The Joe Rogan Experience - #414 - Cmdr. Chris Hadfield

Episode Date: November 11, 2013

Chris Hadfield is a retired Canadian astronaut who was the first Canadian to walk in space. He also authored the New York Times Bestseller "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth"

His name is Chris Hatfield. The book is An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. Hear that? That's me. I never forget. I never remember, rather. Turn my laptop off. You were in space for 166 days. Amazing, huh? That's insane. It's when I sit on my dock and watch the space station go over, uh, it's really hard to rationalize because I know I was up there and I can remember

all the details, but to try and link in life on earth with, uh, with seeing that spotlight go across the horizon, it's, it's still, I haven't got sorted out of my head how to connect it. Is that the longest a person's ever been up there? No, we, there was a Russian guy named Valery Polyakov who stayed up 14 months straight, 400 and whatever that is days, long time. Wow. Yeah. No, I'm nowhere near the record. That's still 166 days is an incredible amount of time to be detached from gravity and floating around in space. What is the effect on your body? Big effect, short term, huge. Your body doesn't have to lift the blood up to your head when you're weightless, right?

So your whole cardiovascular system changes. All the nice little mechanisms that squeeze the balloon that is your body to get the blood up to your head, they stop working. Your heart gets smaller. You start losing your skeleton. Your balance system completely shuts down. I mean, it has no stimulus from gravity anymore, so you become totally visually based. You start losing your skeleton. Your balance system completely shuts down. I mean, it has no stimulus from gravity anymore, so you become totally visually based. So when you come home, it's brutal building all those things back up again.

And most of them you feel, I mean, you lose the calluses on the bottom of your feet. It's kind of disgusting because your feet are like a snake up there, but the bottom of your feet are shedding because you never use the bottom of your feet. And you build up calluses on the top because you're always tucking your feet underneath things. So when you come back, you even have to grow the calluses back at the bottom of your feet. And the thing that takes the longest is your skeleton. I lost about 8% of the bone across my hips, but it's grown back. And within about a year of landing, I'll hopefully be back to normal. One year. It takes one year for your body to fully recover. It took about four months before I could run normally again, where my body would get the

blood out of my feet and pump it properly back up to my head. About four months, which is almost as long as I was up on this trip. But yeah, the bone takes the longest. But it's automatic, which is interesting. My body got osteoporosis and it's reversing osteoporosis using some internal stimulus that we don't even understand. So it makes a pretty good medical study for everybody. Yeah, I would imagine so. Now, how long do you have to be in space before your body loses so much mass of skeleton? The first time you take a leak in space, your urine is full of calcium and minerals. We do urine samples all the time.

And your body, we don't even know why. We don't know what sensors in the body recognize that you're weightless or why we would even have those sensors. But your body starts to shed your skeleton right away. And we can almost beat it now through heavy exercise. We have a bunch of equipment on board, resistive exercise and treadmill and bicycle and stuff. And with that, we can almost beat it. But across my hips and my upper femur, we haven't been able to load that area up right. You always lift symmetrically. And on treadmill, you always run nice and symmetrically. So you don't get all the banging transverse loads that you need to make your body keep the bones dense there. So how much of it can you preserve by using exercise?

The rest of my body was fine. In fact, I increased muscle mass. I decreased fat a little bit. My bones were at the same density. The only place we haven't solved yet is just the hip cradle. And I think with another iteration or two of our exercise equipment, we'll get that solved. And then we can go to Mars. Wow. So now how long are you, when you're doing like exercise to try to build up, what percentage of your day is spent doing that? Two hours a day, every day.

We do one hour of cardiovascular and one hour of resistive every single day, seven days a week for the whole half a year that you're up there. We've determined that's the best tradeoff between getting useful work done, because it's a big multinational laboratory, and keeping your body healthy. So we commit about two hours a day. When they first started going up there, did they not do anything? No, we've tried a bunch of different things. The Russians even tried a suit they call a penguin suit, which is like a set of coveralls, tight-fitting coveralls that's full of elastics,

so that every time you bend your elbow or twist your body or something, you're fighting the resistance of the suit because they thought then you could sort of get it for free. But you need to demand it. You need to actually heavily force your body to exercise. And if you do that, then you can stay in shape. But we started out with resistive exercise device, and then it was the improved IRED. And now we're on ARED, which is the advanced resistive exercise device, as we've learned how to make it better so that we can return to Earth healthy. Or when we go to the moon, more importantly, when we go to Mars, it takes about half a year to get there.

This is one of the problems we need to solve. The Mars is really that next level trip, right, because there's no coming back. It's like several levels above where we are now. The station is in orbit, right? It's around us, the space station. It's been up there 13 years now with people on board. But it's like sailing up and down the coast with insight of land. We haven't headed across the body of water,

even to go to the moon, as far as habitation goes. So right now we're just sailing up and down the coast of the world, figuring out how to beat osteoporosis, how did the radiation, the psychology of it, what to make the hull out of, how do you make a toilet that works, a closed environmental system. Got to invent all those things.

Then I think we'll go to the moon, because it's the next, it's only three days away. And then we can do how to use resources that are there. How do you generate power? How do you navigate? How do you do all that? And then once we've got that sorted out, then I think we'll go further, but it's still, you know, a lot of years away. What are the big hazards? The big hazards are radiation from space, What are the big hazards? The big hazards are radiation from space, micrometeors. Yep. And what else? Psychological.

Psychological. How do you keep people sane? And it's not so bad in the space station because we're close to the world. There's only like a two-second delay talking on the radio. So you can have a normal conversation, just a little pause. But as soon as you start going to Mars, within a couple weeks, you will never have another conversation with Earth, a normal one. Again, everything's got so much lag that you'll just have, like, recorded video messages back and forth. And so the psych impact of that is going to be high, and the Earth will shrink to just another star within a couple weeks, you know,

and that, those people will become Martians in their mind. You know, they will no longer be from Earth. They will see themselves as separate. When I was on the space station the second time, one of the other crew members, her name's Sue Helms, she and I were talking. We'd known each other since test pilot school. And in passing, a throwaway thing, she didn't even think she was saying. She said, hey, you know, Earth said that we're supposed to do this next. And in my mind, I heard Earth said.

