Christopher J. Ferguson
“I really didn’t know what to expect”
Ferguson reveals his regret at the retirement of NASA’s iconic Space Shuttle, but tells us how excited he was to be working on the next generation of spacecraft at Boeing
Interviewed by Jonathan O’Callaghan
© NASA
BIO
Christopher J.
Ferguson
Born on 1 September 1951, Ferguson is a retired US Navy Captain and NASA astronaut. He was the pilot on STS-115 in September 2006 and commander for STS-126 in November 2008 before serving as the final Space Shuttle commander aboard Atlantis for the STS-135 mission in July 2011. He now works at Boeing, where he has helped build a new generation of space vehicles with their CST-100 capsule under contract from NASA.
Why did you decide to become an astronaut?
I’ve always had this fascination with things I didn’t completely understand. I spent a lot of time in the Navy only because I could never really understand how an aircraft carrier worked, I thought it was just one of the most intriguing places on Earth. So I was in the Navy for a good 15 years and then the next logical step, the next thing I really couldn’t understand, was what it’s like to operate in space. As I matured in my Navy career I realised I had been through most of the steps the early astronauts had done, and I thought I’d give it a go. I started applying as early as 1991 and I endured a couple of rejections, but as with most good things in life persistence certainly pays off and I finally got picked to join NASA in 1998.
Was it an exciting time to be involved in NASA’s space program?
What a ride it was. It was kind of the heyday of the Space Shuttle program. The [International Space Station] was just coming online and we knew that we had an incredible amount of Space Shuttle flights, 35 in total, dedicated to the space station’s construction. I don’t think the public could truly appreciate the magnitude of the effort, but when you think about the fact there were 35 Space Shuttle missions, each of them carrying about 50,000 pounds [22,500 kilograms] of cargo into space, and not to mention the many Soyuz flights, Progress cargo flights and Proton flights with the Russian segments, it was truly a global construction effort and I look back at my time and think I was just so lucky to be a part of the whole thing?