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My Job: Astronaut
It’s always helpful and inspiring to hear from men who have found success in their field of work. In the “My Job” series, we’ll interview men who have desirable jobs and ask them how they found purpose in their life. In this episode, we interview Col. Pat Forrester, an astronaut with NASA.
Q: Tell us a little of your background.
I live in Houston, TX now, but I was born in El Paso. My father was in the military, so we moved all over. I consider the place where I grew up to be Springfield, VA in Northern Virginia. That’s where I went to school before going off to West Point. I’m 54 right now. My background was as a military officer and a pilot following West Point. I flew all sorts of different aircraft and was a test pilot. Following that, I came to NASA as an astronaut. I’m married; I’ve been married for 30 years in a month to Diana, whom I met in high school in VA. She also was born in TX and her father was in the military; they were at Springfield too and we met there. We have two sons, Patrick (27) who is an army pilot and Andrew (25) who lives close by in Houston and is a financial analyst. My father passed away recently, but my mother is still living.
Q: What is your current job and how long have you been doing it?
Probably the big title job that people would be interested in is that of astronaut. I’ve been an astronaut since 1996. Currently, I’m the Chief of Safety for the astronaut office. When we are not assigned to a space station, training and flying, we fill all the support roles. So I’m the Chief of Safety for the astronaut office, but also still an astronaut. At the same time I was an astronaut, I was also a military officer. About half the astronauts are in the military and half are civilians, and I spent 27 years in the military, so there is a broad range of things I do.
Q: How many space missions have you been on, where to, and what were you doing?
I have been on 3 missions, all 3 were on the space shuttle to the International Space Station. I began flying and training for a mission in 2000, which was the first year that we launched people to go full time on the Space Station. We began building it in 1998, and had been building it ever since. I flew in 2001 on the shuttle Discovery and we went up to the space station for 2 weeks as part of the assembly process. I did 2 space walks while up there and some robotic operations. I flew again on the shuttle Atlantis in 2007 also to the space station…did 2 space walks and assembly missions…so we would go outside and fix things. And I flew again in 2009 on Discovery and we completed that mission doing assembly, robotics, and outfitting the space station. So all 3 missions were about building the Space Station which is now complete.
Q: How did you become an astronaut?
It started back when I was in the army; I had always wanted to be an army officer at West Point. I was a pilot and was flying in Hawaii, when I read an article about an army astronaut, and I realized that there was the possibility to do two things I could really enjoy – being in the military and flying but also being an astronaut. I didn’t even know we had those. I read the article about the first army astronaut. I began applying then, but it turned out I needed to be much more qualified than I was at the time. So I began to do those things…go back to Graduate school at UVA and get more experience flying, being a test pilot by going through the Navy test pilot school. I just loved flying different things, and thought that flying the shuttle would be the ultimate thing. So I applied for about 11 years when I was finally accepted after 5 applications; NASA takes applications every 2 years, and I was selected in 1996.
Q: What is the top misconception of your job?
I think that sometimes people feel like all we do is fly in space. I always tell people if they’re interested in this job that they need to remember that at the time the person who had flown in space the most times (6) had a total of 30 days in space and they had been with NASA for 30 years. So, there’s a lot more to it than just being in space…a lot of hard work. Like any job, it is a job. It takes a lot of time away from family. But I think that would be the biggest misconception…that we spend all out time in space.
Q: What is the impact of actually being in space on your faith in Christ?
I would tell you that being in space doesn’t have any impact on my faith in Christ. I would say that by being in space, I have an opportunity to impact somebody else’s faith. I get the question a lot…everyone thinks that you go to space and have some religious experience by looking back at the earth. What I try to tell them is that it’s just another perspective. It is without a doubt a beautiful perspective of God’s creation. But I live in Houston in the middle of the heat and concrete and all I have to do is go up to the mountains of North Carolina or Colorado and that different perspective allows me to see God as Creator a little differently than I had before. So I would say it is a unique experience and perspective to see creation, but I feel like I knew God as Creator before then. A lot of people want to know if we have a religious experience because of being afraid, launching on a rocket. I usually try to tell that that I had a lot of peace. Diana had a lot of peace and I had a lot of peace because of my faith. So I think we are the minority: Christian astronauts, but I think we do have an opportunity to witness and be witnesses for Christ.
