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I Am six forty bill Handle.
Here it is a taco Tuesday, June seventeenth. Pretty special guest this morning a friend of Amy's, Colonel Nick Hayes, NASA astronaut, who is on a four month tour, a PR tour around the country because that's what they do. And he brought his fourteen year old son with him, Asher, And I asked, Asher, are you bored silly coming to these things? He said absolutely so, Colonel Haig, how can you do that to your kid?
I know it's cruel and unusual punishment, isn't it.
Yeah? Yeah, fourteen year olds? Look what you did.
Hey, congratulations, you're starting your summer vacation and you get to follow me around for a week.
Yeah.
I also asked him, so do you stay in the same hotel room as your dad?
He goes absolutely. I go do they give you an nice hotel room?
Goes no, no, no, no, this is the gard special treatment nothing, you know, this small hotel room and yeah, none of that. Although you have the Dodger game today, it's a Colonel Haig, do you mind if we get inform informal, can I just call you colonel Haig? You could just call me Nick and that'd be great. Oh that's even better. Well you can call me your excellent See that works out.
Well.
Oh do I have questions? Now?
I know you've gotten every question in the world. Inevitably the bathroom question everybody asked you.
Is that where you're starting?
No, God, now I will finish up there. Yea, yeah, I couldn't care less. Uh. And the food, there's so much tang you can drink, of course, you know the food that Yeah, okay, fine, we've done that. But life on the space station. Uh, that one gets kind of interesting. First of all, what's the difference between, for example, being weightless and going in a really fast elevator?
So is it just a question of time?
So weightless, it's it's the we're up there in orbit because we're all falling toward the center of the Earth. We just happen to be going fast enough forward that as we fall the trajectory, the curvature of our trajectory matches the curvature of the Earth. And so if you could throw a baseball five miles a second, then it would go into orbit, but you can't throw it that fast.
But that's what we do with the space station. So there's this thing up there that's the size of a football field that we assembled over the course of a decade and over one hundred spacewalks put this laboratory together, and it allows us to float or free fall NonStop as long as we want to.
So, uh, do you get used to it? I mean, does that become do wayless?
This just becomes sort of a normal thing like gravity is here.
We don't pay attention to Your body adapts, your mind adapts, and so first your your body figures out, hey, everything's floating inside me, and it starts to adapt how it processes those inputs, and so it stops listening to your inner ear and it just uses your eyes for visual cues on how you navigate around. You start predicting subconsciously how things are going to behave based on floating versus
being in gravity. So if go back to a ball analogy, if I was going to throw a ball when I'm up there, if I threw it to you, I'd invariably hit the ceiling when I first got there, because I'm trying to compensate for gravity. When I get back down to Earth, the exact same happens. So you know, you throw it short because you're not planning on gravity. I've been back three months, so I've got high hopes that I'm actually going to get the first pitch across the plate tonight.
Oh that's right, you are. Show Hey, Otani's going to be putting the ball in orbit. I understand he'll do that five miles a second. Now I know that, and everybody sees that in the videos. Is the exercise two and a half hours you have to do and that treadmill where you're strapped, you have that tether down there two and a half hours of They get at least give you a little screen in front so you can watch Netflix or something.
Oh yeah, that's because the wall is like two feet away. It get pretty monotonous. So we do have iPads up there, get apps we can download. We've got great connectivity up there, so I can download shows and binge watch seasons of things. So there's a lot of there's a lot of podcasts. There's a lot of things that you can listen to two and a half hours a day every day.
You we get bored.
I mean just you know, you're doing this basically this sort of the same thing, or is it so different, different experiments, different things that you do that it's just all fascinating.
It's like waking up at Christmas. You don't know what's going to be inside some of these boxes. Some of the stuff we don't actually see until I open it up. And so there's a team on the ground, hundreds of people. They plan every five minute segment of the day, and from seven thirty in the morning till seven thirty at night, they're telling us, hey, this is what you need to do,
and so we do experiment after maintenance after experience. Keep busy and it's different every day, and so we're busy, the time flies, and then if you're ever bored, then all you need to do is just.
