Life in a Mars Simulation with Kelly Haston

What would life be like for astronauts on Mars? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Chuck Nice dive into the world of simulated Mars missions with Commander Kelly Haston, who recently completed a NASA analog mission in a simulated Mars habitat.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I love talking to folks with NASA.

• 0:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because NASA's in our culture.

• 0:05Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 0:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's not just a telescope showing a picture. They're people.

• 0:08Chuck Nice?

  There's, I mean, there's no wonder that they are the most popular branch of taxpayer-funded government activity.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one of the most recognizable brands there ever was.

• 0:18Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:19Chuck Nice?

  And the fact is that we found out that you don't have to go to Mars to go to Mars. That's what I like.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up, life in a Mars habitat on StarTalk.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Of course, I'm here with Chuck Knight.

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening, Neil?

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, very nice, very good. You've been doing all right?

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  You know, actually, I've been doing very well. Yeah.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:01Chuck Nice?

  This has been a great time. The past few months have been. Thank you for asking.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, good.

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  I'm very, I'm very happy right now.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to keep our comedians happy.

• 1:09Chuck Nice?

  Well.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because.

• 1:11Chuck Nice?

  That's an oxymoron, right? Happy comedian.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's kind of the job of everybody. We've got to make sure you can, you're ready for the gigs.

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So, you know what we're going to talk about today?

• 1:21Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm, what?

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Simulating Mars.

• 1:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 1:25Chuck Nice?

  Well, we're supposedly, get your eyes to Mars. You know, we're supposedly going there at some point, so we should simulate it here. So we figure out what we're going to be in for.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Figure that out.

• 1:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have no expertise whatsoever in this.

• 1:38Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we found Commander Kelly Haston. Kelly, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Hi, it's nice to be here.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you're commander of what?

• 1:53Speaker 02

  So, I was the commander of the first of three simulated Mars missions with NASA.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So even though you didn't fly through the vacuum of space, they still got to call you commander because the whole mission was simulated?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I know. How lucky is that?

• 2:09Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, well, does that make you a simulated commander?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm an analog commander.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you have a PhD in biomedical sciences. That's exactly the kind, you know, that's who you want.

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  That's, yeah, that's.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a Mars habitat.

• 2:27Chuck Nice?

  That's very Mark Watney of you.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they didn't leave her for dead on Mars. And she's still on Earth.

• 2:33Chuck Nice?

  It's a good simulation, too.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're talking about NASA's Chapia mission. Did I pronounce that correctly?

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, Chapia.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is, reads like one of those tortured acronyms, but take me through it.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  So Chapia, and I will, it's a crew health and it's basically going to evaluate the health and performance of a crew in a one-year Mars mission. So the idea behind it is to put people into a simulation where you can actually test how the isolation and resource restriction, including food, communication, water, all sorts of things that you, any kind of resource that you can imagine that you would need on a Mars mission, is actually in limited, limited amounts. And you have three, four people actually basically pretending to be on Mars and doing all the activities associated with keeping a habitat functioning and doing science while they are actually on a mission.

• 3:30Chuck Nice?

  Now, you know, in other parts of the military, we call that enhanced interrogation.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, you know what it is? It's a test to see if they'll kill each other. That's all it is.

• 3:40Chuck Nice?

  That's a great reality show.

• 3:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 3:43Chuck Nice?

  That is a great reality show.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they have to leave their weapons outside.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chapia, I have here, crew health and performance exploration analog.

• 3:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:57Chuck Nice?

  And it sounds like something you would put in yogurt. Like I'm so healthy. I put so much trapeze in my yogurt.

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so where did this take place?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  It took place in a hangar on Johnson Space Center in a 3D printed habitat.

• 4:13Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is in Johnson Space Center in Houston?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  In Houston, Texas. That's right.

• 4:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So it was 3D printed to simulate maybe what you would do on Mars. You have to print up anything you need.

• 4:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. You can't carry it there, right?

• 4:27Speaker 02

  You can't carry it and you need to use the materials that are possibly present. So obviously regolith, which is those, you know, a soil that is going to be on the Martian surface is a potential substrate that you could use to actually print something. Other options, of course, are to be.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, regolith, when we think, we loosely say Martian soils, but soil has a very strict meaning on Earth, which Mars does not have. So what's the difference between soil and regolith?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Well, there's going to be mineral content differences. So Mars is actually made up of the same minerals as the Earth, but it has different components, different proportions. So you're going to have different proportions of minerals present. You're also going to have a lack of moisture because Mars is, does have some water in the ice caps and potentially underground, which is pretty exciting. But it does not actually have water content easily available on the surface, the way our soil would have, you know, water content in it.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Therefore, it doesn't support a biota in the soil itself?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So that's why Mark Watney had to get, he made poop potatoes.

• 5:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. You couldn't just grow it in the, in the soils of the.

• 5:33Chuck Nice?

  Right. Cause isn't, isn't a lot of the soil iron? What do you do with that?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Well, you can't do a lot with it other than actually build a habitat. So you can actually potentially use it to create a habitat that might actually be both protective in, from environments and also potentially protective from radiation as well. So that's something that I think.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Construction material. That's great.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How long were you there?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  We were there for 378 days.

