An Out-of-this-World Career Trajectory
Read about Gregory Johnson's, MBA '05, experience piloting the space shuttle Endeavour and how getting his MBA helped him perform better in outer space.
by Sandy Sheehy
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When Air Force Colonel Gregory H. Johnson blasted off on the flight deck of the space shuttle Endeavour at 2:28 a.m. on March 11, he had an unusual cheering section watching from the causeway linking Cape Kennedy to the mainland: 26 members of his 2005 Texas Executive MBA class. Along with their families, they’d flown to Orlando, then boarded a bus for the pre-launch party Johnson and his wife, Cari, had organized for family and friends at Cocoa Beach.
Bussed from the party to the prime viewing site, the McCombs contingent listened in on the astronauts’ final pre-flight preparations. At 9:30 p.m., they heard Johnson’s voice speaking to them. They were thrilled. He was about to make his first trip into space, and he was taking the time to let his classmates know he was glad they’d come all the way from Texas to see him off.
When the engines flared at liftoff, “It was really awesome,” recalls classmate Vid Desibhatla, who works in information services for the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. “It was like the Fourth of July.”
When Johnson learned he’d been selected to pilot STS-123, the official name for the 2008 Endeavour mission, he felt like he’d won the lottery. With several dozen U.S. astronauts and recently only three or four shuttle flights per year, only about a third of those who go through astronaut training actually get to launch.
This mission would be unusually challenging. To begin with, at 16 days it was one of the longest. Missions usually range from five to 16 days, with the record 17.5 days for STS-80 in 1996. For another, one of the seven astronauts was Japanese; one was Canadian. This meant coordinating among three space agencies and, for Takao Doi, operating in a foreign language.
Furthermore, the tasks were unusually diverse and demanding. They included ferrying astronaut Garrett Reisman up for a stint at the International Space Station and ferrying Leo Eyharts home, delivering the Japanese Logistics Pressurized Module to the station, and assembling the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator—a 12-foot-tall Canadian robot known as Mr. Dextre.
Johnson also helped his crewmates execute five spacewalks from inside the shuttle. The trickiest involved an essential piece of safety equipment used to prevent future tragedies like the one that destroyed the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. Outside the vehicle, two astronauts had to grab a 50-foot long boom with the shuttle robotic arm and use it to examine the underside of the vehicle, to make sure no potentially fatal pieces of foam had come loose. Then they had to secure the boom to the top of the International Space Station, because the next shuttle would contain so many scientific experiments that it wouldn’t have room for it. “It was a very delicate operation,” Johnson explains, “and we only had 90 minutes in which to do it.” All this as both the space station and the shuttle zipped around in orbit at 17,500 miles an hour.
Although his official title was pilot, Johnson’s shuttle role was similar to that of a co-pilot on a commercial aircraft. He trained to do everything Mission Commander Captain Dominic Gorie did, and their tasks in flight were the same. But because it was Johnson’s first time in space, Gorie, who had three previous shuttle missions under his belt, handled the controls on liftoff, docking and landing. Johnson hand-flew during the undocking and flyaround, the circling of the space station, which took an hour and a half. “That was really cool, flying through space and seeing the space station from every angle,” he recalls.
Zero gravity helps make efficient use of otherwise tight quarters. Astronauts can spread paperwork out on the ceiling. To sleep, they hook up hammock-like sleeping bags and zip themselves in. “It’s real comfortable,” Johnson explains. “There are no forces on your body. Your arm never falls asleep.”
Every astronaut has a unique menu, chosen from foods they sample prior to the flight. Most are dehydrated. “Some foods rehydrate better than others, but you’d be amazed,” says Johnson, who started every day with Kona coffee and seasoned scrambled eggs and was particularly fond of the hamburger patty. “The shrimp cocktail you’d think wouldn’t work, but it was pretty tasty.”
M&Ms were snack favorites, because they were easy to eat and fun to play with in zero gravity. During the two times Johnson got to communicate with his family on the laptop-based IP phone, he had fun showing his kids how the popular candies floated around. “I felt like a circus clown,” he says.
Each astronaut is assigned a color, and all his food, toiletries and other personal items bear a dot of that distinctive hue. Johnson’s was yellow. “That way, if your toothbrush floats away while you’re shaving, whoever finds it knows whose it is,” he explains.
Exercising in zero gravity required getting used to. The astronauts took daily 30-minute turns on a stationary bike bolted to the floor. Once, Johnson did 90 minutes, the duration of a full orbit around the earth, so he could say he’d peddled around the world.
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