Terry Virts - A Beautiful Planet

Full transcript: Terry Virts on London Real

5:44 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Terry Virts, the US Air Force colonel, NASA astronaut and space station commander. You have flown on the space shuttle, conducted three space walks and logged 200 consecutive days on the International Space Station. You’ve recently started a new IMAX film A Beautiful Planet, narrated by Jennifer Lawrence, that chronicles the natural wonders of Earth captured from space.

6:20 Terry, welcome to London Real. It’s great to be here. Awesome to have you here. I’m always curious. You flew here from Texas.

6:27 When you think of London and England and you’re flying in here, what is your impression of, like, this country, this town, this people as a culture? Oh man, I love England. It’s beautiful. The main thing about England that scares me is that driving on the left-hand side of the road, ’cause I’m always afraid I’m going to get run over. So it’s like you’ve got to look both ways before crossing the street.

6:50 But it’s a beautiful country, and love the history and It’s awesome to be here. Yeah, it’s got this whole history of kind of exploration, right? And, kind of, I guess sea navigation, which, you know, probably has some thoughts in parallels to, you know, air and space navigation. It does. Yeah.

7:09 We, I think the tradition of exploration, it was pretty much found in born right here in the UK, and for centuries England set the standard for exploring space or exploring the Earth, and even now, recently, they’re back into space because Tim Peake, a British-born astronaut, just landed from a space station flight. When I flew on my space shuttle flight a few years ago, I flew with Nick Patrick, who’s a British-born person, now American citizen, but I got some great time, you know, flying with Brits in space, and so it’s pretty cool history, tradition. Yeah, it’s fascinating, because if you think of some of these guys that went out on these ships back in the day, you know, to try to circumnavigate the globe or go to these crazy places, I mean, they really didn’t know what was out there.

8:00 I know. Well, it’s amazing, you know, flying across the Pacific Ocean in space happens pretty quick, but man, that is a gigantic ocean. And you look down and there’s, from space, nothing but water in all directions and I would often think about, what was it like to be on a ship where you didn’t know, you’re just going on a parallel and, you know, you run into Australia. Captain Cook or those guys. So I would think about them from the 22° comfort of my space station.

8:28 And thing, man, that was, those are some pretty brave guys to do that, right? And when you were in the Air Force, I mean, you know, test piloting was still happening as well. And, like, we all know that great movie The Right Stuff, which is the only thing I think about when I think of test pilots. I think of these guys that are going up, as they would say, pushing the envelope, right? Pushing the outside of the envelope, and they’re doing their own bit of exploration.

8:51 You know, doing things. Absolutely. And also giving us intellectual property that we can build on, like what happens when you go to the speed of sound, twice the speed of sound, right? When you were flying, you know, what was that whole mentality like? Yeah, it’s, the test pilot is you know, seeing what you can do.

9:08 And actually that movie is so awesome. George Zamka, who was my space commander and I watched that movie the night before our space shuttle launch. Like, we went down, sat in the lounge, put The Right Stuff on and watched it, and then the next day we went out and flew into space on a space shuttle, which is pretty cool. Is that the right movie to watch before you go into space? It was, it was, it was good.

9:29 On my most recent flight on the station, we actually watched Gravity while we were in space, while you were in space? Yeah, so we got to chuckle out of that. Everybody’s like, you watch Gravity while you’re in space, but it was funny. What is the thing that you laugh the most at when you see Gravity? You know, gravity it.

9:44 The thing that we laugh the most, so I flew with an Italian lady named Samantha Cristoforetti, so we always talk about who they chose to play us, you know, George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. So we laugh about that. So you’re George Clooney. Okay, yeah. And certain things, unfortunately, he didn’t survive.

10:01 So, but anyway, yeah, but certain things were you impressed with the reality of the way they depicted it? And is certain things just a Hollywood version of what it’s like? Well, yeah, the so, it’s basically an animated movie. But the animation is very realistic. The, what the space station looks like, or what the space shuttle looks like, is they got that really close.

10:21 The physics of what was happening, you know, was they had to take some liberties of changing orbits and that kind of stuff. But that’s okay. You got to, you got to make the movie interesting for people. The thing I did not like about the movie was the point of the movie was just get back to Earth, ’cause it’s safe. Like, don’t be in space.

10:40 So I didn’t like that. Like, I’m more of a, let’s go into space and explore. But yeah, the animation and stuff was very accurate. Taking a fire extinguisher and changing orbits from Hubble to space station can’t be done. But that’s okay.

10:54 Okay, it was a good movie, too far, too far away. Okay. And I guess there was that subtle underlying thing of, is that Earth is safe, not space? That was what I didn’t like about it. Okay, which, you don’t feel that way?

11:05 Well, safe. Space is certainly dangerous. I mean, it requires a lot of effort to do it. But you know, America wasn’t safe either for four or five centuries. Of Christopher Columbus and, you know, when the Brits first went there to Jamestown, I think 90% of the colony died.

11:22 So, you know, exploration involves risk, and that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, right? Just going back to The Right Stuff briefly. Like when you watch that movie, does that bring back memories of flight school? Do you know guys that are like that? And how accurate was that movie?

11:39 I think it was completely accurate. Now, life in the ’50s and ’60s is different than, you know, life in the ’90s and 2000s. The politically correct aspect was different, and we weren’t developing a new fighter jet every year or two. Nowadays the airplanes take decades and billions of dollars. But the whole concept of you’re going to go do something that hasn’t been done, or we’re still doing that.

12:05 I mean, even today, new with new airplanes, or new bombs or missiles or whatever. You’re testing on a, on a fighter, is still there. And you remember the medical scene where they were getting tested to be astronauts? Yeah, it’s still like that. I mean, they don’t stick a needle in your hand anymore and do that, but a lot of that stuff, it was just what it was.

12:27 For me, when I applied to be an astronaut, so that those scenes bring back memories too, where you’re carrying around the bottle of water, whatever was going on. Y’know, that there’s that whole dichotomy of these test pilots and then astronauts in that movie, where here you got guys that are a bit crazy to go do these things, but also you’ve got guys that are very systematic, right, and quite safe, as in they don’t, they do things in a calculated way, but at the end of the day they’re going up where they might not come back, right? And does that classify what an astronaut is or a test pilot?

13:02 Yeah, we’re kind of crazy, so you have to have a safety mentality. So we’re, NASA just got 18,000 applications for the new astronaut class. So we don’t want just thrill seekers, right? We want people who are willing, who are able to operate under pressure, but we don’t want just risk for risk’s sake. So you have to have a blend of you’re willing to do some crazy things, but you handle it in a professional, calculated risk kind of way.

13:31 So when you fly into space, you know that there’s a danger that the rocket might blow up, but the capsule has an escape system, or in this, in the space shuttle, we had a parachute that could potentially have been used. So it’s, you recognize the risk that you have, and then you take them actively It’s funny, like a lot of times when I drive, I’ll drive the speed limit. I’m like that guy, and my friends will say, dude, you’re an astronaut, why you should be driving crazy and stuff?

13:55 I’m like, well, if I had to, I would, but you know, you kind of have to balance the risks that you take. So that is an interesting dichotomy. Do most astronauts drive the speed limit? Probably. It probably depends.

14:09 Okay, a few outliers there, a few outliers. Yeah, just like anything, there’s something that I’ve heard called the overview effect, and I don’t know if you’ve heard of this theory, that people like yourselves that have spent so much time watching the Earth rotate, and I mean, you took 320,000 pictures, and I, and you were just talking about it in the studio, all of our guys here, and you’re obviously passionate about viewing the Earth and taking pictures in the light and in the day and just seeing the majesty of this planet, right? Do you think that that kind of gets into your head and where you see the Earth, the population, the species, kind of in a different way when you come back?

14:46 It’s like, do you feel like it’s changed you as a person? So you, it has, you know, there’s a couple of great effects from that, the overview effect My crewmate Samantha put it this way, that you get to see Earth as a spaceship flying through the universe. It’s like when you’re here, born and raised on Earth, you just think, this is home, this and everything else is out there. But when you’re out there, you can look back and see that the Earth is a spaceship, and the words that she used are, “We need to be crewmates, not just passengers,” which I think is a great description of it.

15:19 But the other thing: it’s so easy to get bogged down in daily stress. I got emails and there’s traffic and blah, blah, blah, and I can just, like, close my eyes and realize that there’s the most unbelievable sunset that you can’t even imagine happening right now, just, you know, right on the other side of the Earth. And this amazing Milky Way is out there, and so that kind of puts the mundane in perspective. Which is a really great, not to say that, you know, things are meaningless here or we’re just a speck in the giant universe, but to say that there really is a bigger picture, you know, more meaningful things, and not to get too stressed out about the daily life.

16:00 When I landed for my first space flight, I landed, got reunited with my family, did medical tests, and I went back to my room and I was like, alone. And so, just like any business traveler, you go to your room, you turn on TV. So I turned on the TV and I just landed on the space shuttle a couple hours ago. CNN was on, and I watched it for like 30 seconds and I was like, you’ve got to be kidding me. I turn this is news?

16:22 It was complete meaningless, blah, blah, blah. And that was my one moment where I went, all this stuff is really meaningless. Some things are meaningful, but most stuff isn’t that we worry about on Earth, because I’m like, I was just flying through the atmosphere and, you know, the perspective really is, I think a great thing, a great change for me anyway. And you mentioned, like, we’re actually crew members on our own spaceship. So besides the news being, yeah, quite meaningless sometimes.

16:51 Also, do you see, like, sometimes conflict? You come back and, like, here we are all in this beautiful spaceship, right? And yet we all seem to want to pick all these fights with each other and put each other in these different teams. Does that also become something irritating when you get back? So it’s the International Space Station, and the main partners are Russia and the US.

17:12 There’s also Europe and Japan and Canada, and so half of my training was in Russia. Half of my crew were Russian cosmonauts, and I just got to be great friends with them. I love being there with the Russian people. The night before launch I was with Samantha and Anton, and I said I’m an only child, and we did our toast, and I said you guys are like my brother and sister, even though I’m an only child. So while I was training, the Ukraine civil war happened, and Russia annexed Crimea, and we, the West and Europe and America, imposed sanctions on Russia.

17:44 So I’m in space with all this stuff going on in space. While that’s happening, okay, in training and in space, it was that time, it was 2013, 2014, 2015, that’s when all that stuff happened. So you’re in Star City while it’s happening on the ground, training, and then up there. Okay. And in space we watched little red flashes, and with my cosmonauts we could see bombs going off in Ukraine.

18:04 Serious. And if you’re Russian, you have a cousin or a mother or yourself, or somebody’s from Ukraine. It’s just, it’s like England and Wales or something. Huge population centre. They’re cousins, you know, or closer.

18:21 So we were watching the war happen there, and my Anton is from Sevastopol, which became Russia. So, and they were on the phone calling home, hey, how’s our apartment doing or, because their currency got cut in half because of the sanctions. So anyway, I was right in the middle of this conflict, and here we are getting along great, and we’re, you know, friends, eating dinner together. We’re like, surviving space together, which is not an easy thing, because you could die pretty quickly in outer space.

18:52 So I’ve seen that dichotomy of, on the interpersonal level, people are people, and you can get along very well, whereas on the government-to-government level that doesn’t always happen. So I’ve seen this firsthand, where, yeah, it is like, come on, guys, we should be able to get along. Unfortunately, there’s this thing called domestic politics, and it’s very valuable for, you know, Mr Putin to stand up against the West, or it’s very valuable for a Western politician in America or Europe to stand up against those Russians.

