Jim Voss, the NASA astronaut from Opelika

The following is a production of Alabama Public Radio News. I'm Pat Duggins, and this is the National Award-winning APR Notebook. 2026 has been a busy year for NASA. Four astronauts flew to the moon on the first trip by human beings there since Apollo 17 in 1972. The flight of Artemis II also highlights Alabama's role in the U.S. space program. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville designed, built, tested, and manages the big space launch system rocket that sends Artemis missions to Earth orbit. Huntsville has its claim to fame when it comes to NASA, but Opalika does too. One of its favorite sons is retired astronaut Jim Voss. He flew four times on the space shuttle and served on the second full-time crew aboard the International Space Station. A conversation that's out of this world is next on APR Notebook.

My guest today is veteran astronaut Jim Voss. His hometown is Opelika, Alabama. So he's a local guy and also an Auburn grad. So do you want to work in a War Eagle now or wait till later or what? Well, War Eagle to all your fans out there. There we go. And all of our University of Alabama listeners are like, what? What's going on? I'm going to say it's okay. The roll tide's not a bad thing. There we go. Yeah, we're all one big happy family here. Colonel, I cover the space program nationally on radio for 22 years. And I was one of those faces in the crowd for all the press conferences that you did during your space missions. But I got to say, this is the very first time that I've had the opportunity to sit down and talk with you one-on-one. So I really appreciate your making time to talk with us. Well, it's a pleasure to talk to you today. And I love talking about space. So, as I mentioned, you grew up in Opelika and read a lot of science fiction when you were a youngster. I mean, is there a certain book that comes to mind or a certain author that you were a big fan of back then? Well, I liked any kind of science fiction. Isaac Asimov was a big one. You know, I read a lot of rocket kind of stories and things that just... about people going into space and all of it was imaginary at the time since we hadn't flown in space. So that made it kind of fun when things started happening and it was almost like a lot of the science fiction writers envisioned it to be. But it sort of captured my imagination. But I couldn't be an astronaut because I didn't have perfect eyes. I still don't. And so it was one of those dreams. And then when they started allowing people to apply for astronaut duty, who didn't have perfect vision, boy, that was like a dream come true for me. That was when NASA brought on the notion of the mission specialist that would not fly the vehicle but still do important jobs in orbit. Yes, and that was back when the space shuttle program first started. You know, and you mentioned Opelika. That is my hometown. Yeah. And it's where I spend a lot of my growing up formative years. And it's a wonderful place to have grown up. Small town, you know, hardworking people. I grew up with their grandparents and lived with them. And they worked in the cotton mill. They're in Opelica. So hardworking people. I learned an awful lot from living and working with them because they were wonderful people. But, you know, things like how to work on engines and things like that for my grandfather, because we were always fixing something. gardening and, you know, the kind of things that people needed to do back then. You had to do your own maintenance. You had to do your own gardening, so you'd have plenty of good vegetables eat and that sort of thing. But it was a wonderful place to grow up. I really enjoyed high school there. You know, because I was from so close to Auburn, I fell in love with Auburn and always followed Auburn sports. And there was never any question. That was where I was going to go to school.