• 5:59Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Oh, that is, that's intense.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 6:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Now who do you hate most? Let's be honest. Cause you know, it's like day three and you're just like, oh my God, this dude's an a-hole.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's four of you. Who are the other three? You can name them. Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  So we had flight engineer Ross Brockwell, who is a structural engineer. You need to. We had our. Good one. Yeah, and we had our medical officer, Nathan Jones. Damn it, Jeremy. An ER doc, so, so really versed in emergency medicine. And then we had our science officer, Anca Solario, who is actually a microbiologist who works for the Navy right now.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So this, this is, and, and combined with your background. Right. But you guys can make anything happen. Yeah, sounds like the nerdiest heist crew ever. It's like a heist movie with, with the nerdiest crew ever, which is awesome.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  There was, there was significant levels of nerd, I can't lie.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, that's, and nerds know how to hang out. We love that. So, uh, before we get into some of the nitty gritty of this, I'm a big fan of the, of the Twilight Zone series, going back to the late 1950s, actually. The original. The original, the original, the original. And. Not the, not the, uh, Jordan Peele version. Well, maybe I haven't seen it yet, I can't comment. Yeah, you don't like it. Okay.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry. So, uh, that, if we remember, was the dawn of the space age. Right. And many of the episodes were made before anyone had been yet launched into space. Right. But we knew it was coming. And there were multiple episodes of astronauts that are just alone in space, and they're exploring the psychological damage that can bring from being away from other humans. Right. And it wasn't until I was older that I realized, you know, there's long stretches of time I don't want to be around anybody. Oh, yes. And I'm a sociable person. Right. So clearly, they're like hermits out there, where this would not be an issue at all. Right. And. Or fathers.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and NASA's always yapping at you anyway, all right? So, so this idea of isolation, is it as devastating as these psychological dramas would have us think?

• 8:17Speaker 02

  You know, one of the questions that comes up is, is how, how isolating is it truly to be on a mission like this? Um, or how isolating will it be? That's what it's testing, right? How are people going to handle this? Um, and I will say that it's both. Incredibly isolating at times and also an opportunity to get closer to people. And so amazingly, I feel like actually many of my relationships deepen during this period. Because there was less, so, so first of all, NASA does speak to us all the time. There was a significant delay.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Well, the good news is they could only type because there was a time delay of a significant time delay across the mission based on how far Mars was from Earth during the whole mission, up to 22 minutes one way. So at the height of our time delay, it took 22 minutes for a message to get to us and 22 minutes for us to send an answer back or vice versa.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the time delay of radio waves moving through the vacuum of space.

• 9:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. It was no witty repartee with NASA.

• 9:14Chuck Nice?

  And why use, I'm asking you both, why use radio? Why not use like some kind of laser communication?

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All light.

• 9:21Chuck Nice?

  It doesn't make a difference.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All light has the same speed.

• 9:23Chuck Nice?

  Same speed, no matter what.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same speed.

• 9:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, correct, okay. So, so they built that in, even though you're just sitting right there in Houston, they built in the time delay.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and, and data size also comes into play there. So it's not just actually sending something, but how large you're sending. So the larger the item, so if you're going to send an audio file or a video file or even a picture, that's going to take longer than just a typed message. So you have all sorts of limitations there that you have to sort of take into account when you're sending a message. So we had communication with NASA, which was delayed for the same amount of time as our emails, but our emails would also take into account generally size. So, yes, we did actually have communication with NASA. We had a schedule that NASA, you know, set up for us daily. We followed that schedule similar to astronauts on the ISS. We basically check marked, you know, our things off the same way they did.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  We followed a red line of sort of timeline and had to do things in a timely fashion. But we also would have to communicate back to them sometimes, or if we were troubleshooting, we'd have to ask them for help. And then we'd have to wait for, we'd either have to troubleshoot it ourselves or wait for that 22 minutes to hear back from them for what their answer was.

• 10:30Chuck Nice?

  But that's a great way to get yourself 22 minutes, if you want. They ask you a question and you just write back, "Please clarify," and then go have some coffee.

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a delay.

• 10:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. I don't understand, please repeat. I didn't quite get that, and it's like, alright, guys.

• 10:48Chuck Nice?

  Now it's time for some Maxwell.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  A badly behaved crew would potentially do that, but we would have never done anything like that.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  To, you know, sort of follow our own solution while waiting for NASA to let us know what to do. But, but we did become quite autonomous in our responses. And then in terms of communicating with your family as well, there was that delay. And also like things like video were very intensely sort of data heavy. So hard to do for more than a minute or two. You really relied on emails and audios, but, but you did get to talk to people in that, in that way, talk, I guess, in quotes. And so, you know, you, you spent more time than you normally did communicating with people, but you actually put a lot into it. And my friends and family were amazing in that they gave me this like richness of communication that I've referenced a few times where

• 11:37Speaker 02

  they really stepped up to a form that we don't use anymore very often and communicated with me in this way and supported me through the mission. And it was, it was actually, I ended up learning things about people that I didn't know yet.

