Video off as well the chat is closed but you can open your chat window to purchase the books and then you can submit questions to me directly for q a whenever the spirit moves you i will ask at the conclusion of the conversation any of those we have received as a reminder if you are watching the rebroadcast later for a future description as well thousands of titles are available if you live in southeast michigan we ask you to consider a fivedollar donation to sustain our programming for this weeks events or the events in september you can make a donation. Otherwise thank you for your attendance this afternoon and this evening where we are joining us from today. And from the United States air force academy in 1989 and a master of aeronautical science degree from embry university. I got you loud and clear. Good to see you again. To have this conversation where im going to ask every single question ive ever been curious about. Youve got pictures to share of your experience. The book we are talking about tonight and let me find the screen share you will have to give me current permission for that. It is a book that i really wanted to write as something thats fun to read. I wanted to have a book that is something that isnt technical or you dont have to be a space nerd. Those are the two reactions i was looking for. So its designed to be fun and a lot of the chapters you would expect and a lot of them are things you might not have expected. Every good book starts with every good astronaut and i talked about a lot of the different aspects and the process of getting strapped into the Space Shuttle isnt exactly like getting in your car and putting on a seatbelt will. Just the experience. Ive done a lot as a Fighter Pilot test pilot and i thought i knew what i was getting into and the end ever i endeavor is unlig id ever done so the chapter is pretty cool. I like that part of the story. And another part that you just expect getting in that suit that you see me in that is a 300 or 400pound behemoth that takes hours to get into as they decrease their pressure they have to worry about the same problems scuba divers have. In hollywood you throw on your suit and start fighting aliens. And its what its like to be outside you are in this big suit, you have a plastic visor in front of you. The threat level is a little bit higher. The views i saw i felt like at times i was seeing creation like then i had to get back to work and plug in smart cables so there are these extremes of 99 as work and 1 is seeing things you cant imagine. My computer just locked up. Let me try to do this. Another aspect of life in space i got the chance to film a movie. I hadnt planned on it but ever since i was a kid i have been seeing imax movies and i love them. Thats what motivated me to be an astronaut and when i found out i was going to get a beautiful planet which was the final film shes been the director for all of the imax movies going back to the 80s. Shes amazing and was a mentor and hopefully, in getting the film it was amazing. I ended up taking a lot of pictures for someone whose job it was to count the photos and it turns out i took more pictures than anybody. I didnt plan on that. Hopefully my laptop wont lock up again. It was a module that i installed on the spaceflight. I installed the last two modules. It was amazing. One of the parts of how to astronaut is learning how to be a doctor. I got to spend a week in houston at the hospital setting up people that got bit by their pitbull and had been in Car Accidents and chemical plants, fires and all kinds of disasters. A funny story. I would always put on that white coat when i would go through training and put a stethoscope around my neck and these engineers would volunteer to give blood or to be the guinea pigs we could poke and prod because we needed practice on people. I walked in and was super nervous. He asked how long have you been a doctor and i said im not a doctor im a Fighter Pilot and he turned as white as my coat so the medical training i fell in love with that. Survival trying training is something you might not think of but in case you get shot down or have to survive or go into a prisoner of war camp i thought i was done with that after doing it for the air force but when i got to nasa i had to do it with the u. S. Navy as a part of my training and then with the russians and again at nasa weiss antwiceand alaska for this kayag trip so i spent a lot of my career freezing and being hungry. Theres a chapter about all the different experiences there. Flying jets is something you probably expect. Its the most important training we do. You can practice the Technical Skills of how to install this piece of equipment and how to do this experiment but the thing the flying jets gives you more importantly than anything else is the ability to have your brain we call it stay ahead of the jet we have to think five steps ahead at whats going to happen in the future and if i go in this direction, whats over there and you are doing all of that while you are on the line. If you crash, you die. Its not a simulator where you just hit the pause button and go get lunch. So the flying airplanes is good for your mental ability to stay ahead of whats happening. We call that Situational Awareness and also stay calm under pressure because of all of the training that was almost all of it was a simulator, the jets are one of the only real world things we do so flying jets is super important with my astronaut training. One of the things i never expected is to get to know earth by color. It helped with that to tell a story how all of a sudden the station