ChangED
ChangED is an educator based podcast for Pennsylvania teachers to learn more about the PA STEELS Standards and science in general. It is hosted by Andrew Kuhn and Patrice Semicek.
ChangED
NSTA Keynote: From Educator to Astronaut: Ricky Arnold's Extraordinary Path
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From classroom to cosmos, Ricky Arnold's journey shows it's never too late to discover hidden talents. At 39, this first-generation college graduate applied to NASA on a whim and found himself training as an astronaut. Arnold's teaching background uniquely prepared him for space challenges—even building a mock Space Shuttle cockpit on his dining room table! His experiences as both aquanaut and astronaut offer fascinating contrasts, proving we all have undiscovered talents waiting to be revealed if we're brave enough to "take the shots we don't take."
Don't miss Arnold's upcoming keynote at the NSTA conference in Philadelphia, where he'll further explore how educators can inspire students to reach for their own stars—wherever those might be.
Want to send us a show idea or just say hi? Email us at: thechangedpodcast@gmail.com!
welcome back to the nsda podcast. I am your host, andrew coon, an education consultant from montgomery county intermediate unit in the philadelphia area and also host of the change ed podcast, and here with me is trees, samachek-host, apparently, because we can only have.
Speaker 2All right, we go back and forth on that? No, it's fine. It's fine, I know my place. I'm also the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit in Southeastern PA, just outside of Philadelphia.
Speaker 1We have here with us today A fabulous human. Yes, who's done a lot of things that I have not done in my life.
Speaker 2Most of us have. I think he's probably like one in I don't even know the numbers probably like 17 million people that have been where he's been. That's a good point.
Speaker 1I feel like you have a better chance of being a professional athlete than you do of doing what this person has done. That's a really good perspective. Well, we have here with us Ricky Arnold. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Andrew and Patrice, Great to be here with you. And Ricky, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 3Yeah, I'm a guy who grew up in Maryland, a first generation college graduate, who actually the first person in my family on either side to go to university. It on either side to go to university. It was something my parents always made clear. That was something that my sister and I were going to do. While I was in university I kind of started to fall in love with science, which I had not fallen in love with perhaps in middle and high school. There were parts of it that I really enjoyed, but parts of it that were a bit more tedious and less interesting. But in university it really kind of unlocked kind of this passion for science. And when I graduated, being a first generation college student, my parents were pretty clear that 120 credits is what you're going to get and anything beyond that you got to figure out. It's on you, it's on you. And so I graduated knowing that I wanted to go to graduate school, but I didn't even have the science prerequisites to get into graduate school to do what I wanted to do. So I started working odd jobs with the federal government. I also ended up working at the United States Naval Academy in the oceanography department and found I had a real in addition to this love for science, I had a passion for working with young people.
Speaker 3Whilst working on my college prerequisites to get into graduate school, I simultaneously decided I was going to get a teaching certificate.
Speaker 3So I left the Naval Academy, went and got my teaching certificate in the state of Maryland in science, went to work at a middle school here in the state of Maryland, a John Hanson Middle School Go Patriots and I can't believe I remember that actually and ended up starting my second semester of teaching middle school.
Speaker 3I started graduate school working on a research degree in marine science, which I love, but I also found out that I didn't really find research nearly as much fun as working with people, and working particularly with students. Anyway, I went off, had a great teaching career and, at age I don't know, 38, 39 years old, I had an interest in the space program. I saw that NASA was recruiting educators to become part of an astronaut selection in 2003. And I felt really fortunate to get selected to be interviewed and I thought that would be the end of it. I'd have a lovely framed rejection letter from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but I ended up getting selected as part of the 2004 astronaut class and spent the rest of my career with NASA, working in the astronaut office.
Speaker 2That is insane. That really just goes to show you that you missed 100% of the shots you don't take, amen. Who would have thought? Right, you just threw your hat and you're like this sounds really fun, I'm going to try it out, and even just getting a framed rejection letter for me would be like heck. Yeah, like I even. I'd be proud of that. They responded to me. I'd be excited about a response, let alone being chosen to go and be an astronaut. My gosh.
Speaker 3Yeah, that's the kind of the lesson and something I hope to be able to share with the teachers at NSTA and anyone else at the convention that hopes to be there, and I try to share this message. Right, you said it, you can't make the shots you don't take, right. But the other piece of that is we all have gifts that if we don't challenge ourselves in different ways and take some risks, you'll never find out. They're there. I know that I had never.
Speaker 3I had been in one small plane in upstate New York, probably right after I got out of college, and that was the limit of my flying experience before I went to NASA, and I just never thought that would be something that I would A enjoy or B have some aptitude for. And it turns out that was one of the favorite parts of my job and it's something that I had some aptitude for. I found that out in my forties. You know how many people get to do that and I think, as part of their job, right. But I think the lesson there is we all are capable of probably doing so much more than we do, and accepting challenges is the only way you're going to figure out what you're good at and figure out, maybe, what you're not so good at, and that's okay too.
