4, 3, 2, 1, and lift off of Space Shuttle Atlantis to assemble the framework for the Science Laboratories of Tomorrow. Houston, now controlling Houston Atlantis roll program. This is the Cosmosphere podcast, episode 31, and our first for 2024. In today's episode, we've got a look at what's going on at the Cosmosphere, an update on construction and the audio from a talk given by astronaut Steve Swanson at the Cosmosphere this past March. Uh, the little intro audio from today was the launch of STS-117, which was Steve Swanson's first mission to space. Stay tuned for Steve's talk and some bonus questions we asked him after his presentation. Before we head to the hall of space to hear how updates are coming along, I've got a programming note. Um, in the nearly seven years of podcasting, um, that I've been doing, I've never lost an episode or audio files until now. Um, the files that I had been editing for the long awaited JWST have disappeared. I don't know how. I feel like they've slipped beyond the event horizon of a black hole because for the life of me, I cannot figure out what happened to them. Um, I'm not sure if it was an Adobe thing, a Mac Os problem. Um, I'm sure we'll have more opportunities though to cover the incredible science being done with JWST in a future episode just because that mission continues to show us absolutely just incredible views of the universe and our place in it. Uh, while we're on the topic of space science 2024 is NASA's Heliophysics Big Year, and there are a ton of opportunities to learn about Our sun and events are running now through Christmas Eve 2024 when NASA's Parker Solar Probe makes its closest approach to our sun. Um, there's a ton of different monthly themes for the Heliophysics big year, um, art, a back to school month, earth and Earth's environment and more. Um, check out NASA's website for more details. The link will be in the show notes. Um, April's theme was obviously the total solar eclipse, which was visible for what seems like just about everyone but me. This year. Um, I was part of an event in Texas on Eclipse Day, and the clouds just didn't cooperate. Um, it was a great time though. The Tye Preston, uh, Memorial Library was great. Um, as was the, uh, people from the New Braunfels Astronomy Club. I just want to thank everyone for making us feel welcome and hanging out that day. Now let's check in with Chuck McClary and my daughter Astrid, who was along for the ride that day for an update on what's going on at the Cosmosphere. I'm sure this won't be the only time we hear from Astrid in this podcast. She's seven months old now and getting more and more vocal every day. You may hear some squawks or some laughs at, uh, various points of this episode. So, uh, bear with us on that. I'm here with Chuck McClary. Uh, we're actually down in the hall of space. There's some construction going on. Um, Chuck is gonna tell us a little bit about what's going on right now, and if you've ever been, oh, Astrid, Astrid agrees. There's lots of stuff going on here. Um, if you've ever been to the hall of space, there's gonna be a lot of really cool changes coming up, and it's starting with what's now gonna be a classroom. Yeah. So, um, the area that was once our, um, uh, kind of our blockhouse area, you know, we had Eno's couch, uh, right where you see the square on the ground. Yes. Um, for those of you in, uh, in radio land, it's a dark gray concrete Yeah. But grayer than the rest of the gray. Yes, exactly. So Eno's Couch used to be in here. We also had, uh, an Atlas engine and a Redstone engine. Um. The Atlas and Redstone engines are both going to be put back in this area. Um, and the, redacted, I believe is going to go in this area as well. Very cool news. Yeah. And along with that, there are going to be a lot of, um, interactives that teach, um, kids and adults how, uh, how rockets actually function. So kind of like Dr. Goddard's lab, but instead of watching a whole presentation, you get to, um. Use interactives that you actually engage with and it teaches you how they work. And then we're still able to get through, uh, through this area to go to the Titan two pit. Um, that I believe will be unchanged. Okay. And then our shuttle gallery, what used to be our shuttle gallery is going to be a new classroom, uh, area for. Um, for our education, uh, department. Awesome. And actually I'll pull the plastic back and you can see, walk over here a little bit. So it's very cool. So that's where our shuttle gallery used to be. Yeah, let's get away from that guy. That's where our shuttle gallery used to be. And it is now, uh. Going to be a classroom. Okay. Which having worked in the education department, I can tell you will be very helpful. Yeah. Uh, we used to have two classrooms down in the museum area and um, they were pretty sizable and that got turned into Cosmo kids. Yeah. Perfect for you here in just, just about a year. Yeah. You got, you got things to say about Cosmo kids there a little bit. Um, so lots of good things happening and like Yeah. Just as we're walking around here too, all of the, we're over by the German wall. All of the old backlit panels are starting to come down too, so. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. And honestly, I'm pretty happy about that because the backlit panels, they started to fade after several years here. Yep. But, um, the, the new panels are gonna be like the ones in the previously remodeled sections of the, of the museum where, you know, they can be taken down if they need to and replaced, or they can be cleaned by just wiping them off and they won't wear out like this, like the, like these, um, big improvement. So the way you see this now, uh, how there's, you know, no. Real displays or anything like that. It's just, it's ripped apart, but you can still walk through it. Yep. This is how we hope the museum will be, uh, towards the middle of the summer. Okay. The mu the entire museum will be walkable by about the summer, but there won't be displays ready yet. Okay. The, all of the construction will be done by, um, we're hoping Christmas. Okay. Um. But we're saying I'll do updates throughout the summer. Yeah. And we're saying end of 2024 is when it'll all be done, which is gonna be here before we know it. All right. We're gonna move on to another part of the museum here now. All right. So we are just now in the space photography exhibit. We're working our way over towards Odyssey. Um, and Chuck has a little, uh, detour here for us. Of course I do. I love all this