19:20 And so it helps each other get elected. But the reality is we’re great friends and can get along and do amazing things like fly in space together if we put our minds to it, and kind of set aside those domestic politics. Yeah, I keep thinking of that movie. I think it was Rocky 4, where, you know, Rocky fought Drago, right? I like, we’re probably not too different in age, so that was, like, you know, I mean, I remember the Cold War.

19:46 I remember I grew up during the Cold War, the nuclear, the threats. I mean, as a kid I was, I actually had bad dreams when I was a kid. So the day after, yeah, the day after I saw that movie. Yeah, scary. So that, but I mean, that must have been in your subconscious.

20:00 But then you go over there and train with them? Oh, yeah. Well, Anton’s a MiG-29 pilot, so my whole career was spent learning about the MiG-29, and Sasha Soku was a Su-24 pilot. Yeah. So, I mean, yes, we knew a lot about each other before we ever met, and we had a great time, you know, flying in space together.

20:19 What did you learn from the Russians? Because obviously you have this huge superpower like America, they obviously have different views on space, different views on how they do things. I saw some exhibit on the Science Museum here all about the Russian program, and, you know, the way they think of it. What kind of ways did you see that they thought of space differently, or just treated it differently? Yeah.

20:39 So they’re very capable. I mean, they were the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. In fact, I launched from his launchpad in Baikonur, which is amazing. Same launchpad that Gary Powers flew over in a U2 taking pictures of it. So we have this 50-year connection with a space program.

20:59 I do, and they are great at what they do. Their hardware tends to be simple, very robust. My favorite example is how we do water. So there’s an American water system. There’s a water processor, there’s all these pumps and tubing, and you plug things in and dial, and it’s temperature control, blah, blah, blah.

21:21 On the Russian segment there’s a pump, and you pump it up a couple times, and you take your hose and you drink water. So there’s two different ways of doing something. The American way is usually complicated. It usually, you can do more. I mean, we get more electricity, or, you know, there’s more capability.

21:38 The Russian system is usually more simple and more robust, and so it always works. So it’s actually a great partnership to have both, because you have something that you can depend on all the time, and then you have something that has more capability. Some, it’s more risky, and it does more. So it’s actually really good to have both of those together on the same spaceship. Okay, and is that what the Soyuz is like?

22:01 Is that like that robust piece of machinery? Right. So a friend of mine, one time the Soyuz had a problem. It’s basically three balls that are stuck together, and when it comes back to Earth they separate, and the middle part is the descent module, heat shields, and whatever. So when they came back from space, there was a problem and it came back backwards with the heat shield in the wrong direction.

22:27 And eventually the other part just burned off and broke off, and then it’s flipped around and righted itself, and they survived. They were fine. So I mean, that’s the ultimate example of robustness, right? So it’s a good characteristic to have. It may not be this gigantic space shuttle with seven people, a robotic arm and spacewalks.

22:48 It’s just a simple little capsule. But that was one example where everything didn’t go right and it worked, which is a good, that’s a good trait to have. Okay. And what about just safety in general? They have a different way of looking at safety.

23:00 I think that speaks to their safety. They tend to, they don’t build things right to the very edge of the limits. They build things with a lot of margin, so if something doesn’t go right, they’ll still survive. Whereas the American philosophy is build it more advanced but with less margin, so everything kind of has to go right. Okay.

23:24 But if it does go right, you can do more things with it, right? Space shuttle is this big capable vehicle, so uses a simple little capsule. But the space shuttle, also, you know, we lost two of them, unfortunately, in accidents. So they’re just different design philosophies, right? So when the US thing goes wrong, it kind of goes wrong.

23:39 It goes wrong, right? Right, right right. Interesting. You know, different than the overview effect, and I’m sure you’ve heard all those things. I mean, when you’re out circling the Earth so many times and you’re looking out to the rest of the universe, do you come to different conclusions than you did, say, when you were on Earth, about, like, is there life out there, right?

23:59 Do you think About that. I know you’re busy doing other things, but my whole mission was this dichotomy of the mundane and the sublime. So I’d be like, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and then take a second and you’d see a view that humans weren’t meant to see. That is just, you can’t even imagine it. And then get back to work, especially on my spacewalks, ’cause there’s, so you’re just on the clock.

24:23 I mean, it is work, work, work, and you’re outside in a little space suit. There’s like that much plastic between you and death, so you don’t want to spend a lot of time out there. You want to get your stuff done, and you’re usually hanging on to metal, looking at stuff. So every once in a while I would turn away, and I can remember this one specific view. There was a sunrise going, you know, from horizon to horizon, and it was just beautiful.

24:46 There’s not even a word to describe it, and I, it was like, I’m seeing God out here in space, and then I had to get back to work, ’cause there was, you know, I had to go turn some bolts and do something. So that’s kind of the astronaut’s life, this back and forth between seeing these amazing sites, and there’s a lot of work to do to keep the space station running. Do they keep you busy up there to keep you busy? Or is there really all that work to do? Or is it better not to have you idle?

25:12 So it is better to not be idle. That’s when people go to Antarctica or on a sub or something. That’s when you kind of go crazy if you don’t have any work to do. But that’s not a problem on the space station, at least. There’s only three US crew members, usually.

25:27 It’s two Americans and a European or Japanese or Canadian. And on that segment, on the modules that we have, there’s more than enough work for those three people, you know, every day to keep them busy. But the psychological aspect is super important. In fact, you were talking about the difference between Russians and Americans. There was one day I was floating down from the Russian segment into the US segment, the main module, Node 1, where everything connects.

25:53 And as I was floating through Node 1 and I had been in space for a couple months in this nice, comfortable, sterile, like I said, 22°, 15% humidity environment, metal and plastic. It was night. It was like a Hollywood spaceship hotel room, all the, and I heard these birds chirping, and I, like, stopped, and I went, “That was a bird I just heard.” And I looked in the Node 3 and Misha Kornienko was in there exercising on our weightlifting machine. Basically, there was birds, and I started talking to them in Russian, and I said, Misha, I hear a bird, and he said, yeah, listen to this.

26:32 And so the Russian psychologist had sent him an MP3 of bird noises, like noises from space, and it was the coolest thing I’d ever heard in my life. And so I said, well, tell them to send me some. So they emailed me some MP3 files, and at night time, for about a month, I would put my headsets on and fall asleep in my sleeping bag, listening to rain, just the sound of rain from Earth, and it was so awesome. So everybody all of a sudden got all excited about birds and crickets, like at night time when you can hear crickets, or a crowded restaurant.

27:05 They sent up… you could just hear glasses clanging and crowd noise. So we said let’s make it rain. So one weekend we put rain on all the laptops, the station’s full of laptops, we put this rain MP3 file, and it was kind of cool for a while, and then by Saturday, by Sunday night, we were ready to, you know, jump off a building. So we turned the rain off. We’re like, that’s enough rain.

27:28 But the sounds of Earth were something that I missed. Everybody up there too seemed to enjoy that. Do you really think we understand that psychological change that happens when you’re up there and separated from Earth for so long? You know, there’s a guy named Jack Stuster, he’s a PhD who does the psychology investigation, and most astronauts keep journals. I did, and he takes our journal, and you can be completely honest with them because they never get released, and he analyzes, you know, how people do.

27:59 And he’s got a great in fact, he studied a lot of the Antarctic expeditions and submarines as kind of a precursor to a long duration space flight. And we do understand a lot of the things that make people happy, a lot of things that make them unhappy. And it’s really important. I mean, when you are working together and there’s no escape, you know, um, it’s super important that that can really make a mission go wrong or right. In fact, when I was commander, one of my goals was to like each other when we were done.

28:30 You know, when I was commander of Expedition 43, and I think our Expedition 43 crewmates are all good friends. We email each other every week, the Russians and Europeans and Americans. And so, but it’s, that’s an important part of space flight. How do you, uh, lead a crew like that? I mean, like, you got everyone to be friends.

28:47 You must have been successful. How do you go about doing that? So I think when you’re leading any organization, you need to understand who you’re leading. If you’re an army drill sergeant and you’ve got a group of 18-year-olds out of high school, you tell them what time to wake up, you tell them to put their right shoe, boot, on first, and then put your left boot on, and hold your gun, and do this. You know, you’re very directive about every aspect of everything.

29:12 That’s on one scale, and on the other side of the scale, if you’re leading astronauts who are all, you know, it’s very collaborative, and it’s, all right guys, let’s, what’s a better way to do this? Or here’s our problem, how are we going to solve it? It’s very collaborative until there’s an emergency. We had a couple of emergency cases, and when that happens, do this, do that. You become directive, but 98% of the time it’s very collaborative, and a lot of, we made some good changes, I think, to the station just by saying, hey, what do you think, what ideas?

29:40 And the guys I was flying with, I flew with Gennady Padalka, a Russian cosmonaut, he has the most time of any human in space, over 800 days in space. So it’s not like I’m going to be up there and be Mr. I know it all. It’s more like, hey, how, you know, you work together, but you kind of have to know your situation. Are you going to be directive or are you going to be collaborative? And that’s true on Earth.

30:04 It’s true for, you know, every facet. And I think if you come across as you know it all, people can see through you in like two seconds and know that that’s not true. So that’s how that’s kind of was my philosophy about leadership. Someone told me that when you’re up there, there’s like a little bit of a delay when you talk to Earth. Yeah, and that can start playing a little bit of a psychological factor, and that if we ever do venture out to Mars, etc., the longer that delay is, the more people feel isolated up there, feel that.

30:38 Can you see that happening? So the proximity, you know, the speed of light limits you. So our signal had to go to a TDRS satellite and then back to Earth, which is tens of thousands of miles. So it’s less than a second, plus there’s computer delay, and you know, it’s like maybe a second delay. So wasn’t really that bad.

30:59 But once you get to the Moon, you’ve got a couple seconds of delay, which becomes annoying. The Apollo guys got annoyed occasionally just from the delay. And once you go to Mars, you start to have minutes of delay, which means you can’t have a conversation. You can say a bunch of stuff and hit send, and that becomes more of a text conversation, or something like it. It was more of an email conversation.

31:26 And that’s, you know, that will definitely play into it. I felt like I was close to Earth because I could talk with somebody, but when you have to email them, you’re going to feel like you’re not close to Earth, because you’re not. When you go to Mars you’re not close to Earth. There’s a reason why you feel like you’re not close to Earth, right? Cuz you’re a Martian because you’re not close to Earth, right?

31:45 Exactly, right. And that can really over time really kind of degrade. I heard people say that psychology is like, I think someone who in space said it’s almost like it’s us and them. Almost, yeah, a lot of astronauts tend to, or have experienced that, us versus them, and they don’t, the ground doesn’t understand what we’re doing. I’ll tell you, our flight directors are really good at NASA.

32:07 I think they’ve learned a lot over the years because it used to be us and them, and I did not personally feel that way. I spent a lot of effort to try and build a relationship with my flight directors, and they’re the guys that run, you know, Mission Control, and they spend a lot of effort trying to understand what it’s like on our side. So that’s, but you kind of have to work on that relationship, otherwise it’ll really quickly degrade into us and them.

32:34 And if we ever had, if I ever had an issue, like, hey, this has taken too long, or can we do this? They were very responsive, and not, but over the years astronauts and cosmonauts have often felt like they’re just task masters. They don’t realize, so, for For example, something might be a really simple task, but you have to go get this stuff, so that we call it stowage. Just finding things, gathering it, everything’s floating, so you’ve got to put it in a bag or whatever, so just gathering things and putting them away can take forever, way longer than you can imagine.

