StarTalk Radio - Inside NASA Mission Control, with Astro Mike Massimino - StarTalk All-Stars

Episode Date: September 20, 2016

Former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino puts on his old CAPCOM headset and takes us inside Johnson Space Center, with a little help from his guests, Flight Directors Emily Nelson and Royce Renfrew, and co-host Maeve Higgins. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

This is StarTalk. All-Stars. I tried to say it like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Did you catch that? Okay, Star Talk All-Stars. I'm your All-Star host tonight, and I have with me in studio my comedic co-host, Maeve Higgins. Hello. Thank you for having me. Maeve, thank God you're here. Thanks for being here. I'm going to go by Comic Maeve, maybe. Comic Maeve? Just to go with your astromyke. Is that your Twitter?

No, but I mean, I just thought of it. I think it's going to be. Comic Maeve. It's a good way. This way, tell them what you do for a living and then give them your name. Yeah. That's the way all Twitter handles should be. And you definitely have to do that if you're a comedian and you're not very funny. You have to keep reminding people, I'm a comedian.

You are very funny. That was funny what you just said. Thank you. All right, Maeve. With this episode of All Stars, we're going to give everyone a peek into the NASA Mission Control Center. I'm so excited for our guest today. You know, these are two very good friends of mine who I both work with, and I think they probably have dirt on me. Because as an astronaut, you get to work in the control center as a CAPCOM, which is a spacecraft communicator speaking to astronauts in space.

I was lucky enough to do that for many years when I was an astronaut. And also, you get to work as a crew member really closely with your flight directors. They more or less run the flight making sure you're going to be okay in all areas, mission success and in your personal well-being, which means making sure you're kept alive. They are totally in charge. They are the burning bush. Everyone listens to them when they talk. And these are two of the best ones we've got right here. The two flight directors that will be speaking with, Emily Nelson and Royce Renfrew.

They're right now coming to us from the Johnson Space Center. How are you guys? Hey, we're great. How are you today? Hey, Mike. It's great to have you guys. You look great up on the big screen. I guess this is a radio show, so people can't see you, but I can see you on the big screen, and you guys both look great.

You do. Thank you for joining us. We're happy to be here. It's so funny. You have this job, but you just look like regular people. Nobody would know. You're wearing blouses and suit jackets, and nobody would know you're kind of a superhero. They don't need the clothes to be superheroes. They just they just themselves and everyone knows they're in charge. The superhero gears when we put on our headsets.

There you go. That's it. That's right. We know they're in charge. Yes. So I thought it might be interesting. Both of you have had very exciting careers. And, you know, what would you say? I'm going to ask you guys this question, because we used to talk about this in the astronaut office. What are the two best jobs you could have in the space program? Number one and two, maybe not necessarily in order. What do you think the most exciting jobs are in the space program? Number one is clearly flight director. And what's number two? I guess astronaut.

All right, there you go. But that's the way we used to feel about it, that if we felt that the coolest job was astronaut, we're lucky enough to have that. But I would say a close second, and maybe some people could argue even more cooler than being an astronaut, is flight director. It really is a cool job, and it's not an easy job to get. There's only been 100 people or less than 100 people that have been flight directors. Many more have been astronauts. So it's very select. Where do you start to become a flight director?

I think that's a good question for these two very successful flight directors. Why don't we start there, both of you? You can tell us. How did you get to where you're in charge of the control center? So actually, I started out as a high school math teacher when I got out of college. And I spent seven years doing that job. And that actually played into my getting hired out here at JSC. The original job that I had was as an instructor for the

robotic system on board the station. And when they hired me as an instructor out here, they were looking for people that had a technical background and also had some history of a teacher or whatever. So I actually fit perfectly. I had a computer science degree and seven years of teaching high school mathematics. perfectly. I had a computer science degree and seven years of teaching high school mathematics, and I wound up getting hired out here to teach astronauts how to operate the robotic arm on station. Do you remember teaching me? Do you remember teaching me, Royce? You were my instructor way back when. Do you remember that? I do. Or have you blocked that out of your head?

How would you rate Moss as a student? He was great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he forgets. Thank God his memory is selective. But I was just going to say, you had to teach astronauts, and I think teaching high school kids probably was not as challenging as teaching astronauts. It was probably a good way for you to get ready to do that.

So I think your time in the high school classroom was probably good. I didn't know that. So you did that, and then you became a robot instructor for the astronauts. And then what happened? I became a flight controller for that same system. So I was a robo in the flight control team, which is the flight controller that's responsible for the robotic arm

on board station. And then I worked for a while as an ODIN. We have all these names of console positions, and then we try to fit them into some description, but we pick the name first. But ODIN was responsible for the big computer network on board station, the one that runs it. And then I was the manager of the ODIN group for a little while, and I was selected as a flight director in 2008. So a lot of different positions in the control room before I got selected as a flight director, but this is by far the most fun job.

