How To Be Successful in a World That Wasn’t Built for You (ft. Astronaut Cady Coleman)

How do you find your way in a world where even when you do everything right, the odds keep getting stacked against you? My guest today, Cady Coleman, shares how she navigated the male-dominated fields of science, the Air Force, and NASA, breaking down barriers with tenacity and grace. From her time on the International Space Station to the release of her first book, Sharing Space, Cady’s story is a powerful reminder of the importance of mission, adaptability, and the unwavering belief in one’s potential, even when the world around you says otherwise. Check it out. Cady’s Book, Sharing Space: https://www.amazon.com/Sharing-Space-Astronauts-Mission-Wonder/dp/0593494016 CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:46 Becoming an astronaut 00:05:56 Spacewalking 00:11:22 On being underestimated 00:14:28 Life's missions, big and small 00:16:19 Life on the International Space Station 00:22:18 A new way of looking at the world 00:29:41 Do astronauts feel more connected to the world? 00:32:43 How do you live in space with other people? 00:41:28 Coming back down 00:51:51 The state of the space program ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  About five years ago, I was backstage at a conference I was speaking at when I casually got into a conversation with one of the other speakers. It turned out she was an astronaut. She had flown multiple missions to space and had spent six months on the International Space Station. Upon finding this out, I immediately said, "I apologize in advance for the barrage of questions about space that I'm going to ask you. Feel free to change the subject at any time." And for the next two hours, I bombarded her with questions about space. Space missions, space flight, living in space, zero gravity, I mean, like, how do you eat? How do you poop? How do you do anything? She never tired, she never changed the subject, and we've been friends ever since. Katie Coleman is a scientist, an astronaut, and an Air Force veteran.

• 0:44Mark Manson?

  She built her incredible career in the 80s and 90s, an era where there were few to know women in the rooms that Katie was in, and she managed to excel through all of them. If I had to describe Katie in a word, I would say tenacity. She has a single-mindedness about her that is very rare, a way of pressing ahead through adversity without accumulating the resentment or pity parades that most of us do. Or as she puts it, "cheerfully showing up even when you weren't invited." A few weeks ago, she released her first book. It's called Sharing Space, and I had her on the show to talk about the importance of mission, the value of role models and support systems, how to persevere in an environment that is not hospitable to you, and of course, many, many questions about space. This is Katie Coleman. Let's get into it.

• 1:27Mark Manson?

  The podcast that's saving the world. One fewer fuck at a dime. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Katie, it's great to see you again. It's awesome to see you. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Why don't we start? When was the moment you decided you wanted to become an astronaut? And how long did it take from that moment to actually making it happen? I was something around 21.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  And I met Sally Ride. She came to speak at MIT where I was a junior. We actually have a certain resemblance, you know, kind of wavy dark hair and and not incredibly tall. And I just, I just thought, wow, maybe I could try to do that. Just the fact that she was so real just made me think this could be me.

• 2:24Mark Manson?

  It made the possibility feel real.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  And so that was nineteen eighty three. I knew I was getting a bachelor's. Studying science was something I really loved, so I went on to get a doctorate. And the Air Force had paid for school for me, for my undergrad. And so I had a four-year commitment to them.

• 2:40Mark Manson?

  When you met Sally Ride, did you decide on the spot? Or was it more of a process over the ensuing years of being like, okay, this is my dream. This is my vision. What did that process look like?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  It's definitely a process that involves homework.

• 2:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  And I, you know, realized that they want people who, you know, have a solid career. And me just finishing grad school.

• 3:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Meant that I still had, and also that I needed to finish grad. Well, at the time I was an undergrad. In my field, no question, getting a doctorate was part of being a part of that field. So it was going on to get a doctorate in a, in a field that really meant something to me, which was chemistry. But I liked applied chemistry. I liked it when you made things that made people's lives better or changed them. But everybody do love that you can make materials that make a difference in people's lives. And for the Air Force, I worked on new materials for airplanes, kind of bigger, better, different Kevlar's kinds of things. So grad school, I'm like, I'm here, I'm ready to apply. And the answer was, but you're not qualified.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Because through the Air Force, you have to apply through the Air Force, which makes sense. They need to decide when you could go. And you needed to have four years of active duty. Because they were very used to having. Pilots who had had a long flight career, including test pilot school. And I looked and felt, I think, different than those folks. And so for me, I needed a waiver because I had already had that professional time.

• 4:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  It just wasn't during my Air Force time. And I said, you know, but if I was, you know, a civilian, I'd be really well qualified. And the answer was, but you are not a civilian man. And they were right.

• 4:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And I think it's an important story because I think when you don't quite exactly fit, but you know that you're supposed to be part of that mission, you have to find a way to to do that and to understand what you need to do that might be different by being a little pesky.

• 4:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  But at the same time, acknowledging that, like for me, I worked in the military and you serve at the pleasure of your country. And it is about what they need, not what you need.

• 4:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  And so finding that balance between asking questions that should be asked because they just hasn't really come up before that people got their qualifications before they got to the military.

• 5:08Mark Manson?

  There's an interesting relationship that I think most people don't think about. You know, you hear a lot about persistence.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 5:13Mark Manson?

  It's like, oh, you have a dream, like be persistent, don't give up. Well, a huge part of persistence is adaptability and understanding that the original plan is almost never going to work out the way you expected. And there's going to be setbacks and obstacles and detours. And you need to have a certain amount of personal flexibility and willingness to adapt to the circumstances. Like that is part of persistence. It's not just brute forcing your way. You know, my way or the highway.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 5:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And that on each of those turns, you didn't expect to have to take.

• 5:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  There's things you could learn. And if you spend your time thinking, how come I have to be here? It's you're missing part of the path.

