How I overcame disability to become a NASA astronaut | Leland Melvin | Big Think
When you get into the astronaut corp, there are two things that you have to demonstrate to fly on either a shuttle or a space station mission. And they are the ability to go into this 300-pound suit and do something called space walking.
And the way that you train for that is you get in this white suit that's pressurized and you go down 25 feet in a 5 million gallon pool to simulate building and creating the space station underneath the pool deck. There’s a submerged space station and a submerged space shuttle, so that's how you demonstrate that.
When I had my chance to train in that environment, I had an accident where I lost all of my hearing. They operated on my ear; they went and looked around, but they couldn't find anything. They told me I would never fly in space.
For a while there, after my hearing did slowly come back in my right ear—I’m deaf in this ear—they told me that we were going to have to figure out what to do with you. That was a really tough time for me because I had never thought of myself becoming an astronaut, but once I got into the astronaut program, then I was solitarily focused on trying to do this thing.
They sent me to Washington DC to work in education. We were choosing teachers to become astronauts. And one of those astronauts was Ricky Arnold, who just came home about two months ago, doing education in space, doing space walks, doing all these things.
While I was kicking this program off and helping him run this program, I was driving from DC to my hometown, Lynchburg, Virginia, and I got a phone call from my boss at the time, who is new to NASA. She says, "Leland, what does it mean when the space shuttle countdown clock is now counting up?"
I said, "How much is it counting up?" She says, "It's 10 seconds, it's 15 seconds." And this was Space Shuttle Columbia. In that moment, I knew that all my friends were dead. So I turned around and drove back to DC to headquarters.
They sent me to David Brown's parent's home in Washington, Virginia, to console his family, who just lost their son in this most tragic, horrific way. I went to the house, got to the door, hugged his mother, Dottie, and walked over to his father.
His father said to me with tears in his eyes, "Leland, my son is gone. There is nothing you can do to bring him back, but the biggest tragedy would be if we don't continue to fly in space to honor their legacy."
I'm trying to figure out how I will honor their legacy if I'm not going to fly in space because I'm medically disqualified. Long story short, as we go to the memorial services, the chief of all the flight surgeons watches me clear my ears as we take off and land in the NASA airplane, and he signs me a waiver to fly in space.
I went back to Houston, and I got assigned to a flight even though I don't have any hearing in my left ear. So that was trying to stay focused on the task of helping others get ready for missions, still doing my job at NASA, whether it was in education, robotics, or whatever I was doing.
I had friends telling me I should quit NASA, I should sue them, write the tell-all book, and get paid. I wasn’t raised like that. My parents always taught me to try to do the right thing.
No matter what happens to you, stay focused and try to do the right things. That was one of the hardest things that had happened—just to stay focused on the mission when I'm internalizing all of my own, you know, am I going to fly? I'm never going to hear in this ear.
The chords and the overtones don’t sound the same on the piano as they used to because I had perfect hearing. When I got that piece of paper that says you're now free to fly and getting that first mission, 3-2-1 lift off, I was thinking of honoring the legacy of my friends that had passed because that’s what his father told me to do the night of the accident.
I did that, and it was perfect. We installed things and we built the space station, and it was just an amazing transformation from being at one of the lowest points in my life—in the hospital bed, not hearing; I couldn't hear a bomb drop—to now flying in space and building something incredible.