And what about you, Emily? Mine is much more simple. As soon as I graduated from college, I figured out that this is where I wanted to be. I wasn't one of the folks like Royce that started out necessarily wanting to come here. I just knew I wanted to do what I could to make the world a better place, if at all possible, and figured out that this was a great environment to work in. Went straight to flight control. I worked as a Thor, the thermal operations, managing the thermal

systems on the space station as we were assembling the space station, and pretty much went straight from Thor to flight. So mine is far less interesting. I only worked in one console before getting selected as a flight director in 2007. How long have you been out here? Almost 20 years, right? We've been out here almost the same amount. I got out here in 98.

Yeah. Yeah. So almost 20 years for both of us. So on-site 20 years at JSC. And how many years as a flight director for each of you? So I was selected in 2008. so eight years going on nine here. And nine going on ten for me. All right.

And, you know, you say it's a straightforward, simple, but it's not anything like that. I mean, what they did, Maeve, was incredible. As, you know, Royce as an instructor and then as a flight controller, you know, they worked their way up to get into the front room of the control center and then into being a flight director. It's a big application and interview. And they make it sound easy. I know, right? It is not.

Because I was starting to think, oh, maybe I could do that. Maybe you could, but it takes a lot of hard work and dedication. What do you think are the, like, apart from your qualifications, what do you think is the sort of personality type that you need to do this kind of work? We have a variety of personality types. That's what makes it interesting. It's a game, really, in the flight control community to try to figure out why people got selected. People want to be flight directors. They look at the previous class that got selected and say, well, why did these people get selected? And we do have a variety of different personality types in the office, which I think is good, and a variety of backgrounds as well.

Just like any team, you want as much of a diverse skill set as you can get. And so with each new selection, we're looking for folks who have skills that would fill holes in our experience base currently. So I would say a lot of us, clearly we have all demonstrated leadership capability. We've all demonstrated a capacity to learn quickly because we're certainly not experts on every system, but we may need to become an expert on every system very quickly in the event that something goes wrong. So there are a lot of fundamentals that we had to demonstrate along the way, but our style is probably all pretty unique. We're all a little bit different in that way. As far as something goes wrong, can each of you give us an example of an emergency when

you were on console that you had to act quickly? Give us the inside scoop. So I'll jump in there that the one that comes to mind we were we were talking about before the we started here was the the spacewalk we did in december the eva 35 with tim peak and tim cobra uh during that spacewalk when Jim Coper reported, he was starting to see some water on the inside of his helmet in the visor area of his helmet. And we wound up executing our protocols

that we had put in place to make the determination that we wanted to terminate that EVA based on a couple of different signatures that we were seeing and brought Tim Coper and Tim Peek back inside, got them out of their spacesuits and everything was fine in the end. But obviously that's not the way that we had planned the EVA, but we had prepared and we train all the time for events like that where we need to do something in a hurry to terminate an EVA or to take some other action on board station to keep the crew safe, the vehicle safe, and then work on the success of the mission that we're operating. Yeah, that was very much a life-threatening situation. Very dramatic.

Probably the water in the helmet is probably the closest we've came to losing someone during a spacewalk. It is the closest we've come to losing someone in spacewalk. Would you guys agree with that? Well, so in Mr. Coper's case here, we were far away from a life- situation. But we have very conservative protocols in place now to make sure that we don't get into a configuration where it is life threatening. So we had the water in the helmet, which triggered actions by my team and myself

to bring the crew back inside. But it could have escalated. That's why we took the actions that we did. But I thought Tim Coper was safe and moving forward the entire time. We were prepared to go to the next level of a breakout of an EVA, which is called an EVA abort. But we did not get to that. We stayed in the terminate case the entire time. So that worked out OK. We ran our protocols as designed based on the signatures that we were seeing and got both crew back

inside safely. But it's still not a configuration I wanted to be in, but I thought the team handled it very well, both on board and my team there in the control center. A lot of technical speak there. But you know what? You know what? It's so... A cool head. A cool head and this like calm voice.

That's the voice I want to hear when I like notice something is going wrong. Right. You know? All right. Well, I think we're on to our next segment here. That was great. Thanks for the stories and the intros.

And I'm going to turn it over to Maeve who's got some questions. I've got cosmic queries from our listeners. They knew that we were going to be speaking with people from Mission Control so these are specific questions for you guys. This one is from Benjamin Luria and he contacted us through Instagram and he asks for the missions that take years like the Juno spacecraft's trip to Jupiter, are there people at Mission Control watching its progress 24 hours a day for the entire mission?