• 5:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Were there times that you felt compelled to speak out and, you know, kind of insert yourself a little bit more aggressively into into an issue?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Well, I would say probably the clearest situation there is that at a certain point, right after I got there, somebody, one of the other astronauts said to me, came to me, like I was in the mailroom, he's like, Katie, you know, I have been watching and you are doing really well in spacewalking. And I think you have the head of a spacewalker, I think you have the skills, but you need to know that the small spacesuits are going away. So, we're flying on the shuttle right now, when we get to the space station, there will be no small spacesuits. And they also say no extra large spacesuits, but I'm betting those are gonna come back. And I'm like, you mean the ones that fit most of the women?

• 6:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And he said, yes. And I was also assigned with Kathy Thornton to a flight at the time, and she's like, Katie, when this happens, you call me, and we are gonna figure out how to help you function in a medium spacesuit. And it was a huge deal, and the sentence that really comes, that stood out to me was, I mean, they had a meeting, and I didn't actually speak up in this meeting, we have a Monday morning meeting every Monday, and one of the announcements was, really a couple of years later, was, so, we're eliminating the small suits and the extra larges, and we think that's gonna work out, because we've looked ahead at the manifest, and we have all of the spacewalkers that we need. I mean, there couldn't be a more clear way to say, I mean, because it affected at least a third

• 7:28Speaker 01

  of the women, some of the guys, but, and probably more, in that, and yet, here you are, you know, you're me, do you stand up and say, wait a minute, you knew how big I was when I got here, you measured everything, right? You know, how can this be, it's not right, you know, do you really not think that you need half women up there on that space station? Because this really meant, you could go and be on a mission as a woman, or as a person who didn't fit in the medium, or couldn't make the medium work. You could be a person on the shuttle, going up, doing robotics, whatever, but you couldn't be somebody who lived on the space station and had a mission up there, unless you qualified in the medium suit. And people would say to me, and so, I mean, the medium suit was a reality, I worked hard, got a lot of help, really a lot of help from people figuring

• 8:13Speaker 01

  out, how could I function best in that suit?

• 8:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  And I qualified in that suit, which, you know, and it's the kind of thing where I would show up to meetings, or... You know, spacewalk meetings and they kind of look at you like, why are you here? And, and I just wanted to go, do you really not know that I have like above average grades in spacewalking? You know, and everything but speed because I have short arms, right?

• 8:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  And, you know, sort of like you should care, right?

• 8:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  And, and so it was not an easy thing. And, and I have to say that it's, it's something that people do the best they can. I mean, I probably loved everyone in that meet, in that room, loved working with them, you know, all those things, but people can have blinders on. And, and I think that, um, I think it's still, I, I, I understand, I do hear from people who are still there today, that it still happens. And this is something that can happen to all of us, but there's, let's say there's two people on the pool deck, because we practice in these 300 pound suits in a swimming pool to, so that we can be weightless, so to speak. And you have a, a new guy and a new woman, both in space suits.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  And chances are, somebody is looking and judging and looking at the guy going, I wonder how he'll do. And looking at the woman astronaut and saying, I wonder if she can do this.

• 9:34Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  And it's a different, it's a different way of thinking, right? And of not recognizing, and I, and I think that it happens in a lot of different fields still. And that's really one of the biggest reasons I wanted to write the book was if this kind of thing can happen at NASA where we're accomplishing these great missions and in, in, you know, this is a smaller part of NASA within the astronaut office and choosing missions, it's more complicated. But if we can actually not see people in this context, it means it's happening. It could happen anywhere.

• 10:07Mark Manson?

  Everywhere.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  And it does.

• 10:08Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Right? And so I'm really proud of my efforts. I mean, I think when you're trying to make change, you could either be saying, what do you mean, change this? It's not exactly my way.

• 10:18Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  But, and more in the way of finding a way to communicate with people in a way they can understand.

• 10:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Which involves performing in that suit and also recruiting them to be part of the team that helps you be successful in that suit.

• 10:33Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  And so for me, qualifying in that space suit and then getting assigned to a space mission, uh, or a space station mission was like the pinnacle of my career.

• 10:43Mark Manson?

  Amazing. Comes back to that adaptability as well, right?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  It does. It does.

• 10:49Mark Manson?

  Understanding that there's going to be unforeseen obstacles.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And I, and I think, you know, you've talked a lot about mission and I think that that adaptability, like you can either just go, but it, you're, I can be fretting about the fact that this is so hard. This is so unfair. Why do I have to be in this medium space suit?

• 11:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  It is difficult for me and, but it is hard. And if you don't have a hundred percent of your focus on succeeding and making the things work and part of you is just wasting some, um, you know.

• 11:20Mark Manson?

  Just being angry and fuming all the time.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Um, you can be mad about a lot of things. I mean, in your everyday life and injustice and politics and there's, I mean, you can have a really big circle and I don't enjoy existing like that. I like, it just feel better focusing on what I can do right now to make things be the way I think they should be, whether that's in my community or what, where I'm trying to go.

• 11:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah. From science to the air force to NASA, you are not what most people expect in those environments. Like, is that a motivating factor for you of like, kind of showing people?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  I think I have that little competitive part of me.

• 12:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  I do.

• 12:05Mark Manson?

  I mean.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Wanting to show people, but also, um, also a sort of like naive, just, I call it cheerfully showing up.

• 12:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Where I'm like, okay, so they didn't invite me to the spacewalking meeting. It wasn't like they were like, no, let's not invite Katie. I just realized it never occurred to them. They don't know I'm supposed to be there, but I know, so I'm going. And I don't, I don't show up, you know, like I'm here. How come you didn't? I mean, it could be, because it's just not the way, you know? I'm, I'm more about sort of like, what do I have and what can I do with it? As opposed to how come I don't have this?

• 12:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Were you always that way, do you think? Or was it something you learned?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  I think I'm a very optimistic person and I, I love like connecting people and figuring out, and, and I love doing unusual things. I don't know.

• 12:54Mark Manson?

