SOLVED with Mark Manson - How To Be Successful in a World That Wasn’t Built for You (ft. Astronaut Cady Coleman)

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

How do you find your way in a world where even when you do everything right, the odds keep getting stacked against you? My guest today, Cady Coleman, shares how she navigated the male-dominated fields of science, the Air Force, and NASA, breaking down barriers with tenacity and grace. From her time on the International Space Station to the release of her first book, Sharing Space, Cady’s story is a powerful reminder of the importance of mission, adaptability, and the unwavering belief in one’s potential, even when the world around you says otherwise. Check it out. Cady’s Book, Sharing Space: https://www.amazon.com/Sharing-Space-Astronauts-Mission-Wonder/dp/0593494016 Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will make you a slightly less awful person: https://markmanson.net/breakthrough Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose. About five years ago, I was backstage at a conference I was speaking at when I casually got into a conversation with one of the other speakers. It turned out she was an astronaut. She had flown multiple missions to space and had spent six months on the International Space Station.

Upon finding this out, I immediately said, I apologize and it advance for the barrage of questions about space that I'm going to ask you. Feel free to change the subject at any time. And for the next two hours, I bombarded her with questions about space. Space missions, space flight, living in space, zero gravity. I mean, like, how do you eat? How do you poop? How do you do anything? She never tired. She never changed the subject. And we've been friends ever since. Katie Coleman is a scientist, an astronaut, and an Air Force veteran. She built her incredible career in the 80s and 90s, an era where there were few to know women in the rooms that Katie was in, and she managed to excel through all of them. If I had to describe Katie in a word, I would say tenacity.

She has a single-mindedness about her that is very rare, a way of pressing ahead through adversity without accumulating the resentment or pity parades that most of us do. Or as she puts it, cheerfully showing up even when you weren't invited. A few weeks ago, she released her first book, it's called Sharing Space, and I had her on the show to talk about the importance of mission, the value of role models, and support systems, how to persevere in an environment that is not hospitable to you, and of course, many, many questions about space. This is Katie Coleman.

Let's get into it. The podcast that's saving the world, one fewer fuck at a dime. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Katie, it's great to see you again. It's awesome to see you. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Why don't we start?

when was the moment you decided you wanted to become an astronaut and how long did it take from that moment to actually making it happen i was something around 21 and i met sally ride she came to speak at at mit where i was a junior we actually have a certain resemblance you know kind of wavy dark hair and and not incredibly tall and i just i just thought wow maybe I could try to do that. Just the fact that she was so real just made me think this could be me. It made the possibility feel real. Exactly.

Yeah. And so that was 1983. I knew I was getting a bachelor's. Studying science was something I really loved. So I went on to get a doctorate. And the Air Force had paid for school for me for my undergrad. And so I had a four-year commitment to them. When you met Sally Ride, did you decide on the spot?

Or was it more of a process over the ensuing? years of being like, okay, this is my dream, this is my vision. What did that process look like? It's definitely a process that involves homework. Yeah. And I, you know, realize that they want people who, you know, have a solid career and me just finishing grad school. Yeah. It meant that I still had some, and also that I needed to finish grad. Well, at the time I was an undergrad. In my field, no question getting a doctor. It was part of being a part of that field. it was going on to get a doctorate in a field that really meant something to me, which was chemistry, but I liked applied chemistry. I liked it when you made things that made people's lives better

or changed them. But I really do love that you can make materials that make a difference in people's lives. And for the Air Force, I worked on new materials for airplanes, kind of bigger, better, different Kevlar's kinds of things. So grad school, I'm like, I'm here, I'm ready to apply. And the answer was, but you're not qualified. Because through the Air Force, you have to apply through the Air Force, which makes sense. They need to decide when you could go. And you needed to have four years of active duty. Because they were very used to having pilots who had had a long flight career, including test pilot school. And I looked and felt, I think, different than those folks. And so for me, I needed a waiver. Because I had already had that professional time. It just

wasn't during my Air Force time. And I said, you know, but if I was, you know, a civilian, I'd be really well qualified. And the answer was, but you are not a civilian name. And they were right. Yeah. And I think it's an important story because I think when you don't quite exactly fit, but you know that you're supposed to be part of that mission, you have to find a way to do that and to understand what you need to do that might be different by being a little pesky. But at the same time, acknowledging that, like, for me, I worked in the military and you serve at the pleasure of your country. And it is about what they need, not what you need.

And so finding that balance between asking questions that should be asked because they just hasn't really come up before that people got their qualifications before they got to the military. There's an interesting relationship that I think most people don't think about. You hear a lot about persistence. It's like, oh, you have a dream, like be persistent, don't give up. Well, a huge part of persistence is adaptability and understanding that the original plan is almost never going to work out the way you expected. And there's going to be setbacks and obstacles and detours.

And you need to have a certain amount of personal flexibility and willingness to adapt to the circumstances. is like that is part of persistence. It's not just brute forcing your way, you know, my way or the highway. Exactly. Yeah. And on each of those turns you didn't expect to have to take. Yeah. There's things you could learn.