So, I'll answer that two ways. Juno's not controlled out of Johnson Space Center. Somebody else's problem. There's nobody on board. Only people. We do the missions that have people on them. People. In the ISS program, we have

people in the control center 24-7, but it's not just the control center in Houston. All of our international partners around the world also have control centers that have people in them. Okay. That's a good point though i think to say you know that with the johnson the difference between the flight directors that we have at the johnson space center

they've got to worry about keeping people alive and that really changes the whole equation i mean we never want to lose a spacecraft or but they also worry about um cargo ships and so on you want to keep the spaceship alive but they have the added pressure of keeping people alive people that they know but there's a whole other group of flight directors right guys that are out uh out there working these other uh spacecraft without people on them right but i would also offer that it's all very much related we're we're big big proponents and champions of the folks that are doing rovers and missions to other planets because all of that effectively is pathfinding that's eventually

going to enable us to send people to those planets like Mars, which is the goal of NASA here eventually. Without those pathfinding rovers that run around on Mars, we would not know nearly as much about what we're going to get ourselves into when we put people there eventually. Totally. There's a question here about the Mars trip, and this is from Kyle Yocum. He's from Tennessee. How does NASA feel about setting up a space station on the moon for trips going to and from Earth and Mars? Would that be worth the effort? So what's interesting about getting down to any surface is that it's pretty expensive in terms of mass, getting things down to a surface and back up again.

So one of the things we're talking about in terms of a way station for getting to and from Mars is not necessarily on the surface of the moon, but in either high earth orbit or in an orbit similar to the moon's orbit so that we're far enough away from Earth that it's easier to launch out towards Mars, but we don't have the all of the infrastructure needs that would be required for getting down to and back up from the moon. So our plans going forward do involve setting up kind of spaces in very high Earth orbit, basically pretty close to the moon, where we can assemble a vehicle so that it can head out to Mars. But getting down to a surface and back up from a surface is a lot more complicated and costly than you would necessarily assume.

Right. Well, this question is for you, Mike. Is there a culture shock from being an astronaut and then training as Capcom? I think that... Does everybody do that or just... No, not everybody. What is the latest on that? You know, Maeve's second question about every astronaut doing it. Back when I was an astronaut, there were a lot more astronauts.

And so it was only a portion of us that got a chance to do it. I think now, don't they try to get, it was almost part of their training? They try to have all of the new astronauts spend some time as a CAPCOM so that by the time they get to the space station, they're more familiar with what's going on in real time. And the best way to get an astronaut familiar with real time is to put them in mission control. Yeah, absolutely.

And it really helps. You know, my first flight I flew on, both of my flights were shuttle flights. And my first flight, I had not yet been a Capcom and I flew. And then I, and then I was a Capcom in between. That was my job in between my flights. And it gave me such an appreciation for what goes on in the control center and makes you a much better astronaut. Yeah. And I think that we realize that now. And that's why they have the newer, they used to say, well, you need to fly in space in order to know what to tell the astronauts in space. But I think it's more, more valuable to have an astronaut who is working in the control

center and, and learning what it's like to work with a flight director. Because when you say something from, from space and you radio that down to Houston, they listen to what you're saying. And you can put the team off spinning off on something that you may not think is that important. But just because you said something, they're going to be working an issue that you had no idea how they're going to be working it. And it's very important to be clear and appreciate what they're doing. And plus you get to see the day-to-day of what an astronaut goes through as a CAPCOM. It's a great job for an astronaut. And it's also, it's a

blast to get to work with these people like him. This is another question. This is from Phil Finde. What is the most entry-level job that gets to stay in the room of mission control? Do you have like an intern that's sitting there getting you guys coffee? That's the Capcom. Maybe the entry level would be the Capcom. I guess one of the things you need to realize is that we train flight controllers just like we

train astronauts, if you want to think of it that way. So an entry-level job, somebody that actually gets to come out here and work could be somebody right out of college that is now training to be one of those console positions that you see in the control room behind us there. So the most entry-level job in the building, I would suggest, is somebody that's in training to do all those jobs. You always see the shots of the one room there in the control center. We're on that TV all the time, but the building itself is relatively large and there are other control rooms in the building where we train as a team. We train flight controllers. We have an entire group of folks here at JSC who are instructors.

Mike's very familiar with all the instructors that worked with him the entire time he was training to go do his missions. They also train flight controllers to do their job. So entry level, I would say it's the person in training to do one of those jobs. Yes. Well, Emily and Royce, don't go anywhere. We have to wrap up this part of the show, but we'll be right back with more of your cosmic queries. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to Star Talk All Stars. I'm your host, Mike Massimino, perhaps known to some of you as Astro Mike on Twitter. Co-hosting today is comedian Maeve Higgins. Hey. Hey, Maeve. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. I like how modest you are saying you, some of you may know, you have like a million and

a half followers on Twitter. I was the first person to tweet from space. Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, that's, yeah. So, but it's all relative. There's a lot more. What year was that?

