Inside NASA Mission Control, with Astro Mike Massimino - StarTalk All-Stars

Former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino puts on his old CAPCOM headset and takes us inside Johnson Space Center, with a little help from his guests, Flight Directors Emily Nelson and Royce Renfrew, and co-host Maeve Higgins.

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

• 0:00Mike Massimino?

  This is StarTalk.

• 0:08Mike Massimino?

  Hi, Mike Massimino here, aka Astro Mike, that happens to be my Twitter handle. And you're listening to the first season of a brand-new series, StarTalk All-Stars. I tried to say it like Neil deGrasse Tyson, did you catch that? Okay, StarTalk All-Stars. I'm your All-Star host tonight, and I have with me in studio, my comedic co-host, Maeve Higgins.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Hello, thank you for having me.

• 0:35Mike Massimino?

  Maeve, thank God you're here, thanks for being here.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go by Comic Maeve, maybe.

• 0:40Mike Massimino?

  Comic Maeve?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Just to go with your Astro Mike.

• 0:41Mike Massimino?

  Is that your Twitter?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, I just thought of it, I think it's gonna be.

• 0:45Mike Massimino?

  Comic Maeve, it's a good, this way they tell them what you do for a living, and then give them your name.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:50Mike Massimino?

  That's the way all Twitter handles should be.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  And you definitely have to do that if you're a comedian and you're not very funny, you have to keep reminding people, "I'm a comedian."

• 0:56Mike Massimino?

  You are very funny, that was funny what you just said.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 0:59Mike Massimino?

  Alright Maeve, this episode of All-Stars, we're gonna give everyone a peek into the NASA Mission Control Center.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  I'm so excited for our guest today.

• 1:08Mike Massimino?

  You know, these are two very good friends of mine who I both work with, and I think they probably have dirt on me, because as an astronaut, you get to work in the control center as a Capcom, which is a spacecraft communicator, speaking to astronauts in space. I was lucky enough to do that for many years when I was an astronaut. And also, you get to work as a crew member really closely with your flight directors. They more or less run the flight, making sure you're gonna be okay in all areas, mission success, and in your personal well-being, which means making sure you're kept alive. They are the, they are totally in charge, they are the burning bush, everyone listens to them when they talk. And these are two of the best ones we've got right here.

• 1:51Mike Massimino?

  The two flight directors that we'll be speaking with, Emily Nelson and Royce Renfrew, they're right now coming to us from the Johnson Space Center. How are you guys?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Hey, we're great, how are you today?

• 2:01Mike Massimino?

  It's great, it's great to have you guys, you look great up on the big screen, I guess this is a radio show, so people can't see you, but I can see you on the big screen, and you guys both look great.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  You do, thank you for joining us.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  We're happy to be here.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  It's so funny, you, you know, you have this job, but you just look like regular people. Nobody would know. You're wearing like plouses and suit jackets and nobody would know you're kind of a superhero.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  I don't know about the superhero part.

• 2:30Mike Massimino?

  They, they, they don't need the clothes to be superheroes. They just, they're just themselves. And everyone knows they're in charge.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  The superhero gear is when we put on our headsets.

• 2:40Mike Massimino?

  There you go. That's it. That's right. And we know they're in charge.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:44Mike Massimino?

  So I thought it might, might be interesting. Uh, both of you have had very exciting careers and, uh, you know, I, what would you say, I'm gonna ask you guys this question, because we used to talk about this in the astronaut office. What are the two best jobs you could have in the space program? Number one and two. Maybe not necessarily in, in order. What do you think the most exciting jobs are in the space program?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Number one is clearly flight director.

• 3:05Mike Massimino?

  And what's number two?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  I guess astronaut.

• 3:09Mike Massimino?

  Alright, there you go. That's exact, but that's the way we used to feel about it, that if, you know, the mo, we've, we felt that the coolest job was astronaut.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18Mike Massimino?

  We're lucky enough to have that, but I would say a close second, and maybe some people could argue even more cooler than being an astronaut, is flight director. It really is a cool job and it's not an easy job to get. There's only been a hundred people, or less than a hundred people that have been flight directors. Many more have been astronauts. So it's very select.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Where do you, where do you start to become a flight director?

• 3:39Mike Massimino?

  I think that's a good question for our, for these two very successful flight directors. Can, would you, uh, why don't we start there? Both of you, you can tell us, where, how'd you get to where you're in charge of the control center?

• 3:49Speaker 03

  So, so actually I started out as a high school math teacher when I got out of college. And I spent, uh, seven years doing that job. And that actually played into my getting hired out here at JSC. The original job that I had was as an instructor for the robotic system onboard the station. And when they hired me as an instructor out here, they were looking for people that had a technical background and also had some history of a, a teacher or whatever. So I actually fit perfectly out of a computer science degree and seven years of teaching high school mathematics. And I wound up, uh, getting hired out here to teach, uh, Astronauts how to operate the robotic arm on station.

• 4:31Mike Massimino?

  Do you remember teaching me? Do you remember teaching me, Royce? You were my instructor way back when. Do you remember that?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  I do.

• 4:36Mike Massimino?

  Or have you blocked that out of your head?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  How would you rate Moss as a student?

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Uh, he was great.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:42Mike Massimino?