I heard those words come out of her mouth. And it was like, she has in her mind completely split off from the other 7 billion people. There's her crew, and Earth is one singular identifiable entity on the other side. And that was a real bell ringer to me of what it's going to be like to go to Mars. Those people are going to be a completely discreet unit of people, and they'll be Martians. They won't be Earthlings pretty quick in their heads. And how do you deal with that? How do we plan for that? And it's still a long ways in the future, but it's one of the many things we need to sort out before we,

because as you say, once you get the engines going fast enough that you're headed for Mars, you can't just turn around. There's no coming back. That's it. Well, I mean, Apollo 13, right, they lost an engine on the way to the moon. They coasted all the way to the moon, and they just used like a ball on the end of a string. They just went around the moon with the gravity of the moon to sling them back at Earth again. So if something failed on the way to Mars, you could do the same thing, but it would take a year. So, you know, no problem can normally last a year to get resolved. So pretty much, yeah, you've got to have all the problems solved before you head that way.

And what about, like, sustainable resources, like as far as, like, food and things like that? Do they have to terraform when they get to Mars and start growing things? Well, we don't know. We're trying to figure all that out. A really interesting discovery about three weeks ago, Curiosity, that big rover that is driving around on Mars right now, has some pretty good equipment on it. And it discovered just in the last few weeks that in every cubic foot of dirt on Mars, there's a quart of water. There's a quart of water. So there's oceans of water.

I mean, the topsoil is full of water on Mars. So that's really promising for when we get there because water is hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen and debris, hydrogen and oxygen makes fuel. Hydrogen and oxygen makes water. So that's a huge resource. The moon, there's water there, but it's really rare. So that's a big discovery for us eventually being able to go there. But, you know, we need a power source. The sun's a long ways away, and it's dusty on Mars.

You can't just, you can't have a solar-powered bulldozer. You know, you need a power source. And we need, how do you navigate? And there's just a whole, how do you build a perfect closed loop environmental system so that you don't have a constant losses? And because the space station, we only, I think it's about 92% of our water we reclaim, but we constantly need that little trickle from earth of new water because it's not perfect. There's, there's a whole, and there's a lot of stuff we need when don't even know what we don't know yet. And that's, I think, why we'll sort a lot of that out on the moon before we launch to Mars.

To me, watching the footage of the rover and the images that it sent back was almost surreal. It didn't seem real. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that they sent a robot to another planet, and it's roaming around taking pictures and sending them back, and we're looking at them. Yeah, it's phenomenal. It's incredible. taking pictures and sending them back, and we're looking at them. Yeah, it's phenomenal. It's incredible. Yeah, that we could do that. And the way that came to, you know, Mars has just the wrong atmosphere.

It's not thick enough to use a parachute in, but it's not thin enough that you can ignore it and just slow down and land with a rocket. You know, it's not good for landing. The Earth's atmosphere is nice and thick. You can come down under a parachute, and the moon has none. You know, it's not good for landing. The Earth's atmosphere is nice and thick. You can come down under a parachute. And the moon has none. So you can just, like the Apollo guys, you can just land on your rocket plume. Mars, you're kind of stuck in the middle.

So you need a complex landing system. And Curiosity, the way they came up with the solution to that was just phenomenal. The big aerobrake through the atmosphere and then that sequence of miracles and the retro rockets and the extendable bridle and everything. It is amazing that that worked. And a huge kudos to the JPL guys and everybody who came up with it. And the stuff it's teaching us about how planets work and what is the past and the future for that planet Mars. And therefore, it gives us a lot better understanding of what's normal and what we can expect on Earth. Yeah, huge kudos to those people indeed.

I mean, they did an amazing, amazing thing. And just one of those, in my opinion, one of those paradigm shifting moments where when we're back here on Earth and we're watching those images, you're like, wow, they can do this now. Yeah, I'm an astronaut. I'm an astronaut. And I've been in space twice. And I gathered my family around to watch that thing happen because it's so, it is right on the edge

of what we can just barely do. It's such a brave thing to do and such a capable probe, a capable extension of us all to put down on the surface. And it's teaching us about Mars. Did you ever pay any attention to the face on Mars or any of that craziness before? That's all fun. And, you know, there's faces all over. I mean, just lay on your back and look at the clouds.

Oh, yeah. There's faces everywhere, right? Sure. We naturally look for faces. Especially in weird shadowy images like those images were. I mean, there were some really unique things.

There's a rock near my house that's a square rock. And I have a friend who believes in a lot of conspiracy theories and he believes in the face on Mars and a lot of different stuff and i said i'm gonna show you something man come over here i go look at that rock do you think anybody made that rock i go that rock is just made that's just a rock amongst a pile of rocks it's big and it's kind

of square not perfectly square but if you looked at a blurry picture of it that was taken from space you would swear this is the building block for a pyramid. Obviously. This was clearly made by an intelligent species. Yeah, the same one that built the pyramids. Yeah, I know. It's always easier to believe something than it is to understand it. Yeah, the fascinating thing about the face on Mars is not that it looks like a face on Mars. It's the idea that Mars at one point in time actually could have sustained some

form of life, and in fact, definitely did. It had an atmosphere that was livable at one point in time. It really, there could have been some kind of life. Maybe it was just like microbes or plants. It might still. I mean, it is the biggest volcano in the solar system. So it has heat, and it has all this water, but that we've just found now for sure and heat and water on earth always means life to me and just look under your sink and so on on mars maybe there's

a fossil record of it maybe there's even something still primitive stuff living somewhere in the rock we don't know but we haven't found any yet but if we can find it on mars and we know there's life on earth then there's life everywhere and that would be a pretty important thing to figure out. Or the possibility that life actually started on Mars and some sort of an impact from an asteroid, panspermia, sent it hurling towards Earth. I'm not sure that's a logical conclusion. If life can start somewhere, then it can start in two places, right? And so it doesn't have to miraculously be panspermia from one planet to another. If it formed on Mars, then, and there's life on Earth, then it's a more logical conclusion to think that it just formed in two places, I think. Do you, when you sit in that space station and you're floating above Earth, much as you were

saying that your colleagues started referring to earth as like a separate individual entity and you guys were separate from earth did you look out when you're looking at the vastness of everything i mean it's just everything and do you did it feel like earth was in a neighborhood more like you know what i mean that we weren't isolated that we're it's so silly the thing is so big. Did you feel like more connected to the rest of the universe in any sort of a way? Joe, when you're in the side of the spaceship and you look at the world, you're looking at it through the windows. And I came back. It was so funny.