turned red and i didnt know what was happening. I looked out and there was the outback of australia. Theres a picture of australia on the bottom left but i got to know the planet by colors and that wasnt expected. Canada and russia are white, the caribbean is a beautiful blue, turquoise aqua color you see the bahamas there. Central africa, south america but really africa, the congos dorisdark its almost black ito dark. Australia and saudi and the sahara are all like pink, red, orange, they have these bright colors so i got to know earth by color which was something i hadnt expected. This is the southern you see the satellite flying down there. This is aurora the Southern Lights and its an amazing alien thing. Its just something i had never experienced before seeing the northern and Southern Lights. I need to see them in person. They are a sight to behold but i cant imagine looking down on them. The problem being an astronaut is your bucket list gets too long. Thats definitely on my bucket list. Talk about unexpected, cutting samanthas hair. Samantha is a italian and anton is russian. He held the vacuum cleaner while i did the cutting and its a stressful thing. I think you will find that chapter pretty funny. Cutting her hair is something i never expected i would do but it was important. Shes the most popular italian on the planet, very well known. I had to make sure that i didnt screw it up. So that is just a sample of some of these chapters, and i apologize for the computer glitch earlier, but there is the stop share button. You were able to recover from that near disaster and got to think on your feet. It all came in that very moment. So, ive read the book a couple of times at this point. As a journalist, ive been reporting on the stuff for 20 years and there was a lot i didnt know. And i think one of the some of it is even true in the air force the rule as it has to be 10 true and this is at least 10 . One of the conversations i love to have when i get the chance to talk with them is that experience of launching on a machine like the Space Shuttle. You showed us a picture of a Space Shuttle flying away but can you kind of put us in the seat with you and help us to sort of understand what that whole thing feels like . What flying is Space Shuttle is like . From suiting up to getting in and feeling it. The suiting up part like i said it takes hours. When i launched we sat in the same chairs, we were in the same room, plugged into the same oxygen tanks that neil and does the data back on the apollo. The government doesnt want to pay money to update furniture or anything. I think theyve updated it now. There was no one flying so they spend money on new furniture but they went to ikea and got furniture. You go through that process. The launch itself is amazing, but as a pilot, its broken out in three phases. There is the launch which normally the computer flies and in my case it flew but we trained to fly it and you have to be really smooth. If you touch it a little bit too much, those big giant engines that are putting out millions of pounds of thrust, they will move quickly and it will waste a lot of energy. And so, if you are not super smooth, you waste so much energy you cannot make it into orbit or you you cant make it to the orbit you want to be in so you end up in a lower orbit and having to abort and you cant view your mission. So, flying on the launch you have to be very smooth. Once you get on orbit its completely counterintuitive because in an airplane if you want to go faster and catch up, you push the throttle and go faster and that catches up to the guy you are trying to shoot down. In a space jet if you try to rendezvous on somebody, you slow down which causes you to think and to speed up and thats how you catch up and you have to speed up which causes you to climb and slow down and that is how you fly into space. Completely nonintuitive. You make an input and then wait a minute or two to see whats happening and make another input so its kind of like watching paint dry. Then when you come back to earth i got the chance to fly the shuttle and the atmosphere and its an airplane except it is a double wings so when you pull back you want to climb. When you pull back the first thing like a Space Shuttle or garage it comes up and you get more of an angle of attack and that causes a decline. What you dont want to do is be as aggressive on the stick just like on the launch because when you come into land its like im coming out too hard, i need to climb. The first thing that it will do is sink. You have to stay a couple of steps ahead of it. And youre going down hill a doa 20 degrees dive which is basically a divebomb approach so it was normal to me like im on another divebomb approach. Its a divebombing glider and you only get one shot. You dive, pullup and you are going to touch down and thats it. There is no more after that. So, flying the shuttle was awesome. These vehicles are great but the pilots dont have anything to do. They are just passengers along for the ride. I was lucky and fortunate where you can actually fly the vehicle. You had a chance at this point to fly the Space Shuttle and how are those two vehicles different and how does it feel . The shuttle is like a big american muscle car. Its big, majestic as the saturn five, it is huge. It was huge. We havent flown it for ten years now. The sole use is more like a ferrari, like a sports car. Its designed to get up and get moving as fast as it could towards america. [laughter] i mean, its not designed to sit there and go slow and be majestic. Its like boom, youre gone. The other is small and like