StarTalk Radio - Humans In Space with Astronaut Leland Melvin and Dr. Sheyna Gifford

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Are human bodies good for space? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly discover the effects of space on the human body and if we are ready for long-haul missions with astronaut Leland Melvin and space doc, Dr. Sheyna Gifford. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/humans-in-space-with-astronaut-leland-melvin-and-dr-sheyna-gifford/Thanks to our Patrons John Moehrke, Scott Williams, Mike Trujillo, Josue Diaz, Walter Flaat, Semyon Torfason, Craig Smart, Elissa DiPierro, OnlineBookClub.org, and Nic Stock for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. The title of this episode is The Space Cowboy. Ooh. We'll find out more about that in a moment. Let me first introduce my co-host, Gary O'Reilly. Gary, former soccer pro.

Yeah, great to be here again. All right. And you're also a former sports commentator. I'm still commentating, yes. Still commentating. Yep, still out there. The game's gone into extra time. I'm still commentating.

Yes, exactly. Well, you used to commentate soccer, and now you've come stateside, and you're with us on StarTalk. Yeah. Delighted to have you as a former pro athlete. And, of used to commentate soccer, and now you come stateside and you're with us on StarTalk. Yeah. Delighted to have you as a former pro athlete. And, of course, Chuck Nice, who's not a former pro anything. This is true. Okay. Longtime StarTalk co-host, comedian, and actor, we add to your resume.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm often acting like a comedian. Okay. Gary, give me the show overview and who do you got for us this time? You see, Neil, we all want to go to space. Seems like fun. We can get to float around up there in microgravity. As long as there's enough money to bring me back, I'll go into space.

Always get a return ticket. But the whole thing is, what if you had to spend weeks, months, years in space? You know, what if it was your job? How do you prepare a human body to spend an elongated period of time in microgravity? A living body. What impact does microgravity have on the body? How do you adapt to life in space?

And when you come back, how does it react to full gravity? So all of the answers to those questions are going to help us understand how better to travel into space and not have detrimental effects to our being. I mean, it's going to influence so much of space travel in the future. If we're going to be a space-faring species, yeah, you got to do it. I mean, otherwise we're trapped here on this little blue marble. And that may not be the best idea as things go forward. So for these answers to these questions, we need some serious, serious expertise.

We have, later on in the show, the space doc, Dr. Shana Gifford. Her expertise is rehabilitation, and in particularly for astronauts. But what if, imagine you had an NFL athlete and put that athlete into space? It seems like, you know, the rarest of beings, but that's exactly what we have as our first guest. Leland Melvin is a former NFL wide receiver with the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys. He has been on two space missions on the shuttle Atlantis. I mean, he's logged over 500 hours in space. He's also an author, Chasing Space, a book a lot of our listeners may well be very familiar with. He'd been a NASA administrator and communicator for the Office of Education. And if you want to talk about what it's like to prepare, exist, and then rehabilitate from being in microgravity,

Neil, I couldn't imagine a better guest. You're talking about Leland Melvin, my man. Yeah. Leland, dude. Leland Melvin. Amen. How are you feeling, man? So good to be here.

You know, sports and space is something that we all should gravitate towards. I mean, we're all space. Saw what you did there. We see what you did there. Gravitate. Saw it. Caught it, Leland. I caught it.

I'm trying to be Chuck Nice. So you're a retired NASA astronaut. You're a former NFL wide receiver with the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys. For a minute. For a minute. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

So what you're saying is only for a minute you were with the Cowboys? Both. I pulled a hamstring in both training camp with the Cowboys and the Lions. And I thank actually Danny White for helping me get the space. Right on. I'll talk to you about that later. Okay. Wow. You pulled a hammy.

Wow. Okay. But you were on the team. Wide receivers and hammies, you know, they kind of go up. You need that, right? But I tell you what, Leland, there'll be a journey to get that far. Right. That will make you an elite athlete by a long stretch. Yeah, you made the team. That's all that counts.

Right, right, right. There you go. And also, you were a science communicator with NASA because after you did your astronaut thing, you headed up the education office at NASA. The Office of Education, I think, is the official title for it. But before that, you had two

missions on the space shuttle Atlantis, logged more than 500 hours in space. So, you're the man. Wow. You're the show. Hey, just trying to inspire that next generation, Neil. You know, that's what it's all about. Well, Leland, you failed.

What? Why, Chuck? Come on. Have you seen the next generation, man? Have you met them, man? No, no. Wait. Chuck's got it backwards.

Chuck, the next generation is fine. So, Leland, you've been paying too much attention to the young folk. They're fine. It's the old folk that are messing up the world. It's true. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

So, let me ask. So, I'll start this off because we have 100,000 questions we want to ask you. What did you weigh when you were recruited by the Detroit Lions or the Cowboys? What did you weigh? I was 220. Wow Detroit Lions or the Cowboys? What did you weigh? I was 220. Wow. 220, not too bad. That's great for a wide receiver.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Solid. That's right. And so then— And a 4'5", 40, 220 pounds. I didn't ask all the rest. I didn't ask all that.

Nah. Dude, I don't blame you. I don't blame you. That's like somebody saying, what did you get in chemistry? And you're like, oh, yeah, I got a 98 in chemistry, but I also got a 96 in physics. I got an 87 in, yeah. I don't blame you, man. I don't blame you.

