Television provider. Welcome, i am john, event director at literati bookstore. Were pleased to welcome terry virts in support of how to astronaut in conversation with fraser cain. You came in but you are muted and will remain muted, speaker of you will be the primary viewing experience for you tonight, that way you will be speaking on your screen at any given time and we asked you keep your video off as well. The chat is closed but you can open your chat window because ill be dropping links to purchase terrys book and more information in the chat window and you can submit questions to me directly for the q and a at anytime whenever the spirit moves you. Feel free to ask a question and i will ask at the conclusion of the conversation any ofthose questions we have received. As a reminder you can purchase how to , how to astronaut at the chat and theres a link on the youtube description as well. You can also shop for more books at literati bookstore. Com. Ifyou live in southeast michigan , we do ask that you consider a five dollar donation to sustain our virtual programming but i like to think about as a five dollar donation to this weeks event or for the events in the months of september or for events remaining in thisyear. You can make a donation at literati bookstore. Com donations. Thank you for your attendance where you may be joining us from today. Without further ado, colonel terry virts earned a bachelor of science in mathematics in the United States air force academy in 1989 and a masters in aeronautical science degree from embry riddle aeronautical university. Selected by nasa 2000 he was a pilot in the sts 130 mission aboard the shuttle endeavor in march 2016 he assumed command of the International Space station and spent over 200 days on it. Hes also the author of use from above, he lives near houston and razor cane is the publisher of university and a cohost of the astronomy podcast and is also the creator of the guide to space theories, videos on youtube. Its been a safe journalist for over 20 years porting on new discoveries in the universe and space exploration. Please join me in using your zoom class or heart reaction function to welcome terry and fraser into your living rooms. Terry, can you hear me . I got you loud and clear, goodto see you again. Its been so long. I know. So i think before we get started with this weeks conversation where im just going to ask you every single question ive ever been curious about spaceflight, youve got some Cool Pictures to share your experience on board thestation. I do, but me jump into that. Ill do screen share. The book that were talking about tonight and let me find the screen share. I think literati will have to give mepermission for that. But youve got it, its on the way. There we go. So how do astronaut is a book i really wanted to write as something thats fun to read. I wanted to have a book that is something thats not technical. You dont have to be a space nerd to get into it. My goal when i wrote was for the readers to laugh and say wow, those are the two reactions i was looking for and its not a memoir. Theres 1 million memoirs, this is not one of those. Its something you can read by the pool or the beach. 51 short essays so the chapters are all short. You can read them in any order you want. So its designed to be a fun, learn something. A lot of the chapters are things youd expect and a lot of them are things you may not have expected that youve seen in other astronaut books so these are a few of the chapters that i wrote. And of course every good book starts with a launch, every good astronaut book and i talk about a lot of the different aspects of launch, just getting into your suit and how complicated that is and the process of getting strapped into the Space Shuttle is not exactly like going and getting in your car and putting on a secret and then the experience itself launch with all the noise and the views that i had and the sounds of things happening and what it feltlike , just the experience of launch. Ive done a lot as a Fighter Pilot and i thought i knew what i was getting into. And actually launching on endeavor was unlike anything ive ever done. So the launch chapter is pretty cool. I like that part of the story. And another part of life in space that youprobably expect would be spacewalking. Again, gettingin that suit that you see me in , that thing is a three or 400 pound behemoth. It takes hours to get into. Astronauts as they decrease the pressure they have to worry about the same problem divers have and that is getting the benz when youre changing pressure if you do it too quickly area so in hollywood youthrow on your suit and you go outside and start fighting the aliens. In real space this whole process takes hours. Its a long ordeal i talked through that and what its like to be outside. Youre in this big bulky suit, youve got this been elastic visor in front of you and on the other sideof that is instant death. So the threat level of being outside on spacewalk is higher than it is doing other things. The views that i saw i felt like at times i was seeing creation. Like, humans are supposed to see this, this is gods view and then i had to get back to work and plug in some more tables so theres these extremes of 99 percent of the spacewalks work and one present is seeing things you cantimagine. Theres a few chapters on different aspects of spacewalking that are pretty fun. The, my computer just locked up,can you guys hear me . I can hear you. Interesting. Let me try and do this. There you go. Hows this . Can you see that . All right. Another aspect of life in space was i got a chance to film a movie area i had planned on it but my whole life life ive 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 to film a beautiful planet with tony myers final film, shes been a director for all the imax films