• 11:50Chuck Nice?

  So now let me ask you this, and this may seem a bit juvenile, but I just got to ask, I'm not saying that it happened. I just want to know what NASA's policy is when it comes to, you know, a little like a romance happening between the crew members. Are there any guidelines? Like you find yourself having some warm feelings about somebody on the crew? What, what happens in something? Cause you're spending a year with these people. What happens in that case?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  NASA probably didn't, I can't speak for NASA. I can tell you that they did give us some information about that. And, and one thing, and, and, and I'm, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say this, but I will say that pregnancy was an out. Like you did not get pregnant on this. You were not supposed to get pregnant on this mission. And so I would imagine, given that it was earth-based, if you did get pregnant, they would have removed you from the mission potentially. I'm hypothesizing on this based on information maybe that I was given. We were also, the majority of us were partnered. So that would create some problems on earth. If you did get warm, fuzzy feelings about someone there. So, so I. Think that, um, you know, again, you're in a professional setting.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Um, I'm and and humans are humans and professional settings lead to relationships all the time. Uh, so I'm, I'm sure that that could happen at some point and we were lucky enough not to deal with anything like that. Uh, however, I, I don't know if, um, you know, once we're in there, once, once you're on an analog where you're pretending to be on Mars, you're on Mars and unless somebody gets hurt, they can't really step in, you know, they're gonna let the mission go. Um, unless certain things do happen that they've outlined ahead of time. So I would say luckily, we didn't have those issues, but, but it brings up something that I'm actually really interested in and in future thoughts around analogs and also real missions, which is, is it better to send partners? There's a huge issue with sending partners in terms of crew dynamic, but in terms of human happiness,

• 13:46Speaker 02

  there's actually a reason to think about sending families or, or, or, you know, units of people because you, you know, if you're going on a three-year mission, a one-year mission is actually relatively short. Mars is going to be longer and, and so thinking about how we can send couples may actually be a viable way to keep people happier. Although admittedly, that's going to have to be a crew that comes together beforehand and, and there's, there's other inherent dangers in, in crew dynamic to come up.

• 14:10Chuck Nice?

  As part of the research. The, the part of, you're finding that out. You're finding that out, yeah, yeah. However, I would love to see at least one experiment where that happens, where you have couples. Because I just want to see that type back to mission control, which is, uh, can we get a more comfortable couch sent up here?

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, nine months typically is a journey to Mars. You were not simulating the ride to Mars, you were simulating your time on Mars. But getting back to the pregnancy issue, the, there was a movie about this.

• 14:45Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was called, I think, The Space Between Us.

• 14:47Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep, there was a woman who got pregnant the night before she flew to Mars.

• 14:53Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 14:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then she's delivers on arrival to Mars, because it's a nine-month mission, right? And so, but NASA had to keep the whole thing. So this was a child born and no one knew about the child.

• 15:06Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so the child grew up on Mars in 40% gravity and there was a whole story.

• 15:11Chuck Nice?

  A secret Mars baby.

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars baby.

• 15:14Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 15:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was interesting, interesting.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much square footage did you guys occupy?

• 15:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Seventeen hundred square feet.

• 15:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, but, but.

• 15:53Chuck Nice?

  I'm done.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Well, okay.

• 15:55Chuck Nice?

  Sorry.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Okay, that was.

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Four people and you didn't.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  That was the habitat. That was the habitat. We did have outdoor area that we went out into and when we mimicked Mars walks. Um, that was obviously in an outfit where we were, you know, mimicking a spacesuit. So we did actually have a little, I call it going outside. I loved going outside, but our habitat, which we were in sometimes for weeks at a time. We didn't go outside all the time. So, um, yes, seventeen hundred square feet.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So when they go out, that's when they sneak to McDonald's.

• 16:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She didn't say where they went. They're just simulating. You're in Houston, girl.

• 16:32Chuck Nice?

  Guys, guys have gone on another Mars walk. How come you always come back from the Mars walk with ketchup on your suit? What's up?

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so seventeen hundred square feet, you could easily put four people in that living in a Manhattan apartment.

• 16:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you get to exit the apartment multiple times a day.

• 16:53Chuck Nice?

  Which is why New York City streets are so crowded because there's a bunch of people living in these tiny little Mars bases.

• 17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not an impossible area that I can imagine putting four people.

• 17:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But when you have the urge to go on a Mars walk, where in Houston do you go? Are you walking down, down like the street with a Mars or they have a, like a campus? Where this happens?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  So within rate attached to our habitat, we actually had an area that was covered over to and and made to look like Mars. So we actually exited the habitat, but stayed within a defined area and we used two different mechanisms. We used virtual reality. So we actually had goggles and a treadmill that we got on and we were able to go and do activities associated with scientific activities and also maintenance activities that you would expect to do. So we actually went outside.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, you said goggles. You mean VR goggles?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  VR goggles.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a whole, a whole VR rig, like, like, you know, with the hand controllers.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gloves and the whole deal. Gotcha, gotcha. And the treadmill is to to pretend like you were actually walking great distances. Cover ground. Cover ground.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  I mean, at this point, I've walked miles on Mars.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Oh, that's super cool, actually. But it does kind of feel like a little Truman Show. It is, yeah. Yeah. What was your, what was your sky and your horizon?