being in the front seat of a minivan with two other people in these big spacesuits. Its a little too small, specific. Its like they have these pig festivals every august and september so you have your own couch it hits the ground going so hard. Its pretty much a crash. I think they suggested they rename them the crash landing rockets. It works. I crawled out of it on my own power so its not a nice air force landing on the runway. Its a navy crash landing on the ground, but it works. Once you make it to space weather you are on the Space Shuttle or the International Space station, how different is trying to get around and do things in space compared to what you are used to down on earth . Everything is more difficult in space and that is almost true. But Everything Else is harder in space because everything is floating away. Its hard to move around but you are a new guy. They are kind of like police men opolicemanon a bike. Soft lik ball shorts. Otherwise it just floats away immediately. Theres a few chapters talking about that and it takes a few weeks before you are really good. And you talk about how stuff goes missing which is kind of amazing on a fairly small enclosed space, stuff just floats away. If you give it more than a few seconds its going to float away. Theres a story on my first flight will will will i was working on something, my feet were just sticking out and after a few minutes i pushed myself out and i was looking for the light. I was dizzy, my head hurt so i was having to slowly look around. I couldnt find it anywhere and about five minutes later my back was itching. Whats going on. I reach back and in between my shoulder blades was this flashlight. Id put it down my shirt and it floated around to the back of my shirt and it was just hanging out back there. You give yourself a minute to look for something and then just stop because you could go down a rabbit hole and waste your entire day looking for your pencil and usually it shows up. You had mentioned a card, like a flash card on your camera. I imagined it like some kind of 2001 rotating perfectly just disappearing into a crack on the spaceship. Im impressed that you remember that story. Early in the mission i took the most amazing aurora pictures. I was excited. A little compactflash card it was perfectly rotating like this and it was like slow motion. Its just rack after rack and there is theres a little half p and it went literally down it so i waited because if something goes and it will bounce and come right back out and probably bounced and went sideways. Anyway, thats funny. But how long does it take to get your space legs, if you are from when you arrive to when you are no longer no longer a menace to your fellow astronauts. So, youre probably good after a couple of days. But youre not great for weeks and like i said, its a pretty steep learning curve. For me it was the morning of flight today number thre day nut pretty good but i was feeling awkward and not as efficient at getting tools. The whole two weeks Space Shuttle mission i was getting better. When i went back four or five years later it took like a month may be. It takes weeks, but then i was really good. I was a space man. I could move around. It was second nature. It took like i said less than two months, maybe a month or two weeks. I wonder about that. You talk about how when you say push off from a wall, you not only are [inaudible] but you also cant help but give yourself some kind of rotation at the same time in multiple axes. But i can imagine at the same time after a while you are doing this sort of threedimensional planning like i want to be over there but i also want to twist at least twice and be able to end up upside down so you sort of form all of that into the maneuver to get yourself over to that location. There used to be a competition to push off from one end of the station and see how far you could go without bumping into the wall. So, the station in these modules its probably 20 or 30 feet. There is a lab that is probably 40 feet maybe 50 feet, its pretty long. Then theres another 20 feet and then it bends so you cant go from one end to the next because it literally bends so you have to have some type of curve. But we would push off and getting through one module isnt hard, getting to the end of the second is almost impossible without bumping into something. But you have to learn to move with your hands and carry things with your feet. So you know, you would push and then you have to calculate. I remember on my first flight i was a pilot so i was in the pilot seat a lot commanding and endeavors to fly it and there is an old 1970s computer with zero through nine and a through f. Thats the keyboard that we handled like in apollo, the same font and everything. And i remember i wasnt strapped in completely but i would stick my legs for the seatbelt so i at least had something to stabilize me so i didnt just float away. I would push the keyboard and my whole body would bounce. I would push the keyboard and my whole body would bounce. Just sitting here typing right now, my keyboard is right there, you would go flying in the other direction. In the crew quarters everybody had a laptop and thats how you did email and communicated, you would have to strap yourself, stick your foot under a handrail to hold your feet together. I had a bungee cord so i would get in my crew quarters and wrap a bungee around my waist and click it and hold my body because as i was typing my whole body would be bobbing up and down against this little skinny bungee cord holding me tight. People always want to know how the food is. How