The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 330: Scott Tingle—I'd Go in a Heartbeat

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

Astronaut and combat veteran Captain Scott Tingle, a.k.a. "Maker," explains how he turned his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut into a reality. He provides a harrowing blow-by-blow account of what it's like to fly an 8-hour combat mission and land on an aircraft carrier at night, as well as how to poop in space.  

Hey guys, it's the way I heard at episode number 3.30. This one's called I'd go in a heartbeat with Scott Tingle. For the record, that's a direct quote from Scott Tingle in answer to the question, would you go to Mars? Scott Tingle's an astronaut, you see. And a pretty good one, Chuck. And I have to say, without patting ourselves too hard on the back, we've done it again. That was a good one. I believe you are right, Mike. Captain Scott Tingle couldn't be a nicer guy. I mean, really. Just a really down-to-earth guy, pun intended. And, you know, his military career is stellar and his career with NASA. You know, he flew FAA 18s. He flew Hornets, 54 combat missions, 168 days in space. Am I leaving anything out? Yeah, the most important thing.

Five years ago, when NASA gave him an opportunity to call anybody on the planet from the space station. You get one call a month to anybody in the world. Scott Dingle said, I want to talk to the dirty jobs guy. And I was like, really? An astronaut wants to talk to me from space. So NASA sends me this encrypted iPad, right, with a special app on it. And you guys at the office sent it to me. I was down in New Orleans filming something or giving a speech or something.

And I'm like, what in the hell is this? I go to my room and I open up this container and I take out this super secret special high-tech iPad and I start clicking things in and the next thing you know, I got an astronaut on the line up there in space. Yep. And we talked, I don't know, we probably talked for a half hour, 45 minutes. And it was one of the greatest phone calls I ever had with one of the nicest guys you ever want to know. I didn't know much about him at the time. I just knew that I was very flattered to be talking to an astronaut.

The reason he wanted to talk to me was he supports our foundation. He likes what we do. And Scott's a tradesman at heart. He's an engineer, but he was one of those kids who said, what do you want to be when you grow up, right? You ask the kid and like everybody else. He said, I want to be an astronaut, except he meant it. Yeah, he made it happen.

Yeah. He made it happen. The one question that we didn't ask him, Mike, is how many people higher up on the list said no before they got to calling you? Yeah. There's a reason we didn't ask him that, Chuck. No one's interested. No, look, I promised to return the favor when he came back to Earth and if the situation presented itself. So, you know, we had this podcast, so we reached out to NASA.

And, of course, he said, yeah, I'd love to. So what you're about to hear is another. extemporaneous 90-minute conversation with a real American hero. And look, you can't overstate it. Legion of Merit. Defense Superior Service Medal. Meritorious Service Medal. NASA Space Flight Medal.

NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Three air medals. Six Navy Commendation medals, including one with combat valor. Four Navy and Marine Corps achievement medal. Blah, blah, blah. The guy is a patriot. He has an enormous brain. He's fearless.

I mean, he's just a true adventurer. And I just thought, you know, with what's going on right now in the country and this mess with the Titanic, submersible that everybody's talking about, might be a good time to hear from an astronaut. On July 4th. On July 4th. On July 4th, right, why not? Yeah, it's all coming together. Yeah. I went through my rolodex, checked out all the astronauts I know.

And I decided to go with Captain Scott Dingell. Good job. Yeah. Kidding aside, you're going to love this man. He's a great American. And when he says he'd go in a heartbeat, I believe him. And so will you. It's episode number 3.30. And it all starts right after this. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time.

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You wrote figures. Astronauts are never late for anything. I'll be there in moments. Show hosts on the other hand are rarely on time. Hello, Scott. Hey, Mike, it's great to see you again. Thanks for having me. Oh, are you kidding me? It's impossible to know from your background where you are exactly. To be clear, you're on Earth, right? You're back. Yes, sadly to say, I am back on Earth.

Are you really sad to say it? You realize your family might be listening to this at some point. No, I'm really not sad. You know, Earth is home. I love being at home. There's lots of people here. There's food here. There's showers here.

There's lots of good things here. But being in space is very unique. And when you leave it, there are aspects of it that you miss forever. I just have so many questions, Scott. But I just want to start by telling you, I don't get nervous much. anymore and I haven't been nervous in years. And I don't think I was actually nervous when we spoke the first time. But I was apprehensive.

And I was apprehensive because I really didn't understand exactly what was happening. All I knew from my office was that an astronaut was given one call a month and they could talk to anybody they wanted to and you wanted to talk to me. It's so weird because first I was flattered and then I started thinking about it. I'm like, what the hell is happening? This poor guy's been up there. I don't even know how long you've been up there. You want to talk to me.

So now that we've got some years between it, I got to tell you, man, it was one of the most flattering requests of my entire career. And I loved every minute of that conversation. And when I hung up, I just thought, damn, I wish the world could have heard this. Because modesty aside, I think they would have really enjoyed it. I think so, too. And I'll tell you, it was equally rewarding for me for that. And some folks do do more, but I actually only did one in the six months, as far as I remember,

and it was you. It was one of the highlights of my six months up there, being able to kind of talk to somebody on Earth the way that we did and got to show you the bathroom and all the cool places in the International Space Station. So it was pretty cool. It was good to reach you and some of your audience over the years as you've been relaying some of those bullets to them. Well, you know what?

It's funny. You don't always know when you're in the middle of a thing, that you're going to look back on so fondly. Life's like that. You don't always know the most instructive moments that you're in. But I knew when we were talking that I was going to remember that for a long time. And it's funny, in that last sentence, you actually said do-do, which made me laugh because, like, an idiot, I think the first thing I asked you about was do-do.

I mean, it's like my eight-year-old came out, and I wanted to understand what's going on up there with toilets. And that just opened up the conversation. So maybe that's where we should pick up here. because I've got literally 700 questions off of Facebook and probably 20% of them. The people just want to know how you poop, man, and what is going on up there? Well, the good news is that humans are humans, and the human body goes through some changes, but not pooping is not one of those changes. We will always have to eat, and we will always have to eliminate.

The trick is to have systems to help us do that. Without gravity, it's a little bit different. On Earth, you know, we have a toilet and your solid waste falls into the water and goes through the plumbing. And as you know from all your dirty jobs episodes that, you know, there's various things that can go wrong, but you can fix them and you know how the systems work. And they're not that complex most of the time. In orbit, though, what can go wrong up there aside from maybe everything? Right.

So the system is very complex. Not only do we have to contain, but we have to transport your eliminations or your waste. And to do that, we use airflow. So there's airflow that comes in and around and pulls, transports your solid waste into a bag that's perforated. You gather the bag, you tidy it up, and you throw it into a bucket. And you keep the bucket tamped down because you don't have a whole lot of storage space. and then every, I don't know, seven days, six or seven days, depending on how many crew are up there.

We got a lot of crew up there now, so maybe five days. You have to replace those buckets. Those buckets are called Keteos, and they're made by the Russians, and we use them very frequently. And then those buckets go onto a garbage or onto a cargo vehicle that is taking garbage back, and then it goes back to Earth, and most of the time for the garbage haulers burn up on entry, and it just gets incinerated.

for that. That sounds very efficient, actually. Most of the time. Most of the time. One minor thing, and I promise not to belabor the point, but you said that in the Keteo goes a bag, but you said the bag was perforated. Why is the bag perforated? Because you have to have flow that kind of goes through the bag to hold the solid waste there while it's opened and you're using it. What's on the other side of the perforation is my question? So on the other side of the perforation is the bucket. with all the other bags below it. And we have a cover that goes on top of that. So when you're done, you close it,

and then you turn off the fan. That way you keep the odors in the bucket. Now, more complexity in the system, not only do you have a fan with flow, but we also have charcoal filters to filter out some of the, for every flow in flow, you have to have an outflow, otherwise you don't have continuity, and it's like blowing up a balloon,

and that wouldn't work very well either. So they worked that part of the program. that part of the program. And for the liquid waste that is, everything's recycled on Space Station, it goes into a separator and spins it up and it separates it and you get brine that gets put in a different tank and you have the water, the more liquid, you know, less particles stuff goes into another line and it goes through a regenerator where they extract the water and the condition the water and it becomes your drinking water for tomorrow.