• 18:15Speaker 02

  So in VR, the the realism was excellent. Like, it was the, the VR team was amazing and they put together a really beautiful package and set of activities for us that we got to do. The, the non VR was a little less realism because obviously you're in a hangar in Houston that's pretending to be part of Mars, you know, in a little area, but it actually wasn't bad. Like, it was really the activities we were given, the builds that we were given, the different activities that we had to do outside, combined with the outfit that we wore, did really sort of give you the sense, again, without the environmental issues of Mars. So we, we were lacking that, but like, you know, so you can't, you're not going to mimic the gra, the difference in gravity or the difference in.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could. They could, they could put a joist on you, all of you, right? To make you just a little bit lighter. Yeah, they could have done that.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  You're, you're right. And, and we did have aspects of, like, I think, again, what we. I always think about analogs as what are they trying to ask? Here, they were trying to mimic the workload that would stress us out and or tire us out or be the thing that actually made you physically or mentally tired. They were not actually, you know, trying out, you know, equipment for an actual Mars mission. So, you know, we were, we were addressing very specific things and that was not in the scope. So, but that would be really, really cool.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can imagine another such mission, analog mission, where it's just for the gravity part.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that would be amazing, right? To really try that out and see how that would feel. But you would have to rig both outside and inside. It would be, you know, resource wise, it would be quite a heavy lift for, no pun intended.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Mars, you'd be about 60 pounds, is that right?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that sounds about right, yeah. So, so you'd have a very different, different experience.

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta get to Mars as quickly as I can. My goodness. And to know how it works, Chuck. You don't leave the fat behind. What does Mars do for man boobs? Because that's where I'm really having the problem. So, so of course, you're in a hangar, so you never exit the hangar, even when you go out on your walks. Now, I figured that out.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  I mean, we didn't see anyone, we didn't hear the people outside of, like, even though, I mean, it's, it's the weirdest feeling, right? You enter this habitat and you enter this space that you're going to be living in for 378 days. But, and you know that mission control is in a wall just a few, few doors down from you. And yet, you don't see them for a year, you don't speak to them directly for a year, you don't hear them because they're being quiet. Like, what a, what a, what an incredible labor of love that they did, which is they, they spent a year working in a place where they had to be bone quiet, like, just so quiet so that they didn't actually interfere with the mission at all. So, it's a really strange, like, I mean, analogs are really funny that way because you have to buy into it on both sides, right? The ground has to be the ground, the, the mission in, in space or on a planet has to

• 21:02Speaker 02

  be the mission. And so, it's actually a really, it's a very surreal thing. As a scientist, I can tell you that, like, it's, it's a really interesting thing to see, like, all of us drop into it and then, like, experience it. And everybody had different approaches and different ways to deal with it, but we all did, you know, do our best to. To to do the mission as if it was real so that we were giving the best possible data to NASA because that's the key, right? Why else are you giving a year of your life up?

• 21:28Chuck Nice?

  At any point psychologically, do you begin to believe the cosplay?

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was gonna ask that.

• 21:35Chuck Nice?

  That you are involved in.

• 21:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're actually on Mars.

• 21:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And and you don't want to actually exit.

• 21:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that could mess up your brain.

• 21:42Chuck Nice?

  Do you actually go Daniel Day Lewis on us and just like, you know, I'm actually here? I'm doing this, you know? I am Bill the Butcher like.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  I can honestly say I did not. I I wish I could say I did. Um, I think it would have actually made it a really interesting experience as well. But but I think you're always, it's almost impossible to turn your brain off and know that you're not on Earth. There's just a number of differences, right? Like that you're not going to experience similar things. So so you are aware of it, but you're also, you're so determined to do the the mission in the way that it's set up that I think that you you buy into the experience in a very deep way, like the fact that we were this unit, this team that was functioning together and that we had to continue functioning together to do our work properly and so forth. And and even to think about the work, right?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Like doing science in this setting is not the way I do science normally, right? I do science and I actually produce particular types of data. Um, here we were doing, making data for the sake of actually producing data personally. So we were actually making science, um, that, for want of a better word, didn't matter. It was creating data of a different sort. And it was, it was kind of a layer that I, you know.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're the data.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  You had to.

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are the data.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  But really, but really, I am doing the science is actually the data. Me doing the science is the data and then, you know, then capturing.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And and by the way, that was also a Twilight Zone episode.

• 23:13Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where there is an actor on a set.

• 23:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who had such a miserable home life, but his acting role, he had a joyous family and loving kids and everything, and he just flipped one day and became the actor that he was acting.

• 23:32Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, and they took down the walls of the thing. He's like, what are you doing?

