Joe Rogan Experience #1425 - Garrett Reisman

three-two-one welcome thanks for doing this man I really appreciate it thanks for inviting me this is awesome I've seen a bunch of videos online of you talking about space and your your your dream of being an astronaut as a young man and what what is it like just to see the Earth from above and to be you lived up there for like what 95 days 95 days which actually is kind of a bummer to be honest with you because you know this if you saw that video maybe yeah the thing is if you stay for a hundred days they give you a patch right I'm a day 95 and the space shuttle Discovery shows up to bring me home and Mark Kelly was a commander he goes Garret it's time to hop in and come home and I'm like man I just need five four takes to get that badge can we just like go around a few more times or something and yeah it seems like 95 days should be enough man give the man a patch right right you know how much does a patch cost what's the long as anybody stayed up there the longest for an American was Scott Kelly's nearly a year in space is longest in in a row basically but it is a Russian that stayed up there for longer than a year and he has the all-time record how and they when they come back like what is 90 days like coming back because I've talked to people who've gone there when they come back their balances all off the equilibriums oh yeah you're kind of it's you're kind of messed up and in your vestibular system is what's affected the most at least that's what's most noticeable when you first get back actually the first thing I noticed that let me back up is how heavy things were again you know so I like I took off my helmet and I was holding it in my hand and it felt like I was holding the anchor to the USS Nimitz you know that's like I can't my ever gonna brush my teeth it'd be like too arduous you know this is your body severely weakened in 95 days well back in the day back when I was going there so that mission my long-term mission was back in 2008 and back then we were still losing bone density and muscle mass as we're going up dead along it about he lost about one percent of bone every month so I was about three loh they don't anymore they don't anymore because we found out we came up with better countermeasures to prevent that what are the countermeasures it's basically working out and it's resistive exercise that that does it for you which we knew back when I was going but the problem was we had a in that we had this machine that was kind of a first generation of the workout machine and it could do large reps but but low load so you're doing like a lot of reps at low weight and and that helped but but what helps it turns out we didn't we found this out kind of by happenstance but it turns out that high load low reps works much better hmm and so we got this new machine that you could really crank it up to 11 and the guys now that that are working out on that thing are coming home with no muscle muscle or or bone loss at all wow that's that's right because whoo what's the Canadian gentleman that we had on yes Chris Hadfield when commander Hadfield came back he I believe he said it took him a whole year to recover yeah I mean that was still like a nearly it's still kind of in the early days so he I don't know which machine he used he probably did use a new one but overall it does take to get everything back to get your full vestibular system back your sense of balance to get your all your bone all your muscle back to baseline it took me a year to get all that back - Wow it's kind of like rehabbing from a major sports injury that's got to be so strange you know your body just wants to shrivel up when you're up there because there's no gravity yeah it's really interesting because you're it's a it's an adaptation and then the body's is incredible so what is doing is it's realizing hey you know I don't have to carry my own weight anymore so why do I need this big bulky skeleton alright it's like you're becoming kind of like a fish where you're you're just you're shedding all the bone density because you don't have to your body realizes I don't need it it's like it's like a fish in water you know the health fish have very slender bones that's an interesting way to look at it like a fish yeah Wow and we fight it by working out and how often you have to work out every day every day every day how often how much time these do schedule two hours now you're not on the machine for two hours it's also prepping you getting changed and you know cleaning up afterwards but so you're working a good hour every day was it like a sweat in space it's weird because what happens is uh it if you don't notice if you like in the beginning you don't even realize it but it's all building up and even without like if you have no hair to soak it up it just builds up like this thin film of water on your head like a coating of water aha you don't even notice it cuz it doesn't run down and then somebody calls your name you're like yeah and then oh that's crazy I've never even thought of that so it just kind of floats off your body yeah it's like a dog shaking itself you know and it just goes everywhere so if you have it on your arm you can kind of just go and the sweat will go flying you know your crewmates won't be too happy with you if you do this a lot but yeah Wow oh that's is there video of people doing that in space there's got to be there should we show so much video somebody's gonna have done that but so are you basically doing compound movements like deadlifts and squats and things along those lines yeah functional fitness kind of stuff we're but and you're focusing on certain areas so the bone loss comes mostly from your legs because you're not loading so so basically our bones need a stimulus to regenerate and it happens to us every day so as you walk as you go up stairs that load that the bones feel the compressive load is telling the bone hey make some more hmm now you take that away and the bone stops making more and that's the problem people say like can't you just think like calcium pills but it's not a mineral deficiency it's just there's no load that's interesting the the body adapts so quickly yeah the ninety days it has such a and if you didn't do anything for ninety days at all you'd be in real trouble right yeah that's what's really kind of freaky is thinking about like well what if we don't fight this because all these adaptations you go through are not a problem when you're in space it's only a problem if you want to come home right right losing that bone even like not using your vestibular organs anymore your semicircular canals your otolith organs you're not making use of those for your balance you're just going purely on the visual but that doesn Ischl even make you kind of sick you get kind of it's like being airsick seasick but once your body adapts you're fine so the question is like what would we become if we didn't fight it what if we just went with it and stayed up there building a water balloon what would you become right you'd become actually the place I think in science fiction that gets it the most correct is if you watch the the expanse ever watch that show no I heard it's a really good show I never got into it though it's good and they get it right because they show people like these belters that live in partial gravity like their whole lives and they have much slip more slender bones and like they catch this like terrorist guy and they want to torture him and all they do is I make him stand up in gravity and unearth and it's incredibly painful for him and uh oh wow yeah that would probably be what would happen and it must take a long-ass time to get everything back if you went from earth gravity to the space station and you lived up there for a year and didn't do anything about it and then came back to earth you'd basically be like it would be hard to crawl right yeah you would yet you're you all you're if you don't try to fight it the vestibular stuff would come back probably about the same rate but well you would be really hurting with your muscle atrophy and your bone so you wouldn't you would lose a lot of your skeleton if you're up there for a year and did nothing and you would also you're all your muscles that you don't use like in your legs and your postural muscles so you lower back you're not using those anymore so they were just like waste away to nothing you'd be okay in your arms because you're doing everything you're everything you do is with your arms that's how you move that's how you get around is by pulling and pushing but you don't you know there's no walk in there's no stairs there's nothing does it affect the way you think at all you know some people describe a kind of an issue with short-term memory they call it like space brain is that a small group of people that would understand what you're talking about there I got spray spray bro I got that too oh yeah so it's something that I never really noticed it but I don't know how much of that is real and how much it's like like you're freaking out because you're in space right so it's distracting and maybe you forget like what then was you're supposed to remember but mmm you know like if you're really in the middle of something and you're all excited and or and and and you kind of can't remember somebody's phone number it's kind of like kind of like that oh okay so it's just well I would imagine that just being up there breathing that recirculated air it's gotta be odd right yeah and it might stink but I don't know because the other thing that happens is you have this big fluid shift so right now we have a lot of blood pooling up in our legs and our heart it's most important job of course is to feed the bringing oxygenated blood and then when you take the gravity vector out of the picture the heart sends too much up to the brain and the stuff doesn't collect in our legs anymore and it all shoots up here and you get to shift of all that blood volume to your upper body and your head gets all puffed up whoa yeah like my so my first night in space I went to sleep which is kind of hard to do cuz you're in space you don't want to go to sleep right yeah and on that first night I woke up in the middle of the night I could have sworn I was standing on my head doing a headstand or a handstand I'm like why am i standing on my head in my sleep this is strange right and then I looked at the one that saw the earth I'm like oh that's right I'm in space yeah so all the blood was just kind of pooling in your head yeah is if you like hanging by gravity boots or something it feels exactly like that Wow and then after a day - you get used to it and it doesn't bother you anymore but you feel congested because you still have all those volume up here so your sense of smell and your sense of taste are all dead end Wow Wow it's kind of like yeah so it's kind of like when you have a cold and you in in your sense of smell and your sense of taste our leg not as strong so it's like that all the time that's why we take we cover we have every hot sauce known to humankind upon the space station we like sriracha we got you know Louisiana Cajun fire sauce and all whatever we got like a whole stockpile of it because you pour that on everything so you get some taste because otherwise everything tastes really bland oh wow now what are you eating up there that's terrible is it freeze-dried foods mostly er but yeah you don't go for the food alright this is not like a foodie holiday so you get basically two choices you have the American food which is essentially MREs like military freeze-dried irradiated you know infinite shelf life kind of stuff and and then the Russian food is also based on their military rations but from submarines and the Russian food actually tastes better but the problem is one a presentation because it comes in cans so you get these these cans and even though it tastes good you open that can up and you look at it it's like God looks like dog food there's like congealed and yeah but it tastes it tastes better but it's just like so unappetizing when you open that can happen you know it's just not it does what would happen if you brought fresh things up there would they would they rot at the same rate that they would rot in America yeah the thing is we have no refrigeration oh we didn't when I was there they actually have a small refrigerator now so you can't have anything that needs to be refrigerated but you would usually like for the first couple days we take a bag of fresh food and we took like sandwiches and and and fruits and vegetables and stuff and then because that's the last time you're gonna have it after that's all gonna be this the stuff in the packets that you add water to now when the first day you actually got up there was that the first time you had ever been in space on my first mission yeah the first yeah the first time in space so your first view of the Earth from above yeah was that right there what is that like Wow well I didn't see it right away because I was in the mid-deck the downstairs of the shuttle and there's only one window down there and it's in the corner okay so it's in the hatch and it's like the size of a dinner plate and I was up there you got a lot of work to do when you as soon as you get up there so I'm working like crazy and after about 30 minutes I see this pale blue glow coming from that window and I'm like that's the earth you know I should have a look at that and I was super excited for this you know so I wanted to be ready so I pause I close my eyes I meditated you know call it whatever you want I just got ready and when I felt like I was ready I floated up to that window and I opened up my eyes and I gazed out for the very first time at the earth from space and what that felt like is is really really hard to describe in words but if I had to pick one word to describe what it was feeling at that moment it would be me really just man just man I mean it was alright it was pretty it had a lot like those earth colors like blues and greens right but man we've all seen pictures of the Earth from space okay I mean we got like HD video coming down from space now where it's just spectacular you could see stuff in that video that you can't even see with your own eyes like like the aurora and all that hmm and I'm sure like John Glenn and and like Yuri Gagarin had no idea what to expect and so when they looked at and I saw the earth they freaked out you know and it was amazing and it was beautiful but it was it was underwhelming I guess my expectations are so high mmm like I felt like there should be like some heavenly choir and that we should all hold hands I think yeah yeah most people that have done it they talk about this realization that you like this inescapable realization that we're all on this thing together and that all these boundaries of civilizations and cultures and countries and continents are all nonsense we're really just all on this one thing together yeah they call that the overview effect mmm and a lot of guys come back and talk about that and they really feel it and they talk about a world without borders and you know and it's a beautiful sentiment and and I don't I don't want to knock that in any way but cuz like really a whirlwind up what you expect to see expect they look damaged and I dotted lines between a really you know I guess it you do you it's inescapable when you look down and you see the planet and you realize that we're all in the same boat you know but that didn't strike me as a sudden realization because I think it's because I knew that before I went you shouldn't have to go and strap into a rocket and blast off and look at the earth another basically we're all human beings I think I mean I think the things that unite us are so much stronger and more important than the crazy little things that divide us like race or sex or nationality or politics or whatever and and you at the end of the day we have this one home and and we're all stuck here in it together so I had that strong knowledge before I went and maybe that's why when I look down I'm like yeah there it is okay I get it mmm but it wasn't like all of a sudden like that the the shade was pulled back then there's like suddenly a new realization about like well is there one place that's the spot on the space station to get the view well you really got a big window there's this huge window called the cupola that wasn't there in my first mission but it was there my second mission I got to see it the second time they added a window yeah a window the space station yeah you just you know get there you know it's a it made it a whole module no had this cupola which is like as that it right there so what you look into that's exactly it yeah so this that's pretty tight it's like a it's a dome and so you get a full 360 view and it's spectacular Wow and we tell the guys that don't get to do a spacewalk that this view is just as good as doing a spacewalk but it's not it's not it's not but don't tell them because it it makes them feel better they're gonna listen yeah what is the spacewalk like man well first thing I tell you that the likelihood of me doing the spacewalk was like slim to none when I first got there they tell you that when you to become an astronaut to go talk to some of the other astronauts and so I went in there and we had this presentation about space walking and it seemed like to be the like the ultimate experience just an incredible thing and I wanted to do it bad so I went I'm talking to this one astronaut who's a pretty tall guy those who they can't tell from the podcast I'm five four okay so I'm not like not like a real towering individual a little vertically challenged I guess and I'm talking to this real tall astronaut and I said you know I just heard about this space walking sounds awesome I want I've been living in California I've been doing like some rock climbing some scuba diving maybe that makes me a good candidate to do a spacewalk and this tall astronaut looked at me like right in the eye he laughed in my face he said what are you four foot what a rude I know my first thought was you know I thought astronauts were supposed to be polite and this guy like was not being nice but he was he was actually just being brutally honest you know it's kind of tough love and he was like listen the suit is one size fits all you're gonna get in that thing and it's gonna swallow you up and you're not gonna be able to anything you're gonna be useless so this is impossible forget about it so I was kind of pissed off but