So last night's dinner, tomorrow's breakfast. Wow. No. Wow. Oh, you buried the lead. No. There's a lot of chemicals, and here's what's bad with what can go wrong. We have pretreat that is level three, level four type hazard, and it's really corrosive,

and it will burn you, and you've got to be really careful with it. And so we monitor that system. We have a lot of safety interlocks on it, and if the slightest thing goes wrong, it fails, and then we have to do some troubleshooting to figure it out. we have to get the gloves on. You know, it's a good episode for dirty jobs because you really got to get in the rack and start pulling things apart. And you really got to be careful about liberating some of this toxic chemicals and urine

in the facility. Liberating the urine. I think we just got our title earlier in the episode than normal. But that's pretty great. I'll jot it down, but I'm hoping for something else. Yeah, me too, Chuck. Look, I'm going to try and kind of guide this in some kind of chronology, but apologies and advance because, I mean, I'm sure you've done this a thousand times and you're probably sick

of answering a lot of the same questions you've been getting from the jump. But I just want to hear about, I mean, one of the things you told me that really struck me was that you knew from an early age that you wanted to be an astronaut. Not like I did. Like, what do you want to be? I want to be an astronaut or maybe a president or maybe a major league ball player. But you you had a level of certainty with what you wanted to do with your life. But the path that you took, the way that you got there, the impact of learning a trade as a young guy, and the plan that you laid out, I mean, if I remember it right, you told me that you literally sat down and you wrote out a plan that took you through various levels of education, ultimately up to a test pilot, and then literally an astronaut. I don't know that I've met anybody who had that level of foresight and certainty at that age. But if you would, am I remembering it right?

If you're remembering it right. I put a lot of thought into it when I was younger and looked at a lot of options for my life and for my future career. I had the one goal that I had, and that was to be an astronaut. And I needed to know that every milestone and every step along the way, because they were not small goals. or small milestones. They were life-defining career milestones in themselves. I had to make sure that I was okay with that being the end state, knowing that any medical issue, family issue, or just a political issue that maybe selections were down and just luck,

could very well just stop you from progressing to the point where you wanted to go. And you know, there's a book out there, an ex-military person, a next seal, I think, wrote that it was called No Plan B. You know, they only had one plan to go be a seal and to go do what they wanted to go do. And he said, I don't want to plan B because I don't want to go do the path of least resistance. I just want to go to that one goal. I was a little bit different. I put a little bit more discipline into it.

I had my plan A, but I had quite a few plan B's. And I had to make sure that I wasn't just going to quit and do the path of least resistance. I really had to motivate myself over 30 years to be able to reach the end goal. And I'll tell you, you know how it goes. You know, you go through days, months, years, where you're just pretty sure that goal's not going to happen, but you just keep moving your feet forward because you're not ready to give up. And my mantra in my brain was, hey, I'm either going to get there or I'm going to die, and I'm going to go to my grave knowing I tried as hard as I could.

When times got tough, that's what I told myself to try to keep moving. But yes, I sat down at an early age. I went through this cycle several times and I said, hey, I want to be an astronaut. What do they need? And there were times because we didn't have the Internet. I had to call NASA Johnson Space Center. And there was one of our good friends who's retired now, Dwayne, would answer the phone every time.

And he would send me the profiles of all the astronaut classes that got selected, all the individuals. And I would study them and see what they did and see what all the different options were. And I knew I loved aviation. I was interested in DOD at the time. And at the time, I had not seen the right stuff. I had just decided that, hey, I could go be a test pilot or be a pilot and a test pilot and then go be an astronaut.

And so I started investigating that more and more and more. And that was really a career path that really interested me. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about that and what I would do to prepare for that. But halfway through that, as I was on my second or third iteration while I was in undergraduate at University of Massachusetts, I realized that I really did. liked science. And so I had an alternate path of going to graduate school and pressing forward to a PhD and then going the science route to try to get to the astronaut corps. And that was a battle because I really liked science almost as much as I loved aviation. Obviously aviation won with 51%

of the vote and I decided to go that route. But it was a good thought process and it was a good challenge. But yes, I drew out the map with all the milestones on it and proceeded to press forward with it. How did vocational training, how did the business of learning a trade inform that? Because that surely must have been one of the first things you affirmatively pursued. Right. So when I was younger in junior high, I had already had it in my head that I wanted to be an astronaut. I didn't talk about it much because everyone was, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a lawyer, you know, I want to, you know, all the normal professions. And I remember saying that once in class, and I got some laughter and I just decided that they don't know what's in my head and

I'm just going to move forward. And I got some support for some teachers and, and some folks just thought it was a phase that little boy wanted to go be an astronaut. So when I was getting done with junior high, I had to make a decision on which high school that I wanted to target. in our local town had a good high school, and they had good academics that would get you into the college of choice, but they also had some negative things going on there as the town was growing, you know, drugs, gangs, things like that. What was the town? Where'd you grow up, Scott? It was Randolph, Massachusetts. It's a great little town with some great folks there.

But when I was younger, there were some things going on there that I was definitely not interested in in my life. And I was racing motorcycles at the time, or mini-cycles. I was a smaller, I love to pull the engines apart. I love to do ring jobs. I love to pull them out, change the cranks and put the trannies back together and all the maintenance in between the races to try to keep the performance up on the vehicle. I knew I was really good and I loved to kind of work with my hands and I love to know how things worked, how they fit together. I experimented with some electricity things with various results with circuit breakers at my parents' home.

They were where I grew up in Randolph. but I ultimately created this thing out of cardboard with little switches that turned all my lights on in my room whenever I wanted them and I didn't have to get out of bed I could just flick the switches. At the time, you know, there wasn't any internet and I didn't have a whole lot of books. I just had to sit there and think it through. And so it was obvious that I really wanted to go work in a kind of a hands-on environment. And one of the options was Blue Hills Regional Vocational Technical High School, which offered a lot of different curriculums. They offered auto mechanics. They offered, you know, structural, electrical, they offered cooking, all of the things that you would normally get at a vocational school.

But the one that caught my eye was the metal fab and machine drafting and machine shop, tri-shop there. And I got to go in all three shops, and I ended up spending most of the time in the machine drafting shop. And that really, putting that design work together, and I ended up getting a job in my senior year of high school. as a machine draftsman. So I was actually designing control cubicles for power plants at a place called Phoenix Electric in Canton, Massachusetts. And these drawings were huge. It was a lot of responsibility.

It was a lot of work. And I was 17 years old. It was amazing that they would actually let me go do that in lieu of going to school. I could actually go to work and actually see things. Got to go to the field a couple of times and see why and where the tolerances were important and why bolts wouldn't fit through holes

because either they weren't drilled right, or they weren't designed right. It was just a wonderful experience for that. And so I kind of saw all of that happening as I was making that decision to go to a vocational high school. It really seemed like that was a good route to go knowing that I was probably going to move on to engineering after that.

Going back to the Votec thing for just a minute, like the business of a field trip, the business of getting a thing in your hands accompanied with instruction and having a tactile moment, right? Some people's brains don't require that. Some people's, I think, appreciate it, and some people need it. That's how they learn. That's how they make sense of the world.

Was that you at that point? Yes, I learned through my fingertips for sure. I've gotten better, a little more patient, I think, with being able to think things through and, you know, get on a whiteboard and kind of understand things. but I'm always relying on those experience of things that could actually hang my hat on, things I could hold and feel and touch and make work. I've always said I've learned through my fingertips and it was really prevalent in undergraduate and graduate school

because if I knew I had a thermodynamics test coming up, I literally had to sit there and do a hundred thermodynamics problems because it was this motion, writing it down on the paper and getting to the right answer that kept my brain in gear because otherwise, I just wanted to be out flying airplanes and driving fast motorcycles and things like that. But keeping my hand movement gave me enough action to just sit there and really concentrate through the hard problems. That's so interesting. I mean, this is literally the third time you've talked about the business of writing a thing down. I mean, I ask you about the plan, which you wrote down.

You just referenced the flight plan, which, of course, you would need to write down before you hop in the cockpit. You're doing everything it seems to start. It starts not just with pen and paper, but. with the motion, like just the physical motion of writing it down. Right. I just think that's a blast. So do you go from Votech to college? There it is.

