations, that soldiers face. It’s completely unnatural for a soldier to run towards somebody firing a gun at him, but if they have to do it, generally they do it because of their training and their confidence. They’re also doing it because they want to help their friends, who are in the same situation.
In the space shuttle, we didn’t had anyone firing guns at us, but certainly it was dangerous. We knew that we were about to unleash a lot of energy on the launch pad and if that energy somehow got misdirected it will be a very bad day for us. But in the end we were working with a team to go through the problems that we had with the spaceship prior to the launch. We were all involved with the decisions.
“Not every problem can be solved,
but every problem should be contained.”
Not every problem can be solved, but every problem should be contained, and it should be to everyone’s satisfaction that we’ve done everything we can and that risks are acceptable to go fly. And in every of my four launches I was in that situation and had confidence in the ground team, had confidence in my crew. Certainly, we were all apprehensive, but we all had a lot of confidence in each other and we were going to support each other to make sure that we had a successful flight and we all come home to our families.
killing all seven crew members aboard.
The danger is still there. You lost friends…
Yes…
My first mission was supposed to be a mission 61E, wasn’t on my resume, but we were scheduled to launch in March of 1986, and the launch prior to that was the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger… and it exploded. We were about six weeks of flying my first flight when we lost Challenger. Of course, we didn’t fly then, we stood down for about three years while NASA put in over 300 safety flight changes.
Another big surprise was the loss of Columbia. Not very many people saw that coming. We had been watching foam come off the external tank for a long time… That was another classic example of people becoming comfortable with an anomaly, thinking we understood it, when in fact it was a hazard and a danger that we greatly misunderstood.
And it cost us the loss of Columbia and the loss of the Columbia crew. It was another example of what I would call inadvertent arrogance, in the fact that we thought we understood something, put it aside, and thought it was a normal event — when it was hardly normal! It was another lesson to be learned, that in this environment we’re flying in it only takes small things to go wrong to have bad things happen to you.
So you should not ignore an alarm…
That’s exactly right! If something is normal, then look again!
I was lucky to travel to Florida and admire the Space Shuttle Atlantis at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral. What a marvellous machine!
I think it’s a work of human art! That’s how I described it. In museums there are pictures of the night before launch and of the Shuttles, when all of the rotating superstructures that protect it from thunderstorms are rotated out of the way, and all you see is this beautiful space shuttle that’s illuminated by the xenon lights in the night sky.
It took my breath away all the way down to the last flight, on STS 134. We will never build anything like that again, I think (laughs).
How comfortable was it? Today’s astronauts are flying the Soyuz capsule.
Compared with previous vehicles, it was pretty good, we had gobs and gobs of room, I think between the middeck and the flight deck we had something like 2,500 of cubic feet of volume for habitable space. Of course, it could be as many as 7 of us, and that sounds like it’s a small space, but compared with what the Apollo astronauts had, when they went to the Moon and back, operating in a command module of about 2 to 300 cubic feet, with three people… So from that perspective it was spacious.
The Space Shuttles were extremely complex machines, and not very cheap, considering their goal of reusability.
But we learned a lot from them! The Space Shuttle was reusable, but it was also very very complex, and because of the fact that human beings were operating it and we lost one with Challenger, NASA got very conservative, like they should, about making sure the vehicle was in absolute perfect shape when it flew again. But the result of that was we had safer launches, but another result of that was that we flew less often than we had originally planned for the cost involved.
And, again, it had a capability that existed nowhere else in the world, as far as flying weight and volume. We would not have built the ISS without the Shuttle. But when the last piece was put in place, the Space Shuttle’s mission was done and it is now in the history books. Someday, somebody will build another totally reusable spacecraft, but I hope some of the lessons we had with the Space Shuttle will help them in that process, to be successful.
SpaceX is doing those marvellous vertical landings out in the middle of a floating platform in a moving sea. My hat is off to them for pulling that off.
Coming back to your experience as a pilot, how do you see the future, because I dare to say that we’re living in the drone age.
You’d have to conclude that from reading the paper. At least from the military side of things, nobody wants to risk pilots becoming POWs or prisoners anymore, so drones seem to be the first choice.
