Hello and good afternoon. My name is Tim Dodd but I'm better known as
the Everyday Astronaut. But I always been a genuine fake astronaut,
as a matter of fact, I used to be and since 2008, I've actually been a professional photographer,
mostly doing weddings all around the world and what my wedding clients often didn't know
is I would sneak a space suit in the trunk of the rental car and then after the wedding
go around and look for cool shot opportunities and this, this was fun for me but, let's get
started on how exactly I wound up with a space suit in the first place, right? I was sitting at my favorite coffee shop,
in my home town of Cedar Falls, Iowa. Conveniently located as far away from anything
space related as humanly possible and I'm just sitting there and I see this article
that says, "You could own a piece of an Apollo spacecraft." and I'm like "Yes I could!" So I click on the website. $400,000 is the starting bid, I'm like, "No
I can't!" ok! Uh, but maybe there is something I can afford. So I, you know, start being smart and scrolling
through looking for things that hadn't been bid on. Lo and behold, there's this. Russian high altitude survival suit. $330! Let's give it a shot! Next thing you know, a stinky, old, Soviet
era high altitude flight suit arrives at my doorstep. And what's the first thing you do when you,
you know, you get your first space suit? You put it on and take a cool picture! But there's more to this story, because I
wish it had just gone this smoothly but, unfortunately it didn't go anywhere near that simple. It involved me first excitedly putting on,
you know, the jump suit portion. Which by the way has this thick rubber lining,
smells terrible and is insanely, insanely, hot. The next part is you shove this neck ring,
it feels like you're going through your own birthing process basically as an adult, every
time. It still sucks. You squeeze into that. And then of course the next exciting part,
as I was super excited to do, put on the helmet, and play around with it for a while to figure
out how to make it lock because unfortunately there weren't instructions with this used
flight suit. If there were, they would've been in Russian
and that wouldn't have done me much good. Anyway. I eventually figured it out, locked it in
place the second it locked, I go, "I can't breath!" Unfortunately, I had no idea how to undo the
locking mechanism that I had just locked because it's a one way thing you have to know this
little trick behind it. Which I didn't know. All of a sudden I'm sitting there immediately
seeing my premature obituary, "Idiot dies alone in space suit, in his living room." And I finally get smart, you know with my
good brain and things, and I follow the air hose down and I see it has a plug at the end
of the air hose so I undo that which returns air to my wonderful face allowing me to be
here today. Moral of that story is when you guys get your,
you know, your first space suit someday. Make sure you have someone with you that knows
how to, you know, do the locking mechanism so you don't do what I did. So that's the first time this thing almost
killed me. There's never been anymore, yeah, so. The next part of this story is when I got
invited as a professional photographer to come down here to Florida to shoot a rocket
launch at Kennedy Space Center. And of course, as I'm packing I ask my friends
you know, I send a text message. "Should I take the space suit?" and they're
all like "Yeah duh of course, you gotta take the space suit to Kennedy Space Center!" and
I'm like "You're right!" so I did. They did not allow me inside to into the visitors
center wearing the space suit, I tried, I tried different channels of the security even
like, oh, I'm just checking in, "Sorry you can't bring that in here." oh? Next person maybe? Uh, nope. No one let me in. So I just stayed outside no big deal got this
picture, took one with the meatball. The funny thing about this is, as I'm taking
this picture a line formed because people assumed I was part of the attractions. After literally 20 minutes, I joke, I kid
you not. 20 minutes I stood there, "Yup ok!" next. And I, it's 80, you guys know, it's Florida
it's 85 degrees. I have this thick rubber lining this huge
space suit and I am sweating literally to the point to where I'm about to pass out and
finally I just realized, "ok stop, I can't." I took off the space suit and it just puddle
of sweat. Disgusting, sorry. But I vowed to never put that space suit back
on in the Florida heat ever again! Until about three minutes later when I saw
I had to take this picture cuz it was so great. The dumb thing about this one is this was
taken with a 300mm lens. Which means its um, it's very, I'm very far
away. Probably 200 feet or so. So, you could kind of picture the process. This was back when I only had a self timer
on my camera. No fancy remote, so. Click. Beep beep beep beep, ten seconds to sprint
my 200 feet out to the car, and pfftt pose. I did that twice before I realized, I'm literally
going to die again I need to stop doing this. And the best part about this is I know there