And if you spend your time thinking, how come I have to be here? It's you're missing part of the path. Yeah. Were there times that you felt compelled to speak out and, you know, kind of insert yourself a little bit more aggressively into an issue? Well, I would say probably the clearest situation there is that at a certain point, right after I got there, somebody, one of the other astronauts said to me, came to me like I was in the mailroom, he's like, Katie, you know, I have been watching

and you were doing really well in spacewalking. And I think you have the head of a spacewalker. I think you have the skills. But you need to know that the small spacesuits are going away. So we're flying on the shuttle right now. when we get to the space station, there will be no small spacesuits. And they also say no extra large spacesuits, but I bet those are going to come back. And I'm like, you mean the ones that fit most of the women? Yeah. And he said, yes. And I was also assigned with Kathy Thornton to a flight

at the time. And she's like, Katie, when this happens, you call me and we are going to figure out how to help you function in a medium space suit. And it was a huge deal. And the sentence that really comes, like stood up to me was, I mean, they had a meeting and I didn't actually speak up in this meeting. We have a Monday morning meeting every Monday. And one of the announcements was really a couple of years later was, so we're eliminating the small suits and the extra largest. And we think that's going to work out because we've looked ahead at the manifest and we have all of the spacewalkers that we need. I mean, there couldn't be a more clear way to say, I mean, because it affected at least a third of the women, some of the guys, but and probably more in that, and yet here you are,

you know, you're me, do you stand up and say, wait a minute, you knew how big I was when I got here, you measured everything, right? You know, how can this be? It's not right. You know, do you really not think that you need to have women up there on that space station? Because this really meant you could go and be on a mission as a woman or as a person who didn't fit in the medium or couldn't make the medium work. You could be a person on the shuttle going on.

up doing robotics, whatever, but you couldn't be somebody who lived on the space station and had a mission up there unless you qualified in the medium suit. And people would say to me, and so, I mean, the medium suit was a reality. I worked hard, got a lot of help, really a lot of help from people figuring out how could I function best in that suit. Yeah. And I qualified in that suit, which, you know, and it's the kind of thing where I would show up to meetings or, you know, spacewalk meetings and they kind of look at you like, why are you

here and I just wanted to go, do you really not know that I have like above average grades in spacewalking, you know, in everything but speed because I have short arms, right? Yeah. And, you know, sort of like you should care, right? Yeah. And so it was not an easy thing. And I have to say that it's it's something that people do the best they can. I mean, I probably loved everyone in that me in that room, loved working with them, you know, all those things. But people can have blinders on. And I think that I think it's still, I understand, I do hear from people who are still there today, that it still happens. And this is something that can happen to all of us. But there's, let's say there's two people on the pool deck because we practice in these 300-pound suits in a swimming pool so that we can be waitless, so to speak.

And you have a new guy and a new woman, both in spacesuits. And chances are somebody is looking and judging and looking at the gun. going, I wonder how he'll do. And looking at the woman astronaut and saying, I wonder if she can do this. And it's a different way of thinking, right? And of not recognizing. And I think that it happens in a lot of different fields still. And that's really one of the biggest reasons I wanted to write the book was if this kind

of thing can happen at NASA where we're accomplishing these great missions. And this is a smaller part of NASA with the in the astronaut office and choosing missions, it's more complicated. But if we can actually not see people in this context, it means it's happening. It could happen anywhere. Everywhere.

And it does. Of course. And so I'm really proud of my efforts. I mean, I think when you're trying to make change, you could either be saying, what do you mean? Change this. It's not exactly my way. But I'm more in the way of finding a way

to communicate with people in a way they can understand, which involves performing. in that suit and also recruiting them to be part of the team that helps you be successful in that suit. And so for me qualifying in that space suit and then getting assigned to a space mission or a space station mission was like the pinnacle of my career. Amazing. Comes back to that adaptability as well, right? It does. It does. Understanding that there's going to be unforeseen obstacles. And I think, you know, you've talked a lot about mission and I think that that adaptability like you can either just go but I can be fretting about the fact that

this is so hard this is so unfair why do I have to be in this medium space suit yeah it is difficult for me and but it is hard and if you don't have a hundred percent of your focus on succeeding and making the things work and part of you is just wasting some you know just being angry and fuming all the time yeah you can be mad about a lot of things I mean in your everyday life and in just and politics and there's I mean you can have a really big circle and I don't enjoy existing like that I like it just feel better focusing on what I can do right now to make things be the way I think they should be whether that's in my community or what

where I'm trying to go yeah from science to the Air Force to NASA you are not what most people expect in those environments like is that a motivating factor for you of like kind of showing people? I think I have that little competitive part of me. Yeah. I do. I mean, wanting to show people, but also,

also a sort of like naive, just I call it cheerfully showing up. Yeah. Where I'm like, okay, so they didn't invite me to the spacewalking meeting. It wasn't like they were like, no, let's not invite Katie. I just realized it never occurred to them.

They don't know. I'm supposed to be there, but I know, so I'm going. And I don't show up, you know, like, I'm here. How come you did it? I mean, because it's just not the way. And I'm more about sort of like, what do I have and what can I do with it as opposed to how come I don't have this? Yeah.