Speaker 1The part of your story that really resonates with me and I find so fascinating is that you had shared that you were the first to go to university. But I would imagine there is a whole line of firsts that are within that story, that you were the first to do a lot of these things and that still is the case for so many of us, that we can still be the first to do things Right and that there's this uncharted territory that we can engage in and that we can be a part of. And what's amazing as educators is that we're laying that foundation. We actually are like there in the thick of it when they're developing and creating who they are.
Speaker 1So you had your education that led to you being an educator and ultimately working at NASA, which I'm guessing working at NASA is the first, unless there's a long list of Arnold's that all of that you know. You went into the family business at NASA, but that all started with a step. It all started with taking a risk and taking a chance Right. And what a powerful message for all of us, wherever we are in life. If we're way done with education and work and some other space not physically but metaphorically you know a different concept, that you're never too old or never too young to take a risk, and risk even on yourself. Right, like bet on yourself and right and take that chance.
Speaker 3Yeah, yeah, I mean we. That's one of the things I really enjoyed about working for NASA. It was a, an organization that was in envisioning a future for humanity, and that's not terribly different from a teacher sitting in front of a classroom full of students, right, they're envisioning a future for these individuals typical college age, where I'm used to like absorbing things, to switch to that.
Speaker 2How did that work for you? Was that a huge shift for you? Was it something that you're just a lifelong learner and you loved it, or like? How did that go for you?
Speaker 3Well, I mean you're being generous. Stating that I was imparting knowledge on my students. I always felt like I was learning alongside them and sure, there were factoids that I could share with them throughout the course of a day, but a lot of fun of teaching science was. You kind of were walking alongside your students and learning as they ask questions to things I didn't have the answer for. So I've always had a passion for learning.
Speaker 3I wasn't quite probably prepared for the sheer volume of information that I would be expected to learn at NASA. I felt like my curiosity and my work ethic were going to carry me further than my intellect, and I think that was probably true. So I really loved the challenge. It was the first two years of your astronaut candidate training. You'd learn to fly an airplane. You learned to fly, eventually, the space shuttle and then you learned to fly the space station. You learn geology, medical treatments, team building, team dynamics, leadership, spacewalking, robotics there were all these things and you were all being taught by really smart engineers who were really passionate about their subject, and it was great and I quickly figured out that I had to kind of okay, here's the volume of information I can carry with me. What, in this hour long journey lesson on the life support system of the space shuttle, is going to be absolutely critical for me to remember, and what can I rely on other folks to help me out with?
Speaker 2Because I can imagine it's like drinking from a fire hose, right.
Speaker 3Yeah, for sure, For sure. Yeah, it was one of my favorite stories. I had a good friend still have a good friend who was visiting while I was in the middle of my space shuttle training, which was really intense. I remember walking into the middle of my space shuttle training, which was really intense.
Speaker 3I remember walking into the cockpit of the space shuttle mock-up for the first time and just the number of switches and the amount of information I mean they're far more than any airplane.
Speaker 3They're all overhead and you turn around, they're all behind you, on the panels behind you and on the sides, and I was really trying to figure out where all this stuff was. So when I read our procedures I wasn't okay, what does that mean? And then spending five minutes trying to find a switch when maybe you only have a few seconds to throw it? Nasa gave us these printouts of the space shuttles, all the switch panels in the space shuttle, and I was gone at work one day and my friend went up to the hardware store and bought PVC pipe and hard stock like foam, foam, hard stock paper and cut out all the panels, put them on hard stock and built a framework for the cockpit of the space shuttle with all the panels, oh my gosh. So like a mock one. A mock one that I had sitting on our dining room table for the duration, which was really popular, especially around Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2I'm sure, I'm sure.
Speaker 3What does this one do? What if I hit this one? But I remember sitting there in the evenings looking through FDF you know the flight data file, our procedures and okay, well, it says this is the master event controller. Okay, that's over there. It was really intense, but I had to use a lot of those same skills that we encourage our students to use. Not one was manipulatives and I really benefited, I think, from having seen students struggle with just hey, here's some information, learn it, right, right right, so you're the first person we've interviewed that has a wiki page.
Speaker 2I have to be honest about that. So I was digging around a new wiki page, which is kind of awesome, by the way. I think I'm going to make that one of my new goals is I want to have my own wiki page.
Speaker 3Well, I got it. I don't know. I had a nephew for a while who was very happy to go in and make changes to my Wikipedia page, so I feel like.
Speaker 2I would.
Speaker 3Yeah, I feel like that's why I'm asking OK so we're not always flattering on the wiki page, so I don't know what's true and what's not true.
