Sears: [00:00:14] Welcome to ethics in the name of Warrior. I'm your host, Michael Sears, and we have a treat as naval officers. We serve in the air, on land and sea. But the reality is we can do so much more. I'm joined from low Earth orbit on board the International Space Station. Yes, in space by Captain Chris Cassidy, the United States Navy, Naval Academy class of 1993, and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a master's degree in thousand. Captain Cassidy served for 11 years as a member of Navy SEAL Teams, where he made four deployments to in Afghanistan and two in the Mediterranean. Welcome Captain Cassidy.

Cassidy: [00:00:55] Hi, Michael, thanks a lot. It's great to be with you.

Sears: [00:00:58] Chris, if you don't mind, I'm going to go on with your resume. You were selected as an astronaut by NASA in May of 2004. In February 2006, you completed astronaut candidate training. You've flown on several missions and you are officially known as the five 000th person in history to fly in space. Overall, you've accumulated 31 hours and 14 minutes of spacewalk time and 182 days in space so far. And you are currently circling above us at about two hundred and fifty-four miles high and serving as the commander aboard the International Space Station, which launched on April 9th, 2020 as part of the Expedition 63 mission. I say all that to remind our audience that you are truly an officer who has been there and done that. And with that background, including services NASA's 14th chief astronaut in July of twenty fifteen, we're talking about the importance of leadership in our jobs and careers. You know, we get a pretty liberal education here at Navy. I wonder if you can remind us of the importance of science, the scientific method, questioning hypotheses, et cetera,

Cassidy: [00:02:09] And understanding in science is important for a naval officer for a number of reasons. One. The better you understand your equipment, the more successful you'll be able to be in employing and using that equipment, whether it's warfighting or maintenance or whatever. And everything I find has a scientific background. If you can understand the principles of how something works, you have just a deeper level of appreciation for what you're, how you're employing that tool. And those tools can be really anything from just pushing the button on a comm channel and you expect to communicate. But if you understand exactly what's happening to your voice as it comes out of your mouth, goes through the microphone and through some cables and antennas from a to another antenna and does the same process to the speaker. On the other end, you can help troubleshoot if something isn't going wrong. So just understanding in science and technology is, I found to be very, very helpful in my professional career.

Sears: [00:03:08] How do you get your work done in such tiny space with a tiny crew?

Cassidy: [00:03:12] Well, how do we get stuff done with a small crew and a small space up here? It's actually quite easy. What we have going for us is the mission control centers both in Houston, in Moscow and in Munich, where the European astronaut center is coordinated out of and Japan and in Canada. Montreal, they monitor the robotic arm. So, it's not a tiny crew, it's a tiny crew on board the space station. But the crew is large when you add all those five control centers in the engineers and technicians and subject matter experts that are all part of the whole, the whole process. But actually, getting it done up here is a combination of ground sending remote commands. We try to have everything, be everything that can be done by ground commanding. We try to have that happen and we use crew time as a resource just like oxygen, food, water crew. Time is valuable. And just because, like you said, there's a tiny crew finite amount of minutes in a day because it won't just happen naturally.

Sears: [00:04:20] Talk about trust. How do you build trust with your crewmates?

Cassidy: [00:04:24] How do you build trust between crewmates? It's no different. I found that in the space world as it was in the military world, it's be proficient at your job, be a good communicator. That means listening just as much as speaking fact, more 90 percent listening and 10 percent speaking. I found that at least for me, when I feel like someone is listening to me, then that builds trust. And as that's as a subordinate, I feel that way. And as a leader, I've tried to employ that where, you know, everybody in a unit, everybody or in their organization has value, has important thoughts, has important feelings. And if you're keeping your finger on the pulse of all that and listening and caring, it's going to go a long way now. Can you accommodate everybody's desires? Can you make everybody happy? No, it's impossible. But in when I've been in a unit, if I felt like my opinion was heard considered and we different took a different course of action, it's totally comfortable with that. It's fine, you know, but it's about knowing that your voice is heard and considered. I think that goes a long ways for building trust both up and down and laterally across the chain of command. People need to know that you can get the job done. They don't have to go back and look at your work. And if you say something, then you mean it. They can go take it to the bank. So, integrity goes a long way for obvious reasons.

Sears: [00:06:01] So how do you build trust with mission control? The guys who are not on board the space station with you who aren't taking the risks that you are?

Cassidy: [00:06:09] How do we build trust with mission control? It's kind of the same exact concept right there. The mission control does not have really eyes on what we're doing. We do have cameras on board the space station and they're pointed wherever we want to point them, quite frankly. So, there are dead spaces where they can't see. And if we're doing an activity that there's no camera, then they they're not watching us. And but that's what. They know that we are going to give them words if we make a mistake, which we strive very hard not to do every day, and if we're unsure of an action to take, even if it's small and seemingly inconsequential, we generally call mission control and double check if we're sort of what we call deviating from the procedure. Being methodical, owning up to mistakes and taking input with open ears, I think is the short answer of how do we build trust with mission control?