• 23:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was the Twilight Zone been up and down these streets multiple times. Couple of things, the, the, I seem to remember some studies where they put people in a, in a room where they could live whatever biorhythms was natural to them. I don't know if that's the right term. And when they did this, they found that 24 hours was not a natural unit of people's, what do you call it? Circadian rhythm. Of their rhythms, that it was more like 25 and a half hours. Oh, really? So they, so when they were left to their own, their, their schedule shifted against,

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  so it made you wonder, is our life and our 24 hour clock forcing us away from our, what is natural? So, did you do Martian days or Earth days? Ooh. Martian days, Martian days.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Martian, yeah, the Martian day would be a little longer, so it would actually be perfect to that, it would, I would actually speak to that study. We did not, and I can hypothesize a few reasons for that. Number one, when we do activities on our schedule, right? Some of them can be autonomous, like cleaning the hab or doing maintenance on the hab or, or whatever, or our personal time, obviously. But there are other activities where we need an expert on the ground that's actually monitoring us in case there's troubleshooting to be had, right? So our time, and, and similar to anyone that's going to go to space or do these trips, is also going to be dependent on the crew in Houston or whatever space station who's actually monitoring them. So we stayed to the, the Earth clock.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I'm not buying that. No, no, because when we send actual missions to Mars, the folks at JPL, right? Have Mars, two clocks on their wrist. They have Martian time and Earth time. Yeah, yeah, how many Sol's are there? That's right. S O L for Sun, Sunday. And so they're forced to match the circadian rhythms of the rover. So, so make, make Houston's go on your schedule.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Don't, don't. Well, I would say from the experience that I think that, and this is just my experience, um, not NASA's opinion of this, but, but I think having had this experience, that the crews that go to Mars are going to be far more autonomous than what NASA is used to. Like, the, the time delay means you can't wait 45 minutes for an answer. Most of the time, you have to go forward with your, your troubleshooting solution unless it's something that can be put off and changed to a later time in the day after you've heard from them. So to be honest, I think that the, the, the environment and also the, the delay and the length of time that people are going to be there. I have a feeling it's going to be a very different style mission even than what we're doing right now. So even though I think that they're, they're getting close to trying to actually answer questions about safety and health

• 26:26Speaker 02

  with analogues like this. By the time we go to Mars and actually have people living there, I think they're going to have like ironed out some of these things. And I have a feeling that people's biology is going to actually, you know, adapt and, and reign supreme. So in the end, I have a feeling that will probably be the case. Um, but for our analog, we did stick to Earth time. Uh, and so.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. See, I was just, if you, you're going to put me away for a year, you're going to follow my schedule.

• 26:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I, I am the one that's up there.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would get belligerent about it.

• 26:54Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Chuck Nice?

  Right. So let me ask you, when you said cleaning the hab, like, how do you guys divvy up those duties? Is it a group thing where you all get together like, okay, so?

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where do you put the dust that gets swept in the corners?

• 27:07Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah. And what do you do if somebody's like kind of a slob, just like Jim? How many times are you going to leave your space drawers in the middle of the doggone hab? What's up, man? Seriously, we're all a unit here.

• 27:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space drawers?

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That a different kind of drawers?

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you had to, you're self-sufficient, right? So food.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Washing clothes.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Everything. So we had everything. So there was, um, uh, There was a pre-supply in certain locations, so we could get things delivered to us from those pre-supplied areas. We had depots that were potentially, so there were times where we retrieved things from those resupply areas.

• 27:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a simulation of what a supply ship would deposit.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uncrewed supply ship in a drop.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Exactly, yes. But there were instances and there were things where we just had everything we were going to have and to have from the very start. And so way from the get-go, for cleaning supplies, we inventoried them and we actually, we were tremendous, I will be braggy about that a little bit and say like, our crew had so much stuff left over because we really were like very resource, we were like so tight on the resourcing that we actually had abundance at the end in some of our items because we just were really strict and we reused things like crazy. We were like recyclers like you wouldn't believe. So that was kind of awesome. But for the cleaning and all the different activities, some of them were assigned. So sometimes it would, we would go to our schedule and it'd be like, you

• 28:40Speaker 02

  know, Commander and Fenn, the flight engineer, are out today on EVA. So those would be dictated by our schedule and by NASA. But other things, we would actually have-

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  NASA will never call that spacewalking. They have to say extravehicular activity. Uh huh. Okay. You know, I feel like just slapping them. Okay. So your Fenn is out on an EVA. Go on. Okay.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Yes. But other activities like cleaning and so forth, we would come together as a crew at the beginning of the week and look at the activities that we sort of were either assigned for or thought needed to happen. And then we would divvy them up. And so we had a pretty fair system where we kind of kept track of who did what the last time and cycled it around so people didn't get bored. But also, luckily, I didn't see anybody in their space gotches. So yay for me. That was great. That would have been not good. And also-

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those are not normal men.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  But we were really clean.

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Men left to themselves, they just, you know, drop their pants, walk around in underwear all day.

• 29:46Chuck Nice?

  Listen, we will seek our lowest common denominator of existence. It's, that's, that's who we are. It doesn't make a difference. You know, my mother said, well, to me once, she came into my room, she was like, when are you going to clean this room? And I went, why is the question? You're asking about time. I'm talking about reason. So we don't, we don't see a reason.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so we always hear about these tasks that everybody has to perform. And particularly if you're doing science experiments, it's timed or it's, all right. What about movie night? I mean, do you, how does, what, what's, what do you do for entertainment?

