The Joe Rogan Experience - #1425 - Garrett Reisman

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

Garrett Reisman is a former NASA Astronaut. He is currently a Professor of Astronautical Engineering at USC and a Senior Advisor at SpaceX.

3, 2, 1, welcome. Thanks for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. Thanks for inviting me. This is awesome. I've seen a bunch of videos online of you talking about space and your dream of being an astronaut as a young man. And what is it like just to see the Earth from above and to be, you lived up there for

like, what, 95 days? 95 days, which actually is kind of a bummer to be honest with you because uh you know this if you saw that video maybe but the thing is if you stay for 100 days they give you a patch right and i'm at day 95 and the space shuttle discovery shows up to bring me home and mark kelly was a commander he goes garrett it's time to hop in and come home and i'm like man i just need five more days to get that patch can we just like go around a few more times or something and yeah it seems like 95 days should be enough man give the man a patch right right you know how much does a patch cost what's the longest anybody stayed up there? The longest for an American was Scott Kelly's nearly a year in spaces,

longest in a row, basically. But it was a Russian that stayed up there for longer than a year, and he has the all-time record. When they come back, what is 90 days like coming back? Because I've talked to people who have gone there. When they come back, their balance is all off. The equilibrium is all screwy. You're kind of messed up.

And your vestibular system is what's affected the most. At least that's what's most noticeable when you first get back. Actually, the first thing I noticed, let me back up, is how heavy things were again. I took off my helmet and I was holding it in my hand and it felt like I was holding the anchor to the USS Nimitz, you know? It's like, I'm like, how am I ever going to brush my teeth?

It'd be like too arduous, you know? Does your body severely weaken in 95 days? Well, back in the day, back when I was going there, so that mission, my long-term mission was back in 2008. And back then we were still losing bone density and muscle mass as we're going up there. You lost about 1% of bone every month.

So I was about 3% low. They don't anymore? They don't anymore because we found out we came up with better countermeasures to prevent that. What are the countermeasures? It's basically working out. And it's resistive exercise that does it for you, which we knew back when I was going, but the problem was we had this machine

that was kind of a first generation of the workout machine, and it could do large reps but low load. So you're doing like a lot of reps at low weight. And that helped, but what helps, it turns out, we found this out kind of by happenstance, but it turns out that high load, low reps works much better. And so we got this new machine that you could really crank it up to 11,

and the guys now that are working out on that thing are coming home with no muscle or bone loss at all. Wow. What's the Canadian gentleman that we had on? Yes, Chris Hadfield. When Commander Hadfield came back, I believe he said it took him a whole year to recover. Yeah.

I mean, that was still kind of in the early days. So I don't know which machine he used. He probably did use a new one. But overall, it does take to get everything back, to get your full vestibular system back, your sense of balance, to get all your bone, all your muscle back to baseline. It took me a year to get all that back too. Wow. It's kind of like rehabbing from a major sports injury.

That's got to be so strange. Your body just wants to shrivel up when you're up there because there's no gravity. Your body just wants to shrivel up when you're up there because there's no gravity. Yeah. It's really interesting because it's an adaptation, and the body is incredible. So what it's doing is it's realizing, hey, you know, I don't have to carry my own weight anymore. So why do I need this big bulky skeleton, right? Oh, wow. It's like you're becoming kind of like a fish where you're shedding all the bone density because you don't have to – your body realizes, I don't need it.

It's like a fish in water. You know how fish have very slender bones. That's an interesting way to look at it, like a fish. Yeah. Wow. And we fight it by working out. And how often do you have to work out? Every day?

Every day. Every day. How often? Like how much time? They schedule two hours. Now, you're not on the machine for two hours. So that's also prepping, getting changed and cleaning up afterwards. So you're working out a good hour every day. What is it like to sweat in space?

It's weird. Because what happens is if you don't notice, like in the beginning, you don't even realize it, but it's all building up. If you don't notice, like in the beginning, you don't even realize it, but it's all building up. And even without, like, if you have no hair to soak it up, it just builds up like this thin film of water on your head, like a coating of water. And you don't even notice it because it doesn't run down. And then somebody calls your name and you're like, yeah. And then. Oh, that's crazy.

I never even thought of that. So it just kind of floats off your body. Yeah. It's like a dog shaking itself, you know, and it just goes everywhere. So if you have it on your arm, you can kind of just go whoosh, and the sweat will go flying? You know, your crewmates won't be too happy with you if you do this a lot, but yeah. Wow. Oh, is there video of people doing that in space? There's got to be. There should be, right?

We've shot so much video. Somebody's got to have done that. So are you basically doing like compound movements, like deadlifts and squats and things along those lines? Yeah, functional fitness kind of stuff. And you're focusing on certain areas. So the bone loss comes mostly from your legs because you're not loading. So basically our bones need a stimulus to regenerate. And it happens to us every day.

So as you walk, as you go upstairs, that load that the bones feel, the compressive load, is telling the bone, hey, make some more. Now you take that away, and the bone stops making more, and that's the problem. People say, like, can't you just take, like, calcium pills? But it's not a mineral deficiency. It's just a load. It's no load. That's interesting the body adapts so quickly. Yeah.

That 90 days has such, and if you didn't do anything for 90 days at all, you'd be in real trouble, right? Yeah, that's what's really kind of freaky is thinking about like, well, what if we don't fight this? Because all these adaptations you go through are not a problem when you're in space.

It's only a problem if you want to come home. Right. Right? Losing that bone, even like not using your vestibular organs anymore, your semicircular canals, your otolith organs, you're not making use of those for your balance. You're just going purely on the visual. What that does initially is it makes you kind of sick.

It's like being air sick or sea sick. But once your body adapts, you're fine. So the question is, like, what would we become if we didn't fight it? What if we just went with it and stayed up there? Be like a water balloon. What would you become, right? You'd become, actually, the place, I think, in science fiction that gets it the most correct is if you watch The Expanse. You ever watch that show?

No, I heard it's a really good show. I never got into it, though. It's good. And they get it right because they show people like these belters that live in partial gravity like their whole lives. And they have much more slender bones.

And they catch this terrorist guy and they want to torture him. And all they do is they make him stand up in gravity on Earth. And it's incredibly painful for him. Oh, wow. Yeah, that would probably be what would happen. And it must take a long-ass time to get everything back.

If you went from Earth gravity to the space station and you lived up there for a year and didn't do anything about it and then came back to Earth, you'd basically be like, it would be hard to crawl, right? Yeah. If you don't try to fight it um you the vestibular stuff would come back probably about the same rate but you would be really hurting with your muscle atrophy and your bone so you would you would lose a lot of your skeleton

if you're up there for a year and did nothing and you would also your all your muscles that you don't use like in your legs and your postural muscles on your lower back, you're not using those anymore. So they would just waste away to nothing. You'd be okay in your arms because everything you do is with your arms. That's how you move. That's how you get around is by pulling and pushing. But there's no walking. There's no stairs.

There's nothing. Does it affect the way you think at all? Some people describe kind of an issue with short-term memory. They call it like space brain. Boy, is that a small group of people that would understand what you're talking about there. I got space brain. Bro, I got that too. Oh, yeah.

So it's something that I never really noticed it, but I don't know how much of that is real and how much is like you're freaking out because you're in space, right? So it's distracting and maybe you forget like what that number was you were supposed to remember. But, you know, like if you're really in the middle of something and you're all excited and you kind of can't remember somebody's phone number. It's kind of like that. Oh, okay. So it's just – I would imagine that just being up there breathing that recirculated air, it's got to be odd, right? Yeah. And it might stink, but I don't know. Because the other thing that happens is you have this big fluid shift.

So right now, we have a lot of blood blood pulling up in our legs and our heart, its most important job, of course, is to feed the brain oxygenated blood. And then when you take the gravity vector out of the picture, the heart sends too much up to the brain and the stuff doesn't collect in our legs anymore. And it all shoots up here and you get the shift of all that blood volume to your upper body and your head gets all puffed up. Whoa. Yeah, so my first night in space, I went to sleep, which was kind of hard to do because you're in space. You don't want to go to sleep, right?

Yeah. And on that first night, I woke up in the middle of the night, and I could have sworn I was standing on my head doing a headstand or a handstand. I'm like, why am I standing on my head in my sleep? This is strange, right? And then I looked out the window. I saw the earth. I'm like, oh, that's right. I'm in space.

So all the blood was just kind of pooling in your head. Yeah. As if you're like hanging by gravity boots or something. It feels exactly like that. Wow. And then after a day or two, you get used to it and it doesn't bother you anymore, but you feel congested because you still have all this

volume up here. So your sense of smell and your sense of taste are all deadened. Oh, wow. It's kind of like when you have a cold and your sense of smell and your sense of taste are not as strong. So it's like that all the time.

That's why we take, we cover, we have every hot sauce known to humankind up on the space station. Oh, really? Like sriracha. We got, you know, Louisiana Cajun fire sauce and all, whatever. We got like a whole stockpile of it because you pour that on everything so you can get some taste. Because otherwise everything tastes really bland. Oh, wow. Now, what are you eating up there? Oh, it's terrible.

Is it freeze-dried foods mostly? Yeah. You don't go for the food, all right? This is not like a foodie holiday. It's like – so you got basically two choices. have basically two choices you have the american food which is essentially mres like military freeze-dried irradiated uh you know infinite shelf life kind of stuff and uh and then the russian food is also based on their military rations but from submarines and the russian food actually tastes better but the problem is one of presentation because it comes in cans.

So you get these, these cans and even though it tastes good, you open that can up and you look at it and it's like, God, it looks like dog food. There's like congealed and yeah, but it tastes better. It tastes better.

But it's just like so unappetizing when you open that can up and, you know, it's just not. Does what wouldizing when you open that can up and, you know, it's just not. What would happen if you brought fresh things up there? Would they rot at the same rate that they would rot in America? Yeah. The thing is we have no refrigeration. We didn't when I was there.

They actually have a small refrigerator now. So you can't have anything that needs to be refrigerated but you would usually like for the first couple days we take a bag of fresh food and we took like sandwiches and and and fruits and vegetables and stuff and then because that's the last time you're going to have it after that it's all going to be just the stuff in the packets that you add water to now when the first day you actually got up there was that the first time you had ever been in space? On my first mission, yeah, the first time in space. So your first view of the Earth from above.

Yeah, it was that right there. What is that like? Wow. Well, I didn't see it right away because I was in the mid-deck, the downstairs of the shuttle, and there's only one window down there, and it's in the corner. Okay, so it's in the hatch, and it's in the hatch and it's like the size of a dinner plate and i was up there you got a lot of work to do when you as soon as you get up there so i'm working like crazy and after about 30 minutes i see this pale blue glow coming from

that window and i'm like that's the earth you know i should have a look at that and i was super excited for this. So I wanted to be ready. So I paused, I closed my eyes, I meditated, call it whatever you want. I just got ready. And when I felt like I was ready, I floated up to that window and I opened up my eyes and I gazed out for the very first time at the earth from space. And what that felt like is really, really hard to describe in words. But if I had to pick one word to describe what I was feeling at that moment, it would be meh. Really? Yeah, man.

Just meh? Just meh. I mean, it was all right. It was pretty. It had a lot of those Earth colors, like blues and greens. Right. But man, we've all seen pictures of the Earth from space, okay? I mean, we got like HD video coming down from space now, where it's just spectacular. You can see stuff in that video that you can't even see with your own eyes, like the aurora and all that.

video that you can't even see with your own eyes, like the aurora and all that. And I'm sure like John Glenn and like Yuri Gagarin had no idea what to expect. And so when they looked out and they saw the earth, they freaked out, you know, and it was amazing. And it was beautiful, but it was underwhelming. I guess my expectations were so high. Like I felt like there should be like some heavenly choir and then we should all hold hands and sing kumbaya. Yeah, most people that have done it, they talk about this realization that you like this inescapable realization that we're all on this thing together.

And that all these boundaries of civilizations and cultures and countries and continents are all nonsense. We're really just all on this one thing together. Yeah, they call that the overview effect. And a lot of guys come back and talk about that, and they really feel it. And they talk about a world without borders. And it's a beautiful sentiment, and I don't want to knock that in any way. But meh. Yeah.

It's like, really? A world without borders? What did you expect to see? You expect to look down and see like dotted lines between all the countries? You know, I guess you do, it's inescapable when you look down and you see the planet and you realize that we're all in the same boat, you know. But that didn't strike me as a sudden realization because I think it's because I knew that before I went. You shouldn't have to go and strap into a rocket

and blast off and look at the earth and know that basically we're all human beings, I think. I mean, I think the things that unite us are so much stronger and more important than the crazy little things that divide us, like race or sex or nationality or politics or whatever. And at the end of the day, we have this one home, and we're all stuck here together.

So I had that strong knowledge before I went. And maybe that's why when I look down, I'm like, yeah, there it is. Okay, I get it. knowledge before i went and maybe that's why when i look down i'm like yeah there it is okay i get it but it wasn't like all of a sudden like the the the shade was pulled back and there was like suddenly a new realization about life is there one place that's the spot on the space station to get the view where you really get a big window there's a huge window uh called the cupola that wasn't there in my first mission but it was there in my second mission. So I got to see it the second time.

