HWHAP Ep407 A Place in Space to Call Home- Part 1 (Ep407 A Place in Space to Call Home Part 1)
1:00:28 · OptimusPrimeBot · 2026-08-04
Nilufar Ramji Houston We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 407: A Place in Space to Call Home, Part 1. I'm Nilufar Ramji, and I'll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight and more. For the last 25 years, humans have lived and worked aboard the International Space Station… turning what was once a dream into a permanent home in space. What started as a bold idea has grown into a symbol of international cooperation, a cutting-edge orbiting laboratory and a launch pad for humanity's future exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond. For the astronauts who have lived aboard the space station for these 25 years, the experience of calling the space station home has looked a little different for each one. As part of our ISS25 series, we had the opportunity to speak with two NASA astronauts who each have different perspectives of life on the space station. You'll be hearing from one of them, Tracy Dyson, on this episode; and coming soon in Part 2, Mark Vande Hei will tell us about his experiences in space. Tracy Dyson's career is deeply tied to the history of the International Space Station, from helping to assemble it aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor on STS-118 in 2007, to living and working there in 2010 during expeditions 23 and 24 and most recently, returning for expeditions 70 and 71 in 2024. We'll reflect on what it means to celebrate 25 years of continuous human presence in space, what life aboard the space station is really like, and how this orbiting outpost is preparing us for the next great era of exploration. Here's Tracy Dyson. Nilufar Ramji Tracy, welcome to Houston We Have a Podcast. We are so happy to have you here. Tracy Dyson Thank you. It's my pleasure. Nilufar Ramji So before we get into the topic of the space station, I want our listeners to get to know you. So tell us a little bit about you, your background, and maybe when you joined NASA, what what things were like at that time? What was human space flight exploration looking like at that time? Tracy Dyson I should go back to the the year of 1997 I had finished up my PhD and submitted my dissertation in the month of June, and I think it was the next month July, when I submitted my application for the astronaut program. And then I went on and did a postdoctoral fellow fellow fellowship in Southern California at UC Irvine. And it was during that period of time that I got the notice to that I was being offered an interview. And so that start that kicked it off. And and then later on that year, I was selected in August of 1998, just prior to turning- my birthday, in fact. And so I began in 1998 with the class group 17. We were called the Penguins, and we were not the largest class, but probably the second largest class of astronauts, with or without our international partner astronauts, we were 25 altogether. Nilufar Ramji Wow. Tracy Dyson Yeah, there was big but the group before us, the sardines, as they were called, had something like 44 so it was a huge, huge astronaut corps when we arrived. And there's, you know, depending on which astronauts you asked, there was somewhere between 110 to 140 astronauts. I mean, it wherever it fell, at any one given time, there was a lot of astronauts during that period of time. And it was also a transition time where we were flying shuttles for individual missions, but transitioning to building the International Space Station. And so we, we the class of 1998 are kind of the babies of the International Space Station, because it was only a couple months after our arrival, while we were still astronaut candidates, that we launched the first element of the International Space Station, the functional cargo block. Nilufar Ramji That is really exciting. No one can see me right now. I'm smiling ear to ear, just because you actually helped build the space station. You put it together. Yeah, and it's been up there for 25 years. Tell us a little bit about what that was like. Tracy Dyson Oh gosh, it's hard to put it in a nutshell, because there were so many facets of the construction of the space station. I mean, for us to have a space station, first of all, brand new idea. I mean, minus all the time it took to conceive the idea, plan it, and do all. Work to get the elements but But nevertheless, the operations of an International Space Station were in its complete infancy, and we were a long way from where we are today in terms of even knowing how we were going to operate, because each and every shuttle flight was bringing up a new element to the space station. Each and every flight meant that the configuration of the space station was changing. And so as new astronauts, here we are learning everything. We had to learn about the space shuttle, which was delivering everything, and then we had to learn about each piece of international spa