The Value of Space Exploration During a Time of the Global Pandemic w/ Charlie Bolden #26

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to another edition of the age of infinite. Infinite possibilities, infinite resources. Space is going to give us new perspectives on how we can live, how we can change the future. And with that, we're not talking about the 4th industrial revolution. We're not talking about these micro changes that are happening on Earth.

And even though the challenges we're going through today, we're talking about possibilities and resources you've never heard of before. We're talking about the age of infinite. We have the opportunity now to bring that into fruition. And this podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, named by NASA. And what it is is we are looking to establish a box of the roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut.

And that is through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. Then to take those endeavors, take that that paradigm shifting, that innovation that takes us to get there and turn those back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring an unbelievable topic, very apropos for today, very current for today, the value of space exploration during the time of the global pandemic.

And we have on the line an amazing friend and amazing individual, Charlie Bolden. How are you, Charlie? David, I'm doing great in a way and then not great in another way. So how about you today? I'm doing okay. We're we're gonna get into that in a moment. Let me tell some of the people about you for just one moment, and I Okay. I we don't do a lot of introduction to individuals. We don't go on and on and on. Your your bio, your CV is very long.

We met in 2016 at an event, Charlie and I, and we had this great I I I listened to his presentation. It was then focusing on Mars. I listened to his presentation. We had a great long talk. I met his wife, and that's where the the friendship started. Charlie, was a major general in the US Marines. By the way, Charlie, my best friend when I grew up, my best man at my wedding was a marine. And he was he's been up this marine unless he's dead. No. He he well, he is.

He you know, I did say that when I was writing at the what and I said Minor point. Minor point. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. He once you're a marine, you're always a marine. It's a very important I actually was typing that, and I said, how do I say so you're right. And then, Charlie's been up into space, four times on the space shuttle, some commanding the mission and others as a participant. He's also been the 12th NASA administrator from, I think, it was 2009 to 2017. And, unbelievable.

I we can go on and on and on about Charlie's background and his and his history. Big thing is he's here today to talk about this topic. So, Charlie, do you have some bullet points or an outline? I have, bullet points for you, and and and, yeah. I have some bullet points, David. It's really really hard to do this thing, but Well, no. You're gonna do fine. So what are what are the how many bullet points do you have so I know I have I have 6. 6. So, okay. Give them to me, please.

Yes. Bullet point number 1 is the fragility of the human body. Bullet point number 2 is challenges of getting humans to Mars. To Mars. Number 3. Cancer treatment delivery. Delivery. Number 4. The US has a national laboratory on the International Space Station. 5. We're involved in crop growth in space. Number 6. I worry about interplanetary contamination. I have to say, one thing I didn't I forgot to say and I didn't put it down is you are the first astronaut on our program. Which I'm right.

Yeah. You are the first one as far as I know. You have to think of the first astronaut. So I absolutely love that. And the second thing is I was watching the television Mars, series last night, and there you are. Like, oh, Charlie's on it. So on on Netflix. So okay. So let's start with number 1, the fragility of the human body. Take us where you take me. Teach me, Charlie Yeah. About the fragility of the human body. Let let's let's start with the with the mind.

You know, David, I I you asked me how I was doing today, and I said I was, I'm kind of really doing well in one respect, and I'm horrible in another. And, you know, the when we talk about the human species, one of the things that that I think you and I should be considering really is, what's what's really important? A lot of times people, particularly today, when we talk about this pandemic, people get stuck up in talking about, science.

And when we talk about space, there's a lot of controversy about NASA launching, the demo 2 mission with SpaceX this past weekend. And should it have been done? Shouldn't it have been done? And I think, you know, one of the things that that I would like for you to keep in mind is that in everything we do, people, you know, they're our they're our most important product or our most important asset.

Without people, we're not able to do anything, and that's that's one of the reasons that I picked the fragility of the human body as the first. But but, But before you go too far, I wanna stop for a moment because I know of this week was SpaceX launching. Mhmm. But you said, NASA and demo 2. Did you mean that NASA participation in Elon Musk's SpaceX launch, or did was there something else that I don't know about?

It was actually a partnership, a teamwork, and and we can talk about that, but, the the one point I wanna finish because it's Yep. Important because it will it will permeate, everything I always say when I talk to everybody. And that's there's this thing that we we use three terms, or I use three terms all the time, and they are diversity, inclusion, and equity.

And, the the the events of the last couple of weeks have, for me, pointed out the critical importance of of really understanding what those three terms mean because I think that today, it's more important than ever before in our institutions and particularly to people like me who are in the space community. Okay. And in what way?

If we are not focused on the importance of of including everyone in the things that we do and trying to understand where all the players come from, we are likely to find ourselves, in the dilemma that that NASA found itself this past week when confronted with the question of why are you launching, something to space when we're having all these issues on earth?

And and it was for me as a 73 year old, it was very reminiscent of 1969 when, reverend Ralph David Abernathy flew to Orlando, Florida and then drove over to the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, to protest the launch of Apollo 11 because the country was spending 1,000,000 of dollars to get people to the moon when, in his opinion, we should have been spending that money on poor people and, people here on Earth.

And and it was it was the same as it seems to be now, an either or when that's life's not like that. Life is life is never black and white. It's always, nuanced. And so if we're focused on trying to improve the diversity and inclusion in our organizations, we'll always be getting a myriad of ideas and and concepts as we think about what we wanna do.

And I think it saves us sometimes from getting into these either or situations because we we realize that we've gotta take into consideration everything. So that's that that that was one of the things that I, you know, I wanted to share with you, because I'm not sure that that any of us thought about it at the outset of all this stuff at the beginning of the pandemic.

The pandemic has has exposed a lot of the raw parts of our country of the United States, things that have always been a problem, and they they come to a head every once in a while, but but only when they come to a big head like they have done during the pandemic when we look at who are the dominant victims of the disease. And and, so it's caused us to think a lot about where we are.

And I think I think it emphasizes for me the critical importance of helping people understand why space exploration is important, at a time of a global pandemic or or racial strife in our nation?

Because I thought about this in 1968, 'sixty nine, 'seventy, when I was a brand new second lieutenant in the Marine Corps coming out of the Naval Academy, and I had to answer these same questions for myself, wearing the uniform of this nation when my wife, you know, my who had been my girlfriend, had been marching in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia while I was strolling through the campus of Annapolis in my bubble the way that a lot of people in the space program today are strolling around in their bubble, oblivious to what's going on around or trying to be oblivious to what's going on around them when in fact, we're all affected by it.

And we all owe an explanation to people for why we're doing what we're doing and why it's important and why it contributes to making things better here on the planet, so that some of these systemic problems we have will go away. So so, can you describe to me or give me thoughts on, because I don't think there's any empirical evidence on this, why do you believe people are walking around in a bubble? I and I'm speaking about the space community. I know. I know. That's what I meant.

I why do you because you just said the the the people in the space industry are walking around above a bubble, oblivious to what's going on around them.

Oh. Oh. Oh. You know, all I need to do is point out Monday morning, ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, you know, as if as if the launch on Saturday had changed the world and and everything was great now and the market is going and this launch in fact, I I read so many articles and I've talked to a lot of reporters who have written articles about, will this flight, give the US a big boost and and help us to solve this problem that we're confronting?

I think this flight is critical, and it can contribute to solving some of the problems that we have. But but we have to be, we have to be cognizant of the fact of the role that we all play in what's going on around us and and realize that we don't operate in isolation. And I think you, you know, you know Jeff Manber. You know Gwen Shotwell.

Mhmm. It has been very refreshing and and rewarding for me to see leaders in some of our foremost space companies take the time to, to pin out communications to their employees to help them come into the moment and and come back down to earth, and recognize the fact that we do play a role in what we are accomplishing is very, very important for a number of different reasons that it will hopefully, it will add to our national prestige.

Hopefully, it will bring all of us some some some pride as a people, but that it will make us hungry to increase the diversity in our organization such that, people who might otherwise be excluded or have been excluded for for eons will now be included in our thought, and that we can we can help to solve issues of poverty and issues of hunger and and issues of illness and things that when we talk about the fragility of the body, the human body, they will understand that when I look at an astronaut and the osteoporosis, of a of a woman here on the planet, we're really talking about the same thing.

The bone loss that an astronaut suffers, the muscle atrophy that an astronaut suffers over a very short period of time is, you know, is a laboratory to help me help a woman or sometimes men who suffer osteoporosis, and it led to the development of a drug called Prolia that today is is a treatment for osteoporosis, based on studies that we did on orbit. Changes in vision, so changes in the immune system.

The twin studies with Mark and Scott Kelly over the year period of time that that Scott was in orbit and Mark was on the ground, are helping us to understand DNA shifts or or effects on DNA that that will answer some questions, about human frailty here on earth, that that we don't think about the way we think about the fragility of the human body in space because we see things happen so much more quickly.

We see what we consider to be aging effects down here on earth that happen over a very short period of time in an astronaut on orbit. So just, you said osteoporosis and you gave an example. Can you give me an example of vision?

Yeah. The you know, we we see changes in vision, in astronauts, not all, but in but in many over periods of time in orbit because the the the absence of well, gravity is there, but but the fact that gravity is overcome by our speed going around the planet, the the shape of the eyeball actually changes. And and in so doing, in some people, their visual acuity will change.

We also find that, again, based on the the relative absence of gravity, and the fluid shift that sends a lot more blood into the upper extremities than is the the head mainly than is normally there, we get pressure on the optic nerve. And and a lot of the things that that that I'm talking about here, we know basically what's going on, but it's gonna take much more research for us to to understand fully what happens. The changes in the immune system.

When when an astronaut goes to space over the the first few days weeks, it it you get the appearance. And we we were fooled by shuttle because we flew relatively short short missions. So long mission in shuttle was 16 days. And over that 16 day period of time, the the human immune system seemed to get worse and worse and worse or or fail more and more and more.

When we started flying long duration on shuttle on space station, we found out that, you know, you get to a point where the human immune system adapts, and all of a sudden it springs back. And in some astronauts, it it actually goes through a a series of of, sinusoidal cycles where it gets hypersensitive and finally settles out that you're back to where you were before you left the planet. So we we learn something every time we fly now.

Have we have has something come out of just because we're on these three topics on the vision side, We have for osteoporosis. We have a a drug that helps. Has anything come out of the eyeball shaped transformation and the, optic nerve pressure? To my knowledge, we haven't yet, and and that's why there is that that's why I say we need more research. We we don't to my knowledge, I don't know that we have found a direct correlation to something that happens here on earth. Ken Ken sorry to jump in.

I'm I'm wondering, and I've thought this before, so I'm I'm this is the first time I ever asking this. Yeah. The eyeball changes, and I know it's become more round because it doesn't have the pressure because our eyeballs are actually somewhat elliptical. Elliptical. Exactly. Exactly. When you're in space, 2 questions. The first one is, you you do lose some visual acuity, I've gotta believe, because our eye was not is not designed to be used that way.

But over time, do we have we I mean, if you can't if you don't have glasses on Earth and you don't have glasses in space, we'd have to develop would we have to develop glasses if we were gonna go on a long term mission in space that would be able to be transformative? Interesting you asked the question. We, and, again, I'm a I'm an old guy. So most of what I talk about now has happened since I long since I left the the astronaut office because I haven't been in the astronaut office since 1994.

But but I am told now every time I go back from my annual physical to Houston, a a space station astronaut today takes 3 pairs of glasses. They take a pair that they're wearing today and and prescriptions for where they think their vision might go depending on how the shape of the eyeball shifts. I love that. 6 months that they're in space. You have you have answered us. But we don't but let me let me go back because remember you said, can we make them in space?

We don't have the capability to do it yet, but the reason we want to commercialize space is because I can guarantee you that if we put somebody in space, say an optometrist, they will figure out that we do 3 d printing every day on the International Space Station today. We're 3 d printing food. You know, we we are 3 d printing any and everything. Someone will figure out how to 3 d print a play a pair of a set of corrective lenses.

And so, today, because of the miniaturization that we have found with things like the ultrasound ultrasound machine, you know, it used to be that you got in this big machine, and they they threw flew your body into into this thing that scared half of the people. Not quite like, what's what's the big, Yeah. The MRI? C scan or yeah. Yeah. Yeah. MRI.

But but today, an ultrasound can an astronaut can perform an ultrasound on them on him or herself with something that's like the receiver of, or the the handpiece of a phone and completely do an ultrasound of their body while the flight surgeon sitting in in mission control in Houston, or in the flights flight medicine clinic in Houston or in Baden Baden or some other country in the world, they can actually see what's going on in the astronaut's body and make diagnoses and and help to anticipate things that the astronaut may may need to do to keep themselves well over the rest of that 6 months in space.

That is one of those technologies that has now come to earth, in the form of something that we call advanced diagnostics ultrasound, and you can find it in a village in somewhere in sub Saharan Africa or in some some small town down in Central or South America where the nearest doctor is 100 of miles away, but the doctor has a midwife who has one of these little miniature ultrasounds, and the doctor can, every week, do an examination of the developing fetus in its mother's, you know, uterus and say everything's okay, everything's okay, or one week say, oh, I don't like what I'm seeing.

Can you put her in the bus or whatever it is and let her make the 200 mile trip up to wherever the doctor happens to be located because I think we're gonna have to do something. So The, was the technology developed for space, or was it developed for earth and then went to space?

This was a technology that was developed for space because we, with long duration space flight, medical researchers wanted to they are always hungry to learn more and more about the human body because as you and I talked about earlier, you know, we we age. Not not significantly, but but it's enough, for doctors to be concerned. And so, every astronaut gets a physical every year, and you'd like for the astronaut to be able to get their physical on time, even if they happen to be in space.

And so we have found the necessity to, to to develop instruments that down here on earth are pretty big, but that now are relatively small that we can put in the small confines of an international space station, and allow the astronauts with because there's not always a doctor on the crew to to do the the manual manipulation or the the remote manipulation while the doctor on the ground actually looks at the data.

So we've got a little bit of that the remote physician that we found through the pandemic. The there's a a there's a company, I don't know if you've ever heard of this, I don't know the name of the company, there's a company I believe in Israel that was has been working on a set of glasses that they've got 4 sensors in the front, 2 on the both sides of the lens that we have today.

And what it does is it looks at the eye, figures out the focal point, and changes the glass configuration structure so that you no longer need a glass that changes its, that's a prescriptive, what you call it when it changes gradation? There's a name for a glass that's not. I don't remember that. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Whatever it is. Yeah. We have different levels.

And what it does is it tracks where you're focusing, and it modifies the lens focal point so that you could see anywhere in your glass Yeah. Which is kinda cool. And I I have actually read about some of the research that's going on on the International Space Station, and there is an instrument that is similar.

It it is able to and doctors on the ground have have used the technology that was developed there because in doing research on the eye, they wanted to know exactly where, you know, where the eye was, where it was positionally, whether it's the retina or the or, you know, something some other part of the eye very precisely when doing something like, what's the surgery we do nowadays where you you use lasers to Oh, yeah. To to remove yeah. To change the lens.

And I I don't remember that one either, but, yeah, I know which one it is so that you it's corrective surgery Yeah. For your lens for people who have had eye issues. So when we're looking at, the fragility of the human body, is there oh, I was gonna ask this first.

Is I'm looking for we're looking for project moonlight, is looking for more and more of these ideas, and we'd like to collect them that space went to Earth that we did not that you don't hear about that often because we always hear the same series. And we're also looking for ideas that never made it to space, but were designed for space and created something on earth as a result of not getting there.

And I think in the Oh, you know, long time ago, this went to space, but it but it turned out not to it turned out that that where everybody thought it was gonna be so much better when we talk about, mainly when you're talking about making immunizations and vaccines, we generally wanna look at a protein. Most things, you know, are have are made up of protein crystals or proteins. Yep. And you you we can do something called clock.

We can do a process called protein crystal growth in the microgravity environment of space, and we get these really pure, perfect crystals because gravity isn't there to screw things up. And, it a lot of it's done in the Japanese experiment module called Kibo. Kibo has some of the more advanced laboratory facilities onboard the International Space Station today.

But with protein crystallography, we can look at the makeup of a of a of a protein, figure out how you how you build a mirror image to it to defeat whatever the disease or the or the the the the, virus or whatever it is that you're trying to you're trying to overcome. You can build something that will negate it, if you will. And that's a very that's a crude explanation of what is done.

There was a program called electrophoresis operations in space where we were using differential current electrical charge to separate out, protein material. Johnson and Johnson and McDonnell Douglas did it in the early days of the space shuttle, and it was determined that, yeah, it's not worth the time and effort.

But going through changes in the process, they were able to bring it back down to earth and modify the processes on earth such that they got pretty good results, and it's used even today. So that that's an example of of taking something to space that we thought was gonna be very successful, and it turned out not to be. But it made the process better on earth when you took the lessons learned in space and apply them to the And and that's the paradigm shifting.

It's when you have to think about space to solve the challenge of space. You have to think differently. You have to learn differently. And as a result, your ideas can be used for manufacturing a cup or a bowl or a electronic circuit because you're rethinking the law not the laws of physics, but the the laws that you have understood and were used to on earth. And and the same you know, if if if you'll allow me to to to to move a little bit, we Sure.

Another example of that is, in this part that you were asking me about the launch, whether it was, you know, was it a SpaceX launch and was NASA doing something? Well, the crew was NASA. SpaceX doesn't have any astronauts, and that's their choice. And they every time you ask them, so far, they have no intention of growing their own cadre of astronauts. So they're Really? Those 2 they were both NASA's astronauts?

Oh, the the the test crew, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, were both veteran NASA astronauts. Now when you see Boeing fly their first flight, the commander of the mission is Chris Ferguson, who is a former NASA astronaut, but he is the chief of human space flight for Boeing.

And he will be since it's a Boeing test mission, he will be the commander of the mission, and he'll have 3 NASA astronauts on board with him who are assisting, but but it it will be different than the than the approach that SpaceX took. So this They're they're creating they're creating the airplane, and pilots are coming from the military, if you wanna say or something. You can say exactly that. And that is the concept of commercial spaceflight.