  Yeah, he forgets. Thank God, thank God his memory is selective. But I was just gonna say is that it's that's kinda you you went to you had to teach astronauts and I think you know, teaching high school kids probably was not as challenging as teaching astronauts. And it was probably a good way for you to get ready to do that. Uh, so I think your I think your time in the high school classroom was probably good. Alright, I didn't know that. You're high, so you did that and then you became a robot instructor for the astronauts. And what happened?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Uh, I became a flight controller for that same system. So I was a robo in the flight control team, which is the flight controller that's responsible for the for the robotic arm on onboard station. And then I worked for a while as an Oden. We we have all these uh, names of console positions and then we try to fit them into some description, but who picked the name first. But Oden was responsible for the the big computer network onboard station, the one that runs it. And then I was I was the manager of the Oden group for a little while and I was selected as a flight director in two thousand and eight. So a lot of different positions in the control room before I got selected as a as a flight director, but this is by far the most fun job.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  And what about you, Emily?

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Mine is much more simple. As soon as I graduated from college, I figured out that this is where I wanted to be. I wasn't one of the folks like Royce that started out necessarily wanting to come here. I just knew I wanted to do what I could to make the world a better place, if at all possible, and figured out that this was a great environment to work in. Went straight to flight control. I worked as a Thor, the thermal operations, managing the thermal systems on space station as we were assembling the space station. And pretty much went straight from Thor to flight. So mine is far less interesting. I only worked in one console before getting selected as a flight director in two thousand and seven.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  How long have you been out here? Almost twenty years, right? We've been out here almost the same amount.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  I got out here in ninety-eight.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  So almost twenty years for both of us.

• 6:39Mike Massimino?

  Well, so onsite twenty years at JSE, and how many years as a flight director for each each of you?

• 6:45Speaker 03

  So I was selected in 2008, so eight years going on nine here.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  And nine going on 10 for me.

• 6:51Mike Massimino?

  All right, and you know, you say it's a straightforward, simple, but it's not anything like that. I mean, what they did, Maeve, was incredible as, you know, Royce as an instructor and then as a flight controller. You know, they worked their way up to get into the front room of the control center and then into being a flight director. It's a big application and interview and it's, they make it sound easy.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 7:14Mike Massimino?

  It is not.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Because I was starting to think, oh, maybe I could do that.

• 7:18Mike Massimino?

  Maybe you could, but it takes a lot of hard work and dedication.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  What do you think are the, like, apart from your qualifications, like, what do you think is the sort of personality type that you need to do this kind of work?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  We have a variety of personality types, that's what makes it interesting.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  It's a game, really, in the flight control community to try to figure out why people got selected.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  People want to be flight directors, they look at the previous class that got selected and say, well, why did these people get selected? And we do have a variety of different personality types in the office, which I think is good, and a variety of backgrounds as well.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Just like any team, you want as much of a diverse skill set as you can get. And so with each new selection, we're looking for folks who have skills that would fill holes in our experience base currently. So I would say a lot of us, clearly, we have all demonstrated leadership capability. We've all demonstrated a capacity to learn quickly because we're certainly not experts on every system, but we may need to become an expert on every system very quickly in the event that something goes wrong. So there are a lot of fundamentals that we had to demonstrate along the way, but our style is probably all pretty unique. We're all a little bit different in that way.

• 8:32Mike Massimino?

  As far as something goes wrong, can each of you give us an example of an emergency when you were on console that you had to act quickly? Give us the inside scoop.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  So I'll jump in there. The one that comes to mind, we were talking about before we started here was the spacewalk we did in December, the EVA 35 with Tim Peake and Tim Copra during that spacewalk when Tim Copra reported he was starting to see some water on the inside of its helmet, in the visor area of its helmet. And we wound up executing our protocols that we had put in place to make the determination that we wanted to terminate that EVA based on a couple of different signatures that we were seeing. And brought Tim Copra and

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Tim Peake back inside, got them out of their spacesuits, and everything was fine in the end. But obviously, that's not the way that we had planned the EVA, but we had prepared and we train all the time for events like that where we need to do something in a hurry to terminate an EVA or to take some other action onboard station to keep the crew safe, the vehicle safe, and then work on the success of the mission that we're operating.

• 9:59Mike Massimino?

  Yeah, that was very much a life-threatening situation.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Very dramatic.

• 10:04Mike Massimino?

  Probably, you know, the water in the helmet is probably the closest we've came to losing someone during a spacewalk. It is the closest we've come to losing someone in a spacewalk. Would you guys agree with that?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Well, so in Mr. Copra's case here, we were far away from a life-threatening situation, but we have very conservative protocols in place now to make sure that we don't get into a configuration where it is life-threatening. So we had the water in the helmet, which triggered actions by my team and myself to bring the crew back inside. But I wouldn't, it could have escalated, that's why we took the actions that we did. But I thought Tim Copra was safe and moving forward the entire time. We were prepared.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  To go to the next level of a breakout of an EVA, which is called an EVA of board. But we did not get to that. We stayed in the terminate case the entire time. So that so it worked out okay. We ran our protocols as designed based on the signatures that we were seeing and got got both crew back inside safely. But it's still not a not a configuration I wanted to be in, but I thought the team handled it very well, both on board and and my team there in the control center.

• 11:22Mike Massimino?

  A lot of technical speak there and but a great, you know, a cool head.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  A cool head and this like canned voice. That's the voice I want to hear when I like notice something is going wrong.

• 11:32Mike Massimino?

  All right. Well, I think we're on to our next segment here. That was that was that was great. Thanks for the stories and the intros and I'm gonna turn over them. Maeve has got some questions.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  I've got cosmic queries. They're from our listeners. So and and these are they knew that we were going to be speaking with people from mission control. So these are specific questions for you guys. And this one is from Benjamin Luria, and he contacted us through Instagram, and he asks, for the missions that take years, like the Juno spacecraft's trip to Jupiter, are there people at mission control watching its progress 24 hours a day for the entire mission?