I came back from my first space flight. I was sitting in the living room with my wife, Helena, and we were watching Star Trek. And they show that scene with Sulu and whoever up front, and they were in the standard orbit, Mr. Sulu, and there's the curve of the Earth underneath. And I remember going, that's it. That's exactly what it looks like. They got that right.

They guessed right in 1968 or whatever it was. Because when you're inside the spaceship, it looks like that. The difference is when you go outside. And then it's like the difference between sitting in your living room looking outside and hanging on a cliff or, you know, hanging on half dome or somewhere where it's this huge hanging, spinning mass next to you, and the universe is what's around you. And you are part of it. You're suspended in it. We aren't used to having the universe under our feet or all around us and feeling that you're in it, not just sort of below it, looking up at it. And that is really different. And that's when you really see that the world is just in the neighborhood and that it is

a ball with the moon being a ball and the sun's over there. And if we go out there, that's Mars. You really get that feeling when you're out on a spacewalk. I've heard several astronauts talk about that feeling and that moment when they are outside of a spacecraft looking at the universe itself and saying that it changed them forever. It gave me a profound respect. And also, I don't even know. I mean, nobody knows the answer, right?

even know. I mean, nobody knows the answer, right? Big Bang and all the rest of it and all the belief systems around the world and how everybody deals with all that. And I sure don't know the answer to that. But when you look at the world, it's really hard to convince yourself that it's random, just looking at it. It's like, how can that possibly be? But then again, if you look a little further out, there's, you know, how could Mars be random? And how could all the other planets, how could Saturn, the way it looks, be just a random event? And the unlimited number of stars that are out there. And the planets we're seeing around other stars directly. I don't know how to resolve it in my mind. I didn't find the meaning of it all by being on a spacewalk.

If anything, it just deepened my dumbfoundedness at the immensity of it and our tiny little part of it. I've often thought that questions, pondering questions like the randomness of the universe or just the reality that we know about subatomic particles and the idea of the universe being this fractal thing and impossible and never ending i think it's almost like walking up to a mountain and going yeah i could see how that could be picked up but you can't really pick it up yourself so you're just like man i guess i guess it could be random i don't know i mean what i don't understand i don't even know what the fuck random means i mean the idea of random seems the universe itself seems to be this incredibly complex thing that has not just laws but very clear directions that things move into it constantly is complexifying from the big bang till now and the idea of black holes the eating matter and creating a singularity and that, possibly these new astrophysicists and string theorists guys are saying that

they think that inside every black hole may in fact be a completely different universe. You know, on the top of the space station we have an experiment put there by a Nobel Prize winning physicist named Sam Ting. And it's from CERN, from the big particle accelerator that's under Switzerland and France. It's their baby. And it's up there. It's a huge magnet. And what it's doing is collecting subatomic particles of the universe. And it's got layer after layer of detector. So it can try and figure out what they all are as they come ripping through. And it's collected trillions and trillions of them. It's been up there for the last couple of years.

And the reason is we don't know what the universe is made of. We can only account for 5% of the universe with the known particles that we have. We don't know what 95% of the universe is even made of. And so we call it dark energy and dark matter. And we're trying to indirectly prove that those exist based on the proportions of the subatomic particles we're collecting up in the top of the space station. And it's a decadal long project. And they released the first layer of the results back in the spring. And it's starting to look like maybe some of the theories are correct. But we talk as if we're conclusively brilliant and we understand everything.

I mean, we're still calling things dark matter and dark energy. We have no idea, and we're just trying to figure it out. That's another word for magic. It is indeed. It's another word for I don't know. Well, we are most certainly the smartest and the most informed human beings that have ever existed as far as we know. The two of us?

No, no. Human and denying me 100 i'm not an idiot but as far as like humans that have ever lived we're the the most informed the most technologically capable but much like when we look back at the renaissance era or look back at galileo being imprisoned because he dared question the idea that the earth wasn't the center of the universe. We're going to make fun of us. Someday they're going to make fun of us like these dummies. They didn't know what Clark-Gluon plasma was. They had to use a particle accelerator to prove that the Higgs boson existed. Yeah, I agree.

We're going to look at the space shuttle and go, what were they thinking? That station wagon. It's just so ridiculous, like a DC-3 now, you know. That's one thing I really wanted to bring up with you. You know, you had to take one of those up there. You had to take some sort of a spaceship up there. What is the feeling like of, did you have to get in a Russian one? My first two flights were on shuttles. I flew Atlantis and then Endeavour. And then my third flight, I was left seat. So sort of like the pilot of the Soyuz. So I flown them all. Wow. So you flew when the space shuttle was in operation and you flew the Russian version of

the space shuttle. What's the difference? The shuttle is so much more capable. It is the most capable flying machine humans have ever built. Unbelievable. And three quarters of everybody who's ever flown in space flew on the shuttle. It was the first great lifter. Its purpose was to take a huge spy satellite up. This was the conception in the 60s and early 70s. Take the best technology 60s spy satellite, launch out of Vandenberg, go straight north, go halfway around the world, take pictures of the hotspots of the world, come back again, and then use the wings to be able to go sort of sideways and sideslip because the world's turned underneath you and come back and land again after one orbit. That's why we had wings on the shuttle was so that we could carry

this huge telescope. And they weren't automated back then, so we needed a crew to be able to operate the telescope. That's why the payload bay was the size that it was and why the shuttle could lift the amount that it could lift. It was to meet all those requirements. That all immediately stopped being the reason for the space shuttle to exist, but the design was already set. What that gave us, though, was a vehicle that could carry, gosh, 40 or 50,000 pounds up in a payload bay that's the size of a city bus and then bring it back and land it gently on a runway and carry a crew up to seven. So it's like a space station all on its own. An amazingly capable vehicle. Amazingly complex, too.

