Astronaut Reid Wiseman Thinks We're Going to Be OK

This is Humans. Humans. Humans. Humans. Humans. Humans. [MUSIC] I'm Hank Green. I've never had a harder time writing an introduction to one of these episodes. People who follow me on YouTube will know that I was obsessed with the Artemis 2 mission, and in particular, the photographs that we received from it. I made a whole, like, internet tool that organized the photos by what camera was used to take them exactly when they were taken and where the astronauts were in space when those photographs were captured. It got a fair amount of attention on the internet. It was on Reddit. It was on a bunch of places. And then, a couple of days later, I got a message on Instagram, and it said, "We need to talk." It was from Artemis 2 mission commander Reed Weissman. He will be unsurprised to hear I was interested in talking. And so we are. Reed Weissman, Baltimore kid, Navy fighter pilot, test pilot selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. He spent 165 days on the International Space Station in 2014, where he got a little famous online for sharing some of the raw, rookie-eyed wonder of spaceflight. In 2020, his wife, Carol, died of cancer, leaving him an only parent of his two daughters. Seven months later, he became Chief Astronaut, which is the top job in the astronaut corps. And it is one that grounds you, because you are the person assigning everyone else's flights. Two years after that, he gave up that title for a chance, not a guarantee, at flying again. Well, it worked. This April, Reed was the commander of Artemis 2, the first crewed mission to the moon in over 50 years. He's one of four people who have been farthest from the Earth. He's also a guy who will, it turns out, slide into your DMs. Reed Weissman, what is it about the moon? I think the moon, to me, is just about everyone on Earth looks at the moon. They all see the moon. They all dream about the moon. And it's something that, to me personally, it connects you to family, it connects you to relatives, it connects you to friends around this planet. I spent a lot of time in the military, a lot of time away from home. And I would know if I was looking at that moon, my brother was looking at that moon, or my kids were looking at that moon. And I think it just ties you all together. It's like the original TV, it's the original Instagram. It's the thing that we can all just look at. We all see it the exact same way. Except in Australia, we're a sub-side down. I went to New Zealand two years ago. The first thing I did, I wish my kids were here. The first thing I did when I got on the airplane is look at the moon and go, "Yup, it's upside down." That's so weird. So it turns out it is a pretty weird astronomical situation that we are in. Our moon is very big. It's tidally locked. It was probably formed by this gigantic impactor a very long time ago. That sort of split earth into two. It seems to be made of a lot of earth crust. So that's why we think that is the case. It potentially had an impact on the entire life system of earth by creating our tides, which are a pretty big deal. Ever-present friend, always in the sky. So sometimes we point a rocket at it or substantially ahead of it so that they will meet together. And then we put four people on the top of that rocket. Can you, to start out here, tell me what it's like when they strap you into this giant candle and are like, "Okay, this might happen today." And you don't know for sure it's going to happen today. But it might happen today. No one was as surprised as the four of us that we lifted off that day. 11 minutes into the window. The first time we had ever been on board that rocket fully fueled. Yeah. We had a couple practices before that, but the crew had never made it on in these wet dress rehearsals. So this was the first time we got on. And I had prepared all of my family and friends that were going to be at Kennedy Space Center. That, you know, I really think it's 50/50 that will launch on the first try. I think we're going to get behind timeline and something is going to prevent us from flying. But we didn't. I mean, NASA knocked it out of the park and we went 11 minutes into the window. We went. We have four liquid engines, RS-25s. When the four liquid engines start, they come up to speed. Everything just looked good on board the vehicle. You can hear a little rumble. Couldn't really feel too much from that. But then those two big white heritage space shuttle solid rocket boosters light off and you're just going. 8.8 million pounds of weight we were at liftoff and we got going in a hurry. It takes six and a half seconds to clear the tower. And, you know, that's one of the more dangerous parts of the mission is getting clear of the launch entry there. And six and a half seconds is a long time at nine million pounds riding uphill there. But it went quick and it was so smooth. Apollo astronauts talked about lateral oscillations. Shuttle astronauts talk about all the bumpy feeling with the solid rockets. But for us, I think we were just on such a massive rocket. It was smooth all the way up. One other thing I'll just share at the beginning here and I know we'll get in a more detail later. Jeremy Hansen, he was the only rookie on the crew. He's such a deadpan, funny human being. We were a minute and a half into flight. And we still really couldn't see outside yet because we had our launch abort system covered the windows. But Jeremy just goes, this is so cool. And it like, it broke the ice for all of this. Perfect. I mean, to have that be your first time in space, amazing and smooth. But I imagine heavy and a long time under acceleration. About nine and a half minutes under acceleration and the acceleration under the solids. The solids last a little over two minutes. And that's, you're about three, three and a half times Earth's gravity there. So I weigh, close it in on 200 pounds, some like 600 pounds there. Your arms feel heavy, but the feeling is good because as long as you feel heavy, you know, the engines are running and you're going the right direction. You're just getting hugged. Yeah, yeah. And then the solid rocket motors were kind of winding down and we were starting to feel like we were hanging in the straps because the G had come down to about a half a G. When the solids come off, that's a loud evolution inside. But there's really no change when those two solid rocket motors come off. And then about three minutes into flight is for us is probably one of the neatest events. That's when our launch abort system detaches because we're through the atmosphere now. And now we can get off of the core stage of our booster if we need to in an emergency. So when that launch abort system comes off, there's solid rocket motors in there that. Explosive bolts fire. It actually flies away off the top of the spacecraft. There's a lot of fire out the window. It kind of goes right by your windows. You accelerate past it. But now Victor Glover and I have these four huge windows. And we're looking out. We're only about 100,000 feet. So we're about three times higher than airliners fly. So we're pretty far up, but not crazy far up. And you can look out to barely curvature the earth, the black of space. It was crystal clear, like such high contrast. Absolutely gorgeous. And then moments later, the moon just rises above the horizon and we're pointed straight at it. And that was just that was just absolutely unbelievable. And Victor jokes, he's like, that's the last time Reed paid attention to this spaceship. From that on in the mission, I was looking outside, just smearing your face against a window. Absolutely. Understandable. Is there a moment where you're like, these are the times that are the scariest parts of the mission? Or are you just not really thinking about scary stuff until and unless something starts to look a little concerning? I like the way you ask that question. So first, a little bit of fear is always there. I think on launch day, we were so at peace, the four of us, we were so ready for this. We were ready to take whatever was going to come our way. But the whole mission, I would feel a little tiny bit of latent fear. I had never had panic. Any time I would hear an emergency tone come on, I could feel my heart skip a beat. I could tell I was gained up. But overall, just the fear was there. I think the thing that was more prevalent to me was especially the first two days of the mission, as we're kind of building speed and getting away from earth, was I always felt like the next thing we could do would be go home if we had an emergency. So I was always really, really ready to go home and a little bit ready to go to the moon. And I kind of just kept that philosophy going until we were definitely going to the moon. And then I would let those things start to drop off the backside. Right, right. In the beginning, there were a boards that did not involve going to the moon. 100% And then there were a boards that did involve going to the moon. And sometimes when you go to the moon, you're best aboard. Like Apollo 13 is to go to the moon. You'll get home faster if you continue to the moon. I love it. I love it. What we just did was so cool. Yeah, and it was, it's so interesting because I definitely feel in my job that sometimes I'm bringing people along on a journey, whether that's raising money for a hospital in Sierra Leone or starting up a new business or weird thing, because we have to feel these things were we're together doing a thing. But man, to be that focus and to be like the human, these four human focuses, because of course, it's much easier for us to pay attention to individual humans than to all of the, you know, millions of hours of human labor that has gone into Artemis mission so far and we'll go into future ones as well. You become the focus of all of those people's work and also the focus of all of us coming on with this journey with you as something that humans are doing, not that four people are doing. I love that. I didn't know when we were rolling up to launch. I just didn't know if people would tune in. I just didn't know if there was an appetite for that. And there was, I didn't either. We've been so thankful to specifically the content creators who actually showed up and made this, made this into something that really connected. And it connected with people who are 90 years