from space that's my first time see if you know people who have never been here before so i'm so glad to be here and what i want to talk to you about is the right stuff is the never give up stuff because i've had a lot of obstacles in my life i've overcome a lot of things i never imagined i'd ever find space and i had that opportunity and so when i say it was shout out to the people w ok hello everyone out there and radar i hope we can see the screen when i turn the slides but if not we'll get you a copy of the of the slides too all right so i grew up in a small town  is about eighty thousand people so that's pretty small compared to the hundred million people in ethiopia and i'm just really excited because when i was in space i saw the planet from this vantage point of two hundred forty miles up and when you go around the planet and you go around it every ninety minutes you see a sunrise and a sunset every forty five minutes and it changes you fundamentally  makes you want to come home and be a better person and do better and help inspire the next generation which are in this room right here today so i want you to ask me questions i want to use me as a resource because i have an opportunity to see some things that only five hundred sixty two people have ever seen so far and maybe some of you in here one day will be you know in the orange flight suit of the blue flight suit going to space with the ethiopian space program you know dr solomon with the space program he's in two years he's going to try to fly a sixty five kilogram satellite they can go up and do telecommunications or earth observation and then after that who knows what building rockets building growing astronauts from ethiopia to go in take that pride in take that step maybe we'll mars be the first person on mars so just always have this exploration in your heart in your mind because you know no one can hold you back unless you let them and no one can hold you back in your mind unless you let them so i'm going to share my congress our congress for money to sin a human being to the moon at that same time dr martin luther king jr was in the south going to help people had just been bombed they were the freedom riders and so the civil rights of people who live like me were being violated because of the color of skin and so you have these two things going on one of the most technologically incredible thing setting up human being to the moon and we at the same time can't get our civil rights straight and right before that and april of one hundred sixty one yuri gagarin went around the planet so the russians beat us to space and this moon shot this moon landing thing was something that never been done before but it was and there was no infrastructure there were no rockets there were nothing built to do this but it was the sheer will of people using their brains to develop and create and motivated a nation to get to this to this planet and september of one nine hundred sixty one this is my mom and beams melvin grace melvin they were thinking about starting a family now i call this my pre me pitch or pretty me because i wasn't born i was born in one hundred sixty four and so they were thinking about how they're going to raise their family how will they be educated you know they were schoolteachers they were middle school teachers and you know my dad taught language arts but we did so many other things besides language arts he taught me how to do you know building things creating things and so you don't have to have a degree in something to be good at something if you have the sheer will and desire in your heart if you have an internet connection you can find out how to do anything mit has classes online stanford has classes online the same classes you take it mit they have them online for free so if you want the knowledge it's there there are certain things you have to have you get to have access to that internet piece but there are ways to figure things out and so we did a lot of things like that with me growing  creating things this isn't a shell nichols she was the first african american woman on television in a leadership role on television this was star trek she was the lieutenant who or who was the she was the communications officer so on the flight deck with mr spock and mr sulu and captain kirk and all these people there was a black woman who was running things large and in charge and she inspired so many people in the sixty's one was ron mc mayer who was an mit physicist an african american physicist who went to space and he was watching her on television not being a scientist or engineer but you know playing that role on television and that inspired him he said himself he said if there are women like that in space i want to go and so he ended up going to school got a physics degree went to mit got say that it makes me cringe a little bit because this was this was back in the time when only white men went to space if you saw all the people it was only white men and so when people asked me after neil armstrong a buzz walked on the moon did i want to be an astronaut and i said no i said i don't want to be i don't i don't see someone like me and so this happen we had so many different things happen the problem with that is one man the women here can do the same thing the man can do right right i can't hear you but i want to hear because it's one you know you depend on someone for your life whether it's a man woman whoever it is that person has the knowledge in the skill set they can they can save your life just like anyone else when i was in space on my first mission the commander of the entire space station one hundred billion dollars space station  eighteen different countries working on this space station was a woman dr peggy whitson and she applied to be an astronaut thirteen times there was a medical condition that she had and they said you can't be an astronaut she went in found and did the research on that condition improved to the flight surgeons that this would not affect me being an astronaut she got to the core in one nine hundred ninety six and she will be the longest running person ever u s person ever to be in space six hundred fifty days and when she first thought about becoming an astronaut there were no women astronauts so she had a she had a dream to become an astronaut when sally ride became the first female astronaut her dream changed to a goal because she saw someone there and so that's why she was so hungry so tenacious so driven to not give up when those doctors told her she would never be an astronaut and now she's going to be six hundred fifty days in space so it lets you know that you can overcome all kinds of things if you believe if you have the desire and the willing your heart then there's me and my sister kathy doing drawings is my mom she was a school teacher we were wearing her out every day we were doing all kinds of things but my mom was a schoolteacher too and we helped inspire us and i grew up in a town in lynchburg virginia like i said where we had this gentleman here is name is whirlwind johnson he was the first black doctor who integrated the hospital where i was born he was the first black