In this episode, Garrett talks about his time in space and what it's like returning home after a long stint in space. He talks about the physical and mental challenges of coming back to Earth after such a long period of time, and how to recover. Garrett is a former astronaut who served as an astronaut on the space shuttle Endeavour Discovery and served as a Navy SEAL Team Six member. He also served as the commander of the Space Shuttle Discovery, and was a member of the Astronaut Corps. He is now retired from the Navy and serves as a consultant for the Department of Defense. Garrett is the author of the book "Space Junk" and is a regular contributor to the Astronomy and Physiology section of the New York Times. He has also been featured in the Hollywood Reporter, and is one of the most influential people in the science fiction and fantasy communities. Thank you to Garrett for coming on the show and for being kind enough to share his story with us. I really enjoyed this episode and I hope you do too! Thanks to Garrett and the crew at NASA for letting me use his voice on this episode. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and share it with a friend or become a supporter of this podcast. It helps us spread the word. Thanks again and again! Cheers, Garrett, Garrett and God bless you! -Jon and Garrett, Jon and Brett, and God Blessings, Caitlyn, and Cheers. -P.S. -Jon & Brett, -A. Jon & Garrett, Kristy, Caitlyn and Ben, and Joe, and Sarah, and Mike, and the Crew Chief, and all the rest of the Crew at The Crew at NASA HQ. --Jon and Jason, and everyone else at the Space Junk Project, and so much more! -- Thank you so much, Jon, Jon & Ben, too much, Thank you for being here, Jon and Jon, and thank you for listening to this podcast, and thanks for listening and supporting us all for listening, and for supporting us, and good vibes, and we appreciate you, and sending us back again and back and back again, again and more and again, thank you, again, and again and AGAIN, and more, and much more. Love you, bye, and Thank you again, bye! <3 -
00:00:24.000Which actually is kind of a bummer, to be honest with you, because you know this if you saw that video maybe, but the thing is, if you stay for a hundred days, they give you a patch, right?
00:00:34.000I'm at day 95, and Space Shell Discovery shows up to bring me home, and Mark Kelly was the commander.
00:00:41.000He goes, Garrett, it's time to hop in and come home.
00:00:44.000And I'm like, man, I just need five more days to get that patch.
00:00:48.000Can we just go around a few more times or something?
00:01:53.000Does your body severely weaken in 95 days?
00:01:57.000Well, back when I was going there, so that mission, my long-term mission was back in 2008. And back then, we were still losing bone density and muscle mass as we're going up there.
00:02:10.000You lost about 1% of bone every month.
00:02:24.000And it's resistive exercise that does it for you.
00:02:27.000Which we knew back when I was going, but the problem was we had this machine that was kind of a first generation of the workout machine, and it could do large reps but low load.
00:02:40.000So you're doing like a lot of reps at low weight.
00:02:43.000And that helped, but what helps, it turns out, we found this out kind of by happenstance, but it turns out that high load, low reps works much better.
00:02:52.000And so we got this new machine that you could really crank it up to 11, and the guys now that are working out on that thing are coming home with no muscle or bone loss at all.
00:03:22.000But overall, it does take to get everything back, to get your full vestibular system back, your sense of balance, to get all your bone, all your muscle back to baseline.
00:03:30.000It took me a year to get all that back, too.
00:07:24.000Yeah, that would probably be what would happen.
00:07:27.000And it must take a long-ass time to get everything back.
00:07:30.000If you went from Earth's gravity to the space station, and you lived up there for a year and didn't do anything about it, and then came back to Earth, you'd basically be like, it would be hard to crawl, right?
00:08:41.000So it's something that I never really noticed it, but...
00:08:46.000I don't know how much of that is real and how much it's like you're freaking out because you're in space, right?
00:08:51.000So it's distracting and maybe you forget what that number was you're supposed to remember.
00:08:56.000But if you're really in the middle of something and you're all excited and you kind of can't remember somebody's phone number, it's kind of like that.
00:09:17.000Because the other thing that happens is you have this big fluid shift.
00:09:21.000So right now, we have a lot of blood pooling up in our legs and our heart, its most important job, of course, is to feed the brain oxygenated blood.
00:09:31.000And then when you take the gravity vector out of the picture, the heart sends too much up to the brain and the stuff doesn't collect in our legs anymore and it all shoots up here and you get the shift of all that blood volume and Yeah.
00:10:02.000I could have sworn I was standing on my head doing a headstand or a handstand.
00:10:05.000I'm like, why am I standing on my head in my sleep?
00:10:23.000And then after a day or two, you get used to it and it doesn't bother you anymore, but you feel congested because you still have all this volume up here.
00:10:31.000So your sense of smell and your sense of taste are all deadened.
00:10:35.000It's kind of like, yeah, so it's kind of like when you have a cold and your sense of smell and your sense of taste are, like, not as strong.
00:10:51.000We got, like, sriracha, we got, you know, Louisiana Cajun fire sauce and all, whatever.
00:10:57.000We got, like, a whole stockpile of it because you pour that on everything so you can get some taste because otherwise everything tastes really bland.
00:11:21.000You have the American food, which is essentially MREs, like military freeze-dried, irradiated, infinite shelf life kind of stuff.
00:11:31.000And then the Russian food is also based on their military rations, but from submarines.
00:11:37.000And the Russian food actually tastes better, but the problem is one of presentation, because it comes in cans.
00:11:45.000So you get these cans, and even though it tastes good, you open that can up and you look at it, and it's like, God, it looks like dog food.
00:12:55.000I didn't see it right away because I was in the mid-deck, the downstairs of the shuttle, and there's only one window down there, and it's in the corner, okay?
