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