  I think so much of that comes down to the, the attitude behind it. Cause there's a very fine line between that kind of cheerful optimism of like, well, I could do this and I'm just going to go and. Show them that I can do it versus an entitlement of like,

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:13Mark Manson?

  Well, fuck them. I'm gonna like, I should be there. I'm gonna show them, et cetera, et cetera.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Well, there is a little bit. I mean, I think there's a scale.

• 13:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Right? In between. And sometime, and I'm not a very good arguer.

• 13:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  I wish I was, but I'm not. I don't like one thing I could never be. I decided I was a lawyer.

• 13:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Right? But, um, and so I choose a little more naturally, partly because I am, I'm, I don't know, I'm a blender.

• 13:42Mark Manson?

  Right. Well, there's a bias towards action, it sounds like.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I would say, yes.

• 13:47Mark Manson?

  It's just like, let's stop talking. I'll just go do it.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  But also I think being open to help and even, you know, the people who think that you shouldn't be there or just never, they're like, why is she here? When they realize that you're really working hard and planning to be there. Um, and, and it actually, they like to help.

• 14:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And, and I, and I certainly got a lot of help in my career from people who are guys, from people who are women that, you know, had skills that I didn't have that would say, you know, Katie, you need to think about this. You know, you're, you're just barging ahead and you're forgetting that you need to show this as well. And here's a way that I think you could do it, even though it's challenging for you.

• 14:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Have you ever struggled with?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Okay, yes.

• 14:34Mark Manson?

  Everything is easy. Uh, that'll be the title of this podcast, Katie Coleman, on how everything is easy. And I've never struggled at anything at all. Have you ever struggled with, you know, when you have such a big consequential mission, something that is driving you, motivating you for years and years and years? Is it hard to care about, say, the small missions, the small things? Like, is there a come down from that? Is that something that you've struggled with at all? I'm asking for a friend. I know I struggle with that.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, um, I definitely struggle with the fact that everything can seem important to me.

• 15:13Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  And that, and how to, you know, maybe chunk things together. How, how do I, at the end of the day, feel successful that, you know?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  I don't know whether it's, you know, on the space station, I would say, even though I loved it there and I would go back, it was a very, uh, it was so clear that everything you did was important and got us one step closer to understanding how to design an environmental system that will take us to Mars and, you know, in moon as a first step, right? So it's so clear that everything is important, but it's also important to talk to your family at the right time.

• 15:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  When, you know, and, and they can't call you, you can call that, only you can call them. And so making all that kind of stuff work and, and doing some of the things that I wanted to do as a human, I mean, so the range of things, they all seemed like important missions. And if I went back, I would be a little bit more cutthroat about, okay, I've given 12 or 14 hours to most of the mission, I'm going to take some of these hours for myself to do the things that are really important to me.

• 16:19Mark Manson?

  So you spent six months on the space station. You said you miss it, you loved it, you would totally go back. I'm curious, like, let's remove the mission from it.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:29Mark Manson?

  Right? Because I imagine, you know, so much, again, the, the mission imbues every action with so much meaning and purpose and significance that that has a real psychological effect. I'm curious, what is the actual objective experience of living on the space station? Is it difficult? Is it maddening? Is it, is it comfortable? Is it uncomfortable? Is it stressful? Like, how are you sleeping? Like, do you strap yourself to a wall or something? Like, how does all of this stuff work?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Um, we're going to get NASA and all the other new space companies in trouble here because everyone will want to go.

• 17:06Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  It is magical.

• 17:08Mark Manson?

  Is it?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  It is.

• 17:09Mark Manson?

  What's magical about it?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  First of all, people think about floating around, you know, my hair floats around, right? And we float around, but once you want to go somewhere, you are flying and you are not in an airplane or a glider or, I mean, anything. One of the demonstrations that I, I like, it's actually on the internet, like splitting hairs in gravity is, I could take one hair from my head, so could you. And push it against like this microphone and I would push myself all the way across the space station or until I run into something else, right? Because it takes that little force to move. I mean, if you push real hard with that hair, you're gonna break it. But just given it like this, that's how, so it's a whole new way of life and it's a little bit like underwater.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  And you can, if you look and see, you can see people who've spent some months up there, they're, they're just sort of like liquid people and you give your, I call it tending, you know, you give yourself a push and you get better at giving that push through a real direction, but then you're sort of tending and

• 18:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  So that, I mean, there's that that just reminds you every day when there are some things that are miserable.

• 18:09Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  I mean, the food, nobody goes for the food.

• 18:12Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, it's, I mean.

• 18:14Mark Manson?

  Big ups on flying, thumbs down on the food.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  I mean, but I had a, um, well, I was gonna joke around and say that I have a full, I had a full-time job because I flew with an Italian. And I never understood, because I hadn't been to Italy, why he was so sad about the food. Okay? Because he would like be like, lasagna, la, all about it.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  But I was in charge of, I mean, the packages of food and half the food is freeze dried, half of it is like meals ready to eat with lots of preservatives in them.

• 18:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  And there's stuff that you like and I mean, I, I'm like, okay, we have this food and I would have favorites and, you know, and it, it just was, um,

• 18:52Mark Manson?

  Sounds like it's, it's like microwaveable meals.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Or, well, we didn't have a microwave, um, but actually we have a, it looks like a suitcase.

• 18:59Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Like a briefcase and there's a panel in the middle that gets hot and you strap, you put a stuff, everything has to stick under like bungee cords or whatever. Sticks on there, you strap it shut and it heats up your food. Um, you could, we have a little, our faucet is like a faucet, is like a, a needle.

• 19:16Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Whether either hot or cold, you dial up hot or cold water, you put hot water into your scrambled eggs or your chicken soup or whatever, beef stroganoff. And, um, and then, uh, we'd put it in the suitcase to get it just all kind of warmed up and nice. So, and then there's also, I don't know, they send up fresh food when a new supply ship comes up. But on the first, uh, supply ship that actually ended up coming, um, the Russians had specified lemons and onions, raw onions.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  And pickles, and pickles. And you're

• 19:49Mark Manson?