You know, I I I I took I I cheated, and I took advantage of listening to you and Jeff Manber Manber because I I I support him. I'm I'm sort of a consultant for him with Nanoracks because I love what they do. Yep. But as, you know, as Jeff said, we're trying to we are purposely trying to change the paradigm. We're trying to get back to to doing things the way that capitalists do things, where you create there is a need created and somebody responds to that need.

And so rather than NASA going off and and building a spaceship and finding a use for it, we have a mission we wanna accomplish, and we now go to industry and we say, hey. We wanna do this. We need to get 4 or or as many as 7 crew members to the International Space Station. Can you do that for us? And so 2 companies, SpaceX and Boeing, said, yeah. We can do that, and and they designed and built, their respective spacecraft.

And in those 2 spacecraft, we have 2 that do the same mission, but they do it in 2 sometimes, dramatically different ways. They, inside the spacecraft, don't look the same at all. SpaceX is all touch screen, built to fly autonomously on purpose because that's the way Elon Musk likes stuff, And Boeing, being a traditional aircraft manufacturer, they still have knobs and switches and dials and hand controllers and everything.

So, you know, a crew member trained to fly a SpaceX Crew Dragon will will have to undergo some training and and and mindset change to go into back into a a more standard cockpit when they fly the CST 100. So it's no different than a pilot who's learning to fly the 737 versus a triple 7 versus the Dreamliner. You well, what well, it is different because What I mean is you you're skilled at a different level.

You know, again, that's the the Boeing model is make the cockpit look the same in all the all the models of here. Oh, okay. That's essentially what Boeing is now trying to do with the with the b 767, 777, 777. They're trying to build a cockpit that looks the same throughout, and and it's just the the size of the airplane or the passenger capacity or stuff like that that's different. And and I I didn't know that.

You know, I think SpaceX is doing essentially the same thing as they go from one model of the crew dragon to the next. The touch t the touchscreen televisions or whatever you wanna call them, the controls are are basically the same. So it'll be relatively easy for a pilot to go from one spacecraft to the other. But but going back to this partnership between SpaceX and and NASA, I talked about, in my outline, I talked about, or I talked about the challenges of getting to Mars.

And You wanna jump to number 2? Yeah. I did. Okay. You did. I did. I did. I'm I'm following you. Because I because I sensed you were getting ready to start asking me stuff about about the human body, and and I my wife my daughter is the doctor in the family, and she tells me all the time, dad, you're not a doctor. No. I wasn't gonna ask you about the human body. I was really I was really fascinated because as a as a fighter pilot, I've got 28 hours in a warrior, and you learn one way.

And as a Yeah. And I'm not a fighter pilot, by the way. You wait. I saw you you sent me a picture with you near a plane. I'm a I am an attack pilot. This is one of the idiosyncrasies of the marine corps. Okay. Tell me, please. In the air force and it the navy is sorta like the marine corps. In the air force, every pilot is a fighter pilot. You gotta be a fighter pilot or and I won't use the word we use, but you ain't something. You you can imagine what it is.

But either you're a pilot a fighter pilot or you don't count the air force. In the marine corps and the navy, we have a we have attack pilots. We have helicopter pilots. We have fighter pilots, and and the way you tell them is by the size of their watch. The the big the big watch guys are the fighter pilots, and and the guys like me who wear normal face watch, we're the attack pilots. And we have different different missions. You know, mine was air to ground and that kind of stuff.

So I'm I'm an attack pilot. I started out in the in the a 6 intruder in Vietnam, and I migrated when the a six went away to the f 18 Hornet, so which is a fighter attack aircraft. So it's an it's an aircraft that allows us to do both missions with the same airplane. So I do wanna get to the next quick point, but I want I have one question I wanna ask because I I'm just curious. Yeah. When is it because the technology behind the, what is it called? Cord and rope.

I forget what it is for Oh oh, yeah. You're talking about, the The the stick in the motion of the airplane allowed yeah. There's no longer cables and pulleys. There's no longer cables and pulleys. So therefore, because the tech is advanced, we can make a single modular dashboard, if we wanna call it that, or for us to work off of.

Yep. Because the plane is compensating for, the the center of gravity of the plane, the plane is compensating for speed or or motion that you wouldn't have you would have had to have done manually 20 years ago.

Yeah. The the computer in the plane is essentially, thinking it's becoming the mind of the pilot in the old airplane, and it because it because the computer has access to far more data than the throughout the throughout the aircraft than the pilot has ever had, the computer can actually make an unstable airplane fly pretty well. Whereas it took a pretty good pilot to fly some things. And some things that a pilot would not be able to fly were they not computer augmented, fly pretty well.

You know, NASA designed something called the x I wanna say the x 29, which was a forward swept wing. Highly maneuverable, very unstable as a basic in fact, would have would have just pitched over backwards and, you know, died if if the the computer augmentation failed because it it just wasn't supposed to fly. But but you put a a computer in it, it doesn't augment Yeah. It doesn't it's called fly by wire. Fly by wire. Exactly. And and I couldn't come up with the name.

So shuttle was the first fly by wire spacecraft, and so now everything's fly by wire. Well, not not fly it's not fly by wire. What's that? It's no longer fly by wire when you have a computer doing it. Oh, we that's what you call fly that's what we call fly by wire. Oh, okay. As opposed Oh, fly by wire, you meaning wire and cables and everything.

Meaning, meaning electronic Okay. You know, digital controls as opposed to analog, with the analog being a cable or a pulley or stuff like that that goes throughout the airplane. Very, very few airplanes nowadays, except for the, you know, the basic things that people just fly for fun. Very few airplanes have cables and pulleys anymore. They send an electrical signal electronic signal to a small actuator in the tail, and it it moves this giant rudder around or or the something else.

And, yeah, it was called manual control and fly by wire. And I'm just getting confused, but I I that's the that's the reason that we can go to a standardized dashboard. Yeah. That's right. And that allows the space industry tying it back.

It allows the space industry to become more universal in application because with a 143 launch companies out there and the who wanna create any type of flying, they can go to a more traditional or more like a car, they can go to a very simple structure that pilots can be cross trained in. Exactly. Okay. So let's get on to the changes of, changes, of challenges of getting humans Yeah.

Getting to Mars. And, you know, we can talk about this really quickly because there there are 3 basic things that we have left to to overcome. There are 3 there are 3 basic. There are 3 giant hurdles. 1 is I'm saying I'm thinking to myself, has it really become that simple? No. It's not that simple.

But but the the the the big three and and it it differs who you talk to, but I think most of us would would would agree there is consensus that radiation in transit and when you get to the planet, propulsion, how fast can you get there? And the big thing is entry what we call entry, descent, and landing. And that is you're going to a planet that has a very thin atmosphere compared to Earth, and you've and you're taking a lot of weight to get humans there.

So, you know, with when we took cure the Curiosity rover, Curiosity weighed about £2,000, about a about a ton. That's that's nothing compared to the amount of weight that we're gonna have to put on the surface in order to support human beings, and so you might be talking about 15 tons. How do you safely get that through the thin Martian atmosphere? How do you slow things down enough so that it can land intact, when it lands on the Martian atmosphere?

That's why the Jet Propulsion Lab out in California coined this phrase, the 7 minutes of terror, when we flew Curiosity. You may or may not remember that, but it was it it their video became I mean, it just went viral because everybody, they had lots of dramatic music and everything, but the the 7 minutes comes from the, the travel time for communications from Mars to Earth.

So we didn't know for 7 minutes, after Curiosity was on the safely on the surface that it had arrived safely because it took 7 minutes for the for the communication signals to get us to let us know it was there. And so this was the 7 minutes of terror going through the Martian atmosphere and landing. And and this is I'm laughing inside. Now I'm laughing outside. I do wanna go over all three points. Yeah. I hope I hope you planned on that.

Last night, in the television series or the Netflix series, Mars, whatever the I don't remember the name of it. Their the scene that I just had watched was they had a larger 3rd shipment, the 3rd set. The first were the the few, then there was another group, and then there was this bigger vehicle. And the guy one guy has had such a he he said it was the most horrific thing coming into space.

They were they're afraid of the landing, and he like, the way I saw it is his life flashed before before his eyes, and then he landed. And very soon after that, there was a, a dust storm, a thunder cloud, a storm overhead for 8 to 10 months. So the combination of that is pushing I I don't know the answer. I haven't watched the rest of the show, but it's pushing this guy to the edge. So now I know the 7 minutes of terror. I got it. You helped me a lot today. No. It it's it's okay.

But but the if you talk about interdecent landing, I'll go back to SpaceX. And, one of the things that that we're discussing is do we parachutes don't work very well in, really high speed flight, like supersonic flight, which is the speed that you're going as you enter the Martian atmosphere and until you get well down into the atmosphere, you're still supersonic. And so parachutes rip themselves apart. So we're trying to figure out, is there a better way to slow down, to decelerate?

And you may know that SpaceX now does a return to a barge or a return to the launch pad and, not the launch pad, but a but a landing pad, at the Kennedy Space Center when they fly most of their flights. So they recover the Falcon 9. And in the upper atmosphere when the Falcon 9 is coming back, it does several engine starts or engine burns to to decelerate it, to help it slow down.

And it just so happens that high enough up in Earth's atmosphere, the the atmosphere density atmospheric density is very similar, if not the same as Mars. And so we're gathering you know, NASA has access to all of this entry data, of the SpaceX Falcon 9, and we can we can use it to try to model what it what it's going to be like to try to decelerate, going to the surface of Mars. Yeah. It's it's yeah.

You've got you've got a test we've got a a space in our atmosphere that mirrors the atmosphere of Mars so we can test within that band. You can see how well the spacecraft can decelerate itself using its own internal engine. And and so far, I think the results are looking good. SpaceX had a we had actually signed an agreement with SpaceX when I was the NASA administrator for a project that was supposed to be very little known, but it got it got public pretty quickly called the red dragon.

And red dragon was going to be a SpaceX Dragon module that they were gonna send to Mars and do a propulsive landing, and we would what NASA would get in return from for assisting them in getting there, providing, communications and navigations through our deep space communication system was we would get all of the entry and and landing data, that would help us decide how we were gonna safely get large payloads on the surface of Mars.

The the the project eventually fell apart for a variety of reasons, but, but that's that again is an example of collaboration, public and private, to help to help everybody advance, the things that they're trying to do.

So, you know, the public private ventures or public private collaboration, is the wave of the future, and and it it it enables both the government and the private sector to get what they need to advance their causes without both having to do it separately and having the cost be astronomical. No pun intended. So we just talked about that that's what I was talking about, entry, descent, and landing. We're still trying to figure out how to do it, but that that remains a challenge.

But we're learning a lot as we watch the SpaceX Dragon the SpaceX Falcon 9 do its its return to Earth and its what we call propulsive landing, where it slows itself down until it's on the pad. The blue not to be fair, Blue Origin does the same thing, you know, with their with their New Shepard spacecraft. It's just they're not as they're not as flamboyant and public. Well, there was also I somebody in the space industry said to me, David, we did this in the 19 eighties or seventies.

We were able to bring a rocket back to space, and he sent me a video. And he said it just wasn't as elegant. It didn't have the controls and mechanisms, but we had already delivered and and brought a rocket from space back down to Earth. We did it with the Delta Clipper, and I Yep. That's an idea. We didn't come back from space to earth. Right. And what what I meant is a rocket coming back from launch back onto earth. Yeah. And and that was the Delta Clipper. That was Pete Conrad.

You know, when Pete Conrad left the astronaut office before his untimely death on his motorcycle out in California, Pete was with, I I wanna say it was McDonnell Douglas that was the the big contractor working it, and and we flew the Delta Clipper a number of times, sort of the the hop test that that SpaceX is doing periodically with the, Starship. Yep. We did that with the Delta Clipper and and as as frequently happens, you have a big failure and people walk away from things.

It's it's the way that Elon almost did with the Falcon. You know, the Falcon 1 was horrible. I wanna say the first three launches were losses and, he finally gave up on it and he then he moved up the line to where he was going anyway, which was to the Falcon 9.

And he was 1 probably 1 I would I you'd have to ask Elon if this is factual, but most of us believe he was probably one failure away from from going out of business, you know, from not being a company when he won his first NASA contract and the rest is history. But but to the Delta Clipper was, in fact, one of the first spacecraft or intended to be spacecraft that we were gonna bring back and land propulsively. So we we have been there.

The more we as a general rule, it's kinda hard to do something that's never been done before. Some somebody's tried it and failed or tried it and it worked a few times and then it failed and they walked away from it. And I'm trying to look it up, the in Paid to Thanks, the book that you have that I've given you. Yeah. I talk about Elon Musk at 2 minutes what was that here?

I was just trying to see if, SpaceX founded multiple planets that if, $26,000,000 rockets failed on launch and the 3rd suffered a loss by a nose, an altitude of 217 kilometers, single where a single line of code did not allow enough time for commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation. Yep. In other words, the fate of a multimillion dollar project rested in a single line of code Yep. Within the rocket's millions of lines of code.

And that is the we we I'm not gonna talk about that because that's way over my head, but that is that is one of the, for the technical people, that represents among the greatest challenges, not just to space flight, but to aerodynamic flight. Because we talked about fly by wire aircraft and fly by wire spacecraft. A single line of code will doom your day or not a single line, a single digit of code misplaced, ruined your day.

Well, that's that's exact the the point was win by a nose, lose by a nose. That Exactly. We don't tend to always win by these amazing mounts. This rocket burst into flames because of a one line, and it could have been a point or a dot. I didn't look that up. A one line of code was the difference between the millions of lines. So let let's hit on the very quickly because we wanna make sure that we cover these. Yeah. Radiation and transit, in transit on the planet and propulsion.

Yeah. And, you know, radiation is a is an issue that time and experience is helping us feel a little bit more comfortable about. Now again, you're getting an opinion of 1. If you talk to some of the heliophysicists, people who study the sun, they're panicked. They they are convinced that that humans are not gonna survive going to Mars.

And but but most people that I know, and me being one who would love to go do it, believe that we now understand the radiation environment between here and Mars because we've sent enough spacecraft that have been highly instrumented. The Mars Science Laboratory, MSL or Curiosity, on its transit to Mars was unbelievably well instrumented.

So, with that and, several other of the orbiting Mars spacecraft, we we have a pretty decent understanding of the the radiation environment between here and Mars, and we think radiation normal kinds of radiation will not will not pose any threat to the crew.

We're looking at other forms of radiation shielding, for example, Bigelow Aerospace, that you don't hear very much from anymore, but, I understand that that there is talk now between Bigelow and one of the other launch providers to to fly another series of Bigelow spacecraft that will that will be flown into Earth orbit as free flyers, not not mounted on the International Space Station the way that the Bigelow module is today.

They have a couple of free flyers that have been up there now for, I wanna say, 5, 6, maybe 10 years and seem to be doing okay, but but I think they're they're getting ready to get back into the game. Their big thing is using water. You just take a bunch of water bags and over time, you fill the water bags and you line the module, with water bags, and water is a good attenuator of radiation.

So, we're looking at at simple things as well as very complex things to to protect the crew from radiation. So so we we're beginning to understand entry decent landing a little bit better. We understand radiation for the most part, and that leaves propulsion as the as the big outlier. It will not be solved in time to to help us when we well, let me not say it will not be. It it probably will not be to the point of sophistication that we're ready to use things like ion engines.

A former crewmate of mine, doctor Franklin Chang Diaz, is the father of something called VASMIR. That is an ion engine that is constantly accelerating, and, theoretically, we could get to Mars in in a matter of a couple of months as opposed to 8 months shortest time today, depending on the relative position of Mars and Earth as they go around the sun. But but one of these days and and you you probably watched The Martian as I did.

In The Martian, the Chinese spacecraft that goes to help rescue Mark Watney, was using fasmer engines, and that's the reason they could go so fast, whereas we couldn't. But, so those three challenges of getting to Mars, we're dealing with. And I think by the time we roll into the decade of the 2030s, we'll we'll we'll have most things in hand and we'll be able to successfully put humans on the on the on the Martian surface sometime in the next decade, in the 2030.

And see, that's why you love Project Moon Hut because we're gonna help you get there. I hope so. Help the technology advance. I I do hope so. Okay. So anything else with the challenges of getting to Mars and under that category? No.

You know, and we, I was gonna say my my 3rd bullet point, we talked a little bit about because I talked about protein crystal growth and and when we talk about cancer treatment delivery, I just wanted to again, my my hope is that when when I when you and I finish talking here, you and I both are gonna know a lot more about what good things come from space exploration to make life on this planet better and and help us explain to people why it was really critically important for us to launch last weekend in the middle of a pan pandemic and racial disturbances in the United States rivaling 196869.

Well, I I I think you touched on it. Maybe we can go back to it because our conversate our conversation, even though when we were coming up with the topic, I could tell you were bursting a little bit more than you did on the program so far. So you you so let's let's be real here. What I could sense, and you could tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm using this as a trigger point, as a starting point.

I'm not saying it's gospel, is that you were distraught at the at what was happening in terms of what's been happening in the United States. You could see it in your face. You could feel it in the in the in your voice coming through the isolation that we have over, of our screen. And you also shared in that one moment, you really hit on that in the time of Vietnam War and in the time of 1968, 1969, 1970, you had said the words, so I'm helping you with what you said.

You said, it wasn't as as popular as people think. Oh, no. Not at all. Well, you didn't say that today, so I'm kind of helping. Yeah. But but I mean Finish your point because we didn't go into it. And and, again, you asked me earlier, you know, what are we really in a bubble? And, and I think we in the space community, and I count myself among them, we really do like to believe that everybody believes in us, and everybody is as excited about space exploration as we are.

I I would love to think that my wife, for example, is as enamored with space exploration as I am and that she gets as excited as I do when I know very well that does not happen. I mean, she could care less, sort of. Not really. But No. No. She she you're not far off because I'm it's no secret on all the programs and whenever I speak and all the things that we're doing in Project Moon. Everybody knows that I'm not a space fan, meaning I don't look up to the sky. I don't say, oh my god.