Float over to the window.
How much free time do you get a day? If any? Free time is how you define it. You know, during the work day, there's not really much free time. Before we start the work day, You've got about an hour and a half after you wake up, but you got to eat and you got to get ready for the day and check your email and check in with the
family at home. And then you've got about an hour two hours before you go to bed after the end of the workday, and so there's time to steal away moments and enjoy living in space.
Say you're up for how long?
Six months? This time?
Around six months? Yeah, and you're there. Obviously, do they pay you overtime over forty hours?
I would think no salary employee, no overtime.
Wow, it turns out you don't even make minimum wage.
Does it not if you add up all the hours? Yeah, all right.
Colonel haigu is here. Colonel Nick Haig is with us.
Say an astronaut, am still working as an astronaut. We were just talking Nick, You've been kind enough to let me call you Nick. That we were going through the process of how you get selected as an astronaut. And I'm a space buff and you go look back to the original seven astronauts and what they had to go through. I mean the testing, I mean, for it's just insane. They got prodded and poked and I mean there were more things going to their bodies simultaneously.
That's just part of it.
Are they still that insane or has it become reality now?
They are still that thorough yes, you know, medical getting over the medical bar is one of those high things. So you know, if you want to become an astronaut, you got to take care of yourself, you know, just in general it's a good thing to take care of your body and take care of yourself and stay in shape. But yeah, it's an in depth, thorough screening process. But
it all starts with an application. And to apply to be an astronaut, you just have to be a you know, a US citizen and have a master's degree in a STEM field and submit your application online when they send out a call for a selection, and they do that based on demand, and on average it's been about once every four or five years there'll be a job listing on USA Jobs.
Now, it used to be we go back to the original Yeah, right there. You look at indeed, the original astronauts and in the second class, and Neil Armstrong was in the second class astronauts, interestingly enough, and he had applied and you know, the first time.
Out didn't make it. They were all test pilots.
That was Eisenhower who decided that test pilots were going to be it. Anybody who I'm assuming is either the commander or actually flies, you know, pilots they aircraft and during the Shuttle days had to be a pilot of some kind.
Right, Yeah, the Space Shuttle was a different vehicle. The capsules we fly now have a different, different interface, if you will. We still, as an astronaut Corps value the skill set of the test pilot, but we also bring in a pretty you know, disparate experience base when we bring in a class, and so we don't want everybody to be a test pilot. We want to have those different.
I would think.
So now I'm assuming the psychological testing has to be insane, that you have to get along with people. Have you ever flown with anybody that just everybody hated? Yeah, yeah, just I hate that person and you're there for six months.
Yeah.
Well, you know, fortunately we don't end up on the
International Space Station like that. There's you know, we we select people coming in, and you're right, there is a pretty steep or pretty thorough selection process where we'll bring people in and you know, put them in this in this situation, put a number on them, have a whole group of people surrounding them taking notes, and then give them something to solve that's impossible to solve and then see how the stress of the situation plays out and
understand their inner skills, because fundamentally, you want to be on a space mission in that confined space with people that are good people to work with, and so we really want to know do you have those soft skills you Are you a good teammate? Do you take care of yourself? Do you look to take care of the people that you're with? And are you kind?
Do they put groups together? I mean, did you meet.
Let's say this is the crew that's going to go up, and y'all sit around and do a cocktail party the night before, so you get to know each other.
Or field trips in Disneyland or whatever.
We do our version of that.
So once I got assigned to Crew nine mission, we took our crew and we went to Wyoming and through an outfit there, the National Outdoor Leadership School, we did a six day camping trip up into the mountains in waist deep snow and built igloes and suffered in the cold and got to know each other in that stressful environment. So yeah, we spend time intentionally getting to know each other and understand, you know, what's everybody everybody's got pet peeves.