security footage somewhere. From some vantage point of this whole situation. I need to find that. But yeah. But the moral of this story is I, I come home. Back to Iowa. And I was really sad that there was nothing
space related. You know I had caught, I grew up liking space. You know. I had space shuttle legos and bed sheets and
posters. But in my adult life, I'd kind of fell out
of love with space. I got more into music and other things. And when I got home. I just had the biggest bug to try to express
my childhood obsession with space. It came back. So I started a series, a photo series called
"Everyday Astronaut." um and it was the initial series was going
to take you through "A day in the life of Everyday Astronaut." So this is how it started. And I kind of released these all at once. So we'll go through them here real quick. But my, the thing is. I decided that, as I loved space and was really
falling in love with the facts of space, I decided to hide easter eggs in there for the
pedantic space nerds on the internet to at least enjoy as well. So in this picture for instance. This is titled "Good morning world." On the night stand, you see I'm hitting an
alarm clock it says 6:07. And that's the last time, that's the last
wake up call alarm, on the last space shuttle mission STS-135. Which was in 2011. They have a call time alarm to actually wake
up for the day. And it was the last time they ever hit an
alarm, Americans riding an American space ship back to Earth. 6:07. On that same night stand, you see a little
piece of paper. That's the echocardiogram of Alan Shepard
who was the first American to ever leave Earth from the United States and go to space. So kind of in the same little frame there
we have the first American in space and something that represents the last Americans to ride
an American space craft that launched from the United States and land in the US. That will change soon, we'll get into that
later maybe. Um so that was the first picture. The next one was "Decisions, decisions" I
photoshopped that suit to make it so there was 7 flight suits, representing one for every
flight suit option on the space shuttle. The flight deck has 7 seats. Um I'm also holding a newspaper talking about
Yuri Gagaron's inaugural spaceflight. The first man in space. So I just kept, I found a lot of fun hiding
these easter eggs. Um this is called "Brushing up on orbital
Mechanics." and uh, as soon as this one went online, immediately, within 5 minutes someone
goes, "Oh, you're missing a G for gravity." I was like "oh my gosh, of course!" well maybe
that's why I haven't quite figured out how to get off Earth yet. So. My escape velocity, you know, I'm just not. I'm not very good at it. This one's called "Boldly going where no astronaut
has gone before!" Now this one looks, I mean, so what, it's
laundry. Well, fun fact. They don't actually do laundry on the international
space station. As a matter of fact they wear their garments
for up to two weeks. It's because it's physically barely touching
your skin, it doesn't come in contact in zero gravity. And it's, water is such a valuable resource,
it needs to be drank, and then recycled instead of wasted trying to do laundry. So it actually ends up coming back to Earth
in a big fiery, basically their garbage shoot. Which is throwing, hucking it back at Earth. But there is one Astronaut, Don Petit, who's
up on the wall there. Who uh, who actually reused his underwear
as a plant seed for basil seeds. This is in tribute to him. But otherwise boldly going where no astronaut
has gone before. This one is called, "Darn it Chris Hadfield." And that's because I photoshopped Chris Hadfield,
who's a famous Canadian astronaut. Um I photoshopped him onto TIME magazine as
their coveted "Astronaut of the year", which we all are very familiar with obviously. Within one hour of this being on, on Reddit,
he commented, and his comment was, "The suit chafes a bit, don't it." and I go, "Yes, I
always knew my first interaction with one of my favorite astronauts would be about perspiration
and chafing." um so that made me very happy. This one's called "It's just not the same" You have to take a certain approach when you walk onto a playground, with this weird mischievous
grin on your face, putting on a space suit, reassuring all the parents that everything's
fine. This one's titled, "I prefer my ice cream
a-la space." and that's uh, it's that freeze dried ice
cream that we all see at museum shops. I feel like that's a staple of space food,
right? Everyone's familiar with space ice cream,
right? hmm, did you know, it's only flown once on
Apollo 10. So that's why there's the Apollo 10 mission
patch, sticker hidden in the window somewhere. I can't zoom in here and show you, but trust
me it's there. Apollo 10, they took freeze dried ice cream
up, they opened the bag and of course, poof! Dust everywhere. Dust and sensitive electronics tend to not
mix uh too well. So space ice cream has been no more. But we can still enjoy it here on Earth obviously. I love it. Um, this one's called, um, "Time to mow."