33:06 And I think over time the flight directors who understand that can have a great relationship with the crew. If Mission Control doesn’t understand that, then that can degrade pretty quickly. My experience was we, I had a great relationship with them. Okay. Again, back to that question I had earlier.

33:23 You’re looking down on the Earth, you said, you said one time you’ve seen colors you’ve never seen in your life, which is interesting, like I guess because us as humans we haven’t figured out how to create those colors, right? So I remember my very first, I launched at 4:00 in the morning from Florida, and there was 10 things that happened during launch that were amazing sites, and then maybe 10 or 15 minutes later we flew into the first sunrise over the North Atlantic, maybe over the UK. It was just a few minutes later, and I saw the sunrise, and my first overwhelming impression was, I’ve never seen that shade of blue before.

33:57 It shocked me, ’cause I didn’t think there were shades of colors I hadn’t seen before, but it really was. And the pictures we take are amazing, but the chip doesn’t capture it. It makes one blue too much, and it misses the green, or the chip does not detect or sense light the way our brain does. And so I’m writing a book right now, a space photography book. It’ll be out next October, and I’m titling chapters by color.

34:25 Like, oh, the first chapter is white, because my shuttle flight was in the winter time. The Earth is, well, Canada and Russia are white. I mean, there’s a lot of white. The US was white from snow, Europe was white, so it was just like the Earth’s white. It was pretty wild, mostly snow but some clouds.

34:42 There’s a chapter on water, where most of the Earth is blue, you know, because there’s water everywhere. But anyway, it was interesting to get to know the Earth by color. We installed the Cupola module for the first time on my shuttle flight, and I remember when I opened the windows, well, I opened the window shades for the first time, and that thing is just incredible, ’cause there’s seven windows and you can, like, stick your head and be surrounded by space.

35:08 Now there’s window panes, so you can tell you’re in a spaceship, whereas during a space walk you can’t, like, you can push your face out and kind of be in space completely, but in the Cupola it’s a similar experience. And whenever we would fly over Australia the whole space station would become red, and just because Australia is red, the Outback is red, and so I, when I think of Australia, I think of red, or the Sahara is very red also. So it’s just interesting to think of the different places on Earth by color, which is something I had never thought of before.

35:42 I would think of, I love the food in France, or, you know, I love seeing England, or Korea was a very busy place, or whatever, but now I think of it by their color, not by the cultural things. That’s interesting. With the colors like that, 320,000 pictures, uh-huh, uh you have a picture problem. I guess why, why, and it’s the first step, you know? Yeah, why so many?

36:07 Yeah, what did you see up there that really got you excited? We could talk for an hour so a part of the reason I took so many pictures is I did a lot of sequences or time-lapse, where I’d set the camera up, put it on two or four frames a second, and let it run for five minutes, and then you can take that sequence of pictures and turn it into a little movie. In fact, our IMAX movie has a lot of that. The beautiful planet IMAX film, all the Earth pictures, most of the Earth pictures were taken like that, with a still camera, just taken, you know, a couple frames a second, and then in post-production they turn that into a movie.

36:46 And so that led to a lot of pictures. We also got extended by a month during my flight, before, during and after, in my flight time. There were three rocket failures in an 8-month period. The middle one was a Russian Soyuz rocket that was carrying cargo, thankfully, but when it exploded, they delayed my replacement crew, ’cause they wanted to make sure they had everything solved before they launched the next crew. Yeah.

37:12 So my Miss tense when you hear these, this news, well, of course, yeah, I mean, we were, of course, it was a big deal, and we didn’t know we were coming back to Earth. So we spent weeks, again, leading the crew. Every day I would get every everybody together. All right, what did you hear? We, I just wanted all the rumors out there, and we would, like, we knew that they were rumors and they weren’t true, but when are we coming back?

37:34 What was the problem? This one on for weeks. So anyway, so I got, you don’t know when you’re coming home. We didn’t know. We were, yeah, it can, we, but you know the way I looked at it was, I’m going to, you have to, every astronaut has to look at every flight as their last flight, because they might get another one, but it’s, so I just looked at it as, hey, this is my time in space.

37:54 I’ll have the rest of my life on Earth, and I’m going to just enjoy it while I’m here, and I’ll have the rest of my life to go have fish and chips and at the pub and drink a pint or whatever. So I think we had a great attitude, although in the past there’s been a couple other guys who got extended, and it’s like, it can be tough to get extended unemployment. So one of the reasons why I took so many pictures is I had a bonus month, and so, you know, I took more pictures during that month.

38:19 But as far as the sights to see, there are, so the problem with being an astronaut is your bucket list gets really big, you know, now there’s all these places on Earth that I want to go visit, having seen them, you know, I really want to go see. Uh, what are some of your favorite pictures? So one of my favorite pictures is the UK. Very early in the mission, I did a time-lapse from Ireland to Siberia. I mean, UK, Scandinavia, St Petersburg, Moscow to Siberia.

38:49 It was at night time, and you can see the Northern Lights this thin green ghost. And it was a moonlight night, so with the cameras are so sensitive, you can see the clouds and the islands and the London and City lights. It’s just a beautiful… it’s a really cool picture. That was one of my favorites. I love doing sunrise and sunset, moon and moonrise and moonset pictures.

39:14 It was about day 190, and Samantha saw me taking, she’s like, Terry, haven’t you gotten enough sunset pictures yet? You’ve been doing these for 109 days, and I said, no, there’s, I still haven’t gotten the perfect one. I still want to get the perfect sunrise, but every single one of those is different because there’s a thing called beta, which is the angle between us and the Sun, that changes. Different phases of the Moon makes every moonset different. Sometimes it just, it’s just there, and all of a sudden it gets squashed and disappears into nothing.

39:47 Sometimes you can see the Earth and you see the Moon set below it. Sometimes it’s kind of riding the horizon and goes in at a really steep angle or shallow angle, so every one of those was different. I remember seeing Namibia. I didn’t know about Namibia until I flew in space, and I looked down at these gigantic sand dunes, and I thought, those are some pretty big sand dunes. And then I learned that they are, in fact, pretty big sand.

40:13 They’re the biggest sand dunes on Earth. They’re a couple thousand feet tall, and you can see them from space very clearly. Wow. You can see weather patterns that were very unique based on the part of the Earth you’re in. The North Pacific has these things that look like hurricanes, except for their thin bands, like galaxies.

40:31 They look like galaxies. It’s interesting how nature repeats itself, you know, from galaxies to hurricanes, right, to little sea creatures. They all have the same shape. They’re just different scales. The Southern Ocean by Antarctica just looks bizarre.

40:49 The weather patterns down there are really not like anywhere else on Earth. It looks like I’m glad I’m not down there. That’s the kind of weather that, you know, I would rather not be on a boat. I’d rather be in the Bahamas. The Bahamas look like the place I want to go, except when there’s a hurricane, except for there’s a hurricane.

41:05 Yeah, so we got to see hurricanes. I saw over 20 when I was in space, and they’re all amazing, but there’s one in particular, Myck, and it’s in the IMAX movie A Beautiful Planet. This thing was incredible. I was watching, and I saw this giant eye, and I floated down, guys, come here, look at this, and I brought the crew down, and everyone was like, holy cow, we got all the cameras out, started taking pictures. That was an incredible the, to see that giant eye was pretty awesome.

41:34 Is it, look daunting? Uh, it looks, I mean, everything looks, you know, unearthly, or not everything, but the, it was amazing. Volcanoes in Kamchatka were amazing. They really do look unearthly. There’s one in particular that looks like it’s from Venus.

41:52 It’s just cracked and has this weird alien shape. They’re always covered in snow there in northeastern Russia, and there’s always a couple of them erupting. You say big gray plumes of smoke. That’s another place I’d love to go, that there, most people don’t ever go to Kamchatka, but having seen it from space, is a place that you, I got a sense that I was like looking down on creation, you know, from space, which is pretty cool perspective. Yeah.

42:21 How do you ever replace that, knowing that you’re probably not going to go up again, right? You know, I was okay with it. It’s funny. I had a chance to go to Harvard Business School, and I spent a semester there, and there’s really cool things happening on Earth. There’s cool projects people are doing, interesting work and, in business and nonprofit, there’s a lot of stuff that’s very interesting to do on Earth, and my experience there made me realize that there’s nothing like being an astronaut.

42:51 I mean, it’s amazing, but there’s other stuff that’s great too, right? It’s like winning, you know, I’m an American winning the World Series or the Super Bowl, or for Europeans, if you win the World Cup. I mean, that would be great if you’re a footballer, but you’re probably, you’re never going to do that again, so you don’t want to live the rest of your life just reliving that one game, right? You want to have new challenges to do, so that’s kind of the perspective that I have.

43:15 Yeah, it was awesome being an astronaut, and I want to tell people about it, but I don’t want to just live in the past. I want to have things to look forward to in the future. A lot of people would like to know how you became, you know, the guy they got to go up in the space station and do all these epic things. And you know, a lot of people that watch the show, you know, in their late teens or early 20s, and they’re like, how can I become these big, you know, important people?

43:38 And I was wondering if you could tell us how you got there. My story? Yeah. Is it something you always knew was going to happen? Yeah.

43:46 There’s, I had this great picture of me as a two-year-old by this Saturn V rocket. No way. My mom was a secretary at Goddard Space Flight Center, a NASA center near Washington, and my dad was a technician there. Neither one of them had gone to college. They just worked, you know, as a kid.

44:02 As a kid I knew I wanted to do it. When we were in space I remember with my crew, there were six of us. We were having dinner together one night, and I said, guys, there’s over six billion people on Earth and there’s six of us here. We’re like, one in a billion, lucky. Not that we’re good or whatever.

44:17 We just are pretty lucky to be up here. But my personal story, I tell people, don’t tell themselves no. So I always knew I wanted to be an astronaut. As a teenager my room was full of airplane pictures and space pictures. And I didn’t think it was possible, ’cause no one actually gets to be an astronaut.

44:37 That’s a crazy dream, but I figured out what you needed to do, and so I went to the Air Force Academy for college. I had a technical degree. I was an applied math major and a French minor. I wanted to be a pilot, and then eventually I became a test pilot. So I kind of learned what was required, and I got the box checked.

44:57 That’s the path, a good path, one of the paths, not the only one. You could be an engineer or scientist or doctor, but pilot is one of them, and it’s a good one. Why? Why do pilots become astronauts, or why do astronauts recruit from pilots? So I think that flying is just the best analog for space, like all the skills that make a good pilot make a good astronaut.

45:23 It’s, we call it an operational environment. So when you’re in space, you’re not on a chalkboard designing new equations or coming up with new experiments. You’re doing things, and you’re handling emergencies, and you’re flying vehicles, and you’re, you’re, you’re an operator. You’re not the theoretical guy on the ground. And so even the scientist astronauts, many of them are pilots.

45:47 You know, private pilots. They fly Cessnas or whatever, or scuba divers or mountain climbers, or they have some type of experience where they do that work that a misstep would cost you for real. Right? If you’re just sitting at a chalkboard, if you get the wrong equation, you can erase it and write up a new one, but in an operational environment that’s not true. So that’s kind of the thing that we look for.

46:08 But I had done all these steps. I’d been a math major and pilot, and I came to a point at test pilot school where NASA announced that they were going to have a new class, and I said, all right, so I filled out the application. Some of my classmates didn’t do that. They decided to, well, I want to wait till I get more experience. You’re not going to get picked.