is the food in th space . Its not bad. Its basically military style. They come in those green bags, like mrds with the military calls then. The nasa office here theres a food lab and they dehydrate food so its like this horrid, crunchy meat or vegetables or dessert or whatever in a little plastic bag. Used to get in a machine, push a button, it fills with water, you spin it around and then ten minutes later it turns into chicken tetras the knee or asparagus or whatever it is you are eating. So the food is actually not bad. Theres a variety. Its all processed. Its not fresh, so one of the interesting things about food is the American Food anyway doesnt have expiration dates. The russian food does. When i was there for some reason or food didnt have expiration dates, but the beef did. There would be containers of beef that had the year on it like 2011 was okay, 2012 was a good year. Like going through the wine cabinet to pick out the year you wanted. I dont know if there was a good thing or bad thing. Its probably better to just leave the date off, eat what you want, dont ask, dont tell, just eat your food and everybodys happy. But there would be food left over from previous astronauts, right . So, would you be like trading for various treats from different nations were rooting through stuff people left behind . One of the things i did, i started a bag of uneaten food on the american segment, so you know, there were certain things nobody liked. Grits, curried vegetables, there was just a handful of things that for some reason nobody liked. We had a million of tea and coffee. They gave a million of those. We went and threw them in a bag and once a month the russians would come down and read through the bag and they took everything. They loved it because it was something different. We would go down to their place and they would give us left over food, and a lot of their food is in tin cans like a tuna can. And they had a lot of fish, lots and lots of fish and we had none. The only ones we had were like the tuna bags from the grocery store, starkist, thats the only fish we had so i would eat all of their fish. We loved it. They had bread and it was like really dark black bread that lasted for months. A normal loaf of bread lasts a week and then its old. So the russian bread is the only bread we had in space, so we liked that. So they liked our stuff, we liked theirs. It was good to have a variety. And during the whole mission nobody ever threw food away. We just always ate each others food. It was good. What is amazing to me right now is the astronauts, thereve been astronauts continuously inhabiting the space station since its launch more than 20 years ago and now the next step the United States is looking at is going to go back to the moon and hopefully eventually on to mars so we can kind of imagine this time when not only are there astronauts permanently living up in the space station that astronauts permanently living on the moon. There will always be astronauts up there. Do you have any advice for the next generation of astronauts as they push further and further away from the earth . That is a great question actually. And that would be cool. Thats what we have been dreaming about and expecting to have been ever since neil and buzz went to the moon, and i think that for astronauts that are going to be doing exploring, one piece of advice i would give is to share that experience with people on earth because very few people get to do that. One night we were having dinner on the segment which i tried to do as often as i could and there were six of us. The russians were great, they had windows everywhere. There was a big window and i said look out the window. There was earth. I said there are six of us here. Theres over 6 billion people down there. Like we are literally one in a billion. We are lucky. We are fortunate. Its not like everybody worked hard and people did well. We are pretty lucky and fortunate so you really want to share that experience which is why i took so many pictures and i try to focus on viewing the beautiful planet and why i wrote the book to share the experience of space with everybody and not just the precious views. So that is probably my advice. We are learning more and more and we see like space acts, elon musk looking to send the settlers to mars and more and more people are starting to imagine they are going to start to make this light to other worlds. Its a lot harder on the body and the mind i think than a lot of people are expecting. They have these grammatical notions of what it will be like to go and live on another world when not necessarily pushing themselves to the limit here on earth. So, between sort of all of the Survival Training that you did as well as the actual time you spent in space, do you think that that humankind is ready and we are, can our imagination sort of understand whats going to be expected of us if people do try to make this journey . I think so. People are Pretty Amazing and resilient and weve been wondering whats over the horizon and exploring for thousands of years. Thats just what people do. Mars is going to be tough. There will be psychological challenges. The psychological aspect of it basically is more important than the physical technical challenges. There are some physical things you just have to get right. You have to have electric power and you have to have the engines to get you there and back and equipment that works. But the emotional status of the crew i think is ma maybe the hardest problem to get right and one of the most important ones to do. They say mars is going to be dangerous and this