My Monday Morning: Randy Bresnik

(upbeat music) - I'm Randy Bresnick, and this is my Monday morning. (upbeat music) - Astronaut Randy Bresnick is leading NASA's Artemis III mission into space next year. He's a retired marine colonel and has been to space two times before. His daughter was born on the day he first walked in space in 2009. Artemis III will build off of the huge success of Artemis II earlier this year. And Randy will lead a crew of astronauts, Andre Douglas, Luca Parmitano, and Frank Rubio onboard the Orion spaceship next year. And NASA's ultimate goal with these missions is getting humans back on the moon. For his Monday morning, Randy told me what it's like to wake up in space and why it's the best sleep he's ever had. I'm Lane Florscheim, and that's coming up after the break. (upbeat music) Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mavily, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin. That still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Mavily, New York. Maybe it's Mavily. I've interviewed a lot of people for this and never an astronaut. So I can't wait to hear about your routines and how you start the week. I'm happy to meet you Lane and looking forward to the conversation. We ask about routines in this show. And I think that a lot of people are going to be really interested to hear about the routine of a NASA astronaut and how you start your week, especially as you're prepping for this big mission. So I was wondering what does a Monday morning look like for you? - Well, here on Earth, before the mission, my preparation now kind of starts a little bit Sunday, making sure I know what I'm doing on Monday. I guess I've got either the gear, the uniforms, food, whatever it is I need, ready to go. Get a Monday morning doing my five most important things. And this is my Monday morning five must-have. First is wake up and give my wife a kiss and say good morning. Number two, get my daughter a hug when she comes downstairs and gets ready to go to school. Number three, put my dog sky. And number four, feet, my dog sky. And then sit and have a quiet moment as I have breakfast and thank God for another day. Anything about this job as an astronaut is it varies every single day, every single week. Training goes from being in a simulator that has computer screens and we're integrated with mission control to being in a simulator that's more of a mock-up where we're actually in our spacesuits and we're in the vehicle, we're actually on our backs as if we're taking off or landing. And even just yesterday, we were in our spacesuits doing an egress if we had to get out quickly on the ground over the water. Or is it actually taking a class on a particular guidance or navigation type of thing or learning about our size experience or learning how to take my own blood samples. It is such a neat wide variety of stuff that you just never boring. It's always challenging, you're always learning something. Everybody feels a belonging, they feel that they are contributing and that's what drives us all. - I mean, that sounds so special. To go back a little bit into the morning, do you have a go-to breakfast that you like to eat? Are you a coffee drinker? - I don't drink coffee or tea. And so by morning breakfast is a breakfast shake but doing that since literally since I was in high school. And then it's off to the work. Most days I try and get to the gym before I get to work so that way I can just have the best part of the day started off at the beginning. And then I see people, if we're leaving the gym, we're getting ready to hand to the office like, okay, the best part of the day is over now. But we go into the work and do all the exciting stuff that has to do with learning or making the space program work, supporting the people that are in space right now. Sometimes that can go later than normal hours. But we try to keep most work to between the eight to five hours on Monday and Friday. - How do these routines change when you're in space? Like how does going to sleep and waking up work in space do you set an alarm clock? - We do, we do. I mean, the first part is just, is going to sleep. You're not, you know, pulling back the covers, laying down the bed, having gravity hold you there and pull the covers back on top, you know, get comfortable with the pillow and get comfortable with the blankets, you know, push on your toes. In space, you set up your sleeping bag and kind of tie the corners to where it won't float. And then you float into the bag and zip it up. And then usually your body's just floating in the bag. And so to me, that is the most comfortable position I've ever been in sleeping and I sleep great. It is absolutely awesome because I have nothing touching or moving my body or making it uncomfortable. But the part of the edge is a little bit different. Is it, you know, you can put stuff down, you put your watch down, your glasses or drink of water next year, nightstand, next to your bed. In space, you put something down and it floats off. So you got to have stuff either with Velcro on it, you got to have a little bag where you put everything and keep track of everything. So the routine is a little different. The morning you wake up, I wouldn't have my wife there to give a good morning kiss to at the start, so I'll be unfortunate. I think you've seen Luca and Frank and Dre great humans, but