  Damn Russians.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  But sleeping and sleeping is like delightful.

• 19:53Mark Manson?

  Is it?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Where you can, we have a little sleeping bag. It's like you slither into it like a snake. And we have a cabin and I think it's nice. It's really soundproof. You could have a screaming, yelling fight with your husband. No one would know.

• 20:07Mark Manson?

  Wow.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Um, but if you actually go to leave, there's some magnetic lock that you could never defeat. And so as soon as you wake up in the middle of the night and decide to go to the bathroom, you know, bang, bang, big noise.

• 20:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  I would, I would change that.

• 20:19Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Next mission.

• 20:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  But sleeping is, you know.

• 20:22Mark Manson?

  Send your notes.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  I don't know. I would sleep like curled up in a little ball. And when I woke up, I might be like under my, looking up at the bottom of my desk or.

• 20:29Mark Manson?

  Did you feel like you slept better? Cause like now that I'm thinking about it, a lot of discomfort while sleeping comes from the, the pressure.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Pressure.

• 20:37Mark Manson?

  With the mattress and like the, the weight of gravity, like

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:40Mark Manson?

  Kind of makes your arm uncomfortable, your leg falls asleep or something. So like, is it more comfortable?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  I would say it's more comfortable, but it takes a long time to learn to actually relax and not be kind of like a little bit tense, a little bit. Our natural posture is kind of like curled up a little bit.

• 20:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Knees up a little bit.

• 20:57Mark Manson?

  How is that view? Does it ever get old?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 21:00Mark Manson?

  No, I imagine not.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  No. And I was not somebody that would be always looking out the window. When I was a kid, you know, and you'd sit in the station wagon and look out the back window. I kind of liked that, but it, it wasn't like I was so much like that, but it's, it never gets old.

• 21:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Even a place you see a lot, like I would always, I just set my watch to know when we're going to go over Massachusetts. And then you see it at sunset and sunrise. Cause we're also seeing, you know, here's, if you're the sun and you're, you know, sunrise, sunset, we're seeing 16 sunrises and sunsets a day.

• 21:32Mark Manson?

  Oh my God.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  And so we're seeing the earth looking like that too.

• 21:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  And, and one of the things I put in the book, cause I think it's so important is that space station is still up there. There's six people or seven people on it right now and you can see them.

• 21:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  If you, if you live between 51 or 52 degrees latitude and, um, and down below. I mean, you, that part of the earth, except for the really far north and really far south, you can see the space station. Crossing the sky, looking like the brightest star. And, and, and, and you just go to this website, spot the station. Or if you just go to the internet and say, I wanna, where is the space station?

• 22:10Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  It will show you.

• 22:11Mark Manson?

  It'll tell you.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  And it'll say, you know, look in this direction at this time. And you'll be seeing probably stars and you're kind of looking, is that one moving? Is that one moving? But then suddenly you realize one of them is just moving. And it's not zipping across the sky.

• 22:27Mark Manson?

  Right, slow.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  It's just sailing across the sky.

• 22:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  And I saw it just, I don't know, I, I'm the kind of person that I run down to the diner down at the bottom of the hill. I'm like, in five minutes, everybody outside.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Because there's, I mean, I'm thrilled to see it, but people, it makes it real. And I think that's actually part of what the book is about is I didn't love everything about my job and some parts of it were hard.

• 22:53Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  It's, um, real people get to do this job. And at the same time, they have some struggles.

• 23:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Just like real people. And I think it's, makes people realize they could be that person.

• 23:07Mark Manson?

  What do you do for fun? And do you run out of things to do for fun? Because I imagine you can only take so many books. I don't know if you take like movies or anything up there. If you get TV, like I, I don't know, what do you do for fun up there?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  They do, um, depends whether it's fun or it depends on the crew.

• 23:23Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean? Um, we, they will send, they have agreements with all the studios. They'll send movies, they'll send TV shows. And finding, uh, TV shows that six people who speak different languages can appreciate, right? You know?

• 23:36Mark Manson?

  It's a struggle.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  And we all, so on the space station, we all speak Russian to a reasonable degree. And we all speak English to a reasonable degree.

• 23:44Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  So it's hard on like the people who are not from the US or Russia. They did learn a lot, right? But, um, a lot of them involved like physical comedy, easy, easy things to follow. One of the crew members said to me, they go, you're gonna figure it out anyway. You know, I like American Idol, okay? So it's a really good show. It's nice to watch these people, you know, and, and, um, and, and, and, and that was the kind of thing where we could all watch and we'd have an opinion. And, and it's kind of like on demand, like where they've sent it up, we can watch it anytime. And I was on a crew that kind of liked to watch TV during, um, during dinner. And we'd watch the news, which we would get 24 hours late.

• 24:25Mark Manson?

  Oh.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  I am proudly responsible for being the first person to request nicely, but firmly that NPR be sent up.

• 24:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And they're like, how often? I'm like, every day. I mean, it's like a tiny file compared to all these TV shows. I'm like, I just want the news. Um, and we listened to it exercising and stuff like that.

• 24:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. You were asking what I, what we did for fun.

• 24:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I mean, how much stuff is there to, do you run out of?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  If you run out of stuff on the ground and you're like, oh, I'm bored, you know?

• 24:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  It's, it's just not my way.

• 24:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  I'm kind of never bored.

• 24:59Mark Manson?

  I imagine there's an endless amount of work to do, to do.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  There's endless work, but there's also projects that each of us have, whether it's to run around and, I don't know, and my, my son's little stuffed tiger and I would do various little videos with him, you know, in troublesome places and, you know, just, I mean, but, but also videos for, um, videos that were unofficial, but official. You know, I did the introduction to Ted from space.

• 25:27Mark Manson?

  Oh, wow.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  In 2011. That was very fun.