All right. So you were 220. Now, astronauts, at least from the old days, are famously little, all right, because you have to fit inside of a capsule. Unmissly little, all right? Because you have to fit inside of a capsule. But in the shuttle era, it's basically a living room with a couch compared to the old days of the capsule. But how tall are you also, by the way? Six foot.

Six foot. So weren't you a little chunky for that journey? Wow. So, wait a minute. Wait, wait. And are you eating the food that other astronauts wanted to eat? Leland. Are you taking up seat space? I'm starving. Let me just say this for a second. Go Wait, wait. And are you eating the food that other astronauts wanted to eat? Are you taking up seat space?

I'm starving. Let me just say this for a second. Go ahead, Chuck. Only Neil could phrase it in those terms. You are 6 feet, 220, mostly muscle. He's like, it's not Hollywood, man. You're like, aren't you a little chunky for this role? But actually, Chuck, he is right. He is right.

Because when you're on the flight deck with someone else sitting beside you, I'm a mission specialist and another one sitting beside me, and the shoulders and the breath, it pushes into his space. Right. So maybe not chunky, but voluminous maybe. So did you have to lose bulk to go on a space mission? No, no, I didn't. No, he just took up both armrests.

This is mine. Mine. The person you don't want in the middle seat of the airplane. All right, I just had to lead off with that question just to figure that out. Oh, no, okay. So here they come, Leland. Chunky.

That's my name. My name is now Chunky. Okay, thanks, man. Thanks, bro. I mean, how do you as an astronaut combat effects of microgravity before you go up into space? So what sort of protocols are you going to go through to get that? What kind of pregame do you have for that?

Pregame. Yeah. I mean, the main thing is cardiovascular shape. You want to run, you want to do cycling, different things. Swimming is great. But the other thing is really is the free weights. And as a football player, free weights have been always part of my regimen for strength and endurance and all of that.

Free weights have been always part of my regimen for strength and endurance and all of that. But we find that if you lift free weights, whether it's on the ground or actually the equivalent of free weights in space, it keeps your bones from getting osteoporotic. When you go to space, the morphology of your bone structure changes because there is no gravity. Well, we're in free fall around the planet. There is actually gravity, nine, what, nine tenths of a G in 240 miles up. But your bones start to change. And when you come home, if you haven't done resistive exercise, your bones may be embrittled. You will come back to get stress fractures. And so it's really important that you precondition with lifting free weights, especially squats and deadlifts to work the big bones in your body, your hip bone.

Just to be clear, because some people listening to this may be from the deep geek spectrum have never done sports. When you say free weights, these aren't weights that cost no money. These are weights. These are the heavy weights. These are weights that live in each hand, and you move them in whatever way you choose rather than be constrained. Individual, press, you know, those kind of things. Gotcha.

So you're not taking those into space because Neil has taught us it's $10,000 a pound to get it up there. Wait a minute, wait a minute. $10,000 a pound. Leland, you were chunky. You were damn real fat. This is what I was talking about, Chuck. You were an expensive boy to put up in space. Tell me about it.

They were having meetings. They were having meetings about you. You need to lose weight before you go. meetings. They were having meetings about you. They were having meetings. Let's give Leland a little bit of love before we take him down. Sorry. So when you get up into the space station, you're there for a certain period of time. Your exercise regime still has to be in place. So A, what are you doing? And I can't imagine there's already a gym waiting for you there. So you're going to have this equipment to set up, exercise, and then dismantle. So how much of your whole day does it take to go from beginning to packing it

away in the box? Just to be clear, Leyland was on the space shuttle, which doesn't spend months in space. So we might ask, what preparation do you need for just the days or weeks on a shuttle relative to the months on a space station? So that would be two different questions there. All right, point taken. Yeah, Leland, go for it. So short duration space flight, you know, a week or two weeks at a time, we had a cycle ergometer. We could set up this bicycle in the mid-deck of the space shuttle. So you would go down, you would strap in, you strap your body in so you don't start pedaling and float away, and your feet are in straps, and so you're cycling.

And then we had these rubber bands that we would stretch to do resistive exercise. That's what you need is that resistive exercise. That's what you need is that resistive exercise. But on the space station, when people are living there for six months or a year, we have a machine called the resistive exercise device that has these bands that allow you to do the equivalent of what we just talked about with the free weights. So you can do bench press, deadlift, overhead press, curls. We have a cycle ergometer up there and we have a treadmill. And on that treadmill, so that you can get the cardiovascular shape,

you need two hours of exercise a day for long duration space flight. So the lifting and the running or the cycling. And we had actually Sunny Williams. Neil, you know Sunny. Yeah, I do know Sunny. I love her. Yeah, it's great.

Sunny Williams was one of my classmates. She's a marathoner. She's just an incredible athlete. She ran the Boston Marathon in space while Karen Nyberg ran the actual Boston Marathon, and they were comparing times as they were running. No. Yeah, but one of them didn't have gravity.

Stop. No, Chuck. I just said one. Chuck. Oh, she cheated? Are you saying she cheated? Yes, I am. Stop. No, Chuck. I just said one. Chuck. Oh, she cheated? Are you saying she cheated? Yes, I am. I'm saying she cheated.