going back to the 80s, all the space movies. She was a mentor for me now that i actually made a movie last year and hopefully im moving into tv and film she was really my mentor and getting to film beautiful planet was amazing. I ended up taking a lot of pictures. Theres some poor guy in houston whose job it was to count photos and it turns out i took more pictures than anybody. I didnt plan on that but i took a lot of photos so the experience ofdoing that was Pretty Amazing. Are you able to share your screen again . Im not, im on screen share. Im sitting here staring at it on my own computer. Theres a lot going on in your background. I think it keeps us busy but you were not screensharing again. How is that . Hopefully my laptop wont lock up again. This is apicture of me taking those photos from a beautiful planet , this was the land i installed on the Space Shuttle flight. You installed a couple, i didnt know that. I installed the last three. It was amazing. The couple is everybodys place. Its an incredible, you cant even describe it. So one of the parts of how to astronaut is learning how to be a doctor area i was through medical officer which im just a Fighter Pilot but i was actually the crew medical officer so i got to spend a week in houston atthe hospital , sewing of people that got bit by their pitbull and then in Car Accidents and chemical plants, fires and all kinds of disasters and i was there in the er working on them, learning how to deal with these differentthings and a funny story , i would always put on that white coat when i would go through training and i put the stethoscope around my neck and these engineers in houston would volunteer to give blood were to be guinea pigs that we can poke and prod because we needed practice on people and i walk in the sky was super nervous as i was going to draw blood and he sees me in my white jacket says 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. Anyway, the medical training was, i loved it, i really fell in love with that. Survival training is something you may not think of but i had to do it in the air force as a Fighter Pilot in case you get shot down or you have to survive or you have to go into a prisoner of war camp. And i thought i was done with that after doing it with the air force and doing it with the French Air Force as i did anexchange with the French Air Force. In nassau i had to do it with the navy and then i had to do it with the russians. We did winter survival in russia and water survival in russia and i had to do it again at nasa twice in alaska for this kayaking trip so i just spent a lot of my career living in the woods freezing and being hungry. Theres a chapter about all the different experiences there. Flying jets is something youd 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 thats flying jets is gives you more important than anything else is the ability to have your brain we call it stay ahead of the jet and you have to think five steps ahead and whats going to happen in the future and if i do this in thisdirection whats over there . Youre doing all that while your butt is on the line. Ifyou crash, you die. Its not a simulator where you hit the pause button and go get lunch. 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 the training almost all of its in a simulator, the key 38 jets are one of the only realworld things we do so flying jets is so important super important to my astronaut training. One of the things i never expected was to get to know earth by color and the cupola helped with that. The station turned red and i didnt know what was happening and there was the outback of australia, theres a picture of australia on the bottom left but i really got to know the planet by colors and that was unexpected. Canada and russia are white area in the caribbean is this beautiful blue turquoise green aqua color, you see the bahamas there area of Central Africa andsouth america also that really africa , the congo is dark. Its almost black its so dark there. Australia and saudi and the sahara, and the name and desert in namibiaare all pink, red, orange. Have these bright colors so i got to know earth by color which is something i hadnt expected. This is the Southern Satellite flying bydown there. This is for australis , the Southern Lights and that is just this amazing alien thing. Its just something ive never experienced before seeing the northern and Southern Lights. I need to go see him in person but i never have. There a sight to behold but i cant even imagine looking down on them. A problem with being an astronaut is your bucket list gets too long. So thats definitely on my bucket list. Talk about unexpected, that makes samanthas hair, cement is italian. This is a three person job, anton l the vacuum cleaner while i did the cutting and this is a stressful thing area did you find that chapter pretty funny but cutting hair was something i never expected i would do but its important. Shes the most popular italian on the planet, shes the most wellknown italian. So i had to make sure ididnt screw that up. So that just an example of some of these chapters and i apologize for the computer glitches earlier but there is a stop share button, how is that . Perfect. You were able torecover from the near disaster. You got stink on your feet. On your astronaut training came back in that moment. Ive read that book acouple of times at this point. And as a journalist, ive beenreporting on this stuff for 20 years and theres lots in it i didnt know. And i think one of the. Some of it is even true. Some of it is true. In air force and have to be 10 percent true so thisis at least 10 percent true. One of the conversations i love happened with astronauts is that syrians of launching on board a machine the Space Shuttle. So 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 understand what