• 25:29Mark Manson?

  That's cool.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Um, and, uh, I mean, so it's, there's quite, you know, I don't know, a local NPR, um, station, TV station had, we got, we had an event to answer questions and clearly there were a lot of questions unanswered. And I said, just send me the list. And then I made a little video. So everybody has their own kind of interesting projects. And I also love music.

• 25:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And I'm, I'm not the most amazing flute player, but I love to play. And one of the ways to bring other people with you is to bring their flutes.

• 25:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  So I brought flutes for the Chieftains, the Irish band. I'm like a quarter Irish on each side. It makes way more than a half, right?

• 26:06Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah, we'll we'll count it.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  And

• 26:09Mark Manson?

  I'm sure Ireland will take you.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Anyway, so I brought I brought an Irish flute and a tin whistle and pretty much learned to play them up there. It was on my it was on my list. I better learn to get better at that Irish flute. I play more silver flute.

• 26:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  But I brought my own flute from Massachusetts Company that made it. And and I brought one for Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull.

• 26:30Mark Manson?

  Oh, cool.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  He's the person that brought the flute to rock music.

• 26:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah, he is.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  And improvisation and

• 26:37Mark Manson?

  If you told me to name a flutist, he's probably the only one I would come up with.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think you get help with your bravery from other people. There is a Houston, very well known Houston DJ Dana Steele, married to one of our NASA pilots. And so, you know, I was like, Dana, you know, I have very little time. Can you help me find this guy? And she's like, Ah, I think so, Katie. I am a rock and roll DJ.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  And anyways, he wrote him a letter and said, you know, Katie doesn't have much time. She'd like to take your flute. She needs a single point of contact. And he wrote this very funny letter back that just said, or email that said, Well, I think I myself am a pretty reliable source of of contact. And I, you know, take a shower most days and presentable. I'm mostly nice to people. And he's very funny. And we and we actually only talked on the phone before we left. And then I don't know if you've seen the little duet thing?

• 27:32Mark Manson?

  No, I don't think so.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  We we tried to figure out something we could do because you do this to kind of broaden, like, you got to go, but what else can you make happen?

• 27:41Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  And we tried to figure something out. We asked the lawyers. They never answered. And

• 27:48Speaker 01

  well, and I mean, you want it to be for the power of good, so to speak. And looking at his schedule and our schedule, he was playing a concert in Russia, in the city of Perm on April 12, 2011. And that is a special day because it's the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight, the first time a human left the planet.

• 28:08Mark Manson?

  Oh, wow.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  And it's it's celebrated as Yuri's night.

• 28:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Because it's when you think about it, and especially if you're somebody who's looking down at the whole earth, like

• 28:17Speaker 01

  It's not that they're from a certain place. We're all from Earth.

• 28:21Mark Manson?

  Do you get that sense? Because I was it John Glenn or so? I don't know. I've heard astronauts have come back saying that when they're up there, it's like their sense of nationality, ethnicity, all that stuff just kind of goes away.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  I think it's different for everyone. For some people, it's more religious. For me, it's about

• 28:43Speaker 01

  realizing that I thought I was going to go to space and be gone, but I felt very connected to the planet. And also just looking down, realizing like, if only these people understood how connected they could be, we could get a lot further on some of these big challenges that we have. You know, because I don't know. I mean, coming from MIT and being in material science and being an astronaut, you get exposed to some of the bigger questions and bigger things to solve, and they're all interdisciplinary. It's not just chemistry, or physics, or engineering, or, you know, how to help people who don't have enough.

• 29:16Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  There's just so many aspects to it, and so you need a lot of experts and that they could be connected. So I think it's different for everyone. They call it the overview.

• 29:25Mark Manson?

  That's right, the overview effect.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yep. So I just thought it was, I mean, when we go to Mars, okay, I mean, we are on Mars because there's rovers on Mars. But if people were driving those rovers and they had bumper stickers, I don't think they're going to say some country. They're going to have an E for Earth.

• 29:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  So, so that's where I realized that Ian was going to be playing this concert. I was going to be on the space station, and he suggested that we play this duet called Bourree. It's kind of a song that is, you know, da da da, da da da, it's a Bach piece. And, and he sent it to me and, and I, you know, had really so little time to figure it out.

• 30:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  And I finally actually had to write him a note. And I just, I just said, you said, do this, this, this, and I just actually don't understand anything that you said. And I entitled the note Lost in Space.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  And a funny story is he wrote back, he goes, we don't know each other. And so I just figured that this was, you know, I'm just going to share that my computer was kind of dirty when you had a little crap on the screen. And, and so the O had a little space on it. And so it actually looked like the title of your email was Lust in Space. And I just thought, I don't think she meant to write to me.

• 30:44Mark Manson?

  Wrong email address.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. But then it was indeed lost in space. He explained it to me and we put this duet together and it's, if you look up space duet, you'll find it. But I think it's the, it's just this wonderful thing about being from the whole planet where I play, he plays, I'm clearly in space. And I don't know, I just, I really love it. I think it's a great example of collaboration of, I had to be brave to ask.

• 31:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  He had to be open to really just going, who is this person? And will I be forced to listen to this terrible song my whole life?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  And it's actually part of the audiobook now.

• 31:23Mark Manson?

  You mentioned, uh, living with other astronauts. I mean, you, you, you essentially have five roommates and coworkers in a relatively small space. How does that play out while you're up there? Like, is there internal divisions? Is there cabin fever? Do, do people start beefs with each other?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  I would say there's good news here. I mean, the answer is anyway.

• 31:45Mark Manson?