I didn't want to say it, but now that you brought it up. Chuck. I'm going to let you tell that to Sonny, okay? Wait, wait. Just to be clear, just to be clear, she has devices that weigh her down

onto the treadmill. I got it. That's the whole thing. Okay. It's probably harder up there, Chuck, than it is on the ground. She's got this elastic band around her waist with straps that go down to the base of the treadmill. So she's running and trying not to levitate up, but those bands are keeping her down on the treadmill. Right.

And that's going to affect her actual technique. She's going to have to learn a new technique to run with all of that equipment. All right. I take it back. I take it back. So no cheating. She was actually at a disadvantage. Yeah.

Did you take a pigskin up into the shuttle? I took up. And start whizzing that thing around? The NFL Hall of Fame gave me a football to take to space. And we also took, Gary, the NFL Super Bowl coin for the 2010 Super Bowl. Nice. So we flipped the coin in space. And it never came down.

And it never came down. It's at Jupiter now. Everybody's still waiting for the game to start. I know, right? They're just sitting around. We did rock, paper, scissors to decide who was going to get the toss. That's cool. Okay.

Very good. Okay, so you prepare to go to space. You do your thing while you're up there, and once you return, there's these effects and consequences. But how did you feel about the return? And is it the same for everybody? Or do we have a personal variation in the way things present? Interesting. Gary, as a professional athlete yourself, do you really understand how your body works in 3D space? And, you know, jumping up to take a soccer ball or walking or running or whatever. And when I came back, you know, it took me probably about a week to get back to some semblance of normalcy because your vestibular system, your inner ear in space, it's the data that it's giving

because if there's little rocks in your inner ears are floating, all that data is wrong. So when you start moving and turning and trying to figure out what orientation you're in, that's when you sometimes get sick because your eyes see one thing and your ears are telling you something else and your brain is confused. And so your brain shuts all that down and then just looks at your eyes for orientation. But when you come home, it's trying to reintegrate the inner ear data. And now there's this conflict.

And so if you're walking in a straight line and this just started to turn, you can just fall over because your brain is really screwed up trying to figure it out. So every astronaut will fail a sobriety test. Exactly. Officer, I am not drunk.

I just got back from space. And then he'll go, yeah, right. Okay, so two things. I mean, I've just got off a plane yesterday at a transatlantic flight, so I've got some jet lag. Do you then experience a similar thing

from returning from space? And how do you work with time? Because you don't have the same sort of reference points unless, of course, everything's tethered to a certain time zone back on Earth. So you're saying we have jet lag. You wonder if there is something called rocket lag. Space lag.

Rocket lag. And aren't you on the time zone of Houston because they're the ones yapping at you all the time? Well, we always have multiple watches on different time zones. So you might have your home time zone. You have GMT. You know, you have also you have Mission Control.

So you have all different time zones. But Gary, when you come home, you know, you have also you have mission control. So you have all different time zones. But Gary, when you come home, you're buying. Why do you care what time it is in Greenwich, England when you're in space? Because the space station is kind of slave to that. Because you have people all over the world working. Oh, that's the agreed upon time. I got it. There you go.

Plus they have a marketing deal with the watchmakers. But it is. It's a national space station. And they it. There you go. Plus they have a marketing deal with the watchmakers. But it is the International Space Station. And they all listen to the BBC. Exactly. Man, you're all over this. When I got home, my, you know,

because you've been floating and all this floating, I went to bed and I got up to go use the bathroom, like most people do in the middle of the night. And I started pushing off of my back like I was just going to float to the toilet. Just to be clear, older men get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Yes. Thanks for introducing that.

You confess the state of your prostate in that sentence. Yeah, well, listen. If you drink a lot of water before you go to bed. There you go. Oh, okay. We're just, listen. If you drink a lot of water before you go to bed. There you go. Oh, okay. We're just properly hydrated. Hydration. We're properly hydrated, that's all.

But your brain is still thinking that you're in space and you're trying to navigate now the 1G, the one gravitational pull world. And so you think you can do things that you were doing in space. Like if you're eating a meal, you might have a plate,

you put something on a plate, and then you just let go of it and turn around and the plate gets to grab on. Because in space, everything just floats. That's amazing. I love it.

What is it harder to do? Prepare for a space mission or recover from a space mission. And, you know, as we've discussed, a professional athlete, a former professional athlete like yourself is so conscious of their body because they've used it to do their business. So I'd be interested to hear how you feel about either side of a space mission. Okay.

Again, back to, as Neil said, the short duration space shuttle versus the long duration ISS living, very different. I basically had a vestibular system issue for about a week trying to navigate turning and moving in 3D space

and just not being cardiovascularly in shape like I was before I left because I was running, I was doing all this stuff. But people that go long duration, they come back and they have all kinds of things happen. Like there's something called the intraocular pressure in your head that pushes on your eyeballs and causes you to have to wear glasses if you haven't had to wear glasses before. And that is not necessarily reversible when you come home.

So they're still trying to do the research to figure that part out. You know, your muscle atrophy, your bone density, those things do diminish a little bit. But if you do the two hours of exercise, cardio and the weightlifting equivalent, you can kind of mitigate some of those problems. Whoa, did you say two hours? That's every day?

Two hours a day. Every day, they have to work out two hours a day. They have got a space gym. Wow. It's pretty cold. Every astronaut has to do the same thing. Yes. So imagine you're having to stagger your rotor, right,

if you've got jobs and tasks that you need to fulfill, but you still need to fulfill the two hours per day. There's so much more involved. They schedule that into your day, though. Okay. I mean, you have planners on the ground that put that in for you because that's a countermeasure that we use to stay healthy. And when do they schedule the couch and potato chip time?