00:13:03.000So it's in the hatch, and it's like the size of a dinner plate.
00:13:33.000And when I felt like I was ready, I floated up to that window and I opened up my eyes and I gazed out for the very first time at the earth from space.
00:13:45.000And what that felt like It's really, really hard to describe in words, but if I had to pick one word to describe what I was feeling at that moment, it would be, meh.
00:14:46.000Yeah, most people that have done it, they talk about this realization, this inescapable realization that we're all on this thing together and that all these boundaries of civilizations and cultures and countries and continents are all nonsense.
00:15:04.000We're really just all on this one thing together.
00:15:07.000Yeah, they call that the overview effect.
00:15:08.000And a lot of guys come back and talk about that, and they really feel it, and they talk about a world without borders.
00:15:14.000And it's a beautiful sentiment, and I don't want to knock that in any way.
00:15:42.000But that didn't strike me as a sudden realization because I think it's because I knew that before I went.
00:15:48.000You shouldn't have to go and strap into a rocket and blast off and look at the earth and know that basically we're all human beings, I think.
00:15:56.000I mean, I think the things that unite us are so much stronger and more important than the crazy little things that divide us like race or sex or nationality or politics or whatever.
00:16:10.000And at the end of the day, we have this one home, and we're all stuck here together.
00:16:16.000So I had that strong knowledge before I went.
00:16:21.000And maybe that's why when I look down, I'm like, yeah, there it is.
00:20:50.000And then I talked to the trainers and we said, okay, yeah, we got to think outside the box here.
00:20:54.000If we give you the standard procedure, you're going to be at a disadvantage.
00:20:58.000But maybe we change your body positions instead of going straight on to the work site.
00:21:01.000Maybe we come at the work site from the side so you get more reach that way.
00:21:05.000And we started working at it and we got better and better.
00:21:08.000And the end of the story is that I got...
00:21:11.000Eventually, I got the highest possible qualification to do the most complicated spacewalks we do, and I ended up doing three different spacewalks over the course of my career.
00:21:21.000And that big tall guy that laughed in my face, he didn't get to do any.
00:21:28.000That's your gift for talking shit, sir.
00:24:27.000So your ability to raise up your shoulders is really limited.
00:24:31.000So you're trying to do all this work but you're working inside the suit and I describe it as like it's like trying to change the oil in your car while wearing a medieval suit of armor.
00:25:19.000It really helps to have some kind of mechanical aptitude.
00:25:22.000I mean, a lot of us like working on our cars or building things in our garage, hobbyist kind of stuff.
00:25:27.000We actually started right as I was leaving NASA, which was back in 2010, we started kind of an informal program where we were going over to others' garages and doing car repair stuff just to get more hands-on experience with that kind of thing.
00:25:43.000So, say if you have to do an antenna up there, is that something you're trained for on Earth, in a pool, and then you go up there and do it?
00:25:53.000Everything we did was choreographed down to exactly what handrail I'm going to put my toolbox on.
00:25:59.000I mean, everything is all figured out in advance.
00:26:02.000But nowadays, and sometimes on Space Station, even when I was there, when things break, you don't have the luxury of training.
00:26:08.000If we're going to do a shuttle mission, we're doing a really complex spacewalk, we'll do everything we're going to do in space at least 10 times in the pool first.
00:26:17.000But these days, you don't have that luxury.
00:26:19.000Something breaks, and you brief it, you talk about it, you have some PowerPoints, and then you're out the door and you've got to go do it.
00:26:26.000So how much briefing and how many PowerPoints?
00:26:29.000The training that goes on prior to one of these unscheduled EVAs is, you know, typically on the order of like a day's worth of activity, all told.
00:26:37.000So are these PowerPoints preloaded onto the space station, or do they have to beam it up to you?
00:26:43.000It depends on exactly what you're doing.
00:26:45.000So we identify like the most likely and most serious things that could go wrong, and we practice those in the pool, and we have all those procedures suitcase before we ever go.
00:26:54.000But then sometimes you get a surprise.
00:26:55.000Sometimes something breaks you weren't expecting to break, or it breaks in a certain way, or there's a complication that you weren't planning on, and then you've got to improvise.
00:27:06.000And you're probably doing things that other people on the space station maybe haven't done.
00:27:11.000So there's no one that can tell you, hey, I did it, it's no big deal.
00:27:14.000Yeah, but you know, even if you're doing something that you rehearsed ten times and you think you got it all figured out, you still get surprised when you actually get up there.
00:27:22.000The big one that I remember is on my second spacewalk, we're connecting this dish antenna and it had to go on top of this big boom, like a big pedestal.
00:27:31.000And there was a connector that had an electrical connector.
00:27:34.000And we had like an hour or so to connect the thing And without it connected, it wasn't getting any power or data to that antenna.
00:28:16.000And we get up there like, it doesn't fit.
00:28:18.000And we're like, crap, you know, what do we do?
00:28:22.000So we're shoving, and we're shoving so hard, we're pushing on this thing so hard that the guys inside the space station said they feel the space station shaking.
00:28:54.000I said, hey, the problem we were basically having was that the female side was too small and the male side was too big for it to fit together.
00:29:03.000So I said to one of my crewmates inside, I said, hey, How long till the sun comes up?
00:29:09.000Because, you know, it takes 90 minutes to go around the earth, and every 45 minutes the sun is either coming up or going down.
00:29:17.000And he goes, actually, about 10 minutes, because we're behind the earth, and it was dark, and then in 10 minutes, the sun was going to come up.
00:31:10.000You're not going to be able to reprogram it.