Everybody got things that kind of you know, we'll set them on edge a little bit and you understand what those are and then you figure out how you're going to be successful together.
A lot of big glob building, I'm assuming on the space station.
Yeah, it's similar.
Do you, for one, colonel, have no idea what it's like to be locked in a small space with someone you hate, working day in and day out.
Yeah, I don't know how you do it.
Yeah, I feel by the tone in your voice you like me to close the door here.
No, no, no, I'm fine.
I've got two other questions. I'm hoping we can do this for hours. That and that is do you work in different shifts where there really is no time and people are sleeping at different times, eating at different times.
We try to synchronize to a day.
The circadian rhythm and a person is really important, and so the whole crew will synchronize to Greenwich meantime. Wake up at six am, go to bed at nine thirty at night. And that's also important to synchronize because we've got it's not just the seven people on the space station, it's the hundreds of people in Mission Control Center and So you've got a mission control center in Houston, in Japan, in Germany and Russia, and so they all have to be synchronized.
And I'm assuming one person stays awake just as a guard in case anybody breaks in.
Yeah, you always got a guard against the aliens out there. I know where you're going with this. We all sleep together and fortunately the ground is there twenty four to seven, so we really rely on the ground support.
It's a gigantic team that makes it work well.
Apolo was what four hundred thousand people that put the three men on the moon. What was the first meal you ate when you got off the space station?
I had a Deli sandwich If that sounds strange, not at all. Fresh bread is something that you don't get up there because it's not shelf stable for long enough. And so a nice loaf of bread making a good sandwich is nice.
What's the best thing that they serve you up there food wise? And what's something that everybody hates and will not eat?
Uh?
Well, everybody's got their own personal preferences. I I typically wouldn't touch the crawfish attufe uh uh, because you get sick and throwing up there. Is not easy taste changes up there. So for whatever reason for me, that is a really bland dish, and so to make it spicy, I end up having to add so much hot sauce that it leads to indigestion. So it's just better not to not to not to eat it. But you know,
best foods up there. I got a sweet tooth, So I work out two and a half hours a day up there every day, which affords me the ability to enjoy some dessert.
No corn nuts, because everybody hates those.
And you know they're they're hard, and so you don't want to fracture a tooth up there. Oh yeah, because because then the dentist, which we don't have a dentist up there. So I've had training so that I can try to temporarily fill a cavity or pull a tooth. Oh really, And you don't want me doing that, do you?
Oh that's cool?
So uh yeah, I'm assuming you're you're you know, I mean, they don't have doctors up there, and I don't think anybody's gotten seriously sick where they had to send someone down, have they.
So we've we've had conditions, but we are always have been able to manage those conditions. Space is really hard on the body. Thankfully, there's a team of doctors on the ground and every so often we have an astronaut that is a doctor that's on board, so we leverage that expertise when we can. But we've got flight surgeons on the ground that are in constant contact, so if we have an emergency, we bring them in on the radio and they can talk through and we do a lot of training.
Yeah, and constant training. When you're down here. As soon as this tour thing is over, are you back to Yeah. It never gets old. You're always training, you're always learning something new. It's it's like, you know, it's like going to college your whole life.
How often can you actually fly.
Or let me put it this way, the time the timeline between you coming down and then everybody wants to go back up on assuming as quickly as possible.
What's usually that timeline?
Yeah, on every.
It's probably it's hard to say three, four or five years. When you think of the demand, there's a two year usually a two year lead up to your launch, so you're assigned two years of training. You launch, there's another six months on board the station. And then there's a six month postflight to rehabilitate, to reconnect with the family and rest up and be ready to go again. So that's three years minimum, but it's it's a little bit
more than that. You know, there's four dozen of us down at Houston active astronauts on the US side, and so we cycle through a flight assignments.
One last question, because we're out of time. When your kid goes to school and they you know, they bring in what your dad do day does when he says my dad's an astronaut, do all the kids think he's just a liar?