we won't be kissing them in space. And so then it is, you know, float out of the sleeping bag. You know, go ahead and put the sleeping bag away. You've got to get changed into your work clothes for the day. You know, use the restroom that we have. And then somebody's got to get up and get the food going for breakfast because it takes time to fill up the dehydrated food or other things like that with water and then put them in the food warmer until we can eat, you know, a meal. And then it's, you know, we're in one tiny little area. You know, think of the size of like a king size bed and four people living and working in that space, you know, with a little bit of overhead for days. You know, you have to coordinate with your buddies to, you know, stay out of there while they're trying to go use the facilities to get changed and all that. And so we're ready to start the day on time and then pull them up to the displays of Orion and see it, check in the vehicle systems, making sure everything's working okay. Check in the timeline for what we have to do that day. Sitting up quick and forth, you know, maybe you guys do an interview with us while we're in space and we have to set up the cameras and the audio and the, you know, the scene get ourselves dressed for it and get ready for it. So there's every day is different. Obviously they're both the important days for this mission but the ones where we are able to, you know, look up on our system and see that we have a target vehicle and we have something to rendezvous with and we're going to watch a spec in the horizon, be it closer, it becomes, takes a shape and that shape becomes a spacecraft. And that spacecraft becomes something that we can see the docking hatch on and a docking hatch is something that few hours later we're actually docking our spacecraft too and joining, putting the hooks out, putting the two vehicles together and then executing the joint operations. - Wow, I mean, that just sounds incredible. And I can't believe that this is the follow-up question that my brain is going to but you mentioned heating up breakfast and I was wondering and the dehydrated food and I was wondering what's the best breakfast in space? - Ooh, we've had two of our four food tastings and your taste buds, your change over time and it's certainly changed in space. What I came around this time, kind of familiar and reminding me of taste that I liked and things that stood out as this time and things that I want to take with me are certainly the sausage patties were really good and flavorful. And then there's like a kind of, a breakfast granola cereal, kind of a cereal crunch. It's like, I think I'm going to have that more than one day out of the spaceship 'cause that came across this really good taste and something that's strong enough to overcome the blandness that sometimes you get in your taste buds when you're in space. - Coming up, Brandy talks about his leadership style. Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new groupie setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new groupie setting mist from Mabelie, New York. - Maybe it's Mabelie. - The mission is scheduled for next year ahead of the amazing success of Artemis II this year. I believe you'll be in space for about two weeks and not to be too on the nose, but I was wondering, what is your north star for this mission? What's your goal? - Our north star is enabling the follow-on missions, being successful in the mission elements and parts of the profile that allows to buy down risk so we can safely land humans on the room on the very next mission. How do you think about or define your leadership style? What's the most important consideration when you're leading people in space? - Taking care of your people, it's that simple. I come from, it was a 25 years in the Marine Corps and you can't accomplish anything by yourself of this magnitude and my definition of leadership is the art of getting things done through people. And so whether that is the crew members on my flight or through the lead flight director and the folks that are in mission control, man, the consoles of all the different systems, or it's working with the programs that provide the vehicles, the hardware and the science that we're gonna be doing on the mission. It all comes down to people working together and a unified effort towards accomplishing the mission. And so if you take care of the people, then the people take care of the mission. - And in a high risk job like this, how do you stay calm? - Fortunately, most of us have had backgrounds where we've had high risk jobs or we just have life experiences that have taught us how to compartmentalize. And so there's the compartmentalization aspect and not worrying about things beyond your control. There's the trust factor that we all have working with the people that are building on rockets, designing on rockets, operating on rockets, knowing that they are consummate professionals doing the absolute best that they can, and that they're gonna put the best product for us to trust our lives to go to space. And then lastly, it's training. Being familiar with the tasks we're gonna do so that when we go to do them, we're just floating. We look down and we see the earth instead of the floor of a training building and knowing that if we just execute what we trained, then we're gonna accomplish tasks that