Scott Kelly

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dax Shepard. Hello, Monica Padman. Hi, Dax Shepard.

How are you? I'm good. How are you? Oh, fantastic, fantastic.

We have a really different type of expert today, which is really fun to talk to Scott Kelly. He's a former military fighter pilot and test pilot and engineer, a retired astronaut and a retired US Navy captain. He is a veteran of four space flights and Kelly commanded the International Space Station on three expeditions and was a member of the year-long mission to the ISS. In October 2015, he set the record for the total accumulated number of days spent in space with 340 days, the single longest space mission by an American astronaut.

He has a new audio course teaching lessons in preparation, discipline and leadership called Lessons from a Life in Space, Available, Unknowable, with a K. Knowable, which we will talk about in great depth. So please enjoy Scott Kelly. We are supported by Airbnb.

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Yes. I really like the looseite box with the full outfit. The astronaut outfit. Space suit.

Did you ever see the movies of thorough by chance? No. No one did. But I played a space man and they built me this really cool space suit.

Then I asked for it afterwards after we got done filming. They said no. It's going to go in the Sony archives. I begged for it and I wrote a letter to the president of the studio, No Lock.

Then 13 years later someone texted me a picture of it being sold on eBay for $30. I'll tell you this one if you want. Oh, God. Do you want to keep that stuff?

That's like an asset of NASA. Is it hard to get it? It's not easy. I bought it from the Russian Space Agency.

Oh, that's the way to go. How much does a suit like that cost? To make. I have no idea because it's made in Russia and the way they do their accounting is different.

I think then how you would do something in the United States. Sure, sure, sure. Well, I saw a great documentary on Showtime about these guys who got busted. They were in process of buying a Russian nuclear sub and they had already successfully bought like six heavy lift helicopters and they all went down to the Colombian cartels and they bought these helicopters that would have been like 13 million bucks here for like 60 grand right after the wall fell.

You could really get in there if you knew the right person and buy a really expensive piece of equipment for a very reasonable price. Yeah. And then they bought like the whole mining industry of the former Soviet Union for pennies on the dollar. Hey, you want a nickel mine?

Sure. Here's $10,000 for the billion dollar month. Yeah. Yeah.

And they went around and bought people's like shares that were issued for nothing. Very fascinating. Yeah. So we watched I think four episodes of a year in space and I'm really pissed that we didn't discover it before I knew we were going to interview you because it's super fascinating.

Yeah. I mean, it's really incredibly well done. It's on Netflix a year in space. And when you got approached to do that where you gun how are you apprehensive?

Was that something you were like, oh, that'll be neat or I'll feel really weird doing that. I think the one that's on Netflix is the PBS special, which was made from these smaller episodes that were produced by Time magazine. Yeah. Of my mission.

And at the time I was working for NASA. So I was approached by NASA Public Affairs and they said, hey, Time magazine wants to do this profile of you and your mission and Misha, my Russian colleague, are you okay with that? And generally speaking, you know, when you're working for NASA and they want you to do some promotional stuff, you're okay with it because it's part of your job. So it wasn't like I even gave it much thought other than, yeah, sure, whatever you guys need, you know, however I can help.

Yeah, I imagine that would be my knee jerk reaction. Then when a film crew arrives at my house to like film me interacting with my partner, then I'm like, oh, okay, we're doing this now. All right. I guess that's part of it.

Like I just wondered if there was any of that once you had already signed on the dotted line. Yeah. You know, like anything like that, some of it can be kind of intrusive other times, not so much, but you know, I recognize as part of the job and they were great. I mean, after all, they put me on the cover of Time magazine.

So I felt like I owed them something. Yeah, you join a very select group of people, not a ton of folks have graced that cover. How did you end up as an astronaut? What's the path to get to space?

And how many different routes are there? For NASA, there are two general routes. And that is you're either a member of the military military service or you're a civilian. And of the people that are in the military, you know, a percentage of them, I don't know exact numbers, but especially when the space shuttle was flying, there are pilots that go on to become the pilot and commander of the space shuttle.

So that was the path I took. I was a military fighter pilot and then test pilot and then, you know, applied to become an astronaut. But there's also civilians that apply to the space program. And you know, they're generally scientists or engineers, medical doctors accomplished people in technical fields.

And it's about, you know, half military half civilian, but that's for NASA. Now we're right on the cusp of other ways to get into space, you know, private citizens maybe flying eventually on a SpaceX vehicle. Yeah. What's your knee to your reaction to the afternoon?

I think it's great. Oh, good. Why not? Okay.

It's an incredible experience. I wish as many people as possible could fly into space. Yeah, I guess if I were you, I'd be like, okay, so I dedicated my whole life to this. I flew at F-14 off of an aircraft carrier, but yeah, you should probably just buy a ticket and head on up and then be trusted to not, you know, cause some big fiasco up there.

