Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - 355 Days in Space: Finding Meaning with Astronaut Mark Vande Hei

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

After a historic 355 days in orbit, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth on March 30, 2022, breaking the record for the longest single spaceflight by an American. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Vande Hei discuss conducting experiments in space, the impact of extended spaceflight on humans, and the spiciness of space chili peppers. This is a paid advertisement from IBM.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, hello. Welcome to Smart Talks with IBM, a podcast from Pushkin Industries, iHeartRadio, and IBM. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This season, we're talking to the new creators, the developers, data scientists, CTOs, and other visionaries who are creatively applying technology and business to drive change. Channeling their knowledge and expertise, they are developing more creative and effective solutions, no matter the industry. On the final episode of the season, our guest is NASA astronaut and retired Army colonel Mark Bandahe. Mark holds the record for the longest single space flight undertaken by an American. He spent 355 days in orbit on the International Space Station returning to Earth on March 30, 2022. During his nearly

year-long stay in space, Mark conducted scientific experiments on behalf of NASA, including research where he himself was the test subject. By documenting the physiological changes he went through, Mark serves as an important source of data in understanding the impact of extended spaceflight on humans. I spoke with Mark about his experience as an astronaut and what he learned from living in space for a year. He told me about performing research only doable in space, times he felt true fear, and how seeing Earth from orbit challenged his personal beliefs and led him to become an advocate for mental health and sustainability. Okay, let's get to the interview. So tell me a little bit. Did you always want to be an astronaut? What drew you to space in the

first place? I was always curious about space largely because just trying to get my head wrapped around how we fit into the very grandest scheme of things has always been interesting to me but I always thought of becoming an astronaut like trying to become Spider-Man like that's just not a realistic idea it might sound cool but that's like a superhero thing so when I first joined the army

my company commander my boss handed me a note because he knew I had a degree in a technical field that was a message from the army saying that NASA wanted military people with these qualifications to apply to the astronaut program, and I looked at the list, and I had a bunch of them. That made me really excited. I thought, that's like, that's a possibility. And then when I went to grad school, I had a lot of different things to

possibly study, and I chose space physics, and just randomly the army said, hey, we're starting a new career field called space operations. I signed up and got accepted to go into space operations, And I ended up getting loaned out to the astronaut office at NASA to work in the mission control center, which, honestly, I love that job so much that I could be doing that until I was 65, never having been an astronaut, and felt like I was super blessed. It was amazing to live in history and just talking to the astronauts in space, helping them solve problems while I'm listening to what the flight control team is doing. That's a fantastic job.

I absolutely loved it. During the three-year period that I expected to do that, they hired another class, was that was the first time I decided to apply. And largely because my wife said, Mark, come on, you got to try. Because I thought there's no way they would ever hire me. So I almost self-selected myself out of that possibility. So really, I feel very, very fortunate. I could have very easily not pursued this. I'm very happy it worked out, and I'm very happy I did pursue it. There's thousands of people that could do this job that never got the opportunity and may have done a better job than I did. I just somehow got the job. Yeah. Yeah. Now, you

You have the record for longest time in space, right? It's the record for an American astronaut for the longest single flight. So Scott Kelly flew for 340 days continuously, and I flew for 355 days continuously. What is it about you that allows you to do that? Like, you know, I'm going to say if you put me through the exact same training you went through, there's no way I'm spending 355 days. I would have, I would lose my mind. I think what I'm going to do is compare myself

between the first flight and the second flight. After I came back from the first flight, I had no desire to go back. The big change for me between the first and second flight is I paid a lot more attention to my mental health. I got in the habit of meditating every day. And I think that helped me not only recognize the value of trying to appreciate the present moment

and try to be curious about the present moment, but it also made me more aware of what internal, habit patterns I have and it gave me the ability to kind of almost be an external observer of those so that when I could recognize sometimes that, hey, you're making up a very negative story and that's why you're grumpy right now. And that really helped me out with making a mental shift. Tell me a little bit about what you're doing when you're up there. Why is it important to do various kinds of experiments and things in space? Yeah, great question. It's a really important question too so it is a national laboratory and it's it's unique because a lot of dominant

forces on the ground are not dominant forces in space so you get pretty interesting effects like when you make a flame on the earth because of the pressure differentials and the fact that the hot combustion products are lighter they will rise up and go away from the flame and that'll draw in the oxygen-rich gases that keep the flame going. So in space, those combustion gases will just make a ball around the source of the fire. It turns out that flames in space burn more efficiently and at a lower temperature, so there's some potential to have a cleaner burning combustion engine. But that just gives us a more depth of understanding of how these things work. It just gives us another way to change some of the variables. Another thing that we can do on