46:28 You’re not even graduated yet. You’re still a student. Why are you planning to be an astronaut? Wait, and, and uh, and then I got an interview, and they were like, well, don’t worry, you’re not going to get picked. This other guy’s better looking than you.

46:37 This other guy’s got more experience than you. And I said, that’s fine. I get to go to NASA for a week and hang out with astronauts. It’s going to be awesome. And no one thought I was going to get picked, and then I got picked.

46:49 And my other friends, who really were smarter than me and better looking than me and our top grads, it’s important to be good-looking to be, well, not. In my class, in my case, clearly it’s not required, but they didn’t get picked. And we had the Columbia accident, and that slowed things down, and then we hired, we just had hired too many astronauts, so it took a long time before there’s another class. And so the lesson I learned from that was, don’t tell yourself no.

47:14 If there’s something you want to do, put your name in the hat and try for it. If you don’t get it, then try harder the next time, or pick something else you want to do, or whatever it is, but you know for a fact if you don’t try for it, you’re not going to get it. And that’s kind of my life lesson when it comes to what you’re going to do with your life, professionally or personally, because if you would have waited, you probably would have missed it. If you tell yourself no, you’re not going to get it.

47:38 Yeah. If someone else tells you no, like I said, you can work harder. There’s things you can do, but if you tell yourself no, you’ll never know. And you were training to be a test pilot at that point. I was, I was, who does that?

47:50 I mean, isn’t that kind of the craziest thing to do? Because you’re already flying F-16s at that point, or, you know, and now you want to be a test pilot. And for people that don’t understand, what does that mean? So test pilots are really a different brand. So as an operational pilot, your job is to go out there and get the mission done.

48:06 And as a test pilot, your job is to go out there and make sure that the airplane can get the mission done. So can it fly high enough? Can it fly fast enough? Does this new software work on it? Um, can you put this thing on the airplane that’s going to work?

48:22 And it’s a completely different mentality. Totally different mentality, but it was very valuable. It was great training to be an astronaut, because you’re trying to push the outside of the envelope, trying to break the plane sometimes. So my project, like at test pilot school, my project was a new G-suit. So G-forces are when you’re in an airplane and you turn, you get pushed down in the airplane.

48:44 If you’re driving a car on the local highway here and you go around a corner real fast, you feel yourself can push to the side. Well, if you’re going 500 knots and you do that, you’ll be completely smashed to the side under nine times of force. So we have a special G-suit that compresses your body that keeps blood from draining out of your brain, because if blood drains out of your brain, you pass out and can die. And that’s a whole other project I can talk about that next, but the G-suit keeps you from doing that.

49:12 So they developed this new G-suit, and it was amazing. I could go in the centrifuge and I could sit there at 9 Gs and talk for minutes. Really, it was unbelievable how good this G-suit was. The problem was, it expanded, and the F-15, I got checked out in the F-15, ’cause it has a center stick, so when the G-suit blows up, it froze the stick. Move it.

49:31 Oh my, which is bad, right? If you’re trying to control it, you’re awake but you can’t maneuver the airplane, right? So they were trying to make some modifications. That was my test project at test pilot school, was to help design this new G-suit. Okay.

49:42 Um, all right. And you were going to say something else about G-suits? So then I graduated from test pilot school, and I went to the F-16 test squadron, and they developed a system called Auto GCAS. Any airliner that you fly on, a lot of modern airplanes have a system that warns you if you’re getting close to the ground, and this guy starts yelling at you, “altitude, altitude, pull up, pull up,” like a voice starts yelling at the pilot, so he knows that he’s about to hit the ground.

50:11 Based on a space shuttle mission, STS-99, flew around the Earth with this big radar and mapped the Earth’s altitude, and that database goes into all that. The space shuttle generated goes into all airplanes to know. But what the F-16 had was an automatic system, be that would take over the airplane and fly itself away. It wouldn’t just warn you. It would actually fly itself away.

50:34 And unfortunately, the Air Force didn’t install it for over a decade. A bunch of pilots died from what’s called controlled flight into terrain. And finally they installed it. So just literally a couple months ago, a buddy of mine sent me a text. He said, Terry, thank you for all the work you did on Auto GCAS.

50:50 My students are alive today because of you, and this video just went viral. It’s, you can find it on F-16 Auto GCAS and look it up on YouTube. YouTube. Okay, and this guy was out there maneuvering. He put himself to sleep from all the g-forces, passed out in full afterburner, and the plane just starts sinking, and he starts going supersonic, and his, my buddy is yelling at him, pull up, pull up, and all of a sudden the computer rescues him and pulls him up.

51:13 And you know, he’s home with his wife and kids now, you know, thanks to that system. So that was a really, it’s an amazing, really cool system. And that’s what you, one of the things you worked on. It was one of the things I worked on a long time ago. I did, you know, very little of it, but it was cool to finally see it implemented.

51:30 And that was neat. As a test pilot, you, something got implemented. What was your scariest moment as a pilot? Oh man, that’s a whole other hour. I had a situation one time in flying over Iraq where my wingman had an oil pressure problem.

51:55 In your car, if you lose oil pressure you want to pull over and turn it off, ’cause the engine will seize up, right? But in an airplane you can’t pull over. So anyway, we made it out of Iraq, just barely, until his engine finally seized up, and he did a glider landing to this airfield on the Iranian border, like just barely made it. That was pretty scary. This is before the recent, this was back in the ’90s, so there were no, like, American presence down there.

52:26 Saddam was in charge, so that would have been just a really bad day if he would have ejected over there. Um, does your heart rate go up a little bit when that’s happened? It did for sure that day. Yeah, but it’s a great video, and I try and, like, stay calm, and I was making jokes of them, hey, you won’t have to do your emergency training simulator this year, we’ll count this for you. And anyway, so there’s video of it.

52:50 Yeah, okay, it’s online. It may be on YouTube, probably, somebody. It was in Time Magazine. But anyway, there was another episode. A friend of mine at NASA, where right at takeoff we hit a flock of birds, and it exploded the left engine, and had a fire light, and anyway the right engine was working, thankfully, so we kind of limped around and landed right away.

53:14 But it was, that was an interesting, that was the shortest flight I ever took. It was like a five-minute-long flight, but probably the most exciting flight that I ever did, ’cause you had to land it with only one, you had to land one engine like just a few minutes after takeoff. Yeah. What does it take to be an F-16 pilot? I mean, it’s obviously maybe not Top Gun, but does it take some big balls when you go to F-16 school?

53:38 I, I went to MacDill Air Force Base for training. I remember the very first day I walked in, there’s this big classroom, and the wall had a gigantic thing, and it said single seat, single engine. So your mentality is single seat. You’re the only, you’re the guy in the airplane. There’s no one there to save you.

53:56 Um, um, and that’s just an important mentality. You’re the guy, and single engine, you’re not flying multi-engine airplane, so you got to take care of that engine. So that was it was kind of like a mentality, single seat, single engine. Um, kind of defined being an F-16 pilot. Is it, do you miss it?

54:11 ‘Cause like, I’ve had guys in here that just say that’s the best thing you can do. I mean, I, I love it. In fact, some, a friend of mine at the Air National Guard was talking about trying to get a, you know, a final flight in the F-16 as I’m retiring, but I would love to do it. Of course, it’s the coolest thing, but it was one of those, you know, when it was done, it was done. It’s kind of like being an astronaut.

54:35 After my flight, 200 days in space, I landed, got on a helicopter, got on an airplane, 24 hours later I was back in Houston. I got reunited with my family, went to the gym for an hour and a half, and then I was like, I’m in Houston, and my son had turned 16 when I was in space. He learned how to drive, got his driver’s license while I was in space, and he was like, all right, Dad, let’s go look at cars, it’s time to get me a car. So I was car shopping with my son hours after having been in space, and it was great.

55:07 I had gone from the sublime to the mundane, and it wasn’t a problem. I was kind of worried, like, is this going to be a problem for me mentally? But it wasn’t. I guess my brain is able to, you know, you’re in space, you’re on Earth, and I’m just able to make that switch from one thing to the next pretty easily. Okay, and same with F-16.

55:27 Same with F-16. You had the time. You don’t miss the adrenaline and all that stuff? No, it was like, that was amazing. I’ve got all these memories and pictures.

55:34 It was awesome. Now I’m on to the next, you know, okay, profession. But your face does light up when you start talking about it, at 16 it does. Um, 200 days in space, physically, uh, and even mentally, what’s that like? I know you guys are doing exercise one or two hours a day, I’m guessing, to keep your bone density up, to keep a lot of things happening like what do you have to make sure, do you know, just to survive?

55:59 So psychologically, like I said, I did the I’m going to enjoy space. I’m here. I got the rest of my life to be on Earth, and that attitude kept me. And we had email. There’s a phone system.

56:09 It’s the world’s best phone. Whenever you have the right satellite link, it’s not always available, but when it is, you can call anybody in the world for free, and nobody can call you. It’s like the perfect phone, nobody can call you. And so there’s a weekly video teleconference they would set up, so you can stay connected with friends and family on Earth. But, um, physically we do two and a half hours of scheduled exercise a day.

56:31 Everybody doesn’t do that every day, but I pretty much did it every day. There was a couple days I didn’t, Simonia emergency, and spacewalks. Other than that, I did it every day. It’s a lot of exercise. It’s like going to a health club.

56:41 I came back in pretty good shape. Your legs get skinny because you’re not using them. There’s certain parts that you lose muscle, but for the most part I came back in really good shape, and I did the week I landed, I did 20 pull-ups. I was shocked how good shape I was in after being weightless for 200 days. They did a scan of my body, and my bone density lost 0.0%.

57:02 So that’s like the big thing when you’re weightless, you lose bone and muscle, and because of the exercise that we do, I didn’t. And you know, people can stay. The space station has checked the box. You can live in space for a long time and come back and thrive. Okay, how’s the food?

57:20 The food is pretty darn good. It’s better than what I cook for myself when I’m, you know, back. Because there’s variety. I would much rather go to the pub and have some fish and chips, you know, or Italian restaurant or Chinese. Of course, a good meal on Earth is something I missed, but it’s pretty good.

57:41 It’s, there’s a good diversity. There’s like an American style of food, but the Russian food is great, so I ordered a couple Russian C boxes of food for myself. Um, and that’s just really great meat and potatoes food. Borscht, borscht, borscht is awesome. I love pork, um, beet soup, you know, meat beet soup.

58:00 The European food was pretty good. I normally don’t get a lot, but we had Samantha, and they had some leftover European food, so I had a little bit of that. I think the key is variety, because if you eat the same, you know, bag of grilled chicken every day for 200 days, you’d be ready to come back to Earth. But there was some variety, and it wasn’t too bad. You mentioned ammonia there.

58:23 That’s a very scary thing to happen on that space station. I want, tell us why is that scary? Also, I’ve heard of other times when, you know, space debris is coming in and you get into that ejection capsule. In weight? Yeah, that sounds pretty hairy.

58:38 Both of those situations to me, right? So the ammonia situation. The station has cautions, warnings and emergencies. A caution is not that big a deal. When they happen, the crew doesn’t even have to do anything.

58:53 Usually the ground control can take care of it. Warning, the crew has to take care of it. It’s not, you know, an emergency, but it’s a warning. But the emergencies are really serious. You drop everything, and it floats, and then you take care of whatever the emergency is.

59:08 Okay, and there’s three. There’s a leak, there’s a fire, and there’s ammonia. We call it toxic atmosphere. The fire alarms happen pretty often in the Russian segment. The smoke detectors go off, and they either set off a warning or an emergency, that’s you almost always a false alarm.