• 30:27Chuck Nice?

  Wow, yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  So the crew was, we had a little bit of preloading. So A, we met each other during evaluation weeks when they were choosing the crew.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Preloading, that's when you drink before you go out.

• 30:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's pregame.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  No alcohol. Pregame, yes. No, no pregame on this mission, no alcohol on this mission.

• 30:45Chuck Nice?

  Loading is probably a better term than prelate, than pregame.

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, preloaded.

• 30:50Chuck Nice?

  Preloaded, I got, hey, man, I'm gonna tell you, I'm preloaded. I'm ready to go.

• 30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We should start that right now.

• 30:56Chuck Nice?

  It should be, yeah.

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We do pregame, preload.

• 30:59Chuck Nice?

  Forget pregame, we're preloading.

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so we interrupted, go on.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  No, that's okay. So we were really collaborative at getting together before the mission. We had a limited amount of data that we were each allowed to bring in and a limited amount of personal items. So there was a weight limit to our personal items. We actually made sure that there was very little redundancy in both the movies we brought in, the music we brought in, the books, et cetera, et cetera. So we, we really did actually combine all of our resources, including like, if you wanted to do a Christmas or, or a holiday celebration, one person brought in something that would be appropriate, but not all of us, right? So we were really trying to like, actually do that. So we had a really big movie selection in our personal data. And we watched, I don't even know how many of them there were, but we watched like, it seemed like every Marvel movie.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  We actually had a checklist that we went off. So that was like for a period of the mission.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Martian.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  We did not watch The Martian, but I had read the book already and one person read the book while we were in.

• 32:00Chuck Nice?

  Okay, alright.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, just for, just because I have to say this, Andy Weir is a friend of our show and we've, we've had him as a guest.

• 32:09Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he handed me the highest compliment I ever received.

• 32:12Chuck Nice?

  Which was?

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he's an engineer turned novelist. He said, Neil, when I was writing The Martian, putting all the good science in it, he said he imagined I was looking over his shoulder.

• 32:21Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yeah. Well, because he knows that at some point you would have been trashed in a movie.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, he didn't want me tweeting about it.

• 32:27Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm saying. At some point you would have been like, uh, clearly this is not physically possible.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they don't let you watch the movie Titanic on ocean liners and you didn't watch Martian on your Mars? So when you say-

• 32:40Speaker 02

  We didn't, but we did, we did watch, um, there's, there's a TV show about Mars that we did actually watch. Uh, I'm blanking on the name right now, but, um, but we did. What is it called? It's, it's, uh, it's like a NASA, it's like a alternate universe NASA.

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, yeah, that's for All Mankind.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Yes, For All Mankind, thank you. And, and we did watch that.

• 32:59Chuck Nice?

  The Russians got to the moon first.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:01Chuck Nice?

  And then of course we were behind on everything, including getting women-

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Everything.

• 33:04Chuck Nice?

  Into the space program, the whole deal. It's not a bad, not a bad series, actually.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  I mean, I think they bumped women and people of color up because of the Russians. So it really actually did, it did us some good, frankly.

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, sometimes that you need that.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Because women got to go to space way earlier, um, in the alternate universe. So that was-

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have a, you know, a solid state disk and I have like 300 movies on it. What do you mean you're limited in how many movies you can bring or how many books? Why would there be any paper at all? We live in the digital era.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  So, sorry, I was talking about, uh, ebooks. So we, but we, we did have a data size limit. So there was a, a data size that they gave us, which was all we could bring personally. Um, I don't have an answer for that.

• 33:51Chuck Nice?

  I do.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Give.

• 33:52Chuck Nice?

  Because they don't want you spending all your time watching movies. It's real simple. It's the same reason you do it with your kids.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You limit the time.

• 34:01Chuck Nice?

  You limit the time that they're able to be on their device.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  So I can imagine, though, like that you in any mission, the majority of data you want to go to mission priority items, right? So the items that are going to support the mission's objectives. This stuff for personal is limited in that it's going to be this is what you personally can bring in the same way that the limit of weight. So how many clothes you can bring, how many personal items you can bring? Can you bring a guitar versus a keyboard, you know, if you really love music versus I actually needle pointed. So I brought like sewing items and needle pointed everything I could possibly think of to do with the the mission, including the Chapea logo, which is right behind me.

• 34:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, a guitar you get to bring, but you can only play it in your room. Don't subject the rest of us to your awful guitar playing.

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless she's good at it.

• 34:51Chuck Nice?

  Unless you're really good.

• 34:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I went to summer camp for two weeks and there was no television, no phone, no nothing allowed. And one guy bought a guitar and I swear I wanted to kill this dude after two weeks because every night it was him trying to very poorly figure out a rendition of whatever he was playing. Oh, it was terrible, terrible.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just because you had a bad experience, doesn't mean everybody else has got to follow that. That's all.

• 35:16Chuck Nice?

