Former astronaut to speak at CCU’s fall graduation

If Pierre Thuot had given a commencement speech at Coastal Carolina University before 1990, chances are it would have been about setting realistic and achievable goals and enjoying what you do.

But since then, Thuot has walked in space a number of times and the topic of his speech at CCU’s fall graduation Saturday will be about values and how keeping certain values will help graduates to be successful in their careers and in life. And while his speech, he said Tuesday afternoon, will include an illustration from one of his space walks, the meat of it is drawn from his first-hand observations of the way good values work in successful businesses.

A total of 507 December and August graduates are eligible to participate in the ceremony that’s scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center, but the school won’t know how many will be there to get diplomas until that morning.

The fall graduation ceremony is about half the size as that held at Brooks Stadium in the spring, and Debbie Conner, the school’s associate vice president for university relations, said the ceremonies are identical except for the venue.

As with the spring ceremony, the fall graduates will have a senior celebration Friday afternoon to mark their transition from academia to the world of work, where Thuot’s message could offer a blueprint for success.

Thuot said values “are not really talked about much.” But he’d read studies that showed successful companies have core values, and he made it a benchmark at the company he ran before it was sold. He is currently manager of aerospace programs assessments for Whitney Bradley, a consulting company.

A native of Groton, Conn., Thuot is a 1977 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy with a bachelor of science in physics. He has a masters of science in systems management from the University of Southern California and graduated from the Harvard Business School advanced management program in 2004.

As a Navy pilot, he deployed to the Mediterranean and Caribbean aboard the USS John F. Kennedy and USS Independence. He graduated from the Navy’s Topgun program and the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. He worked as a project test flight officer, flying the F-14A Tomcat, A-6E Intruder and the F-4J Phantom II. He served for a time as a flight instructor at the test pilot school.

He was selected to be an astronaut in 1985 and he broke a 20-year-old space walk record during a 1992 mission aboard the space shuttle Endeavour. His record, 8 hours and 29 minutes, stood until 2001.

Thuot said National Aeronautic and Space Administration, which runs the astronaut program, and its astronauts are extremely mission oriented, so time on space walks outside the shuttle is spent on things such as maneuvering a 9,000-pound satellite onto a new engine.

He was supposed to have some down time during one of his walks when his partner would be performing tasks. He had plotted which part of the earth would be below the shuttle during the break and was looking forward to watching the scene pass below him. But, as happens in space as it does on earth, the assignment didn’t go as planned and he worked on the mission through what was supposed to have been free time in space.

Coastal’s Saturday graduation will be the second university-level commencement where he’s been the speaker, he said. The other was in Australia. He’s also spoken at several high school graduation ceremonies.

But he’s been through a few as a student, and said his memories of them tend to be of how long they lasted.

He doesn’t promise that his will be over in a couple of minutes, but he did say he’s implanted things in his speech to make sure he has the attention of his audience.

“I try to make it so there’s something in the speech they can remember,” he said.