Infinite Space and Cosmic Conversations From a Revered Astronaut Who Propelled His Childhood Dreams Into a Career of Purpose

Michael Mendenhall: Well, this is going to be incredibly fun. I like to refer to the next guest as the guy from outer space. And some of you will understand all this because he’s going to help us understand what’s fact and fiction. He had a seemingly unreachable childhood dream of becoming an astronaut. We’re going to talk about that. And he realized this through an incredible career with NASA. And that included two missions to the Hubble Telescope, four space walks. And that’s important to understand because many people don’t get that many, to repair critical things on the telescope. He also helped set the record for the most time spent space walking during a single mission. He made history as the first person to tweet from outer space and also, interestingly enough, became a celebrity. If you guys are all about the Big Bang Theory, he had a recurring role on the Big Bang Theory—seven times he was on. They actually treated him like a cast member and he now serves as a senior advisor for the space program for the Intrepid Sea and Airspace Museum. He is a professor at Columbia University, a bestselling author, TV host, good Lord. And I’m also hoping he can tell us whether those outrageous images we saw from the telescope in deep space are real or Photoshopped. Big question right now. So anyhow, please welcome Mike Massimino.

He’s got his space jacket on. We just have to say, wait, wait, hold on. All right guys. Where’s the one from Big Bang Theory?

Mike Massimino: I have the patches.

Michael: These are official patches from the missions. No, buddy. Right here.

Mike: This one right here. That’s a cool jacket you got as well. Impressive.

Michael: Anyhow, how awesome to have you here.

Mike: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Michael: Listen, another guy from Long Island. I mean, we have Bob Iger, Long Island, a lot of Long Island people here.

Mike: Yeah. Great place to grow up.

Michael: Yeah. Well, we’re going to talk a little bit about that because you had this childhood dream. I want to know when that started, what you saw or listened to because you could have listened to something as well. And when did that start to happen, at what age and the pursuit of that dream?

Mike: Mike, well, thanks very much for having me. Thanks everyone for coming and listening. I was six years old when they landed on the moon and it’s one of the first things I remember, the buildup to it. I remember Apollo 10 where they got very close to the moon, but didn’t land, They went down kind of like a dress rehearsal for the landing, which was Apollo 11. So that made a big impression on me. It really is the first event I remember happening. Growing up on Long Island that same year, the Mets were in the World Series. Where are your baseball fans? And that was a big deal back then, the Miracle Mets.

Michael: He’s a huge baseball fan.

Mike: Huge baseball fan.

Michael: He knows them all.

Mike: But that really took hold of me and I knew it was important. My parents, my teachers, everyone was talking about it; that this was important. But it hit me in a way that was, I think, different than everybody else. I felt like this was the most important thing that was happening, not only at that time, but I thought it’s the most important thing that had it happened for hundreds of years and it would be the most significant thing. Going to another place and landing on it was the most significant thing that was going to happen for a very long time. And it got me right down in my heart and soul and it never left.

Michael: There was that one iconic image.

Mike: Yes, the image. We stayed up late. It was in the evening when they landed and then went for that walk and seeing that on the black and white television in my living room in Long Island, Franklin Square, as you mentioned, that never left me. And they became my heroes, those astronauts. Neil Armstrong was my greatest hero.

Michael: You have that great Neil Armstrong picture too. That was awesome.

Mike: Yes. Actually, there’s no photographs of Neil Armstrong on the moon.

Michael: No.

Mike: He had the camera and that iconic image is actually of Buzz Aldrin.

Michael: Yeah, that’s right.

Mike: Can you imagine going to the moon and not getting a selfie of yourself? On the way back, “Houston, we have a problem. I gotta turn around. I didn’t get a photo.” How many photographs have you taken already today of you with people? Can you imagine going to the moon? But that I think actually indicates the person he was. He was all about the mission, of getting the job done.

Michael: But you were the first person to use technology.

Mike: Yeah, take that, Neil Armstrong. I was the first person to tweet from space.

Michael: Yeah, you tweeted. So you had this passion as a kid and I think we’re going to go to an image if we could. Let’s see, there he is.

Mike: That’s me.

Michael: That’s him.

Mike: Yep. So that’s the summer of July 1969. They landed on the 20th. So this is probably July 22 because I wanted to dress up like Neil Armstrong and play like I was an astronaut.

Michael: Was that a fishbowl on Snoopy?

Mike: Yeah. So the Snoopy you see there…

Michael: This is going to be very interesting because…

Mike: We go everywhere together.

Michael: ... we’ll go to the next picture. Let’s go to the next picture if we can. There we go.

Mike: And that’s Snoopy with me in space.

Michael: So he had the same Snoopy and he actually fulfilled his dream as a kid. It’s a long road. We’re going to talk about that, that he actually took this. And I said to Mike, “You have to bring the Snoopy.” Oh, it’s the only Snoopy that’s been in space? I don’t know. We don’t want to damage it. And I go, “Oh no.” He goes, “Would you want me to bring the jacket?” I go, “Well, yeah, you gotta bring the jacket.” You’re a television celebrity.

Mike: There you go. Snoopy made the trip.

Michael: Yeah, so Snoopy made the trip and I love that you brought him. Thank you.

Mike: Well, thanks for inviting him.

Michael: Yeah. So from there, let’s progress with this aspiration. So here you are and now what?

Mike: By the time I was about eight years old, I started learning about myself and realized that I probably was never going to grow up to be Neil Armstrong. I’m afraid of heights. I learned…

Michael: No, he’s afraid of heights.

