International Space Station Program
Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript

John B. Charles
Interviewed by Sandra Johnson
Houston, TX – 15 July 2015

Johnson: Today is July 15, 2015. This oral history session is being conducted with John Charles in Houston, Texas, as part of the International Space Station Program Oral History Project. The interviewer is Sandra Johnson, assisted by Rebecca Wright. I want to thank you again for coming in to talk to us again today.

Charles: Glad to do it. Thanks for asking.

Johnson: We appreciate it. I want to begin today, as we talked about a few minutes ago, you’ve actually interviewed about your Shuttle-Mir [Program] experience. Since that was Phase One of the International Space Station, could you briefly describe how you first became involved with the International Space Station [ISS] Program? I know that you began with NASA in 1983 and then became a full-time NASA employee in 1985 and you started as a post-doctoral research associate. If we can talk about, from that beginning, how you became involved with ISS.

Charles: Okay. The beginning—I started a post-doctoral fellow in 1983 in the cardiovascular laboratory in historic old Building 37, formerly the Lunar Receiving Lab. After two years, I was able to get a civil service position in the cardiovascular lab, and shortly thereafter became the head of the cardiovascular lab. My mentor at that time, Mike [Michael M.] Bungo, became a branch chief and left that position open for me, the lab position. In the cardiovascular lab, I was responsible for understanding the effects of spaceflight, especially the deleterious effects of spaceflight from [Space] Shuttle flights on astronauts. It was mostly focused on protecting crew members during operational phases of their Shuttle missions, and the biggest risk we had identified at that time was the orthostatic intolerance after spaceflights.

One of the early Shuttle astronauts, Sonny [Manley L.] Carter, mentioned after his first and only flight that the hardest thing he had to do in the entire mission was to stand up after landing, because even after just a short flight—I think his first flight was four days—there is a lot of fluid loss, a lot of neuromuscular control change. They always say they’re not calibrated for 1-G [force of gravity] after just a few days in weightlessness. That was all the incentive we needed to come up with a program that looked at orthostatic intolerance, that is the lightheadedness that comes after spaceflight, or after blood loss, or after deconditioning, in general.

That was the focus of my research in the cardiovascular lab. I was able to use the resources of NASA to develop techniques for monitoring blood pressure and heart rate, ECG [electrocardiogram], during reentry and landing, essentially a cardiovascular lab in a box, in a pocket. They actually added a pocket to the spacesuit for us in the post-[Space Shuttle] Challenger [accident] era, so we could get data during reentry and landing on astronauts during the actual first exposure to gravity after having been weightless for however long the Shuttle mission was.

I was also able to use the resources of NASA to develop a lower body negative pressure capability, LBNP, which had been used previously on Skylab, but had not been used subsequently. What LBNP is good for is actually to shift the body’s fluids around as if the individual is standing up at 1-G; it gives us a chance to do a tilt test, a G-tolerance test, up to equivalent of 1-G, during weightlessness to understand how the progressive loss of cardiovascular function is changing the cardiovascular control during periods of weightlessness. We tried to understand the earliest phenomena that occurred in spaceflight, the earliest adaptations. We also did the operational stand test. Before and after flight, there was a medical requirement at that time for a clinical assessment of the crew member’s ability to stand upright quietly for 10 minutes or so. We implemented that, and of course that became data for our laboratory to analyze, as well as being clinically relevant healthcare data.

With all of that going on, that was a busy time in the cardiovascular lab. We then got the opportunity to do similar measurements on the first Mir mission that an American astronaut flew, Norm [Norman E.] Thagard’s flight in 1995, and we did many of those same investigations because he was launching on Soyuz, but they were landing on the Shuttle. We were able to implement some of the post-flight monitoring measurements and also the inflight lower body negative pressure experiment, using both our lower body negative pressure device, LBNP, in the Spacelab module and the Russian device called Chibis, which is obviously in the Russian vehicle. They have some differences in design, so we had to do some cross-calibration studies, and we acquired at that time a Chibis device from the Russian manufacturer.

