June 17, 2025 • 15 mins
NASA Astronaut and Space Force Guardian Col. Nick Hague joins Bill in studio to talk about his 6 month mission at the International Space Station.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pretty special guest this morning a friend of Amy's, Colonel
Nick Hayes, NASA astronaut, who is on a four month tour,
a pr tour around the country because that's what they do,
And he brought his fourteen year old son with him, Asher,
And I asked, Asher, are you bored silly coming to
(00:23):
these things? He said absolutely so, Colonel Haig, how can
you do that to your kid?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I know it's cruel and unusual punishment, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Yeah? Yeah, fourteen year olds, look at what you did.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Hey, congratulations, you're starting your summer vacation and you get
to follow me around for a week.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Yeah. I also asked him, so do you stay in
the same hotel room as your dad? He goes absolutely.
I go do they give you a nice hotel room?
And goes no, no, no, no, this is the guard
special treatment nothing, you know, this small hotel room and yeah,
none of that. Although you have the Dodger game today,
it's a Colonel Haig, do you mind if we get informal?
Can I just call you Colonel Haig? You could just
(00:59):
call me Nick and be great. Oh that's even better. Well,
you can call me your excellent See that works.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Out.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Well, oh do I have questions? Now, I know you've
gotten every question in the world, inevitably the bathroom question
everybody asks you. Is that where you're starting? Oh god,
now I will finish up there. Yeah, I couldn't care less.
And the food, there's so much tang you can drink,
of course, you know the food that yeah, okay, fine,
we've done that. But life on the space station, that
(01:29):
one gets kind of interesting. First of all, what's the
difference between, for example, being weightless and going in a
really fast elevator?
Speaker 3 (01:38):
So is it just a question of time? So weightless,
it's it's the we're up there in orbit because we're
all falling toward the center of the Earth. We just
happened to be going fast enough forward that as we
fall the trajectory, the curvature of our trajectory matches the
curvature of the Earth. And and so if you could
(01:58):
throw a baseball five miles a second, then it would
go into orbit. But you can't throw it that fast.
But that's what we do with the space station. So
there's this thing up there that's the size of a
football field that we assembled over the course of a
decade and over one hundred spacewalks put this laboratory together,
and it allows us to float or free fall NonStop
(02:22):
as long as we want to.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
So, uh, do you get used to it? I mean,
does that become do wayless? This just becomes sort of
a normal thing like gravity is here. We don't pay
attention to.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Your body adapts, your mind adapts, and so first your
your body figures out, hey, everything's floating inside me, and
it starts to adapt how it processes those inputs, and
so it stops listening to your inner ear and it
just uses your eyes for visual cues on how you
navigate around. You start predicting subconsciously how things are going
to behave based on floating versus being in gravity. So
(02:53):
if it go back to a ball analogy, if I
was going to throw a ball when I'm up there,
if I threw it to you, I'd invariably hit the
ceiling when I first got there because I'm trying to
compensate for gravity.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
When I get back.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Down to Earth, the exact same happens. So you know,
you throw it short because you're not planning on gravity.
I've been back three months, so I've got high hopes
that I'm actually going to get the first pitch across
the plate tonight.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Oh that's right, you are show Hey, Otani's going to
be putting the ball in orbit. I understand he'll do
that five miles a second. Now I know that, and
everybody sees that in the videos. Is the exercise two
and a half hours you have to do and that
treadmill where you're strapped, you have that tether down there
two and a half hours of they get at least
give you a little screen in front so you can
(03:35):
watch Netflix or something.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Oh yeah, that's because the walls like two feet away,
it get pretty monotonous. So we do have iPads up there.
