Cosmic Queries – Launching the Inspiration4 with Chris Mason & Sian Proctor

What did we learn from the first all civilian mission into orbit? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice explore SpaceX’s recent launch, the Inspiration4, with biophysicist Dr. Chris Mason and geoscientist and pilot Dr. Sian Proctor.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is the Cosmic Queries Edition. And so Chuck, we've got people who like know all about like space and zero G and gravity. I love it. You love it. You love it. I got Chris Mason, who's a biophysicist responsible for analyzing the data they obtained on the health and wellbeing of the Inspiration 4 crew that recently went into space. Chris Mason, welcome to StarTalk.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  It's great to be back. Thanks for having me.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And you're a biophysicist, professor of physiology and biophysics. Love me some biophysics. Cornell University, not upstate, because most of your medical stuff is happening right here in Manhattan. And what's your address? What's your coordinates?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Right on York Avenue in 70th. So the concrete jungle in Manhattan.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Yeah, I'm sorry, but that's not really the concrete jungle if you're on York Avenue. I mean, let's be honest. Okay, compared to Ithaca, New York is the concrete jungle. Yeah, okay, that's the only place you can compare it, yeah. So the only reason why we have Chris on the show is because we have Cyan Proctor on the show, who actually went into space. Cyan, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Hi Neil, it's great to be here.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And you're a geoscientist, I've got you here, and a science communicator. We love me some science communicators in this world and on this show. And you flew in the SpaceX Dragon capsule, right?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  I was a mission pilot. So tell me about it. I was the mission pilot for the SpaceX Dragon capsule, so I became the first black-

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me!

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Neil, I became the first black female pilot of a spacecraft in history.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. So all the bling you got on there, for those who can see this by video, there's chevrons on a shoulder, you got wings, you got art, you got everything going on there. You look like an African dictator.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Well, let me tell you, I came off that capsule dancing, so. And I've been dancing ever since.

• 2:23Chuck Nice?

  That's tremendous, tremendous.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so tell me about the Inspiration 4 mission. What was the goal of that?

• 2:30Speaker 02

  The goal of the Inspiration 4 mission was the first all civilian mission to orbit. And we went for three days and our goal was to not only advance human spaceflight, but to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in the fight against childhood cancer.

• 2:47Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, amazing. Wow. That, I mean, I just thought it was to let a billionaire go to space. I didn't realize, I didn't realize there was something worthwhile attached to this whole thing.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  You solve for space.

• 2:59Chuck Nice?

  I just thought, I just...

• 3:00Speaker 02

  You solve for space, you solve for Earth.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but I thought we were just stroking billionaire egos.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  No, solving for space solves for Earth.

• 3:07Chuck Nice?

  That's, wow, that's really great.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you guys were in orbit, how many orbits did you guys execute?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Forty-seven.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, that's three days right there. I know how to count my orbits.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  And we went up 575 kilometers, so up there just above Hubble.

• 3:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Chuck, just in case you didn't know, there were two digs in that. I just want you to, she first said, first civilian crew to go into orbit. Orbit.

• 3:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you catch that?

• 3:33Chuck Nice?

  Not peek over, not peek over a balcony.

• 3:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, not look over the fence, you know.

• 3:39Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's going on? Wow. Hey, guys, what's happening out there? Like, none of that.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wait a minute, we gotta fall back to Earth.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  As an astrophysicist, Neil, you know that it takes more energy to go to orbit. So the mechanics are slightly, well, actually vastly greater than suborbital.

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, you guys need a heat shield to re-enter. And if, if you're just going up and, and falling back, there are no heat shields involved at all.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 4:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow. And, and then you said you just went above Hubble, just a little above?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Yes, Hubble was initially inserted into orbit over 600 kilometers. But over time, it's been, gravity's been pulling it closer to the Earth. And, uh, yeah, we just went further than any human has been since servicing Hubble.

• 4:24Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so this is, this was badass in multiple dimensions there. So what was your role, other than like your pilot? Um, what, what was being monitored about you that brought Chris into the equation?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Oh, Chris just loved to poke and prod us. I mean, he, we were swabbing, we were giving blood. We were, um, using an ultrasound to look at our eyeballs and just all kinds of stuff. Because, um, I'll let him tell, tell more about that. I was the guinea pig in this.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 4:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so Chris, you know, if I were on that, I would say, you ain't touching me. I'm just looking out the window the whole time. Okay?