old, equally as much as it connected with people who are 5, 6, 7, young teenagers, the people that have just run up and given us hugs or just said, "Thank you for reminding us to dream." And it's been all around the world. It is so uplifting it. It just reminds you of if humans come together and do something that is really unique. There is a huge appetite out there for that togetherness. There is. And it's very hard to find, because of course, the things that are easiest to pay attention to are almost always the fights that we're having. That's just how we are. - That's why it's so important to do big, amazing, crazy things. Even if it is only for people who are really doing it, we're all kind of doing it. - I mean, this was a global effort for sure, the NASA teams that controlled that rocket, international teams have put together parts of this. But it just showed me that people around the world are hungry for a recent tonight. And with World Cup soccer going on right now, it kind of feels the same way. - Yeah. - You see people from all these different cultures coming together, blending together, having a lot of fun, rooting for their teams. And to me, that same hunger is out there. It kind of makes me, it kind of makes me really, actually, this might sound a little counter to it. I'm trying to really embrace everyone's differences. The thing I'm trying to not embrace is if we can't talk about those differences. My three crewmates that I flew with, Victor, Christina Jeremy, we have significant differences. We have different spiritual beliefs. We have different political views. We have different ways that we look at society. But those differences, when we would let ourselves talk and communicate across these differences, we pulled all of each other up. We didn't ignore anybody's thoughts, anybody's viewpoints. We just talked through all of that. And we made each other better by talking across those differences. - I wanna go back to the mission in a second, but we're talking about this. So I wanna keep going on it. There's something interesting about astronauts where we don't talk about their politics and they don't talk about their politics either. And I've seen a little bit of it. And of course, once you leave the core, you could do whatever you want. Am I imagining this or is this like internally is there advice on this front? - I'll tell you, we're humans. And if we go out on a social engagement and people wanna engage on those sorts of discussions, we will definitely engage on those sorts of discussions. At the end of the day, our goal is what we're doing. We're not doing it for the right or the left. We're not doing it for US versus overseas nation. We're really trying to do this to push humanity farther. And in order to do that, we all have to come together. So at the end of the day, we all try to respect each other to the very core. But it's like a family dinner table. I mean, one of the ways to crush a family dinner conversation, it's usually religion, politics, or social events. And so we definitely try to honor that. And yeah, we do a pretty good job of it. - I think so. And it also feels a little like, though I've seen, I watched a lot of astronaut interviews preparing for this. And it seems like some people are like, I wanna get some politics out of this guy. But in general, I see, we just wanna enjoy an amazing thing together. And that feels really good. It also feels good to know that there's a diversity of political perspectives up there on the way to the moon. But a thing I do wanna ask you about, I've been lucky enough to meet a number of astronauts in my life. You're weird in a very interesting way. - Perfect. - Every one of you I've talked to. A lot of ambitious people have very interesting quirks. And I assume you have to be somewhat ambitious to be an astronaut. But the astronaut quirk is like really normal feeling. You feel like really normal people who exude two things, stability and like evenness and capability. And like, I don't find that even when, we don't wanna talk to like really like high level doctors. They're sort of like a little neurotic oftentimes and also like filled to the brim with opinions that they wanna you to know about. And my conversations with astronauts, there's just a lot of like, I don't know there's just this evenness that I don't see in normal people. It seems like that's a lot of what's being selected for by the process. - This is why I wanted to talk to you. Because you were gonna talk about things that nobody else ever talks about. I'm probably gonna end up getting myself in trouble. But I've thought a lot about what you're talking about here. And I don't think we select for that. I think we try to. But I think at the end of the day what ends up happening is humans are all experiential learners. And we have all put ourselves into this position where we are in extreme life or death situations where very uncomfortable being, or we're very comfortable being uncomfortable. We fly around in jets. Most of us are rock climbers or hikers or campers. I've lived under the water for eight days off the coast of Florida in full saturation. Like we just do these weird things. And I think by doing those we start to realize the things that really, really matter in a small team are leadership. But more importantly, even then leadership is active followership. So we're so good at just blending like I'm in charge right now because I understand what's going on. And I know if I just said, of course, everyone's gonna follow in behind me. But if I start going off course, I know if somebody's gonna come from behind me and say stop, that's dangerous. We need to go this way and here's why. And then all of a sudden I go into a followership role. And I'm now supporting that person. And we're fluid in that way all the time. And I think because we have gone and done these things, we've just gotten very skilled at that. One particular team dynamic skill. Active followership is a term I've never heard before. Immediately landed. I immediately know what you meant. I've experienced that as well. And it's a great feeling to have that flexibility of leadership. The crew, the four of you, I think that one of the things people really enjoyed watching was just that you all clearly care a ton about each other and have a dynamic. And it was a little like watching a boring but high stakes sitcom. And I just wanna hear about how you guys developed that relationship. And did you ever have to be a check on each other's ambitions or how did you build that crew? - What an amazing question. I really tried to stress that it was hard work. I think anything that comes off, anything that is well done, anything that is worth doing is worth putting in effort. And we put in a tremendous amount of effort. We have a small team of operational psychologists here at NASA. And usually they'll give you a few briefings before you go fly. And they'll do a few little team dynamic things. But we reached out to them early on and said like we need strong investment. We were four very senior astronauts. I won't say there is power struggle, but it was just our balance wasn't great. And we weren't always the best of friends. But what we did do over the three years that we were together is we really invested in each other. And when it came time to be in space together, you saw the product of all of that hard work. We really, I can only really remember two or maybe three moments of even brief friction on that mission, 252,000 miles away, 10 day mission in a tiny spacecraft. And to only know of like two or three very brief moments of friction, we really worked hard at that. We would always state our intentions. We would always give a tremendous amount of grace. No one is waking up trying to hurt me today. Everyone is trying to do the right thing. So if someone is getting under my skin, the best thing I can do is just ask why. We also spent a lot of time just meeting each other where we were. Like I have a lot of quirks. Like you said, all astronauts are quirky people. I have a lot of quirks. And so we spent a lot of time getting to know each other. But then as we were approaching the mission, especially in the last two or three months, we just started to accept each other for who we were. We had done a tremendous amount of feedback, a lot of work. But there were a few other things in each one of us that we would like to have improved and we just decided we're just gonna meet each other where we are. And when we got into space together, it was truly gold. It was a time in my life that I will never forget. I think the coolest lens that we have looked at this, about a week after we came back from the moon, we were all together. And I looked at Victor, Christine and Jeremy. I said, guys, I don't know how you all feel, but I truly have zero regrets right now. I have zero regrets from lift off until splash down. And all of them agree. - That's what you want. - Man, it was just so powerful. - That's great. All right, I wanna ask you, are we gonna get to the photography? I'm very excited to talk to you about that. But first, our first little segment here. ♪ Ask me a question ♪ - Oh, I didn't think I would have a question for you, but now spending a little bit of time with you. And I just see the way you think. You have a tremendous curiosity. And it's not just about one subject. You're curious about everything. And my dad, my dad had a few simple rules when we were kids growing up. And one of them was, be curious about the world around you. And he tried to instill that into his two children, me and my older brother. So talk to me about this curiosity that you carry with you. - It's the best human emotion. On par with love, the thing about it is, it's one of the human things. You know, with love, you find the people and you are loyal to them and you hold them with curiosity, it lets you reach out. It lets you go somewhere else. Being curious about somebody who you don't like is hard, but so rewarding and also how it all works. Like if I'm not curious about the mind of a person who thinks that climate change doesn't exist or who thinks that the moon landing was fake. If I'm not curious, at least a little curious about where that comes from. I will never be able to help someone not get to that point if they're halfway there or start to help somebody maybe see a little bit of like excitement or interest in my