Transcript
0:04 well thank you so much uh lori thank you for that degree uh trustee since i've been a trustee of the university thank you for voting for me really appreciate that me also thank the graduates for letting me have the opportunity to be your commencement speaker and lastly in the in the thanks that i'm going to give i want to give a shout out to my sweetheart i actually got that word from lori last night when we had dinner and i liked
0:33 that so my sweetheart just came here this morning valerie thank you for being here in this special agreement to the graduates of 2015 i will just simply say that i am very proud of you i know that your parents are proud of you the family that's here are proud of you and lets all of us give them a hand for this wonderful day
1:11 you know as i look out among you it really confirms a couple of things that i believe and that is that there are no limits to human ingenuity or to human achievement and the other is that we are infinite beings with infinite possibilities all of you and it is through that lens that i have really uh lived my life in fact and what i'd like to do is share with you some pieces of that life and maybe
1:42 answer that question and sharing my adventure of what it's like to travel in space because i know a lot of you when you see an astronaut you want to know that so i want to share that with you but also some lessons that i've learned along the way and that first lesson goes like this that dreams are the reality of the future now how did i come about this you already heard that i grew up on the
2:06 navajo nation many years ago and i actually started out in houston texas in a very poor community i came from a broken home there was a lot of struggles that i won't go into but fortunately my mother who was an educator got us out of that environment and took us to a land of grand canyons and painted deserts where i could now get out of that restrictive environment and now be in this environment where i could be free where
2:37 i could discover what my dreams and what my ambitions are i also during that period discovered my talents i discovered that i like science and as you heard in my introduction you know that i like space science you also know that i like star trek do we have any star trek fans out here yeah and so i discovered very early what those talents are and this is an important lesson that i think and you probably have done this already because you're
3:08 graduating today and that is to spend the time with yourself to figure out what are those things that i do that i do well what are my innate abilities and i was lucky enough to discover that one of the other things i discovered is that i like exploring and so my friends and i would take off in the mountains and we would go over the first hill and then go down in the valley and go over the next hill just to
3:34 figure out what was out there and it's kind of funny that uh valerie teases me today because when we go to different places the first thing i want to do of course is to go exploring well that started very early in my life i also learned in my life that i needed to raise my expectations and let me share with you how this came about we would come back to houston during the summers to visit our family and it
4:01 stayed with my aunt in houston texas and my best friend was a guy by the name of clever johnson and we would sit out on the curve and i was about probably 11 years old or so when this was happening and uh we would just sort of dream which sort of talk about our ambitions what we wanted to do what we wouldn't become and i remember one day we had this discussion about money because one of the things that clever
4:26 said he wanted to do is that he wanted to become rich and i said wow you know what i never thought about that so do i so then he asked me well what do you think is a lot of money and so i said man if i had a hundred thousand dollars that's a lot of money and he looked at me and he said hundred thousand dollars so you have to remind you this is way back in the 60s where if you're a
4:50 millionaire you actually had you would live in a house that was worth a hundred thousand dollars so that was a lot of money to me and he says man you're thinking too small i said well um you know what what do you think is a lot of money he says uh 10 million or a hundred million and i had never you know coming from my background even considered that that amount of money and i remember leaving the afternoon
5:17 kind of thinking back and saying to myself wow i really have low expectations i need to raise my expectations so the lesson i want to pass on is that you need to raise your expectations of yourself so i know that you have certain expectations your family have certain expectations of you but it's important that that expectations those expectations actually come from you and speaking of expectations i want to
5:48 remind you don't let or don't build your life around the expectations of others so be careful with that because i know that some of you in this room have graduated in this degree today because your parents encouraged you to go into engineering or encourage you to go in whatever field that you have chosen and i'm speaking to those young people figure out with this degree with this foundation that you have what it is that
6:20 you really want to do remember that it's about passion and discovering your passion in life and that's most important the second thing i want to share with you is and i should answer this question of not only how did i make that transition for star trek to actually space is that when i was 13 years old i followed the early space program i watched the u.s and the russians kind of
6:50 battle each other to see who was going to get to the moon first and i remember on that glorious day in 1969 when neil armstrong and buzz aldrin landed on the moon and when they landed on the moon it was an amazing thing for me to see for the first time human beings had left this planet and gone to another planet uh called the moon of course the moon is simply a planet locked into the earth's gravity and when i saw that
7:16 i knew what i wanted to do i found my passion and so i set off on this course of trying to discover how it would get there realize when i started doing my research i remember research back in the day required that i go to a library and not go to google and so i also learned a lot about the space pro program from the newspapers and and magazines of the day and what i discovered is that i couldn't
