From hundreds of kilometers above the Earth to over 11 kilometers below the sea, Sullivan’s career goes far beyond exploring. The former astronaut helped deploy the Hubble Space Telescope, headed up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) after being confirmed by the US Senate between 2014 and 2017, and was on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Recently, IFLScience sat down with Dr Sullivan to talk about going to space, exploring the bottom of the ocean, which she would do again, and what Sulivan calls the “New Space Age”.

Tell us about your experience in preparing to go to space.

KS: Preparing to go on a spaceflight has a lot in common with the preparations for any other kind of challenging expedition. Whether it’s mountaineering or an oceanographic research expedition, you have to stay really focused and move towards the objectives of the expedition, whatever those might be. And then unpacking from there: what equipment will I need? What will it take to get there? What will it take to do the measurements or do whatever challenge you’ve set, summit a mountain, or collect oceanographic data?

There’ll be a full squad of engineers… all sorts of contributors to bringing those pieces together. The greatest personal challenge lies in making sure you are ready to meet those pieces in the moment. Fully mastering the things that you’re responsible for doing or for delivering. Your fitness, your knowledge base, your technical skills, The whole package of things. Even if you have some of them, you’ve got to take them up to the next level, with a very high standard of performance. That’s where the personal growth and the really intense personal challenge come from.

And how do you feel actually overcoming those challenges?

KS: I think there’s a lot of personal satisfaction in meeting that moment. Excuse me an analogy I’ve often drawn, I’ve had the chance to compare notes with some Olympic athletes with respect to flying in space:

I would happily get another couple of laps around the planet in orbit!

Dr Kathy Sullivan

If your country chooses you to be in its astronaut program, that’s a bit like making the Olympic team. You are now entitled to wear the uniform and the jersey of the US national team but it’s still a long road from the moment you put the jacket on to actually getting to the Games. But if you get to the Games, when you march into that stadium, you’ve actually gotten there. You actually are at the Olympics, you are an Olympian, and you’re in the parade. That is like the moment when you walk out to the launchpad and you strap in.

Still, all of the results you actually care most about are still in front of you and are still up for grabs. It may go your way, it may not go your way. Some of that you can control, other factors you can’t. When you land from a successful spacecraft mission and you did your bit, are pleased with your performance, you got everything done on the mission, that’s like standing on the gold medal platform.

If you do get there, if you’ve got all the grit and stamina and good fortune it takes to get there, it’s a moment that defies description. Small wonder every time a TV personality sticks a microphone in a gold medalist’s mouth, at that moment words fail!

We will come back to space but next, I want to bring you down to Earth, deep below the sea. What was your experience of going down to the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point on the seabed?

KS: Going to the Challenger Deep with Victor Vescovo was a delight. In contrast to the analogy I just gave about earning an Olympic medal, going to the Challenger Deep with Victor was a lot more like opening a Christmas present! [She laughs]

That’s because Victor can pilot the submersible on his own; he had done it many times before. I joined him on an expedition but my responsibilities were very modest. Basically, I joke that it boiled down to being good company and taking some nice pictures. I brought some expertise and made a significant scientific contribution to the depth calculations that we were able to do on that trip. The experience itself of the dive was a delight.

There were still lots of things that could go wrong. The team was preparing a lot like a space launch team would, being very exacting about the condition of the submersible: Is everything ready and is all properly checked and tested and prepared? In any complex system like that, it certainly can happen that you spend two days getting out to the place where you plan to dive and you discover something is wrong, that there’re not going to be any dives. You go back into port and work on fixing it. That can happen.

There was the same kind of suspense and apprehension about this [compared to launch into space]. I made sure I knew how to operate the sonar, operate the radios. I would only need to do it in an emergency, meaning if Victor passed out dead, I want to be able to talk to the surface and release the weights so we will come back to the surface. Truly that was the one technical responsibility that the person who’s not piloting this submersible should make sure they know how to do.

I’m just plain lucky, to be the person that Victor invited along. Victor and I just had a grand day together. Chitchatting on the way down and oohing and awwing as we navigated along the bottom. When we reached the bottom, we were going to navigate to each of the three different instrument packages we had already placed there. We were thinking and collaborating about what’s our estimate of where they are and what heading should we take. There were those fun mini-challenges to solve.

Space and the deep ocean are often put at odds with each other – for example, we know the surface of the Moon and Mars better than the ocean floor – but as an explorer what would you want to do again? Would you be ready to jump into a spacecraft or submersible tomorrow?

KS: I would happily get another couple of laps around the planet in orbit!

You may recall in 1998, NASA took John Glenn, a very famous early American astronaut, on a space shuttle flight. John Glenn had like five and a half hours in space on his one and only flight – like all of us he was hungry for more. It was partly to honor John and his lifetime of public service and it was also to some degree to get some medical data on an older human working in microgravity. He was 77 at the time. so I frequently comment and point out to people that it’s great that they got some medical data on one old man and I think they now need to be getting some medical data on one older woman. I think I’m first in line!

So you want the John Glenn deal?

KS: I want the John Glenn deal! [She laughs]

I hope that someone at NASA who can make it happen finds out about your wishes. Let’s talk about the other federal agency that is part of your career. You were the head of NOAA. Tell us about your time running it and its importance today. 