00:31:12.000Now, that feeling that you were talking about of looking out the window where it was kind of meh, and then the difference between that and the spacewalk, is that where you get this real sense of being in space, above the Earth?
00:31:27.000Yeah, that's breathtaking because you have this helmet that's like a giant fishbowl, and after a while, you kind of forget that it's there.
00:31:35.000And you're just like, it's like, you know, the old Superman with Christopher Reeve when he's like flying around the earth and he's just like in his underwear or whatever.
00:31:53.000If you spend a lot of time down there, you can get to the point where you kind of like forget that you're in this alien environment and it becomes like, you become one with it.
00:33:04.000So like if you run out of air or you lose sight of your body or something, you can't go to the surface because within a couple hours you'll be dead.
00:33:14.000And we use cave diving techniques that we did a lot of training for to be safe.
00:33:19.000And we have redundant tanks, redundant manifolds, redundant regulators, and we had valves that we can flip around so we can always make sure we can get air without ever having to, in an emergency, ever having to come up because coming up is not an option.
00:38:38.000With the sound of the ocean, like, lapping against the dome.
00:38:44.000And you're looking down, and there's endless black, you know, just a black void.
00:38:49.000And you're thinking about every single scary ocean movie, like Jaws, you know, The Meg, whatever, The Abyss, all those scary movies, right?
00:39:02.000Things that could be down there can't help but going through your head so it's kind of freaky and then you finish and you put your mask back on and I took a big breath and I went down and I opened my eyes in my in my mask in the darkness with my flashlight and I saw like right in front of me this huge eyeball Like,
00:39:24.000about the size, I don't know, of a saucer.
00:42:52.000And what is the capacity of these tanks?
00:42:55.000Like how long can you stay down just swimming around for?
00:42:58.000We have two, and we can isolate them in case one of them springs a leak.
00:43:02.000But you don't have that much more time than a standard scuba tank.
00:43:05.000But what we have is refill stations all around the floor with high-pressure hoses.
00:43:10.000So we have these quick disconnects on our system that you can plug in and fill it right back up, and then you're good to go for another couple hours.
00:43:18.000So when you swim to go take a poo, you have to do that?
00:43:22.000You have to wear the tank, or do you just hold your breath?
00:43:53.000The thing about it, what makes it such a great training exercise psychologically is if you had to get to a hospital, it takes about the same time from that habitat as it would from the space station.
00:44:06.000In the space station, you got to get in the Soyuz, you got to put your space suit on, you got to detach the Soyuz from the space station, you got to separate from the space station, you got to do a deorbit burn, you got to land, the helicopter's got to come get you.
00:44:17.000By the time all that's done, it's like a day.
00:44:34.000None of us are happy about this, but what happened was the shuttles...
00:44:39.000The shuttle, let me just say this, is a magnificent flying machine.
00:44:42.000I mean, what's really remarkable, if you go down to the California Science Center and you look at Endeavour, we designed that thing in the 70s.
00:45:56.000I knew the guys in Columbia, and that was really, really rough.
00:46:00.000And then the second thing was it's super expensive because it took so much maintenance, even though it was reusable, or most of it was.
00:46:07.000It took so much maintenance, it took a standing army to keep it running.
00:46:10.000We're spending, I think, three or four billion dollars a year on the program.
00:46:14.000And there's no way, if we wanted to build something that was going to be more cost-effective or safer, There's no way we're going to get a plus up from Congress of like an additional $4 billion a year to go do that.
00:46:25.000The only way really to make it happen was to stop flying the shuttle.
00:46:29.000So we took a very painful decision and we said, okay, we're going to retire these things so we can make something new.
00:46:36.000And we know that there's going to be a gap period where we're not going to have anything and it's going to suck.
00:46:41.000But the good news is, and the great timing about this conversation right now, is that gap ends this year.
00:47:17.000And the schedules are just aligning, so it looks like it all will happen in 2020. Now, they've done some people, civilian trips up into space, right?
00:47:29.000They have, and that's all happened by paying the Russians for rides, yeah.
00:47:34.000Why is their equipment so much better?
00:48:15.000So you're launching, and they're like, this is not good!
00:48:18.000Yeah, it has these side boosters, and one of them got stuck, didn't come off right, and they were starting to spin out of control, and then they punched out.
00:50:27.000But that's kind of like needing to use your ejection seat every single time you go for a flight.
00:50:31.000Because for some reason, if it doesn't jettison, you're dead.
00:50:35.000You can't get the parachutes out with that thing stuck up on top.
00:50:38.000So that's like a failure mode that if you put the engines down here, you don't have to worry about that.
00:50:43.000Plus, you carry it with you the whole time.
00:50:45.000So you could use those powerful engines to really get quickly away from The booster, like the Falcon 9, if it's having a bad day, you can use those...
00:51:51.000And the booster went kaboom, but it was, I think, if I remember right, I think it was 1.5 kilometers away when the rocket went kaboom, and it was fine.
00:52:02.000Now, when you guys do these test flights, do they have to anticipate where this stuff is going to land?
00:52:48.000And that's why Cape Canaveral is where Cape Canaveral is, because if you look at a map of Florida...
00:52:55.000The Cape is where Florida has a little prominence that juts out to the east, into the Atlantic.
00:53:00.000And that way you can go due east, which is generally what you want to do when you launch, or you can even turn a little bit north or south and you're not going to fly over anybody's house or Disneyland or anything.
00:53:48.000Well, now the Russians and the Chinese don't necessarily honor that.
00:53:52.000They actually, the Chinese have dropped Nasty burning boosters on, you know, it's sparsely populated, but they still have dropped these things on like villages and stuff.
