We have a very special treat. We'd like to say good morning to NASA astronaut and Space Force Guardian Colonel Nick Haig, the first Space Force Guardian ever on the International Space Station, the commander of the Crew nine mission, Colonel Haig, I'm guessing you hear this a lot, but welcome home.
Thanks, Ami, it's great to be with you this morning.
So, you spent one hundred and seventy one days in space, you did a space walk, you had a successful splashdown. Obviously back down on Earth along with Alex and of course Sonny Williams and Butch Willmore. It's been an exciting six months. How are you and everybody doing?
Yeah, you know, it's hard to believe the six months goes by really fast, and you know we're back on the ground and just over three weeks back in gravity and adjusting and everything's going pretty good.
Okay, So I want to ask you about that gravity because we saw you when the capsules splashed down and saw you come out of the capsule with a pretty big smile on your face. Can you tell us what you were feeling at that moment and what it feels like to go from weightlessness to full on gravity.
Gravity in a matter of minutes.
Yeah, you know, the smile coming out of the capsule is just the thrill of you've just re entered. You've gone from seventeen five hundred miles an hour down to zero. And we do that by writing in the center of essentially a fireball. And then you know, the adrenaline rush from that experience, and then watching your parachutes open and landing safely, you're just ecstatic to be home. And so
there's a lot of that going on. But then you're also starting to realize, hey, you know, gravity is real, and I've been able to ignore it for the last six months. You're strong, you know, you can stand up, you can carry your own weight, but your sense of balance is really not there. And so that's why they pull us out. They put us on a gurney, They wheel us around. You know, for the first day or so, somebody is there making sure that when we're walking we
don't we don't stumble. But after a few days the body snaps back. It is just truly amazing how adaptable our bodies are.
Okay, so when you say that that it's hard because your balance is off, do you have sort of like a vertigo feeling, or just you're just not used to having to balance.
You just not you haven't used that part of your brain, you know, your inner ear you've kind of ignored for the last six months while you've been in space. And then when you get down on the ground, you know, if I stand up and close my eyes, my mind really doesn't know how to figure out which ways up and which ways down, and so you get a little bit off balance, and then gravity takes over. So you've
just got to be really careful. And but it, like I said, it's amazing because you know, I'll take a nap, wake up, and there's there's this just huge increase in the amounts that my body has already adapted. And so over the course of twenty four hours, you're you know, you're pretty close to having your balance back. Even within the first six hours or so, you go from needing somebody to hold your arm everywhere you go to being able to walk on your own, okay.
And then I was trying to figure out what that might feel like, you know, like we were talking about going from no gravity to having full gravity and having to deal with that, and I was I was like, would it be sort of like when they put those weighted vests on you when you get X rays at the dentist and then you have to walk around all day with one on.
Does it do you have that heavy feeling or what does it feel like?
Yeah, you know, when you described it perfectly, it's like you're wearing this body suit that adds just this excessive amount of weight. Everything feels like it's twenty pounds heavier than it should be. And so just lifting your arm takes effort, or or moving your head takes effort. Uh, And it feels strange because it, you know, for the last six months it's taken no effort, and then slowly, over the course of a couple of days, Uh, that
just becomes your new normal. And you know, I've been back just over three weeks, and you know, after I get off the off the call with you, I'm going to go over and continue with my reconditioning and my strength and conditioning coaches are going to have me, you know, running and lifting and doing all the things that you would expect somebody to be doing, you know, just trying to stay in shape. And so we bounce back so fast.
Okay, And when you were up on the space station. Weren't you exercising a couple hours a day?
Yes, at two and a half hours a day every day. Yeah, so you come you come back so much stronger. You know, I came back stronger than when I launched because I was lifting every day, and so the the big muscles, the you know, my skeleton and remains you know strong. My big muscles remain strong. The real challenge is all of the little muscles that stabilize everything and keep all my joints in the right position. Those are a little
bit you know, those are a little bit atrophied. And so we spend a good forty five days after we land getting all of those conditions so that my joints go back to the right positions that they're supposed to be in. And you've got to be really patient because you're strong, so I can go and out you know, outperform those and end up hurting myself. So's it's a very regiment and program interesting.
Okay, And are you taller too? I've heard that some astronauts come back taller.
So I came back taller, and then I lost it all. Gravity took it away, so it.
Was short lived. Okay, I want to go back up into space for a second. I want to we'll talk in a minute about like what you were doing on the space station and stuff, But the whole journey is so fascinating to me. We followed when you undocked from the space station, when you were finally ready to go home, and there's this pretty large lag time between when you separate from the station and when you re enter the Earth's atmosphere. How long was that and what do you do during that time?