After the first Mir mission, I was moved from research into management, and I became a Science Manager, now just about 20 years ago. So, for most of my career at NASA, I’ve been not a practicing scientist, not a useful scientist, but a science manager. At that time, I became the Mission Scientist for several of the missions of American astronauts to the Space Station Mir, the subsequent missions. I was there, I was a Mission Scientist for the—well, I forget now which ones; they’re sort of a blur, and being the Mission Scientist or not was not really all that different in terms of interaction and responsibility, it just meant I got to do some public affairs weekly briefings on the status and the updates of the mission.

After that happened, after we finished up the Mir Program, I became the Chief Scientist for the second flight of John [H.] Glenn, John Glenn’s return to space on the Shuttle Space Shuttle, STS-95. Then when that was winding down, I became the chief NASA scientist for the last flight of [Space Shuttle] Columbia, the STS-107 research mission. I moved out of the long-duration Space Station domain back into the short-duration domain utilizing Shuttle missions.

Simultaneously with that, though, I was also the NASA life sciences liaison to the Mars Exploration Program, which required understanding of the Design Reference Mission and its requirements on the life sciences for sending astronauts to Mars, and that is, by definition, one of the longest missions we’re considering doing. I kept my familiarity with both things and was starting to see the value of the Space Station, in answering those questions and the value of the Space Station and continuing the work that we had started on the Space Shuttle.

After the [STS-]107 mission, I became involved in the Human Research Program, which was the movement of the life sciences management from [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC] down to the field Centers, in this case the Johnson Space Center during the administration of Mike [Michael D.] Griffin. After being the Deputy Chief Scientist, I became the Chief Scientist for the Human Research Program, responsible for understanding and making recommendations for the investigations that we needed to pursue specifically to prepare astronauts for long-duration flights to Mars. That’s when the Space Station really comes into focus for our research.

After having done that for a while, I was promoted, or moved sideways, to becoming the Chief of the International Science Office of the Human Research Program, specifically to understand how to do the research that we need to solve the problems of spaceflight to Mars using international resources; that is, leveraging all of the resources available through all the partners on the Space Station. It is largely through that role, the International Science Office, that I became more fully involved with activities on the Space Station sort of from the other side, not from the domestic side, but from the international side, trying to see how we can use international resources to solve our problems and how quid pro quo we also apply our resources to the problems that the international partners have. That, in a nutshell, is how I got to be involved in the International Space Station Program. That’s not much of a nutshell.

Johnson: That’s a good summary. Just a couple of things. You mentioned that you became a Science Manager, and that was during Shuttle-Mir, and you made the statement you didn’t do the real science. Maybe if you can explain a little bit more about what the duties of a science manager is—and I’m sure there’s still science managers with the ISS—if you can just talk about the duties in that position.

Charles: Yes, they’re called increment scientists now. They are responsible for making recommendations for the priority of investigations in all the disciplines. That was something that I was always pretty uncomfortable with because it required me as a NASA-designated Chief Scientist for the Glenn mission, or for the 107 mission, to decide which was more important if there was a time crunch, the crystal growth experiment or the flame investigation or the Earth observation or the medical experiment. Now, I did my darnedest to avoid being in that situation and let things sort themselves out, but that really is what the responsibility is, is to decide how best to use the limited resources and the perhaps very constrained resources in this or that mission to get the maximum benefit, and without unnecessarily causing damage or injury to the other investigations. The science manager, chief scientist or the increment scientist or the mission scientist has to have the broad perspective for all the payloads on the mission; has to have done the work ahead of time to become familiar with them, to understand the organizations that are sponsoring them, their needs and requirements and what they need to get out of this or that mission; and then be willing to take the blame for making a decision, or at least a recommendation, to the mission manager or the program manager, or whoever is in charge, for that particular set of priorities to be exercised.