that whole thing feelslike . What flying the Space Shuttle is like . Whats that experience from sitting up to getting in and then feeling it . The suiting up part is like i said takes hours. Cool thing when i launched on endeavor present in the same chairs, we were in the same room and plugged into the same oxygen tanks but it was like the same room as it was. The government doesnt want to pay any money toupgrade the furniture or anything. I think theyve upgraded it now. Now its historic. There was no one flying so they spent money on new furniture, they went to ikea. You go through that process , the launch itself is amazing but as a pilot flying the shuttle its really broken out into three phases. Launch which normally the computer flies but we trained the flight and you have to be really smooth. If you touch the stick a little bit too much , this those big giant engines putting out millions of pounds of thrust will move quickly and that will waste a lot of energy. So if youre not super smooth , you waste so much energy you cant make it into orbit for you cant make it into the orbit you want to be in you end up in lower orbit and you want to abort and you cant do your mission so flying on launch you have to be very smooth in an airplane, if you want to go faster and better you push the throttle up and you go faster and that catches up to the guy youre trying to shoot down in a spaceship if youre trying to rendezvous on somebody you slow down which causes you to think. And it causes you to speed up this is how you catch up and then you have to speed up causes you to climb which causes you to slow down and thats how you fly inspace. Its completely nonintuitive area you make one input and you wait and you have to wait a minute or two and see whats happening and then you make another input thoughits kind of like watching paint dry. And when you come back to earth i got a chance to hand fly the shuttle in the atmosphere and its an airplane except its dont know when or when you pull back because want to climb, when you pull back the first thing a delta wing airplane like a Space Shuttle or a mirage or an old f106, it will sink and when it sinks, the nose comes up and you get more angle of attack that causes a decline. So what you dont want to do is be aggressive on the stick just like on launch because when youre coming in the land if you go like im coming down too hard, i need to climb the first thing the shuttle will do is think so you have to stay a couple steps ahead of it. The Space Shuttle is not an airplane you want to fly the doctors and dentists to fly on the weekend. And youre going downhill at 20 degrees dive at 300 knots which is basically a divebomb approach in and at 16 so it was normal to me , like im on a divebomb approach. Its a divebombing lighterand you only get one shot. You dive, you pull up and youre going to touch down and thats it. Theres nomore shots after that. So flying the shuttle is awesome, i love it. These new vehicles are great but the pilots dont have anything to do. Theyre just passengers, theyre not pilots, youre just along for the ride so i was lucky and fortunate to fly the shuttle where youcan fly the vehicle. You had a chance to fly and a couple of vehicles, launchedon the Space Shuttle, launched on the so use. How are those two vehicles different, how does it feel . The shuttle is like a big american muscle car. Itsbig, its majestic. Its the same weight and thrust as a saturn five, its huge. We havent flown it for 10 years now. The so use is more like a boring, more like a sports car. It was a soviet icbm so its designed to get moving as fast as it could towards america. I mean, its not designed to sit there and go slow and to be majestic area and is like boom, youre gone. That was different. The so use is small. Kind of like being in the front seat of your minivan to otherpeople in these big bulky spacesuits. It seems like they custom make those seats to fit you. And your suits, everything. Its a little too small. Of the seats they make about a couple inches above your head, its a cat so youre laying down on the couch but they put you in this long underwear. They put you on a crane with some stress and they give you down into plaster area like a baby like in germany they have these big festivals every august and september. And if youdown in their , they pull you out. So you have your own custom fit couch or your spine because it hits the ground going so hard. Its like driving through your neighborhood swarming over and running into a telephone pole. Pretty much a crash. I have these soft landing rockets. But i suggested that they rename them less of a crash landingrockets because when the so use it its pretty hard but it works. If you survive. I had a couple bruises, i was finei crawled out under my own power. If not this nice, fancy air force landing on a runway. Its a maybe crash landing on the ground but it works so theres something to be said for simple and working. So once you make it to space whether youre onthe Space Shuttle or whether you are on the International Space station , how different is trying to just get around and just do things in space compared to what youre used to down on her . We have a saying, everything is more difficult in space. Thats almost true. Pullups are easier in space but Everything Else is harder. Everything harder in space because everything is floating away area its to move around. If youre a new guy in the first day ortwo in a week its hard to move you like when you move ,you translate. You move and you rotate. So its not as simple as just walking over to the door. You have to float yourself over there and not spin yourself around and i tell funny stories about how i messed that up and then all the stuff youre trying to deal with is floating away so nasa gives us the school shorts. Theyre kind of like