Well, you know, I recognize that my job and what my responsibilities were different than what you would be doing. If you were flying as a, you know, a tourist on a SpaceX, it's kind of the difference between maybe being the airline pilot and being the passenger. Oh, don't make it so clear, cut. Totally debunked my whole position on it.

But it's great. I think it's an incredible experience. I think people would care more about the earth than humanity. If they had the privilege of seeing the earth from space, it really changes you.

Yeah, I want to explore that extensively, incredibly humbling, right? To look out the window and see earth and you can't see us. I mean, you can see the lights we made and, you know, maybe the Great Wall of China, but we're not even visible, right? Yeah, you can't see the Great Wall.

Oh, you can't even. No, not with your eye. As a matter of fact, you can't really even see anything man made with your naked eyeball, certainly with the knock-a-lars. I mean, I could see my house from the space station.

Really? Whoa. Yeah. Oh my goodness.

Yeah, I was always checking for cars in the driveway. Of course, of course. Did your ring not work all the way up there? You could have just used your ring.

Yeah, but I bet it would be hard to articulate, but is what's humbling about it just the scope and size of it and how just physically insignificant we are to that size and scope? What is it exactly? Well, it's a few things. So one is you see how fragile the environment or atmosphere is.

I mean, or atmosphere just looks like a thin film over the surface of the planet, kind of like a contact lens over somebody's eyeball. Yeah. And so you see that. You see the beauty of the earth, incredibly beautiful, almost like the most brilliant blue paint you've ever seen in your life painted, like, on a mirror, like right in front of your eyes, absolutely breathtaking.

But you also see pollution in certain parts of the world. In some cases, like in certain parts of Asia and Central America, South America, there's certain cities that are almost always covered in a blanket of pollution. Yeah, so you can't really see any mad made stuff really. You could see a city and recognize that it's a city, but you can't really make out buildings unless you use the lens or your eye.

The other thing is you don't see any political borders during the daytime. You do at night a little bit because countries have different colored lights and sometimes they define borders, but it just gives you the sense that we are all on this earth together as humanity and not in this particular country or this particular part of the world or you feel like you're not separated into tribes and it's all about humanity. And then you're doing something absolutely incredible, being able to live and work in space, fly in space and you realize that our species has an incredible amount of capability and potential to do amazing things if we can work together. Yet there are all these problems on the planet.

Yeah, so the notion of the stories we tell and how much we believe in them and how we all agree upon them, I have to imagine the absurdity while looking at the planet as you say with no borders, how preposterous the stories we all buy into are from that vantage point. Like, oh really, you guys are different over here and you're different over there and everyone's so unique and different and your country's so unique and different. It's got to be a bit laughable when you're up there. A little bit, which sometimes I think imagine what an alien species would think about us if they visited Earth, probably not a whole lot.

No, probably not a lot. This is my guy, nice favorite game is we always talk about the aliens watching the monkeys. Like one time we witnessed a wedding on accident. Aliens liked that.

Yeah, the aliens were like, oh cute, the monkeys gather and they all sit in a row and everyone seems happy. That's nice. And then you know, much more of our behaviors quite inexplicable. They're disappointed.

Yeah, there's a pandemic and seriously. Yeah. Now, once you were flying in F-14, how do you throw your hat in the ring to them pursue a career as an astronaut? Well, generally most pilots at NASA, the pilots of the Space Shuttle and the commanders of the Space Shuttle are test pilots.

So the first step is you apply to and get accepted and graduate from test pilot school. And there are several of those that you can go to. I went to the US Navy test pilot school. There's one in the Air Force, the US Air Force test pilot school.

Of course, it's not as good as an 81. Right. How could it be? You know, Navy's always better than the Air Force.

We got both. We got both. And then there are ones, like one of the guys that flew in space with, you went to the French test pilot school. So there are other ones around the world you can go to.

But that's really the first step. And then once you're working as a test pilot and there is a application, a selection process going on, most of the people I found my colleagues in the Navy would apply to the space program, not all of them, not everyone was interested, but most of them were. I mean, they, you know, had met some of the other qualifications and, you know, felt like they would be competitive. Yeah.

Was it a dream that you had always had or did it evolve? Like was dream one like B-Top Gun, B-Maverick? No, no, not for me. You know, that is the case for some astronauts.

You know, there's certainly a lot of my colleagues. And, you know, I wish this was the case for me. Wouldn't be as interesting a story, I think. But there are those people that, you know, saw Neil Armstrong walk down the moon and then, you know, got straight A's for the rest of their lives, you know, was always the top of their class and eventually became an astronaut.

My experience was much different because I was such a poor student when I was growing up. It was impossible for me to pay attention or do homework and do that well. I was able to get by. I think I'd have a lot harder time getting by now.

I think school has gotten a lot harder. Yeah. Fortunately, I was able to kind of just squeak by and graduate in the bottom half of my high school class. Went to college, still not doing well, struggling, couldn't pay attention.

