A production of South Carolina ETV.

>> Well the sky is no longer the limit I'm not really sure we know what the limit is >> The carbon monoxide that you're made from and iron and so on, those are things you have in your body, those were made inside of stars long ago.

And so in some kind of way you're made of star dust.

>> I can't say that is was always easy.

You can imagine as being being the only woman in a F-14 squadron.

>> In the movie Jurassic Park, I was the technical advisor.

That means that... that I was, I was Steven Spielberg's assistant.

>> There wasn't a space program back then.

So I had no desire to be an astronaut.

If you told your mom that you were going to be an astronaut when I was your age, boys and girls, they would have thought I was crazy >> Science is a funny thing.

It's not really a thing in a sense.

It's a way of thinking.

You can apply science to studying anything.

♪ Child #1> Military pilot, astronaut, major general.

He's one of South Carolina's favorite sons, Charles F. Bolden Jr, since becoming an astronaut in 1981, Major General Bolden has flown four space shuttle missions, logging more than 680 hours in space on each space flight.

He served as the pilot.

Maj.

Gen.

Charles Bolden Jr.>How many people were on the crew?

Seven people on the crew.

And most of the time when we fly shuttle.

There's seven crew members sitting up in here.

Usually there's the two pilots on board, the commander in the pilot or copilot, three mission specialist, and then two payload specialist non-career astronauts.

Child #2> How did you feel the first time you went into space?

Maj.

Gen.

Charles> Oh, how did I feel the first time I went in space, I was very excited.

I not I wouldn't say I was afraid or anything, but I was very apprehensive.

You know, when you get up to do a presentation before the class and you get butterflies in your stomach.

Kind of that way.

You have butterflies in your stomach when you wake up in the morning on launch morning, and then you go and you eat breakfast, and they kind of go away, and then they come back again, and then they go away, and they come back again.

And you climb in the vehicle and you have butterflies.

And then finally when you get down right, right.

About time for the launch, the butterflies go up real big and the main engines go kaboom.

And then the butterflies go away and you just start concentrating on your job.

So it's kind of up and down roller coaster like all the time, if at least that's the way it's been with me for four flights.

Yeah.

Child #3> What was going through your mind as you launch?

Maj.

Gen.

Charles> You're kind of constantly going over procedures.

As you get closer and closer to launch time, you start looking around the cockpit and finding out where all the procedures booklets are.

Because we have cue cards and books stuck on Velcro all over, everywhere.

If something goes wrong, we generally don't try to do anything from memory.

We go right to a procedure and we follow the procedure because that way it's, it's something that's tried and tested in simulators, and we know it ought to work.

And besides, the ground controllers know what you're doing if you follow the procedure.

So for the last few minutes prior to launch, you know, you say a little prayer and then I start reminding myself of what the procedures are and everything.

In 1986, January of 1986, January 28th, to be exact, it was ten days after I landed from my space shuttle mission in Columbia, and we were busy debriefing, and we all left our debrief to go watch Challenger.

Leave Earth, just like you just seen there.

What was so important about it was it had a young school teacher by the name of Christa McAuliffe as a member of the crew, and she was going to do several lessons from space.

So it was to have been.

Or it was the first, teacher in space mission.

Challenger lifted off that day.

It was a very, very cold day.

We developed a leak.

And can you go back one, one slide the solid rocket boosters here, and you can see we don't have a lot of affection for them.

They serve their purpose.

They get into space and they do it very well.

But you can't turn them off when they develop problems.

And and they put together in pieces like this is called the frustum or the nose cap.

And then here's one segment.

There's another segment here.

And there are four total segments that have explosives in it.

This is a big bomb, so to speak.

I mean, it's just all solid propellant.

You know, the little Roman candles that you shoot holiday time, it's like a giant Roman candle.

So when you light this thing, it keeps burning until it's done.

Right back in here on the right hand, solid rocket booster on the Challenger flight.

A leak developed right in the joint.

And it meant that hot gases, which are supposed to come out of the back end and give you propulsion, started coming out the side, and the gases were in the thousands of degrees, and it melted on a chart you can see right here.

See that attached fitting?

There's another one, another set of them right back here.

