Gregory C. Johnson

Gregory C. Johnson

 📍 Seattle Washington
NASA Astronaut & Pilot STS-125, American Naval Aviator and Test Pilot, SVP Blue Origin, Board of Directors Limitless Space Institute

 

Mike Davidson: Where did your journey begin?

Gregory C. Johnson: My Dad worked with Boeing on the SST, which was the prototype for the country’s first supersonic transport aircraft, and he took me to Boeing to walk through the full-scale mock-ups of the SST when I was a kid and that experience really got me hooked on aviation.  That day was an epiphany where I said to myself, ‘I’d like to learn how to fly’ and that’s what I did. I went to a Community College at Eastern Washington, got all my licenses, moved back to Seattle and flew for a seaplane company while I put myself through school with a Boeing scholarship.  It took three years to finish off that degree. After that I joined the Navy and it set me on my way.

Mike Davidson: Did you think about flying into space early in your career, or were you just focused on aircraft?

Gregory C. Johnson: You bring up a good question and it's a question that NASA asked me in my first two interviews where I didn't get selected. They asked, when did you want to be an astronaut and the most common answer for that is, “I came out of the womb and wanted to be an astronaut,” but that wasn't honest for me, it happened later on.  I remember John Young landing the Space Shuttle for the very first time in 1981 and somebody was listening to that landing on a transistor radio while I was getting onboard a 747 to Hawaii where I’d meet up with the aircraft carrier USS Kittyhawk. I heard the radio broadcast of that landing and thought, ‘yeah, that would be cool’.  But before I can be a shuttle pilot, I have to be a test pilot.  So, I literally walked on the carrier thinking, ‘well, I’ll become a test pilot’ and that was the start.

Mike Davidson: What’s one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your career?

Gregory C. Johnson: I was the Chief of NASA Johnson Space Center’s aircraft Fleet managing pilots there, and pilots are generally very independent people, so you need to give them full autonomy, yet you still need to have them follow what you need them to do… it's a challenge.  It was a big challenge to lead them, to build the trust with them.  What I found over years and years of leading is that it’s most important to build trust.

Mike Davidson: Was the mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced?

Gregory C. Johnson: It certainly was and when you face spaceflight, generally you know there are going to be real challenges. You have a ground controller telling you essentially what to do, so you're not independent up there, you have a huge team but still, you're working out problems and there were huge struggles with repairing the Hubble. Time management was a huge challenge, and we went late consistently. I think I got a little over five hours of sleep every night for 13 days and that just wears on you.

Mike Davidson: The Hubble mission was the highest the shuttle had gone into orbit, and the fastest it has ever travelled, is that correct?

Gregory C. Johnson: Yes, that right for a sustained orbital mission. And it’s faster because it's higher, it's the highest the shuttle can go and still get back. When we finished our OMS burn (orbital maneuvering system), which is the second burn that gets you up to altitude, we were at about 350 statute miles. And when you looked at the OMS engine fuel quantity, it was about 51% so about a 1% contingency and the only way to get the shuttle out of orbit is to burn that OMS engine. We had just enough fuel to get up there and back, and that's why Hubble is at that altitude and why it does not come down very quickly. The space station is about 100 statute miles lower so it can be more easily accessed, but it has to continually be reboosted as it loses altitude due to solar drag. Hubble doesn’t have boost engines on it and has no ability to get up higher, so it needs to be in that higher orbit.  It's going to eventually come down but it's going to be a long time.

Mike Davidson: What accomplishments are you the proudest of?

Gregory C. Johnson: I think personally, my kids.  They’re doing great and they have a really interesting variety of successful careers. Professionally, the Hubble rises to the top because that mission was so oversubscribed and challenging. They didn't think we could get it all done and we really did get it all done. The biggest challenge of the mission was prior to the last EVA (Extravehicular Activity). The night before our shuttle crew got together and said, “you know mission control tells us we have to end this EVA by a certain period of time and there just isn’t the time to finish based on the schedule.” John Grunsfeld the Payload Commander said, “you know if we get up an hour early we'll have time, we can get it all done.” So, we all woke up early and we actually surprised mission control; they can tell you're up because you turn on lights and they see the power drain. And we went into EVA prep an hour prior to when they were expecting… and we got it all done, completed the entire Hubble mission plan, and I was pretty proud of that.

Mike Davidson: What does leadership mean to you?

Gregory C. Johnson: Leadership is partnership, so the most important thing you can do is build the correct team, hire the correct people. And if you have people on your team that aren't getting with the correct culture than you have to move them aside.  Trust the team but let them make mistakes.  It’s an unfortunate side to some commercial industries where you make a mistake, get fired and they don't allow you to grow in your job. As a leader, you need the ability to let your people make mistakes. That process builds trust and once you get the trust you don't have to double check on everybody.  Then you have the room to look ahead strategically; what's best for the team, what’s best for the business, for the mission and so on.