Q: How do you see your relationship with God intersect with your work the most?
I think that it’s exactly how most other Christians at work do…just by having relationships with people and allowing people to see Christ in your life. There are little things we can do. For example, every day when we are in orbit, we are awakened by music, which is selected for the crew and each day it is selected for a different person. So they will announce “that was this song played for whatever crew member.” So for my songs, at least for the last two missions, have been contemporary Christian songs about creation. A lot of space buffs out there are curious about the music that wakes us up and they will look it up and find interest in it. So there are little things like that on mission that we can do. We are allowed to fly several articles for organizations. On my last mission, I contacted Mission Aviation Fellowship, a missions organization, and asked if I could fly something for them. They sent me a piece of Nate Saint’s plane. He was the pilot of the crew that was martyred as missionaries in Ecuador. Little things like that generate discussion, and people wander why someone would do something like that. One of my missions…I won’t mention which one it was or who was on it…after we had landed and were traveling back to Houston….they came up and knelt down next to me and said “I wanted to let you know that having been on this crew with you, I love my wife now more than I ever have since we’ve been married. I didn’t know that when everyone was talking about their wives or making jokes that it was ok to defend them and not do those kinds of things.” I don’t tell you that to tell you about me, but about the impact that God can create. It didn’t have anything to do with anything other than living the life and being the people He has called us to be. Through that we have an impact on other people. Which…by the way, a lot of these people have a lot of influence out there. It depends on how they want to use it. If we’re impacting other people in our office and they take their position and use it for good things, then that is a good thing.
Q: How do the recent changes in NASA affect you?
For sure it’s the end of the space shuttle program, and we still have the Space Station up there that we built. We used the space shuttle to build it. Its’ a tremendous orbiting laboratory up there, and we have 6 people living on it…continuous human presence on that thing since 2000. We will continue to launch people on Russian rockets. We will continue to support them. As the Chief of Safety, it’s my job to make sure that we’re training and working in space safely and that we’re looking after our crew and their mates. For me, my job is still there. I have told them that I do not want to fly in space anymore. That has to do with where I’m at in my career and wanting to spend more time with Diana and not as much time away training. We’ve still got a bright future; however, all the people who worked on the space shuttle who are losing their jobs, it is a tough time and we need to support them and witness to them and help them in any way we can.
Q: Any other things that might be helpful for us to know?
Working at a government agency where we have to do our best to separate church and state, it’s sometimes tough and the only things we can do are when we get requests from churches or religious organizations. It’s our chance to be able to witness. Once I went to Uganda and taught at a pastor’s conference. I had gone over with my senior pastor, and he and I were teaching a conference to local pastors in a little town in Uganda. It is filled with poverty there; most have never been away from the area or been in a car or an airplane. We taught through the book of Mark, and I felt like that’s what I really wanted to do. The missionary there whom we came in to support wanted me to tell all these pastors what I do, and I didn’t want to. He kept asking me to go and do a presentation for them. Finally, on the last night, I reluctantly agreed to do it. I had a little video that I showed them. The next day, when we were saying goodbye, there was one guy who could speak a little English. I had done my presentation through a translator. His name was Joseph and he came up to me and I said, “how are you Joseph, did you sleep well last night?” He said, “I didn’t sleep at all.” I said “how come?” I figured it is because it was hot, he was sleeping on the floor, mosquitoes, etc. He said, “Until I saw your pictures last night, I didn’t know the earth was round. After I saw that I sat up all night staring out at the stars and realized what a mighty Creator I serve.” Here was a guy in his 40s or 50s who didn’t know the earth was round. I was so reluctant to do the presentation; I wanted to be a pastor while I was there, and God was teaching me to use what he’s given me and it would have a bigger impact than anything I taught out of the book of Mark. The lesson for me in that was that if we could see an attribute of God really…not through human eyes but from a different view like Joseph did, then our lives would probably be as dramatically changed as Joseph’s was when he found out the earth was round.
I did not realize how much time and effort it took to have to go on one mission.