but I wasn't gonna let this guy stop me right so I get there I got the job and I go down for my first training exercise which was in this huge pool we got in Houston and it's like it's a hundred feet wide 200 feet long 40 feet deep and we can fit like most of the space station in there and they get a crane that comes by they put you in the suit which weighs you know something like 175 pounds and stuff with the and then in addition you you're in it too it picks you up and they plop you in the water and you float around it's kind of like being up in space and that's how we train so get down there's my very first exercise and I could tell in the first five minutes of this training exercise that big tall astronaut that laughed in my face was right I was not I was how is that was not doing well I was I was screwing up I was like it just wasn't going well why do they make a one-size-fits-all suit it seems they have the ability to alter the arms and the legs a little bit and they have it's actually three different sized upper torsos there's a there's a medium a large and an extra large but that said it's limited and because it costs a lot of money to make different sizes so there's only the gloves that can tailor because that's actually the most important thing but I'm I'm getting my butt kicked you know and I and I got a needs improvement which is a NASA nice way of saying you failed right but I wasn't ready to give up I went and I knew I was going to need help so I talked to the people to make this suit and they did some of those things they like they shortened up the arms they fixed it up a little bit for me and then I talked to the trainers and we said okay yeah we got to think outside the box here if we give you the standard procedure you're gonna be at a disadvantage but maybe we change your body positions instead of going straight on to the worksite maybe we come at the worksite from the side so you get more reached that way and we start working at it and we got better and better and the end of the story is that I got to eventually I got the highest possible qualification to do the most complicated spacewalks we do and I ended up doing three different spacewalks so of course my career and that big tall guy they laughed in my face you didn't get to do any yeah you get for talking [ __ ] sir look at you out there yeah that's me now what is that feeling like because it's got to feel insane when you're strapped to a space station that's floating around and you're just hanging by a cord yeah well you're holding on tight okay and it you do have that safety tether that you see there and and you know they can prepare you for everything except for the visual so when you like are in the pool you're staring at the pool wall when you get up there and you see the whole earth below yeah some people go out there and get like a sense of fear of falling of course you if you let go you're not going anywhere the space station is moving 17,500 miles an hour but so are you so it's kind of like doing the wing wing walking on an airplane but with no air to blow you off the wing so when you look at the space station is rock solid but you look down and some people get the fear of falling and then they hold on real tight which is a terrible terrible mistake because we call it space walking but you're not walking you're doing everything with your arms so you can wear your arms out exactly so now if you're climbing and you get like kind of totally thrashed in your forearms and now you get that claw hand and it's useless yeah you can do that and you got like seven and a half hours that go and that's bad so so you're out there for seven and a half hours yeah with your tepee diaper diaper yeah poop as well try to avoid that do your best I as a as a scientist I had to experiment right of course so during a training exercise I waited to like the very end just in case you know and I let one go right before they pulled me out of the pool one day and I resolved never ever to do that again is that number one or number two year or two oh boy number one there's no big deal yeah save that project oh I could have told you what was gonna happen that's disgusting and you're doing in the pool - you're not doing it an actual space space yeah to be one of the rare people that it's actually pooped in space would be very interesting that's it that's you know we keep all these records I don't know who's got that record it's not me I / yeah so you just have to let it go when you're up there yeah so what it what are you doing when you're out there so if you're doing seven and a half hours worth of work you're basically doing maintenance so it's kind of like being a mechanic or a technician the way I describe it but the suit is like so hard it restricts everything you do because it's blown up to about four pounds per square inch and so even just closing your fists takes work because the the suits like a balloon and wants to stay like this and so just closing your fingers is is takes effort and over seven and a half hours that gets really fatiguing you're moving your arms everything is and the suit can only move like you can't do this right you can do this maybe so your your your ability to raise up your shoulders is really limited so you're trying to do all this work but you're working inside this suit and I describe it as like it's like trying to change the oil in your car while wearing a medieval suit of armor it's hard what what kind of maintenance are you doing on the outside of the spaceship you know we're cleaning the windows getting the bugs off and like no oh yeah that that's another and this particular spacewalk we're assembling a robot that we took up there but we did other things like we put a new antenna on top of the space station we swapped out a bunch of batteries that were getting old did you know stuff like that that's fascinating so you have to you have to have some real understanding of mechanical things as well yeah I mean you're putting stuff together yeah exactly I mean you it really helps to have some kind of mechanical aptitude I mean a lot of us like working on our cars or building things in our garage hobbyist kind of stuff we actually started right out as I was leaving NASA which was back in 2010 we saw up like kind of an informal program where we're we were like going over each other's garages and doing car repair stuff just to get more hands-on experience with that kind of thing so when like say if you have to do an antenna up there is that something you're trained for on earth in the pool and then you go up there and do it during the shuttle days absolutely everything we did was choreographed down to like exactly where I'm going to put what what handrail I'm going to put my toolbox on I mean everything is all figured out in advance but nowadays and sometimes on space station even when I was there when things break you don't have the luxury of training that for if we're gonna do a shuttle mission we're doing a really complex spacewalk we'll do everything we're gonna do in space at least 10 times in the pool first but these days you don't have that luxury if something breaks and you you brief a brief it you talk about it you you you have some powerpoints and then you're out the door and you got to go do it so how much briefing and how many powerpoints the training that goes on prior to one of these unscheduled DBAs is you know typically on the order of like a day's worth of all told so are these powerpoints pre-loaded onto the space station and you get it or they have to beam it up to you it depends on exactly what your what you're doing so we identify like the most likely and most serious things that could go wrong and we practice those in the pool and we have all those procedures suitcase before we ever go but then sometimes you get a surprise you know sometimes something breaks you weren't expecting the break or breaks in a certain way or there's a complication that you weren't planning on and then you gotta improvise wow that's got to be crazy because I mean and you're probably doing things that other people on the space station maybe haven't done so there's no one that can tell you hey I did it's no big deal yeah but you know even if you're doing something that you rehearsed 10 times and you think you got it all figured out you still get surprised when they actually get up there the big one that I remember is on my second spacewalk we're connecting this dish antenna and had to go on top of this big boom like a big pedestal and there was a connector that had an electrical connector and we had like an hour or so to connect the thing and without it connected it wasn't getting any power or data to that antenna and it could get too cold and this gazillion-dollar antenna could be a worthless hunk of junk if you take too long you're on the clock because when it was in the shuttle it was plugged in it was getting its heaters were on and now you got to plug it back in and get the heaters back on in a certain amount of time and so ok we planned this we train this we get up there and the clinic there's won't go together like it doesn't fit and these two pieces of equipment sat next to each other for like a year in Florida you know like a warehouse and nobody thought well oh maybe we should make sure this thing Oh No yeah and we got that like it doesn't fit and we're like crap you know what do we do so we're shoving and we're shoving so hard we're pushing understand so hard that the guys inside the space station said they feel the space station shaken like that's how hard we're trying and then we see little metal shavings come off and one of those they can get into connectors were like that's bad so we stopped and and then and then this was like kind of my my big hero moment you know I can a movies they like Brad Pitt saves the solar system and stuff you know this is my thing all right it's not that exciting but I thought I had this idea said hey the problem we were basically having was that the female side was too small and now so I was too big for it to fit together so I said to the one of my crewmates inside I said hey how long til the Sun comes up because you know it takes 90 minutes to go around the earth and every 45 minutes the Sun is either coming up or going down so it can't be that long and he goes actually about 10 minutes because we're behind the earth and it was dark and then in 10 minutes the Sun was going to come up and make perfect so I took the the the female side arms I'm sorry I took that I took the male side and I held it in my glove okay and I put it behind the structure wait I knew the Sun was going to be coming from here so I put it in the shadow and I waited for the Sun to come up and it hit the female side and the temperature difference if you're in the Sun or in the shade is I can be up to like 600 degrees Fahrenheit difference so I let the Sun hit it and warm it up and I took the male side quickly out of my my insulated hand and away from the shadow and I slid it in and went right in Wow and that was it save day so you just deduced this just understanding how things change according to temperature yeah thermal expansion Wow yeah yeah that's my thing did you yell to people manufactured it no we're so happy we have video this you can and we're we're going woohoo give each other high fives in the suits we were doing like it was a victory that's a great victory though there really is that you figured that out yeah a lot of people would have been stuck up there how the [ __ ] didn't no one try it before they went up there I don't know maybe they did and it's just like maybe they weren't when it got up the space and experiences different temperatures it expanded differently I don't know for sure but so I'm not pointing any fingers but it didn't work and but we solved it and that's that's the kind of thing that you can't like until you have AI or something that can really learn you can't code that so that's a real benefit that humans bring to the equation being able to do to be able to adapt to something you didn't otherwise that thing would have been junk yeah for robots doing it you're stuck it's gonna keep pushing it's not gonna you know you're not gonna be able to program it now that feeling that you were talking about of looking out the window where it was kind of math and then the difference between that and the spacewalk is that where you get this real sense of being in space above the earth the spacewalk you can't yeah it that's breathtaking because you have this helmet that's like a giant fishbowl and you know after a while you kind of forget that it's there and you're just like it's like you know the old Superman with Christopher Reeve when he's like flying around the earth and he's just like in his underwear or whatever yeah it's like that because you forget like if you ever have gotten scuba diving and you get to the point where you just kind of forget you have the mask on I've never scuba dive I've only snorkelled if you spend a lot of time down there you can get to the point where you kind of like forget that you're that you're in it this alien environment and it becomes like you become one with it mm-hmm and that's just a wonderful thing well you've done underwater exploration as well mm-hmm yeah what have you done there I live for two weeks in the bottom of the sea Wow Jesus just you saying that two weeks at the bottom of the ocean yeah how deep it was exactly twenty thousand millimeters under the sea is about 60 feet which works out to be about no only 60 feet that's yeah that doesn't freak me out too much I thought you're gonna select miles no I'd start panicking no it's about 60 feet but but the cool thing was we stayed there for weeks Wow now if you're normal if you're normally scuba diving and you go down 60 feet you have 60 minutes and then you got to come back up or you get too much nitrogen in your blood and you're gonna get bent right mm-hmm so so we if you but it's not a problem if you just stay the problem is then if you stay you build up all that nitrogen in your blood now you can't go back up so like if you run out of air or you lose sight of your buddy or something you can't go to the surface because within a couple hours you'll be dead Wow so you have to stay down there and we use cave diving techniques that we did a lot of training for to be safe and we have redundant tanks redundant manifolds redundant regulators and we could head valves that we can flip around so we can always make sure we can get air without ever having that in an emergency ever having to come up because coming up it's not an option so how do you eventually get out it's a freaky thing it takes a better day and what you do is you take so we're living in this habitat and it was kind of like a submarine on the bottom of the ocean but it didn't have a motor so just like stuck on the floor like a big like a big cylinder and it had a hole cut in the side here and and the only thing was keeping the ocean out was the air pressure inside whoa kind of like taking a cup and flipping it over putting it in a bathtub and trapping the air and you just scuba dive on down and then you swim into that thing and then if then once you pop up in that hole it's like you're in a swimming pool inside the habitat and then you just step out into the habitat whoa have you ever seen the movie the abyss yes it's like this like that oh yeah how accurate is that movie I think what's a guy was a Navy SEAL in there he just like like that's crazy from the geese legs like what they call that deep dementia or something is that fake yeah that's big so this process of getting back to surface level how you said it takes a day what do you have to do so he do is you close up that hole and you convert the habitat into a pressure chamber and what you do is we very very slowly bring the pressure back to sea level so you decrease the pressure and you slowly as if you're slowly slowly going up in the water column and then over as you do it gradually that the nitrogen slowly comes out of your blood and you could feel it kind of tingles Wow over the course of a day just lie you tried to lie still in your bunk and just like read a book or something in there but you feel like this tingling and then after about a day of that they get you all the way back to sea level slowly so that the nitrogen what you know it is it's like if you take a can of soda and you shake it up if you open it and you know um the top quickly right but if you open the top really slowly and he let it slowly come out don't get all the bubbles right it's that same effect ah that's a that's a great analogy yeah oh what's freakier being in the bottom of the ocean or being up in space up in space is more surreal yeah because the de floating the earth out the window the views are better but being it down there was pretty well too I remember once we're doing this experiment where I had my crew mate and had an ultrasound and we're doing this telemedicine experiment so there were these docks in Houston looking at the screen but there was a delay and I was supposed to find her kidney and I'm like searching around for a kidney and then I look up and I look out the window and I see a six-foot hammerhead shark right out the window and we have a guy in the water and I was I and I dropped a giant f-bomb like wow you know and and all the all the docs in Houston are freaking out too thinking like in a moment thing to see her liver explode on the screen or something and like what's that what has a patient has a patient like patients fine got a six-foot hammerhead yeah that's got to be really weird right you're you're in that thing in their world for how long two weeks yeah so is that the weirdest animal that you saw is the hammerhead the scariest thing I saw was one that I was taking a dump true story I the way you do this okay number one you just pee in the pool okay but if you have to go number two you go into the pool cuz yous gonna you don't want to floater in your pool right that's of course like Caddyshack you know what that right so what you do is you go you don't take a tank you just take your mask and your fins you go down naked you can we had a we had a mixed gender crew so I wore some trunks but you know and you just go down and you have to swim I don't know it's like maybe 10 15 feet it's not that far and there's what we call the gazebo which is just a little dome that has air inside now you're out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean like with no tank no in you're 60 feet down it's night you can't see a thing