The following is from Leroy Chiao’s Dinner with an Astronaut, and describes one step in Chiao’s late 1980s journey to becoming astronaut.Article continues after advertisement

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What was the astronaut interview like?

I flew to Houston the next week. It was September. I emerged from the Houston Hobby airport into a wall of stifling humidity. My shirt stuck to my skin; it was almost hard to breathe. My California-calibrated system was in shock. How can people live here?

Johnson Space Center, NASA’s ground zero for everything astronaut, arrived in this southern inferno just a year after I was born. But why here?