I'd love to live there. And I watched the Elon, the SpaceX. Yeah. Because I had to watch SpaceX because it's what I'm doing. But did I wake up in the morning with a sense of excitement that the world is changing and this is gonna happen? No. I didn't. Honestly, I didn't. And when so these there's a whole world of people that I know most of the people I talked to didn't even know it went off that day. Exactly.

And that when when you and I talked earlier, and I I mentioned the fact that it the myth of Apollo is that it enjoyed overwhelming support by the American people, and and that is just not true. I think I read, you know, Rogel Linus, who is a NASA historian former NASA historian. I think he cites that maybe at the height of the Apollo program, 40% favoritism, you know, after we landed on the moon.

That that was it, and, I mean, people were ecstatic that that humans had landed on the moon because it was it was a global accomplishment. It didn't make any difference what country you went to. People were yelling and screaming and watching the TV, and we did this, and that was what was really important about it.

And I think that in in many respects, that's what people were hoping for this past weekend was that people around the world would see, you know, would see the crew dragon launched on Falcon 9 and and the crew get to the International Space Station, and everybody in the world would would say, wow. We did this. I think for a fleeting moment, that may have been the case. I'm not I I I me, myself, I did not say that.

Yeah. Yeah. I said we have technologically in my opinion, based upon what I've learned, we have actually not reached the potential that we should reach. Yep. That's the reason that Project Moon Hut is working on the software technology that you've read some about or seen some about.

And that's why when you, just for the people listening for a second, there's a video online on YouTube, which was an introduction in Macedonia to not project Moon Hut, not what we do, but some of the concepts behind it. And one of them is that I don't believe, Charlie, that I believe there's a few categories of people. There are people who work in the space, who are space people.

They're the people, the engineers, the astronauts, the people like you who are in the industry working every day to move it forward. But there are also people in the space industry who are not in space industry, meaning I work for an accounting department at SpaceX. I I don't touch anything. I do money movement. I could do it at any company. So there there there's another group. Mhmm. Then there's the enthusiasts. The the they just are interested.

They like they like space, but there are people who are tinkering in their garages. There are people who would like to one day form a company, and that's one group. Yet there's a whole another group of people that have no interest. However, they are very interested in the 6 categories, climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion, social displacement, political unrest, and exponential impact.

Mhmm. And if that group of people knew how influential the things that you're talking about, that you're sharing today, the impact and how it can transform how we live on earth, and that it does come back and it does alter prosperity. You gave 3 words, diversion, inclusion, and equity. It can be the equalizer or solve these challenges. Then there's a reason for space.

Yeah. And and you hit the nail on the head, you know, during and I I always hate talking about my time at NASA, but but I'm a people person.

And, and the one thing that I wanted everyone who worked for NASA, who was a space person, no matter what they did I I remember bringing congressmen several congressmen over who were blown away because when they talked to the janitor about what they did and and, you know, somebody would say, well, I'm helping to get people to Mars, and and they were flabbergasted. And they said, why did they say that? The guys got a broom.

I said, because they know that I believe that we don't get to do what we do unless everybody plays their role, whether it's the janitor or the accountant or, you know, the pay clerk or anything else.

Everybody plays a role in this big mission, and and the the one piece lacking is our ability to communicate to people, the value of their role in this grand venture and the critical importance of making life on this planet much better through the research that we do to get astronauts to the international space. You said it though, Charlie. The space industry makes a bubble. They have things like l 2 and l 5 and dragons and codes and this and that.

And, I mean, it the first event I ever went to, which was, in Hawaii was a PhD event. There was Buzz Aldrin was there and the guy who put the comet onto the, the rover onto the comet from Paris or France was there. I I this industry isolates itself with its own its own language. And it's because it's full of technical people for the most part. However, that that too is I said it, and it's not true. The vast majority of people we we hire at NASA are nontechnical people.

You know, the the comp the component of engineers and scientists in NASA is dwarfed by the people who are administrative specialists or financial specialists or the like because that's what makes the machine run. Mhmm. It's not the people in the lab, and it's definitely not the astronauts. We have, I'm gonna guess, 60 astronauts in the astronaut office today out of 18,000 employees, but who does everybody talk about? The astronaut.

And and in my job as the NASA administrator, I would always tell people I am the face and voice of NASA. I have to find a way to help everybody in the organization understand the critical importance of what we're doing, the value that it brings to the to the populace on the planet, and not just to American people, but to people everywhere because there are a lot of people whose countries will never do any of this stuff because they just don't have the wherewithal.

But they should still benefit from what we do. We should still be able to take a NASA program like SERVIR that takes Earth science data and and will go to farmers in Sub Saharan Africa and help them understand that we can make access. We can give them access to satellite data that will turn their water on and off out in the in the desert so that they don't have to use tons of water just spraying the the doggone little section of cropland that they have.

We can do it by we can do it by satellite to their computers if they let us teach them how to do that. Those are the things that happen every single day that NASA does, and and we've gotta be able to tell that story better. So I believe there's a policy in NASA that NASA is not supposed to market or promote themselves. Cannot market and promote. Cannot. Cannot. Right. Illegal. But we but that doesn't mean we cannot tell our story.

There's a difference between marketing and advertising and and going out and educating. And so our job is to be better educators, to be my mother was a was a librarian at the elementary, middle school, and high school level, and she was my middle school librarian, and I was a library assistant for her. And one of the things that I learned from her was the value of storytelling.

I'm an African American, so I grew up with a mother who was born in Charleston, South Carolina and raised all over rural South Carolina because she became an orphan at the age of 8 and lived and traveled around the state with her aunt and uncle who were Episcopal missionaries. And so, you know, what she taught me was that somebody in the family has to be the storyteller.

We call them the Greedo, and and that's the person who knows the family history, who can take us all the way back to a 16 year old slave girl named Tracy who was brought from West Africa, sold at market, sold at auction in the slave market, on what is now Market Street in Charleston, South Carolina when she was 16.

And she is several generations away removed, you know, a a great great great great something grandmother of mine because her daughter had 6 sons, and one of her 6 sons was my great great great great. Somebody in the family has to be able to tell that story because it's important to us.

Somebody in NASA, mainly people like me and the astronauts and hopefully everybody, has to be able to tell the story of the struggles that we've gone through in order to be able to put, successfully put a a human being on the surface of the moon. And and I got and I gotta be honest, Charlie. Not doing the job. You're not you're not you're not gonna get any argument from me.

I mean, I I would there's a facility in NASA Ames, which is one of the most advanced building structures for eco friendly development. Exactly. It's the new headquarters. And I, yeah, I went through it. They showed me everything and how they're using Bloom Energy, and and I'm telling you, I said people need to know about this. They collect rainwater. They I mean, you're you're absolutely right.

If you go down to Langley, Virginia, the the Langley research center down there, they had a a a redevelopment program called Vital. And so they've got 22nd century buildings. But we've gotta be able to help people understand, look. This is what we did. This is how we adopted adapted, and and this is making life better for our for our employees here because they they live in an eco friendly environment and we can do this everywhere.

So I'm not you're not gonna get any argument from me, David, when when you say that we don't do the job we need to do. I'll get beat up. No. Yeah. Well, it took yeah. You get beat up. All the time because I I was like I told them, I love the communications department in NASA. I I think they're awesome, but we can do better. Yeah. I God, I I've ran into a few challenges there.

When I said when we started working on project moon at with NASA, they I said to the the team said to me, now, David, what are we gonna tell people? And I said, we're not gonna tell them anything. And the communications guy looked at me and said, oh, no, David. They're not gonna understand this. Because they're used to standing up saying, this is our project. This is what we're gonna work on. I said, we don't even know what we're doing yet.

Yeah. We can't go out and tell people we're gonna build something we don't even know we're gonna do yet. What we're gonna do is we're gonna work on figuring out what we're gonna do. Yeah. Then we could tell people. Yeah. And I think the Israelis, in terms of their own society, do probably one of the best jobs, bringing their education and what they do back to the classrooms, back to the society so that they understand the 250 Ramon Foundation. Elon Ramon?

Yeah. They have 250 teachers, volunteers who take space education, and they bring it to high school and elementary schools every year. I am one of them. I'm there every January for Oh. So you so you know Ron? I I'm well, I knew. Oh, I do know Ron. Ron Levine. Ron Levine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's it's amazing. Yeah. So But it's it's, you know, we these other the the other bullets that I put down, they were just real quick examples of So let let's go to them. Cancer treatment delivery.

Go ahead. Yeah. And the the big thing we do there is we take we use we use crystal growth and and, the ability to produce things in space with the with gravity being overcome, little micro capsules, and inside those micro capsules, we can actually put a drug that is an anticancer drug.

You know, the person that would down here on Earth have to go through chemo with a needle in their arm and everything else, today, doctors or cancer doctors are able to take a little microcapsule inserted inside a tumor. I think we started with prostate cancer where we'd actually put a little microcapsule inside the prostate the prostate gland right into the center of a of a cancerous cell, and and it destroys the cell without without destroying everything around it.

Not nothing like the damage that's done from radiation or chemo where you put poison in the body and you kill half the body just to get some cancer cells. So that's that's one of the delivery methods that that was developed on.

So so that delivering this capsule was developed in space as an initiative or as a result of an experiment or as That was actually an initiative that that people believe, scientists on the ground believe that that they could produce these microcapsules, that would be perfectly very small, perfectly round, and would be able to contain the material the way that they wanna do it so they could go in inside a, you know, inside a cancer cell. So that that was purposeful.

So did you have to create it in space, or is the capsule a space technology? Oh, no. It was it was created in space. The the the the technology the concept of the technology was done on earth, and then you you actually take it to space and you and that's where you make the the microcapsules. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So the manufacturing is in space. Yeah. But but that's small scale.

And so the big the big challenge for anything we talk about that's done on the National Lab today is how do we scale it up? How do you how do you take gene therapy or gene, like Kate Rubins is one of the astronauts who's getting ready to go back for her 2nd time on the International Space Station in October. She's a cancer researcher, and she was the 1st astronaut to do, to do, oh, what do we call it when you manipulate genes? Gene therapy. Gene not the therapy. But, there's Gene sequencing.

Gene yes. So she was the first person to literally do gene sequencing in the microgravity environment of space, and she's going back again in October. And my hope is and and, you know, the folk at the NIH were ecstatic when she was there because she could talk to researchers at the NIH every day as she did experiments and go back and forth because we have that ability today.

Back in back in the days of shuttle, only one person talked to talked to the astronaut crew, and that was the person called the CAPCOM, the capsule communicator from the old Apollo days. We don't do that anymore. Astronauts can actually talk to somebody in a laboratory somewhere in the world, if they happen to be doing your experiment at the time.

And that that has become necessary because a normal astronaut in a 6 month period of time on the station may participate in 2 as many as 200 experiments, and there's no way you're gonna train them to do 200 experiments before they leave Earth. So you you give them fundamental capability. You you make them I like to say, I was a jack of all trades and a master of none.

So you you teach them the basics of of utilizing the the equipment, the experiment equipment that's on board, and then you give them sort of a, you know, a a a brief guide to what they're gonna do next week. And you let them talk with the experimenters a little bit and make sure they're comfortable, and then the experimenter looks over their shoulder, and they they conduct the experimenter for the for the researcher.

So I wanna jump off of it for just one second because this telecommunication system, they are you telling me that astronauts or anybody in the International Space Station has the ability to have there could be multiple conversations going on through how does that work? Is it a satellite technology? How do are they making calls all the time? Oh, it's multiband satellite communications, and generally, it's coming from, a an orbiting satellite.

And and one of the things we're looking at, and I'm not sure I don't think we're using it yet on the International Space Station, but we're looking at using laser communications. Because with laser communications, you have a number of different strands or communication I would call them bands in one beam of light that's going down to earth. And so it it makes it seem like communications is sped up. It's not.

It's just you're getting so much more data in in one packet that comes down because you've got multiple bands in one in one light. Is do they tend to do more video than audio? Is it all primarily audio that they're doing? It's a combination. They can they can now do much more video than they used to be able to do because because of the bandwidth that's on the International Space Station and the fact that they use s band, k band, Ku, Ka, who knows?

I'm not a communications guy, but but they now you will hear if you listen sometimes to the communications, you will hear somebody say this is Houston on the big loop. Well, they're talking on a whole separate communications link to the station than what a researcher in the in the Japanese experiment lab is using to talk to somebody in a laboratory.

So there may be 2 or 3 different communications links going on at at one time depending on how many people are doing experiments and how many different things are going on. There's one, but there's one loop that's dedicated to vehicle and vehicle safety, and so that's the one that goes back and forth between mission control either in Houston or Moscow.

And and that's where or in the case of this past weekend, you actually had a a control loop that went or a link that went from SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, to to Houston and then up to the vehicle because with unity of command, there's gotta be one person who's in charge, and that one person is usually the flight director whether it you know, if you're on a mission like this, although this was a SpaceX mission, NASA was kind of controlling everything through the through mission control in Houston.

So the the normal SpaceX communicator would talk to Houston and say, look. We've got this for the crew, and they'd say, okay. Go ahead and give it to them. And the controller from Hawthorne would talk to the crew about something that needed to be done in the Crew Dragon, but that communications, once they once they linked up, once they docked to the station, then communications, power, everything else was going through the station into the Crew Dragon.

So you had to figure out how to integrate that and how to, you know, how to break it out so that the crew could work both in station and in the dragon and and understand where the instructions were coming from. Is these if we got all these if you've got several conversations going on at once, is the International Space Station at times noisy? I've never been there. Okay. So I can't answer the question.

My guess is no because usually you have on a headset, just like you would do in your in your home so that you're not listening to what your kids are doing and they're not listening to you. And so you, your wife, and 3 kids can have 5 different conversations going on simultaneously. Very seldom from my time from my time in shuttle, we frequently would would not have the speaker on on the flight deck as an example Yeah.

Because we we didn't want people to be listening to to the air to ground loop that was talking about things on the shuttle if they were working an experiment and and needed to be talking to somebody in a backroom or something like that. So before we move on from this point, can you describe the National Laboratory? The National Lab is is what that is the name given to the US segment on the International Space Station.

And and the Space Station is a massive complex, and, and it's made up of of a number of modules. I'd at last count, I think there are 5 or 6 big modules, and a module is something that's almost the size of the payload bay of the space shuttle, if anybody can remember that for me. Yep. It's like the size of a school bus, and it's roughly, you know, 15, 12 feet in diameter, internal diameter, maybe 45 feet long, and for people who speak meters, 15 meters long, 4 meters wide.

Does that is that Yeah. That's how that translates good enough. Yeah. So you've got the Columbus module that is a normal kind of a a a basic research and development module. It it is owned or operated anyway by the European Space Agency, and ESA has 22 member nations. About 16 of them are paying members who participate on the International Space Station. Destiny is the US lab, and that's the biggest laboratory there, and it also Destiny along with the habitation module that belong to the US.

That makes up the US segment and the US well, that's not all. Columbus, the European Space Agency module, Destiny, the Japanese space lab module, which is called Kibo or we call it GEM, the Japanese experiment module. Those components make up what's called the US segment, and they are considered by by the 2 2,005 NASA authorization act. They have been officially designated as the US National Laboratory.

So so when you talk about the US segment with its little partner except for the Russians except for the Russian parts, that's that's the national lab. The Russian segment, which is called Poisk, p o I s k, I think, as, that's where they do a lot of experiments and the like.

And so one of my one of my complaints, and I was never able to overcome it as a NASA administrator, was the fact that while we are unified and we work together as a team in space, there is still a little bit of division whereas the Russian cosmonauts because of the culture, historically, they didn't do things unless they were paid for because they were very they weren't paid very well.

They're they're not paid like American astronauts, and so they get they get extra they get bonuses for doing an experiment where they use where they took blood or they took urine. So if it belongs to their body and it goes into an experiment, they get paid for it. At least it used to be that way, and we don't do that in the US segment. When you sign on, you sign on, and everything everything about you and of you belongs to us.

So, you know, you didn't you didn't didn't get a chance to to get away with it. How much does an astronaut make? It depends on it depends on where they came from. For example, the military members maintain their military rank. I I spent 14 years in the astronaut program. When I went there, I was a major selected for promotion to lieutenant colonel, and when I came away, 14 years later, I was a colonel.

So my pay was exact when I first went down there, my pay was same as any major or any o four in any mill military branch. And when I came out, my pay was exactly the same as any o six in any military branch. So you paid for the rank where you were. For the civilians, they were in the civil service rank structure, and so a typical astronaut would come in as a as a GS 12, 13, 14 nowadays, and a GS 13, 14, probably, 80, 90,000. No. I probably I have no idea. No. That's okay.

It's just that you're just it's what you're describing is that there's a a pay scale based upon It's a basic pay scale. And and in theory in theory, you just gave the number so somebody can look it up. It's Yeah. Yeah. If somebody if somebody goes to civil service pay scale and finds out what a GS 13 through 15 makes, then then those 3 pays those 3 ranks or pay scales, pay pay grades are gonna give them an idea of what the average astronaut makes.

Now when you move into what's called the senior executive service ranks, and there are not too many astronauts who are SESs, who are senior executive service, because when you become an SES, then you're eligible to move be moved anywhere in the federal government.

And so somebody who's an astronaut doesn't wanna run the risk of being taken out of the astronaut office and sent to the Department of Education or the Department of Agriculture as a as an executive because an SES is exactly what it says. You're a you're a senior executive available for the service of the US government, and and they make anywhere from a 100 to $200,000 depending on what they do and what's what pay what step in the pay grade system they are.

So we just we we spent far more time talking about that. The the I actually pulled up the numbers, so we have them. A g s 13 is 78,681 to a102. Rudimentary astronaut, that's what they would make. And then a GS 15 is 109366 to 142180. Yeah. So though that you just went through the the range of salaries that an astronaut could make depending on how long they've been in the program and and what their pay grade is.