00:54:11.000But in the US we always, so we launch, and the reason that you usually want to launch to the east is you want to take advantage of the earth's rotation to give you like a slingshot effect.
00:54:20.000Because if you go to the east, the earth is rotating this way.
00:54:23.000It kind of slingshots you into orbit, going with the rotation.
00:54:27.000And that's why you also want to be as close to the equator as you can, because if you're at the North Pole and you launch east, it's not going to help you, right?
00:54:33.000But the lower you are towards the equator, the more of a slingshot you get.
00:54:36.000Now, did they have to figure out over time where those things were dropping?
00:55:10.000And these boosters that fall into the ocean, do they have them documented, like where they're landing, so they know where these things are scattered out throughout the ocean?
00:55:20.000And one cool thing was, probably the most famous booster that landed in the bottom of the ocean was Apollo 11, the Saturn V. And it was just sitting there, you know, as a fish habitat.
00:57:30.000I mean, those villagers are getting pretty unlucky because it is pretty sparsely populated, so you're just playing the odds, but we wouldn't do that.
00:57:37.000Well, that has to be terrible for their...
00:58:23.000So when I was at NASA, they would send us out to do these PR events, and we'd go to schools, and I would go back to Jersey, where I'm from, and go visit all these school systems.
00:58:55.000I just got back two nights ago, actually.
00:58:57.000So every year on the anniversary of the Columbia tragedy, they have a Space Week in Israel where they have a whole bunch of STEM education events.
00:59:05.000And there's also a technical conference.
00:59:08.000And then there's a memorial for the first Israeli astronaut that was on Columbia, Elon.
00:59:13.000I got to know his family really well, and I go back there every year, and we had the memorial last Friday.
00:59:20.000And so, yeah, I'm still, and I try to, I think I met every school kid in Israel.
00:59:26.000And I got to, you know, just try to get him excited about the future, about a bright future, you know.
00:59:32.000Well, one of the reasons why I brought this up is I saw a video where you talked about how during your childhood you had a photo on your wall of looking at the earth from the moon, the photograph that was taken.
01:00:56.000And I kept working, and any time I was having a difficult time, I looked up at that thing and said, no, one day I'm going to hang that in the astronaut office in the Johnson Space Center.
01:01:06.000That must have been surreal, the moment you were on that spacewalk, thinking about your childhood and thinking about being inspired by those images.
01:02:07.000And so we would operate it in mission control, but we're also we're designing the crew one that we showed you.
01:02:12.000So we were coming up with the procedures and all the rules of how we're going to use that thing and meeting all of NASA's requirements and helping to provide input to the guys designing the displays and the suits and the controls and the seats and all the stuff you need for people.
01:02:26.000And so that was, you know, I did that for quite a long time.
01:02:31.000What are your thoughts on this – what's happening now with space travel where it's transferring into the public sector or the private sector rather instead of being something that the government handles.
01:03:18.000It was built here by like McDonnell Douglas and North American Rockwell built – if I remember right, North American built the command module and the lunar lander was built by Grumman.
01:04:46.000But they had to do it that way during World War II is when it started because Like nobody knew how much it was going to cost to build a P-51 Mustang because nobody did one before.
01:05:54.000All those dreams of science fiction, like being able to take your vacations around the rings of Saturn and private space stations, all that kind of stuff that we grew up hoping would happen when we were older, I think it's really finally starting.
01:06:09.000Because this is the beginning of that infrastructure, that private sector commercial infrastructure and ability to actually get it done.
01:06:18.000We're always talking about how wrong they got the future in like Space 1999. Remember that television show?
01:09:10.000And then like liquid hydrogen or even plastic that's derived from hydrogen is pretty good shielding.
01:09:19.000Okay, so you could have like conceivably a light plastic suit that you wear that could shield you from a lot of the radiation on the way to Mars?
01:09:26.000There's actually a company in Israel that is teaming with NASA that's going to fly these like vests to try to shield the people.
01:09:32.000You can also put it in a hull, or you can have just a storm shelter.
01:09:36.000Because there's basically, when we're on the space station, we're above all the atmosphere, but we're still below the magnetic field of the Earth.
01:09:43.000So we still enjoy a lot of protection from radiation.
01:09:46.000Once you go out of that and you go to the moon or to Mars, then you're basically hanging it out there.
01:10:54.000So you have a six-month window where you have to just roll the dice?
01:10:58.000Well, so what you can do is you can have a storm shelter, right, where you put like a lot of this shielding.
01:11:02.000And then if you could detect the SPE, the GCR is there all the time, but the solar events, you can detect them coming, and you have enough warning time to get everybody into the storm shelter.
01:12:08.000Yeah, but again, we keep getting smarter about it, and I think, you know, for like right now, we can send you to Mars and bring you back, and probabilistically speaking, you'd probably have like an additional 4-5% chance of developing cancer over your lifetime,
01:12:26.000which is not like a death sentence, you know.
01:12:58.000We know exactly what radiation is out there.
01:13:00.000We don't know exactly what that radiation does to humans.
01:13:05.000The best we have to go on is like data from some of the atomic bomb survivors and radiation workers that work in like power plants and stuff to take some dose.
01:13:14.000But it's a different kind of radiation.
01:13:16.000So right now, the error bars are really big.
01:13:18.000So when we say like, oh, 5% chance of cancer, that's taking a very conservative estimate.
01:13:24.000If we can find out what it really does to humans, maybe it's a lot more benign.
01:13:28.000And maybe we can sharpen that pencil and say, yeah, it's acceptable.
01:15:31.000The new design, have they made advances in how that stuff is applied, or is it a different surface they use?
01:15:40.000Yeah, so that is something that's also not really a worry anymore.
