Kathy Sullivan’s childhood curiosity has led to a life as an extraordinary explorer. She made history as the first American woman to walk in space in 1984 on her Space Shuttle Challenger mission. Following decades of expeditions, in 2020, she became the first woman to travel to the deepest part of the ocean, Challenger Deep.
Kathy’s Edinburgh visit included delving into our historic HMS Challenger sea expedition archives and talks with students and researchers. She shares some of her trip highlights and insights into her space and ocean exploration.
Your trip to Scotland began with a visit to St Michael’s Parish Church in Linlithgow. Lead scientist on the HMS Challenger ocean expedition and Edinburgh alumnus Charles Wyville-Thomson is buried there. Why is this connection important to you?
That was the initial trigger for my coming over. The east window commemorates the Challenger expedition and Charles Wyville-Thomson. Of course, I knew about him, but I did not know about the window. Then I heard about the community wanting to get the money together to properly refurbish and preserve the window.
I flew aboard the space shuttle Challenger and have dived to Challenger Deep. So, it was a trio of Challenger connections, only two of which I knew about. That’s also part of why it meant so much to me to get to see the University’s HMS Challenger collections.
The University holds records of HMS Challenger’s scientific ocean expedition dating from when it set sail in 1872. How did you feel when you visited these collections?
To see evidence that there was a real human being in 1872 and 74 who saw and recorded these scenes and data, it’s kind of dazzling.
There was a large, long table, just strewn with grey folders and packets of material. A trolley had 10 out of the 40 plus volumes of Challenger reports. Each of these was about three inches thick.
And the next thing I know the archivist is saying, “Well, feel free to leaf through these.” That was just amazing. There was a whole sheaf of drawn illustrations from various locations, or of the interior rooms on the ship. Then huge logs with good old 18th-century handwriting.
Were there particular artefacts that caught your attention?
Two drawings. One was somewhere in the Antarctic, and one was off Papua New Guinea. The one near the Antarctic from the artist’s vantage point is looking out to sea. Challenger is lying in the mid distance, and two long boats are being rowed in. Two individuals are standing on some point of rock with what looked like fishing lines. It was just incredibly, gorgeously detailed.
There were dozens and dozens of examples of biological drawings. I can’t imagine the skill and patience it takes to do those things. So, they were quite fascinating.
Then there was a multi-layer chart on a long strip of graph paper. This little piece of paper, drawn by hand, had cloud cover, wind force, the barometer reading, the dry bulb temperature, the wet bulb temperature and sea surface temperature, and wind speed, all shown in one continuous graph.
It had notations about where these places were. Station by station, someone recorded these things as they go along. It’s just mind boggling to me.
Charles Wyville-Thomson, medicine alumnus and natural history chair at the University at the time, joined HMS Challenger as lead scientist. As a leading space and ocean explorer, how would you compare your contemporary experiences to his more than 150 years ago.
There wasn’t any such field as oceanography at that time. Charles Wyville-Thomson studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, but he’s there as the chief scientist of the expedition across all these scientific disciplines.
You look at the variety of information they’re collecting, such as the sketch off Papua New Guinea, clearly it has an anthropological dimension to it. You’re seeing the conical houses of Papua New Guinea. Plus all these glorious biological illustrations of critters, Challenger was first to record many of those.
They’re all seeing and recording phenomena that they never experienced before, and Wyville-Thomson was the intelligent orchestrator of all of that.
In my own oceanographic work over the years, I’ve been part of many of the same measurements and sampling campaigns that they were doing. Some are done in very much the same way as before – you dip a net, or you go ashore, and you collect a specimen.
Others we can do much more automatically. For example, then a record of temperatures was clearly made of episodic measurements, probably taken regularly but X hours apart. Nowadays, you can make a continuous measurement, which lets you see much finer scale detail.
HMS Challenger discovered the deepest part of the ocean in the Mariana Trench. Named Challenger Deep, it still holds that record today. In 2020 you were invited by American businessman and adventurer Victor Vescovo to visit Challenger Deep. How did this come about?