Were you always that way, do you think? Or was it something you learned? I think I'm a very optimistic person. And I love, like, connecting people and figuring out and I live doing unusual things. I don't know. I think so much of that comes down to the attitude behind it. Because there's a very fine line between that kind of cheerful optimism of like, well, I could do this and I'm just going to go and show them that I can do it.

Versus an entitlement of like, well, fuck them. I'm going to like, I should be there. I'm going to show them, et cetera, et cetera. Well, there's a little bit. I mean, I think there's a scale. Yeah. Right? In between.

And sometimes, I'm not a very good arguer. Yeah. I wish I was, but I'm not. Like one thing I could never be, I decided was a lawyer. Yeah. Right? But, and so I choose a little more naturally, partly because I am, I don't know, I'm a blender. Right.

Well, there's a bias towards action, it sounds like. I would say, yes. Yeah. It's just like, let's stop talking, I'll just go do it. But also I think being open to help. And even, you know, the people who think that you shouldn't be there or just never, they're like, why is she here? When they realize that you're really working hard and planning to be there. And it actually, they like to help.

Yeah. And I certainly got a lot of help in my career from people who are guys, from people who are women that, you know, had skills that I didn't have that would say, you know, Katie, you need to think about this. You know, you're just barging ahead and you're forgetting that you need to show this as well. And here's a way that I think you could do it even though it's challenging for you. Yeah. Have you ever struggled with? No. Okay, yes.

Everything is easy. They'll be the title of this podcast, Katie Coleman, on how everything is easy and I've never struggled at anything at all. Have you ever struggled with, you know, when you have such a big consequential mission, and something that is driving you, motivating you for years and years and years, is it hard to care about, say, the small missions, the small things? Like, is there a come down from that? Is that something that you've struggled with at all? I'm asking for a friend, I know I struggle with that.

I was going to say, I definitely struggle with the fact that everything can seem important to me. Interesting. And that and how to, you know, maybe chunk things together. How do I at the end of the day feel successful? That, you know, I don't know, whether it's, you know, on the space station, I would say, even though I loved it there and I would go back, it was very, it was so clear that everything you did was important and got us one step closer to understanding how to design an environmental system that will take us to Mars and, you know, in moon as a first step, right? So it's so clear that everything is important, but it's also. also important to talk to your family at the right time. And they can't call you. You can call that. Only you can call them. And so making all that kind of stuff work. And doing some of the

things that I wanted to do as a human. I mean, so the range of things, they all seemed like important missions. And if I went back, I would be a little bit more cutthroat about, okay, I've given 12 or 14 hours to most of the mission. I'm going to take some of these hours for myself to do. the things that are really important to me. So you spent six months on the space station. You said you miss it, you loved it, you would totally go back. I'm curious, like, let's remove the mission from it. Okay.

Right? Because I imagine, you know, so much, again, the mission imbues every action with so much meaning and purpose and significance that that has a real psychological effect. I'm curious, what is the actual objective experience of living on the space station? Is it difficult? Is it maddening? Is it comfortable? Is it uncomfortable?

Is it stressful? How are you sleeping? Do you strap yourself to a wall or something? Like, how does all of this stuff work? We're going to get NASA and all the other new space companies in trouble here because everyone will want to go. Okay. It is magical.

Is it? It is. What's magical about it? First of all, people think about floating around. You know, my hair floats around, right? And we float around. But once you want to go somewhere, you are flying. And you are not in an airplane or a glider or anything.

One of the demonstrations that I like, it's actually on the internet, like splitting hairs in gravity is I could take one hair from my head, so could you, and push it against like this microphone. And I would push myself all the way across the space station or until I run into something else. Right? Because it takes that little force to move. I mean, if you push real hard with that hair, you're going to break it. but just given it like this, that's how, so it's a whole new way of life and it's a little bit like underwater. And if you look and you can see people who've spent some months up there, they're just sort of like liquid people. And you give you, I call it tending.

You know, you give yourself a push and you get better at giving that push to real direction, but then you're sort of tending. So that, I mean, there's that that just reminds you every day when there are some things that are miserable. I mean, the food, nobody goes for the food. Okay. Right. I mean, it's, I mean. Big ups on flying, thumbs down on the food. But I had a, well, I was going to joke around and say that I have a full, I had a full-time job because I flew with an Italian. And I never understood because I hadn't been to Italy why he was so sad about the food.

Okay. Because he would be like, like, lasagna, la, all about the. But I was in charge of, I mean, the packages of food and half the food is freeze-dried, half of it is like meals ready to eat. with lots of preservatives in them. Yeah. And there's stuff that you like. And I mean, I'm like, okay, we have this food. And I would have favorites.

And, you know, and it just was, the foods of food. Sounds like it's like microwavable meals. Well, we didn't have a microwave. But actually we have a, it looks like a suitcase. Okay. Like a briefcase. And there's a panel in the middle that gets hot. And you strap, you put a stuff, everything has to stick under like bungee cords or whatever.

