Lee Morin, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.
Exploration Branch, NASA Astronaut Office; Deputy Lead, Orion Cockpit Working Group
Public Health, 1988
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“It really is a surreal experience to see the curvature of the earth and the glint of the ocean. You look off into the distance and 1,500 miles away is the horizon, and you can see little layers of atmosphere, along with thunderstorm heads in the background. Then it goes into the blackest black you can imagine. It’s kind of intimidating—you feel like you could just disappear into it. And you realize how vast it is: The only thing between you and basically billions of light-years of space is an eighth of an inch of Lexan in your visor.”
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Lee Morin has seen both the deepest depths and the highest heights a human being can reach. In the early 1980s, he did a tour as a naval medical officer on board a ballistic-missile submarine; in 2002, he served on the crew of Space Shuttle mission STS-110 helping to build the International Space Station. In between, he earned a degree from the UAB School of Public Health that he says was integral in advancing the career that eventually put him 240 miles above the earth’s surface.
On his early career and finding his way to UAB:
“My father was a diplomat with the United States Foreign Service, so I lived abroad quite a bit. I ended up going to the University of New Hampshire and then to New York University, where I got my M.D. and Ph.D. and did a couple years of general surgery at Bronx Municipal Hospital [now Jacobi Medical Center]. Then I joined the Navy and did a tour with the submarine service, and after that I went into naval aviation; I did my flight-surgeon training in Pensacola, Florida.
“I learned of a UAB program that dean Bill Bridgers was setting up at the Gulf Shores resort area, which is very close to Pensacola. They would lease space at the resorts and have the Gulf Shores Master of Public Health degree, which was 24 weekends starting Friday at noon and going through Sunday at noon. I got that degree in 1988. People came from all over the country to take those classes.
“The focus of the course was public health policy and administration, and I found it to be very good training for the medical board certification in preventive medicine. It was great preparation, and I was very lucky to get it; it’s been an important part of my professional development, a very worthwhile investment that really paid off in many dimensions over the years.”
Upon graduation from the UAB program, Morin left the Navy and went to Jacksonville, Florida, to become the medical director for a large hospital-based occupational-medicine practice. His tenure as a civilian was short-lived, though, as he rejoined the Navy shortly after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990. Morin spent 15 months in Bahrain, using his experience both as a flight surgeon and as a submarine medical officer, before returning home to Pensacola.
By 1996, Morin had completed his residency in aerospace medicine at the Naval Aerospace and Operational Medical Institute. Based on many years of experience in a variety of both military and civilian medical communities, he was accepted by NASA as an astronaut candidate in April of that year. His chance to go into space finally came six years later aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, on NASA’s 109th shuttle mission.
On going into space and building the International Space Station:
“My position was mission specialist 3. We did four EVAs [extravehicular activities] on that mission, and I participated in EVAs 2 and 4. For most of my first EVA, my feet were locked into a set of strips kind of like waterski bindings on the end of a robot arm. The arm is like two telephone poles connected by a elbow joint, and I was basically standing on a trash-can lid with waterski bindings on top of it. There’s a safety cable that tethers you to the shuttle, and you do have an emergency rocket belt so that you can fly back to the space station if, God forbid, you fall off.
“There’s a large truss structure that holds four big solar arrays, and it went up in ten different pieces; we took up the very first one and bolted it on. It was about 360 feet end to end, and we used about 30 bolts the size of the lug nuts you’d use to put on a car tire. It was a great honor to be able to help construct the space station, and it was very special to represent the country that way.”
On the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster a year later:
“It affected me in a very personal way—the astronauts have a program, borrowed from the military, called the CACO [Casualty Assistance Call Officer] program. Each astronaut selects another astronaut to be the interface between NASA and his or her family in the event that an accident happens. I was the CACO for Captain Dave Brown, another flight surgeon who was on the last Columbia mission. There was a second Navy flight surgeon on that mission who was a dual submarine/aviation officer like myself, Laurel Clark; Dave, Laurel, and I were all in the same flight class before becoming astronauts, so that was a great personal loss, to lose both of those friends and colleagues on the same mission.”
Upon returning to earth, Morin served a one-year tour in the State Department as deputy assistant secretary for health, space, and science, and then went right back to NASA—where today he is helping to chart the course of the future of manned space flight. In the Exploration Branch of the Astronaut Office, Morin is working on the cockpit design of the Orion space capsule, which will eventually replace the space shuttle.
On the Orion project:
“Basically the plan after Columbia was to keep flying the shuttle, finish the space station, and then retire the shuttle program—and in the meantime build a new spacecraft that would be the cornerstone of American manned exploration. This would be a capsule-like vehicle that would take up to six crew members into low earth orbit. The first mission planned for that program is to take it to the space station, and after additional parts of that mission are completed—including an Aries V rocket and another lunar lander—we’ll have the components we’ll need to return to the moon around 2020.
“It’s a once-in-a-generation thing that you get to help develop a new manned spaceship. We’ll see what unfolds.”
Advice to future medical and public-health professionals:
“In terms of selecting a medical field, the training takes so long that it’s naïve to think as a pre-med student, ‘I’m going to be a heart surgeon or a neurologist’—that may be, but there’s a lot more left to unfold. People change, and this isn’t a career where you go to school for six months and learn a trade; it’s decades of training, from pre-med to med school and then a residency, so you’ll go through a lot of different experiences, and in those experiences you’ll do a lot of rotations and see different things. You may find that the medical niche you fall into is completely different from what you expected.
“A lot of my colleagues had no idea what niche they were going to fall into until they went through the training and saw what it was like. You have family commitments, you can become geographically tied to places, or wars can intervene and redirect your life—as happened to me—so the point is to get a broad exposure, build some flexibility into your plan, and find out what works for you.”