StarTalk Radio - Living in Space, with Scott Kelly

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

Discover what life is like aboard the International Space Station as Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with former astronaut Scott Kelly, comic co-host Sasheer Zamata, former astronaut Terry Virts, Jennifer Fogarty, chief scientist of the NASA Human Research Program, and Bill Nye the Science Guy.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/living-in-space-with-scott-kelly/Photo Credit: NASA 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. Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we're going to explore the science of human spaceflight, featuring my interview with astronaut Scott Kelly, who endured a year in space aboard the International Space Station. So let's do this!

So joining me tonight is my co-host comedian, Sashir Zamedes. Sashir, welcome. And also joining us is NASA astronaut, Terry Virts. Terry. Welcome to New York. Thank you. Good to be here. You're former commander of the International Space Station for four months in 2015.

I was. And you're the author of a International Space Station for four months in 2015. I was. And you're the author of a new book, View From Above. That's right. That's beautiful. Nat Geo did a great job with it. Nat Geo. Yeah, Nat Geo. There you go. They did a great job. So we'll be tapping your expertise tonight as we discuss my recent interview

with another space station commander who was up there slightly longer than you. Is that all right? I got him started off. When I was commander, he showed up. You gave his first job. I did. Astronaut Scott Kelly. So Scott wrote a best-selling memoir about that year-long mission, and it's called Endurance, A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery. And so I asked him about the title of this book and just to see where it came from and what he was trying to do with it. Let's check it out. You know, it's not only about space, but part of it is about this kid that was a chronic underperformer in school growing up. If I was in school today, I think I'd be one of the kids with ADD or ADHD. They'd have a phrase for you, is what you're saying.

Then I was just a kid that didn't pay attention or was a troublemaker or whatever. So my experience with academics was almost non-existent until I read the book The Right Stuff in my first year of college. So you were all grown up before you even had a thought of going into space. You know, I thought about it, I think, like every kid thinks about it. You know, I want to be a race car driver, an astronaut. Baseball player. Baseball player. I was a Mets fan.

It was in the same category of those things. So it was never something that I seriously considered, aspired to, mostly because I didn't think it was possible for me because I could not pay attention in class. I couldn't do my homework. I wasn't a good student. Now later, once I had this spark of inspiration that this book provided, it took me a while, but eventually I was able to figure out how to pay attention, to study, to do better. I changed colleges to a military school, flew airplanes for the Navy for a number of years, became a test pilot, like the guys in The Right Stuff. So at some point you said to yourself, I have the right stuff. This is extraordinary, coming through an educational background where no teacher is saying he'll go far.

Yeah. background where no teacher is saying he'll go far. Yeah. Because they're basing it on metrics that in fact were the wrong metrics for who and what you were and what you would ultimately become. Yeah. And I think, you know, I'm a good example of, you know, how good you are at something is not necessarily an indicator of how good you can become. You know, just because you're not good at something in the beginning doesn't mean you can't be the best at it someday. So, Terry, did you read the book The Right Stuff? Were you thusly inspired? I did, actually. I read The Right Stuff as a teenager.

And the night before my first... What is The Right Stuff, first of all? So it's more about the qualities that make up the original astronauts. If you read the book, Tom Wolfe was talking about the Mercury astronauts. Oh, so he's not talking about you. Well, the night before my first launch into space, me and Zambo, George Zamko, my commander, we actually watched the movie The Right Stuff.

You're getting in the zone. Went to sleep and woke up and went and launched on the space shuttle. So has our concept of the right stuff evolved? Well, certainly the culture has evolved since the 50s and 60s. But I think the same innate qualities of being willing to take risks, being confident, being willing to ride the rocket, as Tom Wolfe would say, is something that you still need as an astronaut even today. So Scott confessed or admitted that he struggled in school. Yeah. But then he went on to complete four space missions.

Right. Commanding two of them. He was the first American to spend nearly a year in space. It was 340 days, not 365. Right. But long enough. Right. It was about a year.

And he and his identical twin mark kelly are the first siblings to ever go in space and we'll talk more about that a little later but i'm just wondering in school where they always want you to get the high grade and this is clearly not the measure of success in this case so do you do you think we're valuing the wrong things the wrong stuff the wrong stuff yeah yeah that's funny so when this book came out my fourth grade teacher actually found me on facebook and came to one of my book signings mr swisher which is when when when the view from above came out yeah and i was at a book signing he showed up but i remember my mom had to go in and fight for me when i moved to this new school they thought there was something wrong with me

or I wasn't smart. They wanted to hold me back. And she had to go in and fight for me and basically say, look, he's bored. Like, you guys are not challenging him enough. And they ended up, you know, pushing me and I guess it worked out in the end, right? I guess.