Really, I was probably on the path to dropping out after my freshman year. And then I was happening to come across Tom Wolf's book, the right stuff. And it really spoke to me in many ways and inspired me that if I could just improve my study skills, maybe I could graduate from college with an engineering degree, maybe I could become a pilot in the US Navy and if not the Navy, maybe the Air Force. Yeah.

Second choice. Yeah. Air Force guys love that. Okay.

Now my first identical twin question. Yeah. Was your identical twin also bad in school? If he was, did it give you the confidence to just go, Oh, gives a shit.

He's doing bad too. Was there strength of numbers? Yeah, it did at first. And then like we go into the 10th grade and you know, over one summer he goes from being a bad student like I was to getting straight A's.

Oh, geez. Like for the rest of high school. He abandoned you. Yeah.

And a few years ago, I said, Hey, how did you do that? Like what happened? And he goes, you don't remember our dad sitting us down like right before high school and saying how we were such a bad students. He was going to start thinking about a technical education and career for the two of us looking into that.

I was like, No, I don't remember that at all. Probably only because there was like a squirrel running outside the window. Right. Had it not been for that squirrel.

I'm pretty sure I would have went to Harvard. So yeah, you had some probably ADHD issues maybe or something. Yeah. And you missed the pep talk, but you brother got it and he put it into action, which is impressive.

Were you resentful at them? Because of that? Were you like, what are you doing studying and getting all A's? What's wrong with you?

Who are you trying to impress? No, I don't think I was resentful. It was more embarrassing than anything else that he was able to do well. And I wasn't.

Yeah. Not knowing why or, you know, having no idea what the issue was. This is one of my favorite things about our country is that it really is a place of a bazillion second chances if you pursue them. So despite that stutter step, start of yours, you do find your way into this program.

You know, we're talking, you've spent more time in space than any other astronaut in the history of mankind. 520 days in space. No, you're shaking your head. Have you been surpassed?

I've spent more time at one time than any other astronaut with the exception of me and my friend Misha who I was there for nearly a year with. So Misha Corneenko and I have the record for the longest flight on the space station of 340 days. There are other astronauts that have more total time in space. And I do two of my classmates actually Peggy Whitson and Jeff Williams, you know, they did multiple missions, long-duration missions.

And then there are a bunch of cosmonauts that have more total time. Misha and I are record is the, you know, the longest single flight on the space station. Okay. Now you might ask yourself, well, how is this super rare experience going to translate into anything applicable here on Earth or in the lives of anyone that would be listening?

But there weirdly is so many. And one that's exciting right out of the gates for me is the notion that when you were an F-14 pilot, most certainly the adversary you were training for was Russia, right? Is that safe to say most of your planning was the inevitable conflict between us and the USSR? Yeah, as a matter of fact, the F-14 Tomcat was developed basically to protect the aircraft carrier battle group from long-range Soviet bombers and they're, you know, accompanying fighter planes that were sent to protect them.

So yeah, our whole mission was air to air combat, primarily designed against the Soviet Union. And at the time when I was flying, interestingly enough, you know, one point, one of my guys I flew in space with the Russian cosmonaut Demetria Condoratov was a MiG-29 pilot, basically on the other side of the Norwegian border with the Soviet Union. So had we ever got into any kind of a shooting war in that place and time, it's possible I would have been fighting a guy that years later I spent several months in space with. Yeah, it's really wild.

And also, you know, there's a very well-documented approach to help men wage war. And one of the features of that is to really delineate your enemy as others. So it's us and it's them. And we gave the Germans nicknames, we gave the Japanese nicknames, we gave the Vietnamese nicknames.

This is Vietnam, don't laugh at me, Vietnamese. No, that's my nickname that I gave them. You know, there's all this kind of structured and intentional otherness. And I have to imagine that at the height of your involvement and you're spending all your time and energy preparing for this.

You had to have had a notion of who they were as the enemy. Did you fall into that? You couldn't have been that enlightened to not fall into that. Or were you?

Yeah, we were actually taught about who our enemy might be, who you would be fighting against from a cultural perspective, what their lives are like, what their motivation is, which is I think important when you're training to potentially be in combat with somebody for you to understand what they're like. Yeah. I think it makes you a better adversary, a better opponent. So yeah, we were aware of that.

And at the time, you know, when I was flying fighters, most of our effort was designed to counter the Soviet Air Force. And so what some people might not know is that we don't send anyone to space anymore. Before we now, as you pointed out, are going to be doing it privately and there'll be contractors that do it. But for a very long time, the only route into space was through Star City in Russia.

And so as you become an astronaut and you take your very first trip into space, do you set out on that trip with one notion or fear or expectation that then changes? Well, when I became an astronaut, my expectation was I would fly, you know, four times, at least on the space shuttle. And then hopefully by the time that part of my career was over, I would potentially have a chance of flying to the space station, again, launching on a space shuttle and spending, you know, extended time out there. But sometimes reality doesn't meet your expectations initially and things change.