I’m thinking in particular of one of the Mir missions, when we had several setbacks during the Jerry [M.] Linenger–Mike [C. Michael] Foale era—the fire on board which caused a revamping of the timeline, and especially the collision of the Progress vehicle, which cost us access to the Spectre module, which is where we had all of our research equipment. I will say this now on tape and on the record because I know that my Space Station colleagues will be hearing this: there is a natural tendency amongst the implementation folks to, when a problem happens, to stop everything and say, “Okay, well, let’s shut everything down and then gradually turn it back on, when we know what the resources are that we have access to and can safely and gracefully turn things back on.” My job as the Chief Scientist is to say, “Turn off the minimum things you have to turn off, but don’t shut down the science program, which is your justification for being here in the first place.”

There is a natural tension between those two perspectives, and we the scientists almost always lose because we don’t control the resources, we don’t control the need for the capabilities that the vehicle Station or the Shuttle or the Mir provide. When they’re talking about resupply, or they’re talking about priorities of repairs it’s very hard to argue with a guy who says, “Okay John, which is more important, your science or the oxygen supply?” That’s an easy one to lose, and so there has to be a certain set of criteria and a certain perspective that the chief scientist or the mission scientist brings into that job to understand that you need to have a functional vehicle that’s got the right conditions for science, but it doesn’t need to be perfect before you resume the science.

Johnson: As you said, that in particular was with the fire and the collision. Have there been instances with the ISS Program since then that you’ve seen that same tension, or has the process been resolved as far as trying to work between the implementation and the scientists?

Charles: I think the Space Station Program has taken a huge step in that direction by refocusing on utilization after the construction phase was completed. I think they did exactly the right thing, and it became the Space Station Program’s mission to utilize the Station effectively. There have been issues since then. For example, right now we’re in a bit of a tight squeeze because the Space Station is being reconstructed. Modules are being moved around, and if supply vehicles don’t make it—we’ve had three in a row now that didn’t make it, and I guess the Progress just succeeded recently—that puts constraints on activities.

There’s also, it appears to me, not being in the implementation business, there seems to be an endless supply of non-science activities that just need to be done, just absolutely positively have to be done right now. The number of hours that we have available for research purposes is, if you look at the total number of person-hours available on the Station, is pretty small. Again we come back to the position that isn’t the Space Station being justified for the research, and especially for the human—I’ll be very chauvinistic—for the human research that is going to be enabling for missions to Mars? Isn’t that what we’re told publicly the purpose of the Space Station is? How come we seem to get the smallest allotment of hours to do the research that we’re told justifies the existence of the Space Station? Again the engineers say, well, the solar panels have to be working and the oxygen has to be on and the food has to be prepared and all of that, all the infrastructure things. Yes, that is all very true. But there is that kind of ongoing tension that says you don’t have to have a perfect spaceship before you start doing useful research, and how much of that is enough and how much of this is enough?

To the Space Station Program’s credit, they’ve designated Julie [A.] Robinson as the Chief Scientist for the Space Station, and she understands, I know, because we’ve had discussions with her that she is doing the job that I described earlier as the mission scientist had done in previous missions, where she’s trying to weigh the requirements of all the users. We, of course, think our requirements are the most important. Julie is not allowed to agree with us on that position; she’s got to weigh all the requirements she has on her plate. There is that kind of ongoing discussion, which is only compounded by the EVA [extravehicular activity] campaigns or the reconstruction campaigns when they move modules around, or the VIP flights that occur and derail your plan schedule, or any number of things that always seem to pop up when you least expect it.

Now, lest I sound unnecessarily negative, I will also say that we have just recently, the first week in June, succeeded far beyond my imagination, and certainly beyond my expectations, with the Fluid Shifts study. The Fluid Shifts Study is a major U.S.-Russian investigation to understand the actual effects of the headward fluid shift that I studied so intensively earlier in my career on a problem that we’ve identified in the last five or eight years on the Station, that is the visual acuity changes. There’s a natural tendency to think that the flattening of the globe, the change in the shape of the eyeball, and the swelling of the optic nerve just absolutely must be due to the fluid shift that occurs in spaceflight, although we don’t have any proof, any evidence of that. We just have an association, which is tempting to many people but is not rigorously supported yet by data.

