The Jordan Harbinger Show - 516: Mike Massimino | Unlocking Science Secrets with an Unlikely Spaceman

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Mike Massimino (@Astro_Mike) is the astronaut who sent the first tweet from space and one of the few spacefarers we’ve had on this show! He’s the author of Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe. [Note: this is a rebroadcast from the vault.] What We Discuss with Mike Massimino: How is bedtime on a space shuttle mission a lot like a slumber party? Why assembling a team around you is crucial for success — whether orbiting or staying on the surface of the planet. Why it’s important to take small, deliberate steps in the right direction for the sake of your own happiness. How to stay focused on the task at hand in the face of disaster by thinking like an astronaut. Why even astronauts have imposter syndrome. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/516 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I believe we live in a paradise. I believe we're very, very lucky to be here. We need to take care of it. But I think we're very, very fortunate to live here. I can't imagine what heaven would look like. But I can't imagine anything being more beautiful than our planet. And I do think we live in a paradise,

and we should really treasure every moment that we get to be on this planet. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with, people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional Emmy-nominated comedian, National Security Advisor, or Economic Hitman.

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instead of just diving into the feed for some people that might be a little bit overwhelming. But either way, I always appreciate when you share the show with others. So please go ahead and do that and take advantage of those starter packs. Again, Jordan Harbinger.com slash start. Today we're talking with astronaut Mike Massimino. You should listen to this episode. If you want to learn why assembling a team around you is crucial for success, why it's important to take small, deliberate steps in the right direction for the sake of your own happiness and your legacy, and how to stay focused on the task at hand in the face of disaster by thinking like an astronaut and learn why even astronauts have imposter syndrome. Also, he's got some great stories about almost

screwing up multimillion dollar missions in space slash almost dying in space. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on our show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Mike Massimino. First of all, you've spent a lot of time in space, 571 hours and 471 hours and 47 minutes, and that includes 30 hours and four minutes of space walking. At some point, do you wake up in the morning and go, wait a minute, where am I and realize I'm in space? I'm

still in space right now. This is real. You mean when you're in space or after? Yeah, of course. I'm sure you wake up at home sometimes and think, oh, good, I'm not on the Hubble. I can go get a cheeseburger, right? But while you're in space, do you just never forget that you're actually all the way up there because of the whole setup and the weightlessness and, you know, having a Velcro pillow strapped to your head, et cetera? No, I mean, it's just like when you wake up in a hotel room where you're not used to, you know, you wake up expecting to see your home, your regular bedroom, and then you wake up and you realize that, especially like that first night, you know, you realize that,

whoa, where am I? You know, it's kind of this eerie feeling that, you know, where am I? Just like you get when you're waking up in a strange room or in a hotel room where if you're sleeping and you wake up and you have a deep sleep and you have to remember where you are. So it was like that the first couple times waking up, I guess, the first. day, first night or so. But then after a while, you know what, you know, that you're there and you wake up, it looks familiar. And then you come home and you wake up at home and it looks

unfamiliar. Like, you're ready to float out of bed and that won't work. You get in both directions, I guess. When I wake up in the morning generally, the first thing I notice is, okay, you know, I probably got a cat on my head or something like that, or, you know, it's a little warm in the room. When you're in space, it seems like there would be a completely different set of considerations. I mean, you're not just floating around up there. Obviously, you're strapped to something and whatnot, But when you wake up, what's kind of the first thing that you notice when you're in space? So is it the weightlessness?

Is it the temperature? What is it? I think it's when you first woke up like, wow, that was a quick night. I need more rest. You know, just like a regular night. Sort of like, oh, it's time to get up already. But then you're like, okay,

this is going to be a fun day or an interesting day. For me, on a space shuttle, it was more like a slumber party. So you have, you know, your crewmates are around you in their sleeping bags. We're all kind of in the same room. So you wake up and you see everything. everybody else and you see who's up and who's not. And you kind of go through your routine of getting out of your sleeping bag and rolling it up.

Routine kind of becomes pretty important, I guess, because you have to get your stuff out of the way. On the shuttle, we have our own little crew cabin, your own little personal crew quarters to sleep in. On the space station, they do. They have their own little, like, personal area there that they can sleep in. They can close the door. But in the space shuttle, it's more like a big slumber party. So how close are you to the next guy or gal aside right next to you? Do you have any personal space whatsoever?

Oh, no, yeah, you have some personal space. But, you know, they're kind of like rolling around, you know, kind of around the wall or when someone's on the ceiling. I was on the ceiling at the time. They're just kind of scattered around the cabin. You're not knocking into each other or not necessarily down into each other, but you're fairly close. But you wake up and you see everybody.

You see who's in the sleeping bags of who's out and who's in the bathroom and that kind of thing. You just float out and start your day. Usually, you know, take off your sleep mask and put that away by the little kit, sort of a little bed. of stuff that I had, you know, my sleep kit, you know, with earclugs and sleep mask and whatever else I needed for the night.

A little hat I would wear if I was cold and socks, you know, keep my feet warm. So you've got your sleep kit. Are you basically then carabinered kind of into the wall of the shuttle? Because otherwise, I feel like you could wake up and you just have your head, you know, right in someone else's personal space. Or you end up floating over to the bathroom

or something in the middle of the night or banging your head on something? Your bed roll, sleeping bag, has hooks. various little hooks, not carabiners, but like easy, quick release hooks. And there's different things you can hook it to on the space shuttle. There's little things that you can or receive the hook. And so you kind of hook the sleeping bag to the ceiling or hooked the sleeping bag to the wall and then you float inside of it.

As you're inside the sleeping bag, you are floating, but you don't float away. You'll stay attached to the wall. But you're still nonetheless, hovering kind of over the wall or the ceiling or wherever it's like you are. So you're not going to float away and bang your head and wake up your friends. You're going to stay in that one area, but you're just floating that one area because your sleeping bag is secured. Got it. I mean, of course, when we're little, we learn about astronaut ice cream, and that's pretty much it. And then, of course, one kid says, how do they go to the bathroom? And that's kind of the end of the space lesson, at least in the 80s. So I'm still not even

sure how that works. I mean, I think the one thing that I have in common with astronauts is occasionally during a really long show, I too need to pee into a bottle. But I'm I think you probably have a little bit more of an excuse. So the first time you signed up for the astronaut program essentially, and I know it's not as simple as that. I mean, in the book, you go over just repeated defeats and setbacks from your eyesight to your PhD thesis and things like that. I mean, there's no set path to just becoming an astronaut.

Contrary to what every little kid sub 10 years old thinks when they say they want to be a spaceman or an astronaut, there's no application process. You don't upload your resume someplace and then go to school for this, and then end up repairing the Hubble. It's more of a convoluted process. Tell us, though, what was the thought process going into this? I mean, what makes somebody want to be an astronaut

and then actually freaking do it? I mean, there is an application. You don't sign up. You said, you apply, and there is an application. Right. You can fill out, now it's online. I use a typewriter for mine. But say after you've been to school and so on,

there's no straight path. It's absolutely right. You follow something that you're interested in and study what you're interested in school. do a career or whatever it seems to me things just kind of open up and happen and take opportunities but the thing you can do is you can keep a client and so that's what I did but I think it's important I had to learn that

you're not guaranteed you're going to get in and there's no one set path and the path that's good for someone else is not going to be good for you and the path that's good for you is not going to work for somebody else there are some jobs that are kind of like you know there is sort of like a pattern to it some of the test pilots for example that was more of a traditional path. It would become a high-performance aircraft pilot in the military and you go to test pilot school, and you have that credential at that point that you can be considered to be an astronaut.

