Story Musgrave Interview Former NASA astronaut Story Musgrave talks about the many spectacular achievements in a life that has taken him from farm kid to doctor to designer of the Hubble telescope to video producer and market researcher.
By David Hamburg
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Franklin Story Musgrave was born on August 19, 1935, on a dairy farm in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He was in the forests alone at three years old, and by five he was floating his homebuilt rafts on the rivers. He rode combines at that age, drove trucks and tractors at ten and was repairing them by thirteen, alone in remote fields. Story never finished school. He ran off to Korea with the U.S. Marines, where he was an aircraft electrician and an engine mechanic. He started flying with the Marines and, over the next 55 years, accumulated 18,000 hours of flying time in over 160 aircraft. He is also a parachutist, with over 800 freefalls. He has seven graduate degrees – in mathematics, computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature and psychology. He has been awarded twenty honorary doctorates and was a part-time trauma surgeon during his thirty-year career as a NASA astronaut. Story flew on six space flights with NASA. He performed the first shuttle spacewalk, on Challenger’s maiden flight, was a pilot on an astronomy mission, conducted two classified
Sounds to me like it’s an exploration of life.
True, but that still does not answer your question. That’s the result of it: exploration of one playing field after another, following either curiosity, passion or excitement – that’s all about what it is. But I still didn’t answer your question: “Where does this all come from?” What led you from medicine to become an astronaut, one who has participated in six space missions, including repairing the Hubble telescope?
Understand that there was no “space” when I was a kid. I didn’t have that opportunity, so I didn’t have that aspiration. I also got involved in medicine by understanding computers: I knew how to program them, how they worked, the hardware. And I was good at that, but I didn’t know how the brain performs the same functions. So I went into medicine. Curiosity is a fork in the road and medical researchers take forks in the road all the time. Okay, so you understand computers now, but how does the brain work? It’s fascinating. There aren’t any vacuum tubes in their head,
The story of how I became an astronaut is actually quite simple. I applied to a bulletin board posting: an opportunity arose, and I took it. Department of Defence missions, was the lead spacewalker on the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission and, on his last flight, operated an electronic chip manufacturing satellite on Columbia. Today, he operates a palm farm in Orlando, Florida, a video production company in Sydney, Australia, and a sculpture company in Burbank, California. He is also a landscape architect, a conceptual artist with Walt Disney Imagineering, an innovator with Applied Minds Inc., and a professor of design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Story also performs multimedia presentations on topics such as vision, leadership, motivation, safety, quality, innovation, creativity, design, simplicity, beauty and ecology.
so how does it work? They think they know something about it – which they don’t. But at least you leap off to learn what is known. But getting back to space: Kids today can have the aspiration to go there, but in my day I couldn’t, because there was no space. I was in graduate school when Sputnik went up. And so, all of a sudden, it comes on the scene, but that’s late in my life – I was 29. Still, I set my sights on going into space. But the story of how I became an astronaut is actually quite simple. I applied to a bulletin board posting: an opportunity arose, and I took it.
Story Musgrave, your accomplishments are so outstanding and cut across so many fields – medicine, science, arts, business and space. What drives you to achieve all this? What is your motivation in life?
Elation. That was pure joy.
I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to answer that question myself for 76 years. It’s a quest, but that’s not the answer as to where it comes from. It’s a search, it’s an exploration, it’s the adventure, and it’s a playing field. I’m here right now playing with my five-year-old daughter; that’s part of the story too. In fact, her name is Little Story.
That’s a totally different feeling. It was an epiphany; the rest of it is just a lot of details. It was an epiphanal fork in the road, where I said to myself, “I can do that. I have that opportunity now.” It was an incredible moment when Alan Shepard called me and asked if I wanted to come to work for NASA. I stayed for thirty years, longer than anybody in history.
What did you feel when you found out that you were accepted into the space program?
And how does that compare to when you finally went into space, six times?
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It must require a lot of discipline to stay in that kind of a program for three decades.
I didn’t find that it took any discipline; it was just about details. It’s just about doing it right. I suppose it does take discipline on a playing field. In each field, you have to follow the rules. That’s all they teach: Follow the rules. I get in with different playing fields; I’m a tree surgeon now. Get on the field, scope out the rules, and find out what you have to know to meet the world’s expectations. Have you ever slowed down during your long and illustrious career?
Not yet. What’s a typical day for you?
Well, today I worked on my landscape company; I operated big equipment, worked close to fifteen acres. I was out with a chainsaw for a few hours. Then I went home and did some work on my appearances, and then I played with my five-year-old daughter.
humans like to make categories and labels. Both sides are coming together again. Just like with Descartes who split up the mind and the body: we’ve been trying to get them back together again for over a hundred years. I guess that’s true in today’s world. Look at the giants of technology, like Steve Jobs; he’s both creative and technical.
Sure. He’s probably more artistic than technical, if you get right down to it. That guy’s a genius in his own special way. How would things have been different for you if you had been born into this high-tech age?
Well, I’m in this age of technology right now. I’m looking at five computer screens in front of me; I’m in it. All my presentations and teachings are technologically based. Look at my little daughter – she got an iPad and iPhone at the age of four. She works them both at the same time. She doesn’t know the difference. She’s been raised that way: she’s been bilingual in Spanish and English since the age of two. How important is discipline in terms of attaining success?
Sounds like you lead a very balanced life.
I’m not sure it’s balanced; in fact, I would say it’s a little excessive. Are you still challenging yourself to new heights?
Of course, I’m always reinventing myself. I teach courses these days, mostly at the corporate level. Do you still practise medicine?
No. For how long did you practise medicine?