59:27 So we kind of see those once a month, or it’s not that uncommon to see a fire alarm. The leak would be pretty rare, but you would have time to deal with that. The ammonia is super serious. On the American side we use ammonia as a coolant, just like any freeze in your car. It’s a great coolant, has great coolant properties and can work in space with the temperature extremes, but the problem is what they told us when training: they told us if you smell ammonia, don’t worry about it, ’cause you’re going to die.

59:55 It’s like it’s super deadly. It’s very deadly. Yeah. Okay, so we were sitting there one day at the middle of the day, and the emergency alarm went off. Everybody popped out and looked at it, and it’s DPDT, which is leak, fire, is fire, and ATM, or atmosphere, is toxic atmosphere.

1:00:11 And the ATM button was on, and this had never happened ever in the 15-year history of the space station. We never had a false ammonia alarm. And when I saw ATM, I thought atmosphere. The atmosphere is leaking, and Samantha was right there, and she said, no, that’s ammonia. It was so unexpected I couldn’t even process it for 2 or 3 seconds.

1:00:32 So we put our masks on, we all floated down to the Russian segment. It’s all a memorized procedure. We shut the hatch, because the Russians don’t use ammonia, so the theory is if there’s a leak, it’ll be on the American side. You’re supposed to take your clothes off, because if you get ammonia on your clothes, it’ll be deadly to, well, no, to your breathing. It’d be bad for your skin, but then if you took your mask off there would be ammonia.

1:01:00 So you all get naked. So that day, yeah, we actually didn’t. We probably should have, but we didn’t, ’cause no one had. Anyway, we just didn’t. And then you shut another hatch, and then you go through this procedure with this ammonia detector to see if there’s leaks.

1:01:13 So we go through this whole thing. About an hour later, Houston calls up and says, that was a false alarm. It’s like, usually they’re false alarms, but this one was so unusual we thought maybe it was real. They still, it was a false alarm, but just in case, keep your masks on and go measure to make sure. So we open the hatch, we went back, measured it, and it was no ammonia.

1:01:31 So then we start cleaning up this mess that we had made, and then the CAPCOM called us and said, execute your ammonia procedures, this is real. Execute your ammonia procedures, this is a real ammonia leak. So at that point I knew it was real. I knew there was a bunch of engineers, and they were looking, there was like, is that real or not? I kind of knew that they had figured out that they’re not going to call us unless it’s real.

1:01:51 So we went through the same thing. We put the mask on, float down the Russian segment, close the hatch, get the detectors out, and we spent the entire afternoon in the Russian segment. The Russian Deputy Prime Minister called us, Dmitry Rogozin, and said, hey, our American colleagues, you can stay on our segment, we’re going to work on this together. Right in the middle of that, Crimea, Ukraine, sanctions, international tension, we had the Russian top political leadership calling us and saying, America, you we can work together.

1:02:19 And we were sitting there looking at each other thinking, the space station is done, because if there had been an ammonia leak, the American segment would have died, and no one could have ever gone back into that segment. Um, it’s that toxic. It’s, yeah, you can’t, you could have depressurized it and gotten rid of it, but then you can’t go in there. Yeah. And then there’s not enough air to fill it back up, and then if you did, there would still be ammonia there, because it would have stuck to the wall.

1:02:45 Right, and if you depressurize it, all the electronic gear would die, because it’s not designed to work in a vacuum. Okay. So we were really like, end of the space station. You might have, you thought we thought we’d hang out on the Russian segment for a few weeks and then be done. Like that’s what we thought.

1:03:00 And then after hours and hours of sitting around waiting, we got a call from Houston, hey, just kidding, that was a false alarm, but just in case, keep your masks on and go measure, just make sure there’s no ammonia. So we did that, and it was like being in an alien movie or something, where there’s this abandoned spaceship, you know, things are floating around. It was really eerie going back into an abandoned ghost spaceship. Okay, ’cause you hadn’t been there for a little while.

1:03:24 No one had been there all day. Stuff was just floating around. But there was no ammonia. It turned out to be a bad, a computer problem. Okay, but the ground team, I learned later, was actually considering venting all of the ammonia, which would have been, really, half the ammonia, which would have been really bad, because we would have lost our ability to cool the station.

1:03:45 So anyway, it was a really serious situation that turned out to be a false alarm, but that was just one of those cases that you could have been the guy that broke the space station. Yeah, right. Yep, that was, yeah, and right with the political drama going on too, made it even more poignant. Yeah. Why do you think that the Russians are so professional when it comes to that, because like you said, everyone’s got to kind of show that they’re being the tough guy?

1:04:10 And what a great way, I mean, what a great piece of leverage. The Russians have massive leverage. They’re the only one that can actually deliver things to the International Space Station. Um, why do you think they’re very kind of, I don’t know, noble in that way, or, right? Well, they’re super proud of their space program.

1:04:26 I mean, they have Cosmonautics Day, like we have the Fourth of July, and you know, England has the holidays that they’re proud of. The Russians are really proud of Yuri Gagarin. But it was an interesting connection, because the man, the politician who said Americans can take a trampoline to the space station in the middle of sanctions and stuff, Russia realized that the only reason Americans go to the space station is on a Russian rocket. So he said Americans can take a trampoline to the space station, and I thought, don’t say that, because America buys a lot of rocket engines from Russia.

1:05:00 But after those tensions, now we’re spending a lot of money to build our own engines. So in the long run it’s not good for Russia to do this. The same guy that said that is the guy that walked me out to my rocket. So I’m in my space suit, I’m carrying my cooling thing. You always see pictures of astronauts walking out.

1:05:17 Well, he was like holding my arm. He was my guy that escorted me to the Soyuz. He was also the guy that called us in space and said, hey, you can stay there. So I had this connection with Dmitry Rogozin that I never in a million years would have ever expected that I’d have. But it is an interesting dichotomy, that when it comes to space, we would always, you know, doing toasts, we’d always say politics is politics, but we’re the crew and we’re friends, and we’re, you know, we were just able to completely not let that affect our professional relationship in training or in space.

1:05:48 Okay. It’s almost like too pure in Russia, like that, that they’re so proud of what they’ve done, that that gets a pass. You don’t want to politicize it. It’s different than, you know, Ukraine or whatever. The other, ’cause it would taint the entire program if it was ever used as a political tool.

1:06:02 Right? It almost goes against the science itself. Right. Um, doing a, you’re doing a lot of toasts up there. There’s a lot of a lot of vodka being drunk before.

1:06:10 Well, the toasting was on the ground beforehand. That’s like the standard tradition, is before, you know, or like after you pass your exams. And then there’s a big toast. It’s a very formal process. Everybody shows up.

1:06:21 There’s a giant table with, you know, the food and the cucumbers and the drinks, and you know, the NASA representative has to do a toast, and the European representative has to do a toast, and this boss, and there’s a whole long process of toasting, you drinking vodka for ground toasting. Yeah, vodka. Okay. And you link the arms and do the whole thing. And there, you could do that.

1:06:41 There’s, yeah, that’s one of them. Okay. Um, you mentioned, uh, American rocket programs now. Um, what do you think of Elon Musk, SpaceX? I think one of those rockets blew up when you were up there.

1:06:54 What’s your view, just as an outsider, right, going forward? So the SpaceX commercial cargo delivery program started under the last administration, in 2005. Uh, Mike Griffin, our administrator, started this program where we had a competition. It ended up being SpaceX and Orbital, the two cargo providers, and uh, in the future there may be some other ones. But Elon has done some amazing things.

1:07:21 I mean, he’s building rockets that launch cargo to the space station, to launch commercial satellites. Um, it’s all made in America. It’s a really unique, it’s an exciting company, full of 25-year-old engineers, you know, right out of college, working lots of hours. Um, I went down for a cargo ship launch, and it was going to launch in a few days, and just walking around the rocket hangar, there was like five guys doing stuff, and they were running around, busy, and one of the guys, yeah.

1:07:50 So it’s a very different way of doing business, and they get stuff done. Um, the important thing to remember, though, is it’s really hard to get going, 17,500 miles an hour, and it’s even harder to slow down from 17,500 miles an hour coming back to Earth. So you know, there’s some risk there, and Elon certainly understands that. He’s always talking about this or that, but, um, when cargo ships blow up, that’s bad. First of all, for me, because my underwear was on board.

1:08:20 So I had like one sweater for my entire 200 days, so that’s a surprise problem, but it’s not that big of a problem when people fly, that you really need to be concerned about safety. So I think that, you know, we need to balance the enthusiasm of flying commercially and quickly, and maybe with less safety margins, but when it comes to people, you just can’t have failures. You really do need to make it so that you don’t have failure. So I think maybe running two different types of programs, a human one where you really focus on the safety aspect of things, and the cargo one, where you can do things quicker and cheaper.

1:08:59 And that really does need to happen, it’s super expensive to get in space. Um, I was just, I just read an article about the cost, even on SpaceX, that’s still $110,000 a pound to deliver cargo to the space station, which is just, you know, that’s a big limiting factor when it comes time to go to the moon or Mars or other places. Yeah. And do you think ultimately NASA should be building these rockets, or do you think it’s time to let a commercial endeavor try it?

1:09:21 Yeah, so that’s a great question, because that has never really built a rocket like Grumman and McDonnell Douglas built the Apollo rockets. And you know, Rockwell was a shuttle prime contractor, and Thiokol built these, and so there’s always been commercial companies building rockets, and a lot of what SpaceX does, a really significant part of the revenue, comes from government contracts. Um, but the way they’re building them, in the past there’s been a lot more government oversight over projects, which just slows things down and adds to cost.

1:09:50 I mean, the government’s not efficient. I’ve been working for the government for 27 years. It’s not an efficient way to do things. But as somebody who had to strap themselves onto one of those rockets, I wasn’t always interested in the most efficient way to do something. I wanted it to be safe, or as safe as possible, way of doing things when it came to launching people.

1:10:11 So anyway, there’s an interesting dichotomy, and commercial companies could be flying to Mars if they wanted to, if there was a commercial market. There’s a lot of private equity money in the world. There’s a lot of money out there that people want to invest in stuff, and if there was return on equity to be made, if there was return on invested capital to be made, that money would be flowing there, because the people who direct the flow of this money are pretty smart people.

1:10:36 You know, from your history and I know from my history, people know where to put money, and so if there were money to be made, then they would be getting that money, and they are getting some of that money. Money has been flowing into commercial space, but right now flying to the Moon or flying to Mars just doesn’t have a big return on investment, just like driving boats to America in 1520, there was not a big return on investment. It maybe took centuries before it was there, right?

1:11:04 But in the long run, good grief, think of the world without the New World. Right? If we were all still so. In the long run exploration does pay benefits, but you don’t always get them immediate, which is why you need governments to do it, because the private equity guys want quarterly returns, or maybe a couple years, but they’re not going to be willing to be altruistic like a government can, spend the money and not do it. So I think there’s, I think there’s a balance.

1:11:30 Yeah. I mean, JFK’s famous declaration that we’re going to be on the Moon in 10 years, I mean, I doubt any venture capital would have put that money down because it was such a huge idea at the time. Right. Um, when do you think we’ll be on Mars? So I had an opportunity to speak to, uh, Congress recently.

1:11:47 I had probably 20 representatives and senators, and the message I gave each one of them was this: it’s not about rocket science, it’s about political science. So the rocket science challenges are significant. I think propulsion is the main one, but they could be solved if we could come up with an international coalition and the political will to fund it and keep it basically on track. The problem in America, we have such a short attention span with our election cycle.