• 12:12Speaker 03

  So I'll answer that two ways. Juno's not controlled out of Johnson Space Center.

• 12:20Mike Massimino?

  Somebody else's problem. There's nobody on board. Only people.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  The missions that have people on them.

• 12:30Mike Massimino?

  People.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  The ISS program, we have people in the control center 24/7, but it's not just the control center in Houston. All of our international partners around the world also have control centers that have people in them, and they are all.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Maybe we'll add.

• 12:47Mike Massimino?

  But that's a good point, though, I think.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:49Mike Massimino?

  To say, you know, that what the Johnsons, the difference between the flight directors that we have at the Johnson Space Center, they've got to worry about keeping people alive. And that really changes the whole equation. I mean, we never want to lose a spacecraft or, but they also worry about cargo ships and so on. You want to keep the spaceship alive, but they have the added pressure of keeping people alive.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  People that they know.

• 13:10Mike Massimino?

  But there, but there's a whole other group of flight directors, right, guys that are out, out there working these other spacecraft without people on them.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  But I, but I would also offer that it's all very much related. We're, we're, we're big, big proponents and champions of the folks that are doing rovers and, and missions to, to, to other planets because all of that effectively is pathfinding that's eventually going to enable us to send people to those planets, like Mars, which is the, the goal of NASA here eventually. Without those pathfinding rovers that run around on Mars, we would not know nearly as much about what we're going to get ourselves into when we put people there eventually.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Totally. There's a question here about the Mars trip, and this is from Kyle Yoakum. He's from Tennessee. How does NASA feel about setting up a space station on the moon for trips going to and from Earth and Mars? Would that be worth the effort?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  So what's interesting about getting down to any surface is that it's, it's pretty expensive in terms of mass, getting things down to a surface and back up again. So one of the things we're talking about in terms of a waystation for getting to and from Mars is not necessarily on the surface of the moon, but in either high Earth orbit or in an orbit, it's similar to the moon's orbit so that we're far enough away from Earth that it's easier to launch out towards Mars, but we don't have the, all of the infrastructure needs that would be required for getting down to and back up from the moon. So our plans going forward do involve setting up kind of spaces in very high Earth orbit,

• 14:46Speaker 02

  basically pretty close to the moon, where we can assemble a, a vehicle so that it can head out to Mars. But I, the getting down to a surface and back up from a surface is a lot more complicated and costly than you would, would necessarily assume.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Right. Well, this question is for you, Mike. Is there a culture shock from being an astronaut and then training at Capcom?

• 15:09Mike Massimino?

  Um, I think that, uh...

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Does everybody do that, or just...

• 15:13Mike Massimino?

  No, not, not every... It, it is, do you... What is the latest on that? You know, maybe second question about everyone, every astronaut doing it. But back when, uh, when I was an astronaut, there were a lot more astronauts.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:24Mike Massimino?

  And so it was only if, uh, you know, a portion of us that got a chance to do it. I think now, don't they try to get... It was almost part of their training.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they try to have all of the new astronauts spend some time as a Capcom so that by the time they get to the space station, they're more familiar with what's going on, uh, in real time. And the best way to get an astronaut familiar with real time is to put them in mission control.

• 15:43Mike Massimino?

  Yeah, abso- absolutely. And, and it really helps. You know, my first flight, I flew on the... Both of my flights were shuttle flights. In my first flight, I had not yet been a Capcom and I flew. And then I, and then I was a Capcom in-between. That was my job in-between my flights. And it gave me such an appreciation for what goes on in the control center. It makes you a much better astronaut.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:03Mike Massimino?

  And I think that we realize that now, and that's why they have, uh, the newer... They used to say, "Well, you need to fly in space in order to know what to tell the astronauts in space." But I think it's more, more valuable to have an astronaut who is working in the control center and, and learning what it's like to work with a flight director. And when... Because when you say something from, from space and you radio that down to Houston, they listen to what you're saying.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:26Mike Massimino?

  And you can, you can put the team off spinning off on something that, that may not, you may not think is that important, but just because you said something, they're going to be working an issue that, that you had no idea how they're going to be working it. And it's very important to be clear and, uh, and appreciate what they're doing. And plus, you get to see the day-to-day of what an astronaut goes through as a Capcom.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  So what, um...

• 16:49Mike Massimino?

  It's a great job for an astronaut. It's also, it's a blast to get to work with these people like you.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  What's the most... This is another question. Uh, this is from, uh, Phil Findy. What is the most entry-level job that gets to stay in the room of mission control?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Do you have like an intern that's sitting there getting you guys coffee? Or like?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 17:09Mike Massimino?

  That's the Capcom.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's maybe. Entry level would be the Capcom.

• 17:15Mike Massimino?

  In some ways it is.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  I guess one of the things you need to realize is that is that we train flight controllers, just like we train astronauts, if you want to think of it that way. So, an entry level job, somebody that actually gets to come out here and work, could be somebody right out of college that is now training to be one of those console positions that you see in the control room behind us there. So, the most entry level job in the building, I would suggest, is somebody that's in training to do one of those jobs. You always see the shots of the one room there in the control center, where on STV all the time. But the building itself is relatively large, and there are other control rooms in the

• 18:00Speaker 03

  building where we train as a team. We train flight controllers. We have an entire group of folks here at JSC who are instructors. Mike's very familiar with all the instructors that worked with him the entire time he was training, go do his missions. They also train flight controllers to do their job. So, entry level, I would say, it's the person in training to do one of those jobs.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:24Mike Massimino?