That was in 2009, just as the Twitter craze was going. And our friends that we're Skyping with also are on Twitter. And I'll introduce them, and they can tell you their Twitter handles. Good. We have Royce Renfrew and Emily Nelson, both of whom are flight directors at the Johnson Space Center. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having us. What are your Twitter handles now that we're just talking about that?

So a lot of the astronauts, if you type in Astro underscore and you'll get a whole bunch of hits on all the astronauts that are on Twitter. The flight directors went the other direction. that are on Twitter. The flight directors went the other direction. My Twitter handle is tungsten, like the metal underscore flight. So a lot of the flight directors have underscore flight at the back end of our Twitter handle instead of astro underscore at the front. And I don't tweet myself, so I forget what mine is. I think I'm peridot flight with a dot in between, Peridot.Flight.

So what was it? Peridot. So is that your flight director name? Yes. So he's Tungsten, and I'm Peridot. Okay. So can you explain the flight director names quickly for us? Because that's kind of cool.

Yeah. So back in the very beginning, a flight director would have a team of flight controllers that they trained with all the time. We don't get that luxury now. We kind of show up in the flight control room and see what team we get that day. But back when the flight director was also the manager of a team of people, it was simplest to just put on the schedule that the red team is simming today, the white team is training today, the blue team is training today. So each flight director started picking a color at first and then you know you get through your 24 count box of Crayolas and you start running out of color.

So then they started jumping into constellations, gemstones. These days we go into kind of concepts. One of my classmates was Tranquility Flight. The most recent flight director to announce her name, she came out last week as Infinity Flight. And so it's usually a term that means something to us as associated with our path to the flight director office and our hopes for human space flight. I love the name Tranquility Flight, don't you? It's like a medication or something. What would yours be, Maeve? What would your flight director name be? Oh, so I think it would be like

fight or flight. Really? Yeah. Flight or flight. What do you think of that, guys? That's a great one, huh? You guys can use it. That's awesome.

We've got a few more that'll be announcing their names soon. We'll recommend that one. That's a good one. And so how important is it for you guys to use Twitter and communicate with people? We know from this show, people are unbelievably curious. Everybody wants to know what's happening at NASA, what's happening in mission control.

So what does it mean to you guys to communicate in that way? So I started using Twitter when the crew, like Mike was talking about, he did Twitter from space. But the station crew started using social media once we figured out how to get them Internet access. So I actually started using Twitter just so I could follow what they were doing because there was a lot of interesting stuff out there. And I really enjoyed it. So I started using it more and more. And it's a neat way to interact with the public. It's a neat way to throw stuff out there that we're doing in the control center or what we're doing on ISS as an outreach program,

which I think is very useful for NASA. And of course, when we're actively in the control center, it's pretty hard to take the time to send anything out. So for some of us, at least for me, I tend to tweak quite a bit more when I'm in a different role, when I'm leading a mission, which means I'm not sitting in the room that you can see behind us, but I'm sitting in kind of a room behind there overseeing the entire four months or six months of the mission. And then I have more of an opportunity because I'm not responding to what's happening every moment by moment to kind of send out statuses of interesting things the crew has done that day or things I try to focus on things that the ground has done that the mission control team is focused on to try to give that kind of flavor. You know, some of the things you

need to do to keep things going as flight directors and with, you know, you need to do to keep things going as flight directors. And, you know, you talked about following the crew and Twitter and all this. But your job now is much different than it was in the shuttle program, I think, because shuttle flights were two weeks long. And, you know, you had a lot to do. You worried about crew safety. But now with these missions, you know, we mentioned in the other segment that, you know, you could be up there for as long as a year. Wow. And maybe it was before we in the other segment that, you know, you could be up there for as long as a year. Wow. And maybe it was before we started the other segment.

Yeah, we were talking about, yeah, you've just brought somebody home after almost a year. After a year. And so it's not, that's a whole different equation. So it's not just keeping them safe and making sure the mission gets done. But it's also sort of the long-term mental well-being, keeping people engaged and happy and keeping the crew going. Morale is a big part of it, too. And, Emily, you were the flight director for the tail end of Scott Kelly's year in space. Is that right?

I was. I was batting cleanup for that one. You're batting cleanup for that. All right. So you had the last, I guess, the last three months of that, right? Expedition 46? Yeah, about four months. So was that on your mind about trying to make sure his mental health, that he has morale, that he kept going and trying to keep it light and fun for the whole team? Was that part of it for you, or how did you approach this?