policeman on bike shorts. Those kind of softball guy shorts but they have 10 pockets and lots of velcro. So your velcro in your tools and your pencil and everything has to either be in a pocket or velcro otherwise it floats away immediately. Theres a few chapters i think talking about that. Its a pretty steep learning curve and it takes a few weeks before youre really good. You talk about how stuff goes missing which is kind of amazing on a fairly small enclosed space. Stuff just float away. If you give it more than a few seconds its goingto float away. Theres a funny story, i was on my first flight. It was a maglite, a little flashlight and i had opened up his panel and not myself in there and i was working on something. My feet are just sticking out and after a few minutes i got the thing fixed and i pushed myself out and i was looking for the maglite, where the maglite and i was busy life had hurt. I was having to slowly look around and i couldnt find the light anywhere. And about five minutes later my back was itching and i like whats going on and i respect and in between my shoulder blades was this flashlight. Its literally i put it down my shirt and it floated around to the back of my shirt and was hanging out there read you get yourself a minute, look for something and just stop because you could go down a rabbit hole and waste yourentire day looking for a pencil. And usually it shows up. You had mentioned a card, like a flash card that you use on your camera perfectly red i imagine 2001 kind of rotating perfectly and just disappearing into a crack on the station. Im impressed that you remember that story. It was early in the mission i took the most amazing aurora pictures. I was so excited and its a compactflash card so not that big but just perfectly rotating like this. And it was like slow motion, no. And the station at these racks, there like refrigerators of equipmentfor storage or whatever. Its just rack after rack. Its just how the equipment is but theres little half inch gap and the thing went literally directly down so i waited is usually if something goes and it will bounce and comeback out. But it probably bounced and went sideways and anyway, how long does it take to get your space legs . From when you arrive to when youre no longer . Youre no longer a menace to your fellow astronauts . Youre probably good after a couple of days but youre not great for weeks. Like i said its a pretty steep learningcurve. For me it was the morning of the flight date three that my headache went away and i felt pretty good and i was still awkward. And not efficient at getting tools and not that fast. The whole twoweek mission i was getting their. When i went back for a five years later it took i dont know, like a month me. It takes weeks but then iwas really good. I was a spaceman. I could movearound. It was just second nature. It was adapted to space and it took like i said, less than two months, maybe a month, a few weeks. I wonder about that talk about when you say push off from the wall. You not only are on the wall that you cant help but give yourself some kind of rotation at the same time in multiple axis. But i can imagine at the same time though after a while you are doing this threedimensional planning where youre like i want to be over there but i also twist twice and be able to end up upside down so you kind of form all that into themaneuver to get yourself over to that location. So there just to be this competition to push off from one end of the station and see how far you can go without bumping into the wall. So the station is in these modules. Its 20 or 30 feet. Theres the lab which is probably 40 feet, maybe 50 feet, its pretty long and theres another 20 feet and then it bends so you cant go from one end of the net because dna one, literally you have to have some type of curve we would push off and getting through one module module is not hard, getting to that end of the second is impossible without bumping onto something. But you have to learn to move with your hands and carry things with your feet. So you would push and then you have to calculate how you rotate and stuff. I remember on my first flight i was a pilot so i was in the pilot seat, because just commanding endeavor toflight. There this old 1970s computer with accidental, zero through nine and a through f. Was the keyboard we had just like in apollo. It was the same farm and everything as, and i remember , i would not scrap incompletely stick my head through the sea so i had something so that i didnt just float away. I was endlessly, i would push the keyboard and my whole body without and i would push the keyboard and my whole body without so just sitting here typing right now, my keyboard is right therehe would go flying in the other direction. Though in your crew quarters where everybody had a laptop and thats how you did email and medicaid, youd have to strap yourself, stick your foot on the handrail to hold your feet together. I had a bungee cord i would get in my crew quarters and wrap this bungee around my waist and click it and that would hold my body as i was typing my whole body would be bobbing up and down against this little skinny bungeecord was holding me tight. People always want to know how the food is. How is the food in space . Its not bad. Its basically military style. A common as green bags like an art eases what the military calls them. The Nassau Office here theres a food laugh and they dehydrate food so its like this hard, crunchy meat or vegetables or dessert or whatever in a little plastic bag. You stick into a machine, a button and it fills up with water. Pneumatic around, send it around and then 10 minutes later it turns into chicken tetrazzini or asparagus or whatever it is youre eating. So the food is actually not bad. Theres variety. Its all processed food though, is not