the space station is sedimentation. If you take a solution over time on the earth with the heavier items in that solution are going to settle to the bottom, well, in space, there's no preferred direction for those things to go in because everything is in this, what I like to call, a free fall that just keeps missing the earth. So we're in a continuous state of free fall. Solutions stay very homogenous. You can do experiments like there's even the way we try to simulate the human body with body samples. and try to understand how things work in the space station where those things float,

it's a closer simulation to something being inside the human body. So there's, I could go on and on clearly. There's a lot of different things that that allows us to do. And delicate structures, even, protein structures that we could never make, stay together on the ground, can stay together in space. Oh, that's interesting. So it just gives you it, it's like another context

for trying to advance scientific knowledge. It just, you've changed all of kind of the defining variables, of the experiment. Absolutely. That's, I mean, it's a very significant thing. Absolutely. And then there's also that the idea of what we're doing in the space station, not just for science but for human exploration, because we're putting people in space for such a long period

of time, we're getting a better understanding of how to keep people healthy. We can do technology experiments to try to figure out how to get things to work for these long-duration space flights where we're going to put people much further away from the Earth than I was on my flight. Some of those experiments were associated with me being a subject of the experiments, yes. Give me an example of a kind of healthcare-related line of research. Sure. I'm very open about the fact that I lost 8% of my bone density. That's not typical for somebody at my age and my activity level, but as a function of being in space, I lost 8% of my bone density. Because there's no more, you're not exercising with any resistance at all.

Is that the reason? Almost true. You spend all of your time except for when you're exercising without really needing a skeleton to support you because that's why we have a skeleton. When you're in a free fall all the time, there's nothing that you have to use to resist the ground or to keep you standing on the ground. So we have a resistive exercise device on the space station that actually is very interesting. It uses vacuum cylinders as the source of the force. So when you expand the vacuum cylinder, unlike a spring, the vacuum cylinder, the force will be constant, regardless of how far you pull it, whereas with a spring, the more you expand the spring, the higher the force gets. So that allows us to have kind of what we want, what I like to tell school kids, if you imagine those vacuum cylinders being attached

to one side of a seesaw pulling upwards, and you on the other side of the seesaw pulling upwards, then you can change the mechanical advantage by moving where the pivot point is, where the fulcrum is. And so we have the ability to turn a crank, and it can adjust the force you feel anywhere from 20 pounds 600 pounds. But even, so I'm stunned though by, in the space of a year, even given determined efforts on your part to counteract the effects of, the physiological effects of being in a zero

gravity atmosphere, even then the effect on your body was profound. Eight percent is a lot. It's a lot, but I lost seven percent on the first flight and I got it all back before the second flight. Yeah. So I fully expect to get it all back. It does come back. And with a if somebody ever, some archaeologist someday ever examined my bones, they would be able to tell that I had flown in space because the way that matrix is built is somewhat different, but I fully expect all the bone density to come back. Yeah. You know, the series we're doing is,

it's called The New Creators, and we're really focused on the role that creativity plays in kind of pushing the envelopes of knowledge. So I'm just curious about you're up there in this strange environment, doing what sounds like some pretty sophisticated experiments. Can you give me an example over time when you felt your kind of your creativity was being tapped in a meaningful way in this experience?

Yeah, interesting. I would say there is an experiment called Celestial Immunity that involved us with small petri dishes that contained body, samples. I don't know if it was a solution with some blood or what, but I just know they were from various people, elderly

and young people. And we would go through and use a pipet to inoculate them with various things. And then we would take these devices, put them in a black box to control the carbon dioxide and the temperature and put them in a place to let them

kind of incubate for a while. In the process of doing it, I think my creativity came in as I was describing the challenges that I realized that the people who designed the experiment might not have realized we run into and I was able to to use what I had my hands on to give them advice about ways we could change the experiment around because those petri dishes didn't have a lid so they were just held in there by surface tension and so the first time I did it I put them very slowly into the box I closed the box couldn't see what they were doing and I had the very gently move them over to the place

where they're going to incubate. And I had no idea if I was succeeding or failing. Yeah, yeah. So I think it was a lot of conversation, a lot of observing, a lot of trying to draw on the unique experiences I'm exposed to to help out them. And it turned out I was in orbit long enough that the second iteration of that came up

and they had, among other things, they had put a thin sheet of flexible plastic on top. So instead of having to try to contain everything there, we just had to puncture it with a needle and add the inoculation that way instead. Tell me a little bit more about that experiment, that celestial immunity investigation. By the way, that's like the best name ever for a science experiment.