So it was seventeen hours for us. It varies depending. The reason there's that delay is you're waiting essentially for the alignment of your orbit and the position of your capsule to line up with your target for your splash down, and depending on where the station is when you undock, that could change anywhere from seven hours to forty hours, and that's just orbital dynamics, and so what do you
do during that time. We had a fairly long day prior to undocking, and so as soon as we undocked, we got our suits off and got into some comfortable clothes and we all went to bed, and so we slept the solid eight hours and then we got up and we still had a lot of time, and so we did what you might expect a crew coming home
from space would do. We were glued to the windows, looking out, enjoying, you know, the last views we have, you know, for the foreseeable future of the you know, the night sky and all the stars and galaxies and looking down on the Earth during the daytime and just trying to soak it in as much as we could.
That's so great.
And then for the re entry again we're talking to Space Force Guardian Colonel Nick Haig, who just returned from the International Space Station. For the re entry, I mean, it's got to be nerve wracking because you're still going thousands of miles an hour, and then when you do the entry, you're super heated. You're basically, like you said, a big fireball. Like, what does that feel like?
Do you guys?
Are you guys talking and joking during that time or are you just kind of holding on? I mean, what do you do during that time? And what does it feel like?
Yeah, so, you know, the first when you're in the space station, you're you're, you know, four hundred kilometers two hundred and fifty miles above the surface of the Earth, and so as the Earth goes by below, Because I mean, you're really traveling over the Earth, but you see it as the Earth going by below. You don't really realize what five miles a second means in terms of speed.
But once you start to descend lower, we really don't slow down until we start to get into the thick part of the atmosphere, or a thicker part of the atmosphere. So that's four hundred kilometers down to about eighty kilometers. At that point, all those clouds that look really small start to look really big and they are screaming by the windows, and so you get this sense of we are going really fast. And then the air starts to impact our heat shield and that drag builds up and
you can kind of feel the rumble, the vibration. You know, we've spent the time leading up to this kind of turning the air conditioner on, if you will, to max to try to get it as cool as we can inside, because that that aerodynamic heat, that that friction from all that drag is going to start to heat up all the atmosphere around the capsule, heat up our each shield,
and essentially it creates a fireball around us. That's about three thousand degrees and and we're in the center of that, in the calm, the eye of the storm, and you what we feel is essentially just G. So we get squashed into our seat and it goes from six months of not feeling anything and floating to all of a sudden, the G meter reads point zero one g's or point zero two. By the time it gets too point one
one tenth of the gravity everybody feels every day. It feels like somebody's sitting on you because you just haven't been used to feeling it, and you know, it's it's surprising that you know, the first half a G, it's like a man, I don't know if I'm going to be able to handle this. And then your body kind of gets used to it. And then by the time we reach our maximum G, which is just under five g's,
you you're kind of comfortable. So I'm you know, looking at the displays, I'm talking the crew through everything that's going on, where we're at, what what to prepare for next, getting ready for shoots to deploy, and so it's a it's kind of a normal conversation. Uh, and you just you know, you just get you get used to having hav An Earth squashy.
A little bit another day at the office.
It sounds like, indeed, you know, it's like having a conversation why while you're writing a roller coaster.
Okay, okay, nice, that's a great analogy.
We are joined on wake up call this morning by NASA astronaut and Space Force Guardian Colonel Nick Haigh. He's the first Space Force Guardian ever on the International Space Station and also the commander of the Crew nine mission. Colonel Haig, thanks again for joining us. We so appreciate you spending some time with us this morning.
Yeah.
Absolutely, it's it's fun to share the experience.
Well, I know that last time we talked to you, Colonel Haig, we were well, I was kind of jumping out of my skin thrilled we got to talk to you live on the International Space Station. And that was back that was about six months ago. It was pretty early in your mission since you had gotten there, and so we wanted to kind of check in and see what it was like for the last six months. So I know that one of the things that you guys
do is you do a lot of experiments. Are there some of the experiments that you can tell us about that. We're kind of notable to you.
Yeah. Absolutely. You know, the reason we're up there on the space station, the International Space Station to begin with, is to conduct science experiments. You know, I talked about all the things that being in weightlessness does to my body. It does those same things to all of our experiments, and it helps us learn a little bit more, a little bit deeper about everything. And so there we in the course of six months, I was part of one hundred and fifty ke plus different types of experiment and
it's it's everything from looking at at our bodies. You know, how being weightless affects my immune system, how it affects my age of my vascular system. Uh, you know, being in weightlessness can cause my arteries to accelerate in their aging or mimic what it's like to have accelerated aging.
And so we we research what those what those changes are, and then by better understanding those we can we can help inform medicine on the ground for for people that are experiencing aging of their vascular system or have you know, suppressed immune systems. So that's a couple of examples, but it spans the whole game. I grew lots of things up there because we're trying to figure out how do we sustain crews when we send them on missions beyond
Earth orbit? How do we grow the food that we're going to need to take because we can't resupply them all the time. So it's it's it's just a lot of fun to be up there in the middle of it all if you enjoy a if you're a curious person, it's an amazing job.
Okay, and Colonel Hay were the experience that you did, were those form NASA only or for they were they also for Space Force because again there's this this symbiotic relationship between the two. Even though NASA is a civilian organization, of course Space Force is a military organization.