And when things are amazingly complex, they're really expensive and hard to operate safely. And we lost two crews, you know, as a result of the complexity of it. The Soyuz is designed to take three people and a tiny bit of gear up to the space station, dock, stay there for half a year or longer as their lifeboat. And then at the end of time, get back in and come back home again. That's the Soyuz's purpose. And it does that really well. But it's tiny and very purpose-built. The two of them are magnificent vehicles, but built for way different purposes

and both very carefully evolved to do what they do exquisitely well. And I'm lucky to have flown them both. That sounds so incredible. What does the g-force feel like when you're taken off from the launch pad? You go straight up, of course. You have to get above the air. If you want to stay in orbit, you got to go five miles a second. If you're going a little slower, it's sort of like throwing something sideways. Gravity pulls it down. But if you can throw it sideways at five miles a second, then gravity will still pull it down. But the Earth curves away underneath it if it's going fast enough. It goes over the horizon

before it falls. So that's how we stay in orbit, is we go five miles a second. But you can't go five miles a second in the air. The friction's just too high. So the rocket ships take you straight up to get you above the air. And that takes about two minutes going straight up. And in 45 seconds, you're through the speed of sound, straight up and accelerating. And in 70 seconds, you're through the altitude and speed of the Concorde, accelerating straight up. And after two minutes, you're about 160,000 feet and six times the speed of sound, but you're above almost all the air. And then your first stage falls off. So inside, it's this incredibly powerful push in your back, like a dragster, but like one that's gone off the road. The vibration of pushing through the air, it's like a tuning fork kind of vibration.

This enormous, powerful, jaws-of-a-dog kind of ride, straight up. But then, after two minutes, the solids or the stage that got you above the air is all out of fuel. It explodes off, because you don't want to carry all that dead weight with you anymore.

And then you use the remaining engines for the next six minutes or six and a half to accelerate out horizontal basically to five miles a second. And so for the last six minutes, it's like a long liquid drive, heavy, steady, pushing like someone with their fist in your back, pushing you faster and faster and faster, a smoother ride because you're above the air. And after just under nine minutes, like 8, 8.45 or so, you're exactly the right place, the right direction, and the right speed. The engine shut off, and you're in space, and you're weightless. Wow.

So it's nine minutes. Yep. It's 8.42 on the shuttle and just under nine, like 8.55 for the Soyuz. What's the maximum g-force you experienced during that push? The shuttle's about 3G, and in fact, when you hit 3G, the throttles start coming back because it was only built for about 3.5G, so three times your normal weight. So if you weigh 200 pounds, you weigh 600 pounds in there.

The Soyuz is about 4 or 4.5. So if you're a 200-pounder, you're up around, you know, 8, 900 pounds. I got to ride with the Blue Angels, one of those F-18s once. Yeah, I was an F-18 pilot for a lot of years. Oh, those are incredible. That's a great airplane. You got to fly those? Yeah.

What's the most Gs you pulled in one of those things? If you take an F-18 and you grab the stick and you snap it into your lap, you aren't actually connected to anything except a computer. It's little sensors. It's fly-by-wire. So it says, wow, he wants to turn right now. And so then it moves all the control surfaces of the airplane, but it doesn't want to break the wings off, so it will limit you. The airplane limits the amount of G that it can pull, and it'll give you about 8G. About 8G, that's all it'll give you you because otherwise you could structurally damage the airplane.

So there was a paddle you could actually, if you were going to hit the ground, you could hit this paddle that would override the G control system and snap it into your lap and just give you whatever the aerodynamics would give you. And we've had people pull 12G. But the Soyuz,

if you come into the atmosphere the wrong way, can pull 20 or 22G on the way home, which is just wicked. And that happened once in the Russian experience. Can you survive that? You're lying down. When you're in an F-18, like when you flew with the Blue Angels, you're sitting upright. So when you pull back, it pushes the blood down to your feet. So the real limitation is how much of that can you stand before you can't stay awake, before you black out. In a Soyuz, we're actually laying on our back. So the blood doesn't drain out of your head. It just gets kind of pushed to the back of

your body. So therefore, you can survive it. It won't black you out. It doesn't damage you. It's sort of like a prolonged car crash. You know, people pull 20G in a car crash, but it's instantaneous. If you fall into the atmosphere the wrong way in a Soyuz, then as you hit the thick atmosphere, it's almost like crashing into something super high G-peak for maybe 30 seconds. And then you come through that G-peak and slow down. And it's survivable, but I wouldn't want to ride it. Wow.

The feeling must be just incredible. What are the thoughts that are going through your mind when you're going that fast, shooting up into space? It was funny. I'm focusing on the job because there's a million things that can fail. And one of the mantras of astronauts is there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. So we think about that all the time. And so we really are careful on the way up. And so a big part of you is involved with that.

But another part of you is just loving the ride so much. And I found after a while that my cheeks were hurting. And I was like, why is my face hurt? And I realized, cause this smile, this big, stupid smile was on my face so much that my cheeks were cramping up because, because it was so much of a thrill to go. Yeah. It was like having, you know, one, one, those two people on your shoulders, one that's being all serious and one that's yelling bad advice to you. The one that's having a good time is just going, weee, the whole time, just loving the ride. It is so much fun.

Well, I guess that's a good time to do that, right? Because you're completely helpless. Actually, you're not helpless at all. Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff that you're responsible for on the way up and the way down. Even in the suyas when you're lying down? Oh, in the suyas. We've got the full control panel and there's stuff you have to do. Oh, you have to do as it's happening. Oh, yeah. What do you do while you're flying up there and you're smiling? Well, if everything works perfectly, we're just watching. And same in the shuttle.