01:15:44.000The reason that Columbia took that damage was it was foam, like the big orange tank that's behind the space shuttle, it sticks up above the space shuttle, and some foam fell off of it.
01:15:54.000We always had some foam shedding off the thing, and in the beginning we took that very, very seriously as a major problem.
01:16:00.000But the thing is, there's this concept of, I'm going to forget the name of it now.
01:16:18.000So it's when you get away with something for so long that something that was a deviant thing or something that was bad is treated as a normal thing.
01:16:37.000We couldn't really come up with an easy fix.
01:16:39.000In the meantime, we're flying, and nothing bad was happening.
01:16:42.000What was really happening is we were getting lucky.
01:16:45.000And then eventually, a big piece came off, hit Columbia right in the wing, and it shattered, made a big hole in the side of the wing, but nobody knew for sure.
01:16:55.000And they made a bad decision to not, like, investigate it further, assumed it was okay, brought him home, and obviously you know what happened.
01:17:35.000And then we could shelter in place on the space station.
01:17:39.000So there's a lot of things we could do with the shuttle, but the thing about with Dragon and Starliner and the new vehicles is they sit on top.
01:17:45.000So any foam that comes off the rocket is not going to hit you.
01:19:15.000You could use that thing at least 10 times.
01:19:18.000And this really was originally designed for actually entries coming back from the moon when you're going much faster and you build up a lot more heat when you hit the atmosphere than just coming back from the space station.
01:19:27.000So ultimately that's the goal for these things, to take people to the moon, to take people to Mars, to take people and reusable, right?
01:19:51.000The holy grail is 100% reusable, but affordable reusability, where you don't have to spend like a gazillion dollars refurbishing it in between flights.
01:20:01.000And we're getting there, and the next vehicle is going to be the real, that's going to be the real, hopefully we will get that holy grail with this starship that we're working on now.
01:20:12.000So there's a top secret one that you can't talk about?
01:21:20.000This thing, and I know that the guys up in Blue Origin at Jeff Bezos' company has got all kinds of incredible stuff on their drawing board.
01:21:27.0002020 is the start, but it's just the start.
01:22:54.000And then we're going to get both back.
01:22:55.000The rocket will land on its tail, and then this thing, after it goes off to the moon or even Mars, it'll come back and also land on its tail, and then we'll get both pieces.
01:23:05.000And then we've really got reusability gone.
01:23:07.000And hopefully we'll be able to use each one like 100 times at least.
01:23:11.000Now, is there any innovation or any breakthroughs in fuel in the type of propulsion systems that you need?
01:23:20.000Conceivably, is there ever going to be a time where we have like a Star Wars X fighter that can just go shoot off onto its own?
01:23:28.000You know, there's potential for more advanced, more efficient thrust engines, and probably one of the most promising ones in the near term is actually a nuclear engine, a nuclear thermal rocket.
01:23:38.000Where instead of using combustion to propel hot gases out the back of your nozzle, you actually use a nuclear reactor and you take hydrogen, you flow it over that, you heat it up like super hot and shoot it out the back without lighting it on fire.
01:23:51.000And if you do that, you can actually get much more thrust with much less mass of fuel, like a smaller fuel tank but more thrust.
01:24:04.000So it's conceivable that one day there could be a standalone unit that doesn't need thrusters that eject...
01:24:11.000It still would look like a regular rocket because the back of the nozzle would still have fire coming out the back, but it would just be superheated.
01:24:18.000Instead of lighting on fire to heat it up, there you go.
01:25:07.000And you have to bring your own oxygen if you're in space because you don't have the atmosphere anymore.
01:25:13.000So you carry liquid oxygen and some fuel.
01:25:16.000And in the Falcon 9, for example, it's basically kerosene.
01:25:19.000It's rocket fuel, but it's RP-1, but it's basically kerosene mixed with liquid oxygen.
01:25:25.000The engine you saw in that Starhopper is advanced and different because what it uses, it still uses liquid oxygen, but instead of kerosene, it uses liquid methane.
01:25:35.000And it's actually not as efficient quite.
01:25:37.000It doesn't have quite the specific impulse, which is a measure of efficiency.
01:25:41.000It doesn't have that quite as good as hydrogen.
01:25:43.000It's better than kerosene, but not quite as good as hydrogen.
01:26:10.000But the beautiful thing is if you can go someplace and gas up again, fill up your tank without having to bring all the gas with you, that's huge, right?
01:26:22.000And with the carbon dioxide that's in the Martian atmosphere, And the water that's in the ice that's on the surface of Mars, you can have a reaction process that allows you to take those two things and make liquid methane.
01:26:38.000And you can have a tank of that ready to go and all done robotically.
01:26:42.000You can get the telemetry back saying, we got the gas, and then you go.
01:26:46.000Now, how much are things going to accelerate now that you have all these different companies competing against each other?
01:26:53.000It's like the pace of technological change is like really going exponential again, just kind of like it was during Apollo.
01:27:00.000So we're back onto that really rapid, that fast track.
01:27:03.000We kind of fell off of that for a little while.
01:27:05.000And the nice thing about people ask me, like, what's the biggest difference between working at SpaceX and working at NASA? And I would say it's decision speed because we'll make up our mind quickly.
01:27:16.000Now, the reason we can do that is we've got a tremendous amount of agility.
01:27:19.000Because sometimes when you make up your mind quickly...
01:27:24.000But if you hurry up and figure out that you made the wrong decision and you have the agility to then say, okay, that was not right, let's try something else, then it works.
01:27:33.000At NASA, you know, we had all these contractors and suppliers and a very cumbersome kind of system that we took a long time to make sure we made the right decision because changing things was prohibitively costly.