perspective. If I'm not curious about them, they're never gonna be curious about me. It's a really rewarding one to indulge in. It's a muscle you can grow. You could stretch it and like if you know more, you become more curious is the thing that I've noticed. Now if I hear a fact, I have a bunch of like related facts where I'm like, wait a second, that doesn't make quite as much sense when it comes to this thing over here. Why would an astronaut, they must be ambitious, but they seem so calm and even. That's a strange tension in the world. Like that kind of stuff. It's so good. I love that. And I think that if you can indulge in it and your dad is absolutely right to instill that in you. And one of the questions that I have on my list is who helped you become a human. So maybe we should talk about that. Wow, that's deep. My mom and dad. definitely, they gave me boundaries without controlling. So they let me earn their trust. And if I violated their trust, they would bring me back in. And then I would re-earn that trust. I think that that was a very important part of growing up, not to over-control, but to give boundaries and keep people in line. I've succeeded and failed at that with my own kids, but I think about that a lot. I'm a younger brother. My brother is five years older than me. I'm a pretty skinny guy. He's a ripped guy, tough, brotherly love, definitely helped develop me. And then I also think something that was actually quite formative to me is I was a little kid. And in high school, I was a tiny human being. I think everybody in high school gets bullied. I think even people that, like when you're getting bullied, you're like, well, that person never gets bullied. But I bet they get bullied too, like that is. - Yeah, in some ways, yeah. - I don't know what's going on there, but I think that really taught me, I was never a kid that was gonna be able to use muscle or a strength to get my way. So I had to use my brain and reading people, reading a motion to understand, okay, they're in a space where I could talk to them. They're not in a space where I could talk to them. I'll come back later and I started to develop that. I'm overselling it a little bit, but I think I started to develop that in high school or had to just think of different ways to work through problems to get to the space that I wanted to get to. - And also a certain amount of that astronaut comfort with discomfort. If you gotta go to that school where the bad thing happens, you figure out how to go to that school or the bad thing happens. I'm familiar with this. - That's interesting. This was high school Baltimore? - This was high school, North of Baltimore, to Lady High School, great high school. A deep part of Baltimore. You have to leave your hometown to understand the beauty. I say the same thing, I had to leave Earth to look back and really understand the beauty of Earth. But where I grew up, it's a little town called Cocky'sville, Maryland. It's kind of right on the border of suburbs or change into farmland up north of Baltimore. It's gorgeous. Rolling Green Hills, Forest, Horse Farms, really beautiful place. - I find that having been bullied, I carry it everywhere. - Wow. - I don't know if I would be anything like I am. The amount of time that I spend trying to make sure people like me, I'm like, is this just like a middle school thing? Am I just still trying to be safe from the physical assault? And I don't think that's the only thing going on. I think I'm ambitious for lots of reasons, but I don't know. I'm 50 years old now. I'm spending way more time now investing in me than I've ever spent before in my life. And I'm driving in here this afternoon, listening to a podcast on People Placing 'cause I feel like I just say yes a lot and I need to start saying no. I do say no a lot. So I don't think I'm really that far over, but Christina Cook was like, you should listen to this podcast. This will be good for you. And it has been good. It reminds me that you need, you always should be investing in yourself 'cause 50 year old me is way different than 20 year old me. Yeah, I can resonate with that for sure. Okay, so last we left you in this spacecraft. You are now orbiting the earth. Yep. A thing to understand is that the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, they all orbit the earth quite low. You know, in general, the view you get from the ISS is pretty much half of the sky is earth and pretty much half of the sky is space. I guess fair. That's good to know. I didn't mess that up in front of you. It's like, well, you're the International Space Station. I say it's very intimate with earth 'cause you are, you're 250 miles up. It's black sky all above black. Yeah. And then the earth, you see the curvature, you see the atmosphere, but you're like right there. And so you're really kind of in it. You're flying through the Northern Lights and Southern Lights. You're right over thunderstorms and hurricanes. You can see forest fires. You can see sandstorms blowing dust across the Atlantic Ocean. That's so cool. You're just like, you're right in it, you know? But when I was up there on my first mission, I felt like I was so high, like an eagle on the highest perch looking down at earth. On Artemis II, we were gone. I mean, we were gone. (laughing) I feel like you did some orbits and then you had like one big orbit of earth where you got far away and you came back close again. Is that right? Very good. Before the mission, I used to say, we're only doing three orbits of earth. Okay. So on our first orbit coming off of the Launchpad at Kennedy Space Center, we had what's called an apogee, our highest point in that orbit of 1,200 nautical miles. Roughly five times the altitude of the International Space Station. Great view. Wasn't as high as I thought it would look, like it looked about like the space station. But from there, we come down to a Paragee, which is our lowest point on the other side of earth at 100 miles. So now we've just been five times the International Space Station altitude now we're underneath the space station on the bottom side of the earth. And we're screaming. I mean, it looked like we were just skimming the atmosphere because we were just skimming the atmosphere. And then from there, we go out to 38,000 miles on our second orbit of earth. And this orbit's gonna take 24 hours to complete 'cause we're going so far away. And the cool part on this, our second orbit, is no humans had ever done that orbit. Yes, humans went to the moon in Apollo, but we have never done a highly elliptic orbit with a human spacecraft quite like this one. So we lit our engines and we go out to 38,000 miles and we took a little nap in that journey, Victor did some manual spacecraft piloting. And then at the top of that, at our aperture, 38,000 miles, mission control pointed the spacecraft back on earth and we got to look at earth out the window. And it was like that big. I mean, it was like smaller than a basketball. You're just like, we are so far away. And then from that though Hank, we go for 38,000 all the way screaming back down to again, 100 miles. So 38,000 miles down to 100. And we were screaming. Jeremy Hansen, other way, and he was in control of the spacecraft as we're coming in towards 100 miles. And the earth is like growing. You can just watch it growing for a while. You can see it. Closing down on earth so quick. And Jeremy turns around to me and goes, I think we're going to smack right into the center of earth because there was no relative motion. It was just growing so fast up the window. Then we do the magical burn that every astronaut desires, which is TLI Transluner Injection. And that is the burn that is going to take us off to the moon. So in 100 miles, just barely skimming above the atmosphere, it almost felt like you'd reach out and touch the Earth, touch the clouds. We did our Transluner Injection. And now we're heading out to the moon. And just a few, like maybe an hour after we lit the engines on that burn, mishcontrol, again, turn us back around at Earth. And I don't know what my brain I expected to see the Earth's like for space station, like to see this really crisp horizon. They turned us around at Earth. And Earth was in shadow. The sun was behind the Earth. The moon was lighting up the entire Earth. And Earth was that big out the window. Christina Cook was right next to me. And she's just like, look at all the lightning. I mean, look at all the light was lightning everywhere. And then as our eyes start to adjust, you start to see the Saharan Desert. You start to see Africa. Then I was like, oh, there's Strachan Tabralto. You can see the man. You can see Spain, Portugal. You couldn't quite see France and England. They were just over the horizon. And South America is in the photos I took there. But we couldn't see it from space. You could start to make out city lights around Africa. And then as our eyes adjusted a little bit longer, you see northern lights, southern lights. And I was pulling out my iPhone. I was trying to take pictures. There was so much glare. I just couldn't get it anywhere. And finally, Victor, I think it was Victor. It tosses me the Nikon. I think I had the 35 mil lens on. And I just, I started cranking the ISO and cranking the ISO. And then boom, I got that picture. And I know you have seen those pictures. And I have. And when I got that picture, I looked out the little viewfinder on the Nikon, that little back screen. And I just turned my crew. I'm like, I can go home right now. Like I don't think any humans ever taken this picture ever before. And we were all looking at it. We're like, northern lights, southern lights. Oh my gosh, like that picture was nuts. And then we didn't have much time in that attitude. So we held that Nikon up to the window and just went click, click, click. It's like many as many pictures as we could get. And then the internet took all those. They turned them into time lapses. And then that is why I'm sitting here talking to you. Because the data that is pulled out of that series of pictures just blew my mind. So that photo was the big sort of like hello world image that we got of the dark side of the earth being lit up by the moon with it. You could see the city lights. You could see lightning. And one of the things you can see, I think, is you can see in the ocean the reflection of the moon. Which I thought was glare in