We have very, you know, hopefully don't have to do anything, but sometimes things don't go right. And then you got a bunch of things you can do, you know, various shutdowns and aborts. And people probably don't know, but the shuttle, as it launched up the East Coast of the U.S., we kept abort landing runways all the way up the coast. You could land at Cherry Point, or you can land in New York, or you could land in Newfoundland, or all those places. And so as you're ticking up the coast, you're constantly going, okay, if we have a failure now, we're going to abort this way, we're going to turn, we're going to land in Bermuda, we're going to land here, we're going to land, and practice those like crazy. And then you get

to a certain point, and then you would land in North Africa or South France or in Spain. And all those windows, all those tick points, all those thresholds you have to get through, that's what we're hyper aware of. We're not along for the ride. Wow. So while this is all going on, you have this big, giant smile, and you still are calculating. Oh, yeah. You still are going, okay, if it screws up now, I go here. Oh yeah. I'm running my thumb down a long list of all the various wickets that you're jumping through. Yeah. You pay attention. How much of the trip

is automated? How much of it is manual? We'd like it to be as automated as possible because that means things are predictable and things didn't break and for the vast majority of shuttle flights and so use flights it's automated but sometimes it's not on the way uphill and we've had engines fail or engines start to fail had to shut engines down and go to backup or at least a reserve configuration of the engines. Mid-launch? Yeah. During launch, that happened on Apollo as well.

On the way back to Earth, we've had serious problems with the Soyuz, where you have to take over and try and fly manually or come in ballistically, which means it loses its ability to steer on the way home, and you just start spinning the vehicle, and then it just comes in like a pure meteorite. You pull about 8 or 9G on a ballistic entry, and that's pretty tough after six months of weightlessness to suddenly, if you're a 200-pounder now, you weigh 1,600 or 1,700 pounds, and that's pretty hard on the body. Wow. It's incredible.

The feeling that you must have had when you actually stepped onto ground again. What was that like? It's awful. It's awful. You're so nauseous and dizzy. And the reason is, of course, your vision is telling you one thing, telling you where the horizon is, where up is, but your inner ear, which normally, when your eyes are closed, keeps you from falling over. You know, you can close your eyes and not fall over. That has forgotten completely what to do with gravity because you've been weightless for whatever, five or six months. So now you have this sudden great violent disagreement between what your eyes are saying and what your inner ear is saying. It's like if you spin 50 times and then stop spinning and you stagger around. So your body says,

whoa, there is something seriously wrong. Why is his vision so wildly different than his inner ear? And for the last million years, one of the probable causes was you ate something poisonous. You ate some sort of neurotoxin or something that is messing up your internal systems and it might kill you. So the first thing your body makes you want to do is throw up because it's trying to get rid of whatever it was you just ate. And then the next thing your body makes you want to do is go lay down and go to sleep because so you stop metabolizing it, right? It's trying to keep you alive. So when you first get back from space, your body's just screaming at you to throw up and go lie down. But, you know, you got all this stuff to do and people are there to meet you.

And you're trying to just ignore those symptoms and pay attention to what's going on. Is there happiness along with that? I mean, is there a feeling of being home? Oh, yeah. Yeah. All three of my flights. And if the flight went well and we work hard enough that they almost always do, there's a great sense of satisfaction because we just, it's like the final step in an extremely

complicated process where you have done everything right or enough things right that you can have that for the rest of your life. So there's a tremendous feeling of joy and pride and accomplishment when you get back to Earth. I have always been fascinated by space. And if you look up, you can see the lights here are covered with stars. I saw that. I like your lights.

They're good. But what drives me nuts is how little we actually get to see of the stars because of light pollution. I was at the Big Island, and I went to the Keck Observatory. Yep. And there's a station where the telescope is, and then below that at like 9,000 feet, there's like this visitor station. Have you been? I've been near there. I've been up on the top of a couple of the mountains there to have a look at the sky. It's incredible. It's we, I was,

I was, when we were driving up there, I was worried that it was too cloudy. I was like, oh, this is going to be terrible. You know, we wanted to go and see the stars and we picked a cloudy night, but we drove through the clouds. And then when you get above there and you realize that the entire big Island, they, they have special diffused lighting to make sure that they don't emit light pollution. The view is life changing. It must be like one one millionth of what you experience on the space station. But for me, it was a real life changing moment. I'll never forget it.

And I think about it all the time. Whenever I look at the stars, I always think about that night in Hawaii. That's what it looks like. But even crazier, there's an image of it up there. But even crazier when you're actually experiencing it, you can see the Milky Way. And I remember thinking, God, we have to figure out a way to stop light pollution. Because I think just that, just being able to look up and see that would change people's perceptions and would probably make people way more enthusiastic about space. People, you know, of course, the vast majority of people live in cities and the places that have the worst light pollution of the city.

I had a similar experience to yours when I was an F-18 pilot. I would get it up to high altitude, you know, going on a cross country, especially in the north, put on the autopilot and shut off every light in the cockpit and let my eyes adjust. And you're already up at 40, 45,000 feet. And so there's almost no atmosphere above you. And you can see the texture of space. You can see the, I mean, the Milky Way, you can see why it's called the Milky Way. I mean, it's, it's a white, a gray white part of the sky, you know, and you don't need a telescope to see it. You can just see it with your eyes. You don't need some special time-lapse photography.

So it's both humbling and really inspiring, I think, to see. It puts everything into perspective. But I don't know, even if you try and work on light pollution, people are indoor creatures in cities and they have streetlights and they drive around in cars. And I don't know how you get people to notice the universe around them. I think it would help if they could just see it. That'd be a good start. If you look up in Los Angeles, God, what do you see?

You see like a star. I lived in Houston, yeah, for a long time. And yeah, look at that. I can see 18 stars tonight. It's a real clear night. Maybe, barely. But when you're up there in the observatory, and I'm sure when you were at 40,000 feet in the jet, it must have been amazing. Yeah, it's not that much further away.

I mean, the Big Island Mountain is not all that high. No. But you just need sometimes one small step, and you can see a whole new thing. Yeah. I had some similar, but not quite as intense viewings in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado. So like at 8,500 feet up there, it was beautiful too. But I think that we forget that we're really in space. As stupid as that sounds, people really do forget.