Victor had climbed to the highest summit on each of the seven continents. He started to wonder; how come it is not also a thing to go the deepest place in the oceans?
So, he commissioned the building of a submersible that could take people to any ocean depth, multiple times, reliably. And in 2019, he located and dove to the deepest point in each of those oceans.
Then he started funding a scientific campaign to use the submersible to keep exploring those areas.
I think when he did it, there had been three people go to the Challenger Deep before. They’d all been men, and none of them have been a real oceanographer. So, he started thinking, “Let’s change that.” And people said, “Well, the answer is obviously Kathy.”
Having carried out both space and ocean exploration, how would you describe your experience of Challenger Deep?
I had followed a good bit of the literature of robotic and remote sensor expeditions that tried to probe the Challenger Deep. It was a chance to experience the endeavour of getting that deep and then to cruise a couple kilometres along the bottom, and to see the trench for myself.
I know from my space experience, having looked at a gazillion astronaut pictures and remote sensing images of the Earth before I flew, to have the experience of seeing the Earth in person, it was as if it crystallized and provided a deeper sense of understanding of all the data and information that I’d been intellectually gathering before.
After you visited the Challenger collections, you did a workshop with some of the University’s students focusing on space and ocean related studies. How did that go?
The students put the whole thing together and organised it in a fireside chat fashion.
A number of the students are engaged with space data or space activity, so they wanted to know what’s going to happen in the future, where their current studies might take them, and what opportunities may be out there. It was a very vibrant, genuine conversation.
The diversity of their backgrounds, where they’re from, how they came to be in Edinburgh, the focus of their studies, it was an impressively wide array.
They are clearly paying attention and have a good awareness of the way the world around them is evolving in their field, the policy framework that supports research and exploration, and technology trends that will affect the future.
There were some very well put, thoughtful questions which challenged me in a lot of ways, frankly. It gives you a bit of hope that there is that kind of talent coming up.
What did you think about the progress the students were making in their space and ocean projects? Did you have any advice for them?
All their work and the projects they ran were giving them the opportunity to learn how to pull together and integrate many strands of instrumentation or data or even some very different disciplines, using some satellite data to support understanding marine ecology, for example.
I think that dexterity and insight or situational awareness of how many things you need to pull together to get meaningfully useful answers or advances on complex problems, they’re getting good doses of that in their studies. I think that will stand them in very good stead, because I think that’s the essence of what life throws at us all, from household problems to global problems.
The students were really getting at ‘how do I be part of something or make something that can matter and have a good impact?’ They had a sense of purpose beyond their own personal need or want for a degree that I find encouraging. I hope I mainly reinforced the idea that they’re on the right track.
Why do you think academia in space and ocean fields is so relevant today?
We live on a very dynamic planet. In terms of measuring, monitoring and studying the Earth, ocean, atmosphere, or anything, that is not a one and done proposition. The dynamics of our atmosphere and our ocean, every day at various scales is affecting and shaping the environment we live in.
Taking the pulse of the Earth is not something you do once and can just extrapolate from forever and ever. That’s got to be ongoing. We’ve got, I would say, a pretty decent understanding of the atmosphere and ocean in terms of macro circulation, but we have a very paltry understanding of the ocean as a biological system.
Basically, we understand what lives in the ocean only to the degree of what we’ve bumped into, so there remain plenty of unknowns out there.
I think continuing general research, deepening that knowledge, as we’ve seen in every other scientific field, refining it in precision and accuracy, brings new possibilities and new insights to the fore.
I always think of laser surgery. Today, we have a scalpel that’s, say, as precise as a photon. But the first guys that made light behave as a laser, the machinery they had to build to do that was probably close to the size of this building and produced one big whopping laser beam that would have incinerated any flesh you pointed it at. So, what the hell good is that?
It took their results plus different magnets, transistors and high frequency switching, all cobbled together over time before you could make a surgical laser.
The University is committed to making an impact in space and ocean research, through the Edinburgh Space Hub and Ocean Leaders programme, for example. What is your impression of the University’s work in these areas?
In the conversations I’ve been part of, I’ve gotten a little more of a look at the purpose-motivated research, like the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute and Remote Sensing Group, and I’m pleased by that.