It was certainly a concern. It's something that Scott and I talked about before he launched, a whole year in advance. His goal was for Scott Stover, his flight director when he launched, and myself, to be able to compare notes after he got back on the ground and not be able to tell a difference that we would have been working with the same crew member. Honestly, Scott is so even keeled and so unperturbable that that was really the case. So my personal strategy when I'm about to take over, because each of us, when we take over a lead for a mission, we're taking over for crew members that are already on board because it's just this continuous cycle of crew members. We never, ever have the

space station without people living there. And so I will start sending them emails up front saying, hey, we're not going to change anything until I take over. But is there anything you'd like to tweak? What are you happy about? What would you like to do differently? What is, are there any things we can tweak about what the ground is providing for you to try and listen to their needs and make sure that we're providing them the ability to be as efficient as they possibly can because we get so much more work and more productivity out of people in space who are happy just like we get more productivity out of people that are happy on the ground can you give us an example of any of those tweaks that

they asked you to make like without like compromising security no no no let's see i scott actually didn't ask for any um i don't think we've had so we have this whole kind of giant system for how we manage the cruise day they have we have this timeline that shows in five minute increments what they're going to be doing from the time they wake up until the time they go to sleep and then the timeline tells them okay it's time to be asleep and uh then in addition to that we have a list of activities that if they finish something early here's a list of stuff it's just kind of the honeydew list we need these things done but they're not as important so we haven't put them on the timeline the way that we manage that there are a lot of nuances.

If you can imagine somebody else is building your calendar every day, then you might think that you want your calendar managed one way, and then you start doing it for two months and then say, you know, I really wish you would put my exercise in the morning, or I'd rather that we do these kinds of things together and we do these kinds of things alone. So a lot of what I tend to get is, hey, now that I've been here for two or three months, what I'd really like is to change my strategy for how you build my time and make it so that I can execute a little more efficiently through the day. And so at what point did Scott

Kelly say to you, I want to wear my gorilla suit in the afternoon. I want to wear my... I, and I, when I'm in that room, I tend to be a little bit buried and I tend to not necessarily know what's going on in the outside world. But that day I happened to be, I happened to get either emailed to me or tweeted or whatever, a link to the video that he had sent down. I had no idea ahead of time. And so the next thing I do is call Scott, where did you get a gorilla suit and how did you get that thing to space? So, yeah, he managed to surprise us all with that one.

So what happened was, tell us a little bit, we have a few more seconds before we go to the queries. So I saw this, this is a very famous video that went viral of the astronaut in a gorilla suit, right? Yeah. So he put on this gorilla suit and then he stuck himself inside of, Mike, you'd know, an M02 bag. It's basically just a big white stowage bag that you could fit a person in. So he's sitting there and then poor Tim Peake comes along and starts to open up the bag and he jumps out of it and starts chasing Tim Peake all around the space station.

And it was really hilarious. You should see the Colbert clip from what they did on their opening. I think that's where I saw the first, where I first saw the whole gorilla thing in the first place. It was pretty adorable. Good fun in games. It's hard work, but, you know, what Emily said I think is really important. It's fun. Those things are fun,

but it also makes you more productive. You're happy. You're happy. So if it's all just drudgery work all the time, even in space, it can get to you. So it's important to keep it light as much as you can.

All right, I think that brings us to our cosmic queries. What do you got for us, Meg? Okay, I've got a few more questions. This one is from Camila. Camila is from Brazil, and she's asking how is the recovery of an astronaut made after a mission, physically? How do you feel when you come back? So, that's probably a question for Mike, but I'll take a shot at some of it there. My missions were short.

My missions were short now, so it wasn't that bad. It's a lot different with the longer ones. Yeah, so one of the things you need to think about is that the recovery of the astronaut when they get back on the ground starts when they launch. We have a very, very strict protocol that they have to go through that involves daily exercise. In zero-g, if you're not using your bones and your muscles to fight gravity all the time, your bones and your muscles atrophy, and you're not capable if you don't do some countermeasures, when you got back on the ground, you wouldn't be able to stand up because you haven't used those muscles in six months. So we spend a lot of time making sure that the crew does resistive exercises all day. They do a lot of cardio exercises.

We have various other, various treadmills that they can run on. There's a stationary bicycle that they can use. And we have a system that simulates what it would be like to be lifting weights. And all of those, if you think about it, are pretty complicated. How do you design a system that allows you to simulate lifting weights? That's incredible. Yeah. You could be like Hercules, 600 pounds in space.

Even I can lift. That's so cool. We make sure that they stay exercised and we make sure that they eat the right food and we keep track of, you know, are they sleeping enough? And so that when they come back home, the transition back to a 1G lifestyle is not so dramatic. That almost makes me think, though, that like it must be hard when you get home. Like you know about this. There's been somebody watching you.

