Kate Bradshaw

Former astronaut Steve Smith traveled 16 million miles and spent nearly 50 hours out on spacewalks during his time with NASA. (NASA)

Spacewalker and diplomat Steve Smith shares how space has changed his life.

This story was first published in The Mercury News on Jan. 21, 2024.

Many kids dream of becoming an astronaut. San Jose’s Steve Smith remembers scrawling his space exploration fantasies in crayon, too — but his dreams came true. Smith flew four space missions, traveled 16 million miles and spent nearly 50 hours out on spacewalks. Today, he’s an inspirational public speaker, telling stories of chasing that dream, his life in space and his years as a diplomat to support work on the International Space Station.

An athlete and an engineer, Smith has a background that includes undergrad and master’s degrees from Stanford in electrical engineering and an MBA. He worked for a few years at IBM, before leaving the Bay Area in 1989 to work as a payload officer for NASA in Houston. After being rejected four times for the Astronaut Corps, he was finally selected in 1992. He went on to become one of the Americans who has spent the most time “walking” – as much the word applies off Earth – in space, an experience he says is akin to scuba diving.

It all sounds glamorous from the vantage point of someone safely on Earth. But much of his work as an astronaut, Smith says, involved working to keep himself and his colleagues alive in an extremely dangerous place. The launch, the flight, the zero-Gs are certainly challenging, but heading out on a spacewalk poses major difficulties. He wore a specialized suit prepared to handle temperature swings of 400 degrees every 45 minutes and potential impacts from rocks, pellets and other debris.

“It’s a pretty dangerous business,” he says, “but in the end, we do it to make people’s lives better.”

Full story here.