fresh so one of the interesting thing about food is the American Food anyway doesnt have Expiration Dates. The russian food does but when i was there for some reason our food didnt have Expiration Date but the day. There would be these containers of beef that had the year on it, like 2011 was okay, 2012was a good year. Its like going for your wine cabinet pick up your line. So i dont know if that was a good thing or bad thing, its better to leave the dates off and eat what you want, dont ask, dont tell. Just eat your food and everybodys happy. But there would be food left over from the astronauts so would you like, would you be frustrating for various street from different nations or routing. People had left behind . One of the things i did, i started this bag of uneaten food on the american segment so there were certain things nobody likes you that grits, curry vegetables. There was just a handful of things that for some reasonnobody liked. We had 1 million key and coffee, they just gave us millions of those things so we went through all those and usually about once a month the russians would come down and radar bad and they took everything. They love it because it was Something Different from what they had and we would go to their place and they would give usleftover food and a lot of their food is in tin cans like it you can. They had lots of fish and we had none but the only fish we had morethat you back from the Grocery Store , these darkest bags of tuna. So i would all of their fish, we loved it and they had bread and it was actually likereally dark , black bread that lasted for months. A normal loaf of bread only last week and it sold. So the russian bread was the only bread we had in space so we like that. They like our stuff, we like their stuff and it was good to have a variety. My whole 200 day mission nobody ever threw food away. We always eat others food. So with, whats amazing right now to me is that the astronauts, there have been astronauts continuously inhabiting the space station since its launch more than 20 years ago. And now the next steps that is looking at is going to, going 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 on in the space station butastronauts permanently living on the moon. You always go to the moon know there will be astronauts of their area you have any advice for the next generation of astronauts as they push further andfurther away from your . That is the great question actually. And that would be cool. Thats going to be what weve been dreaming about and expecting to happen ever since neil went to the moon. And i think for astronauts that are going to be exploring, one piece of advice i would give his share that experience people on earth because very few people ever get to do that. I remember one night having dinner in the russian side which i tried to do as often as i could and there were six of us on the space station and russians are great, they have windows everywhere. I said without that window, theres. I said theres six of ushere, theres over 6 billion people down there. We are literally one in 1 billion, more than one in 1 billion so were lucky you we are very fortunate , everybody worked hard and people did well but were pretty lucky so you really want to share that experience which is why i took so many pictures , why i really tried to focus on doing a beautiful climate, thats why i wrote this book to share the experience of space with everybody, notjust for the precious fewthat get to do it. So i think thats probably my advice. Were learning more, we see space x, elon musk going to send settlers to mars, people imagining theyre going to make thisflight to other worlds. Its a lot harder on the body and the mind i think that a lot of people are expecting. They have these romantic notions of what it would be like to go and live on anotherworld. Then not necessarily pushing themselves to live here on earth. So between sort of all that Survival Training that you did as well as the actual time that you spent in space, do you think that humankind is ready . You think we are prepared, or our imaginations sort of understand what is going to be expected of us . If people do try to makethis 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 and its going to be tough, theres going to be psychological challenges. The psychological aspect of spaceflight is more important in the physical, technical challenge of spaceflight grid there are physical things you have to get right. You have to have electric power, and you have to have the engines to get you there and back and you have to have equipment that works. Theres some things you have to have the emotional status of the group i think is maybe the hardest problem to get right and one of the most important ones to do. But they say mars is going to be dangerous and mars is going to be this and that and going to the south pole 100 years ago, you want to talk about dangerous, that was dangerous flying across an ocean in the 1920s was dangerous. So people do danger. I think one of the things i look for when i looked at applicants at nasa, we go through thousands of these applications for each class and what i did not want was thrill seekers. I dont wanta guy with me a death wish. I want a guy with me that wants to get back. When kennedy gave his moon speech, achieving the goal of landing a man on the moon, my favorite part of his speech was not. It was returning themsafely to the earth. So you need to have the emotional ability to get to mars i think the thrill seekers not what you want there, the survivalist, the guy going to survive is what you want. One of the things a lot of astronauts talk about is this idea of the overview of that, this experience of being out in space and seeing the planet and there being no borders on some of the natural borders there on earth. Can you talk a