They added a window? Yeah. It's like, hmm, let's get the sawzall and put the – Yeah, how do you add a window to the space station? You just, you know, get the – no, it's – they added a whole module and the module had this cupola, which is like a- Is that it right there? Is that what you're looking through? That's exactly it, yeah.

Wow. That's pretty tight. It's a dome, and so you get the full 360 view, and it's spectacular. Wow. And we tell the guys that don't get to do a spacewalk that this view is just as good as doing a spacewalk. But it's not. It's not. It's not.

But don't tell them because it makes them feel better. They're going to listen. Yeah. What is a spacewalk like? Oh, man. Well, first I got to tell you that the likelihood of me doing a spacewalk was like slim to none. When I first got there, they tell you that when you're interviewing to become an astronaut, to go talk to some of the other astronauts. And so I went in there, and we had this presentation about spacewalking, and it seemed like to be the ultimate experience, just an incredible thing.

And I wanted to do it bad. So I went, and I'm talking to this one astronaut who's a pretty tall guy. Those of you that can't tell from the podcast, I'm 5'4". Okay, so I'm not like a real towering individual. A little vertically challenged, I guess. And I'm talking to this real tall astronaut, and I said, you know,

just heard about the spacewalking. Sounds awesome. I've been living in California. I've been doing like some rock climbing, some scuba diving. Maybe that'd make me a good candidate to do a spacewalk. And this tall astronaut looked at me like right in the eye and he laughed in my face. He said, what are you? Four foot what? How rude. I know. My first thought was, you know, I thought astronauts were supposed to be polite.

And this guy, like, was not being nice. But he was actually just being brutally honest. You know, it was kind of tough love. And he was like, listen, the suit is one size fits all. You're going to get in that thing, and it's going to swallow you up, and you're not going to be able to do anything. You're going to be useless. So this is impossible. Forget about it.

So I was kind of pissed off, but I wasn't going to let this guy stop me, right? So I get there. I got the job. And I go down for my first training exercise, which was in this huge pool we got in Houston. And it's like, it's 100 feet wide, 200 feet long, 40 feet deep. And we could fit like most of the space station in there.

And they get a crane that comes by. They put you in the suit, which weighs, you know, something like 175 pounds and stuff. And then, in addition, you're in it, too. It picks you up, and it plops you in the water, and you float around. It's kind of like being up in space, and that's how we train. So I get down. There's my very first exercise and i could tell in the first five minutes of this training exercise

that big tall astronaut that laughed in my face was right i was not i was failing i was i was not doing well i was uh i was screwing up i was like it just wasn't going well why do they make a a one-size-fits-all suit? It seems... They have the ability to alter the arms and the legs a little bit, and they have... It's actually three different size upper torsos. There's a medium, a large, and an extra large.

But that's it. It's limited because it costs a lot of money to make different sizes. So there's only... The gloves they can tailor because that's actually the most important thing. But I'm getting my butt kicked, you know, and I got a needs improvement, which is a nice way of saying you failed, right? But I wasn't ready to give up. I went and I knew I was going to need help. So I talked to the people that make the suit.

And they did some of those things. They shortened up the arms. They fixed it up a little bit for me. And then I talked to the trainers. And we said, OK, yeah, we've got to think outside the box here. If we give you the standard procedure, you're going to be at a disadvantage. But maybe we change your body positions instead of going straight onto the work site. Maybe we come at the work site from the side so you get more reach that way.

And we started working at it, and we got better and better. And the end of the story is that I got to – eventually I got the highest possible qualification to do the most complicated spacewalks we do. And I ended up doing three different spacewalks over the course of my career. And that big tall guy that laughed in my face, he didn't get to do any. That's what you get for talking shit, sir. Look at you out there. Yeah, that's me. Now, what is that feeling like?

Because it's got to feel insane when you're strapped to a space station that's floating around, and you're just hanging by a cord. Yeah. Well, you're holding on tight and you do have that safety tether that you see there and and uh uh you know they can prepare you for everything except for the visual so when you like are in the pool you're staring at the pool wall when you get up there and you see the whole earth below you some people go out there and get like a sense of fear of falling. But, of course, if you let go, you're not going anywhere. Right.

The space station is moving 17,500 miles an hour, but so are you. So it's kind of like doing a wing walking on an airplane but with no air to blow you off the wing. So when you look at the space station, it's rock solid. But you look down and some people get the fear of falling and then they hold on real tight which is a terrible terrible mistake because we call it space walking but you're not walking you're doing everything with your arms so you can wear your arms out exactly so now if you're climbing and you get like kind of totally thrashed in your forearms and now you get that claw hand and it's useless.

Yeah. You can do that, and you got like seven and a half hours to go. And that's bad. So you're out there for seven and a half hours? Yeah. What if you have to pee? Diaper. Diaper?

Yeah. Poop as well? Try to avoid that. You do your best? As a scientist, I had to experiment, right? Of course. So during a training exercise, I waited to like the very end just in case, you know, and I let one go right before they pulled me out of the pool one day,

and I resolved never, ever to do that again. Was that number one or number two you let go? Number two. Oh, boy. Number one is no big deal Yeah Save that project I could have told you what was going to happen That's disgusting

And you're doing it in the pool too You're not doing it in actual space space Yeah To be one of the rare people that it's actually pooped in space Would be very interesting That's it You know we keep all these records I don't know who's got that record

It's not me Diaper. Boy. So you just have to let it go when you're up there. Yeah. So what are you doing when you're out there? So if you're doing seven and a half hours worth of work. You're basically doing maintenance.

So it's kind of like being a mechanic or a technician, the way I describe it. But the suit is like so hard. It restricts everything you do because it's blown up to um about four pounds per square inch and so even um just closing your fists takes work because the suit's like a balloon it wants to stay like this and so just closing your fingers is is takes effort and over seven and a half hours that gets really fatiguing you're moving your arms everything is and and the suit can only move, like you can't do this, right? You can do this maybe. So your ability to raise up your shoulders is really limited. So you're trying to do all this work, but you're working inside this suit. And I describe it as like, it's like trying to change the oil in your car while wearing a

medieval suit of armor. It's hard. And what kind of maintenance are you doing on the outside of the spaceship? We're cleaning the windows, getting the bugs off. Oh yeah, that's another. On this particular spacewalk, we were assembling a robot that we took up there. But we did other things like we put a new antenna on top of the space station. We swapped out a bunch of batteries that were getting old, you know, stuff like that.

That's fascinating. So you have to have some real understanding of mechanical things as well. Yeah. I mean, you're putting stuff together. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it really helps to have some kind of mechanical aptitude. I mean, a lot of us like working on our cars or building things in our garage, hobbyist kind of stuff. We actually started right as I was leaving NASA, which was back in 2010.

We started kind of an informal program where we were going over to other's garages and doing car repair stuff just to get more hands-on experience with that kind of thing. hands-on experience with that kind of thing. So say if you have to do an antenna up there, is that something you're trained for on Earth in the pool and then you go up there and do it? During the shuttle days, absolutely. Everything we did was choreographed down to like exactly where I'm going to put, what handrail I'm going to put my toolbox on. I mean, everything is all figured out in advance.

But nowadays, and sometimes on space station, even when I was there, when things break, you don't have the luxury of training. If we're going to do a shuttle mission, we're doing a really complex spacewalk. We'll do everything we're going to do in space at least 10 times in the pool first. But these days, you don't have that luxury. Something breaks and you brief it, you talk about it, you have some PowerPoints, and then you're out the door and you've got to go do it. So how much briefing and how many PowerPoints? The training that goes on prior to one of these unscheduled EVAs is typically on the order of like a day's worth of activity all told. So are these PowerPoints preloaded onto the space station or do they have to beam it up to you?

It depends on exactly what you're what you're doing so we identify like the most likely and most serious things that could go wrong and we practice those in the pool and we have all those procedures suitcase before we ever go but then sometimes you get a surprise you know sometimes something breaks you weren't expecting to break or breaks in a certain way or there's a complication that you weren't planning on and then you got to improvise, that's got to be crazy. And you're probably doing things that other people on the space station maybe haven't done. So there's no one that can tell you, hey, I did it. It's no big deal. Yeah, but, you know, even if you're doing something that you rehearsed 10 times

and you think you got it all figured out, you still get surprised when you actually get up there. The big one that I remember is on my second space walk, we're connecting this dish antenna and had to go on top of this big boom, like a big pedestal. And there was a connector that had an electrical connector. And we had like an hour or so to connect the thing. And without it connected, it wasn't getting any power or data to that antenna. And it could get too cold and this gazillion dollar antenna could be a worthless hunk of junk if you take too long you're on the clock because when it was in the shuttle it was plugged in it was getting its heaters were on and now you got

to plug it back in and get the heaters back on in a certain amount of time and so we're like okay we plan this we train this we get up there and the connectors won't go together. Like, it doesn't fit. And these two pieces of equipment sat next to each other for like a year in Florida, you know, like a warehouse. And nobody ever thought, well, oh, maybe we should make sure this thing fits. Oh, no. Yeah. And we get up there, like, it doesn't fit. And we're like, crap.

You know, what do we do? So we're shoving, and we're shoving so hard. We're pushing on shoving so hard. We're pushing on this thing so hard that the guys inside the space station said they feel the space station shaking. Like, that's how hard we were trying. And then we see little metal shavings come off. And one of those, they can get in the connectors. We're like, that's bad.

So we stopped. And then this was, like, kind of my big hero moment. You know, like in the movies, they,, like Brad Pitt saves the solar system and stuff. You know, this is my thing, right? It's not that exciting. But I thought I had this idea. I said, hey, the problem we were basically having was that the female side was too small and the male side was too big for it to fit together. So I said to one of my crewmates inside, I said, hey, how long until the sun comes up? Because, you know, it takes 90 minutes to go around the earth,

and every 45 minutes the sun is either coming up or going down. So it can't be that long. And he goes, actually, about 10 minutes because we're behind the earth and it was dark, and then in 10 minutes the sun was going to come up. I'm like, perfect. So I took the female side um i'm sorry i took the i took the male side and i held it in my glove okay and i put it behind the structure wait i knew the sun was going to be coming from here so i put it in the shadow and i waited for the sun to come up and it hit the female side

and the temperature difference if you're in the sun or in the shade is i can be up to like 600 degrees fahrenheit difference so i let the sun hit it and warm it up and i took the male side quickly out of my my insulated hand and away from the shadow and i slid it in and went right in wow and that was it saved day. So you just deduced this just understanding how things change according to temperature? Yeah. Thermal expansion. Wow. Yeah.

That's incredible. Yeah, that was my thing. Did you yell at the people who manufactured it? No. We were so happy. I have video of this. And we were going, woo-hoo, give each other high fives in the suits. And we were doing like, woo!

Wow. That was victory. That's a great victory, though. That really is that you figured that out. Yeah. A lot of people would have been stuck up there. How the fuck did no one try it before they went up there? I don't know.

Maybe they did, and it just like, maybe when it got up to space and it experienced those different temperatures, it expanded differently. I don't know for sure. So I'm not pointing any fingers, but it didn't work. But we solved it. And that's the kind of thing that you can't, like, until we have AI or something that can really learn, you can't code that. So that's a real benefit that humans bring to the equation, being able to adapt to something you didn't expect. Otherwise, that thing would have been junk. Yeah, if a robot's doing it, you're stuck. It's going to keep pushing. equation uh being able to do to be able to adapt to something you didn't expect otherwise that thing would have been junk yeah if a robot's doing it you're stuck it's going to keep pushing it's

not going to you know you're not going to be able to reprogram it now that feeling that you were talking about of looking out the window where it was kind of meh and then the difference between that and the spacewalk is that where you get this real sense of being in space above the Earth. The spacewalk, you can't, yeah, that's breathtaking because you have this helmet that's like a giant fishbowl, and after a while you kind of forget that it's there. And you're just like, it's like, you know, the old Superman with Christopher Reeve when he's like flying around the Earth and he's just like in his underwear or whatever?

It's like that because you forget. Like if you ever have gone scuba diving and you get to the point where you just kind of forget you have the mask on. I've never scuba dived. I've only snorkeled. If you spend a lot of time down there, you can get to the point where you kind of like forget that you're in this alien environment. And it becomes like you become one with it. And that's a wonderful thing. Well, you've done underwater

exploration as well yeah what have you done there i lived for two weeks uh in the bottom of the sea oh jesus i get weirded out i get weirded out just talking just you saying that two weeks at the bottom of the ocean yeah how deep uh it was exactly 20,000 millimeters under the sea. It was about 60 feet, which works out to be about... Oh, only 60 feet? That's okay. Yeah. That doesn't freak me out too much.

I thought you were going to say like miles. No. I'd start panicking. No, it's about 60 feet. But the cool thing was we stayed there for weeks. Wow. Now, if you're normally scuba diving and you go down 60 feet, you have 60 minutes, and then you got to come back up or you get too much nitrogen in your blood and you're going to

get bent, right? But it's not a problem if you just stay. The problem is then if you stay, you build up all that nitrogen in your blood. Now you can't go back up. So like if you run out of air or you lose sight of your buddy or something, you can't go to the surface because within a couple hours you'll be dead. Wow. So you have to stay down there. And we use cave diving techniques that we did a lot of training for to be safe. And we had redundant tanks, redundant manifolds, redundant regulators. redundant tanks, redundant manifolds, redundant regulators, and we had valves that we can flip around so we can always make sure we can get air without ever having to, in an emergency, ever having to come up

because coming up is not an option. So how do you eventually get out? It's a freaky thing. It takes about a day. And what you do is you take, so we're living in this habitat, and it was kind of like a submarine on the bottom of the ocean. But it didn't have a motor, so it was just like stuck on the floor, like a big cylinder. And it had a hole cut in the side here.