• 5:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, nor- normally, Chris, the aliens are the ones doing this.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Poke in your body?

• 5:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, that's all I'm saying is like, you know, normally it's not another human. It's like, you know.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Chris. Well, we want, we want to learn, just like the aliens do. We want to understand humanity, so, and particularly how humans respond to spaceflight. So, we did a, basically a follow-up, uh, not just, uh, for Dr. Proctor, but for the whole crew. Uh, you know, everything we could really have is a full profile. So, uh, blood draws, we looked at, you know, stool, urine, saliva, you know, skin swabs. Any biomolecule we could grab that they would consent to, we would grab it. So, uh, basically, because we want to understand what happens to the body in space. How do we prepare for longer missions? How do we also help plan just for, you know, any other, uh, space, space medicine as well? You learn a lot when the body goes through these kinds of stressors.

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 5:49Chuck Nice?

  You had me at stool sample.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and so, uh, Cyan, who else flew with you?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Um, my commander, Jared Isaacman. And then we had mission, our miss- medical officer, Haley Arsenault. And our miss-

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  Arsenault?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yep, and our mission specialist, Chris Zambroski. And then myself as the mission pilot. So there, it was a crew of four, and that's why Inspiration Four.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, all of you are, are classified as civilians, and so I have a few questions about that. So you, so you come to this al- also as a science educator? And with, if I remember reading your bio, extensive background in art, correct?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Well, actually, funny enough, I just became an artist during COVID. I needed a way to unleash my creativity because traveling and being an explorer as a geoscientist had been my career. And this was during COVID, I found myself pent up with, you know, nothing to do. And so I thought, oh, OK, I'm going to do, invest in art and poetry. And that's actually how I won my seat to space is as an entrepreneur, an artist, and a poet.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I think to myself, you know, there's nothing less poetic than an astronaut from the old days coming back and talking about, you know, the right stuff that first went up. They were not poets, right? And so I think space, we've been missing a dimension, a human dimension of what it is to experience space by having always sent the same kind of people up. And so now you help to sort of broaden what kind of, what kind of brain wiring interprets what's going on in space. And I think that's great. What does a geoscientist see and think looking out the couple of window?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Well, you know, when you're looking back on Earth as a geoscientist, you start to think about the geologic features, the big land masses, the bodies of water, you know, we are a water planet. But me coming with this artist perspective meant that now I'm seeing the colors, the brightness, the different hues of white. Because a lot of times you think that it's just one, one white of a cloud. A lot of times we talk about the different hues of blue that you see from space, but there's just as many variations of white in the clouds. And I found that striking. And then the patterns that the clouds form, just from an artistic standpoint, was stunning. It was all stunning.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me, so Chris, is there, was there something in particular you were looking for? Or were you doing, so give me everything you got and I'll, and I'll sort it out afterwards? Like, what, what was the, what was the goal set for you?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  We had some hypotheses and it's not just my own group, but there's other collaborators working with Trish and other NASA investigators that are all working together on this mission. But we had some hypotheses going in. We actually thought that, you know, they probably would become more similar. Their microbes on their skin would start to become more similar as the mission transpired, even only a few days in orbit. And the bacteria and cells in your skin start to look a little bit more like the people next to you. We've even seen this with roller derby. If you just sequence the DNA of players before and after a match or a basketball game, there's a transfer of microbes. And so we're calculating exactly how many are moving around.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chris, this is nasty.

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  I don't want anybody else's microbes on my body.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  There's a lot of what we call foreign object debris floating in microgravity. And so everything's moving.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so as I understand this, because I was once tested by NPR did a special on this. So each one of us has our own cocktail of skin microbes. Is that a fair statement to make?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And it's unique to us. Might even be more unique than our fingerprints, perhaps. Right? And so now we're all in a capsule together, breathing the same air, rubbing up against each other, and you're there for days, right? And so you're suggesting that the microbiomes of people's bodies might begin to converge.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Yes. And I don't think they'll just become one giant organism by the end of the mission.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's called aliens.

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  Hey, you got your biome and my bacteria. Hey, you got bacteria in my biome.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Well, I'm, you know, I'm hoping I rubbed off on Jared then, or he rubbed off on me a couple billion dollars.