bit about whats that feeling is like . I actually made a short film in july called cosmic perspective. It talked about how space if he has changed ourperspective. Astronaut photography, politicking the picture of the earth, wise, and space station photographers like me taking pictures of the earth but also hubble looking out intothe galaxy , voyager going to visit jupiter and saturn and the mars probe, weve sent so many people and robots out into space, its really changed how we look at ourselves and the universe and some people get overwhelmed like were meaningless, were insignificant and i dont see that at all. First of all when youre near earth or i was, low earth orbit, earth is like this giant magnetic, you cant take your eyes off you think. You cantdecide. I tried, i made but i did not feel that book. And until you see it with your own eyes dont have the emotional, like the planets over thereand im here. Theres something profound about that. But i didnt see ourselves as insignificant. I sawourselves as you have this planet. Theres no plan the. If you look at plan b its a sea of black light years away that werenever going to be able to get to. Anytime soon. To say the least. So there plan a and there is no plan b anywhere else so we got to take care of plan a, that was the perspective i came away with. It feels like if we could get more people to have that experience, it would wipe away a lot of problems that we have here on earth to see the plan as this one as is a plan a. That we have to live on together. Nasa put it well, my crewmate samantha in beautiful planet. She said were all on Spaceship Earth and we should act like we are crewmate and not just passing and ithink thats a great perspective to have. I think the Space Tourism industry, virgin out lactic is going to start launching a lot of people i hope in the next year or so. And so a lot more people will get to go and it will be most people that it will be thousands of people instead of tens and maybe hundreds of people. And i think the more people that seaver the better it will all be. Some people are just beyond hope, doesnt matter if you put certain World Leaders in space, theyre not going to change but i think if you put enough in space and enough will change that they could be a positive thing. Im looking forward to, ill take one of the Virgin Galactic and one of the blue origin flights. Im not sure i would wantto spend more than a week in space. 220 days, thats a long time on the job. As a nasa astronaut you get per diem which is good and an xray. I have to talk to Chris Hatfield see how it works for the canadians. I get paid in Canadian Dollars so its 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 2 euros in addition to that and the russians get threeeuros in addition to that but were not complaining. I think weve reached the point where i think we want to open things up and get to some of the questions. We got a few questions and we may have time for more so if you have a question you can feel free to ask in the chat im going to set aside some of the questions about your topics so the first one is sort of a twoparty here from a couple people about training. How long does the training and what was the most difficult part of the training mark. So when you get to nasa your and ashcan, they want to make youfeel good about yourself and your selfesteem so astronaut candidate. Your training is about the year, year and a half thats just basic stuff that you need to know about the different vehicles and the space station. But really, then you go to some other job and you help support and spend years doing that and then you get assigned to your mission and thats 2 to 3 years. Specifically trained for your mission when youre going to be in space so its a few years but the reality is a lifetime. By training to the astronaut started offwhen i was a kid. I had a camera like talk myself photography and i got a telescope and i tell myself that and i got a computer when i was in middle school and i taught myself how to write basic so its really a lifetime of learning and your training is your entire life. Cant just sit around and wait and let nasa teach you what you need to know you you need to be curious and learn as much as you can about everything because when youre in astronaut you have to know everything, not know everything but you have to be willing to do just about anything. So its a lifetime of training. Theres a question if you can, wondering if you can see pollution from the iss. The name of our movie was a beautiful planet and it really is a beautiful planet, 99 percent of our earth is beautiful but you can see pollution area prominently in china. It was just thisbrown , smoggy place, especially northeasternchina between shanghai and beijing and gloria. It was brown. India was also pretty hazy. India is also jungle, tropical type of country but it was pretty hazy i think it was accommodation of pollution and hayes. The other environmental problem that you can see, i could see was deforestation. Especially in madagascar are. If this big giant rain forest island off of southeast coast of africa. Its just a brown rock. Its literally this brown orange rock theres a greens in the where the levers live, the monkeys down there and other than that the whole rain forest was the forest back in the 50s in the 1950s and 60s theycut down all the trees, so them. The guys who did got some money that was good for a couple of years and then 50 or 60 years later the whole nation is devoid of trees and i amazon to, you could see that. The big giant squares of light green. They used in the dark green rain forest and now their light green and thats accelerated with therecent regime change their so those are kind of heart breaking to see other than that , most of the earth really does look beautiful. You cant see pollution in