  I mean, they're human.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  You want to. People are human, right? We also, we don't all get to spend so much time together, the six of us, but the three of us, Paolo, Dimitri and I spent a lot of time together. And, and we came from really different backgrounds. And Dimitri had never worked with women before. And so it was really new for him and he had a specific job. He's this astonishing technical guy where he is the, he is the commander of the Soyuz. At what, a certain point up on the station, he became the commander of the station. And he is really great at that technical stuff. And in his world, he has been taught to do that and, you know, accept help from the people whose job it is to help them. And I was the third person in that spacecraft who doesn't have as many assigned pushing buttons

• 32:31Speaker 01

  duties, right? But I was also the most experienced person on that spacecraft in terms of going to space, not in the Soyuz.

• 32:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  But, um, and so how to blend my suggestions with someone who...

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Didn't understand that their job was to hear them.

• 32:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Right? And, and so we figured that out. And it doesn't mean it was always simple.

• 32:52Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Right? And, and I got a lot of advice from, from cosmonauts, from astronauts and, and, and I think he looked for advice as well. Cause he's like, you know, she keeps saying these things. Why? I mean, I don't, I can't speak for Dimitri, right? But it was different. And, um, and one of the things we figured out was that Palo and I pretty much had the same questions. Palo asked the questions and it worked. And, and I wouldn't suggest this mechanism.

• 33:18Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Of figuring out, how come everybody on the team isn't heard in the way they'd like to be? I mean, me wanting to be heard in a different way, maybe speaking my own questions was not the way to get the mission done. But if I was the, you know, Vice President of a company and people were not listening to me and it worked for me, we would have different discussions than that. And so I think the idea that you have to, you brought it up, you have to adapt.

• 33:44Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  To be flexible.

• 33:45Mark Manson?

  Especially when you're in a limited time window, right? Like, it's like if you and, and Dimitri are gonna be working together for

• 33:54Mark Manson?

  the next 10 years or whatever, then yeah, maybe you, you pick a couple of fights and try to change something, but it's, you've got six months. You've got an endless list of things that need to get done. So at a certain point, you have to be like pragmatic about it. I'm curious how much the cultural differences factored into.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Not in that particular case, not so much, you know, and then I had, I was very, a very close, um, with relationships with younger cosmonauts.

• 34:20Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Who would be like on survival training when we each barely spoke English or Russian together and, and they'd be like, Katya, your idea again. Kind of thing, right? Um, and we were known as the crew that laughed.

• 34:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  And, and, and we did really well. But I, I think that, I think that we got, um, we were a crew that because we were all really different, I think we surprised people.

• 34:44Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  In that despite some large differences in the way we each worked, we figured out ways to really optimize. And, and I do think that. You know, one of the biggest lessons is that if you have somebody, um, I mean, we made sure I was heard. It may not have been the way I chose to be, right? Or that I were, not that I did choose, but the way that I would have rather. But to have somebody on your team that, I mean, I'm the person that on a team is kind of like sees all the people. And tries to figure out, you know, who needs what and who's, who has questions that they are not asking and things like that. And to have somebody that either has, needs help or has a suggestion that they, they just figure, you know, they never look at me.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  They never think I've got something to say. At a certain point, that person just goes, you know, maybe I'll be on a team someday that really wants to hear that stuff.

• 35:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  And you lose.

• 35:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  The mission loses and it's the hardest thing you can do, especially at home.

• 35:40Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  But you know, we all have these teams that we don't, we don't choose our teams.

• 35:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  And the, the importance of, um, what people bring and knowing, understanding what that is. And I was up there with Scott Kelly and he knows that I tell these stories. Um, because we're, we're pretty different. I mean, he's a person of few words and I'm a person of many, right? And I don't think either one of us in any way expected that we would be like, oh, I am so glad I'm with that person.

• 36:10Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Right? And it was, I think, really surprising to both of us that with those few words, he was the king of non judgmental feedback. And to tell, you know, for me to, you know, have him say, I've been watching, he's the commander, he's in charge. It's his job to critique people. He goes, been watching you for a while, Katie, and you are slow to start a task. You are fast in the middle and you are slow to finish. I think it all has to do with packing and unpacking the experiment. You're looking for the perfect place. One, and, and then you have to find everything and make sure you don't lose anything, which is paramount, right? And he said, so what if, I mean, you know, you'll figure out what works for you. One suggestion I have is what if you just say, it's Wednesday, everything goes on the left.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  And you, I mean, you just know that it's there, it may not be optimum. Maybe you protect it a little, make sure nobody kicks stuff, but you know. Try that. And if he had just said to me, Coleman, why do you take so long to do things?

• 37:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  It's not like I didn't know. And actually, we're all slower up there than we would like. But I am the kind of person that would be like, oh, I'm so slow, you know? And so, you know, it would have, I just would have been, I know, I know. And it wouldn't have been helpful.

• 37:19Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  So when, when it came time for him to leave, Paolo and I, and we were saying goodbye to him. And, and he kind of looked at us and I was like, I'm gonna miss you.

• 37:30Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  And he was like, I'm gonna miss you too. And when Paolo and I got home, uh, he was like the first person at the bottom of the stairs. He goes, just had to make sure you got home. He's, he's a wonderful guy.

• 37:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So let's talk about coming down. Were you sad to come down? Or did you not want to come?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I didn't really want to come home.

• 37:49Mark Manson?

  Did you know it was, that was it? Like you weren't gonna go back? Or?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Um, I still haven't actually quite given up.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  I mean, they're gonna need a shepherdess on one of these flights, right? And, you know, and some of the space companies do have, um, you know, do have experienced astronauts going. Um, I, I think, uh, I knew, I knew, I was hoping to go again. And at the same time, literally, once you hit the ground, you are back in line. And there's certain boxes you have to check. You have to have had emergency training a certain number of times. And all, and the boxes are hundreds. And so basically you have to kind of check all those boxes again before you're ready to go. When I just, I, I mostly wanted to stay because it takes a long time to get good at things up there.

• 38:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Like even a month or two to really, you, you did ask before about how long does it take to be really good in microgravity? And I would say moving around and flying, you know, just, you know, a couple of days. And after a month, you're like amazing. But to actually do experiments, not lose things, multitask in that environment. Um, I would say it takes a good month to get good. And you're only up there for me almost six. And I just felt like I was so good at things. I just wanted to get more done.