  Well, Emily and Royce, don't go anywhere. We have to wrap up this part of the show, but we'll be right back with more of your cosmic queries. Stay tuned. Welcome back to StarTalk All-Stars. I'm your host, Mike Massimino, perhaps known to some of you as Astro Mike on Twitter. Co-hosting today is comedian Maeve Higgins.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 18:48Mike Massimino?

  Hey, Maeve.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 18:50Mike Massimino?

  Thanks for being here.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  I like how modest you are, saying you, some of you may know, you have like a million and a half followers.

• 18:55Mike Massimino?

  I was the first person to tweet from space.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:59Mike Massimino?

  So, yeah, that's, yeah. So, but it's all relative.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  What year was last?

• 19:04Mike Massimino?

  That was in 2009, just as the Twitter craze was going. And our friends that we're Skyping with also are on Twitter. And I'll introduce them, and they can tell you their Twitter handles. We have Royce Renfrew and Emily Nelson, both of whom are...

• 19:24Mike Massimino?

  Flight Directors at the Johnson Space Center. Thanks for joining us.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having us.

• 19:29Mike Massimino?

  What are your Twitter handles now that we're just talking about that?

• 19:33Speaker 03

  So, a lot of the astronauts, if you type in astro underscore and you'll get a whole bunch of hits on all the astronauts that are on Twitter. The flight directors went the other direction. My Twitter handle is tungsten, like the metal underscore flight. So a lot of the flight directors have underscore flight at the back end of our Twitter handle instead of astro underscore at the front.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  And I don't tweet myself, so I forget what mine is. I think I'm peridow flight with a dot in between, peridow dot flight.

• 20:07Mike Massimino?

  So what was it, what was it?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Peridow.

• 20:10Mike Massimino?

  So is that your flight director name?

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Yes, so he's tungsten and I'm peridow.

• 20:14Mike Massimino?

  Okay, so can you explain the flight director names quickly for us? Because that's kind of cool.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so back in the very beginning, a flight director would have a team of flight controllers that they trained with all the time. We don't get that luxury now. We kind of show up in the flight control room and see what team we get that day. But back when the flight director was also the manager of a team of people, it was simplest to just put on the schedule that the red team is simming today, the white team is training today, the blue team is training today. So each flight director started picking a color at first and then, you know, you get through your 24-count box of Crayolas and you start running out of color. So then they started jumping into constellations, gemstones. These days, we go into kind of concepts.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  One of my classmates was tranquility flight, most recent flight director. To announce her name, she came out last week as infinity flight. And so it's usually a term that means something to us as associated with our path to the flight director office and our hopes for human spaceflight.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  I love the name tranquility flight, don't you? It's like a

• 21:22Mike Massimino?

  What would yours be?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Medication or something.

• 21:24Mike Massimino?

  What would your flight director name be?

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Oh, so I think it would be like fighter flies.

• 21:30Mike Massimino?

  Really?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:31Mike Massimino?

  Flight or flight. What do you think of that, guys? That's a great one, huh?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  You guys can use it.

• 21:36Mike Massimino?

  That's awesome.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  We've got a few more that'll be announcing their names soon. We'll recommend that one.

• 21:41Mike Massimino?

  That's a good one.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  And so, how like, how important is it for like, for you guys to use Twitter and communicate with people? Like, we know from this show, people are unbelievably curious. Everybody wants to know what's happening at NASA, what's happening in Mission Control. So, like, what does it mean to you guys, like, to communicate in that way?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  So, I started using Twitter when the crew, like Mike was talking about, he did Twitter from space, but the station crew started using social media once we figured out how to get them internet access. So, I actually started using Twitter just so I could follow what they were, what they were doing, because they were doing a lot of interesting, interesting stuff out there. And I really enjoyed it, so I started using it more and more. And it's, it's a neat way to interact with the public, it's a neat way to throw stuff out there that, that we're doing in the control center, what we're doing on ISS as a, as an outreach program, which I think is very useful for NASA.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  And of course, when we're actively in the control center, it's pretty hard to, to take the time to send anything out. So, for some of those, at least for me, I tend to tweet quite a bit more when I'm in a different role, when I'm leading a mission, which means I'm not sitting in the room that you can see behind us, but I'm sitting in kind of a room behind there overseeing the entire four months or six months of the mission. And then, I have more of an opportunity, because I'm not responding to what's happening every moment by moment, to kind of send out statuses of interesting things the crew has done that day, or things, I try to focus on things that the ground has done, that, that the Mission Control Team is focused on, to try to give that kind of flavor.

• 23:17Mike Massimino?

  You know, it's some of the, some of the things you, you know, you need, need to do to, to keep things going as flight directors, and with, you know, you talked about following the crew and Twitter and all this, but your job now is much different than it was in the Shuttle program, I think, because Shuttle, Shuttle flights were two weeks long and, and, you know, you had a lot to do, you worried about crew safety. But now with these missions, you know, we mentioned in the other segment that, you know, you could be up there for as long as a year.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 23:44Mike Massimino?

  And, or maybe it was before we started the other segment, and somewhere in our conversation...

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were talking about, yeah, you've just brought somebody home after almost a year in space.

• 23:51Mike Massimino?

  After a year, and it, and it's, so it's not, it's, that's, that's a whole different equation, so it's not just keeping them... Safe and making sure the mission gets done. But it's also sort of the long-term mental well-being, keeping people engaged and happy and keeping the crew going. Um, morale is a, is a, is a big part of it too. And, uh, Emily, you were the, you were the flight director for the tail end of Scott Kelly's year in space, is that right?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  I was, I got, I was batting cleanup for that one.