Well, I mean, I was making jokes about Auburn and Alabama earlier, but I mean, every time I covered, you know, the shuttle or if I ran into an Apollo engineer, there were more of them, you know, wearing Auburn class rings that engineering department. I mean, they really knew what was going on. So you graduated from high school in 67 and already interested in aerospace, but I have to ask, 1967 was also the year the Apollo 1 launch pad fire that killed astronauts, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White. Do you remember where you were when you heard the news of what happened? You know, I actually do not. I remember clearly where I was when I watched the first landing of the moon and Neil Armstrong stepping out onto the lunar surface. But the accident sort of missed me for some reason. I don't have any clear recollection. Maybe that... And it's why I was willing to go and fly on spaceships that were actually fairly high risk because I ignored the bad and look for the good in things. Because it was a very significant traumatic event at the time. But I honestly, maybe it was just because I was so immersed in school at the time and overwhelmed probably. I was going to school in engineering. I was working part-time, and I wrestled when I was at Auburn. So I was really, really busy. So there's a good chance. I probably wasn't even paying attention to the news. I'm sure that I heard about it, but probably didn't get immersed in it quite like the first landing on the moment. I read about your collegiate wrestling career. What got you into that? Yeah, I wrestled in high school, and the reason I wrestled was I went to a wrestling match in high school with a friend of mine whose boyfriend was on the wrestling team. I didn't even know he had a wrestling team until she asked me to go and watch the match. And I went, and it was so exciting to me. And, you know, I'm not a real big person. At the time, I was pretty skinny, and I was like 5'8 and probably weighed about 120 pounds. And so I thought, hmm, that's a sport that I could do. And I played football and I ran track in the spring. And I was doing a lot of different sports things. But I thought, wow, that sport is made for me. So I went and asked the coach if I could come out and started wrestling. And it really was pretty suitable for me. I really did enjoy doing it. And then I hadn't planned on wrestling in college. I did okay, but I wasn't like a state champion, but I was like a runner-up. And I remember getting a letter from Coach Unbach, who was the Auburn wrestling coach, but it was sort of a generic thing. Congratulations. And I like to see it at Auburn one day, and I never thought about it again. But then I was taking a physical education class at Auburn. And we were in the same building, the old, it was like an old hangar from World War II where basketball and wrestling was done. And they also did physical education classes during the day. And I was sitting there doing exercises and that weren't very much fun. And the wrestling team was practicing at the end of the gym there. And I thought, gosh.

Maybe I should try that again. So I walked down there after class and ask Coach Unblock if I could come out. And he said, sure, go get your stuff. And so that's how my wrestling career in college got started. Okay. So after college, served in the Army. And it's at this point that all of a sudden, you know, science fiction gives way to science fact. And you were thinking about applying for an astronaut. Was there a certain point where you realized, you know, maybe I really should sign up. Maybe we should try to get a job with NASA. Well, it was an odd thing. I was serving in the army in Germany. And my wife pointed out an article in the Army Times, a little newsletter that they published for the Army at the time. And it had all kinds of news, but a lot of military focus stuff. And I don't know why she thought that I would be interested in that. Of course I was. But I don't know. I don't remember ever talking to her about thinking about spaceflight in any way. But she pointed out this article and it was taking applications for the shuttle program that allowed people without perfect vision to apply and people who were not military test pilots. And so I thought, gosh, that sounds pretty good. So I actually submitted an application. I don't think the Army even forwarded it to NASA that you had to go through the military because I didn't have very many real qualifications. But I knew about the process then and I started. thinking about it and wondering what kind of things I could do to improve my record in my application. And so then over the next nine years and five application cycles, I gradually got better and improved and learned more things that I needed to include on my application and the things that I could do to improve. my case for NASA. And I did improve over time, and I did get more qualified. And eventually, I got an interview and got selected. I've heard anecdotally from astronauts that sometimes during the selection process, they ask like weird things, kind of like, did you play in the high school marching band, stuff like that? Was there any out of that box stuff for you? You know, there was a little bit. I was working for the Army as an engineer at NASA at the time, so I was doing a lot of space stuff. They don't ask really...

