Out of This World

By Tim Sloan

Three, two, one, zero, liftoff. … Astronaut Clayton Anderson, a former basketball referee, traveled to space aboard the space shuttle Atlantis in the summer of 2007. Anderson’s past officiating experience meant so much to him that he brought his jerseys and whistles with him aboard the International Space Station.

When fans bleat, “It ain’t rocket science, ref!” most officials gag on the stale metaphor, but not Clay Anderson. He hears it and he laughs because, for him, officiating has been just like rocket science.

Anderson the basketball referee spent 15 seasons working toward becoming a Division I official but never quite made it. That was because his day job kept getting in the way. In that other life, Anderson the NASA scientist spent 15 years trying to become an astronaut before finally succeeding and spending 152 days aboard the International Space Station in 2007. Most people, you see, might devote a lifetime to becoming the cream of the cream at one thing. There are few people, like Anderson, who spend it going for two.

“The parallels between becoming a Division I basketball official and an astronaut are very unique,” says Anderson. “Either is a job where you have to be in top shape; you have to be mentally alert. You have to study rules and technical information and be ready to make decisions in a split second.

“You have to deal with a lot of stress,” Anderson adds, “whether it comes from the job environment or the control center or the fans who are in the stands.” Either his vocation or avocation alone would be enough for most people, but how he handled both, even when any reward for his years of effort was uncertain, should be an inspiration for any who have to slug it out to fulfill their dreams.

Anderson, 49, grew up in Ashland, Neb., and his mother told him he started talking about being an astronaut as early as four or five. When he was little, he once wrapped himself in aluminum foil and marched as an astronaut in the Fourth of July parade. He also recalls sitting up watching the Apollo 8 crew read Genesis from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968. The whole concept of going behind the moon and losing contact with humanity and then re-establishing it — “that was pretty exciting for me,” Anderson reflects. “I thought that would be pretty cool to do.” If he had his way, he was going to be an astronaut, too.

But Nebraska is a long way from NASA and Houston, both in terms of mileage and the effort it takes to become an astronaut. Like being a top-level official, you have to do something to stand out from other worthy candidates. Anderson got his first break while he was an undergraduate at Hastings College working on a degree in physics. A NASA employee happened to be pheasant hunting with the school’s guidance counselor and told him about NASA’s summer internship program. The counselor knew of just the boy wonder they might be looking for and the result was that Clay spent two summers in the program while working toward a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at Iowa State. While there, Anderson also started officiating basketball but, after graduating, he was hired by NASA to become a mission planner at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

When he first arrived in Houston, he did two things that would begin the parallel paths in his life. First, he joined a local officials association and began working his way through the basketball ranks. Eventually, that led him to small college leagues around Texas and as high as the Division I Southland Conference. Meanwhile, he submitted his first application to NASA to become an astronaut. “I had the minimum qualifications to apply; a master’s degree and one year of experience,” Anderson recalls and he soon got his first of 15 consecutive, “Thank you for your interest in being an astronaut …” letters.

Working for NASA, he spent his days — usually about 50-hour weeks — as a manager involved with things like the trajectory design for the Galileo mission. Galileo was the spacecraft launched aboard a space shuttle and then sent into orbit around Jupiter to explore the planet and its inner moons. As part of his job, he also lectured astronaut candidates on flight dynamics and remembers giving a presentation to a new astronaut group on shuttle rendezvous. “Here I was in a room with a bunch of brand new astronauts who were doing exactly what I wanted to do,” recalls Anderson, “and I had no idea how to get there.” By 1993, he was the chief of the Flight Design Branch in Houston, but he still wasn’t an astronaut and he still wasn’t a Division I official — but not for lack of trying.

As the years rolled by, his basketball schedule impinged on his job. “When I was in the heyday of my college career, I would have to leave work sometimes at two in the afternoon to drive to a game and then get home late that night and come back to work the next day,” he recalls. “Then I had to put in a lot of hours on the days I wasn’t officiating to make the time up. It was tough because, for me, my job was first and refereeing was second.”

Through the ’80s, as he kept applying to NASA and being rejected, he realized he had to find more ways to stand out in the blizzard of applications NASA received. Obviously, being a shining star right under their noses wasn’t enough so he didn’t hesitate to mention his exploits on the hardwood, too. He hoped that kind of notoriety would be exactly the sort of thing a publicity-sensitive organization like NASA would cleave to. Despite no end to prayer and effort, however, the rejections kept coming and his hopes began to fade.

In 1996, he reached an epiphany. After 15 years of “Sorry, Charlies …” he and his wife Susan decided they’d give it one more try to become an astronaut. About that time, he got a chance to go to the Division I Western Athletic Conference camp to try out as an official and the moment of truth was upon him: yellow brick road or red brick road? He submitted the application to NASA and then headed to Seattle on vacation with his wife to explore job opportunities. When he returned — just like that, he got a call from NASA, who wanted to interview him. Two years later, they accepted him into the astronaut program and one lifelong dream came true … at the expense of the other. Being an astronaut in training means not doing much else.