Sticks on there. You strap it shut. And it heats up your food. We have a little, our faucet is like a needle. Right. With it either hot or cold, you dial up hot or cold water. You put hot water into your scrambled eggs or your chicken soup or whatever, beef stroganoff. And then we put it in the suitcase to get it just all kind of warmed up and nice.

And then there's also, I don't know, they send up fresh food when a new supply ship comes up. But on the first supply ship that actually ended up coming, the Russians had specified. lemons and onions, raw onions. And pickles, and pickles. Damn, Russians. But sleeping, and sleeping is like delightful. Is it? Where you can, we have a little sleeping bag.

It's like you slither into it like a snake. We have a cabin. And I think it's nice. It's really soundproof. You could have a screaming, yelling fight with your husband. No one would know. Wow. But if you actually go to leave,

there's some magnetic lock that you could never defeat. And so as soon as you wake up in the middle of the night and decide to go to the bathroom, you know, bang, bang, big noise. Yeah. I would, I would change that. Okay. Next mission. Yeah. But sleeping is, you know, I don't know. I would sleep like curled up in a little ball. And when I woke up, I might be like under my looking up at the bottom of my desk or did you feel like you slept better? Because like now that I'm thinking about it, a lot of discomfort while sleeping comes from the pressure with the mattress and like the weight of gravity. Like just kind of makes your arm uncomfortable or your leg falls to sleep or something.

So like is it more comfortable? I would say it's more comfortable, but it takes a long time to learn to actually relax and not be kind of like a little bit tense, a little bit. Our natural posture is kind of like curled up a little bit, knees up a little bit. How is that view? Does it ever get old? No. No, I imagine not.

No. And I was not somebody that would be always looking out the window when I was a kid, you know, and you'd sit in the station wagon and look out the back window. I kind of like that, but it wasn't like I was so much like that, but it's, it never gets old. Even a place you see a lot, like I would always, I just set my watch to know when we're going to go over Massachusetts. And then you see it at sunset and sunrise, because we're also seeing, you know, here's, if you're the sun and, you know, sunrise, sunset, we're seeing 16 sunrises and sunsets a day. And so we're seeing the earth look like that too. Yeah.

And one of the things I put in the book, because I think it's so important. important is that space station is still up there. There's six people or seven people on it right now, and you can see them. If you live between 51 or 52 degrees latitude and down below, I mean, that part of the Earth, except for the really far north and really far south, you can see the space station crossing the sky,

looking like the brightest star. And you just go to this website, spot the station. Or if you just go to the internet and say, I want to, where is the space station? Sure. It will show you. It will tell you. And it'll say, you know, look in this direction at this time.

And you'll be seeing probably stars. And you're kind of looking, is that one moving? Is that one moving? But then suddenly you realize one of them is just moving. And it's not zipping across the sky. It's just sailing across the sky. Yeah. And so I just, I don't know, I'm the kind of person that I run down to the diner down at the bottom of the hill.

I'm like, in five minutes, everybody outside. I mean, I'm thrilled to see it, but people, it makes it real. And I think that's actually part of what the book is about is I didn't love everything about my job and some parts of it were hard. But it's real people get to do this job. And at the same time, they have some struggles just like real people. And I think it makes people realize they could be that person. What do you do for fun and do you run out of things to do for?

for fun because I imagine you can only take so many books. I don't know if you take movies or anything up there. If you get TV, like I don't know, what do you do for fun up there? They do, it depends whether it's fun or it depends on the crew. Okay. Do I mean? They will send, they have agreements with all the studios. They'll send movies.

They'll send TV shows and finding TV shows that six people who speak different languages can appreciate, right? You know. And we all, so on the space station, we all speak Russian. to a reasonable degree, and we all speak English to a reasonable degree. Okay. So it's hard on like the people who are not from the US or Russia. They have to learn a lot, right?

But a lot of them involved like physical comedy, easy, easy things to follow. One of the crew members said to me, they think, you're going to figure it out anyway. You know, I like American Idol, okay? So it's a really good show. It's nice to watch these people, you know, and that was the kind of thing. where we could all watch and we'd have an opinion. And it's kind of like on demand, like where they've sent it up, we can watch it any time. And I was on a crew that kind of like to watch TV during dinner.

And we'd watch the news, which we would get 24 hours late. Oh. I am proudly responsible for being the first person to request nicely, but firmly, that NPR be sent up. Yeah. And they're like, how often I'm like, every day? I mean, it's like a tiny file compared to all these TV shows. I just want the news. And we listen to it exercising and stuff like that.

Yeah. Yeah. You were asking what we did for fun. Yeah, I mean, how much stuff is there to, do you run out of stuff to do? If you run out of stuff on the ground and you're like, oh, I'm bored, you know. Yeah. It's just not my way. Yeah.

I'm kind of never bored. I imagine there's an endless amount of work to do. There's endless work, but there's also projects that each of us have, whether it's to run around and, I don't know. And my son's little stuffed tiger and I would do various little videos with him, you know, in troublesome places. And, you know, just, I mean, but also videos for videos that were unofficial but official. You know, I did the introduction to TED from space. Oh, wow. In 2011.