What it did was it essentially melted the attach fitting right back here, causing this solid rocket booster to rotate inward and puncture this tank which has liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen.

When that happened, the tank ruptured.

I think all of you probably know.

Or if you don't, I'll tell you.

When you put hydrogen and oxygen together, you get a lot of good stuff.

You can get fire.

You usually get water is a byproduct.

And that's the way we make water for the shuttle.

That's the way we produce electricity aboard the shuttle, is we put hydrogen and oxygen together in a controlled environment called a fuel cell.

When we punch through the hole in the external tank, just make a room.

The tank came apart.

The right wing on the shuttle came off, the crew module broke off, and we lost the crew and the vehicle.

So that was the - When you hear all of us old people talk about the Challenger accident in 1986, that's what happened.

And we didn't fly into space for another two years.

Two and a half, almost two and a half years, a little bit more than two and a half years.

Her question was, did the Apollo spacecraft used to catch on fire when they were coming back to Earth?

They burned.

They really did.

And, because they had what was called an ablative material on the outside as the heat shock, heat shield.

And its purpose was to just catch fire and burn, to dissipate the energy of slowing from 17,500 miles an hour to nothing.

All of you remember physics again.

Okay.

Energy too big kinds...hold, like I have potential.

Based on what?

Standing up here on the stage, I have, two and a half three feet worth of potential energy.

I have kinetic energy based on what?

My speed.

My velocity.

That's kinetic energy.

17,500 miles an hour, coming from the moon.

That's moving.

And that's a lot of energy.

And you got to get rid of it, or you'll just go right through Earth.

So what we did was we let it burn up on the outside.

There was this big, thick heat shield, and it just you got a lot of friction and it burned.

And so that was what enabled them to come back successfully to Earth.

With shuttle, we don't use a plate of material anymore.

The protective tile on the shuttle doesn't burn.

It heats up to tremendous temperatures.

The tile can be as hot as 24, 25 degrees Fahrenheit.

The nose cap, the little nose, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer, can be 3200 degrees.

And when you look out the front window, see this?

That's the front window, glowing.

It's like being inside a light bulb, trying to look out when you come back to Earth and shuttle.

It's so hot on the outside, and the light is so great that you can't see outside, for most of the entry.

And then finally it cools off and things get back to normal.

But inside is just as comfortable.

It's like 72 degrees or something like that.

Okay.

Child #4> When you were in space, do you have one where you make a hole safely or not?

Maj.

Gen.

Charles> To be quite honest, no.

And I think it's just because of the training that we go through, we, we train all the time in simulators for all kinds of things going wrong.

And you always know that there's a possibility that you can't get back.

But, we generally kind of like it's like anybody who flies airplanes or races, cars, you never really figure anything is going to happen to you.

It's kind of naive, but it's just if you spent your time wondering and worrying, you probably would never be able to do your job.

So you just kind of just kind of press on and do what you, what you've been trained to do.

Child #5> What goes up must come down, the law of gravity.

But if you're traveling in space outside of the Earth's atmosphere, then you can forget this law of gravity no longer applies.

Child #6> What's it like taking off and landing the shuttle.

Maj.

Gen.

Charles> And taking off is not very much unlike an experience that many of you, I think, have had.

If you drive with your big brothers and big sisters, when they start off from a stop sign and send you back in the seat when you lift off in the shuttle, the main engine start about six seconds prior to liftoff, and then the solid rocket boosters ignite and you get a big (boom) and the vehicle kind of start shaking and shuddering, but you feel yourself sink back in your seat about one and a half times the force of gravity.

So it's not really a lot, not, not at all as violent as it looks, but the vehicle's really shaken and rattling, and as you go up until the solid rocket boosters separate.

And then once that happens, the ride gets very, very smooth.

You may feel some little herky jerky stuff every once in a while.

Depends on, you know, what you have as a payload in the, in the payload bay when you come back and land, it's a very gentle feeling until you get back in the Earth's gravity.

And, then all of a sudden you feel anywhere from 2 to 3 times as heavy as you actually are, because you've been out in space with gravity having been overcome for a week or so and just one times, the force of gravity makes you feel like you're.