01:27:46.000But SpaceX doesn't have to worry about that.
01:27:55.000So NASA has this commercial crew program and they selected two commercial companies to partner with, SpaceX and Boeing.
01:28:02.000And so Boeing is using an older rocket that's been around a long time called the Atlas V. And they built a capsule to go on top of that called the Starliner.
01:28:12.000And so this is strictly for commercial flights.
01:28:15.000Well, I mean, it's the anchor tenant, if you will, the core customer is still NASA. Because NASA is going to use both of these rockets to replace the space shuttle, and we won't have to beg the Russians for rides anymore.
01:28:27.000Let me see what the Boeing one looks like.
01:29:03.000So does it fill up like the way they use rovers on Mars where it's surrounded by these gigantic airbags and it bounces when it hits the ground?
01:29:11.000It doesn't bounce because that's not good for people.
01:29:25.000On the same sort of timeline as the SpaceX ship?
01:29:28.000Yeah, I think SpaceX is really ready to go in March, very soon.
01:29:36.000But I think we're going to wait a little longer because they're talking about extending the mission for Bob and Doug and keeping them on the space station.
01:29:58.000I mean, how well do you have to have the system working before you put the boss in the capsule and shoot him off into the heavens?
01:30:03.000He's got a lot of work to do here, so I don't think he's going anytime soon, but he does eventually, when we get this up and running, he does eventually want to go.
01:30:12.000He talks about he wants to die on Mars, just not on impact.
01:31:31.000But hopefully there'll be plenty of room inside once this thing grows to be really big.
01:31:37.000We also have to make sure it's really well protected from radiation because even once you're on Mars, you have to worry about those GCRs and...
01:33:54.000And that's why if we send people and we live on the moon or we go to Mars and we live on Mars and we have data, like on the moon it's about a sixth of the Earth's gravity.
01:34:04.000So we'll get points in between and then we can figure out if this thing is...
01:34:09.000There's a lot of stuff that happens to you that may be completely solved with even just the smallest amount of G. But we don't know.
01:34:27.000Like, what are they going to do with food on Mars?
01:34:29.000Are they going to have to fly all the ingredients out, everything out?
01:34:33.000Once you start talking about missions that are that long, carrying all your food with you, bringing it all, becomes mass prohibitive.
01:34:41.000You know, you just got to take so much, and that just means you need that much bigger of a rocket, and it just, after a while, it gets, you know, to the point where it doesn't work.
01:34:50.000What's all the food for the rest of your life, essentially?
01:35:42.000I open up the book before I go to bed, and I'm reading this like, okay, I got 62 souls, and I got to cover 3,000 kilometers, and I've got 52 moles of nitrogen, hydroxide, blah, blah, blah.
01:36:27.000The idea that you can get stuck up there.
01:36:29.000The only part of the movie, which I don't think was in the book, that was not realistic at all, was when he cuts his glove and does the Iron Man thing.
01:37:25.000But they're not equalizing with the pressure as they go down, you know, when they do those, like, free diving things, right?
01:37:31.000So if you're going to equalize, you're going to have to let the air out, or it's going to just expand and be extremely painful and hurt you.
01:37:43.000So you could do that, but then eventually you get to the point where the pressure gets so low that all the liquid in your tissues starts turning into gas, and it's called ebulism.
01:37:53.000And then you'll start getting this massive swelling, like your neck will puff up like that, and you'll get grotesque swelling wherever your blood is turning into gas, and all the liquids in your tissues are turning into gas.
01:38:10.000How long will that take before that starts happening?
01:38:12.000That will start happening fairly quickly when you equalize, after you breathe out all that air.
01:38:18.000You can counteract it by having squeeze suits, like suits with mechanical counterpressure that squeeze it and hold it in, like a blood pressure cuff kind of pressure kind of thing.
01:39:01.000Now, what is the timeline in terms of, like, does SpaceX have a multiple-stage timeline, like a timeline for incorporating the Dragon Crew, and then a timeline for the Starhopper, and then a timeline for additional projects in the future?
01:39:18.000Like, is he thinking along these lines of, like, charted-out progress?
01:39:44.000So he's got an idea and he'll keep pushing and he gives us aggressive timelines that we have to work to and we work really hard to try to meet him.
01:39:52.000It's hard when you're doing stuff that is this complicated to predict exactly how long it's going to take.
01:39:58.000So we end up often falling a little bit behind, but we do our best.
01:40:02.000That's the case though with everything that's that crazy, right?
01:40:50.000And I said, well, if you can go back in time and you were a young engineer and you had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and work with Howard Hughes when he was doing all the crazy stuff he was doing in his day, wouldn't you want to be a part of that?
01:41:04.000Scott Pelley looked at me with a deer in the headlights look because I don't think he knew what I was talking about.
01:41:09.000But then I realized as soon as I said that, like, oh my god.
01:41:13.000I just made a terrible strategic error.
01:41:16.000I compared my boss to To Howard Hughes, you know, things didn't end up that well for Howard, you know?
01:41:56.000Remember that time we're on TV and I compared you to Howard Hughes, you know?
01:42:01.000I just want you to know I was comparing you to the young, dashing, starlit, dating Howard Hughes, not the old, decrepit, peeing-in-jars fingernail guy.
01:43:24.000The H1 Racer was a beautiful airplane, but it was a one-off.
01:43:27.000It never really led to a large design that changed the way people lived their lives.
01:43:32.000So that was his objection, was not that I was comparing him to some creep, but that he wants, it's really important to him to have the legacy that Of drastically impacting the way all of us live our lives, so kind of the way Steve Jobs did or others that really moved the ball downfield for humanity.