doctor in a hospital but he was also a really good tennis player in  trained arthur ashe who was one of the most incredible tennis players in the world he won every turn a man known to humankind wimbledon u s open french open all the slam tournaments and he was the captain of the davis cup team and this is althea gibson who did the same thing as the first african american woman to win all of those tournaments so they were training five blocks down the street from where i grew up and there was this legacy of excellence in athletics and this guy chauncey spencer he wanted to fly as a kid he would go to the airport and see these planes taking off and he went out when he was sixteen he wanted to go get flying lessons and they told him that we don't allow blacks to get lessons here this was in the in the six fifty's and sixty's so he moved to chicago there was a there was a black mechanic who was also a pilot who trained him how to fly and then him and his friend dale page flew this lincoln page tell dragger airplane to ten cities around the country and the one of the cities they went to was washington d c they went to congress in this leather jacket and gobbles walked in there with you know walk in and they said to african americans cannot currently fly in the military we want you to give money so that we can fly in the military harry s truman raise three million dollars and that was how the tuskegee airmen were born they were led to the first african american astronauts guy bluford in may jamieson were the first male and female after american astronauts then set that legacy for more people to follow the steps when i was a kid my mom read this book to me every night the little engine that could in this book the engine is really small and it has to go over this mountain pulling another engine and he always she always said it was a female agent always said i think i can i think i can i think i can and that mantra built up inside of me from a very young age and so have those things in your mind set that let you know that you can overcome this you can you know i think i can i think i can and finally will do something in the othe book that i read was curious george who was a very inquisitive little guy who went around getting in trouble when i got in trouble sometimes but i was always curious curiosity lease expirations can you recently and then as my dad my sister i wanted to skateboard one summer and my dad said we don't have the money so he said figure it out and so as scientists and engineers we figure out how to solve problems my problem was i didn't have a skateboard the solution was get a piece of wood go to the wood shop make it into the board and then i had to get a paper route it made some money somehow to buy you know the wills in the trucks on the skateboard and i built my own skateboard so that's what engineering is about solving problems with solutions you need to you want something and then i think about this bridge my dad was a schoolteacher you play in the band he did odd jobs to make money for his family and one summer he drove this truck into our driveway and i thought he was going to the bread business so you want me to help you in the bread business beds the flip downs us mechanical engineering electrical engineering we had a propane tank so we could cook so all of this to carry on their legacy so to think about honor and legacy on the night of the death of his son and so i have him in medically you know cleared to fly and i'm trying to figure out how i'm going to honor them by carry on th and so the best way to honor them is to do the best you can in life to do the best you can for people to help people in those kind of things and we were flying to the different more memorial services after this one and the airplane were taking off and landing and i was you know on landing i was clearing away ears the reg you know with my fingers and the chief of all the flight surgeons was watching me every time we took off and landed and he was writing in this little  black book when it was time for me to leave the sea to go back to houston to figure what i was going to do he called me in his office and he said leland i believe in you here's the waiver for you to fly in space if i had quit mass if i hadn't gone to c to do this job and then just stayed the course stayed the past listen to the prophecy i would have never because i would have given up in the moral is don't give up keep going no matter what those obstacles are just keep growing and this is the picture i took when i got assigned to my first mission i stuck my dogs in the nasa they said you can bring your family and my family was in virginia so i thought my dogs in and got the picture and this picture is on the cover of my book chasing space if you get the book you'll launch from cape canaveral three two one lift off minutes later we are now in space and this is what the space station looked like when we came upon it that's the robotic arm the solar arrays the radiators the reject heat and this is the living apartments here that we we work  we were adding one more piece to the space station we're doing a flip so this so the space station astronauts could take pictures of our shuttle to see if the tiles are intact in the wings are intact and everything and then we get ready to dock to the space  you see rex right there it's glasses on and we have a laser that we can tell the distance we are we have a certain closing rate we have to have to be in this sort of there's a cage and antenna for you know sending signals down to the to the ear these are radiators for rejecting heat from all the equipment the computers the sensors and everything in the shuttle and now we're docked to the space station that's the docking compartment so if you come out of the come out of the flight deck you go down this well and you go through this part here and come up into the space station and that's how we get in the space station my job is to take this european space agency's laboratory two billion module take it out of the payload bay with the robotic arm and attach it to the space station that was my job and i've never done this before everything we train of the simulation but the simulation was perfect and we docked is the space station and everyone was excited the female commander dr petit wished and invited us over to dinner he was peggy here's our whole crew we have hot sauce right here because we like it spicy  space if you look at this picture you see a very international crew french american asian american african american caucasian american occasion american female  american caucasian german and russian two people used to fight against on this mission we look out the window going seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour breaking bread with your enemies you know if things are good and you look out the window you see this this glorious beautiful planet below you that's when i came over ethiopia say wow i was pretty and there i want to however go there one day and i never you know i mean i knew i would probably come here one day but it i didn't know i'd be here talking to you guys today and i was honored that i had that opportunity