this picture. I was trying to move. Like you got to think about this Nikon up against the window. And I'm trying to block it with my body. Like just trying to block out all this glare. Because we did have the window shrouds up. And I was trying to everything. And I was just so fed up with that glare. And then I think you or someone alive was like, it's the moon glow. I was like, oh my gosh. When you wrote to me, you said it is the mood reflected to the earth. I never thought about that. And then you said the reason there's a stack of 30 pictures is because I was trying to get the glare to go away. So many pictures from the exact same angle. And was there a tripod involved here at all? A lot of times what we will do is our big windows, we have four of them that are this big. But they're not optically pure. They're made to keep us alive and let us look outside. There's multiple layers of plexiglass. And they're not optically pure. So if you want to get the best picture out of those windows, you smash the lens up against the window so that there's no angle, no obliqueness at all. And then you shoot right through that. So that is just getting that camera is tight against that window. It's got a rubber ring on it so you don't damage the window. But you get the camera is tight on the windows you can. And they just starting out on those pictures. So that held it in place, which allowed this to be turned into this time lapse. Plus we're floating. So the camera's weightless. So it's not like it's hard. You don't get fatigued from that. Well, yeah, I guess. But like you don't want to push or you float away. Yeah, you're usually blocking against the back of the headrest or something. You could wedge yourself in there and then get a really nice picture. Nice, nice. So turning this over. this into a time lapse, you can see the lightning, you can see the northern lights moving around, you can see, like you can see some of the movement of the spacecraft because the earth is actually changing, it's getting a little smaller and shifting a little. And then the other thing you can see, I imagine you couldn't see this with your naked eye, is satellites catching the sun, which you would never have noticed this with, they just look like stars with a single image, but after the time lapse was made, I think that this is a very important image, this movie that people made from your photos. And I asked my audience, because I was like, you know, these great images they get named, there's like the pale blue dot, there's earth rise. And so I asked my audience, you know, what would we call this one? Because I couldn't come up with a good name. And someone suggested the cosmic shoreline, which is a, from Carl Sagan quote, Carl Sagan said, the surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. And I was like, yeah, exactly. Because that's really what it looks like. It's like, here is this. And to see the planet alive with city lights, to see it alive with the geology and the atmosphere and like all of this thing going on, but also to see it alive with this, you know, our communication systems that we now use, it really feels sci fi. It really feels like we're part of something very odd and cool. And I have spent a lot of time with this image. What did it feel like when you first saw it turned into a movie? Oh, that, I just, I was so thankful. I was so thankful that someone online that I never would have thought to take these, this group of images that was never intended to be a time lapse. But people are hungry and people are brilliant. And they saw this and they saw the potential. I don't know that somebody was looking at that and going, I wonder what data I can pull out. I was looking at it and go, I wonder what it would look like as a time lapse. I think it's going to be beautiful. And then the more I look at that little short time lapse, first, I'm kicking myself that I had to take four or 500 images at a time lapse. The fact that you can watch, I mean, those images are seconds apart and you can see the earth getting smaller. And when you pointed out star-link satellites, what we suspect is just a trail of star-links around that one corner. I just, I mean, we said that so much time thinking about is their life out there. Just imagine if you were another organization looking back at earth and you're looking at all this richness going on around this planet. I mean, I used to think the atmosphere was beautiful. The ocean is beautiful. The clouds are beautiful. Now I think like all of it is, all of that is beautiful. I just can't even imagine being another species looking back at earth, seeing these lights moving across the surface and just, it just be blown away. Or you would go, wow, there's such children down there. That's so adorable. But I just think you'd be so blown away. And it gives scientists yet another way to think about how can we look for life out there? Like, what are we missing? What are things that we haven't thought about? There's so much science in that stack of images. It just, I love it. I love that somebody took the time to do that because they were curious. Yeah. And like, you had no idea you were doing it. And here's this thing that you accidentally made. No intention of that being a time lapse. But thank goodness it is. Yeah, you said that as you came away from the window, you said to the crew, I will not take a better image on this mission. Or my life. That was the coolest thing I've ever photographed. And then it turns out that you did take a better image, which is all of them together. Ah, thank you. Which is a metaphor for something. It does seem like we're probably pretty rare. You know, things like this, things like what we're doing right now are probably pretty rare in the galaxy. Otherwise we would have more sign. I think so too. I really think so too. It may be, and I think that maybe even in our lives we'll find that life, you know, like living chemistry, the chemistry that like wants and like does stuff might not be that rare. But it's worth saying that it took four and a half billion years of Earth to get to, you know, like Zoom calls and satellites and stuff. And also like light bulbs or, you know, any of the things that humans have made. And it took like four billion years of life to get there. And that's a long time for a planet to remain stable. That's a substantial portion of the life of the universe. And it's certainly a substantial portion of the time that the universe has had all of the sort of necessary ingredients for life. So it may be that we're pretty weird. And so if some other thing did come by and see those saw those satellites glinting in the sun would be like, oh man. Wow. Here's another place where it happened. I don't know. It's cool. It's so cool. I just love sitting on that. I love sitting with that. Just let that sit for a minute. Yeah. Of course, the primary mission of Artemis II was testing as a test flight. It's also, you know, their science being done. I think at one point you pumped all of the air out of the capsule. Is this correct? Some of it. We got out to 10.2 PSI. So we're 14, 7 here on Earth. We did get down to 10, too. We didn't pump it all out. Jeremy would have loved us to have pumped all the air out because that we would have been on a spacewalk, but we didn't quite go that far. Okay. But yeah, you suited up and, you know, did the emergency procedure. You tested a bunch of stuff. You exercised the exercise machines. You made sure the toilet worked and then fixed it when it broke. But my job, like what I think about so much is what helps people pay attention to things. Why do we pay attention to anything? And how do we pay attention? Of course, we need to pay attention to the problems. And some of the problems we're not great at paying attention to. I wish that they were a little more salient than they are. But I also think that we need to focus on, you know, like the great things that we do, the things that we've discovered, the cooperation that has led closer and closer to understanding what reality is really like. And that allows us to do great things and it also allows us to alleviate great suffering. And it's very easy to not pay attention to that stuff because like it's not a problem. The bridge didn't fall down great. Like that wasn't supposed to happen. So when I think about a lot of the work that you all did and I agree, I did not know if people would pay attention, but they did. I just think it's important for us to figure out the ways to get people to align themselves towards something like the World Cup or like the Artemis mission. We need to do these things so that we can be focused on something that isn't just the rifts. I don't know why that's easier, but it is easier. One thing that our operational psychologist, they gave us a drill when we were deep in the training. We were getting pretty beat down. We were tired. There was more delays. We were having heat shield issues and it just seemed like, you know, man, we're working really hard. We're not sure that this mission is ever going to go. And this upper psychiatrist, Jim Pogano, he just said, I'm going to give you guys one word. And I want you to think about it just one time every day and that word is going to be saver. What are you savering today? Just pick one thing. Now Hank, I can at any point in the day if I'm going down the wrong path, I can just step back and go, what am I savering? And that ties to me, that ties into exactly what you were just saying of it really makes the news when it's an ugly story. It really makes the news when it's an ugly story. It's seldom makes the news when it's a good story. But every newscast usually ends with like a puppy dog that's red enough to the camera. And so it's like every news story does end with that one thing that you're savering. And I do think about, you've given me the mic for a second. So I'll continue to wax a bit. But I do think about all the problems in the world. And I do want to fix all those problems in the world. But the way, maybe it's the capital of spring, but one of the best ways to fix all these problems is progress, innovation, new ideas, new creative thinking and pulling us forward. And maybe, I mean, what SpaceX has done in the last few years is kind of part of that. You're developing something so grand and so new that you're just pulling people out of a problem set and pulling them down. And