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that it has literal meaning now. Oh, you rubbed off on me. It's like literally. Literally, yes, yes.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  It was really interesting to think about this because I had actually worked with Chris's team beforehand, living in the Mars simulation at the Hyce habitat, collecting samples before. So I kind of came in with an awareness of what he had been working on. And this whole idea of living in, that time was four months. I lived in a Mars simulation for four months, investigating food strategies for long duration spaceflight for NASA. But thinking-

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Cyan, you just don't like home. Are there problems at home that you want to share with us on this?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Well-

• 11:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Send me to Mars, even fake Mars, it'll do.

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're here for you, Cyan.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  This whole idea, though, of the microbiology and how it changes and thinking about when we go off to confined habitats, what does that mean and how important it is. And I think as a crew, we all thought that this was really important to do because, you know, advancing human spaceflight means advancing the science that comes along with that.

• 11:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you don't do that, what are you doing? It's just joyrides on that level. Very cool. Well, the whole point of this program is to get questions from our Patreon supporters. Do we have to?

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is really very interesting. You're not hogging the questions, Chuck. Yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to like kill this vibe with like questions from regular people. No, I'm just, I'm joking, people, we love you.

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If a comedian has to say, "I'm joking," what does that mean? Uh-oh, stop it, Neil. What are you doing to me?

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back- You're gonna get me killed. You're gonna get me killed on Twitter.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, Chuck has collected questions from our supporters. And it's, we're really here to find out what they want to know about your trip in space.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries. I've got Chris Mason with me and Cyan Proctor too. Chris is a medical professional studying physiological changes that may or may not have happened in the Inspiration 4 crew that included Cyan Proctor, who's with us here and now. And this is a Cosmic Queries edition, but just before we go to the queries, Chuck.

• 13:19Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you guys pack a suitcase? When I saw you guys boarding, I don't remember y'all carrying, you know, a bellhop and a roller, and a rollerboard. So what happened there?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Well, you know, traditionally NASA astronauts have gotten a very small amount of allotments that they can take to space with us. SpaceX said, "You can take a duffel bag." Now, you can imagine my eyes getting big at the thought of, "I can pack a duffel bag?" Well, I packed that thing so tight, I brought everything I could include, you know, think of from my childhood, my friends, my family, strangers off the street. I was getting everything and bringing it to space.

• 14:03Chuck Nice?

  And so what do you do? You bring it back to them and you're like, "This has now been to space?" Is that the idea?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:10Chuck Nice?

  That's kind of cool.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  I took wedding rings, I took pictures, I took a friend of mine who was a flight attendant, her wings, I took necklaces and jewelry.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought you took the flight attendant. Right, okay. I took a friend of mine's wings. Okay.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  But I also took things like comic books from when I was a kid. I had Star Wars comic books. And I had trading cards. I took Star Wars and Star Trek with me in some form. And so

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, good culture.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then my dad's Neil Armstrong autograph that he got when he was working for the NASA tracking station on Guam during the seventies.

• 14:44Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Yep, and then my art supplies to paint with and to draw with.

• 14:49Chuck Nice?

  What did you paint in space? What did you draw?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  I drew a dragon.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You drew trees and, you know, books and whirlwinds, no?

• 14:57Speaker 02

  I have a kind of art style I call Afro Gaia. You know, like Mother Earth, but from an Afrofuturism standpoint. And so I drew this beautiful Afro Gaia picture with the dragon capsule above it. And so, yeah, really cool stuff.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's cool.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  And I painted, painted in space.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 15:19Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool. Yeah, I would have just had a, I would have just got a black, I mean, a white canvas, painted it all black and been like, space.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  The final frontier.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why we didn't send you, Chuck.

• 15:35Chuck Nice?

  Excellent.

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You keep providing evidence for why you didn't go.

• 15:39Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Chuck, give us some questions. What have you lined up here?

• 15:42Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's jump into it here. This is Carrie Gallagher, who says, hello, Dr. Proctor, Dr. Mason, Dr. Tyson, and Lord Chuck.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Is that like, is that like Baltimore?

• 15:58Speaker 02

  He who shall not be named.

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, Chuck, did she really call you Lord?

• 16:02Chuck Nice?

  She called me Lord, remember that?

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One episode.

• 16:06Chuck Nice?

  We had one episode with the general, who I made a joke, and somehow this is stuck all over.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had an Air Force general address Chuck as Lord, because we all had titles.