You know, you've done those things to be a test pilot astronaut or pilot astronaut. But even that doesn't have a straight path. There's different backgrounds reach one of those pilots too. But particularly when you get into the civilian ranks and some of the other military occupations other than pilot, it's kind of whatever works for you. There's no set path to doing that. But as far as what makes someone want to do it, for me, there was the little boy dream of wanting to walk in space, wanting to walk on the moon like the Armstrong did. When I was six years old, I saw those guys walk on the moon.

And that got me interested. I thought this was a great thing they were doing and the coolest thing that anybody could do. And these guys were super rock stars. They were the coolest guys on the planet. And I wanted to be like them. But quickly realized I wasn't like them. And once I started getting older, I wasn't going to be one of these military test pilots. It just wasn't for me.

And I kind of gave up on the dream. I didn't think it could happen. And when the shuttle program came around it, when I was senior in college, the movie The Right stuff came out and I went and see that. So that was about the original seven astronauts. And that started to rekindle my dream of the wonder of space. And then I just thought it was cool again. But then I started finding out more about it.

The shuttle program began in 1981, is when they first, with the show. shuttle. They selected the first group of shuttle astronauts in 1978. After I was done with college and got interested again because of this movie that I went and saw, I started reading about the astronauts and who they were, and I found out that they weren't all military test pilots. They were women and people of color and different ethnic backgrounds and civilians. It wasn't just the military test pilots who were doing this any longer. And they were still a big part of it, of course, but military test pilots. But it was old types of people who were becoming astronauts. And it was old types of people who were becoming astronauts,

not too much different than who I was, I thought. And I never really thought I could actually do it, really, but I thought I could at least try, and it wasn't that crazy if I needed to get some experience to make myself even eligible to be considered. And even if I got the eligibility where I was qualified to be an astronaut, I'm at the minimum education and experience qualifications, and you're still fighting uphill.

It's thousands and thousands of people that want to do this and just a handful that get selected. But I thought maybe, you know, maybe it could, workout. And if not, maybe by trying to do that, I would lead me to something else in the space program and gave me the ambition to try to get more education and to do something that I really was passionate about, which was the space program. And I realized that that's really what I was interested in all along. I just thought I could never do it. And I thought, well, maybe I can't

become an astronaut, but maybe I could do something in the space program for a career. I started taking steps toward that. And the big step I took after working for a couple of years for IBM after college. I left my job and went back to school and went to graduate school and MIT. When I got my master's degree, that's when I started getting the credentials to be eligible to meet the minimum qualifications. And that's when I started applying. Now, at what point were you working at IBM? Because that was the safe choice. I mean, it's earlier in the book. And finally, someone that you worked with sits you down and says, what are you doing here, man? You got to get out of here. Like, save yourself. What would you say to someone working a job right now that they think is just suffocating

and they made the safe choice. I mean, do you recommend that people always go for it, or do you think there's a place for playing it safe? Yeah, you got to go for it. I think you have to be honest with yourself about what you're really interested in. You know, and for me, it turned out that that wasn't the worst thing for me to do

was to take a couple years after college in work, because if I were to went to grad school right away, I wasn't really into the space thing right out of college. I think that was part of the issue. Getting a college education is a great thing, and I had a good college education under my belt at that point. But grad school, I felt anyway, was a little bit more specialized in that.

You know, now you have your basic education that you get as an undergrad, but now if you're going to go to grad school, I thought I needed a better idea of what it is I really wanted to do. And so what I did is I decided to put grad school on hold and work and think about it. So that was useful time. But it became evident that a couple of years of that was enough, and it was time for me to get going. And I see this in a lot of people with my close friends and family members, too,

that go through this, unhappy with what they're doing and sometimes you're unhappy i think of your job for different reasons sometimes you just feel like you know you don't like people you work with or you're just not a right fit for it or you're not doing something that is meaningful to you or you're that passionate about it you know in my case i felt that a great job and had good people to work with and i could see myself doing that but i just wanted more i wanted to feel like what i was doing was really important to me not that it had to be important to everybody but i didn't think what i was doing there was the thing that i was passionate about. And I thought it was a good job and a good way to earn a living and you're part of

a great team when I was working before I went to grad school. It wasn't my passion. And I wanted to be part of the space program. And in order to be part of the space program, I had to make a change. And I was going to have to leave New York and go somewhere else to school and would be the best thing for me. That's why I went to MIT. And I was able to look enough to get in there. But if I didn't get an air, I would have somewhere else. But I think that it's important to be honest with yourself. Yeah, you don't have to jump off a cliff if you're not doing what you want. But you do have to take steps in that direction? I think it's important to start taking steps, and it'll open up opportunities for you.

What I liked when I was an undergrad and what I started to read about and find interesting was this idea of human factors of people controlling machines and how to design the interface, whether it's a cockpit or a car console or a computer program or whatever such that people can interact with it effectively. And what I got really interested in was robotics of human-controlled manipulators. and robots working in space. And when do you use the robot? When do you use the person?

What's the right combination of that? And I found that to be really interesting. And there was an advisor I had that I found out, a professor that became an advisor to Tom Sherrod, up at MIT, who had done a lot of research in this area for controlling robots in space and in nuclear environments when they started handling nuclear material on the 1950s and 60s.

And also undersea, it's submersibles that would find. find the Titanic and so on. He worked with that. How do you control those vehicles? How do people control those things and operate them? And I found that to be really interesting. And that's what I was able to find a niche in,

something that I could study in graduate school that I found interesting. That also had apt ability to NASA and space program. And you mentioned about having people who cared about me, there were all these mentors, whether it was a teacher or family friend or neighbor or whatever, coming in at the right time to help me out and give me a nudge. It was a guy named Jim McDonald, who I worked with after I was a junior in college. I worked with them at an engineering company on Long Island, Coltsbury, and this was my first big, real engineering job where I had to wear a tie to work and so on. You know, I think he saw something in me. I just wasn't happy for doing what I was doing.

And maybe, you know, the traditional engineering job at a big company might be okay for me, but I needed to be in the right area. And I wasn't really interested necessarily in just being an engineer. I wanted to do something that I thought had more meaning to it. And for me, what I was most interested in was, I ended up being the space program. And I kept in touch, I still see him. My guy Jim McAll has been a mentor my whole life for me. And a very good friend, he was a guy to try to shake me out of it

when I was working after college saying, you know, you might want to think about what you're doing. You need to move on with what you really love and take those steps before it gets too late. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned in the book as well, you only have one life, you have to spend it doing something that matters. And I think it sounds like that spurred you on, quite a bit when you were sitting doing engineering internships, things that weren't really

floating your boat. It seems like you wanted to live by that and thought, look, life's too short to waste sitting in front of this PC designing user interfaces. As useful as that might be, you wanted to be on the front lines. That time wasn't even doing user interfaces. I was working as a systems engineering and putting systems together, which was fine. But it's more of me. I want to be involved with the space program. And I think that the point is that you, the most important thing you can do with your life is what you do with your life and how you're going to spend that time. And you pay for that. It's not money.