• 24:23Mike Massimino?

  Oh, you're batting cleanup for that, alright, so, so you had the last, I guess the last three months of that, right? Expedition forty-six?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, about four months.

• 24:30Mike Massimino?

  So, was that, was that on your mind about trying to make sure his mental, uh, health, uh, you know, that he is morale, that he kept going and trying to keep it light and fun for the whole team? What was that, was that part of it for you, or what, what, how did you approach it?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It was certainly a concern, it's something that Scott and I talked about before he launched, you know, a whole year in advance. His goal was for Scott Stover, his flight director when he launched, and myself, to be able to compare notes after he got back on the ground and not be able to tell the difference, that we would have been working with the same crew member. And honestly, Scott is so even-keeled and so unperturbable that that was really the case. So, um, my personal strategy when I'm about to take over, because each of us, when we take over a lead for a mission, we're taking over for crew members that are already on board, because it's just this continuous cycle of crew members. We'd never, ever have the space station without people living there.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  And, so I will start sending them emails up front, saying, "Hey, we're not gonna change anything until I take over, but is there anything you'd like to tweak? How, what are you happy about? What would you like to do differently? Um, what is, are there any things we can tweak about what the ground is providing for you?" To try and listen to their needs and make sure that we're providing them the ability to be as efficient as they possibly can, because we get so much more work and more productivity out of people in space who are happy, just like we get more productivity out of people that are happy on the ground.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Can you give us an example of any of those tweaks that they asked you to make? Like, without like compromising security?

• 26:04Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. Let's see, I, Scott actually didn't ask for any, um...

• 26:11Speaker 02

  I don't think. We've had, so we have this whole kind of giant system for how we manage the cruise day. They have, we have this timeline that shows in five-minute increments what they're going to be doing from the time they wake up until the time they go to sleep, and then the timeline tells them, okay, it's time to be asleep. And then in addition to that, we have a list of activities that if they finish something early, here's a list of stuff. It's just kind of the honey-do list. We need these things done, but they're not as important, so we haven't put them on the timeline. The way that we manage that, there are a lot of nuances to, if you can imagine, somebody else is building your calendar every day, then you might think that you want your calendar managed one way, and then you start doing it for two months, and then say, you know,

• 26:56Speaker 02

  I really wish you would make, you would put my exercise in the morning, or I'd rather that we do these kinds of things together, and we do these kinds of things alone. So a lot of what I tend to get is, hey, now that I've been here for two or three months, what I'd really like is to change my strategy for how you build my time, and make it so that I can execute a little more efficiently through the day.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  And so at what point did Scott Kelly say to you, I want to wear my gorilla suit in the afternoon?

• 27:24Speaker 02

  I, and I, when I'm in that room, I tend to be a little bit buried, and I tend to not necessarily know what's going on in the outside world. But that day, I happened to be, I happened to get either emailed to me, or tweeted, or whatever, a link to the video that he had sent down. I had no idea ahead of time. And so the next thing I did was call Scott, where did you get a gorilla suit, and how did you get that thing to space? So yeah, he managed to surprise us all with that one.

• 27:54Mike Massimino?

  So what, so what happened was, tell us a little bit, we have a few more seconds before we go to the, to the queries.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  You did, so I saw this, there's a very famous video that went viral of the astronaut in a gorilla suit, right? Like...

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he, he put on his gorilla suit, and then he stuck himself inside of, Mike, you'd know, an MO2 bag. It's basically just a big, white, stowage bag that you could fit a person in. So he's sitting there, and then poor Tim Peake comes along and starts to open up the bag, and he jumps out of it and starts chasing Tim Peake all around the space station. And it, it was really hilarious. You should see the, the Colbert clip from what they did on their opening. I think that's where I saw the first, where I first saw the, the whole gorilla thing in the first place. It was pretty adorable.

• 28:38Mike Massimino?

  Good fun, fun and games in space. It's hard work, but you know what Emily said I think is really important. It's, it's fun. Those things are fun, but it's also makes you more productive. Keep them riled up and keep it so it's if it's all just drudgery work all the time, even in space. It can get to you. So it's important to keep, keep it light as much as you can. All right. I think that brings us to our cosmic queries. What do you got for us, man?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Okay, I've got a few more questions. And this one is from Camilla. Camilla is from Brazil and she's asking, how is the recovery of an astronaut made after a mission? Physically, how do you feel when you come back?

• 29:18Speaker 03

  So that's probably a question for Mike, but I'll, I'll take a shot at some of it there.

• 29:23Mike Massimino?

  My missions were short. My missions were short now, so it wasn't that bad. It's a lot different with the longer ones.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So one of the things you need to think about is that the recovery of the astronaut when they get back on the ground starts when they launch. We have a very, very strict protocol that they have to go through what that, that involves daily exercise. In zero G, if you're not using your bones and your muscles to fight gravity all the time. Your bones and your muscles atrophy and, and you're not capable if you don't do some countermeasures. When you got back on the ground, you wouldn't be able to stand up because you haven't used those muscles in six months. So we spend a lot of time making sure that the crew does resistive exercises all day. They do a lot of cardio exercises. We have various other, various treadmills that they can run on.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a stationary bicycle that they can use. And we have a, a system that simulates what it would be like to be lifting weights. And all of those, if you think about it, are pretty complicated. How do you design a system that allows you to simulate lifting weights?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:30Mike Massimino?