stuff, but, uh, so. A couple months back on our YouTube feed, uh, there's a video about the Nikon F that was used, um, on Apollo 17. Okay. Uh, this one right here. Okay. Or maybe it's, that one doesn't matter. I got to handle it. It was really cool. Okay. Sweet. It was a lot of fun. We'll link to that in the show notes. The, um, but the Nikon F is a tank and you pick that thing up and you can feel that it's built like a tank. And it looks solid. Yeah. But it's painted, uh, it, the ones that were used by NASA were painted entirely black so that they wouldn't get the reflection of like a silver camera or white writing, um, on the, on the glass as they were taking photos out the windows. Okay. Um, but you can see that back when this, back when they were using this Zeiss, they hadn't quite done that yet. But that one always reminds me of the rear window camera. But I'm getting a little distracted. You know, the rear window, the Hitchcock film? I have actually never seen it. All right. I, I know of Hitchcock. Just never seen that one. It's Jimmy Stewart. Look Out Behind You Kid. Okay, now, okay, now I feel silly. Wait, is that the one where he's like broken leg or whatever? Uhhuh. Okay. Yeah. And he's with Grace Kelly, who's like way too young for him in that movie. It was a different time anyway. Oh man. Oh man. All right, so we're gonna meander over here before Astrid gets too mad. And then, uh, rest of the plastic tarps are up. Um, everybody can still see Odyssey. Tell us a little bit about the shorts that you're doing on social. Those are great. And they'll be in the show notes as well. Awesome. So we're doing a series on YouTube and Instagram called our Hard Hat series, where we just do so we've either talk about the construction itself or we feature an artifact that's off display during construction and show it to you so you can see it even though it's not on display currently. Or we might talk about some of the, artifacts that have not been on display for the last, you know, 20 or something years that will be on display now, which there's a lot of, yeah. So we've got a lot of great content that we're going to be doing once or twice a week, depending on how much I have on my calendar and how much I can edit at a time. Another feeling. Yeah, another feeling. But as her degrees. Yeah, as her degrees. But they're really fun videos. Most of them so far have been myself and Shannon, our curator. And do you, do you like purposefully jump scare her? Sometimes I feel like she's really easy to scare. Maybe? No, those were actually all planned. Okay. The, the intros. But in that first one when, when she kind of like backs away from me, it's because I accidentally went too fast and like hit her in the shoulder with my phone. Oh my God. She yeah. But anyway Apollo 13, as you can see, is still on display. Yeah. Which we're going to leave that on display as long as possible. Okay. And then I'll let you. It's nice. What do they call that? Foley? Yeah, Foley. So the limb no longer has the kitty litter down below it. It is literally kitty litter. No. Or okay. Oh my gosh. It was, it was just a different type of gravel, but we called it kitty litter. Okay. That's funny. The rover is going to be back on display once the construction's done and everything. You can see the white, the white room. Yeah, the white room over here has moved or. I've heard it's moved. I've heard implications that they have special plans for the white room, but I don't know what those are. Okay. And then we have our our LE trainer over here as well. Awesome. I can't quite tell what's under the tarp where those guys are, but there's lots of good stuff happening down here. Well, we're gonna get back upstairs 'cause there's lots of construction going on here. But Chuck, thank you for taking a few minutes to show us what's going on. Oh yeah. Astrid's got things to say too. Yes. Do you want, do you wanna be included here too? All right, I get it. Well, we better get rolling before she gets too spicy. So we'll talk to you again soon, Chuck. Wait, she might be doing the outro right now. We'll, we'll, we'll leave it in there. A, uh, big thank you to Chuck for showing us around. Uh, yesterday, um, I did have to use the, uh, beep button. It wasn't due to, uh, language or anything like that, but there's a little surprise that we're just not ready to share publicly just yet. So stay tuned for more details. And now let's get to the talk that astronaut Steve Swanson gave this past March. Um, also be sure to stick around at the end. We've got some, uh, questions that we ask Steve after his presentation. Enjoy. Thank you. You heard my name already. Former NASA astronaut. Right? Good. Very much. I also worked at NASA though for 28 years, 11 as an engineer, and actually that was really fun for me too. I think one of the benefits of working at NASA is being with a whole team of people who are really passionate about what they do. And that I didn't realize that was really rare in life. And I was there for 28 years and then I moved someplace else. And then not everybody liked that, but it was a benefit, uh, for me to, to have that group of people and be part of this mission that actually built the Space Station. So I just as a, as a shout out to Nas a little bit, for me, that was a, a really positive, uh. Place to work for me. So any of your young kids who wanna have a great job go to nasa. Okay, so I get the question a lot and I'm sure you guys have it here, what's space like, right? Is it fun? What do you think? You know? Alright. Could be, right. So I'm gonna show a little video to start off with. Do hopefully answer that question for you. Uh, when we're on the Space station for six months, we got our Sundays off. And we would play on Sunday and videotape it and record it. And then, uh, this is some of that video we, uh, we got to do on the, all the big space is fun. Yeah. Anybody wanna go space? Yeah. Yeah. I Back again. Yeah. It was a good time. My first mission was in 2007 on space Shuttle Atlantis to the National Space Station, and we were bringing up a piece of the space station, a solar array in the cargo bay, and our job was to attach it to the space station. After then, I lucked out on this mission as being a rookie. I got to be the flight engineer who sits between its, uh, commander and pilot, runs the checklist, runs the operations on board, the air, the space shift, and then I got to do two space walks and fly both of a, a buttock arm on the space shuttle and on the space station. So that was a great