7:45 come to a college like wpi and major in being an astronaut that i had to choose a field and so because i figured out what my talents and abilities were early on one of the other things i was drawn to of course was medicine and i found out that there were physicians who worked in the space program and with that my you know this deal my idea my dreams were set and so i went off to
8:13 college you've heard the education that i had and then eventually after i finished mayo clinic i ended up in at nasa ames research center where i worked on my fellowship and now with all of that education background i figured now it's time for me to turn toward my dreams and so i applied to the astronaut corps in 1987 and i got an invitation to come down there i interviewed i spent a week uh going
8:44 through that whole process i came back feeling really good about myself that you know what everything i've worked on to this this point is going to lead to me becoming an astronaut and so i waited around for a couple of months sweating you know kind of kind of like you probably have in the last week or so making sure that you have all of your grades in line to graduate today so i got that call and that call was not
9:09 a victory call but it was a disappointing call so they said uh bernard we liked you the interviews thought highly of you but we're not going to select you this year and i have to tell you i was devastated and i remember sitting back after i cried like a baby sitting back and wondered what am i going to do i had two options option number one was to accept their verdict that i was not astronaut you
9:41 know material and in caliber and just give up on my dream or option two was to say okay they didn't select me this time so maybe i can find a way to increase my skills and liabilities and get more visibility so that i will they would accept me the next time and that's exactly what i did in 1990 they had another astronaut class and i applied and i was the first one selected to interview i was the first one that
10:13 was selected in my class of 23 as you heard about so that little story of vignette reminds me to to remind you that sometimes failure is an option i'm sure that you've heard nasa and you know the call from uh was apollo 13 when he said failure is not an option well sometimes failure is an option why do i say that because that failure allowed me to reassess myself allowed me to go back
10:45 and get those skills that were necessary so that i would be more presentable the next time it allowed me to in fact grow you know i believe that you shouldn't let failure define you but instead you should let failure refine you and that's exactly what i did and sometimes as a reminder to you that our greatest growth comes when we fail so you're gonna you know be released
11:16 today after you graduate you're gonna hit the real world you're thinking right now that you know i've got a degree from wpi and nothing can stop me and i want you to go out there with with that expectation but you're going to have failure and you've got to be able to deal with that so i dealt with that i was in the 13th class of the astronaut office i went through two years of basic training and then got selected for my
11:43 first mission in 1993 my second mission in 1995 and it was a glorious glorious time to be at nasa shuttles were flying on time during that time it was just unusual these days and what i'd like to do now is share with you uh what it's like to travel in space are you guys ready to go that didn't sound very convincing to me are you ready to go so the first thing i want to remind you
12:15 of is the shuttle right now let me back up and explain a couple of things because when people come and they talk to me they always said god i'm sorry that the space program is no longer you know we no longer have the space program guess what we still have the space program the only thing that's happened is that we have taken the shuttle program and we've handed that over to private industry and now private industry is building the
12:43 next generation shuttle but what i flew was a shuttle columbia and discovery and it was a remarkable vehicle that vehicle weighs 5 million pounds in order to get that 5 million pounds of the air we have to light five engines that produce a thrust of seven and a half million pounds and i'm here to tell you this afternoon that when those engines light you are leaving this planet and nothing's going to hold you to it immediately
13:10 when they fire you get pushed back to your seat to about two times uh your weight within about uh 30 seconds or so we're clearing the launch tower and we're approaching the speed of sound at 750 miles per hour within two minutes of liftoff we reach an altitude of a hundred thousand feet above the ground about three times higher than most aircraft fly and at that point we're going a mere 2500 miles an hour and over the next six and a half minutes
13:42 we'll go from 2500 miles an hour to 5 000 to 10 000 fifteen thousand and eventually to seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour now you might wanna know what we're doing on the inside besides screaming like babies it's very rocky it's very noisy you can't even talk to the person next to you as you get pushed back in your seat you can't even lift your arm in fact i i remember i have all these funny stories i know i
14:13 know you won't you don't want to hear me talk talk too long but let me kind of share with you one of those stories on one of my missions actually it was the first mission on liftoff just to give you experience of what it's like on the inside so we're in this suit the suit weighs about 120 pounds we're under this three and a half g force and i remember we were about six minutes into the
14:34 flight and i went from thinking about what i wanted to do and wanted to prepare you know what i need to do in case something was wrong to pointing that you're looking recognizing my legs were hurting and i was going why is my legs hurting so under this acceleration because i have long legs you saw that i had to dip down so they could put the rope on me here my legs were being spread apart by the
15:00 acceleration so every now and then my legs would drift apart like this and suddenly i had to pull them back together and then my legs would lift again and i have to pull them back together by the time i got up to orbit i was exhausted why because if i had let that continue to go out i would have been embarrassed because the last thing i wanted to do when when the mission control or houston wanted me to report in was to say