I think you could do the same with civil rights movements. You could do the same with world hunger. There are times when that damn breaks open and there's a whole new ideology that just pulls us out of a problem set. And that's kind of what I'm trying to think about right now. Like what are we going for? What is our big thing that we're trying to pull? Not solve a problem, but just pull us because we solve some totally different innovation. This is a great point. And it ties into something I wanted to ask you because it occurred to me while I was watching the Artemis 2 mission. It has felt for a while like, why couldn't we get back to the moon? We're just so disorganized. We're so messed up. Nothing works anymore. We were able to do this in 1969. Why can't we do it in 2025? Why not now? Like it's ridiculous. Watching you and having recently been to Johnson Space Center and scene, you know, the inside of the Saturn V was like, I don't think we're late now. I think we were very early then. Way early. That did not make sense. We should have not have done that. Hank, I've said to so many people as we're going about past about 180,000 miles where I started to be like, okay, we are so far away from Earth right now, something goes wrong. We are definitely doomed. And you know, dwell on it. You just respect that that feeling is there. Yeah. I'm like, I bet the Apollo guys were pretty scared too. Because they were doing it for the first time in the 1960s and they didn't talk about it. But I, you know, they had to have felt some fear. Yeah. Yeah. Had to. Certainly, the Apollo 13 group felt a lot of fear. Definitely. But I mean, there were lots of individual moments. But then of course, just being strapped onto that thing. And of course, they'd also just all lost a number of their colleagues. Yep. And yeah, huge. And they lost a few other colleagues in aviation incidents all around that same time. time as well. So it was a risky time to be in that business for sure. It still is, but it for sure was then. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's happened. That's happened to you, I think. Have you lost colleagues in test fight work? Primary place I lost. Colleagues was in training in flight school training. That is a very unforgiving environment there where you're first learning to cut your teeth on aviation. And then in my early days in flying military aircraft, off of aircraft carriers lost two good friends out there. And we've been, I mean, knock on wood. We've been doing pretty well here for the last few years and it's been a pretty good run. Yeah. I mean, there's we're better at stuff. There's a good culture there in NASA. But there's there's no way to not have this be the to eliminate risk in these kinds of situations. You cannot eliminate. We weren't, I mean, nine million pounds was sitting on that launch pad. And when we hit the atmosphere on entry, we were doing six miles every second on the way home. Six miles a second. I was scared. And I wasn't in the thing. I was like, should we watch it with Orin? Catherine was like, Oh, yeah, it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. My kids were in the viewing room in Michigan, trolling. And I was like, I'd actually rather than be scrolling on the internet. They're watching this. But it did work out. And then once it works, you're just so proud. You're so exhilarated. And you just, uh, such like seeing all the watch parties after one of the coolest parts. Hank, after we landed is what I finally got connected back to the internet. And I took a couple days just to chill, but it started to trickle in like all these launch videos and, you know, launch videos to Princess Purple Rain. I'm crying my eyes out watching these things and the splash down parties. And then I don't really need the AI dance videos of my crew as we're going around the moon, but you know, that stuff was funny. So, you know, just I got to relive it in such a magical way through the eyes of all these people. Oh, one of the funniest pictures. Some lady posted a picture of us going uphill on the rocket. So there's all the smoke and fire coming out the bottom. And she said something like, I can't born a commercial airliner without Sandex and these four people willingly boarded this rocket. And I look at that just cracking up like it's so relatable. We have a time where everybody can talk about how they're seeing the world and people can digest it or not to just so even even with all the ills of social media, the internet, it really can be powerful and it can bring a lot of people a lot of joy. You're not a stranger to social media. I really do feel I already told you I feel like I got a people pleaser problem here. The American taxpayers have given me a tremendous gift. And if I don't share it in every possible way, I feel like I've let the people down a little bit. And so I do feel like there is something required in sharing this journey. You talked a little bit about like not wanting to be a meme. Even there's this day of moment early in the mission when when you report to mission control. There's two Microsoft outlets on my computer and neither one of them is working. Good, comfortable. Everybody's had that feeling before. And you said if that's the thing that I get me for good, no no shade to Microsoft. Is that feeling of I'm worried about getting meme? Does that like a feeling sort of in retrospect or like were you thinking about? Because you're going to be on camera this whole time. People are going to be looking at you. And we're going to take whatever we like people are going to take what they take from the people. You know, it's just how we are. I can tell you for sure in this Victor Christina Jeremy, they just didn't share this fear that I had. But I would I would looking at through that lens a little bit. And I don't know if it was because forgive me if this answer is just a little bit off track. But I don't know if it was because of my role as Commander, which I really we we share this mission 100%. I mean, if you ask them, we shared this mission 100% to a thought we shared this mission. But I didn't want we had one Canadian on board. We had one woman on board. Victor Glover is the first African American first black astronaut to go around the moon. I don't look at them that way. Like I we're all for astronauts. But I also in the back of my head was like, I don't want one of us to be singled out. I'm the old white dude. You know, I just don't want one of us to be singled out in that way. That that to me was more of what I was a bit cautious about. And then like you don't know me well. But I really like to speak my mind. I like to joke around. I like to goof off a little bit. I'm serious what I need to be. But I think I was at risk of potentially doing something that could negatively impact my three crewmates when I meant it in a humorous way. And it just didn't come across. So I just got to understand, yes, this mission had risk. And yes, you have to respect where we were in the machine. We got to respect the machine. Or you got to respect the people. But you also have to respect this agency, this nation, this international community have worked for this moment for coming up on two decades. And we have to respect that as well. Yeah. And do you never know what people are going to take from it? It could be a scary internet out there. I'm sure. That makes perfect sense to me that you would feel that. And you become this like focal point for humanity. And we all like as we've been talking about, you know, we have this collective experience. And you got to experience our collective experience of the mission. And what that felt like to you, we're all having this. And it's just crazy to like be a human that has to be the focus of that for some period of time. And it will wane. But like it's, you know, it's it's got to be pretty intense. And you're mostly training to run a spacecraft. Like that's what you mostly train for. You also get media training. I'm sure. But the job isn't to be like the focus of all of humanity's attention. The job is to make sure that all of these parts of the spacecraft work. But you also have to do that other thing. To what you just said, I really want to try to relate this a little bit. We never felt like that during the mission. We never felt like we were under a microscope. In fact, to be honest, we didn't even know a lot of that video was going out to the general public. We just really we did not know. We just thought it was going out of Michigan. The only reason that a lot of that imagery came out is because we realized a short coming in our onboard video. And Michigan control figured out a way to connect a GoPro into the downlink. And so I put a GoPro in my pressure suit pocket that we got approved through the system at the very last minute. So I flew that all that video came from a GoPro that I stuck at my pocket in my pressure suit that we flew up because we just we didn't have an internal cabin camera. It was just an oversight. It wasn't part of the mission. That was that was just you did that. Well, it was the team. Once we got that camera aboard, Michigan control figured out how to feed that through our 4K and code or down to Michigan control. And they're like, yeah, it'll be really good for us. I mean, really helpful for us. In Michigan, to see you all on board. And I'm like, yeah, that would be great. Well, turns out eight billion other people are watching us on board watching Victor shower watching us eat. But we never felt like we were under that under that microscope. We were truly just best friends doing the mission and getting along really, really well. Well, I'm glad because otherwise we'd all be watching. Tushay. Some of the coolest moments that I've seen are when you can see us like downloading pictures under our under our computers and you like point something you can see us all cheer and then get right back into work. I just I really love those moments. They're very raw human emotional moments. Yeah. One of the things that you said was that in space when you're giggling with laughter, you're you're laughter tears stay in your eyes. Yep. And I just love the idea that you're up there giggling with laughter. Oh, we had a lot. Sometimes we were laughing at each other. Sometimes we were laughing together at something else. But there was a lot of grace. And there was a lot a lot of laughter. I mean, we