Yeah. Got a bunch of patches on that jacket. There's so many patches, they're overlapping each other. Yeah, they are. They are. But every kid has a gift or talent. It doesn't necessarily have to fit in the mold, but everybody has these gifts and talents, and they need to be challenged and given opportunities in those areas, and then they'll succeed. Well, before he flew in space,

Scott Kelly was a Navy test pilot, which seems to me is like one of the most dangerous jobs on Earth. So I had to ask him why he'd sign up for something with such a high risk of death. Let's check it out. Interestingly enough and weirdly enough, that made it more attractive to me, that people were getting killed and burning in the woods, charred remains of these guys. I don't mean to laugh, but it is a curious fact of human ambition that the greater the challenge, not for all, of course, but for some, the greater the challenge, the greater the risk, the greater is their urge.

Yeah. And that was you. Absolutely. And the greater the sense of satisfaction when you complete this thing that is risky and challenging. I never flew in combat in the military in the F-14, but Winston Churchill has this famous quote, and it's something to the effect that there's nothing more exciting to be shot at and missed. And I kind of feel I can relate to that a little bit with my career in the Navy and spaceflight, that the fact that it's so risky and you could lose your life makes it more exciting. Maybe a weird thing, but it's true.

Terry, I see you've got your wings on this jacket among your 19,000 patches. So you were a test pilot also. I was in the Air Force, yes. And so why are you guys so eager to do stuff that might get yourself killed? It's funny. If I were your mama, I'd slap you.

My poor mom, I know. But, you know, NASA has Office of Safety and the safety officer and stuff. And nothing about strapping a multimillion-pound rocket applies to the word safe. I mean, it should be like the Office of Less Dangerous, right? But it's just not. The office of less dangerous. It's not necessarily a safe thing to do, but. But is this personality trait common among all astronauts? Well, so my last task at NASA before I retired last year was to help go through the 18,000 applicants we had for the new astronaut class.

And how many slots? 12 got picked. Yeah. So it was a pretty, pretty tight selection group. But what we were not looking for are thrill seekers. Like we don't want, you know, daredevils being astronauts. You want people, you know, you have to be able to deal with risk and not freak out with risk. And in Hollywood, the astronauts are always yelling and screaming. That's not what you want, right? You want to be able to deal with it. But you also have to be willing to take it. So there's a fine balance that you have to have. So in your life, either as a test pilot or with NASA, have you ever been in a situation where you've thought,

at least briefly, that this is it? Well, I need like a lot of fingers to count the number of times. Really? Yes, of course. I was a fighter pilot and a test pilot, yeah. Shashir, has any of this ever happened to you? Yeah, traffic on the way here. Insane.

So if Scott didn't die from some of these other ways that put his life at risk, I wonder whether he might just have died of boredom for spending nearly a year in space. So I asked him, how did he deal with being cooped up for so long? Let's check it out. What did you do for fun? A book?

You get a Netflix account? You know, what's the catch-up on movies? Yeah, you're going to binge. Being in space is a good time to do it. Yeah, you have some spare time. So I binge-watched Game of Thrones a couple of times. Does NASA shield you from disaster space movies like Gravity? We watched Gravity in space. It was kind of cool, actually. But it was also sort of like

watching a movie of your house burning down, but while you're inside of it, you know, when it was getting exploded apart they did a good job so terry in modern times i'm guessing to have the right stuff is to be in space and be able to watch a space disaster is that would you we watched gravity watched 2001, which is pretty cool to watch, 2001. Watched Interstellar. I watched Alien. And then it was kind of weird, like, floating around in the middle of the night, you know, after watching Alien, kind of looking around the corner to see, you know. So what is the middle of the night when you're orbiting Earth once every 90 minutes?

So, actually, that's a great question. So we set our watches to GMT, so London time, England time, and you close the window. G for London. G stands for London, right? The NASA acronym stands for London. For London. Greenwich, meantime. Right. And so you have to have that.

Otherwise, if you, no kidding, had windows on the earth and the sun's coming up and down every, you know know every 90 minutes um your body would not do well after a few days you'd explode right okay so you have an agreed upon a time frame reference so so so did you actually did you you said you watch gravity while you watch gravity i've gotten to be friends with a gentleman by the name of chivo labesky he won the academy award for gravity bird Birdman, and Revenant, back to back to back, which is pretty impressive. And he was like, so how did it look?