Speaker 2So I'm about to ask you a question and it could be true or not true, but there's this really cool book it's Astronaut Aquanaut written by a children's author who's also a scientist, and she describes the differences between an astronaut and an aquanaut, and I noticed her book. We based a student event off of it. We had students design a suit that would survive in both the water and in space. It was one of our STEM design challenges for them. But your wiki page, ricky, says that you had an aquanaut mission as well as space missions, so is that true?
Speaker 3Yes, okay, my nephew did not write that.
Speaker 2Okay, okay, good See, like wiki, I believe, is like a solid source now. So I feel like, okay, you know, I grew up where they're like don't use wiki pages, but can you tell us the difference between the two? How vastly different was it?
Speaker 3Well, I think, starting with the similarities, you know they're both pretty hard. We were doing saturation diving, which basically means you go down to a certain depth and because of your blood chemistry, with nitrogen and oxygen, you've got to stay down there until you can decompress to come back to the surface. So you can't, if something's going wrong, you just can't pop to the surface, get on a boat and go to the hospital, and we were a crew of six in a habitat which was about the size of one of the space station modules. We were eating a lot of the kind of freeze dried food and only able to talk to our families over the radio. We actually had a phone down there, but we have an IP phone on the space station. So it was a really good environment to get I did that before I flew in space and to actually be in that environment with one Nick Patrick was also an astronaut, he was our commander for that mission underwater and to have him talk through the similarities and differences to help prepare us for kind of the human part of flying in space, which was really, really helpful. We are able to weigh ourselves out on the bottom of the ocean to simulate lunar gravity or Martian gravity, and we were actually working on kind of spacesuit design while we were walking on the bottom. We weren't swimming, we were walking on the bottom and it was really cool because we were weighed out to one sixth gravity like we would if we were on the. It was. It was really cool and, having a background in marine science, I my advisor in graduate school got to go in a habitat for one of these missions and I remember him talking about that and I kind of work with him now on some projects and we do chat about that living in an underwater habitat, because there's not a lot of people get to do that. It was no spectacular the differences and to put a very human perspective to the differences.
Speaker 3On the space station you have these amazing windows in the cupola where you can look down at Earth and just take in this expansive view and you get emails from your friends saying, hey, I saw you fly over at night. So you know there's people kind of looking back up at you. And I remember one time flying over Houston while I was talking to my wife on the phone. I'm thinking, oh, this is as close as I'm going to be for some time. I'm only a couple hundred miles away from her.
Speaker 3So where the space station, it's you with your face pressed up against the window looking to see what's going on outside Habitat. We had these massive Goliath groupers which lived around the habitat. We had these massive Goliath groupers which lived around the habitat and at night they would. They weighed several hundred pounds. They would come up to the window and kind of push their eye up against the window to see what was going on inside. Yeah, exactly, so it was a. It was a beautiful. I don't think it was a beautiful view for the grouper, but maybe we were at least in a field.
Speaker 3But that was to me one of the real big differences was you're so separated from the life on Earth, on the space station where, in an underwater habitat it's all around you, so just kind of, I think you feel like you maybe are part of the reef in the habitat we're on the space station. You're kind of just this voyager, kind of separated from everything you've ever known.
Speaker 2That's very cool. Thank you, I'm going to have to tell Jen.
Speaker 1I'm just so stuck in awe stuck in a good way on this idea of, like, what high stakes these are, even in the practice realm. You're putting yourself in a very high stakes situation to make sure you can understand, but then the stakes continue to rise, they don't decrease. I am so fascinated by all that it takes just to get a person into space and then, when they're in space, what it takes to maintain them, to keep them alive and then to get them back. There's so many steps. So getting to talk to somebody who's been on that journey and part of that and I had no idea that you would train that way, I mean it makes sense. Part of that, and I had no idea that you would train that way, I mean it makes sense. But to try to replicate the actual scenario and the situations they'd be facing is truly amazing. And what I love so much about science is there's still so much for us to discover and to learn.
Speaker 2I do have another question for you. Sure, andrew, were you going to ask something? I'm full of questions.
Speaker 1Yeah, no, go ahead, yeah, go go.
Speaker 2So, because I grew up in Florida, I, like I said, went to the Kennedy Space Center all the time. So, like I fell in love with. Where did you launch from? Did you launch from Orlando or from Texas?
Speaker 3No, so Kennedy Space Center is where Space Shuttle launched from, so just they launch from Orlando and then they land near Texas, maybe we could.
Speaker 3So the space shuttle itself would preferably land in Florida, because it's really expensive to put a space shuttle on top of an airplane and fly back. Early in the program it landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. That was the primary landing site. We also had a backup landing site at White Sands, New Mexico, which I think the space shuttle landed once there. But later on in the program preferred landing site would be Kennedy Space Center. If the weather wasn't great there and they needed to get us home, we would land at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
Speaker 2So I have to ask you when you did because you did two right, you did one from the US Were you on a Russian one too?
