Anyone who watched a Space Shuttle launch will have noticed that the vehicle rolled over during lift-off so that the Orbiter’s cargo bay faced towards the Earth.
When former NASA astronaut and Space Shuttle pilot Lieutenant Colonel Duane ‘Digger’ Carey is asked why this procedure was carried out, he replies: “It’s because there’s a certain number of parameters you have to achieve before you get to orbit. You find it’s a heck of a lot easier and cheaper and uses a lot less fuel when you are going slow than if you try when you are going really really fast.”
In a nutshell, the Space Shuttle’s trajectory was adjusted at an early stage to achieve its goals.
And it’s this analogy which Duane uses to describe how parents, teachers and leaders can point young people in the right direction by influencing the course of their lives at a young age.
The 58-year-old and his wife Cheryl are currently engaged in educating young people about the importance of America’s space exploration and research programs.
They also seek to inspire young people, particularly from economically-deprived backgrounds, to pursue education and careers in technical fields.
Duane believes anyone can be inspired into believing and then achieving their dreams, regardless of how unattainable those dreams may appear.
On Monday he spoke to 250 pupils at at Auchmuty High School in Glenrothes and left at least one pupil “sobbing” at the realisation she had potential to fulfil her dreams, despite her challenging socio-economic background.
Then on Monday night at St Andrews University an audience of more than 300, including many children, heard him speak about his experiences of life, from being born to a 15-year-old single parent, living in council housing and hopping freight trains in Minnesota to piloting the Columbia Space Shuttle in March 2002, commanding 60-aircraft multi-national strike packages during Desert Storm and test piloting US Air Force F-16 fighters beyond their flight envelopes.
His favourite school visits are to inner-city and rural areas of the United States where the kids don’t have a lot of money.
But he strongly believes that economic circumstances should have little or no correlation to future success.
He told The Courier: “The message I send out is that when you are lucky enough to be growing up in the UK or the USA or a place that has a half-way decent educational system, it’s on you to grab those opportunities, maximise them and have an interesting, productive life.
“Whatever your dreams happen to be, the first thing to realise is that they are possible. But you shouldn’t be discouraged at the very beginning like I was thinking there’s no way a kid like me can do this sort of thing.”
Duane also wants to get the message across to kids that if they work hard early on, life can still be fun.
So far he has spoken to more than 250,000 middle school kids mainly in the USA.
But he has ambitions to take his ‘One World, One Child, One Dream’ message to every sovereign nation on Earth.
He added: “We are realistic about what we do. We realise that in modern societies, kids have a lot of distractors in their lives – way more than we did. We thought we were distracted. We know we are not going to reach every child. But you know there might be 1500 kids in a school, and our goal is to reach one.
“If there was just one kid from every school we went to who went home that night, looked at him or herself in the mirror and said, ‘I’m going to do it, this is it. I’m going to be great’, then we have succeeded.”
Duane was the 410th human ever to enter space when he piloted Columbia on what was NASA’s fourth Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.
The crew successfully upgraded the Hubble, leaving it with a new power unit, a new camera and new solar arrays. During his shuttle mission he orbited Earth 165 times and covered 3.9 million miles in over 262 hours. It was Columbia’s final complete mission before it burned up on re-re-entry on February 1 2003.
But whilst the crews of the International Space Station tend to have more time to contemplate the fragility of human existence when they gaze down at the Earth, Duane too has been fundamentally influenced by his experiences in space.
He said: “The space station crews do have more time to contemplate, but basically anyone who’s been up there for more than an hour and caught a good glimpse of the Earth – I believe it changes all of us.
“Perhaps in quite a similar way, I believe experienced astronauts are more aware of things like environmental awareness and a perspective that the Earth is not as big as forgiving as limitless as we think it is. It’s a rather small spaceship really.
“Looking at the Earth is beautiful. But I think the true appreciation is when you look the other way. “When you look out into space and say ‘wow there’s nothing out there except radiation and vacuum. There’s nothing warm and soft out there’.
“Everything that can protect us is there on this planet. And then you look back at the Earth and you go ‘she has cradled us and protected us from all this savage radiation and temperature extremes’. “And then you look at the thin layer of atmosphere. And it sounds ridiculous, but when you are in space and you look at the Earth, we are mostly water. Every school kid knows that. You don’t really know it until you are there and you see it. And these little mud spots we call continents, there’s not a lot of room for us to live. And then you develop these contrite ideas that hey, we are all in this together. Let’s get along, work it out, talk until the cows come home. Let’s not hurt each other and shoot each other and do these kind of things.”
In the first Gulf War, Duane did his job and flew over Iraq as a combat pilot. But seeing the Earth from space has merely cemented his view that war “just doesn’t make sense”
He added: “You think what’s all the fuss about? You fly over the Middle East in the shuttle and paradoxically, of all the beautiful portions of the Earth, it stands out. The contrast of the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. How paradoxical that it is the most dangerous place on earth. “There’s very good reason it’s called the Middle East. The world connects there. Africa, Asia, Europe. It’s the middle.”
Duane also feels saddened at the on-going Syria refugee situation.
He continued: “ We (Cheryl and I) feel really bad because we’ve been to many of these places. “These are ordinary people who just want to live their lives. The huge percentage of people I don’t care where you live just want to live their lives. They are not extremists, and they are not violent about their religion. They just want to live and be left alone to raise their children and to be given a chance. People are the same all over.
“To take a step back historically to the beginning of time there have been great exoduses. These mass migrations that happen. We are viewing history again. As to how that should be handled, I don’t know about that. This isn’t the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last, but it is just so tragic.”
NASA is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s.
But having experienced the dangers of space travel, he believes humans should get the technology right with a permanent Moon base first.
He said: “I agree it’s inevitable humans will continue to have curiosity to enlarge our environment and live in other places. The question is from a measly human point of view is who will lead those teams and what social systems will we take to the other planets? Those are questions for smarter people than I.
“The question on whether do we put all our eggs in one basket and concentrate on Mars or concentrate on the Moon first and then go on to Mars? To my way of thinking, I’m more in favour of doing the Moon first. It’s only three days away in terms of travel. If we can live there we can live anywhere. All of the technologies to live on the Moon are transferable with very little modifications. Mars is going to be more hospitable than the Moon. The sad thing about Mars is that it’s very very far away, and if you run into a problem with people out there, you might lose them.
“On the Moon you’ve got a very good chance of recovering from mistakes and learning. And then philosophically I feel maybe that’s why the Moon is there. It’s so close. To let us practice, to let us crawl before we walk. The debate rages but I’m a Moon guy first. I think it just makes common sense to do that first, and it’s well within our means.”