Mike: I was worried about this ramp. Did you see this ramp? It’s treacherous.

Michael: Worried about this ramp.

Mike: Never mind flying in space. I watched you very closely. I learn from experiences.

Michael: And they’re telling you, “Lean back a certain way.” I go, “The people that constructed this did not walk this, that’s for sure.”

Mike: Yeah, no. I was a little scared. But I didn’t like heights, I didn’t like going fast. Even on my bicycle. I’m a very slow driver. It drives my wife and anyone in a car with me crazy. I just didn’t picture myself as this fearless test pilot like Neil Armstrong. So I buried the dream. I was like, “Ah, this can never happen.” When I was a senior in college, I went to Columbia. I was studying engineering and a movie came out called “The Right Stuff.” And I saw that movie. It’s based on a book by Tom Wolfe. I also read the book. And when I watched that movie, it showed scenes of the first astronauts going to space in the Mercury program—John Glenn—and talked about the test pilots before them and it rekindled that interest.

And when I realized that event of the moon landing and what was going on with that exploration when I was six years old, that never left me. That was still deep in my heart and my soul and was what my passion was. And I could either ignore it so it could never happen or I could try to do something about it. And it took a couple years. I worked for a couple years after college, but then I started to pursue it by going to graduate school and trying to pursue this dream. Didn’t know if it was going to work, of course, but I wanted to try.

Michael: At graduate school, what’d you study?

Mike: So I studied mechanical engineering in graduate school and I tried to get opportunities. I worked with NASA over the summers that I was there and…

Michael: But how did you get to then say, “You know what, I’m going to apply”? Because there were some fumbles.

Mike: Oh yeah. So when I was in my third year of graduate school at MIT, NASA announced that they were looking for astronauts. And I met the minimum qualifications, so I sent in an application. And about six months later…

Michael: Explain some of the minimums so they understand.

Mike: So the minimums, you needed at least a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering or qualifying degree. A master’s degree or advanced degree was preferred, that was a good thing. You needed a couple years of experience working. Basic things like that. There was also some basic physical requirements. You had to be no taller than 6’4” and that was okay. That one I squeezed in there by a little bit, but it was just basic stuff.

Michael: Now you should explain and we’ll come back to this because there were some fumbles, but you brought up the 6’3”. Now I said to him, “How is it you’re cramped in these small spaces and if you’re in the space station, there’s seven of you in there and you’re 6’3”. How did that work?”

Mike: I was worried about this during our training because there were times we were on the flight deck of the space shuttle, seven of us each with a job to do and you’re just crowded. How was this going to work? I’m big, so some of my crew mates, seven of us in there. But what I was told was that, “Well, wait till you get to space because you’ll be able to float.” And I was like, “Okay, let’s see what happens.” But it’s true. Imagine if we’re able to float around this room, how much more space we would have. You could go in that corner and no one ever finds you. And that’s what it is in space, you can float and all of a sudden the volume opens up. When you get back to earth, geez, we’re really not using all the room in this place. We could float around here. We could have all kinds of things going on. So you don’t really notice it. I never felt claustrophobic or lack of space.

Michael: But it was also the clothing, the weight.

Mike: Yeah, we were talking earlier about that. So flying larger people is a problem because everything has to get off the planet and that is an associated cost. There’s a cost per pound, which is quite expensive. So you would think, “Well a bigger person’s going to cost more because they’re bigger. They weigh more.” But also you require more food, which weighs more. And your clothing as well is larger.

Michael: And oxygen.

Mike: Everything, all the consumables. So you’re like, “Do we really want this guy?” I couldn’t fit all my clothes because they were big, couldn’t fit in the locker. Megan MacArthur, my poor crewmate had to give up half of her clothing locker for my stuff.

Michael: That’s unusual activity.

Mike: Bigger people require more and that could be expensive. Plus we had to have room for Snoopy too.

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: I’m a high-maintenance astronaut.

Michael: So let’s go back to now, since we got past that because you brought that up. Let’s go back to: you’ve applied…

Mike: I applied. Six months later I get a letter from NASA on official NASA letterhead. I was very excited. I opened this thing up and it said “no.” I mean, there were other words on the page, but we couldn’t have saved the taxpayer a lot of money in ink and just put “no.” So that was a rejection. And then a couple years later, I was just about done with grad school and NASA was looking for astronauts again. So I was like, “Okay, here’s my chance again and this will be perfect. Graduate and go right there to NASA.” So I sent in my second application and, Michael, I get another letter back. This one was different. I had a different date at the top. Other than that, it was the same rhetoric. They told me no.

I went down and worked at NASA so they could get to know me better. And again, applied a few years after that because they announced this every few years, looking for people. So this time I didn’t get a letter I got a phone call under my third try to come in for an interview. And interview’s a whole week of activities. You’re meeting lots of people. You were at the selection board, a lot of medical exams. They want to get to know you very well. And they got to know me very well. And with that information, they rejected me. So I was 0 for three.

Yeah, it wasn’t going well. And I was not only rejected, I was medically disqualified. Back then, you had to see really well or well enough, better than I could, without glasses or contacts. Now the rules have changed, so don’t worry about it. This was 25 years ago, more, and I couldn’t pass the eye exam so they disqualified me. And I was resigned to the fact that this is really difficult to do, but I always thought at least I could try, I could control that. They could tell me no, but I could try. But when you’re DQ’d, when you’re disqualified, they put a stamp on your folder and they told me they would never read my application again, “Because you’re unfit for duty.” And that was pretty bad. I didn’t know if LASIK existed back then. None of this stuff was around to help and they didn’t accept any of it and so it was game over.