Instead of me being 160 pounds, I feel like I'm almost 300 pounds, but you get accustomed to it very quickly.

You readapt.

Child #7> Is there like a transition in the feeling on your body where as you go from gravity to zero gravity.

Maj.

Gen.

Charles> There really is.

As we were reentering Earth's atmosphere, we were all taking something, whether it be a piece of paper or a pencil.

And we'd put it up and we say, still floating, still floating, because your arms were still up.

But at some point and in my particular case, it was like it at 3/10th times the force of gravity.

I actually could feel gravity coming back again.

Now, ordinarily, you wouldn't even be able to tell that, you know, just walking around every day.

But since we had been essentially weightless for about for eight days, at the point that we got to about 3/10th the force of gravity, it felt like we were back in one G again.

And then very gradually, the onset of G occurs over a matter of minutes.

And until the until you get to the point that it's hard to lift your legs and hard to lift your arms off your, off your, your lap.

So what I generally do is I raise my arms up and I'll do isometric exercises.

I'll take my legs and put my feet up on the rudder pedal and press the rudder pedal so that by the time I have to start flying the shuttle like a regular airplane or glider, my body's accustomed to being back in gravity again, and it it's amazing how rapidly the human body readjusts to 1 to 1 G from the standpoint of just force and everything.

It takes your, your in inner ear, your balance mechanism for most of us takes a couple of days, anywhere from 2 to 3 days before you.

You get all your balance back and you don't feel like you're going to tumble.

You know, when you get off of straight up and down, is there any way to cast gravity on the spacecraft?

Very easily.

You can rotate it as it goes through space and, it will create gravity.

I always wonder about that on Star Trek, you know, because they walk around and I know, but they never explain how they do it.

You keep looking to see if it's rotating or something, but if you rotate the craft, you will create an artificial gravity.

We used to think that's what we wanted to do, sending somebody to Mars or something like that.

I understand from my doctor friends that they now have concerns about that because an artificial gravity created by rotating something may have me in and of itself cause, bad things on the body, but we don't know.

How much does your heart slow down?

And how much do you have to exercise when you go in space?

Gravity having been overcome, the fluids in your body floating all around on your own.

The heart doesn't have to do very much of anything.

In fact, if it could, it would quit, you know, because your blood just kind of gets around the body.

But the heart does kind of go.

(whomp...whomp...whomp) And it gets real slow and it gets real lazy.

And for any of you who have ever been on a cast, on your arm, your hand, your foot, your leg, you know, your muscle shrinks, the heart does the same thing.

Therefore, like you implied, we need to exercise and we try to exercise about an hour a day if we can, especially the two crew members who are flying as pilots, because you're going to have to move your feet and your hands when you come back to Earth, since it's a glider and you got to land it, you know, it doesn't just plop in the water anymore.

So you do need to exercise or your heart will shrink.

We try to exercise because, again, you don't want your bones to get brittle and suffer like osteoporosis.

So we try to exercise.

We nowadays we use either a bicycle, a bicycle ergometer.

It's a sink in a pedal with no handlebars.

Or you use a rowing machine or the dreaded treadmill.

The treadmill is the best exercise instrument, but I call it the dreaded treadmill because it shakes the whole vehicle.

You get up on this thing and you run in place, and the whole shuttle is going (panting) to go into space, and your eyes have to adapt to the darkness.

Is it is it difficult or is it weird?

When you come back to earth, your eyes never get unredacted.

There is daylight and darkness and space just as there is down here.

It just happens quicker.

Daylight is 45 minutes in length.

Darkness is 45 minutes.

Something.

You go on Earth once every 90 minutes.

So in the course of an Earth Day, you see the sunrise and set 16 times.

There are 16 sunrises and sunsets every single Earth Day.

When it's dark outside, it is black, dark, I mean dark, dark.

The stars are brilliant, but the stars don't put out enough light in space.

There's not enough air is what it is to diffuse the light.

In order for you to be able to see, like you do, that here from a street light, you need to take a little flashlight.

You can see for miles, but it's because the air is diffusing the light and enabling it to go out into space.

In space where there's little to no air, there's nothing to make that light spread.

So it looks black, dark, even when there's gems and stars around daytime.