mission that lasts about two weeks. And, uh, we got to, we accomplished our mission of getting the solar array on the next one. Was very similar. It was another shuttle flight to the national fire station to put another solar array on. And since I had done the first one, and the person who was a pilot actually on that one is a classmate of mine, and we were both rookies on that one. And now he's the commander and I'm now the lead space walker on this. So it was like you do it once and now you're the expert, supposedly. And, uh, we were surprised that NASA thought that was a true statement too, and we got that assignment, but, uh, we didn't screw it up, so I guess it was okay. Uh, so this one launched again, and this lasted about two weeks also to the International Space Station. And the launch is an amazing, uh, thing on the space shuttle. It is just a, a quite, uh, exciting ride, I'll put it that way. And, you know, to get to space only takes eight minutes and 32 seconds, and we go from zero miles an hour to 17,000 to 500 miles an hour. And that's, that's a lot of speed and that's a lot of change in velocity over eight minutes and 32 seconds. And the solid rocket boosters on the vehicle are very, very powerful. And the white things on the side, and you'll see that in a minute here, but they are 3 million pounds of thrust each. Plus when you put them in the main engine of the shuttle, you get 7 million pounds of thrust, and the vehicle weighs about four, four and a half million pounds. And so you are jumping off, off that launchpad, and by the time you reach the top of the, uh, part of the launchpad, you're already going a hundred miles an hour. Uh, it's just amazing vehicle. Lemme show you a little bit more about the launch though. About two and a half hours prior to launch, we get in our suited up in these pressure suits, pump suits, we call 'em. We head out to the astro van actually, what's the technical name of it? The astro van. It goes out to the launch pad. We have a team there that helps us get into the vehicle, make sure we're all suited up correctly and strapped in well. And when we're done with that, they're gonna close the hatch and seal it and then let it let us be by ourselves while we do go through the countdown, et cetera, to get there. If within six seconds to go, we're gonna light the main engines. And if they all work fine, then a T minus zero, the solar rocket bushers are gonna go and they're gonna light. And once they light, they cannot be turned off. So you're going somewhere at that moment, 4, 3, 2, and ignition lift off space shuttle discovery, taking the space right there. We're already going a hundred miles an hour. It's part of the flight. You are back into your seat, you're on your back at this point, and you're just got so much Gs on your force, on your body, and it is like somebody huge is sitting on your chest, making it a little difficult to breathe, and the vehicle is shaking quite a bit, even so much. It's even hard to read our dials and gauges at this point because the vehicle is shaking so much at this time. But we are going to quite fast. These all buche last two minutes and 10 seconds, and then they, they run out of fuel and they actually blow off of the vehicle and float back down under parachutes land in the Atlantic ocean and get picked up and reused again. So there they go. And once that happens though, it becomes a very quiet ride. It's now, it's very smooth. We're on the three main engines of the shuttle. It's a smooth flight for another six minutes. And we're just on our way. And really what we do, we go to orbit, we get up outta the atmosphere, and then we turn ourselves over so we can get the speed to go around the earth. We gotta go around fast so that we are in orbit around the earth. And after three minutes and three, two seconds, we get main engine cutoff. So we call Miko, and this lady on the left is, we're her right home. She's been on station for four months. So she's pretty happy that we're coming to pick her up. Discovery Houston Domino. Mako Homes, one not required. We get rid of the fuel tank. That's the orange tank. That was the fuel for the main engines of the shuttle. We're not gonna use those again. So that drops off and actually burns up over the Indian Ocean. And then we're on our way to the International Space Station, so that is a shuttle launch. I also got the opportunity to do a Soyuz launch. That's, that's, uh, definitely a very different vehicle, a capsule. It launches from Kazakhstan and of course made by the Russians. Uh, and the ING thing about launching from this place, it was the same launch pad that Yuri Garrin launched from the first minute in space. And it was, uh, I think one of the best benefits for me personally was. I mean, gotta be part of this tradition that he set, uh, as a first man space about all the things you do, uh, up here at the same launchpad before you go to space. And there's many different things from watching a movie the night before called The White Sun in the Desert. It's in Russian of course. And uh, it is a terrible movie. Uh, but you have no choice. You have to watch it because some, back, sometime back in the seventies, one crew decided it was so bad they weren't gonna watch it, and they didn't make it. So that means everybody now has to watch this movie. I mean, you have, you have no choice. And then they do, he did other things like he signed the door or the room he slept in the night before. And one of the more interesting things he did, he did, was just before he got to the launchpad, it's like, okay, 25 minute or 25 mile ride out to the launchpad from where you are. Uh, and, and getting ready in Russia or in Kazakhstan, excuse me. But, uh, he, he got out, he says, can you hold the van here a second? I need to get out and, and relieve myself. And he did that on the tire of this vehicle that he was going out on. So we all have to stop before the launchpad and do that same thing just before you go to space. I thought that was really, um, an interesting aspect to it. But it's Russian tradition and you gotta do it. So this is the unit now, space station. I, you guys haveve seen pictures of it or not, and I think it's an amazing piece of equipment. It's about 360 feet across. You can see it has four solar panels on it. The middle section and you can see the round one round stuff is where we live in, and it has the volume onto a large jumbo jet, like a 7 4 7, which is just amazing to me. It has a huge amount of volume on there. We have six or