When I was looking at going to grad school, there was this cost associated with it. It was going to be a cost that I would have to stop working where I had a real job where I was making pretty good money, right, out of college. So now going back to school, I was going to give that up. In addition to that, I was going to have to figure out a way to pay for school. And eventually, I was lucky I got NASA fellowships to help me pay. I was hardly making anything, right? I was making a little bit of money. He was covering my tuition.

and I had a small stipend. So really was not making money in my 20s. That was where I spent my time in my 20s was predominantly spent in school where you're paying for the privilege as opposed to getting paid to do something. And I remember thinking about that, that I was going to be these years

where my other friends were out there making money and doing that. So there's a money cost with going back to school. But I think the cost for me of not doing that was higher because I was going to pay for it with my life and that I would not be able to pursue what I wanted to pursue in life unless I made that change, I felt. And, you know, I wasn't sure

that this was exactly the right way to go. And there were other ways to try. But I thought at least going and getting at least a master's degree at a place like MIT was a good idea. And that was something I felt like I really should do and wanted to do. And if I didn't do it, I'd always regret it. I think that's the way you'd look at things. It's not in dollars and sense, but in how are you going to spend your time on the planet? You know, how do I want to spend these next couple years? Do I just want to be worried about making money or do I want to do something that I think is really important to me. And the opportunity to go and get a graduate education at MIT was extraordinary. To be there around those types of people, learning the things I learned, being totally involved in learning

about technology and engineering and what was going on in a space program and be surrounded by people who felt the same way. It was just an extraordinary experience. And were you thinking about legacy at this time? In the book, you say, I don't want to tell my children how to live life. I want to show them. Were you thinking legacy or were you just thinking, all right, I need to do something important for myself? Or did you have a wider perspective on this? Do you have a longer timeline in mind? Well, I think it's both. I think I wanted to be a happy person and a happy parent eventually. Everyone wants their kids to be happy and to pursue their dreams and so on. And I think the best way to do that, to have them to do it has to show them how to do it. And then an extraordinary

life, if that's what you want, is not impossible. It might be difficult to be difficult to attain, I think that happiness in that part of your life and your professional life is attained by at least trying and at least like you feel like you're doing something. There were a period of years when I was in graduate school and beyond when I was trying to become an astronaut. I guess it was 12 years when the time I thought that I wanted to try to pursue this and after got out of college in 1984 until the time I was picked in 1996. And those 12 years were pretty much filled with this journey of trying to get to NASA as an astronaut. There was a long time 12 years to be following pursuing something.

And it wasn't just the idea that, if I don't make it, it's not worth it. I don't think that was it. I think it's more like, at least I'm trying. And it might not work out, but I want to try, and I don't want to give up. And that's what I thought the important thing was. And if you're doing that, as long as I was doing that,

giving it my best shot, or at least trying to give it my best shot, that I felt satisfied. And it may not work out for other reasons. You never know why. It will or won't, and it might not. but I certainly was going to give it my best shot. And those years were interesting because even though I wasn't an astronaut,

I didn't think, you know, truthfully that I would ever make it, at least I knew I was putting my best foot forward and trying it. Now, that's what we would want for our kids, but it's also important for us. I mean, I was doing it for me because I really wanted to do it, and the thought of not trying was unthinkable. But at the same point, I wanted to set a good example in that regard, at least, you know, trying to pursue something that's important to you and there's no reason to settle.

You hinted on this earlier as well, and I saw this in the book. You said, I never achieved anything on my own. People have always pushed me to be the best version of myself. And I thought this was really interesting and important because, of course, you get everywhere with the team, but there's also this myth, especially in the United States or the West, I should say in general, of this kind of self-made man, the guy who's just pulling it all together on his own, kind of John Wayne figure. And it seems like that was not the case for you.

You had a team together to help with your PhD. I mean, there's, you recollecting how your buddies are tearing apart your thesis, almost for sport at this point in college. There's no benefit for them. They're just kind of enjoying watching you squirm here. And you realize that if you work hard and get help from good friends, you can do pretty much anything. It sounds like you had the opposite of a bootstrap, do it all myself, attitude. Yeah, I think that people learn or are successful in different ways. And they weren't torturing me just to see me squirm.

They were helping me. I asked them to help me prepare for my doctoral exams, and I did it for other people, too. You grill each other and quiz each other, because it's better to do that amongst friends and prepare for when the professors get at you. So they were helping me, and they really did a good job in getting me ready.

I think that for me, what I found was that I was more of a team guy, more of a team player, where I enjoyed trying to bring out the best in other people and having them try to bring out the best in me. And the concept of team, even in a situation where you're trying to get a PhD, is seen as an individual accomplishment. I didn't necessarily see it that way.

I felt like there's a lot of support that was that I needed from my friend, from my lab mates and from my professors and from my advisor and so on to help me. And they were there to help me and I try to be there to help other people. But I think that the sense of doing it all on your own, I think that that's outdated. I don't know when that ever existed, but you're going to need help. You need a team around you to be really successful.

You know, life is a team game. You're not going to be successful on your own. And so I think when you have success, you need to think about it. All right, yes, you know, I worked hard. I deserve what happened. Maybe I deserve that. But there's usually plenty of credit to go around, and you need to be grateful for the help you got.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Mike Massimino. We'll be right back. And now back to Mike Massimino on the Jordan Harbinger show. So you're at MIT. It's the Smart Kid Olympics. The best of the best. You mentioned in the book. And then there was me, a regular guy from Long Island.

It sounds like what we call imposter syndrome, which is essentially, I'm the guy that slipped through the cracks, what am I doing here? Is that something that you still feel that way? Sometimes, I mean, did you even have that up there? You're with this amazing all-star team. Did you still have second thoughts? Like, maybe I'm the ringer here. Yeah, you know, when I was at MIT, you know, I felt like over my head here, look at all these smart guys. But I think a lot of them, you know, a lot of the men and women up there felt the same way, you know, like, what's going on here?

I think I probably felt it more than most, though. I think I just did. I just get the sense that I did. In the astronaut program, too, I mean, I felt like, you know, it's strange. I mean, at times I felt like, you know, these guys are so tremendous. These men and women are so tremendous. What am I doing amongst them here? But at the same point, you know, I felt like I did have something to contribute and there

were things that I could do well and I just wanted to do well. I wanted to be a part of the team. I wanted to do the best I could. I just worked really hard. but I always felt like, particularly I think at MIT, with the level of brain power they have up there. I wasn't your typical MIT stick. I felt like whatever that means, you know,

I felt I really had to work hard to keep up. What was your first thought when you saw the fueled rocket? I mean, you'd been to the rocket before you got in, of course. What were your thoughts when you saw this thing fueled up, ready to go, and you're walking in? I mean, there's got to be some heavy-duty emotional stuff going on when you're about to actually get in and take off and leave Earth. Yes, what I write about in the book there is that you get out to the launch pad and the rocket is fueled.

