But there we were, living and working together and having a great time It just really struck me how absolutely preposterous anybody would have thought it would have been that even five years before we were having this conversation, that we would be there, two Russian engineers and one American female floating there in space discussing their childhood and how each had grown up fearing each other’s countries. And we even had atomic bomb drills where you would all get underneath your desk, which is sort of crazy if you think about it. They were both discussing how afraid they were of the American bombers that were going to come to their village and drop the atomic bomb on them, and it just really struck me as I was telling them that was our big fear in Bethany, Oklahoma - as we absolutely knew it was the center of the universe - and the Russians were going to come and bomb us. We were just floating around and discussing our childhood. On your Mir mission I understand you had a memorable conversation with your crewmates Yuri Onufriyenko and Yury Usachev about how you grew up in rural Oklahoma, Onufriyenko in a Ukrainian village and Usachev in a Russian village. It was almost like watching creation take place right before your eyes. You could see the rivers starting to flow, and you could see the ice retreat, and it was just gorgeous to see creation. It just seemed like overnight spring came and everything turned green. One thing I saw that was artwork in motion was that when I got up there it appeared most of the northern hemisphere was iced over and frozen and white. What was the most beautiful thing you saw from above? There was just so much that I hadn’t seen and so much that I wanted to see. And the same way from orbit: There’s just so much of what you are flying over that was barren and empty. It also struck me that when I was younger and had first started flying my airplane around Texas and Oklahoma, how hard it is to find cities and towns, because there is so much of the area that didn’t have any habitation or signs of habitation. The other thing that I really liked watching was going over the Eurasian landmass, and there was so much space that I hadn’t been to or hadn’t seen, and it just made you wonder what was going on with the people down there and gave you this urge to go and see all those places that you’d never seen. That put it in perspective that the United States isn’t the biggest country in the world. It really struck me how, in comparison with the rest of the world, we are really small, because it takes about 10 minutes to pass over the United States and takes a lot longer to go across Eurasia. I guess growing up we thought that the United States was the center of the universe and we were big. There are places in South Africa for the same reason you can see the borders.Ī couple of things really struck me on Mir when you had the opportunity to be at the window and look as you went around. You can very definitely see the borders between Egypt and Israel because of the way they use the land. There are geological reasons why you can see the borders. Let me just say right here that people who keep saying you can’t really see borders from space, that just really irks me, because you can. But there are a couple of things that really struck me. Well, I never looked at it like I was an alien.
On Apollo 8, while en route to the moon, Jim Lovell mused, “If I’m some lonely traveler from another planet, what I think about the Earth at this altitude, whether I think it’d be inhabited or not.” Given your experiences on five spaceflights, did you have occasion to view Earth in a fresh light, rather than just say, “Oh, here’s something that I know from the perspective of a familiar landscape or coastline.”Ī. A veteran of five shuttle missions and 179 days aboard the Russian Mir space station in 1996, Lucid discussed what it is like to live and work in space. Among a select group of space travelers, Shannon Lucid has amassed more than her share of frequent flyer miles.
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