  Yeah, because you could be like Hercules, 600 pounds in space, even I can lift.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  So cool.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  We make sure that they stay exercise and that we make sure that they eat the right food and we keep track of, you know, are they sleeping enough and so that when they come back home, the transition back to a one G lifestyle is not so dramatic.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  That almost makes me think, though, that like it must be hard when you get home. Like you know about this, there's been somebody watching you, like Emily said, every five minutes is accounted for, like everything. So then when you're home, that's not there anymore. So that must be a strange.

• 31:07Mike Massimino?

  Well, that's, yeah, they're like having to figure out what you're gonna do with your life, your day. Yeah, that's a problem. That's a real issue when you get back.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  It's not a problem upfront, though, because we schedule them once we're on the ground for the first month.

• 31:21Mike Massimino?

  That's true. That's right.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Do all the rehabilitation.

• 31:25Mike Massimino?

  Yes.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Honestly, one of our biggest experiments are experimenting on the astronauts themselves. So they get home and they do a lot of the same things we had them doing in space, exercises to demonstrate dexterity, providing a great number of biological samples. So we do a lot of evaluative sessions with them for their first two weeks.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  And did you have a moment, Mike, when you were back on land again and you were just like, hmm, wow?

• 31:52Mike Massimino?

  I was, I was, you know, it's funny. I think for me, it's bittersweet. You know, you're very happy to be alive and back and if the mission went well, which in luckily my cases, we were happy with what had happened, you're very grateful. And it's great to see your family and your friends again, to see your flight director again, you know, to see the people that helped you get ready and took care of you while you were up there. But I also found, you know, when I got back home and my crewmates and I, for my second flight, we were training together for two and a half years. And when we, you know, we were together a lot and every day we'd see each other on the weekends even socially. We really were like a family.

• 32:33Mike Massimino?

  And after spending our time about two weeks in space together was our mission and, you know, we saw our families went home that night when we returned, that next morning we all called each other to see what was going on. Hey, what are you up to? You know? And I think, you know, one thing, just to hear what it brings back, when I see my friends, when I see Emily and Roy talking, there really is a bond between everyone at NASA, but particularly between the control. Team, the flight control team, head by the, the flight director and the crew. And, um, you know, you have this certain bond, this certain friendship. It's, it's sort of like a friendship, family, colleague combination that I think is very rare.

• 33:15Mike Massimino?

  Because you know, when you're in space, that you have someone like Emily or Royce looking out after you. And, uh, I, I knew that in our case, that the flight director was going to be watching out for us. And that whole team was going to be watching out for us. And so, you, you know, they describe all the things you're doing. They really did make sure, they really do look out for you, um, while you're up there. Not just from a mission success, but also from a personal standpoint. And when, and when you get back, it's just wonderful to see these guys again. And, and, you know, Emily's right, you're still, you're still scheduled to do stuff. Eventually have to figure out what you're gonna do with yourself.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  We're weighing you from the schedules gradually.

• 33:51Mike Massimino?

  Yeah, it's gradually. Alright, so we have about 40 seconds left here. Uh, is there any other famous prank beside the gorilla that comes to, the gorilla suit that comes to mind?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Uh, the one that Sonny and Mike LA played on us back in Expedition 14. That one was terrible.

• 34:05Mike Massimino?

  What'd they do?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  We come back from a, a scheduled loss of signal. We re-acquire video on side, inside the space station. And I think it was Sonny was doing compressions on Mike LA as if he had had a heart attack. And the flight director Ginger nearly had a heart attack. And so that was not funny. That was absolutely not funny.

• 34:26Mike Massimino?

  Uh, yeah, we're laughing, but no, that wasn't funny, wasn't it? No, never again.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Not funny.

• 34:31Mike Massimino?

  Alright, we gotta take a short break and we'll be right back with our mission control friends Royce and Emily. When Star Talk returns. Welcome back to Star Talk All-Stars. I'm Mike Massimino, your all-star host for the evening. I know I've been called an all-star before, but there you go. And joining me as co-host, Maeve Higgins.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Hey, welcome back, everybody.

• 34:56Mike Massimino?

  You're certainly an all, an all-star in the comedy world. We've been talking about NASA Mission Control Center with actual NASA Flight Directors, Emily Nelson and Royce Renfrew. They're Skyping in from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Thanks for joining us.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Happy to be here.

• 35:13Mike Massimino?

  Well, let's talk about Mars a little bit.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:16Mike Massimino?

  A lot of, a lot of what they're doing here, Maeve, and you know, Mission Control Center, we have people there up in space right now, six-month missions, Scott Kelly, one year, and we may do another year-long mission, trying to learn how to get people to Mars.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Is that's like NASA's number one overriding goal at the moment, would you say, or?

• 35:35Mike Massimino?

  Let's ask our flight directors. How does, how does Mars playing in to what you guys are doing now and where you see your role in the future?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  I'd say that everybody here at the Johnson Space Center would very much like to get the opportunity to go to Mars. A big part of what we're doing to try to make that happen is putting together the various building blocks that would be required for such a large mission. You've got figuring out how to keep humans safe and productive for all that time. You've got coordinating with the, how do you get the launch vehicles set up? How do you get the, the transit vehicle built? There's a whole lot of pieces and our goal right now is to build all of those pieces so that then when we have an opportunity, we put the right pieces together and we can start heading out.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  So that sounds like, is that like the ultimate goal then? Like, I know it's hard to put it into a single yes or no, but like, what, if, if it's like, why is NASA there? Is it like, right now, it's because we want to go to Mars? Or is it because we want to do more research? Like, what's the?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  You know, it's so hard to say because there's so many people throughout the agency, not just here at JSC, but at all of our 10 centers across the country, that are working on so many different things that are feeding into our everyday lives. Everything from aeronautics and improving airplanes to research on the space station to getting humans the opportunity to explore further and further into our solar system and beyond. I would say human spaceflight has near-term goals and long-term goals. And in the near term, we're trying to use our orbiting platform, our laboratory in space, to improve life here on Earth. Our long-term goals are to use the lessons we learn while we're doing that to allow

• 37:20Speaker 02

  humans to get farther and farther away from our home planet and, and finally start really exploring our solar system.

