The Story of Story

There aren’t enough superlatives to describe the experience the RKS Team and family shared, when legendary astronaut Story Musgrave visited us to give an inspirational presentation. 

Story Musgrave was an NASA astronaut for over 30 years and flew on six spaceflights. He performed the first shuttle spacewalk on Challenger’s first flight, was a pilot on an astronomy mission, conducted two classified DOD missions, was the lead spacewalker on the Hubble Telescope repair mission, and on his last flight, he operated an electronic chip manufacturing plant on Columbia.



But the story behind the man becomes even more amazing when you hear the “rest of the story.”  Story was born in 1935 on a dairy farm in Stockbridge, MA.  He was in the forests alone at the age of three, and by five floated his homebuilt rafts on the rivers.  By the time he reached 10, drove trucks and tractors alone in remote fields.  By 13, he was repairing them.

All told, he has flown 18,000 hours in over 160 aircraft.  He has 7 graduate degrees in math, computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature and psychology.  He has been awarded 20 honorary doctorates.  And somehow during his 30 year career as an astronaut he also managed to be a part-time trauma surgeon.

Today Story operates a palm farm in Orlando, FL, a production company in Sydney and a sculpture company in Burbank, CA.  He is also a landscape architect, a concept artist with Walt Disney Imagineering, an innovator with Applied Minds Inc. and a professor of design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.  He has seven children, ranging in age from three to 49 to 3.  He has three grandchildren, and a beautiful wife,  named Amanda.

At the end of his presentation, one team member stood up to thank Story, saying “That was amazing… and humbling.”  Story shot back in his characteristic, no-nonsense manner, “Well, it shouldn’t be!”  And whether he’s telling you how he fixed the Hubble telescope in space with tools he designed himself (or bought from the hardware store), or how he choreographed his spacewalks with help from Dorothy Hamill, you come to understand why he’s done such an awe-inspiring array of things in his life – approaching problems with a combination of elegant grace and pure stubbornness, focusing on simplicity no matter how complex the situation, and by being, at heart, a farm boy.  There was such pride in his voice when he described to us his (admittedly magnificent) compost heap and showed us the 1969 dump truck he still drives, saying, “Do I get under the hood?  No! I don’t need to!  That’s a 1969 diesel engine, it’ll go a million miles!  No computer chips in there, it just runs!”  It’s clear that his brilliant career in space was due in no small part to his being a very practical, down-to-earth guy.