  I'm just trying to protect you.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For me, just speaking as a as a scientist thinking about this mission, it's especially interesting if something unforeseen.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Happens.

• 35:48Chuck Nice?

  Oohs Martian bear.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 35:51Chuck Nice?

  A Martian bear invades the compound.

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something unimagined, some, some new virus that only exists if four people are in the same airspace for a year.

• 36:04Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some, some.

• 36:05Chuck Nice?

  You find an extra set of footprints leading around the back of a habitat.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what's that? Right, then it's like, okay, we did this experiment to explore the limits of what we, that's any experiment taken to the limits is gonna discover stuff.

• 36:19Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the whole point.

• 36:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 36:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why did we build James Webb? To go where we've never seen before. And so you expect to discover stuff we've never seen. What have you discovered? Either anticipated or not.

• 36:33Chuck Nice?

  Or did, and did they throw you a curve? Like, did they?

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Throw something in there?

• 36:37Chuck Nice?

  Did they throw something in there to like, you know, kinda throw you guys off kilter?

• 36:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that would have been good.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  So I do wanna point out that the experiment is not over. There's two more missions planned, so four people. So I'm a, I'm a stem cell biologist. I get to work with hundreds of millions of cells when I do my experiments, right? I make, I make different cell types and tissues out of human stem cells. So I could make a heart cell or a set of heart cells that would communicate with each other. I can interrogate.

• 37:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You created yourself for this interview.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Exactly, right? I could, well, there's some issues with that, but, but.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're, you're a simulation of stem cells turned into the commander.

• 37:13Chuck Nice?

  The Kelly clone, that's who we're talking to right now.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  I will say that even though four people can create a ton of data over a year, it's still only four people. So the additional missions are going to add a lot of complexity to the, the data set and it, so it's not complete yet. Um, and so I, I can't really speak to exactly what we found yet because it's a very long-term experiment and, and it makes me grateful that I'm a stem cell biologist because I get much more immediate answers than these people studying us do because they're gonna have to wait for years. Um, but I think that there were, um, some really interesting findings about, you know, sort of how we interacted. I think that the crew was, and the team on the ground was really inspired by some of the solutions we came up with to some of the things that did happen to us.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  I'm being a little bit vague because of the additional missions. We can't really actually, we don't want to tweak them or give them too much insight into what's going to happen so that they're not actually, you know, so that they remain comparable to us, right?

• 38:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The integrity of the setup.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 38:14Chuck Nice?

  But who analyzes the data that you produce about you doing this work? Because it sounds to me like a lot of the information that you are gathering would be data to be analyzed by social scientists, psychologists, behavioral scientists. Do they have those at NASA?

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, you publish it and then everybody sees it.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  But to answer your question, they do. So they had, they had a plethora of people at NASA working on this and a tremendous amount of groups came together to integrate the study and design it that way. So we had people thinking about exercise. We had people thinking about the team dynamics. We had people thinking about the food that we were eating. We had biological sampling throughout the missions. So the data they collected was actually vast and across many different types of data. And so each group came together and they will actually integrate that at the end when they, when they can analyze all of the people in the study.

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She said biological sampling. I think they're collecting her poop.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  I'm afraid that's true.

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me ask you.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  And I'll just, I'll just tell you guys, because you seem to like to talk about it. I am thrilled to not be pooping into a container anymore.

• 39:30Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Okay. I gotta tell you, I'm not. I think I would rather enjoy the experience. I'm just saying, I've never.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I ain't going into space with you.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  You know what? The third mission still needs people. I think the second mission might be closed, but you could be ready to apply for that third mission and be a Mars analog astronaut just like me.

• 39:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I have to put on my physicist hat and ask you, it's my last, I think we've run out of time here. My physicist hat is, over the 370 days, what was your energy source?

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that would be responsible for imbuing the food with energy if you grew your own food, so for your own nourishment, for your own warmth, for your own, if you're heating food, that energy has to come from somewhere.

• 40:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, did you have solar panels out front, the way you might have on Mars? And were they only operating 12 hours a day? And at Mars, the sun is like, you know, half as intense or something?

• 40:36Chuck Nice?

  It's farther back.

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Farther back. So how, what was your energy budget?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  I don't know how much I can answer about that, but I can tell you that I did clean a lot of solar panels during maintenance. So we definitely did have an aspect of that built into the activities we did.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, so on Mars, there's a lot of dust storms. So dust can just land on your solar panels. And so you dust, it's like the ump at the home plate.

• 41:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta.

• 41:06Chuck Nice?

  You gotta get out there and clean those panels.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So yeah, that's a very natural thing you'd have to do on Mars. Yeah. Okay, go on.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Yes. And similarly, in terms of resourcing and how that was, how that functioned, that was part of the experimental design, and I don't know if I can actually disclose it, but in each case, we were given limitations for certain things that the mission was interested in. And so that was something that they measured throughout the mission. And, and that will probably be some of the items that we actually are unblinded to when we actually see the final data set from all three missions. So there is some element to that that is a little bit on the low down, just so that we don't actually disclose too much.

• 41:47Chuck Nice?