But but going back to the national lab, I I tried to explain what it was, but it is half of the crew time in the net in the national lab is is controlled or owned, if you will, by a nongovernmental organization. Today, it's called CASIS, the Center For Advanced Studies in Space, and it they are under contract to NASA to essentially run the national lab and plan out the experiments plan out and recruit, if you will, the experiments that are flown aboard the International Space Station.

Today, the International Space Station and the and the US National Laboratory is greatly oversubscribed. In other words, they have more experiments standing in line to be flown than they have the capability of of doing in any given period of time, and that's because of the limitation on the number of people on the station.

One of one of the one of the desired advantages that we will get now that we have, the SpaceX Crew Dragon and soon the Boeing CST 100 is it will be able to carry up to 7 astronauts at a time to space, and so that means that where we now have a crew of 6 at any given time and one of them spends almost each day you know, they kinda rotate, but somebody's taken care of the vehicle each day like the maintenance man.

When we get more crew members on board, we'll be able to have 6 or 7 crew members dedicated to research, and so you'll the the amount of of research that you'll get done in a given day or given period of time on orbit will go up. So we'll be able to to accommodate.

And and you're talking about customers, maybe the NIH, maybe the Department of Agriculture, could be civilian pharmaceutical companies, Merck, you know, those are the kinds of that's the kind of research that's going on on the International Space Station now. How much, given the existing past few years volume of astronauts on the station, what was the what's the volume in dollars? Do you know? I do not. I, that I don't know.

1 of the and and when you say the volume in dollars, do you mean how much People pay. Or how much is the government pulling in? How well, the the reason I brought it up was and maybe you can come from the question that I was defining in my head. I didn't say it as clearly as I should. Yeah. Is that if in fact there's opportunity for individuals listening or myself or anybody Yeah.

And or venture backed, they would wanna know what is the what's the how much volume is up there because someone could say, hey. Could we could we make another one of these? Can we expand it? Can we can we create a larger ecosystem? Is there a value in it? And this was not one of my topics, not one of my bullets, but can we talk about it? Yeah. Absolutely.

And that is another thing that I'm very interested in now and that I spend a lot of time on is promotion of of commercial space, truly commercial space. And I and I'll I'll use Jeff Member again as an example because you and I both know him. He is a And by the way, for anybody listening, there's a podcast. And Jeffrey Jeff did a fantastic job, and, Charlie's heard it, what, twice or three times? I don't know. You say you wanna listen. Twice, but Jeff is a dear friend, and Jeff Jeff is a pioneer.

I mean, we are the stuff that's going on on the International Space Station today, and that and that will come in the next I would say beginning in the next 2 years, there's a there's a company called Axiom Space. Yeah. Mike Sufferdini who used to run used to be the program manager for the International Space Station when I was the NASA administrator, what what they envision doing is similar to what Jeffrey did, stand alone space stations, commercial space stations.

So Acxiom will put a module on the International Space Station for a period of time, maybe a year, just the way that Bigelow did. Make sure that it works and make sure that it can be self sustaining once you separate it, and then they'll separate and and they'll begin to be the first commercial space station.

Will not be as large as today's space station, but we'll be able somebody like you would be able to go to Acxiom and say, hey, I I wanna do full time pharmaceuticals development in this area. Can I have a module dedicated to this? Because today, somebody does research on the International Space Station, and it's a finite amount of time, finite amount of volume, and, and finite finite amount of crew effort that goes into it.

And so either you automate it such that they turn it on and and it does it by itself. There's an Israeli company called Space Pharma. And, yeah, I know I know Yossi. I mean You know Yossi. And Yeah. I know Yossi. I've been to his I got photographs. I went to his place, and he is one he's a very big supporter of Project Moon Hut. And he one of the one of our fundamental beliefs or our fundamental data configuration is based upon a confirmation. When I went to him, I asked him a question.

Yeah. And he came back and said, I could use that service. Yeah. I mean, Yosie does yeah. What what SpacePharma does is they they do a lot of protein crystallography, but it is all automated. And so they are not as dependent on the crew as, say, many other researchers are. You know, you'll see, turn it on for me and then get out of my way because the the fundamental research is run by, somebody that's sitting in Tel Aviv or sitting in Haifa or It's done on a mobile phone sometimes.

It's done on anything. A laptop Yeah. With a cell phone, and they've got the band, you know. They use the NASA bandwidth to get the signal there, but it once it gets aboard, it goes to that that what they call a I think one of them is called, something on a chip. They they do all kinds of stuff. They're doing tissue growth, you name it. Yeah. The the and I brought it up. What he he's the challenge that they had was then they did nerve regeneration Yep.

That the nerve grew 10 times longer than they anticipated, which is a big issue. Someone gets cut in space or something goes wrong, we don't know how our bodies are going to regenerate, how are they gonna heal. Yet, we were able to do a nerve regeneration, which we can't do on earth. However, it was not what we expected.

Yeah. But, I mean, you know, experiments like that, water purification work, air quality improvement, we're looking at all those kinds of things in the US segment, and and one of one of the things that I like to talk about sometime is another is another bullet point. It's crop growth. Interestingly, we're now growing lettuce. We're growing, cherry tomatoes. We're growing beans, and this is because astronauts have to eat when they go to Mars.

There is no supply ship that's keeping up with them and bringing fresh food, so they're either gonna have to grow it or they're gonna have to make it. And that's where we're looking at using, fundamental feedstock to 3 d print food, whether it's meat like food or vegetable like food or whatever it is, and we're getting halfway decent.

You visited Ames Research Center, and one of the places that you probably visited was the, it's like a biochemistry lab or something like that, but it's synthetic biology, and it's where they're actually three d printing food or they're using, they're using, oh, jeez, bugs, for lack of a better name, microscopic stuff to to actually they can make bricks, so they work together with Stanford to make something called BioBrick.

Yeah. And it's it is building material that is as strong as concrete, you know, made by somebody like Portland Cement or Sacrete Concrete, but the same lab can make something that tastes like, a piece of ham that you're gonna make on a ham sandwich. But but that's the kind of stuff that's going on. It's we call it advanced astro culture.

One of the things that that has been that was discovered while Scott I think it was while Scott Kelly was on board was the fact that in trying to grow some of these plants, they were dying in the growth chamber. And it turned out that there was this hormone called ethylene that was killing the plants. And, so they started working on a technology that would that would take the ethylene out of the atmosphere in the in the in the growth chamber. Yep. Voila.

Now it prolongs the it prolongs the life of the experiments onboard the station. That technology has been brought back to Earth, so some of the very same grocery stores that you may be shopping, uses the same technology to to take ethylene out of the atmosphere in in a lot of the places in grocery stores, even in wineries, so that fresh fruits and vegetables last longer, wines become better, and all this other kind of stuff.

But those are those are all things that are done, whether it's crop growth or whether it's work in the in the Internet, in the national laboratory, or, any number of other things that we do on Well, the the just to to throw and toss in that you said the Ames facility. You didn't you probably didn't I don't know if I said it in the, video that you'd watched is that we started, with the portal, the NASA Ames, the space portal.

Yeah. So that was the beginning of the conversation, which is a long story, and one day, I guess I'll have to share it with you. But how Project Moon Hut came about was out of frustration. And so, yeah, it was just a space portal. So for for 6 years, five and a half, 6 years, every single month, I was at NASA Ames. You were probably there while Pete Ordon was there. Yeah. Pete was our first interview. Yeah. Okay. I sat down with Pete at at his new place. What was the name? Breakthrough.

Breakthrough where he's there with, Yuri Milner. Yeah. And he Pete, as you know, is known as a tough guy, really hard, and I was set to give him this whole thing about why he should be involved or why he should help me. I went 20 minutes, and he looked at me and said, I'm in. I said, what what do you mean you're in? He said, I'm in. I love it. Yeah. And he and I he said, and I'll do your I'll do your first interview. Really?

So, yeah, I was there when Pete was there, and I just saw Pete in Luxembourg. Yep. He is everywhere. He's everywhere. He's everywhere. So we we've got, let's see. We with crop growth. Is there anything else with crop growth? No. Not really. We, you know, we talked about the the basic thing there is what's what's coming back to us to make life better.

It's it's, among the things is finding out that that there is something that keeps plants from growing well, and if it doesn't kill them, and that's this this hormone called ethylene, and that is transferrable back to technology on earth that enables your vegetables and fruits and stuff to stay longer in the on the grocery shelves and and eventually, we'll bring you better wine, I think.

So if we can eliminate GMOs to some degree and so that we can get a more pure crop and we can eliminate the ethylene, we could end up with a more natural product than earth. You're absolutely right. And that's probably what we're gonna eat on the way to Mars, and when we get to Mars. So the last one you had was Oh, it's just my concern about interplanetary contamination, and and Just your concern. Well, it's it's not my concern. I I I'm learning from people.

Look, most of this stuff, you know, we weren't I've only been gone from NASA for 3 years, but but what's been done over the last 3 years have been absolutely incredible. But but we we have discovered that we've actually taken, strains of bacteria, and we have flown them to space and back, and we find that that if we hide them from ultraviolet radiation from the sun, specifically, that, they survive. We can put them out in space.

We they can be on the on the outside in the unpressurized part of a spacecraft. They can go to the they can go circle around the moon and come back, or they can go to the International Space Station and survive for years at a time, which has led us to believe that we may actually have had life forms that could have come from Mars or somewhere else in our solar system, if not in the greater universe, that have made the trip to earth and survived.

So we may actually have, and I hate this word, but alien life forms that survived the trip here in a meteorite or a or a particle from an asteroid that broke up doing its reentry or its entry into the Earth's atmosphere, and, and it's not of Earth's origin. And we wouldn't even know it because, you know, from the day of the big bang, we think everything started from the same place anyway, and that's why we study asteroids and go to other planets and everything else.

Because every time we learn something about another body in our solar system, we learn something else about our own planet Earth.

It's like discovering sands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina that looks a little different or has some slightly different chemical property than what we usually see there, and we go into the archives and we find out, oh, it's different because it came from the Sahara Desert, and it got caught in a dust storm and went up into the stratosphere, and the upper atmosphere winds took it across the Atlantic Ocean, and and it got caught up in a storm and came back down and got rained onto the beaches of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

So the planet is not as big as we think it is. The solar system is not at all as big as we think it is, and our universe is getting smaller and smaller even as it expands every day, because that is what's happening to the universe.

But but we're much more connected than we think, and that's why many of us are so anxious to finally have humans on Mars because we'll be able to do over the course of if we had had most of my science friends tell me, if we had had one geologist on the surface of Mars for as long as Curiosity has been there, that geologist probably would have completed completely, explored the planet by now because humans are just mobile.

The as we were talking, one of the things that I love about Jeffrey Mamber's interview or discussion. I like more discussion. I think you can tell these are discussions. Yeah. One of the things that I really love this Jeffrey shared pieces of information that people like you and others have said, I I haven't heard that from him. And if, yeah, what what what haven't we heard from you? I mean, what's something that you have not really and I'm not saying to put yourself out there at risk.

I'm saying because I I know there are things I I there's gotta be something that you have not really put out there, a great story, a great example, something that you're proud or something you're not proud or whatever it may be that Oh, no. I I told you. I'm I'm incredibly proud of the people with whom I've served. No. No. I I just mean your story. Something. I I loved when Jeffrey was telling the story, and not a lot of people had heard it. Some people had.

But then he was at the when the Russian space agency was formed Yeah. He was on the Russian side as an American. Yeah. And his his discussion about agencies and how he dislikes them, I had never heard that before in the way and other people had not. So with you, what what I'm trying it's the question. What are you not telling me that I would love to hear? Nah. I I don't know that I'm not telling I mean, we could we could talk forever about things I've seen and done, but but we don't have.

What would be something amazing that has happened? I I don't know that there would be something amazing about Come on. About what Charlie Holden has done. I I tell people all the time, and it's I'm I tell people I'm a a normal ordinary person who has been blessed to do extraordinary things. So I when people ask me about about discrimination, I think back to my childhood, and it is really, really hard for me to give them a concrete example or a story about something.

And it's because I think my mom and dad equipped me to live with what I was given, you know, what God gave me and make the best of it, and not worry about the things about which I had no control. And it's what I tell young people today. I tell I tell young women particularly and and and also minorities. Don't waste your time trying to explain to somebody who you are or what you are. Just do your job and do it in an in the excellent manner that I know you're capable of doing it.

In my time at NASA, as the administrator, my plea to our employees was just do your job. Don't don't waste your time trying to explain to somebody why NASA should be around or why this or why that. Do your job, and and people will understand. So I don't you know, I've I've not done anything that I think is extraordinary. I've I've I've participated in extraordinary things, but but I'm a kind of an ordinary person who's who's participated in those extraordinary things.

I've been blessed to do that. I and I can't take credit for it. Oh, I I've I I loved our our very first time sitting for hours talking, and I I bet you didn't think and I that you'd be coming back to an interview podcast at this point. And I loved the email the other day that said, are you still up for the interview? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Real. Like, what what are you waiting? Myself into? What what are you waiting for?

I mean, I've I've been sitting on the sidelines saying, when are you calling me back? So, this is great, Charlie. I I appreciate it. Is you gave not always interviews are never what I thought think they will be. And I love that you were able to demonstrate after demonstrate and demonstrate and demonstrate and demonstrate.

To a large degree, what they, demonstrate examples of how space and earth and the connection between the 2 have benefited, some might disagree, let's say they have advanced certain technologies and and conditions because we haven't solved the diversity, inclusion, and equity. And that is the critical critical challenge. Well So I'll go back to where I started. Yeah. Go back. I'd like you to tell me. I'm I'm I'm here. You know, I I will go back to where we started this conversation.

Until we solve the problem of diversity, inclusion, and equity, we're gonna continue to stumble around and bumble around this planet, trying to figure out how we exclude people from the things that are going on rather than allowing them all in and taking advantage of the diversity of thought and ideas that will make us even more powerful and excellent than we are today.

We cannot afford, as we learned with women, or we're learning with women, you cannot afford to put 50% of the population on the sideline and hope to win the football game. You can't you know, if you you can't put 50% of your talent on the sideline and think you're gonna win. That that doesn't get it nowadays when you know, that's why when little schools go in to play Alabama, Alabama's got a 100 kids sitting on the bench, and they play a 100 kids.

Ypsilanti State comes down, and they've got 50 kids on the bench, and the poor coach tries to play 20 of them because there is 20 best people. My big schools learned that everybody's good, and if I let them play, everybody's gonna perform up to their sometimes exceed my expectation, and and, boy, will we be good. And that's the way that humanity has to be. We've gotta understand that we are we will be as great as we allow, people to participate and make us Are we closer?

We're much closer than ever before. Trust me. And and let me tell you, you you and I may not know it yet, but I think watching young kids in this past week, unless people like me go out and stop them from doing what I think they're gonna do, we are a lot closer than we've ever been before. I I put I put my faith in in, in the youth of the world, not just not just this country. They are not gonna I don't think they're gonna let us destroy their world. I think they're just gonna take over, I hope.

You know, I at this part here, then you're getting emotional and I am too at the same time. No. No. I I it's the saddest it is so sad to me, having lived in multiple countries. I I lived in Hong Kong. I mean, I have so many friends. I don't know. It's not skin color. It's not gender. It's not I from Bangladesh to to Moscow, from Cartagena to Bali, there's just amazing people around the world, and this this one topic saddens me beyond imagination.

I don't know how people treat people in the way they do. There's plenty to go around. Yeah. And and we're not we have the biggest divide in the history of mankind, bigger than the gilded age. And it it it it makes me sad. I'm the eternal optimist. I I I just believe that, you know, we're gonna in a in a and a little child shall lead them. And that's where at the end we're going to project Moonhop will improve life on earth for all species.

Absolutely. So, Charlie, I I appreciate with all my heart, I appreciate you taking the time, to to to do the work that risk required to create an interview, which I know people say, wow. I never did so much work for an interview. I know. It's true. I think yeah. There's funny. People say I don't I didn't know I have to do work. And I really appreciate the time. I really appreciate the the topics you covered. Thank you. Thank you so so much. Very much for the opportunity. It's it's been great.

I, I I I learned it seems like every time I do something, I learn a lot, and and I have learned so much in in preparing for this and in in in carrying on the conversation with you. I I appreciate you letting me be a part of it. Oh, fantastic. So, for all of you out there who are listening and you've taken the time out of your day to listen, I hope that you learned something today, that you connected some dots. You were able to be wowed or challenged or find a new path.

And in that, you'll make your life and the lives of other or you help them to be improved. And project Moon Hut, which was named by NASA, It's not a name we came up with at NASA Ames. They said they named the project. It used to be a box of the roof and a door, and they gave it the Moon Hut.

And what we're looking to do is establish the box of the roof and the door of Moon Hut through the accelerated development of this ecosystem, that's earth and space based ecosystem we call Mearth, moon and earth. That in that space in which we live, if we take the ideas that were talked about by Charlie today and any and many of the other guests, that paradigm shift thinking, these innovations, and we turn them back on earth.

We not only get to space and achieve the desired outcome of box, a roof, and a door, but in the venture, in the ability or the challenge or the the the road to get there, we bring those back. And as we're responsible for our planet, we improve the lives of all species on planet Earth. So, once again, Charlie, thank you very much. Is there one way that people could get a hold of you? Is there one that you'd like to give if they wanted to come?

You know, I'm, people see me on Twitter, but my my email is the easiest way, and that's just it's very simple. It's [email protected]. No no periods in the Charles Bolden, just one long word. Fantastic. And if you'd love to connect to me or to Project Moon Hut, you could reach out to me at [email protected]. You can, go to Twitter at at project moon hut. You can go to the YouTube, and there is a first two videos we have not marketed for 6 years.

We've got about 60, 70 people around the world, but right there, you could see 2 videos to get an introduction to Project Moon Hut. And it's not Project Moon Hut. It's not what we do, but it's an introduction, and Charlie's seen it. I think there's a lot of value there. And then it's it's an education in the an experience. And you can I'm mister David Goldsmith. I'm at Goldsmith on Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn, on Facebook. We have a fantastic team we're working with, and we're continuing to grow.