I agree. It sounds like Jesus is involved in some way. Yes, I agree. You can do no wrong. But what was that experiment about trying to investigate? We're trying to understand how the human immune system reacts to different situations. So again, I think it's a great experiment. to highlight because a better understanding of the human immune system will help out everybody.

So on Earth, we might do an experiment where we have a variety of different cell samples that we're exposing to various pathogens and studying them. And here what we're doing is repeating the experiment under a radically different set of conditions. And in the hopes that changing the parameters of the experiment expose some new bit of knowledge. Yes, and I don't know if that's been successful or not. But we do know that there are viruses that are more virulent in space for some reason. We don't understand why. The biological things react differently.

What was the most fun thing you did when you were up there? One of my crewmates, Caleb Barron, for some reason the two of us decided we were going to try to do some stunts together. So we literally would just have our feet hooked underneath some ham. rail and push off towards each other and then do something like get curl up hit our hands down low it causes to each spin simultaneously in opposite directions do a couple backflips and then land and it took a lot of attempts before we actually made it look like something was in sync i've never once done a back flip in my life but i've done four in a row before i hit my head on something on the space station yeah yeah uh we grew hatched chili peppers uh i i recently got a certificate from

New Mexico that said, congratulations, you're a astronaut. So I'm proud to have that title. Were you cooking with them? We didn't cook with them. Of course, it was science,

so we had to ship most of them back to the ground after we froze them carefully. But they were very nice about letting us have some of the chili peppers. And they warned us that the stress response to the space environment

that these peppers have, they think would be that they're more potent. and I think they were more potent. They were shockingly spicy. NASA could sell those chili peppers to some fancy restaurant, and it could be, you know, celestial pepper soup or something. What a great name for a dish.

I'm sure that celestial foods will be the culinary trend of the future. Pretty soon, we'll all be paying extra for specialty vegetables grown in space. Forget farm to table. Try orbit to table. All kidding, aside, there was one thing I made sure to ask Mark. I wanted to know more about the relationship between the astronauts in space and the NASA team on the ground. New technologies are reshaping the way astronauts communicate with their counterparts on Earth. IBM, for example, is testing edge computing solutions on board the space station

to try and reduce the time it takes to analyze and send data. But what does this information flow mean for an astronaut's day-to-day life? And what happens if there's an emergency? I asked Mark for more details. Tell me a little bit about the role that technology plays in all of this. I mean, you're doing these experiments. You're actively learning in this new environment. What's happening with the data?

How are you making sense of it, processing it? Tell me about that angle on your work. The astronauts live in the space station. The ground control team is controlling the space. space station. So that data flow, the telemetry from the space station and the commanding to the space station is happening just to actually get the thing to work, to get the lab to work, to make it. If we want to change the temperature, we could go ahead and go deep into the software we've got on board that we're trained to use in case we lose communications with the ground. But if we even want

to change the temperature, we just call the ground control team and say, hey, one of our crew members feels a little cold. We all agreed we should raise the temperature by a degree or something. and they would change it. So they're in charge. We live there, and we take care of everything that we possibly can. So data transfer is crucial to the way we operate the space station today. In your time up there, did you have any kind of moments of crisis? Did you ever lose communication with Houston?

Two times we lost attitude control. I think we got to the point where they told us to start executing the procedure. and then we're able to call us off. They warned us that it's possible you could lose maybe 10 minutes from now. There's a risk of you losing communications, for example. Is that scary? It never felt scary to me, and I think the reason it didn't feel scary is because when we do it on the ground for training,

when we do it in a simulation, the simulation is much harder because in space, the ground is trying to help as much as possible, but on the ground, they give you a scenario where you call the ground you get no response everything is as bad as possible so it was to me it felt just like a simulation but where the trainers were willing to give us more help

than they were willing to give us on the ground so and the culture that I got trained in and that's worked for me really really well is one that says slow way down if you're on an emergency on the space station unless it's an ammonia leak in all other cases slow way down because the worst thing you can do is go so fast that you make a mistake and cause problems.