01:44:07.000And the fact that he does them all simultaneously, that he's involved in the Boring Project, he's involved in Tesla and SpaceX all simultaneously, and Tesla Home, solar, all the solar panels and making solar tiles for roofs, and he's doing so many different things at the same time.
01:44:45.000Have meetings with us, and he'll walk out of his last meeting, and he'll walk across the street to Hawthorne Airport, hop on his jet, and he's at Palo Alto in a couple hours, and he can be first thing in the morning at Tesla, and he's got a staff that helps him, and he's got those advantages.
01:45:01.000But that doesn't explain why he's able to do what he does.
01:45:11.000I don't know how he does it, to be honest.
01:45:12.000Well, he's the next stage of humanity.
01:45:15.000If people are evolving, he's like looking at us from the next spot.
01:45:20.000He's like, hey guys, I've got some ideas.
01:45:23.000Yeah, he's just an idea factory and what's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge.
01:45:32.000I mean, I've met a lot of super, super smart people, but they're usually super, super smart on one thing.
01:45:38.000And he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software and the most arcane aspects of that.
01:45:46.000And then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy.
01:45:57.000And his ability to do that across all the different technologies that go into rockets and cars and everything else he does, that's what really impresses me.
01:46:06.000Well, also the lack of burnout, because he's been doing it at this incredible rate, 16 hours a day, for how long?
01:46:51.000So his ultimate goal is to create some sort of a colony on Mars, but he believes that this technology will continue to expand to the point where we will be leaving our solar system.
01:47:05.000We will be making human trips into other solar systems, into actual deep space.
01:47:12.000Yeah, I mean, certainly, hopefully that's, you know, at some point, if we're going to survive, you take the really long view, you know, the solar system's not going to last forever.
01:48:08.000You know, we're doing a pretty good job of trashing this place all on our own.
01:48:11.000We don't really need an asteroid to hit us.
01:48:14.000We're kind of going down the road of making this place uninhabitable.
01:48:18.000Well, what we need is someone like Elon who concentrates on the solutions.
01:48:22.000I mean, he's obviously got a full plate, many full plates, but someone like him to concentrate on solutions to some of the environmental problems that we've created for ourselves here.
01:48:33.000Well, that's really, that was the thought behind Tesla.
01:48:35.000I mean, so Tesla's kind of like plan A, save this planet, and SpaceX is kind of plan B, if you look at it that way.
01:48:43.000It's just so weird to have a guy like that amongst us.
01:48:46.000Yeah, especially having him as your boss.
01:48:50.000Have you talked to him at all about simulation theory?
01:48:54.000The thing is, every time I talked to him, we focused on, and this is what he does, he focuses on the thing that we are working on.
01:49:02.000So that's one of the ways he does his time management.
01:49:05.000That's one of the ways he is able to do all these things.
01:49:07.000It's like he doesn't sit around and BS with you about what's going on with, what's it, Neuralink, the company where he's making the chips that go in your head.
01:49:59.000Once it happens, I mean, I don't want to be an early adopter, but once it does happen, and it really does remarkably increase your ability to interface with data, because that's the idea, right?
01:50:13.000It ramps up the bandwidth in which people can access ideas and information, and it's going to change the way we interface.
01:50:45.000Yeah, it's just to me, it seems like if you pay attention to the track, if you track technology like where it's going, things constantly improve.
01:50:59.000And we're already wearing these things on our body and watches now.
01:51:03.000A lot of people are wearing the Apple watches and the Samsung and all the Google watches.
01:51:07.000And it just seems inevitable that it somehow or another advances to a point where there's a chip or something you wear or some plate that they put on the back of your head and screw in.
01:51:19.000Yeah, but then you watch Black Mirror.
01:51:25.000I mean, but do you have a sense of history that you are, first of all, you're amongst one of the rare human beings that has ever been in space?
01:51:34.000And then, two, you're working for a company that is at the very tip of the spear of innovation.
01:51:43.000You're at the front of the line in terms of creating viable methods of sending people into space and returning them.
01:51:52.000I feel extremely fortunate to have that experience I had at NASA and had the visceral experience, the incredible experience of flying in space.
01:52:03.000Doing spacewalks, operating robot arms, launching on rockets and all that.
01:52:07.000And then coming to SpaceX and being there in the relatively early days and being there for seven years, I feel pretty satisfied.
01:52:19.000I got incredibly lucky to see these things and be in the room where it happens.
01:52:39.000Those incredible experiences I had opened up a lot of other doors.
01:52:43.000And I ended up, for example, working on this TV show, I find myself in a writer's room with a whole bunch of really talented, creative people.
01:52:53.000There's no way in a million years this would ever happen to me if it weren't for these incredible experiences I was lucky enough to have.
01:53:06.000Especially coming from your childhood, having that image on your wall, and now really being a part of this massive change in the way human beings are going to be able to travel in space.
01:53:51.000Science fiction is always at its best when it's like an allegory and the way they explored things that were happening in society, like terrorism and stuff.
01:53:59.000The way they were able to depict it in an alternate universe, I thought was spectacular.
01:54:06.000Yeah, it was a brilliant, brilliant show.
01:54:08.000So I'm watching it on the space station, which was like the best place to watch that thing.
01:54:55.000I don't remember the numbers, but we weren't getting...
01:54:58.000When I was there, we weren't getting live internet because all that bandwidth is being used for science to get all the data from the experiments and the video.
01:56:17.000I mean, Battlestar, I'm watching Battlestar, and they're like, now I'm in the final season, and they're like, Finding Earth, and I'm like, it's right there.