So visually, gravity is very accurate. It's what it looks like. But thankfully, you don't have to take a fire extinguisher to the Chinese space station, or, you know, there's not explosions and fires as much as there was in the movies. Now, of course, Scott wouldn't have known this but uh in zero g if you have long hair it floats you know he wouldn't know that i'm just saying he was bald all right what if scott yeah so then i tweeted about the movie gravity because sandra bullock's bangs always knew which way gravity was pointing.

They did not float. That's true. So I just said, mysteries of gravity. Why her bangs don't float. Did you ever see the movie? Would you watch it in space? I don't know. I mean, maybe if I knew the science behind it, I would feel more comfortable watching

that movie in space. Because he was comfortable watching Gravity, but he was a little spooked by Alien. That's kind of interesting to me. For me, it'd be like the opposite. So, Terry, what was your longest mission in space? My longest was 200 days. And I've always wondered, is that just a nice round number? And they said, let's pull you down after 200? Or was there an actual reason for this other than that it's evenly divisible by 100? So it's supposed to be 169 days. And then as we launched we had a American cargo ship blow up. In the middle of our mission we had a Russian cargo ship blow up and at the end of our mission we had another American cargo

ship blow up. So when the Russian one blew up it was on the same rocket that the humans launch on, a Soyuz rocket. Thankfully it was just a cargo ship but while they were waiting for the accident investigation to happen they decided to extend it. So we actually didn't know when we were coming back. We weren't sure if we'd come back on time or get extended for a few months. Is that when you go on rations? So did you get bored over 200? So they used to say that space shuttle flights, two-week flights, were like a sprint.

And the space station flight, a six-month flight, was like a marathon. I found my six-month flight to be like a sprint that And the space station flight, a six-month flight, was like a marathon. I found my six-month flight to be like a sprint that lasted for six months. I was never bored at all. So what did you do for fun as part of what it was to not be bored? I took pictures. I filmed a movie. Actually, we filmed an IMAX movie called Beautiful Planet. A beautiful film, I might add. Tony Myers, the producer. If you've ever seen an IMAX space movie, Tony probably made it. And she did a great job with it.

But I filmed that in my spare time. Oh, okay. Yeah. So you had no downtime. So, Sachir, if you were in space, what would you do for fun? Well, I think the things I like to do for fun wouldn't work in space. Like bowling. Jenga.

But space bowling, somebody ought to figure that one out. Space bowling will work, yeah. That's a workoutable thing. It is. That's a mass hitting some balls. Well, Scott Kelly wasn't just up there to just be an astronaut on the space station. He was a kind of sort of a living science experiment in his year-long mission. And for part of that, he also had command of the ISS.

And so I'm just curious, what are the duties of the commander of the ISS? So the commander, it's an interesting job because sometimes if there's an emergency or something really serious has happened, you take charge, you do this, you go here, close this hatch, or whatever. 99% of the time, there's the crew, but there's also Houston Mission Control, there's Moscow Mission Control. We had an international crew with Russians and Europeans. So there's lots and lots of fingers in this pie. And the commander is just one of the fingers in the pie. So you have to go from collaboration, working together, and then, you know, when the stuff hits the fan, it's time to be in charge and take charge.

So you really need to be kind of on all ends of the leadership spectrum when you're the station commander. Does stuff actually hit the fan? It can't. Gravity. It floats into the fan. It floats into the fan. So is this...

Chapter five. Do they give you, like like a captain's chair? Do you feel like Captain Kirk? So when you have like this daily teleconference and you get to like float in front of the microphone and be the guy in charge of the microphone, which is pretty cool. That's fun.

But yeah, literally, I wrote a chapter about some of the emergencies that we had in space that were pretty... Klingons and other stuff that only a captain can... Well, we went through one in particular. There was an ammonia leak, and ammonia is the coolant, like your radiator fluid in your car. And they tell you if you smell it, you don't need to worry about it because you're going to die. I mean, it's a dangerous thing. So it's a long story. It's a chapter long story, but it

basically, we spent a day thinking that the space station was dead. We thought it was going to be left in space to be deorbited, and we were going to come back to Earth, and no one would ever come back. That's how serious it was. It ended up being a false alarm, but it was a pretty amazing story. Cool.

Well, coming up next, Scott Kelly explains why and how he drank his own pee for years when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're talking about life aboard the International Space Station, featuring my interview with a guy who was there for nearly a year, Scott Kelly. I had to ask Scott the question that we all want to know the answer to.