We can get apps, we can download We've got great
connectivity up there, so I can download shows and binge
watch seasons of things.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
So there's a lot of there's a lot of podcasts.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
There's a lot of things that you can listen to
two and a half hours a day every day.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
You we get bored. I mean, just you know, you're
doing this basically this is sort of the same thing,
or is it so different? Different experiments, different things that
you do that it's just all fascinating.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
It's it's like waking up at Christmas. You don't know
what's going to be inside some of these boxes. Some
of the stuff we don't actually see until I open
it up. And so there's a team on the ground,
hundreds of people. They plan every five minute segment of
the day, and from seven thirty in the morning till
seven thirty at night, they're telling us, hey, this is
(04:28):
what you need to do, and so we do experiment
after maintenance after experience. Keep busy, and it's different every day,
and so we're busy. The time flies, and then if
you're ever bored, then all you need to do is
just float.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Over to the window.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
How much free time do you get a day? If any?
Free time is how you define it. You know, during
the work day, there's not really much free time. Before
we start the work day. You've got about an hour
and a half after you wake up, but you got
to eat and you got to get ready for the
day and check your email and check in with the
family at home, and then you've got about an hour
two hours before you go to bed after the end
(05:06):
of the workday, and so there's time to steal away
moments and enjoy living in space.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Say, and you were up for how long six months
this time around six months. Yeah, and you're there obviously.
Do they pay you overtime over forty hours?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
I would think salary employee? No overtime.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Wow, it turns out you don't even make minimum wage,
does it not?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
If you head up all the hours. Yeah, all right.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Colonel Haigue is here. Colonel Nick Haig is with us
an astronaut. A I'm still working as an astronaut. We
were just talking Nick, You've been kind enough to let
me call you Nick. That we were going through the
process of how you get selected as an astronaut. And
I'm a space buff and you go look back to
the original seven astronauts and what they had to go through.
(05:56):
I mean the testing, I mean, for it's just insane.
They got prodded and poked, and I mean there were
more things going to their bodies simultaneously. That's just part
of it. Are they still that insane or has it
become reality now?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
They are still that thorough? Yes?
Speaker 3 (06:16):
You know, medical getting over the medical bar is one
of those high things. So you you know, if you
want to become an astronaut, you got to take care
of yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Just in general, it's a good thing to take care
of your body and take care of yourself and stay
in shape. But yeah, it's an in depth, thorough screening process.
But it all starts with an application. And to apply
to be an astronaut, you just have to be a
you know, a US citizen and have a master's degree
in a STEM field and submit your application online when
(06:48):
they send out a call for for for a selection,
and they do that based on demand, and on average
it's been about once every four or five years there'll
be a job listing on USA Jobs Now used to.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Be we go back to the original. Yeah, right there
you look at indeed the original astronauts and in the
second class, and Neil Armstrong was in the second class astronauts,
interestingly enough, and he had applied and you know, the
first time out didn't make it. They were all test pilots.
That was Eisenhower who decided that test pilots were going
to be it. Anybody who I'm assuming is either the
(07:23):
commander or actually flies, you know, pilots the aircraft and
during the Shuttle days, had to be a pilot of.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Some kind, right, Yeah, the Space Shuttle was a different vehicle.
The capsules we fly now have a different, different interface,
if you will. We still, as an astronaut, core value
the skill set of the test pilot, but we also
bring in a pretty you know, disparate experience base when
(07:54):
we bring in a class, and so we don't want
everybody to be a test pilot. We want to have
those different I think perspective.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
I would think. So now I'm assuming the psychological testing
has to be insane, that you have to get along
with people. Have you ever flown with anybody that just
everybody hated? Yeah, yeah, just I hate that person and
you're there for six months. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Well, you know, fortunately we don't end up on the
International Space Station like that. There's you know, we select
people coming in, and you're right, there is a pretty
steep or pretty thorough selection process where we'll bring people
in and you know, put them in this in this situation,
put a number on them, have a whole group of
(08:34):
people surrounding them taking notes, and then give them something
to solve that's impossible to solve, and then see how
the stress of the situation plays out and understand their
interpersonal skills, because fundamentally, you want to be on a
space mission in that confined space with people that are
good people to work with, and so we really want
(08:54):
to know do you have those soft skills? Do you
are you a good teammate? Do you take care of yourself?
