on wednesday, nasa launched to u.s. astronauts into space for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttle program in 2011. the astronauts will join the current team on board the international space station. for the next 90 minutes we will look at the history of space exploration. manhat's one small step for , one giant leap for mankind. >> we will tour the country to hear the stories of the people and places key to its development. first up is lynchburg, virginia to visit with leland melvin who went on to become a astronaut. he flew two missions to the international space station on board the space shuttle atlantis.

i was like what's going on here. floated, the external tank falling back. and in doing my task and in doing my task in this is falling and we are trying to see if there anything had come off of it. if something in hit our vehicle.

thing and i'm like ok and i see the caribbean. in the colors of the ocean were so dramatic. we're going around the planet every night. , we are in space. in darkness and blackness of space, you can see the sun and it's incredible. it changes you. ,t fundamentally made me happy a cognitive shift in the way that i think about humanity and how i think about the planet and working with people. people.

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. great character. 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 kept playing tennis 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 went 0-10, then 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 we were transforming this team into a winning team for a change. 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 really never got any 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 on catching footballs for america's team and then watching courses. i was with danny wright stretching, and he wants to throw. isolate from a half speed out. tom landry walks on the field. danny is trying to keep his job. he does in audible from half speed to as run as fast and far as you can endanger my leg for the second time and that's the end. toinish my masters and went

work 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. i remember at a career fair, i look at the nasa booth, and i was like no, i want to work for becauser dow, government jobs do not pay much. she saw me and said, i've been looking for you. she said your to work at nasa. unlike norm not. we have this conversation. she is shutting the booth down, she says come help me take my pamphlets to my car and i'm like who is this woman, you know? we go to her car and she says i want you to think about it. i go down and 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 said you can come here and think and create and do what you feel can help civilization. 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.

charlottesville, uva. 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 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. called the national technical association. 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 optical fiber sensors for looking for detection and leaks of hydrogen tanks. the tank that i videotaped falling back to the earth. so ways to actually speed up the process of certifying a vehicle to fly again 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 just through the application away in 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. so the next selection i applied i got in but they want to make sure you can do a certain set of skills. one of the things we are doing is we are 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 this white suit is a cross between the michelin man and the pillsbury dough boy. you get down in the pool and assemble things in the water. -- underwater bird we have a space station submerged and a space shuttle submerged, and you can simulate your floating in space in a 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. they forgot to put mine in. we went down about 25 feet and desha told theor test record wasn't in their. i said, i'll try to keep going,

but i did not have an effective way 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 flight surgeon on call that day started walking towards me. when they got my helmet off, he came and touched my right year, there was blood streaming down the side of my face. i had gone from this accident. they rushed me to the hospital for emergency surgery. the doctors did not know what happened, and they told me i would never fly in space. if you back up four days before the 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.

she said something is going to happen to you. no one is going to know why this happened. you will be healed of this and 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, mary 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. ear 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 fly to d.c., i move there and we are up there and we start this program off and the columbia accident happens. we lose space shuttle columbia. i am there to console the parents. david brown, one of the mission specialists, his parents lived in washington, virginia, about an hour and a half outside of d.c. the night of the accident 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.

and i'm not flying i'm not , medically qualified to fly. i'm having all this emotion. my friends are gone. i'm not flying. i can't honor their legacy. what am i going to do? we go to different memorial services around the country. we are flying and taking off and landing and i'm clearing my ears, like i used to do before that accident. 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. joined on the flight deck. 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. in your orange pumpkin suit with your family around you. 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. we have 100 milk bones. i put the orange suit on and sit down and they start running

towards me. i told the photographer, start shooting. wereboth run up and licking my ear scout is like, , hey. that became a photo. that is how it happened. this is my new addition to the family. this is zorro. you can see the black mask. 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 development 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 the better 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 toa small town who never aspired to be an astronaut or do the things host, youe, talk show know what i mean? with grit,know that persistence, and determination you can do anything. has sent 330 five astronauts into space since 1961. our study began decades earlier in 1935 the u.s. military sponsored balloon went up to graph the curvature of the earth for the first time. originated flight outside of rapid city. captains sailed off to a record-breaking 72,000 feet. >> we are rocky in rapid city,