Scott Parazynski has a life most of us can only imagine: high school abroad, Stanford University and Stanford medical school, trained for the 1988 U.S. Olympics Luge Team, SCUBA diver, mountaineer, private pilot. And then there’s his day job: highly regarded NASA astronaut with five space shuttle missions and seven spacewalks on his resume. All before his 47th birthday.
The highlight of his life? Watching his kids grow up.
“I’m kind of nervous about how quickly the years go by,” he confides.
We’re at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and Parazynski has kindly agreed to an interview even though he’s trying to pack a full week into a couple of days before having to undergo back surgery. It’s humbling to realize that even a lean and healthy ace sportsman like Parazynski has medical issues.
He’s looking a bit thinner than the last time I saw him, probably a result of two months climbing Mt. Everest, Earth’s highest peak. I wonder if wanting to summit Everest is an astronaut’s version of a mid-life crisis.
“It was a defining moment in my life on a number of levels,” Parazynski offers.
He explains the process of acclimating to the increasingly thinning atmosphere by camping for a few days at progressively higher altitudes, then climbing back down again before attempting new heights; how you learn to move as quickly as possible through the slippery, dangerous ice falls because they are unavoidable so the only way to minimize risk is to cut how much time you spend there.
“Every time I went up, it was the hardest workout I’ve ever had in my life. Knowing I could push myself to new levels even at my advanced age of 46, was wonderful,” he says.
The defining moment of the expedition came on Parazynski’s last day of climbing. He awoke that morning at Base Camp Three, located within sight of the mountain’s top, with a stabbing pain in his back. “I thought I had just slept on it wrong, figured it was just a simple back strain probably from years and years of running and being a tall person, which was exacerbated by carrying a pack all the time,” he says.
“I might have pressed on despite the pain but I would have compromised the safety of my fellow climbers and might have ended up in a rescue situation. .You don’t want to be at 26,500 feet and have people try to pull you off the mountain. It’s just a very ugly situation. And so, I made the tough call after 59 days on the mountain and dreaming of standing right there -- I could see it; I could see it and taste being on the summit -- was a tough call personally, but I knew I had to turn around.”
“As a mountaineer, I’m measured not so much by my summits, but by my performance, my behavior all the way up the mountain and all the way down. If you’re lucky enough to have a touch-and-go at the summit, that’s great, but I’ve turned away from several summits over my many years of climbing for weather, running out of water, gear problems, what have you. It is important to keep your wits about you so I take some pride in knowing that I can still do that even with the temptation of the summit,” he says.
“I know that there were more than one death on the mountain this year because of people that placed their aspirations above their abilities,” Parazynski adds. “A Korean climber who made the summit but didn’t have enough energy to get down and was rescued, but lost several digits. It’s just not worth it.”
“Knowing that I, even in the hypoxic environment that I was in, could still exercise really good judgment and put team first was a big thing.”
Parazynski says the power of the team is the biggest lesson NASA has learned in its 50 years.
“We talk about space flights and you see crews up on orbit, but each person represents probably 2,000 or 3,000 people behind the scenes designing, building, testing. It’s just an enormous team effort, very similar actually to my Everest expedition,” he says.
“I think that any truly great accomplishment in life it’s never done by a single person. It’s always a team effort.”
Scott blogged about his Everest expedition and kept in touch with NASAWatch’s Keith Cowing who turned the talks into podcasts and weblogs.
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Posted by: Murem Sharpe | June 29, 2008 at 07:54 PM