• 16:15Chuck Nice?

  And he invented the title of Chuck. Everybody had a title but me.

• 16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now everybody's calling Chuck Lord. Okay, fine.

• 16:20Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fine.

• 16:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. She says, my name is Scarlett and I am 10 years old and I love science. I want to say, Dr. Proctor, I watched the special with my mom and you were setback in your astronaut career. What made you persevere? I want to be a scientist and my mom says I can do anything. Also, what was your favorite part? And what experiments did you perform? Hashtag girl power.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Oh, wow, there is a lot there and perseverance.

• 16:45Chuck Nice?

  There's a lot.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  I always say preparation and perseverance make you ready for opportunity. And what I mean by that is that my preparation through my education, whether it's formal or informal, becoming an explorer, but then also perseverance, persistence. And so in 2009, I was a finalist for the NASA astronaut selection process, got to the yes/no, and it was a no. And you're like, oh, you're kind of devastated. But then figuring out ways to persevere and persist by moving forward. I became an analog astronaut. And I thought if I can't be advancing human spaceflight up in the stars, I will do it here on Earth. And then when the opportunity for Inspiration 4 came along,

• 17:31Speaker 02

  I had that preparation and perseverance, persistence, to be able to take advantage of that opportunity. And so I think, and as a result of that, my favorite moment was looking, opening up the cupola for the first time and seeing our planet from space. It was transformative.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, that's cool. And so in summary, what you're saying is that,

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  well, I don't want to generalize, but I think I can accurately, that many people who succeed in life, that's all you end up paying attention to, but you park the curtains and there were failures back there. And often the people who do succeed are the ones who recovered from their failures, did something different, did something better, continued to advance. And then you see them at the end, then there's the parade and the paper articles and the magazines. But in fact, no achievement really ever occurs without some kind of struggle. Is that a fair characterization of what you said?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I look back when I got that call saying I was going to be the mission pilot for Inspiration 4, that I'd won the seat. My whole life came into focus and I was like, wow, all of that preparation from, just like your mom, Scarlett, is telling you that you can do anything. My dad told me that I can do anything and he always instilled that drive in me that the world was waiting, just follow my passion. And so I look back and I think of all of the little steps that I had and some of them were to the side and some of them were stepped back, but most of them were moving forward in some way. And that's led me to this opportunity and this moment.

• 19:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like the analog to steps. That's beautiful.

• 19:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One step back, two step forward. There you go.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

• 19:22Chuck Nice?

  Now I know what my problem is.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  And one giant leap for humankind.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck.

• 19:28Chuck Nice?

  See, my parents said, you know, not you can do anything. They went, let's be honest. You can do a lot of things.

• 19:37Chuck Nice?

  Let's not get crazy. Not gonna say you can do anything.

• 19:43Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go.

• 19:46Chuck Nice?

  This is Josh Weiner who says, hello, everybody. Josh from Huntington, West Virginia here. Currently a second year medical student at Marshall University. We're in the pulmonary lungs right now and we've learned about ventilation-perfusion ratio of the lungs changes as you move down the lungs because, well, you guessed it, gravity in space travel. Does removing the factor of gravity change the ventilation-perfusion ratios in different sections of the lungs and have any serious consequences on normal physiology?

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 20:13Chuck Nice?

  Boom.

• 20:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mic drop.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  I'm gonna like, Chris can take that one.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say, here's how you do that. I could answer that, but it's so simple. I'll give it to Chris.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Sure answer, yes. It does change when you're in flight. We have not actually, though, taken out human lungs after a spaceflight, though, to really dissect them because when they get back to Earth, the astronauts are still using their lungs. So that hasn't happened.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, that's tough.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  For a full deep dive. But for mice, we have seen this. When they get back, some of the mice have been dissected in space and most of them, though, as soon as they land, we get dissections of mice, including the lungs, and you can see really, you know, dramatic changes in sort of lung function and also how genes are expressed. So when your genes get activated or turned down in response to the stress. So we know that there's a lot of adaptation for lungs and that the perfusion, though, from what we can tell, we can't say for human, but we can say it looks like it definitely changes in mice when you're up in flight. And, you know, like, three liters of fluid goes up in your upper body when you get into space and so it's, that's why you get the sort of puffy face when you first get up there.