A pilot is still a great instrument.
Yes, and there are still going to be human pilots in planes. When something goes wrong and things are happening in real time, in a very fast situation, so far there isn’t a computer that can make those kind of decisions that fast. Human beings still have to do that.
Same thing for spaceflight. 95% of my flight on board the Space Shuttle was me typing in the computer, telling the Shuttle what to do, and then the computer went off and did it. And really that was the appropriate role for the human being, to guide it, rather than be hands on with it. And then, if something went wrong, we knew exactly how to reconfigure things to put ourselves back into a good posture.
The only exception was the landing. All of our 134 landings were done manually, by the pilot on board. We had an automatic landing system and could have engaged it, but we discussed it long and hard and in the end decided not to rely only on it.
The closer you get to the ground, the difference between pilot and computer becomes relevant. You have turbulence, gusts, and uncertainty, that come into play, and we finally decided that it was better to fly ourselves, rather than go with software and have the human being go take over at the very last possible second, if something went wrong, having not flown the vehicle at all until then.
We decided it was a safer thing to do to let the pilot take it from 40,000 feet in the last two minutes and fly it all the way to the ground. I always think that that was a case where the human being was better than what the capability we had on the shuttle. Now, on the next vehicle, the computers may be so good that it will be less of an issue, but for the Space Shuttle that wasn’t the case.
Speaking of SpaceX and Elon Musk, would you go back to space in a Dragon?
I certainly would, I have no reservation for this. He has some very talented people, former NASA people, some very talented aerospace people working for him, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they have the technical capability to build the vehicles.
My only… if he was here in the room, my only caution to him would be: Remember NASA sometimes thought it knew exactly what was going on with the Space Shuttle, but on the 25th flight of the Space Shuttle they discovered they didn’t understand it. So stay humble in your expectations for your vehicle and be cautious, particularly with crewed vehicles, because you probably will get only one chance at this, and if early on there is some accident that costs human lives, that’s much different than having an unmanned vehicle crash into the sea. So stay humble and make sure you take the right steps for that.
But having said all that, I think that they certainly have the capability to even send a Dragon to Mars. If I were an astronaut in the current astronaut office, I would be all over this and I would go out and ‘get in bed’ with mister Musk and his whole organisation and work with them so that when I stepped on board Dragon I knew it as well as I knew the Shuttle when I stepped on it.
Time for an understandable cliché: What do you miss about space?
That’s easy: the floating and the views. I loved looking out at the Earth, and when I wasn’t doing that I loved flying myself all around the Space Shuttle, even though it wasn’t the ISS, where they have thousands of cubic feet of space. I never got tired of developing my skills of pushing off and going exactly at the other end, across the middeck, retrieving something, then flying back, getting better at that particular environment.
Looking at the Earth, I knew I was one of only a few hundred people that have flown in space, a small group, and I was one of those people, and you better be appreciative of it and every minute you have that you can sneak away and look at planet Earth, do it!
Do you now ‘hunt’ as a tourist places you’ve admired from orbit?
Some of them, yes. Two of my favorite views up there were of the Alaska area and British Columbia. For some reason, the air and the water were as pristine and as clean as anything I’d seen. As soon as you went south of the US-Canadian border, it was kind of this haze in the air. I didn’t knew if it was pollution, it also might have been just dust, inversions that typically occur in the summer time, as well as humidity in the summer time, but you couldn’t quite see as well — and it wasn’t just unique to America, that went all the way down to South America, and didn’t clear up until you’d hit somewhere around the Atlantic. In Europe, similar, but one area that was uniquely clear that I always saw clear was the Aegean Sea. It was beautiful! The Greek islands were beautiful every time.
Hi there! I’m Vasile Decu, science journalist, amateur astronomer, professional bookworm. And I need your help:
If you enjoyed this interview, help me launch Modern Explorers magazine, a new monthly science publication that will arrive in your email inbox in the shape of an ebook (ePub file and different PDFs), specially designed so you can enjoy it on your phone, tablet, or laptop.
For 5$, you’ll get a 6 month subscription (6 issues);
For 10$, you’ll get a full year (12 issues);
And 50$ will make you a lifetime member!