But there’s always a way around things and I started asking questions and talking to people and I found out about something called vision training where you could try to improve your eyesight with different techniques and training naturally without any surgery. And NASA was okay. They said it’s not going to work. This is hocus-pocus is what they felt, I think, medically. But it was my only chance. I made an appointment. There was a doctor in Houston, her name is Desiree Hopping and she specialized in this. And I made an appointment, I’m sitting in a chair to see her. And she walks in, she’s confused. And she said, “You’re here for vision training?” And I said, “Yeah.” I go, “What is it?” And she goes, “Well, it only works with kids.”

Their eyes are still forming and the brain’s developing. “I never had anyone older than 10.” And I’m sitting there, I said, “Dr. Hopping, I could be so immature, you won’t even know the difference. You’ll think I’m an eight-year-old, I promise.” And so I begged her and she helped me and I was able to improve my eyesight enough to be able to... It’s like training your brain really. It’s strange techniques, but it worked and I was able to re-qualify and then apply again, get another interview. And then I was selected on the fourth try as a result.

Michael: Now a lot of people are like, “Oh great, so you’re like a pilot basically. You could be a pilot, you can train. You just go right up. It’s a couple hours, maybe a year you’re working on this.” Most people don’t realize you spent at least seven years on the ground.

Mike: Yeah, no. Absolutely.

Michael: Before you can even go up.

Mike: Yeah. In fact, when you’re first hired, you’re not even really an astronaut, Michael. Actually, you’re applying to the astronaut candidate program. Or as the older, more experienced astronauts call you astronaut candidates, AsCans. “Who are the new AsCans?” “That guy, he’s an AsCan. She’s an AsCan.” So for two years, you’re not even an astronaut. But you go through the training and then you have a graduation ceremony. Hopefully everyone passed in my class and we were astronauts now eligible, but then it’s still more years. There’s another four years before I got to go.

Michael: That’s important, the seven years because it’s really about team, not the individual.

Mike: Absolutely, yeah.

Michael: I think we should talk about that when you think about these small businesses and how you work as a team versus an individual.

Mike: For me, it really hit home the very first week we were at NASA. The first week when you show up, you have a press conference and you get to learn about a lot of administrative stuff. Here’s the health plan, this is what’s available to you and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that’s really administrative stuff. The second week is when we really started our training and we were going to start our training with a swim test, believe it or not. And that’s because one of the first things we’re going to do is go through water survival training because a lot of things we did required flying in an ejection seat aircraft, possibly bailing out of a space shuttle, so you had to do that. So before you could go through that training, you had to show that you could survive in the water.

There was a course we had to go through with the Navy and I was not a strong swimmer. And they warned us about this when we got our acceptance letter. It was like, “Welcome to NASA. Please practice your swimming.” Because in the past, they would show up with the Navy and they’re like, “These guys can’t swim.” You have to pass this test before they let you go, so that was really the first event. And on that Friday of our first week, we’re at the end of the day, we’re ready to go home. And one of our more experienced astronauts who was Jeff Ashby, who was from the class before us, was our sponsor telling us about things. And he came in and he said, “All right, before you go home, I want to remind everybody that Monday the training starts and the first event on Monday is the swim test.” And I was like, “Really? That’s what we’re going to do? Can’t we have a math quiz? Can we do something else here? I’m going to embarrass myself in front of these people. This is going to be bad.”

And he went further, he said, “Who are the strong swimmers in this group?” And we had a couple navy divers who raised their hand. And then he said, “More important, who are the weak swimmers? And don’t lie to me.” And I raised my hand. I’m a weak swimmer, I had to admit it. And he said, “All right, everyone else at didn’t raise their hand can go home for the weekend. But the strong swimmers and the weak swimmers are going to stay after class and you’re going to arrange a time to meet at a pool over the weekend. And the strong swimmers are going to help the weak swimmers with their swimming. Because when we go to the pool on Monday, no one leaves until everyone passes that test.”

And that set the bit in my head that I was in a whole new world now. Individual accomplishment is nice, but what really mattered was the performance of the team. You could be Michael Phelps and set a world record, but if you left someone behind in that pool that day, you also failed. Your job was to help the person who needed it. And also from my end, my job was to get help. And sometimes that’s harder I think to admit when you’re not sure about something or you don’t want to admit that you are a little weak at something. You really need to speak up to it and know that the culture there is not going to hold that against you. They’re going to be grateful that you spoke up, so give help when you can, get help when you need it. We helped each other and we all passed that test.

Michael: Was that the whole way through the seven years?

Mike: The whole thing was like that. You had to look at it as the success of a team and how am I contributing to the success of that team? What do I need to be a better team member? It led to relationships that were unbelievable. Alan Bean, who was an astronaut who walked on the moon, became a mentor of mine. He was the fourth guy to step foot on the moon out of the 12 that did that. He also became a commercial artist after he was an astronaut. If you Google him, really incredible person, left and right brain going. But Alan said that the most important thing about being a good team member and a leader as well is finding a way to care for and to admire everyone on your team. And that was so important. You realize that your success is based on everyone else helping you and the team’s success is based on you accepting that help and then giving that help when you could do that. And it built up trust and great relationships. The closest people in my life other than my immediate family are the people I flew in space with.