He's got a blitz. My list of things to do, list of things to think about. Sorry, how did you go from Votech to the military though, right? Yeah, look at Mike's page, blank, yeah. Didn't you enlist at age 18? I did. So I saved up a lot of money from my jobs through high school, and I had enough to pay for my first. my freshman year in college.

Sorry, Scott, but what jobs were you doing in high school? I'm interested. I was making bagels in a restaurant, and I did that on weekends and nights, and I started off cleaning, sweeping up all the cornmeal and just doing the dishes and cleaning up and doing that, and then I moved into part-time bagel maker at a place called Zepi's Bagel Bakery and Randolph.

Wonderful people, they gave me a wonderful opportunity. The pay wasn't great, but you know what? They took a chance on a 13 or 14 year old whenever I was when I started there and gave me employment whenever I could use it. And then I had the machine drafting job at Phoenix Electric in Canton Mass there for that. So I saved up enough money to get through the first year and then I knew that things were going to get rough and I was either going to have to find another part-time job, which I did not want to do, not because I was lazy, but because I was taking 22 credits or 24 credits. I'd gotten a little bit behind on the first year and I needed to do. to keep the credits up and I needed to keep my GPA way up if I wanted to achieve my long-term goal of becoming an astronaut because I couldn't get into grad school without better grades

and it all snowballs. So I ended up looking at all the services. The Navy had an enlisted reserve program that I could go in, work an entire summer for, basically boot camp and then go back to school, work the entire next summer, which was basically a school training and then come back and do a reserve plus a little bit of duty for the remainder of the times donating my summers to travel to places like Korea, Osan, and Okinawa and, you know, places like that. And then that gave a wonderful foundation for life in the real world as I was growing up and becoming an engineer. Why Navy as opposed to Air Force? So I was looking at that.

At the time, I really didn't have a strong preference, but at the school I went to, they didn't have any ROTC. And so I needed a reserve program to get into. And the best program that I found that suited my needs at the time was the Navy. It was called the SAM program. I think it's a selective surface. I can't remember. Sea Air Mariner. Sea Air Mariner program.

It was discontinued a few years after I joined it. It allowed me to go in as an enlisted, you know, I went in as an E2 or an E3 and paid for my books and my tuition. So did the Navy teach you to fly, or did you have any time before they got their hooks into you as a teenager? So one of the big benefits I had as a member of the armed forces was that I could use the aero clubs at the nearest military bases. And so I saved up a little extra money. and I was able to get my private pilots license at the Hanscombe Air Force Base Aerial Club. It took me four years, but I did it, and I got it,

and I was happy I did, because it helped by the time I transitioned into an officer training program after graduate school and moved into the aviation program. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Rowe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues.

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Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just $34.99 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. So you had how many hours in the air by the time you were, like brought to your first jet. I can't even imagine what that must have been like, but I just want to get it straight in my mind, right?

Because I drove a tractor, a Massey Ferguson and then a John Deere tractor for years before somebody tossed me the keys to a car. And I felt like it gave me like a real edge, especially with backing up a wagon. But, I mean, if there's a corollary and what I'm getting at, walk me through it. Yeah. Yeah, so it does help. But it doesn't help where people would think it would help. You know, you'd think it would help, like, oh, it's just another airplane and I can just fly it.

But when you go from civilian training to military training, you know, they always tell you, hey, you got to forget everything, okay, because you have to learn it their way. And I was very open to that, and I was very receptive to that. And I didn't have a big ego or any honor code or anything like that. I wasn't out to prove to them that I knew how to fly airplanes. I was out to prove to them that I could learn how to fly airplanes. fly airplanes the way that they wanted me to. And that was a conscious decision when I went into the military to learn how to fly. But where it really helped was I was comfortable upside down.

I was comfortable sideways. I understood what the winds would do to an airfoil. I understand how engines worked. I understand how air traffic control worked. I understood the whole end-to-end cycle of how aviation worked, at least in the civilian sector. And so moving into that, to the military community was a little bit easier. And being prior enlisted, I was an aviation ordinance man, so I worked bombs and I put bombs on P3s and sauna buoys and things like that. I could really talk the lingo and go down and really get turned some nuts and bolts with the enlisted folks and the folks that were maintaining the aircraft. And so I had a really good reputation and a really good relationships with from E1 to 07s. And it was, uh, you know, oh, sevens. And it was,

I just have to say there is so much street cred in that, as you know, right? I mean, when a pilot comes down to do that, it's like the captain coming out of the wheelhouse on a crab boat to just haul pots with the guy. There's just no substitute for it. And I remember you made a point of telling me five years ago that, I mean, how many hundreds, how many thousands of people are behind every astronaut that actually makes it up into space? Yeah, you're not kidding. And you talk about a lifetime of inspiration from thousands of people, tens of thousands of people for that. But not only that, every one hour of work we do on station, there's probably a good few hundred hours of preparation that folks do on the ground, just getting ready for that one event. It's a nonstop support structure.

And those of us that do it and do it well know that, and we are very appreciative of all of those folks. We make a big effort to keep in touch with our alma martyrs. We make a big effort to keep in touch with our friends. I still have friends from childhood. I talk to my professors all the time, and not all the time, but frequently. And it's just amazing that they believed me. When I said I wanted to be an astronaut, they believed me, and they helped me. And so I hope to pass on the favor.

I got to tell you something, man, and again, apropos of nothing, or maybe apropos of a lot. Going through my Facebook page in the last 12 hours, there must be 10. people who know you personally who went out of their way to leave a message. That's never happened to me before. It's very strange. I didn't put him in any order, but here's Jim Richards. Mike Rose, Scott's wife, Renette Tingle, and my wife, Susan, became friends in the sixth grade. Susan and I remember when she and Scott got married and of his plans to join the Navy as part of the path to becoming an astronaut. We still keep in touch a few times every year. Just thought you'd like to know. Talk about a small world. It's like, talk about a small world. Like, the world is behind you as we sit here

talking and your friends and your connections and the, some people gloss over it. It's not a thing you gloss over. No, not at all. I take it very seriously. And one of my challenges or struggles is that we get so much communications. I get lots of letters and lots of emails and social media. messages and things. And it's just hard, as you know, it's hard. We don't have a huge system in the government to manage that for us. It's literally just me for the folks that want to talk or have an input or, you know, just want to say hi. And I do as much as I can, but it got to the point where I was just spending too much time doing it, not enough time, paying attention to my house, my car, my kids, you know, things like that. And so I had to back off a little

bit. And so this is a good opportunity for me to say this. I say it whenever I can, but it's sincere that, hey, if you haven't heard from me after you've communicated, it's not because I didn't want to talk to you. There's just so much going on. I can't possibly do it all. But I think of you all the time. This is to all the folks that want to talk to. I think of you all the time. And I really appreciate your support and your friendship and your camaraderie over the years. You said something that really stuck just a minute ago. I knew what it felt like to be upside down.

I mean, that's so great. I've been upside down a few times. Yeah, the Blue Angels took me up a few years ago, and I'll never forget that, man. I mean, being upside down, maybe 200 feet above the Pacific going, I don't know how fast, fast enough to make booms, you know, we're mock one at least. And to have that moment of just complete uniqueness and wonder juxtaposed with the vomit

that came out of my mouth and went on to the plexiglass thing above my head. That can really ruin your view. Well, dude, you're upside down. You're looking at the sonic concussions blow up the water off the Farallon Islands. And then you throw up on the windshield you're looking through. And then the guy straightens you right back out. And then you sit there in this weird mix of gratitude and humiliation as your own vomit drips onto your head. Right.

And so, yeah, I know what it feels like to be upside down, Scott. I did it a couple times. I crossed it off the list. Right. You've been upside down the last 40 years. Pretty much. So, you know, being upside down is not insignificant. It's a different perspective.

It's a different feeling. It's a different physiology. and it's really cool when you get used to it. Were you assigned to a specific carrier group, or were you on an aircraft carry for any period of time? Yeah, so I've done several deployments in the Navy, and I've been on most of the boats until the Ford came online for at least several carrier arrests

and short trips. But the big deployments I did were on the USS Nimitz, the USS Carl Vinson. I did the Constellation for, I think, a month. I did two on the Nimitz and one on the Carl Vinson, and all three of those were six months or longer. Can you explain for the novice exactly what it feels like to land a jet fighter on an aircraft out in the middle of the Pacific?