and the funny thing about this is, a lot of these images have a lot of photoshop. This one does not. This happened. My friend actually owns a segway. This is at his parents house. Best of all his dad had no idea and he shows
up seeing an astronaut mowing his lawn on a segway. Yeah uh. I would've loved to hear him pull up, just
"What the? Ugh, Kids!" But the other funny thing about this is is
I was really dumb and actually mowed the entire lawn backwards first from the background to
the foreground. Which means you know, if I was smart I would've
mowed the front bit first, and then the back bit, so you could've seen the difference in
height of grass. Instead I mowed the entire back thing and
leave everything but the 5 foot strip in front of me un-mowed. Ugh, next time I'll do better. Um, this one is called, "Walking my dog Laika." Laika is the first dog in space. Don't worry, this is heavily photoshopped. Don't call PETA. This is three photographs. Me walking, my friend walking his dog with
the leash like this, and a drone which looks like it's from 1982 Radio Shak already. This was just in 2014, how has stuff changed
that quickly? But yeah, that's that picture. This one's called, "Testing out my, my solid
rocket boosters." Um and the Easter Egg in this one is the license
plate is "GO4 TLI" which means go for trans-lunar injection. Which is the call out they give on Apollo
missions giving permissions that everything was nominal and you're good to go and they
will relight the S-IVB upper stage of the Saturn V rocket. And they'll give it, burns enough to give
it 5,000 extra meters per second to intercept, er rendezvous with the moon. And that's the call out that every astronaut
in the Apollo mission they wanted to hear. Because if they didn't that go for TLI, they
weren't going to the moon. So. Yeah. Kind of a fun one. Now this one, I don't even like to talk about
this one. I think I was losing a lot of sleep during
this time and this is the moment when I thought of this picture, I honestly had to have a
brief conversation with myself to decide am I going insane? Am I a serial killer? Like these are the actual thoughts. This one, this one gets weird. Uh, so this one's titled "Houston we have
a problem." we're all familiar with that obviously. Um and that comes from you know, the Apollo
13 mission which famously had an anomaly on their way to the moon. And, it happened on, ooo, uh, April 20th,
1970, which is the era, the time between Aquarius and Pisces. The two uh, what ever you want to call ems. Which is Aquarius is a man pouring water,
and Pisces is a fish. So I'm a man pouring water on a fish and you
can see that represented in the calendar there. Which shows April 1970, and you can maybe
barely see it but there are two, there are those two constellations. But here's the part, ok, that's, that so what? So what Tim, uh, that's normal stuff. Um, get to the crazy part. Ok. Star Crunches. I don't know who bakes Star Crunches first
of all. An idiot. But here I am, I'm about to place my Star
Crunches into the oven. And they're flying everywhere. In a random pattern, right? WRONG. They are in the exact constellation alignments
of those, uh, two constellations. Yeah, no. No. I don't know. I don't know. Why. Ok so then! So that was kind of the end of that initial
series and I continued to do this because people, I had a response from people I didn't
expect a response from. You know, I was, my parents friends, and like
my friends that had no interest in space were loving this. They were just genuinely excited and it was
fueling me to continue to do this. So I kept going. And obviously the, the, the it continued on
as Everyday Astronaut. Mostly as an Instagram project and just posting
it on Reddit. But I just decided I'm just going to take,
keep taking fun pictures and kind of see what happens. Now that first series required a lot of photoshop
work and I heard a lot of people going "Uh that's just photoshop." So I decided, "Alright internet, I've had
enough of you today. We're going to do a whole series with out
photoshop!" So that's what this is. This is a picture looking down at concrete
with some 24x36" printed out windows. To my surprise in the middle of Iowa, I posted
on Facebook, "does anyone have a parachute?" within 20 minutes I find out one of my good
friends has a parachute. That's 100% true and it's orange even! So perfect livery, I'm ready for that. So that was the first one, I did a few more. This one is a 50 minute exposure which allows
you to see the rotation of the Earth and the stars end up moving along side that. And you might go "Tim, how did you stand so
still for 50 minutes? You are in the wrong career, you should be
a professional statue." Well there's a trick! I'm not in the suit at all, those are some
light stands and a tripod, and then some wires to make the gloves kind of look like something. Um yeah. So that's, that's that! Then I ended up traveling all over the place,
just because. I was in Myanmar for a brief, for a two week
project, to do some documentation of this particular orphanage through a non-profit
and I just decided I didn't really know what I was supposed to do besides document the