15:25 houston we're okay so i fixed that problem the next mission i had our nasa engineers design a velcro strap and when the technicians put me in my seat and buckled me up i strapped my knees together and i was able to focus on that next ride so just quickly so you're in the spacecraft being pushed
15:57 back to three and a half g's very heavy very noisy and once you make it to orbit the main engine's cut off you go from all of that experience to zero gravity just like that and you know you're in space because everything begins to float and it was amazing as i got out of my seat and i saw the checklist float over and i took my glove off my glove came off and i floated over in one direction
16:20 i took the other one and i threw it at my neighbor just to you know just for a fact and all that i was finally in space and accomplished my dreams you know as as an astronaut we do a lot of experiments up in space i got a chance of my first mission to do over 91 different investigations on my second one about 45 different investigations got a chance to go to the mere space station and probably the most remarkable
16:45 thing i got a chance to do was to do the space walk this time i donned a three a suit that weighed 350 pounds open the hatch and walked outside now doing a space walk these days is really a misnomer right in the sense that we don't we're not going to any planets we're simply going to the space station or working right around the vehicle that we're in orbit with and so as i open up the hatch and
17:10 pull myself out it was it was a wonderful experience i found i pulled myself along the the side of the vehicle until i got into the robotic arm and i got lifted up on the robotic arm about 35 feet above the payload bay and there i had a wonderful view the view of my crew members down below i would wave back at them as they waved at me through the window behind that was this big blue ball of a planet called
17:39 planet earth with this blue water and these white swirls of clouds it was beautiful and behind that of course was a sea of stars called the milky way and i remember after we had done all of our tasks i was just hanging out because we had completed everything and just taking it all in and i remember feeling this small in a sense that here i was in this spaceship going around the earth at seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour and
18:10 did i fail to mention that seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour we go around the world every 90 minutes we get to see a sunset or sunrise every 45 minutes it's pretty awesome to be up there so during the quiet time i took it all in and felt this big because think about this the spaceship is just skirting right across the atmosphere and if there was an alien ship that came by to try to find it they
18:35 probably couldn't locate us because we'd just be a spec on the horizon there but suddenly i went from being this small person to being larger than life with this realization that i was doing something very few people had done before that i was one about 350 people who've ever gone in space that i was one of about 70 people who had ever done a space walk and then i was about one in 15 of us who
19:06 were african-american and on that mission i became the first african-american to walk in space why because of a dream that i had as a kid i tell that story to remind me to remind you how important you are and can be and so i always share that story with young people you heard that i have a foundation and our foundation support k-12 education programs all over this country
19:38 including here and one of the things that i like to do with the elementary school kids in the high school middle school high school kids is to have them re repeat a phrase that i think is a very important phrase is that one that i mentioned early on about being an infinite being with infinite possibilities and so um i would like you to do that how about that so i want you to repeat after me if you
20:06 would you ready and just the graduates the rest of you you don't count at least not today so repeat after me i am an infinite being with infinite possibilities now let me kind of show you how that sounded it sounded like this i'm an infinite being with infinite possibilities oh god is he going to ask me to do that again
20:37 guess what i'm not only going to ask you to do that again but i'm going to ask all the graduates of 2015 to stand up all right you ready now i want to rock this tent so let's rock this tent show me what you got i am an infinite being with infinite possibilities
21:10 so let me tell you what that means it means that each and every one of you one of you graduates and everybody in this room in attendance today was born multi-potential with the ability to do anything that you want to do in life it also means that each and every one of you in this room was born multi-talented meaning that you were born with certain talents and certain skills that are uniquely yours and of course you can use
21:38 something else called the brain which you have done of the last four years or five years or six years for some of you no and develop other skills that are going to take you further and lastly and i think this is the most important point about being an infinite being with infinite possibilities is that each and every one of you in this room was born for a reason there is something special that you're supposed to do and some of you even more
22:06 than just one so it's up to you to figure out what that is and now you can be seated one of my favorite let's give him a hand and in closing one of my favorite authors is a guy by the name of emmett fox and he says that our hearts desire is the voice of god and that voice must be obeyed sooner or later so my charge to you
22:37 is to go out after this day and find that voice and i can tell you this if you find that voice and if you invest the time and the effort that it that it takes to fulfill that voice that dream that ambition that you have you will change the world i have no doubt about it and you will not only be able to change the world for yourself and change the world for the community around you but you will make a
23:05 difference in this world as we know it i want to thank you so much for letting me be your commencement speaker i want to thank your parents for being here and helping us support us and congratulations and god bless you all
23:39 thank you so much dr harris for that wonderful address we will carry those ideas with us for many years to come