seven people living on board at one time, and even though there's a large volume like that though though it is not, as you probably saw in the earlier pictures, it, it's crowded with a lot of stuff. There's tons of science experiments send to storage. We have to have supplies for anywhere between six months and a year onboard at all time. So it is a, it's busy and one of the hardest things, of course, imagine with all that supply is where everything is on board. As people will come, also come to leave and go. And so we have a whole team who tries to keep track of all that. And to me, one of the other interesting facts is these are all the different pieces to build that space station, and it took 35 shuttle flights and four Russian launches to bring all that stuff up, and it was all put together in space for the first time. So it was never tested on the ground at all together because it was built by different countries and by different companies all around the world, and then put together in space and it worked. That was, to me, one of the most amazing things of the whole, whole thing. And the purpose of Space Station though is science. That's what we were there for. While we were up there, we probably had, uh, 300 experiments going on. We worked on maybe a hundred, 150 of 'em ourselves. This one is called Spheres, which we can load different programs into these spheres, and they will do different things. We can test out different equations and then ideas. Now, I'm not a principal investigator or the scientist on any of these ones. None of us are. We are a, we are a glorified lab tech, right? We go in, we set 'em up, we work with the people who come up with experiment and we make sure they get good data. And that's our job. It's kind of fun though, 'cause you could be part of tons of different experiments. This is fluid dynamics we did tests on that behaves much differently in space. I'm gonna show you more of that later. Uh, it's fine. But one of the other funds won was fire. I mean, every legs would play with fire, right? So we got to do that in space and it behaves much differently. And it would here on earth. We also had to do many on the human body to see what changes are happening to our body. That's when I'm just measuring the muscles in my leg to see how much they I've lost. Uh, over time, we are gonna lose some. We're also gonna lose some bone while we're up there. Even though we work out two hours every day, we're still gonna lose some. I got to grow the first edible food, romaine lettuce onboard. They said, uh, we shouldn't eat it, because they had to test it beforehand. Being the first. However, some of it accidentally floated in my mouth. I don't know how. It was actually pretty good considering you going, you know, when plane, romaine lettuce us taste really good. That's how you know about how bad the food on train station is. But we found out that, uh, Rita Spa really is like growing old quickly. Uh, we have, let's say, you know, bone loss, muscle loss, vision problems, cardiovascular problems, immune system problems, it just goes on and on. And so we're trying to mitigate all these things and hopefully if we can mitigate it for space, we can also do that for everybody here on earth. And we came up with our own science. I'm gonna call this science, uh, experiments ourselves. Yeah. This one was just creating a large, if you call it sphere, not a ball of water. 'cause now it's science, we call it a sphere of water. And the idea was to, uh, go ahead and put a GoPro camera inside the water to see what that would look like. 'cause that's something you just can't do here on Earth. And I like to also think this is a. A really good example of just something you would think is as simple as water, how different it can be in space. So here's the GoPro camera coming in. Definitely gives you a shagged deic look of life. And so then to, you know, continues to experiment that we just we're working on, we just decided to take an Alka Salter tablet and toss it into the water to watch it go. And now just to make it an experiment, I've explained the Little Shine side, like I find very interesting because I'm, I am a sort of a geek. Um, as you see now, all the different little bubbles that it has now over time, it becomes one big bubble inside, you know, the air bubble inside. And that's the physics called that, trying to find, uh, the lowest energy state of the system. And that's what that's doing. So now we can call it real science. But it was really cool. And you'll see here in a second my crew mate, Reed, who happens to actually be now the, uh, commander of Argument two. He's going to grab the camera and try to get it more in the middle of it. And so it's gonna give a little bit of a push, but, uh, we don't, we've never played with this before, so we don't really know exactly where that's gonna take. And he gives a little, probably too much. And then I, I'm gonna try to grab the camera so I can point it at some of my crew mates and other things to take pictures through the water. But I realized as I go to grab it, that water is so sticky that adhesion, cohesion of the water molecules is so strong that I gotta be really gentle with it. I can't really just shove my hand in there then, so I gotta let it come up my hand. It's kinda like the blob in the old movie, right? And I trying to bow my hand. And so I'm just letting it kind of work my way up so I can get in closer. Then I realize that if I just take my other hand, I can actually control the camera without even touching it by using the water. I mean, that's why it is so interesting to see how things behave without gravity. You can just play with water, something as simple as that, and just make a a, you know, experiment out of that. Now, we did have a lot of fun with this, so we decided to try another one very similar to this experiment or going down that path. So we made another big ball, and actually that was actually pretty hard just to make the ball of water, not have it go off in any direction. We had to put the water into it from different angles to make sure it was still staying in one spot. We volunteered to roommate Alex here to go ahead and dive into it. If you look closely, now he is got water over his mouth, his nose, his his eyes, everything. So he's underwater, right? And he can't breathe. And we didn't realize that until he started choking, but that. Another mind detail. We never put this video down to ground until we got home because there's water floating around the station, which