and that. Going to the south pole 100 years ago, you want to talk about dangerous, that was dangerous. Flying across the ocean in the 1920s, that was dangerous. People do dangerous one of the things i looked for when i looked at applicants at nasa, we would go through thousands of applications for each class and what i did not want was thrill seekers. I dont want a guy with me with a death wish. I want a guy with me that wants to get back. When kennedy gave his moon speech, achieve the goal of landing a man on the moon my favorite part of the speech wasnt that. It was returning them safely to the earth. So, you need the emotional ability to get to mars but the thrill seekers isnt what you want. The survivalist, the guy thats going to survive is what you want. One of the things a lot of astronauts talk about is this idea of the overview affect. This experience of being out in space and seeing the planet and there being no borders beyond some of the natural borders that are there on earth. Can you talk a bit about what that feeling is like . I just actually made a short film in july called cosmic perspective. It talks about how space photography has changed our perspective. And through astronaut photography, apollo taking the pictures of the earth, apollo eight, the earthrise and space station photographers like me, taking pictures of the earth but also, hubble looking out into the galaxy, voyager going to visit jupiter and saturn and the mars probes, we have sent so many people and robots out into space its really changed how people look at ourselves and the universe. Some people get overwhelmed like we are meaningless and insignificant. And i dont see that at all. First of all, when you are near earth where i was, in the low earth orbit, earth is this gigantic magnetic you cant take your eyes off of it its so beautiful. You can describe it. I tried. I did a photography book and ive written this book and until you see it with your own eyes, you dont have that emotional like the planet is over there and im over here. Theres something profound about that. But i didnt see ourselves as insignificant. I saw ourselves as we have this planet there is no plan b if you look out it is just a sea of blackness light years away we will never be able to get to anytime soon to say the least. So, theres plan a and there is no plan b anywhere else so we have to take care of plan a. Thats would i came away with. It feels like if we could get more people to have that experience, it would wipe away a lot of the problems that we have here on earth to just see the planet as you say as a planet that we have to my crewmate, samantha, pointed out, she said we are all on the Spaceship Earth and we should act like we are crewmate and not just passengers and that is a great perspective to have. I think the Space Tourism industry is going to start watching a lot of people on these flights the next year or so. A lot more people will get to do it. It wont be most people but thousands of people instead of tens or maybe hundreds. And i think the more people that see the earth, the better we will all be. Some people are beyond hope it doesnt matter if you put certain World Leaders in space. They are not going to change. But i think if you put enough in space enough will change that it could be a very positive thing. I will take one of the like Virgin Galactic or the blue origin flights. Im not sure i would want to spend more than a week. 220 days, thats a long time. As a nasa astronaut you get per dm which is pretty good, and its taxfree. I will have to talk to Chris Hatfield and see how it works for canadians. Its Canadian Dollars so probably not as much. We got five dollars a day taxfree. And no place to spend it. I got a bonus check when i got back. The europeans get i think in addition to that and the russians i think get three in addition to that but we are definitely not complaining. I think weve reached the point we want to open things up and get to the questions. We may have time for more and you can feel free to ask. The first one. How long is the training and what was the most difficult part of the training . When you get to nasa they want to make you feel good about yourself and selfesteem so your training is about a year, year and a half and that is just basic stuff you need to know about the different vehicles and the space station. But then you go to some other job and help them support and spending years doing that and get assigned to your mission and that is two to three years for specifically trained for your mission when you are going to be in space, so its a few years. But the reality is it is a lifetime. I taught myself how to use that and i got a computer when i was in middle school and how to write a basic so its a lifetime of learning and the training is your entire life you cant just sit around and wait and let them teach you what you need to know. You need to be curious and learn as much as you can about everything because as an astronaut who you have to be willing to do just about anything, so it is a lifetime of training. Wondering if you can see pollution from the iss. The name of our movie was a beautiful planet, and it really is. 99 of the earth is beautiful that you can see pollution very prominently in china. It was just a brown smoggy place especially northeastern china between shanghai and beijing and korea. India was also. Now india is also jungle, tropical type of country but it was pretty hazy so i think it was a combination of pollution and hayes. The other problem i dont want to speak for everybody, but that i could see was the d4 station especially at