• 37:28Mike Massimino?

  So it's about, you know, in, in, you know, in mission control, they have to, they have to be concerned about what's going on right now.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:35Mike Massimino?

  You know, it's, so they're looking toward the future, but what's, what's going on right now? And how, how do you, how do you guys see the role that the flight director and mission control will play when we're sending people to Mars or Moon or somewhere else? You know, it's a certain role we had, you know, they had with the Apollo program and then with, with the shuttle program and then it changed, you know, we said how it's, we've been, our other segments, it's changed and it's not just a two-week mission, it's six months and keeping everyone going. Mars or going beyond lower orbit, it's going to be a whole new ballgame. How do you think that's going to affect the, the mission control center and the flight director role when, when we start doing that?

• 38:16Speaker 03

  So, so, you know, I think it's a testament to the architecture that Mr. Chris Kraft and all of those folks stood up all those years ago, that the control room that you see behind Emily and I here would be very recognizable if Chris walked in there and sat down at the flight director console. He's got all the people for all the subsystems scattered out there in front of him, he's wearing a headset. It would look very much like control centers that he worked in or, or Mr. Lanning worked in or Mr. Krantz worked in, all those decades ago. So I think going forward, the, the role of mission control is going to have to change

• 38:57Speaker 03

  a little bit, but I think the configuration that you see today will still exist with a flight director, a capsule communicator, folks who are subsystem experts for all the systems on the vehicle, operating the vehicle will be different because of the time delays that are involved in those great distances, but the architecture of the control team, I think, will still be exactly the same.

• 39:22Mike Massimino?

  I think the time delay is probably pretty critical here because with the, with the shuttle and with the station, you, you say something and they hear you and they get back to you right away. When you're going to send people further away, there's, for emergencies, for example, you know, if we had an emergency on the shuttle or on the station, you right away call the control center and everyone works together and that's what we practice. It's going to be a bit different on, on the way to Mars, won't it? Won't it, guys?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  We've talked about this a little bit and the the space station crew is trained to take care of themselves entirely in terms of emergency events because we do have periods of time where the we have scheduled comm outages where they can't get a hold of us. We also, in the early days of the space station, had really long comm outages just because of the way that we were flying through space and the size of the space station at that time. So we do have some experience even in recent times of

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  of training the crew so that they're very self-sufficient and able to handle whatever it is that comes their way. Because we have near-continuous comm, it's a luxury that we've had on the space station. We have moved away from that. We we make sure that the ground is always accessible and always available and looking over the shoulders of our crew members so that we can provide assistance and make sure that they're able to get just as much accomplished in every day that they possibly can. But we have a history, both in in Skylab, in our work with Mir, with the Russian Mir space station and in the early space station days of long comm delays, not long comm delays, but long comm outages where the crew had to be much more self-sufficient than we we require them to be on a day-to-day basis.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  And so in some ways, it's dusting off those paradigms and adjusting our training and adjusting the way that we operate to go back to that kind of a way of thinking.

• 41:10Mike Massimino?

  Yeah, and there are some things, uh, when we went from shuttle to station, and you guys, you know, keep me, uh, keep me straight on this, but what I found on, as a shuttle Capcom and as a shuttle crew member, the crew was doing lots of stuff, like a lot of switch throws, turning stuff on and off, doing a lot of, you know, manual stuff. And when we went to the space station, a lot of that stuff like switching antennas and cameras and doing, turning on systems and even maneuvering the vehicle, uh, is done by the control center. And I I I thought it was like... And in the shuttle days, the crew did like say eighty percent of all that type of stuff.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:51Mike Massimino?

  And now, I it it and the sense I got as a Capcom was kind of like, I don't know if there's even a number, but I got the sense it was like reversed, that all those sort of turning things on and off and housekeeping and and the systems part of it was done by the ground, like eighty percent of it. And the crew was more devoted toward doing science. And just when you guys, do you guys see that as the way it is now? Because the ground does a lot of stuff, right? You guys control all kinds of stuff and sometimes the crew doesn't even know what's going on. Is that true?

• 42:19Speaker 03

  So, so, so by design, right? What we want the crew onboard, uh, space station to be doing is using our laboratory in space. The, the, the experiments that we do in zero G, there's only one place where you can do experimentation that does not have gravity involved, and that's our space station. So, we would, we really want the crew to be doing experimentation and research and, uh, human research and materials research and everything else that we do onboard station as much as they possibly can. So, we on the ground, you're absolutely right, the control teams around the world are primarily

• 43:01Speaker 03

  responsible for operating the vehicle, keeping it pointed in the right direction, make sure it has power generation, make sure we have, uh, breathable air and the temperature inside is the right temperature, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, so that the crew can focus on their primary job of doing that, doing that research. Occasionally, we run into something where we have to go hands-on. Somebody needs to go turn a wrench on a piece of hardware and change out a failed, failed component. That is not something we can do from the ground. So, we rely on the crew to go do those ops for us, but we want to get that done as fast as we can so that we get that equipment back in, in rotation so the crew can go back to doing what we want them to do, which is research.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  And is that like ultimately working towards then you can just send like, uh, you know, you barely need to be able to do, you can just be a, I don't know, like a psychologist or a geologist and you can just go to space and then they'll take care of everything?