Mike Davidson: Is there a failure or setback that you've learned from and how important is it to learn from those mistakes?

Gregory C. Johnson: I would say, those first NASA astronaut interviews felt like a real setback. I was at the peak of my flying abilities and felt so confident but didn’t get the job. But I always looked at being an astronaut as a very small probable outcome so everything else I did in my career was exactly what I wanted to do, and it was all based on the idea of seeking fun. For instance, I first started flying as a seaplane pilot, then what's the next fun job, well that would be flying off aircraft carriers, the next one… it'd be a test pilot, what's the next fun job well it'd be an astronaut, then shuttle pilot and then after that what's the next fun job… well it'd be Chief of Aircraft Operation, essentially running an aircraft squadron.

Mike Davidson: How important is persistence?  I don’t think it’s talked about enough as an important factor in achieving goals.  You hear a lot about developing skill sets, talent, education, all of which is important, but the not the persistence in pursuit of a goal, like in your case the persistence of seeking fun.

Gregory C. Johnson: I think that's exactly right. As an example, when I was selected as an astronaut I was older and had done a lot in my career already which means I had faced a lot of real-world challenges where I had setbacks, learned from them and forced myself to keep going and overcome those things. But you could see people who were coming right out of college with PhDs, and they had done very few operational things in their life. And they had probably never failed at anything at that point. Then in astronaut training, when they didn't do well at something, like learning Russian, robotics or especially EVAs, it really affected them and affected their initial progress.  But if you have the right mindset, it’s so easy to learn a lot once you fail.  And the people that haven’t been allowed to fail enough, you can just see that they don’t have that persistence.

Michael Davidson: Do you have a life motto?

Gregory C. Johnson: In life, make a little money, make memories, not in that order. I think the memories and what's going on around you is most important when you get old.  I also wrote down three goals for my life when I was 18 years old. One goal was don't overpopulate the Earth – so I had just two kids. The second goal was do something that very few people have ever done and to me I achieved that goal when I flew off an aircraft carrier because I looked at the odds and the number of naval aviators flying off a carrier is quite small. The third goal was to give back to humanity and I thought I accomplished that with the Hubble mission, because it improved our knowledge of the universe.

Michael Davidson: How do you approach things that in a moment can feel insurmountable; how do you Do The Impossible?

Gregory C. Johnson: That’s a good one. One story that comes to mind is from the Hubble Mission.  We're putting in a brand new wide-field camera and the first thing to take off was the handhold… and the screws were stripped.  We decided that we just had to break it off and that was fraught with danger because when you go to break the handle off it could have sharp edges could puncture the EVA suit. So that seemed like it really was impossible, and we approached it as a team, took a measured, calculated risk and just did it.  Overall, I thought the whole mission was impossible when I looked at it for the first time… it was oversubscribed by about 25% so I didn't think we’d get everything done.  But we had an extremely effective crew, we all grouped together to get that mission done, and we were exhausted when we landed at Edwards Air Force Base, but it was very close to an impossible mission.  What did it take, well…we just took it step by step. Jeff Bezos said, and I think this is completely true, ‘you don't have to look at the top of the mountain that you're trying to climb, you just have to be climbing the correct mountain and then after that it's step by step.’

Michael Davidson: What does a ‘Mission Mindset’ mean to you?

Gregory C. Johnson: You always need a plan, and your plan always needs to try accounting for the unpredictable.  There’s a big difference between just doing a job and approaching something as a mission; a job is what’s right in front of you, a mission looks at the layers of a task.  And a mission mindset can apply to the simplest of tasks. One thing that changes in you after becoming an astronaut is that you’re extremely time conscious. Most tasks were time restricted to 30 minutes. Some individual tasks to 15 minutes and some very high-end tasks like a deorbit burn to  five minutes and mission control is watching and tracking you constantly. Now, I'm extremely time conscious and even when mowing the lawn, I’ll think of the fastest way I can mow it and mission plan for it. So, the goal is to walk out of the garage with everything I need to get this lawn done; water bottles to electric mower batteries, and then I start my watch and I time how much grass I cut compared to last time.  Over my career I’ve had so many challenges in the air; flying over Cat 5 hurricanes, into war zones in Afghanistan, carrier landings with the Navy and then the test of spaceflight, you realize looking at all of it as a whole, success in situations always comes down to a good mission mindset of just saying to yourself “I’ve been here before and I can do this. Believe in yourself and your ability.”