I flew my first flight in 1999 and I come back for that mission. And all of a sudden, they're trying to send me to Russia to be the head of NASA's office in Star City. And I was like, what is this all about? I want to be a space shuttle pilot and a space shuttle commander.

I want to drive a Corvette. Yeah. My philosophy has always been that when you're asked to do something that you don't want to do that's challenging, you know, you make an argument, you know, why you might be the wrong person, which is what I did, why I would prefer to do something else. But in the end, you know, if your boss, your leadership is asking you to do the tough job, you take it and you do the best job you can.

So that's what I did. And got me this Russian experience that I think in retrospect was very helpful because my space like career was very diverse, much more varied than other people like, you know, even my brother, Mark, you know, he's flown in space four times. He was the commander of the space shuttle twice, the pilot twice, all to the international space station, whereas my career was much different. I've went to the Hubble Space Telescope.

I was the commander of a shuttle mission to the space station. But then I lived on the space station for over 500 days and got to do some space walks. Just had a much different experience. So, you know, even though you might not appreciate or like the cards you're dealt at the time, you never know what when you look back many, many years later in retrospect and what really the privilege that I had having had, you know, one of the most diverse careers, I think, of any astronaut.

Yeah. Now I want to go to Lily just one bit on this. And then I want to get into the fun stuff that happens at the International Space Station. I guess this is promoting my own personal agenda.

You have a literal enemy in Russia. And then you get into this environment where your survival depends on one another. And these two humans in this insane device that's orbiting Earth, your humanness is so front and center, right? You both need to stay alive or all five of you.

How many people are up there that all these little layers we've added, I feel like just melt and the reality of what's really going on is you're in this together. In any of that other shit is just a mental abstraction. I just want to put it on us. The notion that the people of this country would see themselves as such enemies that they can't see.

They're all in this together and we have to do it together to survive is got to be maddening knowing what you went through in that you're there with the real Cold War enemy. And yet you find a way to be productive and cohesive. Yeah, it's something that some people have a hard time understanding. But when you're in a situation where you have to rely on each other for helping with your work for emotional support for friendship, in some cases, you have to rely on each other literally for our lives in an emergency, that transcends any earthly conflict that may exist between our two countries.

And certainly, I think there are situations where things got really, really bad. It could affect the relationships between the astronauts and the cosmonauts, but it would have to be significant because your friends, your colleagues, friends with some of these cosmonauts, there's some of the best friends I have now, even though I don't work at NASA any longer. And I think they feel the same way. So the earthly politics and conflict doesn't necessarily translate out into space, which is great.

It was one of the great things about the space station program, the International Space Station, it gives the opportunity for countries that have not always been the best of friends to work in a peaceful, cooperative way. Sometimes it's nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah. Hasn't won yet.

I hope someday it will. I think it should. I agree. Okay.

I have some real dumb and fun questions about when you're up there. And of course, we're going to talk at length with lessons from a life in space, which is available on Knowable, where you teach an audio course about all the different lessons you've learned that are applicable to all of us. We'll get into that. But before we do, I have some curiosity questions.

Okay. How do you bathe up there? You don't. You don't have a...

Oh, wow. Not in the traditional sense. So basically, you get a washcloth wet that has some no rinse soap on it. Uh-huh.

And you kind of just rub all the dirt around on your body. So it kind of makes you feel like you're getting clean, makes you feel a little bit better about yourself. Yeah. All fashion, who is that?

Hey, I didn't say it. No, I said it. But you laugh. So that makes you guilty of something.

Now, do you watch TV while you're up there? Yeah. You can watch live TV. You can't change the channel.

The ground has to change the channel for you. I don't know if it's still that way. Hopefully the technology is improved. It's not really good quality video.

I would generally have the news on during the day in the background, just kind of like I do in my house generally. Right. But they'll set up movies and TV shows that are much higher quality. Like HD quality stuff.

Aren't you like a nine iron away from the actual direct TV satellite? Shouldn't you be able to get like the best direct TV signal of all time? Yeah. You're moving pretty fast though.

You're a little closer clearly, but you know, direct TV is not designed for vehicle that's going 17,000 miles an hour. So right. You'd have to have some pretty good tracking of that satellite somehow. I'm about to buy a motorhome that has a tracking disc.

So maybe we could get that at the ISS. That on steroids. Now, okay, so on to that. So the thing is going 17,500 miles an hour or something like that.

And the Earth is roughly what? 24,000 miles around? Yeah. 25 I think.

You're doing a full lap of it. What in like 75 minutes or something? 90. Yeah.

90 minutes. Oh, right. Because you're then a bit outside of that 25. I get it.

I know geometry. Okay. So you're probably making like a 30,000 mile lap or something. 17,500 miles an hour.

Yeah. Times 90 minutes. Times divided by 25,000 miles is time 60 is 90 minutes. I guess the point is I'm making is the Earth's whipping by right like you're seeing Africa and then you're seeing India and then you're seeing Asia.