Speaker 3Right yeah, I launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Russian Soyuz, from the same launch pad that Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly in space, launched from in Kazakhstan.
Speaker 2What a crazy life you've had. Anyway, my real question is the nighttime ones were the most beautiful. Did you launch during the day or at night?
Speaker 3We launched in the late afternoon evening, so for us you get into darkness pretty quickly.
Speaker 3I'm sure get into darkness pretty quickly. So for us it wasn't near. It's a beautiful view out of the window, don't get me wrong, but I remember my guests, like my family, saying just how beautiful it was launching at sunset In Baikonur. We launched in the evening, but I do remember and you growing up in Florida once I was working on a sail training vessel and we were making our way up the coast and I was out on the boat pulling in some research equipment about one or two o'clock in the morning and I looked to the West. We were off the coast of Florida and I saw what I thought was an explosion and my immediate reaction was a refinery or something had blown up, because it was just this massive explosion on the coast and then you can see it start to rise overhead. Oh that's, that's gorgeous, that's a space shuttle launch, and it was.
Speaker 3That image is burned in my mind. It's so beautiful yeah it's so.
Speaker 2That's what I tell everybody who goes down to Florida. I'm like you, I don't care. Disney's great, universal's great. You got to get to the Space Center and you got to get there for a nighttime launch, because you'll never experience even a daytime one, where you hear the booms of the boosters falling off and all of that is like something you'll never experience. Now because I lived. I lived just outside of Orlando, so they were a common occurrence. They didn't scare us as much as other people like, oh my gosh, what happened? I'm like, oh, that's just the space shuttle going off. It's a very, very cool experience.
Speaker 3So I'm glad you got to go Well you guys are in Philly, so there's actually a spaceport here on the eastern shore of Delmarva, down at Wallops.
Speaker 2We haven't been to Wallops yet. Have you been there?
Speaker 3Yes, yes, we did processing of vehicles that actually fly to the space station from Wallops. We have cargo vessels at Northrop Grumman launches to the space station, but there's other things that are launched from there too, and probably in Philadelphia at night. If you're paying attention, you could probably go outside and see one fly overhead even from Philadelphia. But it's worth the drive. It's worth the drive to watch one.
Speaker 2We might have to go down to Wallace and LeNandra.
Speaker 1Yeah, way to appeal to my curiosity, ricky, which is not hard to do. But now I'm like okay, what are you on this afternoon? Let's clear the calendar.
Speaker 2Was it vastly different flying from the US versus flying to the I'm going to say it wrong Soyuz? On the Soyuz, I've been watching Big Bang Theory, so I'm all about.
Speaker 3Right, oh yeah, the physics is the same, yeah, right, so the actual what the vehicle has to do in order to get you into orbit is pretty much the same, but the experience is very different. The space shuttle is very roomy. It was a large vehicle. It could carry all kinds of payload in the payload bay, and the Soyuz is a very small. I mean it's an iteration of a rocket designed in the 60s to carry a small Russian test pilot, which most test pilots at that point in time were smaller in stature. Now it's been updated and upgraded, but it was a very cozy fit sitting in a very small capsule.
Speaker 3Someone I heard likened the space shuttle to launching in a big rumbling truck, and the Soyuz is more of a sports car. I'm not sure how accurate that was. What was also really cool for me was just both programs are really rich in tradition, in that kind of cultural immersion, and the Russians have been doing this for a long time. The cultural immersion in Russia, because they take great pride in their space program. They take great pride that Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space. He's an icon and to be a part of that like on the way to LaunchPad, whatever Yuri Gagarin did for his first successful launch. That was part of our ritual to this day. Yeah, that was really fascinating. Of course, the space shuttle had its own rituals as well.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's very cool. Thank you so much for being willing to share your story. I could talk to you for hours.
Speaker 2I feel like we're just not even scratched the surface. I'm excited for what the keynote is going to be.
Speaker 1So, ricky, thank you so much. We're looking forward to seeing you in person at NSTA at Philly, and we can tell you confidently that our wiki page is going to include we interviewed Ricky Arnold. That is the first thing I'm adding to my page. Might be the only thing, but we're going to add that We've learned so much already. I look forward to engaging in more conversations with you, learning more. Thank you so much for your service, all together with all that you've done in your whole career, and we look forward to you sharing more knowledge with all of us in Philadelphia.
Speaker 3Well. Thank you, andrew and Patrice. It's wonderful to spend some time and I am really looking forward to getting to Philadelphia and reconnecting with my teaching colleagues. It's a wonderful community to be a part of and really excited to get together with everyone.