That's very fun. That's cool. And, I mean, so there's quite, you know, I don't know, a local NPR station, TV station had, We had an event to answer questions, and clearly there were a lot of questions I answered. And I said, just send me the list. And I made a little video. So everybody has their own kind of interesting projects. And I also love music.

And I'm not the most amazing flute player, but I love to play. And one of the ways to bring other people with you is to bring their flutes. Yeah. So I brought flutes for the chieftains, the Irish band. I'm like a quarter Irish on each side. It makes way more than a half, right? Of course. Yes.

Yeah. We'll count it. I'm sure Ireland will take you. Anyway, so I brought an Irish flute and a tin whistle and pretty much learned to play them up there. It was on my list. I better learn to get better at that Irish flute. I play more silver flute.

But I brought my own flute from Massachusetts company that made it. And I brought one for Ian Anderson of Jess Rotall. Oh, cool. He's the person that brought the flute to rock music. Yeah, he is. An improvisation. If you told me to name it,

name a flutist, he's probably the only one I would come up with. Well, you know, I think you get help with your bravery from other people. There was a Houston, very well-known Houston DJ, Dana Steele, married to one of our NASA pilots. And so, you know, I was like, Dana, you know, I have very little time. Can you help me find this guy? And she's like, ah, I think so, Katie. I am a rock and roll DJ. And anyways, he wrote him a letter and said, you know, Katie doesn't have a lot.

much time, she'd like to take your flute, she needs a single point of contact. And he wrote this very funny letter back that just said, or email, that said, well, I think I'm myself, am a pretty reliable source of contact. And I, you know, take a shower most days and presentable. I'm mostly nice to people. And it's very funny. And we actually only talked on the phone before we left. And then I don't know if you've seen the little duet thing. We, we try to figure out something we could do because you do this to kind of broaden like you got to go but what else can you make happen right and we tried to figure something out we asked the lawyers they never answered and well and I mean you wanted to be for the power of good so to speak and looking at his schedule

and our schedule he was playing a concert in Russia in the city of perm on April 12th 2011 and that is a special day because it's the 50th anniversary of human space place place flight the first time a human left the planet. Oh, wow. And it's celebrated as Yuri's night. Yeah. Because when you think about it, and especially if you're somebody who's looking down at the whole earth, like, it's not that they're from a certain place.

We're all from Earth. Do you get that sense? Because I've, was it John Glenn? I don't know. I've heard astronauts have come back saying that when they're up there, it's like their sense of nationality, ethnicity, all that stuff just kind of goes away. I think it's different for everyone. For some people, it's more religious.

For me, it's about realizing that I thought I was going to go to space and be gone, but I felt very connected to the planet. And also just looking down, realizing, like, if only these people understood how connected they could be, we could get a lot further on some of these big challenges that we have. You know, because, I don't know, I mean, coming from MIT and being in material science and being an astronaut, you get exposed to some of the bigger questions and bigger things to solve. And they're all interdisciplinary. It's not just chemistry or physics or engineering or, you know, how to help people who don't have enough.

Right. There's just so many aspects to it. And so you need a lot of experts and that they could be connected. So I think it's different for everyone. They call it the overview. That's right. The overview effect. Yep.

So I just thought it was, I mean, when we go to Mars, okay? I mean, we are on Mars because there's rovers on Mars. Sure. But if people were driving those rovers and they had bumper stickers, I don't think they're going to say some country. They're going to have an E for Earth. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where I realized that Ian was going to be playing this concert.

I was going to be on the space station. And he suggested that we play this duet called Bure. It's kind of a song that is a bach piece. And he sent it to me. and I had really so little time to figure it out. Yeah. And I finally actually had to write him a note. I just said, you said, do this, this, this.

And I just actually don't understand anything that you said. And I entitled the note, lost in space. And a funny story is he wrote back, he goes, we don't know each other. And so I just figured that this was, you know, but I'm just going to share that my computer was kind of dirty when you say. I mean, it had a little crap on the screen. And so the O had a little space on it. And so it actually looked like the title of your email was lust in space. And I just thought, I don't think she meant to write to me.

Wrong email address. Exactly. But then it was indeed lost in space. He explained it to me. And we put this duet together. And if you look up space duet, you'll find it. But I think it's just this wonderful thing about being from the whole planet where I play. he plays, I'm clearly in space.

And I don't know, I just, I really love it. I think it's a great example of collaboration of, I had to be brave to ask. Yeah. He had to be open to really just going, who is this person? Well, I'd be forced to listen to this terrible song my whole life. And it's actually part of the audiobook now. You mentioned living with other astronauts. I mean, you essentially have five roommates and co-workers.

in a relatively small space, how does that play out while you're up there? Like, is there internal divisions? Is there cabin fever? Do people start beefs with each other? I would say there's good news here. I mean, the answer is anyway, you want to. People are human, right? We also, we don't all get to spend so much time together, the six of us,

but the three of us, Paula Dimitri and I spent a lot of time together. And we came from really different backgrounds. And Dimitri had never worked with women before. And so it was really new for him. And he had a specific job. He's this astonishing technical guy where he is the commander of the Soyuz. At a certain point up on the station, he became the commander of the station. And he is really great at that technical stuff.

