"Time Works Like A Lot Of Things In Einstein's Theory Of Relativity: It's Relative.  The Way That Time

On a daily basis?  That's a good question, because when you think of people that might be dressed in flight suits and things or have the duty title of a pilot, that's not all we do.  

Most of our time is actually spent working, coordinating with teams, whether it's scientists with different objectives, learning what they want to do so that we know how to translate that into where we need to put the airplane, to put their instruments in the right place to measure what they want to look at.  Or with engineers, when we're redesigning or modifying aircraft so they can perform the way we want.

That combination there is really pretty amazing.

What do you do on a daily basis?

Yeah!  So if you want to be an astronaut, my best piece of advice is definitely to study something in the science field.  Basically every astronaut has some kind of background in science, technology, engineering.  Everybody has--even the fighter pilots have studied something and done a Masters degree in some kind of STEM field.  So if you start there, you're definitely headed in the right direction.

What is your advice to someone who wants to follow the same steps you take?

Working at NASA has been an extraordinary experience and I have a lot of memories I can tell you are my favorite.  But there's one in particular that stands out above the rest.  

I was a new flight director, only been in the office for two years, and we were executing the STS-120 mission, where we were taking these solar arrays that are in blankets, and you put them up on board the space station and you unfold them like an accordion.  

As we were unfolding one of them, we saw it rip.  And by the time that the power discipline expert could make the array stop, we had a huge tear inside the solar array.  After several meetings, it became clear that we were not going to be able to undock the shuttle in that configuration and we had to figure out a way to fix the solar array.

At that time I was working at what we called a team four.  So three teams used to support the shuttle mission, but we always had a fourth team waiting in the background for something to go wrong.  So at that point we called together a meeting and a young engineer showed up who was about 24/25 years old.  And [he] said "Flight!  I have a solution!"

So he walks into my meeting with this. [holds up object] And I said, "what is that?"  

And he says, "It's a cufflink, Flight, and I made it out of spare parts that are available to the astronauts on the space station. And if you take this and you weave it through some of the holes and you pull it tight, we'll be able to secure the solar array."

And so sure enough, we were able to take this cufflink and a couple more like it, and put one of our tallest crew members on board a stacked set of robotic arms and he installed a cufflink.  And that cufflink is there today and keeps the space station solar array structurally sound.  So best moment ever.  You never know what a 24/25 year old can accomplish.

What has been the best memory you have so far at NASA?

In my 28 years here, I've been able to participate in a lot of exciting missions, but out of all of the future missions we have planned the one I'm looking forward to the most is being a part of boots on the moon in 2024.

What future missions are you looking forward to the most?

"Theoretical?  Yeah, I think so, I think we could do it.  Uh, technically there are still a lot of details that need to be worked out."

Could you theoretically time travel through a black hole or other object with such intense mass?

Yeah, that's a wonderful thing.  And whether you're flying low level, over the earth's surface, or way up high in the earth's atmosphere like with the ER-2, there's different sights.  

One thing I like about flying low level is the vegetation, the hills, the mountains, the water - where you see details in the waves and the trees up close that are just absolutely beautiful.  Conversely, when you're way up high  you see everything.  And that's where you realize how many different pieces of the earth's surface come together, between the oceans, the big lakes, the mountains and everything, and the colors are so different that all they just paint an incredible picture from 13 miles above the earth.  

And when you look from the surface up through the beautiful atmosphere that we have from where the sky moves from a light blue color and then gradually gets dark blue and then purple and even starts to turn black way up high, that's just an incredible sight that I feel real privileged to see every time I go up there.  It's a privilege, it's just amazing.

What's the most beautiful natural scene uou've ever seen personally, as in Aurora Borealis, volcanic eruption, or something that made you seem like the Earth should be treasured?

Yes, there’s several paths to get to where I am right now and where the other researcher pilots are here at NASA.  We have some that come up through civilian flying and they’re educated in different areas.  Typically most of us have engineering or STEM related degrees in college, and usually Masters degrees on top of that. 

The flying portion, most of us actually come from a military background because that’s the best way to get a lot of intense experience very quickly.  So most of us are retired military pilots from all different services, but then we do have several pilots who have grown up flying corporate jets, larger airplanes and became test pilots for companies like, say, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, things like that.  And then they get hired at NASA based on their depth and breadth of experience.

 So several paths to get there, but these are the most common.

I want to pursue a career in aeronautics and want to get into NASA. Any advice?

Yeah, flying's great.  It's a completely different sensation.  You know, you can compare parts of it to things like riding a bicycle, skateboarding, surfing, things like that - even skydiving.  It's a real feeling of freedom when you're actually controlling *makes wing gestures* the aircraft flying through the air - a little bit like a bird. 

And that's an amazing privilege to have, and it's really a nice opportunity to get up there and maneuver in three dimensions - really four dimensions if you consider speed - through the earth's atmosphere.  I absolutely love it.

How does flying feel?

"So, one of the really cool things about black holes that I've been working on recently is using black holes to study another aspect of astrophysics which we don't really understand called dark matter.  Dark matter pervades the entire universe. It's probably five, six times more populous than regular matter, and yet we still have no idea what this stuff is.

The only thing we know about dark matter is that it reacts to gravity.  And if you really want to push gravity to the extreme, of course the way to do it is with a black hole.  So we're trying to understand how dark matter and black holes interact together."

What is the most fascinating thing about black hole research for you, personally?

"So I think what we mean when we say a "gentle" black hole is probably that there's not a lot of hot gas, x-rays, gamma rays, relativistic jets around the black hole.  That makes it safe to go closer to.  In terms of that actually, the supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is a pretty gentle black hole.  But even so it still would be far too dangerous to get close to and survive."

Is there such thing as a ‘gentle black hole’ (as in Interstellar) that would one day be a candidate for sending probes? Or is it a lost cause?