alone in the ocean but you can see this little gazebo you swim to that you pop in and then you got air into some valves you let in some fresh air and then you hold on and you just and you take off your trunks and you just let her rip but the problem is the fish get accustomed to this oh Jesus yeah so they go there knowing that you're gonna poop as soon as you drop in the water at night it's like the dinner bell going off it was like school yeah yeah because this is feeding time woah until you feel them like yeah pecking at the backdoor the worst are the angelfish cuz that shape they can get like right up in there oh boy so you take your fin off and you're like whacking them oh Jesus Christ so that's all bad enough but like but as you're doing that and you're in the pitch-black Atlantic Ocean 60 feet down no scuba tank at night at night Oh with the sound of the ocean like like lapping against the dome and you're looking down and this endless black you know just a black void and you're thinking about every single scary ocean movie like jaws you know the meg or whatever they abyss all those scary movies right and you think about all those things that could be down there it can't help but going through your head so it's kind of freaky and then you finish and you put your mask back on and I took a big breath and I went down and I opened my eyes and my in my mask in the darkness with my flashlight and I saw like right in front of me this huge eyeball like about the size I don't know of a of a saucer you know like this big staring unblinking great at me and I freaked out I just tore off for them for the pool for the moon pool and the habitat I jumped in there I surface I'm screaming I'm screaming and my crew come running with a guy like I've been bit by a shark or something and I'm like giant fish and it wasn't it was a Goliath Grouper oh I've seen those things before their enormous size a cow it's like hundreds and hundreds of pounds right yeah yeah oh my god yeah scared to live in hell at me yeah those things could literally eat a person yeah it it was big enough that's for sure and so it was just decided it scared the heck outta me like so where were you were in the Atlantic yeah how far away were you from like Florida like where yeah we were just off the coast of Key Largo okay because that's what I'm saying like they live down there yeah well that's an enormous fish man huge I've seen videos of people catching them off of boats and it seems surreal look at that yeah there you go yeah it's like a giant largemouth bass that's what it's like if you go bass fishing they're so similar to bass like in the way they look yeah and now imagine like Jesus Christ look at that yeah imagine that being I died with that thing in the middle of the dark Atlantic and no scuba tank they're delicious to it but like I don't know if they taste as good as regular grouper I had yeah I wasn't good so you get a different he was a good fighter look at the mouth on that thing good lord I'll tell you another quick story about down there so I went out for a night dive once and I spent the beautiful thing about saturation diving like this is you can do basically infinite time bottom time you're not limited to like 60 minutes you can stay out there for six hours you know whatever so I was not doing this night dive and I found this beautiful shrimp it was just spectacularly gorgeous it's like translucent you could see through it you see its organs move like internal organs like doing their thing and I stared at it for at least like an hour just helmet light on it and just sat there and stared at it and it was really beautiful and I come back inside the habitat I'm kind of hungry and the best space food we got is shrimp cocktail and I flipped that thing off the shelf and I'm like oh that looks good then I'm like no I can't do it I can't do it you felt bad saw the shrimp Wow I did the next day the next day yeah but that for that day though you really felt bad I feel bad mmm Wow grouper you too felt bad like a nice grouper sandwich it's scary I would've been okay with because it was yeah wonder if they've ever eaten people because it seems like they could I mean they swallow giant fish it seems like if you're not a large person they might be able to just suck you right in there you know say now if this happens to me again I'm gonna be even more freaked there I feel like I've read that grouper have bitten people before yeah like probably trying them out like if they get hunk you're that big you probably have to eat so much yeah this non-stop yeah buffet for those guys and yeah so when you're down there and you're doing all the swimming you're using a rebreather no we're using tanks regular scuba tanks and what is the capacity these tanks like how long can you stay down just swimming around for we have two and we can isolate them in case one of them springs a leak but you don't have that much more time than a standard scuba tank but we have is refill stations all around the floor with high-pressure hoses so we have these quick disconnects on our system that you can plug in and fill it right back up and then you get to go for you know another couple hours so when you swim to go take a poo you have to do that you have to wear the tank or do you just hold your breath just hold your breath you're not gone that far how far you going yeah 15 feet or so in total pitch-black yeah there's a light on the gazebo but that's all so you see that light out there and you know if you get to there that's where you're pulling yeah good lord yeah Wow that's got to be so strange yeah what was it like to get back from that I've probably fill it seems like it would be real similar to getting back from space yeah it is the thing about it the way it makes us such a great training exercise psychologically is if you had to get to a hospital it takes about the same time from that habitat as a would from the space station in both cases it takes about a day I think the space station you got to get in the Soyuz you got to put your spacesuit on you got a detach the Soyuz from the space station you got to separate from the space station got to do a deorbit burn you got a land the helicopters got to come get you by time all that's done it's like a day and the Soyuz is a Russian craft yeah so we have to use Russian crafts back from the space station right now we have to use Rachel craft to go and come back how weird is that it's not cool what happened all right so it's not good none of us are happy about this but what happened was the shuttles the shuttle let me just say this is a magnificent flying machine I mean what's really remarkable if you go down to like the California Science Center and you look at endeavour we design that thing in the 70s like it doesn't even have a microwave it's got a conventional convection oven Wow so it's like ancient technology that the flight computers on that thing your your Apple watch could run circles around them I mean it's like nothing there they're so primitive but but it did it took off like a rocket and landed like an airplane you had you could carry people you carry the Hubble Space Telescope in a trunk you can do a space walk from his has a robot arm that you see there yeah there's endeavour so that's my flight actually that's sts-123 in the middle that's the robot that we put together Wow but but anyway the it's an incredible machine and we'll never design anything like it maybe ever again certainly not anytime soon so despite its technological in incredibleness for lack of a better word it had a couple key limitations one was it's not that safe you know so we lost two of them Challenger in Columbia and we could talk about that I knew I knew the guys in Columbian that was really really rough and then the second thing was a super expensive because it took so much maintenance even though it was reusable or most of it was it took so much maintenance it took a standing army to keep it running we're spending I think three or four billion dollars a year on the program and and there's no way if we wanted to build something that was gonna be more cost effective or safer there's no way we're going to get a plus up from Congress so like an addition of four billion dollars a year to go do that the only way really to make it happen was to stop flying the shuttle so he we took a very painful decision and we said okay we're gonna retire these things so we can make something new and we know that there's going to be a gap period where we're not gonna have anything and it's gonna suck but the good news is is Annie that the great timing about this conversation right now is that gap ends this year really yeah 2020 is when that painful period is put to rest and what what happens we're gonna have the spacex dragon space X dragon yeah it's a great name yeah I love it yeah we're gonna have a brave new ship and not only a dragon we're gonna have the Boeing Star liner and and then we have two other private companies that are gonna be launching people this year yeah it's incredible these four companies all trying to put humans into space with private companies yeah and the schedules are just aligning so it's all looks like it all will happen in 2020 now there they've done some people civilian trips up in the space right they have and that's all happens because by paying the Russians that's what it is all right yeah why is their equipment so much better it's not the it's the only game in town once we once we retired the shuttles there was nothing else available I would be like hey um how are you guys maintaining these things yeah what are you doing like tell me tell me what's your maintenance schedule it's been a little scary lately because I've had some they've had some mishaps right like what well we had a launch goes squirrely where the rocket didn't work right and handed that a punch off Nick cake was the American on that unfortunately he was fine he went off I mean II eject yeah oh [ __ ] yeah that's something you want to like do for fun so during launch yeah so you're launching Shh no like this is not good yeah when it when it has these beside boosters uh-huh and one of them got stuck it didn't come off right and they were starting to spin out of control and then they punched out oh my god how far how far up are they when they punch out that's it so we say punch out or punch out punch out John abort you say abort okay but I don't in that case I don't know the exact out to do they were fairly high they were probably I think they were still in the atmosphere so I'm guessing it I'm guessing something like 40 to 70 kilometers up or so and so they punch out and abort and then are you in like a capsule like what are you in in a capsule and then from that point on it's kind of like a normal landing if you survive the giant you know yank I think they were pulling something like five or six G's I think when a 20 was separate or maybe even more that system when they pulled off and then and then and then at that point you're falling in the capsule and then the parachutes come out hmm and and it from that point on it's kind of like a normal landing oh the G's got to be crazy right I've did a flight with the Blue Angels once oh yeah and I think we went seven and a half G's or something like that wasn't that that bad but it's so weird yeah then you see the consciousness closing in like an elevator door you see the blackness on the sides a soda straw going yes very weird so that like in space like to get ejected or I guess actually not in space in the atmosphere and do you have to climb into that thing before you can abort or are you in it already there's no time it's a it's a rocket and in that case it's a rocket on the top that pulls the capsule away from the booster oh wow just like we did with Apollo and Gemini mm-hmm now I'm dragon and also on Starliner we've got much more advanced systems that are built into the into the capsule and so they they they're they push instead of having a tower up on top that pulls you away they have engines down here that that push and fly away hmm and the nice thing about that is the tower you actually if you don't need it you have to you have to throw it away you have to jettison it but that's kind of like needing to use your ejection seat every single time you go for a flight because if you for some reason if it doesn't jettison you're dead you can't get the parachutes up with that thing stuck up on top so that's like a failure mode that if you put the engines down here you don't have to worry about that mmm plus you carry it with you the whole time so you could use those powerful engines to really get quickly away from the booster like the Falcon 9 if it's having a bad day you can use even if it's blowing up yeah does it look like can you pull up the SpaceX what's it dragon what the crew dragon prude dragon well there she is that looks like something from the future that's the if that's the test we just did that's an artist drawing of it but this is the final big test we had to do before we actually put people inside and we did that successfully just a couple weeks ago oh so what we did was we lit up those those eject engines there that's an actual shot yeah that's insane look at that thing yeah it looks like a UFO yeah it's crazy in a rocket went kablooey not that we blew it up but it started once it's separated the rocket start tumbling out of control and it made a giant fireball and is that normal or expected we kind of thought that would happen yeah well you were right we're planning on using it again there it is so they're there did separate in from the booster Wow and the booster went kaboom but the rocket but it was a I think if I remember right I think it was a 1.5 kilometers away when when the rocket went kaboom and it was fine now when you guys do these test flights do they have to anticipate where this stuff is going to land like where the I mean yeah all this giant metal with fire any chute so what as you're launching you have to take into consideration yeah what the trajectory is wow that's the explosion CSX complete successful abort test launch of Dragon crew capsule Wow yeah so you have to think about where it so they have to calculate what speed how fast the earth is spinning where it's gonna drop well that's that's why and theoretically you know you got to be ready for this any given flight mm-hmm now this one we knew it was gonna happen but it could happen any time so you always that's why we always launch out over the ocean oh okay and that's why Cape Canaveral where Cape Canaveral is because if you look at a map of Florida that's the Cape is where Florida juts out as a little prominence that juts out to the east into the Atlantic and that way you can go due east which is generally what you want to do when you launch or you can even turn a little bit north or south and you're not gonna fly over anybody's house or Disneyland or anything and if something goes wrong in the old days like on the shuttle we actually had explosives on the tank and air these dudes these rain safety control offers officers that would sit with a big red button oh Jesus and if they see you going out of control and you're heading back towards land yeah boom oh my god what a responsibility they have we used to go by before launch and meet those guys look them in the eye and almost look like psychos showing pictures of our family don't get itchy bro don't get it you had that trigger so give it a potato it seems like a crazy way to handle it that the junk has to fall in the ocean yeah well now the Russians and the Chinese don't necessarily honor that they actually the Chinese have dropped nasty burnin boosters on you know it's sparsely populated but they still have dropped these things on like villages and stuff oh boy they're little less really concerned about this kind of thing the [ __ ] in China but in the US we always so we launch and the reason that you usually want to launch to the east is you want to take advantage of the Earth's rotation to give you like a slingshot effect mmm because if you go to the east the earth is rotating this way it kind of slingshot you into orbit going with the rotation and that's why you also might be as close to the equator as you can because if you're ever you had the north pole and you launched East it's not gonna help you all right but the lower you are towards it equator and more of a slingshot you get now did they have to figure out over time where those things were dropping did they ever make some mistakes I don't think is that we've had Rockets blow up on the pad and do a bunch of damage but once they're up and out I don't think we ever in the u.s. anyway had that problem because we always had the ability to blow it up if it's there the red lines and if it passes the red line you push the button now it's all done autonomously so you have GPS monitors on board that self-destruct if it sees it as going past the line there's nobody with the button anymore it's all automatic oh wow and these boosters that fall into the ocean do they have them documented like where they're landing so they know where these things are scattered out throughout the ocean they know approximately and and one cool thing was probably the most famous booster that landed then the bottom of the ocean was Apollo 11 the Saturn 5 and it was just sitting there you know as a fish habitat oh wow and Jeff Bezos with his own out of his own pocket mounted an expedition and went and got him got those engines that's when you know you're a baller yeah throw some money at pulling the rocket boosters from Apollo 11 out of the ocean holy [ __ ] like crazy am I gonna do this weekend maybe I'll watch a movie or now no go get those engines look at that Wow there you go powerful Jeff Bezos and a hard part was finding the right ones and they got them as I saw the serial number they're like yeah look at the image finding the right ones cuz there's a bunch down there yeah there was a bunch of cyber fives Wow and they found the right ones look at that that's nuts and perfectly preserved yeah and then when did he do this what yesterday night 10 that pushed Buzz and Neil and my team to them Wow that's madness yeah what a crazy image boosters landing in China oh yeah oh that's what I'm hitting the ground yes Oh rewinding that again that is very quick I started right where the explosion was there's other ones it's just falling from the sky nighted on impact with the ground so these people are just chillin and a giant chunk of metals falls from the sky oh my god that's crazy know that but that's