• 43:58Mike Massimino?

  That's, that's the, you have the crew do what they have to do and have the ground take care of what, everything else that they can, you know, that, that would be ideal, I think. And that's what, that's what we're doing.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  We have, so Kate Rubens is on the Soyuz, gonna dock to the space station tonight. She's a biological scientist and she's gonna be, and it's just great to get to have somebody with that background and a laboratory background onboard to be able to execute all of these various experiments. And so ideally, yeah, you can have all of these scientists and physical scientists and medical doctors and a lot of our astronaut corps today is made up of those types of folks with that kind of background who can really dig in on the meat of the science because we got the station itself taking care of from the ground.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  All right, we've got about four minutes left.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I've got some questions left.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  And we've got some cosmic queries to finish up.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Okay, um, okay, this is from Cara and she, she asks, "What kind, if any, of good luck rituals happen in mission control?" I don't know if you're superstitious people. It seems like you're rational, but let's see.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  This is a good question.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  This guy is so completely superstitious.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  And it's not about what you do, it's about what you're not allowed to do.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm very superstitious about wearing red in the control room. And it's, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's interesting that the, my control teams know that about me.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  And we all try to wear red whenever he's in the control room.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  Just to mess with me, so.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Oh, and then there's our fruit roll too, right?

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, all right, we have, uh, the folks who, the engineering teams who support us have a, have a superstition about fruit in their, in their area of the control center that if you have fruit sitting on top of a console, that is the discipline that's gonna have problems, so.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  I made up some stickers in the last shuttle mission that I worked STS 133 for them to have little magnetic stickers for them to put on their consoles that said, "Fruit free for 133" and we were all successful though.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure, and it's because there was no fruit, absolutely.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  I was so sure that you were gonna just shake your head at that question and be like, "I don't have any superstitious rituals." Did you as an astronaut? Did you guys have, um?

• 46:26Speaker 03

  I, I would offer that the crew picked on me as well. They do that occasionally. Yeah, I put a, one of the crews recently put a red filter over a camera when they knew I was on a console.

• 46:39Mike Massimino?

  There's been, there were some shown like in Apollo 13, Gene Kranz wearing a vest when he was, when he was flight directing. From the, from the crews, from our perspective there, we've had this thing with the shuttle where, um, before the launch, in the, in the suit room when you were suited up, the head of the office would play poker with the, uh, did you guys know about this? No. This is all classified, so you listeners out there, don't tell anybody this, this is classified. But we, the, the commander would play poker with the chief of our office and they would play until the commander won. Why? And once the commander won, we were all dressed and ready to go, we would walk out of the, walk out of the suit room and go and launch.

• 47:21Mike Massimino?

  And then the, the, uh, launch team down there in, uh, Kennedy Space Center, uh, they had this, this, uh, these beans, these good luck beans. I don't, I don't really know all the history behind it, but I don't know when it started, but beans were, they would all eat beans. After a successful launch, they would, they would eat beans. So these things, they're nice traditions, you know, the Russians have theirs too, and we could do a whole show on traditions. So that's a great question. Let's see if we can fit one more in, we've got about a minute left.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Um, this is a, a kind of a, is food allowed in the mission control? I'm guessing because you just mentioned fruit. So we're asking, just like in an office, is food allowed and are you allowed to have your phones in mission control?

• 48:01Speaker 02

  So we definitely allow food because otherwise we wouldn't get to eat. Um, we don't really, you know, we mentioned before, we have nearly continuous communication with the vehicle and our tradition is that we don't leave the, that control room that you can see behind us unless we're lost, unless we have scheduled a, a comm outage. So we absolutely will race out and heat up our food and bring it back in so that we can eat and drink and, and not just fall over. Um, I forget what the second part of it was.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  So, so phones, it's, you know, it, folks have their phones, you... My, my daughter sends me a text from, from off at school where she is. I, I want to know that's going on, but I'm focused on what's going on on the vehicle. Uh, you don't usually see folks, uh, uh, on their personal phones in the control room very much at all.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, like taking selfies with.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  None of that.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've had friends get very upset that I'm not answering texts and I'm like, dude, it was in my purse the whole day. I never looked at it.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  I think that's fair.

• 49:02Mike Massimino?

  You know, food, food is very important and I, you know, I, I would love to get the concession in mission control center. We don't really have one, but food is really important and you generally have to bring your own, but, uh.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  The right type of.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  Our one game is vending, vending machine food factor, vending, Vendo fear factor. You know, you see who, who will eat the worst food in the vending machine.

• 49:22Mike Massimino?

  We're out of time, guys. Royce and Emily, thank you so much for joining us from, uh, the mission control center at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Thanks for including us. We had a lot of fun.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having us.

• 49:34Mike Massimino?

  Absolute pleasure and, and Maeve, it's always a pleasure.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:37Mike Massimino?

  Thank you.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Thank you. Got to get back to my work at mission control. No.

• 49:43Mike Massimino?

  Lot of work to do there. You've been listening.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  You're late.

• 49:48Mike Massimino?

  You've been listening to StarTalk All-Stars. I've been your host, Mike Massimino. It's been a blast.