How do bathrooms work in space? Check it out. The zero-g toilets, do they work okay for you? Very complicated toilet, and it works pretty well. Why should it be complicated? You know, you got to separate the air from the urine before it's sent to a tank. Oh, so the whole toilet system. Oh, the system and then some of the urine. And usually when I talk about the toilet, I'm also talking about the water process. Recovery. Recovery system that turns

our urine into drinking water. So it's pretty sophisticated. Even though intellectually, I know that's an entirely doable thing. Emotionally, that just sounds nasty. Yeah, like I drank my pee for a whole year. Right, right. I actually drank everyone's pee. Exactly. It was all mixed together. a whole year right right actually actually drank everyone's pee exactly all mixed together what happens to all that is not the h2o yeah from the urine what happens to that it's put into a container and then we eventually when that tank fills we put them into smaller tanks send them down to the russian segment they put them in the Progress, their resupply ship,

and eventually that burns up in the atmosphere. Then that tank will eventually come back with urine in it. We put an entire system. We turn it into water, eventually brine. Wait, so what burns up in the atmosphere? The whole Progress. Oh, I didn't know that. The whole spaceship.

Oh, so that spaceship is designed, it's your garbage disposal system. Exactly. I didn't know that. And that is a critical resource. The ability to get garbage off of a spaceship is something that is not simple. So, Terry, you can't just eject garbage out, you can't just roll down the window and throw garbage out. You can't. Because it might hit something else.

Well. So you really have to send the stuff away. Right. So if you just ejected it, first of all, you'd waste air. Every time you open up the airlock, some air goes outside, so you don't want to do that. And second of all, if you're throwing your garbage. I just said roll down the window. That's all you do.

You could do that once. You could do anything once. But if you're ejecting your trash out into space, then you're suddenly in orbit next to a giant can of poop, right? So you want to put it in a spaceship and let it fly away and not just kind of have it hover there right next to you in orbit with you. So what you're telling me is that your pee and poop, or the stuff of the pee that was not returned, plus the poop, vaporized on re-entry and has descended as molecules.

It's in rain on Earth. Yes, it is in the atmosphere. That's the last time I'm opening my mouth looking up in the rain. Now they know astronaut poop is scattered into it. So I didn't know that there's a whole ship that is on a one-way mission to collect garbage and burn it. Oh, there's multiple. And taking trash away is a big deal.

Like, just like at my house, I have a rule at the house. Like, for every pound of stuff that comes in, somebody's got to clean out a pound of stuff and take it to Goodwill or, you know, throw it in the trash. Ugh, what a terrible rule. You got it? I would hate that if you were my dad. Dad? Dad? I want to keep stuff you were my dad. Dad? Dad? I want to keep stuff.

Throw it away. So the reclaimed water is not only recycled pee, but sweat, wash water, and you would just find drink. You trusted this. Well, it's, you know, this would cost about $10,000 to launch into space. So it makes a lot of economic sense to recycle stuff, especially water. So how long did it take you to sort of get over that ick factor? There's just some things you just don't think about. Like you're drinking your water. How about those Astros? You know, what's the latest tweet that the president sent out? You just don't

worry about, you just don't think about it. You give yourself distracting thoughts. Yes. But in all seriousness, drinking water is a big problem on Earth. I know. There are billions of people with a B who don't have clean drinking water. Right. So this NASA technology has been sent around the world to help recycle water. And, you know, that's the kind of hard problem you have to solve in space. And then you can take that technology and apply it to the problems we have here on Earth.

And hopefully space can benefit us. Well, I asked Scott Kelly another fan favorite question. How's the food up there? All right, let's check it out. What I missed more than the food of Earth is the... I love that too. The food of Earth. The food of Earth.

How many people get to say that? About 500 and something. Okay. I miss the food of earth. Yes. I missed more of the experience of just sitting down at a table where you don't have to worry about all your stuff floating away and losing your spoon. And also, I think a lot of people think, you know, you're in space, you're floating, that must be like the most comfortable thing. And it sort of is a comfortable existence,

but it never changes. Like when you go home at night, you sit on the couch, you're more relaxed. When you lie on the bed, you're even more relaxed. It helps you go to sleep. And it's a contrast between being in the bed, in the comfy couch, or walking around. Or walking around opposing gravity. But in space, it's always the same. Whether you're trying to go to sleep, or whether you're doing an experiment, or always the same. Whether you're trying to go to sleep or whether you're doing an experiment or whether you're eating, you're just kind of floating like this and you kind of almost feel like you're hanging in the straps or something. So you're never in a position to say, gee, let me go get comfortable so I can now go to sleep. Doesn't exist, yeah.