• 39:06Mark Manson?

  When you came down. Was there, for lack of a better term, kind of a come down in terms of it like this incredible once in a lifetime experience just happened? As you said, everything you did, every small action was imbued with all this significance and importance. And then now you're back on earth and it's like, you gotta go pick up the takeout and stop by the dry cleaners and oh shit, I have a flat tire. Like, was there any sort of

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Not kind of what I haven't had one.

• 39:40Mark Manson?

  So was there any sort of kind of psychological like refractory period or hangover? I think hangover is a good word for it.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know if I would say hangover, but um, the coming home part, I think is the part that the spouses like the least. And like for, and for a shuttle mission, you know, you're training for a year or two or so. And then you, and everything is focused on that mission. Then you get home and it's going to be another year or two or so before you're on another one. And, and that's sort of like, what is my purpose now is hard on the person. I think it's also hard on the family.

• 40:13Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  And especially, I think it's easy to just think you're going to step right in and do the things you always were doing.

• 40:19Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, and I did learn, I learned a lot of lessons about letting go. And

• 40:25Mark Manson?

  That's right. Yeah. Cause you, you're inserting yourself back into a life. Like, I mean, while you've been gone, your husband and your kids, like they've developed new routines, your kids are in a new grade, they've, they've got new hobbies, they have new friends, like it's

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. And they've gotten along actually just fine.

• 40:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Without you, you know?

• 40:46Mark Manson?

  Is that hard to accept?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  There's that, I would say in my case, it got qualified in a couple of different ways where in a personal way, just me, um, I really just so much wanted to stay a little longer.

• 41:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  You know, and for some different reasons, it was actually a possibility for a bit. And I was like, yes. And then I was like, but of course I will call home and we'll talk about this as a family, but you could think yes.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  But um, I mean, so it was a little bit real, but not really. I mean, I was just in denial about coming home, right?

• 41:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  But when I came home, I mean, there's a certain grief.

• 41:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  In not being there. I don't want to sit by a window in an airplane. Because I just didn't want to look out.

• 41:31Mark Manson?

  Wow.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Because I, the, the view is different from open space, but there's a similarity of just being above and seeing so much.

• 41:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And um, so I didn't really want to, I mean, there's a certain grief. But in my case, um, I am pretty mission oriented. And the mission of family was really big. And they, they give you a couple of months to do your debrief kinds of stuff, but then, you know, have an easier job for a couple of months.

• 41:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  And in my case, it was nicer to spread that out, like, people would take like X number of months off. And I was like, I could do with just having a little more time at home.

• 42:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Over a longer period. And I would say that's the, you know, thing that I, I wish we had prepared our kid a little bit better. In that I came home to Houston with weeks of medical tests to do. And our 10 year old knew his mom was coming home.

• 42:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  But, I mean, we, we commuted between Massachusetts and, and Houston. And, you know, after a couple of days, they went home. And I got special dispensation to go home, like a week later. My flight surgeon actually put me, took me to the airport, walked me out of the plane, saw that I only had, not, not like my usual kind of. He's like, you are allowed to have a purse that has our wallet in it, and that is it.

• 42:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Um, but I did get to go home. So wanting that home mission. And then, um, in my case as well, when I was up on the mission, one of the big things that we did was to capture a supply ship, a Japanese supply ship, which now is really commonplace. You see the robotic arm reaching out. And, and now you see those ships approaching with people. But what we were doing was the second time ever that we'd use the robotic arm to capture this supply ship. And it's, you could picture a factory, giant factory, and a truck pulling up to make a delivery. And you're going to reach out and sort of bring it into the factory. If something goes wrong, you can't move the factory. It's too big.

• 43:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  The space station is too big. So you have to do everything just right and everybody's nervous and and you know, so you're talking to mission controls around the world. And so when I came home, this was still an evolving process. And my job back at NASA was to be in charge of those supply ships and actually to join together those teams like in Japan for the mission control, mission control in Houston, SpaceX, the company or Northrop Grumman. And so we had to have happy hours, right? I mean, happy hours are important.

• 44:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Because there is really, I mean, I'm kind of making a joke, but we really, I really did like have, you know, happy hours where I said, you know, okay, come to the happy hour, everyone working on this, there will be astronauts there and they're going to tell you what it was like when they did this on the space station.

• 44:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  And my crewmates and people would say, you know, I did that and I was nervous. I mean, people's things, the whole team needs to know.

• 44:26Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  So I had this mission to, you know, help this really critical point of working with all these new companies, to bring them together to make sort of one team.

• 44:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  So that felt very mission oriented as well.

• 44:40Mark Manson?

  So the mission continues.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Which I think I got to, I think it, I think it gave me a reason not to be mourning that I wasn't going again quite yet.

• 44:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The other question I have about coming back, I don't know what term to use other than like culture shock. Like, you know, if you, when you go abroad for six months and then you come back to the States, there's, there's a little bit of culture shock for, reverse culture shock for a few days of just like, oh yeah, I'm back home. I'm in an airport. I'm, everybody speaks English. It's, did you have anything like that of just like?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 45:12Mark Manson?

  I'm in a car again. I'm. I'm carrying my suitcase again.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  I'd say it wasn't about that part of it. It's for me, and I think you're you're sort of going abroad. I was an exchange student and you come back and you've like lived this entire different life than anybody that you're looking at understands. And that means your family, your friends, or going off to college, you know, for me pretty quickly after I got home, I was in Norway and that, the fact that you're sort of like, part of you is like from a different world, you feel like you're from a different planet and people don't quite get it. And I would say the the reality part of of just, I'm a really people person, but it

• 46:02Speaker 01

  took me longer to be able to want to be with a lot of people. It just was so overwhelming.