No, because we live in a town where the mayor is a former astronaut and there's a dozen astronauts.
Deal, it's no big deal. I tell you.
What is a big deal is my dad he's a plumber. My dad's my dad's in the space for that. That is a little bit different because it hasn't existed very long, and so I think that that's a that's a you know, something that he is still educating his his classmates about, you know, like what is a guardian?
What does the Space Force do?
That's cool, that's cool, colonel, Thank you? What a what a trip?
This is I wish we had another hour and a half on this at least, But onwards and upwards. I know you're going in to the Dodger game tonight, and I know anything over ten bucks you cannot accept.
You have to buy your own Dodger dogs.
We're gonna, we're gonna, We're gonna enjoy our evening and I'm not gonna.
Look at the pocketbook.
Yeah, all right, guys, we're done. Time for Tech Tuesday.
Mike Dubuski, ABC News Technology reporter Mike is always thanks for hanging out. Quick question, well I even actually not even quick. The Trump family phone plan. So let me ask you. I don't know if you bought a one of the Trump ties bibles. The stakes were very strong, and now we've got the phone plan, tell us about it. Why would other than for political reasons, why would I buy a phone plan?
That's a great question, and I will try to measure up to the astronaut here.
I know it's a tough act to.
Follow, but yes, on Monday here in New York City, the Trump Organization, which is not run by President Donald Trump but rather run by his sons Eric and Don Junior, announced that they're getting into the telecom space with Trump Mobile.
This is what's known as an MVNO or a virtual mobile excuse me, a virtual mobile network operator, which kind of piggybacks off the larger service providers in the United States AT and T, Verizon T Mobile, so it should offer the same coverage as those types of service providers. It is forty seven forty five a month, which are significant numbers for the Trump family given that that is
sort of his place in the presidential line. But that is a little bit more expensive than what we would expect from some of the competitors in this smaller network space, things like Mint Mobile or things like Cricket Wireless. This is a little bit pricier than that. But the Trump family is saying that they're offering some bonuses, things like roadside assistance and telehealth services. We don't know really how that's going to work in practice, but that is what
they are saying. Justifies that additional cost. And in addition, despite the fact that they say that this will work with pretty much any modern smartphone, they're also offering their own smartphone. But this thing also raises a little bit more questions than it.
You know, maybe at.
First blush answers. It is called the T one. Its full name is actually T one Phone eight thousand and two gold version. It is gold. It has a big T on the back and an American flag. They say it has a six point eight inch screen with a one hundred and twenty hertz refresh rate, of fifty megapixel camera and a five thousand million hour long life battery. So it is a pretty standard mid range Android device, but there are some question marks on the website if
you dive a little deeper into the specs. For example, the processor and RAM section claims that the storage of this phone is twelve gigabytes of RAM. Ram and storage are two different things, so we don't really know what the storage is here. We also don't know what the processor is up until this morning when they change it. They also claim to have a five thousand million amp hour camera of million empowers are used to describe battery size, so that is also a sort of question mark there.
The photo they have appears to be a computer rendering. It looks sort of iPhone esque, but there's no flash next to the camera array, so that's a question mark as well. These are all things that maybe should give people pause before they put down the one hundred dollars deposit.
Yeah, by the way, one dollars deposit.
Towards how much five hundred dollars is.
Okay, all right, but obviously not the gold phone.
Well, so it's interesting, right they call it the gold version, implying a non gold version of standard version, but that there's no real v of that on the website at this point. And in addition to that, that five hundred dollars should also give us a little pause as well, because the Trump family claims that they're going to build this phone here, yes, at some point.
That is the question I asked, How does someone build a phone? Considering the intricacies and the manufacturing, etc.
In the United States, how do you physically do that?