Michael: Did it become family? Because you talk with me a lot about family.

Mike: Especially the people you fly in space with for me, on my second flight especially, which is this patch here, which is a real space patch right here. That group, we spent a long time. It was two and a half years of training. We got delayed a bit. So we got to spend more time together. It’s like a hybrid of friendship and family. Families don’t always get along. Sometimes you have disagreements and people think differently, but you still love each other. And then being friends, you’re not blood relatives, so you’re like friends that way, but it’s almost like a hybrid of a friendship and being a family member. There’s nothing we would not do for each other, literally not.

And even though I don’t live near any of these folks anymore, we still see each other fairly regularly. We’re always in contact checking in on each other and it made work so wonderful. It wasn’t just that we were astronauts or we had really cool things to do at our job, we had relationships with each other where we knew we could count on each other and going to work where there’s no worry about being embarrassed or messing up. I made mistakes in space and it wasn’t like, “Hey, you did that. Look what you did.” It was never that. It was always, “Don’t worry, we got your back.”

Michael: We’re going to get to the bolt. We’re going to get to the bolt.

Mike: Yeah, there you go. My big mistake in space. I’m sure we’re going to cover that. But that’s the way it was for us. If you had a problem, speak up. If you made a mistake, speak up. And if someone speaks up or has an idea, it’s important for leadership not to squash it. If someone has a concern, everyone has a concern and you need to listen. And that is freeing, that, “Hey, I messed up, but I want to let you know about it for the good of the team.” And the leadership has to be accepting of that.

Michael: That’s awesome. So you’ve done multiple missions and we were talking about family. Some of those were not quite so successful prior to you going up and some of those missions, you may have been on and you lost some of your friends. Talk to us about that feeling and what you did as a team knowing that you were going to be on one and got delayed and had you gone up, you wouldn’t be here today.

Mike: Yeah. So what you’re referring to, Michael, my first flight was a space shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. And our space shuttle was space shuttle Columbia. STS 109 was our designated, that was our number. And generally they would assign and fly crews in that number order. There was another flight, STS 107 that was also scheduled to go on Columbia before us. And what happened was there was some problems with Columbia when it came back from an overhaul and they had to do some extra work on the spacecraft to get it ready to go on the space shuttle. And they were worried about us getting to Hubble because Hubble has some failures and we don’t want it to get really bad, so they wanted to get us up there. This other mission was more of a science mission.

So they switched our position. We ended up going out of order and we got their spot and then they got our spot, and we launched and landed successfully. And STS 107 launched in January of 2003. And on February 1st they were trying to come home. If you were around at that time, you probably remember they didn’t come back successfully. They took some damage on the way up during launch. NASA knew about that, but they didn’t think it was damage. They knew it took a debris strike. From what they could tell, everything was fine, but it put a hole in the wing that no one knew about. And when they tried to reenter, when you come and hit the Earth’s atmosphere to slow down, it gets really hot, about 5,000 degrees temperature. Entered the wing, took it off, and we lost the space shuttle and my friends. It was the worst day of my life when that happened.

Michael: And then there was another one.

Mike: There was an accident before that, which was before I was an astronaut, where the space shuttle Challenger went up and we lost that on launch.

Michael: So where was your head? Here you are. I mean, it’s incredibly risky. People take risks. Your family’s sitting here saying, “Wow.” I mean, there’s a lot of uncertainty at times. Where did you take your head in that space and your family in trying to balance what are the potential risks?

Mike: The first accident happened in 1986, right before I was going off to grad school to try to become an astronaut. And when that accident happened, what was strange about it was, for me, I didn’t know any of the people, but it didn’t affect my desire to be an astronaut. In some way, it showed me the price of wanting to do this, of getting to do this. And I felt that at time, that’s the way you should feel about what you’re doing in life. You should feel that it’s worth the risk. You should be passionate enough to be willing to take whatever risk and whatever risk that you’re willing to take. So for me, taking the risk with my life, I felt the dream is worth that. And I felt the space program and what we were doing was worth that. Financial risk, that really scares me.

That’s not where my head is, but that risk of going to space, I was willing to take that. And it solidified in my mind that yes, as important to me as it was, it’s so important that I’m willing to take that risk. And it was really weird, it solidified my interest in wanting to be a part of the program. The second accident. Now, I had just flown, as we talked about on Columbia before that. I knew all those people very well. Some of my best friends. Three of my astronaut classmates were on that flight. I knew all of them. I knew their families. They flew in January, spent Christmas with Ilan Ramon, an Israeli astronaut. I spent Christmas with he and his family right before then. I knew them all very well. And my family and my kids and we knew them very well.

That was a bit different. And the first reaction was, “Well, we have to take care of their families and memorialize them and mourn and do all that.” What was also interesting is about maybe a week or two into it, I think we all started to realize in the astronaut office, “What about the space program?” We had just lost our spaceship and we were counting on flying the space shuttle indefinitely really, because it was no reason to stop. It was working fine after that first accident, but it hit us that as important it was, we had to first take care of the families and our friends, their families. We also had to keep the program going. We weren’t going to let another tragedy occur after this first one happened. And we had this resolve to get back to flying, to figure out how we could prevent that from ever happening again and be able to finish flying the missions to build the International Space Station, to service Hubble one more time.