technical questions at the interview. They're more interested in how you interact, how you respond to questions, how you respond to this high pressure environment of people about to decide your future. So they were asking a lot of routine questions. They asked about what I did in high school. And so I rattled off because I was open like a high school. I did a lot of things there. You know, I played, you know, three sports and did all kinds of extracurricular stuff. And I was just rattling off things. And the head of the board, who I knew just a little bit and feared because I knew he was about to decide my future, he said, well, is that all? And I had listed dozens of things, I think, in my mind, I had just kept talking about it and finally quit because I'd exhausted my list and I thought I'd really impressed them. And all of a sudden it was like, is that all? And I thought desperately, I've got to find something else. And I thought, and I said, oh, and I was in the slide rule club. And so he said, slide rules. nobody uses slide rules anymore. I think he was messing with me, trying to put some pressure on me and see how I responded. And so I was thinking, oh, gosh, I not only haven't listed enough stuff, I don't compare well with everybody else, but now I've listed something that doesn't impress him at all. And then John Young, bless his heart, who was the head of the astronaut office at the time, he was on the board. And I knew John just a little bit. He knew my name because of what I did for my job, but he didn't really know me well. And he reached down and grabbed his briefcase off the floor, and he picked it up and he slammed it on the table, threw it open, and pulls out a slide rule. And he said, well, I still use mine. And it just broke everybody up. And it relaxed me. It made me realize that, you know, maybe this wasn't all that serious. He wasn't really looking for some way to dig at me, but he was just testing me. And John relieved all the pressure. And then the rest of the interview went well with just nice, easy questions. But that's my sort of out there story of my interview with the selection board. Wow. So, okay, now, being selected as an astronaut and all that, that's one thing. I keep hearing that the way NASA actually selects astronauts to go on missions is even more arcane, even more smoky back rooms. Okay, your first mission, STS 44, 1991, I was there, I covered it. How did you get the news from NASA that you had been picked for that crew? Well, the head of the astronaut office, just... called me in and said, hey, you'd like to be part of this crew. And I said, you bet. You're happy to get the word. Usually when you're called into the astronaut office chief's office, you know it's either a flight assignment or you're in real trouble. And I hadn't done anything that would have got me in real trouble at that time. So I was pretty hopeful. And in fact, it was a flight assignment. And usually that's how it happened. You know, they go through a process to try to make sure that people are

well-matched and you didn't know for sure if you were going to be assigned. That happened to be a military flight at the time. And it was classified, later declassified, which was wonderful because all the people that had worked on this satellite program for years were able to then talk about it openly. And that happened a few months before we launched. So I could actually tell my family what we were going to be doing on the flight. So that was a bonus. But it was a group of military guys. And so it turned out to be a nice first flight. So, now correct me if I'm wrong on this, but for liftoff, you had a seat on the flight deck, which, like, you know, had like all these big windows and stuff. And so was Lift Off different from what you had trained for or the same or what do we think? You know, NASA does a really good job of using analogs and simulators for preparing for spaceflight. And up until the moment that the rocket engines ignite, it's exactly like what you've trained for. And even the start of it feels a little bit that way because they have a motion-based simulator that we used a lot. And if we were preparing, it would tip you up so you were like you were on the launch pad. And then when it launch happened, it would sort of move up a little bit. And so except for the, and they made a lot of noise. It didn't quite simulate what the real noise was. But when the real things start, the whole thing shakes and rattles and it's very noisy. And then when you, the launch bolts release, you really get an acceleration that you don't. You can't really simulate on the ground. But up until that moment, very well prepared. And most of the stuff that we did, we simulated and we practiced, and we were really well prepared for the flight. So they get you ready. So I've met astronauts who get to fly one time, and that's one more than I'll ever yet. So after your first mission, was there ever a point where you thought to yourself, man, if I ever get to go again, I'm going to do this that I didn't do on my first flight? Yeah, there are things like that because their first flight, you're sort of overwhelmed with all the sensations and the work. And shuttle flights were really busy. You work really hard all day long. You're constantly busy. Everything is tightly scheduled. So you don't have a lot of time just to enjoy the flight. Luckily, I flew with someone who was very experienced, and he looked at spaceflight a little bit different. His name was Story Musgrave, and Story had a lot of experience, and he did things that most people didn't necessarily think about doing, and he told me about some of these things that were interesting to do and that I made a point of doing on my first flight.

When you get back, you think, oh, I wish I'd spent more time doing this, or I wish I'd done this, or I should have done that. And so having another flight just a year later was kind of good for me because I was prepared to take more time to do other things. And it also happened to have been a classified flight that stayed classified, so we didn't do a lot of the normal. public affairs things and other stuff that occupy your time. So we actually had a little bit more free time to do other things during our flight. Yeah, getting back to Story Musgrave, he was a spacewalker, did the first spacewalk, actually, on the shuttle, and also did the first repair flight on Hubble. I hear that when he went into space, he would put Tabasco on everything during meal time. Did he do that in front of you? Is that true? Well, most of us use some type of condiment. to make the food a little bit spicier, or we ask for spicier foods. One of the favorites of most people on the shuttle was shrimp cocktail. And it was so spicy, it would water your eyes on the ground. And I like spicy food, but it's because you're... Your sense of smell changes a little bit, so your sense of taste also changes. And that means you want things to be a little bit spicier. Things taste bland. So you use spicier stuff. I didn't notice story using Tabasco so much more so than anybody else because most of us used those kind of things. They had little packets like you're finding a restaurant of condiments that we would use.