Like Emily said, every five minutes is accounted for, like everything. So then when you're home, that's not there anymore. So that must be strange. Oh, that's, yeah, like having to figure out what you're going to do with your life, your day. Yeah, that's a problem. That's a real issue when you get back. It's not a problem up front, though, because we schedule them once we're on the ground for the first month. That's true.

That's right. You do. Do all the rehabilitation. Yes. on the ground for the first month just so we can do all the rehabilitation. Honestly, our biggest experiments are experimenting on the astronauts themselves. So they get home and they do a lot of the same things we had them doing in space, exercises to demonstrate dexterity, providing a great number of biological samples. So we do a lot of evaluative sessions with them for their first two weeks. And did you have a moment, Mike, when you were back on land again and you were just like, hmm,

well. I was, you know, it's funny. I think for me, it's bittersweet. You know, you're very happy to be alive and back. And if the mission went well, which luckily in my case is we were happy with what had happened, you're very grateful. And it's great to see your family and your friends again, to see your flight director again, you know, to see the people that helped you get ready and took care of you while you were up there. But I also found, you know, when I got back home and my crewmates and I, for my second flight, we had trained together for two and a half years. And my crewmates and I, for my second flight, we had trained together for two and a half years. And when we, you know, we were together a lot.

And every day we'd see each other on the weekends, even socially. We really were like a family. And after spending our time about two weeks in space together was our mission. And, you know, we saw our families went home that night when we returned. That next morning we all called each other to see what was going on. Hey, what are you up to? And I think one thing, just to hear what it brings back when I see my friends, when I see Emily and Roy stalking, there really is a bond between everyone at NASA, but particularly between the control team, the flight control team,

head by the flight director and the crew. And, you know, you have this certain bond, this certain friendship. It's sort of like a friendship, family, colleague combination that I think is very rare because you know when you're in space that you have someone like Emily or Royce looking out after you. And I knew that in our case that the flight director was going to be watching out for us and that whole team was going to be watching out for you. And I knew that in our case, that the flight director was going to be watching out for us and that whole team was going to be watching out for us. And so, you know, they describe all the things you're doing. They really did make sure they really do look out for you while you're up there, not just from a mission success, but also from a personal standpoint. And when you get back,

it's just wonderful to see these guys again. And, you know, Emily's right. You're still scheduled to do stuff. Eventually you have to figure right. You're still scheduled to do stuff. Eventually you have to figure out what you're going to do yourself. We're waiting you from the schedules gradually. Yeah, it's gradually. Alright, so we have about 40 seconds left here. Is there any other famous prank beside the gorilla that comes

to mind? The one that Sonny and Mike L.A. played on us back in Exhibition 14. That one was terrible. What'd they do? We come back from a scheduled loss of signal. We reacquire video inside the space station. And I think it was Sonny was doing compressions on Mike L.A. as if he had had a heart attack.

And the flight director, Ginger, nearly had a heart attack. And that was not funny. That was absolutely not funny. Yeah, we're laughing. But no, that wasn't funny, was it, Maeve? No, never again. Not funny. All right. We've got to take a short break,

and we'll be right back with our Mission Control friends, Royce and Emily, when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk All-Stars. I'm Mike Massimino, your All-Star host for the evening. I don't know if I've been called an All-Star before, but there you go. And joining me as co-host, Maeve Higgins. Hey, welcome back, everybody. You're certainly an All-Star in the comedy world.

We've been talking about NASA Mission Control Center with actual NASA flight directors, Emily Nelson and Royce Renfrew. They're Skyping in from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Thanks for joining us. Happy to be here. Let's talk about Mars a little bit. Yes. It shows a lot of what they're doing here, Maeve.

Mission Control Center, we have people there up in space right now, six-month missions. Scott Kelly, one year. We may do another year-long mission trying to learn how to get people to Mars. Is that like NASA's number one overriding goal at the moment, would you say? Let's ask our flight directors. How does Mars play into what you guys are doing now and where you see your role in the future? to what you guys are doing now and where you see your role in the future? I'd say that everybody here at the Johnson Space Center would very much like to get the opportunity to go to Mars. A big part of what we're doing to try to make that happen is putting

together the various building blocks that would be required for such a large mission. You've got figuring out how to keep humans safe and productive for all that time. You've got coordinating with the, how do you get the launch vehicle set up? How do you get the, the, the transit vehicle built? There's a whole lot of pieces. And our goal right now is to build all of those pieces so that then when we have an opportunity, we put the right pieces together and we can start heading out. So that sounds like, is that like the ultimate goal then? Like, I know it's hard to put it into a single yes or no, but like, if it's like, why is NASA there? Is it like, right now, it's because we want to go to Mars? Or is it because we want to do more research?

