The Fifth Risk(28)
No one could say she hadn’t done her job. She was not by nature or upbringing a political person, but her ambition had led her to become one. She had made all the little compromises—done all the little deals with others and with herself—required to survive in the upper reaches of American government. She was now second-in-command—and soon to be first—at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. NOAA oversaw the National Weather Service, among other things. The National Weather Service had seen the tornado and had issued a warning. Her people had given these people what they needed to survive. And yet on May 22, 2011, more Americans had been killed by a single tornado than on any day in the past sixty-four years.
She might have said nothing. Just thrown up her hands in the privacy of her office and told herself that it wasn’t her job to save people from their own stupidity. Instead she asked herself: What don’t we understand about our own citizens? She flew back to Washington and gathered the relevant parties—all of whom might have claimed credit for a job well done—and asked them, “Is anyone here happy about the outcome?”
To their credit and hers, no one was.
Before she had been given her first paying job by the United States government, Kathy Sullivan had been put through a battery of tests. Some were physical, some were psychological, and others—well, she didn’t know quite what they were. At no point during them had she figured out what her testers were looking for. She survived two virtually identical interviews with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, one with a good NASA cop, the other with a bad NASA cop. “The bad cop made you feel uncomfortable,” she said. “The room was ill-lit. He sat behind the desk, and you sat in an exposed chair. You weren’t facing each other. He was mumbling and not friendly. Then they did it all over again with a warm, sunny guy who was your best friend.” Only much later did she learn that they wanted to see if she answered questions the same way whether she was at ease or not. “I didn’t have anything to compare it to,” she said. “You might try to manipulate the system, but you need to know the system, and I didn’t.”
Later she decided that they weren’t even really trying to figure out who she was. All they had wanted was the answer to a question: Will she be that same person that she appears to be now when she is traveling at 17,500 miles per hour 140 miles above Earth and something goes bang?
This was her first job interview, and she was applying to be an astronaut. It was 1977, but the work was still risky. “Every flight was still proving that you can get up there and come back alive,” she said. “It’s like riding bombs.” Still, 8,078 other Americans had applied for the job. Five thousand six hundred eight of these had satisfied the basic job requirements. Of those, NASA invited 208 people to the Johnson Space Center, outside Houston, for a week of interviews. “They interviewed us in groups of twenty,” Kathy said. “I got there and saw this cluster of other people. It was all guys. That was okay. I’d been the only woman in a field camp and the only woman on a ship.” The difference was that this wasn’t just guys but a club. “My sense was a lot of these guys knew each other. They’re fighter pilots or whatever. I’m twenty-five. I’m a grad student. I’m broke. They seem to be settled in and knew what they’re doing—and I didn’t. I thought, Well, Kathryn, enjoy the week.”
The main event was a ninety-minute interview at a long table filled with strangers. One was the famously inscrutable head of the astronaut program, George Abbey. At the start he leaned back in his chair, eyes half-closed, and did not so much ask as mutter, “Tell us about yourself. Start with high school.” That was it. Nothing more. “It was deliberately underspecified,” Kathy said.
Telling people about herself wasn’t her strong suit. “I’ve never been a self-revealing person,” she said. She went ahead and told them about herself anyway. How by the age of thirteen she’d learned from her father, an aerospace engineer, to fly a plane. How, as a girl growing up in the fifties and sixties, she assumed that her ticket to adventure was not a pilot’s license but her gift for languages. Before she graduated from high school, without setting foot in France or Germany, she became fluent in both French and German. She planned to learn a bunch more languages. “My simple theory was: learn lots of languages and use them to see the world,” she recalled, in an oral history for the Johnson Space Center. She entered UC Santa Cruz in 1969 as a language major. But there was a science requirement, and to fulfill it she took two classes in ocean science. There she learned that human beings were now descending fourteen thousand feet in tiny submarines and mapping the ocean floor. “It was endlessly fascinating. This mix of things I’d always seen on the pages of National Geographic.”
The travel she’d imagined until then had been horizontal: east or west, north or south. She now began to imagine it as vertical, too: up and down. She wanted to study the plates beneath the bottom of the sea.
She was accepted into graduate geology programs everywhere she applied, including Princeton, with full research fellowships. She accepted the free ride at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, because what interested her was the mountain range at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean known as the mid-ocean ridge, and for several reasons Nova Scotia seemed to her the best place to study it. From just about the moment she arrived, she started looking for access to a submarine that could take her down, so that she might inspect the mid-ocean ridge up close. “I’m pursuing an academic career and asking,” How do I get into one of those submarines?’ I wanted to go see the stuff myself.”