america, you cant see it in your. Most of the planet was really spectacular. I guess at night youget the Light Pollution as well. So one of the analogies i use, if you were an alien zooming past for in the daylight, you might not even notice people. You could see airline contrails. You can see both if you have a zoom lens the boat docks and you can see their wave patterns. If you know youre looking at london or buenos aires or montevideo, theres some cities you could see these big concrete white patches, but not really. During the daylight you cant see people. At night time its a very different story because you can see those lights and i can talk about what youre really seeing as well, just population. You can tell where you are by the color of the lights becausedifferent countries use mercury , vapor or halogen or different types of lights. So some are white, summer blue. Some are yellow,orange so its really cool to see the earth at night. Theres a question here about regarding muscle mass law. I heard rick lenihan mentioned about eight percent muscle mass in his squad during the twoweek mission. If youre willing to share can you tell us about the muscle lossexperience . You shared that no bone loss but i dont remember anything about muscle mass loss . From start to finish 200 days i want hero present of my bone density which was amazing. I was shocked and the doctors were shocked. My muscles were probably 90 percent. Your legs, you lose the most because youre using them constantly just to walk around and the only time you ever use them in space is if youre exercising. My upper body probably got stronger just because i was lifting weights it was like going to the health club for six months. I got in pretty good shape. The week i got back, they put you through these tests like max tests and i was roughly 90 percent on all the different weightlifting i was doing. I did 20 points but 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 pipe and taking vitamin d, i took a vitamin d pill every day. I came back in good shape. I was going to say, i think there was like 11 things weve been able to figure out that happened to your body at this point and with exercise their able to account for ithink all the three this point. So they, you have essentially this fluid redistribution that theyre not able to have any solutionfor. Problems with eyesight as well. I cant remember what the other one iss radiation. Thats a separate thing entirely but at this point, that recovery you were doing, thats what the International Space station has been teaching about spaceflight at this point is how to overcome most of the downsides of being in this microgravity. They can deal with the muscle loss, they can deal with the bone loss, they candeal with a lot of the issues. Its the fluid redistribution and eyesight problems that you just need gravity and we dont know what the longterm consequences of that are. Good news about eyesight is the vast majority of astronauts are fine. Nobodys gone blind. Some guys come back needing glasses. Then again, theyre in their 40s or 50s or 60s, right so people our age, my age need glasses im lucky fortunately, i goodness i dont need glasses that most people do. There was a handful of folks that had kind of alarming potentially bad things but there eyesight recovered so eyesight problems are something we want to look at. We spent a huge amount of effort,200 days in space doing all kinds of experiments on my own money to study but the reality is its not like theres a bunch of astronauts that need guide dogs for the blind. That problem that scares me a lot more than eyesights radiation. Because that truly is something you cant do. Energetic enough to mess with your dna and that can cause cancer so that the problem for the moon and marsand deeper space exploration. Theres a question here, on the iss there is no sunrise and sunset. Theres no normal day with a morning noon and evening and how do you recognize its time to go to sleep and is difficult to not feel normal day like you do onearth . So how do you adjust your circadian rhythms to staying around the earth andseeing many cycles . The great question. You set your watch. We had only get x 30 3c master so we set the gmt which is basically london time. And that was you wake up based on that on your schedule , you are doing, youre going to exercise atzero 900, thats gmt. And you set yourself 24 hour day. My lunch had an alarm on it so thats how i woke up every morning. And it just got everybody going. The russians, the american, the japanese, everybody works on gmt. For japanese were the worst off because the europeans are fine, its only one hour off. Russia is only three hours off. America is five or six hours, that was kind of a pain but the japanese were waking up in the middle of the night for the people that worked on the ground in mission control. We set our hearts gmt, otherwise if you did mobile time, you have a day every 90 minutes so the human body couldnt cope with that. I have a lot of people know or are familiar with the difficulties of living in space. And getting yourself to sleep in space but my curiosity is whats it like the first night sleeping on earth with gravity . At the great question so the first night i going to space and im laying on spatial walk around. I my family, do all my medical tests and finally im back in Group Quarters and i get to sleep. I lay down on the bed and i remember when i pulled the blanket over me i was like, this is a black like im getting an xray i felt like i was a superhero who was, there was some evil guy with a magnetic rate sucking me out under the bed, now i couldnt move. I felt so heavy. It was pretty good, i got to get rid, you cant really see. These dogs want me to be done with my thoughts. Theyre like its time to throw the ball. Two dogs licking me on both sides. We