1:12:14 One president has an idea, and then the next president comes in and dismantles it, and you can’t, that’s not a way to, you can run some social programs that way, but you can’t run a space program that way. You’re never going to, you’re just going to spend money and never achieve anything. So I think we need to figure out a way to have a politically viable and stable program, and then getting to Mars will happen. So the answer is 15 years after we figure out how to do it politically to get a man on Mars.

1:12:46 Yeah, really? Oh yeah, okay. So 15 after we politically, so what does that mean? 50 years? It could mean, it could mean 15 and a half years.

1:12:53 It just depends on when we come up with a thing. The space station program had famously passed the US Congress by one vote, I think in 1993, back in the ’90s, when it was, it just got going. Um, Congress was, you know, 230 to 229, or whatever the vote was, one vote, where the station would have been dead. And the reason it survived is because it was an international program, and even the congressman didn’t like it, didn’t want to slap Europe in the face or break a treaty with Japan or with Russia.

1:13:22 It was at that time, it was the ’90s, Russia was, we were really trying to help prop them up after the Soviet Union collapsed. So it was the international aspect of things that allowed us to not shoot ourselves in the foot, like we are, like we normally do in the States. And so I think the Mars program is going to need some type of similar international treaty obligation. We recently had a Constellation program, that was a building block: first go to the station, then to the Moon, and eventually on to Mars.

1:13:52 And it was a great program, but it got cancelled, and it was largely an American program. There was no international, you know, poison pill that required us to keep funding it, so it got, it got, really most of it’s still going, but it got canceled for the lack of the international partnership. I think if we send someone to Mars, does that man or woman go there forever, or are they not coming back? So, you know, President Kennedy said, this nation will commit itself to achieving the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

1:14:22 That was my favorite part of Kennedy’s speech, was returning him safe. Um, there’s a hundreds of thousands of people who would volunteer to go to Mars one way. I don’t think we should do that. Is that crazy? Hundreds of thousands?

1:14:33 Yeah. Even qualified test pilots like yourself. So hopefully the kind of astronauts that NASA is selecting are not going to want to do that. I’m a, I’m a big fan. You know, would you have done it at 24 years old?

1:14:46 It would depend. I just don’t want to go on a suicide mission. I mean, would you have, when you were younger, or no? So if Mars had a, if it was a viable place to live, yes, I would. Like, the explorers, you know, burned the ships.

1:14:59 This expedition to the New World is going to, um, who’s, Cortez? One of the Spanish. Yeah. He burned his ships. Guess what, guys, we’re going to survive, and maybe back then that was like going to Mars, but there’s land, there’s food, there’s water, you know, like a lot of that stuff doesn’t exist on Mars yet in a way that humans can survive.

1:15:19 So I think eventually Mars will be a place you could go live. It’s just, we’re not there yet. We’re still at the go and come back phase. Um, so I think at least the first decades, if not century or two, is going to be, you won’t be able to really live on Mars for permanently, but Mars does have water in the form, you can see if you have a telescope, that big white dot on the North or South pole is the polar ice cap. So you can see water on Mars.

1:15:47 There’s a really thin atmosphere there. There’s a 24-and-a-half-hour day, which is pretty close to, or I wouldn’t mind an extra 30 minutes a day. So there’s, there’s a lot of things on Mars that, you know, make it promising for the long term, but technically we’re just not there yet. So I’m hopeful that the first guys go there and come back to Earth. Okay.

1:16:08 15 years sounds fast, even if we politically figure it out. So Yuri Gagarin, before him, no one had ever been in space, and eight and a half years later Neil and Buzz were on the surface of the Moon. In eight and a half years we didn’t have iPhones. We didn’t have TDRS communication satellites. We didn’t have 50 years of thousands of rocket, I mean, we went from eight and a half years of nothing to being on the Moon.

1:16:35 So with the right political context, you know, getting to Mars can happen. The problem is designing the political program that survives. Okay, you mentioned the Moon landing. What do you say to people that say we didn’t land on the Moon? So what I say to them, ’cause they’re all over YouTube, I’m actually friends, they’re all over.

1:16:55 You, oh, I know. I know. I’m friends with a lot of the… I’m good friends with Buzz Aldrin. So, I believe, having worked at NASA and in the US government, like, there’s really good people, but it’s not, I think we’re just barely good enough to get to the Moon, but there’s no earthly way that we’re good enough to cover that up.

1:17:19 I mean, we’re just not nearly good enough to cover something that big up. You know, the President of the United States couldn’t cover up a really small thing back in the ’90s. So how in the world are we going to cover up, how in the world are we going to cover up going to the Moon with that many people involved? You’re saying 100,000 people involved? 100,000.

1:17:36 You know, that many people were involved. Apollo program had 100,000 Americans who worked on it, and now the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter actually can take pictures of the vehicles that were on the Moon. So, okay, so there’s something that orbits the Moon as we speak? Yes. And taking, so there are pictures of the…

1:17:54 Yeah. You know, you could say you know, people are always going to believe something. But, uh, yeah, I just don’t think, I wasn’t around, so I don’t know. But I’ve talked to the men who went, they seem like honest guys. And, um, I do know for a fact that we’re not nearly good enough to cover that up.

1:18:14 Okay. It seems to be really popular these days to challenge that more so than five or 10 years ago. Why do you reckon that is? I think there’s a lot of things. I think the internet has grown this conspiracy theory culture about this and that, and people say that you can’t see any stars on the, or the flag is there’s breeze, but, well, it had, like, permanent breeze in it, or when they hung up a flag.

1:18:38 You know, anyway, I don’t know. I, you can’t just, because somebody makes a claim on YouTube, comment, you can’t go try and refute it. So, right. Yeah. Hey, there’s no such thing as bad PR, so if people are talking about it, at least they are talking about the space program, generating interest in space, right?

1:18:54 Which is important, right? I mean, a lot of the things that you do in space, from, you know, beaming down, talking to your alumni at Harvard Business School, to cutting hair in space, I mean, it is, you’re involved in a constant PR machine, even if you look at Apollo 13, the movie. Um, and of course that was slightly fictionalized, but, like, they’re doing live broadcasts down to the, to, in America, in the ’70s, right? And so even they understood then that it was a huge PR issue, just to keep the funding coming.

1:19:24 Right. So um, yeah, The Right Stuff, no bucks, no Buck Rogers, or no bucks. Yeah. So, no bucks, no Buck Rogers. So, I’ve had a chance to travel around the world.

1:19:35 I mean, here I am in England, and everybody universally is fascinated with space travel. Once they find out I’m an astronaut, people would just think it’s cool. It’s like this genetic human desire to explore. It’s been that way ever since humans were first created, and they just love space. It doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on, doesn’t matter what country you’re from, everybody’s kind of amazed that, wow, we went into space.

1:20:03 I would think about that too, flying over, like, Africa, New Guinea, or I would see these places that were super isolated, these rivers in New Guinea. It was thousands of them. It was amazing, and I would wonder, would they even believe that someone’s up here? You know, people who had never even seen a TV. Or, you know, there’s probably not many people like that left on Earth, but there’s some left.

1:20:24 Um, or, you know, flying, because I know I’ve talked to other astronauts who have gone to remote places in Africa and given talks to school kids, or whatever, and they’re they’re like, you didn’t go to space. They just, right? Can’t understand how that could have happened. It’s, anyway, it’s an interesting right? And it is constantly a PR issue.

1:20:41 I mean, you’re constantly letting people know we’re in space, we’re doing these things. It’s important because I guess it needs to be always on the political agenda, and the public, well, so that the public funds it, and, right, ’cause sometimes it’s one of the first things to get cut. People say, you know, why are we wasting money in space when we have these problems on Earth? But I say, um, on my space shuttle flight, depending on how you count the cost, it was half a billion dollars, billion dollars for one space shuttle flight.

1:21:06 What I tell people is, I didn’t launch into space within my space shuttle, open up the payload doors and jettison a billion dollars into outer space. Those billion dollars were spent in Florida, in Texas and California. You know what I mean? Like, there is a cost to it, but that cost gets recouped in any ways, of having kids grow up to be engineers, or having engineers have middle- class paying jobs that generate wealth, or, you know, GDP is generated from that.

1:21:35 So the actual cost, because the space money, I think, gets regurgitated, and those people pay taxes, and you learn technologies that are sold in other places, and so, um, even though there is an upfront cost, the end result cost, because of all the benefits, is much lower. Yeah, and all that intellectual property. And, right, for the next generation. Right? Um, you’ve been, how many times have you orbited the Earth?

1:21:58 Can you even count that? That’s a good question. 16 times a day times over 200 days, so 3,500, maybe. Quite a lot. Yeah.

1:22:07 Um, can you tell us if it’s round or if it’s flat? It’s round. I’ve seen it. It’s like curve, or it’s curve. Um, what do a lot of people ask you about that?

1:22:18 Why is that all of a sudden something that people talk a lot about, and is it pretty easy to prove? Besides all of your pictures, that’s funny. You know, um, Buzz Aldrin jokes about that. He’s like, on the Moon there would be no flat Moon society, because it’s just so small you could actually look out and see that it’s curved. Okay.

1:22:40 Um, but yeah, no, it’s not flat. It’s, I watched myself go around the edge of it, as it was curved. Okay. Huh. Do you ever get involved with those discussions with people?

1:22:49 No one ever talks about Flat Earth. It’s much less popular than, “Moon landings were faked.” Oh, really? Or there’s aliens. Like, there’s other, there’s other conspiracy theories that are higher on that priority list of people, which dovetails us perfectly into the aliens.

1:23:04 Alright. Now you’ve done out there on the spacewalk. First of all, did you ever think, okay, maybe there’s other life out here? And then also, on a slightly more serious note, when you do look out into the universe, do you have this feeling that there’s life out there? That’s the alien thing cracks me up, because in America everybody thinks they’re in Roswell, New Mexico.

1:23:22 That’s the, yeah, the what, it’s Area 51. Area 51 is, that’s in a different place, that’s in Las Vegas, or near Las Vegas, or I don’t know where it is. I don’t even know if there is one or not, but there’s, there’s one in Las Vegas, and there’s one in New Mexico, but I always laugh that if I was an alien and I had to travel, you know, hundreds of light years and billions of miles, and I finally made it to Earth, and it is a beautiful planet, there’s blue, there’s turquoise of the Bahamas, the England, London looks like a fun place to come.

1:23:51 There’s lots of places I would go, but the middle of New Mexico, me, would not be the place I would go if I had traveled billions of miles, which is where they were all sited, although it’s a beautiful place. Yeah. So anyway, so, um, but you know, I, being in space, I learned a lot about physiology and biology, because I had a… I did ultrasound scans on my brain and my eyeball and my heart, and these laser scans, and I just learned a lot about the science of biology and then the science of astronomy.

1:24:22 And I, I’m kind of, I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist, because life is so incredible. I have a garage at home in my house, and if I, if I could wait a month, that garage would never clean itself. If I waited a billion years, the garage would not clean itself, you know? Like, someone has to go out there and clean the garage. Um, I could take a pile of silicon and set it in my driveway, and we have all these thunderstorms in Houston.

1:24:49 Why, I almost missed the show today, because we were late for weather, flying in from Houston this morning. And if lightning hit that pile of silicon for a billion years, it would never make that glass. Like this glass would never be created from some random thing. So when knowing about life, which is so amazing, and we replicate ourselves, and a lot of us work for 70, 80, 90 years, and we have love and hate and happiness and all this stuff, about life, it’s just, too, somebody had to make it.