work that's they're doing. So I'm like, I'm going to bring my space suit
and teach the kids about space. And that was one of the best experiences of
my life. Somewhere in this, I actually get a phone
call. And it's a group, with an organization called
NASA. Never heard of the people, but, I gave em
a listen and I um, come to find out they were really excited and had been seeing my images
all over the place. And they said, "We really like how you communicate
with the general public and get them excited. Let us know what you need!" Ok. Yeah. Might be able to do something with that! Cool! So, I ended up going around different space
facilities such as the old historic Mission Control where humans where they controlled
the Apollo era flights and all those, all the computers in this room, and all the computers
at the time that took people to the moon were less powerful than my laptop that I'm playing
my favorite space game on in this picture. Something that just boggles my mind. I also went out to Plum Brook where they have
this vacuum chamber. These speakers are nitrogen horns that can
produce 156 db's, they blast satellites and payloads to make sure they can survive the
launch environment. It's fascinating, so of course I took my guitar. Then I got to see the world's largest vacuum
chamber, so I asked them "Do you have a vacuum I could borrow?" You have to, vacuum, somebody's got to vacuum
the vacuum chamber! I got to see Skylab, they have an original,
this is in Houston. And they actually let me go in there and jump
on it, come to find out later I think the person that allowed me to do that kind of
got in trouble. So shh. Like literally fragile things that are very
rare. Then I started getting asked by different
rocket companies, "Hey come shoot with us" this rocket took off and left Earth 4 hours
later. I got to go stand and got really close to
it, and it still blows my mind. And then I got really into dad jokes, so this
one's titled "The food here's great, but this place really lacks an atmosphere." This one's meteor showers, or "The worst part
about being an astronaut is the meteor showers." This one's "I'm glad I ordered extra long." I was baby, I was dog sitting this dog the
owners had no idea all of a sudden they see this picture on my Instagram account. This was Halloween last year I gave out rockets,
that's my nephew, two of my nephews and my niece, who's the adorable cat and then one
of their friends. And that brings me to this, which is how I
kind of wrap up, this is again my nephew and his little space suit that he got once. This was during that no photoshop, so I actually
built a wall, cut a hole in it and made it look like a mirror and this was titled, "I
always knew what I wanted to be" and oddly enough, I didn't. I had no idea, I didn't, I had no idea that
my career path would change into science communication. I get asked often, why space? Why? And I think my most, the most poetic most
beautiful reason to me, and what means a lot to my family and my friends and my community
is can be summarized in 1975. The United States and the Soviet Union, two
enemies, literally cold war enemies, docked and rendezvoused spacecraft together in the
Apollo - Soyuz mission. When I think about it I still have to hold
back tears. Literally two enemies coming together over
a common bond of exploration. And um to me that's what space is. It's us as humans all as neighbors, as community
as one species coming together. There's no more borders or you know issues,
like that, we are all together and as we explore the cosmos that brings us together and to
me that's the most the most beautiful sentiment. And um, I think my, I found that my purpose
is that we can all share in that excitement with out being a rocket scientist. I'm a four time college drop out slash flunk
out and I just fell in love with this stuff as a totally normal person, er well maybe
normal er, uh you be the judge. And that's the whole point, is you don't have
to be a rocket scientist, there is some pedestal of "well that's only for a you know an elite
group of people." It is for now but as we grow and as this becomes
more and more of a common thing, I'm ready to champion it and help everyone understand
why the significance of space and why we need to continue to explore together. Um, so you can follow along with that. You can find me anywhere online Everyday Astronaut,
um it's been a fun journey so far and so far Sarasota's been an incredible part of this,
so thank you guys so much for your hospitality. Um enjoy the rest of the conference!
Really love Tim Dodd. He's doing great videos and live hostings. Thanks for your effort!
Every type of science needs an interpreter to explain it to the layman so that we can all join in the wonders of humans ingenuity and our natural world. Bill Nye, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Tim Dodd have all woken up the scientist and engineer inside me. Even David Attenborough took me around the world and exposed me to the most amazing things. Thanks fellas
I love Tim's work! As an armchair space nerd, I've learnt a lot from his videos!