Charlie, I appreciate once again. For everybody out there, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to another edition of the age of infinite. Infinite possibilities, infinite resources. Space is going to give us new perspectives on how we can live, how we can change the future. And with that, we're not talking about the 4th industrial revolution. We're not talking about these micro changes that are happening on Earth.

And even though the challenges we're going through today, we're talking about possibilities and resources you've never heard of before. We're talking about the age of infinite. We have the opportunity now to bring that into fruition. And this podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, named by NASA. And what it is is we are looking to establish a box of the roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut.

And that is through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. Then to take those endeavors, take that that paradigm shifting, that innovation that takes us to get there and turn those back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring an unbelievable topic, very apropos for today, very current for today, the value of space exploration during the time of the global pandemic.

And we have on the line an amazing friend and amazing individual, Charlie Bolden. How are you, Charlie? David, I'm doing great in a way and then not great in another way. So how about you today? I'm doing okay. We're we're gonna get into that in a moment. Let me tell some of the people about you for just one moment, and I Okay. I we don't do a lot of introduction to individuals. We don't go on and on and on. Your your bio, your CV is very long.

We met in 2016 at an event, Charlie and I, and we had this great I I I listened to his presentation. It was then focusing on Mars. I listened to his presentation. We had a great long talk. I met his wife, and that's where the the friendship started. Charlie, was a major general in the US Marines. By the way, Charlie, my best friend when I grew up, my best man at my wedding was a marine. And he was he's been up this marine unless he's dead. No. He he well, he is.

He you know, I did say that when I was writing at the what and I said Minor point. Minor point. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. He once you're a marine, you're always a marine. It's a very important I actually was typing that, and I said, how do I say so you're right. And then, Charlie's been up into space, four times on the space shuttle, some commanding the mission and others as a participant. He's also been the 12th NASA administrator from, I think, it was 2009 to 2017. And, unbelievable.

I we can go on and on and on about Charlie's background and his and his history. Big thing is he's here today to talk about this topic. So, Charlie, do you have some bullet points or an outline? I have, bullet points for you, and and and, yeah. I have some bullet points, David. It's really really hard to do this thing, but Well, no. You're gonna do fine. So what are what are the how many bullet points do you have so I know I have I have 6. 6. So, okay. Give them to me, please.

Yes. Bullet point number 1 is the fragility of the human body. Bullet point number 2 is challenges of getting humans to Mars. To Mars. Number 3. Cancer treatment delivery. Delivery. Number 4. The US has a national laboratory on the International Space Station. 5. We're involved in crop growth in space. Number 6. I worry about interplanetary contamination. I have to say, one thing I didn't I forgot to say and I didn't put it down is you are the first astronaut on our program. Which I'm right.

Yeah. You are the first one as far as I know. You have to think of the first astronaut. So I absolutely love that. And the second thing is I was watching the television Mars, series last night, and there you are. Like, oh, Charlie's on it. So on on Netflix. So okay. So let's start with number 1, the fragility of the human body. Take us where you take me. Teach me, Charlie Yeah. About the fragility of the human body. Let let's let's start with the with the mind.

You know, David, I I you asked me how I was doing today, and I said I was, I'm kind of really doing well in one respect, and I'm horrible in another. And, you know, the when we talk about the human species, one of the things that that I think you and I should be considering really is, what's what's really important? A lot of times people, particularly today, when we talk about this pandemic, people get stuck up in talking about, science.

And when we talk about space, there's a lot of controversy about NASA launching, the demo 2 mission with SpaceX this past weekend. And should it have been done? Shouldn't it have been done? And I think, you know, one of the things that that I would like for you to keep in mind is that in everything we do, people, you know, they're our they're our most important product or our most important asset.

Without people, we're not able to do anything, and that's that's one of the reasons that I picked the fragility of the human body as the first. But but, But before you go too far, I wanna stop for a moment because I know of this week was SpaceX launching. Mhmm. But you said, NASA and demo 2. Did you mean that NASA participation in Elon Musk's SpaceX launch, or did was there something else that I don't know about?

It was actually a partnership, a teamwork, and and we can talk about that, but, the the one point I wanna finish because it's Yep. Important because it will it will permeate, everything I always say when I talk to everybody. And that's there's this thing that we we use three terms, or I use three terms all the time, and they are diversity, inclusion, and equity.

And, the the the events of the last couple of weeks have, for me, pointed out the critical importance of of really understanding what those three terms mean because I think that today, it's more important than ever before in our institutions and particularly to people like me who are in the space community. Okay. And in what way?

If we are not focused on the importance of of including everyone in the things that we do and trying to understand where all the players come from, we are likely to find ourselves, in the dilemma that that NASA found itself this past week when confronted with the question of why are you launching, something to space when we're having all these issues on earth?

And and it was for me as a 73 year old, it was very reminiscent of 1969 when, reverend Ralph David Abernathy flew to Orlando, Florida and then drove over to the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, to protest the launch of Apollo 11 because the country was spending 1,000,000 of dollars to get people to the moon when, in his opinion, we should have been spending that money on poor people and, people here on Earth.

And and it was it was the same as it seems to be now, an either or when that's life's not like that. Life is life is never black and white. It's always, nuanced. And so if we're focused on trying to improve the diversity and inclusion in our organizations, we'll always be getting a myriad of ideas and and concepts as we think about what we wanna do.

And I think it saves us sometimes from getting into these either or situations because we we realize that we've gotta take into consideration everything. So that's that that that was one of the things that I, you know, I wanted to share with you, because I'm not sure that that any of us thought about it at the outset of all this stuff at the beginning of the pandemic.

The pandemic has has exposed a lot of the raw parts of our country of the United States, things that have always been a problem, and they they come to a head every once in a while, but but only when they come to a big head like they have done during the pandemic when we look at who are the dominant victims of the disease. And and, so it's caused us to think a lot about where we are.

And I think I think it emphasizes for me the critical importance of helping people understand why space exploration is important, at a time of a global pandemic or or racial strife in our nation?

Because I thought about this in 1968, 'sixty nine, 'seventy, when I was a brand new second lieutenant in the Marine Corps coming out of the Naval Academy, and I had to answer these same questions for myself, wearing the uniform of this nation when my wife, you know, my who had been my girlfriend, had been marching in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia while I was strolling through the campus of Annapolis in my bubble the way that a lot of people in the space program today are strolling around in their bubble, oblivious to what's going on around or trying to be oblivious to what's going on around them when in fact, we're all affected by it.

And we all owe an explanation to people for why we're doing what we're doing and why it's important and why it contributes to making things better here on the planet, so that some of these systemic problems we have will go away. So so, can you describe to me or give me thoughts on, because I don't think there's any empirical evidence on this, why do you believe people are walking around in a bubble? I and I'm speaking about the space community. I know. I know. That's what I meant.

I why do you because you just said the the the people in the space industry are walking around above a bubble, oblivious to what's going on around them.

Oh. Oh. Oh. You know, all I need to do is point out Monday morning, ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, you know, as if as if the launch on Saturday had changed the world and and everything was great now and the market is going and this launch in fact, I I read so many articles and I've talked to a lot of reporters who have written articles about, will this flight, give the US a big boost and and help us to solve this problem that we're confronting?

I think this flight is critical, and it can contribute to solving some of the problems that we have. But but we have to be, we have to be cognizant of the fact of the role that we all play in what's going on around us and and realize that we don't operate in isolation. And I think you, you know, you know Jeff Manber. You know Gwen Shotwell.

Mhmm. It has been very refreshing and and rewarding for me to see leaders in some of our foremost space companies take the time to, to pin out communications to their employees to help them come into the moment and and come back down to earth, and recognize the fact that we do play a role in what we are accomplishing is very, very important for a number of different reasons that it will hopefully, it will add to our national prestige.

Hopefully, it will bring all of us some some some pride as a people, but that it will make us hungry to increase the diversity in our organization such that, people who might otherwise be excluded or have been excluded for for eons will now be included in our thought, and that we can we can help to solve issues of poverty and issues of hunger and and issues of illness and things that when we talk about the fragility of the body, the human body, they will understand that when I look at an astronaut and the osteoporosis, of a of a woman here on the planet, we're really talking about the same thing.

The bone loss that an astronaut suffers, the muscle atrophy that an astronaut suffers over a very short period of time is, you know, is a laboratory to help me help a woman or sometimes men who suffer osteoporosis, and it led to the development of a drug called Prolia that today is is a treatment for osteoporosis, based on studies that we did on orbit. Changes in vision, so changes in the immune system.

The twin studies with Mark and Scott Kelly over the year period of time that that Scott was in orbit and Mark was on the ground, are helping us to understand DNA shifts or or effects on DNA that that will answer some questions, about human frailty here on earth, that that we don't think about the way we think about the fragility of the human body in space because we see things happen so much more quickly.

We see what we consider to be aging effects down here on earth that happen over a very short period of time in an astronaut on orbit. So just, you said osteoporosis and you gave an example. Can you give me an example of vision?

Yeah. The you know, we we see changes in vision, in astronauts, not all, but in but in many over periods of time in orbit because the the the absence of well, gravity is there, but but the fact that gravity is overcome by our speed going around the planet, the the shape of the eyeball actually changes. And and in so doing, in some people, their visual acuity will change.

We also find that, again, based on the the relative absence of gravity, and the fluid shift that sends a lot more blood into the upper extremities than is the the head mainly than is normally there, we get pressure on the optic nerve. And and a lot of the things that that that I'm talking about here, we know basically what's going on, but it's gonna take much more research for us to to understand fully what happens. The changes in the immune system.

When when an astronaut goes to space over the the first few days weeks, it it you get the appearance. And we we were fooled by shuttle because we flew relatively short short missions. So long mission in shuttle was 16 days. And over that 16 day period of time, the the human immune system seemed to get worse and worse and worse or or fail more and more and more.

When we started flying long duration on shuttle on space station, we found out that, you know, you get to a point where the human immune system adapts, and all of a sudden it springs back. And in some astronauts, it it actually goes through a a series of of, sinusoidal cycles where it gets hypersensitive and finally settles out that you're back to where you were before you left the planet. So we we learn something every time we fly now.

Have we have has something come out of just because we're on these three topics on the vision side, We have for osteoporosis. We have a a drug that helps. Has anything come out of the eyeball shaped transformation and the, optic nerve pressure? To my knowledge, we haven't yet, and and that's why there is that that's why I say we need more research. We we don't to my knowledge, I don't know that we have found a direct correlation to something that happens here on earth. Ken Ken sorry to jump in.

I'm I'm wondering, and I've thought this before, so I'm I'm this is the first time I ever asking this. Yeah. The eyeball changes, and I know it's become more round because it doesn't have the pressure because our eyeballs are actually somewhat elliptical. Elliptical. Exactly. Exactly. When you're in space, 2 questions. The first one is, you you do lose some visual acuity, I've gotta believe, because our eye was not is not designed to be used that way.

But over time, do we have we I mean, if you can't if you don't have glasses on Earth and you don't have glasses in space, we'd have to develop would we have to develop glasses if we were gonna go on a long term mission in space that would be able to be transformative? Interesting you asked the question. We, and, again, I'm a I'm an old guy. So most of what I talk about now has happened since I long since I left the the astronaut office because I haven't been in the astronaut office since 1994.

But but I am told now every time I go back from my annual physical to Houston, a a space station astronaut today takes 3 pairs of glasses. They take a pair that they're wearing today and and prescriptions for where they think their vision might go depending on how the shape of the eyeball shifts. I love that. 6 months that they're in space. You have you have answered us. But we don't but let me let me go back because remember you said, can we make them in space?

We don't have the capability to do it yet, but the reason we want to commercialize space is because I can guarantee you that if we put somebody in space, say an optometrist, they will figure out that we do 3 d printing every day on the International Space Station today. We're 3 d printing food. You know, we we are 3 d printing any and everything. Someone will figure out how to 3 d print a play a pair of a set of corrective lenses.

And so, today, because of the miniaturization that we have found with things like the ultrasound ultrasound machine, you know, it used to be that you got in this big machine, and they they threw flew your body into into this thing that scared half of the people. Not quite like, what's what's the big, Yeah. The MRI? C scan or yeah. Yeah. Yeah. MRI.

But but today, an ultrasound can an astronaut can perform an ultrasound on them on him or herself with something that's like the receiver of, or the the handpiece of a phone and completely do an ultrasound of their body while the flight surgeon sitting in in mission control in Houston, or in the flights flight medicine clinic in Houston or in Baden Baden or some other country in the world, they can actually see what's going on in the astronaut's body and make diagnoses and and help to anticipate things that the astronaut may may need to do to keep themselves well over the rest of that 6 months in space.

That is one of those technologies that has now come to earth, in the form of something that we call advanced diagnostics ultrasound, and you can find it in a village in somewhere in sub Saharan Africa or in some some small town down in Central or South America where the nearest doctor is 100 of miles away, but the doctor has a midwife who has one of these little miniature ultrasounds, and the doctor can, every week, do an examination of the developing fetus in its mother's, you know, uterus and say everything's okay, everything's okay, or one week say, oh, I don't like what I'm seeing.

Can you put her in the bus or whatever it is and let her make the 200 mile trip up to wherever the doctor happens to be located because I think we're gonna have to do something. So The, was the technology developed for space, or was it developed for earth and then went to space?

This was a technology that was developed for space because we, with long duration space flight, medical researchers wanted to they are always hungry to learn more and more about the human body because as you and I talked about earlier, you know, we we age. Not not significantly, but but it's enough, for doctors to be concerned. And so, every astronaut gets a physical every year, and you'd like for the astronaut to be able to get their physical on time, even if they happen to be in space.

And so we have found the necessity to, to to develop instruments that down here on earth are pretty big, but that now are relatively small that we can put in the small confines of an international space station, and allow the astronauts with because there's not always a doctor on the crew to to do the the manual manipulation or the the remote manipulation while the doctor on the ground actually looks at the data.

So we've got a little bit of that the remote physician that we found through the pandemic. The there's a a there's a company, I don't know if you've ever heard of this, I don't know the name of the company, there's a company I believe in Israel that was has been working on a set of glasses that they've got 4 sensors in the front, 2 on the both sides of the lens that we have today.

And what it does is it looks at the eye, figures out the focal point, and changes the glass configuration structure so that you no longer need a glass that changes its, that's a prescriptive, what you call it when it changes gradation? There's a name for a glass that's not. I don't remember that. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Whatever it is. Yeah. We have different levels.

And what it does is it tracks where you're focusing, and it modifies the lens focal point so that you could see anywhere in your glass Yeah. Which is kinda cool. And I I have actually read about some of the research that's going on on the International Space Station, and there is an instrument that is similar.

It it is able to and doctors on the ground have have used the technology that was developed there because in doing research on the eye, they wanted to know exactly where, you know, where the eye was, where it was positionally, whether it's the retina or the or, you know, something some other part of the eye very precisely when doing something like, what's the surgery we do nowadays where you you use lasers to Oh, yeah. To to remove yeah. To change the lens.

And I I don't remember that one either, but, yeah, I know which one it is so that you it's corrective surgery Yeah. For your lens for people who have had eye issues. So when we're looking at, the fragility of the human body, is there oh, I was gonna ask this first.

Is I'm looking for we're looking for project moonlight, is looking for more and more of these ideas, and we'd like to collect them that space went to Earth that we did not that you don't hear about that often because we always hear the same series. And we're also looking for ideas that never made it to space, but were designed for space and created something on earth as a result of not getting there.

And I think in the Oh, you know, long time ago, this went to space, but it but it turned out not to it turned out that that where everybody thought it was gonna be so much better when we talk about, mainly when you're talking about making immunizations and vaccines, we generally wanna look at a protein. Most things, you know, are have are made up of protein crystals or proteins. Yep. And you you we can do something called clock.

We can do a process called protein crystal growth in the microgravity environment of space, and we get these really pure, perfect crystals because gravity isn't there to screw things up. And, it a lot of it's done in the Japanese experiment module called Kibo. Kibo has some of the more advanced laboratory facilities onboard the International Space Station today.

But with protein crystallography, we can look at the makeup of a of a of a protein, figure out how you how you build a mirror image to it to defeat whatever the disease or the or the the the the, virus or whatever it is that you're trying to you're trying to overcome. You can build something that will negate it, if you will. And that's a very that's a crude explanation of what is done.

There was a program called electrophoresis operations in space where we were using differential current electrical charge to separate out, protein material. Johnson and Johnson and McDonnell Douglas did it in the early days of the space shuttle, and it was determined that, yeah, it's not worth the time and effort.

But going through changes in the process, they were able to bring it back down to earth and modify the processes on earth such that they got pretty good results, and it's used even today. So that that's an example of of taking something to space that we thought was gonna be very successful, and it turned out not to be. But it made the process better on earth when you took the lessons learned in space and apply them to the And and that's the paradigm shifting.

It's when you have to think about space to solve the challenge of space. You have to think differently. You have to learn differently. And as a result, your ideas can be used for manufacturing a cup or a bowl or a electronic circuit because you're rethinking the law not the laws of physics, but the the laws that you have understood and were used to on earth. And and the same you know, if if if you'll allow me to to to to move a little bit, we Sure.

Another example of that is, in this part that you were asking me about the launch, whether it was, you know, was it a SpaceX launch and was NASA doing something? Well, the crew was NASA. SpaceX doesn't have any astronauts, and that's their choice. And they every time you ask them, so far, they have no intention of growing their own cadre of astronauts. So they're Really? Those 2 they were both NASA's astronauts?

Oh, the the the test crew, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, were both veteran NASA astronauts. Now when you see Boeing fly their first flight, the commander of the mission is Chris Ferguson, who is a former NASA astronaut, but he is the chief of human space flight for Boeing.

And he will be since it's a Boeing test mission, he will be the commander of the mission, and he'll have 3 NASA astronauts on board with him who are assisting, but but it it will be different than the than the approach that SpaceX took. So this They're they're creating they're creating the airplane, and pilots are coming from the military, if you wanna say or something. You can say exactly that. And that is the concept of commercial spaceflight.

