This is an account of an extraordinary man who the government agency had rejected his application for its space explorer training program 14 times and he needed to sit tight for 15 years to accomplish his dreams.
Clayton Anderson is one of those individuals whose dogged perseverance is inspiring. He didn't feel depressesd in the wake of getting yet another rejection letter from NASA. He said he really felt "hope" at whatever point he got a rejection letter. While pursuing his destiny he built up an ideal case of a never-give-up state of mind.
After first observing Apollo 8 on its outing around the Moon and back, trailed by Neil Armstrong venturing onto the lunar surface for the first time in mankind's history, Clayton Anderson wished nothing else except for to fly out of the Earth's climate and do what these extraordinary men did. Regardless of what number of steps it would take to get him there.
Clayton Anderson was born in February 23, 1959 in Omaha, Nebraska. He considers Ashland, Nebraska to be the place where he grew up.
In 1968, Anderson was only a child when he saw the second manned spaceflight mission in the United States Apollo space program and the first ever to make a trip around and see the dark side of the Moon. The one we never observe regularly, because of tidal locking.
Anderson said when he was nine years of age, in 1968, his mom and dad placed him and his siblings before a TV in Ashland, Nebraska, around midnight on Christmas Eve," he reviewed in a meeting for Popular Mechanics in August 2015.
"We viewed the Apollo 8 space explorers go behind the Moon for the first run through in mankind's history. That was my most punctual memory. My thinking was, 'This is cool. I need to do that,' " clarified Anderson when inquired as to whether there was something specifically that started an enthusiasm for turning into a space traveler, enough to enable him to endure during that time of innumerable rejections.
In spite of the fact that he graduated in physics at Hastings college and got his masters in aerospace engineering at the Iowa State University, Anderson was just a cadet at NASA when he initially applied to end up as an astronaut.
In 1958, when President Eisenhower marked the National Aeronautics and Space Act to build up NASA and with it's America's space investigation program up until 2013, there were 50,758 applications from hungry visionaries, longing to moved toward becoming astronauts. In any case, just 338 were chosen; half of them held a master's degree while the others had PhD's.
He was rejected, however he never got discouraged. Not in the slightest degree. He kept on working at NASA as a engineer and help build stuff other men would fly in, or once in a while to plan, outline, and oversee their flying directions. He did that for a long time and inside that 15 years, he never threw away the opportunity to attempt his fortunes and apply every year.
Meanwhile, he did what should have been done to show signs of improvement. Obviously, he knew that after all said and done that a Ph.D., however helpful, was not compulsory. What was counted were skills, physique, and mastery.
He began by doing what he could do to climb the positions inside where he worked. The year he was first rejected was the year he made the main pivotal advance forward his career when he got a work area inside the Johnson Space Center in Huston, Texas, and was alloted to the Mission Planning and Analysis Division.
By 1988, he was a Flight Design Manager and outlined the way for the Galileo planetary mission towards Jupiter, and directly after for the Magellan mission. The accomplishment of the two missions prompted his promotion to director of the entire Emergency Operations Center.
At the same time, his extra time was loaded with exercises that were on a similar direction. He chalked up endless hours of scuba driving, mountain climbing, and flight lessons to indicate he had the fundamental characteristics of aptitude and perseverance keeping in mind the end goal to be "the correct stuff" for the job he longed for. He should have the capacity to persevere everything under any conditions.
Toward the end, what he endured was 13 rejections, in spite of every one of his endeavors. Just as he was going to stop, Duane Ross, the man responsible for astronaut enrollment and training, inquired as to whether he was ready to enlist "as an individual from the fifth group of space traveler candidates for the class of 1996," that covers everything from what it's like to move at velocities of 850 miles for each hour, to how astronauts "take out the junk" in space.
He was more than willing after such huge numbers of years of devoted diligent work and now closer than any time in recent memory to load up a space carry. Unfortunately enough, while he was viewed as extremely fit for the following missions, he was obviously sufficiently wrong. Just 10 percent were chosen of the individuals who were brought in for an interview and he was not one of them.
Two years and one more rejection later, Anderson was called by Ross once again. This time he made the cut, he got in finally. It was 1998, and he was appointed as a mission specialist and sent for training.
Well ordered Clayton discovered his way to space. It took him 15 years yet he made it. He was an astronaut finally. And over the course of the following 15 years, he experienced the dream he had imagined as a little boy back in Nebraska. He grew to be the first astronaut from his state, the record holder at NASA regarding fizzled work applications for a similar position, and a genuine legend who never quits.
After 14 rejections, he still stood his ground and held onto his childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut, finally the fifteenth trial got him the opportunity to encounter 40 hours of spacewalks and five months at the International Space Station, 250 miles over the Earth.
Image source: 1, 2, 3, 4.
REFERENCES
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/interviews/a16978/clayton-anderson-interview/
https://www.space.com/3622-astronaut-biography-clayton-anderson.html
http://uniphigood.com/portfolio_page/clayton-astro-clay-anderson/
