-- and then you stop you feel , like you're tumbling forward. i was like, what's going on here? under the seat belt, i pushed off my back and flew to the window to videotape the planet. i'm doing my task, and this thing is falling and we are trying to see any marks on it, seeing if something had hit our vehicle, like what happened to the columbia accident. i do this thing and i'm like, ok, and i see the caribbean. the colors of the ocean are so dramatic and blue. i almost need a new definition of blue to describe what i'm looking at. and we are going around the planet every 90 minutes and seeing the sunrise and sunset every minutes. 45 i'm like, wow, this is space. even in the deepness and darkness and blackness of space, you look back at the planet, you see the sun, and it's incredible. it changed me. fundamentally, it made me have a cognitive shift in the way that i think about humanity and how i think about the planet and saving it, and work with people who don't have the same food or whatever. you want to come together and hug everybody and say, we are one race, the human race. i was born and raised in leesburg, virginia. when i grew up, i remember my dad always telling me about how incredible arthur ashe was as a person, as an athlete, as a great character. i thought i would be arthur ashe one day. i started taking recreational tennis lessons, started playing and getting better, and so was arthur ashe, who trained five blocks down the street from where i grew up. i played in high school. but then football got in the way. so i played basketball, tennis, and football, and football was the thing that paid the bills. i got a scholarship to play at the university of richmond. when they said hey, you can come for free and play here, i think my parents liked that a little more. i was a wide receiver at the university of richmond. my freshman year, we were 3-8, but we got better, 8-5, and made the playoffs. the scouts started looking because i had really good stats and was transforming this steam into a winning team. so i got drafted to play with the detroit lions, 11th round in the 1986 college draft. i'm this kid who never imagined playing football in college, because i was a wide receiver on a running team in high school. i never got many balls thrown to me. that was not something i aspired to, being an nfl football player. but, you know, i'm always up for a challenge. i got drafted, went to training camp, pulled a hamstring the second week of training camp. i thought that would be the end of my football career, but the dallas cowboys picked me up for the next season, so i went to the cowboys, but before i'm there, i started graduate school at the university of virginia, only an hour from lynchburg. i was thinking, how am i going to go to graduate school and play football? the professor said, we will take care of that. so they would tape the courses and mail them to me in dallas. so when i wasn't playing, i would watch courses. hardest thing i have ever done in my life. i was with danny wright stretching, and he wants to throw. tom landry walks on the field. danny is trying to keep his job. i ran as fast and as far as i could, and i ruined my leg. but i finished my masters and worked for nasa. when i was at uva, nasa was looking to recruit a lot more women and minorities to get the numbers up. i was recruited by a woman named rosa webster, a physicist. at the career fair, i looked at the nasa booth, and i was like no, i want to work for dupont, i want to get paid, because government jobs do not pay much. she saw me and said, i've been looking for you. we have this conversation. she was shutting the booth down. she said, come help me take my pamphlets to my car. who is this woman, you know? and at the car she said, i want you to think about it. i do an interview, i look around, and i get a job offer from nasa by the time i get home. i said, you know, they've got some really cool stuff. i can get my phd there and all these different things. it was like a campus environment. my interview with joe was incredible, a physicist. he sent you can come here and think and create and do what you feel can help civilization. really? yeah. that was a good, positive interview. i felt i could do some good things. my experience at nasa was pretty phenomenal. i remember the first time i realized that people didn't appreciate the education i had from uva. it was when a technician -- i was going to get some stuff made by this one technician, and he said to me, where did you go to school? i said university of virginia. he said, no, you went to virginia state, right? i said no. he said, you went to the black school in petersburg virginia state, as though i could not go to that school. i'm like, what's up with this guy? that's why i sensed this former -- form of racism a little bit, someone not expecting you to have achieved certain things. i befriended katherine johnson when i was there, from hidden figures. katherine was always positive, and no matter what the situation, she would talk about how there is always a solution, you just have to work hard, you will figure it out. it was just this work ethic she had. she retired when i got there. that was a turning point for me, because i joined this group of african-american scientists and engineers. i became the treasurer and worked with katherine and some other people. mary jackson was one of the members at the time. i did not know their stories at that time. it was not until the movie came out that i really understood truly the advances they made to nasa at the time. but i knew they were great people, smart and hard-working, and that helped me also have a trajectory of being excellent and working hard, even though i did not know what they had done. i worked in the branch where you take light or heat or some types of energy to make assessments on aerospace vehicles, if they are damaged or not. if the wing of an airplane is damaged, how do you nondestructively determine the state of damage? they don't have to break it apart to figure it out. i did work on the space shuttle, making fiber sensors for looking for detection and leaks of hydrogen tanks. the tank that i videotaped falling back to the earth. so we sped up the process of certifying a vehicle after it has come home. i did that for a little while. a friend of mine said, you'd be a great astronaut. i'm like, really, me? he said yeah, nasa is taking applications for astronauts. i through the application away, and that same year, a friend of mine applied and got in. i said to myself, if that knucklehead can get in, i can get in. when i applied and got in, they want to make sure you can do a certain set of skills. one of the things we are doing when building the national space station, you need people to do space walks. they are really space