madagascar are. Its a giant rain forest island off the southeast coast of africa. Its literally this brown orange rock. Theres a little green strip in the east and other than that it was deforested back in the 50s and 60s they cut down the trees and sold them and got money that was good for a couple of years and then 50 or 60 years later the nation was devoid of trees and in the amazon you could see that these big giant squares that used to be a dark green and now they are light green and thats accelerated in the recent regime change so those are kind of heartbreaking to see but other than that, most of the earth does look beautiful and you cant see pollution in america or europe. Most of the planet was spectacular. At night you get the Light Pollution as well though. One of the analogies if you are an alien zooming past of the earth in the daylight you might not even notice people. You can see airline trails and boats if you have a zoom lens you can see their patterns. If you know you are looking at london or buenos aires or some cities you can see these big concrete white patches but not really, during the daylight you can see people. At night time it is a very different story because you can see the lights. And i could talk about what youre really seeing his wealth, not just population. You can tell where you are by the color of the lights because Different Countries use mercury or halogen, different types of lights some are white, some are blue, some are yellow, orange, so its cool to see the earth at night. Theres a question here regarding muscle mass loss. I heard rick mention he lost about 8 muscle mass in his clawed during the twoweek mission. If you are willing to share can you tell us about any muscle loss you experienced and no bone loss but i dont know about muscle. Start to finish, 200 days i lost a 0 of bone density which is amazing. I was shocked into the doctors were shocked. My muscles were probably 90 . In your legs you lose the most because you are using them constantly to walk around and in space the only time you use them as if you are exercising. My upper body probably got stronger because i was lifting weights it was like going to a health club for six months. I got in pretty good shape. The week i got back they put you through these tests and i was roughly 90 on all the different weightlifting i was doing. I did 20 pullups. So i came back in good shape physically, bone and muscle i was in good shape. Between exercising on the workout machine, the treadmill and the bike and taking vitamins. I took a vitamin d pill every day. I came back in good shape. I think there was like 11 things theyve been able to figure out that happen to your body at this point and with exercise they are able to account for i think all but three at this point. So essentially theres fluid redistribution that they are not able to have any solution for, problems with eyesight, and i cant remember what the other one is. Radiation. That is a separate thing and entirely. But that workout regime you were doing, thats what the International Space station has been teaching about the spaceflight at this point. Its hell to overcome most of the downside of being in this microgravity that you deal with the muscle loss and bone loss and a lot of these issues. Its the fluid redistribution you just need gravity and we dont know what the longterm consequences of that are. The good news about eyesight, the vast majority of astronauts are fine. Nobodys gone blind. Some come back needing glasses. Then again, they are in their 40s or 50s or 60s, so people our age need glasses. Im lucky, fortunate thank goodness i dont, but most people do. There was a handful of folks that had kind of alarming potentially bad things but there eyesight recovered, so the eyesight problem is something we want to look at. We spent a huge amount of effort i spent 200 days in space doing all kinds of experiments on my own body to study that, but the reality is its not like theres a bunch of astronauts that need guide dogs for the blind. The problem that scares me a lot more than eyesight is radiation because that is truly something you cant do. Its energetic enough to mess with your dna and that can cause cancer so that is the problem for the moon and mars and deep space exploration. Theres a question here on the iss there is no sunrise or sunset, theres no difference for the morning, evening, how do you recognize time to go to sleep and is it difficult to not feel a normal day like you do on earth so how do you adjust your rhythms to spinning around the earth and seeing the day and night cycles . Thats a great question. You set your watch. We had a speed masters so we set that to basically london time and that was you wake up based on that, all of your schedules, youre going to exercise at 0900, and you set your self to go a 24 hour day. Mine had an alarm so thats how i woke up every morning. And it just kept everybody going. The russians, the americans, the japanese, everybody works off this time. The poor japanese were the worst off because the europeans are fine its only one hour off. Russia is three hours off, america is five or six so that was kind of a pain but the japanese, they were like waking up in the middle of the night for the people that worked on the ground of their mission control. We set our clocks otherwise if you did local time you would have a day every 90 minutes so your human body couldnt cope. I think a lot of people know or are familiar with the difficulty of sleeping in space and getting yourself prepped to sleep in space but my curiosity is whats it like the first night you are sleeping