And it took a lot of hard work, a lot of uncertainty. It took years to get back to that point, but we did it and we were able to come back and fly and do that. And when I look back at my career, we talk about the flights as being highlights, but the way we responded to that accident, the way we all came together to mourn our friends but also to move forward and come up with, I think, really innovative ideas to get to fly again and not let the program die, I look that as a great lesson in teamwork, an example of teamwork. I think you learn who you are as a team in the tough times, not in the good times. But when times are tough, I really think you find out what your team is made of, just like coming back from a pandemic like many of the people here have been able to do.

Michael: Were you disappointed when they killed the shuttle program?

Mike: It was bittersweet. I knew that it was time to move on. I arrived at NASA in 1996. The first flight was 1981, the last one ended up being 2011. I came in right at the middle. Those 30 years, I came in after 15 years and then another 15 years of flying the shuttle. And it was time to move on. It was bittersweet because I thought it was a great spaceship, all the things it could do. It got me to space and back twice. Seven people go up there, it can land on a runway, great vehicle, but also was a bit dangerous. And it killed two crews. It was going to eventually have another accident if we would keep flying it.

Michael: Is it concerning that we’re politicizing the space station?

Mike: Oh, with the Russians?

Michael: Yeah.

Mike: I don’t think there’s any reason to do that. And I don’t think it really means very much. It’s business as usual up there. We are flying, on a launch that’s coming up, there’s going to be a Russian cosmonaut on an American spaceship. There’s going to be two Americans, a Japanese astronaut, my friend Koichi Wakata, and a Russian cosmonaut is flying on a United States spacecraft, the SpaceX spaceship to the space station. And we have one of our astronauts getting ready to fly up on a Soyuz. So the space agencies are still working together. They can’t afford to have arguments. And that’s, I think, one of the great things about exploration in science and engineering is that even if you have differences at certain levels in your organization or your governments, when you have the same goal, those differences go away.

So although these statements are being made that they’re going to pull out, there was a warning that they were going to... my buddy Mark Vande Hei was going to get a ride back on a Soyuz. This was about six months ago. That never really reached a level where it could affect anything. So all these statements can be made, but I think it’s just positioning or political rumor or whatever they’re trying to influence there. But the actual operations and work is continuing as planned.

Michael: So let’s get up because we talked earlier, I introduced you about the space walks.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: So there’s a lot of interesting and fascinating things that go on, but the one thing again is it’s about team because when you exit the shuttle, you always have a team member. And you were talking about the one thing you’ve consistently trained on was how to rescue someone.

Mike: Yeah. So you like each other, hopefully as I described, but you’re also dependent on each other for each other’s safety. And in case there’s a problem, you have to be able to save each other. And you never go outside to spacewalk alone. You’re always out there with a partner, with a buddy, and he or she is going to be looking out for you and you’re going to be looking out for them. They’re looking out for you. You’re looking out for them and the people inside are also trying to help as best they can. And then the whole control center back on Earth and people scattered in different places are looking out after you. But it really comes down to the two of you outside making sure everything’s safe, making sure your safety tethers, checking each other, that if one person needs help, you’ll be there for them. And as you described, the one thing that we’re always most concerned about is each other’s safety. And one thing you needed to demonstrate more than anything else as a space walker is that you could save your buddy. If they had a problem and they were incapacitated and needed to be brought inside, you had to demonstrate that you can get them inside in a timely way. And they had to demonstrate that they could get you inside in a timely way.

Michael: And a lot of that, I mean, there’s risk. And it’s very interesting to me to understand that the position of the shuttle to deflect debris, there’s millions of debris up there traveling at 17,000 miles per hour and it’s a missile. And if you take that, what would happen if you took one of those in your suit while you’re out there space walking?

Mike: Yeah, that’d be a bad day if that happened. Debris was an issue, I mentioned how we lost space shuttle Columbia with a debris strike on ascent. But also in space, as you mentioned, there’s debris there as well. And going that fast, it doesn’t matter what you hit, it can be something very small, it’s going to do some damage. On the telescope, we could see damage. There was a high gain antenna dish that had a hole in it about the size of a golf ball. There was an instrument that had an exposed radiator, the Whitefield camera that looked like a BB gun was taking it, it was like all these little craters all over it. It was cool, “Oh wow, look at all those little craters.” And then you realize, “Wait a minute, I’m standing right here. I’m floating right here, what’s going on?” So we tried to do whatever we could to be ready for that, as you say, we could try to use the shuttle to protect us. Our space suits had seven layers, including a layer of Kevlar. So you couldn’t walk around with these things on Earth. These were only meant to be used underwater for training where you’re floating in the water or in space. So you trusted your suit, you trusted your team, and you…

Michael: What if you got struck? We talked about you had 30 minutes.

Mike: Yeah. So if you get hit and it penetrates all those layers, including the layer of Kevlar. If you get hit with an object that’s moving fast enough and is big enough to penetrate all those layers and to get to the pressure bladder, which is this plastic layer inside that holds pressure, it’s like a balloon almost. If it gets through that, now you have a leak and you’re going to start losing air. If that happens, you have a secondary oxygen system that’ll turn on and feed that leak, but will keep you alive. And that’ll last approximately 30 minutes. So you have to be able to get inside in 30 minutes. And if you’re incapacitated... This is scary stuff. Am I scaring anybody? I’m scaring myself talking about this. Why are you making me think of this? What was I, crazy? So if you couldn’t get yourself inside, that’s where the buddy took over, where they would get you inside and you had 30 minutes. And you needed to demonstrate that in training.

Michael: Yeah. You had to train for that as well.