  But I think I just heard NASA has a secret energy source that the rest of us are not privy to. Oh, who knew? Look at that. So all of us suckers are out here burning fossil fuels, while NASA is luxuriating in their own special energy source.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So another thing, just to clarify, since this was not a mission to see if you could generate your own food, your module was preloaded with food, with a year's worth of food.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  So we had food, basically, that's the same as what's on the ISS. We had dehydrated food and we had shelf-stable food, but we did get to grow crops for certain parts of the mission.

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1700 square feet.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How could you use the word crops?

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Well.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are potted plants, right?

• 42:41Speaker 02

  When you're in, uh, when you, when you haven't had fresh vegetables for six months, then it feels like your crop. Because, man, you are happy to eat those. So I would say, um, yes, we did, we did have a very small scale, uh, grow area and we were able to supplement with that. Um, but I think the idea being that in any mission, you hope to always supplement for people with fresh vegetables and, and, and fruits and so forth. Because you would want that.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could not have lived off of that.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  No, and, and if it failed for any reason, right? If, if you ever had like a, a virus come through or fungus or something like that come through. If anything, a bacteria, anything that took your plants down and you were relying on them, you would be hosed, right? So any, any mission that goes to Mars or any place over the moon or wherever.

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interstellar. Right.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A blight hits the crops. Right.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So obviously you're always going to have to, and NASA, that's, I think, one of the reasons that NASA loves analogs is that you get ready for every eventual, like eventual problem. Right? It lets you test out and, and practice in a safer space where you're not going to hurt people. What's going to happen? So that when they actually get there, and I think that Chris Haffield has said this really nicely, that like analogs just really. They make your muscle stronger in these areas and then you actually know what to do when you're there, right? And that's, that's not for the people that are pretending to be on Mars. It's for NASA. Who's actually, you know, preparing that way too. So they're getting all this data on how to keep us healthy. But they're also actually testing how to keep teams happy and how to grow food and, and do that safely and so forth.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  So there's really cool aspects to it, even though there's aspects that are like, you know, as you say, it's a trade off and, and, and you do have to. Think about those resources. So I think I always want to always ask people who ask me that question, like. Where do you think the best money is for an analog, uh, mission? And what, what is like the best bank for, but how can we actually send people to these places as safely as possible to keep? The public happy because we don't want to hurt people, but we actually have to take risk to, to get to, you know, places like Mars.

• 44:42Chuck Nice?

  I think it's a tremendous exercise in risk management. I mean, it's so, so worth it.

• 44:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  NASA's been very good about that ever since its founding years. By the way, you mentioned Chris Hatfield, the Canadian astronaut, probably the most famous Canadian astronaut, and he's been a guest on StarTalk.

• 44:59Chuck Nice?

  Yes, he has.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we even had him play his guitar, as he did in space.

• 45:03Chuck Nice?

  And says, as I said, leave your guitar at home.

• 45:07Chuck Nice?

  I'm not even gonna lie.

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Kelly, we gotta, we gotta call it quits there. This, this has been a delight to have you on here. And when you get off, when all three missions are done, you're not gonna repeat, right?

• 45:21Speaker 02

  No, although I would love to do like a different form. Like, I'd like to go to Antarctica next and like try out analog there, cause like, that's a different kind of analog and it would be super cool to contrast that.

• 45:30Chuck Nice?

  You are the only person I have ever heard in my life say, I'd love to spend a year in Antarctica.

• 45:37Chuck Nice?

  You're cut from a different jib there, Kelly.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just got the right amount of crazy.

• 45:40Chuck Nice?

  I'm glad you're on our side.

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are reminded here that while you can read about a discovery, especially if it involves humans achieving some goal that's been set forth by others, be it the general population or governments or whatever, and you can read the, you can celebrate the results, but somewhere in there, homework was done. There were people who came before, scientists, engineers, test subjects, and you don't always read about them. You don't always read about the hard work that went in to prep the final steps that are taken by those who get all the media attention.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, it reminds me of how fundamental that is. If you're gonna move the frontier, but you wanna do it sensibly and safely. There are these unsung heroes who actually empowered that in the first place. And I, I try to never lose sight of that. Yeah, we had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Alden walk down on the moon. Anytime I've said that, I've said, they're not the only ones who walked on the moon. So did 10,000 scientists and engineers and, you know, 200 million taxpayers. We all walked on the moon that day. So, uh, just delighted to hear about these early steps and to just get a taste of how

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you make that sausage. So that it tastes good in the end. Commander Kelly, thanks for being a guest on StarTalk.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. It was a real honor to be here and I just want to give a shout out to my crew and also the Chapea ground team, who were an amazing group of people that put this experiment on.

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ground team whose schedule you matched. We'll, we'll start a movement so that that doesn't happen in the future. Yes, exactly.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you know, it only takes a month to go like completely out of cycle, out of cycle with, you know, if you're off by like 30 minutes. Right, yeah. Yeah, a month, you're 12 hours. Yeah. So, yeah, anyhow, we're good here. Again, Commander Kelly, thanks for being a guest.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. This has been StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.