That's on your time. You have to figure that out. Leland, a last question before we let you go. And can you imagine a future where we find a planet that has slightly more gravity than Earth, and you bring an entire athletic team there to work out under these heavier gravity conditions, and then bring them back to Earth and have them kick ass in whatever sport they're in. That's called cheating.

That's called cheating. Just so I haven't had my own damn rocket. Is it cheating? We take athletes to altitude train, warm weather, and we oxygenate their blood and everybody does it.

So just get your own rocket, dude. Everyone has that access to it. Right. Access, opportunity. Right. Oh. Yes.

Level playing field. Inclusion. That's what the Russians argue all the time. They're like, everyone has access to steroid. All right. Leland, we got to say goodbye to you,

but StarTalk will continue with Dr. Shana Gifford, who's otherwise known as the Space Doc. Let's find out why when StarTalk returns. And Leland, really good to see you. We'll catch up with you again. We'll be back. We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. Space Cowboy. Garyary who'd you bring in for the second segment

well we've spoken to the space cowboy and that's obviously a reference to leland melvin's time as a dallas cowboy couldn't resist the title what i from from speaking with with leland all the questions start to tumble as to how you prepare, how you recover, what you do while you're there, but then throw that forward even further into, with the answers we get to those questions, how does that enlighten what we do in terms of space travel in the future? How does it educate and direct us? So for that, we need someone in the medical profession who has an experience of dealing with these sort of cases. The perfect person is Dr. Shana Gifford.

Now this, as we remember at the beginning of the show, is self-titled the Space Doc. The reason being, she was from the 2015-2016 High Seas 4 one-year mission to virtual Mars. So to go through that whole discipline, that whole knowledge set exists in one person. So for me, this is our perfect follow-up guest. Okay.

Shannon Giver, welcome to StarTalk. And so tell us about HI-SEAS. What was that about? All right. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. Oh, so it's an acronym. HI-SEAS. Isn't it's an acronym. I see. Isn't it always an acronym, though?

It always is. In space, it's always an acronym. In fact, maybe my name is an acronym. So what does it mean, a one-year virtual mission to Mars? Does that make you a virtual doctor? Well, if I'm taking care of you over the internet, it does. Good one, good does. Good one. Good one.

So, yeah. No, I mean, virtual missions. I'm an analog astronaut. I've participated in space simulations. My first was for NASA at Johnson Space Center, locked in a big air hangar in a spacecraft. And they locked us in. They shut the doors. And all we saw on the screens was space for about a week until they told us to get

in our rocket ship and explore an asteroid. And then they flew us home. We had mission control, the whole setup. It was very real. Wow. And very scary at times. And then we did so well on that, that two of us got sent up to simulated Mars for a year. And we spent a year living on the side of a barren, although not totally unactive volcano. The volcano occasionally woke up and reminded us we were on a volcano. But, hey. You spent a year? 366 days.

Did I hear you correctly? A year? Neil, you know I did. I made you a movie from it. I know, but I still don't believe. It's still crazy. And there's no, there was no, like, vending machine for Twinkies? Oh, I didn't say that.

You had to... Oh. Yeah, what else would you take to Mars? Twinkies never spoil. Let's see, the Pringles, PB&J. An entire hospital full of equipment, nurses, phlebotomists. Yeah, that would be great. Unfortunately, I literally had a doctor bag,

like the doctors of old. Really? That's what I had for a whole year. Like a little black doctor's bag? Like a Norman Rockwell doctor bag? Indeed. Yeah, yeah. And it unbuckles open?

It has a brass latch and everything. Wow. I would have think they would have at least like played it off and gave you one of those little tricorder readers that they from Star Trek. Oh, and they did. And it had a little laser function. Everything made great fun sounds, but it didn't actually do anything, unfortunately. It was very disappointing. So let's get this into an interesting subject. go, Gary. I gotta, because you know I gotta do this, because you're the space doc. Did you ever even

just mess with somebody, turn to anyone and go, he's dead, Jim. Or say, I'm a doctor, not a butcher, damn it, or something like that. You know, but when a colleague's spacesuit almost caught on fire

and he had to come out of the airlock so that it didn't catch on fire I thought to myself am I a doctor? I'm a doctor, not a fireman, right? Yes, right. Okay, your spacesuit can't catch on fire. That's right out.

That's kind of cool. But you gotta say it. You gotta say it. I'm a doctor, not a fireman, damn it. Not a fireman, damn it. That's right. That sounds like a practical joke that went wrong. Everything goes wrong in space.

The space suit catches on fire. This is why we practice. This is why we do space simulations, because everything that can go wrong in space will go wrong fantastically in space. You mentioned, I mean, all right, we got onto Twinkies and everything else, and then you realize you're not up there with a fully functional kitchen,

but you must be doing something up there to get some fresh produce. Are you growing? Are you culturing? What's happening in that environment? Or is it all like, you know, what stick a dollar in the machine and out comes whatever it is you need? And just to be clear, it's not up there. It's in there, right?

Where was this? In our dome, dome on the range, dome on the volcano, we did actually have a fully functional kitchen because it started as a food study. In fact, we had a gourmet kitchen. But on the ISS, they don't exactly have a gourmet kitchen. And in the experiment at NASA, we were the rehydrators in chief. We literally had a bag of warm water and we injected it into our meals, shook it vigorously and enjoyed.