So I was going around the world and my son who ran the social media for the flight to a large degree sent me a note saying hey dad mount etna is erupting you know in southern italy have a look at mount etna so i'm a good dad took a picture of mount etna but um seeing the the superheated lava and the smoke and the steam coming out of the earth uh was a really especially when you're looking at the world as a ball, was a really clear reminder of the fact that most of the planet is superheated lava and magma and where it's so hot that the rock is liquid and plastic, right? And we just live on this little chilled crust, like the top of a porridge pot, you know,

and we just live on this little thin bit at the top that is crust. And when you tip it the other way around and look up, half of the atmosphere is in the first three miles. Three miles, you know, think about, people go for a three mile run, you know, and really the whole habitable atmosphere is three miles, above 15,000 feet, it's hard to even live. And yet, we live on this little bit of cooled crust and this little sliver of air, and we think it's guaranteed. We think we're invincible, right?

And we think the whole universe is here to serve us. And we're like bacteria in a corner. You know, just found a little niche that will support our life. So much so that we're willing to, almost our entire system as far as energy is based on burning things. Yeah. It's based on releasing fumes.

You talk about 100 years from now looking back and going, what were we thinking? I mean, golly. I mean, you can see why. A five-gallon pail of gasoline is an amazingly enabling thing. You can stick it in your car and drive hundreds of miles, you know, and you can carry it in your hand and it's fairly stable. It's a very seductive fuel, but at the same time, it has such consequences. And when we look, when we figure out the next energy source, when we look back, hopefully in a couple of hundred years, we will

go, what were we thinking? Hopefully. It's really hard for people to change, too, once we have a pattern that we follow. It's very difficult. Especially if we found a way to make it work for ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. In spite of all the pollution, we still rock it that way. In spite of all the stuff that we throw into the ocean, which is still kind of happening basically on a daily basis. Well, you can't... Once you've built the structure, it's real hard to change, of course.

Yeah. And you can't just suddenly starve millions of people or kill millions of people just because you decide to change energy sources. It has to be gradual. We will be weaned off fossil fuels, but they got to get a lot more scarce before we're going to bother just because of its human nature. Well, the ultimate use of fossil fuels is a rocket. I mean, that's the ultimate display of it, shooting into space with a giant plume of fire behind you.

Yeah. It's a brute force way. I mean, we're burning dinosaurs to get to space, but so far, it's the only way we figured out how. So far, it's the only way. Now, when you think about what's possible for the future, when they start talking about all these different propulsion methods that will someday be available, what, if any of them, appear viable? Yeah, you're asking me to predict physics inventions of the future, which, gosh, I wish I could do that. I'd do it tomorrow.

I don't know. gosh, I wish I could do that. I'd go, I'd do it tomorrow. I don't know. To me, the obvious answer is every single molecule that exists, every complex molecule and atom was put together in a blast furnace of a place with almost unlimited heat and pressure, which is the center of a sun. And it stored that energy in every single atom and molecule that exists. And we have yet to find a good way to get that energy back out. But there is more energy in a pencil. You know, if you could truly get the energy that's inside all of the molecules that are in there, there's so much energy stored there. You know, we have like wood that's stored sunlight, right? And by burning it, we can release that stored solar power, even nuclear.

But we haven't found a clean way to release the energy that gives us nuclear power. We can do it, but we're still, you know, we're kind of cavemen about it, and we haven't got it a clean way. So I'm certain that at some point we will figure out how to, whether it'll be cold fusion or just fusion itself. But if you read what they're doing in the various laboratories around the world, even the experts think, well, we're probably 50 years away from being able to contain fusion so that it becomes a net positive power source. But when the experts are saying it's 50 years until we can do it, who knows? There was a recent article in one of the science magazines that the volume of nuclear waste could be reduced by 90%. They've shown that they can mix plutonium contaminated waste with blast furnace slag and turn it into glass.

into glass and it reduces its volume by 85 to 95 percent and effectively locks in the radioactive plutonium creating a stable end product i've always felt like i mean the the nuclear waste thing is a huge issue obviously i mean they've done a lot of weird things like dig holes in the ground and buried in there in nevada and you know and what's going on now in fukushima is very disturbing they're trying to figure out how to contain it. Sure. Coming up with all these different ways. But it's a fascinating thing about human innovation. If their backs are up against the wall, those crazy monkeys figure out a way to fix things.

Yeah. And it's just our nature. Necessity is the main mother. And we need to, sometimes we don't think we have the necessity. And yeah, nuclear waste is a big problem. But, you know, fossil fuel waste is a huge problem as well, and neither of them are perfect. Even solar energy has waste because you have to build all the solar panels and you have to collect all the rare earth metals. None of it's for free.

We have to find as best a tradeoff as we can and still be able to try and sustain as good a standard of living for as many people around the planet as possible. And we've done, I mean, we feed more people now than we ever have, right? But how do we do it in the future? How do we get better at it? I'm not sure. Yeah, there's so many variables, obviously. But I'm always very excited when I see something like this that is like, my faith in the crazy humans has been restored like these these nuts have figured out a way to fix an issue or at least reduce an issue significantly by as much as 90 plus percent yeah the the the fossil fuel thing to me is is a weird one

because obviously I enjoy it we use it it's so important for almost everything we do. But obviously this is going to create a problem someday. And there's no better example for me than automobile pollution or pollution that you get from jet airplanes on a daily basis. How much, I mean, there's a big impact in the environment every time the space shuttle gets launched, isn't it? Well, compared to everything else, it's, well, and of course, space shuttle is retired, but we only flew the space shuttle 135 times. I mean, you couldn't even measure compared to everything else, the pollution that it injected. But if it had gotten to the point where it was like air travel. Yeah. Well, you wouldn't want, you know, thousands of those launching every day, you know,

but that wasn't, it wasn't a possibility and wasn't what it was going to do. But compared to just how we burn coal to generate electricity and how we use cars to transport ourselves around, there are 42,000 people a year killed just in car crashes. That is a societal norm in the United States. We expect that. We say that's okay. It's our right to kill 42,000 people so we have the freedom to drive our cars around wherever we want. Kind of an interesting level of accepted disaster. You know, we just say that's okay.