KS: NOAA is a science agency, but it is not at all just a research agency. I like to think of it as a bowtie. It’s got two sides and there’s a knot in the middle. NOAA sits at the knot. On one side there’s all of the scientific knowledge from satellites or ships or anything about the Earth, the oceans, the atmosphere, how they work, how they interact. On the other side is all of society trying to figure out how to run farms or to run an airline system or whether to take your child out to soccer.

It’s time we all realize that we are crew members on this spaceship called Earth and start to think about our role and responsibility in taking proper care of the spaceship that we depend on.

Dr Kathy Sullivan

All this information in the science arena, all this data can be developed into information that’s useful to those decisions. NOAA is like that broker. It doesn’t make anybody’s decisions. It’s not trying to direct everybody to do something but it is there connecting what we know scientifically about the planet to the actual question you are asking.

To me, that’s really the core of NOAA’s motivations. We live on this planet, we are intimately connected to its systems and affected by its systems personally, physically, and economically in all sorts of ways. We could be more intelligent about the choices we make if we had some more of that information. I loved being part of the enterprise that was bringing you that information, providing knowledge and information that can help us care for and steward this planet.

You’re appearing at the Edinburgh Science Festival next month. Can you tell us about the talks you will be delivering there?

KS: I’m giving a couple of talks at the Science Festival to different audiences. There’ll be a mixture of some stories about what it’s like to live and work in space, in particular for the younger audience where my goal is to really spark their questions and keep their curiosity going.

The other talk I’ve titled The New Space Age. If you say the name SpaceX, everyone goes ‘Oh yes’. But there is so much more going on in terms of countries that are changing their plans and expanding their visions as well as companies that are building new business models and exploring new possibilities. A private company successfully landed a spacecraft on the Moon just this month. The game, if you will, is going to be very different from today. With regards to space, the decades following the 2010s will be radically different than the decades between 1950 and 2000.

What are your expectations and concerns for this new space age?

KS: I think the one thing that most excites me is there are so many new players, companies, universities, and other countries. I think the kinds of challenges that they will undertake, their approaches, the technologies they may develop, that’s going to be very exciting. You can expect a blossoming of new possibilities, new capabilities, and new ways of doing things that Russia, the US, and China haven’t needed to do or haven’t gotten around to doing or just didn’t think of! So that imaginative, creative, entrepreneurial, innovative dimension, I think it’s going to be very exciting.

There are going to be a lot of challenges. It’s common to cluster those together and say there’s going to be a challenge in the years ahead: space will be ever more congested, ever more contested, and ever more commercial.

Let’s get into those three Cs

KS: So congestion. You’ve got I think at least six countries or companies now that are planning on putting up megaconstellations of hundreds to tens of thousands of satellites. We think of space as infinite. But the orbits that are useful for those satellites are like finite pieces of real estate. Theoretically, it could become like a shell with so much stuff that anyone or anything that needed to get beyond that shell, would face a huge risk of a collision trying to get there. Costly and risky!

Space is also contested. We’re seeing another round of sort of major power strategic competition. Russia, China, and the US. That is going to bring back a lot of dimensions of classic military strategy. Who holds the high ground? What is the high ground? 

[I]t’s going to be like the Wild West in the US. Right now there are very few rules that govern how anybody should behave in space or what you should or shouldn’t or can or can’t do.

Dr Kathy Sullivan

In 1958, the high ground was in orbit around the Earth. In the decades ahead, the high ground might be this whole area of space between the Earth and the Moon. There are a couple of particular spots in there that would be of great advantage. If you’ve gotten there, you’re the traffic cop and potential controller of everything else that’s happening. Others will be contesting all sorts of claims, like contesting geosynchronous slots. There are more entities that would like to have of satellite in geostationary orbit than there are slots in that orbit. These kinds of contests, debates, and arguments will happen with increasing frequency.

The third C is commercial. We have witnessed Starlink, the highest-performance global communication system that has ever existed. Or this private sector company that just landed on the Moon. But it’s going to be like the Wild West in the US. Right now there are very few rules that govern how anybody should behave in space or what you should or shouldn’t or can or can’t do, and the few that exist are just between countries and not every country.

Imagine you’re a private company and let’s say you land something on the Moon and say I’m gonna dig up the resources here and I’m gonna mine the Moon right here where I landed and this is now mine. There’s a treaty that says countries will not claim any part of the Moon as their sovereign soil. But for companies? No one knows how it works!

What’s the framework? What are the principles that should exist? Should we negotiate that out ourselves? Should we fight it out? We’ve never faced those kinds of questions before. There is no legal framework [Ed- Yet. IFLScience just so happened to speak to a space lawyer about this very thing]. There’s not even an agreed-upon place that you and I will meet at this court or that cafe and argue it out. It’s just all gonna get figured out on the fly with a large number of players and some very high-stakes, opportunities, and resources in play. So I think it’s going to be exciting in some ways but also kind of fraught.

Is there a lesson you have learned in your exceptional career that you’d like to share with the public?

KS: It’s a common astronaut analogy, but a really true one: it’s time we all realize that we are crew members on this spaceship called Earth and start to think about our role and responsibility in taking proper care of the spaceship that we depend on. We are not just consumers using the planet around us.

It is our life support system and our spaceship and the interconnections among all of the natural Earth systems and humanity are intricate and rich; we don’t understand all of them, but we understand enough to know that we, our fates and fortunes are very directly shaped by and link to how well what this planet is doing, how well it’s functioning.