1:25:21 I, you know, I just don’t have the faith to be a pure, you know, everything happened randomly atheist. That’s kind of the philosophy that I’ve, okay, I had before I went in space, but having seen it, and it’s like this, you know, the sunrise view I was telling you about, wow, that’s, there was something really powerful. Powerful there. So that was kind of my philosophy. Okay.

1:25:43 Looking at things, does that mean that it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the universe? No, I don’t think so at all. Okay, I just don’t think it. I think somebody had to make it. If it, if it existed, just like there’s a glass here, right?

1:25:56 Right. It might exist in France, but somebody had to make it there that it didn’t randomly happen across the Channel. Um, uh, and I don’t know. I don’t know if God made life in other planets or not. There’s an awful lot of planets we’re starting to find with our satellites.

1:26:10 We’re starting to find planets in other solar systems. I mean, you know, you saw the picture of Neil deGrasse Tyson on the wall, and I know he was at your IMAX. He was at the IMAX premiere. I mean, I don’t know if he or other people have said, like, if you do the numbers, like you said, we’re finding there’s so many other galaxies out there that some people say it’s almost, you can almost prove the fact that some biology must must must exist out there. Must be out there.

1:26:37 The flip side of that is, if there is, why haven’t we heard from them? If there’s so many of them out there, you think, and we have this thing called SETI, which is a network that listens for radio signals. Yeah. Um, so, uh, I don’t know. It’s an interesting question.

1:26:55 I, I just, I’ve come to the conclusion that life doesn’t happen randomly, because it’s just too, nothing, everything that is interesting, or, you know, there’s this concept of entropy, where everything kind of disintegrates. Yeah, the second law of thermodynamics, and so without some creative energy my book would not have been written. Without my effort in writing a book, an organism is so much more advanced and harder to make than a book. You know, so that’s my view.

1:27:27 And, um, I’m guessing your view is probably different than most NASA people, ’cause they’re probably born pure scientists. Where, this all, there’s a lot, I know, I know a lot of people who have, you know, Christian beliefs, or I, to be honest, it’s pretty rare for me to find a pure atheist. There is no creator. Okay. Although we don’t talk about that that often, you know, normally we’re just talking about work and business.

1:27:53 But, um, and some people have that view too, and that’s fine, and I’m I like discussing it. I don’t even argue about it, but it’s, um, most of the people I think have that have that. Somebody had to make it. I guess the more, it was just the more I learned about it, the more I thought, wow, I was learning about this little creature that swims around in lakes, and he basically has a clutch and transmission system, between, literally, has gears to make his little tail whip around and move himself around.

1:28:27 There’s a clutch and a transmission system to move that around. Like, how does that randomly happen? Or how does an eyeball randomly, without somebody making it happen, that works for 80 years and can perceive these colors of blue and Earth? And it’s just amazing. That’s Darwin, I guess.

1:28:44 Um, one thing you said, I did see the Goopo Island from space. Oh, you did. That was kind of cool. Yeah, that was cool. Uh, one thing you said you saw from space is how the lights, you can see, concentrate the world, and how you were like, wait a second, this isn’t a population, it’s a wealth.

1:29:00 Uh, it’s a, it’s, I guess it’s an indication of wealth, and I guess the most basic and purest is that vivid image of North and South Korea. Right. Yeah. That’s the most shocking one. On my first space flight, it hit me.

1:29:12 So during the daytime you can’t really see human activity. If you were that alien and you went zooming by the Earth during the day, you wouldn’t really see human activity unless you look. You could see London during the day, but you have to look, and then you see little concrete, or you can see contrails of airplanes flying back and forth, but you have to actually look for it. At nighttime, it is brightly lit up, that kind of yellow-orange color of cities at night.

1:29:39 And as I was looking at them, I realized that I wasn’t looking at population. I was looking at wealth, which is a really interesting perspective. Um, and of course the East Coast of the US is very brightly lit up, but there’s a lot of people there too. There’s 100 million people there. Western Europe is brightly lit up.

1:29:55 There’s 3 or 400 million people here in Western Europe. The further east you go, it’s like it just gets less and less and less and less, and east of Warsaw there’s Kiev, and then there’s nothing, and then there’s Moscow, and then there’s, you know, so it really gets, um, sco. The Middle East is really brightly lit. I realized this about halfway through this flight. I went, wow, Saudi Arabia, like Mecca, Medina, Riyadh, the Gulf States.

1:30:19 It is bright down there, and, um, there’s 28 million people in Saudi Arabia, and it looks like you’re looking at the East Coast of America. It’s that bright. Um, so there’s this dichotomy. And then the one that really struck me was Africa. So in the north, the Nile is really beautiful at night.

1:30:40 The whole Nile River Valley is lit up. Cairo is super bright. The Delta’s bright, and in the south, Johannesburg looks like a European city. It’s, um, really bright, and in between there, there’s a billion people, and I’ve got this video that I made. It’s amazing, watching the lightning storms in central Africa.

1:31:00 It’s just beautiful lightning, but there’s no cities. There’s like a couple of yellow dots between the Nile and Johannesburg, and there’s a billion people down there. And so that was really striking, that for similar numbers of people there’s much different. India has some bright cities, obviously, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, but not that bright. And there’s between there and Pakistan, there’s one and a half billion people down there.

1:31:27 And, uh, so it was just an interesting way to see the Earth and how different people live. Yeah. What does that tell you? We doing something wrong? Some people are doing something wrong?

1:31:39 Yeah. I mean, it’s like, uh, yes, clearly, you know, resources aren’t distributed properly. Perhaps resources aren’t, I think one of the biggest problems. There’s a guy named Charles Krauthammer. He’s an American political essayist and columnist, and I just read an essay by him about how politics is the most important science, and I’m like, math, engineering, I’m a math, I’m a very scientific guy.

1:32:06 But his point is that’s what leads to war, right? If you don’t get your politics right, you’re going to have war, you’re not going to and so I think he’s right, unless you can kind of organize yourself in a democracy, educate people, let’s create industries and do things, you know? Um, and there’s just a lot of governments on Earth that are more interested in corruption and having tribal warfare, and, you know, just not, you can’t have a thriving economy where you have democracies and economies.

1:32:35 You don’t have war, or you have much less war, and you have, you know, people, people’s lives are improved. And so if you can get the politics right, I think you can get the, uh, the quality of life for people can improve. Yeah. It’s fascinating that, like, during the day you can see this, this wonder. Maybe this God, God’s creation, maybe in your mind, and then at night, of course, you see the human element, but you also see this, you know, this wealth distribution, in in some ways violently unfair, whereas North Korea and South Korea, where South Korea is probably massively lit up and then there’s the border, the 38th parallel, and then all of a sudden it’s just jet black.

1:33:13 It’s unbelievable. So I have too bad we don’t have a background. It’s unbelievable, like you said. So, Mount Rushmore has four presidents, right? On an American America.

1:33:23 So we all Americans always use the expression, the Mount Rushmore of baseball teams or whatever. So the Mount Rushmore of cities, the brightest cities, Seoul is right on, right up there. Shanghai’s bright. Moscow’s bright. Western Europe’s hard to see because everything is blended together, but you’re looking down at this bright city, and that line, and the first time I saw it, I flew F-16s there on the DMZ for North Korea, and I was like, what’s, is that the Yellow Sea?

1:33:49 I was trying to figure out what body of water it was, ’cause Beijing is right there, and all these million-person Chinese cities are right there, and then I realized it was North Korea, and it’s black. And so people, it’s the same number of people on both sides of the border. One is living in light, physically and metaphorically, and the other is living in darkness, you know, physically and metaphorically. That is the most striking example of how people live well on Earth and people don’t live well on Earth, and how the politics really drives the quality of life for billions of people on the planet.

1:34:19 Do you think 100 years from now, when your counterpart goes up in that space station and looks down, are there going to be bigger divisions of this light? Or do you think it’ll be, you know, I hope it’s not. There used to be, it was funny, Ronald Reagan had a saying about everybody’s equally miserable, and I don’t think that would be good. I think the best thing would be to improve the conditions in places like Africa and India, where people are living in extreme poverty.

1:34:46 And if if conditions improve there, the conditions will improve everywhere, because we’ll have more trading partners. It’s just better economies are good for everybody. It’s not a question of taking from to give to. It’s a question of let’s build up. I think is a better way to do that, and I hope that happens.

1:35:03 I mean, I hope at some point Africa’s lit up from north to south, not from burning coal but from, you know, some type of nuclear fusion would be the most optimum. In fact, the lady that made our IMAX movie, that’s kind of her hope, is that we can figure out how to do nuclear fusion, which is very clean. That’s how the Sun makes energy. And if, if we could ever do that, Earth would change. Life would dramatically improve across the planet.

1:35:29 Yeah. You’ve now retired from NASA. I have. What do they do? You know, what do they do?

1:35:36 They put you out to pasture, or do they keep you around and fly you around the world, because everyone wants to know about space flight, and these kinds of, so, NASA, so I’m actually done with NASA. Um, I help them out. They still have questions about, Terry, how’d you get this hose hooked up? Or I talk to Mission Control occasionally about going on, or they still need help like that. Hey, they need, well, as I get farther away, I’ll, I won’t be the guy.

1:35:59 But I’m still kind of one of the most recent guys to have come back. But I’m not involved with them. I’m doing, I want to speak and talk to folks around the world, so I am actually speaking as one of my main activities now, but independent of them. I’m doing that on my own. Okay, so, and is that true when NASA did, most people just kind of, when they get done, they go do their own thing?

1:36:20 Yes. You know, some people go be college professors. Some people go become executives at aerospace companies. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. So I’m speaking right now, and I’ve written this book, and I love telling the story of space, because people are fascinated by it.

1:36:37 And I have time to do that now, whereas as an active astronaut you’re very busy, and NASA really limits how much you can go out and do that. So I have more time to do that now. Yeah. Can you tell me about some of your own personal kind of secrets for success? I mean, I was wondering if there’s something that you changed about your daily routine or your perspective or physical routine, maybe back in the day, where you noticed all of a sudden, I’m a better pilot, or all of a sudden I’m a better the rest of the show.

1:37:24 Facebook has that plan to have these, like, drones that go up for like 90 days and be, like, internet access down to Africa, and like they’ve been praised and criticized, and regardless, it’s kind of interesting to think, like, what if the entire continent could have high-speed internet, right? Like, what would that place look like 25 years later? It would be better. My IMAX movie, right? So we went to, we did a premiere with it, and somebody said it’s too bad every kid can’t see that movie, and I thought, why can’t they?

1:37:54 And so that’s something I thought of, because it’s a great, it’s a story about space exploration and the environment and energy and just life in space. It’s a fun movie that would inspire kids to pro, or pursue careers in math and science, and if you had more technically capable kids, then the future would be a better future. Right? So yeah, what do you want people to take away from that movie after seeing it? Um, that we really do have a beautiful planet that needs to be taken care of, and that uh, space exploration is cool, and I think it’s going to be a big part of human history, hopefully for centuries to come, and that we need to be pursuing that also.

1:38:36 You know, our planet is wonderful, but it’s in human history, if you are, there’s no static. You’re either expanding or you’re contracting, right? Just like in business, if you’re a company you can rest on your laurels, and then 20 years from now you’ll be gone. You’ll be in, so same thing with human history. If you’re, you’re either expanding or you’re contracting.

1:38:58 I think nations that expand into space are going to be the ones that, it’ll be, if the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century will be the century of countries that do pursue space exploration, and the ones who don’t will kind of be the afterthought of the century. Interesting. Very interesting. How did you get through, like, the hard times when it came to either fighter pilot training, test pilot, you know, being an astronaut? I’m sure there were missions that were, can, miss, that you were passed over for.