• 46:08Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  And in fact, we so we stay in a quarantine place, not to be quarantined, but it's the most convenient place to do all those nasty medical tests.

• 46:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Right? But then our building that we work in, and the astronauts have like the top floor of that building, when you walk in that building, there's going to be all these like pictures and posters and captions that are your training team celebrating the mission often in a pretty funny way, right? And so I, I mean, I loved, I would always love, you know, walking down the hall, seeing those things. And so I really wanted to go see that, but I waited till nighttime because I just wasn't ready to see so many people. And when I was up there, we got email synced four times a day. So that's, that's, it takes like literally a day, you know, you send a note, somebody sends a note, it takes a day to have a decision, you know?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  I won't tell you the decisions, but, but it, but you only had 100 people on your email list? And, and everybody from work counted as one. So you had 99 friends on that. And then to have email from everywhere, that's what was overwhelming was the communication.

• 47:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah, the quantity of

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:16Mark Manson?

  interaction.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:18Mark Manson?

  I imagine too, that, that feeling of alienation, I imagine the, the community of astronauts is very tight knit, like, is there a kind of this sense of? Family, you know, it's like

• 47:31Speaker 01

  There's so much is.

• 47:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and even, even though we're, we're all different and I mean, there's a lot of stories in the book about not feeling seen. And, and you could hopefully, hopefully it's written in a way that you would realize that I loved the people that I worked with, literally every one of them. And that, um, that's really almost the lesson is that sometimes, you know, these people, sometimes people are so well meaning. And they really do genuinely like you. They just don't necessarily see you in that role.

• 48:03Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean? And, and so despite the fact that I, that some of those things still happen and that's, that's part of the reason that I wrote the book is that I think in our world, it's so easy. We, we all have biases and stereotypes and I myself have them, you know, and hopefully learn, you know, with, with everyone.

• 48:23Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  But, um, um, I forgot your question.

• 48:29Mark Manson?

  Just a sense of family around astronauts. I mean, what, what I'm hearing from you, to me, it's, it's another testament to the power of mission, right? Like you can be in a space station with people who I imagine here on earth, you would never find yourself in the same room with them ever.

• 48:50Mark Manson?

  You have cultural differences, personality differences, language differences.

• 48:56Mark Manson?

  Yet that mission brings you together into such a, honestly, it's, it's similar.

• 49:03Mark Manson?

  It's similar to, to the way that war veterans talk about going to war, right? Like it's, it's almost, it becomes, they talk about the soldiers and their platoon as like brothers, even though they're just completely different people, that they have nothing in common with, other than serving in the war.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 49:19Mark Manson?

  It's, it's a, it's a really, it's a testament to how powerful that, that overarching mission and purpose is. Last question for you. Did you think or hope that we would be further along in regards to space by now? Like I, like you applied for NASA in 92, you got in, I guess you started 92, 93.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:44Mark Manson?

  Back then, when you thought about 30 years from now, 40 years from now, did you think we'd be further along? Or did you have any sort of expectations about it?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  I didn't really have expectations. I think being, being in the thick of it, I just wanted, I wanted to be part of it, right? And if I, I mean, to me, I add up those years, I'm like, oh, is it that many years? You know, and I'm somebody that doesn't mind their birthday or being the age they are or whatever. But, you know, almost sixty-four, well, in six months or so, but, but it seems, if I look back, I'm like, wow. We haven't really, you know, we aren't where we were hoping to be. And at the same time, being in the reality of it, I would tell people, I mean, I came back from the space station in two thousand and eleven. I was like, there's a reason we haven't gone to Mars yet, and it's because we're not ready.

• 50:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  I mean, the toilet and the systems that recirculate air and water on the space station break more than you want them to break when you are on your way to, you're on a six-month journey to Mars. Because we're even just finding out the thing that we thought we'd never replace in the, in the environmental system. That's the thing we're replacing the most, or that's the thing we actually have to open up and replace some of the guts inside, which was never planned. So we're learning really big lessons. So I do think it's, I think it takes a while.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  I think it's complicated. I think that having these commercial companies be part of this environment and this world is really wonderful.

• 51:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Because they can, I mean, there's something about, you know, being with the government where, I mean, they, in our case for NASA, I mean, this is tax dollars. They have to be spent well. Every question that people have literally has to be answered. And so if something, if we say, let's, let's try this, and no people on board. People on board is always different.

• 51:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  No one is going to take human life casually and. You know NASA is always part of that process with humans. But or at least the ones that we missions that NASA does. But hardware, even if we have something not work, launch it and it doesn't work. There's a huge investigation.

• 52:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  And so and you look at actually the Boeing flight. You know, right now, you know, the first launch, they discovered some unexpected things about the way the computers thought about timing. And then, you know, had a long road to realize there's a lot of implications, a lot of things to fix.

• 52:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Right. But these companies can have something can fail and fail often easier than a government agency.

• 52:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  And it's, I think inspirational to see. I would tell people, you know, SpaceX, sometimes they actually make a decision and they don't even have a meeting. I would say that to the people that I worked with in robotics, right? And and

• 52:37Mark Manson?

  Unimaginable.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  It's a, you know, it's just it's but it's inspirational. Like the next time you're at a meeting and you realize that we're all kind of going, yeah, this is hard. Why not figure out what can we do right now? What's the next step? So I think it's great to have them in the mix. I think it's important to have the NASA's and the Japanese and European and Canadian space agencies and then Russian space agencies in that mix as well.

• 52:59Mark Manson?

  Right. Cool. Awesome. Well, the book is Sharing Space. Katie, it was great seeing you again.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  It was wonderful to see you.

• 53:08Mark Manson?

  There it goes.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  That's okay. I should have written a, I should have written a longer book.

• 53:14Mark Manson?

  I know. If you had more pages. Thanks for coming by.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 53:18Mark Manson?

  The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Burney. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura, Jessica Choys, our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.