hypergolic fuels so that's like you don't want to be breathing that stuff that's pretty toxic look at it just landed on people like whoops sorry that's a that's a BRC big great cloud you know or b.o.b FRC you know what yeah you know I've been here that what is in that cloud it's hydrazine so it's a nto MMH mono methyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide it's it's stuff they don't want to drink look at that falling from the sky oh my god that's crazy yeah it fell on a small village China doesn't give a [ __ ] they just let it go it is I mean that those villagers are getting pre unlucky because it is pretty sparsely populated so you're just playing the odds but if we went we wouldn't do that well that has to be terrible for their breathing and their health yeah that stuff was gonna linger right yeah I got we get into the drinking water uh-huh I mean it the quantity is of that are probably not gonna be like absolute catastrophic either the bigger risk is getting blown up by it but it's still not good so why doesn't China adhere to the same sort of well they do what they got to do yeah yeah so when when you're a part of these expeditions and you know you're you recognize that you're one of very few people that ever gets to experience this these kind of things do you feel like a responsibility to try to relay this information to people like yeah it's part of our job you know so when we're when I was that NASA they would send us out to do these PR events and we go to schools and I would go back to like Jersey where I'm from and go visit all these school systems and part of Jersey from my parents are from Newark and I grew up in pursue my - yeah yeah I heard about that yeah Parsippany I know where that is Persephone that's right that's right career I went to press seven high school Wow um and so you go back and try to inspire kids - yeah - pursue this case same kind of thing and I still do it so I was just in Israel last week I just got back two nights ago actually so every year on the anniversary of the Columbia tragedy they have a space week in Israel where they have a whole bunch of STEM education events and there's also a technical conference and then there's a memorial for the first Israeli astronaut that was on Columbia Elan so I got to know his family really well and I go back there every year and and we had the memorial last Friday and so yeah I'm still and I tried it I think I met every school kid in Israel and got the you know it's good just try to get them excited about the future about a bright future you know well the reason why one the reason why I brought this up is I saw a video we talked about how your during your childhood you got a photo on your wall of look at the Earth from the moon the photograph that was taken yeah and that that's what set the seed or planted the seed in your head yeah right so I also I also go out and I do a lot of you know public appearances and do motivational speaking kind of stuff and I talk about the importance of both inspiration and determination so I found out when I was a kid that they were they were taken not only fighter pilots but also like engineers and scientists to be astronauts because I was was totally super stoked by that the whole concept of going into space but I had a mom that's like scared to fly she was typical Jewish mom she was like she's like I told her once I wanted to join the Air Force and she in it like a public restaurant and she starts freaking out and like started like soliciting opinions from the other parents would you listen you know the hilarious oh so I never thought I knew that like being a test pilot was not gonna happen so I thought being an astronaut wasn't gonna happen but then I found out that you could do it you can be an engineer and be an astronaut and then like that was my Eureka moment I was inspired but to be determined I got that photo and I put it over my desk and was like that was my like that was the beacon you know that was the goal and I kept working and any time I was having a difficult time I looked up at that thing and say no one day I'm gonna hang that in the astronaut office and Johnson Space Center and I still have that thing that must have been surreal the moment when you were on that spacewalk thinking about your childhood and thinking about being inspired by those images yeah he's like holy [ __ ] I'm actually an astronaut I'm eeen you really are an astronaut I mean how many are there there's there I think there's been around 500 people that have been to space ever yeah that's nuts not a lot and now with SpaceX what is your role with SpaceX so I left NASA in 2011 and I went down and met with Elon and I said hey I really like what you're doing here can I help and can i and he gave me a job so I went I left NASA and I came here and I worked there for seven years did a bunch of different things eventually became our director of space operations so my team was responsible for operating Mission Control at SpaceX and controlling we have another Dragon capsule that we use for cargo to take cargo and we've been doing that for a long time up to the space station and back and so we would operate in Mission Control but we're also we're designing then the crew one that we showed you so we were coming up with the procedures and all the rules of how we're going to use that thing and and and meeting all of NASA's requirements and helping to provide input to the guys designing the displays and the suits and the controls and the seats and all the stuff you need for people and so that was that was you know I did that for quiet quite a long time well what do you have thoughts on this what what's happening now with space travel where it's transferring into the public sector or the private sector rather instead of being something that the government handles now it's private companies is that a good thing it's a great thing is that yeah because first of all it's not quite that black and white in the media it's all portrayed as commercial space and like these private companies are taken over the truth is at least for the human orbital spaceflight that we're doing at SpaceX and that Boeing is doing with with their vehicle it's a part as a public-private partnership and so NASA is working very closely with both those companies and we're working together and in a way it's not really that different from the way it's always been you know like NASA didn't have a NASA factory that built the Saturn 5 rocket is built here by like McDonnell Douglas and North American Rockwell built if I remember right North American built and built a command module and and the lunar lander was built by Grumman so those were all private companies they're contractors but they're still private companies and what's happening now is just a slight change to the relationship between NASA and the private companies where NASA is not micromanaging quite as much as they used to they're saying ok here's our top level requirements we want you to get four people up and down to the space station that's a bit of a simplification because actually the requirements document is like there are thousands of requirements but they're but they don't go down and tell you how to meet each requirement they leave it up to you so now SpaceX there's a lot more room to innovate then like North American Rockwell did when when they built the vehicles back during Apollo so that that and the other thing that's different is that the funding the way the NASA is paying its firm fixed price you know all these that like the Space Shuttle when we build an aircraft carrier it's it's cost plus contracting which has been terribly abused and has been horrible for the US taxpayer it what it says to the company is you can it could cost whatever costs that's what will pay and in fact will give you a profit as a percentage of the cost so like you're in it your incentive as the company's like to make the cost as high as you can so your profit as high as it could but that's ridiculous yeah so it's not cool and and but it they had to do it that way like during World War two is when it started because like nobody knew how much was gonna cost to build a p-51 Mustang because nobody did one before hmm so they came up with this mechanism but now it's kind of been abused now we're using it to do things that we've done before and then the third thing is that that the companies own the intellectual property so what that means is like Rockwell when they built the Space Shuttle couldn't like build a new Space Shuttle like build like Space Shuttle enterprise or something and then go sell tickets on it they weren't allowed to but we can so we can we're gonna build this dragon we're gonna take Bob banking and Doug Hurley two friends of mine are gonna be the first astronauts that ride it to the space station and once we meet our NASA NASA's our number one customer they're paying the bill so once they are satisfied we can then go make another one and sell tickets and take you know private individuals so really that's the key difference and I really think that 2020 we're gonna look back at 2020 as it as a year that everything changed really yeah because all those dreams of science fiction I like being able to take your vacations around the rings of Saturn and like all the like private space stations all that kind of stuff that we grew up hoping would happen when we were older I think it's really finally starting because this is this is the beginning of that infrastructure that that private sector commercial infrastructure and and an ability to actually get it done we're always talking about how only got the future in like space 1999 that television show I like that show I said all the time yeah but all those shows like even I think Blade Runner was like now right didn't we discuss this like last year 2019 like we got everything wrong in terms of what the timeline was the timeline is totally wrong but I think that the overall the overall direction is is right in a lot of this stuff and we'll get there I really do believe that if we don't end up killing each other or have some horrible catastrophe like asteroid hit us we're going to end up living in space and have that kind of Star Trek future I mean I really think that's our destiny as long as we don't screw it up man how far out are we looking at Star Trek Star Trek might take a while did we get like warp drive another hundred years and we got to find those Dively thorium captain she's predicting hope that like how far do you think we are like if you had a wide timeline of like literally being able to go to another planet well you know well going to Mars is something we could do now in a decade if we really really really want ilan keep saying that I think he's right I mean it's it's not a question of technology the big missing piece I think in an understanding about what that would be like is is the effect of radiation on the human body there's engineering solutions we could come up with for that this is for the prolonged journey the six-month journey once you start talking about what so so right now like on the space station I took a bigger radiation hit than I would have if I stayed at home but much of ahead you know the manner dose I took was not that much it's like like a tenth of a sievert or something I mean it's like it was produced receiver a sievert if you take one sievert then you're increasing your chance of getting cancer depending on your age and gender about a couple additional percent can you mitigate that with supplements like is there iodine that you take or something along those lines there's some you know maybe antioxidants but I think that that's that's not a see it's not gonna fix this problem that could help maybe they say take iodine tablets right if you're exposed to radiation isn't that like something that they recommend yeah for like for the nuclear reactors you know and and all that but I think that protects that protects function of some one under the organs I can't remember but it's not going to solve that's not gonna solve this problem but you can shield yourself with anything that has hydrogen in it it's a pretty good shield so water is great like when I was on the space station I put a big water jug around my head really it just I figured couldn't hurt and and then like liquid hydrogen or even plastic that's made just derived from hydrogen is pretty good shielding okay so you could have like conceivably a light plastic suit that you wear that could shield you from a lot of the radiation on the way to Mars there's actually a company in Israel that is teaming with NASA is gonna fly these like vests on to try to shield the people you can also put it in the hull and or you can have just a storm shelter because there's basically once when we're on the space station we're above all the atmosphere but we're still below the magnetic field of the earth so we still getting we still enjoy a lot of protection from radiation hmm once you go out of that and you go to the moon or to Mars then you basically hanging it out there you're you're not you're no longer protected by that and so you're gonna take either GCR galactic cosmic radiation which is just everywhere out there sounds terrible it sounds bad that it GCR galactic cosmic radiation that sounds really bad yeah yeah those are that those are ionized that there aren't that many of them but when they hit you they can do a lot of damage they have a lot of energy there's accelerated to like near relativistic speeds like near the speed of light and then and then there's a solar then you gotta worry about solar flares SPE solar proton events and those don't come those are very like I'm predictable well they're a little bit predictable with sunspot activity but but they come every once a while in their giant spikes they last a couple hours to a couple days and they could totally fry you they're even worse oh [ __ ] yeah so conceivably we could send people to Mars and halfway there they get cooked yeah so you have a six-month window where you have to just roll the dice well so what you can do is you can have a storm shelter right at way you put like a lot of this shielding and then if you could detect it the the SPE you the GCR is there all the time but the solar events you could you can detect them coming and you have enough warning time to get everybody into the storm sure how much time you have usually when you first start seeing some of the proton radiation then you start you have like an hour oh so you got time going 48 minutes from now it's coming yeah just like hunker down there probably grabbing all the water bottles you can Wow and depending upon how big the ejection is you don't know how long it's gonna last yeah they could be a different magnitudes and different discs ill you even if you have the shoulder the shielding I mean if it's a really huge one and and we didn't really have any capability of defending from it when we did Apollo and there was a between two Apollo missions there's one of these big ones oh boy and we just got lucky that it was in between so that seems crazy what a nutty roll of the dice yeah but again there's there's and we keep getting smarter about it and and and and I think you know for like right now we can send you to Mars and bring you back and and probabilistically speaking you'd probably have like an additional four or five percent chance of developing cancer over your lifetime which it's not like a death sentence you know it's a little it's a little uncomfortable yeah yeah but we're getting better and and the thing about it there's two things about it one we keep getting better technologies better shielding we can actually come up with there's ways you can do active shielding with magnetic you can create your own magnetic field around the ship and and and so it always be like Star Trek with like you know a force a force field or shields or whatever so we're there's a ways that maybe we could do that there's also the other thing that we don't know we know exactly what radiation is out there we don't know exactly what that radiation does to humans the best we have to go on is like data from some of the atomic bomb survivors and and radiation workers then working like power plants and stuff to take some dose but it's a different kind of radiation so right now the error bars are really big so when we say they go five percent chance of cancer that's taking a very conservative estimate if we can find out what it really does the humans maybe it's a lot more benign and maybe we could sharpen that pencil and say yeah it's acceptable what if people come back smarter what if it's like some [ __ ] x-men type [ __ ] yeah maybe like you know I mean radiation is always bad in real life but always good in comic books yeah spider-man if the Hulk spider-man is so many superheroes they were involved in some sort of an accident wasn't dr. Manhattan wasn't that a thing with him as well I think so yeah I think so I don't from The Watchmen I think he became who he is because of an accident a document I believe so yeah and I was hoping that you know I was up I had my kids after I did that flight oh so I'm hoping that they would like one day genius kids yeah how old are your kids now I got a nine-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl notice anything unusual about them I didn't notice one day the two year old girl was concentrating on her blocks and one of them started floating oh man so what what changes have been made since you go from the old shuttle model of that technology to the SpaceX dragon crew thing probably the single biggest changes is all the we've gotten a lot better at electronics and software so the vehicle is highly automated and that's why we can fly like like normal people that don't have like years and years of training because it's so much more smarter than the shot of the shuttle you shouldn't say so much more smarter so much butter but you're such a genius you're not supposed to use language like that you're goddamn astronaut so much more smarter I'm sorry though I was a math as though as my thing that verbal my verbal SATs weren't that spare about the you know yeah this is much more smarter and what about what about the there was always an issue with the tiles right with the re-entry time I was like and then that's that's what did Challenger and know which one was Olivia Columbia that's what did Colombian the the new design have they made advances and how that stuff is applied or is it a different surface they use yeah so that that is something that's also not really