So Terry, what sort of Earth thing did you miss most on your 200-day mission? So one day I was floating down Node 1 in the middle of the station, and I heard this bird chirping, this... And I stopped, and I went back, and Misha Kornienko was exercising. And I said, Misha, what's going on? We were talking in Russian. And I said, there's a bird in there. And he laughed, and he said, no, no, no. So the Russian psychologist had sent him sounds from Earth. And it was so awesome to hear birds.

So everybody wanted these MP3s. We had rain. We had waves. We had. See, if I went up there, I'd want street traffic noise. We did. We had a cafe. We had, like, you know, glasses clinking.

Okay. And I went to bed for about a month. I would put my headsets on, get in my sleeping bag, and listen to rain. It was great. Another question is I've been told that you lose your sense of

not your sense of taste but so much you Like taste in clothing? Or like yellow soup. Astronauts don't have that. We don't have taste in clothing. Any taste at all. Your taste buds need to be more and more stimulated

the longer you're up there. What's going on with that? I'm a pilot. I don't have to ask the scientists, but a lot of guys do want spicy. You can affirm this. Shrimp cocktail is everybody's favorite thing. It's really spicy.

A lot of people put mustard and pepper. They give us some sauces. People just like spicy stuff. It changes, and it gets less sensitive, so you need more spice. Wow. Does that stick when you get back to Earth? Are people putting on way too much? No, it changes, and then it goes back.

Whoa. So, Terry, what does the ISS smell like? You said it's sort of antiseptic, but it's got to have some kind of funk. It depends on your crewmates. Woo! Yeah. No, it actually... Okay, how often do you all bathe? Plus, since it is an international space station,

we all happen to know that not every country's habits is the same as others when it comes down to how often you bathe. I was actually worried about that. And so there's no showers in space, but you take a towel, squirt some hot water in there, maybe put some soap in there, and you can get really clean doing that. The worst part, they give you one exercise shirt

for every two weeks. Well, coming up, we'll take your questions about the challenges of living in space when StarTalk. We're exploring the science of human spaceflight. Featuring my interview with former astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year in space. And I asked how that mission might have influenced his health. Let's check it out.

This is 340 days in zero G. Yeah. Okay. Bone density. How'd you, how'd you fare? It, I lost a little bit, not much and not much more than I did on my six month flight, which was interesting. Was that because you were staying on the exercise? Yeah. Yeah. And it shows that that exercise protocol works if you, if you follow it. How about other things like teeth, eyes? Yeah, so I had some effects on my vision. You know, the microgravity does some, causes some structural changes in our eyes. I don't mean to laugh,

but it's just some structural changes to your eye. So something in the vitreous humor or the focusing? Swelling of the optic nerve, choroidal folds is what they call it. The choroid of her eye is where the retina sits, and it's the thing that nourishes her retina. So that's only with very long-term, long duration? And only in men, surprisingly, so far. Anything else in terms of... I'm not worried that I'm going to go blind or even have any blind spots,

but that is the larger worry. If we go to Mars someday, you don't want astronauts getting there that can't see well. And it's an incredible facility we have currently to do some science that will help us with our exploration goals that we are not always going to have. I mean, eventually we're going to put this space station in the Pacific Ocean and we need to do this kind of science now while we have the capability. Cool. Well, we need some extra expertise in this segment. So joining us now to assess the biological challenges of extended human spaceflight, we have Jennifer Fogarty. Jennifer, welcome.

Thank you. You're a NASA biomedical scientist. Yes. Well, thanks for joining us here on StarTalk. And your title with NASA is you're the chief scientist of the NASA Human Research Program. Did I get that right? That's correct. So anything good or bad that happens to astronauts' health is your fault. Yes, completely. 100%. So what specifically are you tasked to do? So the breadth and depth of our program looks at the human at the center of this exploration activity. So it's going to interact with the entire vehicle, our program looks at the human at the center of this exploration activity.

So it's going to interact with the entire vehicle, which is now at this point is an exoplanet. It's much more complex than any vehicle we know of today. It has to provide everything they need to survive. You're referring to the space station? And the future vehicles as well, which have a slightly different mission. So we're trying to understand how does a human interact with the computer system? How do the humans interact with each other? How do they get their nutrition for much longer periods of time than what we do?

But if you're on the ground, you can't do the experiments on weightlessness. So you have to get the data from them. So could you remind us of the bad stuff that happens to you other than the throw up when you're weightless. Yeah, there's definitely some transitions that are harder than others. So vomit happens for sure. So a doctor just said vomit happens. I love that. For sure.