But otherwise, it's a very safe system. When I was leading newer crew members, I tried to encourage them to have a culture where if they had any confusion that they would feel comfortable stopping everybody to say, hey, why are we going down this path? That doesn't make sense to me, because that could be the one question

that gets us to stay on the correct path. Yeah. You said you didn't get scared in that moment. Do you ever get scared, Mark? Oh, yeah. I definitely get scared. I don't believe you. To give you an example,

my experience of returning to Earth is everything's really interesting. While you're going through the atmosphere and you're in a ball of flame and the heat shield's melting away and see things that are melting away going past the window, that's interesting. But then when there's nothing to pay attention to

while you're falling towards the Earth and this time you know you're on a trajectory, that will result in you hitting the Earth with nothing to do except wait for the parachute to open for what I think was probably a couple of very long minutes and nobody was having a conversation

we're just all quietly waiting to find out if we're going to live or we're going to die. I didn't realize how afraid I was that it wasn't going to work until the parachute actually opened and how giddily overjoyed I felt when it actually opened because I was just like

we're going to live. So yeah, I was scared and again I didn't realize it until after the fact. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk, you mentioned at the beginning your sort of interest in mental health.

Let's talk about that a little bit. You know, you went through an experience which is exceedingly difficult and unusual and surely must have taught you a great deal about the kind of the challenges of maintaining one's mental health. Yeah, it was a good experience,

but certainly those are life skills. It doesn't matter if you're in space or not. I tend to get distracted easily. And so practicing trying to stay focused on one thing and paying attention and trying to maintain a sense of curiosity about something as simple as breathing

is, I think, a really good practice to try to expand your ability to stay focused and actually even find joy and relaxation in it. It's very reassuring if you can get yourself to feel really relaxed no matter what's going on. It's like you've got this island of comfort that you know is just internal to you. So I thought that was very powerful.

It's not something that I had as a skill before my 50s at all. And I think meditation has certainly helped. The awareness of the negative impact that the narratives that I would use to fill in the gaps in information I had was really powerful for me. And I'll give you an example that's associated with spaceflight.

We have a module on the space station that's called the PMM. It's like the attic of the space station. If you have a task that has given you 40 minutes to do, part of every activity is typically gather the materials you need, and a lot of time that means you go into the PMM. And it's not unusual to see somebody's just ankles and feet sticking out between bags as they're digging with a headlamp on trying to get deep into the depths of these bags that are bungee corded in place

and it can be very chaotic when you have to get multiple items and if you just loosely put it underneath a bungee cord and then bump the bungee cord, it can disappear very easily so it can be very frustrating. So there was an instance I remember really well where I had already spent 20 minutes trying to find stuff and still hadn't found the first thing. And I was getting mad and I realized that the reason

I was getting grumpy was the narrative I had was the ground's going to start. thinking that Vanda High is one of the slow guys on the space station. He always takes longer to do other stuff. But then I realized that I didn't know that. That was just some detail that I was adding. And then I thought to myself, wait a minute, for all I know, the ground feels bad that they didn't give me enough time to do this.

So what do I really, all I really knew as fact was that I was on the space station. My job was to find stuff, space hardware, in these bags that are all bunched. Ging corded and floating around. And honestly, that was kind of cool. And I had really, if it took me longer than they expected, then that was just a fact. It took longer than it expected. There didn't have to be a positive or negative emotion associated that. It was just a fact.

So instead of as many times before I've come out of there feeling angry at the world, at the situation, just beating myself about not being good enough in my job, I came out being like, well, you know, this is kind of cool. Yeah. It was just such a huge shift. And I think over time you perform better, too. when you give yourself a break like that. So I think there's this aspect also

about being more accepting of yourself, being more curious about it. There's just so many things that I think have helped make my life easier. And again, by no means am I perfect. This is a continuing process that I'm still working on and struggling with. But it helped you to keep your kind of perfectionistic

and self-judgmental side in check. Absolutely. Is that the most significant change? you've undergone? No, honestly, the most significant change for me was, well, the first big thing was when I first got to the space station, it was after a very long day, and I had the next 24 hours off to recover from that. I spent the first 90 minutes, the first one time around the planet looking out the window in awe. And the first thing that struck me was how isolated the earth looked when you are looking at the earth and in the sun and your eyes are adjusted to the sun

it makes the backdrop to the earth space look inky black like the definition of lack of light like it's liquid so that was shocking to me why you say shocking it was shocking because it it i don't think it was like i had never seen something that black it was just like again if you can imagine taking a ball and dropping it in a in a pool of black ink

that's what it looked like and I knew it was I knew it was emptiness but it just there was an emotional impact in that and I think I think there's been people that I've been it can be hard to grapple with

this sense of the earth being isolated later on in the flight as I was getting ready to come home again this is my first flight I felt like I should be going back to the earth with some unique perspective and some type of change to me and I thought, am I blowing this?