is probably not, uh, really allowed. Don't tell. One of the things we have to do on a regular basis, of course, is just normal, normal life kind of stuff. You know, you get up in the morning, you go to the bathroom, you brush your teeth, all that kinda stuff, but you also have to eat. So eating on board was a little different than here on Earth. We have too many types of food. It's a dehydrated food, and we have packaged food. If we're lucky, you get something that's actually off the shelf, packaged food, not NASA food. That stuff's better. Uh, so this is Reid. He's trying to find his favorite bar and have a little difficulty. That's our table with raic sauce. The most important thing on the, on the space station. And, uh, now we're gonna rehydrate some of the food here. And it is a pretty simple machine that you can actually just stick your packet of food in it. You can tell, say how much water if you want hot or if you want room temperature. You push the button, it fills it up. You wait about 15 minutes. You have a pair of scissors you use to open up the package and then you take your spoon, the one spoon you get for six months on board. And you use that and you eat, and if you're lucky, you have something better. But this says, eating just kind of shows you that you don't sit down. We float, we use our feet throw to hold us in place, and you just let things float. You get so used to this environment, it becomes second nature. So you use the floating as an advantage. You know, you don't ever put really things down as much as you normally would here. And you also notice when you eat food, you gotta think about using the spoon and, and there's no gravity in a sense of free fall. So is food's not just gonna stick to the spoon or stay on the spoon unless there's water moisture on it? Make it sticky. So Alex over there is doing some rice, and you're only gonna see in a second that some of that food comes off a spoon, which happens all the time in space. So then you have to chase your food a little bit and bring it back to your mouth and go get it. So just the way eating space is always like playing with your food. It's just the way the system works up there. Uh, you, you can't really do much about it. Here it goes. I'm actually cleaning off the scis also with a, uh, wet wipe because that's all we have. We don't have running water on the space station here. Alex has got some food going off. Dope. Yeah. Eating was just an adventure every day. Yeah, and it was also fun. One of the other things we get to do is look out the window towards Earths, which is just a fantastic thing. So this is the window, and this picture happens to be though, the first Instagram from space. I got that opportunity to do that. I created an Instagram account called the ISS and took this picture and then, uh, sent it on down. And it is in the area we call the cupola. It has seven windows. There's one in the center and six around the sides. And uh, this told me it was a great place to come down and look at our planet. So here's some video of that. But one thing I'd like you to know is that you can really see the planet in a different way up here. It's not like you're learning countries in the cities you're really trying to do is you're learning. You really see the ecosystems of one big planet. And that's what you're really looking at, uh, way up here. And nighttime happened to be a really. Interesting thing for me. I loved it at nighttime because there was lightning always someplace on this planet. So you can see that list flashes and you can see the whole lightning storm. You can see over a thousand miles and you watch the whole line of light lightning in the thunderstorms as they go by, and it was really, really cool to watch that all the time. We get 16 sunrises and sunsets a day that we go around the earth every 90 minutes. So they happen very quickly and it's really bright when the sun comes up. Uh, so it goes from like really pitch black to really bright, and this is sped up, but lets you know, this is our view from the cuppa. So this is what we saw every day as we went across the earth. It was just amazing to be able to get these views and be able to know our planet in this way. I wish everybody had the opportunity to do this. I think we'd have changes in the way we feel about our planet in other countries, because really there is no real borders if you look at it from that view up here. It was just a amazing site. Uh, and you can really see at nighttime too, the differences between, you know, prosperous areas or very rural areas, stuff like that. It was, uh, amazing to see the differences across our planet. I just liked this picture a little bit. Uh. Uh, this was one of the, the southern auroras. I got to take this picture. We actually got to have really good five, uh, rewards when I was up there. Uh, we actually got to like, fly through the auroras, so that was just a really unique thing also, you know, and also you imagine living with pe the same people for six months, right? Uh, even though though you're good friends, there's some conflicts can arise, right? And so I'm gonna show you a little video about how to handle conflict resolution on the speed station. I'm trying to ask this. We have arguments or disputes like any other group of people would, and we like to handle 'em. Handle 'em. Just like any civilized culture we handle, of course, we talk 'em out like Corona. Do what? Oh, we dual. Dual. Dual. How? I'm gonna give you your weapon. Woo hoo. I brought those up here. Okay. Here we don't get one bullet and we started at other ends of the module. We float to each other. You need one shot at cars, first shot wins. However, if your shot misses, the other guy gets a point blank point you close, closer again. So I'm gonna give it a try. He's been, uh, taking me off a little bit. So we have to do a dual. Excellent. I'm. Think you wrote my family name again. I missed skinny. I'm gonna take a shot right about that. Nice shot man. I went five. They didn't know how to get skinny. Nope, he's too big. How? Use some defense so we maybe had some fun on the space station. This is space walking. Space. Walking is a really fun thing to do. You're going outside the ship in your own little ship, right? It's a, it's your own self-contained little ship. But you move around the whole space station with your arm. So yeah, terms, space walking is not a really good term, right? It's a misnomer. It should be space or hand walking or something like that. It's your feet. Don't do