Sears: [00:07:12] You're the commander up there. What challenges do you have as the commander, the leader of the team on the ISS?

Cassidy: [00:07:19] It's quite easy to be a leader of a space crew there. We're all mature professionals. But the challenges that we have hasn't been between the crew itself. We've been we've been chasing a tiny little leak. We've identified it. It's in the very back of the space station on the Russian side. And Ivan and Anatoly are working a lot of extra hours with executing kind of, I would say, science fair project type of ideas from the ground and justifiably so. I mean, we've got to figure it out. I've been kind of keeping my eye on that. The way I like to think of it is if there's a contingency that happens that requires us to get up in the middle of the night, which we had happen when this leak first was identified. You need to have the reserves, you know, the sort of energy in the bank to deal with that, just like on a ship firefighting damage control. It's your job when you're not on duty to be rested so that when you are on duty, you're good to go. And we have the same kind of thing up here. We take risks very seriously. On board the space station.

Sears: [00:08:31] Is leadership any different in space?

Cassidy: [00:08:34] And I would say there's no difference in leadership in space versus anywhere else, it's just about. It's about people and people are your primary resource. You have other resources available to you. It's about understanding the mission. It's about understanding risk versus reward kind of when it's when you should push the risk line, push the risk envelope and when you should, you know, layup and three put, you know, so to use a golf analogy. So, it's there's really no difference. And when you when you really understand the mission, when you understand the intent commander's intent, as we say in the military or on here in space, it's, you know, the mission control intent. When you understand that very well, you can execute the mission. You can be a leader at your level to help contribute to the overall objective. And that's exactly what we do here on the space station. If if I have concern about a direction that we've been given to go for a particular job or a task, or, for example, out on a spacewalk, that's where you step in and voice your voice, your concerns. It just happens to be that the environment we're in is space, and it's no different than on the sea, under the sea or flying an aircraft over the sea.

Sears: [00:10:00] What are some of the leadership lessons you learned as a junior officer that serve you well in your current assignment?

Cassidy: [00:10:07] Leadership is something that I've been learning continuously at every level. It seems like you're always learning new lessons and having a chance to employ lessons learned from when you're younger. But particularly for me, when I was a junior naval officer, I was really fortunate to have some awesome chiefs. That was probably the single most important lesson I learned as an incident in Lieutenant Junior Grade is that the relationship you have with your chief, the senior enlisted and the leader relationship is kind of sets the tone for the whole unit and that that trust and confidence and being one head and communicating with the LPO as well and kind of kind of just making sure that all are on the same page. And then you're going to just go get the daily jobs done. I learned that again. Twenty-five years later, when my own daughter was now, she was an Ensign, she's a lieutenant now. But when she first checked in to her first unit and I said, Oh, have you met your chiefs yet? And over the course of a couple of months, I think she understood what I had been talking to her about, about the importance of that relationship and how it was really cool for me to watch the lessons that I had learned and tried to give her those tools as she learned how to be a quality junior officer. So, yeah, I'd say the number one thing is that I learned as a junior officer was relationship between the senior enlisted and the unit leader.

Sears: [00:11:59] Let's get back to science. A big part of the mission of the Naval Service in the 21st century will be understanding and responding to the environmental impacts of weather, sea rice winds and fires around the world. How has your service at NASA informed you of the navy's need to go beyond just bombs on target, but rescue and relief?

Cassidy: [00:12:19] Well, my service at NASA has in fact really solidified my appreciation for our Navy. Our military's need to go beyond just the traditional mission that we think the world is changing. Climate is driving a lot. You know, we can see from just a weather environment this year alone how big of an impact hurricanes and fires have had, and the military is really, really well equipped to respond to those kind of situations. I mean, when the pandemic started, we had our two hospital ships steamed to either coast and help out. It's a great example. You often see humanitarian aid with, you know, a C-130 ramp down and water and chow coming out the back end. And those are just great examples. And it makes me proud actually to be part of the military when we have such a broad capability both to do our warfighting mission, but also to humanitarian missions. In the meantime, it's just a great organization to be part of.

Sears: [00:13:35] When you graduated, did you know you wanted to fly in space?