really did laugh quite a bit. In an interview you did with a New Yorker, you said on day seven in the mission, you had this video chat with your daughters. And you said, that was the day they understood why I said yes to this mission. That made me think, I think you might be the first only parent to go to space. You're certainly the first only parent to go beyond low or a thorebit. That introduces a level of risk that is beyond the average risk that's being taken. What is wrong with me? So my question is what is wrong with you? You said that they understood why you decided to go. And I wanted to ask you why why did you go? It is very selfish and it is very selfish to want to go do this. And then as a human, we are graded rationalizing. Like we can just rationalize everything. So I would talk to my kids and say there's eight billion people on this planet. And right now for them have an opportunity to go do this. How can I say no to that? That's a rationalization. I also am going to tie this back. I had the opportunity to talk to former president George Bush at one point. And I asked him, like, how did you decide to run for office when you had two daughters and you knew it would just be so disruptive to their lives. And it would just maybe change them for the better, but maybe not change for the better. And he said, you know what? Because I've always wanted to serve. And I've always had this distant dream. And I saw the opportunity. And I knew that I would be a better parent and a better role model if I did this than if I pulled back from this. And I would never want them to resent me for pulling back from something that I valued. And so for me, when my late wife was getting sick, I really wanted to leave here. We don't have family here. I wanted to get around family. I wanted to go back home. But she was adamant that we not do that. She knew I love this job. I love love coming to work every day. I work at the greatest place that a human can work at. The culture here is spectacular, not every day is good. We do way too much power and point here, but overall it is a great, nothing against Microsoft, but it's a great place to work. She just didn't want me to leave that. She didn't want her kids to leave their friends where they're growing up in the school system here. And so I also felt, I felt like it was the right thing to go flying to space one more time to honor that we had stayed here. And then I really thought that my kids, I did not want to leave them orphaned. Like that was probably my number one thought as we were going past the moon was all I want to do is hug my kids. I want them to feel safe and secure again. But making the decision, there was, I watched Interstellar like two years before we launched and I almost got the Chief Astronaut and said, take me off. Like it was too emotional for me. I was just too emotional. So anyway, I know we're deep in the emotion right now, but at the end of the day, I just, the opportunity was there. I was very honored. I felt like I knew that this mission was not going to be about leadership. This mission was going to be about togetherness. And I just felt like I understood that aspect of it. I'm not trying to be arrogant. Normally when I ever somebody says that, I say, just stop talking. So I'll just stop talking. (laughing) - I don't know, man. There's, I don't know if you know, but I went through my own cancer journey. I was diagnosed with my son with six. And when we were not sure what the heck was going on, when we knew that I had cancer, but we didn't know. I've been staged. I didn't know anything about my prognosis. That, like seeing, you know, my wife have to turn into the strong one and then me turn into the strong one and do that, you do that shared leadership stuff. I thought I might be worried about missing the future and not seeing as much of the human story as I could or my businesses or, I was just, I just wanted to make sure that my son had a dad, you know? And six was a great time for him for me to be diagnosed with cancer because he didn't get it all the way. Whereas now he's nine, I think he'd get it a lot more. But I think that if he'd been a teenager, if he'd been on his way to college, I think that like, to some extent, I did the big part of the thing. And I got you through childhood. So I understand like wanting to maybe take a step back and not fly for a while. - There was no option for me to fly. And there was a few opportunities in there and there was no capacity. Even doing the chief job, I was way out over my skis. It was, that was a tough time. I think because I was just, I was in such a tough spot in my life when I was a chief astronaut that it allowed me to lean really hard on some young astronauts who were up and coming in the office. Christina Cook was one of them. Drew Morgan was another M. McClain like this group that had just finished their first space flights. And they were hungry, they were hungry to lead. And I really leaned on them heavily in their like middle management jobs. And it made in a weird way. It taught me a really valuable leadership lesson of just pointed in direction. It's set them free. General Stan McChrystal has a phrase, "Eyes on hands off." Like just let them go lead because these are super capable people. And I saw how effective that was. It really helped me in this mission to understand what leadership can really look like. - The military, so I've very peripheral contact with the military, just friends and family. There's something very interesting about it to me where I don't know what it is, but the multiple of income between the person who's just enlisted in the top five-star generals is a lot less than you would find at the average US company. - For sure. - You know, astronauts, you're making good money, but not like the kind of money where that's commensurate with, if you had this level of fame as some other thing, you probably would be making a lot more money. There's something here that matters a lot more than money, which is, that's not surprising. But there's something here that matters a lot more than money. And it's interesting that it exists inside of this like ultimate American institution of the military, whereas America's also sort of this ultimate capitalist place. Maybe not, you know, we could get more and maybe we will. - We can. - That there is this like, this institution that is really about duty and it is about the legacy and it is about the story and it is about representing something that is much bigger than you. It is interesting that NASA, to me, appears to also hold on to that ethos without being something that is about war and defense. - For sure. When I applied to NASA in 2009, I think the thing I was most excited about here was it's still service. You're still doing it out of love for the mission, but the mission is not combat. The mission is exploration. That in itself was the number one reason that I wanted to come to this organization. And in the military, I don't even think it's right to talk about, I mean, we have to pay people because currency is just kind of the. - You gotta gotta live. - But in the military, I just, I don't, I guess some people do go in the military for the money. They probably grew up real tough lives. They go into that for that stability of finance. - Yes, stability. - But in the end, what you find in the military is, it's the experience. It's getting to see the world. It's getting to grow your horizons. It's getting to understand what it is like to serve alongside men and women who you truly, you truly know there might come a time where you have to take yourself out to keep them alive. And that is unbelievably powerful. And it just, I just, it is an incredible place to spend some time. - Do you miss that? - I miss, you get it. It's hard to say because I get such good comradeship here. We have such close relationships. But when I really look at who I keep in touch with in my life, it's those first officers and first enlisted men and women that I worked with. The folks who were in my first fighter squadron, and VF-31, those are the people that I'm still to this day, like the most bonded to outside of the folks I live with here in Houston. That's a formative part of your life. You're all in your early 20s. You're getting out there for the first time and you're doing something absolutely enormous. When you look back, it's like I was 23 years old flying fighter jets off of aircraft carriers. Like, first, how do my mom let me do that? But then how did the United States government and the people trust me with that? I had no business. (laughs) All right, a lightning round. It's time for the lightning round. (snoring) Are you ready? Yes, sir. Orion or F-14? F-14. (laughs) Take that, Orion. David Bowie's Starman or Elton John's Rocketman. I'll go Starman. What's the ISS smell like? A clean, surprisingly. Oh, that's not what I've heard. That's great. What's harder, a spacewalk or a landing at F-14 on an aircraft carrier? Spacewalk is so hard. It's just so hard. You didn't even have to hear the second thing. Gravity or no gravity? Oh, no gravity, 100%. Best thing about space. No gravity. Worst thing about space. No gravity. (laughs) It's the weirdest thing about space. That's for sure. For sure. Favorite space meal. Oh, I really love sweet and sour pork and if you could finish it up with a chocolate pudding cake at the end, chef's kiss. Did the Artemis crew listen to music if so? What was on rotation? Okay, so we did. Around the 67th day, Victor Glover found a speaker and rewired it to plug it into my little computer. And then we go to pull up music. And we thought we were gonna be on a pick songs, but we had been uploaded one long, like 18-hour singular MP3 song. So we would just go into different spots and hit play. And we would get whatever we got. That's awesome. Would you rather walk on the moon or on Mars? Oh, Mars. Are there aliens? 