Do you look to take care of the people that
you're with? And are you kind?
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Do they put groups together? I mean, did you meet.
Let's say this is the crew that's going to go up,
and y'all sit around and do a cocktail party the
night before, so you get to know each other. Or
field trips at Disneyland or whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
We do our version of that.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
So once I got assigned to Crew nine mission, we
took our crew and we went to Wyoming and through
an outfit there, the National Outdoor Leadership School, we did
a six day camping trip up into the mountains in
waist deep snow and built iglooes and suffered in the
(09:39):
cold and got to know each other in that stressful environment.
So yeah, we we spend time intentionally getting to know
each other and understand, you know, what's everybody. Everybody's got
pet peeves, every wed got things that kind of you know,
we'll set them on edge a little bit and you
understand what those are and then you figure out how
you're going to be successful together.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
A lot of big glub building, I'm assuming on the
space station.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, it's similar.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
Do you, for one, colonel, have no idea what it's
like to be locked in a small space with someone
you hate, working day in and day out.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah, I don't know how you do it.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, I feel by the tone in your voice you'd
like me to close the door here.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
No, no, no, I'm fine.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
I've got two other questions. I'm hoping we can do
this for hours, and that is do you work in
different shifts where there really is no time and people
are sleeping at different times, eating at different times.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
We try to synchronize to a day. The circadian rhythm
and a person is really important, and so the whole
crew will synchronize to Greenwich meantime. Wake up at six am,
go to bed at nine thirty at night. And that's
also important to synchronize because we've got it's not just
the seven people on the space station, it's the hundreds
of people in mission control centers. And so you've got
(10:52):
a mission control center in Houston, in Japan, in Germany
and Russia, and so they all have to be synchronized.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
And I'm assuming one person stays awake just as a
guard in case anybody breaks in.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Yeah, you always got a guard against the aliens out there.
I know where you're going with this. We all sleep together. Unfortunately,
the ground is there twenty four to seven, so we
really rely on the ground support. It's a gigantic team
that makes.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
It work well.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Apolo was what four hundred thousand people that put the
three men on the moon. What was the first meal
you ate when you got off the space station?
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I had a Deli sandwich. If that sounds strange, not
at all. Fresh bread is something that you don't get
up there because it's not shelf stable for long enough,
and so a nice loaf of bread making a good
sandwich is nice.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
What's the best thing that they serve you up there
food wise? And what's something that everybody hates and will
not eat?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Well, everybody's got their own personal preferences. I typically wouldn't
touch the crawfish at Tufe.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Cause you get sick and throwing up there.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Easy taste changes up there are plan so for whatever
reason for me, that is a really bland dish, and
so to make it spicy, I end up having to
add so much hot sauce that it leads to indogestion,
so it's just better not to not to not to
eat it.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
But you know, best foods up there.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
I got a sweet tooth, So I work out two
and a half hours a day up there every day,
which affords me the ability to enjoy some dessert. No
corn nuts, because everybody hates those and you know they're
they're hard, and so you don't want to fracture a
tooth up there.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Oh yeah, because.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Because then the dentist, which we don't have a dentist
up there. So I've had training so that I can
try to temporarily fill a cavity or pull a tooth.
Oh really, and you don't want me doing that, do you?