It's moving, right? I have to imagine it's pretty stimulating. So five miles a second. So it's not this kind of sensation of speed you would get like on a jet ski or on a motorcycle going 100 miles an hour.

Right. But conceptually it's pretty significant sense of speed in that you're flying from one side of the continental United States to the other about 15 minutes. So you feel like you're going fast because of that. I think the fastest I've ever felt was not in the space shuttle or the space station.

It's not in launching off the flight deck of an aircraft car, which is impressive. And you accelerate pretty fast. It was the one time I got a ride in the back seat of an Indy car. Uh huh.

And you know, went 200 miles an hour. I've been on that ride too. So that's pretty fast. I thought you were going to say, because I also was lucky enough when I worked for GM to be a passenger in a NASCAR.

And when you get on that bank, because the asphalt is only like 14 inches out the passenger side window and then so much your peripheral vision is taken up by that thing, that's the fastest I've ever felt like I was going. Yeah. So even though I've gone 17,500 miles an hour, the fastest I've ever felt was 200 miles an hour in that, in that Indy car. Yeah.

It's all relative. When you're in the space station and you're weightless, are you at zero gravity or is there some percentage of 0.28? Yes. Microgravity.

So it's 10 to the minus whatever six. 90 minutes. Okay. Because of that, when you are weightless, my first question is, do you immediately just feel the most relaxed your body's ever felt?

No, you feel like all the blood is rushing to your head. And that's kind of an uncomfortable feeling at first and it takes a while to get used to. Is that because your body is designed to be pushing blood up to fight gravity and then without gravity, it's just putting too much up there? Yeah.

Yeah. Our cardiovascular system is designed to, you know, squeeze and push blood up to our vital organs and to our brain away from the force of gravity. So when you get up to space, it's still doing that because it hasn't figured out that hey, I don't need to work as hard. We also have more blood and fluid in our bodies than we need once we get into space because it's now easier to move around.

So yeah, that big headed astronaut is not just about like ego. Yeah. It's about like your head is actually swollen. Oh my goodness.

So is it painful? Do you feel like you have a mild headache the whole time? It's like standing on your head. Oh, God.

Because you know what? So funny is my question was designed to be the opposite, which is I thought potentially an exciting aspect is that when you were upside down, you wouldn't get that rush of blood your head like you normally get upside down. But in fact, it's the opposite and it's all the time. Yeah.

So you're like, I'm not going to go over time. Like your body gets adapted. You purge a lot of that excess fluid. But even after being on the space station for 340 days at one time, my head still felt a little bit swollen and still had excess fluid in it.

So you never actually feel quite normal. Oh my God. So you better tell the people buying a ticket about this because I think they might want to refund when they get there because of my fantasy was I was going to feel like I was in the ultimate lazy boy the whole time. Now, it's fun.

You know, the floating is fun. It's hard to do stuff at first. It takes a while to get used to it. You know, once we do start flying, we're people into space for tourism.

I think people need to realize it's an experience for everybody, especially living there for a long period of time. And it is a it's an extreme adventure. Some people love it, but other people will probably not like it very much because of, you know, the fluid shift, the carbon dioxide can be high on the space station is uncomfortable. Your digestive system doesn't work all that great in the absence of gravity because, you know, we just evolved to have gravity helping our digestion.

Let's say pulling the food through your intestines down to your butthole. That's not happening that for. Yeah. It's a vector, I think, for our digestion to know which way to move things.

So what's the remedy for that when you're on the space station? You just poop once a month or something? The Russians have some really great colloquial expressions and they have some space ones, too. And it's the one about like, if you can't go to the bathroom in space, just eat more food.

Okay. So eventually it's going to come out of one end, I guess, is the method. It's such a Russian way to look at things. Get a bigger hammer.

Yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare. Now you said this on Colbert, you talked about how it fucks with your sleep.

Well, there are certain things about sleeping in space that you might think makes it more comfortable. And it is true. Like I have issues with my shoulders that when I sleep, they bother me because I have like torn rotator cups and things like that. But in space, that's not going to be an issue because you're just kind of floating like this and your arms are just floating out in front of you.

So that's not an issue. But then you'll have back pain as an example because now your spine in the absence of gravity is elongated. You know, there's issues of the environment. Like I said, the carbon dioxide might be high.

It could be loud. It could be warm. It could be cold. You don't maybe not have as much control over the temperatures.

I remember my first space flight, it was only seven days, but I get up to space and I'm okay. I'm going to try to just sleep with no assistance at all. Meaning I was going to get my sleeping bag and just kind of float there. And then after every day I was kind of adding something to it, I'm putting an eye mask on, I have earplugs in.

My head seems like, at least for my first flight, it had two neutral positions and it felt like it had to be in one of these two. And one of those positions was like right here. And the other one was like also right here. And they were like a couple of millimeters apart.

And I felt like I would have to, after a while, my head wouldn't be comfortable. I have to move it a little bit back. So eventually my head strapped to a pillow. Oh wow.