I hadn't been around the fuel base shuttle before and is burn off of the cryogenic fuel smoking. It looks like smoke, although it's vapor going into the air and it's making these ungodly noises. And it looked like it was alive. It looked like a beast, like an actual beast alive. And the thought that went to my mind was maybe this wasn't such a good idea. But it was too late by that point. It's time to get on, get on the spaceship and let's take our, let's roll the dice on this one. To get to space, to go from zero to 17,500 miles an hour and eight and a half minutes to get to orbit,

requires an extreme amount of power and a huge, powerful machine, the biggest, most powerful machines ever built. These beasts that take us away from the earth, the power that is harnessed in there is really something that I, you know, we try to control it, but it is right on the edge of uncontrollability just in its utter power. power. It's amazing that people can build machines that can do that. It just really is. It's just incredible that we can build anything that powerful, but we do. Did you think about the safety factor or death when you're going up there, or are you just too focused on the game, too excited? This is the moment. I think I thought about what might happen. I mean, safety, you do the best you can. You're trained to operate safely. Make sure you check everything and make sure you check

the other guy and the other guy checks you and you're very open to making sure that you don't make a fatal error and that everything is just the way it's supposed to be and you have all the people on the ground and you are trained on how to operate in such a way that would be safe so that if you do make a mistake or something is not quite right that you or someone else will be able to catch it because you'll help them see what's going on and come to the conclusion if there is something wrong that could be a safety problem so you want to be very very vigilant about what's going on and help those around you be vigilant with you. And so we're trained to do that.

And so the safety part of it, I knew we would try to do the best we could and we would be as safe as possible. But you also know that there's that uncontrollable factor with this is that because you're doing something that is so dangerous that even if you operate safely and everyone does their job, that just the nature of what you're doing can overcome that and it can be a bad day. So I certainly thought about what the consequences were and what could happen. tried to be ready for it, I guess, if that was going to happen.

But I thought about it more ahead of time, and particularly in the weeks right prior, before that I thought more about it, about what might happen. Not worried about it, but just trying to appreciate the life I had and that if something did happen, that whatever I left behind was in as best shape as it could be. And then once you get out there, especially on the launch bed, you're different. Thinking about something is usually a lot worse than doing it. And I found if there was something I was scared about or even up to this day, or something I'm nervous about or something that worries me.

Thinking about it is always much, much worse than actually doing it. It's actually doing you taking action. Action is always better than inaction. If you're worrying about something that's going to happen in the future, like a space launch, I mean, you can try to prepare and study and do all that, but just the basic nervousness, worry about it of something bad happening. There's really nothing you can do about that. But then when you get into it and you're going through the checklist,

it's not as scary at that point. But thinking about it was always worse. Yeah, I can see that. I watched the clip from the Big Bang Theory where you're going up in space. I don't know if it's a Soyuz or something. There's a Russian guy. And there's Howard Wallowitz. And it's like, this is the moment.

We're doing it. And Wallowitz goes, I actually have very mixed feelings. Yeah, I think I'd say, I love this, but that's ignition. I love this part. You know, I goes, me too. The Russian guy was me too. And in Wallow says, I have fairly mixed feelings. Yeah.

Yeah. That's all the writers in the show. That's just us saying the line. But the writers come up in the lines for us. Of course. It is brilliant at some level because I was thinking, I don't know if I would say I love this part because, you know, at some point, I don't know what all those Gs feel like and the fact that there's just massive amounts of explosions and fireballs underneath and we're about to hurdle off into space.

I think I would just be extremely nervous. Then again, you've trained for this. You're excited. There's probably so much adrenaline going that I don't know what you're feeling at that point. I don't know if you can feel anything. It seems like the kind of thing that would just make you go numb. Are you a natural thrill secret, though? Is that something that you've always had in your blood?

No, I'm not. I'm not. So I wouldn't say something like I was acting when I said I love this part. I was acting in the Big Bang Theory television show that I did where we launched. But no, I'm not a thrill seeker. Some of my friends were. I mean, especially my test pilot friends, they like doing some extreme stuff. But no, I never was an extreme sports thrill seeker kind of jumping out of airplane.

Let's go hand gliding. Let's jump off the mountain and see what happens kind of guy. I was a little more conservative and not used to doing that sort of stuff. I think I was out of my comfort zone a lot as an astronaut, but there was sense in what we were doing in our training to build up the experience and the confidence we needed in case something did go wrong on the day that we could react appropriately. So, yeah, for me, that wasn't really fun.

It was a great experience. I'm talking about the real shuttle flight, not the spaceflight and the Big Bang theory, but the real one, you know, for me, it was fairly exciting, both in a fun and also in a kind of a nervousness sort of way as well. It's a lot of intensity and it's fairly stressful as well. You know, that was something I had to learn how to deal with.

Yeah, I mean, you've said in the book, no matter how bad things are, you can always make them worse, which when I first heard it, I thought, what kind of attitude is that? And then I realized, actually, that's perfect, because you realize that you can only focus on the things that you can control. What does that phrase mean for you in terms of training in terms of your life? Because it's a little counterintuitive, like, oh, my gosh, Thanks for the vote of confidence, Massimino.

I can always make it even worse than it is now. Thanks for the reminder. Yeah, I think it's important. And I don't think it's a really bad thing to remember. I think it's a good thing to remember is that we tend to, I think, make things worse than they really are. When something happens, whatever it might be, you break something. You try to fix something and you break it, you know, you're like, oh, well, that's a pain. You know, and now I've got to do something extra.

What the tendency is that I find is that you make one mistake and then you're like, oh, geez, now I'm going to have to spend 10 minutes to fix that. I don't want to spend those 10 minutes. So let me rush through this and make that time up. And then by rushing, you break something else, which now you're not just going to be 10 minutes, but now it's another 15 on top of that, whatever might happen.

And you just make it worse and worse. And so generally the first mistake, however bad it might be, isn't game over. It might be, all right. It's very rare that one mistake ends the game. That was bad, but let me contain it. Let me not make it worse. we had this happen but things can get worse so for example and what i found when i was training

and what i found in space was is that if you make a mistake so you break something which i did actually you make a mistake and all of a sudden you've created this problem as bad as it might seem it could get worse right now at you know at some point if you're working on something that's broken maybe only part of what you're working on is broken not the entire piece of equipment and you could lose your tools. This is what I was thinking of during my spacewalks that, yeah, I made a mistake, but I could really make this worse. If I made a mistake and all of a sudden I unhooked myself and I start floating off into space and they got to come get me, now I've made it a lot worse because I was nervous or not thinking because I made a mistake. Or if I made more mistakes and I lost

tools, for example, losing a tool that's going to help me fix this problem. Now I've made it worse. All right. So I've made this mistake. I don't want to make it any worse. Let me try to contain it in where it is right now, it's not great, but it could always get worse. And I think that's what we forget. And when we rush and we try to make up for the mistake we made and we don't keep a cool head, and we make it worse.

And then we've got even a bigger problem to deal with. You're referring to repairing the Hubble telescope, I think, which, as you stated, is essentially brain surgery in space. And you end up with a stripped screw, which a strip screw in space, at first I thought, oh, you stripped a screw, I hope this isn't going to be the whole story.