Yeah, so the big thing about landing on the boat is it starts when you wake up in the You got to make sure that you feel okay. You're in an ejection seat. We don't wear diapers in those airplanes usually. So you got to manage your elimination cycle, but you still got to be hydrated because you're going to be working pretty hard, especially in a fighter. So you go through that, you go through your brief,

your planning, your brief, and by the time you get on the flight deck, you're kind of tired and you're kind of worried because you just had all of this information go into your head and you've got this eight-hour mission in front of you. mission in front of you over bad guy land. And so you're really, you're thinking about it. You're not scared, you just, you can't mess it up. And so you do that, you take your time, you get your pre-flight, you talk to the troops

that are covered in Greece and 120 degree weather for hours at a time up on the flight deck, and you just know that any problems you think you have are nothing compared to how hard these guys are working, and these folks are working. And so you jump in the airplane, you get it started up, you work through a couple of technical glitches, you get things moving, and then you jump on the, you get on the catapult, and you know all of this is leading up to the arrest of the trap. You're coming back and you're going to trap on the ship. And so you're just trying to stay on timeline. You're trying to keep your stuff together, trying to make sure everything in your helmet bag is down tight because you don't know

what's going to happen. You've got a hundred kneeboard cards of people you've got to talk to when you're over in the theater, and you're just trying to manage everything. You get launched off the catapult, which is Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. That's a great thing to go through for everybody. You get airborne, you hit the tanker. If you're going on an eight-hour mission, you're probably going to hit the tanker four or five times, which is a good task in itself, depending on the tanker. You've got four or five weapons that you're going to unload either on a target or in the water before you come back to the boat. So you're managing all of that because you don't want to do anything crazy with the weapons and get people hurt that shouldn't

be hurt. And then you're coming back and you're tired. You've already been up for 12 hours, 14 hours and you're ready to land. You haven't eaten. You know, maybe you've had a couple of twizzlers out of your helmet bag and a drink bag just to make sure that you're a little bit hydrated. You hit the tanker one more time. And by this time it's night. So you're really tired and it's night and the deck's pitching plus or minus six to eight feet or so. And not only does it just pitch up and down, you know, when we say pitching deck, you get the Dutch roll because they're all just a little bit crazy. You know, so you're line up, your glide slope, everything is moving. And so you're working the timing.

You know, we catch airplanes about once every minute at night. So sometimes we extend it to once every two minutes. And you get in the line and you know you're running short on gas because you're in a fighter and you don't carry that much gas. So you climb up to 30 or 40,000 feet just to manage the gas. You're watching your watch, you're watching your clock. And you're like, okay, now it's time. You pull the power back to idle and you never touch it again.

That's how you save your gas. And you just very slowly glide way out and then back, again to try to hit that target point plus or minus two seconds and then you hit the target point and then you come back up on the power you come in you get the gear down you get the flaps down you're talking to everybody you go through a layer of goo you break out at about 600 feet and then all of a sudden there's the boat and they see nothing but lights you see these set of lights that's normally straight you know when you're aiming for the center line but they're kind of doing this to you but you can't see the horizon and there's this big glow you

know, over the back because your lights are flashing in the clouds, you know, just above you. And all of a sudden, your world just goes sideways. And you're like, oh, Lord, I got to try to, you know, get through vertigo. And so you put it all behind you, you just stuff it. And then you just concentrate on meatball, line up, angle of attack. And literally, if you listen to my HUD tape, you'll hear me saying, meatball, line up, angle of attack, meatball, don't settle. Meatball, line up, angle of attack. Not too much power. Just talking to myself all the way down the shoot and it's the hardest that you'll ever work for that last 20 or 30 seconds of your life. You listen into the radio the whole time because you get the landing signals officers on the

back of the deck. Say the deck's up. That's easy with the power. You know, they're giving you a little bit of coaching so that you don't make a big correction that you can't recover from. And then you fly it all the way down and as you get closer to the deck, you see the round down kind of go under your nose and then you just kind of focus on the ball and centerline, ball and centerline, and you just kind of work the power and really show.

short intervals until you just kind of just hit the deck. But if you're doing it right, you have no idea that you're about to land and it's a surprise. Then as soon as you feel your body move a little bit, you go full power, just in case you miss the wire. You miss the cable. Oh, my God. That is harrowing. I feel like I just went through it. Just hearing you talk about it. He really did. That's a tough night at the boat or an average night at the boat, average to tough. But during the day, it's a little bit easier because you get so much more situational awareness and it's easier to just to have fun while you're doing it, but the mechanics are the same. Well, let me juxtapose that story with this one. I spent a couple nights on the Stennis, John Stennis, right? And the first night,

they put me in a berth. I mean, this is a big nuclear reactor aircraft carrier. It's got like 5,000 people on it. It's a big one. It might be the biggest. I'm not even sure anymore. But what you just described is what I heard every 90 seconds all night. I'm sure you can sleep through anything. And I want to ask you about sleeping in space too, but I mean, I didn't get a wink of sleep that night. I just sat there trying to imagine myself in the cockpit doing what those people were doing every 90 seconds all night long.

It just never stopped. And they let me wear every single shirt, you know, the next day. days, changed up all the colors, tried all the jobs. And I just left, again, just so gobsmacked at everything you just laid out and the fact that that's happening right now as we speak, concentrating all the time, day and day out, thousands and thousands of men and women, a hair's breath from oblivion, getting it right over and over and over and over again. Right. Dude, it's a miracle.

It is, but you know, it's just a miracle. Yeah, the real miracle is that these are all our, these are our, these are our kids, 18, 20 years old, you know, working their butt off, 20 hours a day, sleeping very little. They're in there doing all the dirty jobs, with crease up to their elbows and all over their bodies, humping chains back and forth on the flight deck and 120 degrees ambient, never mind just on the flight deck with all the asphalt on there. It's just amazing the level of dedication that these folks have.

It's just, you know, it's just, I'll do anything for them. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company

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It was probably that one, wasn't it? That was, yeah, and I think it's 54, isn't it? Yeah, a total of 54 missions, and they were split up between. Afghanistan and Iraq. Dog fights? No dog fights. We took most of their airplanes out, you know, before we even got started. So the other question that I had when you were talking me through that amazing event of landing at night, but how many Gs do you pull from the catapult launching you off the deck? So the catapult is, you know, if I remember, right, it's about two and a half to three Gs. If you're real heavy, maybe three and a half,

but it's a short duration. And, you know, you start off on the catapult, you're in full power, and you give your crisp salute, and you'll see the shooter on the deck, he'll make a big graduated motion so that you know that it's coming so you can get your head back in time, and then you can feel it stroke, and then you're off the front of the ship, and as soon as you're off the front of the ship, about a second and a half later, and it's about 400 feet. You're doing about 160 miles an hour,

and you're thrown forward in the straps for a second as it decelerates for a moment, about three or four Gs down to, you know, a half a G of acceleration. One of my favorite moments, and I'm sure you've seen this, Scott, is, you know, below decks in the mechanical room, these guys are constantly maintaining the cables and the fasteners on the cables that catch you and stop you. Right. Just the business of welding, fabricating, hammering, attaching, heating. I mean, I'm telling you, it is just mind-boggling, like something this big gets the attention of four or five people for about a half hour until it's perfect. And then that's just a fix to a cable and then a thousand others like it and so forth and so on and so on. That's what you're talking about.

The real stories below deck. The glamour's up there. We get it. Top Gun was amazing. But what we don't see. Incredible. Yeah. Absolutely.