You know, I I I I took I I cheated, and I took advantage of listening to you and Jeff Manber Manber because I I I support him. I'm I'm sort of a consultant for him with Nanoracks because I love what they do. Yep. But as, you know, as Jeff said, we're trying to we are purposely trying to change the paradigm. We're trying to get back to to doing things the way that capitalists do things, where you create there is a need created and somebody responds to that need.

And so rather than NASA going off and and building a spaceship and finding a use for it, we have a mission we wanna accomplish, and we now go to industry and we say, hey. We wanna do this. We need to get 4 or or as many as 7 crew members to the International Space Station. Can you do that for us? And so 2 companies, SpaceX and Boeing, said, yeah. We can do that, and and they designed and built, their respective spacecraft.

And in those 2 spacecraft, we have 2 that do the same mission, but they do it in 2 sometimes, dramatically different ways. They, inside the spacecraft, don't look the same at all. SpaceX is all touch screen, built to fly autonomously on purpose because that's the way Elon Musk likes stuff, And Boeing, being a traditional aircraft manufacturer, they still have knobs and switches and dials and hand controllers and everything.

So, you know, a crew member trained to fly a SpaceX Crew Dragon will will have to undergo some training and and and mindset change to go into back into a a more standard cockpit when they fly the CST 100. So it's no different than a pilot who's learning to fly the 737 versus a triple 7 versus the Dreamliner. You well, what well, it is different because What I mean is you you're skilled at a different level.

You know, again, that's the the Boeing model is make the cockpit look the same in all the all the models of here. Oh, okay. That's essentially what Boeing is now trying to do with the with the b 767, 777, 777. They're trying to build a cockpit that looks the same throughout, and and it's just the the size of the airplane or the passenger capacity or stuff like that that's different. And and I I didn't know that.

You know, I think SpaceX is doing essentially the same thing as they go from one model of the crew dragon to the next. The touch t the touchscreen televisions or whatever you wanna call them, the controls are are basically the same. So it'll be relatively easy for a pilot to go from one spacecraft to the other. But but going back to this partnership between SpaceX and and NASA, I talked about, in my outline, I talked about, or I talked about the challenges of getting to Mars.

And You wanna jump to number 2? Yeah. I did. Okay. You did. I did. I did. I'm I'm following you. Because I because I sensed you were getting ready to start asking me stuff about about the human body, and and I my wife my daughter is the doctor in the family, and she tells me all the time, dad, you're not a doctor. No. I wasn't gonna ask you about the human body. I was really I was really fascinated because as a as a fighter pilot, I've got 28 hours in a warrior, and you learn one way.

And as a Yeah. And I'm not a fighter pilot, by the way. You wait. I saw you you sent me a picture with you near a plane. I'm a I am an attack pilot. This is one of the idiosyncrasies of the marine corps. Okay. Tell me, please. In the air force and it the navy is sorta like the marine corps. In the air force, every pilot is a fighter pilot. You gotta be a fighter pilot or and I won't use the word we use, but you ain't something. You you can imagine what it is.

But either you're a pilot a fighter pilot or you don't count the air force. In the marine corps and the navy, we have a we have attack pilots. We have helicopter pilots. We have fighter pilots, and and the way you tell them is by the size of their watch. The the big the big watch guys are the fighter pilots, and and the guys like me who wear normal face watch, we're the attack pilots. And we have different different missions. You know, mine was air to ground and that kind of stuff.

So I'm I'm an attack pilot. I started out in the in the a 6 intruder in Vietnam, and I migrated when the a six went away to the f 18 Hornet, so which is a fighter attack aircraft. So it's an it's an aircraft that allows us to do both missions with the same airplane. So I do wanna get to the next quick point, but I want I have one question I wanna ask because I I'm just curious. Yeah. When is it because the technology behind the, what is it called? Cord and rope.

I forget what it is for Oh oh, yeah. You're talking about, the The the stick in the motion of the airplane allowed yeah. There's no longer cables and pulleys. There's no longer cables and pulleys. So therefore, because the tech is advanced, we can make a single modular dashboard, if we wanna call it that, or for us to work off of.

Yep. Because the plane is compensating for, the the center of gravity of the plane, the plane is compensating for speed or or motion that you wouldn't have you would have had to have done manually 20 years ago.

Yeah. The the computer in the plane is essentially, thinking it's becoming the mind of the pilot in the old airplane, and it because it because the computer has access to far more data than the throughout the throughout the aircraft than the pilot has ever had, the computer can actually make an unstable airplane fly pretty well. Whereas it took a pretty good pilot to fly some things. And some things that a pilot would not be able to fly were they not computer augmented, fly pretty well.

You know, NASA designed something called the x I wanna say the x 29, which was a forward swept wing. Highly maneuverable, very unstable as a basic in fact, would have would have just pitched over backwards and, you know, died if if the the computer augmentation failed because it it just wasn't supposed to fly. But but you put a a computer in it, it doesn't augment Yeah. It doesn't it's called fly by wire. Fly by wire. Exactly. And and I couldn't come up with the name.

So shuttle was the first fly by wire spacecraft, and so now everything's fly by wire. Well, not not fly it's not fly by wire. What's that? It's no longer fly by wire when you have a computer doing it. Oh, we that's what you call fly that's what we call fly by wire. Oh, okay. As opposed Oh, fly by wire, you meaning wire and cables and everything.

Meaning, meaning electronic Okay. You know, digital controls as opposed to analog, with the analog being a cable or a pulley or stuff like that that goes throughout the airplane. Very, very few airplanes nowadays, except for the, you know, the basic things that people just fly for fun. Very few airplanes have cables and pulleys anymore. They send an electrical signal electronic signal to a small actuator in the tail, and it it moves this giant rudder around or or the something else.

And, yeah, it was called manual control and fly by wire. And I'm just getting confused, but I I that's the that's the reason that we can go to a standardized dashboard. Yeah. That's right. And that allows the space industry tying it back.

It allows the space industry to become more universal in application because with a 143 launch companies out there and the who wanna create any type of flying, they can go to a more traditional or more like a car, they can go to a very simple structure that pilots can be cross trained in. Exactly. Okay. So let's get on to the changes of, changes, of challenges of getting humans Yeah.

Getting to Mars. And, you know, we can talk about this really quickly because there there are 3 basic things that we have left to to overcome. There are 3 there are 3 basic. There are 3 giant hurdles. 1 is I'm saying I'm thinking to myself, has it really become that simple? No. It's not that simple.

But but the the the the big three and and it it differs who you talk to, but I think most of us would would would agree there is consensus that radiation in transit and when you get to the planet, propulsion, how fast can you get there? And the big thing is entry what we call entry, descent, and landing. And that is you're going to a planet that has a very thin atmosphere compared to Earth, and you've and you're taking a lot of weight to get humans there.

So, you know, with when we took cure the Curiosity rover, Curiosity weighed about £2,000, about a about a ton. That's that's nothing compared to the amount of weight that we're gonna have to put on the surface in order to support human beings, and so you might be talking about 15 tons. How do you safely get that through the thin Martian atmosphere? How do you slow things down enough so that it can land intact, when it lands on the Martian atmosphere?

That's why the Jet Propulsion Lab out in California coined this phrase, the 7 minutes of terror, when we flew Curiosity. You may or may not remember that, but it was it it their video became I mean, it just went viral because everybody, they had lots of dramatic music and everything, but the the 7 minutes comes from the, the travel time for communications from Mars to Earth.

So we didn't know for 7 minutes, after Curiosity was on the safely on the surface that it had arrived safely because it took 7 minutes for the for the communication signals to get us to let us know it was there. And so this was the 7 minutes of terror going through the Martian atmosphere and landing. And and this is I'm laughing inside. Now I'm laughing outside. I do wanna go over all three points. Yeah. I hope I hope you planned on that.

Last night, in the television series or the Netflix series, Mars, whatever the I don't remember the name of it. Their the scene that I just had watched was they had a larger 3rd shipment, the 3rd set. The first were the the few, then there was another group, and then there was this bigger vehicle. And the guy one guy has had such a he he said it was the most horrific thing coming into space.

They were they're afraid of the landing, and he like, the way I saw it is his life flashed before before his eyes, and then he landed. And very soon after that, there was a, a dust storm, a thunder cloud, a storm overhead for 8 to 10 months. So the combination of that is pushing I I don't know the answer. I haven't watched the rest of the show, but it's pushing this guy to the edge. So now I know the 7 minutes of terror. I got it. You helped me a lot today. No. It it's it's okay.

But but the if you talk about interdecent landing, I'll go back to SpaceX. And, one of the things that that we're discussing is do we parachutes don't work very well in, really high speed flight, like supersonic flight, which is the speed that you're going as you enter the Martian atmosphere and until you get well down into the atmosphere, you're still supersonic. And so parachutes rip themselves apart. So we're trying to figure out, is there a better way to slow down, to decelerate?

And you may know that SpaceX now does a return to a barge or a return to the launch pad and, not the launch pad, but a but a landing pad, at the Kennedy Space Center when they fly most of their flights. So they recover the Falcon 9. And in the upper atmosphere when the Falcon 9 is coming back, it does several engine starts or engine burns to to decelerate it, to help it slow down.

And it just so happens that high enough up in Earth's atmosphere, the the atmosphere density atmospheric density is very similar, if not the same as Mars. And so we're gathering you know, NASA has access to all of this entry data, of the SpaceX Falcon 9, and we can we can use it to try to model what it what it's going to be like to try to decelerate, going to the surface of Mars. Yeah. It's it's yeah.

You've got you've got a test we've got a a space in our atmosphere that mirrors the atmosphere of Mars so we can test within that band. You can see how well the spacecraft can decelerate itself using its own internal engine. And and so far, I think the results are looking good. SpaceX had a we had actually signed an agreement with SpaceX when I was the NASA administrator for a project that was supposed to be very little known, but it got it got public pretty quickly called the red dragon.

And red dragon was going to be a SpaceX Dragon module that they were gonna send to Mars and do a propulsive landing, and we would what NASA would get in return from for assisting them in getting there, providing, communications and navigations through our deep space communication system was we would get all of the entry and and landing data, that would help us decide how we were gonna safely get large payloads on the surface of Mars.

The the the project eventually fell apart for a variety of reasons, but, but that's that again is an example of collaboration, public and private, to help to help everybody advance, the things that they're trying to do.

So, you know, the public private ventures or public private collaboration, is the wave of the future, and and it it it enables both the government and the private sector to get what they need to advance their causes without both having to do it separately and having the cost be astronomical. No pun intended. So we just talked about that that's what I was talking about, entry, descent, and landing. We're still trying to figure out how to do it, but that that remains a challenge.

But we're learning a lot as we watch the SpaceX Dragon the SpaceX Falcon 9 do its its return to Earth and its what we call propulsive landing, where it slows itself down until it's on the pad. The blue not to be fair, Blue Origin does the same thing, you know, with their with their New Shepard spacecraft. It's just they're not as they're not as flamboyant and public. Well, there was also I somebody in the space industry said to me, David, we did this in the 19 eighties or seventies.

We were able to bring a rocket back to space, and he sent me a video. And he said it just wasn't as elegant. It didn't have the controls and mechanisms, but we had already delivered and and brought a rocket from space back down to Earth. We did it with the Delta Clipper, and I Yep. That's an idea. We didn't come back from space to earth. Right. And what what I meant is a rocket coming back from launch back onto earth. Yeah. And and that was the Delta Clipper. That was Pete Conrad.

You know, when Pete Conrad left the astronaut office before his untimely death on his motorcycle out in California, Pete was with, I I wanna say it was McDonnell Douglas that was the the big contractor working it, and and we flew the Delta Clipper a number of times, sort of the the hop test that that SpaceX is doing periodically with the, Starship. Yep. We did that with the Delta Clipper and and as as frequently happens, you have a big failure and people walk away from things.

It's it's the way that Elon almost did with the Falcon. You know, the Falcon 1 was horrible. I wanna say the first three launches were losses and, he finally gave up on it and he then he moved up the line to where he was going anyway, which was to the Falcon 9.

And he was 1 probably 1 I would I you'd have to ask Elon if this is factual, but most of us believe he was probably one failure away from from going out of business, you know, from not being a company when he won his first NASA contract and the rest is history. But but to the Delta Clipper was, in fact, one of the first spacecraft or intended to be spacecraft that we were gonna bring back and land propulsively. So we we have been there.

The more we as a general rule, it's kinda hard to do something that's never been done before. Some somebody's tried it and failed or tried it and it worked a few times and then it failed and they walked away from it. And I'm trying to look it up, the in Paid to Thanks, the book that you have that I've given you. Yeah. I talk about Elon Musk at 2 minutes what was that here?

I was just trying to see if, SpaceX founded multiple planets that if, $26,000,000 rockets failed on launch and the 3rd suffered a loss by a nose, an altitude of 217 kilometers, single where a single line of code did not allow enough time for commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation. Yep. In other words, the fate of a multimillion dollar project rested in a single line of code Yep. Within the rocket's millions of lines of code.

And that is the we we I'm not gonna talk about that because that's way over my head, but that is that is one of the, for the technical people, that represents among the greatest challenges, not just to space flight, but to aerodynamic flight. Because we talked about fly by wire aircraft and fly by wire spacecraft. A single line of code will doom your day or not a single line, a single digit of code misplaced, ruined your day.

Well, that's that's exact the the point was win by a nose, lose by a nose. That Exactly. We don't tend to always win by these amazing mounts. This rocket burst into flames because of a one line, and it could have been a point or a dot. I didn't look that up. A one line of code was the difference between the millions of lines. So let let's hit on the very quickly because we wanna make sure that we cover these. Yeah. Radiation and transit, in transit on the planet and propulsion.

Yeah. And, you know, radiation is a is an issue that time and experience is helping us feel a little bit more comfortable about. Now again, you're getting an opinion of 1. If you talk to some of the heliophysicists, people who study the sun, they're panicked. They they are convinced that that humans are not gonna survive going to Mars.

And but but most people that I know, and me being one who would love to go do it, believe that we now understand the radiation environment between here and Mars because we've sent enough spacecraft that have been highly instrumented. The Mars Science Laboratory, MSL or Curiosity, on its transit to Mars was unbelievably well instrumented.

So, with that and, several other of the orbiting Mars spacecraft, we we have a pretty decent understanding of the the radiation environment between here and Mars, and we think radiation normal kinds of radiation will not will not pose any threat to the crew.

We're looking at other forms of radiation shielding, for example, Bigelow Aerospace, that you don't hear very much from anymore, but, I understand that that there is talk now between Bigelow and one of the other launch providers to to fly another series of Bigelow spacecraft that will that will be flown into Earth orbit as free flyers, not not mounted on the International Space Station the way that the Bigelow module is today.

They have a couple of free flyers that have been up there now for, I wanna say, 5, 6, maybe 10 years and seem to be doing okay, but but I think they're they're getting ready to get back into the game. Their big thing is using water. You just take a bunch of water bags and over time, you fill the water bags and you line the module, with water bags, and water is a good attenuator of radiation.

So, we're looking at at simple things as well as very complex things to to protect the crew from radiation. So so we we're beginning to understand entry decent landing a little bit better. We understand radiation for the most part, and that leaves propulsion as the as the big outlier. It will not be solved in time to to help us when we well, let me not say it will not be. It it probably will not be to the point of sophistication that we're ready to use things like ion engines.

A former crewmate of mine, doctor Franklin Chang Diaz, is the father of something called VASMIR. That is an ion engine that is constantly accelerating, and, theoretically, we could get to Mars in in a matter of a couple of months as opposed to 8 months shortest time today, depending on the relative position of Mars and Earth as they go around the sun. But but one of these days and and you you probably watched The Martian as I did.

In The Martian, the Chinese spacecraft that goes to help rescue Mark Watney, was using fasmer engines, and that's the reason they could go so fast, whereas we couldn't. But, so those three challenges of getting to Mars, we're dealing with. And I think by the time we roll into the decade of the 2030s, we'll we'll we'll have most things in hand and we'll be able to successfully put humans on the on the on the Martian surface sometime in the next decade, in the 2030.

And see, that's why you love Project Moon Hut because we're gonna help you get there. I hope so. Help the technology advance. I I do hope so. Okay. So anything else with the challenges of getting to Mars and under that category? No.

You know, and we, I was gonna say my my 3rd bullet point, we talked a little bit about because I talked about protein crystal growth and and when we talk about cancer treatment delivery, I just wanted to again, my my hope is that when when I when you and I finish talking here, you and I both are gonna know a lot more about what good things come from space exploration to make life on this planet better and and help us explain to people why it was really critically important for us to launch last weekend in the middle of a pan pandemic and racial disturbances in the United States rivaling 196869.

Well, I I I think you touched on it. Maybe we can go back to it because our conversate our conversation, even though when we were coming up with the topic, I could tell you were bursting a little bit more than you did on the program so far. So you you so let's let's be real here. What I could sense, and you could tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm using this as a trigger point, as a starting point.

I'm not saying it's gospel, is that you were distraught at the at what was happening in terms of what's been happening in the United States. You could see it in your face. You could feel it in the in the in your voice coming through the isolation that we have over, of our screen. And you also shared in that one moment, you really hit on that in the time of Vietnam War and in the time of 1968, 1969, 1970, you had said the words, so I'm helping you with what you said.

You said, it wasn't as as popular as people think. Oh, no. Not at all. Well, you didn't say that today, so I'm kind of helping. Yeah. But but I mean Finish your point because we didn't go into it. And and, again, you asked me earlier, you know, what are we really in a bubble? And, and I think we in the space community, and I count myself among them, we really do like to believe that everybody believes in us, and everybody is as excited about space exploration as we are.

I I would love to think that my wife, for example, is as enamored with space exploration as I am and that she gets as excited as I do when I know very well that does not happen. I mean, she could care less, sort of. Not really. But No. No. She she you're not far off because I'm it's no secret on all the programs and whenever I speak and all the things that we're doing in Project Moon. Everybody knows that I'm not a space fan, meaning I don't look up to the sky. I don't say, oh my god.