anything while you're out there. If they're on for a ride, you can tell here we're moving around and nothing happens quickly though, when a space walk 'cause you those suits are. Even though we are floating, they are still have a lot of masks to them. And so they're not easy, they're not easy to move in. They're actually difficult to actually move your arms around. A lot of, bit around a lot, because think about it, you, uh, since we're pressurized in a suit, we are inside a bubble, like a balloon, and you have to press against that force that would be in a balloon every time you move, everything, your hands, your arms, your legs, anything like that. So it's always, it is a very, uh, uh, much of a workout when you're out there and we're out there for six to seven hours at a time. But it's also quite amazing if you look at it, this kind of gives your view of, uh, us on the space station when you're out there working away. It is, it is amazing little thing. And, uh, uh, to me the, the, the emotions too is kind of, uh, wide range of emotions while you're out there on a space walk because it's fun at the same time. It's stressful 'cause you're in a very hazardous environment, uh, with this difficult suit on. And you have everybody watching make sure every, you do everything correctly, but they're still a great thing to be able to do. This is coming back in the Soyuz, so it's a little different, of course, than the, uh, shuttle. So color coming back in the shuttle was like flying an airplane. Uh, this one's much different because it's just a capsule. And so when you come back in a capsule, you're gonna come back much into the atmosphere, which means the vehicle is gonna get hotter. The shuttle is around 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. This is about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And it creates this really interesting plasma around the vehicle. So you'll see this intersection out the window, this orange plasma that's just, uh, what's around the vehicle. You're coming around. It's a very, very hot gas. And then it actually, the way it got dark there is because the heat shield is melting on the front and it's sloughing off and getting metal particles coming on over the rest of the vehicle as it goes by. And that's what it's supposed to do. 'cause it goes through different layers. And then once that phase is over, and that's, we're at four and a half Gs during this phase right now, going to the atmosphere at the beginning of it, we go on parachutes and that's a, you know, the parachutes, once you're on those are fine. Uh, and then we about 15 minutes on a parachute ride down, and then we hit the ground and the middle of Kazakhstan and we're back on earth. And about 55 minutes later we have church and rescues, rescue crews will come and get us. And this is a in case you've never seen it before. And this is the middle of nowhere. And this is definitely a different direction, sorry, definition of middle of nowhere. There is not like a building or a tree within a hundred miles the place we land, uh, that way it, we a parachute. They're not sure where we're gonna land, so that way they can, uh, we're not gonna hit anything on that, on that. But now I will take questions. If you have any questions. There's one. Yes. What does it feel like to be weightness? Well, one, it feels fun to be able to do all those tricks, right? But the hard part is that when you first get to space, being weightless, kind of upset your stomach, you ever been on a rollercoaster? You know that first deep part when you go a rollercoaster and your stomach kind of goes up like, 'cause you're, you're in free fall, right? We get that all the time. That's what happens when you go to space. So your stomach's not really happy with you right away. Right. That's salt mines all over again. You work in the salt mines. Okay, good. Uh, but so, but once your body gets used to it, then it's really fun to be in a micro environment, a floating environment. It is great. It is wonderful. We're going back right here first. Yes. How far was it? What sir? How far? Oh, how hard was it? Go back to living on earth when you get back. Good question. Um, there's a couple sides to that. So first when I talked about that floating thing and why, you know, how your stomach gets upset. The reason your stomach gets upset is you have a. Part of your ear is called the inner ear. And that helps tell you, that helps with your balance. And what it does, it finds where gravity is and it lets you know which way gravity is so you can balance better. But when you're in space, that's all confused. And so to get the, to your stomach to feel better, your brain turns that off. It doesn't use it anymore, which is fine until you want to come back. 'cause you need your balance to come back. Right? And so when you first land, uh, you are a little wobbly. Right. You can, I could walk when I landed after six months, but, uh, I, I was definitely on the wobbly side. I was walking kind of in the mirror and, and if I turned corners very quickly, anything like that, I would, I would kind of sway a little bit more. And they make you do tests right when you land too, to see, say if you land on a Mars after six months. What could you be able to do? So they did this test. Where can you sit down, stand up, can you lay down? Can you stand up? Can you walk? Can you climb over something? Can you do all these little tests to see? And I did everything fine until I gotta the point where it said, close your eyes and try to walk. No, it didn't work out. 