“I tried to stay with officiating after I was accepted. The time commitment was just too much,” Anderson explains. So he quit refereeing in 1999.

Once in the mix in the astronaut office, he began by working on shuttle upgrade projects, then in crew support for other space station crews, included being a CapCom. After that, he became a backup to other space station crews, which put him another astronaut’s broken leg away from being on a flight. About nine years after being accepted into the program, he finally got his ride and spent the summer and fall of 2007 on the space station, returning to earth last November. Space flight was everything he thought it would be.

“The space station is about the size of two football fields and the living quarters are about the size of a three-bedroom house,” Anderson says. He lived with two Russian cosmonauts for most of the time.

“I never got claustrophobic. I also felt normal when I was inside and had an opportunity to fly to work, fly to lunch, fly to breakfast and fly to the bathroom. I got to play Superman everyday.

“The biggest thing for me,” Anderson says, “was I got to go outside the vehicle three times on spacewalks. … To be tethered to an 85-foot piece of cable and look down and see the Earth — there’s nothing that beats that.” His workload in maintaining the American section of the station kept him occupied, but there was always time for tourism.

“I looked forward to being able to float by the window and see where we were because, for me, the vantage point we had was so precious and special. To me, the earth looked different every time I saw it. Certain places look the same but the weather, the clouds and the glint of the sun can change the perspective so much that you can’t even imagine it.

“I’d think,” Anderson reflects, “‘Wow, that’s the same place I flew over a few days ago? That’s incredible.’”

But all good things must end.

Anderson was asked if he were still refereeing, how long he would have needed after coming back from orbit to be able to work a game on terra firma. Astronauts spend a lot of time in orbit exercising as a hedge against the atrophy and biochemical changes that zero gravity induces.

“I worked really hard on the station at staying in shape,” Anderson says. “Within three to four weeks of coming back, I was pretty close to normal. Now, I don’t think I might have been able to hop it up and down with a Texas JUCO league, but I could have done high school … let’s say five weeks at the outset and I would have been ready for a full schedule.”

Not bad, but Anderson didn’t have a schedule to come back to. Perhaps it is ironic to ask a guy who spent roughly 20 times as long in space as Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon, whether he ever wonders where he’d be now if he had stuck to basketball.

“You know, I always have wondered if I ever could have made the Division I level,” he admits, a little wistfully. “I do find myself sometimes imagining stepping on that floor at the Final Four because these days it’s such a huge thing that’s exciting to watch. It would have been a lot of fun and a huge rush.”

Another huge rush is being strapped to the nose of a shuttle at launch, which was once described by an astronaut as being securely fastened to a bomb waiting to go off. Anderson says, “As astronauts, we don’t think a lot about the risk that’s involved. We kind of accept it and go on.

“As a result, I would think that as a basketball official, today, to run up and down a court, I would be a lot more relaxed. I would just enjoy it a lot more. I’d think, ‘Holy cow, I’m reffing what I love and having a blast and staying in shape.’ I was a very lucky guy from a NASA perspective and I’d just be able to relax and enjoy what I was doing.”

From a family perspective, Anderson’s work is very much a team effort. “For me it was always God, family and job and sometimes people lose sight of that when they get the officiating bug. For me, it would have to be that I’d take care of my responsibilities as a father and as a husband and make sure that I’m doing that first.

“There were often times when I wondered whether I had my priorities right … there’s a lot of time spent away from home and the kids. I worked it out with my wife and we decided whether I was working too much or not enough — we kind of did this as a team. She was a huge trooper for me when I was on the station for 152 days. She took care of the house, her job, the two kids and all their activities.

“I’m indebted to her for everything she did because her sacrifice enabled me to do something special, just as many families sacrifice to allow someone to work basketball.

“To me,” Anderson believes, “the parallels are just amazing.”

At the ripe age of 49, Anderson is in the position of being able to look back on not one, but two things little boys would want to be when they grow up — an astronaut or a big-time official. He may well get another spaceflight but figures he’s too old to have a chance at Division I, although he may go back to high school and small college work.

Astronaut-wise he goes in the books with the likes of the legendary Alan Shepard and Pete Conrad, both of whom he resembles a little. He also shares astronaut wings with Gordon Cooper, one of the “Original Seven” who first went into space aboard Faith 7 in 1963. “Gordo” made waves by telling controllers that he could see trains running along the ground and villages in the Himalayas, something most thought was beyond the acuity of the human eye. Could Anderson see trains from the space station?

“Well, you need a little bit of help with a telephoto lens,” Anderson says. “I actually shot a picture of a ship going across the ocean with an 800-mm lens. You can see the contrails of jets with the naked eye but in order to see the jet itself, you’d need the telephoto lens. Same thing with the Great Wall of China; it’s a little hard to find with the unaided eye but with the right lens you can go right to it. Cooper might have been able to do it — he might have had better eyes than me.

“After all,” Anderson admits, “I was a referee.”

Tim Sloan, Bettendorf, Iowa, officiates high school basketball, football and volleyball.