This worked well except for the cereal. When you rehydrate cereal, which had milk powder on it, it does not go well. Those Cheerios do not hold up. I'm just saying. But no, we grow. To answer your question, Gary,

we grow, we culture, we cultivate, but in small volume. Space is at a premium in space. So you can get some micronutrients and some macronutrients. I like that line. Space is at a premium. So really, we could grow as much as we needed to live. So we were discussing with Leland about your bones and the density.

Is there anything you as a doctor can do to mitigate those circumstances? Or have we already done it by adjusting the gravity within the environment you're in? Yeah, because Chuck would just rather take a pill and go back to his couch. We've tried that, Chuck. I would like to take a pill and do anything.

And I could see that. I could see you doing that just about anything. Next time we meet, I'm going to give you some pills and ask you to do some things. So hold on to that. Yeah. We've tried everything. We have tried pills called bisphosphonates, which we give to people with osteoporosis on earth who don't have enough bone. It turns out that the risks outweigh the benefits. We weren't getting a lot out of it. So we stopped doing that. We do supplement though calcium and phosphorus and other things you need,

just like on earth to build boat. So in my patients who are in wheelchairs, who don't load their skeletons by walking, in space you don't load your skeleton by walking, we heavily supplement vitamin D, calcium. There's those things you need to scaffold and build bone. So the astronauts get their vitamins and minerals. And then like Leland was saying,

two hours a day of exercise where we load people on the T2 treadmill by putting a waistband on them and literally bungee courting them to the treadmill so that they do some advancing and they do some strikes. It's the foot strikes. Right. It's the pounding, right? I read a study years ago that talked about how runners actually have better bone density because

of the pounding, which is also something that wears their bones. So it was this weird kind of, you got to find this equilibrium. Yeah, it's a rejuvenative thing. So what was funny is during COVID, I take care- I mean, if it doesn't break your bones and give you shin. Yeah, it's a rejuvenative thing. So what was funny is during COVID, I take care- I mean, if it doesn't break your bones and give you shin splints, it'll make you better. Right, right. Yeah, or for my Boston marathoners, if it doesn't make you pass out after mile 20, right?

But I used to take care of marathoners, sportsmen, sportswomen. And during COVID, they stopped running for a while. They told everyone just stay indoors. And immediately all these people developed knee pain, hip pain, back pain. And they came into my office and they said, doc, I've been running 20, 30, 40 miles a week for years. Why am I hurting now? And I said, because you stopped. Right. You stopped. I feel that way about drinking.

You've been treating your existential pain with alcohol. That's right. But Chuck, you haven't stopped drinking, so how do you know? Oh, my God. That was so well played. I'm at a loss. That was so well played.

And there's no comeback. Just shut up. Oh, snap. Dishy went top gun on me. She just... Okay, wait. She's in the penalty box for 10 minutes. Let me defer, Shana.

I will now be goose to your maverick. You can be maverick now. I got to be goose. Chuck, I'm feeling the need for speed. I think our director would like us to move on here. Here we go. That was great. All right, sorry, go ahead.

All right, so, Chaney, you talked about some of your patients being wheelchair propelled. All right. There was a mission astro access experiment that you were involved in. I mean, am I right here, the para-astronauts? Correct. Yeah. And then if you look at that in a microgravity, were these people actually able to propel themselves upright rather than not have to be wheelchair propelled? And how is this developing in terms of astronauts? That's a great question.

So Mission Astro Access, we put, myself, two flight surgeons put, and a whole team, an amazing team, put 12 people who I say are adapted visually. Some of them had no sight, auditorially or vestibularly. Some of them had no hearing. And then mobility-wise, some of them propel by wheelchairs on Earth. But you put them in space- With their own arms. With their arms. With their own arms. Or in the case of Dana Bowles, who works for NASA and was one of our wonderful ambassadors, she was born without arms or legs. So she propels by electric wheelchair beautifully

and has worked for NASA for many years. In microgravity or lunar gravity or Martian gravity, we had all kinds of gravity during this mission. Many of them could stand, could extend into full extension. And the look on their face when you haven't stood in 12 years or 10 years, when you haven't extended without many people helping you or without having to hold onto a bar, when of your own free will, you just stood. It was incredible. And one of our ambassadors, who has a very rare genetic condition,

stood on his own for the first time in his life. Wow. In lunar gravity. It was remarkable. That's amazing. It was remarkable. Eric, you are amazing. So let me ask this follow-up question. Are para-astronauts teaching scientists now

of maybe how being adaptive in a microgravity will help future space endeavors? I think para-astronauts and para-athletes, people who are adapted to life on Earth and have to function differently here all the time. You know, you put high-functioning people like Leland, who are literally rock stars, superstars, star athletes, you put them in space and suddenly they're disabled.

They have to learn how to function in that environment. You take people on earth who are labeled as disabled, but they function beautifully. You put them in a new environment and they just flip on a dime. They know what it means to adapt. They know what it means to change, to have to do things differently, to not be suited to the environment you're in. They are so much better and faster at this than any of us ever will be that I think they have a lot to teach us. I really do. I can't wait till we get one of them up there. That was the premise of the movie. What's the movie? We're the blue people on the planet Pandora, but the main character- Avatar.