And then I realized, well, you stripped a screw in space, you can't really dig your fingernail under there or grab a screwdriver from a toolbox and hammer the thing off. This is a, I don't know, $76 million or something, something telescope with a piece on it that you can't get another one unless you go down to North America and grab one, which is not an option. Tell us about that harness that almost foiled the entire mission, because that was kind of a brilliant little example of something that if it happened anywhere else in the world, so what? And the fact that it happens in space, could have killed you and destroyed the mission

and possibly the whole Hubble telescope. The harness floats off and you had to jump up and get it, but that's fine if you're in Albuquerque you've got to jump up and grab something. It's not fine when you jumping could actually catapult you into the abyss of nothingness.

It was interesting what happened was that was on my first space walk of my second mission for me. It was a cable, a harness we'd call it. It was a cable that needed to be hooked up to deliver power to this instrument that had a power supply that had failed,

but we had a work around where we were going to hook this power harness to it and put it to another supply and so on. And this cable, I was going to have good access to it. Even was going to be the big repair was going to happen the day after by the other team. The other team of spacewalkers, but the spacewalk that Mike Good, Bueno and I were doing that day gave us good access to hook up this cable for these guys better than they were going to have tomorrow when we rotated the telescope in a different direction. My job was to help them out, do a get-ahead for him for the next day and hook this thing up. And it was a cable that I almost always put two hooks on everything that I used just in case one hook came undone. The item wouldn't float away on me. But this one was different because I only had one hook available.

I was going to put it on that and then go straight into the telescope and install it. But what happened is that I was getting this harness, we were having trouble with the gyroscopes we were installing. And I was told to go to the back of the space shuttle and grab a new gyroscope, a backup gyroscope that we weren't playing to use. and therefore it was kind of tucked away in the back and bring it around to the front of the telescope where we were working. So I had this cable with this one hook, you know, kind of flopping off the side of me as I went all the way to the back to get this gyroscope.

And then it came all the way to the front and handed it off. And somewhere I must have done something to bump that one hook. And I put my waist feather in at a handrail on the telescope. And as I'm just kind of getting myself set, I see this harness, this cable float past my head and up, away from me very slowly. It was about to launch itself away from us. And it's interesting when I went through my mind very quickly at that moment was we only have one of those.

I knew we only had one. So I knew if we lost it, my friends would not be able to repair the instrument the next day. What they did wasn't going to work without this cable. So I knew that that's the only one we have. The next thing I knew was that there was Star Trek recover, which was very, very delicate, were right above my head. And this thing was floating right past those. So if I left for it, if I left for this thing, I could hit those star trackers.

But I also knew through my habits that I had a waist tether around the handrail at the front of the telescope. And the waist feather meant that I had a leash and that if I went and grabbed this thing, if I let go to grab it, that my leash would prevent me from hitting those star trackers and would prevent me from launching myself into space. So I knew I would probably be okay. And so I felt, you know, this split second I made this decision. So I was going to take that chance and try to grab this thing because I thought it. be okay and sure enough that was the case. I kind of pushed myself up a little bit. I grabbed this thing and then I had to tug from my wife, Seth, and it pulled me back down to where I was,

and it worked out fine. If I did not know all those things, I could have created a much worse of a problem by launching myself into space or smashing into the star trackers of when I'm going to try to get this cable, but it worked out and no one really noticed. There's a relief that you didn't kill yourself, but there's probably also got to be some relief like, I think I got away with that and nobody has to know unless I choose to tell them about this, right? Well, what's funny is that when we're working on the Pubble, we're right in the payload bay, and the guy's inside, you take turns when you go out and spacewalk the two teams,

but the team inside is looking outside, reading you the checklist and looking over your shoulder. They see everything that's going on. So John Grunzfeld, my buddy's inside, and I think he said, master, before he could really get the words out, I heard him start. You know, watch your head or watch you, you know, it was over. It was over that quick. And no one said anything, you know,

and I have a helmet camera on, And I know that everyone in the ground is watching, but no one said anything, we just kept going. After we got back and we were home for about a week or so, we had a debrief, a spacewalking debrief. And we went through that and no one said anything to me about it at all. No one said, I almost forgot about it. And then Tomas Gonzalez Torres, who was our lead flight controller for a spacewalking, the EBA flight controller, the guy that had helped train us along with this young lady, Christy Hansen. The two of them worked as a team, but Thomas was the senior guy.

and he was leading the debrief and asked all the questions and he was looking at he was in the front room of the control center during our spacewalks and very intimately involved got to know him very well

good friends with him he pulls me aside after we're walking out of the debrief, restfully outside the building and he comes out and he goes, Matt's got to ask you something.

And the name of his harness was the pie harness there was a PIEE was the acronym I think it's for power interface extension or harness I don't know some way this we call it the pie and he comes up meaning

like very quietly goes, what happened with the pie? He's like, what do you mean? He goes, I just sort of thing, float by your head. You went up and grabbed, what the hell happened? What was that? He didn't want to ask to embarrass me or whatever.

He noticed it, but we just kept going. So he did notice, but I think he's one of the few people that noticed what happened, and it could have been a real problem. The thing would have floated away. It would have been a real problem, but I just snatched it before anyone could really notice, except with the Moss. It's funny because when we think about space, you know, we all watch all these movies and we think, okay, if you accidentally launch yourself away,

you're probably tied to a bunch of different things, or if we really watch a lot of sci-fi, we just figure, oh, there's a way they can maneuver and then grab them, but not really, right? I mean, if you float in a direction, you're not supposed to float, that's it. Yeah, well, you always have a safety tether on. So the safety tether is 85 feet. So if you get that far away, 85 feet is a long way to be, you know, and we've had some astronauts.

We'll get to see a blooper reel. Like, don't let this happen to you. With some astronauts have launched themselves doing a tool chase, and they never get the tool. Once a thing gets away from the end's gone. You're not going to be able to control yourself. accurately to get it. All you're going to do is launch yourself somewhere and create another problem and try to reel yourself back in like a fish. You're having a few times, not all the time,

very rarely, but still enough times that there's a blooper reel that you can see these things where these astronauts have made these mistakes. What I think really the bigger danger for me there is if I would have damaged the telescope because I was in a very delicate area of the telescope and by launching myself, I could have hit it. But I tell you, when I saw that power harness floating away from me. I saw more than just the harness. I saw the future of astronomy floating away, and I wasn't going to let that happen. It was a little bit risky, but I figured it was worth the risk. Yeah, at some point you're thinking, I'm going to look pretty bad if we go back, and the debrief is, so what happened was we were really close, everybody got up there fine, and then Mass let the

pie harness go, don't know what he was thinking, and then we couldn't repair it. That's right, right. I'd be to blame it. My name would be in all the astronomy books for the reason why we don't know the age of the universe. Right, exactly. Due to Mike Massimino's gross negligence. We have no idea what this galaxy looks like. Is that blooper reel available anywhere in the public domain? Because that sounds... No, that is certainly classable. Ah, bummer. I was so hoping. Yeah, I don't know where you'd get a copy of that. Yeah, probably not on VHS. You'd have to dig through the archives, and it's probably not worth the effort. It's more of a training tool than it is. It's not like a blooper reel on America's favorite videos. You probably find it very boring, actually.