So I have my knees kind of strapped up towards my chest a little bit. Yeah. And then you're taking ambient eventually. Yeah.

I was going to say this sounds mad. I mean, I would probably offer some medical assistance. Oh, and especially on the Hubble mission, when you're much higher, you see a cosmic rays with your eyes closed hitting your eyeball, which is kind of distracting when you realize, hey, not only that cosmic ray just hit my eyeball, it actually went completely through my brain. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Is there any long-term studies on astronauts? Do they have a higher rate of brain cancer or anything?

I don't know about brain cancer, but I think a few years ago when I was still at NASA, we tripped over the point of statistical significance for cancers in that population of people. I don't know how much, but yeah. So it is a risk. There's not any I where you could put on that would block out those rays or that would intercept those.

Maybe lead. I don't know. I don't know. Physics around protecting against cosmic rays.

I think it's pretty hard to protect against. Okay. Aluminum foil wouldn't do it. Beer goggles, maybe.

I don't know. Okay. Buckle up for this one. Have people made love up there?

And that might be misleading. Maybe it's fucking, but have people had intercourse up there? As far as I know, no, is it technically possible? Yes, absolutely.

Uh-huh. And someday I think so. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

We are all humans after all, but no, I don't have any evidence that has actually happened. Well, I can tell you when I fantasize about your role, first stop in my fantasy is looking out the window at Earth for a couple hours, and then it's turning and getting straight to some zero gravity fucking. If I'm just being dead honest, that seems like the two most appealing aspects of potentially going up there are zero gravity sex and looking out at Earth. Why would it be better about it in zero gravity?

You could just spin the person around. You could just, you know, every, the sky's the limit. And guess what? You're beyond the limit of the sky.

It seems kind of hard. Like they might float away from yours. Like you'd have to really. Oh, wow.

It's actually pretty, pretty fun. Sorry, Scott. Okay. So you haven't, and you don't know that anyone has, but you know, also there's probably rumors, I would imagine.

There's always rumors. Yeah. I'm not a rumor guy though. I can't share them with you.

Okay. Now I remember a long, long time ago, one of the first Russian guys, and maybe it was me, I don't know, maybe I'm conflating some things, but I had read that, yeah, his spine had unpacted to the point where he was like six inches taller when he landed. Is that possible? Were you taller when you landed?

I stretched an inch and a half while I was in space. And as soon as I got back down, I compressed back down to my normal six foot five. Right. So you're getting an inch and a half and how quickly after you land, well, this is another thing I think people might not know is that your muscles are solely there to pretty much battle gravity.

So in the absence of them, do you have to exercise a tremendous amount while you're up there just to not deteriorate? Yeah. If you did no exercise, you would lose about 1% of your bone mass every month and probably an equivalent amount of muscle mass as well. So yeah, we exercise a lot to prevent that six days a week, seven days a week for some people if they can do that much.

Also your heart gets de-conditioned too, because it doesn't have to work as hard anymore. So you also lose muscle mass in your heart. Yeah. But the exercise equipment is good and we figured out a good way to mitigate those risks, but it is a risk.

Bowflex? Similar, well much better, actually, no offense to Bowflex. The thing we have is very well designed hardware that uses evacuated cylinders to create resistance. So actually feels like you're lifting real weight.

If I could, I would have one of these things in my house, but it's a NASA made thing. Probably caused a gazillion dollars. It'll trickle down into our workout technology. Seemingly, every NASA I mentioned does is drinking permitted in the space station.

Alcohol, I mean, no, it's against the rules. Okay. I actually agreed upon no drinking up there. The rules are there is no drinking.

Okay. All right. So the rules are no drinking, which is not to say the drinking hasn't happened. I once watched a documentary about these MIG pilots and they were pounding shots of vodka just prior to take off.

I was really amazed by it. I can't remember what documentary was, but of course I immediately wondered if there was some vodka up there at the space station, but no vodka. No vodka. Okay.

Before we applaud all the many aspects of the partnership with Russia, I want to know this will feed into what you ultimately are doing, I believe, with lessons from life and space, which is how do you compartmentalize fear? And are you even aware that you're compartmentalizing? My case would be I can't imagine the first time you blast it off in a Russian rocket. You've just left Star City.

You see how most of the mechanical things are working in that area. It's probably not super confidence inducing. And then now you hop into this enormous rocket and you just pray, oh, I hope they built this like Toyota builds their cars. I hope it's the one thing they decided to build perfectly.

Are you not afraid that first time you're on the Russian rocket? Well, I would go back to just the first time you launched in the space, especially on the space shuttle. I mean, the space shuttle is the most complicated thing ever built, complicated vehicle, aerospace vehicle. And the amount of energy involved to get a space shuttle that weighs over 200,000 pounds with the external tank and all the fuel and the solid rocket motors, it's 5 million pounds.