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean that fluid that would normally be in your lower half of your body doesn't know to hang out there, so then it just goes elsewhere in your body? Is that what you're saying?

• 21:23Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, you know, millions and millions of years of evolution has gotten the body used to just being able to push back up and suddenly you don't have to. So it takes a little while for the body to adapt, but it's actually quite adaptable.

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, is that why, wait, wait, is that why when you wake up, sometimes you have a puffy face? Because you're horizontal and so the gravity doesn't know to go up or down in your body? But people do wake up with puffy faces.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  It could be from drinking.

• 21:47Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say. I was gonna say it's Scotch, Scotch.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  There's a lot of reasons possible, but if you're on an angle, it can contribute.

• 21:55Chuck Nice?

  Okay, yeah. All right, all I know now is that mice are the new red shirt Star Trek crew member.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  They are.

• 22:02Chuck Nice?

  As soon as they touch down, they die.

• 22:06Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Let's, uh, let's move, let's move on. This is Andrew Magria. I heard that people who go into space for months become taller by the time they come back to Earth. What are the limits to height that you can gain if you were to stay in space? Love the show.

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'd be nine feet tall, I guess. Cyan, how much taller were you when you came back?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Uh, actually, right when you get back to Earth, you, you shrink back down. Gravity takes over. But I felt taller on orbit, if that helps.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and Chris, what, what's the data on how much you'd lose or gain?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Usually, one to two inches in flight. Actually, yes, so Scott Kelly, when he was up for a year, he got about two inches taller. Uh, but as Dr. Proctor just mentioned, as soon as you get back to gravity, gravity takes it away from you.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Scott Kelly is not tall to begin with. So if I remember, we had him on StarTalk. So, uh, he was a short guy, so maybe he enjoyed those two inches if he, if he had

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Issues with it. There was no way to keep him that way, unless you put him in a

• 23:09Speaker 01

  No, unless you stain space or, yeah, like some implants maybe, but we haven't, that's not a flight appropriate.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right. Give me another question, Chuck.

• 23:20Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is Nathan Mitchell, who says, hi, my current major is aerospace engineering. However, I'm considering swapping my focus to botany and horticulture. I'd love eventually to branch into the study of how we can seed planets and moons. What do you professionals think will be necessary before we can successfully send down spores and seeds to begin to populate other viable bodies in our universe with life sustaining plants and bacteria? Wow.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me ask Chris, because Chris, you're, you're, you're, you studied bacteria on the skin and in the digestive tracts presumably also of your crew. Uh, how hardy are bacteria? Can we just take a colony of them and drop it on Mars and will they get along just fine?

• 24:03Chuck Nice?

  And will they come back and kill us all?

• 24:06Chuck Nice?

  The bacteria come back in their spaceship? Exactly. Drop me off on a desert planet, will you? I'll show you.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  They'll mutate and come back. I mean, so they, there are microbes we know that can survive in the vacuum of space. And there, there's a big concern about if you bring something back from Mars. Like for example, in 2032, we're supposed to get samples back from Mars. We're going to look at them. And the planetary protection is a whole division of NASA that just thinks about this, of either forward contamination or, or reverse, where we bring something back. And we know that microbes can survive in almost any nook and cranny of the earth, including past boiling water temperatures or really deep freezing, high pressure, high radiation. So if we're finding any life on Mars, it'd probably be microbial. And there are strains of bacillus that could probably survive the trip there and back. So, um, but there's people looking at this. We've published on this.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  NASA has a whole team that just swabs the spacecraft before they go and before they get sealed off and sent. So they're keeping an eye on things.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Yeah. So, so we just have to know whether bacteria will ever evolve to be able to build their own spaceships. This is what should worry us. Right? Cause they'll be pissed off that we dropped them off on Mars.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  But if a meteorite hits and come back, comes back with them, you know, they can hitch a ride that way. And I will say, I did bring the first meteorite back to space with me when I went up. So, yeah.

• 25:28Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 25:30Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't you disrupt the, the natural order of the universe by reversing which way the meteorite went?

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a salmon meteorite, you know? That's cool.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. All right. Well, give me some more, Chuck.

• 25:43Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Uh, this is Matthew Kelly. He says, hello, everybody. I'm a recent Patreon supporter. I don't know if that's actually, if this is actually related to the subject, but I'm going to throw it out here anyway, because I can. I'm wondering, as space becomes more and more accessible to civilians, is there any change in the training required to support a rocket launch? If I remember correctly, astronauts feel a force of around three Gs during the launch. No civilians are trained to support that much force on themselves.

