Inside the lives of astronauts’ families
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Flora Lichtman and you're listening to Science Friday. Last Friday, some red and white striped parachutes opened and four Earthlings returned safely home.
A perfect bullseye splashdown for integrity and its four astronauts. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cook and Jeremy Hansen back on Earth after a journey around the moon.
Throughout the journey, we heard the Artemis II astronauts talk about moon joy, awe, wonder. And without exception, we heard them talk about their families.
What challenges do astronauts face being away from their families?
Here's Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman in remarks after the mission.
No one knows what the families went through, man. This was not easy. Being 200,000 plus miles away from home, like before you launch, it feels like it's the greatest dream on Earth. And when you're out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It's a special thing to be a human, and it's a special thing to be on planet Earth.
My next guest knows what it's like to be on the other side. Dr. Tracy Scott is the child of Apollo commander David R. Scott, who went to space three times and was the seventh person to walk on the moon. Now Tracy is a sociologist at Emory University who studies the lives and families of moonshot era astronauts. And she's here to give us a glimpse into astronaut life from the perspective of the family members who orbit them and to weigh in on how this moonshot era compares to the first. Tracy, thank you for being here.
Thank you so much for having me, Flora.
Tracy, what has it been like for you to watch this mission? Is it like just deja vu?
In some ways it is. In many ways it's not because it was so different back in that era that I grew up in. When my dad went into space, there was no communication at all. We could hear them, but we could not talk with them. So it was a completely different landscape in terms of communication. So when our dads went into space, what they did for the families was they put this little communication box called the squawk box in our home. that had a feed for mission control pretty much 24-7, although mission control would turn it off at night and they would turn it off if there was anything that they wanted to talk about technically. But we could hear that in the background during the whole mission, which was just sort of like background noise.
So you heard it, but you're just like, oh, yeah, that's the squawk box. And you sort of, as a kid, you didn't really pay attention to it because we had more fun things to do, like go outside and play with our friends.
I mean, when your dad became an astronaut, you were three. And when he started, I mean, being an astronaut was a completely new job, right? Like it had been science fiction before.
Absolutely, Falara. That's a great way to think about it. So my dad was selected into the third group of astronauts in 1963. So this was a really new occupation. All of the astronauts in the first three groups had been either test pilots or fighter pilots in the military. And this is what they grew up wanting to do, be a really great pilot, a test pilot. There was no such thing as an astronaut, and they never thought about it. So this is new, and they go into this occupation, and I moved to the area around the Johnson Space Center in Houston that was developed for the NASA Space Center at the time. No one had lived in this area before, so there were these new housing developments. We all moved there together, and that was life.
So as a three-year-old, my dad was an astronaut from as soon as I could remember, and I never thought anything about it. All my best friend's dads were astronauts, and everybody that lived in the neighborhood worked at NASA, or they knew we were astronauts. They didn't make a big deal about it, and I just thought it was ordinary.
I mean, I'm sure at the time it felt, you know, it was what you knew, but in retrospect. Was there a culture to your community, like, you know, special quirks or superstitions or rules that you grew up with that felt particular to being in an astronaut community?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–0:37
2
What challenges do astronauts face being away from their families?
0:37–5:38
3
How did Tracy Scott's childhood shape her view on space missions?
5:38–7:56
4
What was the communication landscape like for astronaut families during the Apollo era?
7:56–19:11
5
What unique culture existed among astronaut families in the 1960s?
19:11–19:59
Speakers
6 identifiedMore from Science Friday
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