Most of my day is spent talking about pee, poop and vomit. Okay. All right. It's not as glamorous as it sounds. So the bone loss, the muscle loss, the changes to your vascular physiology. We've noted some architectural changes to your eye. We're really trying to understand any deeper things that might be occurring. So I also hear about cosmic ray stuff hitting your...

Did this happen to you? Did you see it? On my fifth night in space, I was going to bed, and all of a sudden, this bright white flash happened. And I thought, cool. I had read about Apollo astronauts experiencing this. When a cosmic ray hits your optic nerve. A very high-energy particle from space, deep space. Yeah, right, a galactic cosmic radiation.

And I saw this white flash, and I thought, cool. Except, you know, then you think about what's actually happening. And there's this place over the Earth called the South Atlantic Anomaly where the magnetic field kind of dips down, and the radiation environment is worse over the South Atlantic. And if you ever – So it dips down low enough so that you actually – In the orbit. In the orbit, it's stronger as you go through there. And if you close your eyes and you're over the South Atlantic anomaly, for me anyway,

and every astronaut sees it differently and some experience more than others, but if I close my eyes over the South Atlantic anomaly, I would see flashes. So, Jen, does he go blind eventually? What happens here? You can just whisper it. No, we don't believe so. But we're trying to understand it better because I think the point of having an optic nerve hit by a high energy particle and causing damage to a cell can't mean good things. But your body has intrinsically very

complicated repair mechanisms. And we just want to know how those repair mechanisms continue to function. And if they were ever to fail, can we do something about it? Are there any changes in the brain? So the brain has some interesting changes. It moves a little bit. Interesting changes. Interesting changes. Yeah, okay.

Like these euphemisms. Architectural changes to your eyeball. So I've been told. Interesting changes to the brain. Okay, go. Well, what's interesting about them is they're happening, but yet you can't detect any consequence of it. So the brain seems to move a little bit. The fluid-filled areas in your brain seem to change dimensions a little bit.

Change dimensions? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Get bigger? Does he have a bigger brain or a smaller brain when he comes back? It can't be smaller. It's larger but less dense. It can't be smaller.

It's larger but less dense. Okay, so you're not as dense as you used to be. All right. There's an upside to everything. So, yeah, I mean, part of it is it's an extraordinary thing to put the human body through, and then you watch the human body adapt. And you say, at what point does adapting no longer become positive? It's a struggle for the body to try to tease out all these stressors and say, what am I going to prioritize today? Managing fluid stress or GCR damage or nutritional supplements.

So what about the radiation field? Other than the dip in the South Atlantic anomaly, there's a general greater exposure to radiation, I presume, if you're up in orbit, especially high orbit, relative to Earth. That's correct. I mean, all astronauts are considered radiation workers. So we look at them and manage their exposures, which is why not all astronauts were eligible to go on the one-year mission. So one of the twists of the Scott Kelly case is that he has a twin brother, Mark, who's also an astronaut, but in this particular case, they left him on the ground. And so now you have a twin study

basically. So what did this fact do for you as a researcher? What were you after? So it was really an amazing opportunity to have identical twins and keeping one on the earth while one flew. I think we did recognize, you know, both had a lot of space experience prior to this mission, but you couldn't resist the fact to look at a genetic level, given your genes are controlling so much, but then you have the environmental pressures that may or may not trigger, you know, something to change. So what did you learn? Well, at this point, we are now a little over three years after the mission.

It was really considered three years of science. We studied them for the year before they went, the year while he was up, and the year since he came back, which was March 2017. The other part of this is that we will not be able to protect their identity when we do this science, right? It's going to be blatantly obvious who the subjects were. And this is a real concern for NASA is to protect the identity of the astronauts as test subjects. When you do genetic work, the deeper level is you also have to protect their family members. So at this point, the global... It's a privacy issue. It is a real privacy issue. So... But what have you... Oh, so you can't share what you've learned? Well, at this

point, they're just rolling out with an approved release and they're going to be publishing papers this year. But there's been some increase in things like telomeres, which are the end of your chromosomes and are considered protective and generally get shorter while you're aging. So there's an increase in those. Yeah. So it shields you against aging. Well, there was an interesting finding that happened in Scott was his telomeres got slightly longer, which was a little opposite of what you would have expected. Well, that brings us to the part of the show we call Cosmic Queries.

Tonight, we'll look at questions about the challenges of living in space. Shashir, you've got questions from our fan base. I do. Chris Ryu from England says, all right, I'll be the one to ask it. Has NASA done any experimentation with how humans will fornicate in zero G?