Mike: And that was the level of trust we had. When I was going out for a spacewalk, I remember I would look at the hatch and, “What’s going to happen today?” As much as we prepared to train for every problem, there’s always something. There’s a little gremlin out there, something we never thought of. And sometimes it was a little thing, sometimes it was a big thing, but you’re always going to run into that. And I thought, “Oh, we’ll see what happens today. We’ll see if we can get through everything.” But I never felt that something bad was going to happen to me.

Michael: Well, there was trust.

Mike: There was trust. Trust your team, trust your equipment, trust your training.

Michael: Let’s talk about the captain of the shuttle, trusting him.

Mike: The commander, yes.

Michael: The commander. If you got disconnected and started to float in space…

Mike: Yeah, yeah. We were talking about this earlier, how safety was very important. And you always have a safety tether on, which is like you’re on a fishing line, more or less. It’s like a real that had tension in it, so if you were to let go of what you’re working on. You weren’t encouraged to do this. You were shown blooper reels of what could happen, spinning astronauts that hit the wing of the shuttle and then come back and, “Don’t let this happen to you.” So I was very motivated not to let this happen to me. But if that would happen and you got away, your safety tether would bring you back in like a fish on a line more or less. But if for some reason that didn’t work, the safety tether broke or it got unhooked and you’re actually now an object, you become your own satellite there. You could be going away.

Michael: This is awesome.

Mike: For our missions, what we had, we had this procedure, it was called Lost Crew Person. And that was an emergency procedure. And what that meant was that, “Okay, we’re going to take a break from what we’re doing and our commander was going to come get us,” and he promised, in our case, Scott…

Michael: He’d have to fly the shuttle?

Mike: He’d fly the shuttle and we would practice this in the simulators. We didn’t practice this in space. It’d be too dangerous, of course. But in the simulator, we would practice and he would come and get us. So we were really depending on him, if something really happened, he would come and get us flying the spaceship. And we had a friend, it’s like the dark humor sort of stuff. But in that checklist, there were certain things we would always brief, like loss of calm, incapacitated crew. Remember before you go out the door, there are certain things you want fresh in your mind and so one of these things was the Lost Crewmen. And so we had two space walking teams, four people were space walking on the mission and you’d take turns going out and the other team would prep you to go out. And so I would read the checklist, Lost Crew Person and Scooter’s going to come get you, whatever it was. But Rick Linnehan was a prankster guy who was on the other space walking team and we’re in space and he reads this thing, he goes, “Lost crew person.” He goes, “Don’t worry about it. We got two more guys inside.” And then he goes.

So a little bit of humor right before the spacewalk there. But yeah, that was the plan. But your trust was with your crew mates, with your commander, with the person you’re spacewalking with. With the control team, maybe even more so because they were there for you. Your success was their success. And they were very dedicated people in the control center and our training team. And they were there to save the day.

Michael: That was down on Earth?

Mike: On Earth, yeah. It’s a large team. Yeah.

Michael: Yep. That’s down there that’s monitoring. So I asked you, “Well, any problems when you’re out on the spacewalk, were there any problems?” And you had one and I think it involved tape.

Mike: It did, yeah.

Michael: Was it duct tape?

Mike: No. We had a lot of duct tape that was on the inside. That’s inside tape. Outside tape for space walks was Kapton tape, which you can actually buy. I couldn’t believe it. A lot of stuff I thought, “Oh, you can only get it in NASA.”

Michael: Well, talk about you’re out there working and there was no hardware store.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So we had the most complicated spacewalk we ever tried to do on my mission. We had an instrument called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. It’s about the size of a refrigerator, telephone booth size instrument, that was inserted into the telescope on a previous mission. It could do things like analyze the atmospheres of far-off planets. So it was this wonderful instrument. The scientists loved it and then it stopped working. It had a power supply failure. And everything else was fine, except you couldn’t turn it back on. It had a short and you couldn’t turn this thing back on anymore. The power supply itself was a computer board. It looked just like a computer board, which was buried inside of this instrument. And we had never taken an instrument apart before in space. What we did is we would take the whole instrument out and put a whole new one in.

That’s tough enough. You have bolts and connectors and stuff, but trying to take one of these things apart, no, we never tried. To give you an example, this power supply was locked down with a 120-pin connector with these very little pins that had to be seated perfectly and launch lock bolts that were really difficult to overcome because they had to withstand launch. And they had an access panel with 111 small screws with washers and glue on the threads. Think about it, if you’re an engineer and you’re going to send this thing to space for a long time and it’s got a withstand launch and all that, you’re going to button this thing up so no one ever messes with it. And that’s exactly what they did. And now we’re like, “Well, we have to undo all of this great engineering.” Over 100 new tools were developed for this, including a new special power tool, a great taxpayer expense, may I add.

And we were training for this for years. We started talking about this before we were assigned to the mission and that it falls on my day. And I’m the leader out there. I’m an experienced guy. And I’m there with my buddy Mike Good “Bueno” his first flight. Great friend of mine. And we’re out there together to do this.

Michael: And remember, you’ve got to always hold on.

Mike: Got to always hold on.

Michael: Yeah, so can’t just…

Mike: No, the whole time, you want to hold on because then you’ve got another issue. But the easiest thing out all these complicated things, Michael, the easiest thing was to remove a handrail that was used to insert the instrument years earlier. The handrail was blocking access to a few of these little screws. And we had thought about backup for everything.