And the only thing that was keeping the ocean out was the air pressure inside. Whoa. Kind of like taking a cup and flipping it over, putting it in the bathtub and trapping the air. Oh, God. And you just scuba dive on down, and then you swim into that thing. like taking a cup and flipping it over, putting it in the bathtub and trapping the air. Oh, God. And you just scuba dive on down, and then you swim into that thing. And then once you pop up in that hole, it's like you're in a swimming pool inside the habitat. And then you just step out into the habitat.

Whoa. Have you ever seen the movie The Abyss? Yes. It's like that. It's like that. Oh. Yeah. How accurate is that movie? I think, what's the guy, what's the Navy SEAL in there?

He gets like, like. He gets crazy from the bends. Gets like, like, what do they call it? Deep dementia or something? Is that fake? Yeah, that's fake. God damn Hollywood. So this process of getting back to surface level, you said it takes a day.

What do you have to do? So what you do is you close up that hole and you convert the habitat into a pressure chamber. And what you do is you very, very slowly bring the pressure back to sea level. So you decrease the pressure as if you're slowly, slowly going up in the water column. And then as you do it gradually,

the nitrogen slowly comes out of your blood and you could feel it kind of tingles oh wow over the course of a day you just lie you try to lie still in your bunk and just like read a book or something but you feel like this tingling and then after about a day of that they get you all the way back to sea level slowly so that the nitrogen what you know it is it's like if you take a can of soda and you shake it up, if you open the top quickly, but if you open the top really slowly and you let it slowly come out, you don't get all the bubbles. Right.

It's that same effect. Ah, that's a great analogy. Yeah. Oh. What's freakier, being in the bottom of the ocean or being up in space? Up in space is more surreal. Yeah, because the floating, the earth out the window, the views are better. But being down there was pretty wild too.

I remember once we were doing this experiment where I had my crewmate and I had an ultrasound, and we're doing this telemedicine experiment. So there were these docs in Houston looking at the screen, but there was a delay. And I'm supposed to find her kidney. And I'm like searching around for her kidney. And then I look up and I look out the window and I see a six-foot hammerhead shark right out the window. And we have a guy in the water.

And I dropped a giant F-bomb. I was like, fuck! And all the docs in Houston are freaking out. They're thinking in a moment they're going to see her liver explode on the screen or something. You know, and all the docs in Houston are freaking out. They're thinking like in a moment they're going to see her liver explode on the screen or something. And they're like, what's that? How's the patient? How's the patient?

I'm like, patient's fine. Got a six-foot hammerhead out the window. Yeah, that's got to be really weird, right? You're in that thing in their world for how long? Two weeks? Yeah. So is that the weirdest animal that you saw is the hammerhead the scariest thing i saw was one night i was taking a dump this is a true story uh i the way you do this okay number one you just pee in the pool okay

but if you have to go number two you go into into the pool because you don't want a floater in your pool, right? Of course. Like Caddyshack, you don't want that. Right. So what you do is you go – you don't take a tank. You just take your mask and your fins and you go down. Naked? You can.

We had a mixed gender crew, so I wore some trunks, but, you know. And then you just go down and you have to swim i don't know it's like maybe 10 15 feet it's not that far and there's a what we call the gazebo which is just a little dome uh that has air inside now you're out in the middle of the atlantic ocean like with no tank no and you're 60 feet down it's night you can't see a thing you're alone in the ocean but night you can't see a thing you're alone in the ocean but you can see this little gazebo you swim to that you pop in and then you got air just some valves you let in some fresh air and then you hold on and you just and you take off your trunks and you just let it rip but the problem is the fish get accustomed to this oh

jesus yeah so they go there knowing that you're gonna poop as soon as you drop in the water at night it's like the dinner bell going off and there's like school yeah yeah because this is feeding time whoa and so you feel them like yeah pecking at the back door the worst are the angel fish because that shape they can get like right up in there oh boy so you take your fin off and you're like whacking them oh jesus christ so that's all bad enough but like but as you're doing that and you're in the pitch black atlantic ocean 60 feet down no scuba tank at night at night with the sound of the ocean like like lapping against the the dome and you're looking down and there's endless black,

you know, just a black void. And you're thinking about every single scary ocean movie like Jaws, you know, The Meg, whatever, The Abyss, all those scary movies, right? And you think about all the things that could be down there. You can't help but go through your head, so it's kind of freaky. And then you finish, and you put your mask back on. And I took a big breath, and I went down,

and I opened my eyes in my mask in the darkness with my flashlight, and I saw right in front of me this huge eyeball, in front of me, this huge eyeball, like about the size, I don't know, of a saucer, you know, like this big, staring, unblinking right at me. And I freaked out. I just tore off for the pool, for the moon pool and the habitat. I jumped in there. I surfaced.

I'm screaming. I'm screaming. And my crew come running. I surfaced. I'm screaming. I'm screaming. And my crew come running thinking I've been bit by a shark or something. And I'm like, giant fish. What was it? It was a Goliath grouper. Oh, I've seen those things before. They're enormous.

Size of a cow. It's like hundreds and hundreds of pounds, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Scared to live in hell, I mean. Yeah, those things could literally eat a person yeah it uh uh it was big enough that's for sure and so it was it just decided it scared the heck out of me they so where were you were in the atlantic yeah how far away were you from like florida like where were you at We were just off the coast of Key Largo.

Okay, because that's what I was saying. They live down there. Yeah. That's an enormous fish, man. Huge. I've seen videos of people catching them off of boats, and it seems surreal. Look at that. Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, there's one. It's like a giant largemouth bass. That's what it's like. If you go bass fishing, they're so similar to bass in the way they look. Yeah, now imagine like- Jesusesus christ look at that yeah imagine like being eye to eye with that thing in the middle of the dark atlantic with no scuba tank they're delicious too but like i don't know if they taste as good as regular grouper uh i had yeah i wasn't gonna so you get a different yeah i wasn't gonna find out look at the mouth on that thing. Good Lord.

I'll tell you another quick story about down there. So I went out for a night dive once, and I spent – the beautiful thing about saturation diving like this is you can do basically infinite time, bottom time. You're not limited to like 60 minutes. You can stay out there for six hours, you know, whatever. So I was out doing this night dive, and I found found this beautiful shrimp and it was just spectacularly gorgeous. It was like translucent. You could see through it. You could see its organs move,

like internal organs, like doing their thing. And I stared at it for at least like an hour, just held my light on it and just sat there and stared at it. And it was really beautiful. And I come back inside the habitat and I'm kind of hungry. And the best space food we got

is shrimp cocktail. And I pulled that thing off the shelf and I'm like, oh, that looks good. Then I'm like, I can't do it. I can't do it, man. You felt bad because you just saw the shrimp? Wow. I ate it the next day.

The next day. Yeah. But for that day, though, you really felt bad. I felt bad. Wow. Grouper, you would have felt bad? Like a nice grouper sandwich? It scared me.

I think I would have been okay with that. I wonder if they've ever eaten people. Because it seems like they could, I mean, they swallow giant fish. It seems like if you're not a large person, they might be able to just suck you right in there. You know? like if you're not a large person they might be able to just suck you right in there you know see now if this happens to me again i'm gonna be even more freaked out i feel like i've read that grouper have bitten people before yeah like probably trying them out like if they get hungry if you're that big you probably have to eat so much yeah this non-stop yeah buffet for those guys and yeah so when you're down there and you're doing all the swimming, you're using a rebreather?

No, regular tanks. You're using tanks, regular scuba tanks? And what is the capacity of these tanks? How long can you stay down just swimming around for? We have two, and we can isolate them in case one of them springs a leak. But you don't have that much more time than a standard scuba tank but we have is refill stations all around the floor with high pressure hoses so we have these quick disconnects on our on our system that you can plug in and fill it right back up and then you're good to go for you know another couple hours so when you swim to go take

a poo you have to do that you have to wear the tank or do you just hold your breath just hold your breath you're not going that far how far are you going yeah like 15 feet or so in total pitch black yeah there is a light on the gazebo but that's all so you see that light out there and you know if you get to there that's where you're pulling yeah good lord yeah wow that's got to be so strange yeah what's it like to get back from that? I would probably feel it seems like it would be real similar to getting back from space. Yeah. The thing about it, what makes it such a great training exercise psychologically, is if you had to get to a hospital, it takes about the same time from that habitat as it would from the space station. In both cases, it takes about a day. In the space station, you got to get in the Soyuz, you got to put your

space suit on, you got to detach the Soyuz from the space station, you got to separate from the space station, got to do a deorbit burn, you got to land, the helicopter's got to come get you. By the time all that's done, it's like a day. And the Soyuz is a Russian craft. Yeah. So we have to use Russian crafts to get back from the space station. Right now, we have to use Russian craft to go and come back. How weird is that? It's not cool. What happened?

All right. So it's not good. None of us are happy about this. But what happened was the shuttles, the shuttle, let me just say this, is a magnificent flying machine. I mean, what's really remarkable, if you go down to like the California Science Center and you look at Endeavor, we designed that thing in the 70s. Like it doesn't even have a microwave. It's got a conventional convection oven. Wow.

So it's like ancient technology. The flight computers on that thing, your Apple Watch could run circles around them. I mean, it's like nothing. They're so primitive. But it did. It took off like a rocket. It landed like an airplane. You could carry people.

You could carry the Hubble Space Telescope in a trunk. You could do a spacewalk from it. It has a robot arm that you see there. Yeah, there's Endeavor. So that's my flight, actually. That's STS-123. In the middle, that's the robot that we put together. Wow.

But anyway, it's an incredible machine, and we'll never design anything like it, maybe ever again, certainly not anytime soon. So despite its technological incredibleness, for lack of a better word, it had a couple key limitations. One was it's not that safe. So we lost two of them, Challenger and Columbia. And we could talk about that. I knew the guys in Columbia, and that was really, really rough. And then the second thing was it's super expensive because it took so much maintenance, even though it was reusable, or most of it was. It took so much maintenance, it took a standing army to keep it running.

We're spending, I think, $3 or $4 billion a year on the program. And there's no way, if we wanted to build something that was going to be more cost-effective or safer, there's no way we're going to get a plus up from Congress of like an additional $4 billion a year to go do that. The only way really to make it happen was to stop flying the shuttle. So we took a very painful decision. And we said, okay, we're going to retire these things so we can make something new. And we know that there's going to be a gap period where we're not going to have anything. And it's going to suck.

But the good news is, and the great timing about this conversation right now, is that gap ends this year. Really? Yeah. 2020 is when that painful period is put to rest. And what happens? We're going to have a SpaceX Dragon. SpaceX Dragon? Yeah.

That's a great name. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. We're going to have a brand new ship. And not only the Dragon, we're going to have the Boeing Starliner. And then we have two other private companies that are going to be launching people this year. It's incredible, these four companies all trying to put humans into space with private companies.

Yeah. And the schedules are just aligning, so it looks like it all will happen in 2020. Now, they've done some people, civilian trips up into space, right? They have. And that's all happened by paying the Russians. That's what it is? For rides, yeah. Why is their equipment so much better?

It's not. It's the only game in town. Once we retired the shuttles, there was nothing else available. I would be like, hey, how well are you guys maintaining these things? Yeah. Like, what are you doing? Like, tell me what's your maintenance schedule. It's been a little scary lately because they've had some mishaps, right?

Like what? Well, we had a launch go squirrely where the rocket didn't work right, and they had to punch off. Nick Hague was the American on that, and fortunately, he was fine. Punch off meaning eject. Yeah. Oh, fuck. Yeah.

Not something you want to do for fun. So during launch? Yeah. So you're launching, and they're like, this is not good. Yeah. It has these side boosters, and one of them got stuck. It didn't come off right, and they were starting to spin out of control, and then they punched out. Oh, my God.

How far up are they when they punch up? It's a good question. So we say punch out or punch up? Punch out. Punch out? Abort. You say abort. Okay.

But in that case, I don't know the exact altitude. They were fairly high. They were probably, I think they were still in the atmosphere so i'm guessing it i'm guessing something like 40 to 70 kilometers up or so and so they punch out and abort and then are you in like a capsule like what are you in in a capsule and then from that point on it's kind of like a normal landing if you survive the the giant uh you know yank i think uh they were pulling something like five or six g's i think when they when they separate or maybe even more that system when they pulled off and then um and then uh and then at that point you're falling in the capsule and then

the parachutes come out and uh and from that point on it's kind of like a normal landing oh the g's got to be crazy right i? I did a flight with the Blue Angels once. Oh, yeah. And I think we went 7.5 G's or something like that. It wasn't that bad. But it's so weird. Yeah. When you see the consciousness closing in like an elevator door, you see the blackness on the sides.