Like, what's the... You know, it's so hard to say because there's so many people throughout the agency, not just here at JSC, but at all of our 10 centers across the country that are working on so many different things that are feeding into our everyday lives. Everything from aeronautics and improving airplanes to research on the space station to getting humans the opportunity to explore further and further into our solar system and beyond.

I would say human spaceflight has near-term goals and long-term goals. And in the near term, we're trying to use our orbiting platform, our laboratory in space, to improve life here on Earth. Our long-term goals are to use the lessons we learn while we're doing that to allow humans to get farther and farther away from our home planet and finally start really exploring our solar system. So it's about, you know, in mission control, they have to be concerned about what's going

on right now. Yes. You know, so they're looking toward the future, but what's going on right now? How do you guys see the role that the flight director and mission control will play when we're sending people to Mars or Moon or somewhere else? It's a certain role they had with the Apollo program and then with the shuttle program, and then it changed. We said in other segments it's changed, and it's not just a two-week mission. It's six months and keeping everyone going. Mars or going beyond low-Earth orbit is going to be a whole new ballgame.

How do you think that's going to affect the mission control center and the flight director role when we start doing that? So, you know, I think it's a testament to the architecture that Mr. Chris Kraft and all of those folks stood up all those years ago that the control room that you see behind Emily and I here would be very recognizable if Chris walked in there and sat down at the flight director console. He's got all the people for all the subsystems scattered out there in front of him. He's wearing a headset. It would look very much like control centers that he worked in or Mr. Lunning worked in or Mr. Kranz worked in all those decades ago. So I think going forward, the role of mission control is going to have to change a little bit, but I think the configuration that you see today will still exist with a flight director, a capsule communicator, folks who are subsystem experts for all the systems on the vehicle.

Operating the vehicle will be different because of the time delays that are involved in those great distances. But the architecture of the control team, I think, will still be exactly the same. control team, I think, will still be exactly the same. I think the time delay is probably pretty critical here because with the shuttle and with the station, you say something and they hear you and they get back to you right away. When you're going to send people further away, for emergencies, for example, you know, if we had an emergency on the shuttle or on the station, you right away call the control center and everyone works together. And that's what we practice. It's going to be a bit different on the way to Mars, won't it?

Well, we've talked about this a little bit. And the space station crew is trained to take care of themselves entirely in terms of emergency events, because we do have periods of time where we have scheduled comm outages where they can't get a hold of us. have periods of time where we have scheduled comm outages where they can't get a hold of us. We also, in the early days of the space station, had really long comm outages just because of the way that we were flying through space and the size of the space station at that time. So we do have some experience, even in recent times, of training the crew so that they're very self-sufficient and able to handle whatever it is that comes their way. Because we have near continuous comm,

it's a luxury that we've had on the space station. We have moved away from that. We make sure that the ground is always accessible and always available and looking over the shoulders of our crew members so that we can provide assistance and make sure that they're able to get just as much accomplished in every day that they possibly can.

But we have a history, both in Skylab and our work with Mir, with the Russian Mir space station and in the early space station days, of long-com delays. Not long-com delays, but long-com outages, where the crew had to be much more self-sufficient than we require them to be on a day-to-day basis. And so in some ways, it's dusting off those paradigms and adjusting our training and adjusting the way that we operate to go back to that kind of a way of thinking.

And there are some things when we went from shuttle to station, and you guys keep me straight on this, but what I found on as a shuttle Capcom and as a shuttle crew member, the crew was doing lots of stuff, like a lot of switch throws, turning stuff on and off, doing a lot of manual stuff. And when we went to the space station, a lot of that stuff like switching antennas and cameras and doing, turning on systems and even maneuvering the vehicle is done by the control center and I thought it was like in the in the shuttle days the crew did like say 80% of all that type of stuff and now I it and the sense I got as a Capcom it was kind of like I don't there's even a number but I got the sense it was like reversed that all those sort of turning things on and off and housekeeping and and systems part of it

was done by the ground like 80% of it and the systems part of it was done by the ground, like 80% of it. And the crew was more devoted toward doing science. Do you guys see that as the way it is now? Because the ground does a lot of stuff, right? You guys control all kinds of stuff. And sometimes the crew doesn't even know what's going on. Is that true? So by design, right, what we want the crew on board space station to be doing is using our laboratory in space.

The experiments that we do in zero G, there's only one place where you can do experimentation that does not have gravity involved. And that's our space station. gravity involved, and that's our space station. So we really want the crew to be doing experimentation and research and human research and materials research and everything else that we do on board station as much as they possibly can. So we on the ground, you're absolutely right, the control teams around the world are primarily responsible for operating the vehicle, keeping it pointed in the right direction, make sure it has power generation, make sure we have breathable air and the temperature inside is the right temperature, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, so that the crew can focus on their primary job of doing that research.