Cassidy: [00:13:38] When I graduated, no, I had no idea that I'd be interested in NASA. It wasn't even part of my calculus at all. My mental calculus. I came to the Naval Academy not knowing anything about Seals. In fact, I was very naive 18-year-old think I was. I knew that I had to serve in the Navy, but I didn't really know at that point there was no internet, and I didn't really read a whole lot about what it meant. I didn't know that you can do different things in the Navy. And over the course of my time in Annapolis, I learned about seals and I was very motivated by a couple of the Trident wearing guys on the on the yard. And that's what got me in pointed in the direction of seal teams. And then probably five years or so into my seal team time, I learned and met Captain Bill Shepherd, who was a Navy grad and had been in the seal teams and then gone on to become an astronaut. He was the first commander of the International Space Station, and now here it is. 20 years later, a manned operation is on the station and I'm the commander as well. So that's kind of cool for us. But back to the question at hand is was meeting and understanding Shep's career path, which the light bulb dawned on me like, Oh, if he was a competitive applicant. Not my background is stacking up to be similar as his, then maybe I can as well. And that's so I was a lieutenant in the Navy when I got interested. Got motivated. Found out. How do you apply? When do they take applications at NASA? I applied one time in two thousand and was not selected. And then in two thousand four years later, I applied and I was selected. So, I was not a young boy dreaming about flying in space. It was quite the contrary.

Sears: [00:15:41] And for those midshipmen who aspire to follow in your footsteps, what advice do you have?

Cassidy: [00:15:47] What advice do I have for midshipmen that are interested in in the same path? Well, we don't pick astronauts right out of graduating with your bachelor's degree. You have to go do something. And for those of us graduating from Naval Academy, that means go do your job in the Navy and you have to do that. Well, we're not going to pick somebody at NASA. If you were a poor performer in your primary duties in the Navy, whatever those are, it doesn't really matter these days what community you service select with your if you desire to be an astronaut. We'll take we'll take any background in military, civilian, whatever we do require the technical degree, both bachelor's and master's degree, although they just changed those requirements a little bit. I'll have to read up exactly what those requirements are, but math, science, chemistry, physics, that kind of thing is a required degree. So that's step one and step two is just hit the fleet running and be the best naval officer you can be technically sound, be academically sharp, take advantage of opportunities when they come up.

Cassidy: [00:17:06] I don't want this to sound negative, but statistically speaking you, it's less likely that you'll become an astronaut then you than not. And that was told to me, and it was very, very true. I feel very fortunate that I was one of the lucky ones to get selected. But my point being, you have to be prepared to continue doing the job that you're doing in in the Navy, or if that's when the time comes to move on into civilian life. And you should you should be content with what you pick. And that has another benefit to that is when you when you're happy doing your job, you generally do it well and that that supports the theory of, you know, making yourself a better applicant to become an astronaut. So those are the things. It's really simple. We don't we also don't want people that wouldn't be enjoyable to be with on a six-month mission. So be the best tent mate you can be, I think, is probably the best way to describe it. You know, your chances will be selecting as an astronaut will increase.

Sears: [00:18:16] So here's a question. Have you used what you learned in Calc three at the Naval Academy, in your job at NASA?

Cassidy: [00:18:24] I would definitely say yes, there's it's an understanding of math and science in general, to be honest with you, I don't remember the syllabus of Calculus three, so I can't tell you. Oh yeah, in section 7.4, that I use that theorem every single day, but I will tell you this. For example, I know that momentum is the area under the force versus time curve. And I see that with my own eyes up here in space and feel because think about this, this big heavy 350 pound spacesuit behind me, I can flick it like that with my finger and I'm inputting a certain force for a short period of time. The heavy spacesuit barely even reacts. If I take an M&M and flick my finger the same way that I'm imparting the same momentum, the same force for the same finite amount of time. But the P, the M&M goes flying across, so it's fascinating to see this concept. And then now that's the force. And if you put that over time, if you push your finger a little bit and you have a small but constant force, now you're adding, imparting more momentum into the system and you take that back to calculus. Three. How do you determine the area under that curve? Well, you integrate, you integrate from X to whatever and you get the answer. So that's one example that I can think of yourself to up my head is the concept of momentum, which is so critical to just floating around as a person, but also our spaceships, maneuvering and docking and rendezvous wing and control of momentum area under the force time curve.

Sears: [00:20:30] Captain Cassidy, thanks for joining us on ethics in the Naval Warrior. Any parting words?

Cassidy: [00:20:36] So, Michael, thanks a lot. It was great to be with you. It's always fun to connect back with the Naval Academy and discuss leadership. It's it's a fascinating subject. I know that when you're studying it as a young midshipman, sometimes it can be boring. But when you hear case studies in real life examples, it kind of brings it to home. But as you get older, you have a greater appreciation for just exactly the value of those life lessons that others are helping you learn so that you don't make the same mistakes that others have before you. So, thanks very much again. Always great to talk to you. What are the days? How many days till we beat Army? I have nine more days left on board the International Space Station and then return to Earth. So, I'll definitely be home for when we beat Army.

Sears: [00:21:31] You've been listening to ethics in the Naval War here, produced by the Boeing Leadership Innovation Lab at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. You can find more of our podcast by visiting StockdaleCenter.com/Podcasts