It takes 7 million pounds of thrust. It's just operating at extremes of temperatures and pressures. And the fact that you're not on the top of it, you're on the side of it. Yeah.

Yeah. On all of that fuel. So, launching on the shuttle, especially the first time I was more apprehensive and nervous about it than the first time launching on the Russian Soyuz. Because the Soyuz doesn't have the solid rocket motors, oh, solids, you turn them on.

And that's it. And if you turn them off, you can't control the thrust that comes out of them. Yeah, it's like getting un-pregnant. Yeah, there's nothing you can do to stop it.

Right. And in the case of the Soyuz, it's a liquid vengeance and you're on the top and there's an emergency escape system. So you felt a little more safe. A little more comfortable, actually.

Not physically comfortable because it's painful in the position you sit in. And in fact, you can't really move partly at all. And you're kind of like locked into this one position for many, many hours. But from the perspective of like being scared or nervous or worrying that something's going to happen, the shuttle is more risky in that regard.

Okay. And are you in the mode of like when you're a kid and you jump off a tall bridge into water? Do you just go like, yeah, I'm terrified, but I already know I'm going to do this. And now I'm just going to put that in a little vault in my head and not think about it.

What's your strategy to navigate that stressful situation? I think fear is an actual emotion to have. I think it can be helpful. It allows you to focus on the stuff that's important.

In the case of me flying in space on the space shuttle, especially the first time, you think this is quite possibly the last thing I ever do in my life, meaning I could die. Yeah. And it could blow up and that's it. But eventually you come to terms with, I'm actually going to do this.

And then you realize, is it helpful to be scared about it? Probably not. And then when you get into the rocket, you're more concerned or more scared that you're going to mess something up, then the rocket's going to blow up and it allows you to kind of compartmentalize the way that fear. Yeah, getting focused on the task at hand.

What actually are you doing as the pilot of that thing? Are you, I mean, there's no steering involved or anything, is there? On the shuttle launch, if everything goes normally for that eight and a half minutes, you throw a one switch and you don't touch the controls, but you can in an emergency actually fly the space shuttle with the control stick after about 90 seconds. So still when you're on the solid rocket motors, you fly it from Mach one to the other.

The ground to land it. But what you're primarily doing is monitoring the systems and being prepared for what happens if the engines fail at this time, you know, what options do you have to abort? Where can you go land? What do you need to do?

And the systems were so complicated and interrelated that it's really the most complex puzzle, basically, that you're working continuously, you know, in your mind with your crew members, so always trying to think ahead and what's the next worst thing that could happen? Yeah. The next worst failure, how does that affect these other systems? So even though you're only throwing one switch, you're really busy.

Yeah. Now, once you're up there on the space station, how much free time do you have during the day? You generally in the evenings, I would have, you know, a couple of hours between like nine and 11 o'clock when I would generally go to sleep to do some personal things, to get on the phone, to do email, to maybe watch a TV show or something or read. On the weekends, one day is really a work day.

And then, you know, usually at least a half a day off on the weekends, sometimes a full day. But, you know, your time up there is very valuable. So it's not like you would want a lot of time off anyway. Yeah.

How long did people visit? It varies. So I've been up there for one period of time with two Russian guys for six weeks, me and just Gennady Pidalka and Misha Corneenko. Generally speaking, there's six people up there and they swap out in groups of three.

So every, you know, two months or four months. So you might be up there with the same group of people for about three or four months. Is it so exciting when someone else comes? I would imagine like even a least boring person arriving after three months of no visits.

Yeah. When a space shuttle crew comes up there or the new Soyuz comes up, I had a Soyuz come up that was a couple of guys that were only going to be there for a week. But it's kind of like when your relatives visit during a holiday, you're like excited to see them. Yeah.

And then you're also excited to see them leave. Yeah. I guess it gets pretty cramped and pretty quickly, I'd imagine. Especially when they're only going to be in space for a short period of time because it really takes about a month to get used to living in space.

You know, you're not bouncing off the walls or kicking stuff or losing stuff or getting your space legs underneath you. It takes a while. Yeah. Well, I have a question about that.

I watched you float through the space station. I recognize how many things you could bump into, how many switches you could bump into, cords you could get entangled in. And I was wondering, I guess you kind of just said the opposite. I was wondering if as you grew accustomed to being in there and things become routine, if it gets a little more dangerous because you kind of drop your guard a bit, is that an issue?

No, I would say you're always getting better. I mean, the risk in the beginning, not only are you at risk of breaking something, but you're at risk of hurting yourself, like bumping your head into something. If you're going too fast and out of control. So yeah, I would say the longer you're there, the more safe and controlled you are.

Yeah. Now, when you're going to bed, you had to have nights where you would acknowledge how incredibly vulnerable you are. And did you ever have to fight off like panic setting in? No, I've never really had feelings of panic.