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, wait a minute, Chris. Isn't three Gs what you get in any amusement park? In a fast roller coaster?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  On some of the bigger rides, you can get up there, but uh, I mean, so you get a bit briefly though, but you'll get a lot more Gs. You can get up to five or six Gs even for some of the really larger rockets. It uh, actually, you know, but so, and it's, it lasts a lot longer. It's not five, you know, three or four seconds. It'll be for uh, several minutes. It'll have pretty high G-forces as you go.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Cyan, how many G-forces did you experience going up?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Between three, three, between three and four, but it was more, I tell you, coming back was a lot different than going up because um, you know, being on orbit, not having any G-load for three days. We, when we started, we hit the atmosphere, it was like, oh, oh, wait, what is this? As gravity started to take over and, and I was doing some pressure breathing by the end.

• 27:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is your body got lazy?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  It did. It got lazy quick.

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What the hell is this thing?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  And it was definitely noticeable.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  It, it happens fast. If you miss one day of working out for long missions, you can start to see more calcium show up in the urine. You can see, you know, the bones, uh, they go away quickly. So that body is built to move and built to have uh, gravity. So if you take that away, it uh, starts to take, you know, just degrade a little bit.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're in space for long enough, you'll just be boneless, bud?

• 27:36Chuck Nice?

  Mmm, like a chicken nugget.

• 27:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God. Where have you been, space? You look delicious.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an alien plot.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  It's a big swimming pool full of barbecues.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we gotta take a quick break. Uh, when we come back, more really cool questions about the inspiration for flight and what it means to us all when StarTalk returns.

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, third and final segment of Cosmic Queries. We've been into space and back with Inspiration 4, one of the most recent SpaceX launches, and with civilians, only civilians, the highest civilians have ever gone, higher than the orbit level of the Hubble telescope. And they went into actual orbit, not just into suborbit. So this was badass in every way.

• 28:52Chuck Nice?

  Higher than me, listening to Dark Side of the Moon back in college.

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay Chuck. And we've got Chris Mason, who's our biophysicist, studying the crew, not only before they went up, but of course when they came back, as any good science experiment needs, to have the sort of the baseline of what is, so that you will know what could have possibly changed. And of course, Cyan Proctor, I love your career and what you've done, and it's just great to have you on the show. And we're hammering you with questions from our Patreon members. So Chuck, keep it coming.

• 29:35Chuck Nice?

  Jeff Johnson says, "Many astronauts have explained how profoundly their view of life and the world has changed as they have seen Earth from space. You are high enough up to have this experience. What changed about you?"

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Oh, I've got to say, what changed about me was this, thinking about it from that artist lens, and how, when I was staring at our planet, I kept thinking how we're just individual, like, bristles of a brush. And we don't think that we can make an impact, but if you take all of those bristles together, you can paint a beautiful portrait. And we are actually impacting our planet, and we are painting this portrait that's in motion, and we get to determine what it's going to look like. I reference it to What Dreams May Come, the movie with Robin Williams, and when he's running through this portrait, and being able to change it and swirl it and make it into

• 30:34Speaker 02

  what he wanted to imagine. Well, we as humans can do that with our planet, and with that comes responsibility.

• 30:43Chuck Nice?

  I am so glad that you're a painter because I forgot that you're a painter. And when you said each one of us is the individual.

• 30:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful.

• 30:53Chuck Nice?

  Brush. I thought, no, I thought you meant a hairbrush. And I was like, this is the dumbest damn analogy I have ever heard in my life. How you gonna make a?

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Chuck, the rest of us on this call are paying attention.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Is that good?

• 31:14Speaker 02

  I'm like, are you using a pick and not a brush?

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 31:18Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't help him out of this.

• 31:21Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, he does not deserve that.

• 31:28Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the old days, there was like survival training in the desert. They put you in a centrifuge until you vomit it. You know, there are things that they used to do to astronauts. And I don't think they do that to them anymore today. So what's, what has changed?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  The training is not as, how close can I get you to death and see if you don't die? It's much, much more now. Let's make sure you're safe and healthy.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Which, which it has this utility. In the early days of the space program, we didn't know what.