1:39:25 You were like, I’m never going to get a chance. You’re laughing about that. That was a decade. Yeah, I waited almost 10 years to fly. How do you keep the faith when that’s happening, when you’re like, plus you put your entire time in?

1:39:38 Obviously it’s the coveted thing to get into space. I’m sure you went to school with tons of men and women who never got the chance to go. Oh yeah, yeah. Um, you know, I tried to, because I got to that point after I’d been in NASA for probably seven or eight years, and, um, we went through this phase, like I said, we hired too many astronauts, and then the Columbia accident happened, and then they were only flying flown astronauts. They weren’t flying rookies, and so astronauts my age basically waited between 8 and 12 years for their first flight.

1:40:08 It was just a long wait, and I, so the first few years were exciting and fine. It was fun, and then after seven or eight years I was like, I’m ready to fly. So I just said, don’t get depressed about it, you know, it’s going to, there’s nothing you can control. So, so I try to keep that philosophy of, don’t stress about, why worry about things you can’t control? They’re going to happen one way or another, and, um, I just came to the point where I’m just going to work, keep my head down, and not let myself just, you know, think and obsess over something that I can’t control.

1:40:42 And that’s what kind of got me through, and then I got to fly in space. It was awesome. They tapped you on the shoulder that one time, and we’re like, it’s time for you to go. Yeah. Yep.

1:40:53 Did you do a little bit of a jig or something? Yes. That was a big celebration. Yeah. And the classmates that never got to go up, did they take it in stride?

1:41:03 Did they have some perspective on it, or is that something that’s always hard? So my astronaut, you mean? So once NASA picks you, you’re pretty much going to fly. Every once in a while somebody doesn’t get to fly for unusual reasons, but for the most part, but so it was really like test pilot school classmates, guys that wanted to get to NASA that never got in. And the good thing is, if you’re a test pilot, that’s a pretty cool career anyway.

1:41:24 So if you don’t get NASA, it’s a pretty good constellation prize, and they’re all doing great things, interesting things. Um, and it’s hard, that if you have a dream that you really want and you don’t get it, there’s just not a lot of astronauts. And so a lot of it is luck. A lot of guys had medical problems that they’re fine, that they never knew, but NASA found some obscure little thing. And so, um, I have no doubt, or no, you know, misperception that I somehow am an astronaut because I’m really good, because there’s lots and lots of really good people that are better than me.

1:41:59 There’s luck, and an element to do with it. You know, so you just have to be thankful for what you have, and, uh, that otherwise you’ll go crazy. If you, absolutely, like if you want to be a Hollywood actress or something, and you’re only going to be happy in life if you get to be the Jennifer Lawrence star, there’s just not a lot of people that actually get to do that. So you kind of have to have a mentality that allows you to pursue those things, but also allows you to be happy, be in a, in multiple different environments.

1:42:25 You know, not only the, the top one. Yeah, no, it’s, I was just thinking about kind of your transition now into kind of life after NASA, and it can be a weird time, but almost one of the funnest times as well. It’s super fun. Yeah, you know, and I kind of remember when I transitioned from banking into broadcasting, it was like it can be one of the funnest times, but also one of the most insecure times, ’cause you’re like, I don’t know what I’m going to do next.

1:42:48 That’s exactly right. And I don’t know what I want to do next for, for the long run. I mean, um, speaking is what I want to do, but I don’t want to be, you know, 30 years from now, I don’t want to be telling the same story. Yeah. So there’s more in the future.

1:42:59 I just don’t know what that is yet. Yeah, and you know, one of your colleagues was here, Chris Hadfield, and you know, he, I think has done a very nice job of kind of transitioning into that character of, you know, after NASA. So you know, doing the TED Talk and like choosing those stories to tell that really embellish who he is and who the space program is, and this whole concept of, what does he call it, being a zero, a minus one, a zero or a plus one.

1:43:26 So like, if you can’t, if you can’t, um, add something to the mission, at least don’t take away from the mission. Right? And I think you’re saying similar things when it comes to managing these people. It’s just like you know, how do we do it? And so he’s kind of done that and told these certain stories that kind of show who he is, and his book, Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, is this kind of thing, and yeah, I think each one of you can kind of go in different places, and just like we’ve seen Buzz go to one place, and each person kind of brings their own take on their experiences, right?

1:43:54 So, no, I’m kind of really curious, you know, where you transition into it, and you love filmmaking and pictures and photography. So yeah, I think that’s really fascinating. It’s funny, my whole life as a kid and teenager and stuff was all about math and science. I got a C in English, which is not a good grade, I don’t know how the British system is. And the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that communication is by far the most important thing.

1:44:21 I mean, the math and science you need to have, but if you can’t communicate it, what’s the point? And so you know, I just wrote a book in the last two months, and I’ve got some ideas for TV shows and a movie, and all this creative energy is going now that I’ve kind of created some time for myself to do it. And, um, anyway, so hopefully some of those things will come to fruition. And, um, it’s fun being able to tell the story of what’s really cool, but the people who do it are normally not storytellers.

1:44:51 We’re normally, yeah, awkward engineers. That’s the joke that people, you know, that we have. So yeah, so this is your new mission, to learn how to be that storyteller, to be a storyteller. Yeah, because, like, what Chris’s great ad is, becoming that storyteller, because he didn’t do anything really different than you did. He just knows how to tell the story when the teardrop went into his eye on the spacewalk, and like that same thing could happen to you, and you’d be like, oh yeah, the tear happened to my eye, but anyways, it’s like, but he turns it into this metaphor.

1:45:16 But you’re right, um, you kind of have to be that storyteller. And I grew up the same way. I was math and science. I studied mechanical engineering and all this stuff, but, and that’s great, the pure sciences are nice, but it’s those things that are hard for us engineers, right? That might be the more important, but if you get it right, then you give a perspective that maybe the public doesn’t get very often, because most of those guys and girls usually stay in the sciences.

1:45:40 Right? So yeah, so yeah, it’s fun. Yeah, definitely. Um, Terry, I always ask everyone here a couple questions at the end. I’m going to hit you with those.

1:45:47 Um, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Terry Virts, I don’t know if you were, I don’t know if you were at the Air Force Academy at that point. I was. Um, and give that young man a bit of advice, knowing everything you know now, what would you tell him? Don’t worry. I spent the first decade of my career stressed out.

1:46:04 What’s going to happen? Am I going to do this? Am I going to do that? You know, I was always worried. I was always living for tomorrow.

1:46:10 I would just say, you know, don’t worry, just enjoy today, work and plan for tomorrow, but don’t worry about tomorrow, because you can’t add an hour to your life or a hair to your head by worrying. So just, uh, don’t stress out about stuff, and it’s going to work out. I do hear that one a lot. Yeah. Um, it’s funny, it’s usually taught by people that are in that same situation.

1:46:31 Funny enough, those people are in this chair. So it’s like, yeah, those are the people that end up doing push, they do push themselves. Yeah, but at the same time it’s probably some unneeded anxiety in there, right? Uh, on that same note, if you don’t have that stress, like you need in life, you need some stress to perform. Right?

1:46:50 There’s a performance curve where you do have to have some stress, but you don’t let it get to be too much. Yeah, I mean, your greatest learning curve moments, I’m sure, in a, in a jet plane, where when you had those stressful missions and you go back to debrief, and you’re like, what the hell, that almost went wrong, but then I did this and I learned this. Unless you push yourself, you don’t ever learn anything more. And part of the reason I left NASA is, I mean, I’ve been doing the same thing for 16 years.

1:47:15 I could hang around for another five or 10 years and go do it again, but I would be doing the same thing. So I, I didn’t want. In some ways that was the easy path. I wanted to push myself to do other things. Yeah, yeah, like things like that.

1:47:25 It’s stressful, but it’s fun. Yeah. Second part of that is, what’s the best advice you ever received? It might have been from, I don’t know, someone in the Air Force Academy or a fighter pilot instructor or someone in the astronaut program, or none of the above. Right?

1:47:39 Um, probably from my mom and parents and family members. A lot of them just said, go for it. You know, go if you want to do something, go for it. It’s kind of along the same lines of what I was saying, with don’t tell yourself no, you know, like, because I can remember as a kid, my, I had friends that were like, I’m not going to do that, that’s crazy, I’m just going to go be a normal job, which is fine, and there’s nothing wrong with normal. Normal is great, but, um, and the advice will, if you want to do it, go for it.

1:48:13 That was something that, um, a lot of, I think even most people don’t have that mentality. They just want to do the safe and the traditional, and not push yourself to do something crazy. It’s funny, in eighth grade as a teenager, um, they asked us what we wanted to do when we grew up, and I remember saying I want to be secretary of state. That was my uh, that was my mission. I guess I got my back, my second choice.

1:48:37 I got to be astronaut, but you always had those. I always, I always, I’ve always had a little bit of crazy ambition, and that’s coming from, uh, mom and dad, with no college education. Right. So true. That was definitely out of character, but they must have encouraged you.

1:48:52 Yeah, oh absolutely. Okay, uh, last part is, you know, there’s a 20-year-old out there listening to us, probably in Russia, right, China or South America somewhere. Um, what advice do you give to them, you know, if they want to get to the next level, maybe be in space one day, or, you know, get out of that dark region that you’re witnessing from the space program, when it might not be obvious to them the opportunities they have? Right. So education’s super important, like if you’re educated, there’s a lot that you can do, and if you’re not educated, there’s a much smaller set of things that you can do.

1:49:25 But, um, the, uh, so people always ask me, what do I need to do to be an astronaut? The 20-year-old college students want to be astronauts as though they check this box, this box, this box, and that’s not really when I was going over applications, I wasn’t looking for that necessarily. I was looking for people who did well and were passionate about what they did. So if you love medicine, go be a doctor and do great at it, right? Or if you love engineering, go be an engineer and be great at it, or if you love journalism, go be, my daughter wants to be a foreign correspondent and go to Iran and Afghanistan and all these war-torn countries.

1:50:02 Um, you know, go do what you’re good at. Go do what you’re passionate about. Everybody has gifts and talents they’ve been given, so go pursue those with everything that you’ve got, and don’t do something because you feel like you have to do it, because even though you’re good at it, you don’t, you’ll be great at what you love, and you won’t necessarily be great at something that you don’t love. So that’s my advice. Yeah, passion.

1:50:25 Your passion takes you through all those hard moments, right? And if you don’t have passion, it’ll be like, yeah, yeah, you probably won’t make it. Right? Um, Terry, thanks so much for your time. Sure.

1:50:36 Super excited to get myself over to IMAX to watch A Beautiful Planet. Um, uh, looking forward to your book coming next year, with National Geographic. It’s going to be a lot of your pictures that you took up there, it’s, it will be a space photography book. Okay, and each chapter is going to be a different color, and that’s that’s one of the themes. Several of the chapters, never thought that, like, the redness of Australia would reflect into the station, like, that’s deep.

1:50:57 I, it was something I learned about Earth. Like, you know, you kind of know where you’re at over the Earth without looking out the window, just looking at the wall and seeing the colors that are coming in. Yeah, well, um, all the best with your transition. This is an exciting time, and you’ve got so many choices right now, so uh, you know, congratulations on stepping away, and, um, you know, thanks for sharing your story with us. Thanks, good to talk to your listeners.

1:51:20 Um, as we say in London Real, it’s about the journey. Uh, I wish you well on yours, and, uh, yeah, come back and see us again sometime.