I agree. And they're working. They're working three shifts 24-7. Okay, so you've got the naval career, 54 missions. Do you feel like you're on track at this point to the astronaut thing? Do you feel like that's still a realistic hope? I haven't given up on it, but I did the test pilot school in between my operational tours. And I hadn't had any luck with two or three hours. applications. And, you know, the organization, like every other organization, has some politics involved, which I didn't really get into and I didn't really fully understand. So I was content to work really hard. And I was taking the leadership aspects of what I was doing and the technical and the operational things I was doing is the high priority. And I've always said, and this is what I teach folks that have big dreams. It's like, hey, it's great to have big dreams and a big goal.

but if you're not doing the job at hand to the best your ability, you're not going to get there. So you've got to have priorities, and today is a priority. I was into that thinking, and like I said, I had gone through a lot of times where I kind of gave up. I didn't really think it was going to happen for, not because of anything I did right or did wrong, but just sheer luck or it's just the way that it was intended to go or not go. So I kept going, and I liked what I was doing. I was committed to a career in the Navy, and then on my last application, I got luck. There's a whole story that goes along with that one, but I did not think that I was going to make it to the astronaut corps during several years in the middle of my career.

How did you get lucky? Yeah, how did you get lucky and are all astronauts test pilots at some point? So how did I get lucky? I got lucky when I put in my fourth application or I think they canceled the board. and extended the class out. And so two years later, when they were calling for applicants, I was a little older, I was in a command track to command the Navy's largest test squad in VX-23

out of Potoxent River. And I was really hesitant about updating and sending in the application, but I looked in the mirror one day and I said, you know, you gotta go to your grave, knowing you tried as hard as you could try. And so I dusted off the application, I changed a couple of dates,

And then I didn't update it much, though, and I sent it in. And that's what I mean by I got lucky. They actually poked on it and gave me an interview. And then the rest is history on that. And so I got lucky because I wasn't going to send the application, but I decided to probably a couple of days before it was due on that. So I was lucky that I had that epiphany and I executed according to my core values. I'm sorry, what was the other part of the question?

The business of being a test pilot. Oh, yeah, that would be in a test pilot. I mean, is that something that's required of all astronauts? And what was that like vis-a-vis the right stuff that many of us remember? Yeah, no, it's not. And I saved this one for the latter part of the answer because it can get pretty kind of messy. But yeah, when you look at the early days, you know, with the right stuff and all the early classes that they had, they were all test pilots. And it was a high percentage.

And, you know, human spaceflight was born from aviation. And so it made sense to have those folks in there, break. in these vehicles, doing the engineering on these vehicles, doing the test flying on these vehicles, and then executing the mission with this new community that we were building in human spaceflight. And then we realized that, hey, there's a lot of science here, and you guys that have been flying airplanes are pretty smart, but you really focused on operations and machines, and you haven't really focused, dedicated your career to science, not because you don't like it or not good at it, it's just because you chose a different path.

That's kind of a critical thought there. And so they started ramping up hiring of the non-test pilot types and of the science types and the medical doctors and we've got a few teachers that are doing great work here as well. That's been the evolution of human spaceflight for the last 30 or 40 years is to go away from the test pilots and go more towards the scientific folks. And if you look at the percentage of people that they hire, the test pilots are actually a very small percentage. We're only about 10 to 15% at any given time of the classes that might be selected. Sometimes you're lucky if you have 10 and maybe you have three test pilots on that.

But it's kind of turned into a competition. There's a little bit of an effort politically behind the scenes to push back on the test pilot personalities in the community. community. And partly for some good reasons, we're not that easy to get along with sometimes. You know, we're pretty good at engineering. We're pretty good at operations and we're pretty good at speaking our mind when there's something that we want to talk about. And we have typically have years of leadership with leadership of thousands of people behind us and we're pretty comfortable in those shoes moving forward. And sometimes when we move into new communities, we forget to adjust the way that we should. And there's some learning.

that has to go on for that. Rightfully, there's a lot of opportunity for people without test pilot type experience in their background for that. And so right now we're at a phase where we're really trying to push that as a capability, as a flexibility. We're trying to design that into our new vehicles. But we are at a point right now of a lot of development work and the folks that are formally trained test pilots, whether they're flight test engineers or they're, no kidding,

front-seater test pilot graduates, that they really have been pulling the lion's share of the work when it comes to the acquisition and the engineering and the systems engineering and the test flying of putting these vehicles together. Can other people do it? Absolutely. They can, and they're showing every day that they're capable of doing it. But there's a lot of innovation going on right now where people want to eliminate testing as much as they can, eliminate the human in the loop for the vehicles, make it as automated as you can, it's taking a formally, formally trained test pilots to actually stand up and say, no, wait a minute, you can take the human out of the loop in the cockpit, but you just transferred all that human error that you're trying to get rid of to the software

designer in the cubicle. You know, it doesn't go away. This is human spaceflight, and without humans in the vehicle, you don't have human spaceflight. And so there's a little bit of a battle going on. I think it's a healthy battle for that. But no, you. You don't have to be a test pilot to be good at this program. And you've got folks like Harris and Schmidt, you have Story Musgrave, you have some really famous astronauts out there that were not test pilots. So I think it's going to become more and more prevalent. What do you need, Scott?

What non-negotiable quality must you possess beyond the rigor, beyond the discipline, beyond just the basic knowledge that comes with all the training? what is it on a personality level that you must, no exceptions have in spades? You've got to be able to get along with people. This is a cast of personalities, and it always has been, and it always will be. Not only, I'm not just talking about the crew, you know, I mean, we had to stick four to, you know, six people in a minibus or in a minivan and send them away for six months and then hope they all come back without killing each other. But it's much more than that. You have thousands of people all with very diverse backgrounds.

And some folks have come from a lab where they're studying infectious diseases. We have one person in my class that was in the Congo, you know, with a small team studying infectious diseases. We have folks that were prior, you know, CIA ops analyst-type work. We have folks that were engineers here at NASA or at contractor. We have teachers that were technical discipline teachers. When you come to the table and you're working through problems, there's a bazillion ways to skin the cat, and you have to be patient,

and you have to be able to sit on your hands a little bit and let people talk, let people understand and make sense of things so that they can be comfortable and feel valued. The days where, you know, the test pilots come in and sit down and go, we want a window. That doesn't go over very well here. But sometimes we have to do that. Right.

Yeah. Well, the International Space Station is exactly that, right? I mean, international effort. I mean, when you went up there, you left out of Russia, right? Right. Yeah, we launched out of Bikonor in Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz. So how many are up there at any given time? What's maximum capacity?

So, you know, it kind of depends on the tour. But in general, we have four folks on the U.S. OS side, and we have three cosmonauts on the Russian side. So right now the normal is about seven. But when we send a dragon or in the future a starliner up to the U.S. OS, that's the U.S. side of the space station, they'll bring four people. So then at that one moment, you'll have eight people on the American side and three on the Russian side. And so you'll end up with, you know, 12 folks or 11 folks up there. Sometimes you can have more, depending on when the Russians are going to be transferring their people. We try to avoid that so that we just do one vehicle at a time.

And the ports, fortunately now, with the multiple vehicles that we put on station, they kind of limit that. So I think 11 folks is probably about the maximum. So when they used to send shuttle up there, they used to end up with sometimes 12, 13, 14 people on the station. But they had sleeping quarters on the shuttle. They had more food on the shuttle and a little bit more in resources for that. I'd say to bound your question, it's anywhere from 4 to 11. You were about to conduct an autopsy on a mouse when we hung up last. How'd that go?

I'm guessing the mouse didn't make it. Not good for the mouse. He was a brave mouse and he made a great sacrifice for humankind. So the animal research that we do up there is very well choreographed and taken very seriously. We undergo hundreds of hours of training here on Earth to make sure that we notice any stress behavior in the animals themselves. And we always have representatives from PETA. We have representatives from veterinarians that they're all got the cameras on us. They're all watching and making sure that we're doing everything just right so that everything is humane

per standards for animal research, as we would do on Earth. They had actually went well. Those are hard days because you're stuck in a glove box and you're sweating and you can't, you know, rub the sweat off your face and you're trying to talk on the communications, you know, over the loops, we call it. And sometimes it doesn't work so great. And you've got to reach around. and the setup takes hours to do days before we get into that part of the research.