But for astronauts, it's pretty cool. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Mike Massimino. We'll be right back. Hey, thanks so much for listening to this show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going, but honestly, I just love hearing from you. I love creating this for you. All those discounts, all those codes you need to support the sponsors, they're all in one place. So if you're bench pressing or jogging or whatever, you don't have to take notes on that. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And that's where you'll find all the codes, all those special URLs and promo codes. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Don't forget, we've got worksheets for many episodes. This one is no exception. If you want some of the

drills and exercises talked about during the show, those are all in one easy place, and that link is also in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the rest of my conversation with Mike Massimino. Producer Jason was asking if there's a simulator at NASA to try and replicate the launch, or if every time you launch, it's the first time you felt that stuff. Because you simulate pretty much everything, but it seems like the launch would have to be broken down into parts. Like maybe you can simulate the gravity, but not all the controls. Is there something that's just like the inside of that shuttle and tries to simulate the feeling that you're going to get?

There is, but you're right. I mean, you do do it in pieces, but there's no way to get the power of the launch. You just can't do it. So what we do is we have a motion-based simulator where we practice launches. And, you know, you tilt back and you move and they have hydraulics moving you around and shaking you, but they cannot replicate that violence on the ground. It's just impossible. And then for the G forces, we do a simulator ride. We do a centerfuge ride. There's a centerfuge at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio that we ride that centerfuge. And we go up, we get the G profile for eight and a half minutes. Really what it is with the Gs is that the major part of that is the last two and a half minutes of the launch. From six to eight and a half minutes, that two and a half minutes,

you get about three Gs on your body. You know, they spin you around to give the idea of the G's building up and then you get to those sustained 3Gs so you can feel what they're like on your body. We get more Gs, not the most G's I've ever taken it. In our airplane, T-308 that we fly, we get up to 6 or 7 Gs, but those are only for like a split second, a second or

two, a couple seconds, you might get that amount of G force. Here for two and a half minutes, it's kind of long for that amount. Even though 3Gs is not that much, it's three times your body weight pushing down on you. So it's like you're on your back, and you've got a pile of bricks on your chest is what the feeling is.

Jay's, with all the other things to worry about and think about at that time, you've got two of you sitting on you, like a schoolyard bully, basically, at that point, right? Yeah, but that's not so bad, actually. It's just, all right, okay, you know, just wait until this is over. So, yeah, there's really not much for you to do except kind of take it. Yeah, but I guess you're thinking, all right, this is a little uncomfortable. Guess I'll wait until I'm weightless witnessing the miracles. Right, it's not the worst thing, but, you know, you're like, okay, well, you're happy when it's over. Yeah, sure. You're up there repairing the telescope or doing any kind of spacewalk, which, by the way, you've got to, over 30 hours of spacewalking. So think about just being out in the vastness of space,

looking at the earth, hanging out with multi, multi, super expensive, multi-million dollar equipment that's super delicate, fragile. And you're thinking about the consequences of a tear in the suit at one point in the book. How do you even decide what to worry about when pretty much everything up there is lethal? Yeah, I think it's, you don't wanna worry about anything.

You wanna have confidence in your suit and just go about your work, but you also wanna be very careful. You just want to operate very safely. You don't want to cowboy anything or be cavalier about the way you're moving around and doing things because that leads to trouble. You just turn into this sort of mode of operating where you try to be very professional, very precise.

Everything you say that comes out of your mouth, you want to be very, very precise about what you're doing, what you're reporting, what you're asking. Every time you move, you're moving with a purpose. You're always know where your tethers are. You're not going to lose anything. You're not going to lose yourself. You know exactly what you're safe. tether is, you know, where everything is, every piece of equipment, everything that's on you, you have this total consciousness of what you're doing. And in that way, you know, you're operating

in a very efficient way that'll give you the best chance of being successful, but also in a very safe way to give you the best chance of coming back inside. And you have to trust the equipment that it's going to work. When you get into your spacesuit and you seal yourself in there, you have help from your friends and, you know, your buddies are checking everything. And you got people on the ground watching and making sure things going okay as best they can. And that's what you're doing. you try to operate very safely, but still even with that, at the end of my second spacewalk, I found out there was a slight tear in my glove,

and if it was something that we had noticed at the beginning of the spacewalk or anywhere before, then it would have probably created us to terminate the spacewalk. Oh, man. But because it happened toward the end and we were coming in anyway, there was really not much we could do about it.

But luckily, it didn't affect anything that day, except it made me realize that it was a little bit closer to the edge than I wanted to on that one. Yeah, no kidding. The suit, it seems like if you accidentally made little tear in it. What are these things made out of that that can kind of accidentally happen? Sounds like there's a lot that can actually go wrong with the suit. And I assume you can't just throw some duct tape on it and go out there anyway. No, the thing you want to prevent from being

compromised is the inner bladder of the suit. Because the suit has seven layers to it, including a layer of Kevlar. The part that is more vulnerable is the gloves because the gloves don't have that layer of Kevlar in them because it can't be too stiff. Right. And it can't. It can't Kevlar just protects mainly from an impact. And so it's in other parts of the suit, but the glove gets a lot of wear and tear. And so the material on the outside, which is pretty tough, can get worn down over time. And if a little cut developed, it could cut the outer layer. Now, I still had a lot of layers inside protecting men.

I still had the bladder on the inside. But as you start wearing through those layers, you start exposing the more critical layer. So the outer layers, you can take a cut in and survive. But what you've done is you start exposing the inner layer. And it's the pressure bladder. It's like a rubbery pressure bladder inside that keeps your pressure, keeps the air, the atmosphere inside of your suit intact. You can take a hit or a cut or a scratch and the material on the outside as long as it protects

the pressure bladder. But what we've concerned in my case is that we had gone through the outer layers and that we were going to get closer to that pressure bladder. And that's why it would have been a situation where you'd have to stop if it had been discovered earlier. Got it. And so right before you're about to leave the shuttle and go on a spacewalk, are you kind of nervous at this point, or are you thinking, hell, man, I'm already in space.

Like, we're already here. Let's just do this. To me, it was a huge difference going outside because you're in a spaceship. And it's kind of like you're in a room, sort of. You're in this room, you know, inside of your cabin, you know, on the ground. And then you're in space. But you're in space, but you're still inside the cabin. You've gone far away in the cabin, but you're still inside. It's like being in an airplane.

No, you're still inside the airplane as you're flying around. And when you're looking through the window of the spaceship, it's kind of like looking at the fish in an aquarium, looking through a window. But when you go outside, out in space, now of a sudden I really felt like I was outside. I was in space, and it wasn't looking inside of this room and through a window anymore.

I was looking anywhere I wanted, and there's really nothing around you. I mean, even when you're outside on Earth, you have the sky. You know, you see the stars, you know, you have the sky above you or clouds. But when you're out in space, there's nothing there. Just stars, you know, it's just openness. This idea I really felt like,

I was outside, I really felt like a space man was a much different feeling than being inside of the cabin, a much more beautiful view as well, and you can look anywhere you want, and you could really experience the brightness of the sun and the darkness of the, when you're not in the sun, and you can feel the temperature changes, and you can look out and see things without being constrained by a window and look at the stars, and then turn your head and look at the earth. And the altitude we were out at Hubble is 100 miles higher than station where the space station flies. It was at the ceiling of where the shuttle could fly. You can see the curve of the planet. You can see the roundness of it, which is extraordinary.