I loved the Ocean Leaders MO of bringing people together whose value and impact is what they’re doing where they work. It’s not just the value and impact of coming to meetings or coming to a conference. They had very incisive questions on the challenges they’re hoping to find a way to play a role in, from deep sea mining to climate.
What compelled you to apply to join NASA’s first cohort of women astronauts 1978?
My parents would help my brother and I pursue our interests to explore them. I had read about, and watched on television, lots of people as I was growing up. I was dazzled by their lives. They were inquisitive and adventurous; they were doing things no one had done before. It was clear they were doing it not by studying a textbook or a how-to manual, they were doing it by figuring it out and trying and adapting.
I was doing this in miniature largely with my father whenever we went off on a small trip. He would not be the one who decided what we were going to do. It would always be a conversation and my brother and I would always be pulled in. So, we learned early on the explorer’s habit of mind: “Well, let’s think about this, how might we get there? What might we do? What about that?” And we just learned that engineering mindset naturally growing up in little baby steps.
As I watched John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Jacques Cousteau, you name it, I took away that this is what interesting people do. It never entered my mind that I was only seeing examples of men doing the activities I was finding so fascinating.
So why did I apply to NASA? I was adventurous, curious, and the Earth is what fascinates me. I had probably looked at absolutely every photo any astronaut had ever taken of the Earth that had been published anywhere. And they’re dazzling. I applied because I could see the Earth with my own eyes if I happened to get through. And I’m good at planning expeditions, I enjoy the challenge.
In 1984, you became the first American woman to carry out a spacewalk. How did having that first-hand experience of walking in space feel?
It truly took my breath away. It’s shockingly stunning and gorgeous. It never gets old. Every astronaut’s favourite thing to do is go look out the window.
The spacewalk’s a little bit different because by the time you head outside a spacecraft, you’re well acclimated to zero gravity. You’ve trained in that suit a lot. You’re manoeuvring mainly with your hands, grabbing handholds that are mounted to the shuttle itself. As you do that, you’re mainly looking at a part of the shuttle that’s right in front of your face.
Occasionally, you might have an opportunity where you pause and take in what’s around you. So, the heading out the hatch moment – you’re excited about it. And everything’s got to go right or you’re going to abort the spacewalk. My spacewalk was going to be newsworthy, and I had to be reminded by my commander, “Well, when you go out, don’t forget to wave to the camera.”
You’ve travelled to some extreme space and ocean locations. What is it about expeditions that drives you?
On a fundamental level, it’s just curiosity. What’s it like to be there? What does it take to get there? What is the place itself like? Who lives there? Are there creatures there?
Also, it’s a little bit magical to be in a craft that lets you be somewhere that you otherwise absolutely could not be. For several years I owned a small little two-seater airplane. At 10,000 feet above the Earth, you have a clear, straight view down to the ground. It’s amazing to be in a little easy chair that’s just perched in the air. You look around and go, this is a little bit crazy.
It’s also little bit crazy that I can be sitting in a comfortable little chair in a submersible looking out of a viewport 36,000 feet underwater and watching the bottom go by.
We humans have the knowledge and engineering and manufacturing skills to create these, “magic school buses” that let us go to these places and not just be frantically worried about getting there and getting back alive, but actually getting there to understand something more about the Earth or about our oceans. That never ceases to dazzle me.
Photo credits: Images of Kathy visiting the University’s HMS Challenger Archives, close ups of the archives, and photo of Kathy giving a talk to staff and students in the Edinburgh Futures Institute, Yao Hui; group photo of Kathy with Edinburgh workshop students in the Bayes Centre, Andrew Perry; Images of Kathy in her space suit, inside the Challenger Space Shuttle and carrying out her spacewalk in 1984, NASA; image of Kathy inside the Challenger Deep submersible, Kathy Sullivan; Image of young Kathy inside a plane, Kathy Sullivan; image of Kathy in a kayak, Kathy Sullivan; Image of Kathy getting into the the submersible that took her to Challenger Deep, Enrique Alvarez.
