‘Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat,’ said Theodore Roosevelt.
NASA astronaut Capt Jon A McBride used these words to inspire students and others who had come to listen to him at an event organised at the AMA in the city. Talking about how he came to be an astronaut, McBride told students that you don’t get up one day and decide to do something. “You have to plan the entire strategy if you have to achieve something. It doesn’t happen all of a sudden,” he said.
McBride said that since he joined the navy as a fighter pilot in 1965 he had aspired to be in NASA and had been working towards it. “I did my graduation, post-graduation, clocked enough flying hours and all this was aimed at just one thing -- to be able to get into Nasa,” said McBride.
He said that he and a team of 34 others were picked from about 1,00,000 applicants who had applied to NASA.
“After more than a year’s training, we were ready”. Talking of the training, he said that NASA offers the best training for an astronaut; to create zero gravity like situations they also trained in a diving tank. “Of course, even there it is not zero gravity, but almost zero gravity,” he said. McBride spoke of how President Kennedy was the one who inspired Americans to make it to the moon.
Talking of his expeditions in space he said that unlike on earth where you get to enjoy the sunset and sunrise at leisure, in space it gets over in a jiffy. “Here you can enjoy the sunrise for 15 minutes, in space it is over in 15 seconds,” said McBride.
He also talked about the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters. “But in both the cases it was not the crew’s fault. Something happened at re-entry and it happened in a moment. In a way it was good that the crew did not get to know it,” he said.
He said that space exploration has no boundaries and the technology should be used to benefit mankind.