And in his world, he has been taught to do that and, you know, accept help from the people whose job it is to help him. And I was the third person in that spacecraft who doesn't have as many a spacecraft. who doesn't have as many assigned pushing buttons duties, right? But I was also the most experienced person on that spacecraft in terms of going to space, not in the Soyuz. Yeah. But, and so how to blend my suggestions with someone who didn't understand that their job was to hear them. Yeah.

Right. And so we figured that out. And it doesn't mean it was always simple. Sure. Right. And I got a lot of advice from cosmonauts, from astronauts, from astronauts. And I think he looked for advice as well because he's like, you know, she keeps saying these things. Why is my mind?

I mean, I can't speak for Dimitri, right? But it was different. And one of the things we figured out was that Palo and I pretty much had the same questions. Palo asked the questions. And it worked. And I wouldn't suggest this mechanism of figuring out how come everybody on the team is it heard in the way they'd like to be. I mean, me wanting to be heard in a different way, maybe speaking my own questions. was not the way to get the mission done.

But if I was the, you know, vice president of a company and people were not listening to me and it worked for me, we would have different discussions than that. And so I think the idea that you have to, you brought it up, you have to adapt, you have to be flexible. Especially when you're in a limited time window, right? Like it's like if you and Demetri are gonna be working together for the next 10 years or whatever, then yeah, maybe you pick a couple

fights and try to change something, but it's you've got six months, you've got an in list of things that need to get done. So at a certain point, you have to be like pragmatic about it. I'm curious how much the cultural differences factored into. Not in that particular case, not so much, you know, and that I was very, very close with relationships with younger cosmonauts, you know, who would be like on survival training when we each barely spoke English or Russian together and they'd be like, Katya, your idea again, you know, kind of thing, right?

And we were known as the crew that laughed and we did really well. But I think that we got, we were a crew that because we were all really different, I think we surprised people. Interesting. And that despite some large differences in the way we each worked, we figured out ways to really optimize. And I do think that, you know, one of the biggest lessons is that if you have somebody I mean, we made sure I was heard.

It may not have been the way I chose to be, right? Or not that I did choose, but the way that I would have rather. But to have somebody on your team that, I mean, I'm the person that on a team is kind of like, sees all the people and tries to figure out, you know, who needs what and who has questions that they are not asking and things like that. And to have somebody that either needs help or has a suggestion

that they just figure, you know, they never look at me, they never think I've got something to say. At a certain point, that person just goes, you know, maybe I'll be on a team someday that really wants to hear that stuff. And you lose. The mission loses. And it's the hardest thing you can do, especially at home.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, we all have these teams that we don't choose our teams. Yeah. And the importance of what people bring and knowing, understanding what that is. And I was up there with Scott Kelly, and he knows that I tell these stories because we're pretty different. I mean, he's a person of few words and I'm a person of many, right?

And I don't think either one of us in any way expected that we would be like, oh, I am so glad I'm with that person, right? And it was, I think, really surprising to both of us that with those few words, he was the king of non-judgmental feedback. And to tell, you know, for me to have him, say, I've been watching, he's the commander, it's in charge, it's his job to critique people. He goes, I've been watching you for a while, Katie, and you are slow to start a task. You are fast in the middle, and you are slow to finish.

I think it all has to do with packing and unpacking the experiment. You're looking for the perfect place. One, and then you have to find everything and make sure you don't lose anything, which is paramount, right? And he said, so what if, I mean, you know, you'll figure out what works for you? One suggestion I have is, what if you just say, it's Wednesday. everything goes on the left. I mean, you just know that it's there. It may not be optimum.

Maybe you protect it a little, make sure nobody kicks stuff. But, you know, try that. And if he had just said to me, Coleman, why do you take so long to do things? Yeah. It's not like I didn't know. And actually, we're all slower up there than we would like.

But I am the kind of person that would be like, oh, I'm so slow. You know. And so, you know, it would have, I just would have been, I know, I know. And it wouldn't have been helpful. So when it came time for him to leave, leave. Palo and I, and we were saying goodbye to him. And he kind of looked at us and I was like,

I'm going to miss you. And he was like, I'm going to miss you too. And when Palo and I got home, he was like the first person at the bottom of the stairs. He just had to make sure he got home. He's a wonderful guy. Yeah. So let's talk about coming down. Were you sad to come down? Did you not want to come out? Yeah. I didn't really want to come home. Did you know it was that was it? like you weren't going to go back? I still haven't actually quite given up. I mean, they're going to need a shepherdess on one of these flights, right? And, you know, some of the space companies do have, you know,

do have experienced astronauts going. I think I knew, I knew, I was hoping to go again. And at the same time, literally, once you hit the ground, you are back in line. And there's certain boxes you have to check. You have to have had emergency training a certain number of times. And the boxes are hundreds. And so basically you have to kind of check all those boxes again before you're ready to go.

I mostly wanted to stay because it takes a long time to get good at things up there. Like even a month or two to really, you did ask before about how long's it take to be really good in microgravity. And I would say moving around and flying, you know, just a couple days. And after a month, you're like amazing. but to actually do experiments and not lose things, multitask in that environment, I would say takes a good month to get good. And you're only up there for me, almost six. And I just felt like I was so good at things.