Thank you, Avatar. But the main, he was a paraplegic. And because he couldn't use his legs, he immediately acclimated to the avatar. He was completely used to just changing his mental environment. Really how we function in the world is about our mental model of the world and what we're supposed to be able to do and how we function. When your mental model is, I'm going to make it happen no matter what, you cannot stop me, which is the mental model of every single adapted, every single disabled person in the world. Right. Then you put them in a new environment, they're just going to adapt. It doesn't take them a minute. So are we looking at this, I'll call it the standard body shape, maybe not being the best solution in a microgravity environment?

It goes to being one of many possible solutions, one of many possible ways to be, not the best way, just a way. And now Sawyer, for example, Sawyer works for NASA as well down in Florida at Kennedy Space Center. You know, he's been ambulating, propelling with a wheelchair for many years. You put Sawyer on the International Space Station,

he's going to move around as well as anyone else. And he's not going to try to use his feet. It wouldn't occur to him to do that. Everything is going to be arm powered and he's going to be fast, use his feet. It wouldn't occur to him to do that. Everything is going to be arm powered and he's going to be fast, much faster than people who are used to walking are going to be the second you put Sawyer up there. And Sawyer, we're going to get you up there, my friend.

You just wait. So it sounds like it's not only from what we learned from Leland, what you do with your body to get in shape, but your mind as well. The adaptability of your mind and how it then thinks about your body seems to be at least half the effort up there in space. I'd say it's closer to 80%.

Oh, 80%. The other 20% is following the procedure, the checklist that says, do this, don't do that, do this, don't do that. And by the way, Chuck, there is a point in the checklist where you get to it and you're like, time to panic. Oh, oh, good. Yes, exactly. I'm going to take a break and we're going to come back to that in the third segment of StarTalk Sports Edition, Space Cowboy and Space Cowboy Doctor. Space Doc on StarTalk. We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition.

We're talking about being a space cowboy and being a space doc. Relevant to that. We've got Dr. Shana Gifford here. Shana, your expertise is rehabilitation. Is that right? That's correct. We've got Dr. Shana Gifford here. Shana, your expertise is rehabilitation, is that right? That's correct. So we got to hear Leland Melvin talk about, he didn't use the word rehabilitate, but readjust to 1G after being in 0G.

And he gave us some details about his auditory canal and his brain. So what role do you play in this where they just have to shake it off over a week of Earth gravity? Can you help this? What's your role in getting astronauts to get back to one dream? So we can shake it off and we call it re-acclimate.

Kind of like you re-acclimate to coming down from an altitude or to traveling to another time zone. There's things you can do. One of them is sleep. While they've been on the ISS, we give them, I believe you, we give them eight hours a night to sleep, but they usually don't. They usually get closer to six for a lot of reasons that are complicated. So we get back to earth, we say, sleep, please sleep. And then we say, remember, when you put down the water bottle, it won't float.

You need to put it down with your hand on a surface. And then they say, okay, and they drop it. We say, that's okay. Try again. Try again. And they get it after a few times. So all of that clicks into gear very quickly. They stop dropping things. They start remembering that you can't just put stuff down. It's not going to be there when you reach forward again. But then when it comes to the walking, that takes a while, a little while to come back, which is why every picture you see of every astronaut, they're being flanked by someone on either side

as they're walking away typically, or they're standing still. But when they go to walk down a straight corridor, there'll often be one person on either side because they may start to drift. And they may start to drift because the fluid in your inner ear, it's continued to swish around in space. But the sensors that pick up that swishing have shut themselves down after the first few days to a week in space. They just said, we don't need you. And they literally turn off in most people.

So the ability to sense where am I in space relative to my body and the walls and other things in space, that's off for a little while. And it takes a little while to come back. And we can do some vestibular retraining. We do that with them, people who've had strokes, people who've had injuries. We can do some vestibular retraining to try and get that to come back more quickly. So are you talking about, sorry, are you talking about here that anyone who's had an extended period of time in microgravity basically becoming allergic to gravity? You know, it's almost like you've been redesigned. You were designed to function well in this gravity well, 1G.

And your body now says, oh, all that stuff I needed for that, I don't need that anymore. Your body is amazingly good at forgetting. It's also good at remembering, but it's great at forgetting. It'll forget that dripping faucet. It's called habituation. It's going to turn that off. We don't need that. It'll forget those traumatic experiences maybe. We don't need that. It'll forget that I need to use my legs to walk. You'll forget that. You'll even forget that on earth if you're lying in a hospital bed for too long, which is why even my patients have had a surgery. I say, get up. They walk and they say, doc, I can't. You won't be able to if you don't start now. You need to get up. I know. I'm sorry. And just sit up for me.

Dangle your legs. Put your feet on me. So it's not just atrophy, muscle atrophy. That's neurological. It happens with muscle atrophy. That's neurological. It happens with the brain connection. It's neurological. You remember and you forget. So your muscles and your bones start atrophying right away. First thing. Anyone who's had a long illness can tell you it only takes days. And then your body starts to forget. The muscles forget, the bones forget, and the actual circuitry starts to say, do I need to be here? I'm not being used. I don't know, not sure. And so part of rehab is reminding everything, the bones, the muscles, and the brain, this is how it's supposed to work. Now we need to work together. So if you have three astronauts that return to full gravity, wherever that might be, like I say, a moon base, Mars, back here on Earth,

will they all present with the same symptoms? Or does it vary from individual to individual? Like everything else, there'll be shades of difference. But everyone will still be in the same color scheme, if that makes sense. So you're all going to come back feeling a little blue, but it may be light blue, navy blue, midnight blue. You know, some people are going to come back, and they're just kind of stepped right back into it.

