Kathy Sullivan Explores

Somebody else got the job. You didn’t win the game. The gallery won’t show your art. We’ve all felt the sting of rejection in our personal and professional lives. And when we watch it happen on TV—when the cameras show the faces of actors who didn’t get the Oscar or Olympians who didn’t take gold—we sympathize with the grim faces on our screens. We know from our own experiences just how painful th...

Dr. Nancy Zimpher is an educator, state university leader, and former Chancellor of the State University of New York. Before serving at SUNY, Nancy worked as a dean and professor of education at Ohio State University, where she also earned her undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees. In 1998, Nancy served as the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee—the first woman to hold the...

How often have you had to explain to a potential employer or partner that your earlier jobs and experiences equipped you to work in an organization? One might think that this is a challenge only college graduates face but in today’s world, many of us find ourselves constantly shifting from one line of work to another. And unless we’re starting our business alone, we have to figure out how we can t...

Mimi Dane is the CEO of the Belford Family Charitable Fund and former CEO of Flying Horse Farms. Mimi completed her undergraduate degree at St. Norbert College and graduated with a Master’s in English at Western Michigan University. After graduating from Ohio State University - Moritz College of Law, Mimi served as a law clerk for the Honorable Louis Pollak. She then began a 21-year career with Sq...

Charles Frank Bolden Jr. is a retired US Marine Corps Major General and former NASA astronaut. After flying on four space shuttle missions—STS-61-C, STS-31, STS-45, and STS-60—Charlie was appointed by former President, Barack Obama, to serve as the 12th Administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2017, making him the first African American to head the agency permanently. Today, Charlie is the Founder and C...

Tim MacDonald is the Engineering and Operations Manager and Submersible Pilot for scientific and commercial charters at Caladan Oceanic. Tim earned his degree in Offshore Engineering from the Australian Maritime College in Tasmania and recently became the first Australian to dive to the deepest point in the sea: the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. Tim’s enduring goal is to help marine scien...

In our celebrity-crazed world, the term “one-hit wonder” is commonly used to refer to an athlete, musician, or author who earned an Olympic gold, a Grammy, or a best-seller with their first work, and never repeated. Sometimes, I wonder what life was like after the games for a swimmer or gymnast who earned gold at the ripe age of 16 or 20. They had achieved something they had dreamed of for most of...

Renee Wynn is an Independent Board Member with over three decades of leadership experience in environmental policy, global information technology, and cybersecurity operations. She has spent over 25 years of her career working in information services at the Environmental Protection Agency before becoming the Chief Information Officer at NASA, a post she served for five years. In addition to servin...

When I was young, I wasn’t one to utter the sentence “When I grow up, I want to be an astronaut!” I was fascinated by other things—geography, maps, and languages—and studied foreign languages, oceanography, and geology in college and beyond. You might think that sounds like an odd background for an astronaut, but astronauts come from a wider range of professional experience than most people recogn...

Jim Toomey is a cartoonist, global ocean advocate, and the creator of Sherman’s Lagoon, a daily comic strip syndicated to over 150 newspapers in 20 countries and six languages. Sherman’s Lagoon tells the story and misadventures of the great white shark Sherman, his wife Megan, and their friends in the fictional Kapupu Lagoon. Jim completed his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering at Duke University’s...

As NASA’s best ambassadors, astronauts do so much more than just train and fly. They also do public appearances and media interviews around the country, in addition to occasionally being deployed on foreign soil to represent the United States. My first such foreign assignment came in the summer of 1985—but it turned out to have an unexpected, spy-novel-like dimension.   In this episode, you’ll hea...

Dr. Alexandra Horowitz is a cognitive scientist keen on understanding a dog’s mind. She is Professor of Nonfiction Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she also teaches seminars in canine cognition creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. In addition to teaching, Dr. Horowitz is a Senior Research Fellow and heads the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. Her books, I...