You get the so distraught feeling going. Yeah, it's very weird. So that, like in space, like to get ejected, or I guess actually not in space, in the atmosphere. And do you have to climb into that thing before you can abort, or are you in it already? No, there's no time. It's a rocket. In that case, it's a rocket on the top that pulls the capsule away from the booster. Oh, wow.

Just like we did with Apollo and Gemini. Now, on Dragon, and also on Starliner, we've got much more advanced systems that are built into the capsule. And so they push. Instead of having a tower up on top that pulls you away, they have engines down here that push and fly away. And the nice thing about that is the tower,

you actually, if you don't need it, you have to throw it away you have to jettison it but that's kind of like needing to use your ejection seat every single time you go for a flight because if you for some reason if it doesn't jettison you're dead you can't get the parachutes out with that thing stuck up on top so that's like a failure mode that if you put the engines down here you don't have to worry about that plus you carry it with you the whole, so you could use those powerful engines to really get quickly away from the booster, like the Falcon 9, if it's having a bad day.

You mean if it's blowing up? Yeah. Yeah. It's a bad day. It's a seriously bad day. What does that look like? Can you pull up the SpaceX, what's it, Dragon what? The Crew Dragon.

Crew Dragon. Whoa. There she is. That looks like something from the future. That's the test we just did. That's an artist's drawing of it. But this is the final big test we had to do before we actually put people inside. And we did that successfully just a couple weeks ago.

Wow. So what we did was we lit up those eject engines. That's an actual shot, yeah. That's insane. Look at that thing. That looks like a UFO. That's crazy. And that rocket went kablooey.

Not that we blew it up, but once it separated, the rocket started tumbling out of control and it made a giant fireball. Is that normal or expected? We kind of thought that would happen, yeah. Well, you were right. We weren't planning on using it again. There it is. So there it is separated from the booster. Wow.

And the booster went kaboom. But it was, I think, if I remember right, I think it was 1.5 kilometers away when the rocket went kaboom. And it was fine. Now, when you guys do these test flights do they have to anticipate where this stuff is going to land like where the i mean you have all this giant metal with fire and you shoot so like as you're launching you have to take into consideration yeah what the trajectory is wow that's the explosion. SpaceX complete successful abort test launch of Dragon crew capsule. Wow.

Yeah. So you have to think about where it, so they have to calculate what speed, how fast the earth is spinning, where it's going to drop. Well, that's why, and theoretically, you know, you've got to be ready for this any given flight. Now, this one, we knew it was going to happen, but it could happen anytime. So you always, that's why we always launch out over the ocean. Now, this one, we knew it was going to happen, but it could happen anytime. So you always, that's why we always launch out over the ocean. Oh, okay. And that's why Cape Canaveral is where Cape Canaveral is. Because if you look at a map of Florida, that's the Cape is where Florida juts out, has a little prominence that juts out to the east, into the Atlantic. And that

way you can go due east, which is generally what you want to do when you launch. Or you can even turn a little bit north or south and you're not going to fly over anybody's house or Disneyland or anything. And if something goes wrong, in the old days, like on the shuttle, we actually had explosives on the tank. And there were these dudes, these rain safety control officers that would sit

with the big red button. Oh, Jesus. And if they see you going out of control and you're heading back towards land, yeah. Boom. Oh, Jesus. And if they see you going out of control and you're heading back towards land, boom. Yeah. Boom. Oh, my God. What a responsibility they have. We used to go by before launch

and meet those guys, look them in the eye. Oh, they must look like psychos. Show them pictures of our family. Don't get itchy, bro. Don't get itchy to hit that trigger. Give it a potato. It seems like a crazy way to handle it that

the the junk has to fall in the ocean yeah well now the russians and the chinese don't necessarily honor that they actually the chinese have dropped nasty burning boosters on you know it's sparsely populated but they still have dropped these things on like villages and stuff. Oh, boy. They're a little less concerned about this kind of thing. Fucking China. God damn it. There you go. But in the U.S., we always... So we launch...

And the reason that you usually want to launch to the east is you want to take advantage of the Earth's rotation to give you like a slingshot effect. Because if you go to the east, the Earth is rotating this way. It kind of slingshots you into orbit. Oh, wow. Going with the rotation. And that's why you also want to be as close to the east, the Earth is rotating this way. It kind of slingshots you into orbit. Oh, wow. Going with the rotation.

And that's why you also want to be as close to the equator as you can. Because if you're at the North Pole and you launch east, it's not going to help you, right? But the lower you are towards the equator, the more of a slingshot you get. Now, did they have to figure out over time where those things were dropping? Did they ever make some mistakes? I don't think. We've had rockets blow up on the pad and do a bunch of damage. But once they're up and out, I don't think we ever, in the U.S. anyway,

had that problem because we always had the ability to blow it up. There are red lines. And if it passes a red line, you push the button. Now it's all done autonomously. So you have GPS monitors on board that self-destruct if it sees that it's going past the line there's nobody with the button anymore it's all automatic oh wow and these boosters that fall into the ocean do they have them documented like where they're landing so they know where these things are scattered out throughout the ocean they know approximately

and one cool thing was probably the most famous booster that landed in the bottom of the ocean was Apollo 11, the Saturn V. And it was just sitting there as a fish habitat. Oh, wow. And Jeff Bezos, out of his own pocket, mounted an expedition and went and got them, got those engines. That's when you know you're a baller. Yeah. He just throws some money at pulling the rocket boosters from Apollo 11 out of the ocean. Holy shit.

It's like, yeah. That's crazy. What am I going to do this weekend? Maybe I'll watch a movie. Now I'm going to go get those engines. Look at that. Wow. There you go.

Powerful Jeff Bezos. And the hard part was finding the right ones. And they got down there. They saw the serial number. They're like, yeah. Look at the image. Finding the right ones and they got down there they saw the serial number they're like yeah look at the image finding the right ones because there's a bunch down there yeah there was a bunch of saturn fives wow and they found the right ones look at that that's nuts and perfectly preserved yeah and then when did he do this what yes that's the engine that pushed buzz and neil and Mike to the moon. Wow.

That's madness. Yeah. What a crazy image. Boosters landing in China. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's them hitting the ground? Yeah. Oh, rewind that again, please.

It is very quick. I started right where the explosion was. There's another one that shows it falling from the sky. Ignited on impact with the ground. So these people are just chilling, and a giant chunk of metal falls from the sky Ignited on impact with the ground So these people are just chilling And a giant chunk of metal falls from the sky Oh my god That's crazy

Not only that but that's hypergolic fuel So that's like You don't want to be breathing that stuff That's pretty toxic Look at it just landed on people They're like whoops Sorry That's a BRC

Big red cloud You don't want to Or BFRC You don't want to, or BFRC. You don't want to be near that. What is in that cloud? It's hydrazine, so it's NTO, MMH, monomethyl hydrazine, and nitrogen dioxide. It's stuff that you don't want to drink.

Look at that falling from the sky. Oh, my God. That's crazy. Yeah. It fell in a small village. China doesn't give a fuck. They let it go it is i mean that those villagers are getting pretty unlucky because it is pretty sparsely populated so you're just playing the odds but uh we wouldn't we wouldn't do that well that has to be terrible for their breathing and their health yeah that stuff is going to linger right yeah i guess we get into

their drinking water uh-huh i mean the quantities of that are probably not going to be like catastrophic the bigger risk is getting blown up by it but it's still not good so why doesn't china adhere to the same sort of rule they do what they got to do yeah yeah so when when you're a part of these expeditions and you know you're you recognize that you're one of very few people that ever gets to experience this these kind of things do you feel like a responsibility to try to relay this information to people like yeah it's part of our job you know so when we're when i was at nasa they would send us out to do these pr events and we'd go to schools and i would go back to like jersey where i'm from and go visit all these school systems what part of jersey from uh my my parents are from newark

and i i grew up in parsip my two yeah i heard about that yeah parsipany i know where that is parsipany that's where i grew up. Went to Parsippany High School. Wow. And so you go back and try to inspire kids to pursue this same kind of thing. And I still do it. So I was just in Israel last week. I just got back two nights ago, actually. So every year on the anniversary of the Columbia tragedy, they have a space week in Israel where they have a whole bunch of STEM education events.

And there's also a technical conference. And then there's a memorial for the first Israeli astronaut that was on Columbia, Elon. So I got to know his family really well. And I go back there every year. And we had the memorial last Friday. And so yeah, I'm still – and I try to – I think I met every school kid in Israel. And I got them – just try to get them excited about the future, about a bright future. Well, one of the reasons why I brought this up is I saw a video where you talked about how during your childhood you had a photo on your wall of looking at the earth from the moon, the photograph that was taken. Yeah. And that's what set the seed or planted the seed in your head. Yeah, right.

So I also go out and I do a lot of public appearances and do motivational speaking kind of stuff. And I talk about the importance of both inspiration and determination. Inspiration and determination. So I found out when I was a kid that they were taking not only fighter pilots, but also like engineers and scientists to be astronauts. Because I was totally super stoked by the whole concept of going into space. But I had a mom that's like scared of flying. She was a typical Jewish mom.

She was like, I told her once I wanted to join the Air Force in a public restaurant. And she started freaking out and started soliciting opinions from the other parents. Would you let your son do this? That's hilarious. So I never thought – I knew that being a test pilot was not going to happen. So I thought being an astronaut wasn't going to happen. But then I found out that you can be an engineer and be an astronaut. And then that was my eureka moment I was inspired but to be determined I got that photo and I put it over my

desk and it was like that was my like that was the beacon you know that was the goal and I kept working and anytime I was having a difficult time I looked up at that thing and said no one day I'm gonna hang that in the astronaut office in the Johnson Space Center. And I still have that thing. That must have been surreal, the moment when you were on that spacewalk thinking about your childhood and thinking about being inspired by those images. Yeah. That would be like, holy shit, I'm actually an astronaut. I mean, you really are an astronaut.

I mean, how many are there? I think there's been around 500 people that have been to space. Ever? Yeah. That's nuts. That's a pretty small percentage. That's not a lot. And now with SpaceX, what is your role with SpaceX?

So I left NASA in 2011, and I went down and met with Elon, and I said, hey, I really like what you're doing here. Can I help? And he gave me a job. So I went and I left NASA and I came here, and I worked there for seven years, did a bunch of different things, eventually became our director of space operations. So my team was responsible for operating mission control at SpaceX and controlling. We have another Dragon capsule that we use for cargo, to take cargo, and we've been doing that for a long time, up to the space station and back. And so we would operate it in mission control. But we also were designing the crew one that we showed you. So we were coming up with the procedures and all the rules of how we're going to use that thing.

And meeting all of NASA's requirements and helping to provide input to the guys designing the displays and the suits and the controls and the seats and all the stuff you need for people. And so that was, you know, I did that for quite a long time. What are your thoughts on this, what's happening now with space travel where it's transferring into the public sector or the private sector rather instead of being something that the government handles now it's private companies. Is that a good thing? It's a great thing. Is it?

Yeah, because, first of all, it's not quite that black and white. In the media, it's all portrayed as commercial space and these are private companies that are taking over. The truth is, at least for the human orbital spaceflight that we're doing at SpaceX and that Boeing is doing with their vehicle, it's a public-private partnership. And so NASA is working very closely with both those companies, and we're working together. And in a way, it's not really that different from the way it's always been. You know, like NASA didn't have a NASA factory that built the Saturn V rocket.

It was built here by, like, McDonnell Douglas and North American Rockwell built, if I remember right, North American built the command module. And the lunar lander was built by Grumman. So those were all private companies. They're contractors, but they're still private companies. And what's happening now is just a slight change to the relationship between NASA and the private companies. Where NASA's not micromanaging quite as much as they used to. They're saying, okay,

here's our top level requirements. We want you to get four people up and down to the space station. That's a bit of a simplification because actually the requirements document is like, there are thousands of requirements, but they don't go down and tell you how to meet each requirement. They leave it up to you. So now SpaceX has a lot more room to innovate than like North American Rockwell did when they built the vehicles back during Apollo. So that – and the other thing that's different is the funding, the way NASA is paying, it's firm fixed price. You know, all these – like the space shuttle, when we build an aircraft carrier, it's cost plus contracting, which has been terribly abused and it's been horrible for the US taxpayer. What it says to the company is, it could cost whatever it costs, that's what we'll pay.

And in fact, we'll give you a profit as a percentage of the cost. So your incentive as a company is to make the cost as high as you can so your profit is high as it can be. Oh, that's ridiculous. Yeah. So it's not cool. But they had to do it that way during World War II is when it started because nobody knew how much it was going to cost to build a P-51 Mustang because nobody did one before. So they came up with this mechanism.

But now it's kind of been abused. Now we're using it to do things that we've done before. And then the third thing is that the companies own the intellectual property. So what that means is like Rockwell that built the space shuttle couldn't like build a new space shuttle, like build like space shuttle enterprise or something and then go sell tickets on it. They weren't allowed to, but we can. So we can, we're going to build this dragon.