'cause I didn't have my inner ear working right. It was just my eyes keeping my balance. As soon as I closed my eyes, I was over. So that took about 10 days to solve that problem. Your body hit that back. And the other part was I just wasn't as strong and as I should be after, uh, being up there for that long. And so it took me about, I had six months of rehab to get back strong again. Yeah. Even though we work out two hours a day up there, I still needed a bunch of rehab to get everything back. Yes, yes. Oh, do things taste different when you're up there? Is that what you're asking? Yeah, so there is something to do that, and especially when you first get to space, we get a thing called fluid shift and what it is, you know your body has a lot of water in it, right? And so when you get to space, that water is actually normally held down by gravity and your body is just no used to this kind of gravity thing and the water's there. But without gravity, this water shifts up to your head up this way, and your actually head actually swells. And it gets bigger and it gets really get, you get really stuffy too, and you can't breathe well through your nose, right? So your nose doesn't work as well. And a lot of taste comes from what your nose does, right? And so if people realize when they first get a space, they cannot taste things near as well as they could back on earth, but over time, like a week or two, this, your body adapts to that. And that if that goes away, and then you're kind of back to normal after that. Okay? Yes. Um. My mom. Okay. She wants know if anyone has ever like pulled off during space walk. Well, so I needed help. Yeah, and that's a good question. So when we do a space walk. The, uh, we have tethers to hold us on, right? And so maybe we have much and multiple tethers. We have one that's the, like the last ditch one, which is a 85 foot retractable tether kind of thing. And right. And if you don't want to get to that point, and then when you get to a work site, we have a shorter one that's like a four foot one we put on to make sure we stay in our old local area. And that's what we're really concentrate on. But, uh. There has been times when people have gone off farther than they should, and usually luckily they had the 85 foot one on and could get back. Right. And that's a, I only know of one case of that happening and, uh, but it was a pretty dramatic thing. Uh, so that, and we tried not to do that at all. But there is, I know one case then that that has happened on, but we never had anything without anybody having each other and, and getting, you know, far away like that. Yes. Have you ever had any mission failures you ever messed up on mission? Mission failures? Well, one thing, everybody's gonna mess up at some point. All right. That's just life. We retrain hard, but you know, when you're doing so many different things, uh, and every day at some point you're gonna make a mistake. And so we've all done that, but nothing really critical. Uh, what we've had though on my first space shuttle, uh, mission was we had thermal blankets that help us protect us when we come back into earth. Right? Well, one of those got rolled back on launch. We had to go out and do a spacewalk to put it back and secure it back on. So that was, it wasn't a big deal, but we had to make sure we did it right and it had never been done before. And it's basically we had to figure out along with the ground how to get that done. And that was kinda actually fun because, like problem solving and, and figuring out how we were gonna do that. So that was one of the things. But besides that, uh, not too much. I mean, there's a lot of little things that don't work. We just work through them. Just like at your working around your house or whatever. Things break and you fix some stuff like that. Oh, I got one back there. Yeah. Do you sleep? How do you sleep in space? Good question. So we do have a sleeping bag we're in. However, it's not only really to hold you in place. Right. It's not like it's thick to keep you warm because it's not that cold on the space station. It's always 72 degrees, and so you attach your sleeping bag to either the wall, the floor, the ceiling, wherever you want to put it, doesn't matter because it doesn't matter what your orientation is, and then you, you float on into your sleeping bag and you zip it out. Now, the most difficult thing for me at least for going to being a part of sleeping, was going to sleep, and that's because. When you try to go to sleep here on earth, you have a pillow and you have a blanket, and you're just used to these triggers to help you go to sleep well in space. You're like sleeping, standing up. Because you're just like this and you're trying to go to sleep and you're like, come on, come on. Right. Well, it was difficult at the beginning to learn how to do that, but you already figured out a way to do that after a while. But once you go to sleep, it is the best night's sleep you're probably gonna get because you're on the best mattress. You know, you're, you're floating. There are no trigger points. Your neck is fine. When you wake up, there's no back pain, there's nothing 'cause you're just filling in space. Yes. Regular tasty food that I've ever had up in space. Ooh. Um, well, they, our food, most of the foods, like say we get packages that we heat, just heat up our standard things like you from spaghetti and meatballs to, to, uh, um, I don't know, brisket even. We had, and so standard foods like that now, they weren't near as good as the foods you get here, but they were still similar in that way. So there was lots of standard food we had while we were up there. Uh, it just wasn't as tasty. Yes. What. Be astronaut. Uh, what advice do people want to be a astronaut? To be an astronaut, first you have to have a degree in science or engineering. So hopefully you'll like that stuff 'cause that's what you need to do, right? And, but then the second one is they don't really care what area of science or engineering you do. So find the one you like the best is the next thing. 'cause that way you'll do the best in it, right? And you don't have to work that hard because if you like it, it's not working anymore. Right? So that's why I looked out with that. 'cause I realized. For me, my, my journey was I became, uh, uh, an engineer first and I realized, and all the things I did, I liked anyway, so, you know, I went on and got a master's and a PhD, but in stuff I already liked doing, you know, and a job I had at NASA as an engineer was fantastic. I gotta do a software and this really unique aircraft called a shut training aircraft, which was an airborne semi that shuttle, it got started off in the software. Then I got moved over to doing both software and they, uh, flight operations. They got the flying on train astronauts. Do all this kind of stuff and I realized I really liked that stuff, right? And I didn't know that until I did it, but it was just amazing. So that opportunities and then, you know, instead getting a PhD was still fun 'cause I liked to learn and all that aspect of it. And me also, besides just that aspect of it, getting a good education, getting some operational experience, which was either like flying or you know, working science out in the field or proving that you can be in this unique environment and still do well. Right. And then also just being, well-rounded. 