Between 25 and 30 years. Until I got a bad case of frostbite, and it put my surgery career down. But I would’ve stopped doing it anyways; it doesn’t fit now in my current lifestyle. We’ve talked a bit about the scientific part of your life, but there’s also an artistic one as well. There’s your work with Disney.
My work is mostly creative these days. I’ve chosen that just because it’s fun. At this point, I’m fully employable no matter what I do, so I can choose what I like to do. They say that there are left brain people and right brain people. But usually people are not able to be both. I’m kind of a right brain person, but those worlds are coming together now. There really aren’t two brains. Sperry split them up, and it was a decent metaphor to think that you had one kind of brain, either creative and artistic or more technical and scientific; but that’s not really holding true anymore. It was kind of a paradigm to help explain the world the way that 16
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It’s probably exceedingly important, but semantically you can call it different things. I call it “attacking the details.” You’ve got to identify the details that you have to control, down to a certain level, to guarantee that you can stay on the plan. It’s what I teach all the time: that we become reliable. Here’s the plan – how to get to the end? It’s the same as our mission control. We’ve got a plan; we go to execute it. Everyone on the job has to learn what they must do. Together as a team, you deal with the details that you have to deal with. It’s that simple. I guess I call that discipline – the level of perfection in dealing with the details. When you work on a plan, you actually write out the details?
I do the details, whether they are written down or in my head. That’s what I do in life. I designed the Hubble telescope to make it serviceable by a space walker. Since this is a market research magazine and you have an extensive business background as well, how does market research fit into your work?
I’ve taken a lot of courses in market research; in fact, I have a minor in marketing in my MBA. The research is research; it’s all about paying attention to the details. I think that market research is just like it sounds: understanding your consumer in the marketplace. But if I had one bit of advice for market research, it’s that I think you should look at Apple and Steve Jobs. He did not create products because people needed them; they did not need them. Market research does not lead to an iPod; no one knew what an
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iPod was. You can’t ask people if they want something they don’t know about. You just give it to them. This is critical for marketing. Market research is important, but you also have to understand the radical creativity at Apple. In that kind of creativity, you never ask customers what they want, or you will be led astray.
got to be a nimble little squirrel out there, hauling 480 pounds around in a suit that doesn’t have the flexibility of your own body. The human has a great shoulder joint; a space suit does not have one. And of course you are in a free-fall position out there. I designed Hubble, and the reason that I got that job was because I’m a farm kid.
How would you compare Microsoft to Apple?
Microsoft is done in a technical, non-creative way. They got on the ground floor of the interface in the technical way, and that’s all that Microsoft has ever done. In fact, what else have they ever done except work the interface between the humans and the hardware? Of course, Apple missed it in the beginning. They didn’t see the currents, that DOS was becoming the standard. Apple was also quite expensive early on and didn’t understand that they were better and, like beta versus VHS, they did not understand the trajectory to becoming the standard. In the end, however, it all worked out, and today Apple has a lot more market value than Microsoft. We should probably also admire Apple’s persistence, because it had its own patchy spots. Steve Jobs was even thrown out of the company, at one point.
You’ve just got to smile when you think of Steve Jobs. Then he went out and developed Pixar and beat Disney at their own game. He digitized animation, way ahead of Disney. The man is just unbelievable. Some would say he’s the Einstein of our generation.
He is, in his own way. He reminds me of Howard Gardner’s book Multiple Intelligences, which I think is a must-read for anyone, especially in the business world. I think it’s a hugely important book, because intelligence is not just StanfordBinet. Brilliance can work in a lot of different ways. For example, I’m very strong in working on my own plan, getting the details right. So there are different forms of brilliance; it is not just your standard Stanford-Binet IQ. That’s not the whole answer. There are a lot of massive-IQ people who cannot tie their own shoes. There’s nothing more disturbing when you see that kind of talent that can’t get it together. Some people may not have high IQs, but they have brilliance in other ways. I think this is very important to understand: There are a lot of different types of intelligences.
How does the farm kid tie in with designing Hubble?
Put it this way: You take up the piano – at five or fifty. But what’s it like if you’ve never played the piano, and you take it up at fifty? My contention is that you can’t take it up. You’re going to be mechanical and push those little levers down; that’s as far as you go on the piano. If you take up the piano, however, at a young age, you can be massively successful at it. So I got into mechanics as a kid of about eight or nine; I was driving tractors through a field as a young kid, and by twelve I was keeping the fields going. I was riding the combines and tying the knots, when others could not do it, at five or six years old. The point is that I acquired mechanics when I was getting wired. But you also must have had a knack for mechanics.
Yes, that’s another important point I was going to tell you about. We all know about the word passion. If you have a passion for things, that in itself will give you the energy to control the details down to the level where you will guarantee success of the outcome. The other thing is to do something that comes easy for you. So my lesson is that you do not say, “I’m not good at this. I’ve got to work on it.” You absolutely throw away and forget what you’re not good at, because the best you’re going to do is to become mediocre. What you work on is what you’re already fantastic at, because you will push that to a very supreme level. That becomes your handle on life and what you offer to the world. Ultimately, you’ll make a difference in the world, and you’ll get employed by the world. So you work on your strengths, not your weaknesses. It’s all about passion and what comes easy. Sounds like a cop-out but it is not, because you can push that to extraordinary levels.
This interview would not be complete without a space story.
An inspiring point to end the interview. Thank you very much for doing this interview, Story. It’s been an education and ties in nicely with this month’s theme of education.
What was it like out there in space, working on the Hubble?
Great. I’m sorry that I couldn’t answer your first question.
The real heroics were actually on the ground. I designed Hubble to be friendly to a space walker. The spacewalker’s someone who is in a bulky suit, one that is very massive – it doesn’t have weight, but it’s got 480 pounds of mass. You’ve
Well, it’s good to know that even a man with your accomplishments cannot answer everything.
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