How clear are the stars without the atmosphere? That must have just been a total game-changing. I mean, you're already looking at pictures of space. You're looking at the stars a lot, I would imagine, as a kid. And then you're up there. There's nothing between you and those things. Yeah, they're perfect points of light. So the reason stars twinkle on the ground is because the light comes through the atmosphere and gets a bit distorted in a twinkle. But there's no twinkling. They're perfect points of light when you get above the atmosphere and you see them directly. You're not any closer to them, but they're just a lot clearer. You can see different colors in the stars, and they don't twinkle. They're just these perfect points of light everywhere.

What about space sickness? I wondered, you're in a boat, you're going back and forth, you get a little seasick. Is there space sickness, or is that not a concern? No, it's space sickness for sure. I threw up my first day in space. I was over it by my second day, and my second flight I wasn't affected at all. But my very first day in space, I was motion sick. I was kind of okay.

I got everything done. But at the end of that day, right before bed, I tried to drink some water and it came right back up. And I wasn't feeling well. I was happy to go to bed that night and get a good night's rest and wake up the next morning feeling much better. But it's a conflict of your sensory inputs. Your vestibular system is on earth.

When you're moving around a boat or a car and you get motion sick, it's because it might be elicited, particularly if you're looking at a, if you're trying to read something in your eyes are telling you you're perfectly, still and your inner ear is being accelerated and bounced up and down in a car or a boat or whatever that's what leads to sea sickness, motion sickness. In space, your vestibular system, which works on gravity is not moving at all, is telling you perfectly still, but yet you're moving around. Your eyes can say you're moving, and that leads to the same sort of effect. And what happens is the brain gets smart about this and eventually will stop listening to the vestibular system because

it's not working any longer. And then you're fine. And then you don't get sick anymore. That's amazing how the human body can adapt to space just within a few days. I mean, that's so impressive. Yeah, the brain is an amazing thing. And the whole system, our body is able to do some amazing things and getting ready. So you're repairing the Hubble, saving humanity, the future of humanity, right? The special forces of NASA over here, 650 grand an hour is a mission cost. But you still got to be doing some horsing around up there.

What was the most fun you had? And I'm not talking about the PC answer. It was really rewarding saving the Hubble program. What's the fun stuff that you guys are doing up there, especially when the missions are over and you're just decompressing? Looking out the window, listening to music, and just taking in that extraordinary view was something I could do forever. For me, that was the best way to decompress

and just to enjoy the time up there and enjoy that view. Magnificent. Are you able to stay clean up there physically, or is it just kind of like wipe your armpits with a wet nap and wait until you get back to Earth? No, it's pretty good. It's just like taking a sponge bath. You have a liquid soap that you use and waterless shampoo and, you know, you don't really have

running water for a shower, but you're able to take a sponge bath and stay fairly clean. You're ready for a shower when you get back for sure. Yeah, I bet. There's certainly a lack of water. I mean, that stuff is heavy and you're bringing plenty of it in your body. As you said in the book, today's coffee is tomorrow's coffee, right? Yeah, that's the way it is on the space station. It's recycled.

On the shuttle, we had fuel cells that generated water as a byproduct of the power. that they generated. But on the space station, yeah, they recycle all the water. So, today's coffee, tomorrow's coffee. What does it feel like to readjust to Earth after you land? I mean, what did you do first? And what did you miss most in space besides, of course, your family? Yeah, I miss, of course, as you said, my family and friends. And I miss things like just going to a baseball game. I was looking forward to that. Baseball season was starting. Both of my flights I flew in the spring and was looking forward to that, a pizza, looking forward to just grabbing a pizza and just watching TV and vegging out and people just being around a lot of people

just being around normal sort of normal stuff I think that when we landed a few days after I landed my son as a swimmer and he was on our local neighborhood swim team and the swim meets were on Saturdays and all the parents would be there and sitting in their lawn chairs under you know under these kind of tent like structures and getting the kids ready and it was always a crowd of people you know just a lot of kids and a lot of parents and coaches and, you know, all this activity with the swim meet, just lots of people. And I really enjoyed those things. And that's what I missed. Being around a lot of people out of big family or community event, for me, was something I look forward to those swim meets, look forward to going to baseball games and eating pizza, using a real

toilet and sleeping in a normal bed. Yeah, I can imagine sleeping in a bed that you won't float off of or away from, probably, and taking a nice little shower as well. What was the strangest thing about readjusting back to Earth. You mentioned at one point you dropped a bag of groceries because you just let it go in mid-air thinking it would stay there? Yeah, you kind of forget where you get used to it, you know, in space just floating stuff, and then you get back to Earth, and that doesn't work as well.

It doesn't work at all. And, yeah, so I had that experience where I was taking a bag of groceries out of the car and didn't know where to put it. So I just reached back and put it up high and didn't let go, like it was going to float right there, and of course it just crashed the ground. But, you know, like, bang, gravity is terrible. I think also you're so focused on the mission and you focused on the mission and training and getting ready for it and then and executing it and being up there. And then all of a sudden it's over.

You know, this thing you've been thinking about for years is now over and it's time to figure out, you know, what to do next. So in some ways, you know, it's fun stuff. You know, spend time with your family and do that. But it's life on earth is a lot tough than life in space, I think, because you have more decisions to make and you have more options and you have to deal with a lot more than you do in space. in space, it seems to be more regimented and it's spectacular and it's fun and new and different and then you get back to Earth and you got to mow the lawn and fix the car and it's a lot tougher. It's not as much fun. How did being in space change you? What sort of lasting after effect do you have from being up there?

I think for me, one is that dreams do come true. It's something I dreamt about as a little kid, something I thought would never happen. And even as I'm talking to you now, I can't believe that I actually got a chance to do it. So the dreams really do come true. It is possible to have an extraordinary life. And the other thing is just the beauty of the earth. I describe it in the book and a few different passages, but one where as I view the planet, you know, from the spacewalk, especially, you can see the roundness of the planet. And you can look and turn your head and see the stars and just the beauty of it. In one moment when I paused and I thought, oh, this would be the view from heaven. If you could look down from heaven, this is what you would see.

I just dwelled on that for a moment and I said to myself, no, no, that's not right. It's not just more beautiful than that. This is what heaven must look like. I believe we live in a I believe we're very, very lucky to be here. We need to take care of it. But I think we're very, very fortunate to live here. I can't imagine what heaven would look like, but I can't imagine anything being more beautiful than our planet. And I do think we live in a paradise,

and we should really treasure every moment that we get to be on this planet. Beautifully said, and it's amazing. You've done so much for the future of space exploration, just the Hubble repair in itself, which was, by the way, if you're thinking about grabbing this book, definitely do. even if not just for the very end where you're performing this space brain surgery on the Hubble, and the answer to the problem was rip the handle off using pure brute strength. Really funny stuff and really, really great book.