100%. Somewhere. Somewhere. Do you have a secret skill? Ooh. I do, I really like to cook. I really do like to just take mixed ingredients and create something that is both beautiful and delicious. That is something I love to do. Are we going to make it? We are definitely going to make it. Do not give up. We are gonna make it. So let's go back to the moon. So you're headed out to the moon. Am I correct that without this April 1st launch date, there are a number of occurrences that would not have occurred, a number of good opportunities for photography and science that wouldn't have occurred. I don't know if Hello World would have occurred. Wow, 'cause it wouldn't have been the perfect, like, sunless. Right, Earth. And I did not know that that moment was even coming. We were not expecting that. Just mission control, all of a sudden said, "Hey, we're gonna point you back on Earth for an Earth viewing opportunity." We didn't even know what that was going to be. Yes, we did not know that. This is all I would be trying to figure out. I'd be like in the thing being like, "Oh, if we launch April 1st, we're gonna get this and we were gonna get this over." Yeah, but that's not what your jobs are. Hey, just remember, we are underachievers. So we were, I'd be like, "I always think about astronauts." So April 1st also gave us, which you're probably getting to, but April 1st gave us a very unique opportunity, which is not only did we get that solar eclipse with Earth, but we got a solar eclipse as we passed the far side of the moon. And that turned into, I think the most pure and raw human moment of visual interest in the whole mission. That was not something we expected. We knew we were going to see it and we had seen it in training so we were prepared for what we thought it would look like. But when we were there in three dimensionality, there was a very spiritual side to that, a side that was very difficult to comprehend as a human that gave us all pause and true astonishment. So what are you seeing in this moment? So we just give me a little grace here to set the stage, but I'm on the 400 millimeter long lens. I'm doing solar corona imagery on the Z9. My crewmates have on the truly the little paper solar eclipse glasses that NASA sends out everywhere that the science centers have. Safe way. We weren't. We packed them at the last second. We put them in our private medical kits so that we could get them on the vehicle, our flight docs, flight surgeons, put them in these little kits for us because this solar eclipse was not part of our plan. So Victor, Christina, Jeremy, have these glasses on and Jeremy's doing overall photography. Christina, Victor, just kind of managing the cabin watching this. And as the sun goes behind the moon, now, you know, I think a solar eclipse on Earth, the sun is about the same diameter as a disk of the moon. That's just crazy that that works out. But I think we are about 30, the sun was about 32 or 35 times smaller than the moon. So it's this little tiny sun. Like that big is just escaping behind the moon. Right. Because the moon's so big. I'm taking pictures of the corona. And as I'm taking pictures of the corona, the sun is now behind the moon. I can see the corona and I can just hear my crewmates gasping. Oh my God, you got to see this. This is unbelievable. I never imagined it to look like this. Like there's just there's an absence in the middle of the universe right now. And so after about three minutes, Christina comes and it's like, Reed, just trust me, you got to get off the camera. Like you got to just go look. So I come off from behind the z9 and I look around the cabin. Jeremy's looking out one window. Christina's now on the z9, taking long lens pictures and Victor is up in the docking tunnel above me. But he looks at he's like, Reed, you got to come up and look at this. I'm like, no, no, no, just stay there and look at it. Like I just want you to continue to see this is like, no, you got to come look at this. And so I go up this docking hatch window. It's like this big, but it's on the oblique. So I can kind of get your head up in there and kind of look through this, this whole like that. And I look through it. And I turned right to Victor and I just go, I don't think my brain has evolved to the point where I can process what I'm looking at. I'm telling you Hank, it was the most foreign thing. Like Victor said, we just went sci-fi. Christina has said in post flight that she could look at it for about 15 seconds, but then she would have to look away because it was so hard to process where we were looking at. So out the window, just imagine it's like this matte black sphere, three-dimensional. It looked completely CGI fake, but it's just right outside your window. And then there's a white halo all the way around it. And you can see stars through that halo. You can see the line of planets. You're like in the middle of the galaxy, but in the center of that image, you can't see anything because it's the moon being blocked out by the sun. And then as we start going on a little bit longer, the left edge of the moon, you could just start to see some craters. And it had the tiniest little tinge of blue to it on the left side of the moon. And that was because the sunlight is now bouncing off of earth and coming and highlighting just the sliver of the left side of the moon with Ershine. And that whole thing was just we will never be able to share the beauty, the gravity, and the incomprehensibility of that moment with anyone else on earth. It was just it was truly breathtaking, spectacular awe inspiring. Like every there's no good words. There's nothing we've used them all up. There's nothing. Yeah. There's nothing. And even looking at those pictures that you look at, there's one that they took from a GoPro on the solar array and you can see part of the spacecraft and you can see that eclipse moon. That picture is very, very special. In fact, the background of my cell phone is the Eclipse moon because that was the moment for me, the visual moment that was the most special. Please go see it. If you ever get a chance, please go. It's worth all the risk. I heard you talking about a moment when you're when you're at your most distant from the earth. And it was like when the numbers should start to go down and then the number went up. Our flight dynamics had passed us our maximum distance from the earth in nautical miles. Would be 219,667 219667 in nautical miles. So when we were at our furthest distance really on the far side, we're looking down out the window. You can see the terminator of the moon. We're almost losing the moon because the sunlight is disappearing. So Victor Christina, we're doing lunar science observations right there. And I was just watching the data on the displays and I saw 219667. And I thought this is a great time to grab my phone and do a video of when it goes back down to a 9666. That would be a cool social video. We'll love that. This will be a cool moment. And so I'm filming and it goes to a 9668. I'm like not 666. It went up another mile and I'm like, that's weird. And now we're like so far away from earth. The numbers are going up pretty slow. So it took about another minute or two. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to start a new video because it's going to go to a 9667 now and we're going to be going home. And it goes to 9669. And that was where I was just like, I think they messed up. And I think we're going to go a little too far and I don't think we're ever going to go home. It's such a tiny spacecraft and you're far enough for the moon that there's not a ton of gravity pulling you back. Of course, you're going to get back to earth at some point, but it could be weeks or months away. But I'm like, man, I just this is just terrible. And then a few minutes later, I see it go to 9668 and just click down and I I told the crew, hey, we're going home and everybody went, woohoo. And then right back into the work, but you hadn't been like, hey, everybody, I think we're going to be worried. Yeah, keep that one to yourself until you're sure. And then the next day we did return to check tree correction burn number one and no one ever said that we were off course. So I was like, all right, we'll let this will go. I mean, it's a it that's a lot of significant figures to get that perfect. Yeah. So I wouldn't be too worried about we were good. You were good. Another question, do you know who was farthest away from earth? When integrity was farthest away from earth? He refuted this. We just talked about this yesterday. It had to have been Jeremy Hansen because Christina and Victor were both at Windows conducting sites. They both had cameras. They both had other notebooks. So the windows were pointed at the moon, which means that the back end of the spacecraft was the first way. I was looking at the displays, washing the telemetry for the distance. So Jeremy by default, then Jeremy must have been you didn't wrestle them out of the way. We let Canada win. I mean, I can't believe we didn't think this through. And then you had it home. Was there a scariest part of the journey home? Oh, um, there were a few acute moments of fear during this mission, but I would say there was two things on the way home that I didn't love. The first one was we had a little, a little leak in our fuel system on the spacecraft on our oxidizer side. We had helium pressure that was leaking across the series of valves. So they had closed a primary valve up above it. We were safe. We were totally safe. But at some point in doing that, mischControl and us, we got a little bit out of sync and we got the vehicle in a little bit of a configuration that we didn't expect. So going into one of our return trajectory correction burns, which they're not the most important, but they're important. You can recover if you miss one. But I was getting a little worried. We had a couple warnings pop up that were unexpected. And I was worried we were out of config to get this vehicle home. And that was the first time I realized a little shameful here. But that was the first time I realized how hard our teams on the ground were working from April 1st all the way until April 7, 8, 9 to get us home safe. And I could really feel their stress and fatigue at home, making sure this spacecraft was keeping us alive. But I gathered the crew after that and I said, hey, I took some guilt on that myself, some blame. And we talked through it and said, let's just not forget in these last three days. We aren't going home right now. We're 180,000 miles from home. And we're in a really dangerous spot. It was a recaging moment for us and a recaging moment I think for the ground teams. I haven't talked to them in particular about that. So I think that that ended up being a good thing that we were a little out of config for that return trajectory correction berg. So I think it helped