have a few more questions so we cant delay for long you mentioned you are doing experience experiment at the iss, the question here, you do any experiments that address medical issues formark. Many of them, i did a lot ofultrasound on my eyeball, my brain , my heart. I did a lot of laser stands and infrared scan of my eye. I did some medicine experiments for big pharmaceutical Drug Companies to look at salmonella and e. Coli. I did another one, a Roman Research experiments for bone and muscle wasting diseases osteoporosis muscular dystrophy for another big pharmaceutical experiment. Theres one i think one of the coolest experiment is called ans. Its a big giant particle detector on theoutside. The size of a small room and is looking for antimatter. Basically antihelium particle thats an indicator of dark matter and dark energy so basically the universe is made up 90 percent stuff that we dont even know what it is much less anything of the hail so were trying to find that out. There were a lot of other different science experiments, 250 when i was there material science, combustion science, different hearing, psychology experiments. I did missing all journals are i would keep a journal and send it back to doctor jack and hes been analyzing astronauts journals for the last 20 years and were honest with him, i was honestly him with the nasa documents you put on your happy face and everythings good. The is great, everything stood. Lets go get it done and then you maybe happy, you may not be within everybody was on even able to track astronaut moods and how theyre going psychologically which is super important so yes, i did a lot of experiments and a lot of them were focused on medicine. You have time for one more question from a 12yearold humor. What is on an astronauts application to bring attention to it so you increase your chances of getting selected . You hit the nail on the head. You need something to bring attention to it when i was leaving nasa thousand application and i was helping them go through thousands of these things so all the basic stuff, everybody has a basic stuff. I was one lady and anascar mechanic. , she was working on nascar car that was. Who do serious nothing planning, actual serious call nothing planning for scuba diving and those typesof things. Of course Fighter Pilot file is by far the most important best thing you could have on your resume. Nasa want things that are operational so we dont necessarily want nurse. We dont want professors on blackboards all day long. Thats great thats not what you do as an afterthought. What you do is you do, if not in god, is doing job so you need people and work in these operationalenvironments , especially flying in winter but is online, with a dangerous thing, you can still get the job done thats probably the most important thing but something thats a different than the status quo is theres a sea of status quo application all of them great. Probably only astronauts but theres thousands of them. Theres an interesting aspect nasa is starting to go into, things like material science, 3dmanufacturing , spacebased construction. Spacebased power, so theres a lot of newer technologies that are being too this new space environment and so based on i think what terry was saying i could imagine if you specialize in things like 3d printing, materials , things like that as you say on a handson, that would probably be the kinds of things nasa must have a person whose lies in helping run a 3d printer to build girders in space a future space telescope. We first ever 3d printing when i was there a picture of this old light ranch and that was during my mission but the thing is fraser, if thats your specialty thats great and during our sixmonth mission thats going to take up one and a half hours. And the other 5. 99 months going to be doingdifferent stuff every day. Having a specialty is great. Most importantly the you succeed at what youre doing even more than most importantly is your ability to be adaptable because youre also going to have to be pro doctor and unpack stuff and be an accountant and have to do interviews so the real skill is being operational and being flexible, being able to do more than onething. This hightech mechanic work at night, you can do two things at once. If your test pilot during the day but if you know how to speak russian and you done for next changes before, should you can work with International Crews which is so important obviously. If youre the Systems Engineer and he worked on this injury product and engine engineering manager and you decide this thing and your entire crew and ship python and html, if at the world ultimate engineer resume but you never done anything else thats not what nasa wants. They want to do some international experience, speak a language for two, have a pilots license or be a military test pilot. You do need to be able to do more than one thing. At least in todays nasa. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. Thank you for your time. Thank you for telling us a bit more about earth from up in the iss. We appreciate it and we hope you continue to stay safe on the ground, and hopefully come through. Until then, to all of our viewers thank you for tuning can enter are you watching home later thanks as well. Thanks again everybody and well see you at the next event. Thanks for having us. Weeknights this month were featuring booktv programs as a a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight we focus on biographies and memoirs. Watch tonight beginning at 8 p. M. Eastern. Enjoy booktv this week and every weekend on cspan2. You i watching booktv on cspan2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2 created by americas cabletelevision companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider
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