worry anymore that the reason that Columbia took that damage was it was foam like the big orange tank that's behind the Space Shuttle it sticks up above the space shuttle and some foam fell off of it we always had some foam shedding off the thing and in the beginning we took that very very seriously as a major problem but the thing is is this there's this concept of mmm gonna forget the name of it now well let me just describe it so so you get away with something for so long that you begin it's not normalization of deviance that's what it's called so it's when you get away with something for so much so long it's something that was a deviant thing or something that was bad it's treated as a normal thing and that's what happened to us because we knew that that foam coming off could do damage to the Space Shuttle and in the beginning we tried really hard to do something about it we treated it very seriously but it was hard we couldn't really come up with an easy fix in the meantime were flying and nothing bad was happening what was really happening is what we were getting lucky and then eventually a big piece came off hit Columbia right in the wing and it shattered a mint a big hole inside the wing but nobody knew for sure and they made a bad decision to not like investigate it further assumed it was okay brought him home and and obviously you know what happened so it could be possible to fix something like that if they had known it could have been possible we did a lot of things like when I flew we had a lot of things in place that to try to fix that one we got a rid of a lot of the foam that was unnecessary we tried to do things that stopped the foam we also had ways of detecting it so that we would know we had sensors and the wings we added a maneuver we do when we fly up to the space station we did like a pitchover where we took photographs of the of the heat shield to see if anything got hit hmm so at least we would know and then we could we could shelter in place on the space station so there's a lot of things we can do at the shuttle but the night the thing about with Dragon and Starliner and the new vehicles is they sit on top so there's no any foam that comes off the rocket is not gonna hit you so problem solved so that that's one example of how we don't have to worry about that anymore now is the surface different do they still have the same kind of tiles the the heat shield it looks like again the heat shield is that the material on the side of the capsule on the walls of the capsule is is made out of silica so it's it's similar to the tiles but the the the material that's in the in the heat shield itself is an ablative material it means it kind of like as it heats up it flakes off and it takes the heat away with it and that's that's kind of more similar to like it was during Apollo it's a much more advanced that thing yeah and they're cool can we see that could we go there well they give us a tour I bet we can I bet we could my bail Apollo no I don't want to see a spaceship the guy you should ask was my boss when he was here yeah we're talking about other [ __ ] no I you know he's got the keys to the factory but but there there she is on the launch pad so that white stuff at the top mmm on the capsule itself that's kind of like the same material as the as the time has the tiles but the heat shown on the bottom is called pica phenolic impregnated carbon ablator so it's a different it's a different very high-tech material that is really really good at withstanding tremendous amounts of heat that heat shield is way oversized you could use that thing at least 10 times and it really was originally designed for actually entries coming back from the moon when you go in much faster and you hit you build up a lot more heat when you hit the atmosphere I think just coming back from the space station so ultimately that's the goal for these things to take people to the moon to take people to Mars to take people well and reusable right this is just a start so reusability is key and there's elements of this vehicle that are not reusable that trunk you see the thing cylinder below the capsule is not reusable we throw that away that the second stage on the Falcon 9 we throw away and you know Elon hates that with that the Holy Grail is 100% reusable but affordable reusability where you don't have to spend like a gazillion dollars refurbishing it in between flights mm-hmm and we're getting there in the next vehicle is going to be the real that's gonna be the real hopefully we will we will get that Holy Grail with this starship that that we're working on now so there's a is a top-secret one that you can't talk about that what it does you seem hesitant well it's just you know we got a lot of development going on and and it's not top-secret I mean Elon went down did a press conference in front of it in Texas not too long ago and it showed what it looked like yes this is one of the tests it's called star hopper so this was a beginning this is a testbed to test the engine to make sure that we can that's fake that's real that's rude that is come on that is not CGI really that's the thing that's the thing whoa now the real thing is gonna look just like that it's it's it's the a this is really testing the engine and the sensors and the electronics what is the jet coming out of the bottom those are that's that that the bottom is a is there as a raptor engine it's burning liquid methane and liquid oxygen and then those puffs at the top are cold gas thrusters just to keep it pointing the right way and so that's landing now yeah my god that's amazing awesome that is a mate look how gently it lands yeah dude that seems like science fiction I know that's not telling you like this thing and I know that the guys up in Blue Origin - Jeff Bezos company has got all kinds of incredible stuff on their drawing board 2020 is this start but it's just a start show me that again I need to see that again I need to see other pictures of it okay that's that I want to see that thing land again that video of it landing is crazy I got lucky did you it's so crazy though the image to see it gently come down and perfectly land like look at that man that looks like some war the world's type [ __ ] that's in a Tom Cruise movie right yeah like if they were flying over earth and they were starting to land my god that's amazing I remember when Elin first talked about landing Rockets on their tails he was like I think I remember him saying yeah we want to do it just like Buck Rogers so so I'm working with with with Ron Moore on this TV show I'm working on now Wow look at that thing I mean yeah it's pretty awesome I said before people want to see this Jimmy what is the name of the the video so people listening can go 150 meters star hopper test more than two million eight hundred thousand seven hundred thousand views that's amazing man two million eight hundred ninety-eight Wow it's on the SpaceX page so you can go and check that out so that's next stage that's net stakes so there's gonna be a rocket and then that that thing is gonna sit on top of it or something like that thing and then we're gonna get both back the rocket will land on its tail and then the same after it goes off to the moon or even Mars it'll come back and also land on his tail and then we'll get both pieces will get 100% back Wow and then we really got reusability guy and hopefully we'll be able to use these one like a hundred times at least now is there any innovation or any breakthroughs in fuel and in the type of propulsion systems that you need me no dude conceivably is there ever gonna be a time where we have like a like a Star Wars ex fighter that can just go shoot off onto its own you know there's there's a potential for more advanced more efficient thrust engines and probably one of the most promising ones in the near-term is actually a nuclear engine a nuclear thermal rocket where you instead of using combustion to propel hot gasses out the back of your nozzle you have to use a nuclear reactor and you take hydrogen you flow it over that you heat it up like super hot and shoot it out the back without lighting it on fire and if you do that you can actually get much more thrust at with much less mass of fuel like a smaller fuel tank but more thrust over time so that's one possible way to go so it's conceivable that one day there could be a standalone unit that does need thrusters that eject oh it still would look like a regular rocket because the back of the head of the nozzle would still have like fire coming out the back but it would just be superheated instead of letting him and fire to heat it up you would you would there you go there we go here nuclear propulsion ntp yeah nuclear thermal propulsion so the top one is traditional and the second one's the nuclear one Wow yeah that's so it's yeah so alright so there there it is that's the hydrogen coming in and flowing over the reactor instead of having liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen then you just all you need is the liquid hydrogen's Wow so that's one way but in a short term the advanced you're sitting there with that star hopper is that it's still a traditional chemical propulsion rocket so it's got fuel and oxidizer which is liquid oxygen because no oxygen up there to have fire you need the pyramid right so you need the oxygen and that fuel and the spark and you have to bring your own oxygen if you're in space because you can't use there you don't have that much for anymore so to carry liquid oxygen and some fuel and in the Falcon 9 for example it's basically kerosene it's rocket fuel but it's our p1 but it's basically kerosene mix what looks like liquid oxygen the engine you saw in that star hopper is advanced and different because what it uses it still uses liquid oxygen but instead of kerosene it uses liquid methane and it's actually not as efficient quite it doesn't have it quite that the specific impulse which is a measure of efficiency it doesn't have that quite as good as hydrogen it's better than kerosene but not quite as good as hydrogen but here's a thing you can make it on Mars and that's why we're that's why he lands bill in that engine because you can go to Mars and you don't have to bring your gas to come home oh oh so that was the big knock on going to Mars for the longest time was that you'd never be able to return you have to you have to wait two years for the trajectory for the plans to come back around so you have a window that come home so you do it to stay a while but that the beautiful thing is if you can go someplace and gas up again fill up your tank without having to bring all the gas with you that's huge right you can you can be so much you can carry some much more that way and and that's you can with a carbon dioxide that's in the Martian atmosphere and the water that's in the ice that's on the surface of Mars you can have a reaction a process by that allows you to create to take those two things to make liquid methane and you can have the tank of that ready to go and all done robotically you can get the telemetry back saying we got the gas and then you go now how much are things can accelerate now that you have all these different companies competing against each other that's what's beautiful is like the pace of technological changes like really going exponential again just kind of like it was during Apollo so we're back into that really rapid that fast track we kind of fell off of that for a little while and the nice thing about people ask me like what's the biggest difference between working in SpaceX and working at NASA and I would say it's decision speed because well we'll make up our mind quickly now the reason we can do that is we got a tremendous amount of agility because sometimes when you make up your mind quickly you make the wrong decision right yeah but if you hurry up and figure out that you made the wrong decision and you have the agility did then say okay that was not right let's try something else then it works at NASA you know we had all these contractors and suppliers and and a very cumbersome kind of system that we took a long time to make sure we made the right decision because changing things was prohibitively costly mm-hmm but SpaceX doesn't have to worry about that oh now what is the difference between the way SpaceX is handling it you said Boeing has something what did they call it again so nASA has Commercial Crew program and they selected to commercial companies to partner with SpaceX and Boeing and so's Boeing is using you know an older rocket that's been around a long time called the Atlas 5 and they built a capsule to go on top of that called the Starliner and so this is strictly for commercial flights well it mean it's for its that that the anchor tenant if you will that the core customer is still NASA because NASA is going to use both of these rockets to replace the Space Shuttle and we won't have to beg the Russians for rides anymore hmm let me see what the Boeing one looks like what's the name of it again a star liner or used to be called the cst-100 let me see what this sucker looks at least call it the POS 100 there's Network meeting but it's a good ride it's a good vehicle okay so it's kind of similar in its design a little bit it's doing it look well looks pretty dope yeah one key difference is it lands we splashed down in the water and this one lands on land with those air bags oh wow [ __ ] that yeah what if those bags don't work this was it is it fill up like the way they use Rovers on Mars where it's surrounded by these gigantic air bags and it bounces when it hits the ground it doesn't bounce because that's not good for people robots don't mind but if you bounce like that you're gonna be really upset so it just hits and kind of like airbags that deploy in a car and they deflate and then you're done and so this is on the same sort of timeline as the SpaceX ship yeah I think they're there I think SpaceX aspects is really ready to go like in March like very soon but I think we're gonna wait a little longer because they're talking about extending the mission for Bob and Doug and keeping them on the space station so they need more training sorry Bob alone yeah well they get they get to hang out in space for a while I'm not - I don't feel too bad for them and their equipment is keeping them from losing all the bone density and muscle and everything yeah they'll be fine now when does Elon go to space oh wow I mean how well do you have to have the system working before you put the boss in the capsule shoot him often in the heavens he's got a lot of work to do here so I don't think he's going to anytime soon but he does eventually when when we get this up and running he does eventually want to go he talks about he wants to die a Mars just not a tactful you know that the that jokey cos so that's that's you know he's serious about that he really does want to die on Mars like really old he wants to go and live the rest of his days as part of a permanent Martian colony Oh Elon I got to talk to you about this but he's not going to tell us you always thought that way yeah that's always been the plants always been a play maybe we can get him high again seems like it's our boy yeah well he's gonna wait he's not gonna be the first one he's gonna wait until we have like pieces and some catchy no and like in a decent hotel and so the concept is terraforming right that is that's not gonna happen I think even Elon would tell you that's not gonna happen in his lifetime that's something that like generations from now we could think about it's that's that's hard so there's some sort of domed civilization like what yeah yeah live in some kind of pressurized compartment some kind of pressurized habitat so it it'd be kind of like science fiction like what you see in science fiction things where it's land on planets and people live inside the ships and you can't go outside unless you wear a suit let's wear a suit yeah Wow but hopefully there'll be plenty of plenty of room inside if once this thing grows to be really big we also have to make sure it's really really well protected from radiation because even once you're on Mars you have to worry about those GC ARS and yeah yeah didn't he have an idea to like nuke the caps yeah like nuke the Solar polar caps and yeah you know it's not like anybody's really sitting around drawing up plans for that that was kind of like like if we had to do it how could we do it that's one thing you know that came off the top of his head but what was that that was to raise the temperature or the change the atmosphere or that's the like melt the captain and eject a lot of gas into the atmosphere and beef up the Martian atmosphere what a weird roll the dice that would be and I think we're gonna be trying that easy and then what is the concept like in terms of terraforming what kind of window of time would it take to turn that into a livable environment that you're starting to really extrapolate it out pretty far and I'd be pretty hard for me to give you it so there's like giant leaps of technology that have to take yeah that's that's a big one but it's as a proof of concept it's it's sort of I mean there is a theory right the young can alter the atmosphere and I mean Mars has got enough gravity that if you could put enough gas into the atmosphere it would stick around mmm kind of like you know it's it's got its possible you're not going to get to one atmosphere pressure like 14.7 PSI like we enjoy here might be enough now and there their gravity is what percentage of Earth's it's about third third Wow so you you would definitely experience a lot of the same issues that you have if you go to the Space Station so if you wanted to go from Mars back to Earth it would definitely be some sort of an adjustment period yeah you know the really interesting thing is like we know we have a lot of data we know what happens at in zero-g because we have a lot of us have been up to the space station and Skylab and mirror and all that and we have tons of data at 1g because all of us every day live in 1g we don't really have any data in between mm-hmm so the question is is a half a G half as good or maybe it's like 80% is good Brian and and and so is it linear or is it nonlinear we don't know mm-hmm and that's why if we send people and we live on the moon or we go to Mars when we live on Mars and we have data a kind of moon it's about a sixth of the Earth's gravity so we'll get points in between and then we can figure out if this thing is there's a lot of stuff that happens to you that