You certainly recognize, you know, when you're in space, you're at risk, you know, you're always at risk of there being a fire or a depressurization. The space station uses some high pressure ammonia to cool the systems. Generally, it's on the outside, but there's risk that it could get inside. It could be very deadly, very quickly, you know, orbital debris is an issue.

So yeah, you recognize you're at risk, but you do everything you can to mitigate that risk and prepare for it. And you know, like launching on the shuttle and knowing that it could blow up, you come to terms with it. So it's not something I would really think about. Right.

Okay. Now when you do a space walk, crawl outside and you're in a vacuum and Earth is, you know, 250 miles below and you're attached by this little very thin tether, you realize you're in kind of a precarious position. Great. So that's what is the most dangerous duty that you had to perform routinely on that?

Is it the space walks? Yeah, the space walks are, you know, launch landing and space walk. I would say the launch and the landing are the most risky, but space walks are pretty risky. Fortunately, and surprisingly, you know, we've done so many now on the space station and no one's really ever been seriously injured, kind of shocking actually.

Once you overcome the uniqueness of it and the fear, is it exhilarating to be out there? Yeah, it's impressive to be on the outside of a spacecraft flying at those speeds in a vacuum and seeing Earth below you. And you're in this really, what is amounts to a small tiny spaceship itself, the space suit, the life support systems and the cooling systems and the protection it provides, a very complicated suit. You recognize it's no joke.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Other quick questions.

Everyone wants to know what it's like to look at Earth, but I'm curious, what is the view like looking out at space? Is it different than a super clear night? Yeah, it's a good question. So if the sun is up, so if you're on the daylight side of the Earth, you really can't see anything.

Uh huh. So the sky is not like pitch black. It's more like a darkest gray. The sun is really, really bright.

And you can't really see much of anything. Sometimes you can see the moon, just like you see the moon on Earth when the sun's up, sometimes. Yeah. But when you're on the opposite side of the Earth, if you turn the lights down, if the moon is not in the wrong place and it's really dark and if the Milky Way galaxy has risen, so it's, you know, in the part of the sky that you can see, it is absolutely spectacular.

Like you could see the Milky Way kind of like how you might see it in pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. You can kind of see that with your own eye. Oh, wow. You know what people don't realize though, you know, it's really a privilege to be able to fly in Earth's orbit because the Earth blocks out the sun.

One day when we have people that are going to the Mars and it's going to take 260 days to get there, you're going to look out the window. You're not going to see anything. Yeah. Because you're not going to see Earth.

It'll be a tiny dot. You're not going to see Mars and your view of the sky is just going to be washed out because you're in perpetual sunlight. Yeah. Wow.

There's so many bizarre thoughts about going to Mars like that. Kevin Pollack, it's taking me an hour, but that's who you remind me of. Kevin Pollack. Have you ever heard that?

No. Okay. Similar voice. I heard Phil Collins.

Oh, well, visually. And Mark Kelly. That was a good one. I walked right into that one.

Are they all orbiting in the same direction? You don't ever see countering satellites. Do you? Are they all going the same direction?

There are satellites that are in retrograde orbits, meaning like opposite where like the spin of the Earth. I don't know how many. You know, we have satellites that are in polar orbits. So, you know, when we're kind of at a 51.6 degree angle to the equator in the space stations orbit, there are ones that are just going, you know, pure North and South, but you don't really see a whole lot of satellites when you're in space, even though there's a lot of stuff up there.

Oh, you don't. That was imagining like the combined 35,000 miles an hour of a whip by and that could be exciting. Yeah. That could be hard to see.

That's 20 times faster than a bullet from a rifle. Yeah. Okay. Last one of these questions.

Did you see anything while you were up there that defied explanation? I always wanted to. Yeah. I always hoped like I would open the window and there'd be some like flying saucer hovering next to us, but never happened.

Sometimes you would see something and you'd be like, that light is not behaving like I think it should if it was a satellite or a planet. Uh-huh. Look like it would have some motion that's not in its like normal trajectory. But then you realize as soon as you think, oh, that's really weird.

What is that? Then you realize it's just something that's passing behind the lensing of the atmosphere. Okay. So those things are always explainable.

Yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare. Okay.

Now lessons from a life in space, which is an audio course and knowable is it a site where people can go and learn about different peculiar topics. It's a new app and it's for audio courses, kind of like Spotify is, but it's for learning. So, you know, different people have their own courses, some new ones, Alexis, O'Hanyan, Chris Paul, mine, of course, which can be found at knowable.fyi forward slash Scott. And you know, my course is about like things I learned throughout my career that hopefully, you know, might help people.

I think there are probably lessons learned that will help people. Hopefully also it'll be a little entertaining. Well, right now, I mean, there are a couple of things that immediately come to mind is we've all been in some level of quarantine for the last 10 months, right? And people are really struggling with that.

I know I am and everyone I know is. So, you know, the challenges of a prolonged period of solitude and isolation is something that you know a tremendous amount about. Are you almost laughing at people that are unraveling here in quarantine? Like get over yourself.