Mark and Scott Kelly like to say that, you know, after a few days they were feeling pretty good. And then some people, and different things come back differently. In case no one else is on a first-name basis with them, we're talking about twins. One stayed on Earth, and one went up into space. And then the one in space got the overview effect. So, no, but they were up for a very long time and became sort of the model medical experiment for the effects of space versus Earth living.

And so… You know, the two of them have both been up. And then one stayed home to care for his wife, Gabby Giffords, after she was injured. And that's the one who's currently a rep, I believe. And then Scott was the one who was up for a year. And he was good enough to call me during my mission and wish us luck. And he was so kind.

But they've both been. And according to Endurance, which I believe is the title of Scott's book, he acclimated in many ways very quickly. He was sitting at the table with his family, eating dinner there a few days after he got back. But then he woke up in the middle of the night with incredibly swollen legs

because his body, his veins, forgot how to pump the fluid back up against gravity. They had just given up doing that for so long. They didn't need to. Right, right. They didn't need to. Why did they need to? So he woke up with these very swollen legs.

That was his shade. Other people come back and they have different shades. They stumble more or it takes them much longer to get back to running. So we put them in special treadmills that are filled with water and they literally run in a water treadmill until they get their groove back to running on earth and full earth gravity. So everyone is back. They're back in their color. They're like, I'm feeling a little blue, but maybe it's a different shade. Everyone has their thing. Do you get sort of like pressure sores from if you've been in microgravity a long time from just sitting because you're not used to the contact? Yeah. Thankfully, skin shearing, like the health of the skin and pressure sores, pressure sores happen when people don't have the sensation and don't know to move away from the pain.

So as long as you sense your nerves are intact, usually you won't get a pressure and you can move. Usually you don't get a pressure sore. What they will get though is the bottoms of their feet have lost all their calluses. What? Their calluses...

So it's like going to space and getting a pedicure. It's the best pedicure I've ever had. It's so soft and smooth. It's so smooth. So they get calluses on the tops of their feet because they're always hooking into the box at the Lord's destination. Yeah.

And the bottoms of their feet literally shed, and it is super gross. Okay. All of them have pictures of it, and it's gross. Well, that's a bad trade-off. They come back to Earth, and they have to redevelop their calluses on their feet. Yeah, yeah. Nobody's looking at the bottom of my feet when I'm wearing some flip-flops.

Is anyone ever looking at the bottom of your feet, Sean? That's true. Very good point, Shana. Wait, wait. So what you're saying is that the bottoms of the feet look like they're molting or something. Is that correct? Yes, they are shedding. They're shedding skin.

Wow. It's quite a thing. Let's, I mean, with all of this experience and knowledge that we've gained, how do we need to overcome the physiological issues to, say, take us from Earth to the moon, maybe to Mars or further, and not find ourselves having to deal with all of these problems once you return to a full gravity? We haven't.

Right. Well, wouldn't it be, wouldn't a solution be to create gravity in space? So 2001 Space Odyssey. Artificial, an artificial gravity. If you've got a 2001 Space Odyssey type solution where part of the station rotates, that will give you some relief.

It will. It should give you 100% relief. Why not? Why not? So, because when you lock somebody in a box away from... Oh, that's different. Okay. The isolation piece is still there.

The radiation piece is still there. Even if you've given someone gravity back. And the homicidal computer, you know. Please don't give them that. Please skip on the how. Let's pass. Let's not stop for 200. Let's pass right past how.

They will still have immune system issues. They may still have psychological issues. Wow. And they still have to worry about radiation. Unless we've come up with that. Do we have a magic wand for that too? I would really like that. You know what's funny? It just

dawned on me that what you said, we are seeing the effects of from just the pandemic. And we weren't even locked in a box. We were just locked in our homes. I mean, unfortunately with our families, but still, that was Well, now we know how Chuck feels about his family.

Yeah, apparently. I make no bones about it. Honey, I love you. Chuck, if you're listening. Well, thank you. Say the nicest things. That was for you, Gary. I can understand the calcium bone situation,

but how does our immune system begin to suffer in space? Because you're in an environment that is pristine. Or is it? Am I wrong there? Wouldn't that be the problem?'re in an environment that is pristine, or is it? Am I wrong there? Wouldn't that be the problem? I would not call the ISS pristine. I don't think Leland or anyone who's been up would call our space environments pristine. It's a vehicle one yard shy of a football stadium. It's an enormous, enormous place that people have been having. The space station is. The station is, Yeah, so 109 meters long.

And we've been inhabiting it for 20 years. And we've never sent up a full-blown cleaning service. Ew. So I wouldn't call it pristine, but I would say. And astronauts exercising two hours a day. Two hours a day, every day for the last 20 years. And do they recycle the water from people's sweat and pee? Oh!

Everything. No, they just open water from people's sweat and pee? Oh! Everything. No, they just open a window and let it out. Yeah, I got to go with Gary. You can just roll down a window for a few minutes and let some fresh air in. So NASA's Brian Krushen, who's the expert in this, will tell you that a couple things happen. When anyone here box?