Yeah, and so you know, I'm a Space Force guardian and and my job is to work for NASA conducting the civil space mission, not the not the the you know, the National Security Space mission. And it is a symbiotic relationship. And so you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't thank all of my fellow guardians that are stationed around the globe that that provided all those essential things like you know, keeping us clear of debris, up there and helping us move the station to get out of the way,
or helping us launch and land. You know, they do some fundamental things that make it possible for us to even go up there and do those science experiments and there. You know, it's just phenomenal to be associated with that team and to be a representative of the Space Force.
But yeah, those experiments up there. It's an international space station, and so I'm conducting experiments across you know, for for universities across the nation, you know, the United States, but I'm also conducting them for other governments, you know, whether it's Japan or the European Space Agency and all of the countries associated with that. It's a little you know, agnostic.
I don't necessarily care where the research is coming from, because in principle, we're sharing that information with everyone, and so the discoveries on the space station come back and benefit the whole world.
Good to see that we all get along in space.
Okay, So when we talk to you when you're on the space station, no space walks had been done.
But as it turns out, you got to one. How long was that and what did you do? And what was it like?
You know, a spacewalk is effectively eleven hours in a spacesuit. It takes a while to put it on, and then once you're in it, before you even step out of the space station, you have to purge all of the nitrogen that's naturally in your body because you go down to a lower pressure when you start to work outside
in the vacuum of space. So after about four hours, then we go out the hatch and you know, from a thrill perspective, you open the hatch and you look down and two hundred and fifty miles below there's the Earth kind of just gliding by, and you can see snow covered mountaintops and fan dunes and oceans and it's just spectacular. You know, it's an office. It's the best
view you could have at work. And you go out and you're you know, at some point the just kind of melts away and you're just working outside with your with your coworker. You know, Sonny was out there with me and uh and uh we got to work. We we were working on repairing a couple of things.
Uh.
You know, the station is old, it's been up there for two and a half decades.
Uh, and and so we.
Repaired a couple of pieces of equipment that needed to be replaced. Uh, and then I also got to work on an X ray telescope, which we use to kind of try to answer those deep questions about why are we here and how did the universe? How did the universe come into being? You know, it studies neutron stars and the you know, the remnants of of of massive explosions in space, and so I got to work on that and help repair it.
That's so cool.
Okay, So we only have a couple of minutes left, so I got to ask you a couple of questions about life on the space station.
You were up there for Christmas. Did you get to like did what is that like?
I mean, did you get to take the day off? Did you celebrate or was it just another day in the office.
You know, we still have to we still have to make sure that the station goes and keeps running, and so there's a little bit of work on every day. But holidays, it's an international space station, so we celebrated.
We celebrated Christmas just like everybody else here in the United States, but we also ended up celebrating Russian Orthodox Christmas, and so we celebrate international holidays up there as well, and so we find time to get together as a crew of seven and have a meal, you know, make a cake, put out, you know, a spreadshare our you know us food, or partake in you know, the international food that's there, and really just commune with each other as people and and talk about you know, families and
everything that's going on in each other's lives, and share our favorite music with each other and tell jokes and and just be And those are really special times up there.
And I would imagine for New Year's no one got to pop champagne. I would think that might be a little.
Dangerous, a little bit dangerous.
All right.
I did see one of your videos and I noticed that your hair was shorter than when we talked to you. So you've got a haircut in space And I want to know, this is important question stuff, How does that work? Because I would imagine it would be very problematic to have hair floating around the space station.
Absolutely anything floating around is if it floats around, it can get in your eyes. Even worse, you could breathe it in than it gets in your lungs. And so we're always trying to scrub the air up there to make sure that stuff that's floating around gets taken out of it. So a haircut, essentially you're hooking a vacuum cleaner hose to the hair trimmer. But an interesting fact is we receive no training on how to give a haircut, So the first one is a little you know, dicey, but we learn as we go.
I love that, okay, and we're coming up at the top of the hour.
I know we got to go.
You got to go in thirty seconds, Colonel Hag, what's next for you?
So the mission doesn't end when you land. Surprisingly, I'm going to do rehab. But there's also those science experiments. They're still collecting data on me for the next thirty days, sixty days, some of them will collect data on me up to two years after I land. That's the science aspect. The other aspect is for the next four or five months, my focus is going to be on going out and engaging the public and sharing the story and so that postflight tour I'm looking forward to.
Well, we hope that your.
Tour includes a stop in Los Angeles. We would love to welcome you home in person, and again, Colonel Haig. We can't thank you enough for all of your time and everything that you're doing. It's been such a thrill to get to talk to you and get a little bit of insight into what it's like to be an astronaut.
So we thank you so much.
Yeah, no, my pleasure, Amy and I do look forward to visiting.
La all right again.
That is Space Force Guardian NASA astronaut old Nick Hagu fresh off his trip around the Earth six months in space.
Amazing stuff.