us. And then the day before we came home, we were studying our entry procedures. I remember we were in the back of the spacecraft. All four of us were lined up studying our entry procedures. No one was at the displays because we were having a little conference. And we heard our one and only emergency tone of the whole mission. And there's really only two things that can trip an emergency tone. One of them is fire and one of them is deep resurization. And we weren't feeling our ears pop at all. So I went straight to the displays. I already knew what it was going to say. And it was a fire alarm. And with that, the vehicle automation shuts down all ventilation, all powered and try to take those two legs out of the fire triangle. And we didn't see smoke. We didn't smell smoke. So then the next level of fear there is something is overcurrent or burning behind the panels. And that would be that would be pretty bad potentially catastrophic for us. So heart rate was elevated. Fear was elevated. Not terror. Just not comfortable with that. And we talked to Michigan troll after a minute or two. And I asked them specifically, do you see anything that's gone off scale high, current wise? And they said, no, everything was good for us. We went around Jeremy and Christina were off like smelling true leaves smelling every way. where every panel, Victor and I were back in the displays, working with the automation on the machine, the computer system to try to get the vehicle in a safe configuration. And over a few minutes, we realized it was a fossil arm. It was a fossil detection of smoke, probably some particulate through the smoke detection system. And we worked to repower this spacecraft. The most uncomfortable part of that, because we had no ventilation, no cooling, no power, is it started to warm up rapidly inside this spacecraft. We're just sitting out there roasting in sunlight, 300 degrees above zero, and you could feel it getting warm and there was uncomfortable. We knew we were safe, but it was uncomfortable. - Yeah. - Oh yeah, and then after that, we hit the atmosphere at like Mach 39, and it was a big ball of fire, and all that. (laughing) - Broody's scary, but as planned. - As planned, better than planned, better than planned. That was awesome. - There are those moments where you're out of contact or those special or disconcerting at all? - You know, a lot of people talk about losing contact with Earth on the far side of the moon. That was a 45 minute LOS loss of signal. But throughout this mission, we're communicating through the deep space network, and there's three receiver sites on planet Earth. This Earth rotates, you're switching between Canberra, Spain and US for the big receiving dishes, Australia, Spain, US. And so as the Earth is rotating, there were periods of time where we would go two or three hours without communications with Houston. And we had trained for that, and our displays were very good at telling us when we're about to lose calm, why we have lost calm and why we will reacquire. And so I actually looked at those, they're peaceful. And you just know during those times that you have to make the decisions, there's also six minutes of plasma calm blackout on reentry, and that for me was a little more higher gain, higher intensity, because there's just so much dynamic activity in that vehicle that Victor and I, we are the two people at the controls at that moment in time. And we, I think you're just hyper analyzing, do I need to take over, do I need to take over, do I need to take over, and every time that do loop was just kind of up, nope, nope, nope. And you're just, you're letting the machine go, but we were hyper vigilant and ready to take over in a split second. - Ooh, and then you just flashed down. Is that the highest g moment in the year? - Yeah, entry was 13 minutes long, and we first hit four times Earth's gravity, and then we backed off for a while to two times Earth's gravity, which is kind of really cool, 'cause you're looking out the back of the spacecraft, there's this huge plasma funnel behind you, you're just, it's like as bright as a sun, but for six minutes you're just, you're just chilling at two Gs, just letting the friction of the atmosphere slow you down, and then at the end you dive back into four Gs for a little while. So we could see in our computer that we were gonna hit four, and then come back down to two for a long time, and then back up to four, and then we're in the atmosphere coming in. I loved it, I loved it. - You've said that you're not a religious person. I'm also not a religious person. After landing, you said that you broke down in tears upon seeing the Navy chaplains cross. So I'm not really just, at the same time, I like, I get this to some extent, that's not a foreign thought to me, that that is how I would feel upon seeing a symbol like that. Have you gotten your mind around that moment anymore in the time that has passed? - I'm gonna think about this for the rest of my life, I think. I definitely, I've always, I definitely feel spiritually connected, like to the universe, the people, to this planet, there's something for sure that's there. And I think each one of us walks our own journey, and I think every one of those journeys should be respected. And some of the people that I most respect and admire are my deeply religious friends who have always honored my walk that I am on. And to me, Victor Glover is one of those people. He is a man of true faith. He expresses it with eloquence, and he honors me as a human sitting right next to him at all times. So that's part of the story. So that I have tremendous respect for. And then when we got back to the ship, I've served in the Navy, I know what it's like to be on a Navy ship. And some of my favorite moments at sea are every night before you go to bed at sea, the chaplain on a Navy ship will come on, and he does a prayer that usually is fairly Christian race because of the US. But it's also, it tries to be inclusive. And I used to love evening prayer on the ship. I just saw it was a nice moment, it was a nice moment of quietness, it was a nice moment to reflect on the day. And we were sitting in this really weird environment, these four medical beds in the medical bay of the US's Champy Merta. And there's nurses and doctors everywhere. And some people are taking our blood, I'm getting an IV, and I just looked up and I'm like, is there a chaplain on board in the ship? Because I think it'd be great to see him right now. And there was, and I did not, I just wanted this person, I didn't know if it was a man or woman at that time, it turns out it was a man. I just wanted this person to be around me for a minute because I just felt like this person's so calming. I was always feeling I had one of those in the Navy when I was around the chaplain, I just felt calm. And so that man comes through the little, you know, the little curtains in the medical, and walks in there and I just looked up at him. I just started crying. I just thought, Victor knows what we just went through. Christina knows what we just went through. And Jeremy knows what we just went through. But on the ship, that's probably the only guy that can relate to the four of us right now. That's probably the only person who has such a deep faith that they can maybe even peel back a little bit of the lid on what the four of us just went through, what we just experienced together, what we just saw in the cosmos together. And that was a very powerful moment for me. - I really appreciate you, I mean, taking this risk, but also bringing those pictures back for us, bringing these thoughts back for us. This podcast, the idea is like, we're all in the weeds all the time and we need to be in the weeds a lot. You know, we need to figure out how to put dinner on the table, we need to figure out how to take care of the problems that we have and have the arguments we need to have. But I also really think that we need to zoom out sometimes and that does not have to be literal. Like, what's for you? But we need to take, you need just to get a few hundred feet up there and be like, what is going on? And like, what am I a part of? And it's a long history of humanity and it's all entangled and it's all like it's unclear to what extent anybody gets to make decisions at all and how much are we a collective and how much are we individuals. So I'll tricky and I really, there are these moments where I feel like I am a human that is part of a humanity. And they feel really nice. So thank you. - I love that. Love that. - It feels in some ways like an inhuman thing to go to the moon, but it cannot feel that way when we've been watching you and your crew do it because it is so human. - Thank you. - I have a final question for you, which is if there's anything that you've learned from this work that you wish everyone on Earth knew, what would it be? - Well, it can't be just one thing. We do have to be able to communicate. We gotta be able to talk through our differences. Everybody should understand that this Earth is magnificent. Christina Cook, I think said at the past when she said, when I looked back at Earth, I just felt lucky. If everybody could just feel that for a second to just feel like we are so lucky to have this gift. And then the last thing I'll leave you with Hank is, I've really come to the realization at the end of all this. The great things take really hard work. And I think we spend a lot of time thinking, how can I get rich quick or how can I make this splash? How can I do this thing? 'Cause you see these really good people that are doing it and they make it look easy. I promise you behind that is just countless days, months, years, half a lifetime of tremendously hard work, skill, and risk taking. People that are willing to step out a little bit, step out of their comfort zone. And so I just hard work, it really matters and it really does pay off. - Thank you so much for having this conversation with me and also for going to the moon. - My honor, Hank, thank you. - Thanks to all the humans who helped make this episode. Morgan Levy is the show's supervising producer and Greg Ripon is our engineer. Peyton Mitchell manages our social media, Andrew Wong composed the music and James Barnard designed the artwork. You can and should follow us. Wherever you listen to podcasts. - Let's do it one more time. - He can. - He will never lose.