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, we didn't know. So you gotta protect, they gotta be, they gotta be ready for anything.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  But I will say that we did have centrifuge and which was very helpful to understand the G-load. And, and we did fighter jet training and we did a Knowles-like experience where we hiked up to the top of Mount Rainier to do crew cohesion and bonding. But what has been different as the mission pilot is that I really became a systems engineer, where I had to understand all of the systems and how they integrate. Because the Falcon, well, the rocket, but also the Dragon capsule is autonomous. And so my job and the commander's is to look at, you know, making sure the flight computer stays on target with what it's supposed to do and know how moments, talking to you and taking over, you know, 2001.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  But also thinking about if you have a contingency or an emergency, how do you take care of that? What do you need to do? And so that's what I was trained on.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cyan, did you barf? You can tell us.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  No, I didn't.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't believe you. No, you lying.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Better. I did, but I got a shot of Phenergran. I was like, better living through chemistry.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  I'm not ashamed to say that. I got on orbit and I was like, oh, okay. And why, why even chance it? And I was like, hit me, hit me.

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, I did a centrifuge once and I, I lost my lunch. And so I, I was the inadequate stuff, not the right stuff.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  But what's great about it now is that you can, you can take something or that you can take a shot and feel better. And I got one and within a half hour, I was like, oh, okay, I'm great.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some of my best friends are made of chemicals.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, give me some more.

• 33:46Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is J Maxx479 who says, hello, Dr. Mason. Hello, Dr. Proctor. Hello, Dr. Tyson. And Chuck, you occasionally make me laugh.

• 33:58Chuck Nice?

  Damn.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Mailed it.

• 34:00Chuck Nice?

  I should read these, I should read these in advance of the show.

• 34:05Chuck Nice?

  He says, uh, this is Jason. I'm a new member here. How do you have to curtail your food intake for the mission? I suppose there's no Mexican buffet, right?

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I was eating pizza on orbit and BLTs. And it was three days. So we worked it out with SpaceX. They wanted us to be on the healthier side. And we're like, mm, this is more like camping. We want food that, because food and mood go together. So we wanted food that wouldn't stress us out because you're already in a, a, a high stress environment.

• 34:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm betting no one brought kale with them.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Kale chips.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kale chips.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a very omnivorous thing to say.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  With no soylent, we didn't bring that either.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soylent, yeah, yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  But there were meal cubes that they offered us and we rejected them. We were like, no, we're not taking meal cubes. And so because we were up there for such a short period of time, we had a cooler that with cold coffee, like frozen coffee that we could drink and tea. And that helped to keep our fresh food like veggies and pizza. And, you know, like I said, BLT and bacon preserved.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Cyan, if they let you take a duffel bag, then you're not eating food cubes. There's no way. I'm smuggling some cheeseburgers in that duffel bag.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  That was one of the things that we talked about. Like if we get to fill a duffel bag, we can put whatever we want in here.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm putting some cheeseburgers in that puppy. All right, Chuck, give me some more.

• 35:39Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is Brian S. who says, I've heard a lot about the effects of human beings being away from Earth's atmosphere and gravity. But what can long-term effects of being absent from the Earth's magnetic field have on the human body?

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Chris.

• 35:56Chuck Nice?

  Or does it?

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Chris, I don't know that our bodies even thinks or cares or knows about the magnetic field at all physiologically. Is that true?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  We don't do too much in sensitivity to whales potentially navigate with magnetic fields, but we don't yet have any of those abilities. So we can basically...

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said yet. You're working on that.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. There's a project in lab. It should be done next year.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're just implants, that's all.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  That's right. So they, you know, we're still in the protected Bexley Van Allen Belt. So most of the risk of radiation is still, we're still fairly protected in low earth orbit. But the inspiration for a mission went much higher than the space station, which is normally 400 kilometers, went almost out to 600 kilometers. And so there is an expectation that's a little bit more radiation the farther you get from Earth. And so it's something we're looking at right now in the data. And I don't know, Dr. Proctor, did it feel more radiating out there?

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you glow when you went to the...