I'd love to live there. And I watched the Elon, the SpaceX. Yeah. Because I had to watch SpaceX because it's what I'm doing. But did I wake up in the morning with a sense of excitement that the world is changing and this is gonna happen? No. I didn't. Honestly, I didn't. And when so these there's a whole world of people that I know most of the people I talked to didn't even know it went off that day. Exactly.

And that when when you and I talked earlier, and I I mentioned the fact that it the myth of Apollo is that it enjoyed overwhelming support by the American people, and and that is just not true. I think I read, you know, Rogel Linus, who is a NASA historian former NASA historian. I think he cites that maybe at the height of the Apollo program, 40% favoritism, you know, after we landed on the moon.

That that was it, and, I mean, people were ecstatic that that humans had landed on the moon because it was it was a global accomplishment. It didn't make any difference what country you went to. People were yelling and screaming and watching the TV, and we did this, and that was what was really important about it.

And I think that in in many respects, that's what people were hoping for this past weekend was that people around the world would see, you know, would see the crew dragon launched on Falcon 9 and and the crew get to the International Space Station, and everybody in the world would would say, wow. We did this. I think for a fleeting moment, that may have been the case. I'm not I I I me, myself, I did not say that.

Yeah. Yeah. I said we have technologically in my opinion, based upon what I've learned, we have actually not reached the potential that we should reach. Yep. That's the reason that Project Moon Hut is working on the software technology that you've read some about or seen some about.

And that's why when you, just for the people listening for a second, there's a video online on YouTube, which was an introduction in Macedonia to not project Moon Hut, not what we do, but some of the concepts behind it. And one of them is that I don't believe, Charlie, that I believe there's a few categories of people. There are people who work in the space, who are space people.

They're the people, the engineers, the astronauts, the people like you who are in the industry working every day to move it forward. But there are also people in the space industry who are not in space industry, meaning I work for an accounting department at SpaceX. I I don't touch anything. I do money movement. I could do it at any company. So there there there's another group. Mhmm. Then there's the enthusiasts. The the they just are interested.

They like they like space, but there are people who are tinkering in their garages. There are people who would like to one day form a company, and that's one group. Yet there's a whole another group of people that have no interest. However, they are very interested in the 6 categories, climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion, social displacement, political unrest, and exponential impact.

Mhmm. And if that group of people knew how influential the things that you're talking about, that you're sharing today, the impact and how it can transform how we live on earth, and that it does come back and it does alter prosperity. You gave 3 words, diversion, inclusion, and equity. It can be the equalizer or solve these challenges. Then there's a reason for space.

Yeah. And and you hit the nail on the head, you know, during and I I always hate talking about my time at NASA, but but I'm a people person.

And, and the one thing that I wanted everyone who worked for NASA, who was a space person, no matter what they did I I remember bringing congressmen several congressmen over who were blown away because when they talked to the janitor about what they did and and, you know, somebody would say, well, I'm helping to get people to Mars, and and they were flabbergasted. And they said, why did they say that? The guys got a broom.

I said, because they know that I believe that we don't get to do what we do unless everybody plays their role, whether it's the janitor or the accountant or, you know, the pay clerk or anything else.

Everybody plays a role in this big mission, and and the the one piece lacking is our ability to communicate to people, the value of their role in this grand venture and the critical importance of making life on this planet much better through the research that we do to get astronauts to the international space. You said it though, Charlie. The space industry makes a bubble. They have things like l 2 and l 5 and dragons and codes and this and that.

And, I mean, it the first event I ever went to, which was, in Hawaii was a PhD event. There was Buzz Aldrin was there and the guy who put the comet onto the, the rover onto the comet from Paris or France was there. I I this industry isolates itself with its own its own language. And it's because it's full of technical people for the most part. However, that that too is I said it, and it's not true. The vast majority of people we we hire at NASA are nontechnical people.

You know, the the comp the component of engineers and scientists in NASA is dwarfed by the people who are administrative specialists or financial specialists or the like because that's what makes the machine run. Mhmm. It's not the people in the lab, and it's definitely not the astronauts. We have, I'm gonna guess, 60 astronauts in the astronaut office today out of 18,000 employees, but who does everybody talk about? The astronaut.

And and in my job as the NASA administrator, I would always tell people I am the face and voice of NASA. I have to find a way to help everybody in the organization understand the critical importance of what we're doing, the value that it brings to the to the populace on the planet, and not just to American people, but to people everywhere because there are a lot of people whose countries will never do any of this stuff because they just don't have the wherewithal.

But they should still benefit from what we do. We should still be able to take a NASA program like SERVIR that takes Earth science data and and will go to farmers in Sub Saharan Africa and help them understand that we can make access. We can give them access to satellite data that will turn their water on and off out in the in the desert so that they don't have to use tons of water just spraying the the doggone little section of cropland that they have.

We can do it by we can do it by satellite to their computers if they let us teach them how to do that. Those are the things that happen every single day that NASA does, and and we've gotta be able to tell that story better. So I believe there's a policy in NASA that NASA is not supposed to market or promote themselves. Cannot market and promote. Cannot. Cannot. Right. Illegal. But we but that doesn't mean we cannot tell our story.

There's a difference between marketing and advertising and and going out and educating. And so our job is to be better educators, to be my mother was a was a librarian at the elementary, middle school, and high school level, and she was my middle school librarian, and I was a library assistant for her. And one of the things that I learned from her was the value of storytelling.

I'm an African American, so I grew up with a mother who was born in Charleston, South Carolina and raised all over rural South Carolina because she became an orphan at the age of 8 and lived and traveled around the state with her aunt and uncle who were Episcopal missionaries. And so, you know, what she taught me was that somebody in the family has to be the storyteller.

We call them the Greedo, and and that's the person who knows the family history, who can take us all the way back to a 16 year old slave girl named Tracy who was brought from West Africa, sold at market, sold at auction in the slave market, on what is now Market Street in Charleston, South Carolina when she was 16.

And she is several generations away removed, you know, a a great great great great something grandmother of mine because her daughter had 6 sons, and one of her 6 sons was my great great great great. Somebody in the family has to be able to tell that story because it's important to us.

Somebody in NASA, mainly people like me and the astronauts and hopefully everybody, has to be able to tell the story of the struggles that we've gone through in order to be able to put, successfully put a a human being on the surface of the moon. And and I got and I gotta be honest, Charlie. Not doing the job. You're not you're not you're not gonna get any argument from me.

I mean, I I would there's a facility in NASA Ames, which is one of the most advanced building structures for eco friendly development. Exactly. It's the new headquarters. And I, yeah, I went through it. They showed me everything and how they're using Bloom Energy, and and I'm telling you, I said people need to know about this. They collect rainwater. They I mean, you're you're absolutely right.

If you go down to Langley, Virginia, the the Langley research center down there, they had a a a redevelopment program called Vital. And so they've got 22nd century buildings. But we've gotta be able to help people understand, look. This is what we did. This is how we adopted adapted, and and this is making life better for our for our employees here because they they live in an eco friendly environment and we can do this everywhere.

So I'm not you're not gonna get any argument from me, David, when when you say that we don't do the job we need to do. I'll get beat up. No. Yeah. Well, it took yeah. You get beat up. All the time because I I was like I told them, I love the communications department in NASA. I I think they're awesome, but we can do better. Yeah. I God, I I've ran into a few challenges there.

When I said when we started working on project moon at with NASA, they I said to the the team said to me, now, David, what are we gonna tell people? And I said, we're not gonna tell them anything. And the communications guy looked at me and said, oh, no, David. They're not gonna understand this. Because they're used to standing up saying, this is our project. This is what we're gonna work on. I said, we don't even know what we're doing yet.

Yeah. We can't go out and tell people we're gonna build something we don't even know we're gonna do yet. What we're gonna do is we're gonna work on figuring out what we're gonna do. Yeah. Then we could tell people. Yeah. And I think the Israelis, in terms of their own society, do probably one of the best jobs, bringing their education and what they do back to the classrooms, back to the society so that they understand the 250 Ramon Foundation. Elon Ramon?

Yeah. They have 250 teachers, volunteers who take space education, and they bring it to high school and elementary schools every year. I am one of them. I'm there every January for Oh. So you so you know Ron? I I'm well, I knew. Oh, I do know Ron. Ron Levine. Ron Levine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's it's amazing. Yeah. So But it's it's, you know, we these other the the other bullets that I put down, they were just real quick examples of So let let's go to them. Cancer treatment delivery.

Go ahead. Yeah. And the the big thing we do there is we take we use we use crystal growth and and, the ability to produce things in space with the with gravity being overcome, little micro capsules, and inside those micro capsules, we can actually put a drug that is an anticancer drug.

You know, the person that would down here on Earth have to go through chemo with a needle in their arm and everything else, today, doctors or cancer doctors are able to take a little microcapsule inserted inside a tumor. I think we started with prostate cancer where we'd actually put a little microcapsule inside the prostate the prostate gland right into the center of a of a cancerous cell, and and it destroys the cell without without destroying everything around it.

Not nothing like the damage that's done from radiation or chemo where you put poison in the body and you kill half the body just to get some cancer cells. So that's that's one of the delivery methods that that was developed on.

So so that delivering this capsule was developed in space as an initiative or as a result of an experiment or as That was actually an initiative that that people believe, scientists on the ground believe that that they could produce these microcapsules, that would be perfectly very small, perfectly round, and would be able to contain the material the way that they wanna do it so they could go in inside a, you know, inside a cancer cell. So that that was purposeful.

So did you have to create it in space, or is the capsule a space technology? Oh, no. It was it was created in space. The the the the technology the concept of the technology was done on earth, and then you you actually take it to space and you and that's where you make the the microcapsules. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So the manufacturing is in space. Yeah. But but that's small scale.

And so the big the big challenge for anything we talk about that's done on the National Lab today is how do we scale it up? How do you how do you take gene therapy or gene, like Kate Rubins is one of the astronauts who's getting ready to go back for her 2nd time on the International Space Station in October. She's a cancer researcher, and she was the 1st astronaut to do, to do, oh, what do we call it when you manipulate genes? Gene therapy. Gene not the therapy. But, there's Gene sequencing.

Gene yes. So she was the first person to literally do gene sequencing in the microgravity environment of space, and she's going back again in October. And my hope is and and, you know, the folk at the NIH were ecstatic when she was there because she could talk to researchers at the NIH every day as she did experiments and go back and forth because we have that ability today.

Back in back in the days of shuttle, only one person talked to talked to the astronaut crew, and that was the person called the CAPCOM, the capsule communicator from the old Apollo days. We don't do that anymore. Astronauts can actually talk to somebody in a laboratory somewhere in the world, if they happen to be doing your experiment at the time.

And that that has become necessary because a normal astronaut in a 6 month period of time on the station may participate in 2 as many as 200 experiments, and there's no way you're gonna train them to do 200 experiments before they leave Earth. So you you give them fundamental capability. You you make them I like to say, I was a jack of all trades and a master of none.

So you you teach them the basics of of utilizing the the equipment, the experiment equipment that's on board, and then you give them sort of a, you know, a a a brief guide to what they're gonna do next week. And you let them talk with the experimenters a little bit and make sure they're comfortable, and then the experimenter looks over their shoulder, and they they conduct the experimenter for the for the researcher.

So I wanna jump off of it for just one second because this telecommunication system, they are you telling me that astronauts or anybody in the International Space Station has the ability to have there could be multiple conversations going on through how does that work? Is it a satellite technology? How do are they making calls all the time? Oh, it's multiband satellite communications, and generally, it's coming from, a an orbiting satellite.

And and one of the things we're looking at, and I'm not sure I don't think we're using it yet on the International Space Station, but we're looking at using laser communications. Because with laser communications, you have a number of different strands or communication I would call them bands in one beam of light that's going down to earth. And so it it makes it seem like communications is sped up. It's not.

It's just you're getting so much more data in in one packet that comes down because you've got multiple bands in one in one light. Is do they tend to do more video than audio? Is it all primarily audio that they're doing? It's a combination. They can they can now do much more video than they used to be able to do because because of the bandwidth that's on the International Space Station and the fact that they use s band, k band, Ku, Ka, who knows?

I'm not a communications guy, but but they now you will hear if you listen sometimes to the communications, you will hear somebody say this is Houston on the big loop. Well, they're talking on a whole separate communications link to the station than what a researcher in the in the Japanese experiment lab is using to talk to somebody in a laboratory.

So there may be 2 or 3 different communications links going on at at one time depending on how many people are doing experiments and how many different things are going on. There's one, but there's one loop that's dedicated to vehicle and vehicle safety, and so that's the one that goes back and forth between mission control either in Houston or Moscow.

And and that's where or in the case of this past weekend, you actually had a a control loop that went or a link that went from SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, to to Houston and then up to the vehicle because with unity of command, there's gotta be one person who's in charge, and that one person is usually the flight director whether it you know, if you're on a mission like this, although this was a SpaceX mission, NASA was kind of controlling everything through the through mission control in Houston.

So the the normal SpaceX communicator would talk to Houston and say, look. We've got this for the crew, and they'd say, okay. Go ahead and give it to them. And the controller from Hawthorne would talk to the crew about something that needed to be done in the Crew Dragon, but that communications, once they once they linked up, once they docked to the station, then communications, power, everything else was going through the station into the Crew Dragon.

So you had to figure out how to integrate that and how to, you know, how to break it out so that the crew could work both in station and in the dragon and and understand where the instructions were coming from. Is these if we got all these if you've got several conversations going on at once, is the International Space Station at times noisy? I've never been there. Okay. So I can't answer the question.

My guess is no because usually you have on a headset, just like you would do in your in your home so that you're not listening to what your kids are doing and they're not listening to you. And so you, your wife, and 3 kids can have 5 different conversations going on simultaneously. Very seldom from my time from my time in shuttle, we frequently would would not have the speaker on on the flight deck as an example Yeah.

Because we we didn't want people to be listening to to the air to ground loop that was talking about things on the shuttle if they were working an experiment and and needed to be talking to somebody in a backroom or something like that. So before we move on from this point, can you describe the National Laboratory? The National Lab is is what that is the name given to the US segment on the International Space Station.

And and the Space Station is a massive complex, and, and it's made up of of a number of modules. I'd at last count, I think there are 5 or 6 big modules, and a module is something that's almost the size of the payload bay of the space shuttle, if anybody can remember that for me. Yep. It's like the size of a school bus, and it's roughly, you know, 15, 12 feet in diameter, internal diameter, maybe 45 feet long, and for people who speak meters, 15 meters long, 4 meters wide.

Does that is that Yeah. That's how that translates good enough. Yeah. So you've got the Columbus module that is a normal kind of a a a basic research and development module. It it is owned or operated anyway by the European Space Agency, and ESA has 22 member nations. About 16 of them are paying members who participate on the International Space Station. Destiny is the US lab, and that's the biggest laboratory there, and it also Destiny along with the habitation module that belong to the US.

That makes up the US segment and the US well, that's not all. Columbus, the European Space Agency module, Destiny, the Japanese space lab module, which is called Kibo or we call it GEM, the Japanese experiment module. Those components make up what's called the US segment, and they are considered by by the 2 2,005 NASA authorization act. They have been officially designated as the US National Laboratory.

So so when you talk about the US segment with its little partner except for the Russians except for the Russian parts, that's that's the national lab. The Russian segment, which is called Poisk, p o I s k, I think, as, that's where they do a lot of experiments and the like.

And so one of my one of my complaints, and I was never able to overcome it as a NASA administrator, was the fact that while we are unified and we work together as a team in space, there is still a little bit of division whereas the Russian cosmonauts because of the culture, historically, they didn't do things unless they were paid for because they were very they weren't paid very well.

They're they're not paid like American astronauts, and so they get they get extra they get bonuses for doing an experiment where they use where they took blood or they took urine. So if it belongs to their body and it goes into an experiment, they get paid for it. At least it used to be that way, and we don't do that in the US segment. When you sign on, you sign on, and everything everything about you and of you belongs to us.

So, you know, you didn't you didn't didn't get a chance to to get away with it. How much does an astronaut make? It depends on it depends on where they came from. For example, the military members maintain their military rank. I I spent 14 years in the astronaut program. When I went there, I was a major selected for promotion to lieutenant colonel, and when I came away, 14 years later, I was a colonel.

So my pay was exact when I first went down there, my pay was same as any major or any o four in any mill military branch. And when I came out, my pay was exactly the same as any o six in any military branch. So you paid for the rank where you were. For the civilians, they were in the civil service rank structure, and so a typical astronaut would come in as a as a GS 12, 13, 14 nowadays, and a GS 13, 14, probably, 80, 90,000. No. I probably I have no idea. No. That's okay.

It's just that you're just it's what you're describing is that there's a a pay scale based upon It's a basic pay scale. And and in theory in theory, you just gave the number so somebody can look it up. It's Yeah. Yeah. If somebody if somebody goes to civil service pay scale and finds out what a GS 13 through 15 makes, then then those 3 pays those 3 ranks or pay scales, pay pay grades are gonna give them an idea of what the average astronaut makes.

Now when you move into what's called the senior executive service ranks, and there are not too many astronauts who are SESs, who are senior executive service, because when you become an SES, then you're eligible to move be moved anywhere in the federal government.

And so somebody who's an astronaut doesn't wanna run the risk of being taken out of the astronaut office and sent to the Department of Education or the Department of Agriculture as a as an executive because an SES is exactly what it says. You're a you're a senior executive available for the service of the US government, and and they make anywhere from a 100 to $200,000 depending on what they do and what's what pay what step in the pay grade system they are.

So we just we we spent far more time talking about that. The the I actually pulled up the numbers, so we have them. A g s 13 is 78,681 to a102. Rudimentary astronaut, that's what they would make. And then a GS 15 is 109366 to 142180. Yeah. So though that you just went through the the range of salaries that an astronaut could make depending on how long they've been in the program and and what their pay grade is.