01:56:54.000And that's why, before I was going to mention this, when we were talking about, you know, science fiction and science fact and how there's this crazy feedback loop about you got to think about it first.
01:57:04.000Like you go back and look at 2001 and you see these guys using tablets.
01:57:13.000And you know Steve Jobs saw that and said, I'm going to make one of those, right?
01:57:18.000And so there's this crazy interplay between fiction and fact, and I got to talk to Ron more about all this, and then he invited me to come on the set for the final episode of Battlestar.
01:58:13.000I don't think people appreciated it enough, because it was on Syfy, which is not the most popular network, and it's also a reboot of a classic show, so maybe it had a bit of a stink to it, but that was so much better than the first version of it.
01:59:10.000So he came to SpaceX, and I gave him a tour of the place, and then we sat down in the cafe, and he said, okay, so I'm thinking about doing a show about NASA back in the 70s.
01:59:35.000He goes, yeah, I'm also toying around with a slight twist to that where we use an alternate reality.
01:59:39.000And in this alternate reality, we start at that point, but things turn out differently.
01:59:46.000And we started talking about how close the Russians were to actually beating us to the moon, which not a lot of people know about.
01:59:54.000But when I was over there in Moscow, I got to see actually they have a warehouse where they still have their lunar lander, for example, that they built.
02:00:08.000How would things be different today if that seminal moment of Neil and Buzz stepping out on the moon was instead Alexei Leonov, a cosmonaut, doing it, right?
02:00:20.000And I was like, that is freaking genius.
02:00:23.000I mean, that was like a—I thought, I want to see that show.
02:00:25.000That's like a great premise— And he pitched that to Apple and they bought it.
02:00:30.000And then he called me up and said, you want to work on the show?
02:00:41.000We have another group of people, a couple of other people that help out too.
02:00:45.000But I get involved in like everything.
02:00:46.000So I was in the writer's room where we're first coming up with basic ideas and sketching out like multiple seasons and character arcs and all that kind of stuff.
02:01:11.000I get phone calls from, like, the hair and makeup people, like, what do ladies do with their hair if they have long hair when they do a spacewalk?
02:01:19.000I'm like, you're calling the wrong guy.
02:03:36.000So you're sitting there watching some hokey solution for something that would never work.
02:03:42.000Yeah, if it gets to the point where, like, but that's the beautiful thing about, like, doing this with television is you don't have to actually be right.
02:03:49.000You just have to be believable, which the bar is, like, when I'm teaching my class at USC, I gotta be right.
02:03:57.000But when I'm like, yeah, well, maybe this could happen, you know, with a TV show, it's easier.
02:04:43.000And it was one – like episode 9 and a little bit of episode 10 of season 1, we ended up sitting – I ended up sitting and working very closely with the writers and changing all the technical content to fit – to make the story work in a believable way.
02:04:58.000When we do that and then you see it on the screen, it's so incredibly rewarding.
02:05:20.000One thing I wanted to ask you about space is we always hear stuff about space junk, about satellites and just junk that's floating around the atmosphere.
02:05:31.000How much of a concern is that and what could be done about that stuff?
02:05:38.000In certain orbits around the Earth, low Earth orbit and also at the geostationary orbits, that's where you can put communication satellites and they stay over one spot of the Earth.
02:06:21.000Like at SpaceX, we take our second stages in all of our NASA missions, and after it's accomplished its mission, we keep enough gas in the tank to burn the engine one more time and bring it back in one piece so it doesn't blow up into smithereens and cause more junk.
02:06:35.000Whenever we do anti-satellite tests though, China did one relatively recently and we've done them in the past.
02:06:41.000Those are like the worst because they create giant clouds of junk and we still have to live with that.
02:06:49.000Is there any concepts on the table for how to take that stuff out?
02:06:54.000There's some ideas of using lasers to laze the things and make subtle changes to their trajectories and orbits.
02:07:05.000But all the technical solutions are challenging and expensive.
02:07:09.000So I don't know of any one idea that's going to just solve this problem easily.
02:07:14.000Because we've seen the map of the Earth and all the different satellites that orbit it now and all the different pieces of junk that have been identified.
02:07:44.000Yeah, we tend to not really react until it's a really big problem, but it's a big problem.
02:07:48.000And when I did my first spacewalk, one of the things we had to do was we had to bring in this handle that we're going to use on a subsequent spacewalk.
02:07:59.000It's just basically a half-inch piece of aluminum around like this that you can attach to something and then carry things.
02:08:06.000So he had this big chunk of aluminum, and we brought it inside, and my spacewalk partner Rick looked at the thing when we came inside, and he saw a hole shot straight through it.
02:08:15.000It's like about a millimeter in diameter.
02:08:18.000It's really small, but it went right through this half-inch thick solid aluminum.
02:08:23.000And he looked at that, and he said, man, if that hit one of us...
02:08:27.000And he didn't have to finish that statement, because if this stuff is moving...
02:08:33.000Generally speaking, about 10 kilometers per second.
02:08:35.000So that's like roughly 10 times as fast as a rifle bullet.
02:08:40.000So if something like that hits you, it could be a fleck of paint hitting you at that velocity.
02:08:45.000If it hits you in the suit, you're in 100% oxygen environment, and you're just going to flame up.
02:08:50.000I mean, you're going to instantly combust.
02:10:30.000What about micrometeors and things along those lines?
02:10:33.000Well, depending on where you are, so in Earth orbit, there's much more of man-made junk than there are micrometeorites, but there are those too.
02:10:42.000When you get out away from Earth orbit, like if we're going to go back to the moon, then there's no more human-made junk, but those micrometeorites are still out there, and they can do the same kind of damage.