It's really difficult. In short, for one, all the reasons that you laid out right, there's no real infrastructure to do this. The Trump family would need to spin up a factory to do this and agree with suppliers to build the materials needed for this phone in the United States as well. And in addition to that, there are no major smartphone manufacturers building phones in the US, so there's no real knowledge base to hire people to do
this at least here in the US either. So it's going to be a big task if that is exactly what they're trying to do. Now, we've seen similar phones like this crop up aimed at like one specific side of the political isle, on both sides of the isle, where essentially they've bought cheap phones from China and then imported them into the United States with different branding on them. There's a phone called the Freedom Phone a few years
ago that basically did that. But again, a major point of the Trump administration, which again is separate from the Trump organization, so they say, you know, is aimed at bringing manufacturing back to the United States. So that's what they say they're going to do. But even still, for all the reasons that we've outlined, there's some reason to be skeptical of that.
All right, I wish we had more time. I know, we have to be a lot of here. You got a lot more reported into. Thank you. We'll talk again because there's a ton of questions I have about that and the madest the meta story.
Take care, Mike, Thank you much.
Take care.
All right. I want to tell you.
A little bit about what happens happened to the Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump. And one of the things, as you probably know, that the cuts that have come from this administration across social programs have been extraordinary, as well as scientific programs. And you know about the schools
were federal funding. Federal grants have been cut like crazy. Well, one of the other ones that I want to spend a few minutes on talking about the EPA, and the agency has told the staff this is official and this is the EPA oversees the country industrialized sort of Midwest. This is the section that where this letter came in, and this is the place that is just played with pollution,
the legacy of pollution. The agency has told the staff stop enforcing violation against fossil fuel companies, those protections that we had against fossil fuel companies. Now, I will tell you here's my bias. I want to start right now. Is I happen to be someone that number one believes in climate change and has for a very long time
believes in global warming. Actually, and I am, at least in this way an environmentalists, and not for the political purposes, not the kumbaya, you know, getting married in front of a bush and everybody holding hands and singing kind of environmentalists, but the kind of environmentalists that recognizes, at least I do, that we are going to be in trouble. The world is truly going to be in trouble, to the point
where I believe that critical mass is already here. We heard signed to say, you know, we still have a month, we still have a year, we still have five years. I don't think we do. I think we have now just tipped over and it's going to get worse. And this is why I tell my kids, for the first time in my life, I'm happy that I'm at the back end, as opposed to, Oh my god, I wish I would be born. I wish I were a kid right now because of the technology that's coming, flying cars,
et cetera. Absolutely not and so ambitious. Deregulation has come down and the EPA administrator Lee Zelden at the behest of President Trump and Trump entered the office promising to slash burden some oil and gas industry regulations and increased production. As you know, one of the statements the President Trump made as part of his campaign was a drill, baby, drill, Well,
if you're gonna drill, baby drill. That means you have to eliminate a whole lot of the protections, or if you don't view them as protections, you view them as policy that just gets in the way, regulations that gets in the way, and that is exactly what the administration is looking at. So you have and we've talked about this before. There has never been a I don't think so since the Civil War maybe where such polarization occurred between parties and between philosophies, and here in this country.
So as far as the Trump administration is concerned, EPA protections, if you will, are just burden, some wasteful and they get in the way of what United States does and does really well, and that's produced energy, albeit fossil fuel energy. Because I don't even know if Trump remember when he said that climate change was a hoax.
It was part of that crowd who said that. I don't know if he's ever changed his mind.
I don't think he's ever admitted and I may be wrong on this, that climate change is number one real that I think he probably has or it is.
A real problem and it is not easy.
I mean, we're so these are executive orders Biden puts in more protections for the EPA than had ever been done before, more restrictions on power plants, VPA having more and more power, and throwing in regulation after regulation, of which Trump is removing virtually all of them. And this is all executive order stuff, which means executive direction, which means directive, which means that the next president, and assuming it is going to be a Democrat, is going to unravel that.
So nothing gets.
Easy, Absolutely nothing, All right, kf I am six point forty.
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