But but going back to the national lab, I I tried to explain what it was, but it is half of the crew time in the net in the national lab is is controlled or owned, if you will, by a nongovernmental organization. Today, it's called CASIS, the Center For Advanced Studies in Space, and it they are under contract to NASA to essentially run the national lab and plan out the experiments plan out and recruit, if you will, the experiments that are flown aboard the International Space Station.

Today, the International Space Station and the and the US National Laboratory is greatly oversubscribed. In other words, they have more experiments standing in line to be flown than they have the capability of of doing in any given period of time, and that's because of the limitation on the number of people on the station.

One of one of the one of the desired advantages that we will get now that we have, the SpaceX Crew Dragon and soon the Boeing CST 100 is it will be able to carry up to 7 astronauts at a time to space, and so that means that where we now have a crew of 6 at any given time and one of them spends almost each day you know, they kinda rotate, but somebody's taken care of the vehicle each day like the maintenance man.

When we get more crew members on board, we'll be able to have 6 or 7 crew members dedicated to research, and so you'll the the amount of of research that you'll get done in a given day or given period of time on orbit will go up. So we'll be able to to accommodate.

And and you're talking about customers, maybe the NIH, maybe the Department of Agriculture, could be civilian pharmaceutical companies, Merck, you know, those are the kinds of that's the kind of research that's going on on the International Space Station now. How much, given the existing past few years volume of astronauts on the station, what was the what's the volume in dollars? Do you know? I do not. I, that I don't know.

1 of the and and when you say the volume in dollars, do you mean how much People pay. Or how much is the government pulling in? How well, the the reason I brought it up was and maybe you can come from the question that I was defining in my head. I didn't say it as clearly as I should. Yeah. Is that if in fact there's opportunity for individuals listening or myself or anybody Yeah.

And or venture backed, they would wanna know what is the what's the how much volume is up there because someone could say, hey. Could we could we make another one of these? Can we expand it? Can we can we create a larger ecosystem? Is there a value in it? And this was not one of my topics, not one of my bullets, but can we talk about it? Yeah. Absolutely.

And that is another thing that I'm very interested in now and that I spend a lot of time on is promotion of of commercial space, truly commercial space. And I and I'll I'll use Jeff Member again as an example because you and I both know him. He is a And by the way, for anybody listening, there's a podcast. And Jeffrey Jeff did a fantastic job, and, Charlie's heard it, what, twice or three times? I don't know. You say you wanna listen. Twice, but Jeff is a dear friend, and Jeff Jeff is a pioneer.

I mean, we are the stuff that's going on on the International Space Station today, and that and that will come in the next I would say beginning in the next 2 years, there's a there's a company called Axiom Space. Yeah. Mike Sufferdini who used to run used to be the program manager for the International Space Station when I was the NASA administrator, what what they envision doing is similar to what Jeffrey did, stand alone space stations, commercial space stations.

So Acxiom will put a module on the International Space Station for a period of time, maybe a year, just the way that Bigelow did. Make sure that it works and make sure that it can be self sustaining once you separate it, and then they'll separate and and they'll begin to be the first commercial space station.

Will not be as large as today's space station, but we'll be able somebody like you would be able to go to Acxiom and say, hey, I I wanna do full time pharmaceuticals development in this area. Can I have a module dedicated to this? Because today, somebody does research on the International Space Station, and it's a finite amount of time, finite amount of volume, and, and finite finite amount of crew effort that goes into it.

And so either you automate it such that they turn it on and and it does it by itself. There's an Israeli company called Space Pharma. And, yeah, I know I know Yossi. I mean You know Yossi. And Yeah. I know Yossi. I've been to his I got photographs. I went to his place, and he is one he's a very big supporter of Project Moon Hut. And he one of the one of our fundamental beliefs or our fundamental data configuration is based upon a confirmation. When I went to him, I asked him a question.

Yeah. And he came back and said, I could use that service. Yeah. I mean, Yosie does yeah. What what SpacePharma does is they they do a lot of protein crystallography, but it is all automated. And so they are not as dependent on the crew as, say, many other researchers are. You know, you'll see, turn it on for me and then get out of my way because the the fundamental research is run by, somebody that's sitting in Tel Aviv or sitting in Haifa or It's done on a mobile phone sometimes.

It's done on anything. A laptop Yeah. With a cell phone, and they've got the band, you know. They use the NASA bandwidth to get the signal there, but it once it gets aboard, it goes to that that what they call a I think one of them is called, something on a chip. They they do all kinds of stuff. They're doing tissue growth, you name it. Yeah. The the and I brought it up. What he he's the challenge that they had was then they did nerve regeneration Yep.

That the nerve grew 10 times longer than they anticipated, which is a big issue. Someone gets cut in space or something goes wrong, we don't know how our bodies are going to regenerate, how are they gonna heal. Yet, we were able to do a nerve regeneration, which we can't do on earth. However, it was not what we expected.

Yeah. But, I mean, you know, experiments like that, water purification work, air quality improvement, we're looking at all those kinds of things in the US segment, and and one of one of the things that I like to talk about sometime is another is another bullet point. It's crop growth. Interestingly, we're now growing lettuce. We're growing, cherry tomatoes. We're growing beans, and this is because astronauts have to eat when they go to Mars.

There is no supply ship that's keeping up with them and bringing fresh food, so they're either gonna have to grow it or they're gonna have to make it. And that's where we're looking at using, fundamental feedstock to 3 d print food, whether it's meat like food or vegetable like food or whatever it is, and we're getting halfway decent.

You visited Ames Research Center, and one of the places that you probably visited was the, it's like a biochemistry lab or something like that, but it's synthetic biology, and it's where they're actually three d printing food or they're using, they're using, oh, jeez, bugs, for lack of a better name, microscopic stuff to to actually they can make bricks, so they work together with Stanford to make something called BioBrick.

Yeah. And it's it is building material that is as strong as concrete, you know, made by somebody like Portland Cement or Sacrete Concrete, but the same lab can make something that tastes like, a piece of ham that you're gonna make on a ham sandwich. But but that's the kind of stuff that's going on. It's we call it advanced astro culture.

One of the things that that has been that was discovered while Scott I think it was while Scott Kelly was on board was the fact that in trying to grow some of these plants, they were dying in the growth chamber. And it turned out that there was this hormone called ethylene that was killing the plants. And, so they started working on a technology that would that would take the ethylene out of the atmosphere in the in the in the growth chamber. Yep. Voila.

Now it prolongs the it prolongs the life of the experiments onboard the station. That technology has been brought back to Earth, so some of the very same grocery stores that you may be shopping, uses the same technology to to take ethylene out of the atmosphere in in a lot of the places in grocery stores, even in wineries, so that fresh fruits and vegetables last longer, wines become better, and all this other kind of stuff.

But those are those are all things that are done, whether it's crop growth or whether it's work in the in the Internet, in the national laboratory, or, any number of other things that we do on Well, the the just to to throw and toss in that you said the Ames facility. You didn't you probably didn't I don't know if I said it in the, video that you'd watched is that we started, with the portal, the NASA Ames, the space portal.

Yeah. So that was the beginning of the conversation, which is a long story, and one day, I guess I'll have to share it with you. But how Project Moon Hut came about was out of frustration. And so, yeah, it was just a space portal. So for for 6 years, five and a half, 6 years, every single month, I was at NASA Ames. You were probably there while Pete Ordon was there. Yeah. Pete was our first interview. Yeah. Okay. I sat down with Pete at at his new place. What was the name? Breakthrough.

Breakthrough where he's there with, Yuri Milner. Yeah. And he Pete, as you know, is known as a tough guy, really hard, and I was set to give him this whole thing about why he should be involved or why he should help me. I went 20 minutes, and he looked at me and said, I'm in. I said, what what do you mean you're in? He said, I'm in. I love it. Yeah. And he and I he said, and I'll do your I'll do your first interview. Really?

So, yeah, I was there when Pete was there, and I just saw Pete in Luxembourg. Yep. He is everywhere. He's everywhere. He's everywhere. So we we've got, let's see. We with crop growth. Is there anything else with crop growth? No. Not really. We, you know, we talked about the the basic thing there is what's what's coming back to us to make life better.

It's it's, among the things is finding out that that there is something that keeps plants from growing well, and if it doesn't kill them, and that's this this hormone called ethylene, and that is transferrable back to technology on earth that enables your vegetables and fruits and stuff to stay longer in the on the grocery shelves and and eventually, we'll bring you better wine, I think.

So if we can eliminate GMOs to some degree and so that we can get a more pure crop and we can eliminate the ethylene, we could end up with a more natural product than earth. You're absolutely right. And that's probably what we're gonna eat on the way to Mars, and when we get to Mars. So the last one you had was Oh, it's just my concern about interplanetary contamination, and and Just your concern. Well, it's it's not my concern. I I I'm learning from people.

Look, most of this stuff, you know, we weren't I've only been gone from NASA for 3 years, but but what's been done over the last 3 years have been absolutely incredible. But but we we have discovered that we've actually taken, strains of bacteria, and we have flown them to space and back, and we find that that if we hide them from ultraviolet radiation from the sun, specifically, that, they survive. We can put them out in space.

We they can be on the on the outside in the unpressurized part of a spacecraft. They can go to the they can go circle around the moon and come back, or they can go to the International Space Station and survive for years at a time, which has led us to believe that we may actually have had life forms that could have come from Mars or somewhere else in our solar system, if not in the greater universe, that have made the trip to earth and survived.

So we may actually have, and I hate this word, but alien life forms that survived the trip here in a meteorite or a or a particle from an asteroid that broke up doing its reentry or its entry into the Earth's atmosphere, and, and it's not of Earth's origin. And we wouldn't even know it because, you know, from the day of the big bang, we think everything started from the same place anyway, and that's why we study asteroids and go to other planets and everything else.

Because every time we learn something about another body in our solar system, we learn something else about our own planet Earth.

It's like discovering sands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina that looks a little different or has some slightly different chemical property than what we usually see there, and we go into the archives and we find out, oh, it's different because it came from the Sahara Desert, and it got caught in a dust storm and went up into the stratosphere, and the upper atmosphere winds took it across the Atlantic Ocean, and and it got caught up in a storm and came back down and got rained onto the beaches of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

So the planet is not as big as we think it is. The solar system is not at all as big as we think it is, and our universe is getting smaller and smaller even as it expands every day, because that is what's happening to the universe.

But but we're much more connected than we think, and that's why many of us are so anxious to finally have humans on Mars because we'll be able to do over the course of if we had had most of my science friends tell me, if we had had one geologist on the surface of Mars for as long as Curiosity has been there, that geologist probably would have completed completely, explored the planet by now because humans are just mobile.

The as we were talking, one of the things that I love about Jeffrey Mamber's interview or discussion. I like more discussion. I think you can tell these are discussions. Yeah. One of the things that I really love this Jeffrey shared pieces of information that people like you and others have said, I I haven't heard that from him. And if, yeah, what what what haven't we heard from you? I mean, what's something that you have not really and I'm not saying to put yourself out there at risk.

I'm saying because I I know there are things I I there's gotta be something that you have not really put out there, a great story, a great example, something that you're proud or something you're not proud or whatever it may be that Oh, no. I I told you. I'm I'm incredibly proud of the people with whom I've served. No. No. I I just mean your story. Something. I I loved when Jeffrey was telling the story, and not a lot of people had heard it. Some people had.

But then he was at the when the Russian space agency was formed Yeah. He was on the Russian side as an American. Yeah. And his his discussion about agencies and how he dislikes them, I had never heard that before in the way and other people had not. So with you, what what I'm trying it's the question. What are you not telling me that I would love to hear? Nah. I I don't know that I'm not telling I mean, we could we could talk forever about things I've seen and done, but but we don't have.

What would be something amazing that has happened? I I don't know that there would be something amazing about Come on. About what Charlie Holden has done. I I tell people all the time, and it's I'm I tell people I'm a a normal ordinary person who has been blessed to do extraordinary things. So I when people ask me about about discrimination, I think back to my childhood, and it is really, really hard for me to give them a concrete example or a story about something.

And it's because I think my mom and dad equipped me to live with what I was given, you know, what God gave me and make the best of it, and not worry about the things about which I had no control. And it's what I tell young people today. I tell I tell young women particularly and and and also minorities. Don't waste your time trying to explain to somebody who you are or what you are. Just do your job and do it in an in the excellent manner that I know you're capable of doing it.

In my time at NASA, as the administrator, my plea to our employees was just do your job. Don't don't waste your time trying to explain to somebody why NASA should be around or why this or why that. Do your job, and and people will understand. So I don't you know, I've I've not done anything that I think is extraordinary. I've I've I've participated in extraordinary things, but but I'm a kind of an ordinary person who's who's participated in those extraordinary things.

I've been blessed to do that. I and I can't take credit for it. Oh, I I've I I loved our our very first time sitting for hours talking, and I I bet you didn't think and I that you'd be coming back to an interview podcast at this point. And I loved the email the other day that said, are you still up for the interview? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Real. Like, what what are you waiting? Myself into? What what are you waiting for?

I mean, I've I've been sitting on the sidelines saying, when are you calling me back? So, this is great, Charlie. I I appreciate it. Is you gave not always interviews are never what I thought think they will be. And I love that you were able to demonstrate after demonstrate and demonstrate and demonstrate and demonstrate.

To a large degree, what they, demonstrate examples of how space and earth and the connection between the 2 have benefited, some might disagree, let's say they have advanced certain technologies and and conditions because we haven't solved the diversity, inclusion, and equity. And that is the critical critical challenge. Well So I'll go back to where I started. Yeah. Go back. I'd like you to tell me. I'm I'm I'm here. You know, I I will go back to where we started this conversation.

Until we solve the problem of diversity, inclusion, and equity, we're gonna continue to stumble around and bumble around this planet, trying to figure out how we exclude people from the things that are going on rather than allowing them all in and taking advantage of the diversity of thought and ideas that will make us even more powerful and excellent than we are today.

We cannot afford, as we learned with women, or we're learning with women, you cannot afford to put 50% of the population on the sideline and hope to win the football game. You can't you know, if you you can't put 50% of your talent on the sideline and think you're gonna win. That that doesn't get it nowadays when you know, that's why when little schools go in to play Alabama, Alabama's got a 100 kids sitting on the bench, and they play a 100 kids.

Ypsilanti State comes down, and they've got 50 kids on the bench, and the poor coach tries to play 20 of them because there is 20 best people. My big schools learned that everybody's good, and if I let them play, everybody's gonna perform up to their sometimes exceed my expectation, and and, boy, will we be good. And that's the way that humanity has to be. We've gotta understand that we are we will be as great as we allow, people to participate and make us Are we closer?

We're much closer than ever before. Trust me. And and let me tell you, you you and I may not know it yet, but I think watching young kids in this past week, unless people like me go out and stop them from doing what I think they're gonna do, we are a lot closer than we've ever been before. I I put I put my faith in in, in the youth of the world, not just not just this country. They are not gonna I don't think they're gonna let us destroy their world. I think they're just gonna take over, I hope.

You know, I at this part here, then you're getting emotional and I am too at the same time. No. No. I I it's the saddest it is so sad to me, having lived in multiple countries. I I lived in Hong Kong. I mean, I have so many friends. I don't know. It's not skin color. It's not gender. It's not I from Bangladesh to to Moscow, from Cartagena to Bali, there's just amazing people around the world, and this this one topic saddens me beyond imagination.

I don't know how people treat people in the way they do. There's plenty to go around. Yeah. And and we're not we have the biggest divide in the history of mankind, bigger than the gilded age. And it it it it makes me sad. I'm the eternal optimist. I I I just believe that, you know, we're gonna in a in a and a little child shall lead them. And that's where at the end we're going to project Moonhop will improve life on earth for all species.

Absolutely. So, Charlie, I I appreciate with all my heart, I appreciate you taking the time, to to to do the work that risk required to create an interview, which I know people say, wow. I never did so much work for an interview. I know. It's true. I think yeah. There's funny. People say I don't I didn't know I have to do work. And I really appreciate the time. I really appreciate the the topics you covered. Thank you. Thank you so so much. Very much for the opportunity. It's it's been great.

I, I I I learned it seems like every time I do something, I learn a lot, and and I have learned so much in in preparing for this and in in in carrying on the conversation with you. I I appreciate you letting me be a part of it. Oh, fantastic. So, for all of you out there who are listening and you've taken the time out of your day to listen, I hope that you learned something today, that you connected some dots. You were able to be wowed or challenged or find a new path.

And in that, you'll make your life and the lives of other or you help them to be improved. And project Moon Hut, which was named by NASA, It's not a name we came up with at NASA Ames. They said they named the project. It used to be a box of the roof and a door, and they gave it the Moon Hut.

And what we're looking to do is establish the box of the roof and the door of Moon Hut through the accelerated development of this ecosystem, that's earth and space based ecosystem we call Mearth, moon and earth. That in that space in which we live, if we take the ideas that were talked about by Charlie today and any and many of the other guests, that paradigm shift thinking, these innovations, and we turn them back on earth.

We not only get to space and achieve the desired outcome of box, a roof, and a door, but in the venture, in the ability or the challenge or the the the road to get there, we bring those back. And as we're responsible for our planet, we improve the lives of all species on planet Earth. So, once again, Charlie, thank you very much. Is there one way that people could get a hold of you? Is there one that you'd like to give if they wanted to come?

You know, I'm, people see me on Twitter, but my my email is the easiest way, and that's just it's very simple. It's [email protected]. No no periods in the Charles Bolden, just one long word. Fantastic. And if you'd love to connect to me or to Project Moon Hut, you could reach out to me at [email protected]. You can, go to Twitter at at project moon hut. You can go to the YouTube, and there is a first two videos we have not marketed for 6 years.

We've got about 60, 70 people around the world, but right there, you could see 2 videos to get an introduction to Project Moon Hut. And it's not Project Moon Hut. It's not what we do, but it's an introduction, and Charlie's seen it. I think there's a lot of value there. And then it's it's an education in the an experience. And you can I'm mister David Goldsmith. I'm at Goldsmith on Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn, on Facebook. We have a fantastic team we're working with, and we're continuing to grow.

Charlie, I appreciate once again. For everybody out there, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.