You're listening to the National Award-winning APR Notebook on Alabama Public Radio. I'm Pat Duggins. My guest today is four-time NASA Space Shuttle astronaut Jim Vos of Opelika. Working in the space program means a lot of official things going on, but there are unofficial ones, too. I asked Voss what it was like to be an astronaut on NASA's first so-called dog crew. Yeah, that was a very special thing to be part of. You know, when you're in a group like that, having things to... bond the crew together and the training team and others who participate in a mission are very helpful and they make you a stronger team and you work better with people that you know really well. When we first met with them, they explained to us that maybe it was after a couple of simulations we'd done with them. They explained that training astronauts was a lot like training dogs. You use a lot of repetition, reward, and punishment. And so they thought that we should be, we should have dog names and be trained like dogs are. And our commander took it on as his responsibility to issue dog names to people. So like our pilot, well, the commander himself, he assumed a dog name. He had red hair and his military call sign was red flash. So he became red dog. He assigned the pilot a name, and usually he talked to us about what names we ought to have, and we would all sort of agree, but he was directing it somewhat. But our pilot was just really good at everything, and so he became Mighty Dog. The newest member of our crew who had not flown before with the only rookie naturally became Puppy Dog. And he didn't like that one very much. So we were nice to him, we called him PD. If we weren't being nice, we'd call him Puppy Dog. We had a fourth crew member, Guy Bluford, who was the first African-American astronaut. And he was always traveling. He was very in high demand for speaking things because he was a very unique person in the astronaut office. And Guy was gone a lot during our early training. When he finally came back and settled into full-time training, we decided that his name, since he was gone half the time, was doggone. So he was doggone. And they couldn't come up with a name for me. Usually you try to find some physical characteristic or something about their personality. And they just couldn't come up with any special. I was pretty mundane, nothing real special. And when Guy came back, Dave Walker, our commanders, we was talking about it with him. And Guy said, well, it's obvious what his dog name should be. He's an infantry soldier. And World War II infantry soldiers were called Dogface soldiers. So my name became Dogface. And that really is the reason that it's Dogface.

Wow. And then you flew again with Dave Walker on SDS 69 and then more dogs that way. That became dog crew too. And, you know, it was a wonderful thing. We really got a lot of mileage out of the bonding part of it. He even bought a car, an old station wagon that we painted and put dog names on the side of it. We drove around and he had a loudspeaker system on to actually. talk to people. We used wolf as a greeting instead of hello when we met our training team or other people on the flight control team that had dog names. And it became a thing that people felt like it was kind of an honor to get a dog name after a while. And then we repainted it for dog crew, too, and it had been black. First, it was spray painted with just a spray can, flat black. It was really ugly. So Dave decided it was time to really paint it. So he borrowed a couple of gallons of paint from the... aircraft paint shop, the NASA paint shop, it was probably hundreds of dollars a gallon paint, the stuff they painted the T-38's with, and we repainted it. And it looked a whole lot nicer then. And we added some shuttle and airplane hardware to it. It had a fin on the top of it that was off of a T-38 incident that someone had had. some shuttle hardware that he'd picked up somewhere. And it became a really good bonding thing. And we would haul our training team around in it. We could get a lot of people inside this big old station wagon. And so it was a lot of fun. It really was a unique thing. We enjoyed being part of the dog crew. And not coincidentally, a dog crew three, I think it was, was the crew that actually assembled the first two parts of the International Space Station, where you were going to wind up as part of Expedition 2. So now, now take me through this again now. We're used to the International Space Station being like the size of a football field, lots of compartments, lots of big solar panels, easy to spot from the ground. But at nighttime, anyway. But when you went as the second... second full-time crew. So it was what? It was the American unity compartment, the Russian Zaria module. And I think that that was about it, right? Well, there were actually two Russian modules, the one that we had paid for, it's called Functional Cargo Block, and that was part of the early part of the station before people were constantly on there. And then the U.S. Unity, the node, was there. So those two things. And then the Russians had put up a service module, which was a former living compartment part, and it had their controls in it. And then the U.S. laboratory.

