My great, great grandfather, Jens Nissen, immigrated by accident to the United States from Haderslev, Denmark. He was a teenager hired out as a sailor. One day he came home to find his mother had died and father had remarried, and he didn’t like the new wife, so he left and ended up on a ship to New York.
He got into in a barroom fight and worried he would be arrested, so he ran down to the wharf and hid in a ship that cast off for Port St. Joe, Florida, in 1829. He anglicized his name to John Nelson, married a local girl, and moved to what is now Orange Hill, six miles south of Chipley.
The 1862 Homestead Act said if you settled and worked the land for four years, the government would deed you 160 acres. My grandparents moved to the little town of Titusville and then bought property across the Indian River on Merritt Island. I have a copy of the deed from 1917. That acreage today is at the north end of the runway at Kennedy Space Center.
My grandmother lived until age 104, and she saw her grandson fly in space. But she didn’t like it at all. She came from a country farm family and never drove a car and didn’t like the fact that I was leaving the Earth.
An astronaut needs to have a tremendous sense of humor, which is therapeutic, because everything about flying into orbit is right on the edge. You discipline yourself not to dwell on potential problems or you go crazy. You focus only on the mission.
“The view of
Earth from orbit
is seared into my
consciousness.
You don’t see
political divisions
from up there. ”
The rise of the shuttle off the pad was slow. Then it accelerates to 25 times the speed of sound. That’s when you feel the g-force all over your body. Then after the main engine cuts off, a dramatic change takes place: Your breath comes back to you, and your arms start floating out in front of you.
The shuttle experience made me a better NASA administrator, as did the Challenger investigation. Along with the political experience of 30 years in Congress, I felt I was ready. But I didn’t realize just how important the political part would be.
Trump is savaging NASA. He’s cutting the budget for science in half, and there are going to be layoffs all over the agency. He cut funding for the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope (named after NASA’s first chief astronomer) even though it’s already been built. We also have 32 titanium tubes in a Martian lakebed waiting to be returned, and they canceled that mission.
It’s sad that America has lost its common sense. America is a beacon of what others want to be, and we’re changing that image, unfortunately. We’re changing the way we treat others and taking an exclusionist policy instead of a welcoming one.
I realized a problem was brewing in the late 1980s when domestic politics was becoming a blood sport. Campaign finances allowed for unlimited money to go into campaigns, along with the rise of excessive partisanship.
For a democracy to work, you have to build consensus. It’s like a football field. The way you govern in a democracy is between the two 40-yard lines where you can hash out your differences. If your politics get to either end zone, it’s very hard to build consensus. That’s what’s happened to our country.
If you’re egged on by social media to the point where you don’t know what truth is, you’re in for a very difficult time.
We’re in a crisis with the First Amendment because people are intimidated about speaking out. For this to occur in America, where people can’t do their job, is leading to a big problem.
Florida has extraordinary potential, and the future is very good. But I’ll give you a caveat: The Earth is heating, and storms are going to be more ferocious. As a result, insurance rates will be out of control. Everything will come to a halt because Florida is built on construction, home sales and real estate. All of that will be paralyzed.
I don’t know what retirement is. I’m writing a book right now and I’m trying to see if nearly 50 years of public service is worth anything. But it’s going to have a space theme. The title is Space Odyssey: Risk, Rivalries and the Next Giant Leap.
I’ve always jogged. My knees are getting shot, so I jog on grass. But exercise gives you the energy to keep going at age 82.