may be completely solved but even just a smallest amount of G hmm but we don't know well that's interesting right we don't know yeah because zero G's an issue we don't know how much of an issue 1/3 G is yeah now what about food like what are they gonna do with food on Mars are they gonna have to fly all the ingredients out everything out would you start talking about missions that are that long carrying all your food with you bringing it all becomes mass prohibitive you know you just gotta take so much and that just means you need that that much bigger of a rocket and it's just after a while it gets you know to the point where it doesn't work what's all the food for the rest of your life essentially yeah so we're probably if we're talking about like living for a long time on Mars or even deep space missions we gotta grow food so probably plants hydroponically like the Matt Damon movie yeah yeah how realistic was that you know that movie is really pretty good good movie yeah there was a I met the author the guy that wrote anyway the guy that wrote the book and I told him that I really didn't like his book [Laughter] yeah he's like why was it because like there's not really enough dynamic pressure in a Martian windstorm to knock the antenna off the roof like now it's fine with that said it was because we don't have enough redundancy in the comm system and that's not really realistic I'm like that no because well why didn't you like it I'm like well listen I have a long day of work at SpaceX I come home I open up the book before I go to bed and I'm reading this like okay I got 62 Souls and I got to cover 3000 kilometres and I've got 52 moles of nitrogen hydroxide blah blah blah and I'm like it's like I'm still at work like I wanted some escapism I want to like go home really have romance now or something well that's not his fault though no well so you just busted his paw busting his balls yeah that's it's interesting though that he got it close yeah yeah he did a great job that's all true I mean for something does he have a background in that yeah I think he does uh I hear something okay that makes more sense yeah yeah but what that movie was terrifying the idea that you can get stuck up yeah the only part of the movie which I don't think was in the book that was not realistic at all was when he cuts his glove and does the Iron Man Thing uh-oh usually flying back to the spaceship you can't really control it that he would spin out of control it's yes you'd also need a big hole to really get enough propulsion and then your suit would deflate I mean it's just that's just not gonna work yeah and how long would you survive out there with no suit that's a good question just holding your breath just well you can't really hold your breath because as the as a pressure all goes down the first thing you have to worry about is Barrow trauma so like in your lungs and in your sinuses and you're it's all gonna like like an overinflated balloon so if you try to hold your breath that's a wrong thing to do cuz you go so you have to let the breath out yeah you can't really do that for very long though like the way people hold their breath underwater they actually have breath in their lungs yeah but they're not equalizing what the pressure as a go down you know when they do those like freediving that's right so if you're gonna equalize you're gonna have to let the air out or it's going to just expand and and be extremely painful and and hurt you so you could do that but then eventually you get to the point where the pressure gets so low that the all the liquid in your tissues starts turning into gas that's called a Buell ism and then you'll start getting this massive swelling like your nickel for a puff up like that and everything you'll get grotesque swelling and wherever that your blood is turning to gas and OH although all the liquids and your tissues are turning into gases it's not a good thing how long will that take before that starts happening that will start happening fairly quickly when you equalize after you breathe out all that air you can counteract it by having squeezed suits like Scouten suits with mechanical counter pressure that squeeze it and hold it in like a blood pressure cuff kind of pressure Oh kind of thing so you could do that that's um promising no no you know there's there's ways you can you can live through it but it is we've had this happen to people in vacuum chambers accidents like industrial vacuum chambers and one test chamber and NASA once had an accident and we've momentarily subjected people too close to space vacuum but very quickly got him back to pressure and they were okay mmm so all the bubbles just kind of like yeah now what is the timeline in terms of like does SpaceX have a multiple stage timeline like a timeline for incorporating the dragon crew and then a timeline for the star hopper and then a timeline for additional projects in the future like as is he thinking along these lines of like a like charted out progress oh yeah yeah he's in fact he measures pretty much every major decision by whether or not it brings the day when we have a self-sustainable colony on Mars sooner or later that's the prism by which he makes every like every single decision he makes through that prism Jesus yeah so he's got an idea and he'll keep pushing and you know he gives us aggressive timelines that we have to work to and we work really hard to try to try to meet him it's hard when you're doing stuff that this does this complicate it to predict exactly how long it's going to take so you know we end up off and falling a little bit behind but we do our best that's the case though with everything that's that crazy right yeah I mean no I mean especially Elon he's never right in his predictions all wacky inventions they're always a little off you know but we think but but he's so driven you know and he's such a smart guy and and he's he's the most he's really the most driven person I think I've ever met I'll give you a story that kind of Illustrated once when I first got hired by SpaceX we did a interview with 60 minutes and they interviewed at Elon and myself and Scott Pelley was the any anchor he'd talked to us and he said to me why did you leave NASA and come work for SpaceX he had like the best gig in a world you know going up on rockets and stuff why would you do that and I said well if you can go back in time and you were a young engineer and you had the opportunity to like get in on the ground floor and work with Howard Hughes when he was like doing all the crazy stuff he was doing and in his day wouldn't you want to be a part of that Scott Pelley looked at me like with a deer in the headlights so cuz I don't think he know what I was talking about but I was like that's it but then I realized this as I say that like oh my god I just made a terrible strategic error I compared my boss to Howard Hughes and you know things didn't end up that well for Howard you know he went crazy right and went kind of crazy became washed his hands too much and germaphobe he was peeing in jars and like his fingernails grew out like hmm yeah and I was like god no I really kind of stepped in it right you don't say that about the boss right so it took a while I was like months later we were driving in a rental car just the two of us in Florida we were had a meeting at NASA and we were driving back to the airport he got on his airplane to come back to LA and I'm driving the car he's sitting in the passenger seat and I said hey boss remember that time we're on TV and I compared you that Howard Hughes you know I just want you to know I was comparing you to the young dashing starlet dating Howard Hughes not the old decrepit peeing in jars fingernail it's all about the timeline yeah and and all I got back was silence I'm really scared right and I'm sitting there like waiting for him to say something and he'll and we'll do this and I he did this on your show right he kind of like if you if he posed to him a serious question he'll consider it and he'll kind of go into this I almost like a trance he'll stare off into space and you can see the wheels turning he's like focusing all of his intellect which is considerable and there's one question and that's what was happening so I waited and then he turned back to me he said you know Garrett I don't think it's an apt comparison I said okay good good why I'm curious why do you think that and he said well none at Howard none of Howard's designs as brilliant as they were ended up really changing the way we live our lives so we don't send like he made the dispersed goose which is an incredible airplane was all wood you know trying to solve the problem during the war of rationing he said we don't send our our Goods across the oceans and giant wooden airplanes we don't do that the h1 racer was a beautiful airplane but it was a one-off and never really led to a large designs that changed the way people lived their lives so that was his objection was not that like I was comparing him to some creep but that he wants it's really important to him to have the legacy of drastically impacting the way all of us live our lives the kind of the way Steve Jobs did or others that really move the ball downfield for Humanity that's what's driving he's such an unusual human I mean there's very very few people that you could make any kind of rational comparison to other than maybe Nikola Tesla will you really stop and think what he's done yeah and the fact that he does the most simultaneously that he's involved in the boring project he's involved in Tesla and SpaceX all simultaneously and Tesla home solar although the solar panels and the making solar tiles for roofs and he's doing so many different things at the same time it it's it's almost impossible like it I don't understand how he does it yeah I seen him do it and I still don't understand it you know it's like I've kind of burned myself out just trying to do one of those things yeah there's all of them and and and he does have all the advantages of wealth which helps you know so like he'll have meetings with us and he'll walk out of his last meeting and he'll walk across the street to Hawthorne Airport hop on his jet and he's at Palo Alto in a couple hours and he could be first thing in the morning at Tesla right he's got a staff to help some and you know he's got those advantages but he he that isn't in any way described what do you or that doesn't explain why he's able to do what he does I don't know how he does it to be honest oh well he's the next stage of humanity yeah if people are evolving he's he's like looking at us from the next spot he's like hey guys I've got some ideas yeah he's just an idea Factory and and he his uh what's really remarkable to me is is is the breadth of his knowledge I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software and you know the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across all the different technologies that go into rockets and cars and everything else he does that's what really impresses me well also the lack of burnout because he's been doing it at this incredible rate sixteen hours a day for how long is whole life I think that's nuts I know and he's still hungry for it and he still taking on these new projects and new ideas and yeah you know at that pace seven seven years was a bad as like as much as I could take like do something else I just don't I you know I mean I'm very happy exists you know yeah but it's very confusing to me I just feel so stupid when I'm around him the conversations I've had with him like goddamn I'm dumb yeah do what you got to do with what you got I would go that far so his uh his ultimate goal is to create some sort of a colony on Mars but he believes that this technology will continue to expand to the point where we will be leaving our solar system we will be making human trips into other solar systems into actual deep space yeah I mean certainly hopefully that's you know at some point if we're going to survive you take the really long view you know the solar system is not gonna last forever right it's gonna last plenty long and if my kids are listening at home don't worry freaking out right now no we got plenty of time couple billion years kids relax it's not in our lifetime they're so funny but uh but eventually we're gonna have to find a new home if we're gonna last forever mmm and we all hope that we last forever as a species right so at least most of us do so eventually we got to get there but we got plenty of time in a short term the important thing is at least getting out so not in just one place in the solar system because this you know something bad could happen to this planet sure we've got no backup right and particularly if there's a natural situation supervolcano super vodka steroid extract more you know we're doing a pretty good job of trash in this place all on her own yeah yeah we don't really need an asteroid to hit us we're kind of going down the road of making this place an uninhabitable well what we need is someone like Elon who concentrates on the solutions I mean he's obviously got a full plate yet many full plates but someone like him to concentrate on solutions to some of environmental problems that we've created for ourselves here well that's really that's that was the thought behind Tesla I mean so so Tesla's kind of like plan a he saved this planet and SpaceX was kind of Plan B if you look at it that way it's just so weird to have a guy like that amongst us you know especially have him as your boss have you talked to him at all about simulation theory we never thing is what every time I talk to him we focused on and this is what he does you know he focuses on the thing that we are working on mm-hmm so he just that's one of the ways he does his time management that's one of the ways he's able to do all these things it's like he doesn't sit around and and and and and BS with you about like what's going on with was a neuro-link the company was making the chips at going oh that's right I forgot about that that's the other thing he does that one he doesn't in the way humans interface with data he never said to me like Garret what do you think about having a chip in your head that like never he doesn't do that he talks to the people who really know about chips and people and putting chips in people's head he talks to them about it so you're gonna sign up for that no face expression you made like no my website got hacked and it freaked me out of how well they're gonna put wires in your head yeah right that's the idea behind it idea Christ he's probably gonna be inevitable it once it happens I mean I don't want to be an early adopter but once it does happen and it really does remarkably increase your your ability to interface with data is that's the idea right it said it ramps up the bandwidth in which people can access ideas and information it's gonna change the way we interface yeah I mean I could see it being kind of an extreme haves and have-nots situation like you think wow how far behind you are today how left behind you are if you have no internet access right and this will be kind of this could be like another level of that yeah I'm worried I'm worried about that yeah I got other things that keep me up at night I got yeah I mean what is it going crazy nine-year old and it real real-world problems yeah it's just to me it seems like if you pay attention to the track if you track technology look where it's going things constantly improve they constantly we demand constant innovation and we're already wearing these things on our body and watches now a lot of people were in the Apple watches and the Samsung and all the Google watches and it just seems inevitable that it somehow or another advances to a point where there's a chip or something you wear or some plate that they put in the back your head and screw in yeah but then you watch like black mirror and it is the problem in that be good I mean but do you have a sense of history that you are first of all you're amongst one of the rare human beings that has ever been in space and then to you're working for a company that is at the very tip of the spear of innovation like the you are you're at the front of the line in terms of creating viable methods of sending people into space and returning them I feel extremely fortunate you know eight to have that experience I had at NASA and had the visceral experience the incredible experience of flying in space doing spacewalks operating robot arm is launching on rockets and all that and then coming to SpaceX and being there at in the relatively early days and being there for seven years I feel like you know I feel pretty satisfied I got to see I got incredibly lucky to see these things and be in the room where it happens you know it's it's pretty remarkable and now so now I'm a now I'm still a consultant of SpaceX but I'm a full-time professor at USC so now I'm teaching and I'm also working on TV shows so now I'm like taking that those incredible experiences I had opened up a lot of other doors and like I ended up it was like for example working and working on this TV show I find myself like in there in the writers room with a whole bunch of really talented creative people where there's no way in a million years I would so it ever happened to me if it weren't for these incredible experiences I was lucky enough to have you know it's like that gets even that gets really surreal I could only imagine I mean I can only imagine especially coming from your childhood having that image on your wall and now really being a part of this massive change in the way human beings are going to be able to travel in space yeah now what is tell us about this TV show because you were talking about it off air before we started yeah so this this is for all mankind it's on Apple TV and the the way I got involved with this thing I was a big fan of Battlestar Galactica dead the reetou reboot was awesome wasn't it oh it's oh so underrated yeah when the best science fiction shows ever yeah I mean it's like in the early days of kind of like peak TV I guess and it was like um it was just so good I mean the writing was so good and the whole concept and everything all that all the things they're exploring and the science fiction is always as best when it's like an allegory and the way they explored things that were happening in society like terrorism and stuff the way they were able to depict it as in a scienter alternate universe I thought it was spectacular yeah it's brilliant brilliant show so I'm watching it on