I just wanted to get more done. When you came down, was there, for lack of a better term, kind of a come down in terms of like this incredible once in a lifetime experience just happened. As you said, everything you did, every small action was imbued with all the significance and importance. And then now you're back on earth. And it's like you got to go pick up the takeout and stop by the dry cleaners and, oh, shit, I have a flat tire. Like, was there any sort of kind of kind of what I haven't had one? Was there any sort of kind of psychological, like refractory period or hangover? I think hangover is a good word for it.

I don't know if I would say hangover, but the coming home part, I think, is the part that the spouse is like the least. And for a shuttle mission, you know, you're training for a year or two or so. And then everything is focused on that mission. Then you get home and it's going to be another year or two or so before you're on another one. And that's sort of like, what is my purpose now? It's hard on the person. I think it's also hard on the family. Yes.

And especially, I think it's easy to just think you're going to step right in and do the things you always. we're doing. Right. And, you know, and I did learn, I learned a lot of lessons about letting go. And that's right. Yeah, because you're inserting yourself back into a life. Like, I mean, while you've been gone, your husband and your kids, like they've developed new routines. Your kids are in a new grade. They've, they've got new hobbies. They have new friends. Like, it's. Exactly. And they've gotten along actually just fine. Yeah. Without you. You know. Is that hard to accept? There's that. I would say in my case, it got qualified in a couple different ways where in a personal way, just me, I really just so much wanted to stay a little longer.

Yeah. You know, and for some different reasons, it was actually a possibility for a bit. And I was like, yes. And then I was like, but of course, I will call home and we'll talk about this as a family, but you could think yes. but I mean so it was a little bit real but not really I mean I was just in denial about coming home right but when I came home I mean there's a certain grief yeah and not being there I don't want to sit by a window on an airplane because I just didn't want to look out because I the the view is different from open space but there's a similarity of just being above and seeing so much and so I didn't

really want to I mean there's a certain grief but in my My case, I am pretty mission-oriented, and the mission of family was really big. And they give you a couple months to do your debrief kinds of stuff, but then, you know, have an easier job for a couple months. And in my case, it was nicer to spread that out. Like, people would take, like, X number of months off. And I was like, I could do with just having a little more time at home over a longer period. And I would say that's the thing that I wish we'd.

had prepared our kid a little bit better in that I came home to Houston with weeks of medical tests to do and our 10-year-old knew his mom was coming home. Yeah. But we commuted between Massachusetts and Houston and, you know, after a couple days, they went home and I got special dispensation to go home like a week later. My flight surgeon actually took me to the airport, walked me under the plane, saw that I only had not like my usual kind of text. He's like, you are allowed to have a purse that has our wallet and it, and that is it.

Yeah. But I did get to go home. So wanting that home mission, and then in my case as well, when I was up on the mission, one of the big things that we did was to capture a supply ship, a Japanese supply ship, which now is really commonplace. You see the robotic arm reaching out. And now you see those ships approaching with people. But what we were doing was the second time ever that we'd used to. that we'd use the robotic arm to capture the supply ship. You could picture a factory, giant factory,

and a truck pulling up to make a delivery. And you're gonna reach out and sort of bring it into the factory. If something goes wrong, you can't move the factory. It's too big. The space station is too big. So you have to do everything just right and everybody's nervous and you know,

so you're talking to mission controls around the world. And so when I came home, this was still an evolving process. And my job back in NASA was to be charge of those supply ships and actually to join together those teams like in Japan for the mission control mission control in Houston the SpaceX the company or Northrop Grumman and so we had to have happy hours right I mean happy hours are important yeah because there is really I mean I'm kind of making a joke but

we really I really did like have you know happy hours where I said you know okay to the happy hour, everyone working on this, there will be astronauts there, and they're going to tell you what it was like when they did this on the space station. Yeah. And my crewmates and people would say, you know, I did that and I was nervous. I mean, things the whole team needs to know. Right. So I had this mission to, you know, help this really critical point of working with all these

new companies to bring them together to make sort of one team. Yeah. So that felt very mission oriented as well. So the mission continues. Which I think I got to, I think it gave me a reason not to be morning that I wasn't going again quite yet. Yeah. The other question I have about coming back, I don't know what term to use other than like culture shock. Like, you know, if you, when you go abroad for six months and then you come back to the States, there's a little bit of culture shock for reverse culture shock for a few days of just like, oh, yeah, I'm back home. I'm in an airport. I'm everybody speaks English. It's, did you have anything like that of just like, I'm in a car again?

I'm carrying my suitcase again. I'd say it wasn't about that part of it. It's for me, and I think you're sort of going abroad. I was an exchange student and you come back and you've like lived this entire different life than anybody that you're looking at understands. And that means your family, your friends, or going off to college, you know, for me pretty quickly after I got home. I was in Norway. And that, the fact that you're sort of like part of you is like from a different world. You feel like

you're from a different planet and people don't quite get it. And I would say the reality part of just, I'm a really people person, but it took me longer to be able to want to be with a lot of people. It just was so overwhelming. Interesting. And in fact, we stay in a quarantine place, not to be quarantine, but it's the most convenient place to do all those nasty medical tests. Yeah. Yeah.