Do you ever box? And you got to get your elbows down and your guard up and you get in your stance? So our immune system's like a boxer. It's looking out for the bad guy. It's looking, it's ready. And then in space, one immune cell called a cytokine, which is kind of like a referee. It tells our immune system where to aim. It gets really confused. It's like, where am I looking again? Because normally you got to score off against the person in front of you. Where am I looking again?

Because normally you got to score off against the person in front of you. But suddenly, yeah. And people sometimes, their immune systems react in strange ways. Childhood diseases reactivate. They get strange rashes. But again, it varies. Everyone's different. But the immune system.

Damn, Shana, I don't want to go into space anymore. I'm telling you. I mean, seriously, it kind of sounds worse than being at one of those one-hour motels. What's happening to you in those motels? Never been, Chuck. I don't know what your situation is. I was very sleepy. I needed a nap.

Yeah, for an hour. You took the pill, didn't you? So the thing is, what you've described sounds horrible. What you've just described, Shaina, sounds horrible. So why would we want to put ourselves through all of that? Well, this also happens to people on submarines, Gary. Yeah. And this happens to people on aircraft carriers.

And in Antarctica, every single year. And every great mission and every great endeavor involves a change. In Antarctica, there's a research station, and no one is frolicking on the ice sheets. They're basically inside with each other in an enclosed environment. They do frolick a little in the snowmobiles, but it's been there for 50 years, and people overwinter every single year, and they're kind of locked up on the base a little bit during that time.

I have to tell you, though, you really didn't answer Gary's question. He said, this sounds awful. Why would people want to do this? And then you said, well, they also want to be in submarines in Antarctica. And all those things also sounded awful. Josh, you're just saying it was not a unique problem. The U.S. Navy is now writing you a love letter, Chuck.

Chuck has always known he was the wrong stuff, right? You know what? Listen, Neil, I know you're kind of joking, but I think you, I'm going to put that on my tombstone. Chuck Nice. Chuck Nice is the right stuff for a nice cushy seat in mission control. So as I like to say, space needs everybody, but it doesn't need you all in the same place at the same time.

It needs some of you in Mission Control, that nice cushy seat, the warm coffee. It needs some of you building the rocket. It needs some of you launching the rocket. It needs some of you repairing. It needs some of you in the rocket in space. It needs everybody to be where you need to be. And some people love this. I love this.

Mark and Scott Kelly love this. Leland loves this. And maybe you love your coffee and your air on chair and mission control, Chuck. There's a place for us all in space. It's just not maybe in space. Let me just say this. Failure is not an option. If we cannot travel in space

without this discomfort, these problems, are we stuck on our little blue marble? Absolutely not. And by the way, we're going to get over that discomfort. I think some very rich and very people very used to comforts

have been in space now and they've done just fine. In fact, they came back crying, if I recall, William Shatner. You know, he's not a hard player. He's not passing the pigskin as Leland is. The man lives a comfortable life, but he came back from his seven-minute exposure to microgravity in tears, barely able to speak, so profoundly moved. And he's not a sentimental man.

And so I'm going to say it's, I think it's… And he's hardly ever a man for no words. Right. The man can talk. Yeah, he really can. He's well niverbose, kind of like Chuck. So I would say it's a place for us all to go for some period of time,

maybe just a brief glimpse, or maybe for the rest of our lives. It's what do you need out of it? What's going to be your best trip to space? Make that trip. Okay. Space needs me, apparently. Space needs you.

In whichever role I can find. In whatever capacity. And right now, for the little price of $110,000, you can go. No, the first airline tickets were that much. The first civilians who went flying after World War II paid a lot of money. You're right, you're right.

It was kind of a luxury curiosity more than it was a mode of transportation. And T-minus 60 years later, save up a little bit, you know, on your summer job and you're off. In fact, there's a line in a Cole Porter song, the one I get no kicks from champagne. One of the lines is, I get no kicks in a plane. Really? So that was a, the plane was a reference point for people who would take thrill rides in that song

when that song was written. Yeah. So I'm just showing off my Broadway knowledge there. There you go. Yeah. So Shana, I think we're going to have to call it quits there. Oh, no. I've got to end on that note.

I missed you, Chaco. Where you said, there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of space experience for us all that could possibly change us for the better forever. There's something out there. Get out there. Find it. There's something out there for us all. All right. Gary, did you have any last questions you had to put on the table?

No, I'm good. I mean, I'm going to go away and unpack what we've learned from this show. Yeah, good, good, good. It's pretty amazing to understand what astronauts like Leland Melvin have gone through and then how scientists and physicians like Shana Gifford here are able to assess, redirect, comfort, rehabilitate, and just allow us to then maybe improve these situations going forward. It's fantastic.

Yeah. Yeah. And I delighted learning about the para-astronauts. I didn't even know that was a thing. They're remarkable. To the extent we can learn about that. Dana, Nina, all of my para-astronauts, all 12 Mission Astroaxis ambassadors, you guys are amazing.

Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Shout out to them all. All right. This has been StarTalk Sports Edition, Space Cowboy and Space Docs. I want to thank Leland Melvin and Shana Gifford for giving us their time to take us

where no one has gone before. Where hundreds have gone before. Only 600 have gone before. 600. To boldly go where 600 have gone before. All right. This has been StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here.

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