the space station which was like the best what do you what using an iPad or something like how do you have things stored or is there a TV up there there's no TV but there's we have all these laptops so you could send up files and you can you can give them like four shows that you like how long does it take for a show to download in space well they download it for you which is nice while you're while you're working then when you're when you're ready to watch you just pop up the file so is it like a satellite connection internet satellite it's it's kind of it's a it's a kayuu band system that goes to satellites that aren't part of it NASA satellites are called tigress satellites so the data goes up to teachers and and down at ground stations to White Sands and then so we're gonna ban with you getting what's your latency I don't remember the numbers but we weren't getting when I was there we weren't getting live Internet because all that bandwidth is being used for science to get done all the data from the experiments in the video so you can't tor check your Twitter you can now you can now can now I just missed that that's terrible yes probably yeah traction yeah yeah just google searching random things are you supposed to be doing your job at space yeah so you you get these shows and you're watching Battlestar Galactica yeah on your lap question bouncer galactic Colbert Report Daily Show and like New York Yankees game someone wow that's one watching wow you want you not watching Yankees games in real time no no pretty pre-recorded Wow still though so it's just that was the nights like like a bit at home that you know I would play the radio broadcasts while I was working and just in the background and so I feel like you're the crack of the bat and it's kind of like you're in space but you're still kind of connected to home that seems like something that would go on in a movie yeah some guy who's working about a spaceship in the movie is listening to a baseball game go just yet three balls two strikes yeah doesn't that yeah it really does seem very like some classic George Clooney movie about space yeah that's real yeah how weird that feels so surreal that you were that guy up there with a laptop yeah I mean like bow so I'm watching Battlestar and they're like now I'm in the final season and they're like finding earth I'm like it's right there you're you're in a spaceship how many people have watched Battlestar Galactica while in a spaceship you might be the only person ever well my commander is watching it too so there's at least two of us but but so they ask you like are there any celebrities you'd like to chat with while you're up there and they will go out and get them for you the kind of morale boosting oh wow as I said I want to talk to Ron Moore and David Icke oh the creators of Battlestar mm-hmm so we had this great Skype session wow it's so cool and that's why before I was gonna mention this when we were talking about you know science fiction and science fact and had this is crazy feedback loop about you got to think about it first like you'd go back and look at 2001 and you see these guys using tablets in 1960 was in 1968 that movie came out hmm and you know Steve Jobs saw that and said I'm gonna make one of those all right and so there's this crazy like in play between fiction in fact and and I got to talk to around more about all this and any invited me to come on the set for the for the final episode of Battlestar Wow and you're not supposed to like the first 30 days you're back from a long duration mission you're not supposed to like go anywhere and I'm like look they're only gonna shoot this once you know it's it's two weeks from now I'm going yeah the last time I checked this was a free country I'm not gonna stop me so I went and I went all way up to Vancouver and I got to go on the set I met all the cast I got to be a focus puller on the camera guy I got to do that that sticks you know oh wow I just had a blast Nate and then they made me an extra I was a colonial Marine in the back of a ship that gets blown up I'm sure that show was super complicated to make but I would love if they brought it back yeah I don't think people appreciated enough because it was on Sci Fi which is not the most popular network and it's also a reboot of a classic show so maybe it had like a bit of a stink to it but that was so much better than the first version of it it's a great [ __ ] show it's really intense yes it's really really well made I like everything about it from the plot to the acting it's it's sensational yeah this is my favorite sci-fi show of all time for sure yeah me too it's blasphemy for Star Trek fans yeah but it's really good it's [ __ ] good I mean you couldn't have it without Star Trek you couldn't have it without the original Battlestar Galactica but at the end of the day it's yeah they all kind of build on each other and that's what and so there's Ron went off and did Outlander after that okay and now he came in one day he calls me up and he says I got this new idea can I come by we can together and maybe I could bounce the idea off of ya and I was like yeah so he came to SpaceX and I gave him a tour of the place and then we sat down at the in the cafe and he said okay so I'm thinking about doing a show about NASA back in like the 70s and be kind of like a period piece would be kind of like we'd have a cast of characters but they're all working on Apollo and it would be true to real life but it would be the drama of the people behind the scenes sounds pretty cool because yeah I'm also toying around with a slight twist that where we use an alternate reality and in this alternate reality things we start at that point but things turn out differently and we start talking about like how close the Russians were to actually beating us to the moon which not a lot of people know about but when I was over there in Moscow I got to see actually there in they have a warehouse where they still have their Lunar Lander for example that they built they were really working hard on it so we started what-iffing like well what if the Russians got there first what would what would America done how think how would things be different today if that seminal moment of Neil and Buzz stepping out on the moon was instead of letting the owner for cosmonaut doing it right mmm I was like that is [ __ ] genius I mean that was like a I thought I want to see that show that's like a great premise and he pitched that to Apple and they bought it and then he called me up and said would you want to work on the show I'm like yeah so what is your role what do you do there I'm a technical consultant one of a couple we have a we have a another group of people a couple of people that help out too but I get involved in like everything so I was in the writers room where we're first coming up with basic ideas and sketching out like multiple seasons and character arcs and all that kind of oh and then I got then I get all the scripts and I read them all and I give notes on all the scripts and then it come to the set and I meet with the actors the cast and I give them suggestions about like how to look real when they're in space and then I like work with the VFX guys I work with the stunt team that I get phone calls from like the hair and makeup people like how to what the ladies do with their hair if they have long hair when they do a spacewalk I'm like you're calling the wrong guy I can ask a friend right so so so all this was so much fun for me it's like you know you know how like you can pay a whole lot of money and go to fantasy baseball camp yeah and like you get to like have batting practice with the Dodgers or something and they humor you because you paid a lot of money well it's kind of like that I keep waiting for them to say like okay the fun is over get out of here go back to your day job you know but I'm like I'm just loving it that's wild so how much correcting do you have to do how much do you get the script and go eh that doesn't happen that you can't do that that's not it depends and every production is different the nice thing about for all mankind is they really really want to get it right I've worked on other projects where they say they want to get it right but then they like completely Bluff the laws of physics and and you know I'm okay with that the Martian with the hand cutting thing yeah because at the end of the day like I said this is so my student it's like nobody goes to see a movie for the orbital mechanics you go for the story the characters that sure yeah but it's hard if you're an expert in something to watch a movie with a fudge stuff and it doesn't make sense yeah like for me martial arts movies martial arts movies do dumb [ __ ] I mean come on man you know or if I watch a movie about a pool player and I can tell the guy can't really play pool I get upset so for you when you're watching something like gravity yeah right that was a big one a lot of people got really like Neil deGrasse Tyson I know I hate it he hated it hated it I liked it and the problem is now that I have this job now I'm getting more persnickety about it you know I'm sure now I'm watching I'm like that's not right well yeah everything the gravity the hair the did not care though like I when I first saw gravity I loved it because it was a good story it was it gripped me and but you knew that those space stations were not close to each other oh yeah the inclinations were the orbits are totally different there's no you're gonna go from one to the other with a fire extinguisher I knew that was complete [ __ ] don't get me wrong but that bleep were they treating you like you're a [ __ ] they're treating you like there's no way you're gonna be able to research this but something like you someone like you rather that's your life so you know that's nonsense so you're sitting there watching some hokey solution yeah for something that would never work yeah so if it gets to the point where like but that's a beautiful thing about like doing this with televisions you don't have to actually be right just have to be believable which is the bar is like when I'm teaching my class at USC I gotta be right but when I'm like yeah well maybe this could happen you know with the TV show it's easier but this TV show you're just saying they really want to try to really do because it's it's really important to them and so yeah I've ended up making like wholesale changes to episodes become like the original idea I try very very hard not to interfere with their creative process because they're it's really really good at that and um you know I'm not worthy but I'm like yeah okay I see what you're trying to do you might this gotta be the hero you want this person to feel remorse you want this and and and over the course of time this person has a change of heart I get the story but what if instead of doing it this way what if the events occur like this because this could actually happen right and somebody tried to change it and there's one like like episode 9 and a little bit of episode 10 of season 1 we ended up sitting I ended up sitting and working very closely with the writers and changing all the technical content to fit to make the story work in a believable way and that when we do that and then you see it on the screen it's like so incredibly rewarding it's really fun that must be especially as someone who's a sci-fi fan like you've you've had to dream lives here like I know you're four really incredible that you've gone from that from NASA to SpaceX and now to be able to create television shows that you can actually enjoy yeah Wow um one things I wanted to ask you about space is we always hear stuff about space junk about satellites and just junk that's floating around the atmosphere how much of a concern is that and what could be done about that stuff it's a huge concern it's a very very big problem in in in certain orbits around the earth low Earth orbit and also at the geostationary orbits that are very that's where you could put like communications satellites and they stay over one spot of the earth those are very polluted you know there's a lot of junk and it is very dangerous and it's it's a real problem is hard to clean up over time eventually even even at higher altitudes there's still a little bit of atmosphere like individual atoms eventually that slows you down those collisions eventually slow you down so eventually it comes back but it could take a long long time come back to earth you mean yeah they'll come back and he'll burn up so the most important thing is don't make any more junk that's like the best thing we can do and we're getting much smarter they get SpaceX we take our second stages and all of our NASA missions and after after we it's accomplished its mission we keep enough gas in the tank to burn the engine one more time and bring it back in one piece so it doesn't blow up into smithereens and cause more junk whenever we do anti-satellite test though China did one relatively recently and we've done them in the past those are like the worst because they create giant clouds of junk and and we have to still we still have to live with that is there any concepts on the table for how to do that stuff out there's some ideas of you know using lasers that lays the things and and and and and make subtle changes to their trajectories and orbits but it's all that all the technical solutions are challenging and expensive so I don't know of any one idea that's gonna like just solve this problem easily because we've seen the map of the earth and all the different satellites that orbit it now and all the different jump pieces of junk that have been identified it's crazy yeah the amount of stuff and it seems like nobody kind of thought it through they just sort of did it and left the junk up there and that's what humans do man I mean like we've been dumping stuff in the oceans forever yeah and not really giving much thought to it and now we're funny giant gyros of plastic or them you know yeah so yeah we tend to not really react until it's a really big problem but it's a big problem and and when I did my first spacewalk one of the things we had to do was we had to bring in his handle they were going to use on a subsequent spacewalk it was like it was we call it D handle it's just basically a half-inch piece of aluminum around like like this that you can attach to something then carry things so we had this big chunk of aluminum and we brought it inside in my spacewalk partner Rick looked at the thing when we came inside to saw a hole shot straight through it it's like about a millimeter in diameter it's really small but it went right through this half-inch thick solid aluminum and he looked at that and he said man if that hit one of us and he didn't have to finish that statement because if this stuff is moving generally speaking about 10 kilometers per second so that's like roughly 10 times as fast as a rifle bullet so something like that hits you it could be a Fleck of paint hitting you at that velocity in the hitch in the suit you're in a hundred percent oxygen environment and you're just gonna flame up I mean you're gonna instantly combust it's gonna be a really a bad day so he didn't have to like you said you know when he said that he didn't have to finish it and we both looked at it and then I looked at him and said yeah but you're six foot four so statistically it's gonna hit you more object and beside that was kind of behind you most of the way out there but I probably go right through him and right through you to hit probably him like that's what's so crazy about is there's so much of that stuff up there I'm always wondering like why doesn't it hit the space station what it does does a couple of times I was inside the space station I heard us take a hit whoa but just but so I heard the ping but fortune I didn't hear the ping fall but a change yeah so that ping is probably something bouncing off something or going through something so the station has shielding it's called whipple shielding and it's basically a piece of a wall a thin piece of metal that stands off from the hull so the thin piece of metal is never going to stop this thing but it when it hits at that hyper velocity it breaks up into lots of little tiny pieces and it's almost like a fluid at that point it's like these like it's like it like almost a cloud of dust and then when it hits the hull those individual pieces don't penetrate hmm so it just it just shatters it and that what that works what if it hits that window it has hit the shuttle window you know we've it has multiple panes and it's really really strong but we came home with big it looks like like when a rockets kicked up and it takes really yeah we've we've seen that yeah wow that's a little scary Jesus Christ a little chest what about micro meteors and things along those lines well depending on where you are so in in Earth orbit there's much more of manmade junk than there micrometeorites but there are those too when you get out away from Earth orbit like if we're gonna go back to the moon then there's no more human-made junk but there is those micro meteorites are still out there and they can do the same kind of damage but there's a lot fewer of them the density of those things is a lot less than what you experience so it's if you go to Mars I'd worry about the radiation first and then the micro meteoroids I like down the list it just seems to so many things to think about yeah and is this all factored into your television show uh well a lot of these things are I can't can't say I can't give any spoilers but Susan one is available right now it is all we can talk about that but season two I am NOT allowed to give any spoilers or anything but I can tell you this like yeah there's some of these concepts end up in there yeah well listen it's been a real pleasure having you in here man I really appreciate you coming here and talking about the stuff and you've lived three amazing lives a third one right now and it's you've had a pretty cool one too man so now this has been a real honor and a real pleasure the honors mine man thank you very much so one more time for people it's available right now on Apple TV for all mankind for all mankind and if people want to find you on social media do you have yes you can go to my website Garrett Riesman calm thank you and then on Twitter and Instagram I'm Astro G dog with - gee thanks brother appreciate you being here man my pleasure thank you bye everybody [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 6,167,417