• 36:47Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, I came back with an aura.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there you go.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, artists have always painted auras. This is a thing that shows up in artwork, for sure. Okay, so but otherwise, Chris, because I know just numerically, the field is very, very weak. And so there was no reason why I think the field itself would matter, but the fact that it protects us from the the harmful charged particles from the sun. That's a that's that's the interesting fact here.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. Yeah, and then when you start to get the lunar missions that are planned and even Mars missions, you'll you'll then transit into planetary space and you'll get a lot more radiation. So that's when it starts to really be a factor, we think. And that's one of the biggest questions that NASA has and that we have, just keeping an eye on the radiation risk.

• 37:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and you're using radiation in the reference to particles, not electromagnetic energy of light, right?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, the light's fine, but it's really just these high-energy particles that zip through space.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, which we're also calling radiation. It's a it's a it's a it's a unfortunate defect in the term back when we were first learning about radioactivity.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  What it was.

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they can have the similar effect on you, but they're actually two different things. One is made of light, the other is made of particles. And so we're stuck with it. We got just a couple of minutes left. Chuck, see, let's try to do a lightning round. So you guys have to answer the question in three seconds, okay? All right, Chuck, go.

• 38:10Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is Bill Wasale, who says, greeting Earthlings. How difficult was it to operate the touchscreens and read accurately during the powered ascent?

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I like that. Cyan, what was what was happening there?

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Easy, didn't even notice. Now, the I was surprised that the vibration level and stuff was negligible.

• 38:28Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Cozy, cozy.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so now I have fat fingers, which makes it difficult to navigate on my smartphone. So were those screens big enough so like a fat-fingered person won't miss the right button?

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You'd be you'd fit right in.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Because if one button is a nice sailing forward, the other one is eject, I don't want to miss the button.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you're gonna do okay. Nice big screens.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Excellent, good. All right.

• 38:56Chuck Nice?

  This is Jared Sorber, who says, hello, given the current plethora of proposals for private space stations that are now out there, what are the additional capabilities or facilities that you might think would bring to the, that are not currently in the ISS?

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that. So, Cyan, what do you need? What do you want up there?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  I want a, I want a shower.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  I want that, I want that swimming pool that they had on Interstellar. But I do want to take, not lose gravity, but I want something like that.

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about an espresso machine? I mean, stuff, you know?

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. I want the replicator thing that, you know, when I say Earl Grey hot, um, from Star Trek.

• 39:38Chuck Nice?

  Earl Grey hot.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Yes, please. Yes.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, you know, now you're just, you know, a child of science fiction. I want the lift drives.

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think that's what he was asking you.

• 39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you could get all sci-fi on us, okay, I want the replicator too.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  It's gonna be more, I think, personal space is one of the things, the Dragon Capsule, we didn't have any, and so that's something to think about. You know, when you're talking about new, you know, bigger, different designed international space stations for tourists and stuff, where it's not research lab based, that means that some of the luxuries that you might want to have when it comes to bigger personal space, access to more windows, and then with comfort areas, where you can go and lounge and relax. I think those are things, because you're moving to some extent away from that, that

• 40:39Speaker 02

  focus on just pure research and science behind it.

• 40:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting, so comfort.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This reminds me, that reminds me, I mean, I read, you know, the first airplane flights, the biplanes where you would pay to take a ride, if you were around back then, you might have said, you know, I think you should enclose this cabin.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want to wear goggles. Simple things, you know?

• 41:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Like a roof.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  A room with a view.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So guys, we got to call it quits there, but this has been fun. It's been delightful just to see the dawn of an entire new industry, really, which is tourists in space. And I'm glad we, you know, this is StarTalk, so we do it from all angles. And Chris, great to hear what you're doing with the data and more that you might be learning that you can possibly report back to us in a future episode. And Cyan, delighted to meet you and see what you're doing. And I bet this won't be your last time in space, is what I suspect. All right, guys, again, thanks for, thanks for being on the show. Chris, Cyan, Chuck, always good to have you there as my trustee co-host.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson here, and then Cosmic Queries, as always.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  You know, can I put you on the spot and say, are we astronauts?

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Well, yes, I heard your view on the sub-orbital, so.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to be like stick in the mud for everybody. But if I had to really draw a threshold, I'd say going into orbit, that's, as you began this show, saying accurately, is completely different in the engineering of an object that goes into orbit than something that goes up above the Karman line and falls back to Earth. And it's not just, one is not just simply an extension of the other. It's a whole other thing. So, but I'm going, I'll stay with it, Karman line, okay. But as an astrophysicist, send me somewhere, Moon, Mars, and beyond, and then I'm good to go.