We're going to take Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, two friends of mine, are going to be the first astronauts to ride it to the space station. And once we meet our NASA, NASA is our number one customer. They're paying the bill. So once they are satisfied, we can then go make another one and sell tickets and take private individuals. So really that's the key difference. And I really think that 2020,

we're going to look back at 2020 as a year that everything changed. Really? Yeah. Because all those dreams of science fiction, like being able to take your vacations around the rings of Saturn and like private space stations,

all that kind of stuff that we grew up hoping would happen when we were older. I think it's really finally starting because this is this is the beginning of that infrastructure, that that private sector commercial infrastructure and and and ability to actually get it done. We're always talking about how wrong they got the future in like space. Nineteen ninety nine. Remember that television show? I like that show. I watch that all the time yeah but all those shows like even i think blade runner was like now right didn't we discuss this like last year 2019 like we we got everything wrong in terms of what the timeline was

the timeline is totally wrong but i think that the overall direction is right in a lot of this stuff, and we'll get there. I really do believe that if we don't end up killing each other or have some horrible catastrophe like an asteroid hit us, we're going to end up living in space and have that kind of Star Trek future. I mean, I really think that's our destiny as long as we don't screw it up. Man, how far out are we looking at star trek star trek might take a while do we get like warp drive and a couple hundred years and we got to find those dilithium crystals captain she's breaking up yeah like how far do you think we are like if you had a a wide timeline of like literally being able to go to another planet well you know well going to mars is something we could do now in in a decade if we really really

really want to elon keeps saying that i think he's right i mean it's it's not a question of technology the big missing piece i think in in understanding about what that would be like is the effect of radiation on the human body. There's engineering solutions we could come up with for that. This is for the prolonged journey, the six-month journey? Once you start talking about – so right now, like on the space station, I took a bigger radiation hit than I would have if I stayed at home. How much of a hit? You know, the amount of dose I took was not that much. It's like a tenth of a Sievert or something.

I mean, it's like it was pretty – What's a Sievert? A Sievert, if you take one Sievert, then you're increasing your chance of getting cancer, depending on your age and gender, about a couple additional percent. Can you mitigate that with supplements? Like is there iodine that you take or something along those lines? There's some, you know, maybe antioxidants,

but I think that that's not a panacea. That's not going to fix this problem. It could help maybe. They say take iodine tablets, right, if you're exposed to radiation. Isn't that like something that they recommend? Yeah, for like nuclear reactors and all that. But I think that protects a function of one of the organs. I can't remember.

But it's not going to solve this problem. But you can shield yourself with anything that has hydrogen in it. It's a pretty good shield. So water is great. Like when I was on the space station, I put a big water jug around my head really i just i figured couldn't hurt and uh uh and then like liquid hydrogen or even plastic that's made this derived from hydrogen uh is is pretty good shielding okay so you could have like conceivably a light plastic suit that you wear that could shield you from a lot of the radiation on the way to Mars.

There's actually a company in Israel that is teaming with NASA that's going to fly these like vests to try to shield the people. You can also put it in the hull. Or you can have just a storm shelter. Because there's basically – when we're on the space station, we're above all the atmosphere. But we're still below the magnetic field of the earth. So we still enjoy a lot of protection from radiation. Once you go out of that and you go to the moon or to Mars, then you're basically hanging it out there.

You're no longer protected by that. And so you're going to take either GCR, galactic cosmic radiation, which is just everywhere out there. That sounds terrible. It sounds bad, doesn't it? GCR, galactic cosmic radiation. That sounds really bad. That sounds terrible. It sounds bad, doesn't it? GTR, galactic cosmic radiation. That sounds really bad. Yeah.

Those are ions up to iron, so heavy ions. There aren't that many of them, but when they hit you, they can do a lot of damage. They have a lot of energy. They're accelerated to near relativistic speeds, so near the speed of light. And then there's the solar. Then you've got to worry about solar flares,

SP, solar proton events. And those don't come. Those are very unpredictable. Well, they're a little bit predictable with sunspot activity, but they come every once in a while, and they're giant spikes. They last a couple hours to a couple days, and they could totally fry you. They a couple hours to a couple days. And they could totally fry you.

They're even worse. Oh, fuck. Yeah. So conceivably, we could send people to Mars, and halfway there, they get cooked. Yeah. So you have a six-month window where you have to just roll the dice? Well, so what you can do is you can have a storm shelter, right, where you put, like, a lot of this shielding and then if you you could detect the the the spe the gcr is there all the time but the solar events you could you can detect them coming and you have enough warning time to get everybody into the storm how much time do you have um usually when you first start seeing uh some of the uh proton radiation then um uh you start you have like an hour so you got time so you're sitting in that

thing going 48 minutes from now it's coming yeah and you're just like hunkering down there probably grabbing all the water bottles you can wow and depending upon how big the ejection is you don't know how long it's gonna last yeah it Yeah. It could be at different magnitudes and different directions. And it could just kill you even if you have the shielding. I mean, if it's a really huge one. And we didn't really have any capability

of defending from it when we did Apollo. And there was a, between two Apollo missions, there was one of these big ones. Oh, boy. And we just got lucky that it was in between. That seems crazy. what a what a nutty roll of the dice yeah but again there's there's and we keep getting smarter about it

and and and and i think you know for like right now we can send you to mars and bring you back and and probabilistically speaking you'd probably have like an additional four or five percent chance of developing cancer over your lifetime, which is not like a death sentence. It's a little uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. But we're getting better.

And the thing about it, there's two things about it. One, we keep getting better technologies, better shielding. We can actually come up with – there's ways you can do active shielding with – you can create your own magnetic field around the ship. There's ways you can do active shielding with magnetic. You can create your own magnetic field around the ship. And so it would almost be like Star Trek with like a force field or shields or whatever. So there's ways that maybe we could do that.

There's also the other thing that we don't know. We know exactly what radiation is out there. We don't know exactly what that radiation does to humans. The best we have to go on is like data from some of the atomic bomb survivors and radiation workers that work in like power plants and stuff to take some dose. But it's a different kind of radiation. So right now, the error bars are really big. So when we say like, oh, 5% chance of cancer, that's taking a very conservative estimate. If we can find out what it really does to humans maybe it's a lot more benign and maybe we could sharpen that pencil and say

yeah it's acceptable what if people come back smarter what if it's like some fucking x-men type shit yeah maybe you could like you know i mean radiation is always bad in real life but always good in comic books yeah right we went? We went to Spider-Man every morning. The Hulk, Spider-Man, so many superheroes that were involved in some sort of an accident. Wasn't Dr. Manhattan, wasn't that a thing with him as well? I think so. Yeah, I think so.

I think from The Watchmen, I think he became who he is because of an accident. The Dr. Manhattan, I believe so. Yeah. And I was hoping that, you know, I was up, I had my kids after I did that flight. Uh-oh. So I was hoping that you know i was up i had my kids after i did that flight oh so i'm hoping that they would like one day genius kids yeah how old are your kids now i got a nine-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl notice anything unusual about

them i didn't know it's one day the two-year-old girl was concentrating on her blocks and one of them started floating but you know man so what what changes have been made since you go from the old shuttle model of that technology to the spacex dragon crew thing probably the single biggest change is is all the we've gotten a lot better at electronics and software so the vehicle is highly, and that's why we can fly like normal people that don't have years and years of training because it's so much more smarter than the shuttle. You shouldn't say so much more smarter. So much smarter. But you're such a genius. You're not supposed to use language like that.

You're a goddamn astronaut. So much more smarter? Yeah, right. That sounds like something I would say. You've got gotta talk better than that bro yeah i know i'm sorry though sorry to interrupt you that was uh math was always my thing the verbal my verbal sats weren't that spectacular but uh you know uh yeah this is much more smarter and what about what about the there was always an issue with the tiles right with the

re-entry tiles. And that's what did Challenger – no, which one was it? Columbia. Columbia. That's what did Columbia. And the new design, have they made advances in how that stuff is applied or is it a different surface they use? Yeah. So that is something that's also not really aware anymore. The reason that Columbia took that damage was it was foam, like the big orange tank that's behind the space shuttle. It sticks up above the space shuttle, and some foam fell off of it.

And we always had some foam shedding off the thing. And in the beginning, we took that very, very seriously as a major problem. But the thing is, there's this concept of – I'm going to forget the name of it now. Well, let me just describe it. So you get away with something for so long that you begin – it's normalization of deviance. That's what it's called. So it's when you get away with something for so long that something that was a deviant thing or something that was bad is treated as a normal thing. And that's what happened to us. Because we knew that that foam coming off could do damage to

the space shuttle. And in the beginning, we tried really hard to do something about it. And we treated it very seriously. But it was hard. We couldn't really come up with an easy fix. In the meantime, we're flying, and nothing bad was happening. What was really happening is we're flying and nothing bad was happening what was really happening is we're getting lucky and then eventually a big piece came off hit columbia right in the wing uh and it shattered a big hole in the side of the wing but nobody knew for sure and uh they made a bad decision to not like investigate it further assumed it was okay brought him home and and obviously you know what happened so it could be possible to fix something like that if they had known? It could have been possible. We did a lot of things.

Like when I flew, we had a lot of things in place to try to fix that. One, we got rid of a lot of the foam that was unnecessary. We tried to do things that stopped the foam. We also had ways of detecting it so that we would know. We had sensors in the wings. We added a maneuver we do when we fly up to the space station. We did like a pitch over where we took photographs of the heat shield to see if anything got hit.

So at least we would know. And then we could shelter in place on the space station. So there's a lot of things we could do with the shuttle, but the thing about with Dragon and Starliner and the new vehicles is they sit on top. So any foam that comes off the rocket is not going to hit you so the problem solved so that that's one example of how we don't have to worry about that anymore now is the surface different do they still have the same kind of tiles the the heat shield is i see what it looks like again the heat shield is the material on the side of the capsule on the walls of the capsule is is

made out of silica so it's it's similar to the the tiles but um the uh the the material that's in the in the heat shield itself is an ablative material it means it kind of like as as it heats up it flakes off and it takes the heat away with it um and that's that's kind of more similar to like it was during apollo it's a much more advanced. Wow, look at that thing. Yeah, isn't that cool? Can we see that? Can we go there?

Will they give us a tour? I bet we might be able to pull that off. Dude, I want to see a spaceship. The guy you should have asked was my boss when he was here. Yeah, we were talking about other shit. I know. He's got the keys to the factory. but there she is on the launch pad. Wow.

So that white stuff at the top on the capsule itself, that's kind of like the same material as the tiles. But the heat shield on the bottom is called PICA, Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator. them is is called uh pika phenolic impregnated carbon ablator so it's a different it's a different very high-tech uh um material that is really really good at withstanding tremendous amounts of heat that that heat shield is way oversized um you could use that thing at least 10 times um and this really was originally designed for actually entries coming back from the moon when you're going much faster and you hit you build up a lot more heat when you hit the atmosphere than just coming back from the space station. So ultimately that's the goal for these things, to take people to the moon,

to take people to Mars, to take people, and reusable, right? This is just a start. So reusability is key, and there's elements of this vehicle that are not reusable. That trunk you see, the cylinder below the capsule is not reusable. We throw that away. The second stage on the Falcon 9 we throw away. And, you know, Elon hates that. The Holy Grail is 100% reusable but affordable reusability where you don't have to spend like a gazillion dollars refurbishing it in between flights.

And we're getting there. And the next vehicle is going to be the real, that's going to be the real, hopefully we will get that holy grail with this Starship that we're working on now. So there's a top secret one that you can't talk about? Is that what it is? You seem hesitant. Well, it's just, you know, we got a lot of development going on and it's not top secret. I mean, Elon went down and did a press conference in front of it in Texas not too long ago. Oh, really? And showed what it looked like? Yeah. Is this it right here?

This is one of the tests. It's called Starhopper? So this was a beginning. This is a test bed to test the engine to make sure that we can... Oh, that's fake. That's real. That's real?

That is not CGI. Really? That's the thing? That's the thing. Whoa. Now, the real thing is going to look just like that. This is really testing the engine and the sensors and the electronics. What is the jet coming out of the bottom of it?

The bottom is a Raptor engine. It's burning liquid methane and liquid oxygen. And then those puffs at the top are coal gas thrusters just to keep it pointing the right way. And so that's landing now. Yeah. My God, that's amazing. Isn't that awesome? That is amazing. Look how gently it lands. Yeah. Dude, that seems like science fiction. I know. That's what I'm telling you. Like this thing, and I know that the guys up in Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos company, has got all kinds of incredible stuff on their drawing board. 2020 is the start, but it's just the start. Show me that again.

I need to see that again. I need to see that video again. Find better pictures of it. Oh, okay. There it is. I want to see that thing land again. That video of it landing is crazy. I think I got lucky.

Did you? Hold on. It's so crazy, though, the image, to see it gently come down and perfectly land. Like, look at that, man. That looks like some War of the Worlds type shit. Like, that's in a Tom Cruise movie, right? Yeah. Like, if they were flying over Earth and they were starting to land.

My God, that's amazing. Yeah, I remember when Elon first talked about landing rockets on their tails, he was like, I think I remember him saying, yeah, we want to do it just like Buck Rogers. Of course he said that. So I'm working with Ron Moore on this TV show I'm working on now. Wow, look at that thing. Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

For people who want to see this, Jamie, what is the name of the video? So people listening can go. 150 Meter Star Hopper Test. 150 Meter Star Hopper Test. More than 2,800,000 views. Space X page. 2,700,000 views. That's amazing, man.

2,898,000. Wow. It's on the Space X page. So you can go and check that out. So that's next stage. That's next stage after this one. So there's going to be a rocket, and then that thing is going to sit on top of it or something like that thing. And then we're going to get both back.