had been delivered about two weeks before we got there. So there are actually four pieces there. Three of them about the size of a normal full-sized bus on the M-side, and then one that was like a little mini-sized bus. So we had a good bit of room for three people at a time that we were up there. When we got another visiting seven-person shuttle crew up there, it got a little crowded, but it was reasonably sized for a three-person crew. So space shuttle missions I keep hearing are very, very tightly choreographed because you're only up there for maybe a week or two. As I recall, Expedition 2 is like, what, 163 days? So how much of an adjustment was that for you in terms of like having a lot to do? But it's like, you know. Yeah, there's still a lot of time. Well, it was really nice because shuttle flights are scheduled. Every 15 minutes is blocked. Sometimes it's an hour-long thing, but they use 15-minute time periods. And you are really busy scheduled all day long. And it's very, very intense, busy times, usually pretty big events. The Space Station had a lot of those, but they were spread out. So maybe one day out of seven or eight, you'd have some... pretty busy, intense, big activity. But most of the time, it was routine operations. We did a lot of installation of things, checkout of systems, things that were just there, and then we had to activate them. They weren't on a strict schedule. You've got to get this done today right now. So it was much more relaxed. We still put in, you know, 14, 16 hour days a lot of the time because we were there to work. And there weren't a lot of recreational activities on the space station at the time either. We had music we could listen to. We had a few movies on a little tiny viewer that we could use. And we did that while we exercised mostly. And then we could exercise or we could look out the window or just play around with microgravity. So we spent a lot of time working, but it was at a much more relaxed pace and you could take your time with things. And it was completely different than a shuttle flight that was very intense, very active the entire time. In the evenings, when we weren't supposed to be working, we could either do more work or we could do relaxing things if we wanted to or enjoy or experience space without having to do that during our sleep periods. Now the space station has a big glass dome known as the cupola, and that gives like a really big, unobstructed view of the Earth. What kind of a view through the portholes did you have during Expedition 2? We had pretty good ones. The U.S. laboratory module had a, oh, it was probably a two-foot diameter, very large, excellent optics window. The Russians had one similar size to that. And then there were three small windows in the Russian part of the space station that were really quite good, too. They were only about eight or nine inches in diameter, but they were three of them at slightly different places that allowed you to...

have pretty good views out of them. But the U.S. laboratory window was really quite good, and it was wonderful to use it for looking out for Earth observations and just for looking outside. What do people get wrong the most when they imagine what it's like to be in space? But I think most people don't really understand all the science that's being done or the value of the science. They know that we're up there doing something. but they're not really sure about the benefits. I don't think we are sure about the benefits yet. It's like any research laboratory. A lot of work goes on, but you don't win the Nobel Prize or you don't cure cancer. You know, there have been a lot of people running laboratories and government facilities to investigate things that they go for years and years without truly significant. discoveries, but they keep plugging away and we keep learning little things as we move along and eventually those matter. Same thing with the research that's done in space. We do little things all the time and today we're doing hundreds of research experiments constantly on the International Space Station. And some of those... They're trivial. They make no difference. There's nothing that's ever going to come from them. But the others might actually lead to something. And the only reason for using the space station is you can do things there. You can't do on the earth because of the microgravity, low gravity environment. So they are constantly learning things. The significance of that learning is yet to be determined. Colonel Jim Boss, former NASA astronaut, favorite son of Opelika, Auburn, Brad. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It was just a great opportunity to say hi to you, and thanks for all your wonderful coverage of our space program and activities there in Alabama.

I'm Pat Duggins, and you've been listening to the National Award-winning APR Notebook on Alabama Public Radio. The students in the APR newsroom are Vivian Lang, Cater Costa, Bella Stier, Nicole DeGanna, Alex Schoenfeld, Alexis Barone, Ian Schwartz, Cameron Goldberg, Chris Alf, Matt Moran, and Brooke Goodrich. I'm Pat Duggins. We'll see you next time on APR Notebook.