back on earth . Thats a great question. The first night i go into space and i lay in the Space Shuttle, do a walk around, meet with my family, do my medical tests and finally im back in the crew quarters and get to sleep. I lay down on the bed and i remember i pulled the blanket over me and i was like this is a lead blanket like im getting an xray. I felt like i was a superhero. Like there was some evil guy sucking me down into the bed. I was in the bed and couldnt move. I felt so heavy. I got some [inaudible] these dogs want me to be done with my talk. They are like its time to throw the ball. I have two dogs on both sides. [laughter] we have a few more questions so they dont have to wait long. You mentioned you are doing experiments at the iss. Theres a question here. Did you do any experiments that addressed medical issues . Oh yeah. Many of them were on myself. I did a lot of ultrasound on my eyeballs, my brain, heart, a lot of laser scans and infrared scans on my eyes, i did some medicine experiments for pharmaceutical Drug Companies to look at salmonella and e. Coli vaccines. I did another one, a Research Experiment for bone and muscle wasting disease like waste disease like osteoporosis and muscular dystrophy for another pharmaceutical experiment. One of the coolest is a big giant particle looking for antimatter anything of details, so we are trying to find that out. Materials science, combustion science, different engineering, psychology experiments. I did this thing called journals where i would keep a journal and send it back and hes been analyzing astronauts the last 20 years and we were honest with him. I was very honest. You put on your happy face and everything is good. You may be happy, you may not be. But with him everyone was honest so theyve been able to track astronaut moods and how they are doing psychologically, which is super important so i have done a lot of experiments and a lot of them are focused on medicine. We have time for one more question and its a question from a 12yearold viewer. What is on an astronaut application to bring attention to it so you increase your chances of getting selected . You just hit the nail on the head. You need something to bring attention to it. I was telling them go through thousands of these things and so all of the basic stuff everybody has the basic stuff. I remember there was one lady that had been a nascar mechanic like she was working on nascars and that was cool. Folks who do serious mountain climbing like actual serious technical mountain climbing or scuba diving those type of things of course Fighter Pilot test pilot is probably by far the most important and best thing you could have on your resume. Nasa wants things that are operational so we dont necessarily want book nerds or professors that right on blackboards all day long. Its not a thinking job is doing jobs that you need people that can work in these environments especially and when there but is on the line it is a dangerous thing so thats probably the most important. So thats something thats a little bit different than the status quo because there is a sea of status quo applications. Theres interesting aspects they are starting to go into these days, things like material science, 3d manufacturing, spacebased construction, spacebased power. Theres a lot of newer technologies that are being adapted to this new space environment and so based on what we were saying i could imagine a few specialized and things like 3d printing materials, things like that but handson that would be the kind of thing helping run a 3d printer. We did the first ever 3d printing when i was there. There was a picture of a wrench during my mission but the thing is if thats your specialty, thats great and during your mission thats going to take up one and a half hours and the other 5. 9 you are going to be doing Different Things every day but even more than most importantly is the ability to be adaptable. You have to unpack stuff and do interviews like this so the real skill is being operational and flexible and being able to do more than one thing. You have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time so put the word adaptable on your resume. If i were looking at the applications which im not anymore, that ability to be adaptable would be important for me. How would a person demonstrate that they are adaptable. That isnt a job. If you are an astronomer by day but you do this hightech mechanic work at night, you can do two things at once. If you are a test pilot during the day but you know how to speak russian and youve done foreign exchanges before it shows you can work with International Cruise which is super important obviously. So i think that if you are the Systems Engineering and worked on this project and then you were in engineering manager and designed this thing and your entire crew you needed to have python and h gml, if you have the ultimate resume but youve never done anything else, that isnt what they want. They want you to have some in her International Experience and speak a language or two, have a pilots license or be a military test pilot so you do need to be able to do more than one thing at least in todays nasa. Thank you so much for joining this evening. Thank you for your time and for telling us a bit more about earth from up in the iss. We appreciate it and hope you continue to stay safe here on the ground and hopefully come through will someday. Until then to all of the viewers thank you for your questions and for tuning in. Thanks again, take care everybody and we will see you at the next event. Thanks for having us. Will will