What if we can’t get the pins unconnected at the back, if we can’t overcome the bolts? We had backups for everything, all those little screws, we had a backup plan of how to get those screws out if I messed one of those up. But this handrail was the easiest thing to remove. It had four big screws. The old power tool had worked just fine. One line in the checklist, we probably budgeted about 10 seconds for this. Zip, zip, zip, zip, done. Get it out of the way. Now we’re going to do the tough stuff. And two bolts at the top come out fine. One at the lower left’s coming out and the one at the lower right is not coming out for me. And I’m like, “What’s going on here? I’ve got things to do.” And I pulled and I’m inside the telescope floating around the planet doing this.

I take my tool out of the way and I take a closer look. And it was a hex head screw when I started, and I had turned it into a gnarled piece of metal. It wasn’t a screw head any longer and I realized, that screw’s never coming out. It’s never coming out. Hand drill’s not coming off. One hundred and eleven screws aren’t coming out. Power supply’s not getting replaced. We’ll never find out if there’s life in the universe and everyone will blame me. There’s no one else there. I mean, Bueno was with me, but I couldn’t blame it on him. And I look at him and his eyes are like, “What did you just do?” Boy, did I mess up now. And I remember leaning…

Michael: You looked back?

Mike: I leaned out of the telescope and I was like, “Who’s going to help me here?” And I looked down at the planet. We were over the Pacific Ocean when this happened and I couldn’t even imagine a hardware store nearby to help. And I fessed up and said what I did and we did not have a backup for this. And for over an hour, we were troubleshooting. If you ever encounter a thing like when you mess up so badly, there were two things that I had during my training to go through my head. One was a 30-second rule we had, which is when you make a mistake, you’re going to make mistakes in life, and no one wants to make mistakes. Some are little, some are big. This was a big one. Give yourself 30 seconds of regret. Beat yourself up for 30 seconds.

Call yourself every name in the book. “I’m the worst astronaut ever. Neil Armstrong will never talk to me again.” Whatever. Don’t vocalize any of this, you’ll scare people. But just internally, “Aw man, how did I mess up? We should have done it differently.” But after that 30 seconds is over, Michael, flush it. Your team needs you to participate. And if you wallow in the misery, you’re not going to be a good teammate any longer. You’ve made the mistake. It’s now in the past, move on. Thirty seconds of regret and move on. The other thing I kept in mind was that I learned in my training was no matter how bad you’ve messed up, no matter how hopeless a situation appears, you have to remember you can make it worse, okay? No sun will come out tomorrow, it’ll get better. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. Because then you start, “Oh, I can make up for it.” That’s a good thing. No, you’ve messed up. Don’t make it worse. Let’s not make another problem. Let’s not damage my suit. Let’s not lose any tools. Let’s not do anything stupid to make it worse. Let’s not give the ground, the whole team, problem B, before we get back to problem A. Those are the two things going through my mind.

Michael: We talked a couple weeks ago about commercial space flight. These people going up to the outer rim, going into space for three minutes, coming down. Does that trivialize the science that you guys are doing that people think, oh, this is just now some tourism program that you could spend several hundred thousand dollars or millions on?

Mike: Yeah, it does. And I think the access to space now has opened up so more people can go. It’s not just government astronauts, whether it’s a NASA astronaut, Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency, Japanese, all the different countries that are represented. It’s now open to more people. Being a commercial private astronaut is now possible. We’ve already had them. We’ve also had those, I don’t know if you call them tourists, but they’re going up there for different reasons.

Michael: Tourists.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: I was going to say tourists.

Mike: Tourists that are going up there to…

Michael: Travel at leisure.

Mike: ... travel at leisure. That’s an expensive vacation. And so far, short, just a couple minutes. Some of them are longer. But I think it’s a great thing. I think that people have different reasons for going. Me personally, we mentioned it was years before I got the chance to fly. And it was only, for me, two missions, which was great. But I only spent about a month in space total compared to 18 years at NASA. Most of my job was on the ground. And that’s part of the job that I enjoyed as much as the flying in space. I mean, of course the flying in space is the highlight. Nothing’s ever going to match that. But the teamwork, the problem-solving, being in the mission control center, being a part of that team, that’s what I really wanted.

I wanted to be a NASA astronaut. I didn’t want to just go for a ride. I didn’t want just the experience, I wanted to be a NASA astronaut. So I think there’s a big difference in maybe the goals you might have. I think some people just want that experience or they want to accomplish one thing in space. It’s opened up the opportunities, not just for people who can experience it, but also people that want to go to raise awareness for a certain cause. A group of people I’ve come to know now, the Inspiration4 flight, they went up to raise awareness for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. There are people going up there to do research. People who have dedicated their life. They couldn’t take a time out to try to become an astronaut and go through all this training. They’ve done other things in medical research or in material science.

And now they’re interested in going to space to try out some of their ideas in this space environment. So it’s not just going up for the heck of it. And I think even those who are going just for the experience want to go through that and see through that experience of launching and seeing what the planet is like. My students at Columbia have gotten a chance to fly experiments in space because its access has improved. They flew on a Blue Origin vehicle almost three years ago now, that went up just for a few minutes, but they were able to collect data on a biomedical experiment. We had another biomedical fluid experiment that flew on the space station that went up on a SpaceX rocket. They were able to do this because now these things are affordable. So I think it’s just opening up so many opportunities.

And the more opportunities that are there, creative people out there are going to think of ways to use space. As an astronaut, I more or less followed directions. Not all the time correctly as we’ve shared. By the way, the ground came up with a plan that involved tape to rip that handrail off.