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Oh that's cool, so uh yeah, I'm assuming you're you're
you know, I mean, they don't have doctors up there,
and I don't think anybody's gotten seriously sick where they
had to send someone down, have they.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
So we've we've had conditions, uh, but we are always
have been able to manage those conditions.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Space is really hard on the body. Thankfully, there's a
team of doctors on the ground and every so often
we have an astronaut that is a doctor that's on board,
so we leverage that expertise when we can. But we've
got flight surgeons on the ground that are in constant contact,
so if we have an emergency, we bring them in
on the radio and they can talk through and we
do a lot of training.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Yeah, and constant training. When you're down here. As soon
as this tour thing is over, are you back to Yeah,
it never gets old. You're always training, You're always learning
something new. It's it's like, you know, it's like going
to college your whole life. How often can you actually fly? Now,
let me put it this way, the time the timeline
between you coming down and then everybody wants to go
(13:40):
back up on assuming as quickly as possible. What's usually
that timeline?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Yeah, on average, it's probably it's hard to say three,
four or five years. When you think of the demand.
There's a two year usually a two year lead up
to your launch, so you're assigned two years of training,
you launch, there's another six months on board the station,
and then there's a six month post flight to to rehabilitate,
to reconnect with the family and rest up and be
(14:04):
ready to go again. So that's three years minimum. But
it's it's a little bit more than that. You know,
there's four dozen of us down at Houston active astronauts
on the US side, and so we cycle through a
flight assignment.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
One last, one, last question, because we're out of time.
When your kid goes to school and they you know,
they bring in what your dad do day does when
he says my dad's an astronaut, do all the kids
think he's just a liar?
Speaker 3 (14:31):
No, because we live in a town where the mayor
is a former astronaut and there's a dozen astronauts. Deal,
it's no big deal. I tell you what is a
big deal is my dad he's a plumber. My dad's
my dad's in the Space Force. That that is a
little bit different because it hasn't existed very long, and
so I think that that's a that's a you know,
something that he is still educating his his classmates about,
(14:55):
you know, like, what is a guardian?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
What does the Space Force do?
Speaker 1 (14:58):
That's cool? That's cool? Well, thank you. I what a
what a trip this is. I wish we had another
hour and a half on this at least, but onwards
and upwards, I know you're going into the Dodger game. Tonight,
and I know anything over ten bucks you cannot accept.
You have to buy your own Dodger dogs.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna enjoy our evening and
I'm not gonna.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Look at the pocketbook.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
All right, guys, we're done.
Pretty special guest this morning a friend of Amy's, Colonel
Nick Hayes, NASA astronaut, who is on a four month tour,
a pr tour around the country because that's what they do,
And he brought his fourteen year old son with him, Asher,
And I asked, Asher, are you bored silly coming to
(00:23):
these things? He said absolutely so, Colonel Haig, how can
you do that to your kid?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I know it's cruel and unusual punishment, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Yeah? Yeah, fourteen year olds, look at what you did.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Hey, congratulations, you're starting your summer vacation and you get
to follow me around for a week.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Yeah. I also asked him, so do you stay in
the same hotel room as your dad? He goes absolutely.
I go do they give you a nice hotel room?
And goes no, no, no, no, this is the guard
special treatment nothing, you know, this small hotel room and yeah,
none of that. Although you have the Dodger game today,
it's a Colonel Haig, do you mind if we get informal?
Can I just call you Colonel Haig? You could just
(00:59):
call me Nick and be great. Oh that's even better. Well,
you can call me your excellent See that works.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Out.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Well, oh do I have questions? Now, I know you've
gotten every question in the world, inevitably the bathroom question
everybody asks you. Is that where you're starting? Oh god,
now I will finish up there. Yeah, I couldn't care less.
And the food, there's so much tang you can drink,
of course, you know the food that yeah, okay, fine,
we've done that. But life on the space station, that
(01:29):
one gets kind of interesting. First of all, what's the
difference between, for example, being weightless and going in a
really fast elevator?
Speaker 3 (01:38):
So is it just a question of time? So weightless,
it's it's the we're up there in orbit because we're
all falling toward the center of the Earth. We just
happened to be going fast enough forward that as we
fall the trajectory, the curvature of our trajectory matches the
curvature of the Earth. And and so if you could
(01:58):
throw a baseball five miles a second, then it would
go into orbit. But you can't throw it that fast.