Am I like, I don't know what that is. I had this incredible sense of smallness. And I say that because another thing that struck me looking at the earth was when you look towards the horizon, the atmosphere looks like a varnish on a rock. It's like a puddle in a parking lot. It just looks super thin. So recognizing that first of all, and then recognizing that on that same horizon, none of the mountains show up. They're too small. So these things we perceive as huge relative to the size of the earth are unobservable

on the horizon. But then you think about the largest structure that humans have ever built and how that compares to the largest mountains. And then how big we are compared to those structures. I just I felt like any sense of self-importance I had was stripped away. So I was really struggling with, is that what I'm going to come home with? This idea that there's this meaninglessness to it? Like that was really troubling to me.

And also I had a lot of time to think about my mortality because I, you know, I might not survive this. So it's a, for me at least, I don't know that everybody has had this experience, but for me it was a very thoughtful time. Yeah. I realized that you have, I was struggling with the scale of things

when really part of my role is to be attentive to the scale I choose. If I'm studying a plant for my whole career or maybe I'm sitting around the dinner table and being attentive to the scale right there which is just my loved ones around the table or maybe you're studying the structure of universe. Just being attentive to that scale,

the scale you choose. And we have the flexibility to pick it and they're all okay. But just kind of accepting that, I thought, was a big leap for me. So mental health advocacy is something that you've become quite interested in. Sustainability has also been an idea that is that something that also grew out of those sort of observations when you were in space, that interest in sustainability? Yeah, I do think that I did spend a lot of time on the space station thinking about, well, this is probably my last time. in space. What I'm going to do after I work at NASA? What is my purpose here? And I love

being outside. That's why I joined the Army as opposed to the Air Force. I just, the idea of being outside and being comfortable in challenging environments is something that's always been appealing to me. And I also feel like with devices that we all carry around that are engineered to distract us, I think it's very easy for us to stop being attentive to the environment that we actually live in. I do think we've got challenges ahead of us. Climate change is

atmospheric change. Again, I've already mentioned my perception of the atmosphere is that very thin resource. And I really want to get that message across to people because it's easy to think of the earth as so big that how could we possibly impact it? But really, it's not the

whole earth we're worried about. It is just this thin layer we live in. That idea as well as concern that we're getting so sucked into screens that I would love to get involved in helping younger people appreciate that there's other alternatives, that there's an outdoor world that's super interesting. And I don't think a lot of young people

are getting the opportunity to compare one way of living to the other like we have. We grew up without those things. We know what it was like and how fun it could be without having a cell phone in your pocket all the time. and a lot of people are growing up without that. So I'd love to get involved with getting people to experience that. Yeah, yeah.

Well, wonderful. Thank you. This has been really fascinating. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. Malcolm, it really, really was a pleasure. I feel blessed I got to talk to you. It was really a wonderful opportunity for me as well. When Mark was looking at Earth from orbit, and grappling with how insignificant we all seemed, he said he felt troubled by the possible meaninglessness of it all.

But then he realized, it's up to human beings to choose the scale we pay attention to. We decide what's worthy of our attention and what's meaningful. That might be something as expansive as studying the cosmos, or as immediate as having dinner with our loved ones, or as minute as the well-being of a single-hatch chili pepper plant. This piece of wisdom from Mark is a great place for us to end this season. Pay attention to the scale you choose. Because creativity begins when we give attention to something previously unnoticed.

A minor detail overlooked, a bigger picture still unseen. As we strive to be new creators in our work and in our lives, let's remember that new insights can be found wherever we choose to look, as long as we're attentive enough to see it. Thanks for listening to Smart Talks with IBM. This is our season finale, but stay tuned for more Smart Talks coming soon. Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Romano,

David Jaw, Royston Preserve, and Edith Russela with Jacob Goldstein. We're edited by Sophie Crane. Our engineers are Jason Gambrell, Sarah Brugar, and Ben Toliday. Theme song by Grammascope. Special thanks to Carly Migliore, Andy Kelly, Kathy Callahan, and the 8-Barr and IBM teams, as well as the Pushkin marketing team. Smart Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and IHeartMedia.

To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm Glabo. This is a paid advertisement from IBM. Thank you. Thank you.