Michael: Oh yeah, we forgot the tape.

Mike: Tape was used to prevent debris from spreading. But we try not to cause problems, but we more or less were told this is what we’re doing in our program and this is what you’re going to do. But now since more people are able to go, they can use it for different reasons, like to raise awareness, for the experience or to do some research or whatever their intention is. And when you give the people opportunity to do that, “Wow, now maybe I can go to space,” now you can think of it as how you might want to utilize it. And things I could never even imagine as a NASA astronaut utilizing space for, people are…

Michael: I’m going to go a little long because I have a couple more questions, if you don’t mind.

Mike: Sure. No, I don’t mind. I feel bad for these people even to listen. I’m sorry. Thanks for hanging in there.

Michael: So the telescope, we’re looking at outer, outer space, deep space. We see these new images that have come along and there’s a lot of people saying, “This is all photoshopped. This isn’t real really, these other galaxies that are out there.” What’s your opinion of that? I mean, there’s just this lack of understanding, “Oh, this is real.”

Mike: Well, I think that maybe some of the doubting might be that this can’t be possible. That it’s almost too hard to imagine, but it’s actually real. In fact, people say, “Oh, we staged the moon landing and we don’t really go to space.” When I was looking up at the rocket on my first launch and looking up, the shuttle looked like it was alive. It was nighttime, it looked like a beast and there was smoke coming off of it and making really strange noises. And at that point, I was hoping we would fake it. I was like, “If we want to fake this, I’m okay with it. I won’t tell anybody.”

But then you go inside and you’ll launch and we really do these things and you’re floating above the planet. I can’t believe that people can accomplish these things. And so I think maybe that’s where some of it comes as, “Could this really be possible?” But it is possible. And the telescope, the Hubble, has been amazing. I think the greatest scientific instrument ever built. You can argue that, of course. But I’m biased, but I think James Webb is going to outperform it. And yes, we’re able to do these things. People are able to use technology and teamwork and perseverance and passion for what they’re doing, and things get delayed. It takes time. It doesn’t always go according to schedule. There are setbacks, but they do happen. It’s amazing what people can accomplish.

And we see that with our space program. And particularly what you talked about with the James Webb Telescope that’s now returning amazing images. And what we saw when it first turned on, I guess now it was about a month ago or I can’t remember whether it was a month or two ago. But when those images came out, that’s just the beginning. I was on CNN doing an interview and Brianna was the host and she was saying this. When I was talking about it, she goes, “Just like the test page in the printer.” That’s all that is. That’s stuff that we saw a couple months ago. That’s just the first couple images. And NASA didn’t talk about this much, but when we last fixed Hubble, those first images that we returned from Hubble, these targets that we used, they’re called early release images.

They’re the same ones they use with James Webb. So if you look online, you can look at the Hubble image and the James Webb early release images, and you’ll see the difference. NASA didn’t talk much about that, but I recognize some of them when I looked and they aren’t the same. You can see the difference. Yes, they are real. They are incredible. And I think what this telescope is going to discover, we can’t even imagine what to ask yet.

With Hubble, there were things they wanted to look for. Planets and other solar systems, Hubble found them. Black holes, Hubble found them. But then there were things we couldn’t even predict, like dark matter, dark energy, which led to the awarding of a Nobel Prize. It was something we wouldn’t even think of. There’s matter we can’t recognize? Well, that’s what they found. Or there’s an energy source that makes the universe expand at an accelerating rate? You could never think to look for that, but they stumbled upon that and it led to this great discovery. I could only imagine what this telescope, what we’re going to find.

Michael: So we see these other systems. You and I talked and I said, “You may think I’m crazy, but I’m going to say it to you, there must be life elsewhere?”

Mike: Yeah. I don’t think you’re crazy. I think I know you well enough to know you’re not crazy. I mean, it’s hard to say anything with absolute assuredness, but billions of galaxies, billions of stars, most of which have multiple planets orbiting, to think that we’re the only place where life exists, I think is unlikely. I do think that there’s life out there somewhere. I think eventually we’ll find each other.

Michael: Not extraterrestrials.

Mike: I don’t think we’ve been visited yet. I mean, I don’t think we’ve been visited yet. No, I think for that, we see a lot of things that we don’t understand and people report things and say, but we really need evidence. And just because we see something that’s a little bit out of the ordinary, that doesn’t mean it’s ET coming to visit. Well, it could be a drone, but is it ET? So we really need proof of that. I don’t think that’s happened yet from everything I know, but I think that day will be coming where we’ll find some sign of life somewhere and hopefully the telescope will bring us closer. But I will say that having seen our planet from space was amazing for me, especially from the altitude I was at during my space walks. And I looked at our planet and I realized that it’s so beautiful.

I felt like I was looking into heaven. I believe we’re living in a paradise. There’s a lot of bad things going on here on our planet, but it is so beautiful and it’s so much opportunity for happiness and love, and it’s just a paradise that we live in, and it’s a place we all share. That’s the other thing. When I think of home now, I think of Earth as my home. I’m from New York. I think we talked about Long Island. When I was a kid, that was my home. And then New York, I identified as a New Yorker. And then as an American. I’ve got this flag on my shoulder. But I think of myself as a citizen of the Earth and we live in a very special place. So yes, I do believe there are other places where there’s life, but I can’t imagine any place being as beautiful as the home we have.

Michael: Mike, this was awesome. Thank you so much.

Mike: Thank you very much. Thank you for listening.