But that's what we do with the space station. So
there's this thing up there that's the size of a
football field that we assembled over the course of a
decade and over one hundred spacewalks put this laboratory together,
and it allows us to float or free fall NonStop
(02:22):
as long as we want to.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
So, uh, do you get used to it? I mean,
does that become do wayless? This just becomes sort of
a normal thing like gravity is here. We don't pay
attention to.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Your body adapts, your mind adapts, and so first your
your body figures out, hey, everything's floating inside me, and
it starts to adapt how it processes those inputs, and
so it stops listening to your inner ear and it
just uses your eyes for visual cues on how you
navigate around. You start predicting subconsciously how things are going
to behave based on floating versus being in gravity. So
(02:53):
if it go back to a ball analogy, if I
was going to throw a ball when I'm up there,
if I threw it to you, I'd invariably hit the
ceiling when I first got there because I'm trying to
compensate for gravity.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
When I get back.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Down to Earth, the exact same happens. So you know,
you throw it short because you're not planning on gravity.
I've been back three months, so I've got high hopes
that I'm actually going to get the first pitch across
the plate tonight.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Oh that's right, you are show Hey, Otani's going to
be putting the ball in orbit. I understand he'll do
that five miles a second. Now I know that, and
everybody sees that in the videos. Is the exercise two
and a half hours you have to do and that
treadmill where you're strapped, you have that tether down there
two and a half hours of they get at least
give you a little screen in front so you can
(03:35):
watch Netflix or something.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Oh yeah, that's because the walls like two feet away,
it get pretty monotonous. So we do have iPads up there.
We can get apps, we can download We've got great
connectivity up there, so I can download shows and binge
watch seasons of things.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
So there's a lot of there's a lot of podcasts.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
There's a lot of things that you can listen to
two and a half hours a day every day.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
You we get bored. I mean, just you know, you're
doing this basically this is sort of the same thing,
or is it so different? Different experiments, different things that
you do that it's just all fascinating.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
It's it's like waking up at Christmas. You don't know
what's going to be inside some of these boxes. Some
of the stuff we don't actually see until I open
it up. And so there's a team on the ground,
hundreds of people. They plan every five minute segment of
the day, and from seven thirty in the morning till
seven thirty at night, they're telling us, hey, this is
(04:28):
what you need to do, and so we do experiment
after maintenance after experience. Keep busy, and it's different every day,
and so we're busy. The time flies, and then if
you're ever bored, then all you need to do is
just float.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Over to the window.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
How much free time do you get a day? If any?
Free time is how you define it. You know, during
the work day, there's not really much free time. Before
we start the work day. You've got about an hour
and a half after you wake up, but you got
to eat and you got to get ready for the
day and check your email and check in with the
family at home, and then you've got about an hour
two hours before you go to bed after the end
(05:06):
of the workday, and so there's time to steal away
moments and enjoy living in space.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Say, and you were up for how long six months
this time around six months. Yeah, and you're there obviously.
Do they pay you overtime over forty hours?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
I would think salary employee? No overtime.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Wow, it turns out you don't even make minimum wage,
does it not?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
If you head up all the hours. Yeah, all right.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Colonel Haigue is here. Colonel Nick Haig is with us
an astronaut. A I'm still working as an astronaut. We
were just talking Nick, You've been kind enough to let
me call you Nick. That we were going through the
process of how you get selected as an astronaut. And
I'm a space buff and you go look back to
the original seven astronauts and what they had to go through.
(05:56):
I mean the testing, I mean, for it's just insane.
They got prodded and poked, and I mean there were
more things going to their bodies simultaneously. That's just part
of it. Are they still that insane or has it
become reality now?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
They are still that thorough? Yes?
Speaker 3 (06:16):
You know, medical getting over the medical bar is one
of those high things. So you you know, if you
want to become an astronaut, you got to take care
of yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Just in general, it's a good thing to take care
of your body and take care of yourself and stay
in shape. But yeah, it's an in depth, thorough screening process.