The rocket will land on its tail, and then the thing, after it goes off to the moon or even Mars, it'll come back and also land on its tail, and then we'll get both pieces. We'll get 100% back. Wow. And then we've really got reusability gone and then and hopefully we'll be able to use each one like 100 times at least now is there any innovation or any breakthroughs in fuel and in the type of propulsion systems that you need i mean do conceivably is there ever going to be a time where we have like a Star Wars X fighter that can just go shoot off onto its own? You know, there's a potential for more advanced,

more efficient thrust engines. And probably one of the most promising ones in the near term is actually a nuclear engine, a nuclear thermal rocket, where instead of using combustion to propel hot gases out the back of your nozzle, you actually use a nuclear reactor, and you take hydrogen, you flow it over that, you heat it up like super hot, and shoot it out the back without lighting it on fire. And if you do that, you can actually get much more thrust with much less mass of fuel, like a smaller fuel tank, but more thrust over time.

So that's one possible way to go. So it's conceivable that one day there could be a standalone unit that doesn't need thrusters that eject oh it still would look like a regular rocket because the back of the nozzle would still have like fire coming out the back but it would just be superheated instead of uh lighting on a fire to heat it up you would you would uh there you go there we go here nuclear propulsion ntp yeah nuclear thermal propulsion so the top one is a traditional and the second one's the nuclear one wow yeah that's so that's yeah so right so there there it is that's the hydrogen coming in and

flowing over the reactor instead of having liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen then you just all you need is the liquid hydrogens. Wow. So that's one way. But in the short term, the advance you're seeing there with that Starhopper is that it's still a traditional chemical propulsion rocket, so it's got fuel and oxidizer, which is liquid oxygen. Because there's no oxygen up there to have fire. You need the pyramid, right?

So you need the oxygen and the fuel and the spark. And you have to bring your own oxygen if you're in space because you don't have the atmosphere anymore. So they carry liquid oxygen and some fuel. And in the Falcon 9, for example, it's basically kerosene. It's rocket fuel, but it's RP-1, but it's basically kerosene mixed with liquid oxygen. The engine you saw in that Starhopper is advanced and different because what it uses, it still uses liquid oxygen, but instead of kerosene, it uses liquid methane.

And it's actually not as efficient quite. It doesn't have quite the specific impulse, which is a measure of efficiency. It doesn't have that quite as good as hydrogen. It's better than kerosene, but not quite as good as hydrogen. But here's the thing. You can make it on Mars. And that's why Elon's building that engine. Because you can go to Mars and you don't have to bring your gas to come home.

Oh, so that was the big knock on going to Mars for the longest time was that you'd never be able to return. You have to wait two years for the trajectory for the planets to come back around so you have a window to come home. So you do have to stay a while. But the beautiful thing is if you can go someplace and gas up again, fill up your tank without having to bring all the gas with you, that's huge, right? You can carry so much more that way.

And with the carbon dioxide that's in the Martian atmosphere and the water that's in the ice that's on the surface of Mars, you can have a reaction process that allows you to take those two things and make liquid methane. And you can have a tank of that ready to go and all done robotically. You can get the telemetry back saying, we got the gas, and then you go. Now, how much are things going to accelerate now that you have all these different companies competing against each other? That's what's beautiful is like the pace of technological change is like really going exponential again, just kind of like it was during Apollo. So we're back onto that really rapid, that fast track. We kind of fell off of that for a little while.

And the nice thing about, people ask me, like, what's the biggest difference between working at SpaceX and working at NASA? And I would say it's decision speed because we'll make up our mind quickly. Now, the reason we can do that is we've got a tremendous amount of agility because sometimes when you make up your mind quickly, you make the wrong decision, right? Yeah. But if you hurry up and figure out that you made the wrong decision and you have the agility to then say, okay, that was not right. Let's try something else. Then it works. At NASA, you know, we had all these contractors and suppliers and a very cumbersome kind of system that we took a long time to make sure we made the right decision because changing

things was prohibitively costly. But SpaceX doesn't have to worry about that. Now, what is the difference between the way SpaceX is handling it? You said Boeing has something. What did they call it again? So NASA has this commercial crew program, and they selected two commercial companies to partner with, SpaceX and Boeing. And so Boeing is using an older rocket that's been around a long time called the Atlas V.

And they built a capsule to go on top of that called the Starliner. And so this is strictly for commercial flights? Well, I mean, it's the anchor tenant, if you will, the core customer is still NASA. Because NASA is going to use both of these rockets to replace the space shuttle, and we won't have to beg the Russians for rides anymore. Let me see what the Boeing one looks like. What's the name of it again? Starliner.

Or it used to be called the CST-100. Let me see what this sucker looks like. We used to call it the POS-100 because, you know, we're competing. But it's a good vehicle. Okay, so it's kind of similar in its design a little bit it's the way it looks wow looks pretty dope yeah one key difference is it lands we we splash down in the water and this one lands on land with those airbags oh wow fuck that yeah that's what if those bags don't work so? So does it fill up like the way they use rovers on Mars where it's surrounded by these gigantic airbags and it bounces when it hits the ground?

It doesn't bounce because that's not good for people. Robots don't mind. But if you bounce like that, you're going to be really upset. So it just hits and kind of like airbags that deploy in a car, they deflate and then you're done. And so this is on the same sort of timeline as the SpaceX ship? Yeah, I think SpaceX is really ready to go in March, very soon. But I think we're going to wait a little longer because they're talking about extending the mission for Bob and Doug and keeping them on the space station. So they need more training.

Sorry, Bob and Doug. Yeah. Well, they get to hang out in space for a little while. I don't feel too bad for them. And their equipment is keeping them from losing all the bone density and muscle and everything like that. Yeah, they'll be fine. Now, when does Elon go to space? Oh, wow.

I mean, how well do you have to have the system working before you put the boss in the capsule and shoot him off into the heavens? He's got a lot of work to do here, so I don't think he's going anytime soon, but he does eventually, when we get this up and running, he does eventually want to go. He talks about

he wants to die on Mars, just not on impact. You know that joke he gives? So that's, you know, he's serious about that. He really does want to die on Mars. Like if he's really old. He wants to go and live the rest of his days as part of a permanent Martian colony. Oh, Elon, I got to talk to you about this.

But he's not going until we have. Has he always thought that way? Yeah. That's always been the plan? That's always been the plan. Maybe we can get him high again. See if he reconsiders. Seems like a terrible idea.

Well, he's going to wait. He's not going to be the first one he's gonna wait until we have like pizza there and some cappuccino and like a decent uh hotel and so the concept is terraforming right that is that's not gonna happen i think even elon would tell you that's not gonna happen in his lifetime that's something that like generations from now we could think about it's that's that's hard so there's some sort of uh domed civilization like what yeah yeah live in some kind of um pressurized uh compartment some kind of pressurized habitat so it it'd be kind of like science fiction like what

you see in science fiction things where ships land on planets and people live inside the ships and you can't go outside unless you wear a suit let's wear a suit yeah wow but hopefully there'll be plenty of plenty of room inside if once this thing grows to be really big uh we also have to make sure it's really really well protected from radiation because even once you're on mars you have to worry about those gcrs and yeah yeah Didn't he have an idea to, like, nuke the caps? Yeah. Kind of like nuke the solar polar caps. Yeah.

You know, it's not like anybody's really sitting around drawing up plans for that. That was kind of like if we had to do it, how could we do it? That's one thing, you know, that came off the top of his head. And what was that? That was to raise the temperature or to change the atmosphere? That's to, like, melt the caps and then eject a lot of gas into the atmosphere and beef up the Martian atmosphere. What a weird roll of the dice that would be. I don't think we're going to be trying that any time soon.

Then what is the concept? In terms of terraforming, what kind of window of time would it take to turn that into a livable environment? terraforming, what kind of window of time would it take to turn that into a livable environment? You're starting to really extrapolate it out pretty far, and it'd be pretty hard for me to give you a timeline. So there's like giant leaps of technology that have to take place? Yeah, that's a big one. But as a proof of concept, it's sort of, I mean, there is a theory, right, that you can alter the atmosphere. I mean, Mars has got enough gravity that if you could put enough gas into the atmosphere it would stick around um kind of like you know it's it's got uh

it's possible you're not going to get to one atmosphere pressure like 14.7 psi like we enjoy here but might be enough now and their their gravity is what percentage of earth's uh it's about a third third yeah wow so right you would you would definitely experience a lot of the same issues that you have if you go to the space station so if you wanted to go from mars back to earth there would definitely be some sort of an adjustment period. Yeah. The really interesting thing is like we know we have a lot of data. We know what happens in zero G because we have a lot of us that have been up to the space station and Skylab and Mir and all that. And we have tons of data at one G because all of us every day live in one G. We don't really have any data in between.

So the question is, is a half a G half as good? Or maybe it's like 80% as good. Right. And so is it linear or is it nonlinear? We don't know. And that's why if we send people and we live on the moon or we go to Mars and we live on Mars and we have data, like on the moon, it's about a sixth of the Earth's gravity. So we'll get points in between.

And then we can figure out if this thing is – there's a lot of stuff that happens to you that may be completely solved with even just the smallest amount of G. Hmm. But we don't know. That's interesting, right? We don't know. Yeah, because zero G is an issue. We don't know how much of an issue one-third G is. Now, what about food?

Like, what are they going to do with food on Mars? Are they going to have to fly all the ingredients out, everything out? Once you start talking about missions that are that long, carrying all your food with you, bringing it all, becomes mass prohibitive. You know, you just got to take so much, and that just means you need that much bigger of a rocket, and it just after a while it gets you know to the point where it doesn't work what's all the food for the rest of your life essentially yeah so we're probably if

we're talking about like living for a long time on mars or even deep space missions we gotta grow food so probably plants hydroponically like the matt damon movie yeah yeah how realistic was that you know that movie was really pretty good pretty good movie yeah there was uh i met the author the guy that wrote andy weir the guy that wrote the book and i told him uh that i i really didn't uh like his book he told him that yeah and he's like he's like why was it because like there's not really enough dynamic pressure in a martian windstorm to knock the antenna off the roof i'm like nah it's fine with that he's like well it's because we didn't have enough redundancy in the comm system and that's not really realistic i'm like no no he goes well why didn't you like

it i'm like well listen i have a long day of work at spacex I come home. I open up the book before I go to bed, and I'm reading this like, okay, I got 62 souls, and I got to cover 3,000 kilometers, and I've got 52 moles of nitrogen, hydroxide, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, it's like I'm still at work. It's like, I don't want that. I want some escapism. I want to go home and read a romance novel or something. Well, that's not his fault, though. No. So you just busted his balls.

I busted his balls. It's interesting, though, that he got it close. Yeah. Yeah, he did a great job, actually. I mean, does he have a background in that? Yeah, I think he does. I think he's an engineer or something. Okay, that makes more sense.

Yeah. Yeah, but that movie was terrifying. The idea that you can get stuck up there. Yeah. The only part of the movie, which I don't think was in the book, that was not realistic at all, was when he cuts his glove and does the Iron Man thing. Oh, yeah. He's like flying back to the spaceship.

You can't really control it that. You'd spin out of control if you tried that. You'd also need a big hole to really get enough propulsion and then your suit would deflate i mean it's just that's just not going to work yeah and how long would you survive out there with no suit that's a good question um just holding your breath just hold well you can't really hold your breath because as the as the pressure all goes down the first thing you have to worry about is barotrauma. So like in your lungs and in your sinuses, it's all going to like an overinflated balloon.

So if you try to hold your breath, that's a wrong thing to do because you're going to – So you have to let the breath out. Yeah. You can't really do that for very long though. Like the way people hold their breath underwater, they actually have breath in their lungs. Yeah. Right? But they're not equalizing with the pressure as they go down, you know, when they do those like free diving things.

Right. Right. So if you're going to equalize, you're going to have to let the air out or it's going to just expand and be extremely painful and hurt you. And it would be extremely painful and hurt you. So you could do that. But then eventually you get to the point where the pressure gets so low that all the liquid in your tissues starts turning into gas. And it's called ebullism. And then you'll start getting this massive swelling.

Like your neck will puff up like that. And you'll get grotesque swelling and and wherever that your blood is turning into gas and oh all the all the liquids and your tissues are turning into gas it's not a good thing how long will that take before that starts happening that will start happening fairly quickly when you equalize after you breathe out all that air um you can counteract it by having squeeze suits like suits with mechanical counter pressure that squeeze it and hold it in like a blood pressure cuff kind of pressure uh kind of thing so you could do that doesn't sound promising no no you know there's there's ways you can you can live through it but it is we've had this happen to people in vacuum chambers accidents like industrial vacuum chambers and one test chamber in nasa once had an accident and we've momentarily subjected people to close to space

vacuum but very quickly got him back to pressure and they were okay so all the bubbles just kind of like yeah i was like slow down now what is the timeline in terms of, like, does SpaceX have a multiple stage timeline, like a timeline for incorporating the Dragon crew and then a timeline for the Starhopper and then a timeline for additional projects in the future? Like, is he thinking along these lines of, like, charted out progress? Oh, yeah, yeah. In fact, he measures pretty much every major decision by whether or not it brings the day when we have a self-sustainable colony on Mars sooner or later.