Rating: 4.8343968 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party, JRE #1425, Garrett Reisman, Joe Rogan, comedian, astronaut, SpaceX, space, Dragon, rocket, Endeavor

Id: 3RG5pXTpLBI

Length: 132min 12sec (7932 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Alex29992]

This guy is like the 4th person to mention it. Anytime they talk about realistic space they bring up the expanse.

[u/Kahmael]

The only thing that isn't so realistic is no one's hair is floating. They do mitigate that w/ the Roci crew by giving the cast short/rigid hair styles. So at least there's that.

[u/KManIsland]

I wonder if “The Rogan Effect” will hit the show’s streaming numbers?

[u/thadude42083]

Hey asshole, I was expecting a clip! Instead I got a full length amazingly interesting podcast that I simply had no choice but to listen to and watch! Lol, thanks

[u/TheTrooperNate]

This was a great interview.

[u/Phyto420]

Another big Expanse fan is the lead scientist Dr. Marc Raymond, on the Dawn Mission to Ceres & Vesta which is still in orbit around Ceres. Here he gives a talk at the Griffith Observatory. Though he is a fan of the books, the moderator is a big fan of the show. They bring up the show at 45:39.

Eventually the Dawn Spacecraft will crash into Ceres and become the first Beltalowda!

[u/bkconn]

Damn I already posted this last night.. guess I had bad timing.

[u/fishlord05]

Time stamp? I’m not tryna watch the whole thing lmao

[u/jazzbuh]

Yes!! I wanna say “we did it, guys” but I didn’t do anything personally. I’m still glad my favorite show is mentioned.