'cause you're competing against, like last I think, uh, application process. There was 18,000 applicants for 10 slots, right? So you have to figure out what you can do on this resume to stand out. And for me, I did just 'cause I like doing different things. Uh, you know, I like the backpack and stuff, but I got into ultra marathons and I was doing these in the woods. They were 50, you know, mile runs in the woods kind of thing. Uh, and take an all day kind of things, but just anything like this, anything you can show that you can handle adversity and, and that is interesting like that 'cause you have to, you have to kind of market yourself in a way we that too, right? You have to be the one selling yourself in these interview processes. Alright, we have time for about two more questions. All have two more? Alright. Yes. How a rocket go? How fast can a rocket go? Well, it can go. That's a good question. But it all depends on where it's gonna go. 'cause like if you're going to the moon, you have to go faster than if you're going up to space. And the way they do that though, with different stages. So when we go to just, we call lower low Earth orbit, that's where I was. It's 70,500 miles an hour. Now if you're going onto the moon, now you're talking over 20,000 miles an hour. Right? But they do that with a different set of engines each time they go on that. So it all depends, but the rocket, once it gets out the atmosphere, they can keep going faster and faster and faster as long as you have rocket through fuel, right? Yes. Are your best times in space and your worst times. Oh, your best times in space and worst times in space. The best times is definitely the playing stuff, right? That was fun, right? That was really fun. Probably the worst times in space is there's a, is a job you gotta do every day. Uh, what we do here in home too is a, you know, more of a biological job. Say and, and remember everything flows. So you never really liked that job. That was not a fun thing to do. You said to get through that every day. What happens in a blackout hole come toast. That's very good. Yeah. You're not coming home. Yeah. Yes, exactly. We would become the first people to know what actually in a black hole. Thank you very much. Yeah, let's give Dr. Swanson a hand. A huge thanks to Steve for coming by the Cosmosphere that week to, uh, give two talks, and I think he met with some kids one of the other days too. Just a great person. I wish I would've been able to hang out there a little bit longer. Um, Chuck with the Cosmosphere was able to ask, um, Steve some questions, um, that we came up with for the podcast and I am so glad that Chuck remembered to ask that last final one here in just a few minutes. Um, so I hope you enjoy this bonus q and a with astronaut Steve Swanson. So we're approaching the 15th anniversary of STS one 19, your final space shuttle mission. Um, do you have any thoughts you'd like to share about the mission and your role in building the ISS Oh, just to being part of that project to build the ISS, I'm just so proud to be part of that team. Uh, the team at NASA that did that, I mean, there's thousands of people who were involved and it was just fantastic. Everybody was so, uh, passionate about that mission and wanting to get it done and every, to have that and have everybody working so hard and being part of that, it was just great. Um, what moment during s ts one 19 were you most proud of and is there a question you wish people would ask about that mission? Mm, that's a good question. For me personally though, it's was about the spacewalk, so that was the lead space walker. And on our second space walk, I was out with another person and. We ran into an issue with, uh, one of the pieces not working like it was supposed to. And this other person thought it was their fault that it happened that way, but it really wasn't their fault. And, uh, we were working with mission control to figure out what was going on and the next time they were gonna go out and fix it, I was gonna be inside and running the checklist while the two new people went outside again to, to work on it. And. We had a big discussion about should, uh, me being the most experienced, uh, go out and do it, or should we let those two people do it? And I voted for letting the other two people doing it 'cause I thought that was the right thing. They had trained for it, they knew what they were doing, and I could be the most help. I. Uh, inside the vehicle, walking them through it. And that to me was great because I got this person who was not feeling very bad about what had happened. The first one, to get him to go out again on that next one and have it go successful, I think changed his whole career path on, uh, being an astronaut. As we approached the end of the ISS era, how do you think history will remember the station, uh, on the same track? What do you hope it's remembered for? Oh man. How will history remember the space station? Hopefully it's when we started living in space permanently. That's what what we've been having since 19, uh, sorry. Since 2000, we've had, uh, permanent residents onboard the space station and we're gonna hopefully continue that and have a. Permanent presence in space from now on. And that's where that all started. So hopefully that's one of the legacies of the space station. Plus then all the science that has been done already on the space station, the things we're learning, uh, is just so valuable, I think, to our humanity. I hope that is actually something also that comes out of that. Um, and then what's the bat? On the side of the, uh, the shuttle. Was that s sts one 19? Yes. Yes it was. Did you guys learn about that while you were in space or, you know, I don't re I think we did yet. We didn't know about it beforehand. Yes, we got, they sent pictures and stuff of it to us. Yes. That's kind of fun. All right, that one was my question. Okay. That's it for this episode of the Cosmos Sphere podcast. We appreciate you listening. We would love to hear your feedback or questions or if you have ideas for the show, please reach out to the cosmos sphere on social media, um, and let us know what you think. We've got some exciting things lined up for this year and we hope that you'll join us. Be sure to follow the Cosmos sphere on social media and as always, watch out on cosmo.org for the calendar of events at the Cosmos sphere. All of those links will be in the show notes for this episode, so make sure to check those out and follow along. We'd love to see you in person. For the Cosmosphere, I'm John Mulnix. Thanks again for listening, and we'll catch you soon.