That's a great one for a joke. No. She's a lying Nazi. All right, no. Okay, so the official answer is no. Now, that's the NASA answer. How about other countries in the space station? We don't have sovereign laws over them.

Their pieces of the space station is like their own country, right? So what about the French? It was a long 200 days, Neil. That's all I can say. The French? I didn't fly with the French, yeah. I did not fly with them. All right.

Next question. Go. Elm Soup from Oklahoma asks, how would one perform surgery in zero G? For example, if an astronaut had to have an emergency appendectomy. So we would treat, I was one of the crew medical officers and we would probably treat that with antibiotics, try to kind of string them along. And if it got so bad, we would put them in the Soyuz and send them back to earth. Cause you can't do open surgery. First of all, I'm a fighter pilot, so you don't want me doing surgery on you. That's your excuse for a lot of stuff.

I'm a pilot, so I don't know. Wait, but Jen, why can't you talk them through an appendectomy? I've seen that in the movies. Yeah, well, we do remote guidance with ultrasound. Our first rule of thumb is to really do prevention, as much prevention. He's right on the money with you would treat it medically rather than surgically because actually surgery um has been done on a zero g aircraft and and you can do it the problem is the post-surgical care gets really complicated

really fast and that's when it gets super dangerous i think we have one do we have more more quick yeah last question go last question at Judson Doyle 4 on Twitter asks, what steps are being taken to soothe the senses? Sounds, smells, tastes, blue skies, breezes, you know, Earth stuff. I talked about the sound. This would be mental health, Jen, right? Yeah, sure. So I talked about the sound. Having sounds from Earth was great.

We get cargo ships every few months full of supplies and they try to send up fresh vegetables and which are good to eat but my favorite part about them was actually smelling them especially oranges i mean the smell was great to actually have like smells from earth so that helped what we'll do in the next segment is assess the psychological the full depth of psychological challenges of living in space when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk. We're talking about the science of human space life.

Featuring my interview with astronaut Scott Kelly, the first American to spend nearly a year in space. And I asked Scott about the psychological challenges of being aboard the space station for that long. Let's check it out. What's it like psychologically, emotionally? It's a big place, and I never felt like I needed more space. That was a joke.

Yeah. You can steal that one from me. Okay, gotcha. I think from a psychological perspective, the challenge is not the fact that you're confined. It's more that you're confined. It's more that you can't leave. And if something happens to your family, in my case, on my previous flight, my sister-in-law, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot.

And I still had several months in front of me. And I couldn't come home to support my brother or be with my family. And it's those kind of moments, those kind of things that I think create more of a psychological stress on people. The fact that if something happens to their kids, your kid gets sick, injured, loved ones, something happens, you are not coming home. And I think over time that kind of, you know, can, you know, wear on certain people. To me, that was always the most stressful part. It wasn't the fact that my own personal safety was at risk. It was more that, you know, something happens on the ground and you cannot get there and be with the people that you care about.

I can't believe you asked this man to open up about his psychological issues, and your first response was a pun. No, I just, because it's space. You actually, you have a lot of bad puns, and I put a list together. Oh, you've been listening. I've been listening to you. What do you call a year on a diet? A light year.

Look at your face. Okay. Want to know how I make such awesome space puns? I plan it. So, Jen, what does NASA research say about the psychological effects of space travel? Yeah, I mean, we definitely know it's challenging. We know definitely having private space is important. You can't go for a walk. You can't get away from a situation, really. So you're going to have to go someplace that's

private. So the private space is tantamount to therapy for otherwise being in a crowded, confined space. Yeah, it definitely gives you the option to go reevaluate yourself, be with things that you enjoy, a book, a movie, whatever it happens to be. We also look a lot at augmented reality and virtual reality to give people a sense of the sounds and sights that they would miss from Earth.

So, Jen, for the longest of missions that might be in NASA's future, is there any thought given to what we see in science fiction movies where you go into some kind of slumber, some kind of hypersleep? Is that in the works? There has been some research kind of dabbled into. It doesn't seem very realistic in the next couple of decades,

but it's still something you're going to want to understand. It's basically hibernation. It is. Something similar. Neil, I think your attitude is the most important thing. My attitude, and we got extended

and we didn't know when we were coming back to Earth was, this is my chance to be in space. I'm going to have the rest of my life on Earth to be on Earth.

To not be in space. To not be in space. So, you know, it can be a grind, whatever, but it's pretty cool, too. You get the float. You get the view is not describable, honestly.