So once you're set up, you just got to run until you're done. So you've got a couple of 10-hour days, maybe 12-hour days of doing this stuff, and it gets really old. And, of course, it's a living, breathing creation. And so it eliminates as well and makes things that you have to clean up and you have to keep up with, not just the ones that you're working with, but the ones that you have in storage in their living compartment. there as well. So it really is a lot of work. But they get some pretty good science from it,

you know, as far as bone density and heart things that cardiovascular. That's my question. What have we learned? What have we learned as a result of these experiments? And what was the impact on you? You were up there for what? Was it six months or so? Yep. In terms of weight and fitness and all of the things that you have to do to get your sea leg or your space legs back. Right. Well, the good news is we generally come back healthier than when we left from a general perspective. For example, I was leg pressing about 700 or 800 pounds before I left, and that's laying on your back and just pressing with your legs. It's not a squat. It's just a leg press. And when I came back, I was closer to, you know, 950 or 1,000 for that because of all the

weight training that we do while we're up there. But that's the good news. The bad news is I I gained 10 pounds because they set you up with kind of a higher diet and I don't know why, but they had me on like a 2,800 calorie a day diet. And I was just, I was like, okay, they know best. And so I stayed on it and I gained almost 15 pounds in the first month. And I was like, I spent the next five months trying to work it off, which they don't want you to do because that increases your bone density law, your bone density changes or your bone loss during your time frame up there.

But the biggest losses that we see is from a physiological standpoint are in bone density. And that's obviously because we don't do a whole lot of load-bearing activity. Like you just went walking with their rucksack and some weight to do just that, which is great exercise. And we don't have that opportunity on stations. So we have a couple of machines that we use to simulate that. They do great work. We've been able to control bone density loss magnificently. We've learned how to do that very well.

and we're good at it, but we still experience it. I ended up losing about 6% in some of the critical areas, and then around 2 or 3% in some of the non-critical areas, and that's just bone density. And they specifically are looking at hips, thighs, and lower back, and things like that, those places that really take the brunt when you're out walking on your trail with your backpack on there. And that's what they look for in the animals when we do animal research.

They look for changes in those types of parts of the body. Is that the primary focus of most of the animal research that's done up there, that exact thing? No, it varies. And the scientists kind of run it. We're not experts in it. We kind of execute what they want us to execute. But the things that I do know is they are looking at the body parts to check for bone loss.

They're looking for muscle atrophy. They look at brains for any changes in brain. and especially if we have one that's not act that's showing stress behavior, we will promptly under guidance from the folks on the ground, euthanize, and then set it up to come back home so that they can take a closer look at it to see what the differences were in that one versus the others. For that, they look at a lot of the cardiovascular. Some of the rodents are given different medications or different levels of hydration,

and they're trying to see what the differences are, so this can all maximize or to optimize, what we're doing with our astronauts, and not only for our astronauts, but it also gives us insight into how we manage bone density loss or some of these changes that we actually see in people on Earth, specifically with calcium and bone density loss for our older population. I can't help but think about, you just said that there's a feed dedicated to watching you conduct an autopsy on a mouse that's being monitored by people from PETA. And I'm thinking back in the with the 50s, right, Lyca, the dog sent up there, you know, the first dog in space.

And I just wonder, that all by itself is probably the subject for hours and hours of conversation. Just our relationship with animals and the way that sensibility is changed. And well, has it really changed? Or are we just doing things to play the next acronym who really has some skin in the game who wants to keep an eye on the money? No, we really care. All parts of this team care, no matter what side of the fence that you're on. This is valuable science, and it really is helping humankind. And we want to make sure we do it right. I think that the timing of this is pretty fortuitous. I've got, I'm not going to go through them, but so many people have asked me to ask you about the Titanic and about the submersible.

and I was going to anyway because the thing that stuck with me more than anything else in our first conversation five years ago, I asked you what you would do if you got the call to go to Mars. And I think maybe it took you a quarter of a second to say, well, what do you mean? What would I do? I'd go. Of course I'd go. And I wasn't surprised that you said it, but I was surprised with just the absolute matter of factness. You've got a, you're married, you've got what, two, three kids?

Three. Great kids. So talk a little bit about just the spirit of adventure. And if that thing that made you know you wanted to be an astronaut when you were a kid, is that same thing that allows you to answer that question now in the affirmative with virtually zero hesitation. Absolutely. Yeah, I'd go in a heartbeat. I'd like to go back to the moon, too, like everybody else.

You know, unfortunately, that's probably not in the carts for me. but those are, they're not even generational. You know, testing a new aircraft is a generational opportunity because the acquisition cycles are eight to 12 years. And you're really only going to get one chance when you're in the peak of your career to go do that. And when you talk about exploring another planet, that's more than generational.

That's like 10 generation. That's like humanity type opportunity. I would not pass that up for even a quarter of a second. That would just be, my hand would be the first one up. Takes a year to get there, give or take, right? Two weeks on the surface. You do your research back in the pod. Year to get back home.

Or maybe a little faster, right? Yeah, depending on where the trajectories for the planets are. It's six to nine months one way and a year the next way. That wouldn't be a tailwind, I assume. Probably not. Probably not a tailwind, Chuck. What makes that happen? What makes it faster coming back?

Well, it's not so much just coming back. It's just when you launch and where the planets are located at the time that you launch and knowing that they're going to move between where you launch and where you come back. And if you get it, like right at the, right at a perigy or an apogee, then you can kind of even it out a little bit. But there's a lot of optimization that you do with overall mechanics to be able to make it work like that. So what has to happen realistically for us to get there? I mean, you were up there for six months in the space station.

This would be much, much, much longer. The bone density thing is obviously a big thing. Your mental health is a big consideration. The loneliness. Would it be a two-man team? Would it be more? How do you think it's going to happen when it does? My guess it'll be two to four people.

I think the first time probably ought to be two just to minimize the risk. But, you know, you can get a lot of science done with four people, but it takes more resources. So they wouldn't send, I don't think, one person to go do this by themselves for that. But I'm not so much worried about the mental challenges on that and being alone and all that because we got some really strong people in this program, whether they're previous military or science-based folks. They are headstrong, exploration, very strong-willed people, and they will be able to manage that. There's a lot of people that are worrying about that.

I'm not worried about that aspect of it. and I don't think there's a whole lot of people here in the office that are worried that they would be able to handle that mentally. I know they could, and they know they could. As far as the systems go, we need a system that can reliably get us there, get us on the surface and get us back again, which I think we can build. The thing that's going to get us is the radiation. We don't yet know how to shield ourselves from the radiation that we would be subjected to. So we may make it, but we might not be that healthy when we get back, you know, with higher radiation and increased levels of risk to cancer, things like, you know, everything that radiation can cause on human bodies for that.

And so that's probably one of the hardest problems that we have to solve to be able to do this successfully in the future for that. The bone density losses, the muscle atrophy, we're not sure yet of, so I went up to 6% bone loss. for six months. We're not sure if that's a continued rate or if it flattens out and just kind of you get to that point and then it just flattens out and you maintain at 6% per six months or if it just goes there and then goes down to zero. We're not 100% sure on that. So we're doing more and more on Space Station as a test bed to try to figure these things out. For example, we have a few folks that are set up to do a year on station. Frank Rubio's been up there partly because his vehicle had a coolant leak and he had to stay up there until we could get another vehicle up there.

He's up there for a year. You know, Scott Kelly was a year, and we have a few other folks that are training to up there for a year. The Russians have had folks up there for long periods of time. And I think we're going to have the answer to that bone loss concern here in the near future. And so I think that's right on track to hit that milestone before we would ever have a vehicle ready to launch to Mars. So I actually think that the big factor is managing the radiation. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level,

we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades.