to see your country from space and know that now dr solomon has put in twenty sixteen put together a space institute and they want to launch a satellite in two years a sixty five kilogram satellite after that maybe launching astronauts from ethiopia so one of you in this room may be one of those going to space one day maybe going to mars the first human being to put a flag on the martian surface from ethiopia you don't know and the possibilities are endless so get ready and so after that i had to show off my lions in space is about two football jerseys and this is what the space station looked like when we left the space station that's the piece that we added to it and snoo outpost has a new a new home and don't do that ok almost choked to death in space drinking a water above with him and ems in it but if you look at that that's you know we're playing with their food we have a good time but if you look at that that's physics that's newton's laws a surface tension that's chemistry it's all those things combined in that one bit of play and so understanding those concepts in those things helps you understand how you can play better with your food but it's also looking at designing in developing new medicine in the microgravity environment looking at how your heart changes shape when your heart gets smaller actually smaller and changes shape because it's not pumping as much blood it doesn't have to pump the blood from a feat the intercranial pressure in your head it increases when the fluid shifts into your head some people actually have to to wear glasses in space because their eyeballs get a little bit distorted from that pressure so we're having to do the research on people to understand how we can overcome some of these things michael j fox the actor that was in back to the future yes parkinson's disease his foundation is funding research to get more therapy for parkinson's in space research and we're looking at stem cells for heart and lung so lots of lots of research going on to help people down here on the planet we're doing in space and i came home and for a williams and i presented this montage to quincy jones the artist quincy jones and there's buzz aldrin who walked on the moon so this is like old school astronaut new school astronaut old school musician new school musician in the rose really passionate about space he loves space he's got a lot of cool stuff going on my second mission was in two thousand and nine this guy right here randy bresnik he's in space right now he's in a space for six months he just launched about two weeks ago and he's having a great time follow him on twitter astro brezhnev and you'll see some of the stuff that he's doing but this  our crew this is what it's going to be like when maybe you guys go to space one day and see ok that video didn't play so if you look at this i'm in the right corner on a bottom right corner i put a mirror up to my to this to look out the window once we rotate i could see how that overhead window back to where my family was sitting on the ground and that plume connected with the ground and follow us all the way to space so it felt like they were all connected with us as we went to space and a half minutes later this orange tank is jettison that falls back into the atmosphere burns up and falls in the ocean those are all of our tiles on the bottom and then we started doing robotics once we docked to the space station s t s one twenty nine it was one of the last few missions of the space shuttle so our job was to get all of the hardware up to the space station so in case something broke you have this preposition up on the space station on this truss or you can just use a robotic arm and grab it and bring it back to to install so this is robotics area we have robotic hand controllers monitors for use in the robotic arm to actually do installations and help build the space station these are the targets he works are you got to play hard to right playing football eating raisin that's floating around in space there in space sometimes you carry things with your feet because you pull yourself around with your hands and so you know you can use different ways to move things there randi right there is a space right now that's bob you going to do a little superman this to hear me playing with my food these are all mines now in the in the m and m's took my game up to a whole nother level coming home you start building the g s back up in your body you saw the book starting to fall you get about two and a half times your weight and g s you feel your body coming home your arms were really heavy this is the heads up display lining up on the runway at about three hundred knots i have a stick that i can hit the guy in front of me to say lower the landing gear if you didn't lower it so he pushes the switch gear comes down and then we actually land you can see in this little inset that the tires heat up quite high because they get they turn white instantly all that energy going around the planet and coming home has to be dissipated back on the drug comes out helps us rotate back down to the to the earth and you know this is my last time in space over the two missions i have almost ten million miles in space so i can have only a little bit of those frequent flyer miles will be set right and here is the growth you coming off the cool thing was the massive minister was here two years ago charlie bolden and he's a big advocate for stem education and this is the first time the two african american men in the nasa administrator and the president of the united states of america are all african american males really be really brilliant and just great great person to work with there's our crew on thanksgiving day in space we just finished eating our turkey and all of our food wasn't mama makes it home but you know it was pretty good in the for the station is about the size of a football field and some of the things we do human research life sciences physical sciences earth science astrophysics technology research a lot of technology transfer like we have something called the u p a the urine processor assembly it converts sweat and you're an interim period drinking water and so that's a way that you can you know use technology to transfer things  back down here the size of it's about six bedroom house the volume of seven forty seven weighs about a million pounds about three hundred twenty automobiles and it travels the equivalent distance to the moon and back that's four hundred  eighty thousand miles a day as it goes around is pretty for and then these are some of the other things clean drinking water for people living far from water treatment facilities so these are some of the benefits advanced robotic surgery that we can do medical diagnostics we look at lots of things in people's bodies in space for diagnostic purposes in forty two million students reach an educational events from space and so that's really important these are some of my last football hits in space and we actually flipped the super bowl coin in space so the super bowl for this year was this was the coin we took of the space we actually flip the coin on the show you this quick video