But it all starts with an application. And to apply
to be an astronaut, you just have to be a
you know, a US citizen and have a master's degree
in a STEM field and submit your application online when
(06:48):
they send out a call for for for a selection,
and they do that based on demand, and on average
it's been about once every four or five years there'll
be a job listing on USA Jobs Now used to.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Be we go back to the original. Yeah, right there
you look at indeed the original astronauts and in the
second class, and Neil Armstrong was in the second class astronauts,
interestingly enough, and he had applied and you know, the
first time out didn't make it. They were all test pilots.
That was Eisenhower who decided that test pilots were going
to be it. Anybody who I'm assuming is either the
(07:23):
commander or actually flies, you know, pilots the aircraft and
during the Shuttle days, had to be a pilot of.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Some kind, right, Yeah, the Space Shuttle was a different vehicle.
The capsules we fly now have a different, different interface,
if you will. We still, as an astronaut, core value
the skill set of the test pilot, but we also
bring in a pretty you know, disparate experience base when
(07:54):
we bring in a class, and so we don't want
everybody to be a test pilot. We want to have
those different I think perspective.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
I would think. So now I'm assuming the psychological testing
has to be insane, that you have to get along
with people. Have you ever flown with anybody that just
everybody hated? Yeah, yeah, just I hate that person and
you're there for six months. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Well, you know, fortunately we don't end up on the
International Space Station like that. There's you know, we select
people coming in, and you're right, there is a pretty
steep or pretty thorough selection process where we'll bring people
in and you know, put them in this in this situation,
put a number on them, have a whole group of
(08:34):
people surrounding them taking notes, and then give them something
to solve that's impossible to solve, and then see how
the stress of the situation plays out and understand their
interpersonal skills, because fundamentally, you want to be on a
space mission in that confined space with people that are
good people to work with, and so we really want
(08:54):
to know do you have those soft skills? Do you
are you a good teammate? Do you take care of yourself?
Do you look to take care of the people that
you're with? And are you kind?
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Do they put groups together? I mean, did you meet.
Let's say this is the crew that's going to go up,
and y'all sit around and do a cocktail party the
night before, so you get to know each other. Or
field trips at Disneyland or whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
We do our version of that.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
So once I got assigned to Crew nine mission, we
took our crew and we went to Wyoming and through
an outfit there, the National Outdoor Leadership School, we did
a six day camping trip up into the mountains in
waist deep snow and built iglooes and suffered in the
(09:39):
cold and got to know each other in that stressful environment.
So yeah, we we spend time intentionally getting to know
each other and understand, you know, what's everybody. Everybody's got
pet peeves, every wed got things that kind of you know,
we'll set them on edge a little bit and you
understand what those are and then you figure out how
you're going to be successful together.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
A lot of big glub building, I'm assuming on the
space station.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, it's similar.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
Do you, for one, colonel, have no idea what it's
like to be locked in a small space with someone
you hate, working day in and day out.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah, I don't know how you do it.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, I feel by the tone in your voice you'd
like me to close the door here.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
No, no, no, I'm fine.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
I've got two other questions. I'm hoping we can do
this for hours, and that is do you work in
different shifts where there really is no time and people
are sleeping at different times, eating at different times.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
We try to synchronize to a day. The circadian rhythm
and a person is really important, and so the whole
crew will synchronize to Greenwich meantime. Wake up at six am,
go to bed at nine thirty at night. And that's
also important to synchronize because we've got it's not just
the seven people on the space station, it's the hundreds
of people in mission control centers. And so you've got
(10:52):
a mission control center in Houston, in Japan, in Germany
and Russia, and so they all have to be synchronized.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
And I'm assuming one person stays awake just as a
guard in case anybody breaks in.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Yeah, you always got a guard against the aliens out there.