But then our building that we work in, and the astronauts have like the top floor of that building, when you walk in that building, there's going to be all these like pictures and posters and captions that are your training team celebrating the mission often in a pretty funny way, right? And so I mean, I would always love, you know, walking down the hall, seeing those things. And so I really wanted to go see that, but I waited till nighttime because I just wasn't ready to see so many people. And when I was up there, we got email synced four times a day. So it takes like literally a day.

You know, you send a note. Somebody send a note. It takes a day to have a decision, you know, I won't tell you the decisions. But you only had 100 people on your email list. And everybody from work counted is one. So you had 99 friends on that. And then to have email from everywhere, that's what was overwhelming was the communication. Yeah, the quantity of interaction.

Yeah. I imagine, too, that feeling of alienation, I imagine the community of astronauts is very tight-knit. Like, is there kind of this sense of family, you know? There's so much. Yeah. Yeah. And even though there were all different. And I mean, there's a lot of stories in the book about not feeling seen.

And you could hopefully, hopefully it's written in a way that you would realize that I love the people that I worked with, literally every one of them. And that that's really almost the lesson is that sometimes, you know, these people, sometimes people are so well-meaning. And they really do genuinely like you. They just don't necessarily see you in that world. Right. Do you know I mean? And so despite the fact that I, some of those things still happen. And that's part of the reason that I wrote the book is that I think in our world, it's so easy.

We all have biases and stereotypes. And I myself have them, you know, and hopefully learn, you know, with everyone. Sure. But I forgot your question. Just the sense of family around astronauts. I mean, what I'm hearing from you, to me, it's another testament to the power of mission, right? Like, you can be in a space station with people who I imagine here on Earth, you would never find yourself in the same room with them ever. You have cultural differences, personality differences, language differences.

Yet that mission brings you together and is such a, honestly, it's similar. it's similar to the way that war veterans talk about going to war, right? Like it's almost, it becomes, they talk about the soldiers in their platoon as like brothers, even though they're just completely different people that they have nothing in common with other than serving in the war. I agree. It's a really, it's a testament to how powerful that, that overarching mission and purpose is. Last question for you. Did you think or hope that we would be further along in regards to space by now?

Like you applied for NASA in 92, you got in, I guess you started 92, 93. Right. Back then when you thought about 30 years from now, 40 years from now, did you think we'd be further along? Or did you have any sort of expectations about it? I didn't really have expectations. I think being in the thick of it, I just wanted to be part of it, right? And if I, I mean, to me, I add up those years, I'm like, oh, is it that many years?

You know, and I'm somebody that doesn't mind their birthday or being the age they are or whatever. But, you know, almost 64, well, in six months or so. But it seems, if I look back, I'm like, wow, we haven't really, you know, know, we aren't where we were hoping to be. And at the same time, being in the reality of it, I would tell people, I mean, I came back from the space station in 2011, I was like, there's a reason we haven't gone to Mars yet, and it's because we're not ready. Yeah.

I mean, the toilet and the systems that recirculate air and water on the space station break more than you want them to break when you are on your way to, you're on a six-month journey to Mars. Because we're even just finding out the thing that we thought we'd never replace in the environmental system, that's the thing we're replacing the most. Or that's the thing we actually have to open up and replace some of the guts inside, which was never planned. So we're learning really big lessons. So I do think it's, I think it takes a while. I think it's complicated. I think that having these commercial companies be part of this environment and this world is really wonderful.

Yeah. Because they can, I mean, there's something about, you know, being with the government where, I mean, they, in our case for NASA, I mean, this is tax dollars. They have to be spent well. Every question that people have literally has to be answered. And so if something, if we say, let's try this. And no people on board. People on board is always different. No one is going to take human life casually.

And, you know, NASA is always part of that process with humans. but or at least the ones that we missions that NASA does but hardware even if we have something not work launch it and it doesn't work there's a huge investigation yeah and so and you look at actually the Boeing flight you know right now you know the first launch they discovered some unexpected things about the way the computers thought about timing and then you know had a long road to realize there's a lot of implications a lot of things to fix right but these companies can have something can fail and fail often easier than a government agency. And it's, I think, inspirational to see.

I would tell people, you know, SpaceX sometimes they actually make a decision and they don't even have a meeting. I would say that to the people that I worked with in robotics, right? Unimaginable. You know, it's just, but it's inspirational. Like the next time you're at a meeting and you realize that we're all kind of going, yeah, this is hard. Why not figure out what can we do right now? what's the next step? So I think it's great to have them in the mix. I think it's important to have the NASA's and the Japanese and European and Canadian space agencies and in Russian space agencies

in that mix as well. Right. Cool. Awesome. Well, the book is sharing space. Katie, it was great seeing you again. It was wonderful to see you. Oh, there it goes. That's okay. I should have written a longer book. I know. If you had more pages. Thanks for coming back. Thank you. The subtle art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Bernie. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer.

Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.