I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

But I will bear true faith and allegiance to the sea that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion and that I will will inflate the lead discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

So help me God, so help me God.

So help me God.

Welcome to the Oath. I'm Chuck Rosenberg and I am honored to be your host for another compelling conversation with a fascinating guest from the World of Public Service.

This week, the Oath ventures into orbit.

My guest is Kathy Sullivan, a former NASA astronaut and the first American woman to walk in space.

An oceanographer by training and an explorer at heart.

Kathy was selected into a new class of NASA astronauts in 1978, an exceedingly competitive and rigorous process that included the first six women ever admitted to the highly selective program.

After years of intensive training and simulations, Kathy ultimately flew three missions for NASA on the space shuttle, including her 1984 spacewalk.

And the 1990 mission that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most advanced and important scientific achievements in the history of NASA.

After leaving NASA, Kathy ran the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a crucial part of the Department of Commerce that houses among other agencies, the National Weather Service.

In June of 2020, after this episode was recorded, Kathy became the first woman to reach the deepest spot in the ocean, a nearly seven mile descent to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific Ocean.

That makes Kathy the only person ever to walk in space and to dive to the ocean's deepest known point.

Kathy Sullivan, welcome to the Oath.

Thanks for to be here.

It's a real pleasure to have you. Tell me where you grew up.

Six years in Northern New Jersey, where my dad was in the early stages of his aerospace career. And then in 1958, we drove across the country and settled in Southern California, San Fernando Valley outside of Los Angeles.

When I was a child, I wanted to be an astronaut. I know many people who shared that dream. You became an astronaut, but that's not what you wanted to be when you were little.

Well, I wanted to be lots of things I think when I was little, but mainly I didn't have labels for what I wanted to be. I had impulses that were very strong geographic impulses, what I would call them now, but curiosity about what's out there, what's it like at the top of that hill, intense and unsatiable curiosity around maps and the stories that they tell.

You know, what I wanted was somehow to have all that stuff apart of my life. And what I didn't know was what kind of job label title meant you got to do that.

You didn't know what it was called, but you know which way you wanted it.

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