crawls, because you are pulling yourself along the station. to do that training, you have to be in an environment, which we call a neutral buoyancy laboratory, a 5 million gallon pool. you get in a tube that is a cross between the michelin man and the pillsbury dough boy. you get down in the pool and assemble things in the water. we have a space station submerged and a space shuttle submerged, and you can assess your floating in space in the pool. in the suit, there is a little ball where if you are the type of person to squeeze your nose to blow your ears, that is your lifeline. i forgot mine. i said, i'll try to keep going, but i did not have an effective way to clear my years. at about 25 feet, i told them to -- to clear my ears. at about 25 feet, i told them to turn the volume up in the headset. i heard nothing but static. they took me out of the pool. they took my helmet off. the surgeon on call that day started walking towards me. when i got my helmet off, he came in and touched my right ear. there was blood streaming down the side of my face. i am now completely deaf from this accident. rush me to the hospital, emergency surgery. the doctors did not know what happened, and they told me i would never fly in space. if you backed up four days before that accident, i was here in lynchburg. my parents were having their 45th wedding anniversary. i was sitting in a car downtown, waiting to go in. my cousin and a friend of hers, by the name of jeanette, was in the car. i did not know jeanette, but jeanette said, i have something to share with you. something is going to happen to you. no one is going to know why this happened. you will fly in space, and this will be your testimony to the world. i'm like, ok. four days later, i was completely deaf. i remember when i was in the hospital, another friend of mine, barry gordon, who was in my parents' wedding anniversary service, remembered what jeanette said and she wrote a note to me saying, remember what jeanette said? it gave me hope. i was depressed, sad. the doctors told me i'm not going to fly. i'm completely deaf. so my hearing slowly comes back in about three weeks. my right year is good, my left ear is pretty much gone. i am trying to figure out what to do with my life as an astronaut because they are not going to fly me. i ended up going to washington, d.c., to work in education because they needed someone for the astronaut educator program. i flew up there, and we started this program off at the columbia accident happens. we lose space shuttle columbia. david brown, one of the mission specialists, his parents lived in washington, virginia, about an hour and a half outside of d.c. so the night of the accident, february first, 2003, i go to their home to console them, and i'm trying to figure out what i'm going to say to his mother and father who just lost their son. and his father said to me with tears in his eyes, leland, my son is gone. there is nothing you can do to bring him back, but the biggest tragedy will be if we don't continue to fly in space and honor their legacy. i'm not medically qualified to fly. i'm having all this emotion. my friends are gone. i'm not flying. what am i going to do? we go to different memorial services around the country. i'm clearing my ears, like i used to do before that accident. and beside me on every takeoff and landing is the chief of all the flight surgeons. he is watching me clear my ears and taking notes. when it's time to travel from d.c. to houston, he calls me to his office and says, leland, i believe in you. here is your waiver to fly in space. i go back to houston with a waiver. a year and a half or so later, i get assigned to a flight and, yeah. >> atlantis, go with throttle up. >> copy, go with throttle up. >> this throttle-up call acknowledged. kicking off the work week a monday commute to orbit. leland: i was told that you could bring your family in. when you get assigned to a mission, you can bring your family in to take a picture. my family is four-legged, but they are family. i drove my dogs into nasa in a van with my neighbor holding them back in the back. i pass the guard after i show my badge, and i get to the photo lab and go up the back stairs and get them in there. i go sit down, and they start running towards me. i told the photographer, start shooting. one's licking my ear. scout is like, hey. that became a photo. so that's how it happened. this is my new addition to the family. this is zorro. you can see the black mask. i picked him up recently from boston. he is a rescue dog. he is a rhodesian ridge back. you can see the ridge on his back. he is very active. he wants kibbles and bits and things. he is going to honor the legacy of jake and scott, my other two dogs who passed away four years ago. they were road warriors. they went on trips with me. he has already made a long trip with me from boston. he is ready for some more adventures. i think we can do more to help inspire more kids to see themselves as scientists and engineers, especially underserved, underrepresented kids. if you think about the numbers of scientists and engineers who are matriculating in china and india, we are probably fifth or sixth on the list. when you thing about economic develop it and the future of your society, it comes from innovation and creativity. i call it steam. science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics. you need to tell the stories of those things, so the a is important. i think that we as a country need to make sure that everyone at the table can help create that technology and that brain trust, or we are going to falter. for those who are reading chasing space, i want you to know that this kid from a small town who never aspired to be an astronaut, who never aspired to do the things i've done, nfl, scientist, talk show host, who does that stuff? to let you know that with grit, persistence, and determination, you can really do anything. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> the u.s. has sent 335 astronauts to space since 1961, but the study began decades earlier. this man's flight originated just outside rapid city, south dakota. >> in 1935, two army captains named anderson and stevens sailed off of the south dakota planes to a record-breaking 72,000 feet. >> we are really lucky in rapid city. we have some interesting history that goes beyond just the culture of the area. within that journey museum and learning center, we are talking about the stratobowl and the stratosphere flight, and sending man up above the stratosphere. essentially, the rapid city area is the home of the first spaceflight. what the national geographic and u.s. army air corps did was they decided to work together to make this happen. they wanted to find a natural

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