They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people. people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see too how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org

slash Mike. That's skillsusa.org slash Mike. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. U.S.S.S.S.S.S. USA. How does NASA, you and your colleagues, feel about Musk and Bezos, you know, in their space programs? Do you guys work in conjunction or is it kind of a race to Mars? It's a little bit of both. The American Spirit is alive and well for exploration. And so both have been partners with NASA. You know, SpaceX obviously got the commercial crew contract early on, you know, 10, 12 years ago, whenever they competed it. And we developed together. Primarily SpaceX developed it and we borrowed it. But we did participate with them in the development. It's a wonderful vehicle. And he's got a wonderful company that's very flexible. They can make some rapid changes. and get things done quickly. Blue Origin was just awarded a part of the program for the Artemis, and they're equally excited. They have a little bit of a different business model,

but they're very excited and they're very focused. And again, it's just thousands of people that are really anxious to put people in space. And right now, the big push is towards, there's return to the moon and grow their businesses that way. Mars isn't gonna happen for a while. It's in everybody's head and it's a big talking point,

A lot of the work that's going into the Mars effort is kind of on paper and in research and pushing things forward. We're not launching rockets out of the desert like Elon is, you know, a couple times a year as he's preparing to return us to the moon. So the moon is really the focus right now. I think the thing that's swirling around in the headlines right now, back to the Titanic mess and all of that is it's risk, right? it's risk. How much risk do we need to eliminate around the radiation issue? How much risk in general does NASA have to look at to say, all right, well, that's enough to assume, right? We'll risk it, knowing this. Or like, when do you stop eliminating the risk in order to get to a go signal? And doesn't that basic calculus inform just about every single thing we all do, smear mortals every single

day, whether it's getting behind the wheel of our vehicle or getting in a submersible, taking a chance, rolling the dice. I think people are just so interested in trying to understand where that line gets drawn if, in fact, there's anything objective to it at all. Right. We do all the standard things when it comes to systems engineering and risk management and all the cubicles that we put them into and the risk categories for that. And there are several risks out there that are catastrophic, right? If you have a pressure vessel rupture, that's catastrophic. So we try to make it so that the likelihood is a one or a two, very low or low. And then we feel like we've got a pretty good handle on it. Sometimes it can get up and say, you know, you get to

a three by five and you can't push it down and you're, we'd be a hard press to put people on a machine that had a three by five risk attached to it. And we would work very hard to get it down to to one and two, but sooner or later, you know, you got to fly or get off the pot. And that's kind of an engineering, leadership, and I don't know if it's political will. Sure does. It has to be. Yeah. It just feels to me like there was a point where sensible people worked really hard to eliminate risk, thereby creating a safer environment. And I don't know when it happened, but it just feels like elimination, mitigating risk is no longer enough. We need to eliminate it. And I feel like there are a lot of people making a lot of decisions. And I do think it's political. I think people

get elected and I think some people stay elected by promising to eliminate risk. And I just wonder as an astronaut, as a guy who's landed a plane pitching and this and that on top of a heaving deck and done many, many other things, you know, what we might learn about ourselves vis- to VR relationship with risk. Right. And this office is full of operators and the operations directorate out here at Johnson Space Center. We're very comfortable managing risk because you never really eliminate it. There are things that you're never going to see. And if it happens, then who cares?

It's not much of a risk. But there are things that like this parachute might not open. That's a big risk. And if you haven't mitigated properly, then there's a judgment call in there somewhere. Do we go or do we not go? for that. And you're right, the community for, has tended more towards risk aversment, you know, being averted to risk. I've heard the comment that, you know, we've become risk averse. That's not really true, but we don't want to mismanage the risk. The biggest thing is,

is to just acknowledge it as a reality. Okay. So there was a time throughout, you know, several engineering communities. And, you know, when you look, you can go look at the B737 max. You can go back and you can probably you'll see something in the investigation for the Titan sub that's just had an accident of folks saying oh that's not a risk and so we're just not going to pay attention to it that's not good enough you have to acknowledge it and if it comes out that hey it's a it's a one-in-one it's a no-brainer that's fine if it comes out that it's a three and a five it's very possible that it will happen and it's catastrophic then you need to know that

so that you can make an operational leadership decision on whether or not you're going to accept that risk or not. And we have some pretty high standards here because the last thing we want to do, it's not just the astronaut families that will suffer if something bad happens. It's all the workers that worked on that project. It's the country. I mean, we're spending billions of dollars to send people back to the moon. We've got to take them back.

We've got to make sure they come back. So we are going to manage the risk to the best of our ability. And when we feel like we've done that, then we'll go. So I wouldn't say we're risk-averse. No, we're definitely not at the point where it's just like, hey, this is dangerous. Here are the keys. Good luck.

You know, we probably won't do that. No. We probably won't do that either. No. But there'll be some really good engineering thought followed by some really good leadership at all levels on this. And then different categories of risk require higher levels of acceptance and concurrence. Okay. I get it.

I'm just going to take one more swing at it because I haven't said it quite the way I want to say it, which is it's one thing to take the steps you need to take to make it as safe as possible. I get all that and I think most people get it. What a lot of people don't get is the speed with which you would say, yes, I'm going to Mars. Of course I'm going to Mars. Of course. I'll miss my wife and my children very much. I'll miss my race cars and my motorcycles.

But of course I'm going, right? It's that that I admire. And what worries me now about my species is that a lot of us are going reflexively the other way. Why? Like, why would you do that? Why would you assume any level of risk? Why would anybody risk their life in their kids' lives to go see the Titanic? It's a ship.

It's down there. It's been down there. It's what's the point, right? Like, look, I wrote this question down from a guy. the way he asked it is, what can we realistically expect to learn by sending people to Mars? The important word here is realistically, because most of the conversation is around the best case scenario were the greatest hopes that we have, but I would rather hear a realistic expectation of what we will actually find, perhaps based on what it was that we actually learned by landing on the moon,

not just the hype and celebration of achieving something that had never happened before. the whole thing becomes a parenthetical, the adventure, the exploration. Somehow it became subordinate. And it's in that that I'm trying to understand what makes Scott Tingle look at me like I'm the crazy one and say, of course I'm going to Mars, which I love. But it's that quality. I guess that's the stuff that's right. Yeah, so I don't know, spirit.

The shortest answer I gave you all day. That's a good one. That's pretty good. Okay. Then what's happened to our spirit? Are you worried about the American spirit? Oh, yes, absolutely, especially now. We're kind of living in the upside down, as you know.

We got challenging times, and the challenging times aren't new. They've been here the whole time. It's how we live in this country. It's why we're so great. But your thinking can change from being courageous. and wanting to explore and try new things and take risk for greater reward. Or you can throttle back and live in security and not have to worry about all that. But for a lot of us, we're just wired differently, and the latter is not an acceptable way of life for us.

Boldly go comes to mind as opposed to timidly consider. That's right. That's right. I love Captain Kirk. His best line was from William Chattner was, I'm pretty sure I invented the cell phone. Yeah, right. You're right. Did you grow up fascinated with Star Trek? Did you care about Star Wars when it came out? Were you that guy?

So I wasn't a big TV person. I was always out getting dirty and doing stuff. But when I did watch TV, there were times that you go through phases where it's like, oh, I really like this show. I'm going to go watch it. And it was Star Trek. And lost in space. I just thought, you know, danger will, danger will, you know. Danger.

Danger. It's Mars, man. Those are some great shows. No, I was not a Star Wars buff when it first came out. But since then, I've watched every episode probably a couple of times. And I think it's pretty intriguing that they had some of the creations and the insights that they had way back then. I think it's absolutely prophetic. I mean, it's unbelievable from sliding doors to, I mean,

I mean, like Shatner says, he probably didn't have had the cell phone. Right. Well, he did a show about that, didn't he? Yeah. Where it was like, you know, how I changed the world. Yeah, something like that. Or maybe that was just his diary. I don't know.

24 astronauts were born in Ohio, Scott. What is it about that state that makes people want to leave the Earth? I love Ohio. It's a beautiful state. I don't know. They know how to groom them. Groom them for exploration. Lisa Myers wants to know if you saw anything unusual out there.

I think we all know what she's talking about. Yeah, that's a good question. Well, no, no aliens for me. What do you think personally? Well, not necessarily an alien, but I mean, just, you know, like we don't know that these things are aliens that are showing up, the little tick-tacks or whatever, but it's something that we don't know what it is.

Did nothing, no flashing lights or anything like that? No, just the vehicles. that we're rendezvousing on the International Space Station. What do you think when you see the amount of time, the amount of TV shows, entire channels today, right, are dedicated to supernatural, paranormal, UFOs? I mean, we love it. We just eat it up as a species.

Do you dismiss it out of hand, or are you open to anything? I don't dismiss it. And if people want to research it and they get some interesting results, I'm happy to watch it once in a while and fantasize about what could be real and what isn't real. I don't lose any sleep over it and I don't worry about it. And I don't think we're at any risk of being invaded by the paranormal or aliens anytime during my lifetime or my kid's lifetime or our grandkids lifetime. As scientists told me once that sort of the analysis is, well, the universe is so big. We can't comprehend it.