we have. And so all those things put together really give you a sense of peace and calmness and the real emotions you get is this excitement of, wow, look down at the earth, you know, seeing America as you come over the coastline from west to east, you know, see in the Florida Keys as you exit the bottom corner on a descending node and see the beauty of them as you then head across the Atlantic. I mean, just all these things that add to the joy and allow you to just take in some moments of pleasure and mental joy as you execute the timeline of the mission. - Well, kind of on that note, I know that NASA has been live streaming more of their recent missions and I was wondering, how do you feel about doing your job on camera with a lot of people watching? - Well, certainly, even when we're here training or anything like that, you always, somebody's always watching. And so, fortunately by the time you get assigned to a space like you've gone through training in a bunch of different areas and many different areas. And so you become comfortable with it, you know, and so certainly it was neat to see Artemis too be able to have the connectivity and the bandwidth of the comm systems to be able to send down, you know, a lot more continuous images and videos of what was going on which allowed the public to, you know, the public all over the world to be engaged. And you know, he used that as a mission event for them to be, you know, really had their passions ignited and follow, follow the space flight. And so certainly we're ready for that to continue that momentum to show people what, you know, humans can do in space, what the capabilities of these great American spacecraft are. And so we hope to convey, you know, a mission that is successful that shows humans working together in harmony and shows us unified in the purpose of, you know, getting humans to the moon as soon as possible. - What are some of the fun things that we can expect to see you do in space? For example, I saw this great photo of you on a previous mission eating personal pizzas with several other astronauts. - We won't unfortunately have the pizza making you know, opportunities in the small capsule ride. I mean, fun things, the first one is going to be, you know, Frank and Luke and I seeing Andre Douglas in space and his experience of that for the first time. That is always one of those joyful things to see another human feel weightlessness. Look out the window and see the horizon. It's always been flat their whole life turning to a horizon that's now curved. And you have them go around the earth and you know, hour and a half and have them realize that, wow, I'm going at tens of thousands of miles an hour. And I just ran over on the whole planet in under two hours. I mean, you can't even get, you know, in a cross-town traffic in most of our major cities in that amount of time. And so that's certainly number one, when we do an earth observation base, it's certainly being able to see a blue origin lander, you know, up in space and get close to it and dock with it. And in turn, that's going to be an amazing opportunity. First time we've had humans inside of a lunar lander, you know, since 1972 and the Apollo 17. And for all of you to see, you know, the blue origin lander launch. You'll see that it's us launch. And then a few days later, see the SpaceX Starship launch. To be able to see all these launches, all coordinate in space, get together. That's what's going to bite down a lot of risk for the follow-on mission when we're actually randomly with lunar lander in lunar orbit to be able to take humans down the surface. That is so cool. This being your third space flight, I was wondering, are there any rituals or habits that you've brought into all of your space flights? Certainly, I always have taken items with me that were personal items that you met a lot. Whether it was for my wife or for my kids. You know, one of them was something I took on a previous flight that was meant for my Southern return to 18. And to be able to give him that two years later. And him understand that, wow, they kind of put some effort into this. And this was like five, six years ago that they planned this and did this for me. You know, I think it made it mean more to him. So, you know, taking things that are, you know, memorable and important to me and my family are certainly wonderful things. But I think more importantly is, you know, all of us crew members will have those types of things. But be able to go up and represent the country. That'll be the part that really, you know, gives us a lot of, you know, satisfaction and knowing that we are contributing to, you know, the evolution of human space flight exploration. Thank you so much for joining us for my Monday Morning. Happy Monday. My Monday Morning is part of the journal, which is a co-production of Spotify Studios and the Wall Street Journal. I'm Lane Floreshime, and we'll be back with another episode of my Monday Morning next week. Follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on Instagram, @LaneFloreshime for more behind the scenes stuff for my Monday Morning and to let me know what you think of the show. This episode was produced by Jiva Kavarma and edited by Catherine Brewer and Sarah Platt. Video production by Nathan Singapok, original music by Nathan Singapok. 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