And that's not some global warming problem that may manifest itself on our children. That's a guaranteed thing this year. itself on our children. That's a guaranteed thing this year. And that's just an interesting thing to hold up the mirror and look at yourself and say, okay, that's what we decide is all right. There's also a matter of a very statistically significant number of years of your life that you lose by living in a smog-filled environment. That's a fact. And we don't think about that because you can survive and be healthy in New Yorkork city you know you can go jogging down the streets of manhattan and you know drink spring water and think everything's all groovy but the reality is if you're living in a city and you're breathing in those fumes on a daily basis it will reduce your life period yeah but

yeah i agree with you but none of us are lasting forever and people live where they want to live for all the reasons, and only one of the variables is how many years you're going to live there. Right. Would you rather live in the middle of nowhere where the air is clean, but there's no people to talk to? Right, and the theater's really bad, right? The theater's always bad, let's be honest. I mean, what's the best theater? Even nearly as good as the best movie?

It's not even close. Antiquated, goofy art form. Okay, here I have to ask you about these guys. Yep. Aliens. That little alien guy we got there? Yeah. When you're up there, when you're in space,

I mean, do you ponder the possibility? And is that something that you ever wondered yourself? Are there intelligent life forms out there? And if so, do you think that they watch us? Do you think they're aware of us? You mentioned earlier that with Galileo inventing the telescope, he was tortured for pointing out that we weren't the center of the universe. for pointing out that we weren't the center of the universe. And with every invention that's come since then,

we've been able to prove more and more conclusively just how far from the center of the universe we are and also how huge the universe is and billions of years old and more vast. The numbers are so big, they're incomprehensible, both in numbers of stars and number of galaxies. And within the last few years, using the great-great-grandchildren of Galileo's telescope, we are seeing planets, directly seeing planets around the nearby stars. And we've seen thousands of them. So we've basically shown that every single star has planets. And so there's an unlimited number of planets out there. And so to think that with an unlimited number of chances that we are the only life in the universe, to me,

is just a natural extension of thinking that we're the center of the universe. You know, it's an arrogance, egotism thing based on belief instead of fact. But it's also, I think, arrogant and egotistical to think that we're so fascinating and we're so revelationary and so special that somehow weird, big, black-eyed monsters with no hair on their bodies are sneaking around staring at us because we are so special. To me, that's just – I mean, it's fun science fiction and it makes for great entertainment, but it's not real. Well, I've heard that the archetype of the doctor, the alien with the large black eyes and the strange big head, that what it may very well come from is the actual birth experience for children. The first time the eyes are outside of the womb, they don't have clear vision, for children the first time the eyes are outside of the womb they don't have clear vision and they see the bright light of the operating room which is the

first time they've ever been exposed to something like that and it's incredibly traumatic experience they recognize the eyes which are enormous in front of the head this this face with a white mask on it featureless interesting and that this is most likely what the archetype of the experience, these medical experiments that supposedly go on with these aliens, that that's the origin of it. Could be. Well, we have this very arrogant idea that children don't remember things. Yeah.

And it's been my point about circumcision. I don't think circumcision is a good idea. I think it's ridiculous. I think it's antiqu. I think it's antiquated. It's genital torture. And I think the justification is, one of them is that the baby doesn't remember it. And I'm always like, how do you know the baby doesn't remember it? Just because they don't have a point of reference or context, it's very possible they remember it. Well, the scientific answer to the alien abduction experience and these cold, hard medical

examinations, these emotionless medical examinations may very well just be the birthing process. Or circumcision. The trauma of it. Or circumcision. Both. And then the incredible feeling of helplessness that they have is basically their body doesn't move yet. And that these intense memories are burned deep, deep, deep into our consciousness. I think it also just comes from a fear of being alone and a fear of being immortal.

And if we can somehow convince ourselves that neither of those two things are true, then it's a great comfort to folks. And to think that there's other life out there and it's holding us as super special and it's been here before and it's going to be back, it's a nice seductive thought process to go down. So, but there is, I mean, we have left Earth. 13 years ago this month, we permanently started living on the space station with the International Space Station Program. And the Soviets had been there for decades before on their space stations.

We have sent probes to every planet in the solar system and got one going up to Pluto right now, and we're rovers on a couple different, three different planets and moons of the solar system. If aliens did show up, I don't think their behavior would be the one that is in the common science fiction media. You know, it just doesn't make sense.

So I am convinced there's life in the universe. You know, just on the statistics of it, it just makes sense. So I am convinced there's life in the universe, you know, just on the statistics of it. It just makes sense. It's just egotism to think that we're that special. But I think it's also just egotism to think that we're so special that we're the object of great secretive fascination by higher beings. Well, I think you're very humble. And so you look at us and say that it wouldn't be that interesting. But I say to you, imagine if we found out that there was a planet just outside of our solar system where there were some people that were there. They were just like human beings, but they were like human beings from like the 1300s.

They just hadn't figured anything out yet. We would be like, holy shit, they have guns. They figured out the wheel. They're lighting their cities on fire. They're crazy. They just haven't figured out mass communication yet, and most of them can't read. I think we would be absolutely- Sounds a lot like us right now, actually. Sounds a lot like us right now. We really haven't changed that much. But I mean,

if we found some people just from a thousand years ago, a thousand years in our past, we would be absolutely incredibly fascinated. I think if we found some being somewhere that had harnessed the power of fire, if we went back 40,000 years ago, I think we'd find it incredibly fascinating. So the stuff that we can do, I don't buy it. I think if I was an alien, I would be so fascinated by these freaks, these pink monkeys with bang sticks and the internet and religions and all the freak show stuff that we have down here on Earth. I think we would be the most wonderful freak show of all time.

I've often said that if there is intelligent life on the Earth or outside of Earth, I think that Earth is probably the Tijuana of outer space, which explains why all visitations come in the middle of the night. They're hammered and they want to see a show. They want to go see the freak show. I think if I was an intelligent being, I do not buy the idea of what would be so special about human beings.

Where do we start? There's a lot special about this crazy species. Above all other species on this planet, there's 7 billion of them. They're like rats on a sinking ship. They inhabit every little spot in the ocean. Find a little floating thing poking out of the ocean where some plants are growing on it. Boom.