Brilliantly bright when the sun comes up.

It's like looking at a black piece of paper.

I mean, it's black, as you could ever imagine.

Having somebody take a pen, stick a hole in it from behind, and gradually, over a matter of about 30 seconds, widen the hole wider and wider and wider, until the sun just explodes from behind her.

So that's the way the Sun City is.

Every day, every single day.

16 times a day.

When it goes away, it just kind of.

It's like Earth swallows it up and it disappears and it stays gone for about 45 minutes.

And you can be up in the sunlight, and Earth can be dark, because the sun's peeping across the horizon and shining on you and the shuttle.

But it's not on that part of Earth over which you happen to be orbiting that sunset, sunrise.

It's kind of hard to tell the two apart.

Earth is up here.

Space is down here and in space it makes no difference.

I mean, you know, you go like this and you can't tell it.

And, gravity's been overcome.

So your balance mechanism that tells you down here what's up and down doesn't work.

It depends on gravity to tell you what's up and what's down.

And with gravity having been overcome, it's still there as you go around Earth.

But, but you can't tell things, so you depend on your eyes to tell you what's up and down.

Sometimes, the brain gets confused.

And in some people, doctors tell us about 50 percent of the people will go into space.

The confusion is significant enough that you get sick, for, you know, for a day or so, but, everybody adjusts sooner or later.

Child #8> The Hubble Space Telescope, Major General Bolden knows about this telescope.

He helped put it in space by piloting the space shuttle that launched the Hubble.

During this space flight, Bolden and his crew, observed the Earth from a record setting altitude of more than 400 miles.

Maj.

Gen.

Charles> This is Saturn, the next one.

The next one is going to be Saturn also.

And it's just a lot closer picture.

And I'm showing you what Hubble is able to bring you now.

In fact, this was what Hubble brought you before it was repaired.

Are the planets like different colors?

They are.

And it depends on a lot of different things.

Their atmospheric makeup is one thing.

Mars, we call it the red planet.

But Mars looks a lot like Earth has lots of ice.

It's an icy, cold, icy planet.

That bluish tint there is real because that's methane gas.

And that's mostly what Mars' atmosphere is made up compared to Venus, which is mostly carbon dioxide compared to Earth, which is mostly oxygen and nitrogen.

And that's the, that's the basic difference between those three triplet planets.

They are almost identical in size and make up, crust wise.

If there is any chance, any remote chance that there is other life in the universe, it's on that planet.

That's what the Martians are saying about us, because it has all the right makeup.

It has, you know, it's got oxygen and some nitrogen and stuff like that, and we think that that'll support life.

So that's what the Martians are saying about us.

Child #9> We all know every school has bragging rights, but C.A.

Johnson High School in Columbia, South Carolina, can boast about something that the rest of the nation's high schools can't brag about.

You guessed it, Major General Bolden Jr.

attended C.A.

Johnson High School.

Bolden claims the education he received in South Carolina started him on the road to success.

Maj.

Gen.

Charles> That is very, very much true, and we're very proud of that.

Frank Culbertson and I, who presently represent South Carolina as active astronauts, Charlie Duke, who lives over in Texas.

But we get together with him periodically.

The late Steve Thorne, the late Ron McNair, others who, there are others who were born in South Carolina but claim other places at home.

But we always remind them that they got their start here.

So South Carolina has done very well, and it's done very well because of its school systems.

It's done very well because it has kids like these who, have been really willing to stand up and say, hey, it sounds a little weird, but I think I want to try that and I'm going to do it.

Child #10> Major General Charles F Bolden Jr, a man of courage, a man who had a dream to be an astronaut.

It wasn't an easy dream to achieve.

But then dreams seldom are.

However, if you study, the world and even the out of this world can be yours.

Major General Charles F Bolden Jr, a man who made a dream that seemed impossible, possible ♪ So here we come.

♪ Just watch us fly.

♪ ♪ Showing all the world ♪ the reason why ♪ ♪ There ain't no stopping us.

♪ ♪ We are the ones.

♪ There's nothing stopping us.

♪ ♪ Nothing's above us.

♪ (No stopping us.)

♪ ♪ There's just ♪ no stopping us now.

♪ ♪