I know where you're going with this. We all sleep together. Unfortunately,
the ground is there twenty four to seven, so we
really rely on the ground support. It's a gigantic team
that makes.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
It work well.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Apolo was what four hundred thousand people that put the
three men on the moon. What was the first meal
you ate when you got off the space station?
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I had a Deli sandwich. If that sounds strange, not
at all. Fresh bread is something that you don't get
up there because it's not shelf stable for long enough,
and so a nice loaf of bread making a good
sandwich is nice.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
What's the best thing that they serve you up there
food wise? And what's something that everybody hates and will
not eat?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Well, everybody's got their own personal preferences. I typically wouldn't
touch the crawfish at Tufe.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Cause you get sick and throwing up there.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Easy taste changes up there are plan so for whatever
reason for me, that is a really bland dish, and
so to make it spicy, I end up having to
add so much hot sauce that it leads to indogestion,
so it's just better not to not to not to
eat it.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
But you know, best foods up there.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
I got a sweet tooth, So I work out two
and a half hours a day up there every day,
which affords me the ability to enjoy some dessert. No
corn nuts, because everybody hates those and you know they're
they're hard, and so you don't want to fracture a
tooth up there.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Oh yeah, because.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Because then the dentist, which we don't have a dentist
up there. So I've had training so that I can
try to temporarily fill a cavity or pull a tooth.
Oh really, and you don't want me doing that, do you?
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Oh that's cool, so uh yeah, I'm assuming you're you're
you know, I mean, they don't have doctors up there,
and I don't think anybody's gotten seriously sick where they
had to send someone down, have they.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
So we've we've had conditions, uh, but we are always
have been able to manage those conditions.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Space is really hard on the body. Thankfully, there's a
team of doctors on the ground and every so often
we have an astronaut that is a doctor that's on board,
so we leverage that expertise when we can. But we've
got flight surgeons on the ground that are in constant contact,
so if we have an emergency, we bring them in
on the radio and they can talk through and we
do a lot of training.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Yeah, and constant training. When you're down here. As soon
as this tour thing is over, are you back to Yeah,
it never gets old. You're always training, You're always learning
something new. It's it's like, you know, it's like going
to college your whole life. How often can you actually fly? Now,
let me put it this way, the time the timeline
between you coming down and then everybody wants to go
(13:40):
back up on assuming as quickly as possible. What's usually
that timeline?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Yeah, on average, it's probably it's hard to say three,
four or five years. When you think of the demand.
There's a two year usually a two year lead up
to your launch, so you're assigned two years of training,
you launch, there's another six months on board the station,
and then there's a six month post flight to to rehabilitate,
to reconnect with the family and rest up and be
(14:04):
ready to go again. So that's three years minimum. But
it's it's a little bit more than that. You know,
there's four dozen of us down at Houston active astronauts
on the US side, and so we cycle through a
flight assignment.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
One last, one, last question, because we're out of time.
When your kid goes to school and they you know,
they bring in what your dad do day does when
he says my dad's an astronaut, do all the kids
think he's just a liar?
Speaker 3 (14:31):
No, because we live in a town where the mayor
is a former astronaut and there's a dozen astronauts. Deal,
it's no big deal. I tell you what is a
big deal is my dad he's a plumber. My dad's
my dad's in the Space Force. That that is a
little bit different because it hasn't existed very long, and
so I think that that's a that's a you know,
something that he is still educating his his classmates about,
(14:55):
you know, like, what is a guardian?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
What does the Space Force do?
Speaker 1 (14:58):
That's cool? That's cool? Well, thank you. I what a
what a trip this is. I wish we had another
hour and a half on this at least, but onwards
and upwards, I know you're going into the Dodger game. Tonight,
and I know anything over ten bucks you cannot accept.
You have to buy your own Dodger dogs.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna enjoy our evening and
I'm not gonna.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Look at the pocketbook.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
All right, guys, we're done.
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