There's a whole sea of people living there. Go to Hawaii. This little tiny spot. It's a million people in Oahu. We're crazy. I think I would look. We gotta go there. We gotta go to Earth. I think we would be probably one of the most fascinating things to observe because

we're so incredibly advanced and yet so Contradictive so so hypocritical so ridiculous so easily led so easily tricked and fooled We have access to instant information, but yet we choose to believe some of the most ridiculous things of all time Yeah, I agree with you though that I find the evidence of us being contacted by aliens incredibly uncompelling. And the people that I talk to, I did a sci-fi show called Joe Rogan Questions Everything where I met with a lot of these UFO guys. And I felt like I was talking to religious fanatics. It's just like talking to a religious fanatic. It's just they feel like they're too clever for the Koran.

So they fall for the Blue Book. Project Blue Book is their lord. So two weeks ago, a satire paper in Canada published a thing about what I did in a movie theater watching the movie Gravity. And they said I heckled it. I heard about that. Yeah, and I farted to protest the movie and did all this stuff and got thrown out of the theater. That's really rude. I thought it was very funny, right?

I read this article. Thousands of people believed it and sent notes and sent it to their friends. And, hey, look, hey, look, hey, look, this must be the truth because I believe it. And that thinking is so easily prevalent and dominates a lot of populist conclusion making when, in fact, it's not based on fact at all. Because people want to believe stuff, but they don't want to spend any time actually doing the thinking or the research about it.

And so, you know, that's pervasive right across all cultures, including what people think about, you know, alien abduction. Yeah, that... There's also a real problem with the access to information right now. It's so beautiful.

Anybody can get information at any time, but it's not vetted. And there's also a lot of what they call satire sites, which are just not satire. They just lie. I mean, there's been, there's this one national news something or another website that people keep constantly tweeting me stories from, and they just make up stories. There was one about that I retweeted before I read where it came from that Texas decided to use sexual predators for medical experiments. And there's, but there's just, it's just a lie.

There's no, it's like if you read The Onion within five minutes or five seconds, you realize, okay, they're doing comedy. This is funny. This is humorous. They're not being humorous. They're just lying and they're calling it satire. When you see that attributed to you, like farting in a movie theater, that's rude. And I've read it and I had it sent to me like, this guy's an asshole. Like he farted in the movie.

It made me laugh. But the reaction to it made me laugh as well. It's just like, come on people, please. We are actually separate from the one-celled organisms. We have brains and reason and experience and logic and use it. We're clearly still developing. Clearly, right? Oh, I... I mean, there's folks like... You and I both and everybody here.

Well, there's folks like you that have experienced technology and innovation at its very height. The highest highs. You've actually gone above the actual atmosphere of our Earth. And you've experienced the amount of technological sophistication it takes to pull something like that off. But then there's other folks that are barely

chimps with a language. And they exist amongst us. Because of this complex society, it makes it really easy for dumb people to just get by and breed and make more dumb people it's so it's so easy yeah well so you got to have that right is this the yin and the yang of life uh you know i think the real key to it is what does everybody want to get out of it you know what do you want to get out of your life and what do you what do you find is your own compulsion? What is it that gives you the satisfaction at the end of the day?

And it may be that stuff you've read on the Internet or maybe the television show that you watch or maybe the sports team that you idolize or it may be some new invention somewhere or some area, your huge belief into some particular subset of what we know or what we don't know. And to me, that's all great. Everybody should be doing that. As long as they're pushing themselves to something that they're interested in,

they're trying to get the best out of the things that they're naturally inclined towards and make the most of it. It's just been what I've been doing. I'm just interested in this particular part of spaceflight. And I'm K. Surah is fine by me. Live and let live. But don't spend all of those efforts in taking your particular set of interests

and your beliefs that have given you this area and try and force them on other people. Make them good for you. Offer them up for other people to believe if they like. But don't try and convince everybody else in the world that they're UFOs just because this is what you believe.

Why would that become your mantra? Why would it be so important? I think it's just like people that want people to convert to Islam. They just have this idea in their head that this is the truth and they have to pursue it. It's just like a religion. I think the religion of belief you know the the the the the intensity of ideology once you there's i know people that want you to

be on at&t because that's their network you know like man what are you doing with verizon school at&t there's a weird clan thing that human beings have and blackberry versus ipad and the people that believe in aliens they all stick together They go and they have conferences and it becomes a part of their culture. That's fun. And there's this thing that happens, this confirmation bias, where they don't want to look at anything outside of something that confirms their idea. They don't want to look at it objectively. I think having a belief system is important.

Did you see anything up there? Anything weird? Nothing? No lights? The world is really weird to look at. Yes. And fascinating to look at. And the storms around the planet and the, I mean, I was out on a spacewalk going through the southern lights, you know, with the Aurora, in this case, Aurora Australis coming up underneath my feet for a thousand miles. And

that is a weird thing to see it's beautiful it's fascinating it's it doesn't look real it mostly what you see in pictures is green because that's what the cameras see but in reality it's it's got red and orange and yellow coming out the top of it and that your eyes can pick up and it's it's uh you can't believe it's real like how could this possibly be earth how can this be going on all the time? It is phenomenal to see, especially when you can see for several thousand miles and it's under your feet.

It's amazing to see. So, yeah, we see amazing stuff all the time. Yeah, that's way cooler than some dork in a flying saucer. He doesn't even have the manners to come and say hi. He's got to circle around and abduct you and erase your memory. To me, the world is fascinating and unknown and interesting enough to invent little green men visiting. It really is.

And the awareness of how fascinating it truly is is greatly enhanced by people like you. So I want to thank you very much. Thank you very much for doing this. Thank you very much you very much. Thank you very much for doing this. Thank you very much for being you. Thank you very much for writing this book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, What Going to Space Taught Me

About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything. Colonel Chris Hatfield, you, sir, are a bad motherfucker. It was really nice talking to you. Thank you very much. This was a very enjoyable and fascinating conversation. I really, really appreciate it.

So, folks, go out and buy this book. Is it available everywhere? Can they get it on Amazon? It's available. It's a New York Times bestseller. It's on Amazon. Go to chrishadfield.ca. We'll show you everywhere you can buy it.

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