What do you think of SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and companies like that privatizing space travel? I think it's our future. We've been waiting, I think, ever since the government got involved with sending people back in space back in the early 1960s and the Apollo program, you know, there's always been. been this talk of when is it going to open up. You know, when it's like aircraft, when airplanes were first designed, it was just a few of them in military applications and the government used them as military tools. And for other reasons, they developed them.

The government primarily did. Now we have this thriving commercial airline industry where every second we have a plane taken off going somewhere. It's going to be a long time until we have a spaceship every second taking off. But I think we're finally at the point now where we can have people flying in space as a profitable business. Space has been profitable with launch systems and satellites

and communications and all the things that we have with satellites. But now it looks like space travel for people, which is ultimately what I think most people are interested in and is getting a chance to go is now, I think, going to become more and more possible.

And it's only because of the efforts of the private sector, like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin is another one, Jeff Bezos's company, and they are making incredible strides, and they are doing some great things. You know, Blue Arjun is making rocket motors that NASA is going to be buying. They're just great companies, I think, and these visionary entrepreneurial leaders are also space nuts, thank goodness,

and they are willing to take the risk and put in that initial capital that you need to get this thing going, take that risk to see if we can open up space to the masses. And I think it's going to happen. Besides just sending tourists up for some fun, I think what's going to happen is because they'll be developing these things, these systems, these rocket ships, propulsion systems, I think that's how we're going to get to Mars. I don't think it's going to be a government program or even governments together going to Mars. I think it's going to be that. I think it will be that. I think it's also going to be these private companies that are going to help us get there too. I think it's going to be truly a great

effort between different countries and these private companies to get us to Mars. So I think it's great. It's exciting. It's opened up opportunities for people interested in working in the space program. Back, you know, when I was a kid, it was basically NASA, one of the really big companies that NASA contracted directly. Now it's still that, but it's also these private companies. And some of my smartest students, I teach at Columbia, some of my best students and smartest kids in our country are going to work who are interested in the space program are working for SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin and these other companies. So I think it's a great opportunity for those. They can be entrepreneurial and they can explore space and they can do some really exciting

things, but I think we're opening up a whole new golden age, and I think it's here. I think it might be maybe just a couple years away, and it may be a little bit year or too longer than what we had expected. But that's nothing compared to the lasting effect it will have over the decades to come. Would you go to Mars if given the opportunity? Yeah, I'm not going to be given the opportunity, but if I was given the opportunity, I would go, yes. Right. I figured, are you just saying that because you know you're not going to get the opportunity? So you're like, yeah, why not? No, if I really had a chance to go on a mission to Mars, I'd go, but I'm getting too old, man. I think it's going to be a great mission when it happens, but I think you're going to want to come back.

I think there's no credibility to these one in particular that is saying it's a one-way trip, and people are applying to go. It's preposterous. Yeah, I think we are going to go, but it's going to be a return trip, and it's going to be done the right way. And when that happens, it's probably going to be years from now, but maybe not too far along. You know, we'll see. Yon Musk has some real interest in making it happen soon, so, you know, hopefully it'll happen before him too much longer.

But, no, absolutely. If I had the opportunity to go there, I would. You hear that, Elon? Bring Mass with you. Sign me up, man. Well, thanks for being a hero, Matt. We are really honored to speak with you today. Really appreciate it. Well, it's honors mine. I really appreciate your interest, and thanks for sticking with me for so long, and appreciate you reading the book, and I hope whoever does read it enjoys it and appreciate the conversation. Thanks. Now, I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that,

here's a sample of my interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We talk about why an interest in science serves every field of expertise from law to art what our education should ideally train us for. Here's a quick look inside. Walt Whitman, when I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures were ranged in columns before me, when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide, and measure them. When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick, till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself into the mystical moist night air and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars. It's the same curiosity you have as a kid, but I just have it as an adult. I've had it since childhood. You don't have to maintain it. You just have to make sure nothing interferes with it. So the counterpart to this would be, oh, sir, literate one, why ruin what something looks like by describing it with words when I can see it fully with my eyes? Your words just get in the way. I'd rather my mind float freely as I gaze upon something of interest and have the writer step in between me and it and interpose his or her own interpretation. You don't know the thoughts that you're not having. What keeps me awake is wondering what questions I don't yet know.

to ask because they would only become available to me after we discover what dark matter and dark energy is. Oh, man. Because think about it, the fact that we even know how to ask that question, that's almost half the way there. But I want to know the question that I can't know yet. What is the profound level of ignorance that will manifest after we answer the profound questions we've been smart enough to pose this far. For more, including how science denial has gained a global foothold, what it'll take for the U.S. to get to Mars before China, and why it's dangerous for people to claim the Earth is flat, check out episode 327 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

My impressions of this conversation, Mike Massimino is really freaking cool. He's a super friendly guy. He's really, really the guy you want representing the space program, I think. He's been on the Big Bang Theory six times. That doesn't hurt. He's done 30-plus hours of spacewalking. That's just the stuff outside of the space shuttle. That's a long time to be walking around in space literally. Plus, he's done 550 hours or more at this point of just space time in general. That is an incredible feat. He's an incredible person. And you know what's funny? Because I was going to ask him, he's a pretty tall guy. I was going to ask him to do the math on his size and calculate the cost of sending him to space versus sending somebody else whose average size

or even small, and see if he could justify his performance in light of that extra cost. But I'll tell you, his height made him perfect for spacewalking. I learned that from the book. And you have to be big for a spacewalk because you get more leverage, which us short guys or us average guys, we don't actually get that. So, unfortunately, even in the infinite vastness of space, size matters. It's unfair. I highly recommend the book as well, especially the audio version because he reads it himself,

and the passion is just really, really, it comes through in the book. I loved it. And if you enjoyed this, don't forget to thank Mass on Twitter. We'll have that linked in the show notes as well. Links to the books, always in the show notes. Please do use our website links if you buy the book. It helps support the show. Worksheets in the show notes, transcripts in the show notes.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or you can hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same system, software, and tiny habits that I use in real life every single day, over at our six-minute networking course. The course is free. I don't need your credit card.

I'm not selling you anything. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. What I'm doing is teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And most of the guests on the show they subscribe to the course or contribute to the course or both. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

This show is created in association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jay Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in space travel, exploration, high stress leadership situations, share this episode with them.

I hope you find something interesting in every episode of this podcast. So please share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show and leave everything and everyone better than you found them. That's right. I'm changing it up, folks. All right, another podcast I can always recommend. My friend, Dr. Emily Morris. Is she a doctor now? That's amazing. She's on a mission to help you prioritize your pleasure and liberate the conversation around sex. For 15 years, she's been answering her questions like, how do I talk to my partner about trying something new in the bedroom? Or how do I increase my sex drive? And there's a whole lot more that I just kind of didn't want to put in this promo, because it's a little bit, you know, saucy. Sex with Emily is the number one podcast about sex, dating, and relationships, and has been for quite a while. You know that question you've been wondering about or too afraid to ask? On sex with Emily, nothing is off limits.

Her no-shame approach has made Dr. Emily a trusted source to guide you no matter where you are on your sexual journey. Find Sex With Emily wherever you listen to podcasts or go to sex withemily.com slash listen. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused form.

Matt, Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting.

So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people and the world really work itch search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening you can thank me later