One of the ways we’re going to acquire data is by using the Russian Chibis device which I mentioned earlier, and a suite of American monitoring capabilities relocated into the Russian segment into the Zvezda module, and converting the Zvezda module into a cardiovascular lab, displacing the people—displacing the kitchen and the bedrooms and the thoroughfare the Russians need to go back and forth through there to get to their duty stations. This is an example of where we have seen the science requirements prioritized above the comfort and the activities of daily living for a very specific purpose. Full credit to the Space Station and to our Russian colleagues, and to the other NASA folks for persisting, for overcoming an almost infinite number of last-minute reasons not to do this thing and to succeed in implementing the set of investigations at least once in the Space Station, I hope several more times in the Space Station. It can be done, and as I say, full disclosure, it has been done, and I’m very glad to see it happen.

Johnson: As you said, the vision changes, that’s a very important thing, because if you don’t have vision, you can’t necessarily do your work. I can see where that would become a priority.

Charles: It’s a bit of a surprise, a bit of a surprise, too. We’ve gone through 20-plus years of spaceflight knowing that vision changes did occur, but not thinking they were very important. They just sort of were one of those things that happen in spaceflight, and it probably is going to get better afterwards, and everybody’s vision changes when you get to be of a certain age anyhow, so what’s the big deal? But after three or so months on the Station, several astronauts said, “You know, this is worse than I expected, and I haven’t got enough prescriptive lenses on board to help me see my checklist anymore.” And then post-flight analysis and post-flight measurements show the actual changes in the globe in the optic nerve that were not in family, not within the scope of previous experience.

So it was a bit of a surprise, it came out of nowhere. We still don’t know exactly what causes it; we have several hypotheses, several possible contributing factors. If it continues unabated, then it will definitely be a problem on a long-duration Mars mission. Right now we’re trying to understand whether it does level off after a few weeks or a few months or a year in spaceflight, or whether it continues to progressively impact the astronaut’s visual acuity. If it does do that, then that is a problem that needs to be solved, and that’s one of the things we’re focusing on on our current one-year mission, and the other activities, the other experiments that will continue after that.

Johnson: As you mentioned during the Shuttle–Mir time, a lot of those experiments, those physiological experiments, were being done in the Spacelab. How much of it was being done on the Mir itself, compared to what you were doing in the Shuttle?

Charles: The Shuttle has always been a much more intensive venue for human research. The Russian philosophy on the Mir station was expressed to Norm Thagard by one of the cosmonauts he flew with, when the cosmonaut said, “Norm, why do they have you doing all this research? Don’t they know Mir is not a research facility? It’s an outpost.” He was saying essentially, we’re showing the flag in orbit, and all this idea of doing all this research, that’s not what it’s all about. Of course on the U.S. side, that was exactly what it was all about. We didn’t build the Space Shuttle for that purpose, but we certainly used it to the fullest extent we were allowed to, and that was the justification for flying astronauts to the Mir station, is to get long-duration experience before we went on to the ISS. What is long-duration experience if not documentation of the effects of spaceflight on the human body?

There is that kind of intensive research that we took on the Mir station. We also had the benefit on the first flight of having the Spacelab module for a week’s worth of post-long-duration data collection, including lower body negative pressure and exercise testing with American hardware so we could compare those results to previously-acquired Shuttle data. We didn’t repeat that again, but the Space Station now fills that niche with U.S. and Russian and other hardware that allows us to make measurements in both segments. Sometimes we’re able to make measurements on U.S. and Russian devices within a few days of each other to understand whether we’re seeing a phenomenon that’s related to specific peculiarities of hardware, or peculiarities of spaceflight, because we can compare the responses from several different items of hardware. That is something I had not expected was going to be available to us on the Station, but now in retrospect makes a lot of sense. But the purpose, as you mentioned, as far as we’re concerned, is to understand the effects of spaceflight and use these venues and use the Space Station and the Mir and the Shuttle for that purpose.