Occasionally, we run into something where we have to go hands-on. Somebody needs to go turn a wrench on a piece of hardware and change out a failed component. That is not something we can do from the ground. So we rely on the crew to go do those ops for us, but we want to get that done as fast as we can so that we get that equipment back in rotation so the crew can go back to doing what we want them to do,

which is research. And is that ultimately working towards then you can just send like, you know, you barely need to be able to do, you can just be, I don't know, like a psychologist or a geologist and you can just go to space and then they'll take care of everything. That's the idea. Have the crew do what they have to do and have the ground take care of everything else that they can, you know, the ground take care of everything else.

That would be ideal, I think. And that's what we're doing. So Kate Rubins is on the Soyuz going to dock to the space station tonight. She's a biological scientist. And it's just great to get to have somebody with that background and a laboratory background on board to be able to execute all of these various experiments. And so ideally, yeah, you can have all of these scientists and physical scientists and medical doctors and a lot of our astronaut corps today is made up of those types of folks with that kind of background who can really dig in on the meat of the science because we got the station itself taken care of from the ground. We've got about four minutes left.

Oh, I've got some questions left. We've got some cosmic queries to finish up. Okay. This is from Cara and she asks, what kind, if any, of good luck rituals happen in mission control? I don't know if you're superstitious people. It seems like you're

rational, but let's see. Here's a good question. This guy is so completely superstitious. That's not about what you do. It's about what you're not allowed to do. I'm very superstitious about wearing red

in the control room. It's interesting that my control teams know that about me. And we all try to wear red whenever he's in the control room. Just to mess with me. Absolutely. Oh, and then there's a fruit rule too, right? Yeah, we have the engineering teams who support us We have the folks, the engineering teams who support us have a superstition about fruit in their area of the control center. That if you have fruit sitting on top of a console, that is the discipline that's going to have problems. So I made up some stickers in the last shuttle mission that I worked STS-133 for them to have little

magnetic stickers for them to put on their consoles that said fruit free for 133 and we were all successful though. Yeah, sure, and it's because there was no fruit. I was so sure that you were going to just shake your head at that question and be like, I don't have any superstitious rituals. Did you as an astronaut, did you guys have... I would offer that the crew picked on me as well. They do that occasionally. One of the crews recently put a red filter over

a camera when they knew I was on a console. There were some shown, like in Apollo 13, Gene Kranz wearing a vest when he was flight directing. From the crews, from our perspective there, we've had this thing with the shuttle where before the launch in the suit room when you were suited up, the head of the office would play poker with the, did you guys know about this? This is all classified. So you listeners out there, don't tell anybody this. This is classified.

But the commander would play poker with the chief of our office and they would play until the commander won. And once the commander won, we were all dressed and ready to go. We would walk out of the suit room and go and launch. And then the launch team down there

in Kennedy Space Center, they had these beans, these good luck beans. I don't really know all the history behind it, but I don't know when it started, but beans were, they would all eat beans. After a successful launch,

they would eat beans. So these things, they're nice traditions. You know, the Russians have theirs too. And we could do a whole show on traditions. So that's a great question. Let's see if we can fit one more in. We've got about a minute left.

This is a kind of a person. Is food allowed in the mission control? I'm guessing because you just mentioned fruit. So we're asking just like in an office, is food allowed? And are you allowed to have your phones in mission control? So we definitely allow food because otherwise we wouldn't get to eat we don't really you know we mentioned before we have nearly continuous communication with the vehicle and our tradition is that we don't leave the that control room that you can see behind us

unless we're lost unless we have scheduled a a calm outage so we absolutely will race out and heat up our food and bring it back in so that we can eat and drink and not just fall over um i forget what the second part of it was so so phones it's you know folks have their phones my my daughter sends me a text from from off at school where she is i i want to know that's going on but i'm focused on what's going on on the vehicle. You don't usually see folks on their personal phones in the control room very much at all. Yeah, like taking selfies with... None of that. Yeah, I've had friends get very upset that I'm not answering texts, and I'm like,

dude, it was in my purse the whole day. I never looked at it. I think that's fair. You know, food is very important and I would love to get the concession in Mission Control Center. We don't really have one, but food is really important and you generally have to bring your own. Everyone's game is vending machine

food factor, fear factor. You see who will eat the worst food in the vending machine. We're out of time, guys. Royce and Emily, thank you so much for joining us from the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Thanks for including us. We had

a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks for having us. Absolute pleasure. And Maeve, it's always a pleasure. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Gotta get back to my work at Mission Control. A lot of work to do there. You've been listening. You've been listening.

You've been listening to StarTalk All-Stars. I've been your host, Mike Massimino. It's been a blast. This is StarTalk.