And it's so crazy to imagine there wouldn't be life anywhere. else purely based on its size. But if the universe is infinite or something close to it, then the idea that there's any life anywhere else is really subordinate to the larger idea, which is if there's life anywhere else, there must be infinite life or something close to it, which kind of makes your head explode with regard to infinity. But I just wonder, are these the kind of thoughts to keep you awake if, in fact, you actually sleep up there on the space station? It just looks so damn big. that it just keeps you up at night?

It's beautiful. It's big and beautiful, and you can see more stars up there for a 10 or 15-minute time frame than you're going to see anywhere on Earth. And so if I'm awake, I'm probably got a camera in my hand because I want to take more pictures for that.

But no, I don't lose any sleep over that. I'm at peace with our place in the universe. Personally, I think that there's probably got to be life out there somewhere, but, you know, it's so far. And so we're never going to see it. We're never going to meet it. And I think humans will be gone before we ever realize it, or we have a chance to realize it for that. The universe has been around for a long time.

13.8 billion last day. I mean, if I can believe this stuff I narrate. That, that is what blows my head up. Tell me about it. Why? Just the yawning chasm of time. You just can't fathom. You know, you talk about the, you know, start with the Big Bang, and then you talk about the expansion of the universe and how everything has progressed.

the next 13 billion years could look like. And there's just some really good theories out there, most of which I don't really fully understand. I just read them very quickly because they're interesting. But just to wrap your, we have 100-year brains. And to add 10 or 15 zeros out of that, it just doesn't compute. I got this book called Children of the Universe by an unpronounceable German physicist who tries to get his head around in the first couple of pages.

And he says, so take the $13.8.8 billion and imagine it as 10 meters, right? That's what it is. That's the beginning of everything. It's 10 meters long. And then basically he goes through a number of touch points. But in the end, he says, now the amount of time that humans have been in existence occupies space on this 10 meter, right? linear thing. How much space does it occupy? The answer is three microns. So, I mean, it's invisible.

It's an infinitesimal spec on the far right end. And he said, he also says that something we should do to help kids early on is set aside a week in school, probably in the third or fourth grade, and count to a million. Right? Like, until you count to a million, you don't have a sense of what it means. But if you get there, then you start to understand that, that's a lot of sand, that's a lot of money, that's a lot of anything, and so forth and so. We just don't know what numbers mean anymore,

which is probably why we're, what, $34 trillion in debt? I was just thinking. All right, look, man, I want to be respectful of your time, but would you go to the Titanic if offered? No, I'd have to wait and see what program. As far as I know, there's only one program that recently stopped working to bring you down there. But if the program was right, I'd go in a heartbeat. I'd go in a heartbeat.

There it is. It's really just a privilege. I met what I said. I was so flattered when you reached out, and I'm doubly flattered that you set aside all this time for us. You've got so many fans. I'm honored to know you. Oh, I forgot to ask you about racing. Are you driving? Are you back in your hobby? So I had a Harley before I flew in a... space and I came back and I was driving that around quite a bit. And then my desires changed a little bit. I sold it and I bought some land north of Houston and I'm building a small ranch up there. So I'm starting, I think, to settle down and become more of a farmer. What are you going to raise? I don't know. Cow? I mean, what do you think beef? Are you going to grow crops? What's the

plan? No, it's just a getaway for now for that. And I'm going to try to practice, I'm going to have a few big gardens and I try to practice growing vegetables and things like that. And we do have some critters on the properties such as hogs and bobcats and coyotes and things like that. It may practice hunting, you know, when it comes to the wild hogs there and sturdy up those skills a little bit there. But tell you the truth, I just love getting up there in the middle of the day when it's hot on the weekends and putting in a fence line and just working myself to the bone and putting it all together. I come back feeling refreshed and knowing that I actually did something positive.

You're still that guy, man. You're still the part-time bagel maker. I am. I am, absolutely. Amazing. I should probably eat more bagels while I'm up there. I wouldn't lose so much weight. Bone density.

All right, brother. Yeah, that's right. Thank you again for being so generous with your time. But are you out there with some social presence? Do people follow you? Do you want to send these people somewhere to do? something? So right now I would just say keep in touch with www.nasa.gov.

There's a lot of information on the programs. Right now, I got rid of my Twitter account a while ago and the social media was starting to get a little bit crazy, so I decided to just get some distance from it. I do have an Instagram account and I'm probably going to start up Twitter and some other social websites before my next mission here in a couple years for that. So keep an eye on it and we'll get it up and running here and give the folks that. a place to go. Right now, it's just the normal I'm on LinkedIn, which I enjoy being on for a professional website. But other than that, it's just nassah.gov. Got it. Is your Instagram

handle at Astro underscore Maker? Yes, sir. That's the question that we didn't ask just very quickly. How did you get the call sign maker? So I came out of initial training and they give you your call signs. You don't have much choice in it. And if you fight it, that becomes your call sign forever. And that's just the way it works. But I had a call sign that was a little bit more. I won't say it on the podcast here. And when I got to my first squadron, the commanding officer,

they had painted it on the side of an airplane. And the commanding officer said, you cannot be that. That's not your call sign. I'm going to get fired. And so they sent the whole wardroom back to the drawing board to figure out what my call sign was going to be. And so they voted and it became Make Her Tingle. Make Her Tingle.

Make her tingle. I was thinking it was an homage to fabrication, but it was an homage to something else altogether. Yeah, then maybe we aren't known for imaginative type of responses. You're probably going to have to hang up on me to end this call because I keep wanting to ask you. On a slightly serious note, you're wearing a NASA shirt. The NASA logo is there. you're sitting in front of the globe, you're really representing an agency. You're an ambassador for a lot of people, but you're also an individual and a fairly

rugged one, if you'll pardon the, oh, what are they? The trope. Do you feel pressure to not always be yourself? Do you carry the weight of that world behind you on those shoulders of yours? You know, sometimes it kind of depends on kind of what's going on. I just had a couple of years where adjusting to that was a little hard because you try really hard to do everything just right because you really do. You want to be that good representative. You want to be the diplomat. You want to let everybody know that you're working for the greatest agency in the world. And sometimes, obviously, we have a very

large PAO group and they do a great job about putting talking points together. And you can read into that and say, well, why would they want me to say this? This is not what I believe. But when you look at it and you talk to them, they're very good people. They're very smart. And they're really giving you the information so that you can process it into what you believe. And kind of weave the thread on that. And after I realized how to work that together, the angst came down, the stress, the nervousness. came down. And I trust everybody around me. You know, I've made mistakes and they tell me about it and I fix it or I apologize or get smarter and don't do it again. But I trust the people will support me behind me in the scenes, specifically in our PAO and in our operational leadership for that.

And so from that, no, no stress whatsoever anymore. And I love to talk about human spaceflight, especially with a country that's really pressing forward. We've got the Artemis Accords going. We've got really a huge international program that we are proud to represent. So that was a kind of a, I've not had that question before. I've asked it to myself several times. And I think this is the first time I've put it into words. So thank you for asking it. Well, you're welcome because I know it's a delicate thing.

It's a balancing act. And the world does feel a little out of balance right now. And I guess it makes a certain amount of sense that an astronaut could kind of swoop in and make it sensible. for us. So we appreciate it very much. Mike, I'm getting signals from Houston that we better wrap this up. Got it. All right, good. Just as well. Please thank everybody on that end, Scott. You know how to reach us, reach out anytime if there's anything we can ever do for you. And yeah, what a pleasure. Thank you. You bet. It's all my honor, Mike and Chuck. Thank you so much for reaching out.

Thanks for talking to me during my six months up there. It's a pleasure. I love listening to your podcast. I love watching you on TV and thanks for making me part of your life. Privilege. Be careful up there. When you leave a review which we hope that you'll do, tell us who you are. Tell us who you are. And before you go, won't you leave a stop? Being outside is good for us. It's that simple. And trails make it easy for us to walk, bike, and be active outside in our own backyards. On the trail, we see people moving, connecting with their communities, making the places where they live great. For 40 years, Rails to Trails Conservancy has led the way, creating trails across the country,

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