That's the prism by which he makes every single decision he makes, he makes it through that prism. Jesus. Yeah. So he's got an idea and he'll keep pushing and and uh you know he gives us aggressive timelines that we have to work to and we work really hard to try to try to meet him it's hard when you're doing stuff that this does this complicated to predict exactly how long it's going to take so you know we end up often

falling a little bit behind but we do our best that's the case though with everything that's that crazy right yeah i mean no i mean especially elon he's never writing his predictions all his wacky inventions they're always a little off yeah but what do you think but but he's so driven you know and he's such a smart guy and um and he's he's he's the most he's really the most driven person i think i've ever met i'll give give you a story to kind of illustrate it. Once, when I first got hired by SpaceX, we did an interview with 60 Minutes. And they interviewed Elon and myself. And Scott Pelley was the anchor.

He talked to us. And he said to me, why did you leave NASA and come work for SpaceX? You had like the best gig in the world, you know, going up on rockets and stuff. Why would you do that? And I said, well, if you can go back in time and you were a young engineer and you had the opportunity to like get in on the ground floor and work with Howard Hughes, when he was like doing all the crazy stuff he was doing in his day, wouldn't you want to be a part of that? This guy probably looked at me like with a deer in the headlights look, cause I don't think he knew what I was easy stuff he was doing in his day wouldn't you want to be a part of that this guy probably looked at me like with a deer in the headlights look because i don't think he knew what i was talking

about but i was like that's but then i realized as soon as i say that like oh my god i just made a terrible strategic error i compared my boss to howard hughes and you know things didn't end up that well for howard you know he went crazy right he went kind of crazy he became washed his hands too much and germaphobe he was peeing in jars and like his fingernails grew out like yeah and I was like oh no I really kind of stepped in it right you don't want to say that about the boss right so um it took a while it was like months later we were driving in a rental car, just the two of us, in Florida. We had a meeting at NASA, and we were driving back to the airport to get on his airplane to come back to L.A. And I'm driving the car. He's sitting in the passenger seat, and I said, hey, boss, remember that time we were on TV,

and I compared you to Howard Hughes, you know? I just want you to know I was comparing you to the young, dashing, starlit, dating Howard Hughes, you know, I just want you to know I was comparing you to the young, dashing, starlit, dating Howard Hughes, not the old decrepit, peeing in jars, fingernail guy. It's all about the timeline. Yeah. And all I got back was silence. And now I'm really scared, right? And I'm sitting there, like, waiting for him to say something. And Elon will do this, and he did this on your show, right?

He kind of, like, if you pose to him a serious question, he'll consider it, and he'll kind of go into this almost like a trance. He'll stare off into space, and you can see the wheels turn, and he's, like, focusing all of his intellect, which is considerable, on this one question. And that's what was happening. So I waited. And then he turned back to me and he said, you know, Garrett,

I don't think it's an apt comparison. I said, oh, okay. Good, good. Why? I'm curious. Why do you think that? And he said, well, none of Howard's designs, as brilliant as they were, ended up really changing the way we live our lives.

So we don't send, like he made the Dispruce Goose, which is an incredible airplane. It was all wood, you know, trying to solve the problem during the war of rationing. He said, we don't send our goods across the oceans in giant wooden airplanes. We don't do that. The H-1 Racer was a beautiful airplane, but it was a one-off. It never really led to a large design that changed the way people lived their lives. So that was his objection. It was not that, like, I was comparing him to some creep, but that he wants—it's really important to him to have the legacy

of drastically impacting the way all of us live our lives. Kind of the way Steve Jobs did or others that really move the ball downfield for humanity. That's what's driving him. He's such an unusual human. I mean, there's very few people that you could make any kind of rational comparison to other than maybe Nikola Tesla. Will you really stop and think what he's done? Yeah. And the fact that he does them all simultaneously,

that he's involved in the Boring Project, he's involved in Tesla and SpaceX all simultaneously, and Tesla Home Solar, all the solar panels and making solar tiles for roofs. And he's doing so many different things at the same time. It's almost impossible. I don't understand how he does it yeah i i've seen him do it and i still don't understand it you know it's like i i kind of burn myself out just trying to do one of those things yeah he does all of them and and um i mean he does have all the advantages of wealth

which helps you know so like he'll have meetings us, and he'll walk out of his last meeting, and he'll walk across the street to Hawthorne Airport, hop on his jet, and he's at Palo Alto in a couple hours. And he can be first thing in the morning at Tesla. Right. And he's got a staff that helps him. And he's got those advantages. but he, he, that isn't in any way describe what he,

or, or that doesn't explain why he's able to do what he does. I don't know how he does it to be honest. Well, he's the next stage of humanity. Yeah. If, if people are evolving, he's,

he's like looking at us from the next spot. He's like, Hey guys, I've got some ideas. Yeah. I mean, he's just an idea factory and and um he his uh uh what's really remarkable to me is is is the breadth of his knowledge i mean i've

met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software and the most arcane aspects of that. And then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy. And he'll just go back and forth. And his ability to do that across all the different technologies that go into rockets and cars and everything else he does that's what really impresses me well also the lack of burnout because he's been doing it at this incredible rate 16 hours a day for how long his whole life i think that's nuts i know and he's still hungry for it and he's still taking on these new projects and new ideas and yeah you know at that pace seven

seven years was about as much as I could take I was like I need to do something else I just don't I mean I'm very happy he exists but he's very confusing to me I just feel so stupid when I'm around him

you know the conversations I've had with him I'm like god damn I'm dumb gotta do what you gotta do with what you got The conversations I've had with him, I'm like, God damn, I'm dumb. No, no. Gotta do what you gotta do with what you got. I won't go that far. So his ultimate goal is to create some sort of a colony on Mars, but he believes that this technology will continue to expand to the point where we will be leaving our solar system.

We will be making human trips into other solar systems, into actual deep space. Yeah. I mean, certainly, hopefully that's, you know, at some point, if we're going to survive, you take the really long view. You know, the solar system is not going to last forever. Right. It's going to last plenty long. And if my kids are listening at home, don't worry. They're freaking out right now, especially a two-year-old. Oh, no, Daddy said we're going to last forever. Right. It's going to last plenty long. And if my kids are listening at home, don't worry.

They're freaking out right now, especially a two-year-old. Oh, no, Daddy said we're going to die. No, we've got plenty of time. A couple billion years, kids. Relax. It's not in our lifetime. They're so funny. But eventually, we're going to have to find a new home if we're going to last forever.

And we all hope that we last forever as a species, right? Or at least most of us do so uh yeah eventually we got to get there but we got plenty of time in in the in the short term the important thing is at least getting out so not in just one place in the solar system because this you know something bad could happen to this planet sure and we've got no backup right particularly if there is a natural situation, super volcano, asteroid impact. Or, you know, we're doing a pretty good job of trashing this place all on our own. Yes.

We don't really need an asteroid to hit us. We're kind of going down the road of making this place uninhabitable. Well, what we need is someone like Elon who concentrates on the solutions. I mean, he's obviously got a full plate, many full plates. But someone like him to concentrate on solutions to some of the environmental problems that we've created for ourselves here. Well, that's really – that was the thought behind Tesla. I mean, so Tesla is kind of like plan A, save this planet. And SpaceX is kind of plan B if you look at it that way.

It's just so weird to have a guy like that amongst us. Yeah, especially having him as your boss. It was really weird. Have you talked to him at all about simulation theory? We never, the thing is, every time I talked to him, we focused on, and this is what he does, you know, he focuses on the thing that we are working on. So that's one of the ways he does his time management. That's one of the ways he is able to do all these things.

It's like he doesn't sit around and BS with you about what's going on with, what's it, Neuralink, the company where he's making the chips that go in your head. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. That's the other thing he does. That one. Changing the way humans interface with data. He never said to me, like,

Garrett, what do you think about having a chip in your head? Like, never. He doesn't do that. like, Garrett, what do you think about having a chip in your head? Like, never. He doesn't do that. He talks to the people who really know about chips and putting chips in people's heads. He talks to them about it. Are you going to sign up for that? No.

Your face. The expression you made. You're like, no. My website got hacked, and it freaked me out well they they're gonna put wires in your head yeah right that's the idea behind it that's the idea christ it's probably going to be inevitable it once it happens i mean I don't want to be an early adopter, but once it does happen, and it really does remarkably increase your ability to interface with data, because that's the idea, right? It ramps up the bandwidth in which people can access ideas and information, and it's going to change the way we interface. Yeah. I mean, I could see it being kind of an extreme have and have not situation.

yeah i mean i could see it being kind of an extreme have and have not situation like you think about how how far behind you are today how left behind you are if you have no internet access right and then this will be kind of this could be like another level of that yeah i'm worried i'm worried about that yeah i got other things to keep me up at night i got yeah i mean what is it a crazy nine-year-old in it. Real world problems. Yeah, it's just, to me, it seems like if you pay attention to the track, if you track technology, like where it's going, things constantly improve. We demand constant innovation, and we're already wearing these things on our body and watches now. A lot of people wearing the Apple watches and the Samsung and all the Google watches. And it just seems inevitable that it somehow or another advances to a point where there's a chip or something you wear or some plate that they put on the back of your head and screw in.

Yeah, but then you watch like Black Mirror. I know. That is the problem. This might not be good. Yeah, but then you watch Black Mirror. I know. That is the problem. This might not be good.

I mean, but do you have a sense of history that you are, first of all, you're amongst one of the rare human beings like the the you're you're at the front of the line in terms of creating viable methods of sending people into space and returning them i i feel extremely fortunate you know that to have that experience i had at nasa um and had the visceral experience the incredible experience of of flying in space, doing spacewalks, operating robot arms, launching on rockets and all that. And then coming to SpaceX and being there in the relatively early days and being there for seven years, I feel like, you know, I feel pretty satisfied that I got to see, I got incredibly lucky to see these things and be in the room where it happens, you know. incredibly lucky to see these things and be in the room where it happens you know uh it's it's pretty remarkable and now uh so now i'm a now i'm still a consultant at spacex but i'm a full-time professor at usc so now i'm teaching and i'm also working on tv shows so now i'm like

taking that those incredible experiences i had opened up a lot of other doors and like i ended up it's like for example work and working on this TV show, I find myself in a writer's room with a whole bunch of really talented, creative people. Where there's no way in a million years this would ever happen to me if it weren't for these incredible experiences I was lucky enough to have. You know, it's like, even that gets really surreal. I can only imagine. I mean, I can only imagine – I mean, especially coming from your childhood, having that image on your wall, and now really being a part of this massive change in the way human beings are going to be able to travel in space. Yeah. Now, what is – tell us about this TV show because you were talking to me about it off air before we started. Yeah.

So this is For All Mankind mankind it's on apple tv and um the the way i got involved with this thing uh i was a big fan of battle star galactica the reboot was awesome wasn't it oh it's so underrated yeah one of the best science fiction shows ever yeah i mean it was like in the early days it kind of like peak tv i guess and it was like um it was just so good i mean the writing was so good and the whole concept and everything all the all the things they're exploring and and uh the science fiction is always at its best when it's like an allegory and the way they explored things that were happening in society like terrorism and stuff uh the way they were able to depict it as in a science in an alternate universe, I thought it was spectacular.

Yeah, it was a brilliant, brilliant show. So I'm watching it on the space station, which was like the best place to watch that thing. Whoa, that's crazy. Do you use an iPad or something? Do you have things stored, or is there a TV up there? There's no TV, but we have all these laptops, so they can send up files.

And you can give them like four shows that you like. How long does it take for a show to download in space? Well, they download it for you, which is nice, while you're working. And then when you're ready to watch, you just pop up the file. So is it like a satellite connection, internet satellite? It's a KU band system that goes to satellites that aren't part of it. NASA satellites are called TDRS satellites. So the data goes up to TDRS and then down to ground stations to White Sands.

So what kind of bandwidth are you getting? What's your latency? I don't remember the numbers, but when I was there, we weren't getting live internet because all that bandwidth is being used for science to get down all the data from the experiments and the video. So you can't check your Twitter? You can now. You can now? You can now.

Oh, that's terrible. I just missed that. That's terrible. Yeah, it's probably better. Yeah, it's probably better. What a distraction. Yeah. Yeah.

Just Google searching random things. Are you supposed to be doing your job in space? Yeah. So you get these shows, and you're watching Battlestar Galactica on your laptop. I'm watching Battlestar Galactica, Colbert Rapport, Daily Show, and New York Yankees games. So I'm watching. That's what I'm watching. Wow.

You're not watching Yankees games in real time, right? No. No? Pre-recorded. Wow. Still, though. So that was a nice bit of home. Sure.

I would play the radio broadcast while i was working and just in the background and so i feel like you hear the crack of the bat and it's kind of like you're in space but you still kind of connected to home that seems like something that would go on in a movie yeah like some guy who's working on a spaceship in the movie who's listening to a baseball game go shit three balls two strikes't that? I mean, that really does seem very like some classic George Clooney movie about space. Yeah, it's real. Yeah. Wow, man.

How weird did that feel? It has to feel so surreal that you were that guy up there with a laptop. Yeah. I mean, like Battlestar, I'm watching Battlestar and they're like, now I'm in the final season and they're like finding Earth. And I'm like, it's right there. You're in finding earth. And I'm like, it's right there. You're, you're in a spaceship.