So you don't need to get the book because he cannot describe the view. The view I cannot describe from space. That's the sequel. That's going to be the sequel. Well, my good friend Bill Nye has sent in a dispatch to share his thoughts on the many challenges of life in space. Check it out. When you're on orbit circling the earth, you're in near zero gravity. You're in free fall. It's like you're free, except you're

not really free the way you might be on a sunny summer day, because whether you're down there or up here, you have to breathe. So if you want to leave the cozy confines of your spaceship, your space station, you have to be inside one of these, a space suit. Astronaut Scott Kelly has said that long-duration spaceflight is like being in prison because you're always locked up, airtight. You can't get out. In fact, it's hard to even scratch your nose. Bill Nye out. Back to you, Neil. He's falling into a wormhole there.

The vortex. Watch out. So, up next, Scott Kelly will share a viewpoint from space that applies to us all. We are StarTalk Return. Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with former commander of the International Space Station, astronaut Scott Kelly. Check it out.

Will you be sad the day we drop the space station into the Pacific? I will definitely be nostalgic about it. I will think about it, and I will watch it. I will absolutely be there if there's any way I possibly can. And I will appreciate, you know, what we've accomplished, which I think is the hardest thing we have ever done as humans, building and operating the space station. When I was leaving for the last time and I was looking out at it and I'm thinking, you know, we built this thing while flying around the earth at 25 times

the speed of sound in a vacuum, extremes of temperatures of plus or minus 270 degrees. From day to night. Yeah, constantly changing temperatures built by this international partnership of 15 countries, different languages, enemies, you know, working together in space to do the hardest thing we've ever done. And if we can do this, we can do anything. I mean, if we want to go to Mars, we can go to Mars. If we decide we want to cure cancer and put the resources behind it, we can do that. Absolutely inspired. Evidence of what is possible. Absolutely. So Terry, you've commanded the space station just as he did. So what would you be feeling the day the ISS plunks into the Pacific Ocean? The Pacific, yeah.

The great toilet bowl of space. If we have a follow-on program, I'll be sad but excited. What happened with the shuttle, we ended the shuttle program and canceled the follow-on program. And so that was really not good. And when I talk to folks in Washington, I always tell them, the most difficult thing is not the rocket science, it's the political science. And we got to figure out how to get that straight so that every time, four years from now, when the next guy come in, he doesn't cancel the last program. Maybe the word science doesn't belong in the phrase political science. Well, you know, that's really the hurdle for a vibrant human exploration program is the political challenges as much as it is the physics challenges. I think the space station has been the most important American foreign policy initiative since the Marshall Plan.

During my mission and training. So minus the Marshall Plan, rebuilt Europe after World War II. And so when I was in space. A huge cooperative, shared. Former enemies worked, you know, to rebuild the world. And so things were not good between America and Russia on Earth. And yet I was in space with Russian cosmonaut friends, training with them. And that, to my mind, was how people can work to do difficult things. Like we weren't worried about politics. We were just worried about staying alive. You know, like it was not easy to stay alive in the vacuum

of space. I think that's the best thing. In this final clip, I asked Scott what he gained from spending so much time in space, looking down on earth from the space station. Let's check it out. My Russian colleague that I was on the space station with for a year said to me one day, he goes, you know, if we want to solve our two countries' problems, we should just send our presidents here together for a whole year. Being in space, looking down at the Earth where you don't really see any political borders,

where at times can look very, very peaceful and inviting, and then you realize it's not. There was one day where we were having these beautiful flights over the Mediterranean. It was cloudless, and it was incredibly blue. It was incredibly blue. And then on the news, you would see that same area where you would see the kids washing up on the shores, the kids from North Africa and immigrants trying to get to safety, dying in that very, very beautiful Mediterranean Sea. It just didn't make sense to me. Like, why can't somebody do something about that? So this is a cognitive disconnect between the beauty of it at a distance and the news that permeates. Yeah, from Earth, which is generally bad news.

But, you know, and seeing this and seeing the Earth, and it looks like, you know, we're all part, we're all in this together. When I reflect on Scott's thoughts, thoughts that are shared by so many of his astronaut brethren, no matter the nationality, this is a perspective that you glean when you're above it all. You see nature on its largest scale with oceans and land and clouds. That perspective from space is transformative. Astronauts experience it firsthand. I wonder, can it be transmitted to others who need it most? Everybody who takes arms against everybody else. Politicians, people who run this world,

who see and think of the world as a color-coded map. I've got a quote from an Apollo astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out

and say, look at that, you son of a bitch. Ladies and gentlemen, you've been watching StarTalk. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and as always, I bid you to keep looking up.