Astronauts spend months, even years, waiting for the day they get to fly. And when it’s their turn, they can feel on top of the world—but it certainly didn’t work that well on my third mission, STS-45. We were taken for granted, to say the least. We were but a speed bump on the road to another telegenic space mission.   But, dear explorer, there are a few insights from the experience you might pon...

Lt. Gen. Susan J. Helms is Commander, 14th Air Force, Air Force Space Command and a NASA astronaut. Gen. Helms was selected by NASA in 1990, became an astronaut in 1991, and became NASA’s first US military woman in space when she joined the Space Shuttle Endeavour crew in 1993. Other missions she participated in include STS-64 in 1994, STS-78 in1996, and STS-101 in 2000. In 2001, Gen. Helms served...

In November of 1990, Toby Goodman received a gift from his father for his 10th birthday. It was a telescope: an item with a purpose and capacity for evoking awe that no other toy had. It was no surprise that telescopes filled the shelves of toy stores in London: a few months before receiving the gift, Toby explains, the Hubble Space Telescope had launched, captivating the wonder of people from all...

While my work with the NOOA was a complex and generally fun job, it was one that fully demanded full intensity. It left me pretty tired after four years. So, when I left the country’s preeminent climate and ocean agency in 2017, I planned to slow down—maybe travel some, enjoy the flexibility that comes with retirement, and have time to get a dog. I eventually got my pup and, for several years, did...

Patricia (Patty) Nelson Limerick is a historian, author, lecturer, and teacher. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also completed her Ph. D. in American Studies at Yale University, where she also taught as a graduate teaching assistant. She served as an assistant professor at Harvard University from 1980 until she joined the U...

Does the daily news ever make you wonder how the government actually works? Civics classes used to teach us how our country’s laws and constitution work. Today, in the US, most students don’t have a single civics class in school. What amazes me is not how so few people know how the government works, but how few seem curious about how it works—despite how much it impacts lives. There are so many th...

Amy Ross is an advanced spacesuit designer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. She is the daughter of astronaut Jerry Ross—who has set two US records by flying in space seven times and conducting nine spacewalks—and Karen Ross, a dietician who worked with shuttle crews. Amy completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University while simultaneously participatin...

While I have never met the Queen of England, I did have a brush with British royalty during my career at NASA. In 1989, when news spread that a British princess wanted to visit NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston—where I was based—for her grand tour of the US, it caused a lot of excitement in my world. Royal visits to the United States are rare, but royal visits to the NASA Houston base are a l...

Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd is a leading international weather and climate expert as well as the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia. Marshall received his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Ph. D. from Florida State University, becoming the first African American to receive a doctorate from the university’s...

It’s been quite a journey since I launched the Kathy Sullivan Explores podcast, to say the least. From exploring the power of mythology and leadership styles to delving into the commercial space industry and the advent of the new space age, I’ve certainly had a lot of fascinating conversations in my first year of podcasting—and what’s a better way to celebrate my first podcasting anniversary than...

Charles Frank Bolden Jr. is the Founder and CEO Emeritus of the Charles F. Bolden Group, a consortium of accomplished leaders founded in 2017 to foster international collaboration in making life better for all humanity. Appointed by the former president, Barack Obama, Charlie served as the 12th Administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2017, making him the first African American to hold the position perm...

Charles Frank Bolden Jr. formerly served as the 12th Administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2017. He was the first African American to head the agency permanently. In addition to being a retired U.S. Marine Corps Major General, Charlie is a former astronaut who has flown on four Space Shuttle missions. He is the Founder and CEO Emeritus of the Charles F. Bolden Group, a consortium of accomplished lead...

In the late spring of 1985, two colleagues and I were invited to a dinner in France. While it was all well and good to be invited to an evening event—in France, no less—it did raise a few concerns. The thing is, it wasn’t a usual dinner: it was the Paris Airshow of that year, held at a chateau. My colleagues didn’t know how to rent tuxes in Paris, I didn’t know what to wear, and I was one of two f...