How many people have watched Battlestar Galactica while in a spaceship? You might be the only person ever. Well, my commander was watching it too. So there's at least two, two of us. But so they ask you like, are there any celebrities you'd like to chat with while you're up there?

And they will go out and get them for you. The kind of morale boost thing. Oh, wow. And so I said, I want to talk to Ron Moore and David Ike. Okay. When the creator is a Battlestar. there and they will go out and get them for you the kind of morale boost thing oh wow and so i said i want to talk to ron moore and david ike okay the creators of battlestar so we had this great skype session wow it was so cool and that's why before i was going to mention this when we're talking about um you know science fiction and science fact and how there's this crazy feedback

loop about you got to think about it first like you go back and look at 2001 and you see these guys using tablets. In 1960, was it 1968 that movie came out? And you know Steve Jobs saw that and said, I'm going to make one of those, right? And so there's this crazy like interplay between fiction and fact. And I got to talk to ron more about all this and then and then he invited me to uh come on the set for the for the final episode of battle star wow and you're not supposed to like the first 30 days you're back from a long duration mission you're not supposed to like go anywhere and i'm like uh look they're only going to shoot this once

you know it's it's two weeks from now i'm going and the last time i checked this is a free country And I'm like, look, they're only going to shoot this once. It's two weeks from now. I'm going. And the last time I checked, this is a free country. You're not going to stop me. So I went, and I went all the way up to Vancouver. And I got to go on the set. I met all the cast.

I got to be a focus puller on the camera guy. I got to do the sticks. Oh, wow. I just had a blast. And then they made me an extra. I was a colonial marine in the back of a ship that gets blown up i'm sure that show was super complicated to make but i would love if they brought it back yeah i don't think people appreciate it enough because it was on sci-fi which is not the most popular network and it's also a reboot of a classic show so maybe

it had like a bit of a stink to it but that was so much better than the first version of it no comparison it's a great fucking show it's really intense yeah it's awesome it's really really well made i love everything about it from the plot to the acting it's it's sensational yeah this is my favorite sci-fi show of all time for sure yeah me too it's blasphemy for star trek fans yeah but it's really good it's fucking good man i mean you couldn't have it without star trek you couldn't have it without the original battle star galactica but at the end of the day it's yeah they all kind of build on each other and that's what and so then ron went off and did outlander after that oh okay

and now he came and one day he calls me up, and he says, I got this new idea. Can I come by? Can we get together, and maybe I can bounce the idea off of you? I was like, yeah. So he came to SpaceX, and I gave him a tour of the place, and then we sat down in the cafe. And he said, okay, so I'm thinking about doing a show about NASA back in, like, the 70s. And it'd be kind of like a period piece. It'd be kind of like we'd have a cast of characters,

but they're all working on Apollo. And it would be true to real life, but it would be the drama of the people behind the scenes. I said, oh, that sounds pretty cool. He goes, yeah, I'm also toying around with a slight twist to that where we use an alternate reality. And in this alternate reality, we start at that point, but things turn out differently. And we start talking about like how close the Russians were to actually beating us to the moon, which not a lot of people know about.

But when I was over there in Moscow, I got to see actually they have a warehouse where they still have their lunar lander, for example, that they built. They were really working hard on it. So we started what-if-ing, like, well, the russians got there first what would what would america done how think how would things be different today if that seminal moment of neil and buzz you know stepping out on the moon was instead alexei leonov a cosmonaut doing it right and i was like that is freaking genius i mean that was like a i thought i want to see mean, that was like a – I thought I want to see that show. That's like a great premise. And he pitched that to Apple and they bought it.

And then he called me up and said, do you want to work on the show? I'm like, yeah. That's so cool. So what is your role? What do you do there? I'm a technical consultant, one of a couple. We have another group of people – a couple of other people that help out too. But I get involved in like everything.

So I was in the writer's room where we're first coming up with basic ideas and sketching out like multiple seasons and character arcs and all that kind of stuff. And then I get all the scripts and I read them all and I give notes on all the scripts. And then I come to the set and I meet with the actors, the cast, and I give them suggestions about like how to look real when they're in space. And then I like work with the VFX guys. I work with the stunt team. I get phone calls from like the hair and makeup people. Like how do, what do ladies do with their hair if they have long hair when they do a spacewalk?

I'm like, you're calling the wrong guy, but I can ask a friend. Right. So, so, so all that's just so much fun for me. Like, you're calling the wrong guy. But I can ask a friend, right? So that's just so much fun for me. It's like, you know how you can pay a whole lot of money and go to fantasy baseball camp? Yeah. And you get to have batting practice with the Dodgers or something? Mm-hmm.

And they humor you because you paid a lot of money? Well, it's kind of like that. I keep waiting for them to say, like, okay, the fun is over. Get out of here. Go back to your day job. But I'm like, I'm just loving it. That's wild. So how much correcting do you have to do?

How much do you get to script and go, hey, that doesn't happen. You can't do that. That's not. It depends. And every production is different. The nice thing about For All Mankind is they really, really want to get it right. I've worked on other projects where they say they want to get it right, but then they completely blow off the laws of physics. And you know I'm okay with that.

Like the Martian with the hand-cutting thing. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, like I said this to some of my students, nobody goes to see a movie for the orbital mechanics. You go for the story, the characters. Yeah, sure. sure yeah but it's hard if you're an expert in something to watch a movie where they fudge stuff and it doesn't make sense yeah like for me martial arts movies martial arts movies do dumb shit i'm like come on man you know or if i watch a movie about a pool player and I can tell the guy can't really play pool, I get upset. So for you, when you're watching something like Gravity, that was a big one. A lot of people got really – like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I know. He hated it. He hated it. He hated it. I liked it. And the problem is now that I have this job, now I'm getting more persnickety about it. I'm sure. Now I'm watching it. I'm like, that's not right.

Yeah, everything. The gravity, the hair. He used to not care, though. When I first saw Gravity, I loved it because it was a good story. It gripped me. But you knew that those space stations were not close to each other. Oh, yeah. The inclinations were, the orbits were totally different.

You're going to go from one to the other with a fire extinguisher? I knew that was complete bullshit. Don't get me wrong. But that leap where they're treating you like you're a moron they're treating you like there's no way you're gonna be able to research this but something like you someone like you rather that's your life so like you know that's nonsense you're sitting there watching some hokey solution yeah for something that would never work yeah so if it gets to the point where like but that's's the beautiful thing about doing this with television is you don't have to actually be right.

You just have to be believable, which the bar is, like when I'm teaching my class at USC, I got to be right. But when I'm like, yeah, well, maybe this could happen. With a TV show, it's easier. But this TV show, you're just saying they really want to try to get it right. They really do because it's really important to them. And so, yeah, I've ended up making wholesale changes to episodes because I'm like the original idea. I try very, very hard not to interfere with their creative process because they're really, really good at that.

And I'm not worthy. But I'm like, yeah, yeah okay i see what you're trying to do you want this guy to be the hero you want this person to feel remorse you want this and and and over the course of time this person has a change of heart i get the story but what if instead of doing it this way what if the events occur like this because this could actually happen right and so i tried to change it. And it was one, like episode nine and a little bit of episode 10 of season one, we ended up sitting,

I ended up sitting and working very closely with the writers and changing all the technical content to fit, to make the story work in a believable way. And that, when we do that and then you see it on the screen, it's like so incredibly rewarding. It's really fun. That must be be especially as someone

who's a sci-fi fan like you've you've had two dream lives here like three or four really incredible that you've gone from that from yeah nasa to spacex and now to be able to create television shows that you can actually enjoy yeah wow um one thing I wanted to ask you about space is we always hear stuff about space junk, about satellites and just junk that's floating around the atmosphere. How much of a concern is that and what could be done about that stuff? It's a huge concern. It's a very, very big problem in certain orbits around the Earth, low Earth orbit and also at the geostationary orbits. That's where you could put like communication satellites and they stay over one spot of the Earth. Those are very polluted.

There's a lot of junk and it is very dangerous and it's a real problem. It's hard to clean up. Over time, eventually, even at higher altitudes, there's still a little bit of atmosphere like individual atoms. Eventually, that slows you down. Those collisions eventually slow you down. So eventually, it comes back, but it could take a long, long time. Come back to Earth, you mean? Yeah.

It'll come back, and it'll burn up. So the most important thing is don't make any more junk. That's the best thing we can do. And we're getting much smarter. Like at SpaceX, we take our second stages in all of our NASA missions, and after it's accomplished its mission, we keep enough gas in the tank to burn the engine one more time and bring it back in one piece so it doesn't blow up into smithereens and cause more junk. Whenever we do anti-satellite tests, though, China did one relatively recently,

and we've done them in the past. Those are like the worst because they create giant clouds of junk. And we still have to live with that. Is there any concepts on the table for how to take that stuff out? There's some ideas of using lasers to laze the things and make subtle changes to their trajectories and orbits. But all the technical solutions are challenging and expensive. So I don't know of any one idea that's going to just solve this problem easily. Because we've seen the map of the Earth and all the different satellites that orbit it now

and all the different pieces of junk that have been identified. It's crazy. Yeah. The amount of stuff, and it seems like nobody kind of thought it through they just sort of did it and left the junk up there and that's what humans do man i mean like we've been dumping stuff in the oceans forever and not really giving much thought to it and now we're finding giant gyres of plastic or down you know yeah so yeah we we tend to not really react

until it's a really big problem, but it's a big problem. And when I did my first spacewalk, one of the things we had to do was we had to bring in this handle that we're going to use on a subsequent spacewalk. It was like, we call it a D-handle. It's just basically a half-inch piece of aluminum

around like this that you can attach to something and then carry things. So we had this big chunk of aluminum around like this that you can attach to something and then carry things. So he had this big chunk of aluminum, and we brought it inside, and my spacewalk partner, Rick, looked at the thing when we came inside and saw a hole shot straight through it. It's like about a millimeter in diameter. It's really small, but it went right through,

this half-inch thick solid aluminum. And he looked at that, and he said, man, if that hit one of us and he didn't have to finish that statement because if this stuff is moving uh generally speaking about 10 kilometers per second so that's like roughly uh 10 times as fast as a rifle bullet so if something like that hits you it could be a fleck of paint hitting you at that velocity if it hits you in the suit you're fleck of paint hitting you at that velocity. If it hits you in the suit, you're in 100% oxygen environment, and you're just going to flame up.

I mean, you're going to instantly combust. It's going to be really a bad day. So he didn't have to, like, he said, you know, when he said that, he didn't have to finish it. And we both looked at it. And then I looked at him and said, yeah, but you're 6'4". so statistically, much more likely it's going to hit you. More object. And besides, I was kind of behind you most of the way out there. But it'd probably go right through him and right through you, too.

It probably might. That's what's so crazy about it is there's so much of that stuff up there. I'm always wondering, like, why doesn't it hit the space station? It does. It does. There's a couple times I was inside the space station I heard it take a hit. Whoa. station what it does it does it's a couple times i was inside the space station i heard us take a hit whoa but this but um so i heard the ping but fortunately i didn't hear the ping followed by the oh you're leaving yeah so that ping is probably something bouncing off something or going through something so the station has shielding it's called whipple shielding and it's basically

a piece of of of a wall a thin piece of metal that stands off from the hull. So the thin piece of metal is never going to stop this thing. But when it hits at that hypervelocity, it breaks up into lots of little tiny pieces, and it's almost like a fluid at that point. It's like almost a cloud of dust. And then when it hits the hull, those individual pieces don't penetrate. So it just shatters it. And that works. What if it hits that window?

It's hit the shuttle window. It has multiple panes, and it's really, really strong. But we came home with big... It looks like when a rocket's kicked up and it takes... Really? Yeah, we've seen that. Wow. That's a little scary. and it takes... Really? Yeah, we've seen that. Wow. That's a little scary.

Jesus Christ, a little? Yeah. What about micrometeors and things along those lines? Well, depending on where you are. So in Earth orbit, there's much more of man-made junk than there are micrometeoroids. But there are those too. When you get out away from Earth orbit, like if we're going to go back to the moon, then there's no more human-made junk. But those micro-meteoroids are still out there.

And they can do the same kind of damage. But there's a lot fewer of them. The density of those things is a lot less than what you experience. So if you go to Mars, I'd worry about the radiation first and then the micro-meteoroids are like down the list. There seems to be so many things to think about yeah and is this all factored into your television show

uh well a lot of these things are I can't can't say I can't give any spoilers season one is available right now we can talk about that but season two I'm not allowed to give any spoilers or anything but I can tell you that. But season two, I'm not allowed to give any spoilers or anything, but I can tell you that some of these concepts end up in there.

Well, listen, it's been a real pleasure having you in here, man. I really appreciate you coming here and talking about this stuff, and you've lived three amazing lives. You're in the middle of a third one right now. You've had a pretty cool one too, man. Now, this has been a real honor And a real pleasure Seriously The honor's mine man

Thank you very much So one more time for people It's available right now On Apple TV For all mankind For all mankind And if people want to find you On social media

Do you have Do you have everything Yes so You can go to my website GarrettReisman.com Thank you And then on Twitter And Instagram

I'm AstroGDog With two G. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you being here, man. My pleasure. Thank you. Bye, everybody.